The Downing Street Years (99 page)

We had one last disagreement. Nigel wished to include a commitment to zero inflation in the next Parliament. I thought this was a hostage to fortune. Events unfortunately proved my caution right.

As always, I slept on the decision about whether to go to the country, and then on Monday 11 May I arranged to see the Queen at 12.25 p.m. to seek a dissolution of Parliament for an election on 11 June.

In my case, preparation for the election involved more than politics. I also had to be dressed for the occasion. I had already commissioned from Aquascutum suits, jackets and skirts — ‘working clothes’ for the campaign.

I took a close interest in clothes, as most women do: but it was also extremely important that the impression I gave was right for the political occasion. In Opposition I had worn clothes from various suppliers. And if I had had any doubts about the importance of getting these matters very carefully organized, they were dissipated by the arrival of an outfit ordered for the Opening of Parliament in 1979. It was a beautiful sapphire blue suit with a matching hat. I had no time for a fitting and as I put it on with just a few minutes in hand I found to my horror that it neither fitted nor suited me and had to rush away to change into something else. It was a lesson not to order from a sketch, which can disguise unwanted bulges that are too painfully obvious to the real customer.

From the time of my arrival in Downing Street, Crawfie helped me choose my wardrobe. Together we would discuss style, colour and cloth. Everything had to do duty on many occasions so tailored suits seemed right. (They also have the advantage of gently passing by the waist.) The most exciting outfits were perhaps those suits I had made — in black or dark blue — for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. On foreign visits, it was, of course, particularly important to be appropriately dressed. We always paid attention to the colours of the national flag when deciding on what I should wear. The biggest change, however, was the new style I adopted when I visited the Soviet Union in the spring of 1987, for which I wore a black coat with shoulder pads, that Crawfie had seen in the Aquascutum window, and a marvellous fox
fur hat. (Aquascutum have provided me with most of my suits ever since.)

With the televising of the House of Commons after November 1989 new considerations arose. Stripes and checks looked attractive and cheerful in the flesh but they could dazzle the television viewer. One day when I had just not had enough time to change before going to the House, I continued to wear a black and white check suit. Afterwards a parliamentary colleague who had seen me on television told me, ‘what you said was all right, but you looked awful.’ I learned my lesson. People watching television would also notice whether I had worn the same suit on successive occasions and even wrote in about it. So from now on Crawfie always kept a note of what I wore each week for Prime Minister’s Questions. Out of these notes a diary emerged and each outfit received its own name, usually denoting the occasion it was first worn. The pages read something like a travel diary: Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black and last but not least English Garden. But now my mind was on the forthcoming campaign: it was time to lay out my navy and white check suit, to be known as ‘Election ‘87’.

The Conservative Party, as I pointed out earlier, deliberately makes a slow start in elections. A slow start, however, is one thing: no start at all is quite another. As the days went by, it seemed to me that the Opposition parties were making most of the running — though at one moment they fell over their own feet when Denis Healey told an astonished world direct from the Soviet capital, where he had been seeking to establish Labour’s international credentials, that Moscow was ‘praying for a Labour victory’.

On Friday, I spoke at the Scottish Party Conference in Perth. But of course at that stage our manifesto had not been published, so my main message was a warning of what to expect from Labour, which would try to conceal its true nature and purpose: I told people to expect an ‘iceberg manifesto’ from Labour with ‘one-tenth of its socialism visible, nine-tenths beneath the surface’.

On Tuesday 19 May, I chaired the first press conference of the campaign to launch our manifesto: the Alliance’s had already appeared, and disappeared, and Labour’s, which would be more notable
for omissions than contents, would be launched the same day. Our manifesto launch was not quite all that I had wished. The press conference room at Central Office was far too crowded, hot and noisy. Cabinet ministers — all of whom were present in order to demonstrate the strength of the ‘team’ — were crowded in too, so much so that the television shots of the conference looked truly awful. Nick Ridley explained our housing policy and I hoped that the journalists might be tempted actually to read the detailed policies of the manifesto. I was certainly determined that our candidates should do so and I took them through it in my speech to their conference in Central Hall, Westminster, the following morning.

