Effectemergence of Thatcherismthe successful conclusion of the Falklands war, Mrs Thatcher’s position was transformed. She could now look forward to almost certain re-election whenever she chose to go to the country. There was some speculation that she might cash in on the euphoria of victory by calling a quick ‘khaki’ election in the autumn. But that, she told George Gale in an interview for the Daily Express, would be ‘basically wrong. The Falklands thing was a matter of national pride and I would not use it for party political purposes.’1 This was humbug. In fact, she had no scruple about claiming the war as a specifically Conservative – indeed Thatcherite – achievement.she realised that to call a snap election would have looked cynically opportunist and might have backfired. Besides, it was unnecessary. Why should she cut short her first term just when she had finally secured her dominance? She could carry on for nearly two more years if she wished, to the spring of 1984. Her preference, she hinted was to go on to the autumn of 1983.2 That gave her another full parliamentary year to reap the political harvest of her enhanced authority, and time to show some clear economic results from the pain of the last three years.the meantime something like normal politics resumed, and the Government could still be embarrassed by the unexpected. On 9 July there occurred an incident, trivial as it turned out, that was potentially almost as humiliating as the seizure of the Falklands. An intruder named Michael Fagan not only broke into Buckingham Palace, but found his way into the Queen’s bedroom and sat on the end of her bed; fortunately he was unarmed and harmless, and she coolly engaged him in conversation until help arrived. (The Duke of Edinburgh, the public was fascinated to learn, slept in another room.) But the implications were alarming. It turned out that it was not the first time that Fagan had broken into the Palace. If security at the Palace was so poor, was it any better at Downing Street and Chequers? ‘I was shocked and upset,’ Mrs Thatcher told George Gale. ‘Really I was very, very upset… Every woman in this country was upset because we all thought, oh lord, what would happen to me?’3 Willie Whitelaw accepted responsibility as Home Secretary and initially felt he must resign. Having already lost Carrington, however, Mrs Thatcher could not face losing Whitelaw too, and persuaded him to change his mind. Whitelaw’s popularity in the House protected him. Security at the Palace was tightened, and the bizarre episode passed off with no lasting political damage.the economic upturn was slow to materialise. Though Geoffrey Howe declared that the recession had officially ended in the third quarter of 1981, growth during 1982 was still only 0.5 per cent; industrial output was the lowest since 1965. Several times the Department of Employment massaged the basis of calculating the unemployment figure, but still it went on rising. Many analysts reckoned the true figure to be nearer four million than the three million the Government admitted. From within the Cabinet, too, Jim Prior continued to warn that the present level of unemployment was unsustainable and claimed that it could easily be relieved by ‘some additional activity’ which need not involve any more Government spending.4 Howe and Mrs Thatcher rejected such siren voices as firmly as ever. ‘When the rulers of old started to debase and clip the coinage,’ she asserted, ‘they were in difficulty. That’s what reflation is and I’ll have nothing of it.’5the other hand inflation – the Government’s preferred measure of its success – continued to fall. It was down to 5 per cent by the end of 1982, enabling Howe to reduce interest rates steadily (to 9 per cent by November), which helped raise both living standards and the sense of wellbeing of those in work. The heavy shedding of manpower eventually produced higher productivity in those parts of the manufacturing economy that had survived, while industry was relieved by a steep fall in sterling – due largely to a fall in the oil price – which eventually forced Howe to raise interest rates again in December. While maintaining a tight spending framework overall, Howe also pursued an imaginative supply-side programme of deregulation and targeted incentives: more free ports, double the number of enterprise zones, loan guarantee schemes, grants to assist in the introduction of computers. For all these reasons, economic activity slowly picked up. Public spending, though still higher as a proportion of GDP than in 1979, was at last coming under control – despite the war, which was indeed paid for out of the contingency reserve, as Mrs Thatcher had promised – so that by the spring of 1983 Howe was in a position to make some modest but timely tax concessions in what was likely to be his election-year budget.after three years of restraint the Chancellor and Prime Minister provoked general amazement in late 1982 by suddenly urging local authorities and other public bodies to spend more on capital investment. In fact, she was not telling local authorities to spend more, but rather to spend more of the money provided on capital projects and less on wages.was much more confident now in dismissing Labour allegations that she did not care about unemployment. ‘I have come to the conclusion,’ she retorted, ‘that they do not want to get rid of unemployment. They wallow in it.’6 In a changing economy, new jobs came from new industries and small businesses, not from declining industries. ‘It is no good the Opposition yowling about it. It is a fact.’ 7 The Government, she insisted, could not create jobs. ‘One gains jobs by gaining customers. There is no other way.’8the time Mrs Thatcher went to the country in June 1983, the Government could plausibly claim, against all its critics, that its central economic strategy was working: inflation was being squeezed out of the economy and the way was now clear for a soundly based recovery which would soon bring real jobs. Sceptics countered that, on the contrary, Britain had suffered a more severe recession than the rest of Europe, while the Government’s boasted recovery was shallow and patchy and concentrated in the south of England, leaving the manufacturing regions of Scotland, South Wales and the north of England permanently devastated. Economically this is undeniable; the impact of the Government’s policies was cruelly unbalanced. The political fact, however, was that the Government had won the argument. Mrs