To avoid such a fate for her bill, Margaret Thatcher sent handwritten letters to 250 Conservative back-benchers, requesting their presence and support. It was quite a favour to ask, for most MPs were committed to constituency engagements on a Friday. But her assiduous correspondence achieved a good turnout of over a hundred Tory MPs.
Margaret Thatcher was understandably nervous, but she did not look or sound it as she rose to introduce her bill. Wearing a coat dress of bronze and black brocade buttoned down the front with a black velvet collar, she opened with a brisk self-dispensation from the conventional maiden speech tributes to her constituency and her predecessor.
The Official Report of Parliamentary Debates in Hansard can be a cold leveller and deceiver. Read half a century after the event, Margaret Thatcher’s maiden speech seems a rather clinical if competent performance, with little sparkle. But at the time it was seen as a brilliant debut that immediately established her as a parliamentarian to watch. What dazzled her colleagues in the House and the reporters in the press gallery was that she spoke without referring to notes. She was master of her subject, with a delivery that was both impassioned and ex tempore. A combination of these abilities is a sure-fire winner when it comes to building a parliamentary reputation, as was apparent on the day. Even allowing for the convention that compliments to a maiden speaker are expected to be gracious, the tributes to Mrs Thatcher from all parts of the House were exceptionally fulsome.
From the Labour benches Barbara Castle** recognised ‘her outstanding maiden speech’. The future Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart praised ‘a most striking, impressive and skilful performance’.
Charles Pannell, who had admired Margaret Roberts from his then position as Labour leader of Erith Council when she was adopted to fight Dartford in 1949, offered flowery congratulations on ‘rather a beautiful maiden speech’, describing it as ‘almost a model to the occupants of the Government Front Bench on how to deliver a speech in favour of a Bill, instead of having a dreary essay read to us in a turgid monotone’.
From the government front bench, the minister winding up the second reading debate, Henry Brooke, was almost equally flowery in his congratulations:
No words of mine can be too high praise for the brilliance with which my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley opened the debate. She spoke with charm, as we all expected, she spoke with a fluency which most of us would envy, and she achieved the rare feat of making a Parliamentary reputation on a Friday.9
It might have been expected after these felicitous tributes that the bill would get an easy passage. Not so. Henry Brooke was only at the last minute persuaded (by the size of the 152 to thirty-nine majority at the second reading vote) to allow the long title to be extended to include members of the public as well as journalists. This could only be done on a government motion, and was a vital step in order to avoid a procedural quagmire at the committee stage.
Steering a bill through a standing committee is a challenge to a well-briefed minister. For an inexperienced back-bencher it is a mountain to climb. It was hardly surprising that Margaret Thatcher lost her footing several times during its passage. Away from the committee debates, she managed to give offence to the departmental officials whose help she most needed – the parliamentary draftsmen. One of them advised against arranging a meeting between the appropriate clerks of the House of Commons and Mrs Thatcher, and wrote a minute warning about her abrasiveness: ‘If she treats them as she has treated us, she may well put their backs up.’10
She also lost supporters within the standing committee by being aggressive rather than conciliatory in debate. She annoyed some Tory MPs so much that they voted against a crucial clause to give public access to all local authority committees, which exercised delegated functions. After this defeat she had to settle for access to be granted only to committees of the full council. A leader in The Times reported that this reduced the bill to a ‘half measure’.11
To those who were not following these manoeuvres in standing committee, the half measure still looked like a full-scale success for the Member for Finchley. Although weakened, the bill went through all its stages in both Houses and received the royal assent in October. The end result may have underwhelmed a handful of Whitehall and Westminster insiders, but most outsiders regarded the passing of the bill into law as a considerable achievement and triumph for Margaret Thatcher. Because her Private Member’s Bill directly affected the interests of the press, the reporting of its progress was extensive and favourable.
After the second reading debate the Daily Express, then selling over four million copies a day, proclaimed, ‘A new star was born in Parliament’.12 The Sunday Dispatch declared ‘Fame and Margaret Thatcher made friends yesterday’.13 The Peterborough column in the Daily Telegraph, almost certainly written by William Deedes MP,†† a golfing friend of Denis Thatcher, forecasted that her maiden speech ‘is unlikely to be excelled by any of her contemporaries’. In the same panegyric style, the column continued: ‘To her intellectual and forensic abilities she added yesterday a new frock and not merely charm, but an uncanny instinct for the mood of the House.’14
MAKING HER WAY IN THE HOUSE
The success of her maiden speech enabled Margaret Thatcher’s parliamentary career to get off to a flying start. She impressed the House not only by her performance but also by her good manners afterwards.
Having written to 250 of her colleagues asking them to stay at Westminster on a Friday to support her bill, she sent a second handwritten letter expressing her gratitude to more than a hundred of them who responded to her request and voted for it. She also thanked many of them personally.
One recipient of this gratitude was my father, William Aitken, the Conservative MP for Bury St Edmunds. He enjoyed telling the story of how he ‘didn’t know Margaret Thatcher from Adam’, when he received her first letter.15 It persuaded him to cancel his constituency engagement, on that Friday. He was even more impressed the following week when the Member for Finchley sat down beside him in the tea room, thanked him for supporting her bill, and began questioning him about his time in the RAF.
