Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (32 page)

‘You lot’ delivered the goods for Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party because she came to trust them completely. All three of them were in love with her politically and to some extent personally. Ronnie Millar’s finest hours as her in-house wordsmith, or ‘Ronniefier’ of her speeches, came in her early years as Prime Minister, but he was effective in opposition, too. He got upset when some of his best efforts were discarded by her saying ‘It’s not me, dear’, but she learned to let him down gently, explaining to other members of her team, ‘Ronnie’s very sensitive, you know’.
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Gordon Reece and Tim Bell could not be categorised as sensitive plants, and her handling of them could be rougher. There was one explosive episode when both of them were fired for a serious transgression.

In the summer of 1978, Conservative Central Office received a letter from the BBC, asking if the Leader of the Opposition would participate in televised debates with the Prime Minister and the leader of the Liberal Party, during the election campaign. Reece and Bell thought this was a bad idea because their boss had most to lose in a contest with Callaghan. They also saw no merit in giving equality of airtime to the despised Liberals. So Gordon Reece wrote back to the BBC turning them down.

After receiving acceptances from Jim Callaghan and David Steel, the BBC tried again with a second letter, which puzzled Margaret Thatcher because Reece had not shown her the original correspondence. She asked him what had happened to the first letter. ‘Oh well, we answered it’, he said rather nervously. ‘You see, in image terms Callaghan’s a rather avuncular figure, and you can be a very hard fighter. So we thought it wouldn’t look nice on television for him to be seen getting beaten up by this …’

‘By this tough bitchy housewife’, snapped Margaret Thatcher.

‘Well, er, I wouldn’t put it quite like that …’, faltered Reece.

‘Let me understand something here’, said the Leader of the Opposition, with her voice rising to earthquake level eight on the Richter scale. ‘You got this letter from the BBC and you answered it without asking me. Get out! Get out, and take Tim with you! Get out!’

The two delinquents beat a hasty retreat from Flood Street, escorted to the door by a somewhat worse-for-wear Denis, who whispered, ‘She’ll be all right tomorrow’.
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His assurance gave little consolation to Reece and Bell. Shaken by the lady’s seismic wrath, they assumed their relationship with her had been terminated. So they spent the rest of the night drowning their sorrows.

The following morning, at seven-thirty, their respective hangovers were interrupted by calls from Caroline Stephens, who controlled the Leader of the Opposition’s diary: ‘Could you be at Flood Street by nine?’ When they presented themselves it was business as usual. Without a word of explanation, recrimination or apology, Margaret Thatcher never mentioned the BBC debates again.

Although television had counted in previous elections, by 1979 it was expected to be the dominant force in the coming contest. Margaret Thatcher was lucky to have three such consummate media professionals guiding her through the new age of animated PPBs and rolling electronic news bulletins. She relied on her experts completely. Her head told her she had to defer to them technically; her heart said she could trust them personally.

Tim Bell said:

I think it was because we understood the loneliness of her position as leader. Almost everyone political around her wanted something from her, or even wanted her to lose. We only wanted her to win. We understood her, almost loved her, as a woman – which helped. And all three of us were absolutely sound in our agreement with her convictions. We were pretty much the original ‘One of us’ group.
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What this group could not know as they re-scripted and re-shot all five of the election campaign PPBs in the autumn of 1978 was that events on the street were about to deliver a whole lot more of ‘us’ into Margaret Thatcher’s political corner.

THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT

The ‘winter of discontent’ was preceded by an autumn of division for the Tories. The Party Conference in October highlighted the split between Heathite and Thatcherite Conservatism. Predictably, the most troublesome issues were incomes policy and trade-union policy. On the first, Ted Heath spoke in support of the government’s 5 per cent pay norm, while Margaret Thatcher was known to favour free collective bargaining. On the second, Jim Prior was in favour of a ‘softly, softly’ approach to trade-union reform, while his leader wanted to legislate for secret ballots before strike action, the withdrawal of benefits for strikers’ families and the outlawing of the closed shop. It was becoming increasingly difficult to paper over these cracks with a façade of shadow cabinet unity.

