The Downing Street Years (52 page)

Nonetheless at Thursday morning’s press conference there was yet more about the
General Belgrano
and I could not conceal my irritation at the failure of some journalists to grasp the harsh reality of war. I said:

On Friday, after the press conference, Cecil and I had now to decide whether we needed a full-scale newspaper advertising campaign over the weekend. Two opinion polls that day showed us with leads of 11 and 17 per cent over Labour. We were being told that we were home and dry. But many voters make up their minds in the last week, some indeed as they are on their way to the polling station; so I have always been a wary campaigner. Cecil was an equally battle-scarred electioneer and we had planned to run expensive three-page advertisements in the Sunday newspapers. But we decided to take a risk and save the money, cutting the advertisements to a more economical two pages. On this my political calculations coincided with my instincts as a Grantham grocer’s daughter. Obvious extravagance is bad advertising.

I spent Saturday (D-5) campaigning in Westminster North, then going on to the constituencies in Ealing and Hendon close to my own. I campaigned in Finchley for most of the afternoon and then went to support our candidate in Hampstead and Highgate.

On my return to No. 10 work began almost at once on the speech I was to deliver the next day at our Youth Rally at Wembley Conference Centre. My speech writers and I worked late into the night, breaking for a hot meal which I served up in the kitchen from the capacious store of precooked frozen food I always kept there for such occasions. Shepherd’s pie and a glass of wine can do a great deal to improve morale. Speech writing was for me an important political activity. As one of my speech writers said, ‘no one writes speeches for Mrs Thatcher: they write speeches with Mrs Thatcher.’ Every written word goes through the mincing machine of my criticism before it gets into a speech. These are occasions for thinking creatively and politically
and for fashioning larger themes into which particular policies fit. I often found myself drawing on phrases and ideas from these sessions when I was speaking off the cuff, answering questions at Prime Minister’s Question Time and for television interviews. This helped to preserve me from the occupational hazard of long-serving ministers: so I was never accused of thinking like a civil servant. (They had to think like me.) These occasions often continued long into the night and can perhaps be described as fraught but fun.

So was the Youth Rally. Some of the sourer critics chose to take offence at joke remarks made by the comedian who preceded my appearance on stage. What they really took offence at was the broad social appeal of the new Conservative Party demonstrated both by the unconventional people on the stage and in the audience. As one punk rocker told a journalist at the time: ‘Better the iron lady than those cardboard men.’

One of the opinion polls on Sunday put the Alliance ahead of Labour for the first time. This gave the last days of the campaign a new feel and a new uncertainty. But personally I never believed that the Alliance would beat Labour into third place — even though the Labour leaders were doing their best to ensure it did.

I chaired our last press conference of the campaign on Wednesday morning (D-1), accompanied by more or less the same team as had launched the manifesto. There was an end-of-term feeling among the journalists, which we felt confident enough to share. I said that the vital issues on which the voters must decide between the parties were defence, jobs, social services, home ownership and the rule of law. I was keen to answer the charge that a large Conservative majority would lead us to ditch our manifesto policies and pursue a ‘hidden agenda’ of an extreme kind. I argued that a large Conservative majority would in fact do something quite different: it would be a blow against extremism in the Labour Party. And that, I think, was the real underlying theme of the 1983 general election.

Election day itself is an oddly frustrating time. I always voted early and then visited the Finchley committee rooms, each of which would be receiving information as to which of our known supporters had voted: later in the day party workers would visit those who had not done so to urge them on to the polling stations. All the opinion polls suggested a Tory landslide. But I have seen too many electoral upsets in my life to take such things for granted.

The Finchley count takes place in Hendon Town Hall. The result was late in coming through because of the number of other candidates anxious to gain publicity for their cause by fighting against me. It was
made later still on this occasion because one of them successfully demanded a re-count. (My eventual majority was 9314.) It was not until well into the early hours of the morning that my result was declared and I was safely returned for the eighth time.

While waiting for my own count to finish I watched the national results coming in on television. The first three were not particularly encouraging: in both Torbay and Guilford the Alliance vote was up substantially, though we held the seats. Then there was worse news: we lost Yeovil to the Liberals. But the turning point came soon after — the first Tory gain from Labour: Nuneaton. From then on the shape and size of our victory became clearer and clearer. It really was a landslide. We had won a majority of 144: the largest of any party since 1945.

I returned to Conservative Central Office in the early hours. I was greeted by cheering party staff as I entered and gave a short speech of thanks to them for their efforts. After that I returned to No. 10. Crowds had gathered at the end of Downing Street and I went along to talk to them as I had on the evening of the Argentine surrender. Then I went up to the flat. Over the previous weeks I had spent some time clearing things out, in case we lost the election. Now the clutter could build up again.

CHAPTER XII

Political success is a good deal pleasanter than political failure, but it too brings its problems. Conventional wisdom, reinforced by classical mythology, has it that this is all a matter of hubris or at least of complacency. But it is not always so. Nor was it in fact during the somewhat troubled six months which followed the 1983 general election. On this occasion there were subtler problems. One was that the media, having felt obliged during the election campaign to cover real political arguments about practical choices, soon reverted to the more amusing sport of scoring points off the Government. And there was a second problem, which we encountered increasingly over the years, that the less the socialist threat seemed, the more people were inclined to jib at the inevitable difficulties and disappointments of running a free enterprise economy.