Thatcher’s toughness could be seen to be showing results.A level of unemployment hitherto held to be insupportable was discovered to be tolerable after all: there were no more riots. Meanwhile, as the political world adjusted to the probability of a second Thatcher term, a number of distinctively ‘Thatcherite’ policies were beginning to take shape., Norman Tebbit carried the Government’s second instalment of trade-union reform. With the reputation of a right-wing hard man,Tebbit had been appointed Employment Secretary in September 1981 specifically to do what Prior had successfully resisted. In fact he displayed a more subtle touch than his aggressive rhetoric suggested and produced another carefully judged package which was considerably less punitive than the Institute of Directors and right-wing backbenchers had been demanding.main thrust of his Employment Bill, introduced in January 1982, was to remove the unions’ immunity from civil action arising out of unlawful trade disputes, while narrowing the definition of what constituted lawful action, thus rendering unions liable for damages (up to £250,000) for secondary and sympathetic strikes. Henceforth the law would only recognise disputes over pay, jobs and working conditions between groups of workers and their own employers. This was the crucial step which ended the privileged legal status granted the unions in 1906 – the anomaly on which the whole history of the abuse of union power since the 1960s had been founded.’s Bill simultaneously tightened restrictions on the operation of closed shops; made it easier for employers to dismiss persistent troublemakers and offered Government funds to finance union ballots. But it still did not require ballots to be held before official strikes. It did not try to outlaw strikes in essential services. Nor did it touch the Tories’ oldest grievance, the unions’ political levy, which still required members to contribute to the Labour party unless they specifically opted out. Strike ballots and abolition of the political levy were foreshadowed in another Green Paper in January 1983, but their implementation was left to a third instalment of reform brought in by Tebbit’s successor, Tom King, in 1984.again this was shrewd strategy, which disarmed opposition by its carefully calculated moderation. As usual trade-union and Labour leaders furiously denounced the proposed legislation. But polls showed that public opinion overwhelmingly supported Tebbit’s Bill; more important, the great majority of ordinary trade unionists supported it. By acting moderately but firmly to curb the abuses of the past fifteen years the Government was seen to be redeeming one of the clearest promises on which it had been elected.unions were additionally weakened by the level of unemployment, which severely cut their bargaining power. 1982 saw two long-running public-sector strikes – one on the railways, one by NHS workers – both of which ended in clear defeat for the unions without the Government’s new legislation even being called upon. Mrs Thatcher vigorously condemned the strikers. ‘If you want more unemployment and more job losses,’ she told them bluntly, ‘then keep on striking. Don’t blame me.’9 Tebbit’s Bill was really a case of kicking the unions when they were already down. The industrial climate had been transformed since 1979. The unions’ power to enforce unproductive overmanning and delay the introduction of new technology was already broken; management was recovering the power to manage. Some major battles still lay ahead, but by 1982 the dinosaur which had humbled Wilson, Heath and Callaghan was already mortally wounded.second distinctively Thatcherite policy which began to take clear shape in 1982 was large-scale privatisation. The breakthrough from a limited programme of asset disposals to the selling of whole industries came about quite suddenly as a result of the convergence of a number of factors. First the arrival of Patrick Jenkin at the Department of Industry and Nigel Lawson at the Department of Energy gave a new impetus to policies which Keith Joseph and David Howell had initiated but failed to carry through. Then the easing of the recession offered a more propitious economic climate. The likelihood of the Government winning a second term on the back of post-Falklands euphoria gave potential investors the confidence to buy shares in privatised companies without fear of a returning Labour Government immediately renationalising them. Perhaps most important, the newly established telephone company British Telecom urgently needed a massive injection of capital to finance the new digital technology. Mrs Thatcher took some persuading that privatisation was practical; but she eventually gave Jenkin the green light to go ahead.also needed some persuasion to privatise Britoil (the former British National Oil Corporation). This time her reservations were patriotic, reflecting a widely shared feeling that North Sea oil was a national asset which should remain under national control. Lawson’s solution was to split the production side of the business from the trading side and sell only the former, retaining for the Government a ‘golden share’ to prevent the company falling into unsuitable (that is, foreign) hands. The first 51 per cent of Britoil shares were put on the market in November 1982. Despite an unexpected drop in the price of oil which left the underwriters with large losses, the sale raised £334 million for the Treasury, making it by far the biggest privatisation to date. The BT privatisation – much bigger again – was not ready to go before the 1983 election and had to be restarted in the next Parliament.
