Word: campaigns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Britain had never seen an election campaign quite like it. Looking and sounding like a confident winner, Tory Leader Margaret Thatcher last week made a whirlwind trip from one end of the island to the other that had many of the earmarks of a royal tour. She traveled in her own executive bus, which was followed by two others filled with dozens of journalists, ten television crews and a swarm of still photographers. It was election razzmatazz, American style, and Thatcher reveled...
Nonetheless, as the campaign entered its final week, most polls showed that the Conservatives' lead over Prime Minister James Callaghan's Labor Party had dropped from 20% or more to less than 6%. At week's end yet another poll by Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) indicated that the Tory margin had shrunk to a bare 3%; a 6% lead might translate into a majority of 30 seats or more, but the MORI sampling of voters suggested that this Thursday's election had become too close to call. Beyond that, other polls indicated that Callaghan...
Despite her middle-class manner and accent, Thatcher in fact is a grocer's daughter from a market town in Lincolnshire. Her campaign strategy was designed in part to impress working-class voters, especially women, that she shared their concern about prices and other gut economic issues. At a shopping mall in Halifax, she brandished in her right hand a shopping bag crammed full of groceries, while in her left hand she held a half-empty one. "The right hand," she trilled, "was what a pound would buy under the Tory government in 1974; the other is what...
...sharp contrast to Thatcher's colorful road show, "Sunny Jim" Callaghan was waging a rather low-keyed, traditional campaign, appearing frequently at poorly attended rallies on behalf of Labor candidates for Parliament. Callaghan and his aides traveled without fanfare on an executive jet, leaving the press to catch up as best it could on whatever planes and trains were available. As a result, he was getting less national attention than the Tory leader...
Despite Thatcher's well managed, energetic campaign, few experts were willing to predict assuredly that she would become Britain's first woman Prime Minister. There were simply too many imponderables. One unanswered question was whether the unions were in such bad grace with the majority of voters that the open support of bosses like Evans and Weighell for Callaghan would tip the crucial swing vote in favor of the Tories. The country's rapidly growing and increasingly restive black and Asian population could be a significant factor, even though less than half of eligible minority voters...