Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (34 page)

14

The final ascent to No. 10

WAITING BEFORE THE OFF

Immediately after the no confidence debate, the Conservative lead in the opinion polls was between 9 and 13 per cent.
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No political party had ever entered a general election with such an advantage. Margaret Thatcher and her inner circle immediately recognised that the contest was theirs to lose. They resolved to make the campaign as low-key as possible. Dullness and safety were the order of the day. No lurches to the right. No controversial pledges. No gaffes. No rocking the boat. Such a strategy did not fit easily with Margaret Thatcher’s combative personality but she played the game in order to win the match.

Before campaigning began, Airey Neave was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army, a breakaway faction of the IRA. On the afternoon of 30 March Margaret Thatcher was attending a routine function in her constituency when the senior Conservative Central Office Press Officer, Derek Howe, told her, ‘I think you ought to know that a bomb has gone off in the precincts of the House of Commons, in the garage they think. At least one person has been very seriously injured, but we don’t know who.’
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Within an hour it was confirmed that the victim was Airey Neave. A bomb had been placed underneath his Vauxhall Cavalier with a tilt switch, which ignited the explosion as the car was climbing up the exit ramp of the car park. Neave was trapped in the shattered wreckage for half an hour before being cut free and rushed to Westminster Hospital.

Margaret Thatcher received the news at the BBC where she was preparing to record a party political broadcast. She cancelled it. Numb with shock, she returned to her office in the House of Commons where she was told that Neave had died on the operating table. ‘Thank God one doesn’t know when one wakes up in the
morning what will happen before one goes to bed at night’, she murmured to her staff.
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Then she withdrew into her inner sanctum to compose a handwritten tribute, which went out as a press release. She described Neave as ‘One of freedom’s warriors. Courageous, staunch, true, he lived for his beliefs and now he has died for them. A gentle, brave and unassuming man, he was a very dear friend.’
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The assassination of Airey Neave came as a huge blow to Margaret Thatcher. Even though he had become less influential with her in the last year or so, he was still an important confidant as her Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. She never forgot the great debt she owed him for managing her campaign in the 1975 leadership election. He was as close a personal friend as she ever had in politics. But she kept her grieving for him in private. Outwardly, she was steady as a rock as she returned to the political and professional challenge of preparing for the election.

Polling date was set for 3 May, which made the nine-week campaigning period the longest ever seen in British politics. In line with the safety-first tactics that had been agreed, a decision was taken that the leader should not start electioneering too soon. So for the first ten days of April, Margaret Thatcher had nothing to do. This was a role to which she was utterly unaccustomed. She did it badly. Her private office team was stressed out by her fretting and fuming over irrelevant details during this phoney-war period. Eventually, one of her secretaries suggested to Ronnie Millar that perhaps he could ease the pressure by taking the boss out to dinner and the theatre.

Unaccustomed though they were to thespian evenings, Margaret and Denis Thatcher made three visits to the theatre – in one week. These outings organised by Ronnie Millar were not an unqualified success but they did manage to provide a distraction from politics. The three shows Millar selected were
The Two Ronnies
at the London Palladium,
Annie
at the Victoria Palace and
Evita
at the Prince Edward. In different ways they all gave glimpses of the human side of Margaret Thatcher on the eve of the greatest battle of her political life.

At
The
Two Ronnies
Denis loved every moment of the jokes but Margaret got few of them. The humour she did understand was too blue for her taste. But she enjoyed the chorus line of Ziegfeld-style dancing girls in glittering sequined gowns and feathers, murmuring to Millar, ‘I love this sort of thing … So pretty.’
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It was a reminder that she always had an eye for feminine glamour.

Meeting the cast backstage went with the territory of being a Prime Minister-in-waiting. She proved good at luvvie flattery, laying it on with a trowel even when she had not been enamoured with the show. But after the musical
Annie
, she found her skills tested by the child actress in the title role who wept uncontrollably when congratulated on her performance. The leader of the Conservative Party embraced the sobbing child while her mother explained that she was upset because under the employment laws for juvenile actors she had to take a break from the part for three months.

