Mr President, my Lords Ladies and Gentlemen: May I begin by thanking you, Mr President, and the Council of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, not only for inviting me to be your guest at your Annual Dinner, but for holding the Dinner in this particular and very splendid Hall.
I know you have held it here before but of course I realise why you went out of your way to do so tonight. [end p1]
Clearly where Crapenters get together a Thatcher could hardly fail to feel at home.
I listened attentively and gratefully, Mr President, to your generous speech of welcome and I thank you most warmly for it and for your good wishes.
Believe me, I need them, every one of them, in the task that I have just begun. [end p2]
I was particularly taken by your remarks about the Code of Advertising Practice, and how the section headed “Truthful Presentation” might be applied to politics and politicians.
“A politician” , you said,—I think I have it right— “a politician should not make any statement or visual presentation which, directly or by implication, omission, ambiguity or exaggerated claim is likely to mislead the electorate about his policies, about the politician himself or any other policy or party” . [end p3]
Well, I am sure I don't have to tell you Mr President, politicians never do anything like that. At least, female politicians don't.
You were in your remarks referring to men and of course one never quite knows with men. They do strange things at times. No woman can or should answer for them—and I happen to be a woman.
I trust my “visual presentation” makes that clear and that you won't regard it as “an exaggerated claim” . [end p4]
These days the sexes are not always as clearly defined as they used to be.
So in case you should feel there is any “ambiguity” about it—that possibly “Margaret Thatcher” is some sort of invention dreamed up by Central Office in pursuit of the female vote—let me follow one of the first principles of advertising and as proof of my sex give you three simple facts. [end p5]
I have two grown-up children and Denis Thatcherone husband.
On second thoughts, to avoid any “ambiguity” I think I'll put that the other way round.
It certainly happened the other way round.
I have one husband and two grown-up children.
I hope that kills two Codes with one stone. [end p6]
The code of Moral as well as the Code of Advertising Practice.
Mr President, when I was thinking about what I should say to you this evening I was led naturally to thinking about the respective roles of advertising and politics in what is still, with all its faults, a free society.
It seemed to me that our two professions have much in common. [end p7]
We are both in the business of persuasion.
We are both concerned with the pungent and if possible imaginative use of words and images to put our case across.
Whether it's “Thank heavens for D. H. Evans” or “A Miele is just another washing machine like Shakespeare is just another writer” on the one hand, or “You know Labour government works” (a really imaginative flight of fancy, that) on the other, we both have something to sell. [end p8]
Of course I know only too well that people are more sceptical of politicians than they are of Mr Heinz and his 57 Varieties.
On the whole rightly so.
Politicians come and go. Soup goes on for ever.
But we both, I think, have our place in the scheme of things. And—another link—we are both concerned with information: the getting of it, the sifting of it for its essence and then the putting of it out to the people who, whether it be in shop or [end p9] ballot box, have the final say.
Information is the lifeblood of the democratic way of life, the carotid artery.
For without information there can be no competition.
Without competition there is no choice.
And without choice there can ultimately be no freedom. [end p10]
What happens when choice is suppressed?
Monopoly flourishes—and just how if flourishes can be seen by glancing at Eastern Europe—and Eastward Ho! the land is not bright.
At least, not by the values we in this country have for generations believed in.
And so I think it's fair to say that advertising, which is selling what you want to sell in a society that allows you to sell it, provides a service which is in fact a guarantee of one of our principal freedoms. [end p11]
The freedom of choice.
I have no doubt that, as the slogan says, it pays to advertise, but its functions go deeper, its importance is greater than that.
For example, advertising underwrites another freedom. The freedom of the press.
Without advertising the only way to run a newspaper today would be by government subsidy, a prospect few politicians of any party would view without profound alarm. [end p12]
It's also the quickest route for a new-found luxury for the few to become, through the economies of mass production, known and available to the many.
With manufacturers vying with one another to make a better product cheaper still, the consumer must be the gainer.
