I stumbled across an old file from Total Politics days with recollections of various politicos of the 1979 general election campaign, which some of you might find of interest...
Julia Langdon
I spent most of the 1979 election campaign in a state of mild terror. The Guardian,had come to the conclusion that the election was highly likely to be decided by whatever happened to the votes in West Yorkshire and Lancashire. I was despatched. And I was glad to leave London, partly because I had been the other side of Parliament Square when the bomb went off that killed Airey Neave. But I had forgotten about the Yorkshire Ripper. Everywhere I went, he seemed to have been just ahead of me. The worst night was when I went canvassing late in the evening in Hebden Bridge. I had left my car miles away, earlier, in the daylight, and had to return to it alone in the sepulchral valley dark with the words of the Yorkshire police chief echoing in my head: “ No woman on her own is safe in West Yorkshire tonight.” The politics of the area was fascinating and a glance at the election map, pre and post election, show that sending me there was a canny idea. What’s more I think I was never more in tune with what was exercising the voters.
Peter Riddell
I spent the best part of a day travelling around with Denis Healey, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, starting in Portsmouth and then facing tough heckling from "Troops Out" protesters in Brighton. Getting on the train to return to London, the local Special Branch mistook me - much to Healey's amusement - for being his protection officer: perhaps it was the raincoat I was wearing.
Michael Dobbs
Election Night. A drab side room in Barnet Town Hall. Waiting for Margaret's count. Only a few of us, and no mobile phones, just an old television set keeping us abreast of what was happening elsewhere. Denis chain smoking, assorted sandwiches curling. The results began to bounce off the screen – three, four, five, all showing a sharp swing to the Tories. Except Teddy Taylor, who lost in Glasgow Cathcart, the only Conservative in the entire country to lose his seat, apart from those who had won at by-elections. ‘Oh, poor Teddy,’ Margaret whispered, in genuine distress, ‘paying the price for being too loyal.’ Then Ted Heath’s count. Total silence. An image of Heath smiling. ‘Bloody man!’ Denis barked.
After only a handful of results, the outcome was clear. I turned to her, in awe. ‘You’ve won. You are Prime Minister.’ She reached into her handbag, took out a handkerchief, wiped her moist nose. ‘We’ll see,’ she said. And we did.
Lord McNally
The 1979 General Election was, for me, the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I was elected as a Labour MP at the age of 36. Jim Callaghan came to launch my campaign at a mass meeting at Stockport Town Hall. As I rose to speak a group of "Troops Out of Northern Ireland" demonstrators began to chant. "Start speaking" hissed Jim Callaghan. I looked at the demonstrators and said "Do you think that there would be a single British soldier in Northern Ireland if the communities there could live together in peace?" The explosion of applause from the Hall silenced the hecklers and my campaign was launched.
Lord Lexden
It was a day of brilliant spring sunshine. Nature seemed hopelessly at odds with the congregation's profound sorrow. The small church at Longworth in the Oxfordshire countryside was packed to overflowing with former war-time comrades and Members of Parliament. We sang with all the vigour we could muster the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Mrs Thatcher spoke so very movingly of 'Airey the quiet, Airey the soft-spoken', describing the man who had made her Leader of the Party four years earlier as ' the most unassuming man I have ever met'. As I was standing in the church porch after the service, she stopped for a moment and grasped my hand.' We will win, and win well - for Airey'. Then she rushed off to comfort Diana and the family. I noted at the time:' No one knows how to comfort people in distress as well as Mrs T'. I thought again about the great political partnership, destroyed by Irish terrorism at a pivotal moment in the Party's history, when exactly four weeks later Mrs T stood on the steps of No 10 and quoted St Francis of Assisi's famous prayer. As I was leaving Airey Neave's dingy little office in the Commons on that terrible day, Friday 30 March 1979, he said: 'Don't close the door. I am just going to take St Francis's prayer round to Margaret's office. She might find it useful'.
Chris Moncrieff
I was not "on the road" during the 1979 election campaign but had a desk-bound "coordination" role in the newsroom. I recall the most comic event was when Mrs Thatcher lifted up a calf at the behest of photographers, with Denis shouting at her: "Put the thing down, woman. You'll kill it." The calf did indeed expire the following day.
