She had no doubt that she wanted the biggest majority possible. ‘The Labour party manifesto is the most extreme ever,’ she declared on a whistle-stop tour of Norfolk on 25 May, ‘and it deserves a very big defeat.’34 ‘As a professional campaigner,’ Carol Thatcher observed, ‘she did not think there was such a thing as winning too well.’ Mrs Thatcher warned repeatedly against complacency, believing that ‘You can lose elections in the last few days by not going flat out to the winning post.’35 ‘We need to have every single vote on polling day.’36
Just as she dominated her colleagues, she also reduced television interviewers to pliant ciphers. Robin Day – the original tough interrogator – felt that he had let his viewers down by letting the Prime Minister walk all over him; but in all his long experience he had not been treated like this before. He was used to asking questions which the politicians would then make some attempt to answer: he was unprepared for Mrs Thatcher’s new technique of ignoring the questions and simply delivering whatever message she wanted to get across.37 ‘In all her set-piece encounters,’ Michael Cockerell wrote, ‘the top interviewers scarcely succeeded in laying a glove on her. She said what she had come prepared to say and no more.’38 By comparison both Foot and Jenkins were clumsy, longwinded and old-fashioned.
The only person who rattled her was an ordinary voter, a geography teacher named Diana Gould, who pressed her about the sinking of the
Recriminations about the Falklands did Mrs Thatcher no harm, however, merely keeping the memory of her triumph before the electorate without the Tories having to boast about it. Labour knew the war was bad territory for them, and tried to keep off it. But two leading figures could not resist. First Denis Healey, in a speech in Birmingham, talked about Mrs Thatcher wrapping herself in the Union Jack and ‘glorying in slaughter’; he was obliged to apologise the next day, explaining that he should have said ‘glorying in conflict’. Then Neil Kinnock – Labour’s education spokesman – responded still more crudely on television to a heckler who shouted that at least Mrs Thatcher had guts. ‘And it’s a pity that people had to leave theirs on Goose Green in order to prove it,’ he retorted. Kinnock was publicly unrepentant; but he too was obliged to write to the families of the war dead to apologise.42 These wild charges only damaged Labour. There was no mileage in trying to denigrate Mrs Thatcher’s achievement in the Falklands – particularly since the opposition was supposed to have supported the war. Such carping merely confirmed her charge that Labour never had the guts to carry anything through.
She started and finished her campaign, as usual, in Finchley. Mrs Thatcher always appeared at her most modest and humble among her own people, where she was still the model constituency Member they had elected in 1959. In all her years as Tory leader and Prime Minister she never missed a constituency function if she could help it. Except when she was out of the country she still held her regular surgery every Friday evening, usually preceded by meetings with businessmen or a visit to a local school or hospital, and followed by supper with her constituency officers and perhaps a branch meeting. Her insistence on keeping these appointments made for a running battle with Number Ten, which always had more pressing calls on her time. She was deeply possessive about Finchley and was furious when press reports suggested that she might seek a safer seat in Gloucestershire. Finchley had been her political base for more than twenty years and she liked everything there to be as it always had been.
As well as Labour and the Alliance, she faced for the first time a phalanx of fringe candidates – not only the imperishable ‘Lord’ David Sutch of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, but a Greenham Common peace campaigner; anti-motorway, anti-licensing and anti-censorship campaigners; and a ‘Belgrano Blood-hunger’ candidate (who came bottom with just thirteen votes). All these diversions delayed the declaration of her result until 2.30 a.m., long after the Conservatives’ national victory was confirmed. When the 326th Tory seat was formally declared, Alastair Burnet on ITN announced that ‘Mrs Thatcher is back in Downing Street’. ‘No, I’m not!’ she shouted furiously at the screen, ‘I’m still at Hendon Town Hall.’43 Eventually she secured a slightly increased majority over Labour, with the Alliance third and the rest nowhere:
She left almost immediately for Conservative Central Office, where she thanked the party workers and was photographed waving from a first-floor window with the architect of victory, Cecil Parkinson. She had won, on the face of it, an enormous victory. The eventual Conservative majority was 144 over all other parties: they held 397 seats in the new House (compared with 335 in the old) against Labour’s 205 and just 23 for the Alliance, 2 Scottish Nationalists, 2 Plaid Cymru, and 17 from Northern Ireland.
Nationally, however, the scale of her victory owed a great deal to the Alliance. Her hugely swollen majority actually rested on a lower aggregate vote, and a lower share of the vote, than she had won in 1979 – down from 43.9 to 42.4 per cent. Though it was rewarded with pitifully few seats, in terms of votes the Alliance ran Labour very hard for second place, winning 25.4 per cent to Labour’s 27.6 per cent – less than 700,000 votes behind. The effect of the Alliance surge, which nearly doubled the Liberal vote of 1979, was not, as the Tories had feared, to let Labour in but, on the contrary, to deliver the Government a majority out of all proportion to its entitlement. Behind the triumphalism, therefore, June 1983 was by no means the massive endorsement of Thatcherism that the Tories claimed. It was ‘manifestly less a victory for the Conservatives’, the
Into the second term
With the second term secured and her personal authority unassailable, Mrs Thatcher now had an almost unprecedented political opportunity before her. Her opponents within the Tory party were conclusively routed. For the first time she was in a position to appoint her own Cabinet. Yet she made remarkably few changes. June 1983 largely confirmed the team that fought the election. There were, indeed, only three casualties. By far the most significant was Francis Pym. She had never wanted him as Foreign Secretary, but in April 1982 she had had little choice. Now she called him in the morning after the election and told him bluntly: ‘Francis, I want a new Foreign Secretary.’46 What she really wanted, as she grew more confident of her capacity to handle foreign policy herself, was a more amenable Foreign Secretary from her own wing of the party, preferably one without a traditional Foreign Office background. The man she had in mind was Cecil Parkinson, as his reward for masterminding the election. In the very moment of victory, however, at Central Office in the early hours of Friday morning, Parkinson confessed to her that he had been conducting a long-standing affair with his former secretary, who was expecting his child. She reluctantly concluded that he could not become Foreign Secretary with this incipient scandal hanging over him, but thought he would be less exposed in a less senior job. She sent him instead to Trade and Industry. With some misgiving she then gave the Foreign Office to Geoffrey Howe.
By the time she came to write her memoirs Lady Thatcher had persuaded herself that this was a mistake.47 At the Treasury Howe’s quiet determination had been invaluable both in riding the political storms and in stiffening her own resolve. At the Foreign Office, by contrast, his views – particularly towards Europe – increasingly diverged from hers, while his dogged diplomacy and air of patient reasonableness