‘We are only in our first term,’ Mrs Thatcher told the party conference in October 1982. ‘But already we have done more to roll back the frontiers of socialism than any previous Conservative Government. In the next Parliament we intend to do a lot more.’10 In due course the 1983 manifesto earmarked BT, British Airways and ‘substantial parts’ of British Steel, British Shipbuilders and British Leyland, plus the offshore interests of British Gas, as targets for the second term. As it turned out, building on the unexpected success of the BT sale, the Government went much further than this, privatising the whole of British Gas before moving on to target electricity and water. But already, she admitted in her memoirs, this was a programme ‘far more extensive than we had thought would ever be possible when we came into office only four years before’.11form of popular capitalism she did enthusiastically embrace before 1983 was the sale of council houses. Michael Heseltine had enshrined the ‘right to buy’ – at a substantial discount – in his 1980 Housing Act. By October 1982, 370,000 families had already taken advantage of the legislation to buy their homes. While the Government was still feeling its way gingerly towards the privatisation of public utilities, she now knew that with the sale of council houses she was on to an electoral winner. It is probably too simple to suggest that those 370,000 families – it was 500,000 by the time of the election – were turned from Labour to Conservative voters overnight: many of them had already made the crucial switch in 1979. But more than anything else this one simple measure, promised in opposition and spectacularly carried out, both consolidated and came to symbolise Mrs Thatcher’s capture of a large swathe of the traditionally Labour-voting working class.limits of radicalismhouse sales, trade-union reform and the beginnings of privatisation were major initiatives which changed the landscape of British politics. Yet beyond these three areas, some of Mrs Thatcher’s keenest supporters were disappointed that her avowedly radical government did not have more to show for its first term.reason was partly that she simply did not have time to spare for social policy: at this stage the economy, the trade unions and the nationalised industries were her domestic priorities. In truth she was not really very interested in it: having served her ministerial apprenticeship in social security and education, she was happy to have escaped to wider horizons. But she was also very wary of the political danger in tackling the welfare state – particularly the National Health Service – which, for all its emerging inadequacies, was rooted in popular affection. ‘She feared that the welfare state was Labour territory – that we weren’t going to win on it.’12 The result was that health, social security, education and public-sector housing were all squeezed to a greater or lesser degree by spending cuts, which gave practical effect – as it were by stealth – to the Prime Minister’s instincts. But this was just tinkering, not the radical shake-up that Tory radicals had hoped to see.biggest question concerned the funding of the NHS. Almost since its inception in 1948, Conservative policy-makers had been looking at ways to switch funding at least partly from general taxation to an insurance basis. But insurance schemes had always been found to be less efficient and more impractical. Both Howe and Jenkin were still keen to explore the insurance option, however, and in July 1981 Jenkin set up a departmental working party to study alternative funding options. Mrs Thatcher was sympathetic. In her very first Commons speech as Prime Minister she had warned, with a clear echo of Milton Friedman, that ‘there is no such thing as a free service in the Health Service’.13 She never forgot that the cost of universal health care fell on the public purse and believed that self-reliant individuals should bear the cost of insuring themselves instead of relying on the state. She was keen, as a matter of principle as well as of economy, to encourage private health provision, which duly mushroomed after 1979 with an influx of American health care companies, a rush of private hospital building and more private beds in NHS hospitals. Kites flown by free-market think-tanks like the Adam Smith Institute and the Social Affairs Unit fuelled the impression – sedulously fostered by Labour – that the Tories were planning to privatise the NHS. But when it came to the point the Government drew back.security was less of a sacred cow than health, largely because it was less used by Tory voters. There was no comparable embargo on radical reform; but here too policy proceeded by an accumulation of small cuts rather than a coherent programme. All short-term benefits – unemployment benefit, housing benefit, even child benefit were devalued more rapidly simply by not being uprated in line with inflation.her experience as a parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Pensions twenty years before, Mrs Thatcher retained the conviction that the benefit system was a wasteful mechanism for recycling money from the hard-working to the lazy. Then at least it had been her job to face the reality of a lot of individual cases. Now she saw only the huge cost to the Treasury and a disincentive to enterprise and self-reliance. She believed that the prosperity of those in work would – in the American phrase – ‘trickle down’ to lift the living standards of all. She averted her eyes from the impoverishment of millions of families whose breadwinners were desperate to work if only the jobs had been there. Apart from throwing ever-larger sums at complicated youth-training schemes – money not for the most part well directed – the Government in its first term made no serious attempt to reform the benefit system.was the area where the Government most clearly favoured the better off at the expense of the poorer. The central plank of its housing policy was the sale of council houses. But while the best houses were sold on generous terms to those more prosperous tenants in secure jobs who could afford to buy them, rents for the rest – usually on the least desirable estates – were steeply increased. New council building almost completely ceased. Local authorities were debarred from using the revenues from council-house sales to renew their housing stock, leading in time to a housing shortage and the very visible phenomenon of homelessness which emerged at the end of the decade. Housing was another service Mrs Thatcher did not really believe the state should be providing at all: her Government’s purpose was to encourage and reward home-ownership. While cutting subsidy to council tenants, therefore, she was determined to protect and even extend mortgage-interest tax relief for home buyers – an anomalous middle-class subsidy which the Treasury had long wanted to phase out, but which she candidly defended as a well-deserved reward for ‘our people’.14Education Secretary from 1979 to 1981, Mark Carlisle had an unenviable task, with the Treasury demanding heavy cuts in his budget and Mrs Thatcher bullying him to punish her old department. Less than a decade earlier she had been vilified for cutting free milk for primary schoolchildren, yet she finished up as a notably expansionist Education Secretary, having announced ambitious plans particularly for pre-school education, which sadly were aborted by the 1973 oil crisis. As Prime Minister, however, she showed no interest in reviving these plans, only the memory of the Milk Snatcher. Carlisle was compelled to enforce cuts in the provision of school meals and rural school transport – though the latter was partly reversed following a rebellion in the House of Lords. The axe fell hardest on the universities, which suffered a 13 per cent cut in funding over three years.This was the beginning of a decade of confusion, demoralisation and falling standards in higher education.
