The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

Introduction

‘Ayes, 311. Noes, 310.’ Even before the figures were announced by the tellers, we on the Opposition benches knew that Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government had lost its motion of confidence and would have to call a general election. When the four tellers return to read the total of votes recorded in the lobbies, MPs can see which party has won from the positions they take up facing the Speaker. On this occasion the two Tories walked towards the Speaker’s left hand in the space usually occupied by government whips. A great burst of cheering and laughter rose from the Tory benches, and our supporters in the spectators’ galleries roared with out-of-order jubilation. Denis, who was watching the result from the Opposition box on the floor of the House, shouted ‘hooray’ and was, quite properly, reproved by one of the Serjeants at arms. Through the din, however, the stentorian guards’ officer tones of Spenser Le Marchant, the 6′ 6″ Tory MP for High Peak who was famous for his intake of champagne, could be heard booming out the result — the first such defeat for a British Government in more than fifty years.

We had known the figures would be close, but we had not known how close as we filed in and out of the lobbies. I looked for the unexpected faces who might decide the outcome. Labour whips had been assiduously rounding up the handful of independent MPs whose votes might put them over the top. In the end everything turned on the decision of one elusive Irish MP, Frank Maguire, who did indeed arrive at the Palace of Westminster, lifting the hopes of Labour ministers. The wait before the announcement was filled with rumour and counter-rumour across the Chamber. It seemed endless. Our Chief Whip quietly gave me his own forecast. I said nothing and tried to look inscrutable, doubtless without success. Some on the Labour benches, hearing of Mr Maguire’s appearance, began to grin in anticipation of victory. But Mr Maguire had arrived only to abstain. And on 28 March 1979, James Callaghan’s Labour Government, the last Labour Government and perhaps the last ever, fell from office.

The obsequies across the despatch box were brief and almost formal. Mr Callaghan told the House that he would take his case to the country and that Parliament would be dissolved once essential business had been transacted. Replying for the Opposition, I said that we would co-operate in this to ensure a dissolution of Parliament at the earliest opportunity. A slight sense of anti-climax after all the excitement took hold of MPs. On all sides we felt that the Commons was for the moment no longer the centre of events. The great questions of power and principle would be decided elsewhere. I got up to leave the Chamber for a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet in my Commons room, and Willie Whitelaw, who could often sense my mood even before I realized it myself, put an encouraging arm around my shoulder.

The Shadow Cabinet meeting was brisk and businesslike. Our main concern was to prevent the Labour Government from scoring any parliamentary runs in the limited time left to it. In particular, we were strongly of the view that there should be no budget statement, whatever limited tax changes might be needed to keep public finance on an even keel. We resolved that in office we would honour the Labour Government’s pledge to increase pensions by the amounts which the Prime Minister had announced in the confidence debate. And we decided to press for an election on 26 April, the earliest possible date, knowing that Labour would wish to stretch out the timetable in the hope of restoring their party morale. (In the end we had to settle for 3 May.) Then, the business concluded, we had a celebratory drink and broke up.

Driving back to my home in Flood Street, Chelsea, with Denis, I reflected on the coming battle. We had a fight on our hands, of course; but barring accidents it was a fight we should be able to win. The Government’s defeat in the confidence debate symbolized a larger defeat for the Left. It had lost the public’s confidence as well as Parliament’s. The ‘winter of discontent’, the ideological divisions in the Government, its inability to control its allies in the trade union movement, an impalpable sense that socialists everywhere had run out of steam and ideas — all these gave a fin de siècle atmosphere to the approaching election campaign.

The Tory Party, by contrast, had used its period in Opposition to elaborate a new approach to reviving the British economy and nation. Not only had we worked out a full programme for government; we had also taken apprenticeships in advertising and learnt how to put a complex and sophisticated case in direct, clear and simple language. We had, finally, been arguing that case for the best part of four years, so our agenda would, with luck, strike people as familiar common sense rather than as a wild radical project. On all these scores I felt a reasonable confidence.

