Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [185]
On Tuesday evening I was to speak at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh. My idea was to use the occasion to report on Williamsburg and to defend our record on the social services. But looking at the material we already had written, I realized that we had a lot of work still to do and the whole thing was finished in a tremendous rush, as not infrequently happens with my speeches. Several of us spent the early evening before the speech crawling around the floor of my room at the Caledonian Hotel, sticking together bits of text with sellotape. After that we flew further north to Inverness, where we stayed the night. A large crowd of chanting protesters outside our hotel serenaded us to sleep.
The next day (Wednesday 1 June, D-8) I held a press conference, gave television interviews, visited two Scottish factories, flew to Manchester, visited a bakery in Bolton and a brewery in Stockport, and flew back to London to begin work on another speech. I am not usually much affected either by pressure of work or by attacks from opponents. But this day was a little different. Denis Healey made the tasteless remark that I had been ‘glorying in slaughter’ during the Falklands War. I was both angry and upset. We had deliberately decided not to raise the Falklands in the campaign and had done nothing whatsoever to make it an issue. The remark hurt and offended many people besides me — not all of them Conservatives — particularly the relatives of those who had fought and died in the war. Mr Healey later made a half-hearted retraction: he had meant to say ‘conflict’ rather than ‘slaughter’ — a distinction without a difference. Neil Kinnock returned to the subject a few days later, in an even more offensive form, if that were possible. These remarks were all the more revealing because they were politically stupid: indeed they did enormous harm to Labour. They were not made from political calculation, but can only have emerged from something coarse and brutal in the imagination.
D-7 TO D-Day
Nonetheless at Thursday morning’s press conference there was yet more about the General Belgrano and I could not conceal my irritation at the failure of some journalists to grasp the harsh reality of war. I said:
I think it is utterly astonishing that your only allegation against me is that I in fact changed the rules of engagement with the consent of the War Cabinet to enable a ship which was a danger to our task force to be sunk.
On Friday, after the press conference, Cecil and I had now to decide whether we needed a full-scale newspaper advertising campaign over the weekend. Two opinion polls that day showed us with leads of 11 and 17 per cent over Labour. We were being told that we were home and dry. But many voters make up their minds in the last week, some indeed as they are on their way to the polling station; so I have always been a wary campaigner. Cecil was an equally battle-scarred electioneer and we had planned to run expensive three-page advertisements in the Sunday newspapers. But we decided to take a risk and save the money, cutting the advertisements to a more economical two pages. On this my political calculations coincided with my instincts as a Grantham grocer’s daughter. Obvious extravagance is bad advertising.
I spent Saturday (D-5) campaigning in Westminster North, then going on to the constituencies in Ealing and Hendon close to my own. I campaigned in Finchley for most of the afternoon and then went to support our candidate in Hampstead and Highgate.
On my return to No. 10 work began almost at once on the speech I was to deliver the next day at our Youth Rally at Wembley Conference Centre. My speech writers and I worked late into the night, breaking for a hot meal which I served up in the kitchen from the capacious store of precooked frozen food I always kept there for such occasions. Shepherd’s pie and a glass of wine can do a great deal to improve morale. Speech writing was for me an important political activity. As one of my speech writers said, ‘no one writes speeches for