Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  By the time the conference broke up, most neutral observers thought it had been the most fractious Tory meeting since the chaos following Harold Macmillan’s resignation eighteen years earlier. ‘By the end of the week’, wrote the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, ‘the government was in open disarray, the Imperial Hotel had become a mill of rumour and malice and it was scarcely possible to wander through its corridors without encountering fringe meetings of the Cabinet at which the bitterness and deepness of the divisions became more and more open.’ Even ordinary activists struck him as almost Bennite in their fervour and animosity; never had Jenkins heard people speaking with such venom of the ‘unions, blacks and foreigners’ they blamed for the nation’s woes.

  Instead of lifting the mood, Mrs Thatcher’s speech on Friday was as dull as ditchwater, a predictable parade of what Hosykns called ‘clichés’ and ‘wallpaper’. The Times thought it ‘empty of new ideas’; the Guardian judged it ‘second class stuff, more Morecambe than Blackpool’. ‘Nothing is beyond this nation,’ she ended grandly. ‘Decline is not inevitable … There are those who say our nation no longer has the stomach for the fight. I think I know our people and I know they do.’ But her listeners had now heard this sort of thing so often they could probably have recited it in their sleep.38

  As the Conservatives headed home from Blackpool, there was, perhaps, one consolation. For all the bitterness, their conference had been a model of harmony compared with the chaos at Brighton, where Labour’s annual festival of socialist brotherhood had been dominated by the titanic battle between Denis Healey and Tony Benn. But by this stage few Tories were particularly bothered about Labour. What worried them was the Alliance, which had made inroads into every social group and still commanded almost 40 per cent of the vote in the opinion polls. In the next six weeks, the Conservatives would face two stiff challenges in the Croydon and Crosby by-elections. If one fell to the Alliance, that would be bad. If both fell, it would be time to panic.39

  The first test came in Croydon North West. This was safe Conservative territory: in 1979 their candidate, Robert Taylor, had won by almost 3,800 votes. After Taylor’s death in June 1981 triggered a by-election, the Tory managers postponed it until 22 October, hoping that a successful conference would give them enough bounce to retain the seat. In this they were completely mistaken. Although the Alliance’s campaign began with a row about who was actually going to contest the seat – the SDP fancied it for Shirley Williams, but the Liberals demanded that their local candidate, Bill Pitt, be given a free run – its momentum proved irresistible. By polling day, about a thousand Alliance volunteers had flooded into Croydon, and reporters found plenty of people happy to discuss their decision to switch. ‘I think Mrs Thatcher’s policy is too extreme and the Labour Party is in too much of a mess,’ said one housewife, who had voted Tory in 1979. ‘It’s worthwhile giving the Alliance a try. When you are right at the bottom you have nothing to lose,’ said a commercial artist who usually voted Labour. ‘I don’t like the way the Labour Party is going’, agreed a local roofer, ‘and I don’t like Benn.’40

  It was a sign of the Alliance’s impact that when the result in Croydon was declared, few people were surprised to hear Pitt had won. Even so, the fact that he had increased his vote fourfold in barely two years, turning a 3,769 Conservative majority into a 3,254 Liberal one, was a stunning blow to the two major parties. The Tories remained relatively sanguine: governments often lose by-elections, and at least they had finished second. The other big losers, though, were Labour, who found themselves on the wrong end of a 14 per cent swing to the Liberals. In other circumstances, Croydon might have been a Labour gain, but this was precisely the sort of affluent, suburban seat in which their supporters were stampeding for the exits. Echoing many local activists, Michael Foot blamed Ken Livingstone’s ‘pronouncements on the IRA’. But the real blame, said Foot’s employment spokesman, Eric Varley, a Chesterfield miner’s son, lay with those who had ‘cynically denounced the Labour governments in which they served’. Everybody knew whom he meant.41