‘We are the true peace movement’Government had given curiously little thought to the agenda for a second term. Given the enormous problems of trying to promote an enterprise economy against the background of a severe recession, it is understandable that the Government attempted so little major reform of social institutions before 1983. It is much harder to explain why, after the Falklands victory had transformed the political landscape and her own authority, Mrs Thatcher did not then grasp her opportunity with a radical programme for the next stretch of road that now extended before her. She evidently found it difficult to explain herself. In her memoirs she blamed Geoffrey Howe.truth is that a Government’s energy stems from its head, and even Mrs Thatcher confessed to being a little tired by the end of the Falklands summer. Just before the recess she admitted that she intended to take a good holiday ‘after this momentous year’ – quickly adding, in case anyone should see this as a sign of weakness: ‘I do not think I could take more than another ten years such as this has been.’15 She actually went to Switzerland for ten days before going into hospital – briefly and, of course, privately – for an operation for varicose veins. After the high tension of the Falklands she was perhaps mentally unprepared for her sudden breakthrough to popularity and genuinely did not know what to do next. A year earlier she would not have dared talk of another ten years. There is a sense in the autumn of 1982 of Mrs Thatcher – still only fifty-seven years old – pausing for breath, resting on her oars for a moment, until she got used to the idea of going on and on.a dearth of new policies to unveil, Central Office was preparing to fight the coming election on the perennial appeal of Tory Governments seeking re-election: ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives, don’t let Labour ruin it.’ In 1983 the claim was rather that life was getting better under the Conservatives. It was admitted that the country had been through a tough three years, but the rewards were now becoming clear: inflation and interest rates were coming down, economic activity was picking up and unemployment – the Government’s Achilles heel – would soon begin to fall as prosperity returned. The warning was the same, however: the return of a Labour Government would throw away all the hard-won gains.bland manifesto, giving no hostages to fortune, was all that was needed to win the election. The opposition parties – divided, poorly led and easily dismissed as respectively extreme (Labour) and woolly (the SDP-Liberal Alliance) – offered no serious challenge to Mrs Thatcher’s inevitable return. Yet the failure to put forward a positive programme for its second term, besides being democratically dishonest, left the Government directionless after the election, prey to untoward events for which it tried to compensate, as the next contest approached, with hasty initiatives.trouble was that Labour offered too easy a target. Even after the defection of the SDP in 1981, the party was still riven by a bitter civil war.The hard left had seized control of the party’s internal arrangements – the mechanism for electing the leader, the selection of candidates and the formation of policy. Yet senior social democrats like Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman remained in the Shadow Cabinet, visibly unhappy but helpless to arrest the leftward slide. In Michael Foot the party was stuck with an elderly leader, elected in a vain effort to preserve unity, whom the electorate found it impossible to imagine as Prime Minister: his approval rating – rarely over 20 per cent – was consistently the lowest since polling began. Moreover, as the election approached, Labour saddled itself with an entire platform of unpopular left-wing policies, any one of which might have rendered the party unelectable: wholesale nationalisation, massive public spending, the restoration of trade-union privileges, withdrawal from Europe and unilateral nuclear disarmament. If the Tories’ manifesto was vague, Labour’s was appallingly specific: Gerald Kaufman famously dubbed it ‘the longest suicide note in history’.16 Of all its suicidal policies the most crippling handicap was Foot’s passionate commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament.for half a century had the major parties been so far apart on the issue of national defence. Ever since 1945 a broad consensus had obtained between the two front benches on the question of nuclear weapons. The left had kept up a more or less constant agitation for unilateral disarmament; but successive Labour leaders had maintained a firm line on the retention of the British independent deterrent. Now, with the election of a lifelong unilateralist to the leadership coinciding with a revival of support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, that consensus was ended. For the first time, nuclear weapons were set to be a major issue at the coming General Election. In the triumphant afterglow of her Falklands victory nothing could have suited Mrs Thatcher better.since becoming Tory leader in 1975, she had taken a strong line on the need to maintain and modernise NATO’s nuclear defences against the Soviet nuclear threat. Her blunt warnings about Soviet expansionism had led the Russian press to christen her ‘the Iron Lady’, and she wore the intended insult with defiant pride. She had no interest in the polite bromides of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with Communism but believed that the West was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the Soviet Empire – a struggle which she confidently expected the West to win, though she did not foresee the timescale. As early as May 1980, in a newspaper interview on the first anniversary of her election, she was looking forward to the fall of Communism. ‘The major