‘My dear, you mustn’t take on so, you’ll be back again before you can say Jack Robinson’, said Margaret Thatcher. ‘Time will fly, it always does. Meanwhile, you know what you must do.’ The howling Annie asked through her tears what she should do.

‘You must write a diary, that’s what you must do’, was the brisk response. According to Ronnie Millar, ‘The child was so stunned by this mysterious advice she stopped crying instantly, and Margaret was hailed as a miracle worker by the entire company.’
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After her third night out in the West End, to see
Evita
, the life of Eva Peron, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice, stirred by ‘Don’t cry for me, Argentina’, the hit song of the show, Margaret Thatcher wrote a letter of thanks to her host. ‘I was thinking, if a woman like that [Eva Peron] can get to the top without any morals, how high could someone get who has one or two?’
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Away from the bright lights of the theatre, a serious issue at this time for both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition was how to make arrangements for the handover of power – should there be one. Although the Sir Humphreys at the top of the civil service had for decades taken pride in the smoothness of earlier transitions, the last one had gone horribly wrong.

When the Conservatives lost power in 1974, the incoming aides to the new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, exchanged angry words and, in one case, actual physical blows with the outgoing political staff of Ted Heath. Jim Callaghan, who knew about these kerfuffles, was determined that no such unseemly incidents should occur again. So he instructed his Principal Private Secretary, Kenneth Stowe, to make contact with Margaret Thatcher’s office for discussions on how to ensure a smooth transition.

Kenneth Stowe had won the trust of the Leader of the Opposition some months earlier, but only after bearing the brunt of her anger. This episode says
much about three weaknesses in her personality. Her tendency to fly off the handle too easily; her capacity to get the wrong end of the stick; and her reluctance to apologise.

The trouble had its origins in a disputed parliamentary vote when Harold Lever, Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury, had allegedly broken his pair. The fall-out over the incident was so serious that all co-operation between the opposition and the government about parliamentary business was suspended on Margaret Thatcher’s instructions. She was right to retaliate. But the House of Commons cannot function without some dialogue between ‘the usual channels’ (a circumlocution meaning the secretary of the Chief Whip negotiating matters of parliamentary business with the opposition whips’ office), so sooner or later an accommodation had to be reached.

After a long and bitter delay, a meeting to settle the row was held between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Michael Foot, as Leader of the House, was also in attendance. Kenneth Stowe took notes. He described it as ‘a painful discussion’.
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But in the end, the protagonists found a way to move on. As a good civil servant does, Kenneth Stowe had his record of the meeting typed up and sent to the principal discussants.

When Margaret Thatcher read the notes taken by the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, she exploded. Kenneth Stowe was summoned to her office in the House of Commons. ‘She was in a bit of a Paddy to put it mildly’, he recalled. ‘Her opening words to me were: “You didn’t tell me you brought a tape recorder into my room.” ’

‘I didn’t tell you because I didn’t take one’, replied Stowe.

‘I don’t believe you’, was the furious retort. ‘You must have had a tape recorder to have taken down my words so exactly!’

A strenuous argument followed. ‘She was seriously angry – no question,’ recalled Stowe, ‘but in the end I convinced her that I had noted her words accurately simply because it was part of my trade to be able to do so.’
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In accordance with her pattern of handling the aftermath of unpleasant rows in which she turned out to be wrong, Margaret Thatcher never apologised for her accusation. But she did manage to cast a warm mantle of compensatory gratitude over Stowe, accepting that his handwritten note was solely responsible for the impeccable accuracy of the record. ‘She was eventually very grateful that I had got her actual words down correctly’, he recalled. ‘That was the
beginning of a very trusting relationship between Margaret Thatcher and myself.’
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The bonds of trust that were forged in this unusual way were to prove invaluable in the preparations for the handover of power. Richard Ryder, the political head of the Leader of the Opposition’s office, made several visits to No. 10 in the weeks before the election. He reported back to his boss in detail. As a result of her decisions about the allocation of offices, the layout of her own rooms and her plans for working practices, the transition from Jim Callaghan’s No. 10 to Margaret Thatcher’s No. 10 became the easiest and smoothest in modern times.

