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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