You have stressed, Mr President, that you have your own strict and self-imposed safeguards against abuse and of course these are necessary—although I am bound to say I have never to my knowledge been exploited by an advertisement. [end p13]
Unlike the young men who recently complained to the Independent Broadcasting Authority that after using a certain brand of after-shave they were not chased by beautiful girls, as the advertisement promised.
Mind you, that may have been nothing to do with the after-shave.
Shaving itself could well have been the culprit. [end p14]
It's astonishing, the number of girls nowadays who are turned on by beards.
No, I don't think the mass of the people are taken in by the deliberate hyperbole of the advertising industry.
I think they accept advertisements for what the vast majority are intended to be—which is fun.
I have a healthy respect for people's instinct—and an equally healthy suspicion of those politicians, and others, who believe that the only way to protect the nation [end p15] from itself is to legislate.
The Voluntary control that your industry exercises seems to me a typically British and much wiser approach, and one that appears to work more effectively than would any Act of Parliament.
Mr President, it won't have escaped your notice that everything I have said has been said in the context of a society in which private enterprise is allowed to flourish. [end p16]
I realise that by no means all my audience tonight is of my political persuasion and I have tried to be politically as non-controversial as a highly political animal can be.
However, I think it unlikely you have done me the honour of inviting me to be your guest only a few short weeks after becoming leader of one of our great political parties without expecting me to say something of my job as I see it and my hopes for the future, not only of my party but of this country. [end p17]
I am only too sharply aware that, because I am the first woman to become Conservative Leader, certain expectations have been aroused.
I shall do everything possible to fulfil them in due course.
But may I say “due course” is the operative phrase.
I am not a sudden person.
I do not believe in magic overnight cure-alls. [end p18]
Life, and especially political life, is not like that.
I believe in proceeding logically, carefully and thoroughly towards a definite, specific goal—but at my own pace.
I believe in keeping my cool.
I believe that promises—those elusive carrots that flourish all over the political vegetable garden—rarely provide a regular and satisfying diet. [end p19]
I believe that steady progress goes down better in the long run—and I prefer the long run to the snap judgment.
In other words, I won't be rushed.
But that does not mean that I do not have a faith—and a blazing faith.
I do.
I believe in the individual. [end p20]
I believe in this country under the private enterprise system.
I believe in persuasion, not compulsion, except as the ultimate resort.
I do not believe in class distinction or class legislation, from whatever quarter it may come.
I have been in my present job only six short weeks, but already it has been exciting to find myself on the same wavelength as a lot of our people, and not simply because I am a woman. [end p21]
Politically, being a woman is neither here nor there—except perhaps for two factors, both of which I think are plusses.
First, women are tough. On the whole we are tougher than men. We endure. And in the heat of the political kitchen endurance is not only desirable, it's the key to survival. [end p22]
Second, woman look to the future rather more than men. Or rather, not so much more as further ahead.
We tend to think not just of our children or even our children's children, but beyond that to generations not yet born.
Perhaps we have an ability to project ourselves further into the future because it is only through women that that future can be given life. [end p23]
At a time when we as a country are going through as harsh a period as we have known except in wartime, and when the worst may yet be to come, the sort of hope, the kind of vision of which some women are capable can sustain and uplift not just one's own spirit but perhaps the nation's.
The other day I came across something that seemed to me to sum up what a new and civilised and tolerant Britain could one day be. [end p24]
A society where “our laws secure equal justice for all in their private disputes and our public opinion welcomes and honours talent in every branch of achievement, not for any sectional reason but on grounds of excellence alone … We have no black looks or angry words for our neighbour if he enjoys himself in his own way, and we abstain from the little acts of churlishness which, though they leave no mark, yet cause annoyance to whose notes them.” [end p25]
That description of Athenian democracy was given by Pericles two thousand five hundred years ago.
It won't be true of this country tomorrow.
The day after tomorrow …?
Perhaps.