Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (9 page)

The Tory manifesto was noticeably short of detail, especially when it came to where the state would be rolled back. As Denis Healey put it, finding Tory costings was ‘like looking for a
black cat in a dark coal cellar’.
²⁷
Labour suggestions about where their opponents’ spending axe would fall proved effective, and as
each week of the campaign went by the Tory lead narrowed from around 11 per cent to 5 per cent. By 28 April, with five days to polling, MORI had the Tories’ lead down to 3 per cent. Two days
later, an NOP poll showed Labour 0.7 per cent ahead. With the Liberals gaining ground, Britain appeared to be heading back towards a hung parliament. This boded especially ill for the Tories given
that Thatcher had come close to ruling out a coalition by stating that ‘the experiences of the last two or three years have been utterly abhorrent. It reduced the whole standard of public
life and parliamentary democracy to a series of wheels and deals.’
²⁸

Certainly, official statistics released during the campaign helped Labour’s cause – inflation remained below 10 per cent and unemployment was edging down. The one bad set of
statistics, the trade figures, was not released because of a civil servants’ strike. Nonetheless, Labour’s fightback was all the more remarkable considering the extent to which the
Tories were outspending them on advertising and the attitude of much of the print media. Aside from the
Mirror
group of newspapers and the
Guardian
, the national press was
overwhelmingly supportive of the Tories. Gaining the endorsement of
The Sun
was the biggest coup – a case of the editor (Larry Lamb) telling his proprietor (Rupert Murdoch) to switch
the paper’s allegiance, rather than, as is more usually assumed, the other way round.
²⁹
On election day,
The Sun
’s front page
proclaimed: ‘A message to Labour supporters: VOTE TORY THIS TIME, It’s the only way to stop the rot.’ The paper’s editorial stated: ‘
The Sun
is above all a
RADICAL newspaper. And we believe that this time the only radical proposals being put to you are being put by Maggie Thatcher and her Tory team.’ The
Daily Mirror
settled for the
equally partisan: ‘Back to the Tories or FORWARD WITH THE PEOPLE, Vote Labour today.’ Arguably the most telling commentary on Britain’s industrial problems was provided by the
silence of
The Times
and the
Sunday Times.
They were off the streets at the time – and would remain so for eleven months, their owners having shut them down in a failed attempt
to force union members who printed the papers to allow journalists to use computer terminals.

In the peroration of his final television broadcast, Callaghan again returned to the great white hope: ‘Let me in conclusion before you vote sum up my attitude to the eighties. We have got
great opportunities if we work together. North Sea oil has given us a wonderful chance. We must use its resources and revenues to modernize our own industry to create more
wealth.’
³⁰
Where the prime minister appeared to be pinning his hopes on a new way to pay for more of the same, the
leader of the opposition was emphasizing that she stood for a whole new approach, telling the audience at her final rally of the campaign:

Had she but known it, Callaghan was privately, if reluctantly, agreeing with her. To his senior policy adviser, Bernard Donoughue, he confessed: ‘It then does not matter
what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.’
³²

The polling day weather was clement. The first results came in at 11.34 p.m. and quickly pointed to a clear, rather than overwhelming, Conservative victory. Turnout was high, at 76.2 per cent.
The swing exceeded 5 per cent. The Conservatives gained fifty-one of the seventy-four seats that changed hands, giving them a total of 339 seats. Labour’s tally fell to 269. Winning 42 per
cent of the vote, Thatcher triumphed with a good working majority of forty-three seats.

