Iain Martin interviewing Norman Tebbit 27/04/15 Iain Martin (IM): Lord Tebbit, thank you for joining us. We’re here back in No 10 Downing Street. It’s election time 2015, but we’re here to talk about a very different election, a fascinating contest in 1987. A contest in which one party got more than 40 percent of the vote, which seems rather outlandish now. Now, you had put a lot of work into the election campaign in the Autumn of 1986 and you’d asked the cabinet for policies and ideas. Norman Tebbit (NT): Yes. Well it really began in the Autumn of ’85 when I was on my way back from party conference - my first as chairman, just been appointed. And I was in the car with Michael Dobbs and I said, ‘Well, Michael, that was pretty near disastrous. That conference didn’t have a theme.’ It was like Churchill’s famous pudding, if you remember, when he was served with dessert and told the waiter,‘Take this pudding back, it hasn’t got a theme.’ I said, ‘The press will write whatever they want to about it. It’s not going to happen next year.’ And I conceived the idea of running the election campaign in ’87 with the air of, this was a formality that we were going through as we continued to govern the country, and that we knew exactly what we were doing. So out of that grew the idea of the ‘Next Steps Forward’ and with the agreement of the prime minister, I was able to ask every cabinet minister that was going to speak at the conference in ’86 to list three steps forward, which they would be taking after the election to carry the government forward. They were all vetted and agreed and as each minster made his speech and then sat down, the posters went up around the hall, ‘Next Steps Forward’ for whichever department it was. The result was an incredible change in public attitudes. We’d been second in the polls, sometimes even lapsing into third place, and within a couple of weeks of the party conference we were into the lead and we never relinquished that lead. IM: Now that in itself illustrates what different times those were, that the Conservative Party chairman could, essentially, demand these ideas or policies of his cabinet colleagues, that the Conservative Party chairman was a great figure in the land, someone to be respected and feared, rather different from now. NT: Well lots of differences about that certainly, but it was partly the relationship between the prime minister and party chairman, and I didn’t demand these things of ministers, I persuaded the prime minister that she should ask them of ministers, and that was agreed at the cabinet. We used to have cabinet government then with a formal process, things had to be processed through the cabinet. IM: And what was your relationship with Margaret Thatcher like going into 1987, coming up to the campaign? NT: Well, it was pretty good. We’d had our rough times as I think all ministers do, if they want to get things along, and I’d had disagreements with her, particularly over some aspects of industrial policy. That wasn’t uncommon. I have a vivid memory of being Keith Joseph’s number two when he was Secretary of State for Industry and we were going off to No 10 to discuss the corporate plan for poor old British Leyland, and his officials were anxious to make sure that we’d got it all in hand, and just before we left his private secretary said to him, ‘Is there anything else I can get you secretary of state?’ ‘No, no,’ said Keith, ‘Oh yes, ambulances for two at half past three.’ So, there were some rumbustious exchanges… IM: Yes. NT: …and I had the same experience when I was secretary of state for trade & industry over convincing her that I knew what I wanted to do and I was going to do it and basically saying to her, ‘Look, if you don’t want it done my way, then do give somebody else the job, I won’t resent it. It’s one of those things - I’ll always be a faithful supporters of yours, but if I’ve got the job, you really must trust me.’ And that’s how we worked. IM: And when the campaign got underway, who were the principal combatants and players, here at No 10 and at CCHQ? NT: Well the names now begin to fade away a bit over the years, it’s a long time, but the key to it all was the shape of the campaign and we knew that we were going to start on the economic issues, so Nigel Lawson was going to be dominant in the beginning of the campaign, that we would move away from those to the other issues with the relevant ministers coming forward, not least defence, where of course we had a pretty easy target in Mr Kinnock, and finishing again back onto the Treasury team, with Nigel in particular. The prime minister, I described to her, and to my colleagues, as being the capital ship of the fleet. All the rest of us were the destroyer screen. It was our job to make sure that there was never a hit on the capital ship. We had to attract the enemy fire, in that sense. Sometimes she found this a bit irritating, she wanted to get out from behind the destroyer screen and mix it, but that was broadly the way that we ran it. So Nigel was one of the key players, of course. Then I had, at central office, as my deputy, Jeffrey Archer. Now a lot has been said, good and ill, about Jeffrey. What I can say is that he is an extremely good organiser. He had the job of going around the countryside to see all the critical seats to make sure that they’d got an adequate chairman, make sure the candidate was really there and knew what he was doing, make sure that they’d got an agent, that they’d got enough money, all those things. And Jeffrey did a superb job on that. There were no foul-ups in the critical seats. So I relied on him very much for that. IM: And how much of the action in the campaign, day-to-day meetings et cetera, how much of it happened here? How much of it happened in CCHQ? What was the dynamic between