The Path to Power

Central Office wished to campaign and the direction I insisted on taking.

Such problems were not, however, immediately evident to me. Tuesday morning’s newspapers carried a report of an NOP poll suggesting that our lead was just 6 per cent, but compared with earlier NOP polls it did not suggest any narrowing of the gap. (Throughout the campaign the opinion polls were to give very different pictures of the balance of party support, ranging from the most exiguous of Tory leads — in one case a slight Labour lead — to an improbably overwhelming Tory landslide.) I felt it was an effective day’s campaigning, beginning in Bristol where I visited the Kleeneze brush factory to use every possible photo-opportunity to demonstrate my intention of ‘sweeping away the cobwebs’, ‘applying a new broom’ etc.

Also in Bristol I was on the receiving end of the Election Gall programme hosted by Robin Day. There is always an element of risk on these occasions. A well-briefed caller can expose gaps in a politician’s understanding which most political opponents never could. Moreover, judging the correct reaction is always more difficult when you cannot see the person to whom you are talking over the telephone. But I felt that this Election Call went particularly well, because the points raised with me were on the precise questions to which we had the most convincing answers — the need for tax cuts, controlling inflation, cutting back on government borrowing and encouraging small businesses. Of course, there were critical points too. I always felt that the key to dealing with these was to admit what had gone wrong and say clearly why a future Conservative Government would put it right. So on this occasion I agreed that the previous Conservative Government was indeed responsible for an increase in bureaucracy in the health service, and said how we were going to reverse it.

On the way back from Bristol, taking the new Intercity 125 high-speed train, I stopped off in West Country constituencies and had my photo taken with the candidates, including Chris Patten on the station platform at Bath. The day finished with my addressing a meeting at Gravesend. Since Central Office was telling me that our support among pensioners was shaky I wrote out a press release reminding voters of the record of Conservative Governments on this point.

The following day (Wednesday 18 April), after the morning press conference, I set off to campaign in East Anglia and the East Midlands. First stop was my bid for the agricultural vote. This consisted of a discussion of cattle feed with a friendly farmer, carefully navigating my way across a field full of cows (I had forgotten my boots) and then cradling a calf in my arms for the benefit of the cameras and, I hoped, the wider public. I had no experience with calves and I was not certain of the right technique. With cameramen from five continents present, Denis, ever realistic, warned that ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll have a dead calf on our hands.’ But it survived my attentions and those of the photographers. Fortunately, perhaps, the calf was not able to give an interview.

THE SECOND WEEK — D–14 to D–7

By now (Thursday 19 April) much agonizing had taken place back in London about the implications of my Cardiff speech for the ‘positioning’ of the Party and our campaign. Peter Thorneycroft had persuaded himself that we had made a strategic error which should not be repeated. And since nothing that Central Office or my colleagues did seemed to get much publicity, he decided to involve himself in the drafting of my speeches. Oblivious to all this, I spent that Thursday morning visiting a Leicester textile factory, where I put my childhood training to good effect by stitching overall pockets amid a chaotic crowd of journalists and an astonished workforce.

It was, however, just before the bus arrived at the Cadbury factory in Bournville that I learned that Peter Thorneycroft was insisting that a strong passage on trade unions, drafted by Paul Johnson, one of Britain’s leading journalists, an historian and a convert from socialism, should be removed from that evening’s speech in Birmingham — the second major rally of the campaign. Peter thought it too provocative. He had also apparently intervened to stop Keith Joseph speaking on the same subject. I did not agree with Peter’s assessment. But being away from London I felt insufficiently sure of my judgement to substitute it for his. So I angrily tore out the relevant pages of my draft speech and inserted some more innocuous passages. I contented myself with the knowledge that the last section of the speech, with which I had been helped by Peter Carrington, contained some extremely strong stuff on defence and foreign affairs, deliberately adopting the tone and some of the language of my earlier Kensington Town Hall speech.

But I was not in the best of humour as our coach drew up in front of the factory. I had specifically said that I did not want a formal reception committee, but rather to go straight in and talk to individual managers and workers. Now I saw two long lines of people in white hats and coats. I could not for the moment see the camera crews but I had no doubt that they were waiting somewhere to take suitable shots of this ludicrous scene. I stayed on the bus for a minute or two to regain my cool. It was only then that I realized that I knew the faces of what I had assumed to be the factory staff. It was the pressmen who, doubtless informed of my earlier instructions, had dressed up in white overalls as a joke. As I left the bus they held up their cameras as a kind of arch beneath which I entered the factory. They were so carried away with their joke that they forgot to take any photographs; but they helped me see the funny side of campaigning, for which I suspect we were all grateful.

Having sewn pockets in the morning, I suppose it was only natural that I should find myself sorting chocolates in the afternoon. It was a tricky, demanding task — the sort which gives the lie to the loosely-used expression ‘unskilled work’. It was many years since I myself had worked in a factory, but I saw that some traditions do not change. One girl who was shortly getting married had all her wedding presents laid out on a table close to the production line for her friends to see. After my chocolate-packing was over, we all discussed them at rather greater length than my programme allowed. In the end I was bustled away, for we had to get to the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. As a chocolate addict, I never thought I would lose my appetite for them. But somehow that clinging smell of vanilla put me off them for the rest of the campaign.

The Birmingham speech, for all the trouble its preparation had caused, was a great success — not just the passages on East-West relations and the communist threat, but also those on law and order, on which I pledged to ‘place a barrier of steel’ against the socialist path to lawlessness. Afterwards we drove back to London where the following day’s (Friday 20 April) constituency visits would take place.

Saturday 21 April was a day of regular campaigning which began at a factory producing highly sophisticated electrical components in Milton Keynes. I was excited by the technology, about which I had been thoroughly briefed, and soon found myself giving a detailed exposition of it to a group of slightly bemused pressmen. I was then wired up and tested on a heart monitoring machine. With all the dials pointing in the right direction I was shown to be in good working order: ‘Solid as a rock,’ as I remarked — something which also reflected my judgement about how our campaign as a whole was going. For one of the oddest characteristics of the 1979 general election campaign was the wide and growing difference of perceptions between those of us who were out in the field and those who were back at the centre. Of course, politicians, like everyone else, are susceptible to self-delusion. But, far more than in 1983 and 1987 when security considerations loomed so large, I was confident that I did have a real sense of what the electorate felt and that their hearts were with us. I was also convinced that this change had come about largely because of the events of the winter of 1978/79 and that therefore undue caution on the issue of trade union power was bad tactics.

But it was clear from discussion at the strategy meeting I held in Flood Street on Sunday 22 April that not everyone saw matters this way. Although the opinion polls were still varied — one showing a 20 per cent and another a 5.5 per cent Conservative lead — there had not been much movement during the campaign. Peter Thorneycroft’s view was that we should more or less carry on as we were. As he put it in a paper for that Sunday’s meeting: ‘We should not embark on any high-risk initiatives. We are in the lead.’ This seemed to me fair enough as far as it went. But it begged two questions. First, had we not gained our lead in the first place by taking some quite high-risk initiatives, such as my interventions in the Winter of Discontent? Secondly, what now constituted a ‘high risk’? Measures to curb union power? Or the absence of them? In any case, one of the greatest dangers in a campaign where you have started out with a significant lead is complacency. Exciting the voters, as long as it is not on some issue on which they disagree with you, is an indispensable part of winning elections.

My campaigning that week would take me to the North of England, before going on to Scotland. After the Monday morning press conference, I flew to Newcastle where the photo-opportunity was at a tea factory. Tasting the sludgy concoctions, undiluted and unmasked by milk and sugar, had something of the same effect on my tea