Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  The words look mundane, but in the fevered atmosphere of the hall they brought the cheering delegates to their feet. Seen in retrospect, this speech was one of the early turning points in her career, for it established her as a new and rising star with the party faithful.

  My third memory is of discussing Margaret Thatcher’s success in the bar afterwards with a group of West Midlands candidates and MPs. The most interesting line of comment was that she had clearly studied and imitated the conference oratory of Iain Macleod. He was an expert in turning a banal line such as ‘on the higher ground of character and principle – there I take my stand’ into a clarion call that could make the welkin ring. Someone in our group imitated Macleod’s compelling counter tenor delivery of those last five words in an earlier speech, and compared them to Margaret Thatcher’s rhythmic and rising five-word crescendo, ‘This chap Callaghan must go’. I was reminded of Mrs Gatehouse, the OUCA speaking tutor, telling Margaret Roberts and successive generations of students, ‘End with a good strong boom of not more than five or six words!’16 She was always a good learner.

  Macleod linked the Thatcher conference speech to her Budget-debate speech, describing them in his Daily Mail column as ‘a magnificent double’.17 It was one of many good reviews in the press.

  A Fiery Blonde Warns of the Road to Ruin was the headline in the Sun, which saluted her for delivering ‘one of those magnificent fire-in-the-belly speeches which are heard too seldom’.18

  From the vantage point of both the tabloids and the Tory conference goers, Margaret Thatcher was becoming a woman to watch.

  JOINING THE SHADOW CABINET

  After the acclaim for Margaret Thatcher’s conference and parliamentary performances, Ted Heath was urged by Iain Macleod to promote her into the shadow cabinet. He did so, but waited for almost a year until the existing ‘statutory woman’, Mervyn Pike, retired on grounds of ill health. Margaret Thatcher had now arrived at the top table of the Conservative hierarchy, but she did not make a favourable impression there.

  Although she soon mastered her new portfolio as Shadow Minister for Fuel and Power, speaking with passion and compassion in the House on the report into the Aberfan Disaster,† her relations with Ted Heath remained cool.

  One problem was that she could ‘never stop arguing’, according to the Crossbencher column in the Sunday Express.19 The Shadow Attorney General, Peter Rawlinson, who was often in attendance at the shadow cabinet, reflected the murmurings of complaint that she was too loquacious. ‘How she talked … I believe that she honestly did not realise how irritating she was.’20

  By contrast, other colleagues were surprised by her reticence at their early meetings. ‘I don’t think she was much noticed at Ted’s shadow cabinet’, recalled Lord Carrington. ‘She made no mark at all.’21

  For her part, Margaret Thatcher found discussions at the Heath shadow cabinet ‘not very stimulating’.22 She put this down to the simmering tensions between her senior colleagues. It was an ill-kept secret that some of the key men at the top, notably Ted Heath, Reggie Maudling, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, did not get on well with each other. They could agree on what they opposed, but there was little unity on what they supported as policy for an alternative government.

  There is little evidence to suggest that Margaret Thatcher played a significant part in the philosophical debate that was starting to divide the Conservative Party between Heath’s ideas and Powell’s ideas. Enoch Powell believed, as Margaret Thatcher came to believe, that inflation should be kept low by tight control of the money supply; that market forces should determine the exchange rate; and that state intervention in almost everything from wage bargaining to incomes policy should be diminished. He was also outspokenly hostile to the growing encroachments on British national sovereignty of the European Economic Community (EEC).

  These ideas were anathema to Ted Heath. He feared Powell’s intellect and disagreed with his rival’s philosophy. Heath believed in building a consensus between what he called ‘the great interests of the state’, i.e. big business and powerful trade unions. He was a government interventionist who wanted to consolidate the corporate state by making it more efficient. He had no desire to reform it, let alone to dismantle it or to encourage free-market forces. Securing Britain’s entry to the EEC was at the heart of his political beliefs.

