The Iron Lady

appeared from behind the Speaker’s chair and held up his thumb.We couldn’t believe it. Spencer le Marchant holding the teller’s slip stepped up to the table and read out ‘Ayes 311 – Noes 310’…¹¹

Callaghan immediately announced that he would ask the Queen for a dissolution. The next day he announced that the General Election would be held on the same day as the local government elections on 3 May.

Into battle

Generally speaking, Mrs Thatcher was pretty confident, though she never liked to count her chickens: she had a superstitious nightmare that she might win the national election but lose her own seat in Finchley.¹² Unlike many politicians, however, she thoroughly enjoyed electioneering, and after four years of frustration she threw herself into the contest – her ninth – with relish, knowing that it would either make or break her.

The Tories’ electoral strategy had three strands – neutral, negative and positive. The first priority was to protect the Tory lead by keeping the campaign as dull as possible and allowing Mrs Thatcher to say nothing that might frighten the voters. The negative strand was to keep the heat on Labour, reminding the electors in simple language of the Government’s record since 1974: inflation (‘prices’), unemployment (‘jobs’), cuts in public services (schools, homes and hospitals) and above all the strikes and picket line violence of the winter. For a party wishing to present itself as the wind of change without being specific about the precise nature of that change, Mrs Thatcher’s gender was a godsend. The possibility of electing the first woman Prime Minister gave the Tory campaign a radical frisson, independent of anything she might say. If the country needed a new broom, who better to wield it than a brisk, no-nonsense woman? ‘Maggie’ – as she was now universally known – symbolised a fresh start before she even opened her mouth.

Above all she shamelessly played up to her conviction that ‘they will turn to me because they believe a woman knows about prices’.¹³ She visited a supermarket in Halifax, bought four jars of instant coffee and a lump of cheese and discoursed knowledgeably about the prices of butter and tea, holding up two shopping bags, red and blue, to illustrate how much prices had risen under Labour. She repeatedly insisted that managing public expenditure was no different from running a household budget: the country, like every ordinary household, must live within its means. In Bristol she was presented with an outsize broom with which to sweep the country clean of socialism.

Mrs Thatcher dominated the Conservative campaign. Ironically the next most prominent figure was Ted Heath, who threw himself into the election with a belated display of loyalty transparently intended to make it impossible for her to exclude him from her Government. He kept off the sensitive subject of incomes policy but spoke mainly about foreign affairs – practically the only candidate in the election to do so – and clearly had his eye on the Foreign Office. Pressed in every interview to say if she would include him, however, Mrs Thatcher firmly declined to name her Cabinet in advance.

After the morning press conference she made flying sorties into the country, sometimes by air from Gatwick, sometimes in a specially equipped campaign ‘battlebus’, but almost always returning to London the same evening. The usual pattern was a factory visit or a walkabout in two or three key constituencies, an interview for regional television or local radio, followed by a big speech to a ticket-only rally of local Conservatives in the evening. Security was necessarily tight, following the murder of Airey Neave, blown up by an Irish car bomb two days after the election was declared, but the ticket-only rule – copied by Reece from his experience of Republican campaigning in the United States – reflected the Tories’ strategy of shielding Mrs Thatcher from the possibility of encountering hostile audiences or demonstrations: as far as possible she was shown only in controlled situations, speaking to rapturous congregations of the faithful.

In fact she was warmly received wherever she went and enjoyed meeting real people when she could get to them through the mass of journalists and film crews. In Ipswich – against the advice of her handlers – she ‘braved a frightening crush of supporters to walk among the enthusiastic crowds’ and made ‘a short, confident, impromptu electioneering speech to a crowd of shoppers and passers-by… from the steps of the Town Hall’. ‘“It was like being on the hustings thirty years ago,” enthused one of her entourage.’¹⁴

But of course it was all for the benefit of the cameras. Mrs Thatcher, normally with Denis in tow, lent herself patiently to every sort of charade in order to get a good picture in the local paper or clip on the television news. In a Leicester clothing factory she took over a sewing machine and stitched the pocket on a blue overall. In Cadbury’s factory at Bourneville she operated a machine wrapping and packing chocolates. In Milton Keynes she and Denis had their heartbeats and blood pressure tested. ‘“Steady as a rock,” she declared triumphantly as the figures… flashed on the screen. “They can’t find anything wrong with me. They never can.”’When someone said that her heart and lungs would last till polling day, she shot back confidently, ‘Yes, and for the next twenty years in Downing Street.’ She took the chance to remind the press that she would be not only the first woman Prime Minister, but the first with a science degree, and ‘proceeded to deliver a brisk lecture on the system to monitor the temperature in containers at Tilbury’, talking about computers ‘with the same ease with which she had been discussing prices with shoppers’. Then she suddenly flashed a winning smile and said, ‘There – didn’t I learn my briefing well?’¹⁵

Most famously, visiting a farm in Norfolk, she cradled a newborn calf in her arms. She held it for thirteen minutes, while the cameramen covered all the angles, until Denis warned that if she held it much longer they would have a dead calf on their hands. ‘It’s not for me – it’s for the photographers,’ she announced. ‘They are the really important people in this election.’¹⁶ ‘Would you like another take?’ she would ask them until they were happy.¹⁷ Callaghan was contemptuous of these vacuous photo-opportunities. ‘The voters don’t want to see you cuddling a calf,’ he told her. ‘They want to be sure you’re not selling them a pig in a poke.’¹⁸ Some journalists began to realise that they were being manipulated.Adam Raphael wrote an article in the Observer, ‘The Selling of Maggie’, criticising the way the Tory leader was being packaged in a series of cosy images, devoid of political content.¹⁹ But Gordon Reece knew exactly what he was doing. The press were offered seats on the Thatcher battlebus for ?600 per head, and took them gratefully. In future elections they would grow more cynical. In 1979 they were still happy to print what they were fed.

The only serious interrogation she faced was on television and radio. Even Reece could not deny the heavyweight media their chance entirely. But Mrs Thatcher accepted only one major television interview and two audience question-and-answer sessions during the campaign, plus two radio interviews and a phone-in. Contrary to Labour hopes that she would crack under the strain of a long campaign she made no serious blunders.

As the three-week campaign progressed the Tory lead in the polls was steadily cut back, from an average of around 11 per cent down to around 3 per cent, while Callaghan’s personal lead over Mrs Thatcher widened. The Liberals, as usual during elections, picked up support, leading to renewed speculation about a hung Parliament. Mrs Thatcher naturally insisted that she wanted and expected to win an overall Conservative majority, and vowed that she would do no deals with the Liberals or anyone else if she fell short. But from about the middle of the second week she began to sound more defensive, and sometimes a bit rattled. Her adviser Angus Maude asked speechwriter Ronald Millar to try to calm her down. ‘It’s urgent,’ Maude told him. ‘If she blows up at this stage it could blow the election.’ Ever resourceful, Millar came up with the slogan ‘Cool, calm – and elected’ and persuaded Mrs Thatcher to adopt it, telling her that of course she was perfectly calm, but it was important that she help to keep those around her calm. She fell for it.²⁰

‘Hello, Maggie’

After a quiet Saturday on home ground in Finchley and Enfield, publicly shrugging off the narrowing polls, her campaign moved into top gear over the last three days. First Harvey Thomas staged a spectacular rally of Conservative trade unionists at the Wembley Conference Centre on Sunday afternoon. This was her highlight of