Worse difficulties were encountered because of clashes between Lord Young, who acted as the Prime Minister’s travelling companion, confidant and right-hand man throughout the campaign, versus Norman Tebbit, who was theoretically in charge of the overall strategy as Party Chairman. The root cause of these conflicts was that Margaret Thatcher came to believe that the election was being mismanaged and would end in her defeat. Norman Tebbit, who had the advantage of monitoring reports from constituencies around the country, was always confident of winning victory by a large majority.
The strained relations between the two camps blew up into angry hostilities on Thursday 4 June – a date that became known as ‘Wobbly Thursday’. With just seven days to go before the nation voted, the Daily Telegraph published the latest Gallup poll, which suggested that Labour were gaining ground. The gap had allegedly narrowed to only 4 per cent, with the Conservatives slipping to 40.5 per cent, Labour rising to 36.5 per cent and the Alliance static at 21 per cent. Margaret Thatcher, whose political anxieties were exacerbated by a raw tooth nerve inflamed by an abscess, went ballistic at her regular early morning meeting in Central Office. Waving around a copy of the Daily Telegraph, she exploded at Norman Tebbit and his Deputy Chairman, Michael Dobbs. ‘Her demeanour at that meeting was unreasoning and unreasonable and close to hysteria’, recalled Dobbs. ‘It was impossible to put a point or even to be listened to. It was quite clear that there was no point in saying anything …’12
Although Norman Tebbit bore the brunt of this fury, he was not alone in being on the receiving end of rough treatment that morning. The subject for the daily Central Office briefing was pensions and social security. The DHSS Minister, Norman Fowler, was upbraided for his draft press release, until David Wolfson bravely intervened to tell the Prime Minister, ‘Shut up, and read it through first’.13 If she did so, it was not apparent at the subsequent press conference which, in Margaret Thatcher’s own words, ‘was widely considered to be a disaster for us and I was held to blame’.14
The problem was not what she said but how she said it. A journalist asked her to justify her use of private health insurance to pay for having her own minor operations carried out speedily in non-NHS hospitals. This was an easy question to handle, not least because many trade unionists and Labour politicians also took out insurance for private health-care. Unfortunately, Margaret Thatcher was at her most aggressive in response. She lectured the questioner that her health-care insurance was there ‘to enable me to go into hospital on the day I want, at the time I want and with the doctor I want’.15
Her justification was fair, but her tone with its three repetitions of the words ‘I want’ sounded unattractive. Many in the audience were shocked. Even Willie Whitelaw became critical of her belligerence. ‘That is a woman who will never fight another election’, he remarked to Michael Dobbs with prescient foresight, as they walked out of Central Office.16
So dark was the mood on ‘Wobbly Thursday’ that some of the closest members of Margaret Thatcher’s entourage were on the verge of predicting that she might lose the election. ‘It really did appear that we were on the run’,17 recalled Lord Young. Having never fought an election himself, Young was a novice in both campaigning and in the analysis of likely voting patterns. In the judgement of experienced professionals, these matters were going remarkably well. But Young, under pressure from an increasingly anxious Prime Minister, took a more pessimistic view. Her negativity was fuelled by Tim Bell who had been excluded from the inner team at Central Office by Norman Tebbit. In retaliation for being exiled, Bell managed to persuade Margaret Thatcher that the final advertising campaign, prepared by Saatchi and Saatchi, was not good enough and should be replaced by a new series of advertisements created by his own rival agency, Lowe Howard-Spink & Bell.
When this demand for a change of advertising strategy was passed on by Lord Young to Norman Tebbit, the Party Chairman was visibly irritated. ‘Who did this?’ he asked, as he was shown the new ads. ‘Tell me who did it.’
‘Tim Bell’, answered Lord Young.
Norman Tebbit became even more irascible, not least because Bell’s covert involvement as an alternative adviser on advertising to the Prime Minister had been concealed from him.
