Naturally, all of this produced tremendous ill feeling. Mrs Thatcher was the last person to know how to sort it out because, although she was happy to have fierce arguments with colleagues about issues, she disliked personal conflicts. This was the dismal background to a series of by-election reverses. A week before the unhappy Chequers meeting, Labour had gained Fulham from the Tories. In early May, the Liberals grabbed the Conservative seat of Ryedale and came within a hundred votes of victory in West Derbyshire, where the seat was held for the Tories by Patrick McLoughlin,* an ex-miner.
Some of the mood may be charted from the diaries of John Biffen, the Leader of the House of Commons. Always independent-minded† and occasionally somewhat old-womanish, Biffen had never found Mrs Thatcher sympathetic, describing her, for example, as ‘emotional and vindictive’.133 In 1986, the complaints in his diary swell. After her survival in the Westland debate, he and Geoffrey Howe were ‘much in agreement’ about her ‘bossy and intemperate manner … I cannot now see how she is secure, and I think she should go before the next election and probably won’t.’134‡ In February, he quoted Willie Whitelaw worrying that she would ‘take the Tory Party under’.135 In May, invited on to the Brian Walden show just after the Ryedale and West Derbyshire results, Biffen opined: ‘Nobody seriously supposes that the Prime Minister would be Prime Minister throughout the entire period of the next parliament. So therefore there is nothing extraordinary about the balanced ticket of the Prime Minister and some of the most powerful in the Conservative Party, one of whom would probably become Prime Minister in due course, being represented as a team.’136
Since Biffen had publicly foreseen Mrs Thatcher’s political end, his remarks were naturally picked up in the press. Bernard Ingham, speaking as usual through the anonymity of the lobby system, described Biffen as a ‘semi-detached’ member of the Cabinet. In Ingham’s view, this was a pleasantly jokey (and accurate) way of defending Biffen’s character against accusations of disloyalty,137 but Biffen interpreted it as meaning he might be sacked. He admitted to being ‘ham-fisted’ in what he had said, but thought it was ‘not a hanging offence’138 and was oddly hurt by what was surely the inevitable reaction to such unguardedness: ‘I sat by the PM for her questions [in Parliament]. There was not a single word. I will not be the first to speak.’139 Besides, Biffen had meant what he had said: ‘I do feel she got out of kimber in the second half of her time. She got to the point of “If I don’t do it no one else will.” ’140 This was well put. Mrs Thatcher did resemble the Little Red Hen in the folk tale of that name. In the story, the hen seeks help from a pig, a cat and so on, to plant a grain of wheat. All refuse. ‘ “Cluck, cluck, then I’ll do it myself,” said the Little Red Hen.’ She does. Because of her efforts, the grain grows. Now the other animals want it, but she refuses them as a punishment for their laziness and eats it all alone.
Yet a ‘balanced ticket’, although certainly a coded criticism of Mrs Thatcher, was what those senior Tories who wished her to survive wanted too. They could appreciate the energy of the Little Blue Hen, though they found it very exhausting. They hoped to harness it. They sought, as politicians always do in tight situations, better presentation, and also a means of getting the government to work as one rather than she alone clucking round the political farmyard.
