The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

All election victories look inevitable in retrospect; none in prospect. The wounds which Westland, BL and reaction to the US raid on Libya inflicted on the Government and the Conservative Party would take some time to heal. Economic recovery would in time provide an effective salve, as it became clear that our policies were delivering growth with low inflation, higher living standards and — from the summer of 1986 — steadily falling unemployment. But in the meantime, Labour had developed a thirst for power, moderated their image and gained a lead in the opinion polls. It was important that I should unify the Party around my authority and vision of Conservatism. This would not be easy.

STYLE AND TONE

Perhaps the most damaging accusation made against me during the Westland affair was that I did not listen. Like most allegations which stick, this contained a grain of truth. Once I begin to follow a train of thought I am not easily stopped. This has its advantages. It means that I can concentrate on a tricky point almost no matter what is going on in the background, a useful ability, for example, at Prime Minister’s Question Time. But it does, of course, also mean that I am inclined to talk over people and ignore timid or inarticulate objections and arguments. People who do not know me and how I work conclude that I have not taken in what has been said to me. Those who know me better will confirm, however, that this is generally not the case. I will often go away afterwards to revise my views in the light of what I have heard. Indeed, I have even been accused by some supporters of taking too much notice of those who do not agree with me.

The suggestion that I do not listen, particularly when it comes from ex-ministers, can, however, simply mean that I do not agree with their views. You might say I ‘chair from the front’. I like to say what I think quite early on and then see whether arguments are adduced which show me to be wrong, in which case I have no difficulty in changing my line. This is, of course, not the traditional formal way of chairing meetings. My experience is that a group of men sitting round a table like little better than their own voices and that nothing is more distasteful than the possibility that a conclusion can be reached without all of them having the chance to read from their briefs. My style of chairmanship certainly nonplussed some colleagues, who knew their brief a good deal less well than I did. But I adopt this technique because I believe in argument as the best way of getting to the truth — not because I want to suppress argument. In fact, I would go further: nothing is more important to successful democratic government than the willingness to argue frankly and forcefully — unless, perhaps, it is the willingness to recognize collective responsibility when the decision is made.

So I set in train a series of steps to make plain that the Government encompassed — and was receptive to — a wide range of views. My first concern was to deal with the impression — that was apparently very widespread — that the Government was unaware of people’s worries. I could do this without diluting the Thatcherite philosophy because, whatever commentators imagined, the hopes and aspirations of the great majority were in tune with my beliefs. It was because I did listen to people that I knew this. But I never confused the leader page of the Guardian with vox populi.

I used my speech to the Scottish Party Conference in Perth on Friday 16 May (1986) to stress that we were indeed listening to what people were concerned about. And in some cases we had already acted to put matters right. The Scots had been up in arms because of the effects of the domestic rate revaluation, which had sent some people’s rates bills soaring while others had apparently inexplicably dropped. So I reminded the 1986 Scottish Conference:

I went on to promise the same radical but sensitive approach to people’s concerns in education, where there was much discontent, and health where there was still more. I acknowledged:

What was important in this speech, and was remarked upon, was the tone. Of course, it is never enough just to listen: you have to come up with answers. But this was a time to demonstrate sensitivity and the speech went down well.

RESHUFFLE

A second step towards getting the Government and Party off to a new start was provided by the reshuffle a little later that month. Keith Joseph had decided that he now wished to leave the Cabinet. The departure of my oldest political friend and ally, indeed mentor, saddened me. He was irreplaceable; somehow, politics would never be the same again. But Keith’s departure gave rise to important changes. What I needed was ministers who could fight battles in the media as well as in Whitehall.

Any analysis of the opinion polls revealed that where we were strong was on economic management; where we were weak was on the so-called ‘caring issues’. There is nothing new about this. No matter how unjust — and I personally resented the injustice because I have always found no one more willing to give time and money without reward than the typical Conservative — this is what was to be expected. In Health I felt that the best answer was to set out the record: but there was no evidence that it made much impact; indeed, it was widely disbelieved. In Education, however, the Conservatives were trusted because although people thought we would spend less than Labour on schools they rightly understood that we were interested in standards — academic and nonacademic — parental choice and value for money; and they knew that Labour’s ‘loony Left’ had a hidden agenda of social engineering and sexual liberation. Ken Baker had won hands-down the propaganda battle against the Left in the local authorities and he and William Waldegrave, stimulated by the advice of Lord Rothschild, had set out what I had long been looking for — an alternative to the rates. But I felt that a first-class communicator like Ken Baker was now needed at Education.

John Moore, who had done an excellent job pressing ahead the privatization programme from the Treasury and was highly regarded by Nigel Lawson, now entered the Cabinet as Transport Secretary. I had high hopes of John. He was of my way of thinking. He was conscientious, charming, soft spoken and in some ways he had the strengths of Cecil Parkinson — that is, he was right-wing but not hard or aggressive. He came across very well on television, where in the subsequent election campaign he managed to be tough and sweetly reasonable at the same time. I had no doubt that John Moore would be an asset to the Government and a loyal supporter to me.

I moved Nick Ridley to the sprawling Department of the Environment. Nick could not match Ken or John in presentation. But we still needed to come up with some radical policies for our manifesto and the third term. No one, I knew, was better suited to find the right answers to the complicated issues which faced us in Nick’s new field of responsibility. Housing was certainly one area which required the application of a penetrating intellect. The sale of council houses had led to a real revolution in ownership. But the vast, soulless high rise council estates remained ghettoes of deprivation, poor education and unemployment. The private rented sector too, in spite of some liberalization through the shorthold, had continued to shrink, holding back labour mobility. Housing benefit and housing finance generally was a jungle, always threatening to swallow up the best laid schemes. The community charge had to be thought through in detail and implemented in England and Wales.[72] And further ahead lay the vexed question of pollution of the environment.

Nick flourished at Environment. He was never popular with the general public who saw what appeared to be a chain-smoking, dishevelled, languid aristocrat; by contrast, he was the object of universal respect and great affection from those who worked with him, above all his officials. Nick had those virtues which seem only to be cultivated in private: he was completely unaffected; he treated people and arguments on their merits; he was incapable of guile; and he was always seeking to take on the unrewarding and unpopular tasks.