the two operations? NT: Well, not that much happened here because after all this is not a seat of the Conservative Party. This is the seat of government. And over the road in Smith Square was where we did party politicking. Nothing could be farther from our thoughts than party politicking in No 10, good gracious me. But to be serious about it, that would have conflicted with our posture that this was government continuing and that there was this sideshow called the election which we were going to get through and just carry on as we were. IM: Did you think, I mean you mentioned there you had an open goal as far as defence was concerned because of Mr Kinnock. How seriously did you take him? How seriously did you think about losing? NT: I never thought that we were going to lose because we’d organised ourselves to win and what, of course, came out of it was a quite remarkable thing that in that ’87 election in the end, after eight years of Mrs Thatcher, the electorate knew her pretty well and they voted, slightly more people, about 100,000 more people voted for her in the third election than the first. That’s something which has not been achieved since, I’m not sure when it was achieved before indeed. Contrast Mr Blair, who I’m told in some quarters is referred to as ‘The Master’, the master politician… IM: By the ‘Cameroons’, yes. NT: …I don’t know where those words came from, but I’m told they’re used. He lost almost 40 percent of his vote by the time it got to the third election. After eight years of Tony Blair he’d put an awful lot of people off. We didn’t. She didn’t. IM: In terms of the operation, she’d come to rely on people like Charles Powell. Charles Powell was obviously an official. During an election campaign did she find it difficult not having the entire machine at her disposal? That division that you talked about between CCHQ and this place…. NT: Well, yes. Charles was here, Bernard Ingham was here, but if they were acting or speaking they were acting for the government, they were not involved in the election. Now of course, at times, things that the government were doing was going to effect people’s affection, going to affect the outcome of the election, but it was pretty strictly run. We tried very hard not to step over the line anywhere and I think we were successful. IM: But Bernard Ingham, powerful personality like Bernard, must have found that rather difficult at points? NT: Yes, I think he probably did. But he was part of the government machine and I think always one has to differentiate that. Now I think in recent years there have been a lot of difficulties because of the nature of coalition and also the growth of the so-called SPADs, the special advisers, where I understand there is enormous complexity of when and how they can act in a political sense during an election and rules and regulations on when they can be paid and when they can’t, which I haven’t followed, but we didn’t have that worry. Michael Dobbs, who was an adviser to me, when I’d been at the DTI, wasn’t paid by the taxpayer, so of course was free to act in a political way. IM: You mention Michael Dobbs. Who else did you have in your team that was particularly useful? You mentioned Jeffrey Archer as well. NT: Jeffrey primarily and Michael. The rest were the professional agents and a very good bunch they were, they knew their job. And of course they looked after the agents’ profession and in those days I think the membership of the Conservative Party, the grassroots membership, was more than twice what it is today. Most Conservative associations employed a full-time agent, some were good, some were less good, and so there was a structure there which was always in place, a sort of bureaucratic civil service type structure in many ways, of the party. There was also a great deal of difference in that I often had to explain to people that the title of chairman of the Conservative Party was mildly misleading. I was really the chairman of the party’s organisation. The chairman of the party, to me, was the chairman of the National Union of Conservative Associations. They were the voluntary side of the body. Party conference may have suffered a lot of organisation by me, but it was the conference of the national union. The chairman, essentially, of the conference, was the chairman of the national union. And it was a mass organisation. The conference was full of grassroots conservatives. It was not, as it has gradually become, an occasion for the media and for advertising agencies, other people to come to, to try to sell their wares to government. IM: And traditionally MPs and ministers didn’t even attend party conference a long time ago. NT: Oh yes, always members of parliament were expected to be there and things of that kind. And of course you were expected, as a minister, to be there certainly part of the time and to be there for debates about your side of the affairs. And I must confess, I, in retrospect, wish the rules had been a bit different and I could have gone home on Friday night in 1984 rather than staying in the Grand Hotel. IM: Yes. You mentioned advertising agencies there. The ad agencies are important in the ’79 and ’83 elections but there’s a sense that by 1987, a question of who gets the advertising contract and who the ad agency is going to be is of central importance. There was a bit of a tussle about that in the run-up to the election campaign but you took a very clear decision. NT: There was a difficulty and that was because Tim Bell, who had been a key figure in Saatchi & Saatchi’s campaigns in ’81… sorry, ’83. Tim had parted with the Saatchi brothers and he was then working for another outfit. Despite Tim’s brilliance - and he was a great communicator - I decided that I was going to stick with Saatchi’s and that caused a great deal