The prospects after an election victory were another matter. Britain in 1979 was a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it with progressively more severe belabourings over the previous hundred years. Beginning in the 1880s, our industrial supremacy had been steadily eroding in the face of first American, then German competition. To be sure, some part of this erosion was inevitable and even welcome. As the pioneer of the industrial revolution, Britain enjoyed a head start over its competitors that was bound to diminish as nations with larger populations and more abundant natural resources entered the race. But since their rise would mean the growth of large export markets for Britain as well as fierce competition in domestic and third markets — Imperial Germany, for instance, was Britain’s second largest export market in 1914 — this commercial rivalry was more blessing than curse.

What made it in the event more curse than blessing was Britain’s failure to respond to the challenge effectively. We invested less; we educated and trained our people to a lower standard; and we allowed our workers and manufacturers to combine in various cartels that restricted competition and reduced efficiency. Thoughtful observers had noticed these trends by the beginning of this century. Arthur Balfour’s Tory administration of 1902–5 reformed education, training and scientific research in response to a non-partisan public agitation that has come to be called the ‘quest for national efficiency’. But such attempts to revive Britain’s economy by social reform were battling against very profound social forces: the natural complacency of a nation grown used for more than a hundred years to ‘top dog’ status; the economic ‘cushion’ provided by Britain’s vast overseas investments (equal in 1914 to 186 per cent of GNP); the deceptive might of an empire which continued to expand until 1919 but which cost more to defend than it contributed to national wealth; and, of course, the exhausting national losses of the First and Second World Wars. As a result, the Britain that woke up on the morning after 1945 was not only a nation drained by two great military efforts in defence of common civilization, but also one suffering from a prolonged bout of economic and financial anaemia.

With the election of Attlee’s Labour Government, however, there began a sustained attempt, which lasted over thirty years, to halt this relative decline and kick-start a resurgence along lines which — whether we call them socialist, social democrat, statist or merely Butskellite[1] — represented a centralizing, managerial, bureaucratic, interventionist style of government. Already large and unwieldy after its expansion in two world wars, the British Government very soon jammed a finger in every pie. It levied high rates of tax on work, enterprise, consumption, and wealth transfer. It planned development at every level — urban, rural, industrial and scientific. It managed the economy, macro-economically by Keynesian methods of fiscal manipulation, micro-economically by granting regional and industrial subsidies on a variety of criteria. It nationalized industries, either directly by taking ownership, or indirectly by using its powers of regulation to constrain the decisions of private management in the direction the Government wanted. (As Arthur Shenfield put it, the difference between the public and private sectors was that the private sector was controlled by government, and the public sector wasn’t controlled by anyone.) It made available various forms of welfare for a wide range of contingencies — poverty, unemployment, large families, old age, misfortune, ill-health, family quarrels — generally on a universal basis. And when some people preferred to rely on their own resources or on the assistance of family and friends, the Government would run advertising campaigns to persuade people of the virtues of dependence.

The rationale for such a comprehensive set of interventions was, to quote the former Labour Cabinet minister, Douglas Jay, that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves.’ A disinterested civil service, with access to the best and latest information, was better able to foresee economic eventualities and to propose responses to them than were the blind forces of the so-called ‘free market’.

Such a philosophy was explicitly advocated by the Labour Party. It gloried in planning, regulation, controls and subsidies. It had a vision of the future: Britain as a democratic socialist society, third way between east European collectivism and American capitalism. And there was a rough consistency between its principles and its policies — both tending towards the expansion of government — even if the pace of that change was not fast enough for its own Left.

The Tory Party was more ambivalent. At the level of principle, rhetorically and in Opposition, it opposed these doctrines and preached the gospel of free enterprise with very little qualification. Almost every post-war Tory victory had been won on slogans such as ‘Britain Strong and Free’ or ‘Set the People Free’. But in the fine print of policy, and especially in government, the Tory Party merely pitched camp in the long march to the left. It never tried seriously to reverse it. Privatization? The Carlisle State Pubs were sold off. Taxation? Regulation? Subsidies? If these were cut down at the start of a Tory government, they gradually crept up again as its life ebbed away. The welfare state? We boasted of spending more money than Labour, not of restoring people to independence and self-reliance. The result of this style of accommodationist politics, as my colleague Keith Joseph complained, was that post-war politics became a ‘socialist ratchet’ — Labour moved Britain towards more statism; the Tories stood pat; and the next Labour Government moved the country a little further left. The Tories loosened the corset of socialism; they never removed it.