On the evening of Thursday 24 July I spoke to the ‘22 Committee to give the traditional ‘end of term’ address. This was always an important occasion, but particularly so on this occasion. My task was to ensure that the Parliamentary Party left in the past all the agonized debates about Westland, BL and Libya and came back in the autumn determined to demonstrate the unity and self-confidence required to fight and win the arguments — and then a general election. There is no point in telling back-bench politicians, who are in regular touch with their constituents, that things are good when they are not. All that achieves is to undermine confidence in you. So in an unvarnished speech I told them that they had had to take a lot of difficulties on the chin in the last year, but those difficulties had nothing to do with our fundamental approach, which was correct. They had resulted from throwing away the precious virtue of unity and also because, as over Libya, we had had to do genuinely difficult things which were right. I was glad to get warm and noisy applause for this, not simply because I prefer applause to execration, but because such a warm response to such a strong speech meant that the Party was recovering its nerve.

The summer of 1986 was important too in another regard. At Conservative Central Office Norman Tebbit, the Chairman of the Party, had been having a very hard time. As Norman used to say, he was the ‘lightning conductor’ for me. A good deal of criticism of Norman found its way into the press and at one point he believed that it was coming from me or my staff. Norman arrived one day at Downing Street armed with a sheaf of critical press cuttings, asking where these rumours came from. I was surprised to read these cuttings — my press summary did not convey the flavour of these vicious attacks — but I reassured Norman that they certainly did not come from me, or my staff, nor — I emphasized strongly — did they reflect my views. These tensions build up when people do not see one another frequently enough to give vent to tensions and clear up misunderstandings: and the civil service machine never likes to give enough time in diaries to party political matters. Relations improved, I am glad to say, when Stephen Sherbourne, my political secretary who understood politics as well as any Cabinet minister and whose shrewdness never failed me, ensured that Norman and I had regular weekly meetings.

THE STRATEGY GROUP AND POLICY GROUPS

My third step was to involve senior Cabinet ministers in the strategy for the next election. In June Willie Whitelaw and John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, sent me a memorandum urging me to set up the group of ministers which was to be officially known as the Strategy Group and, no doubt to the great pleasure of its male members, was soon known by the press as the ‘A-Team’. Its purpose would be to plan for the next election, discussing policy, presentation and tactics. I agreed that, apart from Willie and John, the group should consist of Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Douglas Hurd and Norman Tebbit. I vetoed the suggested inclusion of Peter Walker, and although I would have liked to have Nick Ridley as a permanent member of the group, I decided that it should be confined to the Deputy Prime Minister, the three great offices of state, the Chairman of the Party and the Chief Whip. Plainly, these had to be members. To have included other ministers would have provoked the usual political jealousies and back biting. Other colleagues, though, were invited when their departmental responsibilities were under discussion. Since it was a political rather than a government group it was serviced by Stephen Sherbourne and Robin Harris, the Director of the Conservative Research Department. As head of my Policy Unit, Brian Griffiths regularly attended too. The group met on Monday mornings.

We began by looking through the programme of main events for the week and the response they required. As we got nearer to the election Norman Tebbit would often give us a brief report on the state of party preparations. But the main item was usually a paper from a Cabinet minister — either a permanent member of the group or another colleague — on his departmental plans for the future. Several ministers who today enjoy a reputation for radicalism had originally arrived at our meetings with proposals that would not, as I would privately put it, pull the skin off a rice pudding — and left with the distinct feeling that much, much more was required of them.

At about the same time as the Strategy Group was established I set up eleven party policy groups. On this occasion I made the chairman of each group the Cabinet minister whose responsibilities covered its area of interest. Apart from the obvious areas — the economy, jobs, foreign affairs and defence, agriculture, the NHS — there were separate groups on the family (under Nicholas Edwards, Welsh Secretary) and young people (under John Moore — the nearest we had in Cabinet to a young person). At least on this occasion, unlike 1983, the groups were set up promptly and for the most part managed to send in their reports on time. The fact that Cabinet ministers chaired groups on their own areas meant, naturally, that even though outside experts and back-benchers were members, the groups’ conclusions bore an unremarkable similarity to the suggestions for policy initiatives advanced by departments. As in 1983, however, their real value was to make the Party feel fully involved in what was happening. In this sense they were a counterpart to the Strategy Group which served the same purpose as regards the Cabinet and Government.

In general, the contents of the reports were not particularly exciting. It is, though, worth noting that Nigel Lawson’s policy group, bearing the unmistakable imprint of its chairman, advocated early entry into the ERM (possibly even before the election which would have been potentially disastrous), made no reference to the need to control public borrowing and did not even mention his own invention, the MTFS, which I regarded as the anchor for the whole of our economic strategy. This approach never made its way into the manifesto, but somehow it made its way into policy.

THE 1986 CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE

None of us had any doubts about the importance of the 1986 Party Conference in Bournemouth. This was likely, though not certain, to be our last Party Conference before the general election. Labour’s Conference the week before had been marked by highly professional presentation which, though it deliberately subordinated substance to public relations, was undoubtedly effective. Their device of substituting a red rose for the red flag as their Party’s symbol, impudent as it was, marked a shrewd understanding that whatever else the electorate might vote for, it would not be socialism. Still, their overconfidence persuaded the Labour leadership to offer a number of hostages to fortune — notably a neutralist and anti-American defence policy that was to leave them immensely vulnerable to our attacks in the election campaign.

A temptation which Norman Tebbit and I found easy to resist was that of trying to copy Labour tactics. One of the first rules of campaigning is to play to your own strengths: only if these are insufficient should you think about aping other people’s. This meant that we must stress our record of achievement, not just by reeling off figures but by portraying it as the basis for further progress — or, as the slogan Norman picked for the conference had it, for ‘Our Next Move Forward’. When Norman told me what he intended I was impressed. In the late summer and early autumn he had pressed ministers to come up with crisp statements of what had been achieved and targets which should be met, preferably within a given time-span. All of this material was cleared with the Treasury to see that there were no hidden public expenditure implications. By the time that we arrived at Bournemouth the material was ready and each day of the conference was marked by practical policy announcements which the media could not help but compare favourably with the glitzy Labour Conference which preceded ours. Happily, the Bournemouth Conference coincided with increasing evidence of prosperity, not least the fall in unemployment. As a result it gave us a lift of morale and in the polls which, in retrospect, set us on course for winning the next election.

I took even more trouble with my speech at Bournemouth than on other occasions. The very success of the speeches which the conference had already heard made this a more difficult occasion. I had to sum up but not to repeat: above all, I had to provide a theme which would fire our people over the next few months.

Throughout the year I had collected in a file called ‘ideas for speeches’ articles, speeches and different briefing and policy items which came across my desk. Stephen Sherbourne and the Research Department always provided me with a collection of the most stimulating articles of the week. Stephen also put in for me copies of speeches by those whose ideas he knew I particularly valued, such as Nick Ridley, David Young and Nigel Lawson.

