Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (7 page)

Whatever impact the poster made was short-lived, its newsworthiness quickly receding alongside the prospect of an autumn 1978 election. Although it was resurrected with an amended slogan,
‘Labour
Still
Isn’t Working’, in the weeks leading up to the eventual polling day on 3 May 1979, the claim that it – or, for that matter, the rest of Saatchi &
Saatchi’s campaigning tricks – swung the election for the Conservatives seems overblown. The period of its launch in the late summer of 1978 coincided with Labour regaining an opinion
poll lead which it then extended in the two months thereafter. As for the spring of 1979, far from Saatchi & Saatchi’s campaign being so slick that the Tories’ lead over Labour
widened, the reverse was true: Conservative support crumbled during the five-week campaign, starting at around 50 per cent of the vote and sliding towards 43 per cent on the eve of the
poll.
³
And research by MORI suggested that the electorate actually thought Labour’s election broadcasts were the more successful.
⁴

But if Britain did not get its first woman prime minister because she had the slickest ad men, it was nevertheless a paradox that the supposed ‘conviction politician’ kept such
masters of style over substance within her intimate counsels. Surprisingly, for an instinctive puritan, she enjoyed being feted by the colourful, even louche, band of courtiers that constituted her
image-making team. Their close presence was also encouraged by those among Thatcher’s colleagues who deemed her a liability. She had none of Jim Callaghan’s unaffected common touch with
which to endear herself to the non-committed voter. Nor had she displayed any ability to win in more structured debates. Lacking instinctive wit and verbal dexterity, she had shown herself to be a
leaden parliamentary performer as leader of the opposition. Callaghan regularly basted her at Prime Minister’s Questions, condescendingly treating her like a schoolgirl swot who had learned
some statistics but failed, due to her limitations, to see the bigger picture.
⁵
Her failure became more apparent beyond Westminster’s confines
when, in 1978, permission was finally given for parliamentary debates to be broadcast
on the radio.
^EN3
Such was the
dissatisfaction within her own ranks about her overall performance that there was a clear likelihood that she would have faced a direct challenge to her leadership if she had lost the general
election expected in the autumn of 1978. She appeared to recognize the tenuousness of her grip upon remaining leader, confessing that she did not think she would be given a second chance if she
lost the election, not least because ‘there’s only one chance in life for women. It is the law of life.’
⁶
Even going into the 1979
election campaign, the polling statistics suggested the Tories’ greatest vulnerability was not their policies but their leader. When, on 12 April, Gallup asked its sample ‘who would
make the better prime minister?’ Callaghan was preferred by 39 per cent to 33 per cent. The efforts of Thatcher’s public relations experts to improve her image reached extraordinary
limits as the campaign intensified. At one stage she was even persuaded to stride into a field and cradle a defenceless calf for a full thirteen minutes until her husband, Denis, warned her that if
she cuddled it any longer it might die on her.
⁷
Whether in hard or soft focus, the more the electorate saw of her, the less impressed they pronounced
themselves. On the eve of the poll, Callaghan’s lead over Thatcher as the preferred premier had risen further and he was trouncing her by the vast margin of 44 per cent to 25 per
cent.
⁸

In seeking to capitalize on his greater popularity and ease of manner, Callaghan challenged Thatcher and the Liberal leader, David Steel, to a television debate. No incumbent prime minister had
agreed to go head to head on television with the leader of the opposition since the idea had first been mooted for the 1964 general election.
⁹
Callaghan had rejected the idea as recently as 1978. But in the spring of 1979, with Labour trailing in the opinion polls, televising the leaders’ sparring would have presented an opportunity
to turn the campaign into a presidential race – to Callaghan’s clear advantage. David Steel was keen to attend, naturally leaping at the chance to get equal billing with the leaders of
the two main parties. Thatcher, too, was up for the scrap, but was pulled up by her advisers who saw no gain in turning the election from policy, where they were ahead, to personality, where they
were behind. Some Tory tacticians even thought no good could come of her debating on equal terms with a man, for, as the party chairman, Lord Thorneycroft, put it: ‘If she had won the
argument, which we thought she would, a lot of people wouldn’t have liked that in a woman,’ because men might have thought, ‘“There’s my wife,” and it
wouldn’t have been a good thing.’
¹⁰