challenge to the Communist creed is coming now,’ she told The Times:years they were saying the march of communism and socialism is inevitable. Not now, not now. I would say that in the end the demise of the communist creed is inevitable, because it is not a creed for human beings with spirit who wish to live their own lives under the rule of law.17the Commons she promised to wage ‘the ideological struggle… as hard as I can’.18meant imposing sanctions following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and trying to persuade British athletes to boycott the Moscow Olympics. It meant supporting the struggle of the Polish Solidarity movement, which began in 1981, and keeping up the pressure over Soviet treatment of dissidents in breach of the Helsinki undertakings on human rights. It meant increasing Britain’s contribution to NATO military spending by 3 per cent, as she had promised in opposition. Above all, it meant firmly rejecting the siren call of nuclear disarmament and matching the Russians’ nuclear deployment missile for missile.the Conservatives came into office they were faced almost immediately with the need for a decision – which Labour had postponed – on replacing Britain’s obsolescent nuclear deterrent, Polaris. As is the way with nuclear decisions in every government, this one was confined to a small ad hoc subcommittee composed of the Prime Minister, her deputy, the Foreign and Defence Secretaries and the Chancellor.19 They lost no time in opting to buy the American submarine-launched Trident system, at a cost of £5 billion spread over ten years. The problem was that the expenditure could only be afforded by making cuts elsewhere. Mrs Thatcher, however, had no doubts. She believed passionately in nuclear weapons, both as a positively good thing in themselves, which had kept the peace in Europe for thirty years and would continue to do so as long as the balance of deterrence was preserved, but still more as an emblem of national power, prestige and independence. She never had any truck with the criticism that Britain’s ‘independent’ deterrent was in practice wholly dependent on the Americans for spares and maintenance and would never in any conceivable military circumstances be used without American consent. The decision to buy Trident, she told the Commons in July 1980, ‘leaves us master of our own destiny… We are resolved to defend our freedom.’20then the Americans changed the arithmetic by developing a new, more sophisticated version of Trident. In January 1982 the Government had to decide all over again whether to buy the upgraded D5 model in place of the original C4, at still greater expense. Mrs Thatcher was worried, but she was still determined that Britain must have the best and latest system, whatever it cost. This time she deployed the full Cabinet to outnumber the doubters. She also drew on her special relationship with President Reagan to persuade him to let Britain buy the D5 on exceptionally favourable terms, assuring the Commons – like a housewife in a soap-powder commercial – that ‘the expenditure of this money secures a far greater degree of deterrence than expenditure of the same amount of money on ordinary conventional armaments’.21Thatcher was also eager to accept the deployment of American cruise missiles at military bases in Britain as part of NATO’s response to Soviet SS-20s targeted on the West. The deployment of cruise in several European countries had first been proposed by the West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, as a way of locking the Americans into the defence of Europe at a time when it was feared they might otherwise walk away. Mrs Thatcher strongly supported it, not only to keep the Americans committed but also to demonstrate Europe’s willingness to share the burden of its own defence. She was witheringly scornful when the Germans and other European governments began to weaken in the face of anti-nuclear protests; but at the same time she relished the opportunity to demonstrate once again that Britain was America’s only reliable ally. When Britain agreed in September 1979 to station 144 cruise missiles at Greenham Common in Berkshire and RAF Molesworth in Cam-bridgeshire, the announcement caused little stir. But over the next three years, as the time for deployment approached, the mood changed. Increased tension between the superpowers, the spectre of a new nuclear arms race and the West’s rejection of several plausible-sounding Soviet disarmament offers fuelled a Europe-wide revival of the fear of nuclear war, fanned by a widespread perception of Ronald Reagan as a sort of trigger-happy cowboy who might be tempted to use nuclear weapons against what he called (in March 1983) ‘the evil empire’.22 In Britain the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), dormant since the early 1960s, suddenly sprang back to life, drawing large numbers to marches, rallies and demonstrations. Moreover, its cause was now backed by the official opposition.Thatcher welcomed a fight on the issue, first because she thought defence more fundamental even than economics; second because she believed that unilateral disarmament was absolutely wrong in principle and would make nuclear war more likely, not less; and third because she was confident that the country agreed with her. Opinion polls reflected public anxiety about specific weapons systems. Yet when it came to the point the public overwhelmingly wanted to retain Britain’s independent nuclear capacity. Keeping the bomb was at bottom, for the electorate as for Mrs Thatcher, a matter of national pride and identity. She was scornful of the woolly-minded wishful thinking of those who imagined that the USSR would respond in kind if the West tamely dismantled its weapons. ‘Any policy of unilateral disarmament,’ she told the Commons in June 1980, ‘is a policy of unilateral surrender.’23 The Warsaw Pact currently possessed a 3 – 1 superiority over NATO in nuclear weapons in Europe, she pointed out in July. ‘Those who seek to have a nuclear-free Europe would do well to address their efforts in the first place to Soviet Russia.’24 So long as the Soviets enjoyed superiority she scorned Brezhnev’s offer of a moratorium. She was all for disarmament, but only on a basis of equality. In the meantime, she insisted in November 1982, ‘We should have every bit as much strategic nuclear weaponry at our disposal as the Soviet Union, every bit as much intermediate nuclear weaponry at our disposal as the Soviet union.’25enthusiasm for