drinking as did the Bournville factory on my consumption of chocolates.
Outside the factory a crowd had gathered, among which was a large, formidable woman who was pouring out a torrent of abuse in my direction. The police advised me to stay away. But I felt that if she had something to say she had better do so to my face rather than my back, and so I walked over to talk to her. I took her arm and told her quietly just to say what was wrong. Her manner changed completely. She had the usual grumbles and worries. But the real cause of her anger was a conviction that politicians were just not people who listened. I tried to answer as best I could and we parted amicably. As I walked away I heard her unmistakable tones telling a friend: ‘I told you she wasn’t half so bad.’ My experience of campaigning over the years is that there are very few irredeemably hostile electors. It is one of the tragedies of the terrorist threat that politicians nowadays have so few opportunities to convince themselves of that fact.
Tuesday, too, was very much a traditional-style campaigning day, with four walkabouts, including a visit to the Sowerby candidate, Donald Thompson’s butcher’s shop, and to a supermarket — after which the usual piles of purchases were taken back on the battle bus. On the steps of the Conservative Party offices in Halifax I was photographed in the drizzle holding up two shopping bags — a blue bag which contained the food which could have been bought for ?1 in 1974 and a half-filled red bag which contained all that ?1 would buy in Labour Britain in 1979. And if this was better politics than economics it was no worse for that. Among the no-nonsense Yorkshire people it went down well.
Back in London that evening I was interviewed by Denis Tuohy for
Let’s come to the nub of the matter. What you are saying is that the trade union leaders are saying that the whole of this general election is a hollow mockery and a sham. If you are right, and that is what they
I was especially severe with the Labour Party’s suggestion that discussion with the trade unions, the so- called ‘Concordat’, was a better way of dealing with union power than were changes in the law.
You know, it would have been very, very strange if Lord Shaftesbury, the great Tory reformer, looking at conditions which he saw in the mills and the factories decades ago, had said: I’ll do it by a voluntary concordat with the mill owners. Do you think he would have got it? Of course he wouldn’t. He said: There are some things which we must do
After the Wednesday 25 April morning press conference and radio interviews I had lunch at Central Office before flying to Edinburgh in the afternoon. I was beginning to become tired of the standard speech I made to audiences around the country, which drew heavily on the texts prepared for Cardiff and Birmingham with extra pieces slotted in that would go out as press releases. As a result, I performed inadvisably radical surgery on the material I took with me to Scotland. Just minutes before I was due to speak, I was on my knees in the Caledonian Hotel applying scissors and Sellotape to a speech which spread from one wall to the other and back again. Tessa Jardine Paterson frantically typed up each page of the speech, which was handed out, more or less as I delivered it, at Leith Town Hall. At least it was fresh — even to me. At the end I inserted one of my favourite quotations from Kipling:
It was a marvellous audience, and from the first few cheers my spirits lifted and I gave of my best.
We went on to the hotel at Glasgow Airport to have a late supper and then turn in before another day of Scottish campaigning. I was buoyed up with that special excitement which comes of knowing you have given a good speech. Although the opinion polls suggested that Labour might be closing on us, the gap was still a healthy one and my instincts were that we were winning the argument. Labour’s campaign had a distinctly tired feel about it. They reiterated so frequently the theme that Tory policies could not work, or would work only at the cost of draconian cuts in public services, that they slipped imperceptibly into arguing that nothing could work, and that Britain’s problems were in essence insoluble. This put Labour in conflict with the people’s basic instinct that improvement
Denis, Carol and Ronnie Millar were with me at the hotel and we exchanged gossip and jokes. Janet Young was also travelling with us and had slipped out during the meal. She now returned with a serious expression to tell me that Peter Thorneycroft — or ‘the Chairman’ as she insisted on calling him — felt that things were not too good politically and that Ted Heath should appear on the next Party Election Broadcast.
I exploded. It was about as clear a demonstration of lack of confidence in me as could be imagined. If Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office had not yet understood that what we were fighting for was a reversal not just of the Wilson-Callaghan approach but of the Heath Government’s approach they had understood nothing. I told Janet Young that if she and Peter thought that then I might as well pack up. Ted had lost three elections out of four and had nothing to say about an election fought on this kind of manifesto. To invite him to deliver a Party Political for us was tantamount to accepting defeat for the kind of policies I was advancing.
It was perhaps unfair of me to blame Janet in part for conveying Peter’s message. But this was the closest I came in the campaign to being really upset. I told her that I would not even hear of it. She conveyed a doubtless censored version of my response to ‘the Chairman’ and, still seething, I went to bed.
THE THIRD WEEK — D-7 to D-Day
Thursday morning’s Glasgow press conference was an unremarkable affair. The journalists did not seem to have much to say for themselves and I still felt out of sorts. Later in the morning I had a rather difficult interview with a Scottish television interviewer who was believed to be a Conservative supporter and, as sometimes happens, wished to prove the opposite by being particularly hostile. But from then on the day looked up. We visited a creamery in Aberdeen where I sampled some of the finest butter I have ever tasted — and was astonished to learn that it was all being produced not for consumption but to go into EEC intervention storage. It was my first meeting with the butter mountain.
Then it was on to the harbour at Buckie and a fish factory, where the irrepressibly high spirits and good humour of the people worked wonders on me. I addressed an early-evening meeting at Elgin Town Hall and then the coach drove us on to Lossiemouth to board the plane which would take us back to London. All along the way to Lossiemouth Airport the road was lined with people waving and we had to keep stopping to receive flowers and presents. Here was more proof that we were among friends.
It can well be imagined that there was some unseasonal frost in the April air when I came for my briefing at Central Office before the Friday morning press conference. I was also rather too sharp with a journalist at it on the subject of the impact of technology on employment. Then a television interviewer, whom I had been told would be sympathetic, turned out to be very much the opposite. It was that point in an election campaign when