A third divisive issue was the renewal of sanctions on Rhodesia, which caused a row at the conference and the rebellion of 114 Tory MPs in an autumn vote in the House of Commons. These splits took their toll. Immediately after the conference season, Labour moved ahead by five and a half points in the opinion polls.
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On 26 October the Conservatives lost a by-election at Berwick and East Lothian that they were expected to win. In early November, Gallup reported that Margaret Thatcher’s personal approval had fallen to 33 per cent. When asked whether she or Ted Heath would make the better prime minister, a sample of voters polled by MORI for the
Daily Express
preferred Heath by a margin of 22 percentage points.
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As 1978 drew to a close, Margaret Thatcher’s tenure on the leadership of her party looked shaky. She had her loyalists, but there were nowhere near enough of them to make her secure. Several of the MPs who had voted for her in 1975 were growing uncertain in their support three and a half years later. A few had privately recanted. But Margaret Thatcher, who could at least be confident that there would be no leadership challenge to her position before the imminent election, ignored the negative atmosphere and exuded an artificial air of invincibility.

To Norman Tebbit, one member of the ‘Gang of Four’ who helped her prepare for Prime Minister’s Questions, she breezed: ‘How are you – not depressed? Good. We’ll beat the bastards yet.’ Even the ultra-loyal Tebbit was startled by her defiance. ‘She swore so rarely that I was taken aback’, he recalled. ‘But there was certainly an air of defeatism at that time.’
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Like Queen Victoria, Margaret Thatcher was not interested in the possibilities of defeat. Even so, December weekends at Scotney must have had uneasy moments. ‘We were behind in the polls and seemed all too willing to behave like a permanent Opposition’, she recalled. ‘We still had a long way to go.’
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Suddenly, there were unexpected pre- and post-Christmas developments on the industrial front that changed the outlook. The government’s 5 per cent pay limit, which had been hanging together by the slenderest of gossamer threads, fell apart in December when the health-service unions and local authority workers rejected it with the announcement that they would strike in the New Year. In January the Transport and General Workers’ Union called the road-haulage drivers out in pursuit of an outrageous 25 per cent pay claim. The oil-tanker drivers followed suit. NHS manual workers (including refuse collectors, porters, cleaners and mortuary assistants) made up the next wave of strikers.

By the middle of January the country was in chaos. Lack of fuel deliveries meant power cuts at a time of extreme cold. Unable to have goods delivered in or out by road transport, many businesses shut down. Schools closed. Hospitals accepted only emergency cases. Scenes of violent picketing outside factories, docks and power plants shocked the nation’s television viewers. The worst symptoms of the unrest were the rotting piles of garbage on the streets and dead bodies being prevented from burial by pickets outside hospitals. The face of trade-union militancy had never looked uglier as the excesses spread towards anarchy.

On 22 January, the union leaders called out 1.5 million workers for a National Day of Action. It was the biggest stoppage since the General Strike of 1926. The government’s reaction to such events was one of impotence and incompetence.

In the middle of these upheavals Jim Callaghan attended a G7 Summit in Guadeloupe. It was bad PR for the Prime Minister to be televised in shirt sleeves, relaxing alongside Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter in the Caribbean sunshine while Britain shivered in the turmoil back home. But Callaghan made these images infinitely worse by his complacent underplaying of the chaos when he returned. ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ was the headline of the
Sun
’s report on his press conference at Heathrow Airport.
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Although he did not use these actual words, the journalistic licence cunningly suggested to the
Sun
’s editor, Larry Lamb, by Tim Bell was a fair portrayal of
the Prime Minister’s attempt to minimise the scale of the problem. Callaghan never fully recovered from this gaffe.

