When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  But Hamilton and many of the other Labour and Conservative MPs who had been doing the parliamentary arithmetic in their heads had not included in their counts the two Tories who had been acting as tellers for Margaret Thatcher. The number of MPs in favour of the no-confidence motion – 279 Conservatives, thirteen Liberals, eleven Scottish Nationalists and eight Ulster Unionists – was actually 311. The government had been defeated by one.

  ‘The terrible anticlimax when we realized,’ said Harrison quietly, still looking into the fireplace. On the tape, immediately after the result was announced, there was a brief chasm of silence, followed by a landslide of shouts and cheers from the Conservatives. Then, half- lost in the noise, the slightly dirge-like sound of ‘The Red Flag’ being sung spontaneously by Labour MPs, led by a promising young left- winger, Neil Kinnock. That night, Harrison recalled, Michael Foot, another of Callaghan’s doomed successors as party leader, held a wake to mark the defeat. ‘Very good party,’ Harrison said with feeling.

  ‘I slept well that night,’ wrote Callaghan, who did not go to the wake, ‘for the uncertainty was over.’ The next day, 29 March, he announced that the general election which the government’s no- confidence defeat necessitated would be on 3 May. This meant an unusually long campaign. Over its five weeks, the government hoped, the Winter of Discontent would recede day by day. Already the opinion polls were showing the Tory lead over Labour shrinking, from around 20 per cent during the winter’s most chaotic phase to around 10 per cent in late March. It was also hoped that the extended campaign would expose the Conservatives’ weaknesses, and those of Margaret Thatcher in particular. ‘We thought Thatcher was the weak link,’ Gavyn Davies told me. ‘Shrill, totally out of touch with mainstream thinking. In a presidential contest, people would’ve voted for Jim.’

  The election was not a presidential contest, but Labour tried to make it one. Like Wilson in 1970, Callaghan was the smiling, strolling centre of their campaign, dropping in on shopping centres and housing estates, clasping hands and holding casual conversations, his gaze friendly but knowing, and making low-key speeches about the perils of change. He wore sharper-than-usual dark suits and took care with his haircuts. He made no gaffes. After the gloom and paralysis of the winter, he had recovered his poise. On 12 April, the polling firm Gallup published its answer to the question, ‘Who would make the better Prime Minister?’ Callaghan led Thatcher by 39 per cent to 33 per cent. By the end of the campaign, his lead on this question had more than trebled: 44 per cent to 25 per cent.

  Apart from persistent hecklers who wanted the British troops out of Northern Ireland, Callaghan was treated respectfully by the public. No trade unionists with placards pursued him. Nobody threw ink or stubbed out a cigarette on him, as had happened to Heath in the early seventies. The 1979 campaign, wrote the veteran general- election observers David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, was ‘exceptionally orderly’. Part of this was due to increased levels of security. Two days after the no-confidence vote, Thatcher’s mentor Airey Neave had been blown up by a car bomb as he drove up the ramp from the House of Commons car park, with the Irish National Liberation Army, an IRA splinter group, thought to be responsible. But the Labour campaign also had a deliberately sedative quality. The manifesto, cosily titled ‘The Labour Way Is the Better Way’, was Callaghan’s last triumph over the left of his party. It ignored policy proposals from Tony Benn and other senior Labour figures for getting rid of Britain’s nuclear weapons, for more state intervention in the economy and for the abolition of the House of Lords, all of which were receiving growing support in the party as a whole. The word ‘socialist’ barely featured. Instead, the document offered a mild, modernized, rather optimistic version of social democracy:

  We will take great care to protect working people from the hardships of change … We must keep a curb on inflation … [We] will continue to reduce the burden of income tax, and raise the tax threshold below which people pay no income tax … We shall continue to help those who wish to buy their own homes… We will seek to implement the UN target of 0.7% of the Gross National Product for official [overseas] aid as soon as economic circumstances permit …

  The manifesto concluded: ‘We reject the concept that there is a choice to be made between a prosperous and efficient Britain and a caring and compassionate society.’ With this argument, and in its bright, almost apolitical underlying tone, the manifesto prefigured what would be offered a decade and a half later, to a more receptive country, by New Labour.