Lord Parkinson
By the time of the 1979 Election, I had completed five years on the Opposition Front Bench but I was still surprised to receive a letter from Lord Thorneycroft asking me to set aside six days during the campaign for electioneering outside my own constituency. I had never found electioneering an enjoyable experience. On the doorstep, in market places and in shopping areas and in the streets, it always seemed to me to be odd to approach strangers, interrupt whatever they were doing and then ask them to do something for my benefit, namely to vote for me. It was so much easier to do those things on behalf of someone else as the local candidate.
Charles Moore
In May 1979, I was in my last year at Cambridge University. It was the first general election in which I was old enough to vote. I took no part in the campaign, and voted Liberal, as my family all did. But I remember being pleased that Mrs Thatcher had won. At this point, I had got through to the final round of the Civil Service exams, but one of her first acts on becoming Prime Minister was to freeze all recruitment to the Civil Service. I was therefore one of the first of her army of the unemployed, and began to look for other work. In October, I got a job on the Daily Telegraph. So I have Mrs Thatcher to thank for being a journalist instead of a bureaucrat.
Robert Waller
The third of May 1979 is marked in my memory not only by an historic national turning point, but by my one and only venture in standing for elective office. I had been selected by a series of mischances as one of three Labour candidates for the newly created and thoroughly weird Central ward on Oxford City Council. I recall James Callaghan’s teasing little song at that autumn’s conference, when the realisation dawned on me that he was going to make the mistake of delaying the election until after what turned out to be the ‘winter of discontent’. The annoyance was, I confess, principally because I knew this would interfere with the rare pleasure of following the general election results; and so it came to pass. By skulking in the boiler room beneath the Town Hall with my radio, I even managed to miss my own declaration. My flirtation with candidature ended that fateful night, as, shortly afterwards, did my allegiance to that (or subsequently indeed any other) political party.
Ann Widdecombe
In 1979 I was fighting my first general election as the candidate for Burnley. It was decided that I must go down a mine because in those days a large number of men in Burnley were miners. So down I went, in helmet and full gear, and crawled along a seam so low that I could not raise my head without hitting it. I felt quite heroic upon emerging and posed for photographs for the local papers. The pictures appeared next day showing all too clearly my knee protectors put on upside down.
Simon Hoggart
I was writing sketches from around the country, and my most vivid memories were of Margaret Thatcher holding the calf, Keith Joseph shaking hands with a shopkeeper in the West Midlands then fleeing when customers arrived (to interfere with the transaction of business was the greatest crime in his calendar), Willie Whitelaw spraying greetings around his constituency in Cumbria, sometimes meeting the same people several times in a minute and my favourite of all moments: in a TV studio waiting to go on Thames to talk about the election, sharing the green room with Enoch Powell and Bill Haley. The ageing rocker clearly had no idea who Enoch was, but Enoch knew him very well. 'I am very pleased to meet you. I have always wanted to meet you,' he said, and I had this happy vision of Enoch in a DA haircut and crepe-soled shoes, tapping them by the juke box to ‘See You Later Alligator’.
Geoffrey Howe
1979 was my eighth General. Within six days of polling day, I was welcomed into the Treasury – almost as though the cavalry had arrived. Six weeks later, I presented our first budget. Pay, price, dividend (and later, exchange) controls all scrapped. Spending taxes up and all income taxes down. “Pay as you spend”, I’d often promised - “much better than pay as you earn”. “It’s what you voted for”, said The Economist. As I drove home that week, some council workmen flagged me down: “We just wanted to thank you very much”, they said. “Those tax cuts were great”. One of our senior diplomats, retiring seven years later, echoed my feelings: “To have been present at the arrest of the decline in our national economic performance and to be then able with conviction to trumpet the resurgence of Britain has been an exhilarating privilege”.
Denis MacShane
Just sheer misery. I was president of the National Union of Journalists having stood as a Labour candidate in Solihull in 1974. The left in the party and the unions were determined to destroy Callaghan but he in turn had destroyed the hopes of social democratic modernisation based on the union reform ideas advanced by Barbara Castle in 1968. Jim then went anti-European before 1974 but became an advocate of Britain in Europe in 1975. This zig-zagging left Labour without bearings or purpose. It was slogging work knocking on doors as we slouched to defeat as Tony Benn, Peter Shore and others prepared to make Labour unelectable after 1979 with isolationist anti-Europeanism and protectionist nationalisation proposals. I was glad to get a job with an international trade union outfit and leave Britain. Mrs Thatcher made the country's poor poorer. Labour made itself unelectable for more than a generation.
