Bernard Ingham: Thirty years on, what we can learn from Thatcher’s fears

I had time for speculation since I didn’t have much to do. As the Prime Minister’s press secretary, I was scarcely employed because civil servants are barred from party political activity. My only real task during the election was to make sure that the government machine observed the neutrality rules and, among other things, kept electioneering off government premises.

I am not clear whether these rules exist any more in view of the way schools, hospitals and defence establishments are routinely hijacked as TV backdrops for ministerial pronouncements. Nor is it clear where restrictions on political advisers paid by the taxpayer begin or end.

Neutralities have got very blurred in the last 30 years. This has done politics and politicians no good at all, though perhaps less damage than “cash for questions” – an issue now back on the agenda – and the Parliamentary expenses scandal.

At any rate, I was back in business 30 years ago come Monday when it was clear that a politician who, two years earlier, was “the most unpopular Prime Minister since polls began” had won with the biggest majority – a whopping 144 seats – since 1945.

I continued to do the job – as I did until her resignation and my retirement in 1990 – without a mobile phone or a computer, with its current tyranny in the form of bloggery. I count myself the last of the fortunate Mohicans among No 10 press secretaries. Technology, among other things, has blighted the lives of my successors.

I mention this because Thatcher’s first encounter with a no doubt brick-size mobile phone was on her 1983 election tour in an electronics factory in Reading.

In some ways, it may seem ludicrous that Thatcher, as 
her memoirs make clear, 
worried her way through the 1983 election.

Opinion polls were anything from 11 to 19 points in her favour, though Francis Pym, a former Chief Whip, did not help. He warned publicly against “landslides [that] on the whole don’t produce successful governments”.

But under Michael Foot Labour was in disarray. It had produced a manifesto that Gerald Kaufmann described as “the longest suicide note in history”. In the middle of the campaign the late Jim Mortimer, Labour’s general secretary, was moved, heaven knows by what, to say “the unanimous view of the campaign committee is that Michael Foot is the leader of the Labour Party”.

She even had the international exposure of a successful G7 summit hosted by President Reagan in the almost idyllic Williamsburg, Virginia, which I attended since this was government business. Its communiqué reinforced her stance on economics and defence.

Labour was committed to non-nuclear defence, withdrawal from the EC and vastly increased public spending, which Chancellor Geoffrey Howe costed at an extra £39bn to £43bn, almost equal to income tax revenue at that time.

And yet she never counted her chickens. This was not an act. She was much cannier than those 
who marvelled at her heroic Falklands gamble a year earlier. She thought her “keep up the good work” manifesto was dull. It did not have what is now called “oomph”.

It certainly did not inspire her second administration, which lost momentum as it skidded through what the press branded the “banana skin years”.

Yet the 1983 election tells us more about Labour than the Tories. Even though it has held office for nearly half of the last 40 years, Labour has a remarkable propensity for failing to keep up with public opinion or get on the right side of it.

This is why Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are this week trying to persuade the public that Labour is neither soft on welfare nor profligate on spending.

Both are hard “sells” just as 
are those that will inevitably follow on why we should not upset the EU applecart (in contrast to wanting to leave it in 1983) or lightly tamper with education, criminal justice, immigration and the NHS.

Unlike 1983, I seriously doubt that David Cameron is going to walk it in 2015, let alone by a landslide. Miliband is not yet the lost cause Foot was.

But like Foot he needs to get his party to decide whether to preserve the purity of the Left or serve the people. Some things never change.