During the summer recess I would have a meeting to discuss the general themes I should put across in my conference speech. Speech contributions were commissioned from ministers, advisers, friendly journalists, and academics. On this occasion we began speech writing with no fewer than twelve separate contributions and two and a half hefty files of background material. The weekend before the conference different draft speech sections would be laid out and put together — literally — along the table in the Great Parlour at Chequers. Linking passages would be written and then the still disjointed and often repetitive first draft would be typed up. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when they knew that we at least had a speech of some sort; even though past experience suggested that this might bear little relationship to the final text. Then would come the long hours of refining and polishing until midnight (if we were lucky).

On the Friday morning I used to mark up the text with my own special code, noting pauses, stress and where to have my voice rise or fall. (I would familiarize myself with the speech using this text and always have it with me, even though when I spoke it would be from the Autocue tape.)

My task in this year’s speech was to provide a trailer to the arguments on which we would fight the election and to give a thematic unity to the various reforms of the ‘Next Move Forward’. What would prove to be the single most important element in our victory — namely the rising prosperity achieved by our economic policies — was more a back-drop than a theme in the conference and my speech. Our second campaign theme was foreshadowed in my fierce attack on the Labour Party’s defence policy.

The Labour Conference had voted for a non-nuclear defence policy, including the closure of American nuclear bases in the UK. Mr Kinnock had also made it clear that there were no circumstances in which he would ask the United States to use nuclear weapons in the defence of Britain. This, of course, went further than Labour had ever done before, because it meant that from the first day on which a Labour government took power Britain would be regarded by the Soviets as no longer under the American and NATO ‘nuclear umbrella’. I said:

But my main positive theme which was to be at the centre of our manifesto too was contained in the section of my speech entitled ‘power to the people’. This drew attention to the wider home and share ownership attendant on privatization and looked ahead to the manifesto reforms of education and housing designed to give ordinary people more choice in public services. I said:

When all is said and done, however, a speech is a theatrical as well as a political event. Just before 2.30 p.m. on Friday 10 October I walked onto the platform amid the usual uproar, which increased when people saw that I was wearing a rose on my lapel. I began by saying:

ELECTION PREPARATIONS AND THE MANIFESTO

When Parliament reassembled the Party was in a quite different frame of mind than it had been just a few months earlier. We had a brief legislative programme on the advice of David Young, so crucial legislation would not be abandoned if we went for an early election the following summer. Our position in the opinion polls had begun to improve. The Strategy Group and the policy groups were meeting regularly. Norman kept me informed of the work which was going on in Central Office to prepare for the election when it came. Already, on 2 July, he had given me a paper setting out his view of possible election dates.

The compilation of documents which constitute the Party’s plans for an election campaign is traditionally called the ‘War Book’. On 23 December Norman sent me the first draft ‘as a Christmas present’. I was not unhappy to see the end of 1986 but I felt a new enthusiasm as I considered the fresh policies and the battle for them which would be required in 1987.

On Thursday 8 January I discussed with Norman and others the papers he had sent me about the election campaign. We met at Alistair McAlpine’s house in order to escape detection by the press, which had already started to speculate about election dates. Many details of the campaign had not been worked out as yet, but I found myself largely in agreement with the suggestions. I did, however, have one continuing worry; this was about the advertising. Several months earlier I had asked whether Tim Bell, who had worked with me on previous elections, could do so again now. I understood that he was a consultant to Saatchis. But in fact the rift between them was greater than I had imagined and the suggestion was never taken up. I might have been prepared to insist, but this would have caused more important problems with Norman and Central Office. In any case I continued to see Tim socially. At this stage in January, though, I still hoped that Saatchis would exhibit the political nous and creativity we had had from them in the past.

I regarded the manifesto as my main responsibility. Brian Griffiths and Robin Harris brought together in a single paper the proposals which had come in from ministers and policy groups. We discussed this at Chequers on Sunday 1 February. Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit and Nick Ridley — in their different ways the three best brains of the Cabinet — were there. It was as important at this stage to rule out as to rule in different proposals: I like a manifesto which contains a limited number of radical and striking measures, rather than irritating little clutches of minor ones. It was at this meeting that the main shape of the manifesto proposals became clear.

We agreed to include the aim of a 25 per cent basic rate of income tax. We would not include a figure for the reduction of the top rate, though we were thinking about a top rate of 50 per cent. I kept out of the manifesto any commitment to transferable tax allowances between husband and wife which, if they had been implemented along the lines of the earlier green paper, would have been extremely expensive. I commissioned further work on candidates for privatization which I wanted to be spelt out clearly in the manifesto itself. Education would, we all agreed, be one of the crucial areas for new proposals in the manifesto. Largely as a result of work done by Brian Griffiths, I was already clear what these should be. There must be a core curriculum to ensure that the basic subjects were taught to all children. There must be graded tests or benchmarks against which children’s knowledge should be judged. All schools should have greater financial autonomy. There must be a new per capita funding system which, along with ‘open enrolment’,[73] would mean that successful, popular schools were financially rewarded and enabled to expand. There must be more powers for head teachers. Finally, and most controversially, schools must be given the power to apply for what at this stage we were describing as ‘direct grant’ status, by which we meant that they could become in effect ‘independent state schools’ — a phrase that the DES hated and kept trying to remove from my speeches in favour of the bureaucratically flavoured ‘Grant-Maintained Schools’ — outside the control of Local Education Authorities.

Housing was another area in which radical proposals were being considered: Nick Ridley had already drawn up papers which were yet to be properly discussed. But his main ideas — all of which eventually found their way into the manifesto — were to give groups of tenants the right to form tenants’ co-operatives and individual tenants the right to transfer ownership of their house (or flat) to a housing association or other approved institution — in other words to swap landlords. Housing Action Trusts (HATs), modelled on the highly successful Urban Development Corporations, were to be set up to take over bad estates, renovate them and then pass them on to different tenures and ownerships. We would also reform local authority housing accounts to stop housing rents being used to subsidize the rate fund when they should have gone towards repairs and renovation.

We were by now under a good deal of political pressure on the Health Service and discussed at our meeting how to respond. However good the record of the service as a whole, there was plenty of evidence that it was not sufficiently sensitive to patients’ wishes, that there was much inefficiency and that some areas and hospitals were performing inexplicably worse than others, treating fewer patients etc. Norman Fowler at the 1986 Party Conference had set out a number of targets, backed up by special allocations of public spending, for increases in the number of particular sorts of operation. This announcement had gone well. I was reluctant to add the Health Service to the list of areas in which we were proposing fundamental reform — not least because not enough work had yet been done on it. The NHS was seen by many as a touchstone for our commitment to the welfare state and there were obvious dangers of coming forward with new proposals out of the blue. The direction of reform which I wanted to see was one towards bringing down waiting lists by ensuring that money moved with the patient, rather than got lost within the bureaucratic maze of the NHS. But that left so many questions still unanswered that I eventually ruled out any substantial new proposals on Health for the manifesto.

