Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (35 page)

The reason for the suggestion that the past and present leaders of the Conservative Party should present a united front was that the opinion polls had gone wobbly. After weeks of psephological evidence that the Tories were in a comfortable lead, Central Office received advance warning that a NOP poll to be published on 1 May would show Labour was scraping ahead by 43.1 per cent to 42.4 per cent.
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Most members of the leader’s immediate entourage went into a state of panic over these findings. Margaret Thatcher was the exception. After being told about the figures, she kept silent for about a minute, and then said quietly, ‘I don’t think I believe this’.
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She was right. The NOP findings were a rogue poll. All the other polls confirmed the trend with predictions that the Tories would beat Labour by an average lead of between 4 and 7 per cent.
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In the final week Conservative-supporting newspapers, particularly the
Sun
, stepped up the aggression level of their attacks on Labour. But for Margaret Thatcher, soft-centre campaigning continued to be the order of the day. There was one exception, when she did her only major one-on-one television interview with Denis Tuohy of
TV Eye
on 24 April 1979. He gave her a rough ride, which she made look rougher by talking over his questions as if trying to drown him out. The clashes, both in full flow without giving way, broke all records for what is known in the jargon of broadcasters as ‘simultaneous speech’. It was virtually the only time throughout the election when she gave the impression of having a combative personality.

Although Jim Callaghan did his best to portray his opponent as a dangerous right-wing ideologue, he was not cutting much ice with the floating voters. She continued with her royal progress of photo-calls. The most memorable of these was a visit to a farm in Norfolk, when she cuddled a newly born calf in her arms for thirteen minutes. She might have gone on longer posing for new camera angles, had not Denis warned that if they were not careful they could have a dead calf on their hands. ‘It’s not for me, it’s for the photographers’, she explained. ‘They are the really important people in this election.’
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The priority given to cameramen, calves and chocolates was largely the work of her image consultant, Gordon Reece. He knew exactly what he was doing. Some years later he confided to me that he had been influenced by a minor
classic of American reporting on the 1968 presidential election,
The Selling of the President
by Joe McGinnis.
¹⁹
This told how Richard Nixon had been carefully packaged to avoid sharp questioning by the liberal media.

Margaret Thatcher herself had no qualms about taking such questions, but she had been discomfited by the hostile interrogation she had received at the hands of Denis Tuohy. When it was over, she complained to Gordon Reece about one weakness that she thought was his fault. ‘Gordon,’ she said piercingly, as she swept past the cameras, ‘I understand you were here yesterday. Why was I advised to wear beige when there is beige in the studio set?’ As he began stumbling out an explanation she raised an imperious hand: ‘Let’s leave that for later.’
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She was determined to be mistress in her own house, even when it came to the tricks of the image trade which Reece had taught her.

During the final days of the campaign she exuded the air of Prime Minister-in-waiting with increasing confidence. On the last Sunday before polling day, there was a rally of Conservative trade unionists at Wembley. She entered the hall to a chorus of ‘Hello Dolly’ – with new words by Ronnie Millar and recorded by Vince Hill. It began:

Hello, Maggie,

Well, hello, Maggie,

Now you’re really on the road to Number 10 …

Fourteen lines later it ended:

So here’s to you, Maggie,

Give ’em the old one-two, Maggie,

Maggie, we’re right behind you all the way!
²¹

The penultimate line puzzled the star of the show. ‘What does “give ’em the old one-two” mean? What’s an old one-two?’ she asked. Millar had to explain that it was a boxing term for a knockout.
²²

Margaret Thatcher liked winning arguments with knockout blows rather than on points, but that was not how she presented her case in her final party political broadcast. She decided to play it safe – literally.

