Mrs Thatcher's passion play
Stephen Fay
Margaret Thatcher did not spend much time in Ipswich, but it was an important moment in her campaign. It was day three, and she had visited an insurance broking firm, where she did a quick television interview. From there she went up the street to the Town Hall for what her itinerary described as a walk-about. It was a sunny day, and my concentration lapsed. I was standing by four young punks with multicoloured hair and, judging that they had nothing to lose but their chains, asked them how they would vote. It was bad news for Mrs Thatcher (two abstentions, one National Front and one Liberal). Then something happened. The Conservative leader walked up the Town Hall steps, took a microphone and made a speech. For once she was visible and audible above the ruck of television crews from three continents. Her speech was not original; it contained nothing more complicated than statements about prices and unemployment, an appeal for the restoration of British prestige, and ended with a trite remark about it being time for a change. But it was about politics. `It was like being on the hustings 30 years ago,' enthused one of her entourage a few days later. It was as though they had accidentally discovered what election campaigns ought to be about. The lesson sank in slowly, but by the week-end the strategists had concluded that Mrs Thatcher ought to appear less Olympian. Ipswich was no Midlothian, but it is certainly preferable to the stunts which dominated the first week of the campaign.
The stunts were no accident, of course, but just before arriving in Ipswich the style had degenerated into parody with Mrs Thatcher sitting on the damp grass in a cow field fondling a calf. It looked so phoney that I wondered whether the poor beast had been delivered by Central Office just before her bus arrived. Apparently the calf was legitimate, but the performance was horribly contrived. The photographers wanted her to appear in a rural setting so she peremptorily ordered the rest of us out of the background. Her comment has already been reported: 'It's not for me, it's for the photographers; they're the important people in this campaign.' The tone has not. It was intended as a joke, but humour is not one of her assets and it misfired. I thought it was a self-inflicted commentary on the campaign so far. For this she has no-one to blame except herself and Gordon Reece, the media director at Central Office; a man who is taken seriously more because of his influence than any intrinsic political wisdom. He is a cynic who reportedly says he would be happy to confine Mrs Thatcher's media exposure to film clips of her getting on and off her campaign aircraft. For herself, she genuinely enjoys the stunts Reece is fond of, though for a different reason. She might have gone over the top on the farm, but normally she chatters away to the workers and bosses in a factory, always about their jobs, never about politics. True, the people she talks to often seem bemused by the combinations of herself and the paraphernalia of television. 'You're the new elite,' she informed a dumbstruck computer engineer in Milton Keynes. `He doesn't look very happy about it though,' she said to the managing director. But she does these visits well. She has a genuine curiosity about the industrial process; it seems a pity she feels the need to satisfy it during a threeweek election campaign. The reason, I suspect, that her strategists allow her to get away with it is that they do not entirely share Mrs Thatcher's confidence in herself. They prefer the anodyne remark in a non-political environment like a brush factory, a chocolate company, a textile mill, or electronics firm (all consumed by her in the first week) to the possibility of an indiscretion in a shopping centre, where politics cannot be evaded. The strategy is partly based on fear — their fear of a big boob.
My experience so far indicates that theY are unfair. She is wary on walkabouts, knowing that a careless remark will be overheard and may be used in evidence against her, but she does not flinch from questions. I happened to be standing beside her in Colville, Leicestershire, when a nurse asked what the Tories would do about their pay. think those who don't strike ought to get more than those who do,' she replied earnestly. 'That's why I've always supported the police and the army. I think you ought t° get just as much as those who strike.' In three sentences she had adjusted a statement, from which the nurse might have inferred that they were going to get more than other public employees, to one 10 which there were no hostages to any future pay policy — without alienating the customer. (Although she would not always like what a minority of these questioners say after she has strode on. In Finchley she canvassed a black man: it seemed amicable, but when a reporter afterwards asked what he thought, he announced: 'The Tories are worse than the National Front.' Had he actually said that to her? `No', he replied, 'she's a lady.') Still, her aides worry that a chance remark — especially anything to do with the word 'swamp' in the context of immigration — will be the slip that Labour can seize upon and exploit. But if they are really looking for errors they are searching in the wrong place. I believe she is rather more vulnerable in the rare set speech she gives in the evenings, though the way these are reported makes Labour less likely to pick up any errors. The speeches (at Cardiff and Birmingham during the first week) are distributed in London beforehand and become the property of the journalistic summarisers in Fleet Street. Most of us journalists on the spot are primarily there to watch for any security mishap, and since the meetings are ticket-only gatherings of Party loyalists, these are unlikely. (Not that Special Branch takes any risks. Two of their men were sitting among the luminaries in the front row of the platform at Birmingham. They are easily identified because they don't Clap.) Mrs Thatcher does, however, make various last-minute adjustments to her address, Particularly when the audience is insufficiently responsive; and since they have heard the gist before they often need to be Jogged into action. She leans on the lectern With her right arm and makes the point visually with her left hand. It is her more relaxed and attractive public posture, but some of the statements she extemporises are teetering on the edge of 'the boob'. She hasn't toppled over yet, but you can see how She might. The Labour left is, for example, in the text 'determined to transform our society utterly, and, if necessary, violently'. But that is not enough, so she adds to the text `to one in which they would not have half the freedoms to say what they are saYing now.' It is not the Gestapo smear of 1945, but it is moving in that direction. (Her ad libs produce some delightful paradoxes too. The Cardiff text had her saying: am a reformer', but since she had spontaneously proclaimed herself a reactionary and proud of it in the previous paragraph, this was quickly eliminated.) Listening to Mrs Thatcher deliver these speeches, it struck me that the best analogy for her campaign is that of a passion play. She sees herself as the force for good, of course. This explains her conviction that she is utterly right, even if her source of inspiration is never quite clear. In the Cardiff speech she drew succour from Cromwell, Burke and Johnson (Paul not Sam) — an improbably Trinity. But she is in no doubt about the wickedness of her opponents. Mrs Thatcher will allow that Labour was once motivated by an idealistic vision, but accuses them of losing it by hanging onto power so ruthlessly.
The stunts are the jolly interludes in the play which raise the spirits of the groundlings who have no taste for theology; by fondling calves, boxing chocolates and cutting cloth she pushes the plot along and helps overcome the dangers of boredom provoked by the great issues of good and evil — like SALT talks, war widows' pensions, VAT, and the virtues of small business. After a week I detected signs that the script is being rewritten, perhaps because Mrs Thatcher suspects that much of her audience rather likes the sloppy, evil ways she denounces. So the second act is likely to contain a rather crude attack on the squalors of hell — like the political scene in Ipswich — and a more subdued commercial for the virtues of heaven. If right has had to mix it a bit to triumph over wrong it will at least make the campaign much more interesting.
Previous page
