Having sewn pockets in the morning, I suppose it was only natural that I should find myself sorting chocolates in the afternoon. It was a tricky, demanding task — the sort which gives the lie to the loosely-used expression ‘unskilled work’. It was many years since I myself had worked in a factory, but I saw that some traditions do not change. One girl who was shortly getting married had all her wedding presents laid out on a table close to the production line for her friends to see. After my chocolate-packing was over, we all discussed them at rather greater length than my programme allowed. In the end I was bustled away, for we had to get to the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. As a chocolate addict, I never thought I would lose my appetite for them. But somehow that clinging smell of vanilla put me off them for the rest of the campaign.
The Birmingham speech, for all the trouble its preparation had caused, was a great success — not just the passages on East-West relations and the communist threat, but also those on law and order, on which I pledged to ‘place a barrier of steel’ against the socialist path to lawlessness. Afterwards we drove back to London where the following day’s (Friday 20 April) constituency visits would take place.
Saturday 21 April was a day of regular campaigning which began at a factory producing highly sophisticated electrical components in Milton Keynes. I was excited by the technology, about which I had been thoroughly briefed, and soon found myself giving a detailed exposition of it to a group of slightly bemused pressmen. I was then wired up and tested on a heart monitoring machine. With all the dials pointing in the right direction I was shown to be in good working order: ‘Solid as a rock,’ as I remarked — something which also reflected my judgement about how our campaign as a whole was going. For one of the oddest characteristics of the 1979 general election campaign was the wide and growing difference of perceptions between those of us who were out in the field and those who were back at the centre. Of course, politicians, like everyone else, are susceptible to self-delusion. But, far more than in 1983 and 1987 when security considerations loomed so large, I was confident that I did have a real sense of what the electorate felt and that their hearts were with us. I was also convinced that this change had come about largely because of the events of the winter of 1978/79 and that therefore undue caution on the issue of trade union power was bad tactics.
But it was clear from discussion at the strategy meeting I held in Flood Street on Sunday 22 April that not everyone saw matters this way. Although the opinion polls were still varied — one showing a 20 per cent and another a 5.5 per cent Conservative lead — there had not been much movement during the campaign. Peter Thorneycroft’s view was that we should more or less carry on as we were. As he put it in a paper for that Sunday’s meeting: ‘We should not embark on any high-risk initiatives. We are in the lead.’ This seemed to me fair enough as far as it went. But it begged two questions. First, had we not gained our lead in the first place by taking some quite high-risk initiatives, such as my interventions in the Winter of Discontent? Secondly, what now constituted a ‘high risk’? Measures to curb union power? Or the absence of them? In any case, one of the greatest dangers in a campaign where you have started out with a significant lead is complacency. Exciting the voters, as long as it is not on some issue on which they disagree with you, is an indispensable part of winning elections.
My campaigning that week would take me to the North of England, before going on to Scotland. After the Monday morning press conference, I flew to Newcastle where the photo-opportunity was at a tea factory. Tasting the sludgy concoctions, undiluted and unmasked by milk and sugar, had something of the same effect on my tea drinking as did the Bournville factory on my consumption of chocolates.
Outside the factory a crowd had gathered, among which was a large, formidable woman who was pouring out a torrent of abuse in my direction. The police advised me to stay away. But I felt that if she had something to say she had better do so to my face rather than my back, and so I walked over to talk to her. I took her arm and told her quietly just to say what was wrong. Her manner changed completely. She had the usual grumbles and worries. But the real cause of her anger was a conviction that politicians were just not people who listened. I tried to answer as best I could and we parted amicably. As I walked away I heard her unmistakable tones telling a friend: ‘I told you she wasn’t half so bad.’ My experience of campaigning over the years is that there are very few irredeemably hostile electors. It is one of the tragedies of the terrorist threat that politicians nowadays have so few opportunities to convince themselves of that fact.
Tuesday, too, was very much a traditional-style campaigning day, with four walkabouts, including a visit to the Sowerby candidate, Donald Thompson’s butcher’s shop, and to a supermarket — after which the usual piles of purchases were taken back on the battle bus. On the steps of the Conservative Party offices in Halifax I was photographed in the drizzle holding up two shopping bags — a blue bag which contained the food which could have been bought for £1 in 1974 and a half-filled red bag which contained all that £1 would buy in Labour Britain in 1979. And if this was better politics than economics it was no worse for that. Among the no-nonsense Yorkshire people it went down well.
Back in London that evening I was interviewed by Denis Tuohy for TV Eye. This was the most hostile interview of the campaign. But it allowed me to give a vigorous defence of our proposals for trade union reform. And on this, whatever Central Office might think, I was not going to backtrack. I reaffirmed my determination to deal with the trade union militants. I also pointed out just what was implied by the suggestion that a Conservative Government would be faced with an all-out battle with the trade unions.
Let’s come to the nub of the matter. What you are saying is that the trade union leaders are saying that the whole of this general election is a hollow mockery and a sham. If you are right, and that is what they are saying, then I am going to ask for the biggest majority any country has ever given any government, and I am going to ask for the biggest majority from the twelve million members of trade unions. I don’t think you are right.
I was especially severe with the Labour Party’s suggestion that discussion with the trade unions, the so-called ‘Concordat’, was a better way of dealing with union power than were changes in the law.
You know, it would have been very, very strange if Lord Shaftesbury, the great Tory reformer, looking at conditions which he saw in the mills and the factories decades ago, had said: I’ll do it by a voluntary concordat with the mill owners. Do you think he would have got it? Of course he wouldn’t. He said: There are some things which we must do by law.
After the Wednesday 25 April morning press conference and radio interviews I had lunch at Central Office before flying to Edinburgh in the afternoon. I was beginning to become tired of the standard speech I made to audiences around the country, which drew heavily on the texts prepared for Cardiff and Birmingham with extra pieces slotted in that would go out as press releases. As a result, I performed inadvisably radical surgery on the material I took with me to Scotland. Just minutes before I was due to speak, I was on my knees in the Caledonian Hotel applying scissors and Sellotape to a speech which spread from one wall to the other and back again. Tessa Jardine Paterson frantically typed up each page of the speech, which was handed out, more or less as I delivered it, at Leith Town Hall. At least it was fresh — even to me. At the end I inserted one of my favourite quotations from Kipling: