Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  During the campaign, Michael Cockerell followed Mrs Thatcher round for the BBC, compiling a documentary about what he saw as her campaign made for the media – ‘the most professionally organised ever’. He noted two Margaret Thatchers, the ‘crusading Iron Maiden’, woman of principle, and ‘Our Maggie’, the normal housewife. Mrs Thatcher was interviewed for the programme. She said there were ‘at least three’ Margaret Thatchers – ‘There is the logical one, there’s the instinctive one and there’s just one at home’ – and she was surprisingly frank about how she played everything for the camera. In a passage in which her manner now seems almost comically flirtatious, she explained the incident with the calf: ‘The press say, “Look, we don’t want just another photograph of you, with a hundred, uh, bullocks looking in superb condition.” There was a beautiful calf, and after all, we had 70 or 80 cameramen around with us. They have to do their job …’66 It was important to consider, she said, ‘what you’re like in three dimensions’. She emphasized that she had to get everything right because ‘There’s only one chance for women. ’Tis the law of life.’67 This determination to make the most of her one chance brought out her showman’s flair, and contrasted with Callaghan, good performer though he was, who perhaps by this time (he was sixty-seven and had held all the main offices of state) had too little to prove. ‘I am not eaten up with ambition to get here, like she is,’ he told Bernard Donoughue in 10 Downing Street.68*

  Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher’s campaign was not strikingly successful. It suffered from beginning so well in front. Opinion polls which began by giving the Conservatives a lead of 10 per cent or so narrowed quite sharply. There was some feeling that the Saatchi campaigns which had been so popular in the previous year were too frivolous and clever for the electorate. One, shown on 19 April, depicted the ‘International Prosperity Race’, an athletic contest turned by Labour into an obstacle course. The athletes were burdened with large weights of taxation, unemployment and so on. The crowd protested at the handicaps and Tory managers took over. Another showed a patient in a bed covered with the Union Jack, suffering from a cold and sneezing. Thanks to Labour, said the voiceover, ‘That cold seems to have turned to double pneumonia.’ Film of a stereotypical German in a Bavarian hat and with a cigar showed him doing much better than the British. These were amusing and innovative approaches to political broadcasting, but to some they all looked slightly silly. There seemed to be a disjunction between an election whose result could be momentous, and a campaign which did not want to emphasize this too much.

  With the passage of time, the press got to work on those areas of tax and spending which the Conservatives did not much want to talk about. Would the Tories break the link between earnings and pensions? Yes, but they were reluctant to say so in so many words. Would there be new, or increased, health charges? Would they double VAT? Callaghan havered about driving this point home because he feared that if Labour won he too would have to increase VAT,69 but towards the end of April Labour started to push much harder on tax and prices. Michael Portillo, whose job it was to brief Mrs Thatcher on the contents of the press every morning of the campaign, remembered drafting an answer which said: ‘We won’t double VAT, or anything like.’ When Geoffrey Howe crossed out ‘or anything like’, he realized for the first time how big were the tax changes contemplated.70* In Central Office, to Mrs Thatcher’s annoyance, Thorneycroft worried that the tone of the campaign might be too extreme.71

