It was a marvellous audience, and from the first few cheers my spirits lifted and I gave of my best.
We went on to the hotel at Glasgow Airport to have a late supper and then turn in before another day of Scottish campaigning. I was buoyed up with that special excitement which comes of knowing you have given a good speech. Although the opinion polls suggested that Labour might be closing on us, the gap was still a healthy one and my instincts were that we were winning the argument. Labour’s campaign had a distinctly tired feel about it. They reiterated so frequently the theme that Tory policies could not work, or would work only at the cost of draconian cuts in public services, that they slipped imperceptibly into arguing that nothing could work, and that Britain’s problems were in essence insoluble. This put Labour in conflict with the people’s basic instinct that improvement is possible and ought to be pursued. We represented that instinct — indeed Labour was giving us a monopoly on it. I felt that things were going well.
Denis, Carol and Ronnie Millar were with me at the hotel and we exchanged gossip and jokes. Janet Young was also travelling with us and had slipped out during the meal. She now returned with a serious expression to tell me that Peter Thorneycroft — or ‘the Chairman’ as she insisted on calling him — felt that things were not too good politically and that Ted Heath should appear on the next Party Election Broadcast.
I exploded. It was about as clear a demonstration of lack of confidence in me as could be imagined. If Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office had not yet understood that what we were fighting for was a reversal not just of the Wilson-Callaghan approach but of the Heath Government’s approach they had understood nothing. I told Janet Young that if she and Peter thought that then I might as well pack up. Ted had lost three elections out of four and had nothing to say about an election fought on this kind of manifesto. To invite him to deliver a Party Political for us was tantamount to accepting defeat for the kind of policies I was advancing.
It was perhaps unfair of me to blame Janet in part for conveying Peter’s message. But this was the closest I came in the campaign to being really upset. I told her that I would not even hear of it. She conveyed a doubtless censored version of my response to ‘the Chairman’ and, still seething, I went to bed.
THE THIRD WEEK — D-7 to D-Day
Thursday morning’s Glasgow press conference was an unremarkable affair. The journalists did not seem to have much to say for themselves and I still felt out of sorts. Later in the morning I had a rather difficult interview with a Scottish television interviewer who was believed to be a Conservative supporter and, as sometimes happens, wished to prove the opposite by being particularly hostile. But from then on the day looked up. We visited a creamery in Aberdeen where I sampled some of the finest butter I have ever tasted — and was astonished to learn that it was all being produced not for consumption but to go into EEC intervention storage. It was my first meeting with the butter mountain.
Then it was on to the harbour at Buckie and a fish factory, where the irrepressibly high spirits and good humour of the people worked wonders on me. I addressed an early-evening meeting at Elgin Town Hall and then the coach drove us on to Lossiemouth to board the plane which would take us back to London. All along the way to Lossiemouth Airport the road was lined with people waving and we had to keep stopping to receive flowers and presents. Here was more proof that we were among friends.
It can well be imagined that there was some unseasonal frost in the April air when I came for my briefing at Central Office before the Friday morning press conference. I was also rather too sharp with a journalist at it on the subject of the impact of technology on employment. Then a television interviewer, whom I had been told would be sympathetic, turned out to be very much the opposite. It was that point in an election campaign when everybody’s nerves have become frayed with tiredness. And the pressure was still building. I knew I had further important media interviews, the last PEB to record and big speeches at Bolton and the final Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Moreover, the opinion polls now seemed to suggest that our lead was being eroded. The Central Office view was that it had fallen from about 10 per cent to about 6 per cent. Unfortunately, there was no reason to give any more credence to the internal Party opinion polling — which was on the optimistic side of the median — than to other polls. I had to cancel my visit to the Fulham constituency that afternoon in order to work on the PEB text and the CTU speech. But someone told the press that the real cause was that my voice was failing, which was used to paint an exaggerated picture of a ‘battle-worn Maggie’ trying to stop the election slipping away. In fact, my voice was in remarkably good order — but I now had to risk real strain by raising it so as to convince interviewers and audiences that my larynx was alive and well.
Saturday morning’s Daily Express carried a MORI poll showing our lead down to just 3 per cent. There was evidence of a mild case of the jitters affecting Conservative Central Office. Peter Thorneycroft wrote to candidates saying: ‘Whatever happens, I ask for no complacency and no despair.’ It was not a very encouraging message and perhaps indicated all too accurately the feeling of its author and his advisers that the way to win elections was by doing nothing wrong rather than by doing something right. For myself, I publicly shrugged off the polls, noting that: ‘Always as you get up to an election the lead narrows.’ In fact, I had decided that by far the best course now was to shut the opinion polls out of my mind and put every ounce of remaining energy into the decisive final days of the campaign. I had a good morning of campaigning in London, including my own Finchley constituency, returning home to Flood Street in the afternoon for discussion of the Election Broadcast.
Sunday 29 April would be crucial. The opinion polls were all over the place. I ignored them. I had my hair done in the morning and then after lunch was driven to the Wembley Conference Centre for the Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Harvey Thomas, drawing on his experience of Billy Graham’s evangelical rallies, had pulled out every stop. A galaxy of actors and comedians livened up the proceedings. Ignoring previous instructions from perhaps over-serious Party officials concerned about the dignity of ‘the next Prime Minister’, Harvey played the campaign song ‘Hello Maggie’ when I entered. And dignity certainly went by the board as everyone joined in. I had never known anything quite like it — though compared with Harvey’s extravaganzas of future years this came to seem quite tame.
The speech itself was short and sharp. And the reception was terrific. Then I went on to Saatchi & Saatchi to record the final Election Broadcast. From four o’clock in the afternoon Gordon, Ronnie, Tim and I worked and reworked the text. Then there was an apparently endless succession of ‘takes’, each of which — until the final one — seemed not quite right to at least one of us. At last, well after midnight, we were satisfied.