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‘Don’t put yourself through it again’: Thatcher papers reveal ‘distress’ after bruising election win

sjr81 — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 10:02:33 +0000

But despite winning 376 seats and 13.7 million votes (compared to Labour’s 209 seats and just over 10 million votes), the papers for 1987 are striking in their air of uncertainty and despondency, with one particularly prescient letter from Private Secretary Charles Powell imploring her not to fight another bruising election campaign.

As well as fighting off what Conservatives believed to be a particularly hostile press in the run-up to the election, 1987 proved a particularly troubled and unsettling year for both the Prime Minister and the country at large with the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, Hungerford massacre, King’s Cross fire, Enniskillen bombing, ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash, and the Great Storm all taking place during the course of a turbulent year.

̽��ֱ��extraordinary Powell letter, opened to the public in full for the first time by the Churchill Archives Centre and the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, strikes a pleading tone to Lady Thatcher after congratulating the PM on her historic victory.

“All the same I hope you will not put yourself through it again,” says the letter. “ ̽��ֱ��level of personal abuse thrown at you during the campaign was unbelievable and must take some toll, however stoic you are outwardly… In two or three years’ time you will have completed the most sweeping change this country has seen in decades and your place in history will be rivalled only in this century by Churchill. That’s the time to contribute to some other area.”

Responding to the letter ahead of today's opening, Lord Powell said: “I had actually forgotten writing the letter until Charles Moore cited it in his biography. It’s an unusual letter for a civil servant to send a Prime Minister, even on a very personal basis, reflecting the small size and intimacy of Number 10 especially in those days. I had been distressed to observe at close quarters the stress of a third election campaign and the back-biting it involved on Margaret Thatcher’s health and performance. In the light of subsequent events, my advice to her looks pretty sound.”

Although 1987 had its fair share of difficulties – not least a growing Tory disquiet around the upcoming ‘Poll Tax’ – Thatcher did enjoy enormously successful visits to both the USA and the USSR, the latter to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev during March/April.

̽��ֱ��success of the visit helped launch her election campaign and put clear water between her and Labour in the polls at a time when the gap had been narrowing, a constriction that provoked much disquiet in the Conservative ranks at all levels of the party machine.

While the Russia visit and resulting photos provided a bump to Thatcher's and Conservative Party popularity, Thatcher had since 1983 consciously sought a better relationship with the Soviet leadership. In truth, Lady Thatcher was yet to be convinced by Gorbachev and played down expectations both before and after the visit, even in the face of overwhelmingly positive coverage both in the UK and behind the Iron Curtain.

̽��ֱ��1987 papers also bring back to light a forgotten episode on eve of poll when Lady Thatcher, being interviewed by David Dimbleby, made what could have been a potentially election-losing and career-ending comment. Asking a question about social division, Dimbleby suggested the PM never actually said she cared. In reply, she said: “Please. If people just drool and drivel that they care. I turn round and say ‘Right. I also look to see what you actually do.’”

Thatcher instantly regretted her choice of words and immediately apologised for her use of the phrase ‘drool and drivel’.

Historian Chris Collins of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the only person to have read all 50,000 pages of the 1987 papers in their entirety, said: “She was a bit lucky there, I think. Perhaps the immediate retraction and election victory saved her from having to live with endless taunting in later years.

“It’s hard to find anything quite like this exchange in the whole body of her public rhetoric (which amounted to more than 14 million words by the end of her Premiership) and her feelings about it were correspondingly high.”

On a lighter note, the papers for 1987 contain her Press Office briefing notes after Lady Thatcher was persuaded to appear on children’s TV, including the BBC’s Saturday Superstore. A briefing ahead of an interview for Smash Hits magazine carries the ominous warning ‘You may not enjoy this appearance' – and if proof were needed, included an appendix with a short history of punk.

Noting that the genre was at its most extreme phase under the previous Labour government, the briefing went on to outline the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and Anarchy in the UK, both highlighted in yellow to give these classic punk anthems even greater prominence.

Not content with her brief history of punk, the PM also gave a speech in Jamaica later that year referencing Bob Marley. Powell also sent her the words to Get Up, Stand Up.

While Thatcher may have proved her prowess at winning elections in 1987, she did come a cropper on the domestic front after appearing on a BBC science programme called Take Nobody’s Word For It with Professor Ian Fells of Newcastle ̽��ֱ�� to demonstrate some basic chemistry including a recipe for bread.

“If you offer the viewing public a recipe on a TV programme with a title like that, it better be a good one – ideally foolproof,” added Collins. “Unfortunately this one wasn’t. Horrified officials found themselves receiving letters from people complaining they had tried the PM’s bread. One said it was ‘just like chewing gum’ and another ‘that it was bad enough to cry’. Later that same year, the Roux brothers sent her a book of patisserie recipes, though history does not record whether the gift had any connection to ‘Breadgate’.”