  After two weeks, the Conservative campaign felt as if it was stalling. Polls on 25 April showed the gap between the parties down to 5 per cent (Gallup) and 6 per cent (MORI). That night, after a successful rally in Edinburgh, Mrs Thatcher was dining with colleagues in her hotel in Edinburgh, when Janet Young,† the deputy chairman of the party, returned to the room from a telephone conversation with Thorneycroft and conveyed to her his view that she now needed to share a platform with Ted Heath to show unity and rescue centrist votes. According to Michael Dobbs, who was present, Mrs Thatcher said, ‘No, I won’t have it.’ There was a furious row and she stormed out in tears, being comforted by Carol. In Dobbs’s view, they were tears of frustration at men telling her she wasn’t good enough.72 Her sense of upset persisted, exacerbated by her tiredness; and at the press conference back in London two days later Mrs Thatcher reacted with exaggerated fury to two unsympathetic journalists. She asked Geoffrey Goodman of the Daily Mirror, who asked a question about the effect on jobs of technological change, ‘Why are you getting so frightened?’ And to David Holmes of the BBC, she said, ‘Where have you been this last fifty years?’ Her manner and also her voice showed signs of strain, and her organizers cancelled a speech and walkabout in Fulham that day. A MORI poll in the Daily Express the following morning brought the Tory lead down to 3 per cent, and gave Callaghan his biggest lead yet as the ‘best PM’ – 19 per cent ahead of Mrs Thatcher. Tory jitters were also increased, at least in the memory of some sources, by advance notice of an NOP poll which actually gave Labour a 0.7 per cent lead. This was not published in the Daily Mail until 30 April, so it is strange if the information it contained was already circulating the previous week. The reasons for this delayed publication, if such it was, are not clear. Certainly rumours about bad polls helped fray some nerves. Giving a hostile judgment shortly after the campaign ended, Chris Patten told David Butler that the Conservatives lost the campaign – though they won the election – ‘because they had a leader who was unpopular, and they had no adequate economic spokesman’. He remembered the Tuesday nine days before the poll as a day of ‘desperate panic’,73 though he may have been getting the date wrong – Mrs Thatcher’s embarrassing performance at the press conference was on Friday 27 April.

  Looking back, one can see that the Tory jitters of the penultimate week of the campaign failed to take into account the underlying situation. Famously, it was Jim Callaghan who was clear on the subject. Driving with Bernard Donoughue round Parliament Square about halfway through the campaign, he analysed the situation with detachment: ‘It does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’74 In this sense, although she certainly made some tonal mistakes, Mrs Thatcher was right about the almost prophetic message of change in her campaign, and the more cautious centrists, such as Thorneycroft, were wrong. She displayed her great gift for getting to the simple heart of an often complicated public issue and conveying it urgently. She stood for something which she presented as necessary, and which she contrived to make seem attractively new and yet also reassuringly old fashioned. Perhaps the most telling television programme to convey this was The Granada 500, a forum offered to all three party leaders separately, in which each appeared before an audience in Bolton, chosen as a town whose seats were highly marginal. On his appearance on the programme, Callaghan scored badly, being seen by some to have bullied a nurse. Gavyn Davies,* who worked in Callaghan’s Policy Unit, told David Butler after the election result that Mrs Thatcher’s appearance on the programme had ‘struck all the right notes’.75

  The range of questions allowed Mrs Thatcher to convey her key points. On the ‘woman’ question, she inserted a comparison with Queen Elizabeth I, without pushing it too vaingloriously far. On the unions, she sided with the majority against ‘the few destroyers’ and declared, ‘Someone’s got to tackle this problem.’ On the poverty trap, she argued that it should never pay people not to work. On capital punishment, she took advantage of the moment to reiterate her personal support for hanging, while explaining that it could not be party policy. On immigration, answering an immigrant worried about proposed tightening of the rules so that fiancés would not automatically be admitted, she maintained a tough position which made no concessions to the questioner and won big applause from the audience. No individual answer was strikingly new or unusual, but the overall impression was of a woman well in touch with the anxieties of ‘lower-middle’ England, and ready to do something about
them. It was this England – the C2s whom Gordon Reece had cultivated so assiduously – that had really lost faith in Labour and was ready to turn. With them in mind, Mrs Thatcher published her last newspaper article of the campaign, entitled ‘The Britain I want’, in the Sun.76 The Sun front-page headline on polling day was ‘Vote Tory This Time – It’s the Only Way to Stop the Rot’.