Her last words to the nation on the eve of the election were not just softly, softly; they were sugary, sugary:

Let us make this a country safe to work in; let us make this a country safe to walk in; let us make it a country safe to grow up in; let us make it a country safe to grow old in … May this land of ours, which we love so much, find dignity and greatness and peace again.
²³

‘Amen’, said one of my irreverent supporters in Thanet East to a group of us gathered round a television set to watch this performance. It was a let-down. The breathy pauses reeked of ham acting stuffed with sentimentality. ‘It’s not quite like the Margaret Thatcher I know’, I commented to my party workers.
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But how well did anybody know her?

ON THE EVE OF POWER

During the election I had two telephone conversations with Margaret Thatcher. They were mainly chats about what the canvass returns were showing in my constituency (a clear swing to the Conservatives of about 5 per cent) and how her speeches were playing on television. Among other topics she complained about the invisibility of her shadow cabinet, singling out the exception of Teddy Taylor, who she said was showing himself to be ‘a bonny fighter’ in Scotland.

These exchanges took place during the visits of Carol who was staying at my house in Thanet for much of the campaign. After the second call the thought struck me that the next time I spoke to Margaret she would be Prime Minister. She sounded totally confident of this destiny when I wished her good luck. ‘Not luck. We’ll win because we deserve to win’, she said.
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Her certainty triggered a mood of uncertainty in me. Even after four years of scrutiny as Leader of the Opposition, I thought she would arrive in 10 Downing Street as the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’. Neither her colleagues nor the country had really come to terms with her extraordinary personality, let alone the impact it might make on unforeseen events. I had spent more time with her at closer quarters than most back-benchers, but even so I was making the mistake of seriously underestimating her. Yet this underestimation of Margaret Thatcher was widely shared in 1979, partly through ignorance and partly because she had kept some aspects of her personality and plans carefully hidden.

I remember quite well what I thought about her on the eve of the election. It was a mixture of the intriguing, the exciting and the worrying. If my picture
now seems too negative with the wisdom of hindsight, it was made up not only of my own observations but also of many parliamentary and personal views, which were insider talk at the time.

On the parliamentary front, I saw Margaret Thatcher as the least collegiate politician I had ever met. This was because she had no friends. Naturally she had legions of acquaintances with whom she was friendly, and a handful she trusted. But these were professional relationships. She could work with anyone if it served her purpose, but she relaxed with no one. She had no interests beyond politics. The concept of a disinterested personal relationship or a private hinterland was beyond her ken.

The intensity of her focus on the political tasks in hand seemed both admirable and alarming. Admirable because there was a huge job to be done in pulling Britain out of the slough of despond and disintegration into which it had descended. Alarming because government was thought to require a team effort, and she was no team player. Could she hold together her cabinet colleagues, her party supporters and ultimately the electorate while delivering the medicine that would bring the country back to recovery? Could she win over the House of Commons as Prime Minister?

Many people, including a large section of her parliamentary party, feared that she might be too confrontational a leader to achieve these goals.

Confrontation came naturally to her. ‘I don’t think we should bother too much with the centre ground’, she said in an unguarded moment during a meeting of the CPG at my house in 1977.
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‘I couldn’t waste any time having internal arguments’, she told the
Observer
a few weeks before the election in the context of needing a cabinet of like-minded colleagues.
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This must have been the reason she so fiercely resisted Peter Thorneycroft’s suggestion that she should share a platform with Ted Heath in the closing stages of the campaign.

By chance, Ted Heath came down to visit his father and stepmother in Broadstairs the weekend before election day. I took a walk with him from Will Heath’s house in Dumpton Park Drive down to a pub in Viking Bay. For the previous three weeks Ted had been a highly visible figure on the nation’s television screens. Late in the day he had transformed himself into an exemplary loyalist, speaking mainly on foreign affairs. There was speculation that he might be signalling a willingness to be the next Foreign Secretary. Without asking about this directly, I said that his contribution to the campaign effort had made
many people hope that there could be reconciliation in the air between him and Margaret Thatcher.