  Barely had the dust settled in Croydon than the circus moved on, pitching its tent in Crosby, Merseyside. Once again the death of a veteran backbencher had triggered a competition in a safe Conservative seat. With its suburban mock-Tudor mansions, prep schools and golf courses, its affluent commuters, pensioners and small businessmen, Crosby had been Tory territory since the end of the First World War. From the Alliance’s point of view, though, it was perfect. Precisely because it was a safe Tory seat, even coming second would be seen as a victory. On top of all that, Crosby had one of the largest proportions of Catholic voters in the country. And, as luck would have it, Shirley Williams happened to be one of the most prominent Catholic politicians in the land. At first she hesitated: Crosby was a long way from London. But having declined to fight in Warrington, she could not sit on the sidelines again. She had to overturn a Tory–Liberal gap of more than 25,000 votes in 1979. But if there was ‘one member of the SDP or the Liberal Party who could pull off the impossible’, said the Guardian, it was Shirley Williams.42

  Even at the time, Crosby seemed destined for a place in political legend. Williams seemed to be everywhere, campaigning for fourteen hours a day, banging on doors, greeting voters outside supermarkets, handing out leaflets in the street, always late, always cheerful, always smiling. Her activists called her the ‘tiny tornado’, and wherever she went loudspeakers pumped out the theme from Chariots of Fire. Her modus operandi, as the sceptical Frank Johnson observed, was to base her campaign on personality rather than policy:

  Mrs Williams bustles up to a group of willing voters outside some shops as if she is also a woman who can’t stop now because she’s got some shopping to do … Breathlessly, she finds time to tell them that there are no easy solutions, that these are terribly difficult problems, but that one thing is certain: neither Mrs Thatcher nor Mr Benn have the answers.

  This was smart politics: most people voted for the SDP because of what it was against, not what it was for. After so much economic misery and political factionalism, explained the Express’s George Gale, ‘the public has been yearning for a ready excuse, and somebody to blame’. And in Shirley Williams they had found somebody who could give them both.43

  Polling day was 26 November. A week beforehand, Mrs Thatcher’s factotum Ian Gow visited Crosby and was appalled by what he found. The mood was so bad, he told Alan Clark, that ‘our candidate was now completely shell-shocked, would not meet the press, could not bring himself to talk to strangers, etc.’ And when the ballots were counted, Shirley Williams had achieved the impossible. With 28,118 votes, just over 49 per cent of the total, she had beaten the Conservative candidate by more than 5,000 votes, a result inconceivable only months earlier. The Labour candidate was completely blown away, winning barely 9 per cent of the vote and losing his deposit. It was, by any standards, a stunning result. And after all their sneers about her scruffiness and scattiness, Fleet Street’s finest seemed overjoyed that her decency had won the day. Watching the mud-splattered, exhausted but exhilarated Williams tuck into breakfast the next morning, the Mirror’s John Edwards thought she had ‘a lot of class, the class of dynamic ordinariness’. ‘Against such a goddess’, agreed the Express’s John Warden, ‘mortal men had no chance.’44

  Political history is littered with supposedly seismic and unprecedented by-elections, but Crosby really was something else. Not only was this the first time somebody in the SDP colours had been elected to Parliament, it had seen the biggest turnover of votes in electoral history. As amateur psephologists pointed out, a similar result at the next General Election would give the Alliance 533 seats, Labour seventy-eight and the Conservatives just four. And although nobody thought this was a serious possibility, the last three mainland by-elections had produced Alliance totals of 42 per cent, 40 per cent and 49 per cent. Some bookmakers made the SDP evens favourites to win the next general election, with both the Tories and Labour nine to four against. ‘The moul
d of British politics has been totally broken’, Williams declared in the first flush of victory, ‘and it will never be the same again … This is not for us a party but a crusade, an attempt to find a democratic alternative to what we believe to be the growing extremism of politics in Britain … We are making a new beginning for Britain, a new vision for Britain in the world.’45

