The date of the next election would be 9 June. The Union Jack had gone up over Port Stanley on 14 June the year before. The election would thus progress through the anniversaries of the land battles for the islands. This would be a ‘natural’ backdrop and reminder with no need for ‘party’ propaganda.
How did Thatcher get away with it? The media was not the only culprit. The opposition leaders were mesmerised by her skill. Just as her Labour predecessor, James Callaghan, ‘went through agonies of envy on the opposition benches during the Falklands conflict itself’5 and Labour leader Michael Foot personally believed Thatcher was right to sink the Belgrano,6 so the way Thatcher timed the election took away the breath of her political opponents. How could they really attack her for synchronising it with the anniversary when their deepest wish was that they could have pulled off a similar number? The parliamentary leaderships of Labour, Liberal and SDP alike accepted the election on Thatcher’s terms and thereby gave up the battle in advance.
Only in the last week of an increasingly desperate campaign did Denis Healey, Labour’s Deputy Leader, try to expose the hypocrisy and that, of course, boomeranged. On Thursday 2 June, Thatcher, speaking in Leicester, called on her supporters ‘to vote Conservative for the biggest victory of all time’ and then ‘quietly thanked three Falklands bomb-disposal men’ in front of a display of machine guns and a defused bomb captured from the Argentineans. But there was no need for such ‘quiet’ reminders of the war. The day before, Healey had accused her of ‘glorying in slaughter’. Healey sensed an opportunity to accuse her of ‘hypocrisy’ as it emerged that UK banks were lending money to the Argentinean regime to buy British arms. Defending his remarks, Healey argued,
‘I was making the point that Mrs Thatcher showed nauseating hypocrisy by wrapping herself in the Union Jack and exploiting the sacrifices of our Servicemen in the Falklands for purely personal, party purposes and at the same time allowing 30 British banks to lend $260 million to the Argentine dictator …’
‘Did this mean’, he was asked, apparently by a fully alert Telegraph reporter, ‘that the Falklands was now an election issue, more than a year after the conflict?’ Healey replied,
‘I’ve made the criticism on many occasions … I pointed out that the “Resolute Approach” slogan was designed by advertising men to enable her to exploit the Falklands issue without actually referring to it.’
But by saying this Healey himself did actually ‘refer to it’, thus giving the right-wing press a field-day. Appearing on the BBC’s Question Time, Healey was forced to concede that he should have said ‘glorying in conflict’ rather than ‘glorying in slaughter’. This was then reported under the lead front-page headline of the Daily Telegraph of 3 June (from which all these quotes are taken) as HEALEY BOWS TO STORM. A second story prominently reported ‘RELATIVES’ PROTESTS FLOOD PARTY HQS’. The SDP–Liberal Alliance rose in the opinion polls, gaining 5 points in a week with the war-supporting SDP Deputy Leader David Owen accusing Healey of ‘the politics of the abattoir’.
Two days later, on 5 June, the Observer reported that a detailed poll showed Healey had struck at the only two issues voters ranked as clear Tory successes: the Falklands War and Thatcher’s leadership. Both scored very positive; on everything else, from economic policy to the NHS, the government’s record was seen as mixed or poor. The calculations of Thatcher and her advisors were right. It was an imperative for them to run on the Falklands and her leadership; they had no other achievements that would win them votes.
And when it came to it, many voters sensed this. They delivered a smaller minority vote to Thatcher than they had in 1979, when her party received 43.9 per cent of the votes cast. In 1983 this was shaved downwards by 1.5 points to 42.4 per cent and nearly 700,000 less people voted for her despite the Falklands victory and her perfect electoral exploitation of it. In terms of seats it was a landslide as the opposition split, Thatcher gained an overall majority in the Commons of 144 instead of 43. Labour dropped nearly 10 points, losing 3 million voters to get 27.6 per cent (its lowest support since 1918) while the SDP–Liberal Alliance got 25.4 per cent. But its 7.7 million votes won it exactly 23 seats while Labour’s 8.4 million gave them 209 – which must rank as perhaps the most unrepresentative outcome in the history of representative democracy. The turnout was 72 per cent.
