In the middle of the campaign came the G7 economic summit at Williamsburg. Mrs Thatcher had agonized constantly about whether or not she dared be out of the country at such a time.* Once she had decided to call the election, she informed Reagan that she would not be able to make their planned pre-summit meetings in Washington, but hoped to attend the summit itself: ‘I have to weigh this against the requirements of the Election campaign and possible criticism here if I attend.’44 Reagan wrote asking her to attend the tail end of the meeting in Williamsburg, arriving on the Sunday and leaving on the Monday, the last in May. ‘I wish you every success in the election,’ he wrote, ‘and in gaining another mandate to carry out the courageous and principled policies which you have begun.’45 Reagan’s aide Michael Deaver† rang the British Embassy in Washington to relay the President’s private thought which was ‘Hell, the main thing is to get her re-elected,’46 so there should be no pressure on her to attend if it was considered politically dangerous. On the other hand, Deaver added, if she did come, there would be excellent photo-opportunities. She decided to go. Events at home seemed to confirm the rightness of her decision. On 27 May 1983, the day before Mrs Thatcher set out, the Labour Party put out a strange press release stating that ‘the unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the Leader of the Labour Party,’ which suggested, naturally, that he very nearly was not. She could fly across the Atlantic without due anxiety.‡
Despite the fact that her friend President Reagan was the host and was doing everything he could to be helpful politically, Mrs Thatcher harboured serious worries about the content of the summit, as well as its timing. On top of her normal dislike of international platitudes was a fear that the world’s economic powers might take a turn in the wrong direction, undermining her own economic policies and therefore making her more vulnerable electorally. Ever since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system (the world monetary order worked out, under American leadership, in 1944) in 1970–71, and the inflation that ensued, many political leaders had hankered after a new way of fixing the international system through the management of exchange rates, a dream which Mrs Thatcher did not share. As in Europe, so globally, Mrs Thatcher did not believe that problems could be solved by fixing exchange rates. After preparatory meetings in March, Robert Armstrong reported that the ‘sherpas’ for the summit, of whom he was one, were working on collective action to get ‘a measure of growth’, ‘promoting greater stability in exchange rates’ and strengthening the machinery for international financial co-operation. She put a wiggly line under the point about exchange rates, and wrote, ‘This is quite different from the basis on which Alan [Walters] and I are working.’ She concluded: ‘I do not like the way this is developing. We are not seeking new institutional arrangements or links. We are in danger of becoming committed to something fundamentally unsound just for the sake of saying something in a communiqué.’47
Alan Walters himself warned her, from American sources, that ‘there is a danger that the President may be induced to agree in general terms to some programme involving some degree of fixity in exchange rates. This he might do in an unthinking way.’48 The problem was the size of the US deficit, and only Mrs Thatcher, said Walters, had the standing to put this to the President. Geoffrey Howe backed this up: ‘The key way may be to point out to the President the gains – economic and political – which have accrued to us from our demonstration, in the 1981 Budget, of our commitment to reduced borrowing.’49 Shortly before she called the election, Mrs Thatcher met Edwin Meese, Reagan’s emissary, to discuss the summit. She pushed hard against making statements at Williamsburg about co-ordinating exchange rates. ‘All that we could usefully do’, she insisted, ‘was try to pursue stable economic policies. That was the way to achieve stable exchange rates.’50 The two agreed to try to lower expectations of what the summit would say. They also discussed East–West relations. The Americans were now looking for a statement at Williamsburg on INF deployment in the autumn. Mrs Thatcher was cautious. Naturally she wanted a statement, but only ‘provided this can be agreed without difficulty with our other summit partners’.51 If the Europeans fell out on this subject, at this moment, one of her best electoral advantages would collapse.
As the summit grew close, Reagan and Mrs Thatcher became ever more complicit. She continued to worry about leaving Britain in the midst of the election campaign but suggested she might come to Williamsburg on the Saturday. He begged her to stay on into the Monday, instead of leaving on the Sunday night as she now wished, because ‘it would be a great help to me’. The President wanted her to outmanoeuvre her own sherpa, Armstrong, who was trying to mediate between the Americans and the French. Reagan sought not mediation, but alliance against the French, who were proposing exchange rate control of the sort devised after the war. He wanted ‘a tone of realistic optimism … we must resist a call for a new Bretton Woods.’52 In reply, Mrs Thatcher repeated, with regret, that she must get back to Britain on the Sunday night, but supported Reagan on exchange rates. In her memoirs, she recorded approvingly that, unlike at previous summits, the Americans had insisted that the communiqué, rather than being precooked, should be drawn up in the light of the discussions that actually took place. This was ‘far more sensible’, she wrote. ‘But I took along a British draft just in case it was needed.’53 This was somewhat disingenuously expressed. The draft was precooked, but according to her recipe.
