Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography

by Margaret Thatcher

  But I also needed a full-time head of my office, who had to be industrious, dependable and, with the number of speeches, articles and letters to draft, above all literate. It was my old friend and colleague, providentially translated to the editorship of the Daily Telegraph, Bill Deedes who suggested Richard Ryder, then working on Peterborough, the Telegraph’s respectable gossip column.

  A month after Richard’s arrival Gordon Reece, on secondment from EMI for a year, joined my full-time staff to help in dealing with the press and much else. Gordon was a godsend. An ebullient former TV producer whose good humour never failed, he was able to jolly me along to accept things I would have rejected from other people. His view was that in getting my message across we must not concentrate simply on heavyweight newspapers, The Times and the Daily Telegraph, but be just as concerned about the mid-market populars, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express and – the real revolution – about the Sun and the News of the World. Moreover, he believed that even newspapers which supported the Labour Party in their editorial line would be prepared to give us fair treatment if we made a real attempt to provide them with interesting copy. He was right on both counts. The Sun and the News of the World were crucial in communicating Conservative values to traditionally non-Conservative voters. The left-wing Sunday Mirror also gave me fair and full coverage, however critical the comments. Gordon regularly talked to the editors. But he also persuaded me that the person they really wanted to see and hear from was me. So, whatever the other demands on my diary, when Gordon said that we must have lunch with such-and-such an editor, that was the priority.

  Gordon also performed another invaluable service. Every politician has to decide how much he or she is prepared to change manner and appearance for the sake of the media. It may sound grittily honourable to refuse to make any concessions, but such an attitude in a public figure is most likely to betray a lack of seriousness about winning power or even, paradoxically, the pride that apes humility. When Gordon suggested some changes in my style of hair and clothes in order to make a better impression, he was calling upon his experience in television. ‘Avoid lots of jewellery near the face. Edges look good on television. Watch out for background colours which clash with your outfit.’ It was quite an education.

  There was also the matter of my voice. In the House of Commons one has to speak over the din to get a hearing. This is more difficult the higher the pitch of one’s voice, because in increasing its volume one automatically goes up the register. This poses an obvious problem for most women. Somehow one has to learn to project the voice without shrieking.

  Even outside the House, when addressing an audience my voice was naturally high-pitched, which can easily become grating and I had deliberately tried to lower its tone. The result, unfortunately, was to give me a sore throat – an even greater problem for a regular public speaker. Gordon found me an expert who knew that the first thing to do was to get your breathing right, and then to speak not from the back of the throat but from the front of the mouth. She was a genius. Her sympathetic understanding for my difficulties was only matched by that for her ailing cat. Unfortunately, the cat would sometimes fall sick just before my lesson and force its cancellation. Fortunately, I too like cats. And so we finished the course.

  On one occasion Gordon took me to meet Sir Laurence Olivier to see whether he had any tips. He was quite complimentary, telling me that I had a good gaze out to the audience, which was important, and that my voice was perfectly all right, which – no thanks to the cat – it now probably was.

  Getting all these things right took me several months. But all in all the general system never let me down. The real political tests of Opposition leadership, however, still lay ahead.

  My first real experience of the public aspects of being Leader of the Opposition came when I visited Scotland on Friday 21 February. From the time that I stepped off the aircraft at Edinburgh Airport, where a waggish piper played ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’, I received an enthusiastic Scottish welcome.

  I could always be sure of a friendly reception from grassroots Scottish Tories, whose embattled position seems to sharpen their zeal. More generally, however, the honeymoon did not last long and ordinary political life resumed with a vengeance. The opinion polls, which in February had given the Conservatives a 4 percentage point lead over Labour, showed a 2 per cent Labour lead just a month later – not statistically significant perhaps, but a check on any premature tendency to euphoria. It also soon became clear that powerful elements in the Party were out to make trouble for me. In early April Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath made speeches to a conference of Young Conservatives, warning against shifting the Conservative Party to the right. The European referendum campaign placed the focus on European issues, and this in turn gave a fillip to advocates of coalition government. All this created more difficulties for me.

