Young left Downing Street promising to sort everything out for her: ‘I got into the car and I really felt as if my whole world had come to an end … Not only did she not like it – she somehow felt I’d let her down.’102 It was no longer so good to be seen as ‘the person behind it all’.
In order not to cause a blow-up with Tebbit, and perhaps wanting to conceal from his rival that he had upset Mrs Thatcher so badly, Young concocted a story with John Wakeham in which they told Tebbit they had seen the video without showing it to Mrs Thatcher and were worried by the depiction of her, because it played to the current attack from the Alliance that she was ‘happy to go to Moscow, but she never goes to Middlesbrough’. ‘We need more of the home market,’ said Wakeham. ‘Put her in a white coat in a factory.’103 While a factory visit was deemed impracticable in the time available, Wakeham and Young insisted that an interview with Mrs Thatcher needed shooting immediately to add to the end of the film.104 Tebbit swallowed this line, and Mrs Thatcher, unaware of these shenanigans, went round to Great College Street that afternoon to have her new contribution recorded. As he often did for party political broadcasts, Tim Bell sat between the legs of the cameras looking straight at her and smiling, to reassure her. Always good when in a tight corner, Mrs Thatcher performed extremely professionally, giving a well-delivered encomium about the ‘transformation’ that Britain was undergoing.105 When shown to candidates and the media, the video passed off without incident.
This farcical sequence of events was not an untypical example of the conduct of the whole campaign. It was the result of too many cooks spoiling the broth, and of the fact that, over the question of who should be head chef, Mrs Thatcher’s indecision was final.
The following morning, the Conservative manifesto was unveiled at the first Conservative press conference of the campaign. The efforts to show ‘the team’ meant that too many ministers were crammed into the fairly small room at Central Office, sweating under television lights. The effect was to suggest tension rather than amity.
Although still quite long, the manifesto was a thoughtful and coherent document. ‘I knew exactly what I wanted,’ Mrs Thatcher claimed in later years.106 Its argument was that ‘A vast change separates the Britain of today from the Britain of the late 1970s.’ ‘Pride of ownership of homes, shares and pensions’ had been established. Now it was time to offer ‘greater choice and responsibility’ in areas like housing and education. There would be a core national curriculum in state schools for the first time. These schools could opt out of management by their local education authority (LEA) and run themselves, collecting their money directly from central government.* ‘The abuses of left-wing Labour councils have shocked the nation,’ the manifesto said, and these would be ended by the replacement of the rates by ‘the fairer Community Charge’ which would ‘strengthen local democracy and accountability’. Jobs would be assisted by a guaranteed place on the Youth Training Scheme for all sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds and all up to the age of twenty-five who had been out of work for six months or more. Inner cities would be revived by removing the Labour-imposed barriers against private investment: new Urban Development Corporations, like that which had been so successful in the London Docklands, would be given powers to reclaim derelict land. As for the Bomb, the Conservatives alone promised to continue the replacement of Polaris with Trident nuclear missiles.107
The Labour manifesto, launched the same day, had no comparable depth. Its main policies – unilateral nuclear disarmament, increasing the basic rate of income tax by 2 per cent, repealing all the Tory trade union laws (including the restoration of secondary picketing, the weapon denied Arthur Scargill in the miners’ strike) – were not appealing. Almost the only major concession to modernity was support, for the first time, for the right to buy council houses.* But journalists who came to Mrs Thatcher’s cramped press conference from Kinnock’s suave and spacious, red-rose-decorated one in the Queen Elizabeth II Centre near by, were struck by the contrast between the slick modernity projected by Labour and the stuffiness and confusion of the Conservatives. The idea that a contrast could be made between the fresh young personality of Kinnock and the strident one of Mrs Thatcher was beginning to catch fire – ‘Mr Nice Guy vs TBW’ was the shorthand. The same applied to the way the leaders’ campaigns were organized. Kinnock’s was a war of movement – travelling for days away from London and leaving most of the press conferences to his personable campaign chief, Bryan Gould.† Mrs Thatcher attended almost all the daily London press conferences, and went out on expeditions which, partly because of anxiety about IRA terrorism, kept her at too great a distance from the public. The fear in Central Office was that Mrs Thatcher’s campaign would be ‘overly “Prime Ministerial” and somewhat distant from the electorate, which might be contrasted unfavourably with Mr Kinnock’s family, youth, man of the people image’.108 ‘It is a waste of your time pottering round supermarkets and schools and standing in empty fields shouting through a megaphone,’ Woodrow Wyatt chided her, and she agreed.109