After the meeting I wrote to Cabinet ministers asking them to bring forward any proposals which required policy approval for implementation in the next Parliament. Once this had been received, legislation could then be drafted for introduction in the new Parliament. To knock all these submissions into a coherent whole I established a small Manifesto Committee that reported directly to me. Chaired by John MacGregor, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, its other members were Brian Griffiths, Stephen Sherbourne, Robin Harris and John O’Sullivan, a former Associate Editor of The Times, who had joined my Policy Unit as a special adviser and who drafted the manifesto.

The manifesto was designed to solve a serious political problem for us. As a party which had been in government for eight years, we had to dispel any idea that we were stale and running out of ideas. We therefore had to advance a number of clear, specific, new and well-worked-out reforms. At the same time we had to protect ourselves against the jibe: if these ideas are so good, why haven’t you introduced them before? We did so by presenting our reforms as the third stage of a rolling Thatcherite programme. In our first term, we revived the economy and reformed trade union law. In our second, we extended wealth and capital ownership more widely than ever before. In our third, we would give ordinary people the kind of choice and quality in public services that the rich already enjoyed. Looking back, once the manifesto was published, we heard no more about the Government running out of steam.

The manifesto was the best ever produced by the Conservative Party. This was not just because it contained far-reaching proposals to reform education, housing, local government finance, trade unions and for more privatization and lower taxes. It was also because the manifesto projected a vision and then arranged the policies in a clear and logical away around it. So, for example, the proposals on education, housing and trade unions (requiring more use of secret ballots and protecting individual unionists’ rights not to join a strike) came almost at the very front of the document, highlighting the fact that we were embarked upon a great programme of ambitious social reform to give power to the people. Those we wanted to empower were not just (or even mainly) those who could afford their own homes or private schools for their children or who had large investments, but those who lacked these advantages.

The manifesto went to the heart of my convictions. I believe that Conservative policies must liberate and empower those whom socialism traps, demoralizes and then contemptuously ignores. This, of course, is precisely what socialists most fear; it makes a number of paternalist Tories uneasy too.

I held a meeting at Chequers on Tuesday 21 April with Willie Whitelaw, Norman Tebbit, David Young, Peter Morrison (Norman’s Deputy at Central Office) and the draftsmen and advisers to go through the whole text. Then the redrafting and checking began. Brian and John reported back to me. Stephen Sherbourne, with his special kind of tactful ruthlessness, kept all involved to the increasingly tight deadlines which had to be met. The main new development — and a substantial improvement — was suggested by David Young. This was to bring together the record of government achievements, entitled ‘Our First Eight Years’, in a separate document, to go in a wallet alongside the manifesto. David had great flair and energy, essential for this kind of work, and I left him in charge of overseeing the manifesto’s visual presentation and indeed involved him as much as possible in the wider election preparations.

Because a good deal of misleading comment has been made about the background to and course of the 1987 general election campaign it is worth setting some matters straight at the outset. According to some versions of events this was all about a battle between rival Tory advertising agencies; according to other accounts the main participants — particularly myself — behaved in such an unbalanced way that it is difficult to see why we were all not carried off to one of our new NHS hospitals by the men in white coats, let alone re-elected. This was not to be a happy campaign; but it was a successful one and that is what counts. There were disagreements — but good old-fashioned stand-up rows, in which most of us regret what we have said and try to forget it about it without bearing grudges, feature in all election campaigns. (As far as I can gather there were no rows in what was generally seen as a smooth running and happy Labour campaign.) As it turned out, the talents and character of all the main participants in the Conservative campaign contributed to the victory, though perhaps the creative tension was more tense than creative on occasion.

Apart from the manifesto and the practical preparations for the campaign, there was one other task which concerned us in the early months of 1987. This was the need to deal with the SDP-Liberal Alliance. The Alliance was by now led by the at first attractive but later increasingly ridiculous duo of the two Davids, Steel and Owen: it sought to represent itself as a credible, radical third force and if it did so might attract what (in the psephological jargon we all found it impossible to avoid) is called ‘soft’ Tory support. Within the Conservative Party there was a rumbling debate about how to deal with the Alliance. Some Conservatives on the left of the Party, who doubtless had more than a sneaking sympathy with the Alliance criticisms of my policies, were all for treating them lightly — or just ignoring them.

Neither Norman Tebbit nor I saw things like this. The fact was that, for all the posturing, the SDP were retread socialists who had gone along with nationalization and increased trade union power when in office, and had only developed second thoughts about socialism when their ministerial salaries stopped in 1979. The Liberals have always, for their part, been the least scrupulous force in British politics, specializing in dubious tactics — fake opinion polls released on the eve of by-elections to suggest a nonexistent Liberal surge were a well-loved classic. Another tactic, which the SDP quickly borrowed, was to support one policy when talking to one group and a quite different one when talking to another. The analysis which Norman had done at Central Office showed quite clearly that there were splits and inconsistencies which we must exploit — and do so as far as possible before the election campaign itself began, when such matters risked becoming submerged.

So Norman and I agreed that at the Central Council in Torquay on Saturday 21 March 1987 we would both use the occasion to launch an assault on the Alliance. I called the Alliance ‘the Labour Party in exile’, recalled the SDP leaders’ leading role in the last Labour Government and ended with a quotation from an old music hall song:

While the manifesto was being drafted, I was discussing with Norman Tebbit what I hoped would be the final shape of the campaign and my own role in it. At our meeting on Thursday 16 April we went over press conference themes, advertising and party election broadcasts. By now I was in a mood for an early — June — election. We would have served the four years I always felt a government should. I felt in my bones that the popular mood was with us and that Labour’s public relations gimmicks were starting to look just a little tired.

As is the way of these things, the most appropriate date eventually wrote itself into our programme — Thursday 11 June. By then we would have seen the results of the local elections which, as in 1983, would be run through the number-crunchers of Central Office to make it into a useful guide for a general election. It would be supplemented by other private polls Norman had commissioned: this was particularly necessary for Scotland and London where there were no local elections that year. Some polling in individual key constituencies would also be done: though such are the problems of sampling in constituency polls that no one would attach too much weight to these. I saw this analysis and heard senior colleagues’ views at Chequers on Sunday: I knew by then that the manifesto was in almost final form. I had been through the final text with the draftsmen and with Nigel and Norman on that Saturday.

