Just before the speech started a highly nervous Margaret Thatcher said to Ronnie Millar, ‘I wish it was over’. He thought: ‘She looked young and vulnerable and pretty and scared. I felt suddenly protective.’6
When it was finished she was at first uplifted by the acclamation. But two hours later she plunged herself into the depths of insecurity about whether she could repeat the performance at next year’s conference. ‘Brighton could be the most dreadful anti-climax’, she fretted.7
According to Millar:
This was too much for Denis. ‘My God, woman, you’ve just had a bloody great triumph and here you are worrying yourself sick about next year! I’ll get the others, shall I? Then you can settle down for another all-night session. I mean, obviously, there’s no time to be lost …’ I slipped away. So long as she had this man around she was going to be all right.8
Further away from home, Margaret Thatcher delivered speeches of quality in New York, Washington, Zurich and Hanover. These visits broadened her experience of foreign policy as she started to meet international leaders of the day including Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl, future Chancellor of West Germany. All of them seemed fascinated to meet this new phenomenon among Western democracies, a potential woman prime minister, but not all were impressed.
Jimmy Carter, who normally declined to meet opposition leaders, welcomed her for a forty-five minute discourse in the Oval Office, but was surprised when she used two-thirds of it to argue what a mistake he was making with his efforts to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty.
One early American visitor to London was won over by the Thatcher energy and vision. He was US Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger, who breakfasted with her at Claridge’s a week after she had won the leadership election. He had been trying to meet her since 1972, on the recommendation of his wife Nancy.
Connecting for the first time on 18 February 1975, Kissinger was impressed by Margaret Thatcher’s ardent support for the ‘special relationship’ and her staunch anti-communism. She asked him what he thought was the major problem facing the world now that the Vietnam War was over. He mentioned the Latin American debt crisis. ‘Why is that a problem?’ she asked. ‘You borrow money. You have to pay it back.’9 She may have seemed simplistic in some of her opinions, but Kissinger saw the point of her, ahead of any other world statesman.
He sat down to breakfast with her expecting to be underwhelmed, since the night before one or two of his Tory grandee friends had filled him up with their views on Margaret Thatcher which were ‘distinctly jaundiced’.10 But the US Secretary of State was impressed by her forthright personality. Even so he retained doubts, planted by his UK establishment friends, about her electability. Three months after the Claridge’s meeting Kissinger advised President Gerald Ford, ‘I don’t think Margaret Thatcher will last’.11 This view of the Leader of the Opposition’s prospects evidently improved for during the years 1976–1978 Kissinger organised dinner parties in honour of Margaret Thatcher every time she came to Washington. His guests were luminaries of the foreign-policy establishment, such as Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar; senior White House aides; editors from Time, Newsweek and the New York Times; Kay Graham, the owner of the Washington Post; and the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Warren Earl Burger.
One of the reasons why Henry and Nancy Kissinger went out of their way to be so hospitable was that they were irritated on her behalf by the lack of hospitality extended to her by the British Ambassador to Washington, Peter Jay. This criticism may have been misplaced. Jay seems to have done his best to be helpful on Margaret Thatcher’s visits to Washington. But if there was a certain coolness between the Ambassador and the Leader of the Opposition, it was understandable. For Peter Jay was a political appointee with unusually close connections to the Labour government. His father-in-law, James Callaghan, was the new Prime Minister. He presented a formidable obstacle to Margaret Thatcher’s progress.
OUTMANOEUVRED BY JAMES CALLAGHAN
It might have been predicted that the unexpected retirement of Harold Wilson in March 1976 would have helped Margaret Thatcher. Far from it. Her performances from the despatch box became noticeably worse as she went head to head with James Callaghan.
She got off to a bad start on the day Wilson announced his departure. It was an occasion when the traditions of the House expected the Leader of the Opposition to join graciously in the tributes to the retiring Prime Minister. Instead, she completely misread the mood and slipped into partisan jibes demanding an immediate election. It was a mistake that brought frowns from her own side and protests from Labour. The word in the tea room afterwards was that she had showed no feel for Parliament.
This word increased as she lost clash after clash with Callaghan. His technique was to don the mantle of a wise elder statesman brushing aside the clamourings of an over-eager challenger. His condescension infuriated her. ‘I am sure that one day the right hon. Lady will understand these things a little better’, was his patronising put-down when she tried to interrogate him about government borrowing.12
As Callaghan’s authority in the House increased, she had greater difficulty in penetrating his armour. On one occasion she attacked him for his ‘avuncular flannel’, but he genially brushed her aside: ‘I have often thought of the right hon. Lady in many ways, but never as my niece.’13
Although Callaghan’s flannelling was surprisingly successful, the Labour government hit a dangerous rock in March 1977. The devolution issue turned sour when it lost the support of Welsh and Scottish Nationalist MPs. This caused parliamentary chaos for a while. Margaret Thatcher tabled a motion of no confidence. But Callaghan was able to cobble up a deal with the Liberals. Some Conservative back-benchers thought their leader should have done the same. She was adamantly opposed to the thought, saying privately, ‘never, but never, would I consider a coalition from which could only come irresolute and debilitating government’.14
Callaghan’s deal, later called the Lib–Lab pact, saved his government and enabled him to defeat the opposition’s motion with some ease. He was helped by Margaret Thatcher’s opening speech in the debate, which by her own admission was one of the worst she ever made. It produced many negative reactions. I remember the grimaces and cringes on our back benches as she faltered through her mediocre script.