After the by-elections, and within days of Biffen’s remarks to Walden, Mrs Thatcher reshuffled her Cabinet. The faithful Keith Joseph had indicated his wish to depart. The unspoken truth was that Joseph, so vital in her start on the road to radicalism and success, had been a disappointment to her as a minister, overborne by detail, by honest doubt and by his tendency to give in to officials. The net effect of his presence at Education was that the radical idea of vouchers had drained away. Not a great deal had happened. She replaced Joseph with Kenneth Baker, whose communicative skills she admired. She meant to move Education fast up her list of priorities. She was responding to research showing that the Conservatives were considered ‘weak … on the so-called “caring issues” ’.141 This had already been the theme of her speech to the Scottish Conservative conference in Perth a few days earlier. Its refrain had been ‘It is because we care about …’,142 and she had applied this to the old, the disabled, job creation and so on. With the same idea of ‘caring’, applied more personally, a programme of public engagements was drawn up which would show Mrs Thatcher herself in ‘informal and human contexts’.143
Her new Secretary of State for Transport was John Moore, whose youthful good looks and Thatcherite success in advancing privatization made him stand well in her eyes. She also promoted Nicholas Ridley from Transport to Environment. She did not pretend that this was a presentational advantage: she did it because she wanted ‘radical policies’ for the manifesto and believed that his ‘penetrating intellect’ could deal with issues like housing and the coming community charge.144 She kept Biffen in place, though from now on he felt ‘on the skids’.145
Partly to improve the unity of the government and partly to prepare better for the election, Stephen Sherbourne proposed a sort of informal inner Cabinet. John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, took up the idea and wrote to Mrs Thatcher suggesting the setting up of a Strategy Group. This would mean that senior ministers would submit papers on areas of policy to co-ordinate an election-winning approach. ‘You’re so involved in running the government’, he told Mrs Thatcher, ‘that the party thinks you’re not giving enough thought to running the next election.’146 Typically, Wakeham regarded this not as a substantive exercise, but as one designed to show harmony and unity. ‘Should the group’s existence be secret or public?’ Mrs Thatcher asked him when he put up the idea. ‘I don’t mind whether it even meets,’ he replied. ‘The point is that people should think it will, so it needs to be known about.’
In fact, the group did meet, and was immediately christened ‘the A-Team’ by the newspapers. It consisted of Mrs Thatcher, Whitelaw, Howe, Lawson, Tebbit, Hurd, Wakeham, but neither Biffen nor Young.* The clear majority of the A-Team thought of themselves as ‘consolidators’, but the policy groups the A-Team spawned – Lawson on the economy, Moore on young people, Ridley on planning and the environment – tended to be led by those described as ‘go forwards’, temperamentally and ideologically closer to Mrs Thatcher. The ‘go forwards’ believed that, as Brian Griffiths put it to her just before the Chequers meeting in April, ‘Without radicalism, Thatcherism is dead.’147 These different schools of thought represented permanent tendencies in the collective mind of conservatism. If the Conservatives were to succeed politically, they had to be held in balance.
The first A-Team meeting tried to accommodate both the opinion research produced by Tebbit and Saatchis and that from Young and Rubicam.148 It also agreed to discuss the theme for the coming party conference and the collection of themes for the election. Media relations and PR generally were to be co-ordinated.* The right pitch for the election was discussed. In the Strategy Group’s second meeting, for example, Mrs Thatcher drew the attention of those present to a recent article by Ferdinand Mount called ‘The Reclaiming of Yob England’. ‘It was important to appeal to those who sought security – “the belongers” – and those – predominantly the young – who sought adventure.’149 But Robin Harris, the secretary to the group, considered that the A-Team’s actual products were ‘not very useful’. The group’s virtue was that ‘It proved we wanted to win the election and we wanted to win under her.’150
It was Stephen Sherbourne who put to her more tactfully a message not dissimilar to that first presented by Dobbs and Tebbit. ‘In the next election,’ he wrote to Mrs Thatcher, ‘the main issue will be you and your personality. Nobody, supporter or opponent, doubts the strength of your convictions.’ Voters knew why they needed Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and 1983, but ‘The subliminal question they will be asking at the next election is “What is there to be done in this third Parliament that only Mrs Thatcher can do?”: in other words, “why do we need this strong woman?” ’151 Sherbourne was really appr
oaching again the question which he had raised just before the April meeting at Chequers, only to have it swept away by Mrs Thatcher’s anger at the Dobbs presentation. He had written then that there was famously ‘no gratitude in politics’, citing Churchill’s defeat in 1945. ‘For an incumbent government this problem becomes greater at each successive election – specifically, how does a government in office for 8 or 9 years present itself as fresh?’152 Against this, Mrs Thatcher had written ‘1959’ – the year in which the Tories, by that time led by Harold Macmillan, had won their third successive victory, the year which brought her into Parliament for the first time. By June, Mrs Thatcher felt readier to consider such questions than she had felt when she was under such immediate threat earlier in the year. What could not be said, but was obvious to all – none more so than Mrs Thatcher herself – was that although the Conservatives had previously won three general elections in a row (1951, 1955 and 1959), no party in the twentieth century had ever done this under one leader. A Thatcher-led third victory would be unprecedented.
