Monday, May. 07, 1979

Iron Lady vs. Sunny Jim

The Tories lead in polls but the gap is narrowing

Britain had never seen an election campaign quite like it. Looking and sounding like a confident winner, Tory Leader Margaret Thatcher last week made a whirlwind trip from one end of the island to the other that had many of the earmarks of a royal tour. She traveled in her own executive bus, which was followed by two others filled with dozens of journalists, ten television crews and a swarm of still photographers. It was election razzmatazz, American style, and Thatcher reveled in it.

Nonetheless, as the campaign entered its final week, most polls showed that the Conservatives' lead over Prime Minister James Callaghan's Labor Party had dropped from 20% or more to less than 6%. At week's end yet another poll by Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) indicated that the Tory margin had shrunk to a bare 3%; a 6% lead might translate into a majority of 30 seats or more, but the MORI sampling of voters suggested that this Thursday's election had become too close to call. Beyond that, other polls indicated that Callaghan had a 19% lead over his Tory rival in popularity and that up to one-fifth of the electorate was undecided. Among those uncertain voters were millions of working-class housewives, who were Thatcher's prime target on her electoral blitz.

In the city of Leicester, she stepped out of her hotel precisely on schedule at 9 a.m. Dressed in a smart, gold-trimmed dark blue suit, her blond hair perfectly in place, she made her way to Grahame Gardner Ltd., a small local clothing firm. After greeting the proprietors, she climbed the stairs to a second-floor workshop and proceeded to win the seamstresses' hearts--if not their votes--by sitting at one of their machines and sewing away for a minute or two. Television cameras filmed the event for the evening news. By the time Thatcher left 45 minutes later, most of the women were clearly impressed. Said Beryl Jarvis: "She's a lady, isn't she, but she'll have a go at anything. After all, she can't do much worse than the men."

Later that day, accompanied by her husband Denis, Thatcher visited a Cadbury chocolate factory, donning a white smock over her elegant suit. She spent several minutes cramming brightly wrapped chocolate eggs into yellow boxes. "How many to the box?" she asked over the roar of the machinery. "Forty-eight," was the answer. "Can I do it?" she asked at once, and promptly sat down to pack two boxes. She lamely tried to stuff chocolates into trays that glided slowly past her on a conveyor belt, but found the job difficult. "It takes concentration, doesn't it?" she said with a frown. In a tea factory, she gamely swallowed a bitter brew rather than spit it out into a handy spittoon. "Of course I'm not going to spit it out," she joked to disappointed photographers.

Despite her middle-class manner and accent, Thatcher in fact is a grocer's daughter from a market town in Lincolnshire. Her campaign strategy was designed in part to impress working-class voters, especially women, that she shared their concern about prices and other gut economic issues. At a shopping mall in Halifax, she brandished in her right hand a shopping bag crammed full of groceries, while in her left hand she held a half-empty one. "The right hand," she trilled, "was what a pound would buy under the Tory government in 1974; the other is what one pound would buy under Labor today. If Labor has five more years, I would need only an envelope to carry the shopping."

In sharp contrast to Thatcher's colorful road show, "Sunny Jim" Callaghan was waging a rather low-keyed, traditional campaign, appearing frequently at poorly attended rallies on behalf of Labor candidates for Parliament. Callaghan and his aides traveled without fanfare on an executive jet, leaving the press to catch up as best it could on whatever planes and trains were available. As a result, he was getting less national attention than the Tory leader.

Although he carefully refrained from personal attacks on Thatcher, Callaghan time and again put forward the warning that a Tory victory would mean more hardship for the average family, more privileges for the rich. "The welfare, the prosperity, the jobs and the care of older people depend upon a Labor majority," he told a partisan crowd of 70 people in the Lancashire town of Rawtenstall last week. Responding to Thatcher's tough stand on union abuses, he charged that Tory plans for legal reforms in industrial relations could lead to a disastrous conflict of views between the unions and government. The union leaders, whose battle with Callaghan over his proposed 5% wage ceilings led to a bitter winter of strikes and slowdowns, endorsed the message, closing ranks as they had not done for years. Pledging his allegiance to Labor, Moss Evans, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, said that "working with the Tories would be like running a cross-country race barefoot." Sidney Weighell, head of the National Union of Railwaymen, warned that if the Tories win, "I'll tell the lads to stick their noses in the trough."

Despite Thatcher's well managed, energetic campaign, few experts were willing to predict assuredly that she would become Britain's first woman Prime Minister. There were simply too many imponderables. One unanswered question was whether the unions were in such bad grace with the majority of voters that the open support of bosses like Evans and Weighell for Callaghan would tip the crucial swing vote in favor of the Tories. The country's rapidly growing and increasingly restive black and Asian population could be a significant factor, even though less than half of eligible minority voters had bothered to register. Since Thatcher has publicly called for more restrictions on immigration, their vote was expected to be overwhelmingly proLabor.

Yet another uncertainty is the potential success or failure of the minor parties. This year a record 2,571 candidates are running for 635 seats in the House of Commons. Many of the campaigners represent 100 or so fringe organizations of the right or left that have not the remotest chance of winning. Among them: the Fancy Dress Party, the Dog Lovers' Party,* the Ecology Party and Actress Vanessa Redgrave's Workers' Revolutionary Party. Among the more serious minor parties, the Scottish Nationalists figure to lose nearly all of their eleven parliamentary seats, thanks to the failure of a referendum that would have led to a separate assembly for Scotland. The Liberals, led by David Steel, could have a real effect on the election outcome if they hang on to most of their 14 seats. The result could be a hung Parliament in which Liberal support would be necessary to form a government. Steel has hinted that his Liberals would be willing to support either of the major parties under certain conditions.

The X factor in the election, however, may turn out to be the X chromosome. Will Margaret Thatcher lose votes because she is a woman? In Leicester, Button Machinist Betty Poynton confessed, after Thatcher's visit to her shop floor: "I don't fancy a woman as Prime Minister. It's a fellow's job." Others may well agree. Thatcher, however, thinks her sex may be an advantage. "There's an air of excitement," she says, "about the possibility that we're going to have a change of this kind." Later, in a mood of introspection, the woman whom the Russians have dubbed "the Iron Lady" summed herself up by saying: "I am what I am--it's the whole personality. I happen to be a woman. I have no experience of the alternative."

* Whose founder and only candidate, Columnist Auberon Waugh, is running against Liberal M.P. Jeremy Thorpe in his North Devon constituency. Thorpe's trial, on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder a man who claimed to be the M.P.'s lover, has been postponed until after the election.

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