Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (29 page)

But the tide was already running against the moderates. They could talk as much as they wanted; it was the institutions and groups under Khomeini’s sway that increasingly commanded real power in Iran. Jolted by the flood of criticism, Khomeini now decided it was time to push back on his plans for clerical rule. In July, in an acknowledgment of political realities, the beleaguered Bazargan accepted the appointment of four clerics to the provisional government.
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One part of the dual state established in the wake of the revolution’s triumph was now giving way to another. Back in 1917, Lenin had used the
soviets
to topple the moderate provisional government in postrevolutionary Russia and to impose his radical political agenda. Now Khomeini was using the
komitehs
and the other Islamist institutions to undercut Bazargan’s government and to give flesh to his theocratic vision.

Subsequent events underlined Bazargan’s powerlessness. He had shown little inclination to limit freedom of opinion. But in August, at Khomeini’s urging, the
government introduced a new set of restrictive press laws that banned criticism of the Islamic Republic.
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The office of the moderate left-wing newspaper
Ayandegan
, accused of taking money from Israel and SAVAK, was attacked by Hezbollah thugs; then the paper was shut down altogether. It was only the first. Dozens of other newspapers, including the two largest in Iran, were closed in the weeks that followed. Hezbollahis also staged raids on the headquarters of the Tudeh Party and the two main left-wing militia groups.
³²

The focus of political struggle now shifted to the constituent assembly. In August, Iranians voted for the seventy-three members of the Assembly of Experts, who were to be entrusted with the job of drawing up the constitution for the Islamic Republic.
³³
Fifty-five of those chosen were clerics. This was more than enough to dominate the proceedings; by now, after all, Khomeini effectively controlled all the key levers of power in the country, including the press. They convened on August 18. Khomeini, addressing the delegates, warned them that the constitution must be “100 percent Islamic.” Khomeini’s old rival Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who was now becoming one of the foremost critics of the new order, had urged postponement, arguing that it would be better to stick to the 1906 constitution for the moment. But he was easily overridden. Public debate continued for the next few weeks. But that was enough to show Khomeini and his entourage that there was no serious opposition to their plans for a state run according to the principles that he had mapped out in
Islamic Government
. So the clerical party proceeded to draw up a constitution that enshrined Khomeini’s
velayat-e faqih
, the “guardianship of the jurist,” as its guiding principle.
³⁴

In 1918, Lenin had sent in the troops to dissolve a democratically elected constituent assembly that didn’t follow his plan for Communist government. Ayatollah Khomeini, by contrast, succeeded in controlling the drafting process from within. From now on it was the clerics who shared his vision who would define the ground rules for the state to come. Still, though the momentum was clearly on Khomeini’s side, the new order was not yet complete. A few significant pockets of opposition remained. But events would soon come to the clerics’ aid.

T
he labor unrest of the Winter of Discontent gradually ebbed as wage deals were made to placate the unions. But the damage had been done. Inflation was starting to rise again. Prime Minister Callaghan’s reputation as the man who could bring the unions to reason had been demolished. And now a new threat arose to his government from an entirely different quarter.

Among the many other problems facing the United Kingdom during the 1970s was a sharp rise in nationalist sentiment in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. In 1978, Callaghan tried to mollify the advocates of Scottish independence by promising them greater powers of self-administration, to be vested in a Scottish legislature. The act was supposed to be confirmed by a referendum, which was held on March 1, 1979. But earlier, as the law creating the new legislature passed through the British Parliament, a Labour parliamentarian opposed to the devolution of powers had tacked on a condition setting a higher bar for approval. As a result, the referendum didn’t pass, even though most of the Scots who participated had voted yes. Angry Scottish nationalists in the House of Commons, who felt they’d been betrayed by Callaghan’s government, vowed revenge. There were only a few of them in the House of Commons, but the government was by now so unpopular, and enjoyed such a perilous margin of support, that they felt they could do some real damage. They tabled a no-confidence vote.