Lord Young lost his temper over the Party Chairman’s attitude to Bell’s work. He seized Norman Tebbit by the shoulders and started yelling at him:
Norman, listen to me. We’re about to lose this fucking election. You’re going to go; I’m going to go; the whole thing is going to go. The entire election depends upon her doing fine performances for the next few days – she has to be happy.18
In compliance with the imperative of keeping the Prime Minster happy, Saatchi and Saatchi ads were jettisoned and Tim Bell’s ideas were preferred. Much heat and hurt feelings ensued in the process.
But did the upheavals make any difference to the progress or the outcome of the election? The answer to this question is a resounding ‘No!’ All these dramas were the product of Margaret Thatcher’s reactions to wrong or wrongly anticipated opinion polls.
In the middle of the ‘Wobbly Thursday’ hysteria, I came into Conservative Central Office to pick up some extra posters for my own campaign in Thanet. After three weeks of hard canvassing, I was certain that my result would be much the same as in 1983, possibly better. So it was amazing to hear that the Prime Minister was downcast, Lord Young was panicking and that an opinion poll to be published in the next twenty-four hours by Marplan would show that the Tory lead had been cut to 1 per cent.
When I said that this sounded complete nonsense to anyone who had been on the doorsteps talking to voters, journalistic friends treated me as if I was a foolish country bumpkin. ‘The only person who agrees with you that it’s all going well for the Tories is Norman Tebbit’, said a sceptical Bob Carvel of the Evening Standard.19
The following day, it seemed that Aitken and Tebbit were right after all. The pundits reversed their prophesies of doom after a new poll. Marplan announced that the Conservatives had shot into a 10 per cent lead.20 With the wisdom of hindsight, Gallup’s figures of 4 June were seen to be a rogue poll. ‘Wobbly Thursday’ turned out to be ‘Wrong Forecast Thursday’. Norman Tebbit had been right all along in his assessment that Margaret Thatcher was on course for another landslide. What guaranteed the victory was a combination of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s reassuring promises on the economy and of the Prime Minister’s attacks on the incredible defence policies of the opposition.
The trickiest questions in the last days of the campaign were about how long she intended to continue as Prime Minister. Her responses oscillated between the hubristic and the humble. In the first category were her hints that she might seek a fourth term, or even still be in No. 10 at the age of seventy-five. More modestly, she told an interviewer from the Daily Telegraph: ‘It’s not for me to say I would go on and on. I have to submit myself to the judgment of the people at elections and the judgment of my party every year.’21
At such times it seemed there were two Margaret Thatchers addressing the voters. One side of her personality was cautious and circumspect. The other was aggressive and triumphalist. The electorate split down the middle too on lines that were geographical as well as political. For as the results were to show, South East England supported her with enthusiasm, while Scotland and northern England recorded a significant swing to Labour.
By the time she reached polling day, Margaret Thatcher had recovered her confidence and her ascendancy. She won the battle of the posters against Central Office. As a result, the nation was plastered with a slogan from Tim Bell: ‘Britain’s Great Again: Don’t Let Labour Wreck It.’ It was something of a throw-back to the ‘You’ve never had it so good’, sentiments of Harold Macmillan, but it struck a right if complacent note. So did Margaret Thatcher’s eve of poll broadcast, which took fourteen hours to film, climaxing in four minutes straight-to- camera from the Prime Minister on peace and prosperity.
Although these final messages to the
electorate seemed to go well, few would have dared to predict the size of the Tory landslide that was delivered on polling day. At the final count the Conservatives had an overall majority in Parliament of 102 seats. Although it was a reduction from the 144-seat victory avalanche of 1983, nevertheless a majority of over one hundred for a third term under the same leader was a magnificent result.
Terrific though the hat-trick was, among even the friendliest of insiders there were concerns that the conjurer might be unable to keep on producing the rabbits out of her Prime Ministerial hat. For Margaret Thatcher had been in an unhappy and politically negative mood for much of the campaign, despite its glorious conclusion. In the euphoria of victory all doubts were brushed aside, yet the anxieties that had arisen during the past year had not gone away.