  Some listeners might have thought this a bit over the top, but the next day’s papers were in no doubt. ‘Nothing in recent history’, said The Times, could match ‘the astonishing performance of Mrs Shirley Williams at Crosby’. ‘SHIRLEY THE FIRST’, gasped the front page of the Mirror, which thought the Alliance must now be ‘favourite to be the largest party in the next Parliament’. As the paper’s veteran political editor, Walter Lancaster, explained, Britain was now facing ‘the biggest smash-up of its political system since 1931 when the Labour Party broke in two and its leaders helped form a National Government. Nobody knows what will happen at the general election.’ And even the usually waspish George Gale agreed that the Alliance was poised to become, at the very least, the main opposition party. In the future, he told readers of the Express, ‘the Labour Party will continue to wither away until only a rump is left. Healey and Hattersley must now wish they had joined the SDP. More Labour MPs soon will … We are gaining a new Opposition, a new alternative Government. We are losing Michael Foot, along with his heap of old rubbish.’46

  The heap of old rubbish did not take its humiliation gracefully. ‘They have not got any policies,’ complained Michael Foot, though he promptly contradicted himself by describing the SDP as a ‘kind of Margaret Thatcher Mark II’. By contrast, the Tories were so shell-shocked they could barely muster a satisfyingly bitchy reaction, at least in public. In private, however, it was a different story. ‘How fickle and spastic the electorate are,’ spat Alan Clark. ‘How gullible, to be duped by someone as scatty and shallow as Shirley Williams.’ Even Private Eye’s Denis Thatcher was beside himself with rage. ‘I can’t understand what they see in the Williams woman, not to mention that smarmy little GP or the fat cat from Brussels with the speech impediment,’ he writes furiously to his friend Bill. ‘If ever there was a set of hopeless hand-job merchants those are they.’ To make matters worse, when Denis slips away from Number 10 for a stiff drink, he still cannot escape the shadow of the new party. ‘I was not in the best of moods as I piloted the Rolls back to the sanctuary of Downing Street,’ he adds, ‘only to find some joker had plastered the roof with damnfool stickers for the SDP.’47

  *

  Mrs Thatcher had watched the Crosby result in the Number 10 flat with Ian Gow, the latter seething at the spectacle of the ‘ghastly Shirley Williams’. But there was an even ghastlier spectacle to come: the sight of the Conservative Party’s former helmsman touring the television studios the next day, delightedly telling everybody how sorry he was. The Alliance’s victory, explained Edward Heath, ‘shows that we have alienated a very large number of people … You can’t kid the electorate … If you go on with Crosby after Crosby after Crosby until a general election you will get another sort of Government.’ So what was Heath going to do now? Challenge Mrs Thatcher for the Tory leadership? Or would he and the Wets consider a coalition with the Alliance? ‘I’m prepared to help my country wherever I think I can be of service,’ he said. And if there were a hung parliament in 1983 or 1984, ‘there might be one or two invitations which might be acceptable’.48

  The Express’s Michael Cummings took a predictably dim view of the prospect of a rapprochement between Edward Heath and the SDP–Liberal Alliance. Incidentally, this cartoon also shows how quickly poor Bill Rodgers disappeared from the public consciousness: here he has been supplanted by the Liberal leader David Steel (Sunday Express, 29 November 1981).

  In retrospect, this was the moment for Heath to make a decisive break and raise his ensign alongside that of his former Balliol contemporary Roy Jenkins. But he never did. Jenkins found this baffling, later accusing his old friend of putting ‘the telescope to his blind eye’. But, as Heath’s biographer explains, he saw himself as ‘fighting Mrs Thatcher for the soul of the Tory party’, and was determined not to leave her in unchallenged command. After Crosby, he was more convinced than ever that his old shipmates would come to their senses and kick out Grantham’s answer to Fletcher Christian. That would allow him to return to the bridge as a much-loved elder statesman, vindicated after years in exile, brokering a moderate coalition with his friends in the Alliance. In interviews he remembered how the Tories had installed Churchill as Prime Minister in 1940 because their coalition partners would not work with Neville Chamberlain. In Heath’s own mind, Churchill was almost as considerable a figure as he was. ‘So it has happened in the past,’ he said happily, ‘and it could happen again.’49