‘They’ll be passing a no confidence motion on us after this’, muttered the MP for Canterbury, David Crouch, amidst the half-hearted ‘hear, hears’ when Mrs Thatcher resumed her seat.15
In the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery an eminent Washington columnist Joseph Alsop was listening to the debate. I had tea with him afterwards in the Pugin Room. ‘I came because I heard she was the great white hope’, drawled Alsop. ‘I’m going away thinking she’s not up to it.’16
Joe Alsop’s opinion was becoming the received wisdom in sceptical Tory circles. Edward du Cann, keeping his ear to the ground among Conservative MPs, recalled ‘continuous and considerable sniping against Margaret by a wide spectrum of the colleagues … a recurring theme among several of them was “we’ve made a mistake: how can we undo it?”’17
One way of undoing it, which received a surprising amount of support, was the notion of a government of national unity. This had been floated first by Ted Heath when he was sinking towards defeat in October 1974. In the 1976–1978 period it was revived by various eminent business leaders, by The Times and even by Harold Macmillan, who broke thirteen years of ex-prime ministerial silence. Margaret Thatcher went to see him a few days later ‘to see what he really thought’.18 Their meeting was not a great success. She called it ‘pleasantly inconclusive’. He returned from it to Chatsworth, where his hostess the Duchess of Devonshire asked him, ‘Did you talk?’ ‘No, she did’, was Macmillan’s tart response.19
The general populace, however, did appear ready to listen to Margaret Thatcher’s message. She continued her practice of campaigning alongside the Conservative candi
date in by-elections, and enjoyed a string of successes as large Labour majorities were overturned in seats as diverse as Walsall North, Workington, Stetchford and Ashfield. Her arguments for reining back public spending were gaining ground, apparently even within the Labour government. For the Chancellor, Denis Healey, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had to implement a stringent programme of expenditure cuts, while Jim Callaghan bravely told his party conference that governments could no longer spend their way out of a recession.
The feeling that the Conservatives were winning the debate, in the country if not in the House of Commons, was confirmed by a succession of encouraging opinion polls. The most favourable of these, which showed a leap in the Tory lead over Labour to a margin of 48–39 per cent, came after Margaret Thatcher made a calculated intervention on the taboo subject of immigration.
Ever since the furore created by Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, the rising level of voter concern about immigration numbers had become the ‘elephant in the room’ of British politics. For nearly ten years there was an uneasy silence from the Tory front bench on race and immigration issues. The Shadow Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw spoke, if at all, on the subject in woolly bromides.
On 27 January 1978, without any consultation with her colleagues, Margaret Thatcher answered a question about immigration on World in Action with unusual clarity:
People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture … So, if you want good race relations, you have got to allay people’s fears on numbers … So, we do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration, except of course, for compassionate cases. Therefore we have to look at the numbers who have a right to come in.20
Coming two days after an episode of racial violence in Wolverhampton, the emotive word ‘swamped’ caused excitable reaction. The Chancellor, Denis Healey, accused Margaret Thatcher of ‘stirring up the muddy waters of racial prejudice’. The Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, claimed she was ‘making respectable racial hatred’. The Liberal Party leader, David Steel, said that her remarks were ‘really quite wicked’.21 Willie Whitelaw was furious and briefly considered resignation.
But whatever the political elite was saying, the public reacted favourably. The 11 per cent surge to the Tories in the opinion polls, an unexpected win for the Conservative candidate in the Ilford North by-election and other evidence from market research organisations all confirmed that Margaret Thatcher had struck a populist chord. Even though the Conservative Party’s policy on immigration hardly changed, it sounded as though its leader wanted a new approach. She had followed her instincts, defied her colleagues and successfully made her point. This was to be a pattern she repeated many more times both in opposition and in government. The element of surprise in Margaret Thatcher’s personality was beginning to be appreciated.
NEW POLICIES AND PHILOSOPHIES
During her four years as Leader of the Opposition there was a constant tug of war between two perceptions of Margaret Thatcher. The positive perception was that of a conviction politician who was gradually winning support from the electorate by her courageous openness to new ideas about how to tackle Britain’s decline. The negative image of her, ardently promoted by her opponents, portrayed her as the stereotype of a narrow, shrill, suburban right-winger who could never win an election.
This tug of war was not resolved until the ‘winter of discontent’ in early 1979. In the meantime, the debate about her raged on with peaks and troughs on both sides of the argument.
