Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (74 page)

The range of questions allowed Mrs Thatcher to convey her key points. On the ‘woman’ question, she inserted a comparison with Queen Elizabeth
I, without pushing it too vaingloriously far. On the unions, she sided with the majority against ‘the few destroyers’ and declared, ‘Someone’s got to tackle this problem.’ On the poverty trap, she argued that it should never pay people not to work. On capital punishment, she took advantage of the moment to reiterate her personal support for hanging, while explaining that it could not be party policy. On immigration, answering an immigrant worried about proposed tightening of the rules so that fiancés would not automatically be admitted, she maintained a tough position which made no concessions to the questioner and won big applause from the audience. No individual answer was strikingly new or unusual, but the overall impression was of a woman well in touch with the anxieties of ‘lower-middle’ England, and ready to do something about them. It was this England – the C2s whom Gordon Reece had cultivated so assiduously – that had really lost faith in Labour and was ready to turn. With them in mind, Mrs Thatcher published her last newspaper article of the campaign, entitled ‘The Britain I want’, in the
Sun.
⁷⁶
The
Sun
front-page headline on polling day was ‘Vote Tory This Time – It’s the Only Way to Stop the Rot’.

On the same day as
The Granada
500
, Mrs Thatcher gave the final Conservative election broadcast, the first in which she alone spoke. The hoarseness in her voice which was worrying her managers could be detected, but she looked fresh and elegant, indeed almost too immaculate, beside a bowl of daffodils. Her message was of a great country gone wrong, which it was not yet quite too late to put right. ‘In recent years,’ she said, ‘we haven’t been true to ourselves,’ but with courage, and a rejection of the socialism which was unnatural to Britain and (she mentioned the Soviet threat) menaced the whole world, the nation could recover: ‘What matters are your convictions.’ As if the tune from the patriotic hymn ‘I vow to thee, my country’ was playing in the background, she said, ‘there’s another Britain which may not make the daily news’ of ‘thoughtful people, oh, tantalisingly slow to act yet marvellously determined when they do’: ‘may this land of ours, which we love so much, find dignity and greatness and peace again.’
⁷⁷
In Downing Street, the broadcast seemed preposterous. ‘It was extraordinary,’ wrote Bernard Donoughue, ‘completely artificial, all sugary, an attempt by Mrs Thatcher to imitate the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.’
⁷⁸
Certainly the broadcast was stagy. But what the criticism misses is the genuineness behind it. As Mrs Thatcher put it in a speech the following day, quoting Victor Hugo without attribution, ‘there is one thing stronger than armies, and that is an idea whose time has come.’
⁷⁹
She believed that she had an idea and that its time had come, and therefore, as she told the closing press conference, the Tory campaign had been ‘all of a piece stemming … from our deep beliefs about society’.
⁸⁰

In the month after the election, Nigel Lawson gave a private interview. He said something so blindingly obvious that its importance tended to be neglected by many observers used to the politics of Harold Wilson: ‘A key to understanding Mrs Thatcher was that she actually said what she believed.’
⁸¹

At about the same time, the former Labour MP Brian Walden, by then a television interviewer and strong Thatcher admirer, offered his own private analysis of her campaign. He said that Gordon Reece had been right in his strategy ‘not to expose [her] to journalism but to the cameras’ because if the journalists had been more alert, they would, being mainly leftist, have done much more to oppose her. ‘The editors’, said Walden, ‘have simply not kept pace with Thatcherism’: ‘Mrs Thatcher was saying something
quite
different, but didn’t want to be seen to be
too
different … This election
was
about a woman who believes in inequality, passionately, who isn’t Keynesian, who is
not
worried about dole queues.’ In his view, if interviewers had wanted to find the truth, they should have asked her, ‘Mrs Thatcher, do you believe in a more unequal society?’
⁸²

For the practitioners, British general elections always end up in their constituencies. Mrs Thatcher went to Finchley to speak in an eve-of-poll rally on 2 May 1979. As they approached the Woodhouse School, Michael Dobbs, who was in the entourage, saw a young man step out of the crowd and punch Denis Thatcher in the stomach. Dobbs watched Denis stop and consider retaliation. ‘Then he braced his shoulders and went on. This showed amazing discipline. He knew that if he had hit back, he, not she, would have become the story.’
⁸³
Inside, Mrs Thatcher roused the troops. ‘The moral case’, she said, ‘is on the side of the free society’.
⁸⁴

The following day, Mrs Thatcher voted in Chelsea (for the extremely unThatcherite candidate, Nicholas Scott),
*
while Denis voted in Lamberhurst. Just before midnight, she and Denis arrived at Barnet town hall for the count. By this time, the early results made clear that she would be prime minister, but, with her usual combination of caution and a respect for form, she refused to claim victory until it had been arithmetically achieved, which meant 318 Conservative seats. Jim Callaghan was quicker to react: he telephoned No. 10 from his constituency in Cardiff at 3 a.m. and told his staff that Labour had lost and they should all vacate their offices by 3.30 that afternoon.
⁸⁵

In Finchley, the result was:

Her majority was nearly twice what it had been in October 1974.

The final national result gave the Conservatives 339 seats to Labour’s 269; there were twelve Ulster seats, eleven Liberal ones, two Scottish and two Welsh Nationalists. The Conservative overall majority was forty-three. The swing to the Tories was 5.1 per cent, the biggest swing either way since 1945. It was bigger in the south and midlands than in the north and Scotland, and notably bigger among C2s. The Conservative share of the vote was just under 44 per cent (13,897,690 votes). Among Labour’s losses was the seat of Shirley Williams, the party’s leading and most appealing woman. The only Conservative disaster of the night was the loss of Teddy Taylor’s seat in Glasgow Cathcart.