Two days after the manifesto launches, Labour produced its first party election broadcast of the campaign.‡ Filmed by Hugh Hudson, the director of the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, it marked a revolution in the genre. An RAF Tornado shot across the sky and seemed to transform itself into a seagull. Beneath the seagull were Neil and Glenys Kinnock, strolling hand in hand on the Great Orme headland by Llandudno. This film was interspersed with Kinnock explaining his compassionate attitudes and likeable working-class background, backed up by mainly Welsh friends and relations praising him. It also cut to his party-conference assault on Militant in 1985 and the election speech he had given in Llandudno the week before, in which, in an unscripted addition,110 he had declared himself ‘the first Kinnock in a thousand generations’ to have attended university.* The message was about the freedom and opportunity for working people’s natural talents if only a party would give them the ‘platform’ they needed. No policy was mentioned. The film kept using the word ‘Kinnock’ as if in an American presidential campaign, and never spoke the word ‘Labour’. Mrs Thatcher was not mentioned or depicted, but it was she, by implication, who was denying ordinary people their platform.
The broadcast was a great success. It did not move the opinion polls much, although it did contribute to Labour’s aim of reducing the Alliance threat: the double act of ‘the two Davids’, Steel and Owen, who were not on good terms, was not going well. But it galvanized interest in the campaign and convinced the media, bored with years of stories of Labour uselessness, that change was coming and that Kinnock was the man of the moment. It also suggested the political mortality of the Thatcher era. The film made much of Kinnock’s youth (he was forty-five to Mrs Thatcher’s sixty-one), and of course it was not easy to imagine Denis and Margaret holding hands on some Welsh cliffs.†
Mrs Thatcher had little time to watch television, did not enjoy the medium, and did not have a video-recorder, so she did not see the Kinnock broadcast.‡ She heard of its success, however, and was displeased. ‘Labour had this thing with dear Neil and Glenys on the cliffs … The media were just determined that whatever Kinnock did was right …’111 ‘This is what we were up against, this remarkable guy who captured the imagination,’ she added, in a sarcastic tone, when she remembered her rival’s great moment. Labour considered the broadcast so successful that it made the unique decision to run it twice more in the campaign rather than show new ones.*
On the morning after the Kinnock broadcast, Mrs Thatcher made the second gaffe of her campaign. Answering a question at the press conference about schools policy, she seemed to say that schools opting out of local authority control might be able to charge fees on top of the standard costs paid by the government, and might also be able to have selective admission policies. This point had been left vague in the manifesto because Mrs Thatcher wanted such schools to be able to raise extra funds and Kenneth Baker did not.112 Once the gaffe had been made, it could not be quickly corrected be
cause no one could find the Education Secretary, Kenneth Baker, who had turned his mobile phone off. In Mrs Thatcher’s mind, the problem had arisen because Baker was ‘a big broadbrush man, very, very good at general speeches, but … I had to finish off the detail.’113 In fact, she was forced more or less to back off, because of political damage. When David Willetts, who was handling policy questions for her at Central Office, advised that she should do this, she said, ‘Even you, David, are racked by left-wing middle-class guilt,’114 though she gave in. But the incident had been her fault, a carelessness which, in past campaigns, she had very rarely shown. It was ‘a tragic fall at the first hurdle’, Dobbs said privately shortly after the election: education ‘was supposed to be the jewel in the crown’.115
At midnight, Mrs Thatcher telephoned Young to say that she had just been talking to her daughter Carol who ‘had said we’re about to lose the election the way things are going’.116 A couple of days earlier, John Wakeham, who was almost completely inexperienced on television, had put in a very poor performance on Election Call, largely unable to answer the questions put to him. The Saturday-morning papers led with the education muddle, and spoke of a ‘lost week’ for the Tories.
