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Historic Elections: The 1979 General Election and Thatcher's Iron Revolution
39 Plays15 days ago
Ethan Reuter speaks with Iain Dale, award-winning broadcaster, author, and political commentator, about the 1979 general election that ended five years of Labour government and brought Margaret Thatcher to power as Britain's first female Prime Minister. The conversation traces the decade of industrial strife and economic malaise that set the stage for Thatcher's victory, from the collapse of post-war Keynesian consensus to the Winter of Discontent's rubbish-strewn streets and unburied dead. From James Callaghan's fateful decision not to call an election in October 1978 to the pioneering political messaging of the "Labour Isn't Working" campaign, and from the IMF crisis that shattered national confidence to the monetarist ideas Thatcher magpie-like assembled into what would become Thatcherism, this episode asks whether 1979 was an election the Conservatives won or one Labour simply couldn't avoid losing — and what its legacy means for opposition parties rebuilding today.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Observations podcast, brought to you by Democracy Volunteers. My name is Ethan Reuter and in today's episode we'll be talking about the 1979 general election. 1979 not only changed the political age but swept the Iron am Lady as Britain's first female Prime Minister into number 10.
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm delighted today to be joined by Ian Dale, who is an award-winning broadcaster, author and political commentator. Thank you for being here and welcome to the show. Thank you for inviting me. Looking forward to it.
00:00:39
Speaker
but Bearing in mind that was the first general election I really remember. I want to start today by asking you on what was the national mood going into 1979?
Political Climate of the 1970s
00:00:51
Speaker
In a way, the national mood, I think, is a little bit similar to today, where a lot of voters were very disillusioned with politics in general. They thought the Conservatives had let them down during the Heath government, and they thought Labour had let them down with Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. And i think that there was a lot of just disillusion with politics generally.
00:01:15
Speaker
But I think the one thing that dominated the political scene not just in 1979, but really throughout the 1970s, was the industrial scene. I remember in 1977, as going on a school exchange to Germany,
00:01:31
Speaker
and was horrified at the way this country was seen in Germany. We were seen as the sick man of Europe. They couldn't understand why we had so many strikes. And that just got progressively worse ah in the in the next two years. And it all ended up in the so-called Winter of Discontent in where...
00:01:50
Speaker
where The country just seemed to be in utter chaos. Rubbish collectors went on strike. ah Gravediggers went on strike so so the dead couldn't be buried. It was predominantly in the public sector, but not not not only. So generally generally, public services didn't work.
00:02:08
Speaker
You had rubbish piling up all around Leicester Square in London, and that that seemed to be the symbol of the whole thing. And i mean, I can remember... And I wasn't politically active as a teenager, but I can remember thinking there must be something better than this. And I think that's the way a lot of people are thinking now.
00:02:29
Speaker
And in what way did the winter of discontent, all that had come before, signal the end of the Keynesian post-war economic consensus? Yeah.
00:02:40
Speaker
Well, I'm not sure anybody recognised that it did at the time. It wasn't really until we got into the 1980s that people realised that Margaret Thatcher did mean what she said and that she was going to follow a very different economic path. And we we should remember that she was a cabinet minister in the Heath government. She was Secretary of State for Education.
00:03:01
Speaker
And... She, with collective responsibility in the cabinet, she supported what the Heath government did, but afterwards, I think, came to be slightly horrified in retrospect. um and And she was searching for a new way. Margaret Thatcher was never ah initially very ideological.
00:03:21
Speaker
She was a bit of a magpie when she was elected leader of the Conservative Party in 1975. There was no such thing as Thatcherism. And she spent the next four years really being like a magpie, sort of pinching policies from think tanks or individuals that she came across.
00:03:37
Speaker
And she became entranced by monetarism. And monetarism had really gone out of fashion since the 1930s. And it was only Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago and one or two ah people in Britain, Patrick Minford being one, who were extolling the virtues of controlling the money supply as a way of controlling inflation.
00:03:59
Speaker
um Because we should remember that inflation was a real scourge in the 1970s. It always makes me smile nowadays when people say, oh, my God, inflation is 3.8%. Well, when I was 15, 16, inflation was 25%. And you can imagine the effect of that on the economy as well.
00:04:19
Speaker
So she grabbed onto these sort of what was seen as slightly weird economic theories in the 70s and started implementing them in in the nineteen eighty s um So the the Winter of Discontent itself...
1979 Election Dynamics
00:04:35
Speaker
I think it's difficult to underestimate the effect that that had on the election result, because everyone had expected the Prime Minister James Callaghan to call the election in September, October 1978.
00:04:51
Speaker
And he famously didn't. And he went to the Trade Union Congress conference in Brighton and sang a little ditty, sort of, there I was waiting at the church. I can't remember the rest of the words. but and And he basically said, well, you may all think I'm calling an election, but I'm not.