Even though Thatcher’s policies and approach were losing the Conservatives popular support, they gained a bridgehead into Labour hearts and minds. Her bellicosity led one unemployed voter to pledge support, saying, ‘I detest her but I have to admit she has given us strong leadership’.7 More ominously for Labour, the Wall Street Journal investigated opinion on council estates and provided a vivid example of how Thatcher’s ideology of personal improvement was upending Labour’s patrician concern for the less well off. A self-described working-class family was interviewed. The wife told the reporter, ‘there’d be no future for us with Labour. They don’t want people like us to buy a house; they don’t want people like us to have a start in life.’8
But something else was also happening outside the claustrophobic hysteria of the election campaign. Three meetings took place on Sunday 5 June, in the final weekend of the campaign.
The young Tories rallied in Wembley Hall as 2,500 of them participated in an American-style razzmatazz celebration of the Boss (as she is known in her family). Showbusiness, tight organisation, television coverage, standing ovations, flag-waving … This was US-style orchestrated populism but it didn’t seem to help win Thatcher additional support from the millions who watched the rally on the news.
In another part of London earlier on the same day Michael Foot met and addressed the March for Jobs rally. The March had started from Glasgow on 23 April, before the election had been announced. It should have turned into an overwhelming demonstration of popular rejection of record post-war levels of mass unemployment. Afraid of being branded as extremist, Labour gave the marchers only a formal endorsement. Instead of a hoped-for turnout of 100,000, only 15,000 came to Hyde Park where the gathering dissolved in the rain.
That Sunday a third event took place at Stansted airport in Essex. The American space shuttle Enterprise, attached to a jumbo jet, touched down for the day. It was the first full prototype, built in 1976, and used for flight-testing but was not made for going into orbit. Now, before being retired, it had been sent on an international tour and Stansted was its initial European destination. More than a quarter of a million people turned out to see it, to the astonishment of officials.
Is there a moral here about the state of popular sentiment in England? A longing for escape, perhaps, a fascination with high technology, a dream of being American or at least not being limited to Britain? Ideologically, whatever it symbolised was closer to Thatcherism and the SDP than to Foot’s Labour Party.
To return to ground, of the election, what more needs to be said? It was drenched in the message of the Falklands and its British version of the führerprinzip and there really didn’t need to be any heavy-handed reminders of the military victory. It seems, however, that Margaret Thatcher could not abide the idea that she might have lost votes by not insisting on the point. So the Conservative Party’s final television message spelt it out: ‘Less than five years ago we in Britain no longer believed that we had any right to think of ourselves as a world leader but that has changed. Because of one woman …’
An optimist would hope that the claim contributed to the Tory Party’s loss of 685,607 votes.
Notes
1 Alison Ward, who accompanied the Prime Minister on her election tours: Michael Cockerell, ‘The Marketing of Margaret’, Listener, 16 June 1983 – an article based on the BBC Panorama programme of the same title.
2 As above – an outstanding example of these was Kenneth Harris’s slavish two-part interview in the Observer, 1 and 8 May 1983.
3 Observer, 12 June 1983.
4 On that Sunday morning, 8 May 1983, when supposedly the Prime Minister’s thoughts turned to the que
stion for the first time, the Sunday Telegraph described Conservative Party workers as ‘already prepared for battle’.
5 Economist, 21 May 1983.
6 The Times, 1 September 1983.
7 Observer, 29 May 1983.
8 Wall Street Journal, 3 June 1983.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2012
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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© Anthony Barnett, 1982
‘To Be Absolutely Franks …’ and ‘Time to Take the Great out of Britain’ © Anthony Barnett, 1983
‘How Thatcher used the Falklands to win the 1983 election’ © Anthony Barnett, 2012
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This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–29067–3
Iron Britannia Page 29
