Back in London that evening I was interviewed by Denis Tuohy for TV Eye. This was the most hostile interview of the campaign. But it allowed me to give a vigorous defence of our proposals for trade union reform. And on this, whatever Central Office might think, I was not going to backtrack. I reaffirmed my determination to deal with the trade union militants. I also pointed out just what was implied by the suggestion that a Conservative Government would be faced with an all-out battle with the trade unions.
Let’s come to the nub of the matter. What you are saying is that the trade union leaders are saying that the whole of this general election is a hollow mockery and a sham. If you are right, and that is what they are saying, then I am going to ask for the biggest majority any country has ever given any government, and I am going to ask for the biggest majority from the twelve million members of trade unions. I don’t think you are right.
I was especially severe with the Labour Party’s suggestion that discussion with the trade unions, the so-called ‘Concordat’, was a better way of dealing with union power than were changes in the law.
You know, it would have been very, very strange if Lord Shaftesbury, the great Tory reformer, looking at conditions which he saw in the mills and the factories decades ago, had said: I’ll do it by a voluntary concordat with the mill owners. Do you think he would have got it? Of course he wouldn’t. He said: There are some things which we must do by law.
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. Tessa Jardine Paterson frantically typed up each page of the speech, which was handed out, more or less as I delivered it, at Leith Town Hall. At least it was fresh — even to me. At the end I inserted one of my favourite quotations from Kipling:
So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,
Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And everyone smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own![61]
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. Janet 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.
THE THIRD WEEK — D-7 to D-Day
Thursday morning’s Glasgow press conference was an unremarkable affair. The journalists did not seem to have much to say for themselves and I still felt out of sorts. Later in the morning I had a rather difficult interview with a Scottish television interviewer who was believed to be a Conservative supporter and, as sometimes happens, wished to prove the opposite by being particularly hostile. But from then on the day looked up. We visited a creamery in Aberdeen where I sampled some of the finest butter I have ever tasted — and was astonished to learn that it was all being produced not for consumption but to go into EEC intervention storage. It was my first meeting with the butter mountain.
Then it was on to the harbour at Buckie and a fish factory, where the irrepressibly high spirits and good humour of the people worked wonders on me. I addressed an early-evening meeting at Elgin Town Hall and then the coach drove us on to Lossiemouth to board the plane which would take us back to London. All along the way to Lossiemouth Airport the road was lined with people waving and we had to keep stopping to receive flowers and presents. Here was more proof that we were among friends.
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.
Saturday morning’s Daily Express carried a MORI poll showing our lead down to just 3 per cent. There was evidence of a mild case of the jitters affecting Conservative Central Office. Peter Thorneycroft wrote to candidates saying: ‘Whatever happens, I ask for no complacency and no despair.’ It was not a very encouraging message and perhaps indicated all too accurately the feeling of its author and his advisers that the way to win elections was by doing nothing wrong rather than by doing something right. For myself, I publicly shrugged off the polls, noting that: ‘Always as you get up to an election the lead narrows.’ In fact, I had decided that by far the best course now was to shut the opinion polls out of my mind and put every oun
ce of remaining energy into the decisive final days of the campaign. I had a good morning of campaigning in London, including my own Finchley constituency, returning home to Flood Street in the afternoon for discussion of the Election Broadcast.
Sunday 29 April would be crucial. The opinion polls were all over the place. I ignored them. I had my hair done in the morning and then after lunch was driven to the Wembley Conference Centre for the Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Harvey Thomas, drawing on his experience of Billy Graham’s evangelical rallies, had pulled out every stop. A galaxy of actors and comedians livened up the proceedings. Ignoring previous instructions from perhaps over-serious Party officials concerned about the dignity of ‘the next Prime Minister’, Harvey played the campaign song ‘Hello Maggie’ when I entered. And dignity certainly went by the board as everyone joined in. I had never known anything quite like it — though compared with Harvey’s extravaganzas of future years this came to seem quite tame.
