The untold story of Margaret Thatcher's 1987 election 'wobble day'

Margaret Thatcher won three elections. The first, in 1979, was the one that broke the mould and installed a woman as prime minister for the first time in our history. Her second, in 1983 – having become the Iron Lady over the Falklands – defeated the most Left-wing manifesto and enabled her to start putting the Great back into Britain.

But even for Thatcher, three in a row was always going to be a challenge. On “Wobbly Thursday”, a week before polling day in June 1987, it looked like we were about to lose. The Falklands bounce had quite dissipated; much of what we had done – in the Square Mile and with reshaping industrial relations – was still in its early stages. And this time we would be faced by a much more attractive opposition, one that was free to promise the world, while we, the Government, was largely defending past actions.

The 1987 election was the only one in which I played any part, after Thatcher selected me for a pivotal planning role, working with Norman Tebbit, the party chairman, Michael Dobbs, the chief of staff, Alistair McAlpine, a party fundraiser, and the rival advertising gurus Tim Bell and Saatchi & Saatchi, among other key players.

During the campaign, I dictated a diary entry every night. As soon as we won that monumental third term, I put the tape recorder away and forgot about it. The tapes have been “lost” for more than 30 years. It was only while having a clearout during lockdown last May that I found them.

They say that distance lends enchantment, yet after many decades I can still feel the sheer horror of the last days of that campaign, Wobbly Thursday especially. But I also shudder to think what would have happened to all we had done over the previous eight years if we had lost.

The following extract is from Inside Thatcher’s Last Election: Diaries of the Campaign That Saved Enterprise

June 4 1987, aka ‘Wobble Day’

I woke up feeling very worried and apprehensive – I hadn’t slept too well. I went into central office for the 7.45am meeting. The atmosphere was a bit tense as we went through everything.

The bitter irony was that this was ‘Wobble Day’ – the day that Alistair McAlpine, who as party treasurer had bankrolled our recent election campaigns, had been forecasting for the past three weeks. Early on in the campaign, I went into Alistair’s room, where there was a big chart on the wall, and they were plotting the likely trends in the polls. Towards the end of the chart, on one date, there was a pencil line all the way down, and I asked what it meant.

“Oh,” said Alistair, “that’s Wobble Day.”

“What’s Wobble Day?”

He said: “Well, we had it in ’79, and we had it again in ’83. You see, they’ll be above us on that day – they were in ’79, they moved to half a point above us. In ’83, that was the day when the campaign was going wrong, and we met and thrashed it out and we changed this and we changed that. It will work out all right, but you just wait and see.”

And, of course, Labour have certainly been gaining on us.

The Prime Minister came into the meeting at just before 8.30am – she looked very tired and very strained. She immediately turned round to Norman and said: “We have really got to change some things – we’ve got to have younger people on television. You and David, you’ve been on too much and you’re too old. We must have younger people.”

We went on through all the points and had the report on the polls. She was very tetchy and nervous and obsessed with all the detail.

We went downstairs to the press conference, and she just was not good at all. It went on and on, and she got caught out on a question about private healthcare.

There somehow seemed to be a feeling around that we were on the run. Labour leader Neil Kinnock had had his press conference before ours. The press all came in and they were pushing the PM with questions arising from things that had come up in his press conference.

When the meeting ended, we went upstairs for the meeting I had fixed the night before. This time Willie Whitelaw was there with John Wakeham, which annoyed me slightly (he hadn’t been invited). She went on about the advertising, which she didn’t like at all. She wanted it more aggressive against Labour’s left-wingers, more along the lines that we had discussed the night before. She went on again about television – how neither of us was to be on television. Norman said he had been fixed to do The Granada 500 and one or two other shows; it would look very bad if he suddenly got called out of it. She agreed to let him go on.

She told Norman that he must go out to more constituencies, but she didn’t say anything to me or ask me to do anything. I slipped a note to Stephen Sherbourne, Thatcher’s political secretary, asking: “Has she changed her mind?” He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I was getting more and more desperate until eventually I said: “Prime Minister, what do you want me to do?”