  My first major parliamentary performance, in which I crossed swords with Harold Wilson, in a debate on the economy on Thursday 22 May, was heavily and justly criticized for not spelling out convincingly the Conservative alternative. The difficulty was that at this point we had no credible alternative to offer. Imprisoned by the requirement of defending the indefensible record of the Heath Government, we were unable as yet to break through to a proper free market alternative.

  Even so, on this and several other occasions I did not make a good speech. Leading for the Opposition in set-piece debates, one is not able to make a wide-ranging speech on the basis of a few notes, something which I was good at. The root of all our problems, however, lay in the unresolved contradictions of policy.

  In March 1975 we discussed a paper from Keith and Angus on policy-making. They proposed involving both backbench committees and sympathetic outside experts; and this was accepted. The number of policy groups continued to multiply. They were generally chaired by the relevant front-bench spokesmen. Geoffrey Howe’s Economic Reconstruction Group was the main forum for hashing over economic policy. From time to time, there would be whole-day Shadow Cabinet policy discussions, which I myself would chair. The full Shadow Cabinet approved, rather than devised, policy on the basis of papers put to it by the chief Shadow spokesmen and their policy groups.

  The Centre for Policy Studies and a range of outside advisers, particularly on economic matters, fed in ideas and suggestions to Keith and me (Keith also had a number of lunchtime meetings with other Shadow Cabinet colleagues on policy). And on top of all that I would sometimes advance a new policy in a speech or interview – not always to the applause of my colleagues.

  As a system of decision-taking the structure had a somewhat ramshackle feel to it. But then, no amount of institutional neatness could resolve the fundamental questions we had to decide. The fact that by the time we took office in May 1979 so many of the big issues had been satisfactorily resolved, and Shadow ministers had as clear an idea of their priorities as any incoming post-war British Government, shows that in the most important sense this policy-making system ‘worked’.

  The foremost policy issue was how to deal with inflation, which soared to 26.9 per cent in August 1975 before beginning to fall, going below 10 per cent in January 1978. Discussion of how inflation was caused and cured also necessarily involved making a judgement about the Heath Government. If inflation was the result of an increase in the money supply, which takes approximately eighteen months to work through in the form of higher prices, then the prime responsibility for the high inflation during the first eighteen months or so of the Labour Government should be laid at the door of the Conservatives. If, however, the cause of high inflation was excessive wage awards after the collapse of the previous Conservative Government’s incomes policy and Labour’s abdication of authority to the trade unions, then political life in Opposition would be easier. We might not have any credible solutions to offer, but we could at least blame everything on the Government. This approach was likely to be favoured by those of my colleagues who prided themselves on being sceptics about all kinds of economi
c theory. In fact, the case that the Heath Government’s monetary incontinence was to blame for inflation seemed to me convincingly argued by Alan Walters, whose devastating indictment and predictions were circulated by Keith as background for a discussion with Shadow Cabinet colleagues in March 1975. But if I had publicly accepted this it would have provoked even more trouble from Ted Heath and his supporters.

  Our failure to be explicit about the overriding importance of monetary policy did, however, open up our flank to attack on incomes policy. For if wage rises were the cause of inflation, then how would we in government be able to contain such rises?

  The October 1974 Conservative manifesto had committed the Party to seek a voluntary policy for prices and incomes, with the qualification that it might be necessary to move to a statutory policy if voluntary support were not achieved. I could only gradually wean the Party away from this position. My task was made more difficult both by the fact that wages and prices were soaring alarmingly, and by Ted Heath and Peter Walker putting me under heavy public pressure to support successive stages of the Labour Government’s incomes policy. In an interview with Robin Day in May 1975 I said that under some circumstances a pay freeze might be necessary, but not as a prelude to a permanent statutory incomes policy. Wages had, after all, been growing at some 30 per cent a year since Labour took office. But I never saw even a short wage freeze as having more than a transitional role in any realistic strategy to bring down inflation, which must be based on control of the money supply and government borrowing. In fact, there were already some early signs that the Government had woken up to the need for some financial discipline. The April 1975 budget announced cuts in planned spending levels and raised the basic rate of income tax by two pence – to 35 per cent – in order to reduce the swelling deficit which was expected to reach £9,000 million in 1975/76.

