I had insisted on the insertion of this statement. I said that otherwise terrorists, drug dealers and criminals would exploit the provisions of the act to their own advantage and to the danger of the public. Without it I would not have agreed the Single European Act. In fact, neither the Commission, nor the Council nor the European Court would in the long run be prepared to uphold what had been agreed in this statement any more than they would honour the limits on majority voting set out in the treaty itself. But this is to anticipate.
The first fruits of what would be called the Single European Act were good for Britain. At last, I felt, we were going to get the Community back on course, concentrating on its role as a huge market, with all the opportunities that would bring to our industries. Advantages will indeed flow from that achievement well into the future. The trouble was – and I must give full credit to those Tories who warned of this at the time – that the new powers the Commission received only seemed to whet its appetite.
European affairs took second place for me during the rest of this Parliament. The main decisions had been made and even the Commission’s search for new ‘initiatives’ had been slowed for the moment by the need to work out and implement the Single Market programme. The Community was overspending its resources, but had not yet reached the new limits of VAT revenue which had been set. Enlargement had to be carried out. There was plenty to be getting on with.
* I am a great collector of menus. For the connoisseur I reproduce the menu for dinner on 25 June: Assortiment de foie gras d’oie; Homard breton rôti, beurre Cancalais; Carré d’agneau aux petites girolles; Asperges tièdes; Fromages de la Brie et de Fontainebleau; Soufflé chaud aux framboises; Mignardises et fours frais. All washed down with the finest wines.
* Britain and Ireland – as island countries – were permitted to retain or take new measures on grounds of health, safety, environment and consumer protection.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Hat Trick
The preparations for and course of the 1987 general election campaign
ALL ELECTION VICTORIES look inevitable in retrospect; none in prospect. The wounds which Westland, BL and reaction to the US raid on Libya inflicted on the Government and the Conservative Party would take some time to heal. Economic recovery would in time provide an effective salve. But Labour had moderated their image and gained a lead in the opinion polls. It was important that I should unify the Party around my authority and vision of Conservatism. This would not be easy.
So I set in train a series of steps to make plain that the Government encompassed – and was receptive to – a wide range of views. My first concern was to deal with the impression that the Government was unaware of people’s worries. I could do this without diluting the Thatcherite philosophy because, whatever commentators imagined, the hopes and aspirations of the great majority were in tune with my beliefs.
A step towards getting the Government and Party off to a new start was provided by the reshuffle. Keith Joseph had decided that he now wished to leave the Cabinet. The departure of my oldest political friend and ally saddened me. But Keith’s departure gave rise to important changes. What I needed was ministers who could fight battles in the media as well as in Whitehall.
Any analysis of the opinion polls revealed that where we were strong was on economic management; where we were weak was on the so-called ‘caring issues’. In Health I felt that the best answer was to set out the record: but it was widely disbelieved. In Education, however, the Conservatives were trusted because people rightly understood that we were interested in standards – academic and non-academic – parental choice and value for money; and they knew that Labour’s ‘loony Left’ had a hidden agenda of social engineering and sexual liberation. Ken Baker (successor to Patrick Jenkin) had won hands-down the propaganda battle against the Left in the local authorities and he and William Waldegrave, stimulated by the advice of Lord Rothschild, had set out what I had long been looking for – an alternative to the rates. But I felt that a first-class communicator like Ken Baker was now needed at Education.
John Moore, highly regarded by Nigel Lawson, now entered the Cabinet as Transport Secretary. I had high hopes of John. He was conscientious, charming, soft spoken and in some ways he had the strengths of Cecil Parkinson – that is, he was right-wing but not hard or aggressive. He came across very well on television. I had no doubt that John Moore would be an asset to the Government and a loyal supporter to me.
I moved Nick Ridley to the Department of the Environment. Nick could not match Ken or John in presentation. But we still needed to come up with some radical policies for our manifesto and the third term. No one was better suited to find the right answers to the complicated issues which faced us in Nick’s new field of responsibility. Housing was certainly one area which required the application of a penetrating intellect. The sale of council houses had led to a real revolution in ownership. But the vast, soulless high-rise council estates remained ghettos of deprivation, poor education and unemployment. The private rented sector had continued to shrink, holding back labour mobility. Housing benefit and housing finance generally was a jungle. The community charge had to be thought through in detail and implemented in England and Wales. And further ahead lay the vexed question of pollution of the environment.
On the evening of Thursday 24 July 1986 I spoke to the ′22 Committee to give the traditional ‘end of term’ address. My task was to ensure that the Parliamentary Party left in the past all the agonized debates about Westland, BL and Libya and came back in the autumn determined to demonstrate the unity and self-confidence required to fight and win the arguments – and then a general election. In an unvarnished speech I told them that they had had to take a lot of difficulties on the chin in the last year, but those difficulties had nothing to do with our fundamental approach, which was correct. They had resulted from throwing away the precious virtue of unity and also because, as over Libya, we had had to do genuinely difficult things which were right. I was glad to get warm and noisy applause for this, because such a warm response to such a strong speech meant that the Party was recovering its nerve.