00:05:10
Speaker
um that was the Most people took that as the implication, but nobody was actually 100% clear. So he then had to do um a prime minister or broadcast to the nation that same evening to say, no, he wasn't calling an election. Now, political commentators and sophologists are divided as to whether if he had done, would he have actually won it? Because although there had been a lot of industrial strife in 1978, it wasn't as bad as what came after then. um the the The Labour Party was only 1% behind the Conservatives in the polls at the time. And often during election campaigns, the governing party
00:05:48
Speaker
will actually do a lot better during the campaign than it was doing before. I still think that Margaret Thatcher would have probably just scraped a victory, but it would be a very small majority, because in the end she got a majority of 44. So...
00:06:03
Speaker
But we will never know. It's one of those great what ifs, because she knew that she would only ever have one chance of winning an election, because if she failed, they would blame it on the fact that she was a woman and they'd get rid of her.
00:06:14
Speaker
So it was hugely important that she did win that for her and indeed the Conservative Party. um But it if she had lost, i mean, I've no idea how long it would have taken Britain to have another female political leader.
00:06:31
Speaker
But the Conservative Party would no doubt have gone back to its sort of Heath-ite roots. I mean, Heath may have actually come back at that point because he still remained quite popular among the Conservative Party members.
00:06:43
Speaker
And if you look at the make-up of the Conservative Parliamentary Party before 1979, it was still predominantly full of Heath supporters. So it is, as I say, one of those great counterfactuals. What would have happened if if Jim Callaghan had called the election in October 1978?
00:07:00
Speaker
And what went into his decision-making process for not wanting to do so? Was it exclusively the polls or did anything else inform it? Well, polls always play ah an important role in calling an election, but I think it was the state of the economy. He genuinely believed that he if he waited till April 1979, the economy would have improved. He didn't foresee what was about to happen in the winter of discontent. um So it's it's easy to blame political misjudgment on his part, but really it is the trade unions that have to cop a lot of the blame.
00:07:35
Speaker
because individual trade unions were putting in outrageous pay claims, 20%, 30%, 40%.
00:07:43
Speaker
And the government had imposed, after the collapse of the Lib Lab Pact, which essentially gave James Callaghan a majority in Parliament, that collapsed in October 1978 that
00:07:56
Speaker
It was quite difficult for the government to impose its will, given the fact that it only had a very, well, it didn't even even have a parliamentary majority at that point. There'd been lots of by-election losses.
00:08:09
Speaker
um So the the unions put in these pay claims. The government had um a pay policy of pay restraint, where they they were trying to limit pay rises to 5%.
00:08:22
Speaker
And then they gave in to one union and gave them 14%. So, of course, all the rest thought, OK, well, if it's good enough for them, we'll have some of that too. And that wasn't just in the public sector, in the private sector. ah Ford Motor Company, for example, um i mean, they they were, there was a very long strike that happened there over a huge pay claim. um And it it was the momentum built and it got to the point where it just seemed more or less the whole country was on strike and the economy was in the doldrums.
00:08:56
Speaker
um Unemployment was rising and we've we've got used in this country to very low unemployment over the last 15, 20 years. And everyone thought that if unemployment reached a certain point, well, that would be it.
00:09:10
Speaker
um And when you had high growing unemployment and yeah really high inflation, i mean, it was an absolute nightmare. If people lost their job, they couldn't be confident that they would get a new one very quickly.
00:09:26
Speaker
and And Margaret Thatcher was very good at exploiting that. i remember one party political broadcast she did where she had ah two baskets, one of goods from the supermarket in 1974 and then another one in 1978 or 79.
00:09:42
Speaker
And all of the housewives watching this, and bear in mind at that point, a lot of people did watch party political broadcasts. Everyone watching that thought, yeah well, she's got a point.
Thatcher's Leadership and Image
00:09:53
Speaker
That's that's my life.
00:09:55
Speaker
o And how does the Callaghan government actually come to full and lose its vote of no confidence? Well, it it was a gradual process in some ways, because on March the 1st, 1979, there was a vote on devolution.
00:10:13
Speaker
And one of the ah clauses said that um even if the electorate voted for devolution in in Scotland, or indeed Wales,
00:10:25
Speaker
40% of the electorate had to have taken part in that vote. So um there was a majority in favour of devolution, not a massive one, um but only 33% of the electorate had turned out to vote. So the SNP withdrew their... mean, they they had effectively underpinned Labour up until that point. They then withdrew their support. So that was really the first point where people began to think, well, this could lead to an early election.
00:10:53
Speaker
And on March the 28th, the Conservatives called a vote of no confidence in the government. I'm not actually sure whether they really felt that they were going to win. I think it was probably more symbolic because that they knew the mood of the nation. The the nation had lost confidence in the government.
