Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [359]
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:
Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy is in fact a policy for defeat, surrender, occupation, and finally, prolonged guerilla fighting… I do not understand how anyone who aspires to government can treat the defence of our country so lightly.
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