She wanted to know if he was the same William Aitken (he was) who featured in Richard Hillary’s classic memoir of fighter pilot life, The Last Enemy. She said it was her favourite wartime book. She also asked about his injuries, which were visible as he walked with a stick and had been badly burned in a Spitfire crash.
Naturally, my father was charmed by her attentiveness. He told his wife, ‘This Mrs Thatcher will go places. She is bright and a good looker. She seems to have a thing about the RAF.’
In later years, my mother claimed that her husband had a thing about the Member for Finchley. ‘Your father kept going on about her blue eyes and blonde curls. He compared her to the actress Virginia McKenna’, she said.16
The anecdote confirms what other MPs were saying at the time: the young Margaret Thatcher had sex appeal. Yet, even at this early stage in her career, she also polarised opinions among her colleagues.
There were early signs of the formation of a Margaret Thatcher fan club in the House. Denis’s friend Bill Deedes was a founder member of this group of admirers. His backing, as a columnist and future editor of the Daily Telegraph, was to prove of considerable importance to her career. Other Tory MPs who heard her maiden speech and who later became overt or covert Thatcherites included Humphrey Atkins, Clive Bossom, Robert Grant-Ferris, Patricia Hornsby-Smith, Billy Rees-Davies and Nicholas Ridley. Some were stars, others were merely spear-carriers in the Thatcher story, but all played a part in it.
The most important of them was Sir Keith Joseph. He was the Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, who became extremely helpful to Margaret Thatcher in steering her bill through its standing committee. They may have looked an odd couple. He was a sensitive, deep and intellectually brilliant Fellow of All Souls, Oxford. She was pugnacious, full of simple certainties and shallow in her knowledge of the legislative process. But
they bonded. Their political relationship was later to change British politics.
After her bill, with considerable support from Keith Joseph, became an Act of Parliament, Margaret Thatcher did not settle easily into the collegiate House of Commons groove where back-bench friendships are made. Her early success caused occasional jealousies. She affronted some of her contemporaries at the peak of her maiden speech acclaim by telling a newspaper reporter, ‘I couldn’t even consider a Cabinet post until my twins are older’.17
Aside from this particular immodesty, there was a brassy, humourless presumption to her that grated with some normally affable colleagues. One who quickly decided he could not stand her was Peter Rawlinson, the MP for Epsom, a talented barrister who was later appointed Attorney General. Because of his rudeness to her, the aversion became mutual and later cost him the summit of his ambition, which was to become Britain’s first Catholic Lord Chancellor.
Another early critic was David Walder, the Member for High Peak in Derbyshire. She joined him and Julian Critchley at lunch one afternoon in the Members’ Dining Room. After she had left the table Walter declared: ‘My God! She is like the chairman of my women’s committee in High Peak – but writ hideously large.’18
The only identifiable example of Margaret Thatcher holding populist views writ large during her first years in Parliament came when she rebelled in a vote on the 1960 Criminal Justice Bill. She supported a right-wing amendment to restore birching for young offenders convicted of second or subsequent crimes of violence. This brought her more headlines, of which the most colourful was to be dubbed ‘the most beautiful of the Tory floggers’ by the Sunday Pictorial.19
Alfred Roberts wrote rather gloomily to his elder daughter Muriel that he didn’t suppose that Margaret’s rebellion ‘will help her much in the party’.20 This paternal pessimism was misplaced. Defying the liberal-minded Home Secretary, R.A. Butler, on corporal punishment was a popular cause with the Tory right. In any case, she did not make a habit of being a rebel. This was the one and only time when she voted against the requirement of the whips during her thirty-one years in the House of Commons.
Margaret Thatcher waited for more than a year after her Private Member’s Bill debut before making her second speech on the floor of the House. She chose an important occasion – the Budget debate of 1961. She used her speech to put down a marker that she wanted to be recognised as a specialist in tax and Treasury matters. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Selwyn Lloyd, was impressed by the technical points she made about the Inland Revenue’s powers to tax short-term speculators. He was also surprised when she wished him well ‘throughout the many battles that he will have in the process with his Treasury advisers’.21 The abrasive young MP apparently took a more negative view than the emollient Chancellor about the need for ministers to fight battles against their civil servants.
Margaret Thatcher’s speech in the Budget debate revealed one weakness – her inability to make a joke. Knowing that a light touch can be appreciated in the House of Commons, she attempted a humorous reference to the preceding speaker, Hervey Rhodes, the Labour MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. He had made a passing but entirely proper mention of a friend who was a gamekeeper. She unwisely tried to make a link from this to the topical subject of the trial of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover for obscenity. With ponderous joviality, she observed that she was being asked to follow ‘a man who has described his friendship with his gamekeeper, particularly as he described it in such graphic terms, using four and five letter words’.22 As Hervey Rhodes had not used any of the four and five letter words made famous in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he and others present were baffled by her incomprehensible effort to amuse the House. It was an early indication that a sense of humour was not one of her strengths.