00:11:10
Speaker
um And it was a very spirited debate. Margaret Thatcher put on a good performance. And Jim Callaghan, I remember his... i mean, obviously, there was... um ah There were radio broadcasts at at the at the time of Parliament, but no television. But I remember listening to bits of it and thinking that the Prime Minister Callaghan just didn't exude confidence himself.
00:11:35
Speaker
And if as the leader, your demeanour is like that, it it sort of it doesn't help rally the troops. So um it was really on a knife edge, that vote.
00:11:46
Speaker
And in the end, the Conservatives won the vote by a single vote. That was partly because Gerry Fitt, the leader of the SDLP, the Northern Irish Party,
00:11:57
Speaker
um who had been, i mean, the SDLP is a sister party, the Labour Party. He had always voted along with Labour, but he felt that they were becoming too close to the unionists. He felt that Jim Callaghan had given too much away to the unionists, and therefore he abstained.
00:12:13
Speaker
And there was another Northern northern Irish MP um who had I don't think had ever been to Westminster. um He came over to Westminster for the debate specifically to abstain.
00:12:27
Speaker
And I mean that is how votes are won and lost. So she won by one vote. And the next day, Jim Callaghan went to see Her Majesty the Queen and called the election for May the third And I want to move into the leadership and profiles of the leaders that we see heading into the election. yeah How was Margaret Thatcher perceived as a leader of the opposition and what personality traits came to be afflicted upon her?
00:13:01
Speaker
Well, when she became leader of the Conservative Party on February the 11th, 1975, um she was i mean, it wasn't something that anybody had really expected, let alone her. She had been the only one to have the courage to challenge Ted Heath, despite the fact that many people thought he needed to be challenged.
00:13:21
Speaker
um And she she ousted him 130 to 119 votes of Conservative MPs. um And at that point, it was only MPs that elected the leader. There was a second round of voting in which five other MPs came into the ballot and Willie Whitelaw was expected to win, but she prevailed. um He only got 78 votes. She got 146 and all the others just trailed in behind that.
00:13:47
Speaker
And I think there was initially a lot of buyer's remorse. People thought, oh my God, what have we done? And it's easy in 2025 to think, well, when there have been four female prime ministers, all conservatives, that um and and women's equality is entrenched in our psyche now. It wasn't in 1975. It was a really big thing.
00:14:08
Speaker
And it's interesting, if you look at a lot of the academic studies of the time of the time and since, it was women voters, female voters, who were far more sceptical about a female leader than male voters. mean It seems incongruous, but that's how it was.
00:14:24
Speaker
And that was something that, I wouldn't say dogged her over the next four years, but she always felt the need that as a woman, she had to prove herself more than a man would. And I think, I mean, this is evidenced by the fact that her last party election broadcast before the election in 79... was dominated by her looking straight into a camera and reassuring the nation that, yes, as a woman, she could do the job. Now, I think by that point, a lot of the doubts about her had been dispelled.
00:14:55
Speaker
And bizarrely, the Soviet Union was part of the cause of this happening when, in 1977, a Soviet newspaper called her the Iron Lady.
00:15:06
Speaker
And they meant it as an insult. But the next day, she stood up in Kensington Town Hall and made a speech in which she started with the words, Here I am in my red taffeta evening gown, my blonde hair gently coiffured, the Iron Lady of the Western world. Of course, the audience laughed their heads off.
00:15:27
Speaker
But she used that right throughout her career. She reveled in that nickname. And there were various occasions when she lived up to it. The Falklands I suppose, being the the obvious one. But that's, we're getting ahead of ourselves.
00:15:40
Speaker
So she political debate, apart from the on the economy, was in a sense dominated by the female question of whether she, as a woman, was electable. um she She was very careful initially not to cause too much trouble within the party. She kept the shadow cabinet more or less intact. It was, she never really ever had a majority of supporters in her own shadow cabinet or indeed her cabinet. And that was what partly led to her downfall in 1990.
00:16:12
Speaker
um But that the whole era was, for her, i think was dominated by trying to get a cohesive policy platform together, ready for an election whenever it would come.
00:16:27
Speaker
And everyone thought it would have come in 1977 until Callaghan patched up a pact with David Steele, the Liberal leader. um So, i mean, personality-wise,
00:16:40
Speaker
she She was willing to take advice on what she needed to do to become a more successful politician. Gordon Rees was a man who became her effective PR advisor.
00:16:54
Speaker
um He was the campaign manager in 79 as well. And he persuaded her to moderate her voice, which was a little bit high, a little bit shrill. And she she developed this much lower voice, which I think just became natural as as she went on. um She changed her appearance, um her hair, for example. i mean, she was very she was always very, very...