  On the same day as The Granada 500, Mrs Thatcher gave the final Conservative election broadcast, the first in which she alone spoke. The hoarseness in her voice which was worrying her managers could be detected, but she looked fresh and elegant, indeed almost too immaculate, beside a bowl of daffodils. Her message was of a great country gone wrong, which it was not yet quite too late to put right. ‘In recent years,’ she said, ‘we haven’t been true to ourselves,’ but with courage, and a rejection of the socialism which was unnatural to Britain and (she mentioned the Soviet threat) menaced the whole world, the nation could recover: ‘What matters are your convictions.’ As if the tune from the patriotic hymn ‘I vow to thee, my country’ was playing in the background, she said, ‘there’s another Britain which may not make the daily news’ of ‘thoughtful people, oh, tantalisingly slow to act yet marvellously determined when they do’: ‘may this land of ours, which we love so much, find dignity and greatness and peace again.’77 In Downing Street, the broadcast seemed preposterous. ‘It was extraordinary,’ wrote Bernard Donoughue, ‘completely artificial, all sugary, an attempt by Mrs Thatcher to imitate the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.’78 Certainly the broadcast was stagy. But what the criticism misses is the genuineness behind it. As Mrs Thatcher put it in a speech the following day, quoting Victor Hugo without attribution, ‘there is one thing stronger than armies, and that is an idea whose time has come.’79 She believed that she had an idea and that its time had come, and therefore, as she told the closing press conference, the Tory campaign had been ‘all of a piece stemming … from our deep beliefs about society’.80

  In the month after the election, Nigel Lawson gave a private interview. He said something so blindingly obvious that its importance tended to be neglected by many observers used to the politics of Harold Wilson: ‘A key to understanding Mrs Thatcher was that she actually said what she believed.’81

  At about the same time, the former Labour MP Brian Walden, by then a television interviewer and strong Thatcher admirer, offered his own private analysis of her campaign. He said that Gordon Reece had been right in his strategy ‘not to expose [her] to journalism but to the cameras’ because if the journalists had been more alert, they would, being mainly leftist, have done much more to oppose her. ‘The editors’, said Walden, ‘have simply not kept pace with Thatcherism’: ‘Mrs Thatcher was saying something quite different, but didn’t want to be seen to be too different … This election was about a woman who believes in inequality, passionately, who isn’t Keynesian, who is not worried about dole queues.’ In his view, if interviewers had wanted to find the truth, they should have asked her, ‘Mrs Thatcher, do you believe in a more unequal society?’82

  For the practitioners, British general elections always end up in their constituencies. Mrs Thatcher went to Finchley to speak in an eve-of-poll rally on 2 May 1979. As they approached the Woodhouse School, Michael Dobbs, who was in the entourage, saw a young man step out of the crowd and punch Denis Thatcher in the stomach. Dobbs watched Denis stop and consider retaliation. ‘Then he braced his shoulders and went on. This showed amazing discipline. He knew that if he had hit back, he, not she, would have become the story.’83 Inside, Mrs Thatcher roused the troops. ‘The moral case’, she said, ‘is on the side of the free society’.84

  The following day, Mrs Thatcher voted in Chelsea (for the extremely unThatcherite candidate, Nicholas Scott),* while Denis voted in Lamberhurst. Just before midnight, she and Denis arrived at Barnet town hall for the count. By this time, the early results made clear that she would be prime minister, but, with her usual combination of caution and a respect for form, she refused to claim victory until it had been arithmetically achieved, which meant 318 Conservative seats. Jim Callaghan was quicker to react: he telephoned No. 10 from his constituency in Cardiff at 3 a.m. and told his staff that Labour had lost and they should all vacate their offices by 3.30 that afternoon.85

  In Finchley, the result was:

  Mrs Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) 20,918

  Richard May (Labour) 13,040

  Anthony Paterson (Liberal) 5,254

  William Verity (National Front) 534

  Mrs Elizabeth Lloyd (Independent Democrat) 86

  Conservative majority 7,878

  Her majority was nearly twice what it had been in October 1974.

