Rumours in the City that afternoon had started share prices falling. A Gallup poll in the Daily Telegraph the following day confirmed them. It put the Tories on 40.5 per cent, Labour on 36.5 and the Alliance on 21.5. Her campaign was also rated 16 points behind that of Neil Kinnock. Stephen Sherbourne was with Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street when early news of the poll came through: ‘Our response was quite unscientific. Panic gripped us all. “Is this a horrible turning point?” we asked ourselves.’137
Struggling back from making a speech in Southampton, Young reached Downing Street at about ten that night. He found a scene of distress. ‘She started talking about the prospect of actually losing.’138
The next morning was worse. Mrs Thatcher had passed a sleepless night, racked by tooth pain, until given pills by Crawfie in the small hours, so she was groggy. After arriving at Central Office, she lashed out at Tebbit and Young: ‘You and David, you’ve been on too much and you’re too old. We must have younger people on television.’139 Although she was older than both of them, she wanted to be seen more herself: ‘I thought that Norman was coming across too harsh, which is a strange thing for me to say. I said I have not been on television a great deal, I’m going on more now.’140 She took the press conference. There she allowed herself to be trapped by a question about her private health treatment in the past. She said she had been so treated ‘to enable me to go into hospital on the day I want, at the time I want and with the doctor I want’.141 Her remarks contrasted unpleasingly with Kinnock’s press conference across the road, which highlighted the case of a ten-year-old boy with a hole in the heart who had had to wait fifteen months for an operation. She did not seem to understand, when David Willetts discussed it with her afterwards, that the point at issue was not her right to have private treatment – which few potential Conservative voters doubted – but her implication that the National Health Service for which she was responsible did not offer the speed and quality which she valued to the average citizen who, unlike her, could not afford to go private.142 She would be pursued for her remark until the end of the campaign.
Meeting the Chairman and others afterwards, Mrs Thatcher was ‘almost hysterical, with her arms sweeping everywhere’.143 ‘Her eyes flashed: hatred shot out of them, like a dog about to bite you.’144 She demanded to see Saatchis’ proposed advertising. Despite the fact that the exiled Dobbs, because of his Saatchi role, had separated himself from advertising, the boards and other materials were kept in his office. John Wakeham came in and asked him to bring them to her. ‘I’m not invited,’ Dobbs replied. ‘I’m not going in there without you,’ said the now agitated Wakeham.145 So Dobbs brought the advertisements in. ‘She flayed me,’ he recalled. ‘She was screaming, foaming at the mouth. Norman was trying to talk sense into her. David Young was saying “Leave it to me, Margaret.” Willie Whitelaw was rolling his oyster eyes.’ The only coherent thing she said was that she wanted the material to dwell more on Conservative achievements.146
‘I was getting more and more desperate,’ Young told his diary,
until eventually I said, ‘Prime Minister, what do you want me to do?’ And she just exploded. She said, ‘I can’t do all this myself, I can’t tell you’… Then she went on about the party election broadcast, and the meeting broke up without anything being resolved. I felt very depressed. I really thought … I was being left out in the cold and being blamed that things weren’t going very well.147
He tottered off to arrange a meeting that afternoon with Tim Bell and others to try to put the advertising and the election broadcast right. Then – for the ordinary business of government still chugged on almost regardless – he had to attend a luncheon for the Chinese Minister for Aeronautical Industries.
Mrs Thatcher went to visit Alton Towers, the Staffordshire theme park, in heavy rain. The trip had been arranged in a desperate attempt to lighten the atmosphere of the campaign, but she now faced it, ‘without quite being in the mood for jollity’.148 After she had set off for Alton Towers, Whitelaw turned to Dobbs and said, ‘There’s a woman who will never fight another election.’149*
Rumours were sweeping Westminster and the markets of another unfavourable poll that evening, allegedly showing a 2 per cent Tory lead, so Young, Bell and co., scared by Mrs Thatcher’s mood, believed they must be ready for her return early that evening. They saw a change in the campaign advertising as the only means of winning the election. They met in Downing Street. Bell, with his business partner Frank Lowe, had come up with a poster slogan ‘BRITAIN’S A SUCCESS AGAIN – DON’T LET LABOUR RUIN IT’, a slogan inspired by the Conservatives’ victorious campaign for a third term in 1959: ‘LIFE’S BETTER UNDER THE CONSERVATIVES. DON’T LET LABOUR RUIN IT’.150 At the same time, Saatchis and Tebbit were frantically working on the same vague brief to replace their offering that had been rejected that morning.