00:17:17
Speaker
um careful about her appearance. So she made a comment once, she said, well, it's all very well for men, they can wear the same suit every day, and no one notices, whereas for a woman, they do. And um she became quite a, I'd say, after she became Prime Minister, she became quite a sort of fashionable dresser wearing these aqua scutum suits with big shoulder pads, very much the fashion in the in the nineteen eighty s um she she used to wear these sort of blouses with huge bows so and she'd even wear hats to address the tory conference which i mean again seems ridiculous now but at that time it wasn't seen as something odd so she was very adaptable much more adaptable than i think people think of because people imagine that she was this conviction politician not willing to take advice whereas actually
00:18:08
Speaker
She was much more nuanced and she did take advice, particularly on the sort of that the nub of political messaging. And in comparison, who was Callaghan from a Labour side?
Campaign Strategies and Media Influence
00:18:24
Speaker
James Callaghan was actually quite a popular figure. He was an imposing man. was very tall, quite sort of sturdily built. I mean, not fat, but sort of he looked what a prime minister should look like. That was what I think a lot of voters thought. um The word avuncular was often used to describe him. Yeah. He was quite a chatty man and he also had huge amounts of political experience. He'd been Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary before he became Prime Minister. All things which Margaret Thatcher had never been. um He had a good debating style.
00:19:00
Speaker
and She didn't quite know how to deal with him in Prime Minister's questions. He was patronising to her without appearing to do it too deliberately. By which I mean...
00:19:13
Speaker
There weren't many people who sort of accused a bit of being misogynistic, which if you if you listen or if you read some of the exchanges nowadays, you think, oh, my God, how did he get away with that? um so And he was a good parliamentary performer where she had to learn that. And she did become a brilliant parliamentary reformer, but only after, i would say, several years as prime minister. um He was good on the television. He was a very reassuring figure.
00:19:39
Speaker
um But it was events, as Harold Macmillan used to say, events, Dubois, events. And it was events that destroyed his premiership. And um i mean I suppose what symbolised it was when he went to a conference, I can't remember, was it the G7 or 8 or whatever it was in those days? Anyway, they were meeting on the West Indian island of Guadalupe in January.
00:20:03
Speaker
And of course, in January in the West Indies, it's quite sunny. And it was um they obviously staying in a lovely hotel. And there were pictures of Jim Callaghan in Hawaii shirts and shorts.
00:20:16
Speaker
And they did not go down well back home because that was the time of the winter of discontent. And there were lurid newspaper headlines about the the crisis that the country was in.
00:20:28
Speaker
And when he landed ah back in Britain, the first thing he said to a reporter who was waiting for him at the airport was, um well, Prime Minister, what do you make of the crisis in this country?
00:20:41
Speaker
And he said, well, I don't think anybody looking in from the outside would describe it as a crisis. Now, the Sun newspaper then had their headline, crisis, what crisis, in sort of single quotation marks. He never actually said that.
00:20:57
Speaker
But it it was one of those things that came to symbolise his crumbling government. So in a sense, whether he actually said it or not, i mean, he did say it in the sense that he...
00:21:08
Speaker
you You could paraphrase what he said with those words. um But he never recovered from that. And the other thing which I should have mentioned earlier is that in the autumn of 1978, the Conservatives launched a poster campaign.
00:21:23
Speaker
And the poster depicted a queue of people going into an unemployment office with the headline Labour isn't working. And again, that chimed with what a lot of the electorate were thinking. And during the election campaign, they revived that poster and it said Labour still isn't working because unemployment had continued to rise. It's probably one of the most effective political campaign posters ever used in this country.
00:21:52
Speaker
And they didn't just use it as a poster. um For the first time ever, a political party, the Conservative Party, paid for um advertising slots in cinemas all over the country. And that was the theme of the book that the films that they used. They weren't allowed to buy advertising on television because political parties aren't allowed to do that.
00:22:14
Speaker
But it again, it was seen as an an innovative thing. It showed a fresh Conservative Party with fresh ideas, opposing the Labour Party, which was in the elect in many people's views in the electorate stuck in the past.
00:22:29
Speaker
And you've touched on these points slightly. And I remember learning about the Labour Still Isn't Working campaign. And what was the role of advertising and the media, especially during the campaign?
00:22:44
Speaker
It was massive, much more than any previous election campaign. And again, Margaret Thatcher, she really recognised the importance of photo opportunities in a way that no other politician in this country ever had.
00:22:59
Speaker
This was symbolised by a visit she made to a farm in Suffolk, where um she was introduced to a small calf that had literally just been born. So what did she do? She stooped down, picked it up in her arms and held it.
00:23:16
Speaker
And she held it for quite a long time so the photographers could get their pictures. And she would literally hold it and look at one set of photographers, then move 20 degrees round and hold it. So she understood that they needed to get their picture. And in fact, Dennis Thatcher, was who was there too, he said to her, ah look, love, put it down. You might have a dead calf on your hands.
