Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (56 page)

Faced with these difficulties in the high politics of her party and the position in the House of Commons, Mrs Thatcher worked out a way of getting round them. In May 1975, her friend Gordon Reece was seconded from EMI to work for her once more.

In an unpublished memoir which he wrote in the late 1990s, Reece explained how, in 1975, he approached the task of persuading more people to vote Conservative. The traditional political wisdom was that people voted on issues – tax, defence and so on:

Mrs Thatcher was advised by me that this was not true. Ordinary people, she was told, voted on impressions. Issues … were just some of the strands which made up a voting intention.

Another factor … would be an answer to the question: ‘Do I like or admire or respect one of the candidates more than another?’ Television, itself a medium of impressions, had revolutionised political campaigning, putting more emphasis on the presidential character, the leader being the face of the political party.

Reece believed that most floating voters, in particular, were not very interested in politics:

Mrs Thatcher was advised by me that the majority of the electorate in the late 70s voted for what they perceived to be their own best interests, the party that would do best for them and their families … Mrs Thatcher saw that the middle class divide was breaking down, and she decided to concentrate upon the voters who had the greatest need or ambition to improve their lives. Priority was given to women in Labour-voting households, the people who actually spent the family budget, the people most at risk from economic mismanagement. Secondly priority was given to skilled and semi-skilled workers, those who had the best opportunity to benefit from increasing prosperity. And thirdly to first-time voters, people who would not just hope for a better life but vote for one.

In Reece’s view, such people were not much to be found among the readers of broadsheet newspapers and the watchers of serious political programmes and the longer, night-time, news bulletins: ‘The people we had to reach would read the
Mirror
, increasingly the
Sun
, the
Express
, the
Mail
, the
People
, the
News of the World
, they would watch
Coronation Street
, Jimmy Savile,
Top of the Pops
, they listened to Jimmy Young on the wireless. And any aspiring Prime Minister had better go to them, and not expect them to come to her.’
⁴²

Mrs Thatcher aspired passionately to be prime minister. She accepted this advice, and acted upon it, although much of it was resisted by Central Office, and the full flowering of the Reece strategy did not take place until the summer of 1978. She spoke to Jean Rook in the
Daily
Express
, and to
Woman’s Own
; she appeared on
Woman’s Hour
on Radio 4 and
The
Jimmy Young Show
on Radio 2. After she appeared on Jimmy Savile’s
Jim’ll Fix It
, in December 1976, the two struck up a friendly acquaintance.
*
Bearing in mind her target of women who actually managed the family budget, she frequently spoke as a woman who did just that, and related her own experience to that of the entire nation as it struggled with inflation. In some ways, she was not a natural with the media. She had an instinctive distrust of the press and a dislike of television. Because Parliament was still not televised, or even, until 1978, broadcast regularly on the radio, she had a limited experience of the medium, and was used to constructing her public utterances as formal speeches or sharp debates. She was also intensely serious and high-minded, and touchingly cut off from some of the coarser aspects of daily life. She was in West Germany – her first visit abroad as leader, and her first ever visit to Germany – on 26 June 1975 when the news came through that the Conservatives had gained Woolwich West in a by-election. Mrs Thatcher was naturally delighted, particularly as she felt that her decision to break the old custom by which leaders did not campaign in by-election constituencies had paid off. She expressed her pleasure by making a ‘V for victory’ sign to the cameras. To the dismay of Reece, she did the sign the wrong way round, turning it into the well-known obscene gesture. She had no idea of the mistake, and so great was her innocence that ‘Even when we had explained it, she still didn’t really understand what she had done.’
⁴³

But, for all her lack of vulgarity, Mrs Thatcher was not detached from other aspects of normal daily life. She was perfectly genuine in her housewifely attitudes and her interest in the prices in the shops. She always had the gift of very direct speech, free of jargon, and she had an instinct for placing herself on the side of the person without power, rather than the official or the union boss. The actressy side to her character made her extremely effective in walkabouts and factory visits; far from dreading these encounters, she found that they energized her. And she well understood how to play to the huge interest in her which resulted from
the fact of her sex. A week after her victory, she kept an engagement inherited from Heath to visit Scotland. In later years, Scotland was to be the part of the United Kingdom where she was probably least popular, but on this occasion she was overwhelmed in Princes Street, Edinburgh, by a friendly crowd so large that she had to take refuge in a shop to escape the crush.

