Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography
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Luckily for Mrs Thatcher, both arms of the Labour movement – parliamentary and trade union – continued to try to cut their own and each other’s throats. On 12 December, the public sector unions rejected Stage 3 of the pay policy. On 13 December, the government was defeated in Parliament on a vote on its sanctions against employers, most notably Ford, which had broken the policy’s 5 per cent limit. This meant, Donoughue thought at the time, that the government was ‘effectively finished’.17 Yet in the debate on the vote of confidence the following day, which the government won, it was Callaghan who appeared in charge and Mrs Thatcher who failed to rise to the occasion. Donoughue recorded: ‘She sped on as if nobody else was in the House, and very soon people were chatting on the back benches or leaving for tea – because she does not involve them.’ Discussing the debate afterwards, Callaghan said to Donoughue that Mrs Thatcher didn’t realize that a large part of success in Parliament came from treating it as a form of show business, but he added that ‘she was good when provoked’.18*
On the last day of the old year, the Thatchers gave a lunch party at Scotney Castle. It was the first day of heavy snow, and roughly half the guests failed to appear. Mrs Thatcher told Bill Deedes, who had made it through the blizzard, that she had ‘just endured the worst two months of her time as Leader’. ‘By no means down – but low ebb,’ Deedes commented.19 But Britain’s difficulties were to prove her opportunity. On 3 January 1979 a strike by lorry drivers began. Jim Callaghan, sitting in Downing Street with surprisingly little to do, ruminated. Things were ‘all falling apart’, he told Bernard Donoughue. ‘We shall wake up in a few weeks’ time and find that it is too late, everybody is settling for 20 per cent.’20 The next morning’s Daily Mail carried an NOP poll putting Labour 3 per cent ahead of the Conservatives, but Callaghan was nevertheless correct. He set off for the summit of the G7 – the main world economic powers – on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. It was far away, it seemed irrelevant to the crisis confronting the country, and it was hot and sunny at a time when the British winter was peculiarly beastly cold. Press photographs of Callaghan in shirtsleeves with other world leaders roused feeling against him, and when he returned to Britain on 10 January the upbeat briefing he had received on the aeroplane that the oil tanker drivers’ dispute was settled (it had been, but disputes were under way in road haulage and railways, and approaching in coal, gas, electricity, local authorities and the Civil Service) caused him to appear complacent in his remarks to the press at the airport. ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ was the splash headline in the Sun. Callaghan never uttered these words, but they expressed the attitude behind his remarks, and they stuck to him.
Even before Callaghan’s return to Britain, Mrs Thatcher had already begun to change her tone. Interviewed by Brian Walden on Weekend World on 7 January, she turned more fiercely than before upon the union leaders. ‘I am not in Parliament’, she said, ‘to enable anyone to have a licence to inflict harm, damage and injury on others and be immune from the law.’21 She called for postal ballots before strikes, though she was ‘reluctant’ to impose them, and for a tax on benefits to strikers. In a letter to Hugh Thomas three days later, Mrs Thatcher wrote: ‘If I have one resolution for the New Year it is that I should not depart from my convictions by one iota – nor should I fear the reaction of the so-called Liberal Establishment to what I have to say.’22 In a Commons debate on the industrial situation on 16 January, she expressed outrage at what was happening. Donoughue recorded: ‘Typical of her at her best, articulating popular resentment and prejudices … If she comes to power it will be wholly because of the trade unions … Moss Evans [General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union] and his T & G have acted as her stormtroopers.’23