00:23:42
Speaker
And she said, no, no, no, Dennis, the the boys need to get their pictures. And the photographers loved her ever after that because they knew that wherever she went, they would get a good picture because she would make sure that they did. And it was something that um I think other politicians, some conservatives probably, regarded as pretty shameless but when you get your picture on the front page of a national newspaper the next day well who cares whether it was shameless or not and she did and it it and and also we shouldn't look at this from the perspective of 2025 when
00:24:20
Speaker
when Your generation don't buy national newspapers anymore. The circulation has is a fraction of what it was. But in 1979, five million people would have bought that newspaper, The Sun, with her picture on the front of it. Now, that one picture isn't going to persuade somebody to change their vote.
00:24:39
Speaker
But if you look at the percentage of working class voters that the Conservatives attracted in 1979, and there were many reasons for that, but I would suggest that her courting of the tabloid press was certainly one of them.
00:24:56
Speaker
So some of us still buy newspapers just about. Well, that's because you're geek, Ethan. Yeah, this is this is unfortunately true. This is unfortunately true. I want to move into the tone of the election. It's coming out of the winter of discontent, of strike and strife. And what role did the parties play in pitching their election campaigns?
00:25:23
Speaker
Well, it it was a traditional campaign in some ways in that that each party launched their own manifesto. the Labour one, um it wasn't a left-wing manifesto in the way that the 1983 manifesto was, but it was still much more left-wing than the 1974 manifestos were.
00:25:43
Speaker
And you have to remember that over the course of the 1974 to 1979 Parliament, um the Labour Party itself, not the Labour government necessarily, but the Labour Party itself was becoming increasingly left-wing There were attempts to take over different constituency parties by extreme left-wingers.
00:26:02
Speaker
um The militant tendency had just started, a sort of party within a party. And there were some parties that were not able to withstand this sort of infiltration. So the the cabinet minister or former cabinet minister Reg Prentice, that happened to his party and he then defected to the Conservatives as a result of it.
00:26:27
Speaker
um and then was elected as a Conservative MP in 1979. And we saw this really play out more in the early to mid-1980s, where there was a real fight for the soul of the Labour Party. Now that the The beginnings of that happened in the 1970s, so it's very relevant to include it here rather than your episode on the 1983 election solely. um And again, that didn't chime well with the electorate because, look, elections, I've always thought, are won from the centre ground.
00:27:02
Speaker
And if a but political party is seen as veering off to the left or veering off to the right, it means that that they're losing some of their traditional voters. um you can see that happening on the right nowadays. Well, it was happening on the left at that point.
00:27:17
Speaker
And um it was something that I think Jim Callaghan knew was happening, but was almost powerless to do anything about it, partly because of the influence of the unions. who um um The Labour Party grew out of the trade union movement, so why shouldn't the trade union movement have an influence on the Labour Party? But it wasn't just an influence in the 1970s. It was tantamount to control, not just at national level, where people saw trade union leaders going into number 10 for beer and sandwiches, and emerging, saying, well, we've we've we've got the government to agree to do this. People thought it was the trade unions governing the country rather than elected politicians. And we should also remember that you you have to be, what, um
00:28:05
Speaker
in your mid to late 60s to have been able to vote in 1979. So there's a declining number of people alive in this country now who actually even remember the 1970s. As I say, I was a teenager and I remember it all very vividly.
00:28:22
Speaker
But it it it was like it it was like Britain was a ah totally different country in some ways. i mean, we didn't have the sort of culture wars that we have nowadays. But if there were wars, it was between trade unions and government.
00:28:39
Speaker
And what did each of the parties stand for from a policy perspective in their manifestos?
Election Outcomes and Historical Significance
00:28:46
Speaker
Well, every election campaign is about one of two things. It's either stick with Nurse for fear of worse, or it's what Sarah Palin used to call the hopey changey thing.
00:28:57
Speaker
And Margaret Thatcher was offering change. It wasn't portrayed as radical change, even though that's what it turned out to be. She tried to, throughout the campaign, reassure people. and And remember, on the steps of Downing Street, the day after the election, she read out that St Francis of Assisi poem, sort of, Where There Is Discord and way May We Bring Harmony. Now, to this day, I don't know whether she genuinely believed that, because that's certainly not what happened over the next 11 and a half years. But if if you want to make an omelette, you have to crack some eggs. And she certainly became accustomed to cracking a few eggs. um So that her her campaign was not about saying, well, we're going to be a radical government, even though that's what it turned out to be in many ways. It was about, well, um slowly, slowly, catchy monkey. Everyone thought that she would introduce huge amounts of anti-trade union legislation, even though the manifesto didn't say that.
