Everyone in the parliamentary party knew that Heath and du Cann were chalk and cheese. One was a rude man; the other was smooth man. Du Cann was master of the art of oleaginous compliments to colleagues. One of the many stories of a ‘du Canning’ was about his greeting a new member, Commander John Kerans RN,† with the words, ‘I understand you served in submarines: how brave!’18 Another, surely apocryphal, tale consisted of du Cann being asked the time, and replying, ‘And what time would you like it to be?’19
Du Cann’s over-polished courtesy was seen by his colleagues as a stylistic quirk rather than as a serious fault. He might not have been everyone’s choice but his stature was thought to be higher than Margaret Thatcher’s. She was the only declared candidate, but even as an undeclared candidate he was believed to have a far better chance of beating Heath. Nigel Fisher was not the only experienced colleague to take this view. Airey Neave,‡ the Member for Abingdon, had also offered his services to du Cann as his potential campaign manager. Among younger Members, Peter Tapsell was organising support for him. A key factor in this gathering momentum was that the Tory leadership was still regarded by many MPs as a male preserve. Edward du Cann seemed to be the most competent man available for the job, which was one reason why the odds on him were shortening.
Throughout the months of November and December, du Cann remained politely ambiguous towards all overtures. He had one good reason for his aloofness. As Chairman of the 1922 Committee he was the umpire of the leadership election. He did not wish to jeopardise this position. He feared he might be accused of having used his role improperly if he switched to becoming a challenger.
These arguments had less force after the machinery for the election on 4 February was agreed and in place. So when Nigel Fisher came down to du Cann’s home in Somerset at the beginning of the year, the hesitant candidate was still open to persuasion. However, there was a new problem. It was the attitude of his wife, Sally du Cann. The couple were in the middle of marital difficulties, which later ended in divorce. The future of their country house was one of the issues in dispute. As Nigel Fisher produced his round-robin letter, signed by supporters, it became clear that the candidate’s most important supporter was refusing to countenance a leadership bid. ‘Sally took Nigel out for a walk and told him she was utterly opposed to the idea,’ recalled Edward du Cann, ‘and once she said that, I accepted it completely. My wife’s objections were the chief reason why I told Nigel to drop it.’20
Before Nigel Fisher finally dropped it, he arranged a meeting between Margaret Thatcher and Edward du Cann. This clandestine rendezvous had the effect of extracting a new and quite different assurance – this time from him to her. She wanted to hear from his own lips that he definitely would not stand.
The meeting took place at du Cann’s house in Westminster, 14 Lord North Street. Denis Thatcher accompanied his wife. As Edward du Cann recalled it:
It was of course an entirely private meeting between the three of us. I remember it as rather tense at first. Margaret and Denis sat on the edge of the sofa in my drawing room almost as if they were a housekeeper and a butler applying for a job. After I assured them that I was certainly not going to be a candidate they relaxed. It became quite clear that if my decision was final then she was going to run. No one else knew this. I took away the strong impression that Denis was her only confidant in on the secret and that the two of them were very excited.21
Edward du Cann’s impressions were correct. Margaret Thatcher had taken quite a battering at the hands of Ted Heath’s camp since she had told him of her intention to stand against him. There had been several covert attempts to undermine her. Of these, the most damaging exercise in black propaganda had been Peter Walker’s use of a pre-election interview she gave to a somewhat obscure magazine, Pre-Retirement Choice. In this interview she had advised its readers to buy canned food, particularly tins of ‘the expensive proteins: ham, tongue, salmon, mackerel, sardines’, as a hedge against inflation.22
This dull story was spun into a scandal by well-orchestrated accusations that Margaret Thatcher was a ‘food hoarder’ – a term with unpleasant associations from the days of rationing in the Second World War. The claims had echoes of the ‘milk snatcher’ uproar with the added ingredient of snobbery. The implication was that the Grantham grocer’s daughter was selfishly stocking up her own larder, ‘acting against the public interest’. This accusation was solemnly made on television by the former Conservative Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne, who had become the Deputy Chairman of Harrods.23
In rebuttal, Margaret Thatcher no less solemnly invited a posse of Fleet Street journalists to report on the modest contents of her food cupboard at her Flood Street home. The episode says volumes about the febrile atmosphere of fear and feuding that her leadership challenge had triggered at the highest levels of the Tory Party.