‘Hmm …’, responded Ted Heath. ‘Are they really saying that?’ I nodded. There was a long silence. ‘She’d find it difficult’, he eventually said. ‘She’s a hater, you know. Probably hates me.’ I was bold enough to say that I thought it looked the other way round. ‘She can’t separate the political from the personal, you see’, Heath responded. ‘She always takes the narrow view. Doesn’t realise that you have to make compromises. She bears grudges.’
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Although this was rich coming from him it was probably an accurate view. In private I had heard Margaret Thatcher being scathing about MPs whose main fault seemed to be that they had stood against her in the election (Jim Prior and John Peyton), or stood up to her in arguments (Michael Heseltine). She could get surprisingly personal. ‘In the shadow cabinet she had to win every single argument and ram it home,’ said her admirer Norman St John-Stevas, ‘and she could be quite bitter about those who she disagreed with.’
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But in line with the conventional hypocrisy of politics she was pleasantly agreeable to these same colleagues in public.

Another exercise in her art of dissembling was that Margaret Thatcher presented herself in the election as a moderate consensualist. There were no signs that she would confront the miners, privatise huge swathes of industry, scrap incomes policy or demand rebates from the European Union. Yet she had been quite willing to talk privately about such ideas. She just kept them in the closet, along with her personal likes and dislikes. Everything was subordinated to winning the next election.

This dissonance between the public and private Margaret Thatcher extended into personal issues. I thought she was a more attractive character than the world perceived. I saw her as courageous, kind, feminine and considerate to the least important people in her orbit. Yet I knew there was also an unpleasant streak in her, which manifested itself in her bullying manner towards colleagues she thought were being slipshod in their preparations for policy discussions. At least she only punched people who boxed at her weight.

On the good side, the greatest plus was her courage. This was visible not just on the big stage, where she dared to challenge Ted Heath for the leadership and delivered brave speeches on foreign and domestic policy. She was also fearless in her approach to a host of smaller decisions. To give just one example:

In 1978 I helped to organise Richard Nixon’s first visit to Europe following his resignation from the presidency after Watergate. At that time he was an international pariah. The Foreign Secretary, David Owen, tried to block his private visit. The Speaker of the House of Commons cancelled a planned reception for him. Two ex-prime ministers, Ted Heath and Harold Macmillan, refused to meet the former President.

In the middle of all these rejections from the great and the good, I asked Margaret Thatcher whether she would be willing to see Nixon. She replied unhesitatingly, ‘Of course I would be delighted to meet him’. When I reported her attitude to the nervous Speaker, George Thomas, he did a
volte-face
about the cancellation of his party. ‘What a woman! What courage!’ he exclaimed. ‘That puts a completely different complexion on matters. I think I shall give my reception after all.’ At Speaker’s House Margaret Thatcher struck up a good relationship with Richard Nixon, later receiving him in 10 Downing Street when she became Prime Minister.
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It was not the first or the last time that her ‘infection of a good courage’
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changed events.

Another plus was her kindness. She had a soft touch for anyone down on their luck, ill, bereaved or suffering any kind of adversity. Once she became the Iron Lady, this image eclipsed her gentler side. But compassion was a real part of her private personality, despite all the noise in the opposite direction. I saw this myself in several small ways: concern for my dying godfather, Selwyn Lloyd; a couple of kind notes when I was in hospital; caring for Airey Neave’s widow, Diana; sending flowers and letters to the families of other sick or dying colleagues; insisting the Central Office staffers took days off when they had family problems such as a sick child. Her later image as an uncaring prime minister had some political validity, but at a personal level she cared.

One other aspect of the lesser-known Margaret Thatcher was her consideration for those who worked for her. In those days, the Leader of the Opposition’s office was an overworked, highly stressed crucible of controversy. I knew two of the key figures working there quite well – Richard Ryder, the
de facto
head of her private office, and Caroline Stephens, her personal assistant. Clam-like in their discretion, they were experts in managing her personality. It was a more tumultuous force than they ever let on, but equally forceful was the mutual respect. Just as no man is a hero to his valet, no political leader is without flaws to their private office, but she was something of an exception to this adage.