Election Fever

Waiting for Maggie to decide

All the classic symptoms were in evidence. The political Establishment had polished up its manifestoes, printed new campaign posters and raised partisan invective to libelous levels. Labor Party Leader Michael Foot had had his shaggy locks trimmed. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had had her teeth capped. The country was, in short, coming down with ballot-box fever. Nearly everyone expected Thatcher to call a general election for next month, al most a year before her five-year term runs out. Thatcher was mum on the subject, so the nation looked for omens, above all in local elections that took place last Thursday in every part of the country except London and Scotland.

The vote was supposed to be a curtain raiser for the main event, a leading indicator of the Prime Minister's electoral intentions. At stake were 12,668 seats in 369 local councils. Inevitably, perhaps, it was also anticlimactic. Labor did a shade better than expected, given its poor standing in the opinion polls, but the Tories also fared reasonably well. The fledgling Social Democrats did poorly, though it was their first try at nationwide campaigning. "Very patchy," said Ivor Crewe, a political analyst at Essex University.

Armed with that wisdom, Thatcher and her chief lieutenants scheduled an election-strategy session for Sunday at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country retreat. Thatcher was under pressure from Tory backbenchers to schedule a vote as early as next month. A snap election, they argued, would catch the rival major parties in disarray and take advantage of an improving economy. Others argued that a hasty vote would only damage the Prime Minister's credibility, which rests largely on a reputation for doggedly staying the course. Thatcher refused to discuss any date whatsoever. While the nation braced for a June election, one of her aides insisted last week that waiting for an early announcement was like "barking up a gum tree." Yet the Prime Minister was not above some unabashed campaigning of her own, rallying the faithful wherever she goes and giving a stream of recent interviews loaded with electoral grapeshot. Most likely, there was a one-woman debate going on at 10 Downing Street, between the Iron Lady who toughs it out to the end and the professional politician who knows a good thing when she sees one. . This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.