I had returned early to No. 10 from Tuesday’s daily tour in order to prepare for a Question and Answer session with Sue Lawley on Nationwide. This unfortunately degenerated into an argument about the sinking of the General Belgrano.
The Left thought it was scoring points by keeping the public’s attention focused on this, exploiting minor discrepancies to support its theory of a ruthless government intent on slaughter. This was not only odious; it was inept. The voters overwhelmingly accepted our view that protecting British lives came first. On the Belgrano, as on everything else, the Left’s obsessions were at variance with their interests. But I found the whole episode distasteful.
Wednesday 25 May was a difficult day for both the major parties, though we suffered far less damage than Labour. The Labour Party was so ineffective during the campaign that the newspapers, in desperation for stories, concentrated heavily on leaked documents. The main interest on this occasion was the leaking of a draft report of the Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee, which attacked our economic policies. Cecil Parkinson contacted Edward du Cann, the Committee Chairman, who promptly issued a statement drawing attention to the fact that the report had not been approved by the committee. It was typical of the Labour Party’s lack of grip that they completely missed this opportunity to embarrass us, preferring to spend their morning press conference talking about ‘women’s issues’. We were amazed. As we joked about it I said to my male colleagues at the briefing session: ‘if they have their way, you’ll soon be having the babies.’
Our press conference that day, though allegedly on defence, was in fact devoted to the revelation that our candidate at Stockton South had once been a member of the National Front. He had left the National Front some years before and now claimed to be an orthodox Conservative and regretted his past. As far as we were concerned this was a peripheral embarrassment but some left-wing journalists seemed to see themselves as Woodward and Bernstein, fighting the Establishment. Again, it served to distract the Labour Party from issues of genuine interest to the public.
The Labour Party was now in deep trouble. That same day — the very day we had chosen to devote to defence — Jim Callaghan made a speech in Wales rejecting unilateral nuclear disarmament. The newspapers were full of contradictory statements about Labour’s position on nuclear weapons. Even among Labour front-benchers there was disarray: you could choose between Michael Foot, Denis Healey and John Silkin — each seemed to have his own defence policy. Michael Heseltine at our press conference and throughout the campaign was devastating in his criticisms of Labour’s policy.
I always realized that there were a few issues on which Labour was especially vulnerable — issues on which they had irresponsible policies but ones to which the public attached great importance. They were the ‘gut issues’. Defence was one. Another was public spending, where the voters always have a suspicion that Labour will spend and tax too much. For that reason I was very keen that Geoffrey Howe do a more comprehensive costing of Labour’s manifesto promises than usual. He produced a superb analysis that ran to twenty pages. It showed that Labour’s plans implied additional spending in the life of a Parliament of between £36–43 billion — the latter figure almost equal to the total revenue of income tax at that time. Labour’s economic credibility never recovered. Indeed, Labour’s profligacy has been its Achilles heel in every election I have fought — all the more reason for a Conservative government to manage the nation’s economic affairs prudently.
That Wednesday my election tour took me to the East of England, travelling by aeroplane and coach. It was a beautiful day. I spent part of it campaigning in East Dereham in Norfolk for Richard Ryder. As I have noted, he had been my political secretary, and I was glad to be able to help. And, of course, his wife, Caroline, had also worked for me. Almost a family occasion. I addressed a crowd in the packed market square. There were a few hecklers which made it more fun. I let rip with an old-fashioned barnstorming speech. Later someone told me that above the platform where I had stood to deliver the speech there was a large cinema sign advertising a film called The Missionary.
D-14 TO D-7
On Thursday 26 May (D-14) the opinion polls reported in the press gave us anything between a 13 and 19 per cent lead over Labour. The principal danger from now on would be complacency among Conservative voters rather than any desperate Labour attempts at a comeback.
Thursday was to be another pleasant day of traditional campaigning, this time in Yorkshire. One highlight was lunch in Harry Ramsden’s Fish and Chip Shop — the ‘biggest fish and chip shop in the Free World’ — in Leeds. I thoroughly enjoyed myself but the occasion was quite chaotic, with cameramen crashing around among the startled diners.
That evening I spoke at the Royal Hall, Harrogate, dwelling on a theme which was central to my political strategy. The turbulence of politics in the 1970s and 1980s had overturned the set patterns of British politics. Labour’s own drift to the left and the extremism of the trade unions had disillusioned and fractured its traditional support. The SDP and the Liberals failed to grasp the significance of what was happening. They projected their appeal to the middle-class Left, especially those who worked in the public sector, probably, I suspect, because Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams instinctively sought out their own kind and allowed that instinct to overcome their judgement. In fact, the more numerous and dissatisfied Labour supporters were in the rising working and lower-middle class — the same group that in America Ronald Reagan was winning over and who were known as ‘Reagan Democrats’. They were benefiting from the opportunities we had made available, especially the sale of council houses; more important, they shared our values, including a strong belief in family life and an intense patriotism. We now had an opportunity to bring them into the Conservative fold, and I directed my speech at Harrogate to doing just that:
In this country the things that most of us believe in are greater than the things that divide us. There are people in all walks of life who share our vision, but who have not voted for us in the past. At this election there is so much at stake that I feel I must say to them: the Labour Party today is not the party you used to support. It no longer stands for the traditions and liberties which made this country great. It is the Conservative Party that has stayed true to those traditions and those liberties.
