23,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The year is 1987. Having made history by becoming the UK's first female Prime Minister and then driving out the most left-wing manifesto the country has ever seen, Margaret Thatcher faces a climactic third election campaign. Her eight years in power have been pivotal in guiding the UK back onto the path towards prosperity, and as he surveys the scene, David Young, Secretary of State for Employment, can see the fragile seeds of Thatcher's government beginning to grow. But this third election threatens to destroy it all, plunging the nation back into the chaos of union militancy, the three-day week and the Winter of Discontent, when Britain ground to a halt and even the bodies lay unburied. Drafted in to run the campaign, Young knows one thing for certain: the country cannot afford to go back. Written in lucid, powerful prose, Young's remarkable diary of the election that set the UK on course for the next thirty years invites readers into the room with the key players, including the Prime Minister herself. Full of gut-wrenching claustrophobia, tension and paranoia, Inside Thatcher's Last Election reveals the personality clashes that threatened to derail the campaign from the beginning and presents a very different woman from the Thatcher we think we know. For those in the eye of the storm, there was little doubt about what was at stake: the future of Britain's enterprise.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
i
iii
To Lita, my wife and partner of sixty-five years, without whom none of the adventures in my life would have happened nor would life have been so enjoyable.iv
CONTENTS
FOREWORDBY CHARLES MOORE
Composing the final volume of my authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, I had the great benefit of reading David Young’s diary of the 1987 general election, in which he played such a key role. At that stage it was unpublished, so David was giving me a head-start. Now, backed up by a crisp introduction and a reflective postscript, it can be studied by scholars and read with enjoyment by all.
That election was a very strange one. It was the third victory on the trot for the Conservatives under Mrs Thatcher, and there was never strong rational evidence that the Labour Party, only just beginning to recover from its years of division and weak leftist leadership, was at all likely to overturn the vast majority she had won for her party in 1983.
Somehow or other, it did not feel quite like that at the time. The Tories were very jumpy – none more so than Mrs Thatcher herself. Rightly, she never took election results for granted. Wrongly, she placed too little trust in her top lieutenants on viiithat occasion. Faction-fighting and disharmony were the consequence, although in truth they did not trouble the actual voters much.
It is probably the case that Mrs Thatcher was feeling the strain of having been so long in office. ‘The tiredness; ah, the tiredness,’ recalls Lord Young in relation to himself. It applied to her too. As Willie Whitelaw, Thatcher’s former deputy, remarked at the time: ‘There’s a woman who is not going to fight another general election.’ Although she triumphed at the poll, she perhaps had some slight foretaste of the end which came – without consultation with the electorate – more than three years later. She felt insecure.
Lord Young was perfectly placed as a diarist of that time. As one of the most important managers of the campaign, he was right in the thick of it. As a non-career politician, however, he could observe proceedings with a degree of detachment which is denied to those fighting to get re-elected themselves. He tells his side of the story clearly, entertainingly and frankly – and is not frightened of admitting to moments of panic or bad temper. He felt vindicated by the result but does not conceal that it was a bumpy ride.
David Young did not disappear. As well as experiencing much business success after leaving office, he continued to serve. When David Cameron became Prime Minister, he gave Lord Young an office in 10 Downing Street, so he could advise him about reviving the entrepreneurism which he has done so much to encourage throughout his working life. As the most ixbusiness-minded practitioner of Thatcherism in politics, David Young has a unique perspective. The exciting tale told in this book takes the reader into the eye of the storm.
Charles Moore
February 2021x
INTRODUCTION
In her time Margaret Thatcher won three elections. The first was the election that broke the mould and saw a woman as Prime Minister for the very first time in our history. But Thatcher was far more than the first woman to lead the Conservative Party, remarkable as that may be. She was a woman with a purpose in life, and that was to restore the economy of the United Kingdom. But even more than that, she wanted to restore the self-respect of the individual, as well as of the nation, and to return to the prudent shop-keeping skills she had learnt at her father’s dinner table, over their shop in Grantham.
But at the beginning it was not easy. The country had barely recovered from the 1978–79 Winter of Discontent, when all the public sector unions had been on strike for many weeks and the change from a Labour government to a Conservative one hardly improved their tempers. Her first Cabinet was still an uneasy balance between the ‘wets’ and the ‘dries’: her supporters were not in the majority and she was learning on the job. The economy was not going well, and the nationalised industries were proving a disastrous drain upon the government. After exchange xiicontrol was finally abolished the pound shot to record heights, putting further strain on the economy. Unemployment continued its relentless advance. The country continued to be beset by strikes, and when she gave way, once again, to the miners’ union headed by Scargill, I nearly resigned on the spot. But she was far cleverer and more far-seeing than was I!