But despite Donoughue’s observation of her rhetorical fierceness, Mrs Thatcher’s political stance in the debate was, in a way, conciliatory. She offered to support Callaghan if he introduced the necessary reforms, such as firmer action on picketing and the outlawing of secondary picketing.24 This was part of a strategy culminating in her party political broadcast of the following evening, and involved departing by more than an iota from her convictions – that the Opposition should not seek to bargain with the government. As the ‘Winter of Discontent’, as people, invoking Shakespeare, were starting to call it, deepened, it had become obvious to a wide range of Mrs Thatcher’s advisers – not just the centrist Chris Patten, but also the loyalist Gordon Reece, Tim Bell, T. E. Utley and Ronnie Millar – that an offer of conciliation would be much more electorally popular, and much more lethal to Callaghan, than a piece of partisan aggression. Mrs Thatcher was intensely suspicious. To Tim Bell, who literally went down on his knees to beg her to broadcast in such terms, Mrs Thatcher said: ‘You’re going to try to sell me a One Nation Tory message, aren’t you?’25 She feared she was being painted into a Macmillanite corner and made to endorse some sort of coalition government. Her advisers persuaded her, however, that the question was tactical and tonal, not one of principle: they were going to turn her into a statesman and make the government look like the party of opposition refusing to come together for the greater good of the country. Gordon Reece cunningly added the bait that, by speaking out now and in this way, she would put herself on the right side of the argument with public opinion and so force Jim Prior to endorse all the main trade union reforms she wanted and anticipate any attempt to block her that he might make.26
Mrs Thatcher was thoroughly grumpy about the whole idea, a fact which she partially conceals in her memoirs,27 but, as always, once she had agreed to something she went into it with gusto and professionalism. Reece and Bell filled her room in the House of Commons, from which her broadcast took place, with flowers to make her feel that she had not lost the argument.28 She began by saying that she intended to rise above partisanship: ‘it is our country, the whole nation, that faces this crisis … This is no time to put party before country.’ She wondered ‘what has happened to our sense of common nationhood and even of common humanity’ that the sick and disabled could be made to suffer in these disputes, and she attacked the state of the law on picketing which meant that ‘almost any determined group can strangle the country.’ This particular storm might pass, she said, but the same thing would happen again – ‘What we face is a threat to our whole way of life.’ There had to be changes in the law: ‘there will be no solution to our difficulties which does not include some restriction on the power of the unions.’ She offered parliamentary co-operation to the government if it would ban secondary picketing, make provision for postal and secret ballots in strike votes and union elections, and establish no-strike agreements in essential services such as the fire brigades. The broadcast was artfully constructed so that it reminded viewers of Labour’s responsibility for the problem and yet reached out to Labour in the name of national unity. ‘I recognise how hard this is for the Labour Party,’ said Mrs Thatcher, ‘because of their close connection with the unions. Without the unions there would be no Labour Party. Without union money there would be no Labour funds.’ But she hoped that it would take the chance in the interests of all, since for the past fifteen years both the parties had tried and failed to crack the problem of the unions. ‘We have to learn again to be one nation,’ she concluded, casting aside her earlier anxiety about the phrase, ‘or one day we shall be no nation.’29
The broadcast was a success. Critics of the Thatcher administrations who allege that they promoted selfishness tend not to recall that it was a revulsion against selfishness – in the form of arbitrary union power – which brought Mrs Thatcher into office in the first place. The Winter of Discontent, after all, involved innumerable disputes in which the public were made to suffer. There was even a time, in Liverpool, when (as Tory propaganda in later years never failed to point out) the dead went unburied. In her broadcast, she articulated this revulsion powerfully. She also turned the pressure on to Callaghan. She knew that the precariousness of his parliamentary and trade union position made it impossible for him
to grant what she asked, and yet that most voters would see her offer as reasonable. On the following day, the Cabinet met to discuss whether to call a state of emergency (they decided not to): ‘Afterwards, the PM said to McCaffrey* with a straight face: “How do you announce that the Government’s Pay Policy has completely collapsed?” He also said to McCaffrey, “Well it will all be over in 11 weeks.” ’30 Suddenly, there was a sense that the main point of the Labour government – that it could combine with the unions to achieve industrial harmony – had vanished. The following day, Bernard Donoughue recorded, ‘The end of the worst week … since I came to No. 10 … The atmosphere is one of quiet despair.’31 All Callaghan could do in public was to talk of voluntary codes of practice and new union agreements about pay – he reached a ‘Concordat’ with the TUC on 23 February 1979 – and urge people to cross secondary picket lines. Even this got him into trouble in his own party.