The summer of 1986 was important too in another regard. At Conservative Central Office Norman Tebbit, the Chairman of the Party, had been having a very hard time. A good deal of criticism of Norman found its way into the press and at one point he believed that it was coming from me or my staff. Norman arrived one day at Downing Street armed with a sheaf of critical press cuttings, asking where these rumours came from. I reassured Norman that they certainly did not come from me, or my staff, nor – I emphasized strongly – did they reflect my views. These tensions build up when people do not see one another frequently enough to give vent to tensions and clear up misunderstandings. Relations improved, I am glad to say, when Stephen Sherbourne, my political secretary, whose shrewdness never failed me, ensured that Norman and I had regular weekly meetings.
A further step was to involve senior Cabinet ministers in the strategy for the next election. In June Willie Whitelaw and John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, sent me a memorandum urging me to set up the group of ministers which was to be officially known as the Strategy Group and, no doubt to the great pleasure of its male members, was soon known by the press as the ‘A-Team’. I agreed that, apart from Willie and John, the group should consist of Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Douglas Hurd and Norman Tebbit.
At about the same time as the Strategy Group was established I set up eleven Party policy groups. On this occasion I made the chairman of each group the Cabinet minister whose responsibilities covered its area of interest. Apart from the obvious areas – the economy, jobs, foreign affairs and defence, agriculture, the NHS – there were separate groups on the family (under Nicholas Edwards, Welsh Secretary) and young people (under John Moore – the nearest we had in Cabinet to a young person). At least on this occasion, unlike 1983, the groups were set up promptly and for the most part managed to send in their reports on time.
When Parliament rea
ssembled the Party was in a quite different frame of mind than it had been just a few months earlier. We had a brief legislative programme on the advice of David Young, so crucial legislation would not be abandoned if we went for an early election the following summer. And our position in the opinion polls had begun to improve.
The compilation of documents which constitute the Party’s plans for an election campaign is traditionally called the ‘War Book’. On 23 December Norman sent me the first draft ‘as a Christmas present’. I felt a new enthusiasm as I considered the fresh policies and the battle for them which would be required in 1987.
On Thursday 8 January I discussed with Norman and others the papers he had sent me about the election campaign. We met at Alistair McAlpine’s house in order to escape detection by the press, which had already started to speculate about election dates. Many details of the campaign had not been worked out as yet, but I found myself largely in agreement with the suggestions. I did, however, have one continuing worry; this was about the advertising. Several months earlier I had asked whether Tim Bell, who had worked with me on previous elections, could do so again now. I understood that he was a consultant to Saatchis. But in fact the rift between them was greater than I had imagined and the suggestion was never taken up. I might have been prepared to insist, but this would have caused more important problems with Norman and Central Office. In any case I continued to see Tim socially. At this stage in January, though, I still hoped that Saatchis would exhibit the political nous and creativity we had had from them in the past.
I regarded the manifesto as my main responsibility. Brian Griffiths and Robin Harris, from my Policy Unit, brought together in a single paper the proposals which had come in from ministers and policy groups. We discussed this at Chequers on Sunday 1 February. Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit and Nick Ridley were there. It was as important at this stage to rule out as to rule in different proposals. It was at this meeting that the main shape of the manifesto proposals became clear.
We agreed to include the aim of a 25 per cent basic rate of income tax and I kept out of the manifesto any commitment to transferable tax allowances between husband and wife which, if they had been implemented along the lines of the earlier Green Paper, would have been extremely expensive. I commissioned further work on candidates for privatization which I wanted to be spelt out clearly in the manifesto itself. Education would, we all agreed, be one of the crucial areas for new proposals in the manifesto. There must be a core curriculum to ensure that the basic subjects were taught to all children. There must be graded tests or benchmarks against which children’s knowledge should be judged. All schools should have greater financial autonomy. There must be a new per capita funding system which, along with ‘open enrolment’, would mean that successful, popular schools were financially rewarded and enabled to expand. There must be more powers for head teachers. Finally, and most controversially, schools must be given the power to apply for what at this stage we were describing as ‘direct grant’ status, by which we meant that they could become in effect ‘independent state schools’ – a phrase that the DES kept trying to remove from my speeches in favour of the bureaucratically flavoured ‘grant-maintained schools’ – outside the control of Local Education Authorities.
Housing was another area in which radical proposals were being considered: Nick Ridley’s main ideas – all of which eventually found their way into the manifesto – were to give groups of tenants the right to form tenants’ co-operatives and individual tenants the right to transfer ownership of their house (or flat) to a housing association or other approved institution – in other words to swap landlords. We would also reform local authority housing accounts to stop housing rents being used to subsidize the rate fund when they should have gone towards repairs and renovation.