Murmurings and mutterings began in the back benches and occasional coded speeches were being made when she was rescued by General Galtieri. His invasion of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the response that she led restored the island to the Commonwealth. It was a decision she alone made – and, in turn, it made her.
It is difficult now, all these years later, to remember the shot in the arm that the Falklands gave to the entire nation. For decades we had been in decline: a once great nation looking for a role, we were still smarting from the debacle of the Suez Crisis, when the United States, once our junior cousins, told us to go home and start behaving ourselves. Now, when part of our Commonwealth had been invaded by a dictator, we had reached out over 8,000 miles with our Armed Forces and fought and died to free our people.
Suddenly, we were back again. She had put the Great back into Britain, and she became the Iron Lady – a title she never lost. For the first time she had control of the party and could begin to shape the government as she desired.
The second election crushed the most left-wing manifesto the country had yet seen; a manifesto that afterwards was described as the longest suicide note in history. She won the election so xiiidecisively, with a majority of 144, that there was not to be another hard-left manifesto from the Labour Party for thirty-four years, until 2017 (and even then, the Conservative Party, with indifferent leadership supported by a completely forgettable manifesto, showed that there was still no place in British public life for hard-left policies).
A great deal happened over the four years before the third election in 1987. The stranglehold the trade unions had held over the British economy for the post-war decades was finally relaxed by the simple expedient of giving their membership a democratic and secret vote before any decision to strike.
The third, the only election in which I have played any part in my life, was one which I believe consolidated the course of the nation until today. They say that distance lends enchantment, yet after many decades I can still feel the sheer horror of the last weeks of that election and what would have happened to all we had done over the previous eight years if we had lost.
To understand why I feel this way, you have to go back to the first election I ever remember: the 1945 post-war election. I am not sure whether I am a member or not of the wartime generation. I was thirteen when the war ended, but young people grew up very quickly in those days, as we lived in the centre of London, and so the Blitz, the V1s and the V2s were no strangers.
I was an enthusiastic supporter of the first post-war Labour government. It seemed to me, in those days of innocence, that it was entirely logical to plan resources so they may be put to best use for the nation, to use taxation as a means of redistribution, to eliminate inequalities and to enable workers to have a say in xivthe direction of the business that employed them through their union.
I left school at sixteen to work in a solicitors’ office in the City, and over the next half a dozen years I not only learnt a little law and became a solicitor but also had the scales stripped from my eyes. What I saw evolve was not a world of greater equality but a world of greater regulation. Everything, almost everything in life, required the consent of some authority or other. There was even a time when you could not spend more than £5 on home decoration without a licence.
The government began a great programme of nationalisation of all of our run-down industries, and with every industry they nationalised they increased the burden on the exchequer. I had little concept of taxation at that time, but in years to come I realised that the confiscatory level of taxation that would be justified at a time of all-out war was simply carried on in the days of peace.
The years passed, and to the mild surprise of my firm I duly qualified, married and realised I did not enjoy the law. I was offered a job in Great Universal Stores (GUS), the largest mail-order and retail firm of the day, and after a year or so I became PA to the chairman, Sir Isaac Wolfson. Before long I was engaged in buying a medium-sized firm a week. It was not as if this required any ability to negotiate – they would queue up to be sold and the work entailed was merely, would they fit in, if so where and what should we offer.
After a while I realised why the queue was so long. Taxation on earned income reached 83 per cent very quickly and was then xv98 per cent on interest and dividends, so the black economy flourished. There was no capital gains tax, yet death duties were cripplingly high, and the death of a large shareholder in a private company would put the very company’s existence in peril.
Over the next decade or two a large part of our economy, the Mittelstand, simply disappeared and was absorbed into larger companies, and it only made sense to run a small firm for the living expenses you could draw from it. More and more, you would come across ‘lifestyle’ companies, where the owners would play golf or go fishing whenever they wanted, as it was simply not worth putting in more effort when any additional reward would be taken away in tax.
Even in larger businesses there was a limit to the effort management would put in since their take-home pay was severely limited by tax. In truth, their main interest was getting shares in the company they worked for, and when they reached the top ensuring that the company would be taken over so they could cash in.
I realised only too well during those years how taxation could shape and cripple an economy. Yet the Conservative Party, whenever it was their time in office, changed little and left the economy largely unreformed by the time they lost office. Indeed I, who had little interest in politics, felt that their only ambition lay in delaying, rather than stopping, an eventual socialist society.
By the early ’60s I had left my employment and gone on my own. Why did I do so? Well, partly for the challenge – I was probably constitutionally unfit to work for anybody – and xvipartly to create the opportunity to maybe make some capital. I built distribution estates at the junctions of the new motorway networks that were then being built, founded a plant-hire and civil engineering business and by 1970 had sold out to Town and City Properties, the second largest property company of the day.
