the possibility of defeat. This may explain his dignified reaction on the night, in contrast to the sourness of others who could not believe that the electorate could be so ungrateful.
As the campaign wore on, many Conservative MPs did however foresee the fate awaiting them. ‘I was seduced in the first week into thinking that this was much easier than last time,’ Seb Coe recalls. ‘But then I realised that people were actually being polite and just wanted us off their doorsteps.’6 It was the same for the legions of aspiring Conservative candidates hoping to make it to Westminster. Among them was David Cameron, a fresh-faced thirty-year-old corporate communications executive who was standing in the Midlands seat of Stafford. On paper, it was a seat that the Conservatives hoped to hold, despite recent boundary changes making it less secure. Initially he thought he would have a 50:50 chance, but as polling day neared his optimism drained away. Cameron was struck that during the last few days of the campaign many voters refused to look him in the eye, and braced himself for the worst.
Back at Conservative Central Office in Westminster’s Smith Square, a bunker atmosphere prevailed. Morale had been quite high in the early stages of the campaign, but the more seasoned party officials knew the game was up. ‘We were defending seats that were simply unwinnable. It might have been marginally better if we had fought a more defensive campaign,’ says one. ‘Everything was thrown into the campaign,’ recalls Archie Norman, the former boss of the supermarket chain Asda and one of the few new Tory MPs elected that night. ‘It was the most money ever spent in any election campaign in Britain, but also the least effective money that was ever spent.’7
The Prime Minister’s aides were encouraged by his confidence at the beginning of the campaign. The famous soapbox, which he had used during the election five years earlier to such good effect, was dusted off. But deep down, Major knew the cause was lost. For two years he had been coming to terms with the probability of defeat. ‘You can never be certain in politics, so you have to go on fighting,’ he says. ‘But we had been in government too long. Splits over Europe had made us unelectable. If the Tory Party had been composed of 330 Archangel Gabriels, we would have still come second.’8 The opinion polls spoke for themselves. Labour’s average rating had rarely dropped below 50 per cent since mid-1994, while the Conservatives had consistently languished at 30 per cent or below.9
Major hoped that a long six-week campaign would allow New Labour’s ‘hollowness’ to be exposed under the pressure of scrutiny. Yet the reverse happened. The Tory campaign unravelled when it emerged that many candidates, including David Cameron, wrote in their personal election addresses that they would not countenance Britain joining the European single currency. This contravened the government’s official policy, which was that neither the time nor the circumstances were right for entry, which the press labelled ‘wait and see’. ‘Like me or loathe me, do not bind my hands when I am negotiating on behalf of the British nation,’ Major appealed to his own party in one of the most surreal moments of the campaign. Britain’s uncertain relationship with Europe had plagued his premiership and was now engulfing the party’s campaign in the full glare of the public. ‘The destruction of John Major’s government was suicidal – it was manic,’ says Ken Clarke, Major’s Chancellor, who was one of the most pro-European ministers in the Cabinet. ‘There was an underlying assumption that because we won elections anyway people could behave in this extraordinary fashion, and with any luck we would be returned to office by getting rid of all the pro-Europeans and re-electing the Eurosceptics. The idea that we were all about to be buried in a self-inflicted landslide never crossed their minds.’10
The early indications at 5 p.m. on Thursday, 1 May were that the election result would be far worse than the Conservatives had imagined. Major had hoped that he could confine Labour’s majority to forty or fifty. Indeed, only a few days earlier party officials had predicted that the Conservatives might win 240 seats. Late in the afternoon Major, who had returned to his Huntingdon constituency in Cambridgeshire braced for defeat, received a phone call from Central Office confirming that the party was heading for catastrophe. As the evening wore one, his closest aides thought he looked as if he had been in a car crash.11 At 10 p.m., the BBC and ITN broadcast exit polls predicting a Labour majority of between 160 and 180. By midnight, two hours after the polls had closed, the first results showed a massive 10 per cent swing right across the country. When Labour’s tally reached a hundred seats, the Conservatives had barely moved into double figures. By 2 a.m. the extent of the rout was becoming clear. Stafford was one of countless Tory seats to fall to Labour’s unrelenting advance. A defeated David Cameron and his wife, Samantha, left the count down but not out. He rang Michael Green, his boss at Carlton Communications, to ask for his job back as director of communications. As the result sank in they collapsed onto a sofa together, exhausted. Cameron thought to himself that he had better get on with life for a few more years, but knew that he would give politics another go. Although this was his first taste of defeat, being on the losing side was something that he was going to have to get used to for years to come.
In Conservative Central Office, a large downstairs meeting room had been prepared for a drinks party ahead of Major’s return to London. But the bottles were unopened and the shellfish lay untouched. ‘Everyone was just holding themselves together. It was utterly bleak,’ a senior party official recalls. William Hague, the thirty-six-year-old Welsh Secretary, cut a lonely figure as one of the few ministers on duty in party headquarters overnight. He would have the unenviable task of greeting defeated Cabinet colleagues as they returned to Central Office in the early hours. As dawn approached, a bank of camera lights lit the elegant and imposing façade of the building. Just as Tony Blair took to the stage across the river, a crowd of people including jubilant Labour supporters gathered in Smith Square. ‘Tories, Tories, Tories … Out, out, out!’ they chanted at full volume. ‘This was their night,’ said one official besieged in the building. ‘You really did feel as if the helicopters were coming to take us off the roof.’ By the early hours of Friday, 2 May, the Conservatives had well and truly been airlifted from government and dropped into the wilderness of opposition. It was far from clear how long it would take them to return, if indeed they would return at all.
From High-Water Mark to Downfall
Rewind the clock by a decade, and the scene in Smith Square could not have been more different. From a window in Central Office, a victorious Mrs Thatcher, her husband Denis and Party Chairman Norman Tebbit waved to supporters and party workers below in the early hours of Friday, 12 June 1987. It was a scene of jubilation. Mrs Thatcher had led the Conservative Party to its third successive victory since coming to power in 1979. No other Prime Minister had achieved such a feat in the twentieth century. A majority of 101 would ensure her a third full term in office.
Mrs Thatcher was at the apex of her powers as she embarked on her third term as Prime Minister, but she would be gone within three and a half years. Although an admiring party lay at her feet, all was not well at the heart of government. Her assertive style of leadership had already knocked noses out of joint, including that of Michael Heseltine. Ever since the flamboyant Defence Secretary resigned in 1986, at the height of the Westland Affair, there had been a king across the water. Heseltine would prime himself as a potential successor, around whom dissent could coalesce. Although he had served in her Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, Heseltine was not ‘one of us’, as Mrs Thatcher liked to term her allies. He was from the ‘One Nation’ mould of Conservative politicians, who had dominated the party since the Second World War. They were more consensual and not so steadfastly wedded to the free-market principles that informed much of the Thatcher revolution. After the 1987 general election Heseltine had to bide his time on the backbenches. In the meantime, the ‘Iron Lady’ seemed unstoppable.
‘“Can’t be done” has given way to “What’s to stop us!”’ she declared to the party faithful at their annual conference after the election. If her second term had laid the foundations by curbing the power of trade unions