  Margaret Thatcher eventually became much more of a Powellite than a Heathite. But in the shadow cabinet of the late 1960s she was notable for her invisibility on policy issues. She handled her portfolio well, but as an attacking debater rather than as a thoughtful contributor to policy. She sent in no policy papers to the shadow cabinet, unlike most of her colleagues, during the two and a half years she was a member of it.

  There were, however, one or two interesting clues that she was more sympathetic to Powell and his ideas than she was letting on. On 20 April 1968, Enoch Powell made his explosive speech on immigration, quoting in Latin a line from Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ The next day Ted Heath telephoned her and all his shadow cabinet ministers to say, ‘I have come to the conclusion that Enoch must go’. Alone among her colleagues, Margaret Thatcher tried to resist Powell’s instant dismissal, telling her leader that she thought it would be ‘better to let things cool down for the present than to heighten the crisis’.23

  She agreed with the thrust of Powell’s views about the spate of new Commonwealth immigration. She felt that the selective quotations from his speech had been taken out of context, and was confident that he was no racist. Heath was in no mood to listen to such excuses. ‘No, no. He absolutely must go’, he retorted.24

  Powell went from the shadow cabinet. But he did not depart from the scene of influencing either Conservative policy or the mind of Margaret Thatcher.

  As Shadow Minister for Fuel and Power, she tried to find a way for privatising electricity generation. That would have been a radical exercise in rolling back the frontiers of the corporate state in 1968. But despite her many visits to power stations and conversations with business contacts, her research turned out to be ‘a fruitless exercise’.25

  She was, however, quickly gathering fruit from other research into the benefits of free-market economics. She regularly attended meetings of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a crusading free-enterprise think-tank run by Ralph Harris, which counted her as a supporter of some of its own and Enoch Powell’s ideas. She was far too savvy a political operator to praise Powell at a time when Heath was trying to bury him. Nevertheless, when Margaret Thatcher was invited to give the important Conservative Policy Centre (CPC) lecture at the Party Conference in 1968, she covertly revealed her sympathy for Powellite monetarism.

  Taking as her subject the rhetorical question ‘What’s wrong with politics?’, the main theme of her complaint focused on the growing power of the state over the individual, particularly as exercised by the incomes policy of the Labour government. In a later passage of her speech she said:

  We now put so much emphasis on the control of incomes that we have too little regard for the essential role of Government, which is the control of the money supply … For a number of years some expenditure has been financed by what amounts to printing money.26

  Her flirtation with Powell’s theories on controlling the money supply passed almost unnoticed at the time. More prominence was given to her attack on consensus politics that she dismissed as ‘an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything’. Instead, she wanted ‘a philosophy and policy which, because they are good, appeal to sufficient people to secure a majority’.27 This was an early glimpse of Thatcher’s future ‘conviction politics’. They were deepened by two interesting overseas visits.

  WOOED BY THE AMERICANS, DISMAYED BY THE SOVIETS

  The first voices seriously to predict that Margaret Thatcher might one day become Britain’s first woman prime minister were American. One of them was Dean Mahin, Dir
ector of the Governmental Affairs Institute in Washington, DC. He ran a State Department International Visitor programme designed to bring future foreign leaders and rising parliamentarians to the USA.

  On the basis of reports from William J. Galloway, First Secretary and Political Officer at the US Embassy in London, Margaret Thatcher was invited to make a six-week tour of America. Her schedule was much more prestigious than those arranged for other British MPs of the period. ‘The Embassy clearly indicated that it was possible that she would become the first female PM of Britain’, recalled Dean Mahin. ‘Most of her high level appointments were possible only because Mrs T was billed as a future Prime Minister.’28

  The prescience of the US Embassy in making such a forecast in 1966 was remarkable at a time when virtually no British observers were predicting such a future for Margaret Thatcher. The result was that she came, saw and was conquered by her first visit to the United States.

  She travelled on 20 February 1967 to Washington, DC, where she had twenty-eight appointments in five days. They included meetings at the Federal Reserve Board, the Department of Defense, the State Department, the Brookings Institution, the Supreme Court, the IMF, and the National Security Council. On Capitol Hill she saw several members of Congress, including two prominent Senators, Margaret Chase Smith and Joseph Clark. Later, in New York, she met Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a future Vice President of the United States under Gerald Ford.