But I also used the speech for another purpose. Our political weak point was the social services, especially Health, so I went out of my way to tell the candidates, and through them the voters, that the Government was committed to the principle of a National Health Service which I said was ‘safe only in our hands’. We had a notably cautious section on Health in the manifesto. That done, I devoted most of the campaign to stressing our strong points on the economy and defence. This did not prevent Health emerging later in the campaign as an issue; but it meant that we had armed ourselves against Labour’s attack and done our best to soothe the voters’ anxieties.

Thursday was my first day out in the campaign Battle Bus. This was a new high-tech version of the coach I had used in 1983. It was packed with every kind of up-to-date technology — a computer, different kinds of radio telephones, a fax, a photocopier and an on-board technician to look after it all. Painted blue, the Battle Bus bore the slogan ‘Moving Forward with Maggie’. My first photo-opportunity beside the bus was at Docklands, chosen as an example of our Conservative theme of ‘regeneration’. I left Docklands to return to No. 10 at lunchtime. In the meantime, the Battle Bus had to undergo some regeneration having collided with a BMW. But the bus’s dents were hammered out overnight and it appeared almost spick and span for the following day.

I always held my adoption meeting in Finchley on a Thursday rather than a Friday because the large Jewish population would otherwise be preparing for the Sabbath. In my speech that Thursday evening I concentrated heavily on defence, targeting not just the Labour Party but the Alliance, to the latter’s great irritation.

Our first regular press conference of the campaign was on Friday (22 May). The subject was officially defence and George Younger made the opening statement. We had suddenly been given a great opportunity to sink the Alliance parties which some Tory strategists — but not I — thought were the principal electoral threat to us. Instead, the two Davids sank themselves. The passage in our manifesto claimed that their joint defence policy, because it amounted to unilateral nuclear disarmament by degrees, would just as surely as Labour’s eventually produce a ‘frightened and fellow-travelling Britain’ vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. This was not, of course, an allegation of a lack of patriotism, but a forecast of what weakness would inevitably lead to. David Owen, however, failed to make this distinction and took enormous offence. We could hardly believe our luck when for several days he concentrated the public’s attention on our strongest card, defence, and his weakest one, his connection with the Liberal Party’s sandal-wearing unilateralists. The Alliance never recovered from this misjudgement.

But we were not without our difficulties. I was questioned on education, on which it was suggested that there were contradictions between my and Ken Baker’s line on ‘opted-out’, grant-maintained schools. In fact, we were not suggesting that the new schools would be fee paying in the sense of being private schools: they would remain in the public sector. Moreover, the Secretary of State for Education has to give his approval if a school — whether grant-maintained or not — wishes to change from being a comprehensive school to becoming a grammar school.

That said, however — and over the next few days it all had to be said repeatedly by Ken Baker — I was saddened that we had had to give all these assurances. It is my passionate belief that what above all has gone wrong with British education is that since the war we have, as I put it at this time, ‘strangled the middle way’. Direct grant schools and grammar schools provided the means for people like me to get on equal terms with those who came from well-off backgrounds. I would have liked grant-maintained schools — combined with the other changes we were making, and perhaps supplemented by a voucher applying in public and private sectors alike — to move us back to that ‘middle way’. I also wanted a return to selection — not of the old eleven-plus kind but a development of specialization and competition so that some schools would become centres of excellence in music, others in technology, others in science, others in the arts etc. This would have given specially gifted children the chance to develop their talents, regardless of their background.

If you are to have specialization of the sort I would like to see you ought to allow the school, which has become a centre of excellence in some field, to control its admission procedures. Competition between schools and individuals will also be more effective if there is some ability to ‘top up’ grants received from the state. I hope that we can go further along these lines. We ought to if the full Conservative vision for education is to be fulfilled. But at this stage it was clearly not going to be possible.

