Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  As was usual with her correspondents on matters of policy, Mrs Thatcher wrote no reply, but her marginal notes on Howe’s letter made her feelings clear. Against his claims about currency stability and economic convergence, she wrote ‘Why?’ Beside his view that budget and CAP concessions could not be used as a price for ERM entry, she wrote ‘Can’t do it afterwards.’ Beside his proposition about the Franco-German high table, she wrote simply ‘No.’57 Thanking Sir George Bolton, the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, who had given her his views on the subject, on 13 November 1978, she said: ‘It’s the most illuminating memorandum I have had on the practical problems of an EMS. They look well-nigh insuperable at the moment.’58

  In practical terms, Jim Callaghan made the question easy for the Conservatives. He decided against British entry into the ERM, reporting this to the House of Commons on 6 December 1978. It was simple enough for Mrs Thatcher to say that the failure to join was a sign of Britain’s economic weakness and of Labour’s divisions and ‘a sad day for Europe’,59 and leave it at that. But the documents and letters quoted above perfectly foreshadow – in tone, in content, in personalities, even in the choice of words – the matter which was to cause such extreme bitterness and division in her Cabinets towards the end of the 1980s. Even before she became prime minister, Mrs Thatcher was suspicious of the project of European integration, but was surrounded by senior colleagues who disagreed with her.

  The Tory argument about the ERM remained private at this stage, but these documents exhibit Mrs Thatcher’s habit – one could almost call it a technique – of setting the terms of policy discussion by expressing opinions more trenchant than those of her colleagues. Often, she did this in public. The subject of immigration gave her a notable opportunity. Ever since Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, the question had been toxic in Conservative politics, but public feeling against immigration (and continuing wide working-class support for Powell) was real enough. Indeed, it began to grow again because of Labour relaxation of the rules. For example, the permission given by the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, to fiancés of Asian women to enter the country quickly became a means of abusing the system. When Jenkins temporarily left British politics in 1977 to become president of the European Commission, the by-election campaign in his former constituency of Stechford was dominated by the question of immigration. The Conservative candidate, Andrew Mackay,* sent out 30,000 leaflets headlined ‘Stop immigration’. The Tories dramatically gained the seat from Labour, but it was also notable that the virulently anti-immigration National Front, the forerunner of today’s BNP, won 8.1 per cent of the vote.

  By the end of 1977, with Labour’s measures of economic restraint having some effect, the Conservative lead in the opinion polls had more or less vanished. This seems to have prompted Mrs Thatcher to pay more attention to non-economic issues where there was public discontent. According to Richard Ryder, ‘She felt hemmed in on incomes policy, so she thought she would take a free hit on immigration.’60 In an interview for Granada’s World in Action which was broadcast on 30 January 1978, she noted that there would probably be 4 million Pakistani and New Commonwealth immigrants in Britain by the end of the century. This was ‘an awful lot’, she said, and British people feared that they ‘might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.’ She added that she had been brought up in a small town of 25,000 people, and that about twice that number was entering the country every year. ‘We are a British nation,’ she said, ‘with British characteristics.’61

  There was widespread outrage in the broadsheet press and at Westminster, and widespread approval in the country. The person in the most difficult position was Willie Whitelaw. He was furious both at the tone of Mrs Thatcher’s remarks and at the fact that she had made them without warning him. He would have liked her to qualify them, but he knew that the circumstances of the interview, which had not been recorded live, had given her the opportunity to erase her own remarks before she went on air; she had not done so. Characteristically, Whitelaw went round talking of resignation, but did not actually resign. He told Roy Jenkins ‘how absolutely ghastly life was with that awful woman, how he was thinking of resigning’,62 but continued much as before. In private, Chris Patten, at the Conservative Research Department, expressed the perturbation felt by everyone on the more liberal wing of the party. ‘Just imagine’, he told Michael Portillo, ‘if she’d said we were being swamped by Jewish people.’63 In the House of Commons, the excitable Labour MP Andrew Faulds was ordered by the Speaker to ‘control himself’ in his attacks on Mrs Thatcher. Faulds shouted back: ‘With that bloody woman in the House, how can you expect it?’64 His phrase ‘that bloody woman’ was taken up by many who did not like Mrs Thatcher, often abbreviated to ‘TBW’. Her remarks were significant not for any change in policy – most Tories agreed that immigration controls should be strengthened – but for her choice of language. The way a person talked about immigration was a touchstone of other attitudes then, as it remains today. As with her personal support for capital punishment – a conscience issue on which there could be no party policy – Mrs Thatcher knew this, and was happy to stand up against the chattering classes. There was a sense in which she enjoyed being ‘TBW’. She considered herself to be saying what others sought to conceal. Twenty-five years later, remembering the ‘swamping’ interview, she quoted Kipling’s poem ‘The Fabulists’:

  When all the world would keep a matter hid

  Since Truth is seldom Friend to any crowd,

  Men write in fables, as old Aesop did.65*

  Enoch Powell considered that Mrs Thatcher had quickly backed away from her own position on immigration under pressure from her party – because the Tory bosses were ‘Athenian oligarchs who would always sacrifice culture for class’.66 In fact, however, she stood by her words, and used the occasion to reiterate her belief that the National Front, far from being the authentic, or even the perverted, voice of the patriotic right, was ‘a socialist front’,67 concerned to bring about a siege economy and state control. She was interested in the fact that the word ‘Nazi’ was short for National Socialist, and felt that the socialist aspect was dangerously ignored. She saw the issue of immigration as one where a politician must attend to people’s legitimate fears, and where people were entitled to greater certainty about numbers and commitments. The Conservatives shot up in the opinion polls from neck and neck with Labour to an eleven-point lead and Callaghan, sensing political vulnerability, invited Mrs Thatcher to all-party talks on immigration which she, recognizing an attempt to smother the subject, rejected. The immigration issue helped the Tories win the Ilford North by-election in February 1978. From the whole ‘swamping’ controversy, she took away a growing belief, most annoying to her Shadow Cabinet, but undeniably validated by voters, that ‘I must trust my own judgment in crucial matters, rather than necessarily hope to persuade my colleagues in advance; for I could expect that somewhere out in the country there would be a following and perhaps a majority for me.’68

  The only way, of course, that Mrs Thatcher could prove that there was ‘a majority for me’ was in a general election. With this in mind, in the early spring of 1978 the party made a bold decision in its choice of advertising agency. Three companies were invited to pitch for the account, but Gordon Reece, to whom the party Chairman Lord Thorneycroft, doubting the value of having an advertising agency at all, had delegated the work, did not like pitches. ‘My experience in commercial advertising’, Reece later wrote, ‘had told me that agencies put their best efforts into the pitch when they should be putting it into the client’s business.’69 He made sure that Saatchi and Saatchi, the only one of the three to refuse to pitch, got the account. The Saatchi brothers, Maurice* and Charles,† who owned the company, were complet
ely outside the world of the Conservative Party. Born into a family of Baghdad Jews, they had no previous political involvement. When Reece offered Maurice Saatchi the account, Saatchi rang his chairman, Tim Bell,‡ the only known Tory at the top of the company, who was on holiday in Barbados, to ask his opinion. Bell, who had worked with the Conservative Party in another agency in the Macmillan era, thought it was a bad idea. There was no money in it, he said, and a great deal of aggravation. He thought the Saatchi brothers were not Conservatives and felt socially uneasy with Tories because they feared they would be seen as ‘upstart Jewboys’. Would they be able to put their heart into it?70 Bell was overruled, however, and quickly became the link man with Reece. The Saatchis stayed in the background, Maurice meeting Mrs Thatcher only once before the election of May 1979, and Charles not at all. Alistair McAlpine, the treasurer, shocked Saatchis by saying to them: ‘If we win the election, we’ll pay you. Otherwise not.’71 But he was actually one of the most enthusiastic for their work. When trying to drum up money from rich men for the election, he would go round to them with a sheaf of the best Saatchi suggestions for posters and ask, ‘Which one of these would you like to pay for?’72