Despite the improving sense of direction, all was still not well between party leader and party Chairman. In March, a front-page story had appeared in The Times saying that Norman Tebbit alone was going to write the manifesto.153 Mrs Thatcher was displeased, both by the publicity, which seemed to have come from the Tebbit camp, and by the very idea. ‘I did not like the previous [1983] manifesto,’ she recalled when composing her memoirs, ‘… and I was determined to keep this one under my own grasp. Policy was my forte. Norman was a supreme politician,’ but she added, ‘We don’t want to quarrel with Norman.’154 What she was saying, in retirement, was that Tebbit had tried to usurp her prerogative. On the other hand, she did not want to suggest this publicly because by then – in adversity – he had become her friend once more. At the time, however, battle was almost openly joined. The Times story had convinced Robin Harris, for instance, that ‘Norman had to be reined in.’155 All through the summer, this conflict persisted, more or less underground. At the end of July and the beginning of August, a rash of articles appeared in the press which exposed the rift between party leader and party Chairman. These coincided with a Commonwealth crisis over South African sanctions, so it was a time of extreme tension for Mrs Thatcher. For his part, Tebbit, although on the A-Team, resented encroachment on what he saw as the work of Central Office, and was determined to fight off research (Young and Rubicam) which he had not himself commissioned and defend that which he had (Saatchis).
‘The Chairman is coming to see you tomorrow. He has asked to see you alone, and therefore I will not be present,’ Sherbourne warned Mrs Thatcher on 29 July. ‘The press has been full of stories about your wish to drop Saatchis and replace them with Y & R.’156 He went on: ‘As far as I am aware, nobody from No 10 has said a word to the press about any of this. I do not know who started it, though it may be a fairly obvious Saatchi ploy. But now it is out in the open, it may be becoming a bit of a free-for-all.’ She should consider whether to tell Tebbit that there were no plans to change the agency, while telling him that Young and Rubicam would also be used, or to tell him that the whole subject would be revisited in the autumn (‘He won’t like this … but equally you can say that the party cannot be bulldozed into taking decisions because of press speculation’).
The next day, Tebbit arrived in Downing Street. He ‘had his dark face on’,157 and bore a sheaf of press cuttings which he dumped in front of Mrs Thatcher, accusing her people of inspiring the stories. Mrs Thatcher denied all knowledge of such things – ‘She was very good at not wanting to know.’158 Tebbit said that if such stories did not stop he would resign. Mrs Thatcher asked him not to, but the meeting produced a new flood of press coverage. On 5 August, Mrs Thatcher went into the King Edward VII Hospital for an operation on her right hand, which suffered from Dupuytren’s contracture, a condition which causes the fingers to bend into the palm of the hand. Denis and her children were absent. Barry Strevens, her detective, who accompanied her, was troubled by ‘how lonely she looked in the hospital, clutching a teddy bear that the Garden Room girls had given her’ as she went to the operating theatre.159
She emerged after two days to a note from Sherbourne begging her to sort out the row, arrange weekly meetings with Tebbit to calm him down and make a decision between Young and Rubicam and Saatchis (he favoured sticking with Saatchis).160 He told her that ‘there are people who want to use your Y & R connection to cast doubt on your confidence in Central Office.’ There was also a curt handwritten letter from Tebbit (a ‘cri de coeur’ warned Nigel Wicks),161 addressing her as ‘Prime Minister’ – a bad sign in his case, since his informal notes normally called her ‘Margaret’. He wished her a speedy recovery, but then stated, as through clenched teeth: ‘the press speculation about my position as Party Chairman has continued and seems likely to do so until something is done to end it. While it continues it damages both Party and Government.’162 He added that he was pressing ahead with party conference plans to involve ministers fully: ‘I will need to secure your full backing for my approaches to colleagues by the end of this month.’ With a circumlocutory expression of anxiety, Wicks advised, ‘I wonder whether you might not wish to telephone NT and let it be known that you had telephoned so as to rest all the rumour-mongering once and for all.’163
