Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  In a sudden flurry, starting in early February, the Conservatives redrafted their manifesto. On 5 February, Angus Maude wrote to Mrs Thatcher telling her that the manifesto would be reworked. On this letter, she scribbled: ‘I think the existing draft will have to be radically changed consequent on recent events and on much more robust union policy. But the general approach of limited objectives first (i.e. tax cuts etc. to encourage wealth creation) remains. In my view the average person and a lot of non-average as well, wants “tax cuts and order”.’49 When the second draft of the new version reached her in March, Mrs Thatcher wrote a note on the title page to Chris Patten, who was in charge of the drafting: ‘Chris – have read through this with considerable dismay. See comments.’ She set to work on the section entitled ‘Our Five Main Tasks’, slashing whatever she thought was too vague or feeble. Where the draft said, ‘Our economic weakness has been partly caused by failure to accept that the interests of all classes within the nation are ultimately the same,’ Mrs Thatcher put a line through it and wrote, ‘No it hasn’t – it isn’t.’ Where the draft said, ‘It would be dishonest to pretend that substantial cuts can be made painlessly,’ she wrote, ‘It depends where you make them.’ Beside the assertion, ‘Nor can we go on, year after year, tearing ourselves apart in increasingly bitter and calamitous industrial disputes,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘The chances are we shall for quite a time.’

  Mrs Thatcher was irritated by the consensual tone which still kept creeping in. On trade union reform, the draft declared, ‘We have proposed a “moderates’ charter” based on three changes …’ She scrawled, ‘Don’t be “moderate” in the defence of liberty or the rule of law. It is the way to lose both.’ On picketing, the draft stated, ‘We will clarify the law to ensure that its provisions against such behaviour are enforceable.’ She wrote, ‘How. I haven’t seen any proposals that will do this. This must be more specific.’ And where the draft, on the subject of pay bargaining, meandered, ‘those involved in pay bargaining … must understand properly the scope for total increase in pay and that unemployment is bound to rise if this figure is exceeded while monetary policy remains, as it must, under firm control,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘This is awful.’ In all references to the EEC, she tried to excise anything which offered more power to Europe. When the draft spoke of ‘common economic and industrial problems that lie beyond the scope of any national government’, she cut the second half of the phrase. Where it suggested ‘a more positive approach’ to the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, she added, ‘This is not quite right. It looks as if we shall be more pliant.’ Throughout, she sought to toughen everything up. Yet at the same time her natural caution showed through. Whenever a commitment seemed too specific, she wrote, ‘Hostage!’ or ‘hostage to fortune’.50

  Despite the ferocity of Mrs Thatcher’s assault on the drafts, the final product was not at all rabid in tone. Indeed, the foreword which appeared under her name now began with a rejection of dogma: ‘For me, the heart of politics is not political theory, it is people and how they want to live their lives.’ Power was being tilted away from people and towards the state: ‘This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process.’ She placed herself as the voice of the future – the leader who could achieve greatness for the country – but she saw this achievement as a restoration of the past. Some said that a once great nation could not recover: ‘I don’t accept that. I believe we not only can, we must.’ Her party’s manifesto was based ‘above all on liberty of the people under the law’. She appealed to an almost wartime feeling of ‘we’re all in this together’: ‘The things we have in common as a nation far outnumber those that set us apart.’

  The Conservatives proclaimed that they had five main tasks – economic and social health, the restoration of incentives, the upholding of Parliament and the rule of law (in part a coded phrase referring to trade union overmightiness), support for family life (for example, council house sales, where a tenant’s right to buy was promised) and parent power in schools, and the strengthening of defence. On trade unions, the sentence which Mrs Thatcher had questioned about ‘tearing ourselves apart’ stayed. There were three specific reforms proposed – the removal of immunities from secondary picketing, a proper ballot about a closed shop and the right of individual appeal against membership, and secret and postal ballots, paid for out of public money, for union elections and strike votes. Pay policies were condemned, and the manifesto made no mention of the Pay Comparability Commission, chaired by Professor Hugh Clegg, whose findings, for electoral reasons and much against Mrs Thatcher’s will, the Tories decided they must promise to honour. In a concession to her future Chancellor, Mrs Thatcher did allow Geoffrey Howe his beloved point about ‘concerted action’ by conceding the need for what the manifesto called ‘more open and informed discussion of the Government’s economic objectives (as happens, for example, in Germany and other countries)’.