  In effect, Reece, Bell and McAlpine formed a team within Conservative Central Office unconstrained by the normal organizational structures, rivalries and bureaucracies of party life. They offered a rather unusual combination of attitudes – a belief in the black arts of advertising and the most modern methods of image-management with a serious ideological commitment to radical Conservatism. Even more important, perhaps, they were all ‘in love’ (Tim Bell’s words) with Margaret Thatcher. All three men, by now in early middle age, and none of them at that time married, liked drink and women and parties and fun. They also carried with them ‘the knowledge that we were engaged in a great crusade’.73 They saw in the apparently straitlaced Mrs Thatcher an indulgent mother or nanny, a patron saint and a unique opportunity. Their emotional loyalty was to her, not to the Tory Party, and this gave an edge to their work.

  The Saatchi–Reece strategy, however, was not to focus public attention on their heroine. Bell told Thorneycroft that Mrs Thatcher was ‘hard to sell’ because she looked too like people’s idea of a Tory wife, and the image of a Tory wife supporting her husband was incompatible with the image of a leader.74 Reece was concerned that the radio broadcasting of Parliament, which began in April 1978, had made life even more difficult for a woman leader because the public could hear her shrieking to make herself audible over the hubbub.75* He also had a high opinion of Jim Callaghan’s skills on radio and television. Although the tendency of ever more televised politics was to make election campaigns more presidential, Saatchis did not seek to encourage this. They thought that it was their task to present an optimistic philosophy of freedom and national recovery and the idea that it was time for a change. Their first party political broadcast, in May, was an upbeat message about the creation of wealth. But they quickly realized that the Tories should try to exploit the old saw that ‘oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them’, and should tap into growing popular discontent. People in general were saying how ghastly everything was, so the Conservatives should say so too. They advised that the Tories should not let Labour keep them at its mercy through its power of choosing the date of the contest, but should attack right away. They recommended that Conservative advertising should strike at what had traditionally been Labour’s strongest points.

  Unemployment, which had hit 1.5 million in 1977, was an obvious example. One of their creative staff, Andrew Rutherford, invented the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’. A gaggle of Young Conservatives from Hendon, so small in number that the same people had to be repeated several times in the poster, formed an imitation of an old-fashioned dole queue snaking into the distance. Designed to cause trouble at a quiet time, and perhaps to put Labour off their expected electoral timetable of the early autumn of 1978, the poster was put up in very few sites, but heavily trailed to selected newspapers, such as the Daily Mail. It was Labour, however, who gave it the attention it needed to take off. Denis Healey, whose undoubted cleverness and eloquence tended to be vitiated by bad temper, raged against the poster – partly for the rather odd reason that it insulted the unemployed by portraying ‘actors’ – and so ensured acres of free publicity. Jim Callaghan retired for a summer holiday at his farm in Ringmer in Sussex, accompanied by The Times Guide to the House of Commons,76 and there he went through the statistics of all the marginal seats before making a decision about the date of the election. The Saatchi poster helped to make him nervous. It is a tribute to the power of the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster that the belief has grown up that it led the election campaign of May 1979. This is not the case, but it is a natural error for the memory to make, for the poster did mark the beginning of the Conservatives’ rhetorical conquest of Labour. The poster found the right terms in which to mount the challenge. Variations on the theme followed later: ‘Educashun isn’t working’ said a poster of a boy writing those misspelt words on a blackboard. ‘Britain isn’t getting any better’ said another of pensioners queueing for miles under a sign marked ‘Hospital’.

  Faced with the Saatchi proposals that summer, Mrs Thatcher behaved in a very characteristic way. She had little natural feel for what made a good election poster or slogan, though she often made small, practical comments. ‘The public don’t know what 20 per cent means,’ she would say, and she warned that it was dangerous to produce posters on which opponents could easily write graffiti because she remembered that in Dartford her opponent’s poster ‘Dodds again for Dartford’ had quickly been defaced by her Young Conservatives to read ‘Odds against Dodds for Dartford’.77 She made commonsense objections on grounds of taste or comprehensibility – refusing to appear at all if they went ahead with a party political broadcast which would have shown a baby in nappies and boxing gloves,78 and requiring every joke to be laboriously explained to her. Jeremy Sinclair, the creative director of Saatchis, remembered that ‘When we wrote for her, she’d cross it all out, rewrite it, and end up pretty much where we’d started.’79 She rejected Saatchis’ first proposed photograph of her because the rings on her fingers were prominent, saying ‘It makes me look rich.’80 Her first reaction to the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster was to complain because ‘the largest word on it is “Labour”,’81 but, Bell remembered, she was quickly won over ‘because she saw it was hurtful [to Labour], and she liked that’.82