  Callaghan’s manifesto also prophesied with some accuracy what would happen to Britain if he was defeated: ‘A Tory government … would mean soaring prices and growing unemployment … At work … confrontation … free market forces … misery for millions of the most vulnerable … a drastic reduction in all our social services.’ During the campaign, the prime minister carefully avoided making personal attacks on Margaret Thatcher, but his whole demeanour and almost all of what he said was intended to contrast Labour’s inclusiveness with her divisiveness, Labour’s caution with her recklessness, Labour’s pragmatism with her dogma. This approach could be questioned. Labour, in truth, contained plenty of divisive, reckless and dogmatic figures. One of them, Tony Benn, argued during the campaign that, in the polarized Britain of the late seventies, Labour should match the Conservatives’ new abrasiveness under Thatcher with their own.

  Yet as April went by, Callaghan’s strategy seemed to be at least partly working. The Tory poll lead eroded: in the first week of the month, one survey had the Tory lead down to single figures; in the second week, two did; in the third week, three. In the fourth week, a MORI poll put the Conservatives only 3 per cent ahead. NOP actually gave Labour a 0.7 per cent lead. ‘During the campaign, I felt, “It’s going well,”’ Tom McNally told me. On 29 April, Bernard Donoughue sent Callaghan a memo titled ‘Strategy: Last Three Days’. ‘The genuineness of Labour’s appeal was getting through,’ he wrote. ‘But we must not let up. Harold made that mistake in 1970 … We need one last big heave to get home.’ In the Guardian on 2 May, the respected political commentator Peter Jenkins wrote, ‘It would no longer be amazing to see Mr Callaghan win by a whisker.’

  In the Conservative Party during these weeks there was an intermittent but widely felt anxiety: that the politics of 1977 and 1978 – of the Tories still seeming a little green and divided, of Callaghan catching enough of the national mood and mounting an unlikely political escape – might be returning despite all the recent Labour calamities. In part this nervousness was an occupational hazard for opposition parties entering elections with opinion-poll leads after a long period out of office. In part it was the unreliability of British opinion polls in the seventies. Yet even Margaret Thatcher found the 1979 campaign at times worrying and frustrating:

  I … believed that we should be bold in explaining precisely what had gone wrong [in Britain] and why radical action was required to put it right. I was soon to be aware, however, that this was not how [the Conservative Party chairman] Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office in general saw things.

  Their belief was that we should at all costs avoid ‘gaffes’, which meant in practice almost anything controversial – in particular, attacks on trade union power …

  In fact, Thatcher was partly complicit in her own muzzling. Unlike Callaghan, she only addressed public meetings to which friendly audiences, usually Conservative Party members, had been given tickets. She declined to take part in a televised debate with him and the Liberal leader David Steel, worrying that ‘I might make a mistake.’ Since the early sixties, it had been the norm in Britain that opposition leaders actively sought such confrontations. Instead, she presented herself to the cameras in more controlled circumstances. On a farm in Norfolk, she held a newborn calf in the air for thirteen minutes, smiling determinedly and keeping its dangling legs away from her suit. In Milton Keynes, which she and Callaghan both visited, she had her heartbeat and blood pressure tested for the photographers. ‘They can’t find anything wrong with
me,’ she said as the reading came up, adopting a public style – a little self-mocking but, more importantly, domineering and utterly confident – that would become crushingly familiar to Britons over the next dozen years. ‘They never can.’