Indeed, Keith’s formulation may have been too kind. After a reforming start, Ted Heath’s Government, in which we both served, proposed and almost implemented the most radical form of socialism ever contemplated by an elected British Government. It offered state control of prices and dividends, and the joint oversight of economic policy by a tripartite body representing the Trades Union Congress, the Confederation of British Industry and the Government, in return for trade union acquiescence in an incomes policy. We were saved from this abomination by the conservatism and suspicion of the TUC which perhaps could not believe that their ‘class enemy’ was prepared to surrender without a fight.

No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect. Far from reversing the slow relative decline of Britain vis-à-vis its main industrial competitors, it accelerated it. We fell further behind them, until by 1979 we were widely dismissed as ‘the sick man of Europe’. The relative worsening of our economic position was disguised by the rising affluence of the West as a whole. We, among others, could hardly fail to benefit from the long economic expansion of the post-war western world led by the United States. But if we never had it so good, others — like Germany, France, Italy, Denmark — increasingly had it better. And, as the 1970s wore grimly on, we began to fail in absolute as well as relative terms.

Injections of monetary demand, which in the 1950s had produced a rise in real production and a fall in unemployment before causing a modest rise in prices, now went directly into high rates of inflation without so much as a blip on the charts for production and unemployment. State subsidies and direction of investment achieved progressively more inefficient industries and ever lower returns on capital. Laws giving protective immunity to the trade unions at the turn of the century were now abused to protect restrictive practices and overmanning, to underpin strikes, and to coerce workers into joining unions and participating in industrial action against their better judgement. Welfare benefits, distributed with little or no consideration of their effects on behaviour, encouraged illegitimacy, facilitated the breakdown of families, and replaced incentives favouring work and self-reliance with perverse encouragement for idleness and cheating. The final illusion — that state intervention would promote social harmony and solidarity or, in Tory language, ‘One Nation’ — collapsed in the ‘winter of discontent’ when the dead went unburied, critically ill patients were turned away from hospitals by pickets, and the prevailing social mood was one of snarling envy and motiveless hostility. To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.

Another approach was needed — and for international reasons as well as domestic ones. Britain’s weakened economic position meant that its international role was bound to be cramped and strained as well. Our most painful experience of the country’s reduced circumstances was the failure of the Suez expedition in 1956. This was the result of political and economic weakness rather than military failure, because the Government withdrew a victorious force from the Canal Zone in response to a ‘run on the pound’ encouraged by the US Government. Whatever the details of this defeat, however, it entered the British soul and distorted our perspective on Britain’s place in the world.

We developed what might be called the ‘Suez syndrome’: having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence. Military and diplomatic successes such as the war in Borneo — which preserved the independence of former British colonies against Indonesian subversion, helped to topple the anti-western dictator, Sukarno, and thus altered the long-term balance of power in Asia in our interest — were either dismissed as trivial or ignored altogether. Defeats, which in reality were the results of avoidable misjudgement, such as the retreat from the Gulf in 1970, were held to be the inevitable consequences of British decline. And comic opera enterprises, such as Harold Wilson’s ‘invasion’ of Anguilla in March 1969 (for once, ‘police action’ seems the right term) were gleefully seized upon to illustrate the reality of reduced British power. The truth — that Britain was a middle-ranking power, given unusual influence by virtue of its historical distinction, skilled diplomacy and versatile military forces, but greatly weakened by economic decline — seemed too complex for sophisticated people to grasp. They were determined to think themselves much weaker and more contemptible than was in fact the case, and refused all comfort to the contrary.

What made this more dangerous in the late 1970s was that the United States was undergoing a similar crisis of morale following its failure in Vietnam. In fact, the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ was perhaps more debilitating than its Suez counterpart because it embodied the conviction that the United States was fortunately incapable of intervention abroad since such intervention would almost certainly be inimical to morality, the world’s poor, or the revolutionary tides of history. Hobbled by this psychological constraint and by a Congress also deeply influenced by it, two presidents saw the Soviet Union and its surrogates expand their power and influence in Afghanistan, southern Africa and Central America by subversion and outright military invasion. In Europe, an increasingly self-confident Soviet Union was planting offensive missiles in its eastern satellites, building its conventional forces to levels far in excess of NATO equivalents. It was also constructing a navy that would give it global reach.