  Although she could be pernickety, Mrs Thatcher was quite humble in areas of which she had little knowledge, and advertising was one of them. She trusted Reece, accepted his analysis of what needed doing and liked the people, notably Bell, whom he brought in. She was meekly obedient about what she should wear and how she should speak, and grateful to those who helped her improve. As early as 1972, when she was only a Cabinet minister, Reece had helped her with her voice. He had bumped into Laurence Olivier* on a train from Brighton and had asked the great actor’s advice. Olivier had arranged to lend her the services of Kate Fleming, the National Theatre’s voice coach, to make her sound less shrill.83 Mrs Thatcher had submitted to this uncomplainingly, and she stuck by these lessons as leader. Conscious that she could sometimes be wooden in front of the camera, she asked Bell to sit just behind and below it whenever she did a broadcast so that she could address her words to a real and friendly person. She also accepted the Saatchi–Reece doctrine that no politician should appear continuously on a party political broadcast (which, in those days, had an enormous, statutory length of nine minutes and forty seconds) for more than thirty seconds. They wanted the broadcasts to be untraditional, stylish and funny. These were not natural Margaret Thatcher characteristics, but she endorsed them; and so the most serious-minded of Tory leaders found herself presiding over advertisements full of ingenious innovations like film running backwards (to show the direction in which Labour was taking Britain) and little dramas acted out (of people in a cinema queue complaining about inflation, f
or example), rather than old-fashioned films of MPs stiltedly delivering standard messages. She also agreed with Reece that the voters the Tories most needed to reach were those outside the tent of traditional party allegiance, often people without a strong interest in politics. So she warmly supported advertising campaigns that aimed directly at women shoppers. Advertisements were placed in women’s magazines, which said: ‘Do this quiz to find out if you’re Labour or Conservative.’ After a series of questions about policies, the quiz ended:

  Which of these people is more likely to know what it’s like to do the family shopping?

  a. James Callaghan

  b. Your husband

  c. Mrs Thatcher.

  Cultivation of the popular newspapers was part of the same strategy, as Reece had argued from the first, and Mrs Thatcher readily did her duty. As if to confirm Reece’s analysis of the rising trends in society, the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing Sun overtook that of the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror for the first time in May 1978. Mrs Thatcher sent the Sun a message of congratulation. She flattered its editor, Larry Lamb, and placed great faith in the power of its leading articles. In those days, the leading articles appeared on page two, opposite the famous page-three girls. On one occasion, arguing with her advisers, Mrs Thatcher alighted on two leaders in that day’s Sun which vigorously confirmed her prejudices. ‘There,’ she cried, spreading the paper before them. ‘What do you think of those two?’ The young aides found themselves staring at a large pair of breasts and almost suffocated with suppressed laughter. Mrs Thatcher, of course, failed to notice the source of their mirth.84* Gordon Reece had his own friendships with editors, including John Junor of the Sunday Express and David English of the Daily Mail. When the Mail got hold of the previously unknown story of Denis’s first marriage, Reece exploited his friendship with English to ensure that the story was written in a friendly manner. Indeed, English wrote it himself.85 It says something about the difference between Mrs Thatcher’s successful management of her public image and her uneasy management of her children that the fact of the first marriage had been unknown to Mark and Carol. Carol was in Australia as the story broke and it fell to Alison Ward to inform her about it.86 Mark remembered the incident as very distressing.87 It was part of Reece’s skill that he unlocked in such a correct and almost inhibited woman the showbiz, populist, communicative gifts which lurked within. Her ability to master the media in this way made life far more difficult for her potential opponents in the party.