We had one last disagreement. Nigel wished to include a commitment to zero inflation in the next Parliament. I thought this was a hostage to fortune. Events unfortunately proved my caution right.

As always, I slept on the decision about whether to go to the country, and then on Monday 11 May I arranged to see the Queen at 12.25 p.m. to seek a dissolution of Parliament for an election on 11 June.

CLOTHES

In my case, preparation for the election involved more than politics. I also had to be dressed for the occasion. I had already commissioned from Aquascutum suits, jackets and skirts — ‘working clothes’ for the campaign.

I took a close interest in clothes, as most women do: but it was also extremely important that the impression I gave was right for the political occasion. In Opposition I had worn clothes from various suppliers. And if I had had any doubts about the importance of getting these matters very carefully organized, they were dissipated by the arrival of an outfit ordered for the Opening of Parliament in 1979. It was a beautiful sapphire blue suit with a matching hat. I had no time for a fitting and as I put it on with just a few minutes in hand I found to my horror that it neither fitted nor suited me and had to rush away to change into something else. It was a lesson not to order from a sketch, which can disguise unwanted bulges that are too painfully obvious to the real customer.

From the time of my arrival in Downing Street, Crawfie helped me choose my wardrobe. Together we would discuss style, colour and cloth. Everything had to do duty on many occasions so tailored suits seemed right. (They also have the advantage of gently passing by the waist.) The most exciting outfits were perhaps those suits I had made — in black or dark blue — for the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. On foreign visits, it was, of course, particularly important to be appropriately dressed. We always paid attention to the colours of the national flag when deciding on what I should wear. The biggest change, however, was the new style I adopted when I visited the Soviet Union in the spring of 1987, for which I wore a black coat with shoulder pads, that Crawfie had seen in the Aquascutum window, and a marvellous fox fur hat. (Aquascutum have provided me with most of my suits ever since.)

With the televising of the House of Commons after November 1989 new considerations arose. Stripes and checks looked attractive and cheerful in the flesh but they could dazzle the television viewer. One day when I had just not had enough time to change before going to the House, I continued to wear a black and white check suit. Afterwards a parliamentary colleague who had seen me on television told me, ‘what you said was all right, but you looked awful.’ I learned my lesson. People watching television would also notice whether I had worn the same suit on successive occasions and even wrote in about it. So from now on Crawfie always kept a note of what I wore each week for Prime Minister’s Questions. Out of these notes a diary emerged and each outfit received its own name, usually denoting the occasion it was first worn. The pages read something like a travel diary: Paris Opera, Washington Pink, Reagan Navy, Toronto Turquoise, Tokyo Blue, Kremlin Silver, Peking Black and last but not least English Garden. But now my mind was on the forthcoming campaign: it was time to lay out my navy and white check suit, to be known as ‘Election ‘87’.

THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN

The Conservative Party, as I pointed out earlier, deliberately makes a slow start in elections. A slow start, however, is one thing: no start at all is quite another. As the days went by, it seemed to me that the Opposition parties were making most of the running — though at one moment they fell over their own feet when Denis Healey told an astonished world direct from the Soviet capital, where he had been seeking to establish Labour’s international credentials, that Moscow was ‘praying for a Labour victory’.

On Friday, I spoke at the Scottish Party Conference in Perth. But of course at that stage our manifesto had not been published, so my main message was a warning of what to expect from Labour, which would try to conceal its true nature and purpose: I told people to expect an ‘iceberg manifesto’ from Labour with ‘one-tenth of its socialism visible, nine-tenths beneath the surface’.

On Tuesday 19 May, I chaired the first press conference of the campaign to launch our manifesto: the Alliance’s had already appeared, and disappeared, and Labour’s, which would be more notable for omissions than contents, would be launched the same day. Our manifesto launch was not quite all that I had wished. The press conference room at Central Office was far too crowded, hot and noisy. Cabinet ministers — all of whom were present in order to demonstrate the strength of the ‘team’ — were crowded in too, so much so that the television shots of the conference looked truly awful. Nick Ridley explained our housing policy and I hoped that the journalists might be tempted actually to read the detailed policies of the manifesto. I was certainly determined that our candidates should do so and I took them through it in my speech to their conference in Central Hall, Westminster, the following morning.

But I also used the speech for another purpose. Our political weak point was the social services, especially Health, so I went out of my way to tell the candidates, and through them the voters, that the Government was committed to the principle of a National Health Service which I said was ‘safe only in our hands’. We had a notably cautious section on Health in the manifesto. That done, I devoted most of the campaign to stressing our strong points on the economy and defence. This did not prevent Health emerging later in the campaign as an issue; but it meant that we had armed ourselves against Labour’s attack and done our best to soothe the voters’ anxieties.

D-21 TO D-14

Thursday was my first day out in the campaign Battle Bus. This was a new high-tech version of the coach I had used in 1983. It was packed with every kind of up-to-date technology — a computer, different kinds of radio telephones, a fax, a photocopier and an on-board technician to look after it all. Painted blue, the Battle Bus bore the slogan ‘Moving Forward with Maggie’. My first photo-opportunity beside the bus was at Docklands, chosen as an example of our Conservative theme of ‘regeneration’. I left Docklands to return to No. 10 at lunchtime. In the meantime, the Battle Bus had to undergo some regeneration having collided with a BMW. But the bus’s dents were hammered out overnight and it appeared almost spick and span for the following day.

I always held my adoption meeting in Finchley on a Thursday rather than a Friday because the large Jewish population would otherwise be preparing for the Sabbath. In my speech that Thursday evening I concentrated heavily on defence, targeting not just the Labour Party but the Alliance, to the latter’s great irritation.

Our first regular press conference of the campaign was on Friday (22 May). The subject was officially defence and George Younger made the opening statement. We had suddenly been given a great opportunity to sink the Alliance parties which some Tory strategists — but not I — thought were the principal electoral threat to us. Instead, the two Davids sank themselves. The passage in our manifesto claimed that their joint defence policy, because it amounted to unilateral nuclear disarmament by degrees, would just as surely as Labour’s eventually produce a ‘frightened and fellow-travelling Britain’ vulnerable to Soviet blackmail. This was not, of course, an allegation of a lack of patriotism, but a forecast of what weakness would inevitably lead to. David Owen, however, failed to make this distinction and took enormous offence. We could hardly believe our luck when for several days he concentrated the public’s attention on our strongest card, defence, and his weakest one, his connection with the Liberal Party’s sandal-wearing unilateralists. The Alliance never recovered from this misjudgement.

