Read Online Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart - Free Book Online
Authors: Graham Stewart
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appeal to win through. Thorneycroft’s attempts to get Edward Heath positioned alongside her at election rallies particularly irked her, 11 the clear implication being that she could not carry the campaign without the support of the man she had replaced. While Heath – eyeing up the Foreign Office as his
reward – was keen to be seen and heard in the weeks before polling day, his successor was privately certain that she wanted to rid Britain of his political legacy almost as much as that of
Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
Those given the task of marketing Thatcher encountered the problem of deciding which version of her to portray. On the one hand she was the grammar school-educated, Methodist chapel-going,
provincial girl from a Lincolnshire market town, who had learned life’s often hard commercial realities from her father’s corner shop and won a place at Oxford through her own
endeavours. As such, she was by birth, sex, upbringing, religion and region an outsider from the traditional establishment. Her personal success was evidence of her strength of character and that
she was a battler against difficult odds. This, however, was only the first half of her story. As soon as opportunity presented itself, she had switched Wesleyanism for Anglicanism, turning her
back on Grantham for more material rewards as the London and suburban Kent-based wife of a millionaire businessman, with a son and daughter who had been looked after by a nanny before proceeding,
respectively, to Harrow and to St Paul’s Girls’ School. Only occasionally – usually when roused to anger or disdain – did her voice still betray a Lincolnshire lilt. Mostly,
she sounded like the privileged and somewhat patronizing stockbroker-belt southerner whose tones she had quickly adopted upon becoming Mrs Denis Thatcher in 1951.
In 1974, Enoch Powell assumed she had no chance of succeeding Edward Heath because the party ‘wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent’. 12 Among the image-makers’ first tasks was to steer her away from her tendency to dress as if she were on her way to a garden party in the weald of Kent or to take tea
with Mrs Mary Whitehouse. By 1979, the fight against millinery had been won, leaving her crowned only by a bouffant lion’s mane of golden hair. Under the guidance of Gordon Reece, a former
television producer seconded from EMI, work continued to be done on the pitch of her voice. Laurence Olivier was only one of a succession of experts drafted in to demonstrate how she could sound
less ladylike. Vocal training made her sound progressively deeper, more measured, less shrill and no longer redolent of the Queen in her coronation year.
As director of publicity, Reece did more than lower Thatcher’s voice and ditch the dated hats. He recognized the importance of the tabloid and mid-market press,
building bridges with, in particular,
The Sun
. The Tories had gone into previous elections without the support of a single mass-market newspaper, a disability that was about to be remedied.
Furthermore, Reece was instrumental in getting Saatchi & Saatchi hired to handle the party’s advertising, and its managing director, Tim Bell, became another key member of the Thatcher
posse. Reece also taught his charge how to improve her indifferent television performances, encouraging her to see an interview question as a cue to make her case to the viewers rather than, as was
her instinct, to assume it was a starting gun to argue with the interviewer. It was another key member of her image team, Ronald Millar, who forced her to memorize the mantra ‘Cool, calm
– and elected’. 13 Millar was a successful playwright, whose West End hits included adaptations of C. P. Snow’s novels and the
Tudor historical drama
Robert and Elizabeth
. He quickly identified Thatcher as his modern Gloriana, injecting the Tilbury spirit into her major oratorical performances. For, while she took
infinite care over the crafting of
reward – was keen to be seen and heard in the weeks before polling day, his successor was privately certain that she wanted to rid Britain of his political legacy almost as much as that of
Harold Wilson and James Callaghan.
Those given the task of marketing Thatcher encountered the problem of deciding which version of her to portray. On the one hand she was the grammar school-educated, Methodist chapel-going,
provincial girl from a Lincolnshire market town, who had learned life’s often hard commercial realities from her father’s corner shop and won a place at Oxford through her own
endeavours. As such, she was by birth, sex, upbringing, religion and region an outsider from the traditional establishment. Her personal success was evidence of her strength of character and that
she was a battler against difficult odds. This, however, was only the first half of her story. As soon as opportunity presented itself, she had switched Wesleyanism for Anglicanism, turning her
back on Grantham for more material rewards as the London and suburban Kent-based wife of a millionaire businessman, with a son and daughter who had been looked after by a nanny before proceeding,
respectively, to Harrow and to St Paul’s Girls’ School. Only occasionally – usually when roused to anger or disdain – did her voice still betray a Lincolnshire lilt. Mostly,
she sounded like the privileged and somewhat patronizing stockbroker-belt southerner whose tones she had quickly adopted upon becoming Mrs Denis Thatcher in 1951.
In 1974, Enoch Powell assumed she had no chance of succeeding Edward Heath because the party ‘wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent’. 12 Among the image-makers’ first tasks was to steer her away from her tendency to dress as if she were on her way to a garden party in the weald of Kent or to take tea
with Mrs Mary Whitehouse. By 1979, the fight against millinery had been won, leaving her crowned only by a bouffant lion’s mane of golden hair. Under the guidance of Gordon Reece, a former
television producer seconded from EMI, work continued to be done on the pitch of her voice. Laurence Olivier was only one of a succession of experts drafted in to demonstrate how she could sound
less ladylike. Vocal training made her sound progressively deeper, more measured, less shrill and no longer redolent of the Queen in her coronation year.
As director of publicity, Reece did more than lower Thatcher’s voice and ditch the dated hats. He recognized the importance of the tabloid and mid-market press,
building bridges with, in particular,
The Sun
. The Tories had gone into previous elections without the support of a single mass-market newspaper, a disability that was about to be remedied.
Furthermore, Reece was instrumental in getting Saatchi & Saatchi hired to handle the party’s advertising, and its managing director, Tim Bell, became another key member of the Thatcher
posse. Reece also taught his charge how to improve her indifferent television performances, encouraging her to see an interview question as a cue to make her case to the viewers rather than, as was
her instinct, to assume it was a starting gun to argue with the interviewer. It was another key member of her image team, Ronald Millar, who forced her to memorize the mantra ‘Cool, calm
– and elected’. 13 Millar was a successful playwright, whose West End hits included adaptations of C. P. Snow’s novels and the
Tudor historical drama
Robert and Elizabeth
. He quickly identified Thatcher as his modern Gloriana, injecting the Tilbury spirit into her major oratorical performances. For, while she took
infinite care over the crafting of
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