At last, the Conservatives felt emboldened, having discovered, almost by accident, a way of sounding tough and yet non-partisan at the same time. The minutes of the Leader’s Steering Committee for 22 January – the date chosen for a ‘Day of Action’† by a million local authority workers – recorded the understated view that ‘When we came to revise the Manifesto draft it would be necessary to give greater emphasis to the problem of union power … than we had in the draft the previous autumn.’32 Mrs Thatcher warmed to her themes. On The Jimmy Young Show, as rubbish accumulated in the streets and the power station workers and dockers were demanding 15 per cent pay rises, she spoke of the nation’s ‘spiritual crisis’. And she adopted the rhetoric of battle, against which, earlier, she had been cautioned: ‘If someone is confronting our essential liberties, if someone is inflicting injury, harm and damage on the sick, my God, I will confront them.’ She drove home her point that the rule of law was under threat, explicitly disagreeing with Arthur Scargill, not yet the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers but already its leading firebrand, who had appeared on the programme the day before: ‘There can be no liberties unless the law is enforced. That is my great quarrel with Scargill.’33 An opinion poll in the Daily Express on 6 February put the Conservatives 19 per cent ahead of Labour.
The last few weeks of the Labour government were dominated, even more than the previous five years had been, by parliamentary arithmetic. Until the devolution referendums on 1 March, Callaghan could hold on to his majority in the Commons. But once the Scottish ‘yes’ vote had failed to meet the required threshold of 40 per cent of those entitled to vote and the Welsh had voted ‘no’ outright, the government might fall at any time. Callaghan tried to string things out, but the Liberals, worried about the trial in May of their former leader, Jeremy Thorpe, for conspiracy to murder his ex-lover Norman Scott, were now anxious for an election. On 22 March, Callaghan offered the Scottish Nationalists further talks on devolution, to be settled by the end of April. This did not impress them. Seeing that they could now hope for Liberal, Nationalist and Unionist support (though Mrs Thatcher refused any binding deals), the Tories tabled a vote of confidence, designed to bring down the government.
Although Callaghan was curiously divided about whether or not he wanted an immediate election (the last permitted date for one was October), Labour still made frantic and comical efforts to secure this vote. Could the Liberal MP Cyril Smith, famous for his vast bulk, be persuaded to vote with the government by the offer of a peerage? Negotiations about this went on with his mother, who made all important decisions for him. Would the Northern Irish Social Democratic and Labour Party MP Gerry Fitt* vote with the government if offered a less pro-Unionist Northern Ireland secretary than Roy Mason? Could the Labour MP Alfred ‘Doc’ Broughton be dragged from his sickbed to vote? The Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Frank Maguire, who rarely attended the House, announced his intention of coming to ‘abstain in person’. Maguire was often the worse for drink and had therefore, in the past, been told by his minders where and how to vote in the Lobby, but on this occasion his wife accompanied him in order to prevent this. In short, on the morning of the debate, 28 March, almost nothing was clear. To add to the almost farcical nature of the proceedings, there was a strike of catering staff in the House of Commons. Two Tory whips went out and bought most of the contents of the Lower Belgrave Street delicatessen,* and plenty of alcohol.
Mrs Thatcher did not speak very well. Concerned only to win the vote, she did not want to give any hostages to fortune or start any new controversies. Britain, she said, was ‘a nation on the sidelines’ with ‘far too much power in the hands of the centralised state’, whose taxes and controls produced a ‘pocket-money society policy’. Labour was in hock to the unions, and all substantive reform ‘takes second place to the survival of the Government’.34 ‘She made a bad, flat speech,’ said Bernard Donoughue, ‘and sat down to a disappointed reception from her side.’ Callaghan performed rather more effectively, but, having done so, he told Donoughue the bad news: ‘They cannot get Doc Broughton. He is too ill. We will lose. Please go and get Audrey.’35† Michael Foot, the Leader of the House, wound up for the government in what was generally regarded as a brilliant speech of partisan denunciation. Denis Thatcher was ‘under the Gallery’ watching it, and got furious at Foot’s jibes. He had had a drink or two, and kept saying ‘Rubbish’, until rebuked by an usher.36
Then there was the vote. As the counting came to an end, Bernard Donoughue noticed that ‘The Tories looked down and seemed to expect to lose. One of them who is a friend signalled to me a thumbs down.’37 Then Humphrey Atkins went over to Mrs Thatcher and Willie Whitelaw: ‘They looked disappointed, even angry. Then our teller came in waving his paper gleefully. Our side began to cheer. But when the tellers all came in, it was clear from the grins on the Tory faces and the gloom on ours that we had lost – by one vote.’38 The figures were 310 for the government and 311 against. Broughton had, indeed, not made it to the Chamber. Frank Maguire, who had tried to vote with the government at the last minute, had, despite his wife, been forbidden by Irish Republican heavies* who accompanied him, and was ‘nearly in tears’;39 so it could be said that IRA supporters were the occasion of Mrs Thatcher’s victory.
