The Iron Lady

now looking at a fundamental reform of local government finance. ‘The burden should fall, not heavily on the few, but fairly on the many.’³⁹ The idea that everyone who used council services should pay equally towards the cost of them was, on paper, not a bad one. It was wrong in principle, and corrupting in practice, that only one-third of households paid full rates, yet everyone could vote for expenditure to which they did not contribute. ‘My father always said that everyone ought to pay something,’ she told Woodrow Wyatt, ‘even if it is only sixpence.’⁴⁰ It was not envisaged that the charge would be more than ?50 – 100 per head.

Nigel Lawson had missed the Chequers seminar but later submitted a paper warning the Cabinet committee which considered it that the proposed flat-rate charge would prove ‘completely unworkable and politically catastrophic’.⁴¹ He correctly predicted that it would be hard to collect, while Labour councils would simply hike up their spending and blame the Government for the new tax. He proposed instead a banded tax on capital values (very similar to that with which Heseltine eventually replaced the poll tax in 1991). Having voiced his dissent, however, Lawson subsequently lay low: he neither exerted his authority as Chancellor, nor attempted to combine with Heseltine and Walker (both former Environment Secretaries) to coordinate opposition to the charge. In his memoirs Lawson sought to distance himself from the disaster that followed. But no new tax can be introduced against the opposition of the Treasury. Having identified the flaws in the poll tax so accurately, Lawson bears substantial responsibility for having failed to stop it.

It was Kenneth Baker (having succeeded Jenkin the previous autumn) who published in January 1986 a Green Paper, Paying for Local Government, setting out the detail of what was officially called the community charge. His presentation to the Commons was given a mixed welcome by Tory MPs. Four months later Baker departed to Education, leaving Nicholas Ridley holding his baby. Nevertheless, at that year’s Scottish conference Mrs Thatcher basked in the applause of the representatives for her promise of immediate legislation in Scotland, ahead of England and Wales.⁴² Contrary to subsequent claims, the Government did not use Scotland cynically as a test bed for an unpopular policy, but introduced it there first because the existing grievance was most urgent there. The following year, opening her General Election campaign in Perth as usual, Mrs Thatcher boasted that the Scottish legislation had passed its final stage the previous week. ‘They said we couldn’t do it. They said we wouldn’t do it. We did it.’⁴³ She had no doubt that the change would be popular, at least with her own party.

At the same time other ministers were encouraged to develop a whole range of new policies on housing, health and education. The 1986 Conservative Party Conference was a brilliant public-relations exercise, choreographed by Saatchi & Saatchi under the slogan ‘The Next Moves Forward’ and designed to convey the message that the Government was not a one-woman band but a young and vigorous team full of energy and new, practical ideas for improving public services. Each day a succession of ministers trooped to the platform to set out their wares. On Tuesday Norman Lamont offered further privatisation, including water supply, the British Airports Authority and the return of Rolls-Royce to the private sector. On Wednesday Norman Fowler unveiled an ambitious hospital building programme, while Douglas Hurd announced longer sentences and new powers to seize criminals’ assets. Thursday brought Nigel Lawson holding out the prospect of zero inflation and income tax coming down to twenty-five pence. The coverage was everything Tebbit and Central Office could have hoped for, climaxing when Mrs Thatcher grabbed the spotlight back to herself on Friday morning.

The Government’s poll ratings picked up immediately, so that by December the Tories were back in a clear lead for the first time for nearly two years: 41 per cent against 32 per cent for Labour and 22 per cent for the Liberal/SDP Alliance, which had come badly unstuck over defence. Whereas in the early summer there had been growing belief in the likelihood of a Labour victory, by the end of the year the betting had swung overwhelmingly back towards the Tories. Over the spring that lead was maintained and even extended.Though she had no need to go to the country again before 1988, Mrs Thatcher had much less hesitation than in 1983 about seizing this advantage while the going was good. Having won twice previously in May and June she had become convinced that the early summer was a lucky time for her, and she was keen to get the ordeal over as soon as possible so that she could get back to work.

