The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  She had no doubt that she wanted the biggest majority possible. ‘The Labour party manifesto is the most extreme ever,’ she declared on a whistle-stop tour of Norfolk on 25 May, ‘and it deserves a very big defeat.’34 ‘As a professional campaigner,’ Carol Thatcher observed, ‘she did not think there was such a thing as winning too well.’ Mrs Thatcher warned repeatedly against complacency, believing that ‘You can lose elections in the last few days by not going flat out to the winning post.’35 ‘We need to have every single vote on polling day.’36

  Just as she dominated her colleagues, she also reduced television interviewers to pliant ciphers. Robin Day – the original tough interrogator – felt that he had let his viewers down by letting the Prime Minister walk all over him; but in all his long experience he had not been treated like this before. He was used to asking questions which the politicians would then make some attempt to answer: he was unprepared for Mrs Thatcher’s new technique of ignoring the questions and simply delivering whatever message she wanted to get across.37 ‘In all her set-piece encounters,’ Michael Cockerell wrote, ‘the top interviewers scarcely succeeded in laying a glove on her. She said what she had come prepared to say and no more.’38 By comparison both Foot and Jenkins were clumsy, longwinded and old-fashioned.

  The only person who rattled her was an ordinary voter, a geography teacher named Diana Gould, who pressed her about the sinking of the General Belgrano on BBC TV’s Nationwide, seizing on the discrepancy in her answers about whether or not the ship was sailing towards or away from the British task force, and refusing to be deflected. ‘No professional would have challenged a Prime Minister so bluntly,’ wrote Martin Harrison in the Nuffield study of the election, ‘and precisely because she was answering an ordinary voter Mrs Thatcher had to bite back her evident anger.’39 She came off the air talking furiously of abolishing the BBC. ‘Only the BBC could ask a British Prime Minister why she took action to protect our ships against an enemy ship that was a danger to our boys’, she railed, forgetting that it was a listener, not the presenter, who had asked the question.40 Nevertheless she was entitled to resent armchair strategists who persisted in questioning the sinking of the Belgrano long after the event. ‘They have the luxury of knowing that we came through all right,’ she told Carol. ‘I had the anxiety of protecting our people on Hermes and Invincible and the people on the vessels going down there.’41

  Recriminations about the Falklands did Mrs Thatcher no harm, however, merely keeping the memory of her triumph before the electorate without the Tories having to boast about it. Labour knew the war was bad territory for them, and tried to keep off it. But two leading figures could not resist. First Denis Healey, in a speech in Birmingham, talked about Mrs Thatcher wrapping herself in the Union Jack and ‘glorying in slaughter’; he was obliged to apologise the next day, explaining that he should have said ‘glorying in conflict’. Then Neil Kinnock – Labour’s education spokesman – responded still more crudely on television to a heckler who shouted that at least Mrs Thatcher had guts. ‘And it’s a pity that people had to leave theirs on Goose Green in order to prove it,’ he retorted. Kinnock was publicly unrepentant; but he too was obliged to write to the families of the war dead to apologise.42 These wild charges only damaged Labour. There was no mileage in trying to denigrate Mrs Thatcher’s achievement in the Falklands – particularly since the opposition was supposed to have supported the war. Such carping merely confirmed her charge that Labour never had the guts to carry anything through.

  She started and finished her campaign, as usual, in Finchley. Mrs Thatcher always appeared at her most modest and humble among her own people, where she was still the model constituency Member they had elected in 1959. In all her years as Tory leader and Prime Minister she never missed a constituency function if she could help it. Except when she was out of the country she still held her regular surgery every Friday evening, usually preceded by meetings with businessmen or a visit to a local school or hospital, and followed by supper with her constituency officers and perhaps a branch meeting. Her insistence on keeping these appointments made for a running battle with Number Ten, which always had more pressing calls on her time. She was deeply possessive about Finchley and was furious when press reports suggested that she might seek a safer seat in Gloucestershire. Finchley had been her political base for more than twenty years and she liked everything there to be as it always had been.