  If public expenditure was one aspect of the debate about counter-inflation policy, trade union power was another. On this matter, the line-up in the Shadow Cabinet over these years was slightly different from that on the question of voluntary/statutory incomes policy versus ‘free collective bargaining’. Geoffrey Howe was the most consistently hawkish on trade unions. Right from the beginning he emphasized in our discussions the need to shift the balance of power in industrial relations: indeed, I suspect that he would ideally have liked to get back to the Industrial Relations Act framework which he had devised. Keith Joseph and I shared that approach, though I remained extremely wary about committing ourselves to more changes than we could deliver. Jim Prior and most of the other Shadow Cabinet members could be found in the opposite camp.

  On incomes policy, however, Geoffrey and Jim, supported by Ian Gilmour, were the strongest advocates of some kind of national understanding with the trade unions. Geoffrey’s view was that we should seek to emulate the alleged successes of the West German approach of ‘concerted action’, whose purpose was to educate ‘both sides’ of industry in the realities of the state of the economy and win some kind of consent to limit wages. This did not in itself involve a renunciation of monetarism, to which Geoffrey, in contrast with Jim and Ian, was increasingly committed. But it did involve a large element of corporatism and centralized economic decision-making, to which Keith was fiercely opposed and which I too disliked.

  The most convinced opponent of monetarism and all its works was Reggie Maudling who, when he put his mind to it, actually had the grasp of economics to give his arguments weight. Reggie was the most ardently committed to a statutory incomes policy. As he put it in a dissenting paper to the Shadow Cabinet in May: ‘To the economic purist, no doubt, prices are only a symptom of inflation, but to us as politicians they are the real problem, because it is rising prices that are breaking the country in half.’ With such divisions in our midst it is not surprising that for much of the time our economic policies were felt to lack coherence.

  The difficulties I had faced in the Economic Debate on Thursday 22 May – when for these reasons I had not been able to present a coherent alternative to government policy – persuaded me of the urgent need to sort out our position. Further public differences confirmed this. In June I spoke to the Welsh Party Conference in Aberystwyth, expressing strong reservations about statutory wage controls: the same day Reggie Maudling spoke in Chislehurst implying that we might support a statutory policy. A few days later Keith made a speech casting severe doubt on the value of even a wage freeze, suggesting that it would be used as an excuse for not cutting public spending and taking the other necessary economic steps. On the same day Peter Walker called for a statutory pay policy – and was himself rebutted by Keith, who said bluntly that wage freezes did not work. Not surprisingly, Conservative splits figured large in the press. The fact that these divisions were more than replicated on the Government side was of only limited comfort.

  I found from my own soundings that Conservative opinion in the country was strongly opposed to employers having to bear the brunt of anti-inflation measures. Our supporters wanted us to be tough on Labour. The following day the Backbench Finance Committee met and Bill Shelton reported to me their concerns. While very few wanted us to vote against the Government’s package outright, there was widespread anxiety lest by supporting it we would also be endorsing a continuation of the socialist programme.

  At Shadow Cabinet on Monday 7 July, Jim Prior and Keith Joseph argued their conflicting cases. But the crucial question was still which Division Lobby the Party should enter, if any. By now the safest, if least glorious, course appeared to be to abstain. The risk was that such a tactic would dismay both wings of the Parliamentary Party and we could find ourselves with a three-way split.

