Thatcher plans second term

Mrs Thatcher's announcement that Parliament would be dissolved this Friday, that a General Election would be held barely a month later and that the new House would assemble on 15 June has revived again the sneaking envy of Americans not of a parliamentary system as such, but of an electoral system in which the antagonists, the party leaders, are known many months, often years, ahead, in which the election campaign lasts no longer than a month. Not least, a system which installs the new leader whenever there is a new leader in Downing Street, literally, overnight.

In May 1979, I was in London watching the last General Election returns coming in with a couple of American friends. They were not Anglophiles, so they did not make the automatic assumption that they order these things better in Britain. They had, in fact, never before seen a British election in action. They were bored by the slowness of the counting and, seeing a television shot or two of it going on, wondered if the counters didn't get arthritic fingers and tired lips. For a very short while, they were able to enjoy a little chauvinism when they made the odious comparison with a system in which electronic machines accumulate the totals with every pull of a voter's lever, but their surprise and admiration were unbounded when they woke up next morning to catch Mrs Thatcher twinkling out of Number Ten with all the confidence of the oldest inhabitant.

'I suppose,' said a bland San Franciscan, 'she's been to have a meeting with the outgoing Prime Minister.' 'Not at all, ' I said, 'the outgoing Prime Minister has already out gone with all his worldly possessions and Mrs Thatcher's vans delivered all her possessions in the dead of night. In fact, she lives there.'

It used to be, before America woke up to the fact in the pit of the Great Depression that the world couldn't wait four months to learn what the new government was up to, it used to be that an American president was elected in November and inaugurated the following March. This was changed by a constitutional amendment, moving the inauguration of the new man forward to 20 January. Even so, it takes over ten weeks for the old man to get out and the new man to get in. What can the outpatients and the inpatients be doing all that time?

Well, this leisurely interval provides, I think, a beautiful example of Parkinson's Law, that work will always last as long as the time available for it. The outgoing administration, in all its departments, announces that it's available to the incoming administration to help it to learn the ropes. The new administration sets up what is called 'a transition team' so that this man and a small temporary staff go off to the Department of Agriculture to learn about the machinery already under way for, say, subsidising wheat farmers for not growing wheat. The old boys at the Treasury help the new boys at the Treasury learn about outstanding commitments to debtors or creditors, near and far.

The Secretary of State and his innumerable assistants on the different desks – the Middle Eastern desk, the Far Eastern desk, the West European desk and so on – confer with appointees of the incoming president about the whole range of foreign policy, whether or not any range of foreign policy has been discernible in the old administration.

The people I've talked to who've been on these transition teams have assured me that ten weeks is little enough time in which to get the feel of the ropes. The reason for this is a fundamental difference between the two systems. In a parliamentary system, the transition team has been sitting in the House throughout the whole life of the government. It is in fact that nucleus of the opposition known as the Shadow Cabinet. There is no such thing in Washington as a Shadow Cabinet. How could there be when, for, at the very least, three years and six months, nobody has the faintest idea who the next prime minister, I mean, the next president, is to be?

Also, the new Cabinet, the new administration, is almost entirely recruited from outside the Congress, not from the people who've been doing all the legislation. It's recruited from a motley assortment of the next president's friends and associates, state politicians who've never worked in Washington, businessmen, academics, old college buddies, industrialists, labour colleagues, economists, heavy contributors to his campaign. Most of them, we discover, are not only new names to us, they're new names to Washington and to the conduct of the federal government.

Also, the government bureaucracy that is permanent is very much smaller than it is in a parliamentary country. The new Secretary of State, for instance, cannot call on a permanent Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs who has served many masters from both parties and who is already grizzled and toughened by long familiarity with the Polish question, the Persian Gulf question, the Mexican debt question or whatever.

