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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