The ’70s was a decade seared in the memories of all who worked through it. For me, the secondary banking crisis ensured that I had to start all over again, which I did through a joint venture with Manufacturers Hanover Trust, a leading New York bank, to engage in international property lending.
I was briefly enamoured with Ted Heath, the very first British politician I had heard who articulated the need for enterprise but who, alas, retracted at the first hint of opposition once in power and retreated to his comfort zone in a corporatist society.1 But the real problem of the government did not lie with politicians but with the unequal balance of power that was enjoyed by the trade unions over employers and even the government themselves.
Even in my early years, when I worked for GUS and was briefly responsible for all the company’s trade union negotiations, I realised the nature of many of these discussions. Our main union was the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers, the shopworkers’ union, and we would meet and quickly agree a few pence an hour increase, and then they would ask us to stay on for some beer and sandwiches for a couple of xviihours, so they could impress their membership with how hard they had to work to gain an agreement. Since the leadership of the unions were invariably very left wing, they saw that their responsibility was to redress the imbalances of society, and the source of their authority with the membership was their ability to gain more money for their members, irrespective of the health of the employer. Indeed, the post-war Labour government had added many statutory protections to the unions, which future governments of either party did not take away.
This reached a peak during the early years of the ’70s, when the unfortunate combination of the oil-price rise, which followed the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, and substantially increased union militancy left Ted Heath with no alternative but to introduce a three-day week. We were all allocated three days each week when we could work. A year later, when the statistics were finally published, productivity was shown to have actually increased over this period, which was a fitting commentary on just how inefficient our economy had become. Eventually, in desperation, Heath called an election to decide who should run the country: the government or the unions.
Unfortunately for him, the country decided that he should not, and a surprised Harold Wilson was unexpectedly returned to office, without any clear idea of what to do nor how to restore the increasingly fragile economy. The government was rapidly running out of money and the economy, overtaxed and over-regulated, was beset by strikes. Instead of the number of strikes reducing with the change to a far more sympathetic government, the very political, left-wing leadership of the Trade Union xviiiCongress saw this as their opportunity and applied immediate and increasing pressure upon the government.
The number of strikes continued to increase as the economy continued to decline, and by 1975 the government had completely run out of money and was forced to ask the IMF for a loan. We were now well and truly the sick man of Europe and even my at times limitless optimism was subdued – my wife and I even toyed with the idea of emigration. However, a short trip to Boston, where we hit the school bussing riots, quickly cured us of the idea.
By then, such was the desperate state of the nation that Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the Conservatives. It is difficult now to convey the shock and surprise of the Conservative Party, of all parties, choosing a woman leader: the first not only in the UK but of a major country in Europe as well.
I, by now, was completely disenchanted with British politics, but slowly it became apparent that the Conservatives were on their way to becoming a very different party when I heard Sir Keith Joseph2 make speeches about the need for an enterprise economy. At that time I was still bruised by Ted Heath’s sudden conversion to corporatism, but after a while I thought I should take the party at face value. I went to see Joseph after I first met him when he was a guest of honour at a dinner I chaired, and I so agreed with his speech that I volunteered to work for him on the spot and began to work for him. I became a director of xixthe Centre for Policy Studies, the free market think tank, where we were all taken with the idea of monetarism: the control of money supply advocated by Prof. Friedman.
In the meantime, strikes continued unabated. The economy continued in freefall and Harold Wilson retired and was replaced by Jim Callaghan. By the autumn of 1978 we thought things could not possibly get any worse, but they did. All the public sector unions came out on strike in what came to be known as the ‘Winter of Discontent’, when for six full weeks everything closed and even the bodies lay unburied. That winter, some American friends rang and tentatively enquired whether they could organise some food parcels for us! At the height of the strike, Keith Joseph came to dinner and I agreed that when the Conservatives won the next election, I would give up my business interests and take two years off as a volunteer to work for him in the next government.
The strike eventually petered out and the government tried to pick up what was left of the economy. I always had extensive outside interests, including as the chair of British ORT, a branch of a worldwide Jewish vocational training organisation. I had asked Mrs Thatcher to come to speak at our yearly lunch. It was the first time we had met, and her speech was electrifying, saying all the right things about the need for an enterprise economy. After she left, a number of guests came up to me and said wistfully, ‘If only…’
The election duly took place, and the Conservatives were declared winners with a majority of forty-three seats. Keith Joseph entered the Cabinet and became Secretary of State for Industry, xxand I was his first appointment on his first day of office when I was duly made his special adviser. At that time there were only four other special advisers in the whole of government, and I suspect I increased the average age by many years.
