The Downing Street Years (98 page)

When Parliament reassembled the Party was in a quite different frame of mind than it had been just a few months earlier. We had a brief legislative programme on the advice of David Young, so crucial legislation would not be abandoned if we went for an early election the following summer. Our position in the opinion polls had begun to improve. The Strategy Group and the policy groups were meeting regularly. Norman kept me informed of the work which was going on in Central Office to prepare for the election when it came. Already, on 2 July, he had given me a paper setting out his view of possible election dates.

The compilation of documents which constitute the Party’s plans for an election campaign is traditionally called the ‘War Book’. On 23 December Norman sent me the first draft ‘as a Christmas present’. I was not unhappy to see the end of 1986 but I felt a new enthusiasm as I considered the fresh policies and the battle for them which would be required in 1987.

On Thursday 8 January I discussed with Norman and others the papers he had sent me about the election campaign. We met at Alistair McAlpine’s house in order to escape detection by the press, which had already started to speculate about election dates. Many details of the campaign had not been worked out as yet, but I found myself largely in agreement with the suggestions. I did, however, have one continuing worry; this was about the advertising. Several months
earlier I had asked whether Tim Bell, who had worked with me on previous elections, could do so again now. I understood that he was a consultant to Saatchis. But in fact the rift between them was greater than I had imagined and the suggestion was never taken up. I might have been prepared to insist, but this would have caused more important problems with Norman and Central Office. In any case I continued to see Tim socially. At this stage in January, though, I still hoped that Saatchis would exhibit the political nous and creativity we had had from them in the past.

I regarded the manifesto as my main responsibility. Brian Griffiths and Robin Harris brought together in a single paper the proposals which had come in from ministers and policy groups. We discussed this at Chequers on Sunday 1 February. Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit and Nick Ridley — in their different ways the three best brains of the Cabinet — were there. It was as important at this stage to rule out as to rule in different proposals: I like a manifesto which contains a limited number of radical and striking measures, rather than irritating little clutches of minor ones. It was at this meeting that the main shape of the manifesto proposals became clear.

We agreed to include the aim of a 25 per cent basic rate of income tax. We would not include a figure for the reduction of the top rate, though we were thinking about a top rate of 50 per cent. I kept out of the manifesto any commitment to transferable tax allowances between husband and wife which, if they had been implemented along the lines of the earlier green paper, would have been extremely expensive. I commissioned further work on candidates for privatization which I wanted to be spelt out clearly in the manifesto itself. Education would, we all agreed, be one of the crucial areas for new proposals in the manifesto. Largely as a result of work done by Brian Griffiths, I was already clear what these should be. There must be a core curriculum to ensure that the basic subjects were taught to all children. There must be graded tests or benchmarks against which children’s knowledge should be judged. All schools should have greater financial autonomy. There must be a new per capita funding system which, along with ‘open enrolment’,
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would mean that successful, popular schools were financially rewarded and enabled to expand. There must be more powers for head teachers. Finally, and most controversially, schools must be given the power to apply for what at this stage we were describing as ‘direct grant’ status, by which we meant that they could become in effect ‘independent state schools’ — a phrase that the DES
hated and kept trying to remove from my speeches in favour of the bureaucratically flavoured ‘Grant-Maintained Schools’ — outside the control of Local Education Authorities.

Housing was another area in which radical proposals were being considered: Nick Ridley had already drawn up papers which were yet to be properly discussed. But his main ideas — all of which eventually found their way into the manifesto — were to give groups of tenants the right to form tenants’ co-operatives and individual tenants the right to transfer ownership of their house (or flat) to a housing association or other approved institution — in other words to swap landlords. Housing Action Trusts (HATs), modelled on the highly successful Urban Development Corporations, were to be set up to take over bad estates, renovate them and then pass them on to different tenures and ownerships. We would also reform local authority housing accounts to stop housing rents being used to subsidize the rate fund when they should have gone towards repairs and renovation.

We were by now under a good deal of political pressure on the Health Service and discussed at our meeting how to respond. However good the record of the service as a whole, there was plenty of evidence that it was not sufficiently sensitive to patients’ wishes, that there was much inefficiency and that some areas and hospitals were performing inexplicably worse than others, treating fewer patients etc. Norman Fowler at the 1986 Party Conference had set out a number of targets, backed up by special allocations of public spending, for increases in the number of particular sorts of operation. This announcement had gone well. I was reluctant to add the Health Service to the list of areas in which we were proposing fundamental reform — not least because not enough work had yet been done on it. The NHS was seen by many as a touchstone for our commitment to the welfare state and there were obvious dangers of coming forward with new proposals out of the blue. The direction of reform which I wanted to see was one towards bringing down waiting lists by ensuring that money moved with the patient, rather than got lost within the bureaucratic maze of the NHS. But that left so many questions still unanswered that I eventually ruled out any substantial new proposals on Health for the manifesto.

After the meeting I wrote to Cabinet ministers asking them to bring forward any proposals which required policy approval for implementation in the next Parliament. Once this had been received, legislation could then be drafted for introduction in the new Parliament. To knock all these submissions into a coherent whole I established a small Manifesto Committee that reported directly to me. Chaired by John
MacGregor, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, its other members were Brian Griffiths, Stephen Sherbourne, Robin Harris and John O’Sullivan, a former Associate Editor of
The Times
, who had joined my Policy Unit as a special adviser and who drafted the manifesto.