The speech itself was short and sharp. And the reception was terrific. Then I went on to Saatchi & Saatchi to record the final Election Broadcast. From four o’clock in the afternoon Gordon, Ronnie, Tim and I worked and reworked the text. Then there was an apparently endless succession of ‘takes’, each of which — until the final one — seemed not quite right to at least one of us. At last, well after midnight, we were satisfied.
The main event of my campaign on Monday was the Granada 500 programme, when each of the three party leaders was questioned by an audience from what was deemed to be the most representative seat in the country, Bolton East. (For many years Bolton East had been won by the party which formed the next government, but in 1979, dazzled perhaps by national attention, the electors got it wrong.) I enjoyed these occasions, feeling more at ease than when interviewed on a one-to-one basis. Somehow the fact that these were ‘real’ people with real worries helped me to relax. Judging by the ‘clapometer’ reading I won the contest.
But the following (Tuesday) morning there was a further opinion poll by NOP which showed Labour 0.7 per cent ahead. There was only one real question on people’s lips at that morning’s press conference: how would I react to the poll? I just brushed it aside, saying that I hoped it would stir Conservative Party supporters to go out and vote on the day. Not only did this line serve me at a difficult moment: I suspect it was a correct judgement. For if anything really threatened our victory it was complacency, and from this moment there was no chance of that. I went on to campaign in the North-West, finishing up, of course, by addressing a rally in Bolton, where the comedian Ken Dodd appeared on stage with a blue feather-duster to greet me. After Ken Dodd’s message from Knotty Ash — which he made sound a pretty true blue constituency — any speech would have seemed over-serious. But there was only one real message for this stage of the campaign, which was that those who wished to throw the Labour Party out of government must not fritter their votes away on minor parties, but rather vote Conservative.
Moreover, the same message had to be repeated insistently until polling day. It was my theme at the final press conference on Wednesday (2 May). I returned to it as I went around the London constituencies, finishing up at the Woodhouse School in Finchley — where I had to push my way through protesting feminists chanting: ‘We want women’s rights not a right-wing woman.’ As I drove back to Flood Street I felt the tiredness flow over me. I had had my chance and had taken it. It was oddly satisfying to know that whatever happened now was out of my hands. For the first time in many nights Denis and I had a full six hours’ sleep.
I woke on election day to learn from the radio news that all of that morning’s opinion polls showed the Conservatives with a lead ranging from 2 per cent to 8 per cent. Denis and I went out to vote at 9 o’clock in Chelsea before driving on to Finchley, where, as was my wont, I toured the committee rooms followed by photographers. I went back to Flood Street for a light supper and to try to have some rest before what I knew would be a long evening. At the Finchley count in Barnet Town Hall, where I arrived shortly after midnight, I kept out of the way in a side room, equipped with a television and supplied with coffee and sandwiches, where I could listen to the results as they came in. Roger Boaden was with me, supplementing the television reports with early information telephoned through from Central Office. I kept a running tally, referring to the detailed briefing which Keith Britto had prepared for me. The first few results suggested that we had won, though among them was the upsetting news that Teddy Taylor had lost Glasgow Cathcart. The projections of our majority steadily began to mount. Local councillors, my Constituency Chairman and his wife, my agent and others came in and out looking more and more cheerful. But I deliberately suppressed any inclinations to premature euphoria: calculation, superstition and above all the knowledge that it is easiest to cope with bad news when you are not expecting good entered into this. In the end, however, not even I could remain non-committal. It was clear to everyone by the time I went out to hear the results of my own count that we would form the next Government.
The events of the early hours of Friday — the welcoming clamour of supporters at the count, the visit to Central Office, the warmth and relief of brief relaxation with my family — are no more than blurred recollections. That afternoon’s visit to Buckingham Palace to receive authority to form a government and my subsequent arrival at Downing Street I have described elsewhere.[62]
The scale of the victory took everyone — or almost everyone — by surprise. It was not just that we had won an election: we had also won a new kind of mandate for change. As the psephologists and commentators mulled over the detailed results, the pattern of our success bore this out. We had won a majority of forty-three seats over all other parties. The 5.6 per cent national swing from Labour to the Conservatives was the largest achieved by either — and our 7 per cent lead over Labour was also the largest — since 1945.
