odds. In 1986, by contrast, the revelations and evasions of Westland had left her morally damaged, her reputation for straight-talking integrity in tatters. Having lost two ministers and only narrowly survived herself, her authority was palpably weakened: she could not afford any more resignations, so was temporarily obliged to pay more deference to her colleagues than had become her habit since the Falklands war. Just as the attention of Westminster was beginning to turn towards the next election there were suggestions that she was becoming a liability, no longer an asset to the Government’s chances of re-election, and increasing talk that after seven years she was running out of steam, had been in office long enough and would have to step down some time in the next Parliament. Commentators began to speculate that the succession would lie between Michael Heseltine and Norman Tebbit.
This was not Mrs Thatcher’s intention at all. She was uneasily aware that her second term, despite economic recovery and the success of privatisation, had not been the unqualified triumph it should have been. Too much of the Government’s energy had been diverted into defeating the miners and other distractions, at the expense of more positive objectives. In retrospect, she attributed the loss of momentum to the lack of detailed preparation before the 1983 election, for which she unfairly blamed Geoffrey Howe. But it was not in her nature to think of giving up. On the contrary, she was determined to demonstrate that both her energy and her radicalism were undiminished. With the economy apparently sorted out, unemployment falling at last and Lawson proclaiming an economic miracle, she was eager to turn to what had always been her real purpose, the remoralisation of British society. (‘Economics is the method. The object is to change the soul.’)32 In her first two terms she had cut inflation by busting the taboo of full employment and begun a radical rebalancing of the mixed economy, but she had barely touched the third pillar of the post-war settlement, the welfare state. Belatedly, as many of her supporters believed, she now resolved to regain the political initiative by fighting the next election on this social agenda, with ‘a set of policies… which my advisers, over my objections, wanted to call Social Thatcherism’.33 In practice she was much less certain of exactly what these reforms should be than her missionary language implied; but she was absolutely determined to regain the sense of forward movement.
The problem was that if she was not exhausted, there was plenty of evidence that the public was growing tired of her. The Conservatives lagged consistently third in the polls behind both Labour and the Alliance, and in April her personal popularity rating fell to its lowest point – 28 per cent – since the inner-city riots of 1981. On 13 April Tebbit and his chief of staff Michael Dobbs (seconded from Saatchi & Saatchi) paid an uncomfortable visit to Chequers to present the Prime Minister with the results of polling carried out by Saatchis, which showed not only that the Government was seen to have ‘lost its way’ and ‘run out of steam’ but that she herself had ceased to be an asset on the doorsteps. She was given credit for having defeated General Galtieri, conquered inflation and tamed the unions, but now seemed to have run out of worthwhile enemies:
With the lack of new battles to fight the Prime Minister’s combative virtues were being received as vices: her determination was perceived as stubbornness, her single-mindedness as inflexibility and her strong will as an inability to listen.34
Collectively, Tebbit and Dobbs had to tell her, these attributes were becoming known as the ‘TBW factor’ – standing for ‘That Bloody Woman’. Saatchis’ recommended strategy for the next election involved the Prime Minister taking a lower profile. Of course she vehemently disagreed. She had no intention of being pushed into the background. She was already suspicious that Tebbit was pursuing his own agenda, and her suspicions can only have been confirmed when he went public a few weeks later with a singularly lukewarm endorsement of her leadership.
Rejecting Saatchis’ polling, therefore, she commissioned alternative research from the American firm of Young and Rubicam which was already pitching to displace Saatchis and duly came up with more acceptable results. Their finding suggested not that Mrs Thatcher herself was the problem, but that too much of the Tories’ appeal had been directed at the ambitious and successful (‘succeed-ers’ in advertising jargon), and not enough at ordinary people (‘main-streamers’). On this reading her strength of purpose was still an asset so long as she did not appear doctrinaire but committed to delivering real improvements in people’s lives.35 This was much more what she wanted to hear. She always believed that she had a special rapport with the long-suffering, hard-working, law-abiding middle class whom she regarded above all as ‘her’ people, and specifically wanted to do more for them now that she had got the economy right and sorted out the unions. That was to be her mission for the third term. From now on she received two parallel sets of polling advice, the official line from Saatchis via Tebbit and Central Office, and unofficial material from Young and Rubicam behind Tebbit’s back, which she shared only with a small group of trusted ministers – Whitelaw, Wakeham, Lawson and Hurd – and her private office. This damaging duplication continued right through 1986 and into the election the following year.