That night, Mrs Thatcher had Tim Bell and Young in for drinks with Denis and Stephen Sherbourne in the flat at No. 10. Carol, whose role, according to Tim Bell, was ‘like mine, to listen to her mother’s rants’,117 was present. So was Denis, who ‘was a bit aloof from the whole thing, but from time to time would say things like “The woman’s getting grumpy: watch it!” ’118 Mrs Thatcher was in a mood of despair: ‘It’s hardly worth bothering, let’s give up, it’s the end.’119 She raged against Wakeham’s performance, saying that ‘he can never even be a minister again.’ Denis kept telling her to listen to Bell and Young. They expounded their idea that they should ‘release Norman the assassin’ to destroy Kinnock.
She calmed down a bit, but the next day she twice telephoned Young, full of anxieties. Her first call was to repeat the view of Woodrow Wyatt that she should be on more of her party’s election broadcasts.* The second was to complain how appallingly scruffy her ministers, notably Lawson, Kenneth Clarke and Nicholas Ridley (whose crime was to wear a cardigan), looked on television: ‘Nigel’s got to get a haircut.’ ‘Absolutely right.’ ‘Will you tell him?’ ‘No, Prime Minister … you’ve got to tell him.’ ‘All right.’120 In fact, she did not; his own wife did.121 This combination of explosions of anger about various mistakes and shortcomings with a reluctance to speak directly to the people concerned also led her to strip Wakeham of his role co-ordinating television broadcasts for ministers without giving him the bad news herself. The task fell to Young, who executed her order, but was not pleased: ‘She ensured I made an enemy for life.’122 This atmosphere of unhappiness, anger, irresolution and intrigue dominated the whole campaign. Part of the trouble, caused by her long years at the top, was that she now had very few associates senior enough to stand up to her. Once, when she was firing so many angry questions at David Willetts that he could not get her to read the brief which answered them, David Wolfson intervened and said to Mrs Thatcher, ‘Just shut up and read the bloody brief,’123 but such courage was memorable by its rarity. All the difficulties came back to Mrs Thatcher’s deep insecurity, and her lack of a team in which she could repose complete trust.
The wider political realities were much better for her. There was hardly any alteration in the opinion polls throughout May, except for a decline of the Alliance which favoured Labour slightly more than the Conservatives. On policy, the Conservatives scored some palpable hits, and Labour did not. Indeed, when it came to the community charge, although press questioning revealed considerable Conservative incoherence about who would gain and who would lose, the Opposition largely stayed off the subject because of its fear of being saddled with blame for high rates and their association with the ‘loony left’. As Young said in a private interview after the election, ‘Labour missed a trick on the poll tax which certainly hadn’t been properly thought out and on which the Conservatives were very vulnerable.’124
Running what he called ‘my freelance election campaign’ because he had been excluded from the nerve-centre by Young,125 Nigel Lawson studied Labour’s economic promises. His eye was caught by an oddly specific figure in the Labour manifesto. It promised a £7.36 per week increase in child benefit. He wondered why, and soon worked out that this was the amount that would be raised by abolishing the married man’s tax allowance. Earlier drafts of the Labour manifesto had mentioned the abolition, in order to produce the £7.36 figure, but this had later been excised to prevent anger among married men. The tell-tale exact figure, however, had been carelessly left in,126 exposing the deception. Lawson was also able to mount a wider attack on how Labour’s spending promises must involve tax increases much larger than they were admitting. ‘Nigel was very good at spotting the Labour weaknesses on taxation,’ recalled Mrs Thatcher. ‘Let us give credit where credit is due.’127
Even more helpful to the Conservatives was Labour’s policy of unilateral disarmament. For this Saatchis produced an advertisement – their only one of the campaign which was universally described as a success. Its simple slogan was ‘LABOUR’S POLICY ON ARMS’, and it showed a British soldier with his hands held up in surrender.