  Heath’s optimism was not entirely delusional, since by now parliamentary discipline seemed perilously close to breaking down. On 25 November two dozen Tory backbenchers signed a letter to the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling. If the government attempted another dose of spending cuts or tax rises, they said, they would vote against it. ‘We have got far more dissidents than I expected,’ Jopling warned Mrs Thatcher nine days later, ‘and some of them are very unhappy indeed.’ In total, he thought there were forty-five potential rebels – a ‘very serious situation’, given that the government had a majority of just forty-four. Yet the rebellion never materialized. If it had, political history would have taken a very different course. But a genuinely effective coup would have required considerable ruthlessness and opportunism, which were not qualities people associated with the likes of Gilmour or St John-Stevas. They were, however, qualities people associated with Margaret Thatcher. That was why she was in Number 10, and Gilmour and St John-Stevas weren’t.50

  Even so, there was only so much punishment Mrs Thatcher could take before her position disintegrated. By early December Gallup had the Alliance on 50½ per cent, Labour on 23½ per cent and the Tories on 23 per cent, while the government’s approval rating had collapsed to just 18 per cent. Mrs Thatcher’s own reputation, meanwhile, had descended to frankly diabolical depths. By Christmas, only one in four people said they were satisfied with her performance, the worst figure for any Prime Minister in history. At Conservative Central Office the mood was apocalyptic; according to the party’s research department, the ‘electoral and poll evidence’ suggested that the Alliance was poised to ‘sweep the Conservative party into a small minority position, worse than anything we have experienced for over one hundred years’.51

  In public, Mrs Thatcher never wavered. But she would not have been human if she had not had doubts. ‘Willie, Geoffrey, Cecil and Norman I can count on,’ she remarked to the Sunday Express’s editor, John Junor, but the others were ‘in an utter funk about the election’. ‘She doesn’t know who to trust,’ Denis said. ‘Her authority is being eroded … She feels like jacking it in.’

  But she kept going. Something, surely, would turn up.52

  28

  The Shadow of the Past

  We are increasingly two nations, riven between employed and unemployed, north and south.

  Guardian, 28 August 1980

  The northern cities may offer little other than soot, football, and urban decline, but the surrounding countryside will make your northern expedition worthwhile.

  Let’s Go, 1982: The Budget Guide to Britain and Ireland (1982)

  In the autumn of 1981, the children’s authors Janet and Allan Ahlberg published one of the great masterpieces of the age. Set in a terraced working-class house during the Second World War, Peepo! is the story of a baby, glimpsed through his eyes. The first thing he sees is his parents’ bedroom, his father asleep in the ‘big brass bed’ beside his mother, a ‘hairnet on her head’. A kitchen scene shows his mother making porridge, his father carrying in coal from the yard, his grandmother hanging out the washing. A bonfire burns across the road; an air-raid warden does his rounds; his sisters hunt for a tin ‘to take up to the park / And catch fish
es in’. Later, his mother dozes with the Picture Post, while his father, in green battledress, pours the tea. The baby has a bath in a tin tub; his nightgown warms on the door of the oven; his sisters play under a clothes horse hung with washing. In the final pages, his parents carry him to his cot, his father clearly about to leave for the front. Our last glimpse is of the baby tucked up, ‘fast asleep and dreaming / What did he see?’1

  Quite apart from its virtues as a book for small children, Peepo! is a beautifully observed portrait of family life at the middle of the century. In many ways it is a toddler’s version of George Orwell’s cosy portrait of working-class life in The Road to Wigan Pier. Musing on the differences between working-class and middle-class, Orwell had claimed that in a working-class household, ‘you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere’. He imagined the living room of a terraced house:

  on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat.

  As the historian Robert Colls remarks, there was plenty of ‘sentimentality and contrivance’ in all this. Yet as sentimental dreams go, Orwell’s picture proved immensely influential: an idealized vision of an unchanging world, bound together by collective solidarity and domestic commitment, hard work and family values.2