Was her style of leadership getting too aggressive and high handed? Was there too much friction with some of her senior colleagues? Was she aware of the storm clouds that might be looming in Europe or the economy? Did she really have a vision for the next five years in government? And could she keep and build the right team to fulfil it? These questions were being only quietly asked in the joyful post-election days of summer 1987, but the anxieties that lay behind them were scented in the political ether by the discerning.
‘All I can say is that it will be a jolly sight harder slog for the government than it looks right now – a jolly sight harder’, Willie Whitelaw told me and his other lunch guests at Bucks Club in mid-June.22
‘In a year she’ll be so unpopular you won’t believe it’, Denis Thatcher told his daughter Carol, as they looked down from the flat above No. 10 on the Prime Minister acknowledging the cheers of well wishers on the Downing Street pavement.23 These early forebodings were to prove all too accurate.
A BOLD BUT FLAWED BEGINNING
Margaret Thatcher harboured no doubts about the long-term prospects for her premiership. She enjoyed comparing herself with Lord Liverpool, the only other Prime Minister to win three consecutive elections. He held power for fifteen years in the 1820s. She implied in various sound-bites that she hoped to do even better. Moreover, she intended to make her reforming zeal more radical and more permanent. ‘What’s to stop us?’ she crowed in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference.24
Her rhetorical question drew comparisons with the ‘We are the masters now’ boast of Sir Hartley Shawcross, a Labour minister, after his party’s victory in the 1945 general election.25
Some of Margaret Thatcher’s triumphalism was justified, for she looked an impregnable Prime Minister in the early months after her 1987 victory. Her first moves were to reshuffle her cabinet and to launch the government’s legislative programme for the coming year in Parliament.
The reshuffle, although not seen in this light at the time, created a dysfunctional cabinet who became so disenchanted with their leader that they were to rebel against her some three years later.
Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson stayed in place as Foreign Secretary and Chancellor. Both were suppressing deeper discontents about her leadership than she realised. The middle ranks contained a group of centrist ministers who had no ideological commitment to the Thatcherite credo. They included John Wakeham, John MacGregor, Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind, Kenneth Baker and John Major, who joined the cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Among the departures was the Chancellor Lord Hailsham, in honourable retirement from the Woolsack at the age of eighty.
The most surprising leaver was Norman Tebbit. He withdrew in order to provide care and financial support for his wife, Margaret, who had been paralysed in the Brighton bombing. An unspoken reason was that he too had become disenchanted with the Prime Minister’s style of leadership. The frictions with Lord Young, and the jealousy of Margaret Thatcher aroused by her fear that Tebbit was nurturing secret leadership ambitions, lost the cabinet one of its most capable communicators. His departure was a more grievous blow to the stability of the government than the Prime Minister realised.
The Thatcherite wing of the government was reinforced by the return of Cecil Parkinson as Transport Minister, and the arrival of John Moore, as a telegenic young Secretary of State for Health and Social Security. Yet, if the political leanings of the cabinet were carefully analysed, there were more independent-minded pragmatists around the table than at any time since 1979. In the aura of permanence that glowed around Margaret Thatcher at the beginning of her third term, she showed no signs of understanding that there might be hazards ahead within her team.
When the new Parliament assembled on 25 June, the Prime Minister was on positively messianic form when opening the Queen’s Speech debate. She declared the legislative programme to be ‘one of the most substantial and radical in recent years’; attacked Neil Kinnock for clinging to ‘the shibboleths of the 1930s’, which had no appeal to a Britain that was ‘becoming home-owning, share-owning and savings-owning’; and announced sweeping reforms in education, housing, health and local government finance.