She tried to counter the image of bossiness by presenting a more collective style of leadership. She accepted John Wakeham’s advice that she should set up (and, most importantly, be seen to set up) a Strategy Group to take a grip on policy and presentation in the run-up to the election. In appearance this was a sort of inner cabinet of a sort she had never previously admitted since the ‘Thursday breakfasts’ attended by the inner core of monetarist economic ministers in 1979. Its members – immediately dubbed the ‘A-Team’, from a current television programme – were Willie Whitelaw, the holders of the three senior offices of state (Howe, Lawson and Hurd),Tebbit as party chairman and Wakeham as Chief Whip. In reality the A-Team was more for show than substance: it had less to do with sharing power than with shackling Tebbit, a means of retaining election planning in her own hands. Most of the groundwork for the reforms of the third term was done under her eye in the Downing Street Policy Unit rather than in the departments.
There was one very important exception. The policy initiative which turned out to be the most contentious after 1987 was agreed as far back as 1985, and originated not in the Policy Unit but in the Department of the Environment. After it blew up in her face, the poll tax was regularly cited as the epitome of Mrs Thatcher’s domineering style, the result of her personal obsession with abolishing the rates, pushed through a tame Cabinet purely by her insistence. In fact, no reform of the Thatcher years was more exhaustively debated through all the proper committees. As usual, the Prime Minister was one of the last to be persuaded that it was practicable. Once convinced, she was unswerving in her refusal to abandon it and in her memoirs she still defended it as right in principle. But it was successive Secretaries of State for the Environment and Scotland (and their juniors) who made all the running at the beginning.
Of course Mrs Thatcher’s desire to honour her 1974 commitment to abolish domestic rates was undiminished. She had always disliked the rates on principle as a tax on property which acted as a disincentive against making improvements; and she was keen to find a way to stop Labour councils piling heavy rate demands on Tory householders in order to spend the money on their own voters who were largely exempt from payment. But since Michael Heseltine’s abortive search for a workable alternative in 1979 – 83, her attention had been diverted into other ways of controlling local extravagance. It was Patrick Jenkin who unwisely revived the question by setting up yet another departmental inquiry in late 1984, delegating his juniors, Kenneth Baker and William Waldegrave, to find the holy grail. Waldegrave in turn consulted his old boss in Ted Heath’s think-tank, Victor Rothschild. Mrs Thatcher later credited Rothschild with ‘much of the radical thinking’ which produced the community charge;36 but many other bright sparks on the cerebral fringe of the Tory party, including the Adam Smith Institute, also had a hand in it.
The event which overcame her initial scepticism was the furious outcry against the revaluation of Scottish rates in February 1985, which threatened a steep hike in rateable values particularly in middle-class areas. Willie Whitelaw came back ‘severely shaken’ by the anger he encountered on a visit to the affluent Glasgow suburb of Bearsden in March.37 Whitelaw and George Younger convinced the Prime Minister that something must be done urgently: their alarm coincided neatly with Waldegrave’s review team coming up with an alternative which they believed would work. So she convened a conference at Chequers on 31 March at which Baker, Waldegrave and Rothschild gave a glossy presentation of their proposal, complete with colour slides and flip charts. Waldegrave ended his pitch with words allegedly suggested by Patrick Jenkin: ‘And so, Prime Minister, you will have fulfilled your promise to abolish the rates.’38 She was persuaded.
Five weeks later she paid her annual visit to the Scottish party conference and was able to tell the representatives that the Government had listened to their anger. ‘We have reached the stage where no amount of patching up of the existing system can overcome its inherent unfairness,’ she announced. The Government was