In her attitude to her image, and to communicating with the public, Mrs Thatcher showed a remarkable humility and professionalism. ‘Gordon Reece taught me’, she said later, ‘that television is a conversation, not a lecture,’
⁴⁴
though this was not a lesson she invariably remembered in front of the cameras. She was nervous of television, and Reece used to bring a microphone to rehearsals so that she could practise being at the right distance to it. He told her to get up close in order to sound more ‘sexy, confidential and reasonable’.
⁴⁵
‘Your voice goes slightly tight and high-pitched,’ she recalled him saying, ‘you must consciously keep it down.’ She learnt that ‘Every speech should tell a story or a fable’ and that ‘A speech is to be heard,’ a living performance which the speaker must enact with hands, eyes and voice as well as verbal content.
⁴⁶
For his part, though full of charm and good at flattery, Reece was frank with Mrs Thatcher about the changes that were required. He told her that her clothes were too fussy; her hats should go; she wore too much jewellery for television; her hair was too frizzy for a potential prime minister.
⁴⁷
She must also flatter Fleet Street editors. To the end of her life, Mrs Thatcher remembered her lessons from Reece, and would repeat them enthusiastically as essential truths. She would say, ‘You must wear plain, tailored clothes on television’ rather in the same tone of voice as she would say, ‘You must have liberty – and not just liberty, but law-based liberty.’

All leading politicians, of course, worry about their image, and it is a well-known criticism of spin-doctors (as they later came to be called) that they are not interested in presenting the truth or in what their principals’ principles are. But one reason why the Reece treatment worked so well with Mrs Thatcher was that he himself was in accord with the moral and ideological thrust of what became known as Thatcherism and believed from the first in her character as the vehicle for advancing it. This meant that he warmly welcomed her openness to intellectuals, commentators and assorted policy mavericks, and had none of the instinctive hostility to such people that is bound to exist in party bureaucracies. Chris Patten, at the Conservative Research Department, saw the existence of the Centre for Policy Studies as a ‘provocation’.
⁴⁸
Reece saw the CPS as an ally. He did his best to help Mrs Thatcher make the eggheads feel at home with her.
When, for example, she received Robert Conquest,
*
the historian of Stalin’s purges and critic of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, Reece had warned her in advance that her visitor liked plenty to drink. Reece had arranged for Conquest to arrive at nine-thirty in the morning, but Mrs Thatcher enjoyed the conversation so much that it was still going strong at noon: because of Reece’s advice, she was able to go to the fridge and produce champagne.
^49
†

Avoiding the delicate domestic political situation, Mrs Thatcher chose to make the first highly controversial speech of her leadership on the Cold War. She felt that, as the new leader, she should establish a position on ‘Britain’s role in the world’. This was a normal thing to do, but it was not at all normal to dive in so deep and swim so strongly against the tide. In 1975, the dominant mood of the Western elites towards the Soviet Union was one of rapprochement, against a background of weakness. The American disengagement from Vietnam, seen as dishonourable by some and overdue by others, had produced its logical conclusion in the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, to the Communist forces in April. The buzz word for the policy was détente. The Western allies had committed themselves to the Helsinki process of talks which began in 1973 and were due for completion in a ‘Final Act’ in August 1975. Helsinki was designed to trade an acceptance of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe for the improvement of human rights in the Soviet bloc. The process had been initiated by President Richard Nixon, and so support for it came from Republicans in the United States, and from Conservatives in Britain, as well as from the centre and the left. It was considered maverick right wing to question the whole thing.