But we were not without our difficulties. I was questioned on education, on which it was suggested that there were contradictions between my and Ken Baker’s line on ‘opted-out’, grant-maintained schools. In fact, we were not suggesting that the new schools would be fee paying in the sense of being private schools: they would remain in the public sector. Moreover, the Secretary of State for Education has to give his approval if a school — whether grant-maintained or not — wishes to change from being a comprehensive school to becoming a grammar school.

That said, however — and over the next few days it all had to be said repeatedly by Ken Baker — I was saddened that we had had to give all these assurances. It is my passionate belief that what above all has gone wrong with British education is that since the war we have, as I put it at this time, ‘strangled the middle way’. Direct grant schools and grammar schools provided the means for people like me to get on equal terms with those who came from well-off backgrounds. I would have liked grant-maintained schools — combined with the other changes we were making, and perhaps supplemented by a voucher applying in public and private sectors alike — to move us back to that ‘middle way’. I also wanted a return to selection — not of the old eleven-plus kind but a development of specialization and competition so that some schools would become centres of excellence in music, others in technology, others in science, others in the arts etc. This would have given specially gifted children the chance to develop their talents, regardless of their background.

If you are to have specialization of the sort I would like to see you ought to allow the school, which has become a centre of excellence in some field, to control its admission procedures. Competition between schools and individuals will also be more effective if there is some ability to ‘top up’ grants received from the state. I hope that we can go further along these lines. We ought to if the full Conservative vision for education is to be fulfilled. But at this stage it was clearly not going to be possible.

Some critics argued that this early row resulted from the fact that our reforms had not been fully thought through. That is certainly true of some of the details, even though the main lines were clear. But what was really behind the dispute was that, as I often did in government, I was using public statements to advance the argument and to push reluctant colleagues further than they would otherwise have gone. In an election campaign this was certainly a high-risk strategy. But without such tactics Thatcherism would be a merely theoretical viewpoint.

At the end of the first week we had established ourselves as the only party which had new, fresh ideas. But I felt that we had not gained the momentum from our manifesto which we might have expected and I was starting to be concerned about the tactics of the campaign.

My tour that day took me to the North-West. I made a speech to a large crowd of supporters from the Bury North constituency in the middle of a field. It was just the sort of lively, old-fashioned campaigning which I enjoyed.

Sunday was spent with interviews and working on speeches. Unlike 1983, each of my speeches in this campaign was for the particular occasion rather than drawn from previously prepared material. John O’Sullivan, Ronnie Millar and Stephen Sherbourne were the ‘home team’ of speech writers. The general rule was that I would look at the speech draft overnight, make the changes required and work on the detail through the following day right up to the delivery of the speech itself. This made for fresh and interesting speeches which were probably better than in the 1983 campaign; but it was also much more difficult to link the theme of the speech with other themes of the day from the morning press conference, my tour, other ministerial speeches or external events.

At Monday’s press conference we took the economy as the subject of the day and Nigel Lawson made the opening statement. This was a good campaign for Nigel. Not only did he demonstrate complete command of the issues, he also spotted the implications of Labour’s tax and national insurance proposals — especially their planned abolition of the married man’s tax allowance and of the upper limit on employees’ national insurance contributions — for people on quite modest incomes. This threw Labour into total disarray in the last week of the campaign and revealed that they did not understand their own policies. Nigel had earlier published costings of the Labour Party’s manifesto at some £35 billion over and above the Government’s spending plans. As I was to say later in a speech: ‘Nigel’s favourite bedside reading is Labour policy documents: he likes a good mystery.’

At this stage, however, defence continued to dominate the headlines, partly because we had deliberately concentrated our early fire on it, but mainly because of Neil Kinnock’s extraordinary gaffe in a television interview in which he suggested that Labour’s response to armed aggression would be to take to the hills for guerilla warfare. We gleefully leapt upon this and it provided the inspiration for the only good advertisement of our campaign, depicting ‘Labour’s Policy on Arms’ with a British soldier, his hands held up in surrender. On Tuesday evening, after a day’s campaigning in Wales, I told a big rally in Cardiff:

The speech went very well. Under Harvey Thomas’s supervision our rallies had by now moved into the twentieth century with a vengeance. Dry ice shot out over the first six rows, enveloping the press in a dense fog; lasers flashed madly across the auditorium; our campaign tune, composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the occasion, blared out; a video of me on international visits was shown; and then on I walked to deliver my speech, feeling something of an anti-climax.

Wednesday’s press conference was of particular importance to the campaign because we took education as the theme, with Ken Baker and me together, in order to allay the doubts our early confusion had generated and to regain the initiative on the subject, which I regarded as central to our manifesto. It went well.

But my tours, by general agreement, did not. Neil Kinnock was gaining more and better television coverage. He was portrayed — as I had specifically requested at the beginning of the campaign that I should be — against the background of cheering crowds, or doing something which fitted in with the theme of the day. The media — far more I suspect than the general public — were entranced by the highly polished party election broadcast showing Neil and Glenys walking hand in hand, bathed in a warm glow of summer sunlight, to strains of patriotic music, looking rather like an advertisement for early retirement. This probably encouraged them to give favourable coverage to the Kinnock tours. And what was I doing on Wednesday? I was visiting a training centre for guide dogs for the blind. The symbolism and significance were lost not just on the media but on me too — and much as I enjoyed looking at the dogs, they did not have a vote. I felt that I was not meeting enough real people. I was going to too many factories and firms. This was partly because of the very tight constraints on security which dictated the tour programme. But the basic strategy was wrong because the tour was organized around photo-opportunities — and no one was seeing the photos.

I began to improvise a little on my own account. That afternoon on our way back from the West Country I had the coach stop at a farm shop, plentifully stocked with bacon, chutney and cream. The following press coaches stopped too and we all piled into the shop. I bought cream and everyone seemed to follow suit. This, I felt, had been my personal contribution to the rural economy; perhaps we might even get some reasonable television film footage at last.