A theory, coined after the collapse of communism to justify the policy of ‘doves’ in the Cold War, holds that because the Soviet Union was comparatively weak in the late 1980s, after almost a decade of western economic and military revival, it must have been a hollow threat in the late 1970s. Quite apart from the logical absurdity of placing a cause after its effect, the history of the Soviet Union from 1917 until just the other day refutes this argument. The Soviet Union was a power which deliberately inflicted economic backwardness on itself for political and ideological reasons, but compensated for this by concentrating resources on its military sector and by using the power this gave it to obtain further resources by force or the threat of force. It would extort subsidized credits from a West anxious for peace in periods of ‘thaw’, and seize new territories by subversion and conquest in periods of ‘chill’. By the late 1970s, the US, Britain and our European allies were faced by a Soviet Union in this second aggressive phase. We were neither psychologically, nor militarily, nor economically in shape to resist it.

Taken together, these three challenges — long-term economic decline, the debilitating effects of socialism, and the growing Soviet threat — were an intimidating inheritance for a new Prime Minister. I ought perhaps to have been more cowed by them in my imagination than in fact I was as we drove back to Flood Street. Perhaps if I could have foreseen the great roller-coaster of events in the next eleven years, described in this volume, I would have felt greater apprehension. Perversely, however, the emotion I felt was exhilaration at the challenge. We had thought, talked, written, discussed, debated all these questions — and now, if all went well in the next few weeks, we would finally get the chance to deal with them ourselves.

Some of this exhilaration came from meeting a wide range of my fellow-countrymen in four years as Opposition Leader. They were so much better than the statistics said: more energetic, more independent, more restive at the decline of the country, and more ready than many of my parliamentary colleagues to support painful measures to reverse that decline. We would incur more odium, I believed, by reneging on our promises of radical conservatism with a U-turn than by pressing firmly ahead through whatever attacks the socialists hurled against us. I sensed, as apparently Jim Callaghan also sensed in the course of the campaign, that a sea change had occurred in the political sensibility of the British people. They had given up on socialism — the thirty-year experiment had plainly failed — and were ready to try something else. That sea change was our mandate.

And there was a more personal factor. Chatham[2] famously remarked: ‘I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.’ It would have been presumptuous of me to have compared myself to Chatham. But if I am honest, I must admit that my exhilaration came from a similar inner conviction.

My background and experience were not those of a traditional Conservative prime minister. I was less able to depend on automatic deference, but I was also perhaps less intimidated by the risks of change. My senior colleagues, growing to political maturity in the slump of the 1930s, had a more resigned and pessimistic view of political possibilities. They were perhaps too ready to accept the Labour Party and union leaders as authentic interpreters of the wishes of the people. I did not feel I needed an interpreter to address people who spoke the same language. And I felt it was a real advantage that we had lived the same sort of life.[3] I felt that the experiences I had lived through had fitted me curiously well for the coming struggle.

I had grown up in a household that was neither poor nor rich. We had to economize each day in order to enjoy the occasional luxury. My father’s background as a grocer is sometimes cited as the basis for my economic philosophy. So it was — and is — but his original philosophy encompassed more than simply ensuring that incomings showed a small surplus over outgoings at the end of the week. My father was both a practical man and a man of theory. He liked to connect the progress of our corner shop with the great complex romance of international trade which recruited people all over the world to ensure that a family in Grantham could have on its table rice from India, coffee from Kenya, sugar from the West Indies and spices from five continents. Before I read a line from the great liberal economists, I knew from my father’s accounts that the free market was like a vast sensitive nervous system, responding to events and signals all over the world to meet the ever-changing needs of peoples in different countries, from different classes, of different religions, with a kind of benign indifference to their status. Governments acted on a much smaller store of conscious information and, by contrast, were themselves ‘blind forces’ blundering about in the dark, and obstructing the operations of markets rather than improving them. The economic history of Britain for the next forty years confirmed and amplified almost every item of my father’s practical economics. In effect, I had been equipped at an early age with the ideal mental outlook and tools of analysis for reconstructing an economy ravaged by state socialism.