Compared with the last election, in October 1974, the Conservatives had failed to make up any additional ground among the middle and professional classes. Their gains had come from among the
so-called C1 and C2 categories, dominated by skilled workers. Among this group they enjoyed an 11 per cent swing, giving them 40 per cent of those that voted. There was an 8.5 per cent swing
towards the Tories from trade union members, ensuring that about a third of them voted Conservative. While there was equality in the ratio of men and women voting Tory, with Labour there remained a
clear male predominance. The Tories made gains among young, first-time voters, where they ended up almost neck and neck with Labour.
³³
Regionally,
the swing to the Tories was greatest in the south and the Midlands. But one of the most dramatic regional results was in Scotland, where the SNP contracted from eleven to just four MPs, justifying
Callaghan’s jibe when they deserted him that they were like ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’. Meanwhile, the first-past-the-post system again did its best to marginalize the Liberal
Party, its 14 per cent of the vote translating into a mere eleven seats.

At 2.30 p.m., Callaghan was driven to Buckingham Palace, where he formally resigned. His job done, he departed for the calm of his farm, its familiar bric-a-brac and pictures of fighting ships.
An hour later, Thatcher
arrived at the palace to kiss hands with her monarch, a female first minister for a female head of state – the first instance in the history of
the world.

Callaghan was gracious in defeat. For a woman to hold the office of prime minister was, he said, ‘a tremendous moment in the country’s history’.
³⁴
Indeed, Margaret Thatcher was the first woman prime minister of any European or American country.
³⁵
Her achievement was
sufficiently ahead of its time that, with the exception of Norway, no electorate on either continent had followed Britain’s example by the time she departed from power eleven years later.

A Woman in Power

As Margaret Thatcher acknowledged the cheers (and some boos) in Downing Street on 4 May 1979, she delivered the homily – misattributed to St Francis of Assisi – that
Ronald Millar had suggested she memorize. The opening line, ‘Where there is discord may we bring harmony,’ was the sort of pious wish Edward Heath might have expressed. But the next two
lines suggested there was now a tenant in No. 10 who was not searching for compromise solutions: ‘Where there is error may we bring truth. Where there is doubt may we bring faith. And where
there is despair may we bring hope.’
³⁶

Next to St Francis of Assisi, the other man Margaret Thatcher paid tribute to from the pavement outside 10 Downing Street was Alderman Alfred Roberts. ‘I just owe almost everything to my
own father,’ she replied to a question as she prepared to enter her new home for the first time.
³⁷
At such a moment, personal reflections on
life and the people and events that had shaped its course were understandable. Thatcher’s father had died in 1970, just before his younger daughter entered Edward Heath’s Cabinet. Her
mother, a less significant figure in her development, had died in 1960, the year after she was elected to Parliament. Yet, it was not just the private memory of Alfred Roberts that the new prime
minister cherished. The Victorian values of his outlook and the equally sober commercial realities of his shop-keeping business were what his daughter preached as the only hope for Britain in the
1980s. As one of her most perceptive biographers, John Campbell, has put it: ‘Alfred Roberts’ grocery had become a British equivalent of Lincoln’s log cabin.’
³⁸

Neither Alfred Roberts nor his wife, Beatrice, had enjoyed more than an elementary education. Beatrice was a seamstress, whose father marked time as an attendant in a railway cloakroom. While
Beatrice was essentially a homemaker to her two daughters, Muriel and Margaret, it was from Alfred Roberts’s example of hard work, discipline and status in the local community that Margaret
drew the most inspiration. Early lessons in public speaking came through listening to him deliver sermons as a lay preacher in Grantham’s
Wesleyan church. Having to
attend church four times every Sunday, and with the comforts of the material world strictly rationed, Thatcher later conceded ‘there was not a lot of fun and sparkle’ in her early
life.
³⁹
But there was politics. Elected to the town council as an ‘Independent’, her father was the sort of teetotal Nonconformist whose
historic adherence to the Liberal Party gradually realigned itself to the Conservatives as the practical alternative to socialism. During the 1930s, the anti-appeasement
Daily Telegraph
was
the Roberts family’s newspaper, and in 1938 they gave sanctuary to an Austrian Jewish girl who had escaped the Nazis, taking it in turns with other local Rotarians to let her live with them
in their Spartan flat above the corner shop. Roberts became mayor of Grantham in 1945. When, forty years later, his daughter recalled how in 1952 the Labour Party had controversially used their
newly won majority on the council to remove him as an alderman after twenty-seven years’ service, she started to cry.
⁴⁰