  On taxes, under the heading of ‘A more prosperous country’, the manifesto declared, ‘We shall cut income tax at all levels to reward hard work,’ but offered no particular rate. There would be cuts in public spending, but the document was deliberately vague about where these would fall. Sotto voce, the manifesto explained that income tax cuts could not be paid for without a ‘switch to some extent from taxes on earnings to taxes on spending’. The five-year-old promise to abolish the domestic rating system was repeated only to be postponed: ‘cutting income tax must take priority for the time being over abolition of the domestic rating system.’ Nationalization was denounced, but denationalization was not strongly proclaimed. Only shipbuilding and aerospace were specifically marked for denationalization; it was also promised that shares in the National Freight Corporation would be sold off. There would be better police pay, a new British Nationality Act and firmer immigration controls, and higher defence spending. On Europe, the manifesto called for a ‘single voice’ in foreign policy, but was in other respects rather cool. ‘National payments into the budget should be more closely related to ability to pay,’ it said, a low-key harbinger of a row to come.

  By the admittedly low standards of the genre, the Conservative manifesto reads well. It is clear and coherent, and sets out a scale of priorities. It was reticent, but not dishonest, about the need for spending cuts and for an increase in VAT. It expressed a sense of urgency without lapsing into extremism, and it offered a clear difference from Labour’s message of reassurance. It also represented an enormous amount of policy work, fairly well digested. Adam Ridley, who by the time of publication had already had a transition meeting with Bernard Donoughue, the man he expected to succeed in the No. 10 Policy Unit, remembered: ‘I was excited. We had prepared well.’51 For three years, the Research Department had produced shadow spending White Papers which were ready to go to the Treasury after the election. Mrs Thatcher herself had seen Sir Ian Bancroft,* the head of the home Civil Service, to discuss her transition to prime minister, but had forbidden all her shadow ministers, except for Geoffrey Howe, to see the permanent secretaries of their putative departments, since she did not wish to commit herself in advance to choosing who would get what job. Kenneth Stowe,† who, as Callaghan’s principal private secretary, would be hers for the transition, talked to Bernard Donoughue about the process; ‘Ken says she gives the impression of wanting to run the whole show herself. It is clear that the Civil Service is viewing the prospect of her arriving with some dismay.’52

  In modern, televisual election campaigns, which are always so tightly controlled, the press looks for what it calls a gaffe. Thanks to Gordon Reece’s preoccupation with getting the right television images, the campaign of May 1979 was perhaps the first such election. The gaffe duly came, though not through television, even before the campaign had been officially launched. In 1978, Matthew Parris,‡ a young member of the Conservative Research Department, who dealt with much of the Leader’s correspondence, had replied to a Mrs Evelyn Collingwood, of Erith (Mrs Thatcher’s first e
lectoral stamping ground), who had complained about the state of her council house, as follows:

  At Mrs Thatcher’s request I am replying on her behalf to your recent letter. I hope you will not think me too blunt if I say that it may well be that your council accommodation is unsatisfactory, but considering the fact that you have been unable to buy your own accommodation you are lucky to have been given something, which the rest of us are paying for out of our taxes.53

  This was a freelance expression of Parris’s own irritation with Mrs Collingwood’s querulous tone, and had not been cleared with Mrs Thatcher.

  The Daily Mirror had obtained a copy of this letter, and sat on it until the electoral moment judged most damaging to the Tory campaign. When the story broke on the Mirror’s front page on 30 March, including words of apology from Mrs Thatcher – ‘It was offensive and lacked understanding’ – the Labour Party printed three million copies for delivery to every council house of every marginal seat in the country. The story could be made big because it seemed to confirm the fear many voters had that Mrs Thatcher was a divisive figure, the fierce spokesman of her own class, the fierce opponent of those below her.