Politicians generally dislike elections. But one advantage is that in the course of a campaign you see a great deal of the country that would otherwise be concealed in reports and memoranda. For example, no official report could convey the excitement of the advanced electronics factories around Reading that I visited on the Friday. It was also my first encounter with the portable telephone.
By the time that I arrived back in London there had been yet another extraordinary development in Labour’s campaign. Labour’s General Secretary, Jim Mortimer, reported to an astonished press corps that ‘the unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the Leader of the Labour Party.’ With statements like that one wondered how long either of them would keep his job.
My own mind that evening was very much on the forthcoming G7 economic summit at Williamsburg, for which I would leave for the United States at midday on Saturday. President Reagan was keen to have me there. He had sent me a message on 10 May to say that he would perfectly understand if I was not able to come to Washington for a pre-summit bilateral meeting, but that he very much hoped I would go to Williamsburg. The message concluded:
I wish you every success in the election and in gaining another mandate to carry out the courageous and principled policies which you have begun.
Above all, he wanted me to win — just as I always wanted him to win. I received a report whose authenticity I had no reason to doubt that the President had said that no pressure was to be put on me one way or another about attending the summit. ‘Hell,’ he was reported to have said, ‘the main thing is for her to get re-elected.’ I shared his analysis.
Whatever its electoral implications for
me, there was no doubt that the Williamsburg summit was of real international importance. President Reagan was determined to make a success of it. At previous G7 summits the scope for genuine discussion had been somewhat limited by the fact that a draft communiqué had been drawn up even before the leaders met. This time the Americans had insisted that we should discuss first and draft later, which, however inconvenient for officials, was far more sensible. But I took along a British draft just in case it was needed.
The atmosphere at Williamsburg was excellent, not just because of the President’s own radiant good humour but because of the place itself. In the surroundings of this restored Virginian town each head of government stayed in a separate house. We were welcomed by friendly townspeople in old-style colonial dress. There was a complete contrast with the perhaps overluxurious feel of Versailles.
I had a long tête-à-tête discussion with the President. It ranged over a wide field: from nuclear disarmament negotiations to the state of the American economy and the protectionist leanings of the US Congress — something which was giving us increasing concern. Later I had a short but important talk with Prime Minister Nakasone of Japan. I had met him when I visited his country as Leader of the Opposition. He was perhaps the most articulate and ‘western’ of Japan’s leaders in the period when I was Prime Minister, raising his country’s international profile and fostering close links with the United States. On this occasion, my main interest was to press for Nissan to finalize its decision to invest in Britain, which I hoped would create thousands of jobs. Understandably, Mr Nakasone’s line was that this was a decision for the company. I should add here that it had been reported in the British press that Nissan would not have gone ahead with their investment had Labour been elected. This was publicly denied by the company, but it was probably true.
The two main objectives which President Reagan and I shared for the summit were the reaffirmation of sound economic policies and a public demonstration of our unity behind NATO’s position on arms control, especially as regards the deployment of Cruise and Pershing II missiles. I introduced the discussion on arms control at dinner on Saturday. In fact, by that morning we had what most of us considered a satisfactory draft communiqué. France’s position — as a country outside the NATO command structure — required to be taken into account. But President Mitterrand said that he had no dispute with the substance of our proposal. In fact, he came up with an amendment that we were able to accept, because it strengthened it in the direction we wanted. It seems improbable that President Mitterrand realized this.
Pierre Trudeau of Canada did have a problem with a strong line on deterrence. He urged us all to ‘speak more softly’ to the Soviet Union. There followed some exchanges between the two of us which I later described in a letter to him as ‘on the lively side’. In the end, a thoroughly satisfactory text on arms control emerged.
The text on the economy was pretty satisfactory as well, except for a little misty language on exchange rate co-ordination. President Mitterrand had been tempted at one stage by grand talk of a ‘new Bretton Woods’, shorthand for the system of fixed exchange rates which had operated from 1944 to 1973. But he did not press this view at Williamsburg.
I came home by the overnight British Airways flight, confident that the outcome of the summit vindicated my approach to the crucial election issues of defence and the economy. This summit also marked a change in the relationship between President Reagan and the other heads of government. They might previously have admired his eloquence and devotion to principle: but they had sometimes been dismissive of his grasp of detail. I, myself, had felt some concern about this earlier. Not so on this occasion. He had plainly done his homework. He had all the facts and figures at his fingertips. He steered the discussions with great skill and aplomb. He managed to get all he wanted from the summit, while allowing everyone to feel that they had got at least some of what they wanted, and he did all this with an immense geniality. What President Reagan demonstrated at Williamsburg was that in international as in domestic affairs he was a master politician.