I only realised it years later, but Keith put me through a very tough training programme. I was given an assistant secretary’s office with all the standard equipment: a desk, three chairs, a hatstand, a carpet square and a dictation machine with instructions how to send the tapes to the typing pool. I reported to a deputy secretary and did not see Keith once during the first three months, and after that only occasionally, but I learnt the hard way how to navigate my way through the mysteries of the civil service. After a year, Keith must have thought I was sufficiently house trained, and I moved up to the top floor.
The biggest mystery of all was the way that the nationalised industries were run. They all went through an annual cycle of preparing budgets and targets, which they all invariably missed. If they lost too much, over too long a period, the chairman was duly sacked and sent to the House of Lords! The biggest problem of all was that when they predictably lost money, they applied to the Treasury for more, but at each Budget, the Chancellor, faced with the choice between the industries and pensions, thought of the next election and inevitably ignored the industries. As a result, all were under-resourced; being nationalised, they could not go to the market for funds, since that was more expensive than issuing government bonds. Despite all this, people still call for nationalising industries to this day.
I was busily engaged with preparations for the eventual xxiprivatisation of British Telecom when I received a visit from officials from the small firms department. They told me that for the previous twenty years there been an annual decline in the number of small firms and that they were now down to under 650,000 firms in the country. I could well believe them, remembering my time with GUS, and I started to devise the first of the programmes designed to help small firms. But we were the wrong department to help people start working for themselves, as I was told quite firmly that that was the province of the Employment Secretary.
After about eighteen months, by which time I had become properly established in the industry department, Keith moved to become Education Secretary and Patrick Jenkins became the new Secretary of State. He asked me to continue as his special adviser, while a few weeks later Keith asked me if I could advise him as well, and for a time I did both. However, there were dark clouds on the horizon, for unemployment had started to rise and was becoming a serious political issue.
In the meantime, Norman Tebbit,3 with whom I had developed a good working relationship when he had been the minister of state in the industry department, had been promoted to Employment Secretary. Norman was one of a number of those shadow ministers I had taken to Paris to see the ORT schools and at the time had been very impressed by what I had seen. He has a gift for expressing ideas and concepts in language that people not only understand but adopt. He was great to work for, for he would xxiidelegate responsibility, trust his subordinates and back them no matter what the outcome. More than that, he made it all great fun.
Around this same period, the chairman of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), which was under the employment department and by far the largest government agency dealing with all the unemployment and training matters, retired, and I put my cap in the ring. I was appointed, and at the beginning of ’82 I became chairman. Over the next two years, I moved the focus of the commission, in addition to all the retraining, to helping the unemployed to start to work for themselves or start their own businesses.
Within months of the ’79 election, the government began to take steps, tentative at first, to deal with the continual strikes and the unbalanced advantages that trade unions had in law. The Employment Act 1980 introduced the idea of secret ballots, if only for the election of union officials; removed immunity from the secondary action; restricted lawful picketing; and introduced the first limits on the closed shop.
This did not do much to reduce the incidence of strikes, so in 1982 the second Employment Act continued the process by removing the legal immunities which trade unions had enjoyed; outlawing political strikes; and further reducing secondary action. Although the cumulative effect of both acts was to further reduce strikes, they were still a great drain on the economy.
The first really important steps towards the restoration of an enterprise economy were taken by Geoffrey Howe4 as Chancellor xxiiiin 1980, reducing the top rate of tax from 83 per cent to 60 per cent and cutting the basic rate of tax from 33 per cent to 30 per cent. Taxes were still far too high, but further reductions would have to wait for a few more years, until the economy improved.
In the midst of all of this the government called a new election. Now I was a full-time civil servant and under strict instruction not to say or do anything that could affect the election. Unemployment was becoming one of the big issues of this election, and we took steps to ensure that no officials said anything and that if there were any enquiries about unemployment, national or local, it was dealt with centrally.
As I was under instructions to say or do absolutely nothing, I went down to the West Country and had a few days fishing. Michael Foot, the leader of the Labour Party, produced his infamous manifesto, and when the results were in the government had won its landslide majority.
After the election I went back to the MSC, and, painfully, we tried to slow the rise in unemployment. That was more easily said than done. Our industries, run down during the war years, had been deprived of sufficient capital to modernise, and, anyway, post-war planning, which would put new nationalised industry plants in the centres of high unemployment rather than where they would be most efficient, served to ensure that they would not be able to compete with all the rebuilt industries of Europe and the fast-upcoming Japan and Far East.
Finally, in the summer of 1984, the Prime Minister invited me to join the Cabinet as Minister Without Portfolio, with responsibility for employment measures. We were able to start a xxivnumber of programmes, helping, for example, the tourism and hostelry industries, but it wasn’t until the following year, when I became Secretary of State for Employment, that I was able to employ a number of measures which began to make a real difference.