Margaret Thatcher’s third and final election victory dominates the 50,000 pages of her personal papers for the year 1987 – opening to the public from today at Churchill College, Cambridge.

I had been distressed to observe at close quarters the stress of a third election campaign and the back-biting it involved on Margaret Thatcher’s health and performance.

Lord Powell

Thatcher speaking in the White House grounds during her 1987 visit to the USA

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'Spin' or be lost: how Corbyn rejected New Labour PR for a more civic vision

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:45:05 +0000

Conventional wisdom has it that a lack of guile contributed to Jeremy Corbyn’s shock triumph in the Labour leadership election. He won because he was the anti-spin candidate.

But having been smeared, derided and traduced by the press since winning the election, Corbyn is being urged ahead of today’s party conference speech to get “professional” – in other words time to get spinning or be lost.

But maybe a glance at how PR itself has changed will reveal that what Corbyn is doing has its own merit. It’s not clear that a more “professional” approach, where this is taken simply to mean returning to media relations as usual – of the kind used by Number 10 in the Blair era – would increase the amount of favourable coverage he gets.

Although Corbyn’s speeches might benefit from more rehearsal, it’s also important to think about where Corbyn has been strong. How he has achieved the the biggest-ever mandate for a Labour leader and massively increased party membership.

One of the most interesting aspects about his successful campaign for the Labour leadership was that – unwittingly or not – it revived an older practice of public relations in the UK. Because the idea that public relations is mainly about managing press headlines, or measuring media coverage is actually a relatively new one.

Alistair Campbell – Blair’s former spokesman. ̽��ֱ�� of Salford Press Office, CC BY

It also an idea that plays into a myth that is comforting to journalists, that media opinion is the same as public opinion: that the whole complexity of the public’s relationships can be contained in the media’s representation of them. Or as Campbell put it to the Leveson enquiry with typically astute bluntness: “It’s journalists that are the real spin doctors.”

1930s-style PR

By contrast, Corbyn appears to see public relations as the pioneers of the profession in the UK saw it, as an add-on to civic society not as a container for it. A local mental health charity event was prioritised over an appearance on the Andrew Marr show.

It’s a little-known story that the pioneers of public relations in the UK were the people who promoted the London Tube map and Routemaster buses, who invented “dial 999”, the speaking clock and the Jubilee telephone kiosk. These 1930s innovations were prompted by many of the same types of challenges we face today: economic depression, new technology, and the unpredictable path of mass democracy.

Having come to prominence during the slump, partly as a way of navigating totalitarianism, during the war these pioneers would build the V for Victory campaign, design new towns and plan the Festival of Britain. These initiatives weren’t done to increase media reach, or win the headlines (which they understood were controlled by the newspaper barons and newsreel censors) but they were about building relationships.

People in interwar Britain – from the poor and marginalised to the new consumer classes – were put into contact by these new media pioneers through discussions, films and even telephone debates. They took the electorate seriously. ̽��ֱ��language for making a new nation was taking shape.

When you look at the artwork that David Gentleman did for the Stop the War campaign, which was chaired by Corbyn, or simply the sharply designed logo of his leadership campaign, you can see something of this older visual tradition of public relations in the UK. Good design and media enabled civic connectivity as a conduit for actual social and attitudinal change.

By contrast, an analysis popular with the commentariat is that young Corbyn voters in the election were a regrettable product of an irresponsible age of social media. An age where people want opinions that project a personal image to the world – so-called identity politics – and which signify something about their personality, rather than picking sensible leaders that could win a grown-up election.

Ironically, this is actually quite an old put down; a curmudgeonly dismissal that tends to resurface every time the prospect of political transformation, for example the responses to full votes for women and the working class, rears its anarchic head.

While it wasn’t the change that the pioneers expected, it’s always struck me that it is no coincidence that the biggest economic and political shift that modern Britain has ever seen arguably came in the wake of the new practices of public relations finding their feet in the 1930s.

Sneer if you want but …

̽��ֱ��21st century may once more show the strength of the pioneers' approach to public relations. ̽��ֱ��short-term managing of headlines is an impossible task – in a 24-hour news environment a politician will likely always look on the defensive in times of crisis (real or manufactured). Instead, political parties are forced to play a longer game while shrewd politicians begin to stock up on integrity for the inevitable moments when their judgement goes astray. ̽��ֱ��wheel has turned and approaches that were once dismissed as old hat are starting to look prescient again. Unwittingly or not, this is the approach that Corbyn has taken.

All of which makes it important that being “professional” at the conference in Brighton does not prelude the Labour leadership from continuing to focus on ways to coax the wide network of civic and social relationships that they can call upon (a network far wider than that of the present-day Conservatives) into the media. Bring these groups together – verbally, visually and emotionally – and unpredictable things will happen.