Some critics argued that this early row resulted from the fact that our reforms had not been fully thought through. That is certainly true of some of the details, even though the main lines were clear. But what was really behind the dispute was that, as I often did in government, I was using public statements to advance the argument and to push reluctant colleagues further than they would otherwise have gone. In an election campaign this was certainly a high-risk strategy. But without such tactics Thatcherism would be a merely theoretical viewpoint.

At the end of the first week we had established ourselves as the only party which had new, fresh ideas. But I felt that we had not gained the momentum from our manifesto which we might have expected and I was starting to be concerned about the tactics of the campaign.

My tour that day took me to the North-West. I made a speech to a large crowd of supporters from the Bury North constituency in the middle of a field. It was just the sort of lively, old-fashioned campaigning which I enjoyed.

Sunday was spent with interviews and working on speeches. Unlike 1983, each of my speeches in this campaign was for the particular occasion rather than drawn from previously prepared material. John O’Sullivan, Ronnie Millar and Stephen Sherbourne were the ‘home team’ of speech writers. The general rule was that I would look at the speech draft overnight, make the changes required and work on the detail through the following day right up to the delivery of the speech itself. This made for fresh and interesting speeches which were probably better than in the 1983 campaign; but it was also much more difficult to link the theme of the speech with other themes of the day from the morning press conference, my tour, other ministerial speeches or external events.

At Monday’s press conference we took the economy as the subject of the day and Nigel Lawson made the opening statement. This was a good campaign for Nigel. Not only did he demonstrate complete command of the issues, he also spotted the implications of Labour’s tax and national insurance proposals — especially their planned abolition of the married man’s tax allowance and of the upper limit on employees’
national insurance contributions — for people on quite modest incomes. This threw Labour into total disarray in the last week of the campaign and revealed that they did not understand their own policies. Nigel had earlier published costings of the Labour Party’s manifesto at some £35 billion over and above the Government’s spending plans. As I was to say later in a speech: ‘Nigel’s favourite bedside reading is Labour policy documents: he likes a good mystery.’

At this stage, however, defence continued to dominate the headlines, partly because we had deliberately concentrated our early fire on it, but mainly because of Neil Kinnock’s extraordinary gaffe in a television interview in which he suggested that Labour’s response to armed aggression would be to take to the hills for guerilla warfare. We gleefully leapt upon this and it provided the inspiration for the only good advertisement of our campaign, depicting ‘Labour’s Policy on Arms’ with a British soldier, his hands held up in surrender. On Tuesday evening, after a day’s campaigning in Wales, I told a big rally in Cardiff:

The speech went very well. Under Harvey Thomas’s supervision our rallies had by now moved into the twentieth century with a vengeance. Dry ice shot out over the first six rows, enveloping the press in a dense fog; lasers flashed madly across the auditorium; our campaign tune, composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the occasion, blared out; a video of me on international visits was shown; and then on I walked to deliver my speech, feeling something of an anti-climax.

Wednesday’s press conference was of particular importance to the campaign because we took education as the theme, with Ken Baker and me together, in order to allay the doubts our early confusion had generated and to regain the initiative on the subject, which I regarded as central to our manifesto. It went well.

But my tours, by general agreement, did not. Neil Kinnock was gaining more and better television coverage. He was portrayed — as I had specifically requested at the beginning of the campaign that I should be — against the background of cheering crowds, or doing something which fitted in with the theme of the day. The media — far more I suspect than the general public — were entranced by the highly polished party election broadcast showing Neil and Glenys walking
hand in hand, bathed in a warm glow of summer sunlight, to strains of patriotic music, looking rather like an advertisement for early retirement. This probably encouraged them to give favourable coverage to the Kinnock tours. And what was I doing on Wednesday? I was visiting a training centre for guide dogs for the blind. The symbolism and significance were lost not just on the media but on me too — and much as I enjoyed looking at the dogs, they did not have a vote. I felt that I was not meeting enough real people. I was going to too many factories and firms. This was partly because of the very tight constraints on security which dictated the tour programme. But the basic strategy was wrong because the tour was organized around photo-opportunities — and no one was seeing the photos.