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By Root 2719 0

’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:

I gather at the next