Michael Meadowcroft
My vivid memory of that campaign is of being the Liberals’ representative on Yorkshire Television's live daily election broadcast. The Conservative was James Scott-Hopkins and Labour had the redoubtable Barbara Castle. We were based in the Leeds studio and YTV went around the county to clubs, workplaces and community centres getting electors to put questions to us on air. Barbara would sweep in, fearfully coiffured, with copious notes in tiny handwriting. Before we went on air she would be touchingly nervous and in need of reassurance. The moment the first question was put she was immediately transformed into the well known fiery advocate for the Labour cause! When we went off air, she would then solicit anxious reviews of her performance, knowing full well that she had been terrific. I was never sure whether it was all an act or whether she really did posses human frailties only known to those who became close to her.
Teddy Taylor
The Glasgow Herald newspaper headline was "Tories Romp Home", but under this, beside a gloomy picture of me, was the subtitle "Teddy Taylor's defeat is only blow to Maggie". It was an unusual election for me. I had to spend a lot of time travelling round Scotland as the Scottish leader. It was quite delightful because the people seemed to be for us with an unusual enthusiasm. But when I was in Cathcart, it was clear that Labour had organised gigantic busloads of helpers to invade Castlemilk. The result was a great shock. I learned a lot from the campaign. First it showed me what a kind person Mrs Thatcher was. She phoned me the day after the election and we had a long chat although she must have had many other issues to consider. She insisted that I should not give up politics and I was lucky to secure Southend which turned out to be a huge success for me and the family
Edwina Currie
I'd just had a baby and was a councillor in Birmingham, Northfield where our candidate was Jocelyn Cadbury. We had every hope that we would win the seat though with the Longbridge car factory inside the boundary it would be tight. My own council seat was also up that summer and I was chairman of the Social Services Committee, so it was a very busy and exciting time. We knew we had it in the bag once Jim Callaghan chickened out of an October election. In those days the unions were very powerful and when they smelled blood they went for it - big time - irrespective of who they would damage. The strikes called during the winter have become legendary but at the time they were a great nuisance to the public and helped settled the issue. We won my seat, we won Jocelyn's and Mrs T became PM. No one knew exactly how ground-breaking that was, but we were soon to find out.
Michael Brown
My chairman, campaign aide and I started the traditional tour of polling stations and committee rooms early. Polling had been heavy in the Tory inclined areas during mid-morning. By the time we got to Scunthorpe heavy snow, rain, thunder and hail emptied all polling stations in the strongly held Labour area - all utterly deserted from about 6pm onwards. But still, in this dreadful weather, huge queues waited, drenched, in their hundreds in the "better" Tory areas. But my other fairy Godmother - apart from the weather - was Councillor Cyril Nottingham - Mayor of Scunthorpe - a moderate Labour man who had been expelled from the party and paid his former colleague back by standing as an Independent, polling over 2,000 votes. With local elections also on the same day, many other Labour voters were confused. They wanted to vote for Cyril for council and Labour for Parliament. So they voted for Cyril and the outgoing Labour MP on the parliamentary ballot. "Void for voting for more than one candidate" totalled over 700 - my majority was 487. Nice one, Cyril.
Chris Rennard
The first day of the 1979 election was an extraordinary one for me. I was the 18 year old organiser of one of the Liberal committee rooms in the Liverpool Edge Hill by-election. I had spent four months skipping lectures to work full-time on the campaign. The night before I had been organising our eve of poll rally during which it had been announced that Jim Callaghan's Government had lost the no confidence vote. I had lost all my speakers as all Liberal MPs had returned to Westminster for the vote. Until that point, we were confident of victory in the by-election – even though the Liberal Party stood at just 5% in the opinion polls. The fact that we would now have a General Election increased the stakes enormously. In the early hours of Friday March 30th, we gained the seat with a 28% swing and an 8,133 majority. Over the weekend, Liberal poll ratings doubled from 5% to 10%.
Peter Kellner
I was responsible for the Sunday Times polls during the 1979 campaign. Which was a problem, for the Sunday Times (like the Times) was off the streets, because of a war of attrition between the owners and the print unions. However the polls went ahead, and we published the results elsewhere. One (which ran in The Economist) showed the Conservatives five points ahead, which was close to the final result. But the same poll showed that if Edward Heath was still Tory leader, the Conservatives would have a landslide lead of 18 points. My belief is that there was still a reluctance on the part of some people to vote for a woman to be Prime Minister - a sentiment that vanished by 1983 and the aftermath of the Falklands War.