After a week or two of media hysteria, the synthetic indignation evaporated. It is unlikely to have changed a single vote in the election, but it rattled Margaret Thatcher at the time. ‘I was bitterly upset by it’, she recalled. ‘Sometimes I was near to tears. Sometimes I was shaking with anger.’24
The bruises from the food-hoarder affair meant that the Thatcher family had a downcast Christmas. Denis was having business worries because of boardroom troubles at Burmah Oil. But there were hopeful signs too. A small but gathering band of supporters following in Peter Morrison’s footsteps came to see Mrs Thatcher to assure her of their votes. These early declarers included Geoffrey Finsberg, Robin Cooke, Bill Shelton, John Gorst, David Crouch, Hugh Rossi and William Rees-Davies. None of them carried great weight in the party, and no one was organising or counting them. But their arrival as the outriders of a support movement was a further sign that a spontaneous Thatcher bandwagon was beginning to roll.
Although the Heath camp had shown itself capable of malevolence over the food-hoarder row, it was proving incapable of picking up fresh support. Among the new intakes of younger MPs elected in February and October 1974, dissatisfaction with the status quo was growing. Heath was looking like goods too damaged to be re-elected. Yet he held pole position partly because his potential challengers had too many weaknesses, and partly because he still controlled the levers of power within the party. This gave him the only team of colleagues who seemed capable of running an effective election campaign. This changed the moment Airey Neave became Margaret Thatcher’s campaign manager. Why he got there and how he carried out the job for her is an intriguing story, which greatly enhanced his House of Commons reputation as a man of mystery.
ENTER AIREY NEAVE
Many of his fellow-Conservative MPs were baffled by Airey Neave. He was variously described as ‘a sound man’, ‘a shadowy figure’ and ‘a good operator’.25 His soundness derived from his war record, whose highlights were to have been decorated with the MC, DSO and Croix de Guerre. He was the first British officer to have escaped and made a ‘home run’ from Colditz.
The shadowy side of Neave came from the widespread belief that he had worked in the post-war years for MI5, and still maintained close links with the intelligence community. This may have been an impression he himself liked to cultivate. He would have fitted in well as a character from the ‘Circus’ in John Le Carré’s novels. Even Neave’s way of walking and talking had an air of invisibility. He moved along the corridors of the House of Commons like a crab scuttling towards crevices in the walls. He murmured rather than spoke in elliptical half sentences. Extracting a point of view from him was like fishing for a moonbeam.
Was he on the left or right of the party? For or against the EEC? Supporting which contender in the leadership election? The answers were in the evasive.
One fact that did become known about Airey Neave was his intense dislike of Ted Heath. This was hardly a singular distinction, but the story of their falling out (later denied by Heath) formed part of the apocrypha of leader vilification. According to the smoking-room stories (encouraged by discreet nods and winks from the injured party), N
eave had suffered a heart attack in 1959 and went to explain to Chief Whip Heath that for medical reasons he could not continue to serve as a junior minister in Macmillan’s government. ‘You’re finished then’, was Heath’s cold response.26
Whatever words were actually used on that occasion, there was a lasting resentment between the two men. A further cause of enmity was that Neave felt he had been unfairly denied a knighthood. This was a grievance shared by several other non-‘Knights of the Shires’. The impression was given that Airey Neave was energised into hyperactive plotting against Heath for reasons that were more personal than political.
Willie Whitelaw, Keith Joseph and Edward du Cann were all approached by Airey Neave with the offer of his services as their campaign manager. The spectrum of views held by these potential contestants suggests that Neave’s overtures to them were not motivated by ideological constraints. His primary objective was to get rid of Heath.