On Wicks’s note, Mrs Thatcher wrote: ‘Have phoned Norman & asked Jim Coe [a No. 10 press officer] to kill the story.’164 She did not banish Young and Rubicam, but she did express her confidence in Tebbit and permit him to continue with Saatchis. He felt their uncomfortable meeting had helped: ‘Perhaps she had feared that I was the source of some of the adverse stories about her and my visit somehow reassured her that I was not.’165 She set up the regular meetings Sherbourne had suggested. It was a truce, at least. Tebbit and his wife went off on holiday to France. Mrs Thatcher and Denis stayed with the Wolfsons in Cornwall, where they agreed to be photographed – she with her bandaged hand – holding a rather unruly borrowed dog on the beach.*
Yet another antagonist with whom Mrs Thatcher was wrestling was the BBC. Egged on by Denis, for whom the ‘pinkoes’ of the BBC were a favourite topic of conversation, she had always considered the Corporation politically and personally hostile. This had become a matter of passionate concern to her during the Falklands War, when she felt that the BBC was making life difficult for the British Task Force and preaching defeatism (see Volume I, pp. 739–40). She had also long opposed the BBC for its ‘extravagance’, its broadcasting of material she considered indecent, its overmanned, unionized workforce, its journalistic methods* and its privilege of being funded by a compulsory, flat licence fee (a poll tax, in fact, but one which she was against) imposed on every owner or renter of a television in the land. She favoured the idea that the BBC should, in part at least, be funded by advertising – which, in the BBC’s strict internal theology, was a sin against the Holy Ghost. There was almost nothing she liked about the BBC, with the important exceptions of its original high-minded ‘Reithian standards’ (so named after its original director-general, Sir John Reith), and its External Services, which broadcast in numerous languages. She believed these had a particular value when bringing accurate news to the Communist world, where all other broadcasting was propaganda.
From her earliest days as prime minister, Mrs Thatcher had criticized the BBC consistently and relentlessly, though more often in private than in public. In May 1980, for example, she had lunch at Broadcasting House with the main executives. She laid into the licence fee and suggested that Radio 1 (the pop music station) should carry advertising. Bernard Ingham, who was present, wrote it up afterwards:
Mr Singer [Aubrey Singer, managing director of Radio] also objected to advertising on young people’s programmes (eg Radio 1) because it would encourage ‘covetousness’ in them. There followed a lively exchange during which the Prime Minister demanded to know who around the table did not covet a higher standard of living and who had declined an increased salary … over the
last 12 months.166
The lunch continued with her attacking the Corporation for its craven attitude to the IRA. There were a great many more of these ‘lively exchanges’ over the years, but her problem in bringing about change was that none of her successive Home Secretaries – the ministers responsible for the BBC – agreed with her. Of these, the most important was the first, Willie Whitelaw. Even after he had left the Home Office in 1983, and became deputy prime minister, he did everything he could to defend the BBC in its existing form, making it a personal sticking point. In 1986, he even told a ministerial meeting on the subject that he ‘would not feel able to remain a member of the Government’ if the BBC were to carry advertising.167 Mrs Thatcher was clear in her own mind that Whitelaw’s departure was not a price worth paying. As was quite often the case, her rhetoric was therefore more radical than her actions. Her views did not alter, however, and she rightly foresaw that technology – such as cable and direct broadcasting by satellite – would eventually undermine the duopoly power of the BBC and ITV, and hence the way the BBC was funded. She opposed the efforts of the BBC to capture each new technological area, wanting them all opened up to competition.
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