the latest hardware sounded alarmingly aggressive to those worried about the threat of nuclear escalation. The next time she spoke in the House about deploying cruise she was greeted with cries of ‘Warmonger’.26 Her response to this allegation was to insist repeatedly that nuclear weapons did not cause war but were actually the surest way to prevent it. She gave her fullest exposition of this argument at that year’s party conference, when she devoted a long section of her televised speech to spelling out the ABC of deterrence:understand the feelings of the unilateralists. I understand the anxieties of parents with children growing up in the nuclear age. But the fundamental question for all of us is whether unilateral nuclear disarmament would make a war less likely. I have to tell you that it would not. It would make war more likely…Russia and the West know that there can be no victory in nuclear war, for thirty-seven years we have kept the peace in Europe… That is why we need nuclear weapons, because having them makes peace more secure.27was at a joint press conference with Helmut Kohl at the end of the Chancellor’s visit to London in February 1983 that she found the phrase that encapsulated her paradoxical faith. ‘We really are a true peace movement ourselves,’ she claimed, ‘and we are the true disarmers, in that we stand for all-sided disarmament, but on a basis of balance.’28 She always loved stealing Labour’s slogans for herself. ‘We are the true peace movement’ became her favourite refrain throughout the General Election and beyond.29that defence, and the nuclear argument in particular, was going to be a key battleground in the coming contest, Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity of John Nott’s intention to leave politics by removing him from the Ministry of Defence in January 1983 and replacing him with the much more combative figure of Michael Heseltine. Much as she distrusted Heseltine, she recognised that he had the populist flair to tackle CND head on. This was one of her most successful appointments; Heseltine responded exactly as she had hoped in the months leading up to the election, energetically countering the unilateralists in the television studios and on the radio. His most successful coup was to upstage CND’s Easter demonstration, when they had planned to form a human chain around the Greenham Common airbase on Good Friday. Heseltine stole their thunder by visiting Germany the day before and having himself photographed looking over the Berlin Wall, thus dramatising the enemy whom NATO’s nuclear weapons were intended to deter. Even with all its other doctrinal baggage, unilateralism was the biggest millstone round the Labour party’s neck, and Heseltine made the most of it. The contrast with the recapture of the Falklands did not need spelling out.: June 1983the result of the election was never in much doubt, its timing was uncertain up to the last moment. All Mrs Thatcher’s habitual caution inclined her to carry on until the autumn. But she was under strong pressure from the party managers to go as soon as possible after the new electoral register came into force in February 1983: the redrawn constituency boundaries were expected to yield the Tories an extra thirty seats.The party chairman, Cecil Parkinson, and Central Office wanted to go early, and the temptation was great.she sought every excuse for indecision. First she argued that she had promised President Reagan that she would attend the G7 summit at Williamsburg, Virginia, at the end of May: this would entail her being out of the country at a crucial stage of the campaign. She was persuaded that her absence could be turned to electoral advantage, with media coverage underlining her stature as an international stateswoman. Then she worried that the manifesto was not ready. Parkinson told her that it could be made ready in a couple of hours, at which she immediately started rewriting it herself. Still she wanted to sleep on the decision. But the next morning she went to the Palace as arranged. Polling day was set for Thursday 9 June.Tory campaign was frankly concentrated on Mrs Thatcher, highlighting her strength and resolution, clear convictions and strong leadership. The contrast with Foot was so obvious that it scarcely needed pointing out. Each day the Prime Minister herself chaired the morning press conference at Central Office, flanked by two or three colleagues; most of the Cabinet was paraded, but few featured more than once, and their role was clearly subordinate. Mrs Thatcher answered most of the questions. Besides herself only three ministers appeared in the party’s television broadcasts.campaign closely followed the successful pattern of 1979. After the press conference each morning she set off by plane or helicopter for whistle-stop visits around the country, meeting up with her campaign coach to inspect shiny new factories or do walkabouts in shopping malls, carefully chosen to provide good pictures for the local media and the national TV news; she went mainly to Tory constituencies, where only the local members were told in advance that she was coming, to ensure that she met an enthusiastic reception and to minimise the risk of hostile demonstrations. She made only a handful of major speeches – and those were delivered to carefully vetted audiences of Tory supporters well supplied with Union Jacks. In addition, she gave two interviews to friendly newspapers, did two major radio interviews and five major TV interviews – two taking audience questions and three with heavyweight interviewers.evening when she came back to Downing Street she would have a quick supper and then get on with preparing speeches for the following day. Mrs Thatcher would rewrite and correct them far into the night. Next morning she would arrive at Central Office at 8.15 for an hour’s briefing before the 9.30 press conference. Gordon Reece attended these briefings and also helped rehearse her for her television appearances. But above all in this election she put herself in the hands of Cecil Parkinson, who had the knack of soothing tensions and keeping her calm when things went wrong. She trusted him completely. ‘If Cecil says not to do it,’ she said after one mix-up on the bus when she had wanted to change plans, ‘we won’t do it.’30 When it was all over she was generous in giving him the credit for victory.the campaign she offered little that was new or positive, but concentrated on attacking Labour relentlessly on what she called ‘the gut issues’ – nationalisation, industrial relations and, above all, defence.31 Characteristically she covered her own weakest flank – unemployment – by counter-attacking Labour’s record in the 1970s. ‘In the end Labour always runs away,’ she jeered in her adoption speech at Finchley on 19 May:are running away from the need to defend their country… They are fleeing from the long overdue reform of the trade unions… They are running out on Europe… Above all, Labour is running away from the true challenge of unemployment.to create millions of jobs, she insisted, was ‘no more than an evasion of the real problem’. Real jobs could only be created by gradually building up a competitive economy with profitable industries that could hold their own in world markets. ‘We Conservatives believe in working with the grain of human nature, in encouraging people by incentives, not in over-regulating them by too many controls.’ ‘A quick cure,’ she repeated several times in another favourite formulation, ‘is a quack cure.’32Tories’ only other weak point was the widespread belief that the Government had a secret agenda to ‘privatise’ or somehow dismantle the National Health Service. Mrs Thatcher had already declared repeatedly that the NHS was ‘safe with us’; but she had to go on repeating it until she finally rebutted it with the strongest disclaimer at her disposal: ‘I have no more intention of dismantling the National Health Service,’ she declared at Edinburgh, ‘than I have of dismantling Britain’s defences.’33had no doubt that she wanted the biggest majority possible. ‘The Labour party manifesto is the most extreme ever,’ she declared on a whistle-stop tour of Norfolk on 25 May, ‘and it deserves a very big defeat.’34 ‘As a professional campaigner,’ Carol Thatcher observed, ‘she did not think there was such a thing as winning too well.’ Mrs Thatcher warned repeatedly against complacency, believing that ‘You can lose elections in the last few days by not going flat out to the winning post.’35 ‘We need to have every single vote on polling day.’36as she dominated her colleagues, she also reduced television interviewers to pliant ciphers. Robin Day – the original tough interrogator – felt that he had let his viewers down by letting the Prime Minister walk all over him; but in all his long experience he had not been treated like this before. He was used to asking questions which the politicians would then make some attempt to answer: he was unprepared for Mrs Thatcher’s new technique of ignoring the questions and simply delivering whatever message she wanted to get across.37 ‘In all her set-piece encounters,’ Michael Cockerell wrote, ‘the top interviewers scarcely succeeded in laying a glove on her. She said what she had come prepared to say and no more.’38 By comparison both Foot and Jenkins were clumsy, longwinded and old-fashioned.only person who rattled her was an ordinary voter, a geography teacher named Diana Gould, who pressed her about the sinking of the General Belgrano on BBC TV’s Nationwide, seizing on the discrepancy in her answers about whether or not the ship was sailing towards or away from the British task force, and refusing to be deflected. ‘No professional would have challenged a Prime Minister so bluntly,’ wrote Martin Harrison in the Nuffield study of the election, ‘and precisely because she was answering an ordinary voter Mrs Thatcher had to bite back her evident anger.’39 She came off the air talking furiously of abolishing the BBC. ‘Only the BBC could ask a British Prime Minister why she took action to protect our ships against an enemy ship that was a danger to our boys’, she railed, forgetting that it was a listener, not the presenter, who had asked the question.40 Nevertheless she was entitled to resent armchair strategists who persisted in questioning the sinking of the Belgrano long after the event. ‘They have the luxury of knowing that we came through all right,’ she told Carol. ‘I had the anxiety of protecting our people on Hermes and Invincible and the people on the vessels going down there.’41about the Falklands did Mrs Thatcher no harm, however, merely keeping the memory of her triumph before the electorate without the Tories having to boast about it. Labour knew the war was bad territory for them, and tried to keep off it. But two leading figures could not resist. First Denis Healey, in a speech in Birmingham, talked about Mrs Thatcher wrapping herself in the Union Jack and ‘glorying in slaughter’; he was obliged to apologise the next day, explaining that he should have said ‘glorying in conflict’. Then Neil Kinnock – Labour’s education spokesman – responded still more crudely on television to a heckler who shouted that at least Mrs Thatcher had guts. ‘And it’s a pity that people had to leave theirs on Goose Green in order to prove it,’ he retorted. Kinnock was publicly unrepentant; but he too was obliged to write to the families of the war dead to apologise.42 These wild charges only damaged Labour. There was no mileage in trying to denigrate Mrs Thatcher’s achievement in the Falklands – particularly since the opposition was supposed to have supported the war. Such carping merely confirmed her charge that Labour never had the guts to carry anything through.started and finished her campaign, as usual, in Finchley. Mrs Thatcher always appeared at her most modest and humble among her own people, where she was still the model constituency Member they had elected in 1959. In all her years as Tory leader and Prime Minister she never missed a constituency function if she could help it. Except when she was out of the country she still held her regular surgery every Friday evening, usually preceded by meetings with businessmen or a visit to a local school or hospital, and followed by supper with her constituency officers and perhaps a branch meeting. Her insistence on keeping these appointments made for a running battle with Number Ten, which always had more pressing calls on her time. She was deeply possessive about Finchley and was furious when press reports suggested that she might seek a safer seat in Gloucestershire. Finchley had been her political base for more than twenty years and she liked everything there to be as it always had been.well as Labour and the Alliance, she faced for the first time a phalanx of fringe candidates – not only the imperishable ‘Lord’ David Sutch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, but a Greenham Common peace campaigner; anti-motorway, anti-licensing and anti-censorship