  As well as Labour and the Alliance, she faced for the first time a phalanx of fringe candidates – not only the imperishable ‘Lord’ David Sutch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, but a Greenham Common peace campaigner; anti-motorway, anti-licensing and anti-censorship campaigners; and a ‘Belgrano Blood-hunger’ candidate (who came bottom with just thirteen votes). All these diversions delayed the declaration of her result until 2.30 a.m., long after the Conservatives’ national victory was confirmed. When the 326th Tory seat was formally declared, Alastair Burnet on ITN announced that ‘Mrs Thatcher is back in Downing Street’. ‘No, I’m not!’ she shouted furiously at the screen, ‘I’m still at Hendon Town Hall.’43 Eventually she secured a slightly increased majority over Labour, with the Alliance third and the rest nowhere:

  She left almost immediately for Conservative Central Office, where she thanked the party workers and was photographed waving from a first-floor window with the architect of victory, Cecil Parkinson. She had won, on the face of it, an enormous victory. The eventual Conservative majority was 144 over all other parties: they held 397 seats in the new House (compared with 335 in the old) against Labour’s 205 and just 23 for the Alliance, 2 Scottish Nationalists, 2 Plaid Cymru, and 17 from Northern Ireland.

  Nationally, however, the scale of her victory owed a great deal to the Alliance. Her hugely swollen majority actually rested on a lower aggregate vote, and a lower share of the vote, than she had won in 1979 – down from 43.9 to 42.4 per cent. Though it was rewarded with pitifully few seats, in terms of votes the Alliance ran Labour very hard for second place, winning 25.4 per cent to Labour’s 27.6 per cent – less than 700,000 votes behind. The effect of the Alliance surge, which nearly doubled the Liberal vote of 1979, was not, as the Tories had feared, to let Labour in but, on the contrary, to deliver the Government a majority out of all proportion to its entitlement. Behind the triumphalism, therefore, June 1983 was by no means the massive endorsement of Thatcherism that the Tories claimed. It was ‘manifestly less a victory for the Conservatives’, the Annual Register concluded, ‘than a catastrophe for the Labour Party’.44 Perhaps the most significant statistic to emerge from analysis of the result was that less than 40 per cent of trade-union members voted Labour (31 per cent voted Conservative and 29 per cent Alliance).45 What Mrs Thatcher had achieved since 1979 – with critical help from the Labour leadership itself, the SDP defectors, General Galtieri and the distorting electoral system – was to smash the old Labour party, leaving herself without the inconvenience of an effective opposition for as long as she remained in office.

  Into the second term

  With the second term secured and her personal authority unassailable, Mrs Thatcher now had an almost unprecedented political opportunity before her. Her opponents within the Tory party were conclusively routed. For the first time she was in a position to appoint her own Cabinet. Yet she made remarkably few changes. June 1983 largely confirmed the team that fought the election. There were, indeed, only three casualties. By far the most significant was Francis Pym. She had never wanted him as Foreign Secretary, but in April 1982 she had had little choice. Now she called him in the morning after the election and told him bluntly: ‘Francis, I want a new Foreign Secretary.’46 What she really wanted, as she grew more confident of her capacity to handle foreign policy herself, was a more amenable Foreign Secretary from her own wing of the party, preferably one without a traditional Foreign Office background. The man she had in mind was Cecil Parkinson, as his reward for masterminding the election. In the very moment of victory, however, at Central Office
in the early hours of Friday morning, Parkinson confessed to her that he had been conducting a long-standing affair with his former secretary, who was expecting his child. She reluctantly concluded that he could not become Foreign Secretary with this incipient scandal hanging over him, but thought he would be less exposed in a less senior job. She sent him instead to Trade and Industry. With some misgiving she then gave the Foreign Office to Geoffrey Howe.