Amongst them was the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, a very simple system whereby, in essence, if someone unemployed wanted to go and work for themselves and could produce £1,000, we would agree to pay them unemployment benefit for a year while he or she set up their new firm. Over the next few years 350,000 new firms started under this scheme and, in time, two even made the FTSE 100.
But we still had much to do to restore a proper balance between companies and their trade unions. So, in 1984, the Trade Union Act introduced secret pre-strike ballots and an apparently innocent requirement that a trade union could only start industrial action if the action had been approved by a simple majority of the workers in a secret ballot not more than four weeks before any action. We also ensured that all voting members of the union’s executive committee were directly elected by secret ballot at least once in every five years.
The results were spectacular. The trade unions found, to their dismay, that it was not that easy to persuade their members to go out on strike and jeopardise their own employment. Conversely, employers who were faced with a positive strike vote took the union demands seriously, particularly as they were likely to be more temperate in order to gain a positive vote. No more were there pithead ballots and ridiculous or excessive demands made xxvin order to simply create strife. A strike was a serious matter and over the next year or two the number of strikes dropped precipitously until we were experiencing the lowest level of strikes since the war and the economy as a whole started to grow.
But while all this was positive and boded well for the future, we were approaching an election, and Labour had a new leader in Neil Kinnock. Under his leadership, the party, apparently modernised and certainly using up-to-date marketing techniques in presentation, was fundamentally just as left-wing as it had been under Michael Foot, only it was repackaged in a more subtle and contemporary manner.
Their proposals on industrial action, for example, gave members the right to have secret ballots on decisions relating to strikes, but not before any strike could take place, meaning we could see ways in which the old mayhem would return. Then they wanted to reverse all the income tax cuts we had introduced over the previous eight years and to go further with the introduction of a wealth tax on top. Instead of promising nationalisation, a word much discredited by the performance of the nationalised industries, they were promising ‘social’ ownership by a variety of means and to take a socially owned stake in high-tech industries, as well as social ownership of all basic utilities, including the 49 per cent of British Telecom now held in private hands.
Unemployment was no longer the big political issue. Although it was still far too high, it was now slowly going down, and all the polls showed that people thought the government was now dealing with the issue. In October, the Chancellor xxviintroduced a massive deregulation of the City, which quickly became known as the ‘Big Bang’ and in time led to London regaining its position as the global financial centre.
So, as we surveyed the scene at the beginning of 1987, we could see that the seeds of all that we had done over the previous eight years were beginning to grow; on the other hand, they were far too young to come out of the greenhouse.
Winning three elections in a row would always be a challenge, for by the time of the third election, the government is largely defending its past actions, while the opposition is free to promise the world. The spectacular victory we had enjoyed in 1982 was partially due to the personal glory Margaret enjoyed as a result of Falklands and partially because of the particularly inept campaign run by Labour. By 1987, though, the Falklands bounce had quite dissipated; much of what we had done was still in its early stages; and this time we were faced by a much more attractive opposition, who could well run a much better campaign than could we.
From my own point of view, I had spent the past eight years taking time out of my normal life, and I could see the beginnings of an enterprise society. All the things I had talked about with Keith in the early days were now possible. Yet, as pleased as I was with the beginning, it was only a beginning. When I listened to what Labour were saying, to what they were promising, I realised that it was far easier to undo something than to create it in the first place. I began to worry that if we did not win this third election, much of what we had done would be undone and all would have been wasted. xxvii
Some of the principal players who will appear in the pages ahead are no longer around or have retired from public life. They include Peter Morrison. When I first became a special adviser, I reported to Peter, who was a larger-than-life character, the parliamentary undersecretary of state and therefore the junior minister in the department. He came from a great political family: his father had been a fabled chairman of the 1922 Committee, while his brother Charles was a rather wet backbencher. Peter, in contrast, was not only a ‘dry’ but had been one of the very first to recognise the potential in Margaret and had worked for her from the beginning of her leadership campaign. He was a devil for detail and delved deep into the workings of the department. It was he who coined the term ‘Martian’ for civil servants, for he always asserted that they came from another world. At the beginning he was more than unpopular and stories about him were legion. Before he moved on, he became one of the most loved of ministers. He went on to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and ended his political career as the Prime Minister’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS) at the time of her fall.5
Howell James also looms large in my tale. In my early days as a minister, I was unhappy with my press. The reasons are now long forgotten, but Tim Bell suggested that I meet with Howell, who had just left TV-am, working, as he put it, for Roland the Rat. I took him on at our first meeting. Howell’s advice transformed my relationship with the media in weeks. He came with xxviiime to Employment, where he became special adviser. Some months after the election, he was stolen away from me by the BBC, where he became the director of corporate affairs. He has an ability to get on with people from all walks of life: civil servants, politicians, business people and the media. Born with a highly developed instinct for politics, time after time he would gently point out to me where I was about to blunder and steer me in the right direction. We were to work together again in later years.
