Final Effort

Maggie tries for a landslide

As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher returned to London from the Williamsburg summit, a crushing Conservative victory in this week's parliamentary elections seemed all but assured. Still, there were unexpected signs of voter uneasiness with the prospect of a Thatcher landslide. A poll by Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) showed the Tories with a comfortable though dwindling eleven-point lead over Labor. Yet the survey also indicated an upsurge in the fortunes of the centrist Social Democratic/Liberal Alliance, mostly at Thatcher's expense. In a week the level of support for the Conservatives dropped from 51% to 43%, while the popularity of the new alliance jumped from 15% to 23%. Labor declined only marginally, from 33% to 32%.

Both opposition blocs seemed intent on throwing all their ammunition into a frantic final effort to slow the Thatcher juggernaut. Deputy Labor Party Leader Denis Winston Healey launched a merciless, near hysterical attack on Thatcher for her leadership during the Falklands war. Speaking of "this Prime Minister who glories in slaughter," he accused Thatcher "of wrapping herself in the Union Jack and exploiting our soldiers, sailors and airmen." The outburst stunned even the opposition. Replied Conservative Party Chairman Cecil Parkinson: "This must win the prize for the most contemptible statement of the election campaign." Thatcher declared that Healey's remark was "beyond all bounds of public or political decency."

Poll results showed that popular Liberal Leader David Steel would add about nine percentage points to Alliance support if he were the coalition's head instead of the soft-edged, florid Roy Jenkins, the Social Democratic Party's leader. So Alliance politicians decided to put Steel in the forefront for the remainder of the campaign. Steel, 45, was rated by MORI as the candidate who has most impressed British voters during the campaign. Even so, the Alliance will probably not displace Labor as the official opposition, because Britain's electoral system favors the two established parties.

The Alliance's last-ditch efforts to attract anti-Thatcher sentiment received a timely boost from Labor Leader Michael Foot's manifest ineptness on the stump, as well as from the growing disarray within the Labor Party. The leftist New Statesman abandoned its traditional support for Labor, urging its readers to vote for the Alliance in an effort to "stop Thatcherism in its tracks." Concluded the 70-year-old weekly: "The priority now must be to deny Mrs. Thatcher her goal of a working majority large enough for her to railroad through another five years of New Rightism."

Foot's wife, Feminist Author Jill Craigie, inadvertently seemed to deliver the coup de grace to her husband's chances in an interview with the Reading Evening Post. "Even if the party wins," said Craigie, "I should not think that he would stay on for long because it would be time to make way for a younger man." Asked if Foot would resign as leader if Labor lost, she replied: "Oh, yes." When newsmen queried the candidate about his wife's remarks, he seemed oddly reluctant to dispute them, though he insisted that he had no immediate thoughts of resigning. Said Foot: "I have never run away from anything in my life." That was not enough to stop the growing belief that Foot's days as a Labor leader were numbered.

As the Labor campaign faltered, Thatcher re-entered the fray, fending off Healey's charges that she intended to abolish Britain's 35-year-old government-run medical-care system. Said she: "I have no more intention of dismantling the National Health Service than I have of dismantling Britain's defenses." But as she noted the Alliance's sharp rise in the polls, Thatcher momentarily, and perhaps for the first time in the campaign, seemed flustered. She warned of the possibility of electing a militant Labor government if too many people "thought it safe to give other parties a protest vote; that is the greater danger, make no mistake." Her remark seemed to lend credence to the Alliance's belief that an increasing number of Britons are as worried at the prospect of an overwhelming Thatcher victory as they are anxious about the chaos and leftward movement within the Labor Party. qed This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.