of resentment on the part of Tim and one or two others, and there was always a potential rub there, there was always people trying to whisper in the prime minster’s ear that Saatchi’s had lost it, hadn’t got it and all the rest of it, which made my job a bit more difficult. Because, in fact, Saatchi’s had got things fairly well sewn up to do the advertising, which I wanted. And I should say there was another interesting part of the ’87 election and that is that it was quite late on in that parliament, and indeed into the election campaign, before I was absolutely sure who was our principal opponent. Whether it was Labour… IM: Of course. NT: …or whether it was the alliance, what has now become the Lib Dems. So we had in the locker the ammunition to fire against either target. I’d dictated, set out, said, whatever, that overall our campaign should be highly positive, far more positive than negative. I think in crude terms I said, ‘Let’s call it 60:40’, but it’s not going to be a campaign of knocking the other side and nothing else. And we had prepared to deal with either the alliance or with Labour Party. IM: Mr Kinnock. How would you have dealt with the alliance? NT: Oh it was just a different style of attack. For example, you wouldn’t attack the alliance on the basis of being too far left, that’s reserved for the Labour Party, and we had suitable campaigns. You may remember, for example, a wonderful one of Labour’s policy on arms, which was Mr Kinnock with his hands up. We had another one, big poster which we didn’t use - didn’t need to - on the nuclear issue, which was a Soviet bomber, clearly so with its markings, and the bomb doors open. And the question underneath that was, ‘If we dropped our nuclear weapons, would the Russians drop theirs?’ But we didn’t need it. So they were all still there in the locker. IM: To what extent would the prime minister have been involved in those kind of decisions that you’re talking about, in terms of posters and dealings with the ad agency? Would you show her this material and talk her through precisely how it was going to be done? NT: We generally did do that. We generally showed her, and she and I agreed the outlines of what was becoming the party’s manifesto by virtue of the programme of the ‘Next Steps Forward’. But somebody had to write it, for example, and the final writing of it, the putting together of it between covers, was given to David Young. That was his task. IM: Yes. So the prime minister is spending most of the campaign out on the road, around the country. How, practically, is your contact with her working then? Is she phoning you first thing in the morning? NT: Yes, in touch by phone. And she really mostly based in London, but as you know she was quite an energetic lady in those days and she didn’t need much sleep, and didn’t expect anyone else to require much sleep, so she would normally be back to London not least to carry on the business of government. IM: But would you begin with a morning meeting in London or? NT: Not always. Not every day by any means. We both always knew where the thing was going, what the programme was. And I had obviously shown her the ‘war book’, which was the document which set out what we were going to seek to do each day. And there was a big board up in my office, central office, the ‘war board’, to make sure that we all knew what was happening throughout. Of course, we could amend it if we wanted but - bits and pieces - but it was important to have a structure because the whole idea was that we were dominating it, but the others were pygmies scratching around and we were continuing to govern and after polling day that would carry on. IM: So you have a very clear plan, the campaign is rattling along, the Tories have a pretty clear lead, and then you get to the very famous Thursday, ‘Wobbly Thursday’, which people still reference all the time in this current campaign, people wondering whether, when David Cameron is going to have his wobble. How did it start? NT: Well one thing was that the prime minister wasn't very well. She had a rotten tooth problem and that makes anybody irritable, particularly when they're otherwise under stress, and then I don't think that David Young and I always had the same view of how the campaign should run. As far as I was concerned, as I was responsible for it, and if it went wrong I was going to carry the can for it, it had better be me. And Tim Bell was occasionally popping up advice to the prime minister about how to run a campaign which didn't make it easier. IM: Did Tim Bell have a direct line to the prime minister that he could... NT: I think that he almost did because the prime minister liked to have direct lines to dissident voices. She always did. And sometimes it worked well, sometimes it caused grave difficulty, indeed it caused the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel, to resign in - what was it - 1990 or so. IM: Over Alan Walters. NT: Yes indeed. On that Thursday there was also a rogue poll. It didn't put Labour in the lead or anything like that, it just suggested that our lead had suddenly fallen. IM: To four points. NT: Yes. I think these days Mr Cameron would regard this pure heaven to find himself securely four points ahead of Labour. Things have all changed. And there was this great scene when, in this building, David Young seized me by the lapels and told me that I'd lost the election and was quite emphatic about it. And everybody went off with sort of pretty unhappy feelings, and there was some sort of rubbish about we were going to put some different advertisements in the papers and that, you know, not going to make that much difference. IM: Had you all been summoned here that morning? NT: Oh yes indeed, we'd all been summoned here when the poll emerged. But if you read David Young's