D-14 TO D-7

One week into the campaign and in spite of our own difficulties the political situation was still favourable. Our lead in the polls was holding up. Indeed, the polls recorded little net change in party strength during the campaign, though as will be seen there were a few rogue polls which caused some alarm. There had been a big erosion of support for the Alliance, whose campaign was marred by splits and that basic incoherence which is the nemesis of people who eschew principle in politics. Neil Kinnock kept away from the main London-based journalists and Bryan Gould took most of the press conferences. By the second week, however, this tactic was beginning to rebound and the Fleet Street press were becoming frustrated and critical: they were able to cross-question me day after day and they expected to enjoy a similar sport with the Leader of the Opposition. In this they were enthusiastically encouraged by Norman Tebbit, who by temperament and talent was perfectly suited to maul Neil Kinnock and did so effectively in successive speeches as the campaign wore on.

Thursday’s press conference was on the NHS. Norman Fowler had devised a splendid illustration of new hospitals built throughout Britain, marked by lights on a map which were lit up when he pressed a switch. Like the Kinnocks’ election broadcast, I had him repeat the performance by popular demand. Sadly, like so much of the campaign, it did not come over properly on television. The press conference went smoothly. But what was worrying me, as usual, was my speech that evening in Solihull.

We had worked on the draft late until 3.30 a.m. but I was still not happy with it. I continued to break away to work on it whenever I could during the day — that is when I was not meeting candidates, talking to regional editors, admiring Jaguars at the factory and then meeting crowds at the Home and Garden exhibition at the Birmingham NEC. As soon as we arrived at Dame Joan Seccombe’s house — she is one of the Party’s most committed volunteers — I left the others to enjoy her hospitality and closeted myself away with with my speech writers, working frantically on the text right up to the last moment. For some mysterious reason the more you all suffer in preparing a speech, the better it turns out to be and this speech was very good indeed. It contained one wounding passage which drew a roar of approval from the audience:

But I was to broaden the attack on Labour in this speech. I levelled my sights at the ‘loony Left’s’ policy of municipal socialism and sexual propaganda on the rates. This drew applause which surprised even me. It became clear that there was real public anxiety about the extremism cloaked by Labour’s moderate image. I set out with renewed energy in every speech to win over traditional Labour supporters. Indeed, this became one of my principal themes.

Nick Ridley explained our housing policy at the Friday morning press conference. Then I set off on my tour. This was one of our more successful days, including good photo-opportunities, the chance to meet real people and even a spot of heckling from a Labour councillor when I was making a speech through a loudspeaker to a large crowd on a sports field. The television cameras covered what was thought to be my receiving from No. 10 the news that a British diplomat kidnapped in Tehran had been released: in fact I knew this anyway and the person I was speaking to over the telephone was a secretary at Conservative Central Office. The best picture of the campaign was in Tiptree, in John Wakeham’s constituency. Followed by three tractors pulling trailers full of perspiring press-men and photographers, I was driven out into a blackcurrant field to be photographed looking through binoculars at a bird sanctuary. It was a surreal picture of splendid isolation.

With ten days to go, David Young gave the press conference on Monday 1 June, arguing that voting Conservative was the only way to keep unemployment coming down. Using striking graphics, he summarized the elements of what we called ‘Labour’s job destruction package’, showing how thousands of jobs would go as a result of their policies for defence cuts, sanctions on South Africa and extra powers for trade unions. It was a good performance and I was glad that we were at last beginning to get across our strong card of economic prosperity.

The next day, after chairing our press conference, which again was on the economy, I flew to Scotland. By now the Labour Party had decided that they had better keep off policy altogether and they leaked that instead they would concentrate on personal attacks on me. Neil Kinnock did not do this with great subtlety: he described me as ‘a would-be empress’ and the Cabinet as ‘sycophants and doormats’. I was determined to make this tactic rebound on them. I spoke at a rally that night in Edinburgh:

In spite of the bad weather it had been a pleasant, old-fashioned day of campaigning. Denis enjoyed it too. We visited the Scottish & Newcastle Brewery in Edinburgh and Denis with somewhat feigned reluctance downed the obligatory pint on my behalf. Next morning after giving press and television interviews I flew to Newcastle and went on to the Gateshead Metro shopping centre where, amid the large crowds which gathered as I went into different shops, I felt that I was at last making proper contact with the electorate.

My satisfaction, however, was marred by the onset of extremely painful toothache. I had been to the dentist before the campaign began and nothing seemed amiss. But the pain grew worse as the afternoon wore on and later that evening after I returned to London I went to the dentist once more. There was apparently an abscess under my tooth which would need proper treatment later. For the moment I had to rely on pain killers. By the time I got back to London I had something else unpleasant to think about. I was told in the course of the afternoon that the next day’s Gallup poll would show a definite shift from us to Labour for the first time, cutting our lead to 4 per cent.

D-7 TO D-DAY

I could not get to sleep that night because of my tooth. At about 4.00 a.m. Crawfie gave me some pain killers. They did the trick for the toothache and allowed me to get some rest. But they made me feel and — as I have later learned — look catatonic when, first thing the following morning, I went across to Central Office. This has gone down in political mythology as ‘wobbly Thursday’ or ‘black Thursday’: since we did not wobble but the news looked black I prefer the second description.

The subject of the day was pensions and social security. I had expressly told Central Office that I wanted Health to be covered as well but this had not been done, which angered me. At the press conference briefing my toothache had come on again and I tore into Norman Fowler’s draft press release, rather unfairly, until David Wolfson, who is one of the few people who gets away with this sort ofthing, told me to ‘shut up’ and read it through first before making any more changes. I did so, agreed it and then faced the news about the poll. The worst was that there would be another poll by Marplan for the next day which was the subject of wild speculation. It would show whether the Gallup result was just a rogue poll, or whether our position really was slipping away.

I had talked to David Young the previous night about my worries about the campaign, which seemed to me to be unfocused and not to stress sufficiently our strongest themes, in particular the record of economic prosperity. The following day, Norman Tebbit and I had a ding-dong row. This cleared the air. We agreed that some of our younger ministers, like John Moore and Kenneth Clarke, should be given a higher billing. I arranged to appear upon the David Frost programme from which I had been withdrawn. But at this stage we had still not agreed on the advertising for the following week.

The press conference that day was widely considered to be a disaster for us and I was held to blame. The issue arose of private health care. I refused to be apologetic for the fact that I used private health insurance to have minor operations done speedily, without adding to the queue for NHS treatment and using my own money. What I said was immediately exploited as being insensitive, callous and uncaring. I was aware that the press conference had not been a success in public relations terms. But I was not going to back down, however much others around me hoped that I would stay silent on the matter in the interviews when it was bound to be raised. Moreover, my instincts were right and that of the professionals wrong. The press set out on what turned out to be a fruitful hunt for examples of Labour politicians and their families who used private health care. By the end of the campaign I had won this argument — and it was definitely worth winning.