  That morning, however, while Mrs Thatcher was attending a charity function in her constituency, a bomb went off under Airey Neave’s car as he attempted to leave the House of Commons car park. He died that day. The bomb had been planted by the Irish National Liberation Army, an Irish Republican splinter group. Republicans were keen to murder Neave, chiefly because he was close to Mrs Thatcher, but also because his approach to the subject of Northern Ireland was closer to integrationist moderate Unionism than had been the policy under Heath. From their point of view, his murder was worth while, since from then on the anti-Unionist search for ‘power-sharing’ dominated Tory thinking, even though Mrs Thatcher herself never much cared for it. Republicans believed that power-sharing – the division of the spoils between Unionists and Nationalists – gave them more chance for ultimate success in Northern Ireland than did the integration of the province with the rest of the United Kingdom. In the period of opposition, Mrs Thatcher had devoted very little personal attention to the problem of Northern Ireland, trusting Neave to develop the right policies himself. His death brought out her strongest native feeling on the subject – her hatred of giving any sort of victory to terrorists. Outside her house in Flood Street later that day, Mrs Thatcher told the BBC: ‘Some devils got him. They must never, never, never be allowed to triumph.’54

  It sounds callous to say it, but Mrs Thatcher’s campaign benefited from Neave’s murder, not only because it removed attention from Matthew Parris’s letter. Such terrible occasions brought out both her natural human warmth – all the Neave family were much touched by the attention and sympathy she gave them* – and her attachment to certain simple principles. On 2 April, paying tribute to the man who, more than any other MP, had won her the leadership, she said: ‘Airey’s death diminishes us, but it will enhance our resolve that the God-given freedoms in which he believed, and which are the foundation of our parliamentary democracy, will in the end triumph over the acts of evil men.’55 Few in the House would have disagreed with these sentiments, but equally few would have expressed them with such fervent conviction. For the public, the death of Airey Neave subliminally deepened the idea that Mrs Thatcher was serious, and stood for something important. This struck Alistair McAlpine when he attended Neave’s funeral a few days later. He noted that the funeral had, strangely, ‘quite a joyful atmosphere’. It gave the Tories an ‘incentive to win’. There was a sense that ‘This was definitely the moment, the feeling that this was her hour.’56

  The campaign itself was slow to start. Reece, aware of Callaghan’s tactic of trying to get Mrs Thatcher to make mistakes, kept her quiet. Chafing to be doing something, she made her staff’s life a misery, and Ronnie Millar tried to distract her by taking her off to a musical.57 She explained the delay in a newspaper interview with one of her favourite aphorisms – ‘Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted’58 – but she was not enjoying herself. When the manifesto was launched at Central Office in the opening press conference of the campaign on 11 April, the heat from 300 journalists trying to crowd in was almost unbearable, but Mrs Thatcher’s message was quite cool. Flanked by Whitelaw, Howe, Joseph, Prior, Thorneycroft, Maude, Atkins, Carrington and Pym, she wished to give an impression of unity and calm. She was more concerned to avoid being trapped than to say anything new. She promised – though she hated it – to honour the Clegg Commission’s pay findings; she said that there could be no sudden end to industrial subsidy, and she pushed aside arguments about the distribution of the ‘national cake’ by saying that the point was to create more cake ‘before we can decide how the extra shall be sliced up’.59 Her more emotional speeches – disparaged by Chris Patten as ‘hot-gospelling’ – were confined to the ticket-only rallies which she addressed across the country.