  The final national result gave the Conservatives 339 seats to Labour’s 269; there were twelve Ulster seats, eleven Liberal ones, two Scottish and two Welsh Nationalists. The Conservative overall majority was forty-three. The swing to the Tories was 5.1 per cent, the biggest swing either way since 1945. It was bigger in the south and midlands than in the north and Scotland, and notably bigger among C2s. The Conservative share of the vote was just under 44 per cent (13,897,690 votes). Among Labour’s losses was the seat of Shirley Williams, the party’s leading and most appealing woman. The only Conservative disaster of the night was the loss of Teddy Taylor’s seat in Glasgow Cathcart.

  Mrs Thatcher drove to Central Office, arriving at about 4 a.m. She was still not admitting victory, but Michael Dobbs, who was in the car with her, noticed that, as they passed Buckingham Palace, the escort of two cars suddenly gained three more cars and a motorcycle escort. This, he considered, was ‘the moment of power’.86

  In Smith Square, Mrs Thatcher told the press, ‘I feel a sense of change and an aura of calm,’ but still refused to claim victory. This only became certain at 2.45 p.m. A few minutes later, Mrs Thatcher drove to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands* with the Queen. ‘Good luck, Prime Minister,’ Alistair McAlpine shouted after her, as she left. ‘Don’t call me that yet,’ she said, with constitutional correctness.87

  Part Three

  POWER, 1979–1982

  16

  Downing Street

  ‘They thought she was a sort of right-wing baboon’

  Margaret Thatcher arrived at Buckingham Palace shortly before 3 p.m. on 4 May 1979, accompanied by Denis. Jim Callaghan had left about an hour earlier. The first woman Prime Minister wore a blue outfit with a pleated skirt which Cynthia Crawford, her assistant who had helped her choose it, described as ‘very dainty’.1 Mrs Thatcher saw the Queen, and thus received the authority to take up office. Callaghan’s principal private secretary, Kenneth Stowe, who automatically continued to do the same job for the new Prime Minister, was waiting for her at the Palace as she came down the steps after her audience. He advised her to sit in the official car immediately behind the driver, rather than, as is more usual, on the other side of the back seats. This was to ensure that she could get out of the car at the door of 10 Downing Street without the waiting press and photographers seeing her legs first.2

  When the Thatchers arrived, to cheers from the huge crowd which, in those pre-security days, was allowed into Downing Street, a journalist asked her how she felt. Mrs Thatcher said that she was ‘very excited, very aware of the responsibilities.’ Emphasizing her idea of herself as a woman of conviction, she promised that she would ‘strive unceasingly to try to fulfil the trust and confidence that the British people have placed in me and the things in which I believe’. Then she quoted ‘some words of St Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” ’ These words (not, in fact, by St Francis, but by a nineteenth-century follower) had been supplied to her, at the very last minute, and to the chagrin of her private office,3 by Ronnie Millar. They were to be used against her in later years by those who accused her of sowing more discord than ever. E
ven at the time, they seemed a little pious. Michael Dobbs, who was listening from the hall of No. 10 said: ‘I thought she’d gone mad.’4 Mrs Thatcher half acknowledged the point in her memoirs when she wrote that the overcoming of the forces of error, doubt and despair was bound to produce ‘some measure of discord’.5 But her choice reflected the fact that it was the divisions of the nation, exposed by the Winter of Discontent, which caused the greatest public anguish. The new Prime Minister had to address them. Although she knew a fight might come, she was not spoiling for one.

  Quoting Airey Neave, ‘whom we had hoped to bring here with us’, Mrs Thatcher said, ‘There is now work to be done,’ and made to go inside. But a reporter jumped in to ask whether she had any thoughts at this moment about Mrs Pankhurst, the leader of the Votes for Women campaigns before the First World War, and about her own father. Mrs Thatcher ignored Mrs Pankhurst and invoked Alfred Roberts: ‘I just owe almost everything to my own father … He brought me up to believe all the things I do believe … And it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election. Gentlemen, you are very kind, may I just go …’ and with that she pushed through the door to be greeted, as is customary, by the assembled staff, roughly seventy strong. Among the tiny group of party men accompanying her, expecting to take up political appointments, was Michael Dobbs. Looking at the ranks of career civil servants in the hall, he decided that ‘it was an uneven contest’.6