That Maggie Style

By Jay D. Palmer

"l am what l am, and l am too old to change"

In Cardiff's ornate city hall, the smiling woman in the smart blue suit and two-strand pearl necklace was among friends. "We regard you," gushed the local chairman, "as the finest leader this country has had since the days of Winston Churchill." Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 57, savored the roar of approval, whipped out a copy of the Labor Party manifesto and held it aloft. "A member of Labor's shadow cabinet described this as the 'longest suicide note ever penned,' " she declared gleefully. "If the British people were to put their signature to it, it would be a suicide note for Britain too. Labor hopes you won't read it," she explained, and with that, proceeded to quote from it at length.

As the Prime Minister played to crowds in Wales and hopscotched around England, even stopping at a Royal Navy lifeboat station, Labor Leader Michael Foot, 69, was also out campaigning, putting in tiring ten-stop days around the country. In Surrey the silver-haired scholar hugged a black woman, was cheered by some unemployed youths and pledged to work for an end to fox hunting while cuddling a baby fox. His deputy, Denis Healey, 65, was just as busy. In York he sat down at a piano to play a funeral march--"to remind everyone where Thatcher is taking us"--and then took up the chorus of an old American barroom tune, Hard Hearted Hannah, "a girl from Savannah who pours water on a drowning man." Quipped Healey: "That is just what she is doing to the British economy."

By comparison, the centrist Social Democratic Party-Liberal Alliance was less visible on the hustings, though still hopeful of re-establishing itself as a strong third force. Like some of his colleagues, S.D.P. Leader Roy Jenkins, 62, was concentrating on defending his own marginal seat in Glasgow. Liberal Party Leader David Steel, 45, who has a safe seat, made up for Jenkins' absence, gathering mileage for the Alliance as he traveled the country in his colorful campaign "battlebus." "What chance is there that a new Britain can be built by the old parties," he asked a Scottish audience, "one of whom draws its inspiration from the decaying bones of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery and the other from the widow's weeds of Queen Victoria?"

With less than two weeks to go before polling on June 9, the election campaign is in full swing. The latest surveys suggest that it may already be all but over, bar the voting and the shouting. Last week, a poll by Market and Opinion Research International showed the Tories with a commanding lead of 51 %, well ahead of Labor (29%) and the Alliance (18%).

Thatcher wins support for many reasons, including the "Falklands factor," her display of resolve and determination during Britain's war with Argentina. "She did a good job," says Fire Officer John Oakes, 47, from Timperley in Greater Manchester. "It was about time that somebody stood up to the dictators. If we had let the Falklands go, where would it stop?" Oakes doubts that unemployment will drop under Thatcher, but he still plans to vote Tory this time. "The alternatives," he argues, "are so bad that I have no choice." Others are less impressed. Says Labor Supporter Anthony Pearson, an unemployed teacher from Castle Acre in Norfolk: "I'd vote for anyone to get rid of the cold, tightlipped, unimaginative, suburban Mrs. Thatcher."

Pearson, however, is in a minority; buoyed by her booming polls, the Prime Minister is increasingly confident, almost cocky. She dominates the morning press conference at Conservative Party headquarters; twice during the campaign she has publicly squelched Francis Pym, her Foreign Secretary. Pym's first misstep was to declare on television that he was willing to discuss the future of the Falkland Islands if Argentina drops its belligerence. Thatcher immediately interrupted him with the stern correction, "but not sovereignty, not sovereignty." Pym's second mistake was to note, again on TV, that "landslides on the whole do not produce successful governments." Snapped Thatcher: "I think I can handle a landslide all right."

