It also led to an odd reversal of roles between Government and Opposition. From the very beginning of their campaign, Labour more or less ignored their own manifesto – with the exception of vote-buying promises like free television licences for pensioners – and offered only limited excuses for their record. Instead, they concentrated on attacking real and alleged Conservative policies. Jim Callaghan largely discarded his image of avuncular bonhomie and led an extremely effective but wholly negative campaign. This was carried on at three levels. First, the media were fed with a daily diet of scare stories – ranging from the doubling of Value Added Tax to large cuts in the National Health Service – which would allegedly occur if we were elected. Secondly, doubt was cast on the credibility of our promises, particularly the pledge to cut income tax. Thirdly, there was an attempt to portray me as a dangerous right-wing ideologue, unsuited to the complex and demanding tasks of the premiership. Labour’s strategy presented us with a fundamental dilemma. Should we reply to their attacks? Or should we stick to our own message and our own ground? We only ever partly solved this dilemma.
It is always difficult to co-ordinate the different aspects of an election campaign. The best-laid plans unravel and in no time at all the morning press conferences are concentrating on one message, the Party Leader’s speeches a second, Shadow ministers a third, and briefing for candidates something else again. In spite of the serious difference I had with Peter Thorneycroft over tactics, Peter and the team which worked with him were extremely capable.
Two important tactical questions had to be addressed before the campaign got under way. The first was whether I should agree to take part in televised debates with Jim Callaghan. Discussions had been going on with the broadcasters since the summer of 1978 when the BBC (on behalf of both networks) had approached my office and the Prime Minister’s simultaneously.
Shortly before the actual campaign began, ITV revived the idea, proposing two debates on successive Sundays at the end of the campaign with Brian Walden as chairman. This time I was inclined to accept. It was not just that I had always been a natural debater; I believed that Jim Callaghan was greatly overrated and I wanted the chance to expose that fact.
There were, however, still powerful arguments on the other side which persuaded Gordon Reece, Peter Thorneycroft and Willie Whitelaw to argue against. When the possibility had first been mooted, we were neck-and-neck with the Labour Party in the opinion polls. But by the time the decision had to be made we had a substantial lead of probably 10 per cent. This meant that we might hope to win without the risks of a televised confrontation. And those risks were certainly large. I might make a mistake which it would be hard to obliterate. Jim Callaghan was usually a polished performer on television and he would certainly have no hesitation in using his authority and experience to patronize me. The fact that in the early tentative discussions we learned that he would wish to have the first debate on foreign affairs, where he would be able to deploy all those strengths, caused me to reconsider my earlier enthusiasm.
So I was persuaded to turn down the invitation to debate. It was not worth the risks. In any case, as I wrote in my published reply to ITV’s invitation: ‘Personally, I believe that issues and policies decide elections, not personalities. We should stick to that approach. We are not electing a president, we are choosing a government.’ It was the right decision and the criticism it provoked in some quarters quickly dissipated.
The other tactical question concerned the morning press conferences. Gordon Reece would have liked to dispense with these altogether. In terms of media impact, he was right. Very rarely did anything which happened at the press conference – other perhaps than egregious slipups, which were thankfully absent during this campaign – make its way into the day’s main news. But the morning press conference does provide the press with opportunities to ask awkward questions, and this in turn provides an opportunity for politicians to show what they are made of. The morning press conferences are therefore an opportunity to win the respect of seasoned journalists whose judgement will influence the coverage they give throughout the campaign.
For some reason, the Conservative Party always starts campaigning later and builds up more slowly than the Labour Party. Labour on this occasion, however, had an even freer run than usual between the Dissolution and the launch of our manifesto on Wednesday 11 April – largely because the political colleagues to whom I left the public appearances and statements were not very effective. This was, indeed, a difficulty throughout the campaign. With the exception of Michael Heseltine, always relishing a headline, they seemed to behave more like ministers-in-waiting than politicians – which meant, of course, that they risked waiting a good deal longer than they expected. It also ensured that even more of the focus was on me, which even I felt was a mixed blessing. In all campaigns there should ideally be a balance of tones and personalities.