00:29:55
Speaker
And she didn't do that initially. It took four employment acts for radical trade union reform to happen. She appointed Jim Pryor, one of the so-called Tory wets, as her employment secretary. And he wasn't like a bull in the china shop. and and And nor was she, even though even today that's what her reputation suggests that she was.
00:30:14
Speaker
So um the Labour Party, it it was warning of what would happen if the Conservatives won, that unemployment would rocket. Well, it did rocket.
00:30:26
Speaker
And i I suspect the Conservatives knew that with some of the economic policies they were about to embark on, that that would happen. But in an election campaign, you're certainly never going to admit that that might be the consequence of your actions. um i think the Labour Party found it very difficult to counter the most popular policy that the Conservatives had, which was the sale of council houses.
00:30:52
Speaker
um which, as I said before, enabled them to gain a huge amount of support among the so-called C2D voters. um I think the number of so-called working class people who voted Conservative in 1979 it was around 42%. And it was only surpassed in 2019, the Boris Johnson election, where he got a majority of 80. And I think he got 47%. And that was obviously all to do with getting Brexit done. So that really had ah an impact on Labour voters in 1979.
00:31:31
Speaker
And to the main gaffe of the campaign, which does not come from either of the leaders, but instead a former prime minister, insinuating that his wife may consider voting conservative. What do i mean when I say this?
00:31:48
Speaker
Well, Harold Wilson had been Prime Minister ah well in three different governments between 1964 and 1970, and then 1974 to 76. And he resigned in March 76 and was replaced by an older man, Jim Callaghan.
00:32:02
Speaker
And he was he was married to Mary Wilson, somebody who I got to know a little bit um many years later after he died. and She was a renowned poet and she was a very sort of, I mean, a typical conservative lady in many ways. She looked like a typical member of the Women's Institute. And um she admitted did admit later that she did vote conservative in 1979. But for a former prime minister to say that during an election campaign, I mean, Jim Callaghan must have wondered what on earth he'd done to deserve it.
00:32:36
Speaker
And transitioning into the actual results... What was the seat distribution and the vote share like once the results had come out?
00:32:47
Speaker
Well, you see, the vote share is interesting because I think it proves that if the Conservatives, if if Jim Callaghan had held an election in October, um I don't see this gap would have been, well, it might have been a bit closer, but I don't think it could have been rich. Right, the Conservatives got 43.9%.
00:33:07
Speaker
which has only been surpassed, I think, once since then. Labour got 36.9 and the Liberals got 13.8. and We haven't talked about the Liberal Party at all in this, but perhaps we just to insert this here, the Liberal Party was in deep disarray throughout most of the second half of the 1970s. They'd done brilliantly in the 1974 February election, got more than 6 million votes,
00:33:34
Speaker
but only, I think, 12 seats. um And they thought that was a real but something ah something to build on. In in the October 74 election, though they went back and it was something like just over 4 million votes um and slightly, i think, 9 10 seats?
00:33:52
Speaker
and Then, of course, the Jeremy Thorpe scandal happened. And Jeremy Thorpe had been a very charismatic leader. My mother was obsessed with Jeremy Thorpe, absolutely idolised him and voted Liberal every election.
00:34:07
Speaker
um And then he was accused of, essentially, complicity to murder um somebody who had claimed to have a homosexual relationship with him.
00:34:18
Speaker
And this went to court. in 1979 during the election campaign. Or was it just after? Anyway, it was, as you can imagine, a political party leader accused of being complicit to murder was quite something. um Jeremy Thorpe actually did still stand.
00:34:39
Speaker
in the 1979 election but and didn't lose by that that much in his North Devon constituency. um So David Steele, he had resigned in 1976 and David Steele became the leader. Very sort young, charismatic politician. He'd got elected to Parliament in 1967. He was the architect of the legislation to legalise abortion. um And he he decided to enter the Lib Lab Pact with Jim Callaghan, a big decision for the Liberal Party at the time.
00:35:11
Speaker
um And they they weren't expected to do particularly well in the 79 election. But to get... um but to get I mean, they did still get 4.3 million votes, let's say 13.5%, no, 13.8%, but they only won 11 seats, which didn't really give them much influence in Parliament. But they they could have been eradicated, but they they weren't, and they lived to fight another day, and then, of course, went on to form the alliance with the SDP.
00:35:45
Speaker
And what was the reaction We've already mentioned the Liberals being somewhat pleased at the fact that they weren't eradicated. What was the reaction of each of the parties to the results?
00:35:58
Speaker
I think on the Labour side, it was pretty phlegmatic. mean, Jim Callaghan, I remember saying, well, there are certain times when there is nothing you can do to turn the electoral tide.