memoirs he tells how he got back home and round about midnight, just before he went to bed, the new polls came in and showed that it had been a rogue poll. And he said, 'I knew then that we were going to win the election.' Well I'd known all the time. So it was just one of those things. Fighting an election is a stressful business, you know, and I can understand how anybody can get a bit tetchy. The stakes are high. IM: Did it impact on your relationship with Margaret Thatcher that she was prepared, particularly on ‘Wobbly Thursday’, although she trusted you and you were running the campaign, she still had a line of communication open to Tim Bell and she was prepared to listen to David Young, about whom she famously said, 'David brings me solutions, not problems.' For someone who is actually running the show, that must have been difficult to deal with. NT: Yes. But she always had outside advisers talking to her about everything, about the business of government, whatever it was. There were young boys who'd done a degree in economics who'd impressed her in some way, who she would listen to about the motorcar industry, for example. And there were others who she listened to about monetary policy and that was why she fell out so badly with Nigel Lawson. Doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong, whilst it's understandable that someone at the top who’s going to carry the can ultimately does listen to other people as well, you know - ‘Is my guru telling me the right thing or not?’ - it can be irritating if it is overdone. IM: And when news of ‘Wobbly Thursday’ spread quite rapidly, didn't it, various combatants were discussing it in the press and it was a live issue. When you went back to CCHQ did you tell people about it or… how did it resolve itself? NT: By the time I went back to GCHQ [sic] the next day it was all over. We were serenely on track to win. Yes, of course, there was news about it, and if you're a Bell, well bells tell, don't they, the bells are told, and the news rings out. I suspect that David and Tim Bell were very upset but all was well. IM: Yes. Because they had hoped to engineer a complete shift in the campaign. Were the Saatchis here, on ‘Wobbly Thursday’? NT: We had Saatchis in, yes. IM: Maurice and Charles? NT: No, no. I think Maurice was here, Charles never did, Charles was a very reclusive chap. Very few people ever talked to Charles. Put it the other way round, Charles didn't talk to very many people. IM: And so Maurice was your key link in the agency? NT: Yes. IM: And then, so ‘Wobbly Thursday’ is resolved, the campaign is back on track, you have a rattling good last week to the campaign and you win by a bigger margin than you anticipated? NT: It was almost exactly. I had told the prime minister that we were going to have a majority of 97 I think, I told her. In fact, my calculation was, I think, 101, and we got 103, or the other way round. But I knew her well enough to not forecast a majority of over 100 because that: ‘Over a hundred, Norman?’ And I didn't want that conversation. And we had a very, very good organisation. We knew the marginal, critical seats, we knew that as the campaign progressed that we could go from the concentration on ones we might conceivably have lost, to move on more adventurously to put our resources into the ones that, initially, we didn't really think we were going to win. But as the campaign wore on, it was clear we would. IM: And as you get very close to polling day, what was her mood? NT: By polling day I think she'd relaxed a little because the polls were all going in the right way, and so it worked out. I had a very nice night at the BBC watching their faces get longer and longer as the results came in. It was really very agreeable. IM: And then the famous scene where the prime minister back at Smith Square waving through the window, and you were at the window as well, the atmosphere must have been extraordinary that night. NT: It was extraordinary. It was extraordinary. And again thinking of some of the people who were there who were important. There was a chap whose name I've now forgotten who was quite brilliant on interpreting the results. He was quite brilliant at knowing from the polling stations, how many people had voted at the polling stations, he was getting more and more confident at forecasting the results and I had the benefit of his knowledge and the programme that he had put into the rather primitive computers that we had in those days, so that as the early results came in I could be more and more confident about predicting the final outcome. IM: Do you think that's the high watermark of Thatcherism? That in a sense it's never, it is an incredible evening, but in a sense it's never quite the same again after that, is it? NT: No. She had lost several of the people who were close to her. Keith Joseph, for example, and I had had to tell her during the campaign, when she talked about what my role would be in the next government, that I was not going to have a role in the next government, that I would be standing down. She even unleashed Willie Whitelaw on me to try and change my mind, but I told her that there was no question of me changing my mind. So it was an interesting experience and I think it affected her judgement in some ways when she realised that I was not going to be with her. IM: So she wouldn't, initially wouldn't accept it, or… NT: Initially she would not accept it and indeed I think it is generally known that after Nigel Lawson resigned that she asked me if I would go back and that was an extremely difficult decision to make because quite clearly she was in a lot of problems and was losing the confidence of the cabinet. And I lived in those days just off of Belgrave Square. Sadly I didn't own the house. I wish I had. And I walked