Having missed out on a secondary education, Alfred Roberts disciplined himself to spend what minimal spare time he had on self-improving study, selecting his daughter’s reading matter at
the same time: ‘Each week my father would take two books out of the library – a “serious” book for himself (and me) and a novel for my mother. As a result, I found myself
reading books which girls of my age would not generally read.’
⁴¹
Winning a place at the competitive Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School
freed the eleven-year-old Margaret from the culture prevalent in mixed-sex schools before the war, where girls’ interests and aspirations were often taken less seriously than those of boys.
Instead, she got her chance to focus on what she was good at – the sciences – rather than what was deemed appropriate for girls. Thus armed, she won a place at Oxford. In doing so, she
belonged to the last generation that made its way in the world without the financial and institutional support of the welfare state.
^EN4
In her
experience, meritocracy was not a creation of the post-war social consensus.

She went up to Oxford during wartime, when many of her male contemporaries were absent, serving in the armed forces. Thus her Oxford was not the enchanted playground of formal balls and
male-oriented pastimes like rowing and dining clubs. It was one of the few times in the university’s modern history when showing off was considered bad form. This suited a serious, provincial
girl like Margaret Hilda Roberts, who would never have been an adornment to the milieu of a Sebastian Flyte or Charles Ryder. Rather, rationing was in force in 1943 and social life revolved around
drinking cheap coffee and toasting crumpets in the rooms of her women’s college,
Somerville. After a brief flirtation with cigarettes, she decided the money would be
more wisely invested buying
The Times
. However, in working for her chemistry degree she did not read widely on other subjects and her dogged commitment to the Conservative Party, an
adherence she brought with her fully formed from Grantham, was deemed odd and unimaginative by contemporaries at a time when Oxford’s visible undergraduate intellectual life looked
overwhelmingly to socialism for its answers. The Oxford Union was still all-male and it was primarily through her superb organizational skills that she became only the second female chairman of the
Oxford University Conservative Association, in 1946. She was never considered a great or memorable ‘character’ and formed no lasting friendships while at Oxford. Academically, she was
good if not outstanding, gaining a second-class degree in Natural Sciences and going on to be awarded a BSc in chemistry in 1947.

It was this qualification as a research chemist that allowed her to eschew the common 1940s destinations for women graduates of teaching or the civil service and instead to enter the
male-dominated world of industry, first at a plastics company and then at the massive J. Lyons cafe-owning and cake-baking firm. There, she made ice cream fluffier by pumping more air into it. But
it was not her heart’s desire to become Mrs Whippy. She had campaigned for the Tories in both Oxford and Grantham during the 1945 general election and got herself on to the party’s
candidates list in time for the next election. This showed considerable self-confidence. After all, there was only one woman sitting in Parliament on the Conservative benches at the time. A mere
fourteen had got as far as being adopted as Tory candidates in 1945. She started off contesting the no-hope constituency of Dartford, where the Labour incumbent’s majority exceeded twenty
thousand. Undaunted, her determination to reach out to every voter was such that she found a way of getting round the prohibition on women in Dartford’s men’s club by briefly enrolling
there as a barmaid. Soliciting working men’s votes while serving them pints of mild and bitter, and dating a wealthy divorced man named Denis Thatcher, certainly suggested that ambition was
straining the leash of her Methodist upbringing. On election day in 1950, she managed to chip down the Labour majority to twelve thousand, but, according to a report circulated in Conservative
Central Office, she had been so ‘outstanding’ that Labour canvassers were forced to stay on in Dartford rather than flood the next-door marginal of Bexley, thereby allowing another
promising young Tory, Edward Heath, to enter Parliament with a majority of 133.
⁴²