Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (69 page)

In effect, Reece, Bell and McAlpine formed a team within Conservative Central Office unconstrained by the normal organizational structures, rivalries and bureaucracies of party life. They offered a rather unusual combination of attitudes – a belief in the black arts of advertising and the most modern methods of image-management with a serious ideological commitment to radical Conservatism. Even more important, perhaps, they
were all ‘in love’ (Tim Bell’s words) with Margaret Thatcher. All three men, by now in early middle age, and none of them at that time married, liked drink and women and parties and fun. They also carried with them ‘the knowledge that we were engaged in a great crusade’.
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They saw in the apparently straitlaced Mrs Thatcher an indulgent mother or nanny, a patron saint and a unique opportunity. Their emotional loyalty was to her, not to the Tory Party, and this gave an edge to their work.

The Saatchi–Reece strategy, however, was not to focus public attention on their heroine. Bell told Thorneycroft that Mrs Thatcher was ‘hard to sell’ because she looked too like people’s idea of a Tory wife, and the image of a Tory wife supporting her husband was incompatible with the image of a leader.
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Reece was concerned that the radio broadcasting of Parliament, which began in April 1978, had made life even more difficult for a woman leader because the public could hear her shrieking to make herself audible over the hubbub.
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He also had a high opinion of Jim Callaghan’s skills on radio and television. Although the tendency of ever more televised politics was to make election campaigns more presidential, Saatchis did not seek to encourage this. They thought that it was their task to present an optimistic philosophy of freedom and national recovery and the idea that it was time for a change. Their first party political broadcast, in May, was an upbeat message about the creation of wealth. But they quickly realized that the Tories should try to exploit the old saw that ‘oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them’, and should tap into growing popular discontent. People in general were saying how ghastly everything was, so the Conservatives should say so too. They advised that the Tories should not let Labour keep them at its mercy through its power of choosing the date of the contest, but should attack right away. They recommended that Conservative advertising should strike at what had traditionally been Labour’s strongest points.

Unemployment, which had hit 1.5 million in 1977, was an obvious example. One of their creative staff, Andrew Rutherford, invented the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’. A gaggle of Young Conservatives from Hendon, so small in number that the same people had to be repeated several times in the poster, formed an imitation of an old-fashioned dole queue snaking into the distance. Designed to cause trouble at a quiet time, and perhaps
to put Labour off their expected electoral timetable of the early autumn of 1978, the poster was put up in very few sites, but heavily trailed to selected newspapers, such as the
Daily Mail
. It was Labour, however, who gave it the attention it needed to take off. Denis Healey, whose undoubted cleverness and eloquence tended to be vitiated by bad temper, raged against the poster – partly for the rather odd reason that it insulted the unemployed by portraying ‘actors’ – and so ensured acres of free publicity. Jim Callaghan retired for a summer holiday at his farm in Ringmer in Sussex, accompanied by
The Times Guide to the House of Commons
,
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and there he went through the statistics of all the marginal seats before making a decision about the date of the election. The Saatchi poster helped to make him nervous. It is a tribute to the power of the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster that the belief has grown up that it led the election campaign of May 1979. This is not the case, but it is a natural error for the memory to make, for the poster did mark the beginning of the Conservatives’ rhetorical conquest of Labour. The poster found the right terms in which to mount the challenge. Variations on the theme followed later: ‘Educashun isn’t working’ said a poster of a boy writing those misspelt words on a blackboard. ‘Britain isn’t getting any better’ said another of pensioners queueing for miles under a sign marked ‘Hospital’.