Mrs Thatcher returned from her dismal outing by helicopter. Saatchis (Maurice Saatchi and John Sharkey) set out for Downing Street carrying their ideas carefully wrapped up and sealed against the torrential rain. Sherbourne and Willetts had to choreograph ‘a scene from a Feydeau farce’,151 by which the representatives of the rival groups were kept in separate rooms, unaware of the presence of the other. Tebbit arrived separately. Young took him aside and showed him Bell’s work, about which, until then, he had known nothing. ‘ “Who did this?” he asked … I said “Tim Bell.” He said, “Well, that’s it then, that’s it.” ’152 Young then ‘got him by the shoulders and said, “Norman listen to me, we’re about to lose this fucking election, you’re going to go, I’m going to go, the whole thing is going to go. The whole election depends upon her being right for the next five days doing fine performances on television – she has to be happy, we have got to do this.” ’ Young was, as Tebbit put it, ‘excessively excited’.153 Rather cool-headedly, having inspected the offerings of the two sides, Tebbit decided that the one produced by his rivals was the better and more likely to please Mrs Thatcher.
After a further struggle, in which Young grabbed Maurice Saatchi, who was ‘enraged’,154 by his lapels, and made a speech similar to the one he had made to Tebbit, Saatchis, encouraged by Tebbit, agreed to accept Bell’s proposal so long as they were charged with executing and improving it. Their face-saving modification was ‘BRITAIN’S GREAT AGAIN: DON’T LET LABOUR WRECK IT’, which Bell considered ‘unsubtle’155 but, to the untutored eye, made very little difference. Once this was agreed, Tebbit said, ‘Well, I want to go and tell her.’156 Thus Mrs Thatcher was presented, at last, not with competing alternatives, but with a single, agreed suggestion. ‘She looked very relieved,’157 and accepted it. Early that evening, the news came through that the dreaded Marplan poll was fine – 44 per cent for the Conservatives and 34 for Labour. So all the heat went out of the rows, and the appalling twenty-four hours looked ridiculous.* ‘What childish things we did,’ recalled David Young.158 That night, Mrs Thatcher, very uncharacteristically, failed to work on the draft of her next speech. This was because she was so tired she fell asleep at her desk.159
The next day (Friday 5 June), all rather uneasy with one another, but all working together, Tebbit, the Saatchis team and Young met in Central Office. Young argued for a huge blitz with the new advertising. Tebbit resisted, on the grounds that Central Office could not afford it, to which Young replied, ‘Don’t worry about the cost, because I’ve spoken to Alistair and there’s plenty of money.’160 It was the exact opposite tactic to the one employed in 1983, when the last few days of advertising were cancelled as an unnecessary extravagance (see Chapter 3), but in truth there was little need for this change. No poll at any point in the campaign ever remotely suggested that the Conservatives would lose. As Neil Kinnock himself recalled, ‘We didn’t seriously think we could win.’161
In the view of many seasoned campaigners, the whole business of Wobbly Thursday, as it came to be known, was absurd. Some blamed it on Lord Young. ‘David panicked,’ Nigel Lawson believed. ‘It was infectious. There was n
o wobble. David Young didn’t meet any voters.’162 But although it was true that Young was electorally inexperienced, this was really beside the point. The ultimate problem lay with Mrs Thatcher herself. She was, in advertisers’ jargon, the client (though technically the client was Central Office); and in this election she was an impossible one – sure of nothing except that everything was going wrong. So Young and Bell were right to think that the key issue was to keep her happy and thus coax the best performances out of her. According to Charles Powell, the election campaign was ‘one of her worst and scratchiest periods’ and Wobbly Thursday ‘made some of us feel that she had to be saved from herself’.163
A Saatchi poster in the 1987 campaign – following ferocious internal rows, the idea for the new slogan came from Tim Bell, backed by David Young.
