Then we returned to the Chamber to hear the closing speeches. Michael Foot’s for the Government was one of the outstanding performances of a gifted House of Commons orator. But it would take more than rhetoric to persuade the unpredictable Members upon whose decisions the outcome depended.
Amid clamour and confusion we began to file into the lobbies. Having voted, I returned to my place by the side of Willie, Francis and Humphrey and waited to learn our fate. Humphrey had sought to ensure that I had some advance notice of the result. He asked John Stradling Thomas, one of the senior Whips, to go through our lobby very quickly and then stand at the exit of the other one. For some reason, not just when they are in a minority, Conservative MPs go through the lobby more quickly than the Labour Party. As soon as we were all through, the message as to what our numbers were would be given to John Stradling Thomas, who meanwhile was listening to the other (Government) lobby being counted out. As soon as they had finished, he would know whether we had won or not. If we had not won he would come back, and just stand next to the Speaker’s chair. If we had won, he would put up a finger so that Humphrey could tell me. Only later was I let into the secret code. I just saw John Stradling Thomas return — and then Humphrey leaned across to me and with a stage whisper said: ‘We’ve won!’
The announced figures bore it out. ‘Ayes, 311. Noes, 310.’ So at last I had my chance, my only chance. I must seize it with both hands.[57]
AIREY
Two days later I was attending a function in my constituency — a fund-raising event organized by Motability, which provided disabled people with special cars at a modest price. I was to make the presentation. My mind was at least half on the Party Election Broadcast I was due to make that evening, when Derek Howe approached me to say: ‘I think you ought to know that a bomb has gone off in the precincts of the House of Commons, in the garage they think. At least one person has been very seriously injured, but we don’t know who.’
A hundred possibilities — though not the correct one — went through my mind as we drove down to the BBC studios in Portland Place. When I got there, and before I went in to be made up, one of the producers took me aside into a private room and told me who it was. It was Airey Neave. He was critically injured. The Irish National Liberation Army — a breakaway faction from the IRA — had placed a bomb under his car and it had exploded when he drove up the ramp from the House of Commons car park. It was very unlikely that he would survive — indeed, by the time I heard the news he may well have been dead. There was no way I could bring myself to broadcast after that. I telephoned the Prime Minister and explained. I felt only stunned. The full grief would come later. With it came also anger that this man — my friend — who had shrugged off so much danger in his life should be murdered by someone worse than a common criminal.
CHAPTER XII
Just One Chance…
The 1979 general election campaign
DEFINING THE THEME
As I have already described, I was far from enthusiastic about the first manifesto draft of 1978: it was too long, diffuse and chock-full of costly (but uncosted) spending commitments. The revised draft in August was better. But it was still not adequate. This was no reflection on Chris Patten and Angus Maude who drafted it, but rather on the rest of us who had not been able to agree clear and coherent policies in some crucial areas, particularly the trade unions.
I have also described how I decided to seize the initiative in January 1979. Between the summer of 1978 and the dissolution of Parliament in March 1979 outside events, above all that winter’s strikes, allowed me to shift our policies in the direction I wanted. The balance of opinion in the Shadow Cabinet, following rather than leading opinion in the country, was now that we could and should obtain a mandate to clip the wings of the trade union militants. Similarly — though I was to be less successful in dispensing with this unwelcome aspect of my political inheritance — the collapse of Labour’s pay policy made it easier to argue that the whole approach of prices and incomes controls, both ‘voluntary’ and statutory, should be abandoned. Above all, I was sure that there had been over the winter a sea-change and that our manifesto had to catch that tide.
Before Angus and Chris got to work I sent them a note.
I think the existing [autumn 1978] draft will have to be radically changed consequent upon recent events and our much more robust union policy. But the general approach of the limited objective first (i.e. tax cuts etc. to encourage wealth creation) remains. In my view the average person and a lot of non-average as well wants ‘tax cuts and order’.
A comparison between the manifesto draft of August 1978 and the final text published in April 1979 illustrates both the extent and the limits of the changes which — in varying combinations — Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, my advisers and I secured. The passage on trade unions, of course, was the real test. In 1978 I was prepared to go along with almost everything that Jim Prior suggested, including the promise that we would be ‘even-handed in our approach to industrial problems’, that we would ‘not undertake any sweeping changes in the law of industrial relations’ and that instead we would ‘seek to promote an era of continuity and constructive reform’. The 1979 text was significantly different. Now we promised to strike ‘a fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement’. Furthermore, we challenged directly the idea that the law had no useful role to play in this area: ‘Labour claim that industrial relations in Britain cannot be improved by changing the law. We disagree. If the law can be used to confer privileges it can and should also be used to establish obligations.’
I had disliked both the tone and the intellectual confusion which characterized Jim Prior’s suggested manifesto passages on the general role of trade unions in the spring of 1978. But I objected still more strongly to Jim’s suggestions on the closed shop. Although Jim wanted us to say that we were ‘opposed to the closed shop in principle’, he wanted to add that ‘experience has shown that a number of managements and unions consider it a convenient method of conducting their negotiations’. The contrast in the same sentence between the requirements of ‘principle’ and ‘convenience’ struck me as particularly distasteful. There are, of course, many freedoms which it would be ‘convenient’ for powerful groups to suppress: but most of us reckon that ‘principle’ requires that those freedoms should be defended. Jim also wanted us to promise a ‘code of practice’ which would regulate the closed shop. If the code of practice was not honoured ‘it could result (as at present) in workers losing their livelihood without compensation or redress from either employer or union. In this event we would be prepared to legislate to protect their rights’.