  Her six-week trip went far wider than politics. It took in visits to DuPont’s headquarters in Delaware; NASA in Houston; Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska; the grain trading market in Chicago; the University of California in Berkeley; NBC’s first colour television studios in Los Angeles; and the Harvard Business School. Her journey was a mixture of fact-finding, meeting interesting people and sight-seeing. Her favourite city was San Francisco; ‘the most beautiful of them all’,29 she wrote on a postcard to her sister, Muriel.

  The totality of these experiences filled her with grateful enthusiasm for American friendliness, hospitality and free enterprise. Her immediate reactions were more superficial than substantive. Yet, in a more lasting way, the tour affirmed her commitment to the Anglo-American alliance and impressed her with the management of the US economy. On returning to Westminster, it did not take long for her favourable view of America to be reflected in her speeches and writings. She particularly emphasised the virtues of free markets and low tax rates in the US, pointing out that the highest level of tax paid by a top American earner was 60 per cent, compare to the British equivalent of 91.25 per cent.

  Her love affair with the United States strengthened with a second visit to New York and other cities, organised by the English Speaking Union in 1968. One of the topics for her speeches was ‘Preparing for the future: Britain and America’. This was her first attempt at expounding the virtues of the ‘special relationship’, to which she would contribute much in the 1980s.

  In 1969, she had an opportunity to examine the vices of Communism. Having become the opposition spokeswoman on Transport, she was invited by the Soviet government to come and admire their transport projects, such as the new Moscow Metro. Insisting on paying her own travel expenses to avoid any suspicion of being in the pocket of her hosts, she had meetings at the Kremlin, Moscow University and in Leningrad. Her observations of ordinary people and her exposure to a relentless barrage of Soviet propaganda from her guides confirmed her hostility to the moral bankruptcy of the Communist system.

  Occasionally, she managed to score a keen debating point over her hosts. Outside one art gallery, she was invited to admire a sculpture of a blacksmith hammering a sword. When the guide announced, ‘That represents Communism’, Margaret Thatcher retorted: ‘Actually, it doesn’t. It’s from the Old Testament. “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.” ’30 Trust the Methodist preacher’s daughter to know Isaiah 42:3 by heart!

  Whatever those egalitarian optimists at the US State Department might be forecasting, no British political prophets at this stage in her career would have dared to predict that Margaret Thatcher might one day climb to the top of the greasy pole. She herself told friends that the ‘ultimate horizon’ of her ambition was to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.31

  Throughout the 1960s, the prospect of a woman prime minister was unthinkable. The Sunday Times, shouting the odds in 1967 for the runners in a future Tory leadership stakes, put Margaret Thatcher in the field at 1000–1 against.32 She was not even a dark horse.

  PREPARING FOR GOVERNMENT

  She was, however, quietly moving up on the rails within the shadow cabinet. In 1969, her old OUCA contemporary Sir Edward Boyle resigned from politics to become Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University. His departure left a vacancy in the Education portfolio. Ted Heath initially wanted Keith Joseph to fill the post, but Maudling refused to co-operate in the reshuffle plan and replace Joseph. So, as his second choice, Heath appointed Margaret Thatcher to be the opposition spokeswoman for Education.

  She made an uncertain start. The issue that was troubling the Conservative Party on education was an argument about comprehensive schools versus selective or grammar schools. As a former grammar-school pupil herself, Margaret Thatcher was instinctively in favour of the selective examinations and traditional teaching methods. But by late 1969 most local education authorities (LEAs) had followed the Labour government’s national directive to turn all secondary schools into comprehensive schools.

  Believing that she had no mandate for reversing the consensus in favour of comprehensivisation, Margaret Thatcher concentrated on keeping herself busy as a national political figure. She spoke all over the country on subjects well outside her shadow responsibilities. One such address was to a club of East Midlands businessmen in late 1969. Unfortunately, her words of political wisdom on the taxation of small companies were subsumed by a slapstick comedy involving the chairman of the meeting.