My life, like those of most people on the planet, was transformed by the Second World War. In my case, because I was at school and university for its duration, the transformation was an intellectual rather than a physical one. I drew from the failure of appeasement the lesson that aggression must always be firmly resisted. But how? The ultimate victory of the Allies persuaded me that nations must co-operate in defence of agreed international rules if they are either to resist great evils or to achieve great benefits. That is merely a platitude, however, if political leaders lack the courage and farsightedness, or — what is equally important — if nations lack strong bonds of common loyalty. Weak nations could not have resisted Hitler effectively — indeed, those nations that were weak did not stand up to him. So I drew from the Second World War a lesson very different from the hostility towards the nation-state evinced by some post-war European statesmen. My view was — and is — that an effective internationalism can only be built by strong nations which are able to call upon the loyalty of their citizens to defend and enforce civilized rules of international conduct. An internationalism which seeks to supersede the nation-state, however, will founder quickly upon the reality that very few people are prepared to make genuine sacrifices for it. It is likely to degenerate, therefore, into a formula for endless discussion and hand-wringing.

I held these conclusions very tentatively at the war’s end. But they hardened into firm convictions in the 1940s and ’50s when, in the face of the Soviet threat, those institutions like NATO which represented international co-operation between strong nation-states proved far more effective in resisting that threat than bodies like the United Nations which embodied a superficially more ambitious but in reality weaker internationalism. My concern in 1979 was that the resistance of NATO to the latest Soviet threat was less adequate than I would have liked precisely because national morale in most NATO countries, including Britain, was so depressed. To resist the Soviet Union effectively it would be necessary to restore our own self-confidence (and, of course, our military strength) beforehand.

I recalled a similar collapse of national morale from my first days in active politics as a Young Conservative fighting the 1945–51 Labour Government. Some nostalgia for the austerity period apparently lingers. That is, I believe, an exercise in vicarious sacrifice, always more palatable than the real thing. Seen from afar, or from above, whether by a socialist gentleman in Whitehall or by a High Tory, socialism has a certain nobility: equal sacrifice, fair shares, everyone pulling together. Seen from below, however, it looked very different. Fair shares somehow always turn out to be small shares. Then, someone has to enforce their fairness; someone else has to check that this fairness does not result in black markets or under-the-counter favouritism; and a third person has to watch the first two to make sure that the administrators of fairness end up with no more than their fair share. All this promotes an atmosphere of envy and tittle-tattle. No one who lived through austerity, who can remember snoek, Spam, and utility clothing, could mistake the petty jealousies, minor tyrannies, ill-neighbourliness and sheer sourness of those years for idealism and equality. Even the partial dismantling of the ration-book state in the early 1950s came as an immense psychological relief to most people.

I particularly remember the political atmosphere of those years. Although the Tory rethinking associated with Rab Butler and the Conservative Research Department was important in reviving the Tory Party’s intellectual claims to office, there was a somewhat more robust and elementary rethinking going on at the grass roots. Our inspiration was less Rab Butler’s Industrial Charter than books like Colm Brogan’s anti-socialist satire, Our New Masters, which held up the moral pretensions of socialists to relentless and brilliant mockery, and Hayek’s powerful Road to Serfdom, dedicated to ‘the socialists of all parties’. Such books not only provided crisp, clear analytical arguments against socialism, demonstrating how its economic theories were connected to the then depressing shortages of our daily lives; but by their wonderful mockery of socialist follies, they also gave us the feeling that the other side simply could not win in the end. That is a vital feeling in politics; it eradicates past defeats and builds future victories. It left a permanent mark on my own political character, making me a long-term optimist for free enterprise and liberty and sustaining me through the bleak years of socialist supremacy in the 1960s and ’70s.

I was elected to the House of Commons in 1959 as the Member for Finchley, and later served in the Governments of Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home and Ted Heath. I enjoyed my early ministerial career: it was an absorbing education both in the ways of Whitehall and in the technicalities of pensions policy. But I could not help noticing a curious discrepancy in the behaviour of my colleagues. What they said and what they did seemed to exist in two separate compartments. It was not that they consciously deceived anyone; they were in fact conspicuously honourable. But the language of free enterprise, anti-socialism and the national interest sprang readily to their lips, while they conducted government business on very different assumptions about the role of the state at home and of the nation-state abroad. Their rhetoric was prompted by general ideas they thought desirable, such as freedom; their actions were confined by general ideas they thought inevitable, such as equality.

