‘We’re about to lose this f---ing election’

Lord Young’s 1987 diaries expose the paranoia in the Tory machine – and the Iron Lady’s temper

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Lord Young’s diaries from the 1987 general election campaign brought back vivid memories. It was the first such campaign of my Fleet Street career, and as a leader writer for this newspaper I had a close view of events. Even before the campaign was over, tales of internal rivalries and bitcheries were coming out of Conservative Central Office, where Norman Tebbit, as chairman of the party, sought to manage the strategy to put Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street for a third term. The tensions were visible: when, interviewing the prime minister for the Telegraph,I had the temerity to ask her why, despite having had eight years in power, she had not reformed the welfare state, she reacted as if I had just asked her whether she intended to vote Labour. We hacks only had to deal with such detonations occasionally: for Young, they were a regular occurrence.

He was employment secretary, and one of those rare businessmen who made a successful transition from commerce to politics. A peerage in 1984 enabled him to enter the Cabinet, and he soon acquired a reputation for getting things done. Ideologically, one could not get the proverbial tissue paper between him and Thatcher. His success created enemies, and matters were made worse by the prime minister sending him to Central Office for the campaign, but without a job title or indeed any formal authority. He liked Tebbit, but the informality of the arrangement caused problems: one big beast had been brought in, but ordered not to tread on the toes of the resident big beast. That things went as well as they did is attributable to the inherent decency of both men, though tempers inevitably flared.

To those going around the country and talking to voters, the result seemed a foregone conclusion: Labour were going to lose, and lose heavily – which they did. Their leader, Neil Kinnock, came over as loutish, his pronouncements as vacuous. Labour still did not have a coherent policy on nuclear disarmament, which gave the Conservatives a succession of field days. The Thatcherite economic transforma55 tion of Britain, in which Young played a large part, was paying dividends in the Tory heartlands.

Yet we knew this was not how paranoiacs inside the Tory machine saw it. Every slight dip in the polls brought panic and demands for a rethink of strategy. John Wakeham, chief whip, did a disastrous Election Call programme, and was sent to outer darkness for the rest of the campaign. Even the hired guns had to be kept in separate rooms: the PR men Maurice Saatchi and Tim Bell had fallen out, and although both had good ideas for the campaign, it was a question of one or the other, not both. What Young makes clear is that almost all the professional politicians were temporarily rendered unstable by having to become salesmen for the party, and were thus entirely amateurish in their approach.

Perhaps having a relatively feeble opposition with untenable policies provided the luxury to bicker and panic. Young’s diaries suggest that fear of defeat hardly spread outside the Westminster bubble, yet was entirely genuine inside it. June 4, a week before polling day, became known as “Wobbly Thursday”: word seeped out of Central Office that Young and Tebbit had had a dust-up, and that Thatcher, herself in a near-catatonic state, had told Young to get a grip on everything, including the chairman.

Young’s account of the day is riveting. He says Lord McAlpine, the party treasurer, had predicted three weeks earlier that, a week before the poll, there would be “wobble day”, just as there was before each of the last two elections. He even marked it on a chart. In McAlpine’s analysis, it was the day when it was decided everything was going wrong, the strategy was ripped up and begun again, with a successful outcome. “It was certainly a great big wobble,” Young recalls, “only I wasn’t sure at all that things would change for the better this time.”

That morning, Thatcher “looked very tired and strained… tetchy and nervous”. She told Tebbit and Young that they had been on television too much, were too old (56 and respectively: she was 61) and that younger faces were needed to represent the party. At the morning press conference, the prime minister “just was not good at all… there seemed to be a feeling around that we were on the run”. Kinnock appeared to be setting the agenda.

Thatcher railed against the party’s advertising, then “exploded” at Young when he asked her: “What do you want me to do?” Stephen Sherbourne, her private secretary, told him that Thatcher felt trapped because she wanted Young to take on more campaign responsibility, but she did not know how to handle Tebbit. Where had the “Iron Lady” gone? “It was really getting very depressing and very worrying.”

Things got worse. In the afternoon, rumours went around the Stock Exchange about the dismal state of affairs, and that an evening newspaper poll would show Labour just 2 per cent behind (it didn’t), which caused the market to plunge.

Young then inspected Bell’s new advertising campaign, which he thought better than Saatchi’s, and said he would resign if Thatcher didn’t use it, “because we’ll lose the bloody election”. He hijacked Tebbit inside the front door of Downing

Street to persuade him to back it – despite Tebbit’s strong animus against Bell. “I got him by the shoulders and said: ‘Norman, listen to me, we’re about to lose this f-----election. You’re going to go, I’m going to go, the whole thing is going to go.’” Young then seized Saatchi by the lapels to impress upon him the same point. Did the fresh advertising change anything? Probably not, but it made Thatcher feel better, and that morale boost saw the Tories through to victory.

As a diarist, Young is relaxed and genial, sometimes banal – the restaurateurs of London get plenty of free advertising – but highly enjoyable. Scholars of the period will find his record invaluable; for the casual reader, it brings home how ghastly the clash of egos among politicians can be, and what a repulsive trade politics is. Sadly, in the 34 years since Young wrote his diaries, it has become far worse.

Thatcher berated Young and Tebbit for being too old – and too often on TV