surrender.’23 The Warsaw Pact currently possessed a 3 – 1 superiority over NATO in nuclear weapons in Europe, she pointed out in July. ‘Those who seek to have a nuclear-free Europe would do well to address their efforts in the first place to Soviet Russia.’24 So long as the Soviets enjoyed superiority she scorned Brezhnev’s offer of a moratorium. She was all for disarmament, but only on a basis of equality. In the meantime, she insisted in November 1982, ‘We should have every bit as much strategic nuclear weaponry at our disposal as the Soviet Union, every bit as much intermediate nuclear weaponry at our disposal as the Soviet union.’25
Her enthusiasm for the latest hardware sounded alarmingly aggressive to those worried about the threat of nuclear escalation. The next time she spoke in the House about deploying cruise she was greeted with cries of ‘Warmonger’.26 Her response to this allegation was to insist repeatedly that nuclear weapons did not cause war but were actually the surest way to prevent it. She gave her fullest exposition of this argument at that year’s party conference, when she devoted a long section of her televised speech to spelling out the ABC of deterrence:
I understand the feelings of the unilateralists. I understand the anxieties of parents with children growing up in the nuclear age. But the fundamental question for all of us is whether unilateral nuclear disarmament would make a war less likely. I have to tell you that it would not. It would make war more likely…
Because Russia and the West know that there can be no victory in nuclear war, for thirty-seven years we have kept the peace in Europe… That is why we need nuclear weapons, because having them makes peace more secure.27
It was at a joint press conference with Helmut Kohl at the end of the Chancellor’s visit to London in February 1983 that she found the phrase that encapsulated her paradoxical faith. ‘We really are a true peace movement ourselves,’ she claimed, ‘and we are the true disarmers, in that we stand for all-sided disarmament, but on a basis of balance.’28 She always loved stealing Labour’s slogans for herself. ‘We are the true peace movement’ became her favourite refrain throughout the General Election and beyond.29
Realising that defence, and the nuclear argument in particular, was going to be a key battleground in the coming contest, Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity of John Nott’s intention to leave politics by removing him from the Ministry of Defence in January 1983 and replacing him with the much more combative figure of Michael Heseltine. Much as she distrusted Heseltine, she recognised that he had the populist flair to tackle CND head on. This was one of her most successful appointments; Heseltine responded exactly as she had hoped in the months leading up to the election, energetically countering the unilateralists in the television studios and on the radio. His most successful coup was to upstage CND’s Easter demonstration, when they had planned to form a human chain around the Greenham Common airbase on Good Friday. Heseltine stole their thunder by visiting Germany the day before and having himself photographed looking over the Berlin Wall, thus dramatising the enemy whom NATO’s nuclear weapons were intended to deter. Even with all its other doctrinal baggage, unilateralism was the biggest millstone round the Labour party’s neck, and Heseltine made the most of it. The contrast with the recapture of the Falklands did not need spelling out.
Landslide: June 1983
If the result of the election was never in much doubt, its timing was uncertain up to the last moment. All Mrs Thatcher’s habitual caution inclined her to carry on until the autumn. But she was under strong pressure from the party managers to go as soon as possible after the new electoral register came into force in February 1983: the redrawn constituency boundaries were expected to yield the Tories an extra thirty seats.The party chairman, Cecil Parkinson, and Central Office wanted to go early, and the temptation was great.
Nevertheless she sought every excuse for indecision. First she argued that she had promised President Reagan that she would attend the G7 summit at Williamsburg, Virginia, at the end of May: this would entail her being out of the country at a crucial stage of the campaign. She was persuaded that her absence could be turned to electoral advantage, with media coverage underlining her stature as an international stateswoman. Then she worried that the manifesto was not ready. Parkinson told her that it could be made ready in a couple of hours, at which she immediately started rewriting it herself. Still she wanted to sleep on the decision. But the next morning she went to the Palace as arranged. Polling day was set for Thursday 9 June.
The Tory campaign was frankly concentrated on Mrs Thatcher, highlighting her strength and resolution, clear convictions and strong leadership. The contrast with Foot was so obvious that it scarcely needed pointing out. Each day the Prime Minister herself chaired the morning press conference at Central Office, flanked by two or three colleagues; most of the Cabinet was paraded, but few featured more than once, and their role was clearly subordinate. Mrs Thatcher answered most of the questions. Besides herself only three ministers appeared in the party’s television broadcasts.
The campaign closely followed the successful pattern of 1979. After the press conference each morning she set off by plane or helicopter for whistle-stop visits around the country, meeting up with her campaign coach to inspect shiny new factories or do walkabouts in shopping malls, carefully chosen to provide good pictures for the local media and the national TV news; she went mainly to Tory constituencies, where only the local members were told in advance that she was coming, to ensure that she met an enthusiastic reception and to minimise the risk of hostile demonstrations. She made only a handful of major speeches – and those were delivered to carefully vetted audiences of Tory supporters well supplied with Union Jacks. In addition, she gave two interviews to friendly newspapers, did two major radio interviews and five major TV interviews – two taking audience questions and three with heavyweight interviewers.
Each evening when she came back to Downing Street she would have a quick supper and then get on with preparing speeches for the following day. Mrs Thatcher would rewrite and correct them far into the night. Next morning she would arrive at Central Office at 8.15 for an hour’s briefing before the 9.30 press conference. Gordon Reece attended these briefings and also helped rehearse her for her television appearances. But above all in this election she put herself in the hands of Cecil Parkinson, who had the knack of soothing tensions and keeping her calm when things went wrong. She trusted him completely. ‘If Cecil says not to do it,’ she said after one mix-up on the bus when she had wanted to change plans, ‘we won’t do it.’30 When it was all over she was generous in giving him the credit for victory.
Throughout the campaign she offered little that was new or positive, but concentrated on attacking Labour relentlessly on what she called ‘the gut issues’ – nationalisation, industrial relations and, above all, defence.31 Characteristically she covered her own weakest flank – unemployment – by counter- attacking Labour’s record in the 1970s. ‘In the end Labour always runs away,’ she jeered in her adoption speech at Finchley on 19 May:
They are running away from the need to defend their country… They are fleeing from the long overdue reform of the trade unions… They are running out on Europe… Above all, Labour is running away from the true challenge of unemployment.
Promising to create millions of jobs, she insisted, was ‘no more than an evasion of the real problem’. Real jobs could only be created by gradually building up a competitive economy with profitable industries that could hold their own in world markets. ‘We Conservatives believe in working with the grain of human nature, in encouraging people by incentives, not in over-regulating them by too many controls.’ ‘A quick cure,’ she repeated several times in another favourite formulation, ‘is a quack cure.’32
The Tories’ only other weak point was the widespread belief that the Government had a secret agenda to ‘privatise’ or somehow dismantle the National Health Service. Mrs Thatcher had already declared repeatedly that the NHS was ‘safe with us’; but she had to go on repeating it until she finally rebutted it with the strongest disclaimer at her disposal: ‘I have no more intention of dismantling the National Health Service,’ she declared at Edinburgh, ‘than I have of dismantling Britain’s defences.’33
