Yet, the abuse directed towards the prime minister was as nothing compared to the derisive jibes aimed at the Labour leader. The press had a field day as one ineptly organized rally merged
seamlessly into another and Foot’s colleagues croaked in the effort to hit the same notes of a common melody. Even before the campaign had begun, Bernard Levin, the famously acerbic columnist
of
The Times
, was dismissing Foot as ‘lurching between disaster and calamity with all the skill and aplomb of a one-legged tightrope-walker’, a man ‘unable to make his own
shadow cabinet appointments or indeed to blow his nose in public without his trousers falling down’.
10
The attacks became sharper in the weeks
leading up to polling day. Never ashamed to kick a man when he was down,
The Sun
ran an unflattering picture of Foot shambling along on a morning walk with the headline ‘DO YOU
SERIOUSLY WANT THIS OLD MAN TO RUN BRITAIN?’
An NOP opinion poll suggested only 19 per cent of the electorate was ‘satisfied’ with the Labour leader. By contrast, 50 per cent of respondents were satisfied with Thatcher. Albeit
narrowly, the winner in the personality contest was actually the Liberal leader, David Steel (52 per cent satisfaction). His problem was that the Alliance had a split personality, since he was only
its co-leader along with the SDP’s Roy Jenkins, a politician deemed less of an asset (30 per cent satisfied with his performance).
11
To the
frequently posed question of who would be the Alliance’s prime minister if it won the election, the official explanation – that it would be the leader of whichever of the two parties
had the most MPs – meant that voters did not know in advance of polling day which of the two men would end up in Downing Street. An attempt at clarity had been made at the end of April 1983
when it was agreed that Jenkins – who, unlike Steel, had experience of office – was ‘prime minister designate’, but Steel was put in charge of the Alliance’s election
campaign. This recipe for confusion and contradiction was given the title the ‘Partnership of Principle’. By the end of May, 78 per cent of opinion poll respondents were expressing the
view that ‘the Alliance should be clearer about who is leading it’.
12
This irritation was symptomatic of greater difficulties and tensions within
a force that had until recently seemed poised to ‘break the mould’ of British
politics. The SDP–Liberal Alliance had ended 1981 with a vast opinion poll lead, Gallup tallying its support at over 50 per cent, more than 20 per cent clear of both Labour and the
Conservatives. It was a sensational position to be in and well beyond the reasonable expectations of the four ex-Labour ministers who had posed for photos on a cold morning in Limehouse eleven
months earlier. Yet here was the Alliance at the start of the 1983 election campaign with opinion poll figures of 18 per cent, languishing badly in third place behind Labour, whose support was
firming up at around 30 per cent.
13
How had the euphoria evaporated so quickly?
The Falklands War was a contributory factor, but was not the cause. The truth was that Alliance support had been sliding for months before the islands made the news. It was not that any
catastrophic mistakes had been made. There were some modest signs of friction within the Gang of Four (although no more than in the Cabinet or shadow cabinet) and it looked unimpressive that SDP
MPs could not agree a united line over whether or not they supported Norman Tebbit’s legislation to curtail the closed shop and other restrictive practices. Yet such differences were more
interesting to Westminster obsessives than to the average floating voter, for whom the new party held the greatest appeal. More significant was that the Alliance had become an established fact and
was therefore no longer a news story as of right. There was no need for the media to dispatch a camera team every time Shirley Williams stepped deftly from a railway carriage on to a station
platform or Roy Jenkins emerged well satisfied from a working lunch. Their diminishing novelty value coincided with the two traditional parties sharpening up their performance. For the Tories this
came on the back of better economic conditions, while Labour’s improved poll ratings may have owed something to the hard left’s decision to consolidate its position and to offer Foot
its backing, rather than to stir up further trouble after Tony Benn’s narrow defeat for the deputy leadership.