The leader of the opposition immediately spotted an opportunity to bring down the government. Ironically, Margaret Thatcher and her fellow Conservatives were
fiercely opposed to Scottish devolution. But this was a classic case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Liberal Party, which had lent its support to Callaghan’s government for a while, had followed the changing electoral winds and shifted back to opposition. The Labour Party had also lost two by-elections on March 1, shaving its majority even further. Thatcher decided that it was worth the gamble. She put down her own no-confidence motion, which took precedence over the one initiated by the Scottish nationalists, on March 28. If the motion passed, Callaghan would be forced to call a fresh election.

The day of the vote has been described as one of the most dramatic moments in British parliamentary history. The catering staff was on strike, so members of Parliament had to bring their lunches with them. The party whips, charged with marshaling the votes, engaged in frantic maneuvering. One Labour member was dying of a heart ailment in a Yorkshire hospital, and for a while the prime minister considered bringing him down to Westminster in an ambulance; Callaghan ultimately decided against it. Thatcher struggled to maintain her composure. As the vote count proceeded, she and her Tory colleagues agonized over the outcome. For a while they thought that they had lost. But then the tally was announced: Ayes, 311. Noes, 310. It was the first no-confidence motion lost by a British government since 1925. At that moment, as Thatcher rather extravagantly recalls in her memoirs, “James Callaghan’s Labour Government, the last Labour Government and perhaps the last ever, fell from office.” In a sense she was right. Labour would take the helm of government again, many years later, but by then it would be a party completely transformed—not least by the success of the counterrevolution she was about to launch.

W
hen the election finally came, Norman Tebbit was ready for it. By the spring of 1979 he had already served two terms in Parliament. A staunch Tory, Tebbit represented the London suburb of Chingford. This was not the sort of affluent, traditionally minded area that would have counted as typical Conservative territory. Tebbit’s voters were what he described as “aspirational working class”— skilled laborers who were skeptical about the leaders of their own unions and increasingly viewed high taxes, inflation, and government regulation as curbs on their upward mobility. On top of that, many of them commuted to jobs in London, so they had been hit hard by the transportation strikes of the Winter of Discontent— “a game changer,” Tebbit calls it, that aggravated an already widespread sense of anger at the disproportionate power of the unions. His voters also had plenty of firsthand stories to tell about abuses of power by union leaders (who, for example, might bring in outside workers during strike votes to ensure that they got the result
they wanted). As Tebbit canvassed his district, he uncovered an intense sense of frustration with the symptoms of British decline. His tough rhetoric on the need to rein in organized labor resonated with voters.

For Tebbit, there was no mistaking the signs of a building desire for drastic change among his constituents, and Margaret Thatcher, he believed, was the perfect politician to take advantage of such sentiments. Despite his relatively low position in the Conservative Party’s parliamentary ranks, Tebbit was uniquely qualified to make such an assessment. Long known within the party as a staunch right-winger, Tebbit had joined forces with Thatcher early on. In 1975 he had served as a member of the team (led by the brilliant political strategist Airey Neave) that had engineered her election as leader of the party. Since then Tebbit had belonged to a small group that helped to prep Thatcher for parliamentary debates, a job that gave him ample insight into her way of doing things. It was his immense respect for her that yielded one of the best laugh lines in his 1979 stump speech. Thatcher was one of the most talented leaders in Westminster, he assured his election-rally listeners. As a matter of fact, he would add, “She’s the best man among them.”
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The election of 1979 marked a watershed moment in British politics. This is not to say that everything about the vote was black-and-white. It is, for example, indeed true—as many contemporary historians are wont to point out—that Thatcher was careful to avoid making her proposals sound too radical and that the Conservative manifesto (the party program) included little in the way of detailed policies for change. It is true that she might have faced a much different political landscape if Callaghan had called for a general election back in the early fall of 1978 (as some of his advisers had counseled), before the Winter of Discontent had left British voters conclusively disgusted with the direction of the country. And it is even true that her personal popularity rating remained well below Callaghan’s right up to the end.

