The Iron Lady

to immigration’.²¹

Her words sparked an immediate outcry. In the Commons Labour MPs accused her of stirring up racial prejudice. Callaghan hoped she was not trying to appeal to ‘certain elements in the electorate’, and asked her to explain how she proposed to end immigration, given that all but 750 of the 28,000 admitted in 1977 – actually about one Grantham’s worth – were dependants of those already here.²² Six months later he charged that by speaking as she did she had ‘knowingly aroused the fears of thousands of coloured people living in this country and it will take them a long time to recover their composure’.²³ But she hit her intended target. Like Powell in 1968, she received a huge postbag, some 10,000 letters thanking her for speaking out. The Tories gained an immediate boost in the polls, taking them from neck and neck with Labour at 43 – 43 into a clear lead of 48 – 39; and four weeks later they won a by-election at Ilford North, where polls showed that immigration was the key issue in swinging votes.

Yet Tory policy did not change. Whitelaw was furious, and briefly considered resignation. But short of assisted repatriation there was no way the policy could change. The party was already committed to a register of dependants; Mrs Thatcher could hardly reverse Whitelaw’s promise not to break up families. Powell was disappointed that she never referred to the subject again, claiming that ‘a chloroformed gag was immediately clapped over the leader’s mouth’.²⁴ But as he reflected in a later interview: ‘If you’re trying to convey what you feel to the electorate, perhaps you only have to do it once.’²⁵ In one respect Powell was wrong. She did return to the subject, quite unapologetically, in an Observer interview just before the election, when she denied that she had modified her original statement and defiantly repeated it.²⁶

But in another sense Powell was right. Her words did not have to change Tory policy in order to achieve their purpose of signalling her real views to supporters in the country who wanted to believe that she was on their side. It was a trick she often used, even as Prime Minister, to suggest that she was not responsible for the lamentable timidity of her colleagues. She did the same thing over capital punishment, losing no opportunity in the run-up to the election to remind radio and television audiences of her long-standing support for hanging murderers. Most of the time she was obliged to keep her true feelings to herself. Her immigration broadcast was one of those vivid moments that helped bring MrsThatcher’s carefully blurred appeal into sharp focus, revealing, both to those who shared her views and those who loathed her, exactly what her fundamental instincts were.

This episode is a good example of the way Mrs Thatcher learned to project herself to the public independently of the party she led, not through specific policies or even in big ideas expressed in major speeches, but by constructing an image of the type of person she was, with attitudes, sympathies and instincts which could be guessed at when they could not prudently be spelled out. She realised the importance of projecting her message through her personality, selling the public a wide repertoire of carefully contrived images. It is ironic that Mrs Thatcher, who actually had an unusually clear ideological programme to put across, was the first leader to be packaged to this extent, beginning a process which, taken ever further by her successors, has practically drained politics of ideological content altogether. It was another measure of her political weakness, however, that she was obliged to hint at attitudes whose implications she could not fully expound; and a measure of her political skill that she was able to do so successfully.

The result of this emphasis on promoting her personality rather than her policies was to enable Mrs Thatcher to overcome the perceived handicaps of her class and her sex. In place of the Home Counties Tory lady in a stripy hat, married to a rich husband, whose children had attended the most expensive private schools, she forced the media to redefine her as a battling meritocrat who had raised herself by hard work from a humble provincial background – an inspiration to others, whatever their start in life, who had the ambition, ability and guts to do the same. The transformation did not convince everyone. But long before 1979 she had shown that she could appeal much more widely than her critics had thought possible in 1974. She was not popular, but she was no longer patronised. On the contrary, she had immensely widened the range of available stereotypes for a woman politician, and in doing so transformed her gender from a liability into an asset. First of all she did not try to escape the traditional female stereotype of the housewife, but positively embraced it and turned it to her advantage. Her willingness to act up to the role of ordinary wife and home-maker infuriated feminists, who thought she thereby devalued the whole project of a woman storming the seats of male power. But Mrs Thatcher knew what she was doing. By boasting that she still cooked Denis’s breakfast for him every morning, still did her own shopping and even used to ‘pop up to the launderette’ regularly, she encouraged millions of women to identify with her as they had never been able to identify with any previous politician, male or female. Rich though she was, she sounded as if she understood the problems of daily living in a way that Heath and Callaghan never could. ‘They will turn to me’, she told John Cole, ‘because they believe a woman knows about prices.’²⁷ Mrs Thatcher’s homely lectures on ‘housewife economics’, expressed in the language of domestic budgeting, made monetarism sound like common sense.

But Mrs Thatcher was also able to tap into another range of female types: established role models of women in positions of authority whom men were used to obeying. Thus she was the Teacher, patiently but with absolute certainty explaining the answers to the nation’s problems: and the Headmistress exhorting the electorate to pull its socks up. She was Doctor Thatcher, or sometimes Nurse Thatcher, prescribing nasty medicine or a strict diet which the voters knew in their hearts would be good for them.

Finally she was Britannia, the feminine embodiment of patriotism, wrapping herself unselfconsciously in the Union Jack. No politician since Churchill had appealed so emotionally to British nationalism. Unquestionably it was her sex that enabled Mrs Thatcher to get away with it. She was not yet the full-blown Warrior Queen, the combination of Britannia, Boadicea and Elizabeth I that she became after the Falklands war. But already, thanks to the Russians, she was ‘the Iron Lady’ – recognised as a strong leader ready to stand up to foreign dictators, calling on the nation to look to its defences. While visiting British forces in Germany she was even able to be photographed in a tank without looking silly. No previous woman politician could have done that. As a result, when The Economist announced at the beginning of the 1979 election campaign that ‘The issue is Thatcher’ it meant her personality and her politics, not her sex.²⁸ That was already a huge achievement.

9 Into Downing Street

‘Labour Isn’t Working’

THE summer of 1978 was the lowest point of Mrs Thatcher’s leadership, when it suddenly began to look possible that she might lose the coming election. Though unemployment was still around 1.5 million, inflation was down to single figures and the pound was riding high. The economic outlook was unquestionably improving, and in his April budget Denis Healey was able to make some modest tax cuts. The Tories’ leap in the polls following Mrs Thatcher’s immigration broadcast in January proved to be short-lived. By May the parties were neck and neck again, and in August Labour took a four-point lead. Callaghan’s personal approval rating was consistently above 50 per cent, Mrs Thatcher’s often below 40 per cent. Her efforts to portray Labour as wildly left wing were becoming increasingly implausible; on the contrary, Callaghan was widely recognised as ‘the best Conservative Prime Minister we have’,¹ while it was she who came over as scarily extreme.

It was specifically to try to forestall an early election that Saatchi & Saatchi came up with ‘Labour Isn’t Working’. The dole queue design broke the conventions of political advertising, first because it mentioned the other party by name, and second because unemployment was traditionally a ‘Labour’ issue on which the Tories could never hope to win. In fact only twenty posters ever went up, but their effect was hugely amplified by Labour howls of protest, which meant that the image was reproduced – often several times – in every newspaper and on television. The revelation that the queue was actually made up of Young Conservatives made no difference to the