Labour strategists were certain that the Conservatives’ weakest spot was their leader. For all the downsides of a five-week campaign, they believed it would at least
provide enough time for Thatcher first to sound shrill and then, with any luck, to lose her voice entirely. In the Tory camp, too, there was no shortage of those who feared she lacked the breadth
of vision and appeal to win through. Thorneycroft’s attempts to get Edward Heath positioned alongside her at election rallies particularly irked her,
¹¹
the clear implication being that she could not carry the campaign without the support of the man she had replaced. While Heath – eyeing up the Foreign Office as his
reward – was keen to be seen and heard in the weeks before polling day, his successor was privately certain that she wanted to rid Britain of his political legacy almost as much as that of
Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.

Those given the task of marketing Thatcher encountered the problem of deciding which version of her to portray. On the one hand she was the grammar school-educated, Methodist chapel-going,
provincial girl from a Lincolnshire market town, who had learned life’s often hard commercial realities from her father’s corner shop and won a place at Oxford through her own
endeavours. As such, she was by birth, sex, upbringing, religion and region an outsider from the traditional establishment. Her personal success was evidence of her strength of character and that
she was a battler against difficult odds. This, however, was only the first half of her story. As soon as opportunity presented itself, she had switched Wesleyanism for Anglicanism, turning her
back on Grantham for more material rewards as the London and suburban Kent-based wife of a millionaire businessman, with a son and daughter who had been looked after by a nanny before proceeding,
respectively, to Harrow and to St Paul’s Girls’ School. Only occasionally – usually when roused to anger or disdain – did her voice still betray a Lincolnshire lilt. Mostly,
she sounded like the privileged and somewhat patronizing stockbroker-belt southerner whose tones she had quickly adopted upon becoming Mrs Denis Thatcher in 1951.

In 1974, Enoch Powell assumed she had no chance of succeeding Edward Heath because the party ‘wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent’.
¹²
Among the image-makers’ first tasks was to steer her away from her tendency to dress as if she were on her way to a garden party in the weald of Kent or to take tea
with Mrs Mary Whitehouse. By 1979, the fight against millinery had been won, leaving her crowned only by a bouffant lion’s mane of golden hair. Under the guidance of Gordon Reece, a former
television producer seconded from EMI, work continued to be done on the pitch of her voice. Laurence Olivier was only one of a succession of experts drafted in to demonstrate how she could sound
less ladylike. Vocal training made her sound progressively deeper, more measured, less shrill and no longer redolent of the Queen in her coronation year.

As director of publicity, Reece did more than lower Thatcher’s voice and ditch the dated hats. He recognized the importance of the tabloid and mid-market press,
building bridges with, in particular,
The Sun
. The Tories had gone into previous elections without the support of a single mass-market newspaper, a disability that was about to be remedied.
Furthermore, Reece was instrumental in getting Saatchi & Saatchi hired to handle the party’s advertising, and its managing director, Tim Bell, became another key member of the Thatcher
posse. Reece also taught his charge how to improve her indifferent television performances, encouraging her to see an interview question as a cue to make her case to the viewers rather than, as was
her instinct, to assume it was a starting gun to argue with the interviewer. It was another key member of her image team, Ronald Millar, who forced her to memorize the mantra ‘Cool, calm
– and elected’.
¹³
Millar was a successful playwright, whose West End hits included adaptations of C. P. Snow’s novels and the
Tudor historical drama
Robert and Elizabeth
. He quickly identified Thatcher as his modern Gloriana, injecting the Tilbury spirit into her major oratorical performances. For, while she took
infinite care over the crafting of her set-piece speeches, fully involving herself in their content rather than leaving speech writers free rein to put whatever substance they liked into her mouth,
it was Millar who provided her with her more memorable lines. He shared her love of aphorism, fusing an outlook from the sort of proverbs and homespun wisdom that had been familiar components of
American speech since at least the days when Benjamin Franklin’s
Poor Richard’s Almanack
was a colonial best-seller. Indeed, Millar knew he had found his leading lady when she
approached him for help with her opening broadcast as party leader in 1975. When he recited to her some apposite lines by Abraham Lincoln –