campaigners; and a ‘Belgrano Blood-hunger’ candidate (who came bottom with just thirteen votes). All these diversions delayed the declaration of her result until 2.30 a.m., long after the Conservatives’ national victory was confirmed. When the 326th Tory seat was formally declared, Alastair Burnet on ITN announced that ‘Mrs Thatcher is back in Downing Street’. ‘No, I’m not!’ she shouted furiously at the screen, ‘I’m still at Hendon Town Hall.’43 Eventually she secured a slightly increased majority over Labour, with the Alliance third and the rest nowhere:left almost immediately for Conservative Central Office, where she thanked the party workers and was photographed waving from a first-floor window with the architect of victory, Cecil Parkinson. She had won, on the face of it, an enormous victory. The eventual Conservative majority was 144 over all other parties: they held 397 seats in the new House (compared with 335 in the old) against Labour’s 205 and just 23 for the Alliance, 2 Scottish Nationalists, 2 Plaid Cymru, and 17 from Northern Ireland., however, the scale of her victory owed a great deal to the Alliance. Her hugely swollen majority actually rested on a lower aggregate vote, and a lower share of the vote, than she had won in 1979 – down from 43.9 to 42.4 per cent. Though it was rewarded with pitifully few seats, in terms of votes the Alliance ran Labour very hard for second place, winning 25.4 per cent to Labour’s 27.6 per cent – less than 700,000 votes behind. The effect of the Alliance surge, which nearly doubled the Liberal vote of 1979, was not, as the Tories had feared, to let Labour in but, on the contrary, to deliver the Government a majority out of all proportion to its entitlement. Behind the triumphalism, therefore, June 1983 was by no means the massive endorsement of Thatcherism that the Tories claimed. It was ‘manifestly less a victory for the Conservatives’, the Annual Register concluded, ‘than a catastrophe for the Labour Party’.44 Perhaps the most significant statistic to emerge from analysis of the result was that less than 40 per cent of trade-union members voted Labour (31 per cent voted Conservative and 29 per cent Alliance).45 What Mrs Thatcher had achieved since 1979 – with critical help from the Labour leadership itself, the SDP defectors, General Galtieri and the distorting electoral system – was to smash the old Labour party, leaving herself without the inconvenience of an effective opposition for as long as she remained in office.the second termthe second term secured and her personal authority unassailable, Mrs Thatcher now had an almost unprecedented political opportunity before her. Her opponents within the Tory party were conclusively routed. For the first time she was in a position to appoint her own Cabinet. Yet she made remarkably few changes. June 1983 largely confirmed the team that fought the election. There were, indeed, only three casualties. By far the most significant was Francis Pym. She had never wanted him as Foreign Secretary, but in April 1982 she had had little choice. Now she called him in the morning after the election and told him bluntly: ‘Francis, I want a new Foreign Secretary.’46 What she really wanted, as she grew more confident of her capacity to handle foreign policy herself, was a more amenable Foreign Secretary from her own wing of the party, preferably one without a traditional Foreign Office background. The man she had in mind was Cecil Parkinson, as his reward for masterminding the election. In the very moment of victory, however, at Central Office in the early hours of Friday morning, Parkinson confessed to her that he had been conducting a long-standing affair with his former secretary, who was expecting his child. She reluctantly concluded that he could not become Foreign Secretary with this incipient scandal hanging over him, but thought he would be less exposed in a less senior job. She sent him instead to Trade and Industry. With some misgiving she then gave the Foreign Office to Geoffrey Howe.the time she came to write her memoirs Lady Thatcher had persuaded herself that this was a mistake.47 At the Treasury Howe’s quiet determination had been invaluable both in riding the political storms and in stiffening her own resolve. At the Foreign Office, by contrast, his views – particularly towards Europe – increasingly diverged from hers, while his dogged diplomacy and air of patient reasonableness exasperated her as much as Pym’s had done. She also became convinced that Howe was ambitious for her job. Yet in truth it was an excellent appointment. For the whole of Mrs Thatcher’s second term, at summits and international negotiations, they made an effective combination on the global stage, each complementing the other’s qualities, while Howe put up heroically with being treated as her punchbag.hot tip to become the new Chancellor was Patrick Jenkin. But Mrs Thatcher now had the self-confidence to choose the more flamboyant Nigel Lawson. If Howe had been the perfect helmsman for the first term, Lawson’s slightly Regency style presented the right image of prosperity and expansion for the calmer waters of the second. This combination too worked well for the next four years, though Lawson was always more independent and self-confident than Howe had been.these two key appointments, the rest of the Cabinetmaking was largely a rearrangement of the pack. Willie Whitelaw left the Commons and the Home Office to become Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords. This was a position from which he could better exercise his non-departmental role as deputy Prime Minister; but it entailed the displacement of Lady Young, thus ending the short-lived experiment of a second woman in the Thatcher Cabinet. There was never another.’s replacement at the Home Office was one of Mrs Thatcher’s least successful appointments. Leon Brittan had done well as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and seemed to be a rising star. But he was at once too junior, too brainy and – it must be said – too Jewish to satisfy the Tory party’s expectations of a Home Secretary. He was never convincing in the job and was shifted after two years.was the new team. It was a measure of the change already wrought since 1979 that the Cabinet could no longer be usefully classified into ‘wets’ and ‘dries’. In the medium term the only likely threat to Mrs Thatcher’s dominance came from the undisguised ambition of Michael Heseltine.
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