00:36:09
Speaker
And I think he was absolutely right on that. I think 1979, was the most significant election since 1945. I would probably go far as to say the most, so including right up to today. I think it was a real turning point that the old, what was called the Butzker-like consensus, which was effectively a mix of R.A. Butler and Hugh Gateskill,
00:36:35
Speaker
and And they weren't that far away from each other on the political spectrum. I mean, their economic ideas were very similar. Their social ideas were very similar. And that there was a sort of inter-party consensus that the role of British government was to manage decline.
00:36:53
Speaker
Well, Margaret Thatcher's having none of that. And um I think that that was the most significant part of the 1979 election result in that, although we think nowadays that, or some people think that, well, there's not much difference between Labour and the Conservatives.
00:37:12
Speaker
I mean, there's so much more difference now than there was in 1974, for example, where they both followed relatively similar economic policies um there was a difference in sort of a few nationalisations and denationalisations but generally the the the overwhelming consensus was that unemployment must not be allowed to rise and that would govern most economic policy and that was shattered in 1979 and it it was if it wasn't totally shattered then it certainly was by the end of Margaret Thatcher's reign in 1990 and
00:37:52
Speaker
And then you look forward and you think, well, Tony Blair did very little to reverse the Thatcherite legacy. So there was a bit of a new consensus on some things. It's only really now that some of that consensus is is being challenged. So it it was a hugely significant election. And Callaghan was absolutely right. I don't think there's anything he could have done to change that, necessarily.
00:38:16
Speaker
given the winter of discontent. For the Conservatives, it gave them confidence. um Although there was still there's still a lot of people not happy with Margaret Thatcher's leadership.
00:38:29
Speaker
But they i think they were willing to give her a fair crack of the wind at the beginning, but And I know that this ah isn't the role of this podcast to look at what happened during the Thatcher government, but it wasn't long before siren voices were raised that, or maybe we should have a change of leader. And it was only really the Falklands War that silenced those voices.
Thatcher's Impact on Gender and Politics
00:38:50
Speaker
And how impactful was it for the development of feminism and for Britain as a country to have its first female prime minister?
00:39:01
Speaker
I think it really was a turning point in um showing women that that glass ceiling had been well and truly shattered by Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was not a feminist in the traditional sense of the word, but what more could she have done to help the cause of women than shatter that glass ceiling? Well, you could argue she should have had women in her cabinet because she only ever had one, and that was fairly brief.
00:39:28
Speaker
But there were only about 17 women MPs in the House of Commons in 1979. And that didn't change really until 1997 to any degree. So she didn't exactly have a massive gene pool to pick from.
00:39:41
Speaker
um I think she should have had Linda Chalker in her cabinet. But for whatever reason, she only ever got to Minister of State. um there There's a new book coming out called the Margaret Thatcher, The Incidental Feminist.
00:39:54
Speaker
And i mean it makes all sorts of slightly slightly weird, has all sorts of weird theories about her, that she was autistic, that she had affairs, even when she was prime minister. But I think the title is quite interesting because I think it is probably quite accurate. She didn't see her role as a see herself as a female politician.
00:40:16
Speaker
She regarded herself as a politician who happened to be female. um I think she could have done more to encourage the to be more female candidates at elections.
00:40:28
Speaker
But, I mean, any feminist that doesn't recognise the role of Margaret Thatcher in enabling there to now be 40% female membership of the House of Commons, I mean, needs to give their head a wobble, really. Shabana Mahmood, the labour current Labour Home Secretary, She has publicly said that she regarded Margaret Thatcher as a hero when she was growing up because she knew that if Margaret Thatcher could do it, so could she.
00:40:58
Speaker
um i remember in about 1988, my niece Emma, who was seven years old at the time, said to me, Uncle Ian, is it possible for a man to be prime minister?
00:41:09
Speaker
And... I mean, I remember laughing my head off at the time, but I mean, that's that's how much Margaret Thatcher had got into the heads of children at that point, where they they were only used to a female prime minister and didn't know whether a man could be. Well, we've subsequent subsequently found that most, well, in fact, most men, and I would say most women, haven't done a particularly good job, but there we go.
00:41:34
Speaker
And as the average columnist's question always comes out, Was it the Conservatives that won or was it Labour that lost the election?
Evaluating the 1979 Election Legacy
00:41:48
Speaker
It's, as usual, a mixture of the two. As I say, I'm i'm not sure what Labour could have done differently to have actually changed that result beyond a few seats either way. um The Conservatives won it partly because they had a couple of very hard-hitting policies like the sale of council houses, and their general approach to criticising Labour's economic record, that's what did it. I mean, one thing I haven't mentioned so far is the IMF crisis in 1976, which really shook the nation's confidence, where, as the phrase goes, Dennis Healy, the Chancellor, went cap in hand to the um IMF to bail out the economy. And of course, the um IMF quite naturally put some quite stringent ah quite stringent price on that and said, well, you need to cut public spending by X amount.