Labour used this period to some effect in order to begin attacking policies which we had not yet published. But the trade union leaders managed, before they were muzzled by Labour Party managers, to play into our hands by adopting tones reminiscent of the Winter of Discontent. Sid Weighell, leader of the National Union of Railwaymen, threatened that with free collective bargaining and a Conservative Government, he would ‘say to the lads, come on get your snouts into the trough’. Bill Keays, leader of the print union SOGAT, promised ‘confrontation’ if the country was ‘foolish enough to elect the Tory Party’. David Basnett, leader of the General and Municipal Workers, also predicted industrial conflict. It was the same old tune which had played well for Labour in the past, but which was out of harmony with what voters were now prepared to tolerate.
Nor had I been entirely silent. On Thursday 5 April I had addressed the candidates (including Conservative MPs standing for re-election) at a meeting at Central Hall, Westminster. This was not my – or probably anyone else’s – favourite place for a public meeting, since it was then rather drab and characterless. There was a special difficulty this year because the candidates expected to hear from me the main themes of a manifesto which was still unpublished. I had to give them some idea of what was coming without revealing the details. So I concentrated heavily on income tax cuts to give greater incentives for wealth-creation and on the need for trade union reform. An audience composed entirely of speakers is not the easiest to address. But their enthusiasm confirmed my instinct that we had chosen the right battleground.
On Wednesday 11 April the manifesto itself was launched at the first Conservative press conference which I chaired, joined by Willie Whitelaw, Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, Peter Carrington, Jim Prior, Humphrey Atkins, Peter Thorneycroft and Angus Maude. The manifesto’s tone was modest and practical and Chris Patten and Angus Maude had dressed our ideas in language which was simple and jargon-free.*
It went down well in the following day’s press. But the heat at the hugely overcrowded press conference was almost unbearable.
The following day was Maundy Thursday. Because Easter fell during the campaign, four days of electioneering were lost. So my first day of serious campaigning was on Monday 16 April – what in the election agents’ jargon was D-17 (‘D-day’ of course was polling day itself). We had decided to begin in Wales. Having flown down from Gatwick, I met the election battle bus at Swansea Airport, visited an NHS hospital and went on to the local Conservative Club, where I was to give regional television and radio interviews. I was aware of a fair amount of background noise at the club. But I only learned afterwards that a huge row, which finished up with fisticuffs, had arisen when the club authorities had tried to keep women reporters out of those rooms reserved for male members only.
Then I went on to Cardiff for the first of the major rallies of the campaign. It was an appropriate place to start. This was very much the heart of enemy territory since Mr Callaghan’s constituency was Cardiff South East. So it was a good thing that Cardiff City Hall had a pleasant feel, the right acoustics and an enthusiastic audience. I also had an ext
remely powerful speech to deliver. It was an uncompromising statement of how socialism had debilitated Britain and of the need for a fundamental change of direction – though not towards some experiment with Utopia but rather back to principles from which we had mistakenly departed.
… In politics, I’ve learned something you in Wales are born knowing: if you’ve got a message, preach it. I am a conviction politician. The Old Testament prophets didn’t merely say: ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said: ‘This is my faith and vision. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it too, then come with me.’ Tonight I say to you just that. Away with the recent bleak and dismal past. Away with defeatism. Under the twin banners, choice and freedom, a new and exciting future beckons the British people.
The audience loved it and so did I. But my cunning adversary, Jim Callaghan, successfully used it to awaken all of the old fear in the Tory Party establishment about the unnerving figure leading them in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar direction. From now on a gap opened up between the way in which Central Office wished to campaign and the direction I insisted on taking.
Such problems were not, however, immediately evident to me.
