a transcript

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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.
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