00:42:36
Speaker
And obviously that was something that was anathema to the Labour Party. And he got booed at the Labour Party conference. And that sort of added to this sense of malaise that really affected the country at the time. And our confidence was shaken. And Margaret Thatcher came along and made...
00:42:55
Speaker
sort of speeches full of rhetoric about Britain's greatest days lie ahead and I'm going to make Britain, or it's a bit like Trump at the moment, make Britain great again, etc, etc.
00:43:06
Speaker
And the electorate decided that it was change that they wanted. And I want to get into the aftermath and a bit of the legacy that we see from 97.
00:43:21
Speaker
What are the lessons that we can draw from the general election?
00:43:27
Speaker
I think the lessons are partly that campaigns matter, that if the Conservatives had run a very bad campaign in 1979, victory was not inevitable.
00:43:38
Speaker
And they did run a bad campaign in 1987 and won with a 100-seat majority. um But that was because the Labour Party was still seen as a bit of a shambles, even though they ran the better campaign in 1987. I think the Clinton phrase or the James Carville phrase, it's the economy, stupid. If that applied to any election in Britain in the post-war period, 1979 was it.
00:44:05
Speaker
the pound in your pocket and the importance of low inflation, the importance of um low unemployment. I mean, all of those things, I think, subsequent political leaders have taken on board. But the but the main message from that campaign was the art of political messaging.
00:44:25
Speaker
the the The poster that we've talked about, the election broadcasts, um the way that Margaret Thatcher appeared in the TV news bulletins, the photo opportunities.
00:44:36
Speaker
um I think it's true to say that election it was an election. similar to Barack Obama in 2008, that really changed the dial in terms of political campaigning. It wasn't just now about the number of people you got to leaflet, the number of people that the party got to knock on people's doors and get voting information. There was the ground war, but then there was the air war, which even in 74, I don't think was anywhere near as important as 1979.
00:45:09
Speaker
And you look at every single election since then, and it's been the same where each party has got a narrative, they work out how they're going to market that narrative. to the electorate Now, the um the big change since, I guess, the mid 2000s is the advent of internet campaigning and social media.
00:45:28
Speaker
And ah it's it's an interesting thing to wonder how that might have changed things in the 79 election if the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok had been around then.
00:45:42
Speaker
And what is the long-term impact beyond messaging and the campaign, but of what we see subsequently of the 1979 general election?
00:45:55
Speaker
I'm not sure there's any longer-term
00:46:00
Speaker
impact than what we've just talked about, to be honest. um It did herald... 11 and a half years, well in fact it heralded 18 years of Conservative rule, followed then by 13 years of Labour rule. And up until that point, um most parliaments or most elections, i mean, the other party got in. though i mean, you had the long period of Conservative rule in the nineteen fifty s um But Harold Wilson, when he took over in 1964, he only had six years.
00:46:33
Speaker
Heath only had three. Callaghan, well, the Callaghan-Wilson government had nearly five. um But since between were lengthy governments.
00:46:45
Speaker
and twenty twenty four i mean they were all lengthy governments I think that's something that that there's maybe a a sea change in that soon as as well. But i mean, that's maybe not not for this for this podcast. I think that um the electorate, I think, showed almost that it it liked stability sort of in that period.
00:47:12
Speaker
And it was up to the opposition party to come up to rebuild itself and come up with policies which were appealing again. Margaret Thatcher only had four years to do that. i mean, Labour after her had 18 years to do that, though you could argue that they only really did it after Tony Blair's election as leader.
00:47:32
Speaker
um But I think even now, anybody... When Kemi Beidonok became leader of the Conservative Party, I messaged her to say, you need to really read up on Thatcher's period of opposition, because there are so many lessons there that you can learn.
00:47:46
Speaker
And I remember she sent me a photograph of a page of one of the biographies of Margaret Thatcher, and she circled a passage and just wrote on it, this is my life. And although there were differences in that 75 to 79 period where, I mean, for example, Margaret Thatcher only ever really did four or five big interviews a year.
00:48:07
Speaker
If Kemi Badenowck doesn't appear every day saying something, ah so people say, oh, she's lazy. Well, you could go weeks without hearing from Margaret Thatcher. And she had the time to put together a coherent manifesto in 1979.
00:48:24
Speaker
Ian Dale, thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast. If you have enjoyed this episode and you enjoy nerds discussing elections as we've so talked about, please do follow us for more. We're also available at YouTube on at The Observations Podcast.
00:48:39
Speaker
And if you're already watching there, please do like, comment and subscribe. It greatly helps us against the algorithm. Thank you for joining me and thank you for listening to The Observations Podcast. Thank you.
00:48:58
Speaker
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