  By the time she came to write her memoirs Lady Thatcher had persuaded herself that this was a mistake.47 At the Treasury Howe’s quiet determination had been invaluable both in riding the political storms and in stiffening her own resolve. At the Foreign Office, by contrast, his views – particularly towards Europe – increasingly diverged from hers, while his dogged diplomacy and air of patient reasonableness exasperated her as much as Pym’s had done. She also became convinced that Howe was ambitious for her job. Yet in truth it was an excellent appointment. For the whole of Mrs Thatcher’s second term, at summits and international negotiations, they made an effective combination on the global stage, each complementing the other’s qualities, while Howe put up heroically with being treated as her punchbag.

  The hot tip to become the new Chancellor was Patrick Jenkin. But Mrs Thatcher now had the self-confidence to choose the more flamboyant Nigel Lawson. If Howe had been the perfect helmsman for the first term, Lawson’s slightly Regency style presented the right image of prosperity and expansion for the calmer waters of the second. This combination too worked well for the next four years, though Lawson was always more independent and self-confident than Howe had been.

  Below these two key appointments, the rest of the Cabinetmaking was largely a rearrangement of the pack. Willie Whitelaw left the Commons and the Home Office to become Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords. This was a position from which he could better exercise his non-departmental role as deputy Prime Minister; but it entailed the displacement of Lady Young, thus ending the short-lived experiment of a second woman in the Thatcher Cabinet. There was never another.

  Whitelaw’s replacement at the Home Office was one of Mrs Thatcher’s least successful appointments. Leon Brittan had done well as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and seemed to be a rising star. But he was at once too junior, too brainy and – it must be said – too Jewish to satisfy the Tory party’s expectations of a Home Secretary. He was never convincing in the job and was shifted after two years.

  This was the new team. It was a measure of the change already wrought since 1979 that the Cabinet could no longer be usefully classified into ‘wets’ and ‘dries’. In the medium term the only likely threat to Mrs Thatcher’s dominance came from the undisguised ambition of Michael Heseltine.

  15

  Popular Capitalism

  High noon

  A QUARTER of a century on, the second Thatcher Government looks like the zenith of Thatcherism.This, after all, was the period of economic recovery, when the economy – at least in the south of England – finally emerged from the recession of the early 1980s into the heady expansion of what came to be known as the ‘Lawson boom’; it was the heroic period of privatisation, with the successful sell-off of whole utilities undreamed of in the first term; it was the time of deregulation in the City of London – the so-called ‘Big Bang’ – when quick fortunes were suddenly there to be made by young men in red braces known to the press as ‘yuppies’; a time of tax cuts, easy credit and rapidly increased spending power for the fortunate majority able to enjoy it, leading to a heady consumer boom which helped float the Government back to office for a third term amid excited talk of a British economic ‘miracle’. It was the moment when the hundred-year-old political argument between capitalism and socialism seemed to have been decisively resolved in favour of the former. The moral and practical superiority of the market as an engine of wealth creation and the efficient delivery of public services was incontestably established, its critics reduced to impotent irrelevance, while the Conservative party, under its all-conquering leader, the tireless personification of this liberation of the nation’s energy, seemed likely to retain power for as long as she wanted. Her hegemony appeared complete; or, in the catchphrase of the day, picked up from graffiti scrawled on a thousand walls, ‘Maggie Rules OK’.

  Yet it did not feel quite like that at the time. The years 1983–7 were seen by many of the Prime Minister’s keenest supporters as a period of drift and wasted opportunity when the Government, if not exactly blown off course, was distracted from pursuing its long-term objectives by a series of bruising political battles and an accumulation of accidents which so sapped its energy and authority that, contrary to the legend of unchallenged dominance, the Tories actually trailed the supposedly unelectable Labour party – and sometimes the Alliance too – in the opinion polls for more than half the period. Margaret Thatcher’s hyperactive personality unquestionably dominated the political stage; but her popularity steadily dwindled so that in 1986 her poll rating was barely higher than in the darkest days of 1981. Though in the event she was comfortably re-elected the following year, her ascendancy was never so secure as the triumphalism of her instant myth-makers contrived to suggest.