And she just exploded. She said: “I can’t do all this myself. I can’t tell you…”

“No, no,” I said, “I know, Prime Minister, you just tell me what you would like me to do” – really to give her an opening to tell me to go and fix this or look after that. But she didn’t say anything at all.

The meeting broke up without anything being resolved. I felt very depressed. I really thought for some peculiar reason that I was being left out in the cold and being blamed that things weren’t going very well.

After lunch, I went back to central office. Rumours about the state of the campaign were going round the Stock Exchange, and I had two or three phone calls in as many minutes saying there was a new poll coming out that evening and that Labour had moved within two per cent of us. Well, I had that sickening feeling that normally when you expect bad news it always comes to pass. I recalled how the day before there had been a rumour and that had absolutely been confirmed. So, I was very depressed and very nervous and tetchy – rather like the Prime Minister, in fact.

At half past three, I went over to No 10. In the waiting room on the ground floor, we had a long meeting and went through everything. I outlined an idea for the party political broadcast – the PM’s last one – about paths and choices.

Tim Bell said he had prepared a programme of advertising on the theme of “Britain’s Great Again, Don’t Let Labour Ruin It”. Unemployment’s been coming down for the past six months, but every Labour government there has ever been has put unemployment up.

I told him this was fantastic. “What will you do with it?” he asked.

Well, I jumped up and said: “I’ll tell you what I’ll do with it. If she doesn’t take it, I’ll walk out – I’ll resign because we’ll lose the bloody election!”

Tim looked at me, startled. I told Stephen I wanted to show the Prime Minister Tim’s campaign and the one Saatchi’s had put together. She would have to decide which of the two she wanted.

I really felt we were on the point of actually losing it, and I said so. And Stephen, to his great credit, agreed.

I waited for a very nervous three quarters of an hour, pacing backwards and forwards and really worrying. There was still no news to confirm or deny this rumour of the two per cent poll. The market had gone down enormously. Eventually, we heard that the Prime Minister had landed in her helicopter – she was on her way back.

When she came in, I met her down the corridor. I said: “Prime Minister, come in here and look at this.” And she looked at it, and I said: “Tim did it.”

She loved it. “Well,” she said, “what do I do now?”

Downing Street, 6.30pm

“Norman,” I said when he appeared, “I must see you – there have been one or two developments.”

He looked at me and I said: “Come on, I want to show you something. Look, she’s asked for some other things to be done, come with me.” I take Norman into the waiting room and show him Tim’s “Britain’s Great Again, Don’t Let Labour Ruin It” campaign.

“Who did this?” he asked.

“Just look at it.”

“No, no,” he said, “tell me who did it.”

I said: “Tim Bell.”

He said: “Well, that’s it then – that’s it…”

I got him by the shoulders and said: “Norman, listen to me. We’re about to lose this f------ election. You’re going to go, I’m going to go, the whole thing is going to go. The whole election depends upon her being right for the next five days, doing fine performances on television. She has to be happy. We have got to do this. Now, look at this campaign, look at it.”

He looked at it, and said: “It looks very good.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s very simple – we’ll see what Saatchi’s have got, and if that’s better, we’ll use that. One way or another, we’ll get it done. But if this is better, we’ll use it.”

“All right, then,” he said.

“But you’ve got to,” I said. “Norman, it’s your future and my future and all our futures and the future of this flaming country.” I went on quite a bit.

Later, Norman has one look at Saatchi’s campaign and his face gets longer and longer. He says: “This won’t do. This won’t do at all, it really won’t. I don’t know… she’ll go mad when she sees it.”

So, Norman and I looked at Tim’s again, and I said: “We’ve got to use this one, haven’t we?”

“Yes,” he said, “we have.”

Back home, very tired but feeling that we had made a step forward. I’d had quite a bit of drink. I went to bed but woke up at about 4.30 and immediately started worrying about what my next meeting with Norman would bring. I found it very difficult indeed to get back to sleep.

Inside Thatcher’s Last Election: Diaries of the Campaign That Saved Enterprise by David Young (Biteback, £20) is out now. Buy yours for £16.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514