During the summer of 1961 there was speculation that Margaret Thatcher might be promoted in an impending government reshuffle. Her Private Member’s Bill and her speech in the Budget debate had caught the eye of influential figures in the party. The Chief Whip thought well of her despite their early arguments about the subject matter of her Bill. Selwyn Lloyd believed she might be ‘not un-promising material’ for a future junior minister in his team at the Treasury.23
What counted most in her favour was that one of only three women in the government, Patricia Hornsby-Smith, had signalled a wish to resign from her post as Joint Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in order to pursue her business interests. She also told the whips’ office that Margaret Thatcher would be the best choice as her replacement. The Alfred Bossom connection was responsible for this recommendation. Clive Bossom recalled:
Pat and Margaret were both young protégées of my father back in the late 1940s. He brought them together and nurtured their friendship. When Pat said she wanted to leave the government, the whips asked her if she had any ideas about who should be her successor. Pat urged them to take Margaret, partly because she knew she would be damn good at the job, and partly because Pat felt strongly that we needed more women as ministers. Pat tipped off Margaret that she was likely to be chosen.24
As a result of this advance intelligence, Margaret Thatcher admitted ‘I even had more than an inkling of what my future post might be’ when, in the middle of a lunch date with her sister Muriel on 9 October 1961, she was summoned to see the Prime Minister.25 She had been told in advance about the likelihood of being sent for, so she wore her best sapphire blue suit for the anticipated appointment with her boss.
Harold Macmillan was in a languid mood when he invited Margaret Thatcher to join his government. He told her that she would only have to come into the Ministry of Pensions at around eleven each morning and ‘sign a few letters’.26
This affected casualness was part of Macmillan’s style when appointing ministers. In 1962 he told another Parliamentary Under-Secretary, James Ramsden, who was Master of the West of Ure Fox Hounds in North Yorkshire: ‘Of course there’s no need for you to be in your department on Mondays and Fridays. You must take off all the time you need to continue as an MFH.’27
Although Margaret Thatcher enjoyed telling the ‘just a few letters’ story in later years, it is unlikely that either she or Macmillan believed a word of this charade. The Prime Minister had taken some trouble over her appointment, discussing it in advance with Selwyn Lloyd and Martin Redmayne. He had also cleared it with the Minister of Pensions, John Boyd-Carpenter, who professed himself ‘delighted’, although privately he was doubtful:
I thought, frankly, when Harold Macmillan appointed her that it was just a little bit of a gimmick on his part. Here was a good-looking young woman and he was obviously, I thought, trying to brighten up the image of his government.28
In image terms, the appointment went down well, although The Times, having praised the new minister’s charm, youth and debating ability, struck a prescient note in its profile: ‘Those who know her well detect a strong will, some might say almost a ruthlessness, behind her smiling appearance.’29
Whether it was her talent or the government’s need to fill its complement of women ministers, or any one of the factors that make faces fit in reshuffles, Margaret Thatcher now had her foot on the ladder of government. She was the youngest woman ever appointed to ministerial office. She was the first MP in the 1959 intake to be promoted. She had arrived on the front bench where she was to stay for her next twenty-nine years in the House of Commons.
JUNIOR MINISTER
Life as a junior minister started well for Margaret Thatcher. It began with an elegant gesture of politeness from her boss. On her first day in the job, she turned up at 9.30 a.m. – an hour and a half earlier than the time suggested by Harold Macmillan. She was delighted to be met at the front door by the minister himself, a courtesy she never forgot. She emulated him by greeting all her junior ministers in the same way when she became Secretary of State for Education.30
Her minister was John Boyd-Carpenter,‡‡ nicknamed ‘spring heeled Jack’ by his colleague
s because of his habit of rocking from his heels to his toes when addressing the House of Commons. He was an adroit debater and a capable administrator of his department. He made some early misjudgements of Margaret Thatcher. ‘She’s trouble’, was his initial comment to his senior civil servant, Sir Eric Bowyer, after his first meeting with the new Joint Parliamentary Secretary.31
Boyd-Carpenter also underestimated her capacity for hard work. ‘Knowing that she had two young children, a husband in Burmah Oil, a house in Kent and like the rest of us a constituency to look after, I must admit that I wondered whether I or the Department would get much help out of her.’32
He did not have to wonder long. The Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance## (MPNI) was known as ‘the salt mines’ because of its exceptionally heavy workload in one of the most subterranean areas of government. The junior minister had to bear the brunt of the large volume of correspondence with Members of Parliament about the cases they raised on behalf of constituents on pension claims, national assistance entitlements and national insurance contributions. This could be grindingly dull work, requiring the minister’s approval and signature of over a hundred letters a day.
Margaret Thatcher increased her pressures by her own diligence. She frequently corrected or redrafted the correspondence submitted to her. Sometimes she became irritable in this process, occasionally even tearing up letters she considered to have been badly drafted. This earned her sometimes the resentment and sometimes the grudging admiration of MPNI officials.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 13