One of the first peaks, which led to a short-term surge in her support, was her attack on the Soviet Union. This was delivered in two speeches on home Tory territory, to an audience of the faithful in Kensington and Chelsea. Until these broadsides, she had been noticeably cautious in foreign-policy matters. She had dutifully supported NATO and the Anglo-American alliance, while rather less dutifully campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC. But when she came out as a critic of Soviet expansion and portrayed herself as a passionate opponent of détente, she ruffled many feathers, not least in her own shadow cabinet.
Margaret Thatcher had a long history, going back to her Grantham days, of attacking communism. In her Chelsea speech, inspired by the writings of Herbert Agar, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, she championed the predicament of dissidents in the Soviet Union. She warned that on this subject the Helsinki Agreement consisted of vague words rather than clear action.
In her Kensington speech six months later, she went much further, attacking the Soviet military build-up around the world:
She’s [Russia’s] ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted determined men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen… . The men in the Soviet politburo don’t have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one sense – the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms.22
The men in the Soviet politburo were not amused by this unexpected onslaught from a Western political leader. They disliked being described as ‘a dictatorship’ and resented the challenge to their détente and defence strategy. Affronted by Margaret Thatcher, they decided to counter-attack with ridicule. A few days after her speech, the Soviet army newspaper Red Star came up with the worst insult they could think of. They dubbed her the ‘Iron Lady’.23
The epithet made headlines around the world. Margaret Thatcher revelled in it. ‘They never did me a greater favour’, she commented.24 In the polls, her leadership rating climbed by seven points. She was hailed as a heroine of anti-Sovietism around the world from the dissidents of Eastern Europe to the leaders of China. But the speech played unfavourably inside her shadow cabinet.
Reggie Maudling, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, had already had one private row with her about making anti-Moscow speeches without consulting him. Now he protested even more vehemently against her ‘violent and sustained attack on the Soviet Government’.25 It is likely that several other members of the shadow cabinet agreed with him, for it was the general view of the foreign-policy establishment that détente with the Soviet Union should be supported.
Maudling was out of sympathy with his leader on incomes policy, trade-union reform and now on her policy towards the Soviet Union. To make matters worse, he made a joke – apparently at her expense – at a shadow cabinet meeting in November 1976. She reported to her colleagues that she had been unimpressed by the President-elect of the United States, Jimmy Carter, at their first meeting, ‘but sometimes the job can make the man’.
‘Yes,’ observed Reggie Maudling, ‘I remember Winston’s remark – if you feed a grub on royal jelly, it will grow into a Queen Bee.’
His jibe produced an icy stare from Margaret Thatcher and suppressed mirth among several colleagues. ‘I did not fancy Reggie’s chances in the next reshuffle’, commented Jim Prior.26
This prediction came true a few weeks later when Maudling was sacked from the front bench after an angry encounter in which she told him, ‘You’re getting in my way’.27
The same thought was in her mind when she moved Michael Heseltine from his portfolio at Industry where his interventionist views were at odds with hers. He reluctantly accepted a less palatable role as Shadow Environment Secretary but only after extracting a pledge that he would not be appointed to this post in government.
Two weeks later, the Shadow Scottish Secretary Alick Buchanan-Smith resigned in disagreement with Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to Scottish devolution. His right-wi
ng replacement, Teddy Taylor, was on the opposite side of the issue to Willie Whitelaw and Francis Pym who were supporters of devolution. Other discordant voices, particularly Ian Gilmour (Shadow Defence Secretary) and Jim Prior (Shadow Employment Secretary), were critical of the opposition’s far from clear policies on the economy and the trade unions. One way and another the shadow cabinet was not a happy ship.
To a small group of insiders it was clear that Margaret Thatcher was passionate about reversing Britain’s decline with radical new policies on the unions and the economy. But she was too cautious to allow her real thinking on these issues to surface in the shape of policy commitments.
On the unions, she encouraged two informal advisers, John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, to produce a paper titled Stepping Stones, which advocated a confrontational strategy. Its main policy suggestions were legislation to outlaw the closed shop, secondary picketing and legal immunities for the trade unions. Even when presented in the mildest of forms, this agenda sharply divided the shadow cabinet. Peter Thorneycroft, Jim Prior, Ian Gilmour, Lord Carrington and Francis Pym did their best to block Stepping Stones, even though it had the backing of Keith Joseph, Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe and the leader herself.
John Hoskyns recalled:
Margaret’s heart was entirely in the right place in supporting our radical reforms, but she never allowed Stepping Stones to be published, nor did she accept its ideas publicly until the Winter of Discontent had completely changed the climate of public opinion. So until late 1978 we were just going round in impotent circles on union reform, even though she knew all too well what had to be done.28
This same mixture of private radicalism and public caution prevailed in Margaret Thatcher’s mixed messages on the economy. Off the record, when speaking to small gatherings of colleagues, she communicated her support for free markets, free wage bargaining, lower taxes, the abolition of exchange controls, big reductions in public expenditure and tight control of the money supply. But the specifics of these virtues were not openly spelt out by her. The only policy document the Conservative Party produced while she was Leader of the Opposition was The Right Approach (1977). She herself called it ‘a fudge – but temporarily palatable’.29
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 26