The SDP needed a leader who would take responsibility rather than pronouncing through the politburo of the Gang of Four. As a military hawk, David Owen cut a dash during the Falklands conflict,
in contrast to Williams and Jenkins, neither of whom could convincingly feign excitement about hoisting the Union Jack in a distant part of the world. It was the parliamentary sketch writer, Frank
Johnson, who most adroitly ridiculed Jenkins’s attitude when describing him poised to make a Commons intervention as the Royal Navy sailed towards danger: ‘Like Switzerland, he is
prosperous, comfortable, civilized and almost entirely landlocked. His only previous contact with the high seas has been in various good fish restaurants.’
14
Jenkins had only been returned to Parliament the week before the Falklands were invaded, in a by-election at Glasgow Hillhead. The victory there, though
tangible, was not unqualified because, unlike the avalanches of votes garnered by Bill Pitt in Croydon and Shirley Williams in Crosby, Jenkins had won with only 33 per cent of the
vote in a constituency which, although Conservative-held for decades, had a social profile almost tailor-made for SDP success – with its neoclassical terraces inhabited by university
lecturers and other public sector professionals, it was thought to comprise the best-educated electorate in Britain. Nevertheless, in July 1982 it was the 61-year-old Jenkins, not his hungrier and
younger rival, Owen, who won the ballot of SDP members to become the party’s leader. Having been Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and president of the European Commission, Jenkins
clearly possessed the experience and temperament to administer the country, but his talents equipped him neither for mastering a House of Commons that had become far rowdier since his days in the
Labour Cabinet nor for the sound-bite culture of the modern media. Too often a simple question elicited from him a complicated, and often unclear, answer. As a man who claimed never to have lunched
alone, he failed to convey natural understanding for families struggling on the breadline, even though his intentions towards them were plainly benevolent. Problematically, benevolence seemed like
the posture of an eighteenth-century Tory squire rather than a modern politician. He was, in the concise summary of one increasingly disillusioned SDP MP, ‘a soft man in tough
times’.
15
Subsequent by-elections suggested the SDP was proving itself to be a busted flush.
16
Nevertheless, for the general election campaign the media
gave the Alliance only slightly less airtime than the two major parties, and this level of free publicity was invaluable. As it became clear that Labour’s campaign was unwinding, opinion
polls started showing Alliance support creeping up towards the mid-20 per cent range. What the new force in British politics was actually offering was really more of the old policies that had been
tried by the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, but without the desire to bolster the privileges of the trade union high command. The joint Liberal–SDP manifesto promised
to cut unemployment by borrowing money to pay for public works schemes. The nationalized industries would remain. In place of monetarism, the government would seek to control inflation by
arbitrating fixed pay levels with the unions and principal business leaders. A pay and prices commission would be reconstituted to order companies not to increase their employees’ pay above
nationally determined levels. The Inland Revenue would gain powers to impose a ‘counter-inflation tax’ to penalize businesses that paid salaries according to the market rate rather than
government directive.
17
While it was the Labour manifesto that subsequent commentators have identified as marking a historical dead-end for socialism, the less frequently analysed Alliance manifesto provided equally
strong evidence that the centre
ground was also committed to government-directed policies. Gaining a supportive hearing from the press proved relatively easy. Many key
columnists like Polly Toynbee in the
Guardian
, Anthony Sampson in the
Observer
and even the
Daily Mirror
’s agony aunt, Marjory Proops, were active supporters. Tony Benn
grumbled that the BBC was an ‘agency of the SDP’.
18
If the subsequent ‘New Labour’ party of Tony Blair could stand accused
of being too obsessed with public relations, it is easy to see how the 1983 election had taught hard lessons about the consequences of being insufficiently media-friendly. Of the seventeen national
newspapers, only two – the
Daily Mirror
and
Sunday Mirror
– endorsed Labour. The
Mail
,
Express
,
Telegraph
and
The Times
all ran editorials
urging a Conservative vote (although subsequent market research suggested a third of
Times
readers ignored the paper’s advice and voted for the Alliance). The
Financial Times
failed to appear during the later stages of the campaign because of a strike by its printers. The greatest surprise was that, while an estimated 40 per cent plus of
Guardian
readers voted
for the Alliance, the newspaper of the white-collar public sector employee ran a somewhat equivocal editorial lamenting the way the voting system would not reflect the Alliance’s true level
of support and hoping that the Tories would be denied a landslide. The paper did, however, show where its heart was by condemning Thatcher’s ‘profound corner-shop caution’ and
‘profound, doctrinaire stupidity’.