For dispirited Labor strategists, the theme of "Headmistress" Thatcher bullying her colleagues was a heaven-sent chance to go briefly on the offensive. Within hours, Labor was making the Prime Minister herself a campaign issue, repackaging the toughness that made her the "resolute" leader in the Falklands war into domineering bossiness. The Tory Cabinet, Healey argued, consists of "neutered zombies," and Thatcher would be "intolerable" if she won big. The S.D.P.'s Jenkins put it more starkly. Five more years of Thatcher "still cocooned in her own self-righteousness," he warned, would divide the country. "The revulsion would be such that the result would be a return, in the late 1980s, of a still more extreme Labor Party. We would lurch from Reagan's America to Jaruzelski's Poland."

Thatcher's strategists see no reason to decry opposition tactics that they believe will boomerang. "Let them push Maggie to the front of the campaign," chortles one adviser. "We'll just say, 'Now there's an idea--we never thought of that!' And we will then ask people, 'Whom do you want as a leader?' " The Iron Lady, for her part, relishes the fray. "Yes, my style is one of vigorous leadership," she proclaims. "Yes, I do believe in trying to persuade people that the things I believe in are the things they ought to follow. I am what I am, and I am too old to change."

For all the criticisms, Thatcher has been surging ahead in surveys that rank the rival party leaders by preference as "the best Prime Minister": she scores 48%, vs. 22% for Steel, 16% for Foot and 7% for Jenkins. Much of this, another poll notes, stems from the fact that Britons are preparing to vote for negative rather than positive reasons, against Foot rather than for Thatcher. Certainly one of her biggest allies is Labor's weakness.

"Like your manifesto, Comrade?" asks one heavyhanded Tory ad, going on to compare eleven points in the Communist Party manifesto with identical ones in Labor's. Among other policies, the manifesto would commit a Labor government to undertaking a hefty and inflationary public spending program, leave the European Community and expel U.S. nuclear weapons from Britain. But so far Labor's crusade has been ineffectual, especially over unemployment, which stands at a postwar high of 13.6%. According to one poll, even voters between 18 and 21, who suffer an especially high jobless rate, plan to vote Tory rather than Labor by nearly 3 to 2, apparently because they feel the jobs crisis is not Thatcher's fault.

Not all agree. Secondary School Teacher Christine Bury, 28, of Wilmslow in Cheshire is uncomfortable with the government's unemployment policies. "I have seen lots of students leave school with no work," she notes. "One of our fathers attempted suicide in his despair over unemployment. We are working to teach children to qualify for jobs that aren't there any more. That's the reality of it."

Although a lifelong Labor supporter, Bury this time plans to vote for the Alliance candidate. Says she: "Labor is just a joke. I listen to them talking and I think I am dreaming."

Nowhere has Labor fallen into greater disarray than on defense issues. The party's policy of opposing the installation of U.S. cruise missiles in Britain will, believes Teacher Geraldine Ellison in Norfolk, encourage the Soviets "to think we are weak." Labor also loses points for its infighting over defense. In line with the manifesto, Foot has maintained that Britain would be a "nonnuclear nation" by the end of a five-year Labor government. At the same time, the more moderate Healey was strongly implying that Britain's Polaris missiles would be retained if the Soviets failed to agree to reciprocal disarmament.

Challenged to clarify the difference, Foot and Healey produced a tortured compromise statement marked with internal contradictions. No sooner had it been cobbled together than it was upset by former Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan, who blasted the notion of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Polaris missiles, he declared, have "a life span of ten to twelve years as effective deterrents . . . and we should not give them up unilaterally." That sent a jolt through the party, and at week's end the continuing differences were so obvious that Foot was reluctant to answer questions on the issue.

As polling approaches, Thatcher's lead will probably diminish. Her lieutenants are particularly concerned about the possibility of an anti-landslide vote and a "why bother to vote at all since she is bound to win" syndrome. But the lead is unlikely to disappear, given the turmoil within Labor and the assumption that a vote for the Alliance is a vote wasted. London bookmakers are offering odds of 8 to 1 that Britain is on the verge of five more years of Thatcherism. Last week that assessment sent the London stock market and the value of the pound soar.-- By Jay D. Palmer.

Reported by Bonnie Angelo/ London

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo/London This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.