Yet despite these qualifiers, there can be no mistaking the fact that Thatcher used the election of 1979 to offer a fundamental break with the way the country had been governed. Voters saw that she was offering a dramatically new approach to dealing with the unions, and it was also clear to them that she was proposing a new set of policies on management of the economy. She pledged change to an electorate that was deeply disillusioned with the status quo—and she did this less through election documents than through her own speeches and campaign appearances. Along the way she also departed decisively from the received wisdom on British electioneering. The message here was, at least in part, the medium—Margaret Thatcher herself.

Conservative leaders before her had focused their campaigns on the classic Tory electorate—those members of the middle and upper classes living in the more
affluent parts of the country. Thatcher and her advisers, however, set out to target voter categories long neglected by Conservative campaigners. She made a point, for example, of specifically wooing skilled laborers of the type that Tebbit was courting in his home district. Known in the mysterious argot of British pollsters as “C2s,” these workers had long been considered automatic Labour voters. Thatcher disagreed. She believed that many union members resented the undemocratic ways and the cynical tactics of their leaders, and she surmised that many working-class voters would be correspondingly receptive to her calls for greater constraints on union power. She also felt that upwardly mobile workers would welcome her proposals to allow the tenants of public housing to buy their homes. She reasoned that many C2s were also tired of inflation and runaway spending. This was why she staged her first big election rally in the traditional Labour stronghold of Cardiff in Wales. “Labour, the self proclaimed party of compassion, has betrayed those for whom it promised to care,” she told her audience. “So in this campaign we’ll not only extend and consolidate Conservative support, we’ll carry the fight right into what were once the castles and strongholds of Labour, and in many places we’ll win.”
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Her campaign tactics were equally novel. She shunned the traditional Conservative support network in the broadsheet newspapers and favored instead the tabloids and daytime TV—an approach that allowed her to tap into a new electorate in the embattled middle classes who felt threatened by the growing power of the state and the unions and also allowed her to avoid probing questions about policy specifics. She made aggressive use of television, whereupon she was accused (comical as it might seem to a modern audience) of the egregious sin of importing “American-style campaigning” to Britain. She proved very effective at exploiting the medium—especially once her adviser Gordon Reece prevailed upon her to lower her voice, an adjustment that lent her gravitas and authority.

This might seem trivial, but it was especially important in light of Callaghan’s magisterial efforts to use her gender against her. It was not so much what he said as how he said it; he was a master at sardonically implying that whatever the leader of the opposition said was made even sillier by the fact that it was being said by a woman. She countered this by doing what she had always done to beat so many male competitors before: she worked harder, sleeping just a few hours a night as she relentlessly studied her briefing papers and learned her lines. At the same time, she turned her gender to her own advantage by slipping, when she chose to, into the role of a commonsensical housewife, hoisting sample grocery bags to drive home the corrosive effects of runaway prices on the ordinary household budget. Nor was
she afraid to give interviews to women’s magazines in which she shared recipes and stressed her fussy mastery of good housekeeping. Not only did this help to draw in female voters, but it also underlined her point that the economic remedies she was proposing were less a matter of abstract theories than of the everyday ethos of thrift and moderation on which many British households prided themselves.

Thatcher and her team found other ways to make the argument that Britain needed a change of course. In 1978, casting around for a new approach to her campaign, she had hired two young budding advertisers, Maurice Saatchi and Charles Saatchi, to come up with fresh ideas. They produced the famous poster depicting a long queue of people winding around the slogan LABOUR ISN’T WORKING. Once you saw the image, it was a hard thought to get out of your head. The tagline nicely bundled several strands of disappointment. Callaghan’s economic policies were supposed to be aimed at producing full employment, but jobs were becoming scarce. He claimed that his close ties with the unions were supposed to enable good labor relations—but the Winter of Discontent showed that his government had delivered only chaos and dysfunction.