But there were two bumpy moments in her speech. The first came when she confidently proclaimed, ‘We shall abolish the domestic rates – a grossly unfair tax – and replace them with a community charge’. The benches behind her managed only a half-hearted chorus of hear, hear at this reiteration of a policy which had been dividing the Conservative party for several months in its preparatory stages. The lukewarm reception her announcement received might have registered as an amber light to a more sensitive prime minister. But later at the 1922 Committee, she laid down the law by insisting that rumblings of dissent about the ‘poll tax’, as many Tory MPs were already calling it, must cease because it was her flagship policy. It was an authoritarian approach, which would come to haunt her and ultimately destroy her.
The second glitch in Margaret Thatcher’s performance in the Queen’s Speech debate came when she was talking about her fundamental reforms of education. Referring to the legislation that would enable certain schools to opt out from local authority control, she continued: ‘Those schools will be on the same financial basis as local authority schools. Their fees – I mean their finances …’26
This slip of the tongue produced uproar on the Labour benches. ‘Fees! Fees! Fees!’ was the sustained chant. Eventually the Speaker restored order and the Prime Minister made it clear that there would be no fees payable for these opting-out schools. What was odd about her error was that she had made the same gaffe at the start of the election campaign. Then, she had to be embarrassingly contradicted by Kenneth Baker at her first press conference in Central Office for wrongly announcing that the new schools would charge fees.
A few days later, in a conversation over a drink with Alan Clark, the two of us speculated in the context of the second rumpus about these fees whether the Prime Minister could be having health or memory problems. ‘No one can stand this pace’, Clark’s diary records me as saying.27 The worry was premature but not misplaced. The pressures of eight years as Prime Minister were beginning to take their toll, but only a handful of insiders noticed it.
In the early months of her third term she demanded a fast pace from her ministers. The Great Education Reform Bill, known to Tory MPs as ‘Gerbil’, was a Leviathan of legislation. It covered the introduction of the National Curriculum, opt-outs for schools, the introduction of City Technology Colleges and the abolition of the Inner London Education Authority. As Kenneth Baker steered it through a record-breaking 370 hours of Parliamentary debate, he was subjected to a great deal of pressure from his boss. He recalled:
Her interest in the bill was enormous. She chaired the cabinet committee and we had very feisty rows all the time. Once I had to walk out of the room because things got so heated! But being Margaret, she didn’t mind if you argued back provided you were well briefed. Our fiercest disagreements came over what should be taught in schools, for example over the Maths element in the National Curriculum, where she was a traditionalist on matters such as learning the multiplication tables.28
The greatest dispute concerned the
Prime Minister’s wish to keep the National Curriculum down to three core subjects, taking up 70 per cent of the school year. Schools would be free to choose the subjects in the remainder of the time. This was duly recorded as the decision of the Education sub-committee of the cabinet.
Baker, however, challenged these minutes on the grounds that they reflected Margaret Thatcher’s personal views and not the views of the meeting. His challenge took the form of an almost unprecedented personal minute to the Prime Minister, seeking to set aside the cabinet committee’s findings. A major row followed, at which Kenneth Baker had to threaten resignation before his original plan for a ten-subject National Curriculum was grudgingly allowed to stay in the bill. It was a significant climb-down by Margaret Thatcher, the first of several signs that she would find it harder to get her own way in her third-term government.
LIFE WITHOUT WHITELAW
The colleague who had done most to help her get her own way was Willie Whitelaw. But six months after the election he left the cabinet for health reasons. Attending a carol concert in Westminster Abbey just before Christmas, he collapsed with a mild stroke, which put an end to his political career. He formally resigned in January 1988. His loss was enormous to the Prime Minister and to the running of the government.
For the last twelve years of Margaret Thatcher’s life, four of them as Leader of the Opposition, Whitelaw had been her shrewdest adviser. He had decided, after the 1975 leadership election, that it was his duty to give her impeccable loyalty as her deputy. In government he was extraordinarily effective in helping her to deliver her agenda and to steer through dangerous moments of decision and division.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 67