SOFT-CENTRE CAMPAIGNING

The Conservative election campaign was formally launched with the publication of the party’s manifesto.

In contrast with all other manifestos in political memory, the one she unveiled was remarkably short on specific commitments. It had no title. It was like a user-friendly philosophy stall setting out the themes she had been emphasising in her speeches for the past four years. Lower taxes, lower public spending, less state control, and the upholding of Parliament and the rule of law were its broad principles. Denis Healey quipped that looking for policy commitments in this manifesto was ‘like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar in the dark’.
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This was a fair comment, except in a surprising area. One result of the ‘winter of discontent’ was that Margaret Thatcher won her battle with Jim Prior and most of the shadow cabinet over trade-union law reform. So she did promise in the manifesto to introduce limits on secondary picketing, compensation for workers dismissed for not joining a closed shop and postal ballots for union elections. This was nowhere near as radical an agenda as the one she really wanted on union reform, but it was progress.

On incomes policy, the manifesto was as murky as Healey’s dark coal cellar. That was not what the leader desired, but she had to defer to her colleagues, particularly to the Party Chairman, Peter Thorneycroft, who had moved into pole position as the preserver of quiet equilibrium in the election. This meant manoeuvring Margaret Thatcher away from controversial territory. It was no easy task.

The Thorneycroft strategy worked for a while. Due to a three-day suspension of hostilities for the Easter weekend, the Tory campaign as controlled by Central Office was made as brief (sixteen days) and as uneventful as possible. Of course the leader had to be kept busy around the country with a programme of events. But on the whole the emphasis in her schedule was on soft photo opportunities not hard politics.

She did factory tours with particular panache. At a Kleeneze brush manufacturing plant in Bristol she performed pantomime imitations of sweeping away the cobwebs and applying a new broom. In a Leicester clothing factory she surprised everyone by sitting down at a sewing machine and stitching the pockets on a blue overall with the seamstress skills she had learned from her mother. In Bourneville she wrapped Cadbury’s chocolates with a deft touch. The horde of accompanying paparazzi loved these images. She looked good in them, but away from the cameras she was growing bitter at being confined to soft centres.

While posing at the Cadbury factory, she learned that Peter Thorneycroft was insisting on a major cut in the speech she was due to deliver that night in Birmingham, the second major rally of the election. The passage he wanted to censor was an indictment of union malpractices, which had been drafted for her by the historian and convert from Labour Paul Johnson. The Party Chairman thought it was ‘too provocative’.
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After a blazing row with him on the telephone, Margaret Thatcher furiously tore out the offending pages from the prepared text. It was the first of many frictions she had with the high command at Central Office.

Her worst clash with Thorneycroft came in the last weekend of the campaign. She was relaxing after a successful day in Glasgow when he sent her a message via his Deputy Chairman, Janet Young, that he wanted to invite Ted Heath to join her at her final press conference on Monday. This caused an eruption.

‘Scared rabbits! They’re running scared,’ Margaret Thatcher exploded, ‘that’s what’s the matter with them! The very idea! How
dare
they!’
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She continued in this vein not only for the rest of the evening but for most of the next twelve hours. As Denis confided to a friend the following morning: ‘This business of Ted appearing on the same platform with the Boss. She hasn’t slept a wink all night. I’ve never seen her in such a state.’
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The state continued until she returned to London. Peter Thorneycroft and other members of the hierarchy made one last attempt to persuade her to share a slot with Ted Heath. Her refusal was so vigorous that the plan was shelved.