Then, on 17 March, Nigel Lawson introduced the perfect pre-election budget in which he was able to cut the standard rate of income tax by another two pence while simultaneously finding money for increased spending on health and other services, without even raising duties on petrol, drink or cigarettes. Two weeks later the Tories’ resurgence was crowned by Mrs Thatcher’s triumphant visit to Moscow. She was indignant when reporters dared to suggest that her visit was designed with an eye on the upcoming election. ‘Enlarge your view,’ she told them scornfully.‘I’m here for Britain.’⁴⁴ The impact was doubled by the contrast with Kinnock’s disastrous trip to Washington a few days earlier when he and Denis Healey were received by President Reagan with a barely disguised snub. They were accorded just a quarter of an hour of the President’s time, and the White House put out an uncompromising statement to the effect that Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy would be damaging to NATO. With the Tories making modest gains in the local elections on 7 May the omens could scarcely have been better, and it was no surprise that, having slept on it, Mrs Thatcher announced next day that the election would be on 11 June.

Hat-trick: June 1987

Yet June 1987 was by no means such a walkover as June 1983 had been. Despite the polls there was a nervousness in the Tory camp that perhaps the Government had been in office too long, that Mrs Thatcher’s style of leadership had become a liability and that the oldest cry in democratic politics – ‘Time for a Change’ – might exert a potent effect. By contrast with the shambles of 1983, Labour mounted a very slick and professional campaign while there was always the possibility of a late surge by the Alliance. In fact, the outcome almost exactly mirrored the polls at the beginning and victory was almost certainly in the bag all along. But it was, as Lady Thatcher wrote with some understatement in her memoirs, ‘not… a happy campaign’.⁴⁵

It was vitiated by intense rivalry between Norman Tebbit, the party chairman, and David Young whom she had appointed unofficially to second-guess him. This tension boiled over on 4 June – ‘Wobbly Thursday’ – when a rogue poll almost persuaded some in both camps that the party might actually lose. Mrs Thatcher herself made a number of slips – notably in suggesting that she hoped to go ‘on and on’ – and was irritable throughout, suffering from a painful tooth and missing the soothing presence of Cecil Parkinson who had masterminded her previous re-election so smoothly in 1983.

Thus, at the very height of her electoral success, in securing her unprecedented third election victory, Mrs Thatcher did not dare to seek and certainly did not secure any sort of mandate for ‘Social Thatcherism’. She won easily again, essentially because the voters did not trust Labour on the economy or defence, while the Alliance remained popular enough to split the opposition but too divided to make its dreamed-of breakthrough. ‘Mr Kinnock had in his favour’, The Times commented, ‘eight years of the most vilified Prime Minister of modern times; three million unemployed and a country apparently enraged by the condition of its health service. Yet he could not win.’⁴⁶ By keeping the Government on the defensive on health, employment and the state of the inner cities, Labour was widely judged to have ‘won’ the campaign. Yet Kinnock managed to recover only about half of the three million votes Foot had lost in 1983, and that ground was almost all regained from the Alliance. This gave Mrs Thatcher 376 seats (a loss of twenty-three), Labour 229 (up just twenty) and the Alliance a mere twenty-two, with the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists at three each, trimming the Government’s overall majority from the swollen 144 it had won in 1983 to a still more than comfortable 102. In raw parliamentary terms it was another landslide.[n]

In the hour of victory it seemed that Mrs Thatcher could be Prime Minister for life if she wanted. Speaking to the crowds in Downing Street on Friday morning she was openly delighted with her achievement. ‘I think the real thing now is we have done it three times… With a universal franchise the third time is terrific, is it not?’⁴⁷ Pressed again about how long she intended to go on, she made no bones about her intention to complete the third term, dismissed the idea of grooming a successor (‘Good heavens, no’) and did not demur when Robin Day suggested that she might still be Prime Minister in the year 2000, when she would be only seventy-five. ‘You never know,’ she replied, ‘I might be here, I might be twanging a harp. Let us just see how things go.’⁴⁸ She had no doubt that she had won a huge personal mandate.