At the start, as an inexperienced young minister, I had to live with this. When we went into Opposition after the 1964 and 1966 defeats, I joined with Ted Heath in a rethinking of party policy which seemed to foreshadow much of what we later came to call Thatcherism. ‘Selsdon Man’ won the 1970 election on a radical Conservative manifesto.[4] But the Party’s conversion to its own philosophy proved skin-deep. After two years of struggling to put it into effect, the Heath Government changed course equally radically and adopted a programme of corporatism, intervention and reflation. I had my doubts, but as a first-time Cabinet minister I devoted myself principally to the major controversies of my own department (Education), and left more senior colleagues to get on with their own responsibilities. Yet all my instincts chafed against this. Perhaps because of my very unease, I noticed earlier than most that the very policies adopted as concessions to reality were also the least successful. Incomes policy, in addition to restricting people’s freedom, was invariably the prelude to a wages explosion. And that was one among many. Almost all the policies hawked about by ‘practical’ men on ‘pragmatic’ grounds turned out in the end to be highly impractical. Yet this fact never seemed to dent their enthusiasm. Indeed, Ted Heath responded to the defeat of his Government on the issue of incomes policy in the first 1974 election by proposing a still more ambitious scheme of interventionist government in the second.

While I was pondering on this mystery, Keith Joseph made a remark which reverberated powerfully in my mind. ‘I have only recently become a Conservative,’ he said, meaning that for his first twenty years in politics, many of them at the top, he had been a sort of moderate Fabian. I recognized both the truth of Keith’s remark and also that my own case was subtly different: I had always been an instinctive Conservative, but I had failed to develop these instincts either into a coherent framework of ideas or into a set of practical policies for government. And the faster the illusions of practical men crumbled before the onrush of reality, the more necessary it was to set about developing such a framework. Keith and I established the Centre for Policy Studies to do just that.

With Keith, I had come to see ever more clearly that what appeared to be technical arguments about the relationship between the stock of money and the level of prices went right to the heart of the question of what the role of government in a free society should be. It was the job of government to establish a framework of stability — whether constitutional stability, the rule of law, or the economic stability provided by sound money — within which individual families and businesses were free to pursue their own dreams and ambitions. We had to get out of the business of telling people what their ambitions should be and how exactly to realize them. That was up to them. The conclusions I reached fitted precisely those which my own instincts and experience themselves suggested. But I was aware that all too few of my colleagues in the Shadow Cabinet and in the House of Commons saw matters like this. I knew that I would have to go carefully to persuade them of what needed to be done and why.

The years in Opposition had often been frustrating, but at least they had given me the chance to see that our policies for government reflected my priorities and had been worked out in sufficient detail. We had published the outlines of our policy in The Right Approach in 1976 and The Right Approach to the Economy the following year. We had toyed with the idea of other similar documents, but had in fact come down in favour of speeches to set out our policy proposals. Behind the public pronouncements lay years of intense work by policy groups, usually chaired by the relevant Chief Shadow Spokesmen, whose conclusions were brought before the Leader’s Consultative Committee, as the Shadow Cabinet was formally known, where policies were discussed, modified, rejected or approved.

There were three points to which I had returned again and again during this period. First, everything we wished to do had to fit into the overall strategy of reversing Britain’s economic decline, for without an end to that decline there was no hope of success for our other objectives. This led on to the second point: all policies had to be carefully costed, and if they could not be accommodated within our public expenditure plans they would not be approved. Geoffrey Howe and his very talented Shadow Treasury team combed through everything in great detail to ensure this was the case. Finally, we had to stress continually that, however difficult the road might be and however long it took us to reach our destination, we intended to achieve a fundamental change of direction. We stood for a new beginning, not more of the same.

I was again asking the Conservative Party to put its faith in freedom and free markets, limited government and a strong national defence; I knew that we would be able to keep the Party united around this programme for the election campaign. But in the dark days which would precede tangible success I would have to struggle to ensure that this time the Conservative Government kept its nerve. If we failed, we would never be given another chance.

I was preoccupied by these reflections as we drove home, had a small family celebration at Flood Street, and finally turned in for the night. My last thought was: the die is cast. We had made every sensible preparation for the election and for governing afterwards. If honest endeavour were the test, we would not fail. In the end, however, Man proposes and God disposes. We might deserve success, but we could not command it. It was, perversely, a comforting thought. I slept well.