Faced with the Saatchi proposals that summer, Mrs Thatcher behaved in a very characteristic way. She had little natural feel for what made a good election poster or slogan, though she often made small, practical comments. ‘The public don’t know what 20 per cent means,’ she would say, and she warned that it was dangerous to produce posters on which opponents could easily write graffiti because she remembered that in Dartford her opponent’s poster ‘Dodds again for Dartford’ had quickly been defaced by her Young Conservatives to read ‘Odds against Dodds for Dartford’.
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She made commonsense objections on grounds of taste or comprehensibility – refusing to appear at all if they went ahead with a party political broadcast which would have shown a baby in nappies and boxing gloves,
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and requiring every joke to be laboriously explained to her. Jeremy Sinclair, the creative director of Saatchis, remembered that ‘When we wrote for her, she’d cross it all out, rewrite it, and end up pretty much where we’d started.’
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She rejected Saatchis’ first proposed photograph of her because the rings on her fingers were prominent, saying ‘It makes me look rich.’
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Her first reaction to the ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster was to complain because ‘the largest word on it is “Labour”,’
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but, Bell remembered, she was quickly won over ‘because she saw it was hurtful [to Labour], and she liked that’.
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Although she could be pernickety, Mrs Thatcher was quite humble in
areas of which she had little knowledge, and advertising was one of them. She trusted Reece, accepted his analysis of what needed doing and liked the people, notably Bell, whom he brought in. She was meekly obedient about what she should wear and how she should speak, and grateful to those who helped her improve. As early as 1972, when she was only a Cabinet minister, Reece had helped her with her voice. He had bumped into Laurence Olivier
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on a train from Brighton and had asked the great actor’s advice. Olivier had arranged to lend her the services of Kate Fleming, the National Theatre’s voice coach, to make her sound less shrill.
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Mrs Thatcher had submitted to this uncomplainingly, and she stuck by these lessons as leader. Conscious that she could sometimes be wooden in front of the camera, she asked Bell to sit just behind and below it whenever she did a broadcast so that she could address her words to a real and friendly person. She also accepted the Saatchi–Reece doctrine that no politician should appear continuously on a party political broadcast (which, in those days, had an enormous, statutory length of nine minutes and forty seconds) for more than thirty seconds. They wanted the broadcasts to be untraditional, stylish and funny. These were not natural Margaret Thatcher characteristics, but she endorsed them; and so the most serious-minded of Tory leaders found herself presiding over advertisements full of ingenious innovations like film running backwards (to show the direction in which Labour was taking Britain) and little dramas acted out (of people in a cinema queue complaining about inflation, for example), rather than old-fashioned films of MPs stiltedly delivering standard messages. She also agreed with Reece that the voters the Tories most needed to reach were those outside the tent of traditional party allegiance, often people without a strong interest in politics. So she warmly supported advertising campaigns that aimed directly at women shoppers. Advertisements were placed in women’s magazines, which said: ‘Do this quiz to find out if you’re Labour or Conservative.’ After a series of questions about policies, the quiz ended:

Which of these people is more likely to know what it’s like to do the family shopping?

a. James Callaghan

b. Your husband

c. Mrs Thatcher.

Cultivation of the popular newspapers was part of the same strategy,
as Reece had argued from the first, and Mrs Thatcher readily did her duty. As if to confirm Reece’s analysis of the rising trends in society, the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing
Sun
overtook that of the Labour-supporting
Daily Mirror
for the first time in May 1978. Mrs Thatcher sent the
Sun
a message of congratulation. She flattered its editor, Larry Lamb, and placed great faith in the power of its leading articles. In those days, the leading articles appeared on page two, opposite the famous page-three girls. On one occasion, arguing with her advisers, Mrs Thatcher alighted on two leaders in that day’s
Sun
which vigorously confirmed her prejudices. ‘There,’ she cried, spreading the paper before them. ‘What do you think of those two?’ The young aides found themselves staring at a large pair of breasts and almost suffocated with suppressed laughter. Mrs Thatcher, of course, failed to notice the source of their mirth.
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Gordon Reece had his own friendships with editors, including John Junor of the
Sunday Express
and David English of the
Daily Mail
. When the
Mail
got hold of the previously unknown story of Denis’s first marriage, Reece exploited his friendship with English to ensure that the story was written in a friendly manner. Indeed, English wrote it himself.
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It says something about the difference between Mrs Thatcher’s successful management of her public image and her uneasy management of her children that the fact of the first marriage had been unknown to Mark and Carol. Carol was in Australia as the story broke and it fell to Alison Ward to inform her about it.
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Mark remembered the incident as very distressing.
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It was part of Reece’s skill that he unlocked in such a correct and almost inhibited woman the showbiz, populist, communicative gifts which lurked within. Her ability to master the media in this way made life far more difficult for her potential opponents in the party.