Equally significant, the biggest swing to us was among the skilled workers; and over a third of that lead had apparently built up during the campaign. These were precisely the people we had to win over from their often lifelong socialist allegiances. They were confronted in a particularly acute form by the fundamental dilemma which faced Britain as a whole: whether to accept an ever greater role for government in the life of the nation, or to break free in a new direction. For these people, above all, it was a severely practical matter of choosing whether to rely on the comforting security of state provision or to make the sacrifices required to win a better life for themselves and their families. They had now decided to take the risk (for it was a risk) of voting for what I offered — for what in a certain sense I knew that I now personified. I would always try to keep faith with them.
PART TWO
Beginning Again
On 28 November 1990, as I left 10 Downing Street for the last time eleven years, six months and twenty-four days after I first set foot there as Prime Minister, I was tormented by a whirl of conflicting and confused thoughts and emotions. I had passed from the well-lit world of public life where I had lived so long into… what? Yet, though I may have leapt — or been pushed — into the dark, I was not in free fall. I had my family and my health. I also found that there was an abundance of friends to give me moral and practical help.
Alistair McAlpine lent me his house in Great College Street, close to the Palace of Westminster, to serve as a temporary office. When Denis, Mark and I arrived there, I found a little sitting room for me to work in. John Whittingdale, who had been my Political Secretary as Prime Minister, and several other old and new faces were waiting to greet me. As for our own house, which Denis and I had bought in Dulwich partly as an investment and partly to provide for emergencies (though we had hardly foreseen this one), neither of us really wanted to keep it. It was too far from Westminster and somehow in spite of all that had happened we both assumed that whatever else I was to do, ‘retirement’ was not an option. I wanted and probably needed to earn a living. In any case, I would have gone mad without work.
&
nbsp; It took some time before we found somewhere suitable to live; to begin with we were lent a lovely flat in Eaton Square by Mrs Henry Ford. But finding work to do was certainly no problem. There were countless letters to write in answer to messages of commiseration, which had deeply moved me. Some of my correspondents were in despair. I, myself, was merely depressed.
I was fortunately distracted by immediate personal matters. Christmas was less than a month away, and my departure from Downing Street meant that all my plans for Christmas at Chequers had to be cancelled. I needed to book a hotel for our Christmas party (my own house was stacked high with packing cases from eleven and a half years at Downing Street and Chequers), re-invite my guests now cheated of Chequers, order a new set of non-Prime Ministerial Christmas cards, and see that all the bills were paid.
Nonetheless, the later effect of my departure from Downing Street was to leave time heavy on my hands. Throughout my deliberately busy life I had been able to find solace for personal disappointments by forgetting the past and taking up some new venture. Work was my secret elixir. Now I would have to adjust to a different pace. It was difficult to begin with.
I am not by nature either introspective or retrospective: I always prefer to look forward. I feel easiest dealing with immediate practical problems, and (within reason) the harder the better. Now there was far more opportunity for reflection than I had enjoyed — if that is the word — either as Leader of the Opposition or as Prime Minister. And, painful as it was, perhaps for the first time I felt an inner need to ponder on what I had made of my life and the opportunities I had been given, and on the significance of events.
At first, my involuntary ‘retreat’ was dominated by dark thoughts. I was still able to read in the press a series of obituary-style assessments of the ‘Thatcher years’. And it was no surprise to discover in some newspapers a very different account of the record of my time as Prime Minister than I remembered or thought accurate. It was clear to me from the start that this must be put right by giving my own account in my memoirs — after all, I had made enough public jokes about writing them, and there was no shortage of interest. And one thing that records do not do is ‘speak for themselves’, however much politicians may wish they did. Yet I did not see this so much as a means of self-justification — that was essentially between me, my conscience and the Almighty. Rather, and increasingly, I wanted to give encouragement to those who thought and felt as I did, the next generation of political leaders and perhaps even the ones after that, to keep their gaze fixed on the right stars.
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