Monday 30 May was a Bank Holiday. That day Denis Healey released what the Labour Party claimed was the ‘real’ Conservative manifesto, a fantastical affair, full of lies, half-truths and scares culled from reports of leaked documents, especially the CPRS long-term public expenditure document, the whole thing imaginatively embellished. I was not surprised. Labour had tried this tactic in 1979: it had not worked then either. Once again, Labour was catering not to the interests of the voter but to its own obsessions. They failed to realize that propaganda can never persuade people of the incredible. Apparently, you can persuade the press of this, however.
On Tuesday evening I was to speak at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. My idea was to use the occasion to report on Williamsburg and to defend our record on the social services. But looking at the material we already had written, I realized that we had a lot of work still to do and the whole thing was finished in a tremendous rush, as not infrequently happens with my speeches. Several of us spent the early evening before the speech crawling around the floor of my room at the Caledonian Hotel, sticking together bits of text with sellotape. After that we flew further north to Inverness, where we stayed the night. A large crowd of chanting protesters outside our hotel serenaded us to sleep.
The next day (Wednesday 1 June, D-8) I held a press conference, gave television interviews, visited two Scottish factories, flew to Manchester, visited a bakery in Bolton and a brewery in Stockport, and flew back to London to begin work on another speech. I am not usually much affected either by pressure of work or by attacks from opponents. But this day was a little different. Denis Healey made the tasteless remark that I had been ‘glorying in slaughter’ during the Falklands War. I was both angry and upset. We had deliberately decided not to raise the Falklands in the campaign and had done nothing whatsoever to make it an issue. The remark hurt and offended many people besides me — not all of them Conservatives — particularly the relatives of those who had fought and died in the war. Mr Healey later made a half-hearted retraction: he had meant to say ‘conflict’ rather than ‘slaughter’ — a distinction without a difference. Neil Kinnock returned to the subject a few days later, in an even more offensive form, if that were possible. These remarks were all the more revealing because they were politically stupid: indeed they did enormous harm to Labour. They were not made from political calculation, but can only have emerged from something coarse and brutal in the imagination.
D-7 TO D-Day
Nonetheless at Thursday morning’s press conference there was yet more about the General Belgrano and I could not conceal my irritation at the failure of some journalists to grasp the harsh reality of war. I said:
I think it is utterly astonishing that your only allegation against me is that I in fact changed the rules of engagement with the consent of the War Cabinet to enable a ship which was a danger to our task force to be sunk.
On Friday, after the press conference, Cecil and I had now to decide whether we needed a full-scale newspaper advertising campaign over the weekend. Two opinion polls that day showed us with leads of 11 and 17 per cent over Labour. We were being told that we were home and dry. But many voters make up their minds in the last week, some indeed as they are on their way to the polling station; so I have always been a wary campaigner. Cecil was an equally battle-scarred electioneer and we had planned to run expensive three-page advertisements in the Sunday newspapers. But we decided to take a risk and save the money, cutting the advertisements to a more economical two pages. On this my political calculations coincided with my instincts as a Grantham grocer’s daughter. Obvious extravagance is bad advertising.
I spent Saturday (D-5) campaigning in Westminster North, then going on to the constituencies in Ealing and Hendon close to my own. I campaigned in Finchley for most of the afternoon and then went to support our candidate in Hampstead and Highgate.
On my return to No. 10 work began almost at once on th
e speech I was to deliver the next day at our Youth Rally at Wembley Conference Centre. My speech writers and I worked late into the night, breaking for a hot meal which I served up in the kitchen from the capacious store of precooked frozen food I always kept there for such occasions. Shepherd’s pie and a glass of wine can do a great deal to improve morale. Speech writing was for me an important political activity. As one of my speech writers said, ‘no one writes speeches for Mrs Thatcher: they write speeches with Mrs Thatcher.’ Every written word goes through the mincing machine of my criticism before it gets into a speech. These are occasions for thinking creatively and politically and for fashioning larger themes into which particular policies fit. I often found myself drawing on phrases and ideas from these sessions when I was speaking off the cuff, answering questions at Prime Minister’s Question Time and for television interviews. This helped to preserve me from the occupational hazard of long-serving ministers: so I was never accused of thinking like a civil servant. (They had to think like me.) These occasions often continued long into the night and can perhaps be described as fraught but fun.
So was the Youth Rally. Some of the sourer critics chose to take offence at joke remarks made by the comedian who preceded my appearance on stage. What they really took offence at was the broad social appeal of the new Conservative Party demonstrated both by the unconventional people on the stage and in the audience. As one punk rocker told a journalist at the time: ‘Better the iron lady than those cardboard men.’
One of the opinion polls on Sunday put the Alliance ahead of Labour for the first time. This gave the last days of the campaign a new feel and a new uncertainty. But personally I never believed that the Alliance would beat Labour into third place — even though the Labour leaders were doing their best to ensure it did.
The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990 Page 39