– Thatcher excitedly snapped open her handbag and retrieved from it a crumpled and faded cutting with exactly the same lines on it. ‘It goes wherever I go,’
she assured him.
¹⁴
Yet, while America’s Great Emancipator had succinctly summarized her view of life, perhaps nobody did more for her public
image than the Soviet Army paper
Red Star
, which responded to her anti-communist rhetoric in 1976 by dubbing her the ‘Iron Lady’. Delighted by the backhanded compliment, she
repeated the phrase for both domestic and foreign consumption, bolstering her claim to be not just the irritating schoolgirl of Callaghan’s twice-weekly baiting but some kind of modern
Boudicca. ‘Sunny Jim’ the prime minister might have been in the hot
summer of 1976, but it was not a helpful sobriquet for the Winter of Discontent. By contrast,
Thatcher hit home her advantage and demonstrated her new actress-like sense of timing: ‘The Russians said I was an Iron Lady. [
pause
] They were right. [
pause
] Britain needs an
Iron Lady. [
cheers
]’
¹⁵

Labour clung to the hope that the long general election campaign would expose Thatcher’s tendency to make unguarded statements at variance with what had been agreed with her shadow
Cabinet. Instead, she accepted her advisers’ strategy to save her energies until late in the campaign. Gordon Reece encouraged her to get her mind off politics by going to the theatre. So off
she promptly took herself to see . . .
Evita
.

With Reece and Millar’s help, the showbiz side of politics was turned to her advantage. At one of her rallies, Lulu, Ken Dodd and the DJ Pete Murray provided warm-up entertainment before
she breezed onstage to the theme of
Hello Dolly
, re-lyricized to ‘Hello Maggie!’ Indeed it was not until 16 April 1979, nearly halfway through the election campaign, that
Thatcher cheekily made her first major public speech, on Callaghan’s home turf of Cardiff. ‘I am a conviction politician,’ she assured the assembled believers. ‘The Old
Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, “Brothers I want consensus.” They said, “This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately
believe!’”
¹⁶
Not for the only time in her career, she risked being accused of displaying messianic tendencies, but the speech emphasized
that she represented a galvanizing force in British life.

It was Thatcher’s advantage that she embodied change merely by being a woman. Nor was she afflicted by any snobbish attitude towards modern methods of reaching out to those disengaged by
traditional politics. Her team understood that the media, particularly television, needed visual material to accompany reports. Giving them the right photo-opportunity was the surest way of
securing airtime. The shots of her doing the shopping were deemed particularly helpful because ordinary voters, particularly women, were assumed to relate to her at this level. What was more, it
showed her as she wanted to be portrayed: the grocer’s daughter who well understood how to manage a household budget as a precursor to getting the nation’s finances back into the black.
Callaghan doing the shopping could never have struck the same chord. All the same, as the market research suggested, it was his team’s less inventive approach that won the propaganda war of
1979. The press’s cameramen were tipped off in time to photograph Callaghan with his grandchildren emerging from a local church service, even though few could recall him being a noted
attendee outside of election time. When, as the campaign reached its denouement, he walked out of an interview because he objected to the persistent line of questioning about the unions, his team
leant on ITN to broadcast neither the interview nor his temper tantrum.
¹⁷
ITN duly obliged. Deference to Downing Street was not entirely dead.

Five Weeks that Shaped a Decade?

Despite the claims of both sides that the very future of a prosperous or fair Britain was at stake, the 1979 election never descended into a slanging match, with both Thatcher
and Callaghan avoiding making personal remarks about each other. Front-bench spokesmen in danger of offering policy hostages to fortune – Tony Benn for Labour and the Conservative Sir Keith
Joseph – were kept from fronting press conferences as much as possible. Indeed, the only major gaffe came from Callaghan’s predecessor, Harold Wilson, who appeared to suggest his wife
Mary might vote for the Conservatives because they were led by a woman.