In this role Neave had done well, with the assistance of his friend Nigel Fisher,# in collecting almost seventy pledged supporters for du Cann. The scorecard was far from reliable due to the duplicity of many members of the electorate. Even so, Neave’s figures were at least three times better than the much vaguer list of supporters Margaret Thatcher’s fey and rather ineffective PPS, Fergus Montgomery, claimed were for her.
In mid-January 1975, the rumours, numbers, odds and runners were sharply clarified by the game-changing withdrawal of Edward du Cann. But only Margaret and Denis Thatcher and Edward du Cann knew it was coming. A few hours before the public announcement, Neave had a conversation with Bill Shelton, the MP for Streatham, who was counting the Thatcher pledges, suggesting that they should come to ‘some arrangement’, by which du Cann’s votes could be merged with her votes. The agreement was easily reached and consisted of Shelton stepping down to a number two role and Neave being appointed as the number one campaign manager. All it required was the approval of the candidate herself.
Airey Neave came to see Margaret Thatcher after a late-night division at the House on 15 January. In the manner of a George Smiley, he asked who was running her campaign. Entering into the spirit of dissimulation, she replied that she did not really have a campaign. It is hard to decide whether the question or the answer was more disingenuous. What happened next, by Margaret Thatcher’s account, was: ‘Airey said: “I think I had better do it for you.” I agreed with enthusiasm. I knew this meant he would swing as many du Cann supporters as possible behind me.’27
Her instant trust in Airey Neave was surprising after the way he had been hawking himself around to other candidates. But she had known and liked him ever since their first encounters at meetings of the Conservative Candidates Association in 1950–1951. They had been in the same chambers at the bar. All her life she had a romantic view of war heroes and secret-service operatives. For her, he was the right man at the right time.
With the appointment of Airey Neave to run her campaign, Margaret Thatcher’s leadership prospects were transformed. She was no longer a stalking horse, but a serious runner with credible supporters, organisers and voters. No one could be sure what was going to happen in round one or round two (if it came to that) of the ballot. But the sheer unpredictability of the contest made her an exciting candidate as the end game began.
A STUNNING RESULT ON THE FIRST BALLOT
For the next three weeks, events moved at break-neck speed. Airey Neave ran by far the subtlest and smoothest campaign. Its key ingredients were discreet canvassing, accurate counting, confidential meetings with the candidate and calculated misinformation. By contrast, Heath met no undecided MPs on a one-to-one basis. He felt it demeaning to solicit votes. When he came to conduct a Christmas carol concert in Broadstairs, just before Christmas, I had a few moments alone with him and suggested he should talk to some of his new colleagues from the 1974 intakes, privately. ‘No I don’t think so, actually’, he replied. ‘They all know where I stand.’28
On reflection he relented, allowing his Parliamentary Private Secretary Tim Kitson to organise a series of dinners in a private room at Bucks Club throughout January. These were stilted affairs, attended by around twenty colleagues at a time, with deferential questions from the guests and wooden answers from the leader. The exercise did little or nothing to change the long-held feelings of animosity towards Heath that had been nurtured by so many for so long.
Just before nominations closed, Hugh Fraser threw his hat into the ring. For a while, this was thought to be a blow to the Thatcher camp, who feared that their candidate’s votes would be siphoned off to him. But such fears were misplaced. Although he had been an effective Secretary of State in Macmillan’s government, he was not a serious contender. A romantic Highlander, the younger brother of Lord Lovat, Fraser was a mixture of original ideas, quixotic ambition and a tendency to knock over the card table when he was holding the aces. Unfortunately, at this stage of his career he held no court cards, let alone aces.
Hugh Fraser was contemptuous of Heath but cautiously admiring towards Thatcher. Nevertheless, he felt Britain was not ready for a woman prime minister, particularly one who had shown so little interest in foreign affairs, a frequently heard complaint against her. But he thought Margaret Thatcher’s time might yet come and that she would make a good Chancellor of the Exchequer in a future government headed by Willie Whitelaw.