One mysterious aspect of the affair is that Tebbit had told Mrs Thatcher as early as the middle of April that he had agreed with ‘my Margaret’ (his wife) not to accept office after the election. So it is odd that her suspicions of Tebbit persisted. Possibly she did not believe that he was unpersuadable on the subject: she always found it hard to imagine that people wanted to give up politics. Certainly she tried, including on election night itself, to get him to stay. Perhaps it was just that she never felt at ease with the rather stern Tebbit in the way that she did with louder, easier, more self-consciously charming men. For his part, Tebbit was more deeply hurt by what had happened than he – a proud man who had been treated very unfairly – liked to admit. At the party conference in 1987, meeting one colleague late at night, he ‘embarked on a 10-minute fusillade of RAF expletives about his election treatment by the ghastly — —, an overrated PM’.164 He was so incensed by what he had discovered about Mrs Thatcher using research behind his back during the election that he tried to telephone her at the Vancouver summit that autumn to insist she apologize to him publicly.165 There was something tragic in this falling out, as there was about some of her other relationships with her most able senior colleagues. She admired Tebbit very much and yet, despite everything they had done together, their sense of common purpose had declined. In this sense, Wobbly Thursday may have been not so much a one-day wonder as a watershed.
In the final days, while her tooth still hurt, Mrs Thatcher recovered form. With plenty to do in the television studios, and a clear battle to fight under a clear slogan, she had a renewed sense of direction. Although still pursued on the subject of health, she fought back. On Sunday 7 June, when David Frost had a go at her, she asked him sweetly whether he too used private medicine, and he had to admit that he did. She remained tense, however. When she was interviewed by Robin Day for Panorama on the Monday night, she performed extremely well, but she was so upset by Day’s attack on her as an ‘uncaring’ person that, once the filming was over, she was, recorded John Whittingdale, ‘close to tears’.166 ‘In no other country would the Prime Minister be subjected to personal insults like that,’ she said. Then she added, ‘We must make a list of those in the media who are against us.’167
Mrs Thatcher immediately flew to Venice, for a truncated visit to the G7 summit. Her early departure caused disappointment in Washington where, as George Shultz told an NSC meeting, she was being relied upon to ‘help secure our key objectives’,168 but the summit was a helpful reminder to the electorate of her global importance.* On her return to Gatwick, Stephen Sherbourne was waiting for her reaction to his draft of her speech to be delivered at Harrogate that night. Since she had actually torn up the draft he had given her for another speech the week before, he was extremely nervous, but Charles Powell, seeing Sherbourne across the tarmac, simply waved the speech in the air and put his thumb up.169 She barely changed a word. This was a sign, unprecedented in the campaign, that she was content.
In an eve-of-poll interview, harassed by David Dimbleby about why she did not seem to care about the fate of the unemployed, Mrs Thatcher replied: ‘If people just drool and drivel that they care, I turn round and say “Right, I also look to see what you actually do.” ’170 Very untypically, she immediately retracted the phrase on air. ‘I am sorry I used those words,’ she said twice. If she had used them any earlier in the campaign, they would certainly have been brought up against her again, and probably have created as much trouble as her remarks on health. Yet the words were of the essence of Margaret Thatcher. First, they expressed fierce antagonism to the left’s pretension to any moral high ground. Second, they encapsulated her tendency to judge by results and by action rather than by words. She did care about what happened to people without jobs, but she wished to be judged by how much she could improve their opportunities rather than by how nicely she spoke about them. She apologized, not because she thought she had said a wrong thing, but because she thought she had been politically imprudent. In all her social teaching, she kept asking the question, ‘What is to be done?’, and so she got angry when her critics cared, as she saw it, only about what should be said.