Working on the assumption that there would be an election in the autumn of 1978, the Conservatives drew up their manifesto. All policy groups (there were no fewer than ninety-three of them) were told to wind up their work on 30 June. Most of the policy papers and manifesto drafts show the victory of the cautious over the bold. Michael Heseltine, who had been asked to look into the abolition of domestic rates which the party had promised
in October 1974, reported that all the possible replacements were fraught with difficulty. A poll tax, for example, was ‘extremely regressive’ for the poor. He recommended that the pledge stand but that the manifesto should state that it would take a ‘lower priority’ than income tax cuts. He also proposed a ‘root-and-branch reappraisal of centralised decision-taking’ and the granting of ‘increased discretion to local authorities’.
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Beside this passage, Mrs Thatcher put the wiggly line which was always the mark of her disapproval.

Even the radical Nicholas Ridley, charged with recommending a policy on the nationalized industries, wrote of denationalization (the word ‘privatization’ was not used in the documents) that ‘The objective must be pursued cautiously and flexibly, recognising that major changes may well be out of the question in some industries such as the utilities.’ As for telecommunications, which at that time were entirely controlled by the Post Office, they would be split into a separate enterprise, but ‘The telephone network would remain nationalised but private telephone suppliers would be given a larger role.’
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Ridley did, however, recommend that there could be a direct sale to the public of assets in the British Steel Corporation, British Rail, the National Freight Corporation, the British National Oil Corporation and the National Bus Company. On 10 July 1978 the Shadow Cabinet agreed that the ideas about denationalization would not be published.

The pulling together of the manifesto coincided with a row about Mrs Thatcher’s entourage. Early in her leadership, she had been worried that her office was unable to deal properly with the vast number of letters (3,000 a week) pouring in. Matters came to a head in 1976 when the Duke of Rutland, the local Duke from her Grantham childhood, and not one to ignore
lèse-majesté
, received a reply, from a member of Mrs Thatcher’s staff, to a letter he had written to Mrs Thatcher. The reply began ‘Dear Mr Rutland’. When she heard about this, Mrs Thatcher exploded. Alistair McAlpine recruited David Wolfson, who was helping run his family business, Great Universal Stores, and therefore knew about direct mail, to advise on improvements. Soon Wolfson developed a role of improving communication between Central Office and the Leader’s office. In the summer of 1978, when she thought the general election was imminent, Mrs Thatcher asked Wolfson to work for her full time, and made him secretary to the Shadow Cabinet. This caused a row because, by virtue of being director of the Research Department, Chris Patten was automatically secretary to the Shadow Cabinet. Patten was therefore upset by what he saw as a personal and ideological snub. Mrs Thatcher probably intended no offence. She seems not to have been aware that Patten held the post, a fact which,
in itself, must have been galling to him. Wolfson’s view was that it all started because there was nowhere for him to sit in the Leader’s crowded offices, except in the Shadow Cabinet room. She therefore hit upon the title to go with the geography, and asked him to take the minutes. He never actually did so, and life went on very much as before.
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But the incident illustrated Mrs Thatcher’s surprisingly vague attitude to position, hierarchy, job titles and so on, in some ways an attractive trait, but one which often caused affront. It also brought out her fondness for having people about her whose first loyalty was to her, not to the machine.

The process of manifesto-making made all factions anxious. While Chris Patten feared that he and what he saw as his enlightened liberal conservatism might be excluded, Thatcherites worried that sogginess would prevail. A fragment of Wolfson’s comments to Mrs Thatcher on the manifesto’s early draft survives. On the proposal that competition be promoted by ‘Strengthening the Monopolies Commission’, he writes, ‘Help. Haven’t we learnt anything?’, and when it is suggested that the government should be ‘enlarging’ the Office of Fair Trading, he writes ‘MORE UNPRODUCTIVE CIVIL SERVANTS’.
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For her part, Mrs Thatcher fretted that the energy and discipline of their policy-making were being dissipated in too many promises. The minutes for the Shadow Cabinet meeting of 31 July record, ‘Mrs Thatcher pointed out that because a large number of nuggets were being inserted, we were in danger of losing our credibility on the reduction of expenditure. She proposed that the next manifesto draft put the main emphasis on a few central objectives on which everything else depended: (a) the cutting of taxes and (b) strengthening internal and external defence.’
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But the same meeting went on to agree that ‘We should not pick a fight with the unions on a minor issue by a crude commitment on strikers’ benefits.’