Tim Bell was introduced to me by Norman Tebbit during my MSC days. He worked for the Saatchis during their early years, but by 1987 he felt that his contributions to the company were not being recognised and he left and went on his own. That was the equivalent of a declaration of war, and from then onwards the Saatchi brothers refused to work with him. This gave us immense problems, for he had worked with Margaret during all her elections and had earned and retained her trust as few others had – with good cause, for I know of no one else who can so quickly get to the heart of a situation and suggest a way forward.
It is difficult to recreate the sense of frenetic activity of daily life during a general election. There is a sense of destiny, that the events of the next few weeks really matter in the life of the nation – and in your life, too. As a result, there is the deeply ingrained pessimistic belief in every word of the opposition’s claims and a tendency to discount all your own good news. Then there is the tiredness; ah, the tiredness. Day after day, from before seven in the morning until the early hours of the next xxixday and then starting all over again, for week after week. The whole time driven by the belief that we could lose and that all we had accomplished in the past few years would be lost. I say all this not to assert it as true, but to give some indication of the sheer pressure and stark terror that those weeks held for all the players.
In times like these we are not our normal selves. I know that I was not. The niceties of civilised life dissolve under unnatural pressures. I now blush at the way I then behaved. But I suspect that I would have behaved exactly the same if I had ever found myself in similar circumstances.
As it turned out, by the time of the 1992 election I was a spectator again. I am writing these words with all the advantages of hindsight, a gift that I have successfully practised all my life. The words of my diary that follow are those I dictated at the end of each day, when I was tired and fearful of the future, now over thirty-three years ago. This in no way purports to be a complete history of that time. Rather, it is a tale of some of the players and how we coped under the day-to-day stresses and strains of an election around one of the most important political figures of the past century. It is said that no man remains a hero to his own valet. I worked for Margaret Thatcher, either directly or indirectly, for a decade. She remains a hero to this very day. But she is also a very human hero.
So much has changed over the ensuing years that it is not easy to think back and put yourself in the same frame of mind, in that far more innocent age before social media and all the horror that that is wreaking upon the quality of life today. Yet xxxwhat happened over those few weeks of the election laid the foundations for the decades to come. It ensured that when the Conservative government eventually lost an election, it would be marked by a change in personalities rather than policies.
But that was a long way ahead.
1 Corporatism is a political culture closely related to fascism, the adherents of which hold that the corporate group which forms the basis of society is the state.
2 Sir Keith Joseph (Baron Joseph of Portsoken after 1987), 1918–94. Conservative MP, 1955–87; Minister of Housing, Local Government and Welsh Affairs, 1962–64; Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, 1970–74; Trade and Industry, 1979–81; Education and Science, 1981–86.
3 Norman Tebbit (Baron Tebbit of Chingford since 1992), 1931–. Conservative MP, 1970–92; junior minister, Department of Trade, 1979–81; Industry, 1981; Secretary of State for Employment, 1981–83; Trade and Industry, 1983–85; Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and chairman of Conservative Party, 1985–87.
4 Geoffrey Howe (Baron Howe of Aberavon after 1992), 1926–2015. Conservative MP, 1964–66, 1970–92; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1979–83; Foreign Secretary, 1983–89; Leader of the House of Commons, 1989–90.
5 The sad circumstances of Sir Peter’s death are mentioned in Gyles Brandreth, Breaking the Code (London: Biteback, 2015), p. 308.
DIARIES
INVITATION
I’ve never kept a diary before. There is always a first time. But this is a diary I’m going to keep on tape and just put away for some time in the distant future. It will be the story of my 1987 election. Today is 7 April, but I will go back to 15 March when it all started.
That weekend we’d gone down to Fairacres.1 I think it was only the second time we’d been down there since November. All Saturday I thought about the stories that I had been running for weeks about Conservative central office – about how ready they were for an election, how they were a superb fighting machine – but I knew from inside how unprepared things really were. On Sunday morning, I phoned the Prime Minister. When she came through, after some pleasantries I said: ‘Prime Minister, I’d just like you to know that I’m concerned about things at central office. I don’t really think we are prepared … I’m coming in to 2see you on Tuesday morning, and then I would like to talk to you about ways in which I would help you and the campaign.’
I said my work is nearly completed in the employment department – at least, all the important things that I want to do can only be done after the election. She agreed with some enthusiasm and said yes, she’d been concerned about central office, and yes, please let us talk.