  At her adoption meeting in Finchley the same day, Mrs Thatcher spoke of the ‘choice between good and evil’60 for each person, and implied that such a choice now presented itself. At a rally in Cardiff five days later, she exclaimed: ‘Now, Mr Chairman, because I hold some of these views, I am dubbed as a reactionary. “Maggie Thatcher, reactionary.” Well, Mr Chairman, there’s a lot to react against!’61 Then she delivered one of her classic self-descriptions: ‘in politics I’ve learnt something that you in Wales are born knowing. It’s this: if you’ve got a message, preach it! [applause] The Old Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, “Brothers, I want consensus.” They said, “This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately believe!” And they preached it.’62 This refusal of consensus was something which Callaghan tried to exploit, but it also helped her dominate the debate. At the same time as she proclaimed her faith, though, Mrs Thatcher made raids into enemy territory. One of her most frequent themes was the half-hidden extremism of Labour, contrasted with the sturdy patriotism (which she had certainly not noticed in her youthful speeches at the time) of Clement Attlee’s generation. At Cardiff, this was expressed in one of Ronnie Millar’s dire puns, which nevertheless, to pursue his beery metaphor, went down nicely: ‘Labour today is like a pub where the mild is running out. Soon all that’s left will be bitter, and all that’s bitter will be Left.’ And in Birmingham, she took the example of the city’s famous son, Joe Chamberlain, to show how a politician may change his party, but remain ‘passionately true to his beliefs’.63 She was trailing her coat for converts. In the course of the campaign, the press reported that Harold Wilson’s wife, Mary, was thinking of voting for Mrs Thatcher. And behind the scenes Marcia Williams, Lady Falkender (Harold Wilson’s former political secretary), was working with Reece and McAlpine. She had confided in McAlpine, who was a friend, that she admired Mrs Thatcher and would like to help her. At discreet meetings in the flat of the pro-Thatcher businessman James Hanson,* McAlpine effected the introductions to Reece and an aide of Lord Thorneycroft. The purpose of the meetings was for Lady Falkender to convey to the Tory campaigners her assessment of what the Labour Party was thinking.64

  The Reece plan for the campaign was to get Mrs Thatcher shown in the right television pictures. Indeed, Reece wanted to do away with the London press conferences, which he saw only as traps, but was overruled by his boss because she felt it essential to be in London each day to control the campaign at Central Office. The most important coverage, in Reece’s view, was the least political – the early-evening television news watched by women, the local papers reporting favourably the leader’s visit to their area, rather than the national ones trying to take apart every word she said. He got her out of London, lockstitching clothes in Leicester, wiring herself and Denis up to a heart machine in Milton Keynes, joining tea-tasters in a factory and, famously, cuddling a calf on a farm in Suffolk for thirteen minutes to get the right camera angles. These techniques are now considered old hat, but then they were novelties, the more novel because they were being performed by the firs
t woman to lead a British political party. She was blonde, 5 foot 5, size 14 and weighing 9½ stone:† she was different, and she was bursting with energy. Frank Johnson, then parliamentary sketch-writer for the Daily Telegraph, accompanied Mrs Thatcher to a Cadbury chocolate factory in the marginal constituency of Birmingham, Selly Oak. He described the visit as:

  the most picturesque which your correspondent has witnessed in a decade or so of observing politicians trying to become Prime Minister. Mrs Thatcher would descend on a chocolate woman … They would have a conversation. Because of the din, neither could hear the other … the leader of the Opposition would inevitably be urged to try chocolate packing herself. The problem, of course, would be to stop her. Maniacally, she would raid the hazel crispy clusters and shove them in passing boxes … What a scene! The genius at Conservative Central Office who thought it up must get a knighthood.65

  He did. Reece became Sir Gordon in 1986.*

  An added reason for stunts of this sort was that Mrs Thatcher, as she had proved at the start of her leadership, was very good at them. The artificiality which she sometimes showed in the television studios melted away when confronted with members of the public. Her actressy ability combined with her practical streak and her genuine interest in shopping and how things are made. She loved discoursing about how convenient teabags were, or the best way of mending a garment, and loved hurtling up and down streets, always rushing, always talking. Although Mrs Thatcher was often accused of being humourless, and it was certainly the case that she did not always ‘get’ jokes, she always had a sense of occasion and of fun. She injected drama into these visits, and made the members of the public caught up in them amused and excited to be there.