Although, as was almost traditional, Vincent Hanna’s Newsnight poll two days before polling forecast a hung Parliament, and the BBC’s exit poll did the same, the real result was never, once the votes started to be counted, in doubt.* On the day before polling day, Young told Mrs Thatcher he did not think she would get near a majority of 80. ‘I must have an 80 majority, I must have it,’ she replied. ‘It won’t look right if I don’t.’171 At 2.15 a.m. after Thursday’s voting, the Conservatives achieved an overall majority. Once all the votes were counted, they had a majority of 102. Mrs Thatcher’s own result in Finchley, which saw her majority slightly reduced to 8,913, was:
Mrs M. Thatcher (Conservative) 21,603
J. R. M. Davies (Labour) 12,690
D. Howarth (Liberal) 5,580
Lord Buckethead (Independent) 131
M. J. St Vincent (Independent) 59
The total nationwide Conservative vote was 13,763,066 (42.2 per cent of the total) – a higher numerical, though not proportional, total than in 1979 or 1983. Labour added more than 1,500,000 votes to its terrible 1983 tally to get back just over 10,000,000, and achieved 30.8 per cent of the vote. The Alliance, with 22.5 per cent of the vote, was three percentage points down on 1983. The only serious blot on the Tory success was the sharp fall in the number of seats in Scotland, where voters had been the victims of rate revaluation – from twenty-one seats to ten.
On polling day, Bernard Ingham sent Mrs Thatcher a note of things she might want to say once her victory was certain:
the main story tomorrow will be your historic winning of a third term … While savouring your triumph you must give no impression of resting on your laurels … it would also be of longer term value to signal your concern to get on with the major ‘caring’ tasks which were interrupted by the General Election.172
Mrs Thatcher’s own handwritten notes show her more or less following this advice. ‘To be returned the third term is to make history,’173 and she thanked Norman Tebbit for running ‘the engine-room of victory’. Her notes referred to ‘the duty that rests upon us to represent all the people’. She wanted ‘more choice in housing and education. Especially for those in inner cities’. What she actually said to the cameras, however, was ‘We must do something about those inner cities.’ Those were the words that were remembered.
But the facts spoke louder than anything Mrs Thatcher herself could say. No prime minister in the era of universal suffrage had ever won a third consecutive term before. Despite her own extreme anxiety, ill temper and misjudgments in the campaign, she had triumphantly done so. Thatcherism was now the dominant creed of the age.
The day after the Conservatives’ victory was declared, Charles Powell wrote a letter of congratulation to his boss.174 Although it was typed (‘to save your eyes’), he reassured her that ‘There are no copies.’ ‘If ever a party and a country were carried to success on the shoulders of one person,’ he told her, ‘it has been over the last eight years.’ But then he gave some brave advice:
All the same, I hope you will not put
yourself through it again. The level of personal abuse thrown at you during the campaign was unbelievable and must take some toll, however stoic you are outwardly. There comes a point when your reputation and standing as a historic figure are more important to your party, to your cause and to the country than even you yourself can be … In two or three years time, you will have completed the most sweeping change this country has seen in decades and your place in history will be rivalled in this century only by Churchill. That’s the time to contribute in some other area!
In her moment of greatest triumph, Mrs Thatcher was being reminded by her closest associate that she was mortal.
Illustrations
1. Preparing for battle: Mrs Thatcher, in No. 10, makes sure her hair is in place for the 1983 general election campaign.
2. Denis listens attentively to one of his wife’s election platform speeches. During her more informal ‘stump’ speeches, he was often to be found at the back of the crowd, shouting ‘Hear, hear’.
3. The winning team launch the 1983 election manifesto: Mrs Thatcher with (top, left to right) Norman Tebbit, Geoffrey Howe, Francis Pym and (beside her) Willie Whitelaw. Pym said a landslide victory would be a bad thing. After she won one, she sacked him.
4. Shouting down the hecklers in Salisbury, with the Conservative candidate Robert Key, who won.
5. The 1983 Labour manifesto was even more useful to her than her own. Here she reads out blood-curdling passages to a rally in Cardiff.
6. On the morning of victory on 10 June 1983, Mrs Thatcher, Denis and Cecil Parkinson wave to supporters from the window of Conservative Central Office. She already knew that Sara Keays, Parkinson’s former secretary, was pregnant with his child.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 Page 90