Behind the scenes, the summit was not easy. At dinner on the Saturday night, a few hours after Mrs Thatcher arrived, the leaders debated arms control. Disagreements emerged. These continued in a heated discussion of the draft communiqué among the leaders the following morning. Mrs Thatcher naturally pronounced the draft ‘an excellent document’,54 but François Mitterrand, because of France’s special position outside the NATO command structure, objected to the declaration’s endorsement of NATO policy, though not to that policy’s content. Helmut Kohl, on the other hand, argued that the need to issue the statement was ‘urgent’ in order to counter Soviet claims that ‘the deployment of Pershing missiles in Germany would destroy all German hopes of national unity’. The Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau,* objected that the statement was sending ‘the wrong message, utterly and tragically wrong’. It should not call for deployment by the end of the year, but should offer ‘something about mutual trust’.
Mrs Thatcher pointed out that she was fighting, and Kohl had recently fought, a general election on this issue: Trudeau’s words were ‘utterly devastating and could only give comfort to the Soviet Union’. This would come ‘at a time when it would be particularly embarrassing for those of them who were fighting elections’. With some conciliatory words about how ‘very moving’ it was to be sitting round the table with former enemies from the Second World War, Reagan urged his fellow leaders to accept the proposed declaration: ‘What was wrong with taking the moral high ground against the use of these weapons [Soviet SS-20s]?’ There would be ‘a barrage of headlines’ if they failed to agree, and besides, the strategy would work: ‘The Soviet Union were at full economic stretch, and could not afford to increase the resources devoted to defence. The United States and the West could do so, and the Soviet Union knew that they could do so, because they had seen us do it. So, faced with the possibility of an arms race, the Soviet Union would pull back.’55
After permitting a few drafting changes to please Mitterrand, which, according to Mrs Thatcher, actually strengthened the statement,56 Reagan won the day. Mrs Thatcher returned to London well pleased. On economics, the summit had resisted co-ordination mechanisms for economic policy and pushed for lower interest rates. On defence, it had endorsed INF deployment. ‘It is practically the policy on one’s own manifesto,’ she told a press conference in London the day after her return.57 She was delighted not only by the substance, but by the skill and charm which Reagan had deployed at Williamsburg. ‘The President was wonderful,’ she told Parkinson. ‘He had done his homework.’58 Reagan was equally pleased.
In his letter of thanks to Mrs Thatcher, he wrote: ‘Thanks to your contribution during Saturday’s dinner discussion of INF, we were able, in our statement, to send the Soviets a clear signal of allied determination and unity.’ And he described the Declaration on Economic Recovery as ‘a victory for the future. Your government’s economic policies have proved the wisdom of the key principles laid out in the declaration.’59
On 2 June, a Harris poll put the Conservatives on 46 per cent, Labour on 28 per cent and the Alliance on 24 per cent. When asked why they supported the Tories, 46 per cent of those who did so replied that it was because of Mrs Thatcher’s leadership, with only 31 per cent attributing their support to the party’s policies.
As the election campaign progressed, Mrs Thatcher was vindicated in her then unfashionable view that the SDP–Liberal Alliance would not prove the political force which her party had feared. The Alliance campaign, with its dual leadership of Roy Jenkins, comically entitled ‘Prime Minister-designate’, and David Steel* as the Alliance leader, was unhappy. Jenkins, who, according to his colleague and rival David Owen,* made the mistake of seeing Mrs Thatcher as ‘an aberration’,60 rather than a radical and transformative political phenomenon, was diffuse in his speeches and slow in his electoral reactions. There was plenty of public goodwill for the Jenkins and Steel combination, but the Alliance showed little sense of direction. Jenkins had declared that they would not ‘play a fuddled fiddle somewhere in the muddled middle’, but this phrase seemed an accurate enough reflection of the style of the Alliance campaign for Cecil Parkinson to throw it gleefully back at him at every opportunity. While Mrs Thatcher was in Williamsburg, the Alliance leadership called a summit at Steel’s home at Ettrick Bridge in the Scottish Borders, and agreed to sideline Jenkins for the last ten days of the campaign. It was an admission of weakness.