The other reason that I had rung was to tell her that the unemployment figures, due on the following Thursday, were by far the best unemployment figures since records were first kept. Seasonally adjusted, they were 44,000 down. I was the first holder of my office since Maurice Macmillan in 1973 to have had unemployment lower during his term of office than the day he was appointed.2 Of course she was totally delighted about the unemployment figures and she seemed enthusiastic at the prospect of our talk.
On the Monday morning, after some reflection, I arranged to call in and see Norman Tebbit on my way to the Prime Minister. Norman, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was occupying the set of rooms in the Cabinet Office that I used to have when I was Minister Without Portfolio.3 He was very friendly and warm, for we always got on well. I told him that I was on my way to see the Prime Minister to talk about the ways I could help during the election, and he seemed quite agreeable. He told 3me in considerable detail about a campaign he wanted to run to expose the Lib–Lab alliance for their part in the ‘Winter of Discontent’, and how little their pact had actually accomplished. He felt that he had to show that a hung parliament was not quite the boon that some people thought.
I left Norman and went down to see the Prime Minister. There was a very convenient door between the Cabinet Office and No. 10, the key of which was always held in the private office of Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary.4 When I came through into No. 10, Norman Blackwell5 was waiting for me. Norman was part of the Policy Unit at No. 10 and was responsible for employment matters.
‘Norman, look, I hope you don’t mind, but today there’s very little department business, this is mainly political.’ With that I gave him a broad grin, so he excused himself. I went upstairs to see Margaret in her study.
At the start, I dealt with one or two small matters at the department; the figures; and how I would deal with them. After that the private secretary left, leaving just the Prime Minister, myself and Stephen Sherbourne.6 I launched in without any preamble. ‘Prime Minister, I can really stop work now, I can leave my department for the next few weeks – it will make very 4little difference. I am far more worried about the election, about the state of the campaign. It is not for me to choose when the election will be, but I just want to make sure that early in May, when you see the local election results, if you want to push the button then we’re ready to go. I can clear my decks and be of help.’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘you must. You must first help with the presentation of the manifesto – the way it looks.’ She then made some very flattering remarks about my Action for Jobs campaign7 and then told me that John MacGregor8 was now writing the draft of the manifesto. We spent a few minutes on what it should look like. I said it should have a few charts to make it visual as well. She was very keen on ‘before and after’ photographs.
Then Stephen mentioned the tour. ‘Prime Minister, I believe that there is only one way to run the tour,’ I said. ‘Politics now is only about television – not even the press – just television. You should have a campaign in which you are seen as being met by adoring crowds, if possible on the One O’Clock News, but certainly the 5.45, Six, Seven, Nine and Ten O’Clock News.’
Stephen said that central office had prepared an initial plan, which wasn’t very good and had the Prime Minister going to a number of marginal constituencies. They had identified seventy-two marginal seats which were crucial if the party were to retain 5its parliamentary majority. I exploded: ‘Prime Minister, whether you go to a marginal constituency or not doesn’t make nearly as much impact as you being seen on television in the best light. Quite frankly, we’ve got to select the right places – if you go to the north-west, go to Chester, not Merseyside. I’m sure we can find the places you can visit to get the right reception.’
We discussed for a few minutes how best to achieve this. She felt that the election agents would not be the best people – she wanted to rely upon members to choose the best locations. I suggested that she ask Michael Alison (her PPS)9 to write to about thirty members asking them for three names each. That would help with the security, and we could then choose amongst them.
By then it was time for the Budget Cabinet to start, and so we went downstairs. On the way down the Prime Minister said that she wanted to meet with Norman and me immediately after Cabinet.
Nigel10 had so much good economic news that the proposed Budget received a marvellous reception. We broke up after fifty minutes in a very good mood. On the way out I looked at the Prime Minister and she nodded. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘ask Norman to come back.’
We stayed on in the Cabinet room. The Prime Minister 6started the conversation: ‘Norman, I’ve been thinking about the campaign. I think David’s got some free time now; I’d like him to come and help.’
Norman looked only slightly surprised and said, ‘Well, of course that’s no problem, I’d love that.’
I remarked that it was the old team again – referring to Peter Morrison, who had been made the deputy chairman of the party a few months before. Peter, Norman and I had all worked together when Norman was Employment Secretary, Peter was junior minister and I was chairman of the Manpower Services Commission.
We chatted for a few minutes about the sort of work to be done, and the Prime Minister left us to it. As I went out with Norman I said, ‘Norman, I would like to work with you – what you would like me to do – because I am here to help you?’ Norman replied that he was very busy for the next week and then taking a week’s holiday the week after. He suggested that I have a good look round, get to meet the people at central office and then we’ll have a chat. Right, said I, and that is how we left it.