The manifesto was designed to solve a serious political problem for us. As a party which had been in government for eight years, we had to dispel any idea that we were stale and running out of ideas. We therefore had to advance a number of clear, specific, new and well-worked-out reforms. At the same time we had to protect ourselves against the jibe: if these ideas are so good, why haven’t you introduced them before? We did so by presenting our reforms as the third stage of a rolling Thatcherite programme. In our first term, we revived the economy and reformed trade union law. In our second, we extended wealth and capital ownership more widely than ever before. In our third, we would give ordinary people the kind of choice and quality in public services that the rich already enjoyed. Looking back, once the manifesto was published, we heard no more about the Government running out of steam.

The manifesto was the best ever produced by the Conservative Party. This was not just because it contained far-reaching proposals to reform education, housing, local government finance, trade unions and for more privatization and lower taxes. It was also because the manifesto projected a vision and then arranged the policies in a clear and logical away around it. So, for example, the proposals on education, housing and trade unions (requiring more use of secret ballots and protecting individual unionists’ rights not to join a strike) came almost at the very front of the document, highlighting the fact that we were embarked upon a great programme of ambitious social reform to give power to the people. Those we wanted to empower were not just (or even mainly) those who could afford their own homes or private schools for their children or who had large investments, but those who lacked these advantages.

The manifesto went to the heart of my convictions. I believe that Conservative policies must liberate and empower those whom socialism traps, demoralizes and then contemptuously ignores. This, of course, is precisely what socialists most fear; it makes a number of paternalist Tories uneasy too.

I held a meeting at Chequers on Tuesday 21 April with Willie Whitelaw, Norman Tebbit, David Young, Peter Morrison (Norman’s Deputy at Central Office) and the draftsmen and advisers to go through the whole text. Then the redrafting and checking began. Brian and John reported back to me. Stephen Sherbourne, with his special
kind of tactful ruthlessness, kept all involved to the increasingly tight deadlines which had to be met. The main new development — and a substantial improvement — was suggested by David Young. This was to bring together the record of government achievements, entitled ‘Our First Eight Years’, in a separate document, to go in a wallet alongside the manifesto. David had great flair and energy, essential for this kind of work, and I left him in charge of overseeing the manifesto’s visual presentation and indeed involved him as much as possible in the wider election preparations.

Because a good deal of misleading comment has been made about the background to and course of the 1987 general election campaign it is worth setting some matters straight at the outset. According to some versions of events this was all about a battle between rival Tory advertising agencies; according to other accounts the main participants — particularly myself — behaved in such an unbalanced way that it is difficult to see why we were all not carried off to one of our new NHS hospitals by the men in white coats, let alone re-elected. This was not to be a happy campaign; but it was a successful one and that is what counts. There were disagreements — but good old-fashioned stand-up rows, in which most of us regret what we have said and try to forget it about it without bearing grudges, feature in all election campaigns. (As far as I can gather there were no rows in what was generally seen as a smooth running and happy Labour campaign.) As it turned out, the talents and character of all the main participants in the Conservative campaign contributed to the victory, though perhaps the creative tension was more tense than creative on occasion.

Apart from the manifesto and the practical preparations for the campaign, there was one other task which concerned us in the early months of 1987. This was the need to deal with the SDP-Liberal Alliance. The Alliance was by now led by the at first attractive but later increasingly ridiculous duo of the two Davids, Steel and Owen: it sought to represent itself as a credible, radical third force and if it did so might attract what (in the psephological jargon we all found it impossible to avoid) is called ‘soft’ Tory support. Within the Conservative Party there was a rumbling debate about how to deal with the Alliance. Some Conservatives on the left of the Party, who doubtless had more than a sneaking sympathy with the Alliance criticisms of my policies, were all for treating them lightly — or just ignoring them.

Neither Norman Tebbit nor I saw things like this. The fact was that, for all the posturing, the SDP were retread socialists who had gone along with nationalization and increased trade union power when in office, and had only developed second thoughts about socialism
when their ministerial salaries stopped in 1979. The Liberals have always, for their part, been the least scrupulous force in British politics, specializing in dubious tactics — fake opinion polls released on the eve of by-elections to suggest a nonexistent Liberal surge were a well-loved classic. Another tactic, which the SDP quickly borrowed, was to support one policy when talking to one group and a quite different one when talking to another. The analysis which Norman had done at Central Office showed quite clearly that there were splits and inconsistencies which we must exploit — and do so as far as possible before the election campaign itself began, when such matters risked becoming submerged.

So Norman and I agreed that at the Central Council in Torquay on Saturday 21 March 1987 we would both use the occasion to launch an assault on the Alliance. I called the Alliance ‘the Labour Party in exile’, recalled the SDP leaders’ leading role in the last Labour Government and ended with a quotation from an old music hall song:

While the manifesto was being drafted, I was discussing with Norman Tebbit what I hoped would be the final shape of the campaign and my own role in it. At our meeting on Thursday 16 April we went over press conference themes, advertising and party election broadcasts. By now I was in a mood for an early — June — election. We would have served the four years I always felt a government should. I felt in my bones that the popular mood was with us and that Labour’s public relations gimmicks were starting to look just a little tired.

As is the way of these things, the most appropriate date eventually wrote itself into our programme — Thursday 11 June. By then we would have seen the results of the local elections which, as in 1983, would be run through the number-crunchers of Central Office to make it into a useful guide for a general election. It would be supplemented by other private polls Norman had commissioned: this was particularly necessary for Scotland and London where there were no local elections that year. Some polling in individual key constituencies would also be done: though such are the problems of sampling in constituency polls that no one would attach too much weight to these. I saw this analysis and heard senior colleagues’ views at Chequers on Sunday: I knew by then that the manifesto was in almost final form. I had been through
the final text with the draftsmen and with Nigel and Norman on that Saturday.