  Whatever the tactics to employ, I also needed to be clear in my own mind whether the Healey measures were a genuine step towards financial discipline or a smokescreen. So the day after the Shadow Cabinet discussion I had a working supper in my room in the House with Willie, Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and a number of economists and City experts, including people like Alan Walters, Brian Griffiths, Gordon Pepper and Sam Brittan who were in regular touch with me and on whose opinions I set a high value.* Although we would have to look at the package as a whole, especially the monetary and fiscal side, as Geoffrey said at the start of the evening, I came away feeling still less inclined to lend support to flimsy and possibly harmful proposals.

  The White Paper, containing the details, was published on Friday 11 July. It was, as expected, a curate’s egg, containing measures like cash limits which we approved but not matching these with any real public expenditure cuts. The centrepiece was a £6 limit on pay increases for the coming year. The most astonishing omission was that the Government refused to publish the draft Bill it claimed to have drawn up which would introduce statutory controls if the voluntary limits were ignored. By the time it came to a vote, backbench and Shadow Cabinet opinion favoured abstention and this was now agreed. My own speech in the debate did not go particularly well – unsurprisingly, given the protean case I had to present. That might have been awkward, but Ted bailed me out by regretting that we were not supporting the Government and then refusing to back our critical amendment.

  If one good thing came out of these travails, it was that the Shadow Cabinet was pushed towards an agreed line on incomes policy. This was that the conquest of inflation required that all economic policies must be pulling in the same anti-inflationary direction, in particular public spending and monetary policy. An incomes policy might play a useful part as one of a comprehensive package of policies, but was not to be considered as an alternative to the others, and could not be expected to achieve much on its own. While hardly qualifying as an original (or even true) economic insight, this at least provided a temporary refuge.

  In any case, the Government’s July package was rightly judged to be insufficient to deal with the looming economic crisis. Inflation that summer reached an all-time high of 26.9 per cent.

  We fled to Brittany in August for a holiday canal-cruising. I was still away when Harold
Wilson launched the incomes policy in a television broadcast asking people to give ‘a year for Britain’ by sticking to the £6 limit. In my absence, Willie Whitelaw replied the following evening giving this nonsense a rather warmer welcome than I could have been persuaded to do.

  In spite of the difficulties I had faced in the months since I became Leader, I approached that autumn’s Party Conference in reasonably good spirits. Ted and his friends seemed likely to continue being as difficult as possible, but my foreign visits had boosted my own standing. The Government’s economic policy was in ruins. The Conservatives were 23 per cent ahead of Labour, according to a pre-Conference opinion poll. The task at Blackpool was to consolidate all this by showing that I could command the support of the Party in the country.

  The Leader’s speech at a Party Conference is quite unlike the Conference speeches of other front-bench spokesmen. It has to cover a sufficiently wide number of subjects to avoid the criticism that one has ‘left out’ some burning issue. Yet each section of the speech has to have a thematic correspondence with all the other sections. Otherwise, you finish up with what I used to call a ‘Christmas tree’, on which pledges and achievements are hung and where each new topic is classically announced by the mind-numbing phrase ‘I now turn to …’

  I told my speech writers that I was not going to make just an economic speech. The economy had gone wrong because something else had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically. The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation. But when I discussed the kind of draft I wanted with Chris Patten and others from the Research Department, I felt they were just not getting the message I wanted to dispatch. So I sat down over the weekend and wrote out sixty pages of my large handwriting. I found no difficulty: it flowed and flowed. But was it a speech? I was redrafting on Sunday morning when Woodrow Wyatt – a former Labour MP turned entrepreneur, author, sympathizer and close friend – telephoned. I told him what I was doing and he suggested I come round to his house for supper so that he could look at it. The experienced journalist’s eye saw all that I had not. So the two of us began to cut and shape and reorganize. By the time I arrived in Blackpool I had the beginnings of a Conference speech. I also found that Chris Patten and others had written new material. We married the two and a first draft was accordingly produced.