I went back to the office and told Howell James all about it, and I must say the news caused a certain amount of surprise and pleasure. Then I started worrying a little about how we’d get the word out. The summer before there had been a very fraught period in which the newspapers had, day after day, been playing the Prime Minister against Norman, and in early August, speculation of a rift between the two reached its height. Eventually, there was a well-publicised phone call in which the Prime 7Minister rang Norman at his Devon home, and they appeared to make up. I was very anxious that no further stories would go out about their relationship. Over the next few days, through Michael Dobbs,11 Norman’s chief of staff at central office, and Peter, I tried to find a way to get the new arrangement out in the press in a way that would not start hares running about the Prime Minister checking up on Norman through me.
The following Sunday we were in London, so I invited Peter for dinner. Howell came in at 6.30 to show me a new advertising campaign for the Job Training Scheme (JTS).12 He was in full flood when Peter arrived. Peter seemed rather relieved when he found out that Howell was leaving. As soon as Howell had gone, he told me that he wanted to have a private chat – although he liked Howell very much, there were one or two things he wanted to say to me alone.
Over a good dinner, we talked, and Peter told me that after the election he would like to be considered not for Chief Whip, which I’d always assumed he’d wanted, but either for Northern Ireland Secretary or for chairman of the party. He said that Norman was not the same Norman we both worked for three years back, for since the bomb13 he was a different person. I 8began to get from Peter the same feeling that I was getting from people outside the party about the state of central office.
We spent a few minutes on getting the story out about my role in central office. I did not want to make an appearance in Smith Square before that, as otherwise it would leak in a very uncontrolled way. Yet I only had that week and the week after to get my feet under the table, for if the election date was early, I would have little time to get things organised.
On Monday morning, I agreed with Norman that he would mention my new role casually over a press lunch while he was giving out his new line on the Lib–Lab pact. The following day nothing came out; the line about the Lib–Lab pact went like a lead balloon and was quite heavily criticised. There was no mention about my job. Later Norman told Peter that he did not get round to mentioning it. Eventually he spoke to Paul Potts of the Daily Express. Paul immediately rang Howell, who readily confirmed the story. We had a sensible mention in the Express, and I was now free to go into central office.
I met with Michael Dobbs on Thursday. After a pleasant chat, we talked about the election being called for June or October. I repeated the problems I had outlined at a recent ‘political’ Cabinet. We were constrained from going in much of October because of the conference season early in September – the SDP conference first, followed by the TUC Congress and then the Liberals. A mid-October election would also mean starting the campaign on August Bank Holiday. I had suggested that we should hold a manifesto conference in the first or second week of September, which would really snooker the SDP conference. 9In the end, we worked out that there was a window on 1 October which would be suitable for an election.
Michael promised that he would have a word with Norman. On the Friday I was due in Milton Keynes to open a hotel for Charles Forte14 (I had taken Tourism and Small Firms with me when I went to Employment, and this was the more pleasant side of my job) and to come back straight after lunch to spend three hours with Harvey Thomas15 to improve my television manner.
The lunch went rather well, with a very receptive audience, although we ended up with a rather interesting return journey. There had been tremendous gales that day, the car rolling from side to side in an alarming manner on our way up the M1. I had arranged for Norman Dodds (my driver) to take us to Milton Keynes for the lunch and afterwards to drop us at the railway station so I could catch the 2.17 fast train back to London. That way I could be in central office shortly after three.
I left the lunch promptly and Norman dropped us off at the station. We found that the power lines had blown down and there were no trains expected for the rest of the day. Unfortunately, Howell had taken the telephone out of the car, so we had no way to contact Dodds. ‘Don’t worry,’ said a porter. ‘There’s a coach leaving now for Bletchley station, and you can get a train to London from there.’ So we hopped on the coach, and in ten 10minutes we were at Bletchley station. We found no trains and no other coaches there either.
I rang the office to arrange for a government driver and then had a brainwave. I asked the office to ring the hotel in Milton Keynes. Within ten minutes, a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce – I found out later Charles Forte’s own car – picked us up. We went back to London in great style, but, alas, too late, far too late to do my television training.
When I got back, I went into central office to see Michael Dobbs. I found to my great joy that Norman had reacted enthusiastically to our ideas for the election and told Michael to go away and work it up. That was a very good start indeed, and I went home happy.
I GO INTO CENTRAL OFFICE
During the following week I spent much of my time in central office. It was a rather surprising time for a number of reasons. I found Michael Dobbs enormously agreeable. One day, rather gingerly, I raised the subject of the manifesto. I found to my horror that no detailed plans – in fact, no work at all – had been done to produce it. The more I probed, the worse it became. On Tuesday, Howell came in to see me. He had been speaking to Michael on the phone and the latter had suggested that perhaps the best thing would be for me to take over the actual production of the manifesto.
‘Hold on,’ I said to Howell. ‘This sounds too good to be true. Let me try it out when I see Michael tomorrow.’ 11