As the havoc surged to new heights, Margaret Thatcher’s natural instinct was to go for the government’s jugular. But a combination of her own caution and the restraining advice of her colleagues caused her to handle the drama more skilfully.

The great turning point in Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with the British electorate came with a party political broadcast on 17 January 1979. It was not the message she had planned to deliver. The PPB that had been filmed but rejected at the last minute was confrontational. The one that she actually gave was consensual. She took a lot of persuasion to take the second option.

‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you?’ she said to her three speech- writers, Ronnie Millar, Chris Patten and Tim Bell, who came in to see her with the new text, accompanied by Peter Thorneycroft, the Party Chairman. ‘You’re asking me to let Callaghan off the hook.’ ‘No,’ said Thorneycroft gently, ‘we’re asking you to put country before party.’
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This patriotic argument won her round. The filmed PPB was binned. In its place she gave a completely new speech, straight to camera from her room in the House of Commons.

‘Yes, technically, this is a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Conservative Party’, she opened, as these words in the formal title faded from the nation’s screens.

But tonight I don’t propose to use the time to make party political points. I do not think you would want me to do so. The crisis that our country faces is too serious for that. And it is our country, the whole nation, that faces this crisis, not just one party or even one government. This is no time to put party before country. I start from there.
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Having donned the mantle of a unifying national leader, Margaret Thatcher offered the opposition’s support for the government if they would legislate to introduce a ban on secondary picketing, the funding of strike ballots and no-strike agreements in essential services. She had made these proposals when speaking in the Commons on the previous day. The Prime Minister, in thrall to the unions who were the backers and backbone of the Labour Party, had brushed her cross-party deal aside. But as she repeated the offer on television, she seized the moral superiority of speaking for Britain.

The case is now surely overwhelming; there will be no solution to our difficulties which does not include some restriction on the power of the unions. And if that case is overwhelming, then in the national interest surely government and opposition should make common cause on this one issue.

She concluded with the punch-line, ‘We have to learn again to be one nation, or one day we shall be no nation’.
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It took time for Margaret Thatcher to realise what a resounding success this broadcast had been. One of the quickest and most surprisingly favourable reactions came from Jim Callaghan. The next day, as the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey together after attending a memorial service, Callaghan said to her: ‘That was a damned good broadcast you did last night … I wish I’d said it. Well done.’
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Margaret Thatcher gave him a cool response, thinking she was being patronised. But within a few seconds she was getting the same message again. By chance I was standing close to her near the West Door of the Abbey. ‘Will you walk out with me?’ she asked. So I escorted her through the throng of photographers to her car, congratulating her on the broadcast, and telling her I had watched it at a South London pub in Kennington. ‘Everyone was quiet,’ I said, ‘and when you finished with that line about “one nation or no nation”, a lot of people at the bar clapped.’

‘Our people?’ she asked.

‘No, just ordinary working men in the pub.’

‘Well …’ she said. ‘That’s quite something, isn’t it?’
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Soon she was hearing similar assessments from many sources.

The ‘laughing boys’ were exultant. Tim Bell came to believe ‘this broadcast won the election’.
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It certainly swung the polls her way. Suddenly the Conservatives were nineteen points ahead of Labour, and Margaret Thatcher’s personal ratings leapt by fifteen points to 48 per cent.
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The ‘winter of discontent’ had transformed her from divisive voice to national leader in waiting. As the government’s woes multiplied, she prepared for the final push to victory.

THE VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE

For a Leader of the Opposition whose job it was to defeat the incumbent government, Margaret Thatcher was surprisingly hesitant about delivering the coup
de grâce
. It was caution that made her hold back. Most of her back-benchers had no such reservations. I vividly remember the mood of angry impatience that surged through the 1922 Committee meetings during the ‘winter of discontent’. At one of them, Julian Amery echoed the call his father Leo Amery had made in the 1940 debate about Neville Chamberlain: ‘In the name of God, go!’
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