In fact it's always a shock to visiting Europeans to politicians and reporters, especially, to discover that even the boys who carry messages between the Senate and the senators' offices, the humble Senate pages, are all changed. The patronage of the new administration, as of the new Senate and the House, extends to hiring a whole new set of janitors to firing the old White House barber and hiring the new.

Well, this is amusing and stimulating to look on from the outside but it's no joke to America's allies who find, as one of them put it, 'We have to get to know a whole, new cast of minor characters, often inexperienced, every time the star performers change'.

There've been, for many years, suggestions ranging from the passionate to the half-hearted about how to reform these procedures. One that interested foreigners always come up with is a single, six-year term for the president, the argument being that this would make it absolutely clear at the start how long you could expect any government policy to last, that agreements and joint allied policies would not be hamstrung by the long period running anywhere from six months to two years during which friend and foe alike wonder and guess whether the incumbent is going to go for a second term.

We're all, as you must surely know, in that period now and there's a body of informed opinion in Washington already resigned to the belief that the Russians will not attempt any serious arms negotiations until they know whether or not in 1985 they're going to have to deal with a new man. By contrast, all the doubts about Mrs Thatcher's intentions were canvassed and settled within about a couple of months. She said on Monday that the atmosphere of uncertainty bred by all the 'Will she, won't she?' talk had become intolerable. This provoked wry chuckles in Washington. We've been writing and guessing and arguing for about a year now whether Mr Reagan will or won't run again. We've learned in every administration to tolerate a period of intolerable uncertainty for upwards of two years.

The White House insiders, themselves, I mean the president's own closest aides are regularly interviewed, briefly, on television and some say he will and some say he won't and some say he'll decide in October. The only man who's willing to come out and say flatly that the president has had it and will have no more is Mr Tip O'Neill, hardly a close aide of the president. Mr O'Neill is, in fact, the Speaker of the House, the leader of the Democrats there, who are the majority party in the House, the most dependable political opponent of the president in Congress. So his assurance is, at best, a deliberate exercise in blarney or wishful thinking.

As things stand now, it looks more and more as if Mr Reagan would run again. He gives coy hints, jests about it. His closest aide, Michael Deaver, says positively he will run for a second term and so does – of all confidantes – Vice-President Bush, but, personal opinion apart, there are present most of the signs the president has eagerly looked for that would encourage him that in fact he, himself, would be most persuasive in deciding him to run again, and if these signs have to do with the economy, they are the ones that Mr Reagan swore would appear, the forecasts, the boast, with which he put his presidency on the line. And they are also the ones that the Democrats who've already put themselves in the race – there are six of them – used to discredit with confidence but now are keeping fairly quiet about. What are they?

Well, the worst news for Glenn, Mondale, Cranston, Hollings and co is that even Mr Carter's former economic advisers now grant, with a sigh or a brave smile, that the economy is well on the way to recovery. Inflation is less than half what it was under Carter and going down still. Prime interest rates may not have declined enough for the European allies but they are about half what they were under Carter. Unemployment is the bogeyman, but it's down only slightly, but one-tenth of one percentage point means a gain of another quarter of a million jobs and the other side of that picture, which the Democrats are careful not to mention, is bright.

In a word, there are many more Americans at work than there have ever been. The notable pick-up, very long in coming, has been in the basic industries, especially in automobiles. Two automobile companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy 18 months ago are beginning to show impressive profits. After two years of sluggish life, the retailers are reporting business as brisk.

Now these signs may not be enough for the 40 per cent of unemployed black youths or for the trimmed staffs of welfare agencies or for the people who don't share the president's concern for Central America as a potential or actual Russian base, but they are enough to have changed the public opinion polls dramatically and made Mr Reagan a close-shave winner today against the two men who, six months ago, would have beaten him handsomely, namely, former Vice-President Mondale and Senator Astronaut Glenn.

Nothing in American politics is sure after next Monday but it does look as if the present incumbent would lay down his heavy load in 1989 and totter out of the White House at the ripe age of 78.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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