By Thursday 19 April much agonizing had taken place back in London about the implications of my Cardiff speech for the ‘positioning’ of the Party and our campaign. Peter Thorneycroft had persuaded himself that we had made a strategic error which should not be repeated. And since nothing that Central Office or my colleagues did seemed to get much publicity, he decided to involve himself in the drafting of my speeches. Oblivious to all this, I spent that Thursday morning visiting a Leicester textile factory, where I put my childhood training to good effect by stitching overall pockets amid a chaotic crowd of journalists and an astonished workforce.
It was, however, just before the bus arrived at the Cadbury factory in Bournville that I learned that Peter Thorneycroft was insisting that a strong passage on trade unions, drafted by Paul Johnson, one of Britain’s leading journalists, an historian and a convert from socialism, should be removed from that evening’s speech in Birmingham – the second major rally of the campaign. Peter thought it too provocative. He had also apparently intervened to stop Keith Joseph speaking on the same subject. I did not agree with Peter’s assessment. But being away from London I felt insufficiently sure of my judgement to substitute it for his. So I angrily tore out the relevant pages of my draft speech and inserted some more innocuous passages. I contented myself with the knowledge that the last section of the speech, with which I had been helped by Peter Carrington, contained some extremely strong stuff on defence and foreign affairs, deliberately adopting the tone and some of the language of my earlier Kensington Town Hall speech.
The Birmingham speech was a great success – not just the passages on East-West relations and the communist threat, but also those on law and order, on which I pledged to ‘place a barrier of steel’ against the socialist path to lawlessness. Afterwards we drove back to London where the following day’s (Friday 20 April) constituency visits would take place.
Saturday 21 April was a day of regular campaigning which began at a factory producing highly sophisticated electrical components in Milton Keynes. I was excited by the technology, about which I had been thoroughly briefed, and soon found myself giving a detailed exposition of it to a group of slightly bemused pressmen. I was then wired up and tested on a heart monitoring machine. With all the dials pointing in the right direction I was shown to be in good working order: ‘Solid as a rock,’ as I remarked – something which also reflected my judgement about how our campaign as a whole was going. For one of the oddest characteristics of the 1979 general election campaign was the wide and growing difference of perceptions between those of us who were out in the field and those who were back at the centre. Of course, politicians, like everyone else, are susceptible to self-delusion. But, far more than in 1983 and 1987 when security considerations loomed so large, I was confident that I did have a real sense of what the electorate felt and that their hearts were with us. I was also convinced that this change had come about largely because of the events of the winter of 1978/79 and that therefore undue caution on the issue of trade union power was bad tactics. But it was clear from discussion at the strategy meeting I held in Flood Street on Sunday 22 April that not everyone saw matters this way. Although the opinion polls were still varied – one showing a 20 per cent and another a 5.5 per cent Conservative lead – there had not been much movement during the campaign. Peter Thorneycroft’s view was that we should more or less carry on as we were. As he put it in a paper for that Sunday’s meeting: ‘We should not embark on any high-risk initiatives. We are in the lead.’ This seemed to me fair enough as far as it went. But it begged two questions. First, had we not gained our lead in the first place by taking some quite high-risk initiatives, such as my interventions in the Winter of Discontent? Secondly, what now constituted a ‘high risk’? Measures to curb union power? Or the absence of them? In any case, one of the greatest dangers in a campaign where you have started out with a significant lead is complacency. Exciting the voters, as long as it is not on some issue on which they disagree with you, is an indispensable part of winning elections.
My campaigning that week would take me to the North of England, before going on to Scotland. After the Monday morning press conference, I flew to Newcastle where the photo-opportunity was at a tea factory.
Outside the factory a crowd had gathered, among which was a large, formidable woman who was pouring out a torrent of abuse in my direction. The police advised me to stay away. But I felt that if she had something to say she had better do so to my face rather than my back, and so I walked over to talk to her. I took her arm and told her quietly just to say what was wrong. Her manner changed completely. She had the usual grumbles and worries. But the real cause of her anger was a conviction that politicians were just not people who listened. I tried to answer as best I could and we parted amicably. As I walked away I heard her unmistakable tones telling a friend: ‘I told you she wasn’t half so bad.’ My experience of campaigning over the years is that there are very few irredeemably hostile electors. It is one of the tragedies of the terrorist threat that politicians nowadays have so few opportunities to convince themselves of that fact.
