Margaret Thatcher Volume One: The Grocer's Daughter by John Campbell

Author:John Campbell
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781409039990
Published: 2011-06-29T23:00:00+00:00

No doubt it went down well, but the first part of this answer was simply not true. Righteousness can also be self-deceiving.

This was an election the Tories confidently expected to win. Indeed one reason Heath fought such a poor campaign was that he was afraid of winning too heavily: he did not want a majority of 1931 proportions gained by smashing the unions. In the event he failed to polarise the country sufficiently. The continuing power restrictions merely irritated the voters while defusing the sense of crisis on which the Government’s case depended. By referring the miners’ dispute to the Pay Board the Government seemed to call in question the point of having an election at all. Labour was still in disarray over Europe and beginning to be torn apart by the new hard left: Wilson did not expect to win any more than Heath expected to lose. In these circumstances the electorate called a plague on both their houses and turned in unprecedented numbers to the Liberals.

Mrs Thatcher felt the effect in Finchley, where the Liberals fielded their best candidate since John Pardoe, a young Jewish solicitor named Laurence Brass who made effective play with the Government’s ‘betrayal’ of Israel, claiming as the Liberals always did that it was neck and neck between himself and her, with Labour nowhere.182 Perhaps a little worried, Mrs Thatcher conducted herself with less courtesy to her opponents than previously: despite spending most of her time in the constituency, she vetoed a joint meeting of the three candidates, and refused to be interviewed on local radio, so that the others could not appear either. (She also pulled out of a television debate with Roy Hattersley when she learned that the BBC wanted to film it in a North London comprehensive.)183 Unquestionably she wanted the Government to be returned. However disillusioned she may have been by some aspects of Heath’s policies, she was shocked by Enoch Powell’s disloyalty in giving up his seat and advising the electors to vote Labour. She enjoyed office too much to want to lose it. As she told the Sunday Telegraph on one of her rare trips out of London, the election was a bit of a distraction: ‘What I really like is taking decisions.’184 But by polling day, she writes in her memoirs, ‘my optimism had been replaced by unease’.185

She was still perfectly safe in Finchley. As usual the Liberal hype could achieve only so much. On a reduced poll (and revised boundaries) her vote was 7,000 down, the Liberals nearly 4,000 votes up, but Labour still held on to second place. Her majority was nearly halved but the two opposition parties cancelled each other out.

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