  The second term got off to a bad start with a series of minor embarrassments described by the press as ‘banana skins’. Then most of the second year, 1984 – 5, was overshadowed by a critical confrontation with the Tories’ old nemesis, the National Union of Mineworkers, which stirred deep passions on both sides and brought parts of the country close to civil war. The Government eventually prevailed, but it used up a lot of political energy and capital in doing so. At the same time it had picked a harder battle than it expected over the abolition of the Greater London Council, as well as several more tussles with Labour-controlled local authorities around the country over the level of their spending. It faced serious challenges to public order at the Greenham Common air base, where the first American cruise missiles arrived in November 1983; in parts of London, Birmingham and Liverpool, where another wave of riots erupted in September 1985; and in London’s docklands, where through much of 1986 the police fought pitched battles with the printing unions who were attempting to defy the Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch’s imposition of new technology in the newspaper industry. A series of security controversies further served to keep the Government on the defensive.

  In October 1984 an IRA bomb planted at the Conservative Party Conference hotel in Brighton claimed five lives, seriously injured two members of the Cabinet and only narrowly failed to kill Mrs Thatcher herself. The Government was more seriously destabilised in January 1986 by a major political crisis arising from the future of the Westland helicopter company, which cost two senior ministers their jobs and for a time even threatened the Prime Minister. Between them these events necessitated several hasty reshuffles which disrupted the ministerial team. In addition Mrs Thatcher’s attention was increasingly diverted from the domestic front by an exceptionally demanding foreign-policy agenda: not only the European Community, but Hong Kong, South Africa, Anglo-Irish negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland, the fallout from American military adventures in Grenada, Lebanon and Libya, and the emergence of a promising new leader in the Soviet Union who held out the possibility of an end to the Cold War – all these helped to ensure that even Mrs Thatcher’s phenomenal energies were very fully stretched. There was not much time to chart the way ahead.

  As a result, she was never quite so dominant as she appeared. Immediately after the 1983 election Michael Foot announced that he was standing down as Labour leader. Though the party’s laborious processes took three months to elect his successor, the result was never in much doubt. Neil Kinnock was young (forty-one), inexperienced (he had never held even junior office) and came from the left of the party: he was as emotionally committed as Foot to CND, and not much less hostile to Europe. Nevertheless he was fresh, idealistic and eloquent, if incurably verbose; he had grasped that Labour must change to make itself electable and quickly showed him
self ready to jettison most of the left’s unpopular ideological baggage. From the moment he took over, Labour’s fortunes began to improve. There was, as it turned out, still a long way to go; but in the summer of 1984 the opposition registered its first lead in the polls since the invasion of the Falklands two years earlier.

  At the same time Roy Jenkins was replaced as leader of the SDP by the much younger, more dashing and dynamic Dr David Owen. Owen’s relationship with the Liberal leader David Steel was never easy; yet under the double-headed leadership of the two Davids the Alliance recovered its standing quickly too and from the end of 1984 maintained a regular presence between 25 and 33 per cent in the polls, winning a string of spectacular by-election victories as it had done in 1981–2. Mrs Thatcher’s command of her party was never seriously challenged. Yet a powerful chorus of senior dissidents kept up a steady critique of the Government and its policies. Contrary to collective memory, the Thatcherite revolution did not carry all before it, even in 1983–7.

  Banana skins

  The first ‘banana skins’ began to afflict the Government as soon as the new Parliament met. On the very first day Mrs Thatcher was rebuffed over the choice of a new Speaker. She was sorry to see George Thomas retire, and made the mistake of allowing it to be known that she did not favour his deputy, Bernard Weatherill, to succeed him. She had hoped to use the job as a suitably dignified niche for Francis Pym or, when he declined, one of the other ex-ministers she had put out to grass. But the House of Commons is jealous of its independence and Tory and Labour backbenchers alike rallied to Weatherill. ‘What seems to have clinched his election,’ The Times commented, ‘was the discovery by his fellow MPs that he did not have the Prime Minister’s full approval.’1