Mrs Thatcher drove to Central Office, arriving at about 4 a.m. She was still not admitting victory, but Michael Dobbs, who was in the car with her, noticed that, as they passed Buckingham Palace, the escort of two cars suddenly gained three more cars and a motorcycle escort. This, he considered, was ‘the moment of power’.
⁸⁶

In Smith Square, Mrs Thatcher told the press, ‘I feel a sense of change and an aura of calm,’ but still refused to claim victory. This only became certain at 2.45 p.m. A few minutes later, Mrs Thatcher drove to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands
*
with the Queen. ‘Good luck, Prime Minister,’ Alistair McAlpine shouted after her, as she left. ‘Don’t call me that yet,’ she said, with constitutional correctness.
⁸⁷

Margaret Thatcher arrived at Buckingham Palace shortly before 3 p.m. on 4 May 1979, accompanied by Denis. Jim Callaghan had left about an hour earlier. The first woman Prime Minister wore a blue outfit with a pleated skirt which Cynthia Crawford, her assistant who had helped her choose it, described as ‘very dainty’.
¹
Mrs Thatcher saw the Queen, and thus received the authority to take up office. Callaghan’s principal private secretary, Kenneth Stowe, who automatically continued to do the same job for the new Prime Minister, was waiting for her at the Palace as she came down the steps after her audience. He advised her to sit in the official car immediately behind the driver, rather than, as is more usual, on the other side of the back seats. This was to ensure that she could get out of the car at the door of 10 Downing Street without the waiting press and photographers seeing her legs first.
²

When the Thatchers arrived, to cheers from the huge crowd which, in those pre-security days, was allowed into Downing Street, a journalist asked her how she felt. Mrs Thatcher said that she was ‘very excited, very aware of the responsibilities.’ Emphasizing her idea of herself as a woman of conviction, she promised that she would ‘strive unceasingly to try to fulfil the trust and confidence that the British people have placed in me and the things in which I believe’. Then she quoted ‘some words of St Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” ’ These words (not, in fact, by St Francis, but by a nineteenth-century follower) had been supplied to her, at the very last minute, and to the chagrin of her private office,
³
by Ronnie Millar. They were to be used against her in later years by those who accused her of sowing more discord than ever. Even at the time, they seemed a little pious. Michael Dobbs, who was listening from the hall of No. 10 said: ‘I thought she’d gone mad.’
⁴
Mrs Thatcher half acknowledged the point in
her memoirs when she wrote that the overcoming of the forces of error, doubt and despair was bound to produce ‘some measure of discord’.
⁵
But her choice reflected the fact that it was the divisions of the nation, exposed by the Winter of Discontent, which caused the greatest public anguish. The new Prime Minister had to address them. Although she knew a fight might come, she was not spoiling for one.

Quoting Airey Neave, ‘whom we had hoped to bring here with us’, Mrs Thatcher said, ‘There is now work to be done,’ and made to go inside. But a reporter jumped in to ask whether she had any thoughts at this moment about Mrs Pankhurst, the leader of the Votes for Women campaigns before the First World War, and about her own father. Mrs Thatcher ignored Mrs Pankhurst and invoked Alfred Roberts: ‘I just owe almost everything to my own father … He brought me up to believe all the things I do believe … And it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election. Gentlemen, you are very kind, may I just go …’ and with that she pushed through the door to be greeted, as is customary, by the assembled staff, roughly seventy strong. Among the tiny group of party men accompanying her, expecting to take up political appointments, was Michael Dobbs. Looking at the ranks of career civil servants in the hall, he decided that ‘it was an uneven contest’.
⁶

The introductions completed, Ken Stowe led Mrs Thatcher to the Cabinet Room, where all the briefs, which he had compiled in his adjacent office, awaited. At the door, she turned to Stowe and asked him: ‘Ken, what do I do now?’ ‘You might want to speak to John Hunt [the Cabinet Secretary], Prime Minister,’ said Stowe. ‘You’ve got to form an administration.’
⁷

This little exchange was heartening for Stowe and his colleagues in the private office, and appeared to confirm Dobbs’s fears. The officials were relieved to find her turning to them for help. Mrs Thatcher had a temperamental and ideological suspicion of the Civil Service; her time at Education had made her angry about how officialdom could frustrate what she believed needed doing. In opposition, she had complained of the difficulty in ‘finding enough colleagues with the character and ability to stand up to the Civil Service’, and claimed that she had met with success only ‘by nearly killing herself to get on top of 3,000 [officials] at DES’.
⁸
Many expected that she would make radical changes in the machinery of government. Besides, the plots and dramas of the Lib–Lab Pact, involving a good deal of monkeying with the business of the House of Commons, had made bad blood between government and Opposition. Stowe, as the official charged with operating the pact, half expected to be punished by Mrs Thatcher when she arrived. In his first meeting with her the previous year, to brief her on the Civil List
(the system of parliamentary payments to support the cost of the monarchy), he thought that he had ‘never encountered someone before who was such a bad listener’, and yet when he sat in on the Opposition front-bench speech on the subject shortly afterwards in the House of Commons, ‘My jaw dropped as I heard my briefing coming back … She’d taken it all in.’
⁹
He knew she was formidable, and he did not expect her to be sympathetic.