19
For less subtlety, newspaper readers were directed to the front pages of the two main tabloids. The
3.3 million buyers of the
Daily Mirror
were greeted on the morning of the election with the full-page headline ‘STOP THE WASTE OF OUR NATION . . . for your job, your children and your
future, Vote Labour’; while the 4.2 million who bought
The Sun
were treated to the punchier ‘VOTE FOR MAGGIE’, decorated with a cartoon of her as Britannia. The
country’s third-biggest-selling newspaper, the
Daily Express
, settled for ‘NOW IS THE HOUR. MAGGIE IS OUR MAN.’
20
The course of the campaign showed a shift in votes between the two main opposition parties rather than between them and the Tories. Perhaps due to the ease of predicting which party would win,
turnout, at nearly 73 per cent, was a few pips below the average for the preceding twenty years, although close to the proportion of the electorate who had cast their ballots in the famous contest
of 1945. And it was to Clement Attlee’s finest hour that the statisticians returned on the morning of 10 June 1983 when the results showed the Conservatives had won by the greatest landslide
since that first post-war election, with 397 seats to 209 for Labour and only twenty-three for the Alliance (others made up twenty-one seats). This increased the Tory parliamentary majority from
forty-three to 144. Whereas the electorate had voted to change the incumbent in 1970, February 1974, and 1979, this time it had opted to stay with the devil it knew. For Thatcher personally it
was a triumph, as she became the first twentieth-century Conservative prime minister to win two successive working majorities. The contrast with Michael Foot, who had steered
his party to its worst result since 1935, was stark. Recognizing the hopelessness of his situation, he announced his intention to stand down in time for a new leader to be selected in the
autumn.
Nevertheless, while Labour had undeniably suffered a disaster, the Conservatives had scarcely swept all before them. Due to the growth of three-party politics, they had won a fractionally
smaller share of the vote than four years earlier, down from 43.9 per cent to 42.4 per cent. Not since 1922 had they won an election on so small a share, their increase in seats coming as a
consequence of a far greater lead (14.8 per cent) over Labour – a lead even exceeding that which Attlee had secured over Churchill in 1945 and which had not been bettered in nearly half a
century. In the sense that they had failed to convince a majority of the electorate to vote for them, the Conservatives fell short, as had every post-war government; but in terms of showing
themselves to be vastly preferred over their two main opponents, they had secured an extraordinarily firm mandate. With a 27.6 per cent share of the vote (down almost 10 percentage points from last
time), Labour had narrowly avoided the ignominy of coming third. A late push took the Alliance to 25.4 per cent, and the fact that this translated into so few seats only made them more determined
to proclaim the iniquities of the first-past-the-post electoral system. The age-old Liberal Party, with seventeen MPs, had done better than the newfangled SDP, which had won only six seats. Of the
one Tory and thirteen Labour MPs who had defected to the SDP at its launch in March 1981, only four were returned to Parliament. Indeed, out of the ten who lost their seats, just one managed even
to come second. Shirley Williams lost Crosby, the seat she had won in such spectacular fashion only a year and a half earlier. Bill Rodgers was defeated in Stockton. At Westminster, the Gang of
Four was now a two-man band – each of whom harboured suspicions about the other. In every respect but their actual share of the national vote, the Alliance had endured an exceedingly
disappointing night and Jenkins, like Foot, recognized it was time to surrender the leadership. Given that David Owen was the only other MP with sufficient experience for the job, he assumed the
reins unopposed. It was necessarily a coronation rather than a contest and, as such, it made the Limehouse Declaration’s assertion that Labour had drifted away from its ‘democratic
traditions’ ring rather hollow. But in the circumstances, what else could the SDP do?