It’s worth remembering that the UK’s news media generally sneered at the many social and political oddities of the “Million” march coalition against the Iraq War in 2003 but it marked a watershed in British politics, let alone new Labour’s electoral fortunes, that few predicted at the time.

Equally, it’s worth remembering that it was at a low ebb in World War II that the “V for Victory” campaign was born. What came out of existential weakness has now by a strange trick of history come to be seen as part of an inevitable triumph. There was little that was “professional” about it.

Scott Anthony, Affiliated Research Scholar , ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Scott Anthony, Affiliated Research Scholar in the Faculty of History, discusses Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership campaign and the history of political 'spin'.

It strikes me as no coincidence that the biggest economic and political shift that modern Britain has ever seen came in the wake of the new practices of public relations

Scott Anthony

Chris Beckett

Jeremy Corbyn campaigning in Margate, 5 September 2015

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̽��ֱ��speech that never was – Thatcher papers for 1984 open to the public

sjr81 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 16:32:52 +0000

Draft pages of her intended speech – grabbed from the wreckage of the Grand Hotel following the attack on the Prime Minister on October 12, 1984 – detail how Thatcher planned to warn the country from the podium of the Conservative Party Conference that Britain faced ‘an insurrection’.

̽��ֱ��‘speech that never was’ went on to suggest that the Labour Party was the ‘natural home’ of forces whose ambition was to tear the country apart ‘by an extension of the calculated chaos planned for the mining industry by a handful of trained Marxists and their fellow travellers’.

Her own handwritten notes for the speech, released today by the Churchill Archives Centre (www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives) and online at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website (www.margaretthatcher.org ), suggest plans to link what she regarded as militant mining communities to General Galtieri – the Argentinian dictator defeated during the Falklands War of 1982. ̽��ֱ��note, released for the first time, reads: “Since Office. Enemy without – beaten him & resolute strong in defence. Enemy within – Miners’ leaders…Liverpool and some local authorities – just as dangerous…in a way more difficult to fight…just as dangerous to liberty.”

Chris Collins from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the only historian to date to have had unrestricted access to the papers, said: “It was a speech which would have been remembered as controversial and would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech (delivered in private to the backbench 1922 Committee) Indeed it was intended to do that.

“There’s a certain irony that an act of great violence actually softened this speech. In the end, the original speech was torn up and later taped back together, probably by Thatcher herself, who was a dab hand with Sellotape.”

Among the other 40,000 papers being released online and at Churchill College, are documents which reveal the Prime Minister’s deep sense of foreboding about her fate at the hands of the Conservative Party she ruled, prophesising events of seven years later when she would be forced to resign as PM.

She told her secretary John Coles that: “My party won’t want me to lead them into the next election – and I don’t blame them.” Collins said he was amazed to find Mrs Thatcher imagining her own downfall just days after the 1983 General Election victory. ̽��ֱ��account, written when Coles left Number 10 in June 1984, also reveals that Thatcher’s doubts ran in parallel to a ‘decline in her energy’ after the election win.

More light-hearted pages from the 1984 archive reveal the prickly saga of a rose called Margaret, detailing – in a scene that could have been lifted straight from the scripts of Yes Prime Minister – how an innocent flower sparked a potential diplomatic incident between West Germany and Japan.

̽��ֱ��drama began in innocent enough fashion when a West German horticultural association asked for permission to name a rose after Margaret Thatcher, delighting officials in Whitehall wishing to perhaps promote a softer side to the ‘Iron Lady’.

However, the Prime Minister had forgotten an agreement of six years earlier, signed while Leader of the Opposition, that had given a Japanese firm license to grow the original ‘Margaret Thatcher Rose’.

̽��ֱ��clearly wounded Japanese firm wrote to the PM’s office and the Whitehall machine acted swiftly to pour oil on troubled diplomatic waters. ̽��ֱ��incident provoked many pages of notes between Whitehall and Foreign Office officials. In the end, it took a letter from private secretary Charles Powell to draw matters to a close. His reassuring tones of diplomacy to the slighted Japanese company headed off any threats of legal action and potential embarrassment to the Thatcher office.

Andrew Riley, Archivist of the papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “This release of papers gives us a vivid insight into life at Downing Street and into Mrs Thatcher’s state of mind during a very difficult year, both personally and politically.

“ ̽��ֱ��papers provide fresh insights into the often bitter coal strike of 1984, as well as newly released materials on the impact and aftermath of the Brighton bomb.”

Papers opened to the public today reveal how the Brighton bombing stopped Margaret Thatcher from widening her infamous ‘enemy within’ rhetoric to include not only the striking miners but also the wider Labour movement and Party.

It was a speech which would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech.

Chris Collins

Churchill Archives Centre

A Sellotaped page from the speech that never was. Homepage image: Miner's strike, 1984 by Nick Sarebi (CC: Att)

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