In 1983 we also had two other problems to face — one of our own making and one not. The first was that the 1983 manifesto did not inspire the Government with the sort of crusading spirit which would have got us off to a good start in the new Parliament. Some of the main pledges were popular enough, such as the abolition of the GLC and Metropolitan Counties and the introduction of rate-capping, but they ran into a difficulty with which any reforming administration must bear: that the generalized approval of the silent majority is no match for the chorus of disapproval from the organized minority. The left-wing municipal socialists and their subsidized front organizations were astute campaigners, trained and adept at exploiting every weakness of presentation of the Government’s case. Much of the manifesto promised ‘more of the same’ — not the most inspiring of cries, although there is no doubt that a lot more was needed. We had not yet cut taxes anything like as much as we wished. There was more work to be done on trade union law and the privatization programme — which
would perhaps constitute the really big advance of this Parliament — was barely under way; the bill to privatize British Telecom, which had fallen with the election, had to be reintroduced.

The second problem was one for which we could not be blamed — that there was still too much socialism in Britain. The fortunes of socialism do not depend on those of the Labour Party: in fact, in the long run it would be truer to say that Labour’ fortunes depend on those of socialism. And socialism was still built into the institutions and mentality of Britain. We had sold thousands of council homes; but 29 per cent of the housing stock remained in the public sector. We had increased parent’ rights in the education system; but the ethos in classrooms and teacher’ training colleges remained stubbornly left wing. We had grappled with the problem of bringing more efficiency into local government; but the Left’ redoubts in the great cities still went virtually unchallenged. We had cut back trade union power; but still almost 50 per cent of the workforce in employment was unionized, far more than our main competitors, and of them around 4 million were working in a union closed shop. Moreover, as the miner’ strike would shortly demonstrate, the grip of the hard Left on union power was still unbroken. We had won a great victory in the Falklands War, reversing the years in which British influence seemed doomed to an inexorable retreat; but there was still a sour envy of American power and sometimes a deeper anti-Americanism, shared by too many across the political spectrum.

In all this, my problem was simple. There was a revolution still to be made, but too few revolutionaries. The appointment of the first Cabinet in the new Parliament, which took place incongruously to the background accompaniment of traditional military music and the Trooping of the Colour, seemed a chance to recruit some.

I began by dropping one would-be pilot, whose sense of direction had on several occasions proved faulty. In following Peter Carrington with Francis Pym as Foreign Secretary I had exchanged an amusing Whig for a gloomy one. Even the prospect of a landslide during the election made him utter dire warnings. Francis and I disagreed on the direction of policy, in our approach to government and indeed about life in general. But he was liked in the House of Commons which always warms to a minister who is believed to be out of step with the Government,
something which is often mistaken for independence of mind. I hoped he would consent to become Speaker and I still believe that he would have done the job well. (In fact, I am not at all clear that we would have been able to ensure Francis got the job for it is, of course, a decision for the House itself.) But in any case he was having none of it. He preferred to go to the back-benches where he was a not very effective critic of the Government.

I also asked David Howell and Janet Young to leave the Cabinet. David Howell’ shortcomings as an administrator had been exposed when he was at Energy and nothing I saw of his performance at Transport suggested to me that my judgement of him was wrong. He had the detached critical faculty which is excellent in Opposition or in the Chairman of a Select Committee, but he lacked the mixture of creative political imagination and practical drive to be a first-class Cabinet minister. I asked Janet Young to make way for Willie Whitelaw as Leader of the Lords. She was very well liked by their lordships, but had turned out not to have the presence to lead the Lords effectively and she was perhaps too consistent an advocate of caution on all occasions. She stayed on in the Government outside the Cabinet as a Minister of State at the Foreign Office. I regretted the loss of both David and Janet on personal grounds, for they had been close to me in Opposition.

Willie Whitelaw clearly fitted the bill as Janet’ successor. Willie had become, quite simply, indispensable to me in Cabinet. When it really mattered I knew he would be by my side and because of his background, personality and position in the Party he could sometimes sway colleagues when I could not. Yet Willie had not had an easy time as Home Secretary. In part, this is because Home Secretaries never do have an easy time; it is sometimes said that they possess a unique combination of responsibility without power, taking the blame for matters ranging from breaches of royal security, to the misdemeanours of police officers, prison break-outs and the occasional riot, when their power to prevent them is indirect or nonexistent. But there was more to it than that. Willie and I knew that we did not share the same instincts on Home Office matters. I believe that capital punishment for the worst murders is morally right as retribution and practically necessary as a deterrent: Willie does not. My views on sentencing in general and on immigration are a good deal tougher than his. And, flatteringly but often awkwardly, the great majority of the Conservative Party and the British public agreed with me and showed it regularly at our Party Conferences.

I chose Leon Brittan to be Willie’ successor at the Home Office.
I never appointed a Home Secretary who shared all my instincts on these matters, but I thought that at least Leon would bring a keen lawyer’ mind and intellectual rigour to the job. He would have no time for the false sentimentality which surrounds so much discussion of the causes of crime. From the Treasury he brought with him a well-deserved reputation as a good administrator who worked hard. Leon was the best Chief Secretary to the Treasury during my premiership. His was a powerful mind and I thought he should be given his chance.