After the Wednesday 25 April morning press conference and radio interviews I had lunch at Central Office before flying to Edinburgh in the afternoon. I was beginning to become tired of the standard speech I made to audiences around the country, which drew heavily on the texts prepared for Cardiff and Birmingham with extra pieces slotted in that would go out as press releases. As a result, I performed inadvisably radical surgery on the material I took with me to Scotland. Just minutes before I was due to speak, I was on my knees in the Caledonian Hotel applying scissors and Sellotape to a speech which spread from one wall to the other and back again.
It was a marvellous audience, and from the first few cheers my spirits lifted and I gave of my best.
We went on to the hotel at Glasgow Airport to have a late supper and then turn in before another day of Scottish campaigning. I was buoyed up with that special excitement which comes of knowing you have given a good speech. Although the opinion polls suggested that Labour might be closing on us, the gap was still a healthy one and my instincts were that we were winning the argument. Labour’s campaign had a distinctly tired feel about it.
They reiterated so frequently the theme that Tory policies could not work, or would work only at the cost of draconian cuts in public services, that they slipped imperceptibly into arguing that nothing could work, and that Britain’s problems were in essence insoluble. This put Labour in conflict with the people’s basic instinct that improvement is possible and ought to be pursued. We represented that instinct – indeed, Labour was giving us a monopoly on it. I felt that things were going well.
Denis, Carol and Ronnie Millar were with me at the hotel and we exchanged gossip and jokes. My old friend and now Deputy Chairman of the Party, J
anet Young, was also travelling with us and had slipped out during the meal. She now returned with a serious expression to tell me that Peter Thorneycroft – or ‘the Chairman’ as she insisted on calling him – felt that things were not too good politically and that Ted Heath should appear on the next Party Election Broadcast.
I exploded. It was about as clear a demonstration of lack of confidence in me as could be imagined. If Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office had not yet understood that what we were fighting for was a reversal not just of the Wilson-Callaghan approach but of the Heath Government’s approach they had understood nothing. I told Janet Young that if she and Peter thought that, then I might as well pack up. Ted had lost three elections out of four and had nothing to say about an election fought on this kind of manifesto. To invite him to deliver a Party Political for us was tantamount to accepting defeat for the kind of policies I was advancing.
It was perhaps unfair of me to blame Janet in part for conveying Peter’s message. But this was the closest I came in the campaign to being really upset. I told her that I would not even hear of it. She conveyed a doubtless censored version of my response to ‘the Chairman’ and, still seething, I went to bed.
It can well be imagined that there was some unseasonal frost in the April air when I came for my briefing at Central Office before the Friday morning press conference. I was also rather too sharp with a journalist at it on the subject of the impact of technology on employment. Then a television interviewer, whom I had been told would be sympathetic, turned out to be very much the opposite. It was that point in an election campaign when everybody’s nerves have become frayed with tiredness. And the pressure was still building. I knew I had further important media interviews, the last PEB to record and big speeches at Bolton and the final Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Moreover, the opinion polls now seemed to suggest that our lead was being eroded. The Central Office view was that it had fallen from about 10 per cent to about 6 per cent. Unfortunately, there was no reason to give any more credence to the internal Party opinion polling – which was on the optimistic side of the median – than to other polls. I had to cancel my visit to the Fulham constituency that afternoon in order to work on the PEB text and the CTU speech. But someone told the press that the real cause was that my voice was failing, which was used to paint an exaggerated picture of a ‘battle-worn Maggie’ trying to stop the election slipping away. In fact, my voice was in remarkably good order but I now had to risk real strain by raising it so as to convince interviewers and audiences that my larynx was alive and well.
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Page 33