After the press conference I set out my ideas for a major advertising campaign, which I had previously privately discussed with Tim Bell, who had of course been effectively excluded from the campaign by Central Office and Saatchis. I wanted this to be based heavily on our record of achievements, which may have seemed dull to the creative and unpolitical minds of communications specialists but which — as was subsequently demonstrated again at the 1992 general election — are what the electorate is really likely to vote on. Saatchis were to devise one set of advertising for me to see and approve: meanwhile Tim Bell and David Young were working on another which I believed would be better. I went to the Alton Towers theme park in Staffordshire, without being quite in the mood for jollity, still worried about what would come of the advertising, even more concerned about the mysterious opinion poll we were waiting for. There was media speculation that it would show our lead down to 1 per cent. While at Alton Towers I overheard a BBC newscaster remark, ‘that’s it: she’s downhill all the way now.’

I had little time to deal with the advertising when I arrived back at No. 10. I liked the material Tim Bell had prepared. Norman Tebbit, who is always a big man in such situations, frankly acknowledged that the new ideas for the advertising were better. I left him and David Young to deal with it all while I went on with the briefing for my interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. There is only one complaint I still allow myself to nurture against my staff in No. 10: that is that I was not told before I went on television about the results of the poll, which put us back in a healthy lead and showed that the earlier one was not to be taken seriously. Perhaps it was as well, for it was a tough interview and I really fought back. At least one good — if extremely expensive — thing came out of that rogue poll: for it prompted me to insist on that newspaper advertising blitz on the lines I wanted, which consolidated our support.

I was due to speak in Chester on Friday. I did not really concentrate on my draft speech until I was in the train that morning to Gatwick. I found it far too theatrical. I was expected to use ‘props’ — to ensure that television news concentrated on certain passages — a large key to illustrate the advances in home ownership was just one of several. Stephen Sherbourne and John Whittingdale were promptly asked to bring this flight of fancy down to earth. As is often the case with speeches, panic proved productive. The revised text was first class: the audience approved as well.

Over the weekend I had several more big interviews. The Today Programme on Saturday morning was characteristically hostile. However, I enjoyed Channel 4’s Face the People later that morning, in which voters from marginal constituencies questioned me on our policies. I loved these occasions: the questions are real and have a life and a depth that one-to-one interviews never evoke. On Sunday I was interviewed by David Frost. The questioning was tough but fair, concentrating heavily once more on the private health issue. We all felt that it had gone quite well.

This was also the day of our final ‘family rally’ at Wembley where, as in 1983, television personalities, actors, comedians and musicians gave us their public support. Ronnie Millar had written a version of the Dad’s Army theme song, ‘Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Kinnock?’, to which the audience sang along as at a pantomime. This went down very well and when my turn came to speak I picked up the theme predicting that millions of traditional Labour voters, disgusted with their Party’s swing to the left and neutralism, would soon be joining ‘Mum’s Army’. To my surprise it was the lead item on that evening’s TV news. I felt that this important message, at least, was getting across.

On Monday, after chairing our press conference and then recording an interview with Sir Robin Day, I left for the G7 economic summit in Venice. I had decided before the campaign began that I would almost certainly go to the G7, just as I had gone to Williamsburg in 1983. My role as ‘international statesman’ was a more important element in our election campaign this time; so there were even stronger political arguments for making the visit. In any case, I never missed the opportunity of talking with President Reagan as I would both at the dinner that evening which concentrated on arms control and at my tête-à-tête meeting with him the following morning before the first formal session on the economy. There was a real point at issue on arms control, on which I wanted to make my position clear. Chancellor Kohl wanted to press ahead with negotiation with the Soviets for the removal of shorter-range nuclear weapons. I was not prepared to see British forces in Germany left without their protection and said so forcefully over dinner. I would not subscribe to any communiqué which established the goal of further reductions, at least until agreement to eliminate chemical weapons and redress the imbalance in conventional forces. In this, I received the crucial backing of President Reagan.

I was back in Britain by 2.30 on Tuesday afternoon. A draft of my speech for Harrogate that evening was waiting for me with Stephen Sherbourne and the speech writers when I landed at Gatwick. To my relief and their amazement I liked it. It was essentially a summary of what I, at least, thought were the three main themes of the election: Conservative prosperity, Labour extremism, especially on defence, and the new reforms of education and housing to give more power to the people. On the way to the hall at Harrogate I had been given the results of the specially large — and therefore significant — Gallup 2000 poll. They showed us with a 7-point lead. ‘Not enough,’ I said. But it was good news all the same. It seemed that our opinion poll rating had been practically level throughout the entire campaign.

I returned to London, but I did not ease up. On Wednesday morning I answered questions on the Election Call ‘phone-in programme. I spent most of the afternoon campaigning in Portsmouth and Southampton.

After voting myself, I spent Thursday morning and early afternoon in Finchley visiting our Committee Rooms and then, as the time for getting late voters out to the poll approached, I returned to No. 10. Norman Tebbit came over and we had a long talk over drinks in my study, not just about the campaign and the likely result, but also about Norman’s own plans. He had already told me that he intended to leave the Government after the election because he felt that he should spend more time with Margaret. There was not much I could say to try to persuade him otherwise, because his reasons were as personal as they were admirable. But I did bitterly regret his decision. I had too few like-minded supporters in the Government, and of these none had Norman’s strength and acumen.

I had supper in the flat and listened to the television comment and speculation about the result. Before I left for Finchley at 10.30 p.m. I heard Vincent Hanna on the BBC forecasting a hung Parliament. ITV was talking about a Conservative majority of about 40. I felt reasonably confident that with the Alliance vote having clearly collapsed we would have a majority, but I was not at all confident how large it would be. My own result would be one of the later ones; but the first results began to come in just after 11 p.m. We held Torbay with a larger than predicted majority. Then we held Hyndburn, the second most marginal seat, then Cheltenham, a seat targeted by the Liberals, and then Basildon. At about 2.15 a.m. we had passed the winning post. My own majority was down by 400, though I secured a slightly higher percentage of the vote (53.9 per cent).

I was driven back into town, arriving at 2.45 a.m. at Conservative Central Office to celebrate the victory and thank those who had helped achieve it. Then I returned to Downing Street where I was met by my personal staff. I felt grateful to them because, whatever the deficiencies of the national campaign, they had done a superb job. I remember Denis saying to Stephen Sherbourne, as we went down the line: ‘You have done as much as anyone else to win the election. We could not have done it without you.’ Stephen may have been less pleased by my next remark. It was to ask him to come up to the study to begin work on making the next Cabinet. A new day had begun.