  The chairman was Maurice Chandler, who had been her contemporary at Oxford and a fellow officer of the OUCA. He persuaded her to visit the Millbank Club in Uppingham, where she drew a capacity crowd. Half way through her speech, Chandler needed to go to the bathroom. But instead of departing through the body of the jam-packed room, he decided to climb out of a ground-floor window behind the platform on which Margaret Thatcher was speaking. This attempt at a discreet exit failed because Chandler, a burly figure, got stuck in the window frame. The meeting soon became distracted by his cries for help forwards into the courtyard and by his ample posterior wriggling backwards into the audience. Margaret Thatcher, however, ploughed on regardless of these noises and movements behind her. She kept going without varying her tone of voice, even when the marooned chairman had to be levered to safety by a rescue party of local worthies from the platform.

  ‘It was a scene worthy of Feydeau,’ recalled Michael Palmer, a solicitor who drove the speaker to and from London in his Morris 1100, ‘in which she played the straight-woman, completely ignoring the commotion and the laughter. On the drive back to Finchley she never mentioned the incident. I don’t think she saw the funny side of it at all.’33

  Slapstick humour had no appeal to Margaret Thatcher. Soon into her eight-month spell as Shadow Education Secretary, the political scene became tense because an early election was on the cards. Ted Heath summoned his shadow cabinet for a weekend conference at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Surrey to plan the Conservative manifesto. This gathering was lampooned by Labour as a lurch to the right by ‘Selsdon Man’.34 It was no such thing for the only woman present.

  The leader of the party allowed surprisingly little discussion on Margaret Thatcher’s area of responsibility, observing curtly at the start of the session that the party had ‘got our education policy’.35 This meant that there was tacit acceptance of the status quo of leaving schools policy in the hands of the LEAs. The only higher education issue to come up was the question of whether to say anything in the manifesto about the proposed new independent University of
Buckingham. Margaret Thatcher was all for it and supported the vice- chancellor designate, Professor Max Beloff, in his aspirations for Buckingham to be granted a royal charter. According to the record, Heath cut her off with the dismissive comment: ‘Not committing myself to Royal Charter. Wouldn’t trust Max Beloff for a minute. Already got too many universities.’36

  This churlish view, apparently based on Heath’s mistaken impression that Professor Beloff was still the left-wing socialist he had been in his pre-war days at Oxford, bemused Margaret Thatcher. She was underwhelmed by the Selsdon deliberations. On the Saturday night of the conference, she left the hotel to attend part of her constituency annual dinner in Finchley. The guest of honour was Enoch Powell. It was just as well that her absence for this purpose was never noticed by her leader.

  Ten days after the Selsdon meeting, when Margaret Thatcher was preparing for a major House of Commons speech opposing a government bill to speed up comprehensivisation, she received the news that her father, Alfred Roberts, had died. His end was not unexpected. She had been to see him in Grantham a few days earlier. He was terminally ill with severe emphysema, and had oxygen beside his bed to help him keep breathing. One of his last conscious acts had been listening to his daughter’s voice on a BBC radio women’s discussion programme, Petticoat Lane. He passed away soon afterwards on the afternoon of 10 February 1970.

  Father and daughter had drifted apart during Margaret Thatcher’s six years as an opposition front-bencher. She only took Mark and Carol to visit him twice throughout this period. She communicated with him infrequently. ‘I never hear anything from Margaret either by letter or by phone’,37 he complained in a letter to Muriel, nine weeks before his death.

  Some of this coolness may have arisen from his younger daughter’s reaction to his re-marriage. After her mother Beatrice died in 1960, Alfred married a Lincolnshire farmer’s widow, Cissie Hubbard. ‘I suppose that’s a good thing’, Margaret Thatcher unenthusiastically observed. ‘She’s a nice, homely little woman.’38 She was more gracious about Cissie’s nursing care of her father in his final days.