  She did as few serious interviews as she could get away with. The one proper television interrogation she agreed to, for Thames Television’s TV Eye on 24 April, was not an overwhelming success. The show’s regular interviewer Llew Gardner had questioned her roughly three years earlier, and she only agreed to appear this time on the condition that he was not used. But his replacement, Denis Tuohy, felt obliged to stand up to her and probed her hard about taxes and trade unions. ‘This was the most hostile interview of the campaign,’ she wrote afterwards, ‘but it allowed me to give a vigorous defence of our proposals.’ Her biographer John Campbell’s evaluation of the encounter is less positive: the would-be prime minister, he writes, came across as ‘angry’ and ‘evasive’. Margaret Thatcher, like her brand of Conservatism, with its contradictory mixture of free-market radicalism and market-town moralism, was not impregnable when properly challenged. But, from 1979, increasingly few British journalists and politicians would manage to do so.

  The Tuohy interview, nonetheless, was not quite a gaffe, and afterwards she reverted calmly to her usual electioneering style: energetic, slightly shameless, a production line for easily digested political symbols. In Halifax, she held up two mesh bags of groceries for the cameras, one with a piece of paper tied to it reading ‘February 1974’ – the date Labour had come to power – and one reading ‘Today’. The 1974 bag was twice as full as the 1979 one. The message was as unsubtle and potent as a graphic in a tabloid: under Labour, inflation had stripped voters’ kitchen cupboards. Callaghan was scornful of such photo opportunities. ‘It’s not my style,’ he said. ‘If I do [it], I’ll sound as phoney as she does.’ Given the way his personal advantage over her in the polls grew during the campaign, a lot of voters evidently preferred his more muted, less cartoonish public manner. However, just because people did not particularly warm to Margaret Thatcher did not mean that they ignored her arguments about what was wrong with the country. Over the campaign, MORI found that the Conservative poll leads over Labour on inflation, taxation and law and order all widened.

  Moreover, Thatcher could not really be dismissed as ‘phoney’. In 1979, as throughout her career, she was minutely styled, either by herself or by others, and eerily photogenic. In public, she was always in character. But then that was her actual character – minus her occasional moments of self-doubt and her famously sparse outside interests. The would-be prime minister was conscientious, abrasive, sure of herself, slightly priggish, controlling, occasionally flirtatious, a break with the past, a woman – all this was there in plain sight. And Thatcher was happy to draw attention to how different she was from most other seventies politicians. When journalists and voters, as they often did, asked her whether a woman could cope with being prime minister, she compared herself to Elizabeth I, or said that only a woman could balance Britain’s books, or give the country a good spring-cleaning. It was not exactly a feminist answer. In the May 1979 edition of Spare Rib , published before the election, an editorial headlined ‘Is Margaret Thatcher for Women?’ pointed out that the Conservative leader had a poor Commons record when it came to voting for bills that benefited women; that the union she had been most critical of during the Winter of Discontent, NUPE, had a 65 per cent female membership; and that if she was elected she was likely to cut the welfare state on which women especially depended. ‘We at Spare Rib have no illusions about Labour,’ the magazine concluded. ‘[But] we want to keep the Tories out.’ And yet, in its next issue, published in June, Spare Rib had to concede that during the election the Conservative leader had skilfully used feminist themes in her rhetoric. Beside her Callaghan had looked ‘paternalistic’.

  Set against her challenging political persona the Conservative manifesto also seemed less than radical. Short, untitled and published almost a week after Labour’s, it seemed, like the other policy documents the Conservatives had put out since she became leader, more an exercise in smoothing over the party’s splits and not alarming the voters than in providing a fresh right-wing formula for government. The Conservatives promised to cut taxes, public spending and inflation, but the lack of precise figures and policies in the manifesto – Denis Healey said with some justification that finding the latter was ‘like looking for a black cat in a dark coal cellar’ – made the leaner, more responsible government the Tories envisaged quite hard to differentiate from the one Callaghan was already leading, and which he had been leading ever since the IMF called time on Labour’s mid-seventies extravagances in 1976.