Mrs Thatcher, however, chose to do so, and asked Conquest to draft her speech. She particularly wanted to know from him whether the Soviets had the long-term aim of getting rid of Western democracy – ‘The answer was yes’ – and whether the Soviet Union was, in the long term, viable – ‘The answer was no.’
⁵⁰
She also feared that the effect of Communism at home, chiefly through influence on students, media and trade unions, was to undermine the national will. The result of these discussions was her speech
to Chelsea Conservative Association on 26 July 1975. She identified a threat to freedom all over the world. Communists were attempting to undermine the new democracy in Portugal, she said; Cambodia and Vietnam had been lost (‘Where are the protest marchers now?’). Despite the fact that the Soviets had ‘more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together’, the Labour government was pulling the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean and ditching its base at Simonstown in South Africa. It was wrong to pretend, as the Helsinki Final Act approached, that there was ‘peace and trust’ between East and West: ‘the fact remains that throughout this decade of détente, the armed forces of the Soviet Union have increased, are increasing and show no signs of diminishing.’ The power of NATO, she said, was ‘already at its lowest safe limit’, and if the allies did not maintain enough conventional weapons, they would be confronted, in the face of Soviet aggression, with the appalling choice of either surrender or ‘early use of nuclear weapons’. This language was strong enough, but what really separated Mrs Thatcher’s approach was not so much its hawkishness about Soviet military intentions as its definition of the nature of the Soviet threat. She was not content to see this in traditional terms of the rivalry between global powers, and the consequent need to strike a deal and achieve a balance. She saw the Soviet Union as, by its nature, an attack on the West. The Soviets were ‘arrayed against every principle for which we stand,’ she declared, and she judged them not just by their arsenal, but by the sufferings they inflicted upon their own people:

So when the Soviet leaders jail a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker, for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a regime that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedom we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.

She held up the recently exiled Soviet novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*
as the model of truth-telling against Communist lies. Her test of whether peace was really coming closer was whether there was any advance in ‘the free movement of people and of ideas’.

In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher makes it a point almost of pride that she
did not consult or inform Reggie Maudling, whom she had just appointed shadow foreign secretary, about what she was going to say in Chelsea. ‘… I knew that all I would receive were obstruction and warnings,’ she writes sharply, and with a revealing lack of confidence in her own choice of spokesman, ‘which would doubtless be leaked afterwards – particularly if things went wrong.’
⁵¹
But she may well have been emboldened against possible establishment criticism by the help she received (but does not mention in her memoirs) from Lord Home. Of all the Tory leaders between Churchill and Mrs Thatcher, Home was the most robust in his dislike of Soviet Communism. Before speaking at Chelsea, Mrs Thatcher had meetings with him on the subject, and invited his comments on the draft. After making the speech, she wrote to thank him ‘first for providing the framework for the foreign affairs speech and then for going through it so carefully’.
⁵²
Home wrote back to her that she had been ‘absolutely right’ to make the speech.
⁵³
Chelsea was the first time in her career that Margaret Thatcher made a major public statement about the state of the world. It set a standard of clarity and controversy which she was to maintain.

It was natural that one of Mrs Thatcher’s earliest decisions was to visit the United States. Her first foreign visit, out of deference to the recent EEC referendum, had been to West Germany (see above), where she had met and been impressed by the then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt,
*
and also met the Christian Democrat leader Helmut Kohl.
^†
She decided at once that Kohl was ‘the German equivalent of Ted Heath’,
⁵⁴
a view which was to have important and malign consequences.
^‡
But the visit to Bonn had not been intended as a big show. America was. There was a conscious desire, by putting her on the world stage in the United States, to establish her as somebody of substance in time for what promised to be a difficult first party conference as leader in early October. This was linked with her ideological interest in the language of freedom and liberty which she found very attractive in American politics and which she believed the English-speaking peoples shared. She wanted to relaunch such language into
British political debate, and saw her American trip as providing the time and place to do so.
⁵⁵
She also wanted to repair Conservative relations with American politicians, which had fallen on hard times during Ted Heath’s time as leader. This
froideur
was partly attributable to Heath’s single-minded devotion to Britain’s entry into the EEC, which was seen by some Americans as unfriendly, and partly to his personal anti-Americanism, the strongest of any Tory leader in modern times.
*
Her own feelings were the opposite.