On the same day that a despairing Mrs Thatcher was ringing up Young about Lawson’s haircut, Kinnock was interviewed by David Frost on television. In an extremely convoluted answer about nuclear weapons, the Labour leader ended up saying that, since he did not believe that Britain could use nuclear weapons successfully, it would face ‘the classical choice’, when attacked, ‘of either exterminating everything you stand for … or using the resources you’ve got to make any occupation totally untenable’.128 By using the word ‘occupation’, Kinnock seemed to concede in advance the idea of defeat and surrender. The talk in the newspapers was that Kinnock was advocating that the British, if invaded, should ‘take to the hills’. He was teased about wanting to create his own ‘Dad’s Army’. ‘Norman the assassin’ moved into action as agreed in principle the night before. ‘Britain has no ambition to live under the red flag of socialism or the white flag of surrender,’129 he declared.
Mrs Thatcher was offered a gift of a question about Kinnock’s defence policy at her press conference on the Tuesday morning (the Monday was a bank holiday), but, to the exasperation of her staff she ‘totally threw it away because she said that inner cities, not defence, was the subject of the day. She could be extraordinary sometimes.’130 At a rally in Newport in Wales that night, however, she did launch into the sort of denunciation in which she specialized. She returned to the theme with which she had started the campaign – that Labour had an ‘iceberg’ manifesto, in which its dangers were concealed below the surface. She quoted Kinnock’s words about occupation – ‘A Soviet occupation, I presume. So now we know that Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy is a policy for defeat, surrender, occupation and finally, prolonged guerrilla fighting … I do not understand how anyone who aspires to government can treat the defence of our country so lightly.’131*
On the last Sunday in May, the beginning of the last full week of the campaign, the opinion polls remained unaffected by the fierceness of the public battle being fought between the parties and, of course, by the hysterical atmosphere behind the scenes. The least favourable poll, a Gallup published in the Sunday Telegraph, gave the Tories an 8.5 per cent lead over Labour. Conservative candidates reported good levels of support. Travelling the country, Lawson recalled an even better atmosphere than in 1983, ‘a huge, popular, positive response, a real feeling of a British economic miracle’.132 He was talking his own book,† but there can be little doubt that voters were less worried than before about unemployment and widely convinced that good times had arrived and would stay.
Mrs Thatcher, however, and therefore most of those around her, remained extremely uneasy. They considered the polls alarming, though they had barely shifted. The Su
nday papers reported that Labour would move to more personal attacks on Mrs Thatcher, her arrogance and dictatorial ways. The young Tony Blair, by now a frontbench Treasury spokesman, spoke of ‘her unchecked and unbalanced mind’.133 In a note, Young told her how he thought the campaign should now go: ‘You said when we left last night that it was not as clear as last week. Let me make clear: – 1. Between now and Wednesday/Thursday of this week we must stay on the ATTACK … The attack should be the fear issues … “They will destroy our industrial peace, they will destroy our safety on the streets and they will destroy the money in your pocket.” ’134 Mrs Thatcher always liked attacking, and was pleased to concentrate on the simple case against Labour, the Alliance seemingly having been cleared out of the way. She spoke strongly in Edinburgh on the ensuing Tuesday (2 June), denouncing Labour’s resort to ‘personal abuse’ and warned of what lay behind the ‘mask of moderation’.135 She also spoke directly to Scots: ‘We pledged ourselves to abolish domestic rates and we have done so (Applause.) … And I am proud that we will first be introducing the Community Charge here in Scotland … It will be brought into operation. (Applause.)’
That night, a poll organized by Vincent Hanna of the BBC’s Newsnight and using techniques which he claimed had been perfected in by-elections, gave the Conservatives a slightly less than 4 per cent lead over Labour, the worst figures of the campaign so far. Mrs Thatcher always became anxious if she was absent for too long from the centre of operations, and this was her first night not passed in London since the campaign had begun. Before she got back to Downing Street, the fighting mood in which she had started the week was debilitated by ‘the onset of extremely painful toothache’,136 which was eventually diagnosed as an abscess. On Wednesday 3 June, she returned to find pain which, though not physical, was no less real.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 Page 89