  There were only glimmers of the new political thinking that would dominate the eighties: a promise to sell off shares in the nationalized shipyards; to increase police pay sharply; to encourage private transport companies; and to help council tenants to buy their homes. There were a few ominous words for strikers and trade unionists: ‘We shall … make any … changes that are necessary so that a citizen’s right to work and to go about his or her lawful business free from intimidation or obstruction is guaranteed.’ And, almost buried among all the generalities, there was this brief sentence: ‘We may be able to do more in the next five years than we indicate here.’

  Would hints about change and Margaret Thatcher’s singular political qualities be enough? There were doubts among senior Conservatives. On 25 April, barely a week before polling day, these doubts reached a peak. That night, after an arduous day’s campaigning, Thatcher had a late dinner in her hotel at Glasgow airport with her husband Denis, daughter Carol and the party’s deputy chairwoman Janet Young. Thatcher was tired but reasonably content: ‘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.’ There were jokes and gossip around the table. Then Young got up to take a phone call. She ‘returned with a serious expression’, Thatcher wrote,

  to tell me that Peter Thorneycroft … felt that things were not too good politically and that Ted Heath would appear on the next Party Election Broadcast. I exploded. It was as 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 then they had understood nothing. I told Janet Young that if she and Peter thought that then I might as well pack up …

  Thatcher got her way – although the Heathites and their descendants would get her in the end. Heath did not appear in the broadcast. The politics of the British seventies did not come full circle. Instead, in the last week of the campaign, the opinion polls turned back in favour of the Conservatives. There were no more surveys forecasting a Labour victory. The final predictions were that the Tory vote would exceed Labour’s by between 5 and 8 per cent, enough, even given the unpredictable British electoral system, for a proper majority. The British, it appeared, still liked Callaghan; but they did not like him enough to remain loyal to the politics he represented.

  On the evening of 1 May, Thatcher spoke at her final campaign rally, in Bolton, which had two especially marginal seats, last won by the Conservatives when they last won a general election, in 1970. Her speech concluded:

  There’s a world-wide revolt against big government, excessive taxation … An era is drawing to a close … At first … people said, ‘Oh, you’ve moved away from the centre.’ But then opinion began to move too, as the heresies of one period became, as they always do, the orthodoxies of the next … It’s

  said that there is one thing stronger than armies, and that is an idea whose time has come …

  The next day, Bernard Donoughue waited for the end in 10 Downing Street:

  On the eve of the poll the weather was as awful as it had been for most of our final four months … with widespread snow, h
ail and rain to remind the electorate of the horrors of the Winter of Discontent. I concluded that God was, if only for the time being, a Tory. With the Prime Minister in Cardiff [his constituency], Number 10 was totally quiet. Private Office had already prepared the thick briefing files for the incoming Tory Government. I felt completely drained as I overheard [the principal private secretary] Ken Stowe discussing with … Caroline Stevens, Mrs Thatcher’s Diary Secretary, how to arrange her positive vetting to get security clearance to work in Number 10.

  Conclusion: The Long Seventies

  Shortly before midnight on 3 May, the BBC’s election-night programme Decision ’79 announced the result of an exit poll in one of its ‘barometer seats’, Derby North. There had been a swing of 0.7 per cent from the Conservatives to Labour. ‘If this is right,’ said one of the presenters, with only a little drama in his voice, ‘Callaghan is back. With a tiny majority.’ But, a few minutes afterwards, another presenter broke in with more news on the Derby North poll. ‘It’s been adjusted,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s a 2 per cent swing to the Conservatives.’

  Moments later, Margaret Thatcher came gliding out of the front garden at Flood Street wearing an ocean-blue suit and a great predatory grin. ‘Do you know, Mrs Thatcher, that the polls are in your favour?’ a reporter asked from somewhere in the pavement crush and the darkness, as loud cheers and boos jostled for prominence. The Conservative leader, conscious that no actual results were in yet, said that she was ‘cautiously optimistic’. But her face said otherwise. By the following afternoon, her party had 339 seats and a majority of forty-three.