from there across the park and into No 10 through the back steps and I still had not quite absolutely made up my mind until that moment that I would have to say no to her. After all I'd been married to my wife for longer than I had served Margaret Thatcher and the undertakings I'd given my wife had priority. IM: Do you think that in 1987 the Tories had a very, very clear offer and a very clear story to tell about aspiration and opportunity. And you won really, really big in '87. Why is it, do you think, does the country go off Thatcherism after '87, or is it purely about personality, failings, about her possibly having been in position for too long? Because you can see some of the seeds of the Tory party's later destruction, arguably, are there in '87 and problems that come ahead, come after that. How do you view what happened and why the Tory party goes from that extraordinary high point, of course it wins in '92, but the following ten years are not happy years, are they? NT: No. Well, there's a lot of things to look at in that. Let me put it this way: if you go back into the early fifties, the average British elector was looking at governments which had achieved extraordinary things. The wartime coalition had won the war against all the odds, which were there when Churchill took office in 1940. Then quite extraordinarily, to many people, Churchill was ousted. Attlee and Bevin came in. I say Bevin because he was the key figure. They were able not only to lay the foundations of the welfare state, the National Health Service - some of which were not laid terribly well, but that's another matter but they had seen the menace of the Soviet Union, they had rearmed, rebuilt our reserves, committed us to nuclear weapons… they bungled the economy. 1950, sweets were still rationed, for example. The Churchill government then liberated the economy. That was successful too. So the electors were looking at terrific success of government. Then we had the unfortunate bungles of Eden, of Heath, of Wilson and the despair of Callaghan. They looked at how Heath's government had been brought down by trade unions. They looked at how Wilson had been unable to reform trade union law in the way that he wanted because of the strength of the trade unions. It was a very different picture by then that they were looking at. Thatcher arrived in the wake of the fall of Heath and Wilson and Callaghan. She faced the threat from the unions led by Scargill's threat and the Scargill strike. She defeated it. She faced the invasion of the Falkland Islands. And those who say she was lucky because it helped to win the '81 election, '83 election, I can only say it didn't feel lucky when it happened. She was able, with her government, to take the decision to retake the Falklands and the campaign was carried out enormously successfully. And there were political aspects, her relationships with America, with France and with Chile, which were enormously important. Another success. So, we had a lot to build on then and people had begun to feel, towards the end of the eighties, that things were going right again. You felt that when you were going abroad. I met lots of other politicians abroad who would say to me, ‘Ah, if only we had a Margaret Thatcher.’ When an Italian said that to me I must say I found the thought really rather striking. Can you imagine, an Italian Margaret Thatcher? IM: What a thought. NT: What a thought. What a thought. And then I think she did face the problem that on the backbenches there were more and more people who had been in the government and been dropped. There were more and more who had hoped to have been in and had been overlooked, and fewer and fewer who really thought they had prospects. So she was losing support in her backbenches and that seeps out somewhere. And then we had the resignation of Geoffrey Howe and extraordinary speech of Elspeth Howe's, sorry, of Geoffrey Howe, in the House of Commons, on that occasion. IM: It was always said that Elspeth had spent twenty years writing that speech. NT: Well I suspect that there might have been something in it. His great complaint that she'd broken his bat before sending him out to the wicket. Trouble was he didn't know whether he was playing boules or cricket. But it was a severe blow. And then to fall out with Nigel Lawson was really very damaging indeed. She should, of course, have said to Nigel, ‘Nigel, dear, I've been thinking about your future and your career. It is time you broadened your experience. I want you to go to the foreign office.’ Because you can't have a prime minister and a chancellor at odds over policy. And one of the great virtues of the present government is that there has been a closeness between George Osborne and David Cameron in those two roles. And indeed with David [sic] Alexander as the Lib Dem at the Treasury. And once that had gone I think she was going to fall before very long. IM: Do you think after you had helped win her this victory in 1987, do you think she should have gone for, actually confronted the thought of going pretty soon afterwards? NT: I think if she had gone after ten years she would have been remembered as a totally and completely successful prime minister. She's remembered by anyone with any brains as an extremely successful one, but she wouldn't have had that downside of being brought down in the end by her own side - with a great deal of help from Brussels. Perhaps ten years is enough consecutive years for any prime minister. As I've said, the windows in this building are very big when the prime minister first comes in, and every year they get smaller and smaller and smaller and after ten years it is very difficult for a prime minister to see the world outside as opposed to the world of No 10. IM: Lord Tebbit, thank you very much. NT: Thank you.