This, combined with Williamsburg and the travails of Labour, caused Mrs Thatcher to put aside some of her habitual caution.† Arriving at Manchester airport on 1 June, she approached a small boy riding in a 10-pence-a-ride miniature aeroplane. According to the Manchester Evening News, she announced: ‘ “My name’s Margaret Thatcher and I live in a big house called 10 Downing Street. I’m going to live there for a long time.” The bemused tot hid in the tiny cockpit.’61 She could see her rivals floundering. On television two days later, she broke her normal rule of not referring to the Alliance at all, and enunciated her theory about British political parties. Dismissing the SDP as people ‘who … hadn’t the guts to stay within the Labour Party’,62 she explained that ‘the Labour Party will never die.’ Its problem was that it had become ‘state socialist’ instead of being, as she said it once had been, the party of ‘fraternity’ and the ‘voluntary spirit’. The Liberals were just a ‘miscellaneous mishmash in the middle’. She predicted – a prophecy which served her electoral turn, of course – that Labour would hold on in its strongholds and the Alliance would come third. ‘If you want a good Opposition,’ she went on, ‘you’ve got to reform the Labour Party, as Gaitskell [the Labour Leader until his death in 1963] was trying [to do].’63 At the time, most commentators thought that Labour was all but finished. But Mrs Thatcher took a longer view, one which was eventually adopted by a young man who was first elected to Parliament in the 1983 general election, Tony Blair.*
There were now no serious dangers for the Conservative campaign. Mrs Thatcher felt sufficiently confident to spare the party’s coffers by ordering Cecil Parkinson to cancel the three-page newspaper advertisements designed by Saatchi and Saatchi to run on the last Sunday of the campaign. These would have devoted a page to Conservative policies, a page to Labour ones (sticking to their belief that they had only to repeat Labour policies to gain votes for the Tories), and an almost blank page for the policies of the Alliance. She felt that it was unnecessary to give the Alliance extra publicity by attacking it and that the £1.5 million cost of the advertisements was too great, but it is clear from the diaries of the party’s Vice-Chairman Michael Spicer that Mrs Thatcher made Spicer pass on her command to Parkinson, who was reluctant to quarrel with Saatchis and Tim Bell on the point.64† The only embarrassment of the last days of the campaign occurred at the Conservative Youth Rally at Wembley on Sunday 5 June. Mrs Thatcher’s speech, a surprisingly high-falutin’ oration for such a gathering, quoting Pericles and Kipling, and praising Elizabethan merchant adventurers, passed off without incident, but the comedian Kenny Everett treated the crowds to jokes like ‘Let’s bomb Russia’ and ‘Let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away.’ There was widespread disapproval. In her memoirs – as at the time – Mrs Thatcher sought to downplay this: ‘Some of the sourer critics chose to take offence,’ she wrote,65 but she did not repeat any of the tasteless jokes.
It has become a historical orthodoxy that Mrs Thatcher dominated the election campaign of 1983. This is true, in the sense that her personality, energy and record were the focus of attention, but it is not correct to say that ‘The Tory campaign was frankly concentrated on Mrs Thatcher.’66 Most of the party posters did not feature her, and there was always anxiety that she might put off as many floating voters as she might attract. It was only in the last party political broadcast of the campaign, two days before polling, that she was put at the centre of her own party’s propaganda. By this stage, consistently strong polls had stilled the earlier fears about the negative electoral effects of too much Thatcher. The broadcast spoke of the things achieved ‘because of one woman’ and contained interviews with people praising her. Then the woman herself appeared in a grey-blue suit against a background of roses, offering ‘the certainty of liberty’ and ‘the chance of property ownership’. Everything that mattered, she went on, depended on the nation being properly defended. Voters should ask themselves ‘who would best defend our freedom, our way of life, and the much loved land in which we live’.67
Amid the steady success of the Conservative campaign, a few people noticed something which the public did not. Interviewing Cecil Parkinson on 27 May 1983, David Butler noted, the day after seeing him, ‘I thought he was in a slightly hysterical state … and showed extraordinary anxiety for someone who was 15 per cent ahead in the polls … I think I was seeing a man under great strain, though why he should have been under such strain I can’t imagine.’68 At Saatchi and Saatchi, where election posters were being devised, ‘we were puzzled that what seemed to us a perfectly good piece of work kept being rejected by Central Office,’ recalled Jeremy Sinclair, then Saatchis’ chairman.69 It showed a newborn baby held by a midwife, and boasted of the government’s increase in the number of nurses and midwives under the slogan: ‘Even labour’s better under the Conservatives’.
The explanation was tragi-comic. On the day before polling day, after the last press conference of the campaign, Mrs Thatcher, now confident of victory, turned gratefully to Parkinson and said, ‘Come to tea tomorrow at No. 10 and tell me what you want.’70 By this she meant that he could name the Cabinet job he would like. He went as commanded. ‘I’d thought of Foreign Secretary,’71 she told him. ‘Foreign Secretary for two or three years, then Chancellor; then it’s up to you.’ Plucking up the courage to tell her something which he had withheld during the campaign, Parkinson said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve got a very big personal problem.’ He had made his former secretary, Sara Keays, pregnant (she had left his employment in 1979).* Mrs Thatcher reacted in a way which surprised him: ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ she asked. ‘They tell me Anthony Eden [Prime Minister at the time of the Suez disaster of 1956] leapt into bed with any good-looking woman. You can sort this out.’ ‘Not with two Special Branch men next to me all the time,’ said Parkinson, referring to the protection he would receive if he became Foreign Secretary. Mrs Thatcher continued to look at the matter realistically. ‘If the successful party Chairman isn’t in government,’ she said, ‘everyone will be asking why.’72 The solution, they decided, was that Parkinson should become head of a new department which would combine the existing ministries of Trade and
of Industry. The job was important, but did not have such a high profile. They did not discuss what would happen about Miss Keays’s pregnancy.
Mrs Thatcher scribbles out her early thoughts on the post-election reshuffle. She soon learnt that her desire to make Cecil Parkinson foreign secretary was a political impossibility.
As usual, Mrs Thatcher spent election night at the count in her Finchley constituency. Although the earliest returns suggested a good result for the Alliance and made the Tories nervous – they lost Yeovil* to the future Liberal leader, Paddy Ashdown – it soon became clear, once the Conservatives had gained Nuneaton from Labour, that the night was theirs. Her own result, in which her majority increased to 9,314, was:
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