That last opinion was being increasingly voiced by Tory MPs who had been listening to Margaret Thatcher’s speeches on the Finance Bill. The best of these came on 22 January when she was leading the opposition’s attack on the Budget proposals for a Capital Transfer Tax.
In the early part of the debate she had attacked Denis Healey with a staunch defence of the right of families to pass on inheritance from generation to generation. ‘Why does the Chancellor take such objection to such efforts for one’s children?’ she asked. ‘Some think of it as a duty and a privilege.’29
Responding in the wind-up of the debate the following day, Healey counter-attacked her use of the word privilege, using a colourful metaphor. Comparing Margaret Thatcher to the legendary heroine of the Spanish Civil War, he mockingly described her as ‘La Pasionara of privilege’, who had decided to ‘see her party tagged as the party of the rich few’.30
In the midst of an uproar of points of order, Margaret Thatcher came back with a knockout blow. ‘Some Chancellors are macroeconomic. Other Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap.’31
Her back-benchers roared approval, chanting ‘cheap, cheap, cheap’ at the discomfited Healey, who looked as crestfallen as a school bully who had been thrown to the ground by a girl wrestler.
The Conservatives were electrified by this momentary surge in their morale. Margaret Thatcher instinctively turned up the voltage, delivering a final flurry of thunderbolts at the Capital Transfer Tax which she denounced because it would affect ‘not only the one in a thousand to whom he referred but everyone, including people born like I was with no privilege at all. It will affect us as well as the Socialist millionaires.’
Her conclusion was that CTT would damage private businesses, farming, woodlands and shipping; and it would also damage
the very nature of our society by concentrating power and property in the hands of the State … We believe that the future of freedom is inseparable from a wide distribution of private property among the people … We can say little for this tax. It should be withdrawn.32
The vehemence of this four-word crescendo would have delighted her old Oxford speaking tutor, Mrs Gatehouse.
Many of us listening from the backbenches to this fighting speech saw that Margaret Thatcher had seized the initiative in the leadership contest. Up to this moment the campaign had been a prosaic affair characterised by grubby attempts at character assassination, unsuccessful efforts to persuade the unwilling to stand and dubious number counting. Suddenly a passionate candidate had lifted the battle to the higher ground of beliefs and principles.
The Tory party of the mid-1970s had become
mired in defeatism. Buffeted by events and outmanoeuvred by union militancy it had lost its confidence. On that day in the House of Commons Margaret Thatcher was an inspirational force. Her crushing of Healey was the talk of the tea room for the next few hours. So was her championship of inheritance, family businesses and private property as essential ingredients in what she called ‘the future of freedom’.
I recall Teddy Taylor, the MP for Glasgow Cathcart, saying ‘we’ve heard the voice of leadership today’, as he declared he would probably vote for her. This was a considerable surprise, for Teddy Taylor was thought to be a loyal admirer of Heath, even though he had resigned as a junior minister from his government on the issue of devolution. It was one of several indications that Margaret Thatcher’s speech had turned votes in her favour. The press gallery caught the new mood too. The Times reported, ‘Far fewer members … are speaking dismissively of a woman’s candidature for the party leadership than they did a fortnight ago, when she announced her challenge’.33
With less than two weeks to go until the first ballot, Airey Neave and his core group of six or seven ardent Thatcherites began canvassing with skill and sophistication. It was the ideal role for an intelligence officer well versed in the tradecraft of deceiving the enemy. Neave’s basic tactic was to pretend that his candidate was not gaining enough ground, and to tell all and sundry that ‘Ted’s bound to win’.34 These predictions upset a good many colleagues who thought little of Margaret Thatcher, but would like to see Willie Whitelaw, Jim Prior, Francis Pym or A.N. Other take over the leadership. Norman Tebbit was one of Neave’s key lieutenants in the dark art of persuading the electorate to vote for Thatcher in order to open up the contest for a second ballot. ‘I talked round quite a few colleagues into voting for Margaret on these grounds’, he recalled. One of these voters, according to Tebbit, was Michael Heseltine.35
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 22