We were by now under a good deal of political pressure on the Health Service and discussed at our meeting how to respond. Norman Fowler at the 1986 Party Conference had set out a number of targets, backed up by special allocations of public spending, for increases in the number of particular sorts of operation. This announcement had gone well. I was reluctant to add the Health Service to the list of areas in which we were proposing fundamental reform – not least because not enough work had yet been done on it. The direction of reform which I wanted to see was one towards bringing down waiting lists by ensuring that money moved with the patient, rather than got lost within the bureaucratic maze of the NHS. But that left so many questions still unanswered that I eventually ruled out any substantial new proposals on Health for the manifesto.
After the meeting I wrote to Cabinet ministers asking them to bring forward any proposals which required policy approval for implementation in the next Parliament. To knock all these submissions into a coherent whole I established a small Manifesto Committee that reported directly to me. Chaired by John MacGregor, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, its other members were Brian Griffiths, Stephen Sherbourne, Robin Harris and John O’Sullivan, a former Associate Editor of The Times, who drafted the manifesto.
As a party which had been in government for eight years, we had to dispel any idea that we were stale and running out of ideas. We therefore had to advance a number of clear, specific, new and well-worked-out reforms. At the same time we had to protect ourselves against the gibe: if these ideas are so good, why haven’t you introduced them before? We did so by presenting our reforms as the third stage of a rolling Thatcherite programme. Looking back, once the manifesto was published, we heard no more about the Government running out of steam.
Because a good deal of misleading comment has been made about the background to and course of the 1987 general election campaign it is worth setting some matters straight at the outset. According to some versions of events this was all about a battle between rival Tory advertising agencies; according to other accounts the main participants – particularly myself – behaved in such an unbalanced way that it is difficult to see why we were all not carried off to one of our new NHS hospitals by the men in white coats. This was not to be a happy campaign; but it was a successful one and that is what counts. There were disagreements – but good old-fashioned stand-up rows, in which most of us regret what we have said and try to forget about it without bearing grudges, feature in all election campaigns.
While the manifesto was being drafted, I was discussing with Norman Tebbit what I hoped would be the final shape of the campaign and my own role in it. At our meeting on Thursday 16 April we went over press conference themes, advertising and Party Election Broadcasts. By now I was in a mood for an early – June – election. I felt in my bones that the popular mood was with us and that Labour’s public relations gimmicks were starting to look just a little tired.
As is the way of these things, the most appropriate date eventually wrote itself into our programme – Thursday 11 June. By then we would have seen the results of the local elections which, as in 1983, would be run through the number-crunchers of Central Office to make it into a useful guide for a general election. It would be supplemented by other private polls Norman had commissioned: this was particularly necessary for Scotland and London where there were no local elections that year. Some polling in individual key constituencies would also be done: though such are the problems of sampling in constituency polls that no one would attach too much weight to these. I saw this analysis and heard senior colleagues’ views at Chequers on Sunday: I knew by then that the manifesto was in almost final form. I had been through the final text with the draftsmen and with Nigel and Norman on that Saturday.
We had one last disagreement. Nigel wished to include a commitment to zero inflation in the next Parliament. I thought this was a hostage to fortune. Events unfortunately proved my caution right.
As always, I slept on the decision about whether to go to the country, and then on Monday 11 May I arranged to see the Queen at 12.25 p.m. to seek a dissolution of Parliament for an election on 11 June.
In my case, preparation for the election involved more
than politics. I also had to be dressed for the occasion. I had already commissioned from Aquascutum suits, jackets and skirts – ‘working clothes’ for the campaign.
I took a close interest in clothes, as most women do: but it was also extremely important that the impression I gave was right for the political occasion.
From the time of my arrival in Downing Street, Crawfie helped me choose my wardrobe. Together we would discuss style, colour and cloth. Everything had to do duty on many occasions so tailored suits seemed right. On foreign visits, it was, of course, particularly important to be appropriately dressed. We always paid attention to the colours of the national flag when deciding on what I should wear. The biggest change, however, was the new style I adopted when I visited the Soviet Union in the spring of 1987, for which I wore a black coat with shoulder pads, that Crawfie had seen in the Aquascutum window, and a marvellous fox fur hat. (Aquascutum have provided me with most of my suits ever since.)
With the televising of the House of Commons after November 1989 new considerations arose. Stripes and checks looked attractive and cheerful in the flesh but they could dazzle the television viewer. People watching television would also notice whether I had worn the same suit on successive occasions and even wrote in about it. So from now on Crawfie always kept a note of what I wore each week for Prime Minister’s Questions. Out of these notes a diary emerged and each outfit received its own name, usually denoting the occasion it was first worn. The pages read something like a travel diary: Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black and last but not least English Garden. But now my mind was on the forthcoming campaign: it was time to lay out my navy and white check suit, to be known as ‘Election ′87’.
Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography Page 73