Ignoring Mrs Thatcher’s plea for an early poll, Callaghan chose the last possible date for a general election now open to him – 3 May.† He hoped by doing so to allow plenty of time to turn the attention of the campaign away from Labour’s problems and on to Mrs Thatcher herself, contrasting his own experience, moderation and reliability with what he thought were her shrillness and extremism. For better or worse, Callaghan believed, ‘she is the dominant personality of the campaign. If we win, it will be because people cannot take her.’40 It was for this reason that Callaghan broke the tradition that it is the incumbent who refuses the invitation to a television debate between the party leaders which is always offered but which never took place until the general election of 2010. Although he did not underestimate Mrs Thatcher’s debating skills, Callaghan calculated, surely correctly, that she had more to lose in a debate than he, and so indicated that he would accept the television invitation. Mrs Thatcher was very keen to accept it too. She was terrified of being considered terrified, particularly being terrified ‘as a woman’,41 and wanted to be seen on equal terms with the Prime Minister. Chris Patten, too, advised her to have the debate. Those ranked on the other side of the argument, though, weighed more heavily. They included Willie Whitelaw, Lord Thorneycroft, Gordon Reece and everyone at Saatchis. All of them believed that the debate would be make-or-break for Mrs Thatcher, but not for Callaghan, who was a much better-known quantity, and that the possibility of ‘break’ when the Conservatives were ahead in the polls anyway was not worth the risk. There was also a view that, because of her sex, it would have been bad for Mrs Thatcher both if she had lost and if she had won. If she had lost, she would have demonstrated straightforward incompetence. If she had won, that would have been a woman humiliating a man, and this would have been unsettling for many mal
e voters. As Thorneycroft put it to David Butler, ‘many men would have resented it. They would have said, “That’s my wife” and it wouldn’t have been a good thing.’42
Gordon Reece was so worried that Mrs Thatcher would accept the invitation to debate that he actually hid the first letter of invitation from her and refused it, hoping that it would somehow be swept aside by events.43 A second letter arrived, however, and Mrs Thatcher challenged Reece about why she had not been shown the first. Reece remembered: ‘All the moisture in my mouth dried up because the row was so terrible.’44 Mrs Thatcher said, ‘Gordon, you’d better go home.’ In the early hours of the morning, Reece, by this time drunk, rang Tim Bell and said, ‘It’s all over. My career is finished,’ but Bell advised him simply to return to work the next day and say nothing.45 He did so, and, somehow or other, his view prevailed. Comforting herself with the excuse that the debate would give an unwarranted advantage to the Liberal leader, David Steel, because the television authorities would have to make some sort of provision for him in all this, Mrs Thatcher refused – writing, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, ‘Personally, I believe that issues and policies should decide elections, not personalities. We should stick to that approach. We are not electing a president, we are choosing a government.’46 In 10 Downing Street, her decision was greeted with relief. Callaghan had felt he must be seen to be ready to debate, and Mrs Thatcher be seen to refuse, but he had been worried about it. Bernard Donoughue recorded: ‘He [Callaghan] is very pleased that Thatcher has declined to go on television against him – a relief to us all, since I think she would have done well. She is much more effective than most of our people – or her advisers apparently – seem to realise.’47 For Reece and his allies, though, this was an important victory, one that kept their strategy intact. As David Butler noted Reece saying just after the election, ‘He [Reece] did not want the election to be about the election. He wanted it to be about what happened last winter.’48