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…’. A powerful speech of the sort required to inspire the Party faithful, as well as easing the worries of the doubters, is in some ways more like a piece of poetry than prose. Not that one should be tempted to use flowery language, but rather that it is the ideas, sentiments and mood below the surface which count. Material which could easily form a clear and persuasive article may be altogether inappropriate for a speech. And although one has to scrutinize a text to ensure the removal of dangerous ambiguities, an effective speech may afterwards read almost lamely in cold print. I was to learn all these things over the next few years. But I had barely begun to grasp them when I started work on my first Leader’s Conference speech in 1975.
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 despatch. So I sat down at home 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 reading it all through and 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.
It was Ted who had overturned the convention that the Party Leader only turned up at the end of the Conference, descending from on high to deliver his speech to an adoring, servile throng. I took this a stage further. As well as arriving early, I also, particularly on this first occasion, used every opportunity to meet the constituency representatives, whose loyalty I knew I would have to earn. In fact, I carried this to what the Conference organizers considered extreme lengths by spending my time talking to people down in the body of the hall when I was expected to be up on the platform.
In between receptions and visits to the debates I would go in to see how the speech-writers were proceeding. Adam Ridley helped with the economics. Angus Maude, who like Woodrow had the journalist’s knack of making material bright and interesting simply by reordering it, also came in from time to time. Richard Ryder was the keeper of the text. Gordon Reece’s expertise was in coaching me on how to deliver it, seeing for example that I did not cut short applause after a clap line by moving on too quickly — a perennial temptation for a speaker who is inexperienced or lacks confidence.
But by Wednesday it was clear to me that none of those working away in my suite was what in the jargon is known as a ‘wordsmith’. We had the structure, the ideas and even the foundations for some good jokes. But we needed someone with a feel for the words themselves who could make the whole text flow along. Gordon suggested that the playwright Ronnie Millar, who had drafted material in the past for Ted’s broadcasts, was the man to help. So the whole text was urgently sent to Ronnie to be (what I would always later describe as) ‘Ronnie-fled’. It came back transformed. More precisely, it came back a speech. Then there was more cutting and retyping throughout Thursday night. It was about 4.30 on Friday morning when the process was complete and I felt I could turn in for an hour or so’s sleep.
Earlier on Thursday evening, when I was reading through the latest draft, I had been called to the telephone to speak to Willie Whitelaw. Willie told me that Ted had arrived and was staying at the same hotel (the Imperial). His suite was a couple of floors below mine. For several months a number of Ted’s friends had been urging him to bury the hatchet. Willie, doubtless prompted by them, thought that this would be a perfect time for a reconciliation. He explained to me that pride was involved in these matters and Ted could not really come and see me. Would I therefore come and see him? I replied at once that of course I would. Willie said that that was ‘absolutely splendid’ and that he would ring me back to confirm. Meanwhile, I plunged back into the draft. About an hour and a half went by with no telephone call. Since it was now about 10 o’clock and there was still much to do on my speech, I thought that we must really get on with our ‘reconciliation’. So I rang Willie and asked what was happening. I was then told that Ted had had second thoughts. The hatchet would evidently remain unburied.
The Winter Gardens is a grand popular palace in the self-confident style of the mid-Victorians when Blackpool really blossomed into a seaside resort. It has cafés, restaurants, bars, a theatre and the Empress Ballroom where the main proceedings of the Tory Conference took place. ‘Ballroom’ scarcely does justice to the ornate and opulent splendour of the vast hall with its high ceilings, ample balcony, gilt, stucco and red plush. It has warmth and atmosphere that seem to welcome a speaker, and I always preferred it to the cold and clinical neatness of more modern conference facilities. The climax of the Conservative Conference creates a special electricity at Blackpool. For my part, though I had had almost no sleep, I was confident of my text and resolved to put everything into its delivery.
The speech had two main purposes. First, it was to contain a conclusive indictment not just of Labour policies or even the Labour Government, but rather of the whole socialist approach which was destructive of freedom. Secondly, I would use it to spell out a Conservative vision that did not merely employ phrases like ‘the free market’ and ‘personal independence’ for form’s sake, but took them seriously as the foundation of future policy. Reading it through almost twenty years later, there is nothing substantial that I would change — least of all the section about my personal creed and convictions.
Let me give you my vision: a man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master — these are the British inheritance… We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery — not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped… I believe that, just as each of us has an obligation to make the best of his talents, so governments have an obligation to create the framework within which we can do so… We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stop and with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough’.
I was relieved when, as I got into my speech, I began to be interrupted by applause and cheers. Fun is often poked at the stage-management of Conservative Conferences. But one can distinguish, if one has a mind to do so, between support which is genuine and that which is contrived. This struck me as genuine. It was also quite unlike any reception I had ever had myself and, so the commentators said, quite unlike the Conferences of recent years. I had apparently struck a chord, not so much by the way I delivered the speech as by the self-confident Conservative sentiments it expressed. The representatives on the floor were hearing their own opinions expressed from the platform and they responded with great enthusiasm. I picked up some of their excitement in turn. On both the floor and the platform there was a sense that something new was happening.
But would it play outside the Empress Ballroom? I hoped, and in my heart believed, that the Daily Mail’s leader comment on the contents of the speech was correct: ‘If this is “lu
rching to the right”, as her critics claim, 90 per cent of the population lurched that way long ago.’
By the end of that first year as Leader of the Opposition I felt that I had found my feet. I still had difficulties adjusting to my new role in the House of Commons. But I had established a good rapport with the Party in Parliament and in the country. I was pleased with the way my little team in the office were working together. I only wished the Shadow Cabinet could be persuaded to do likewise.
I had also settled into a new domestic routine. Denis had officially retired from Burmah, though his other business interests kept him fully occupied. The twins, now aged twenty-two, were living very much their own lives: Carol was finishing her training as a solicitor and would take a job as a journalist in Australia in 1977; Mark was continuing his accountancy training. Flood Street remained our London home. I would entertain there or, during the week when the House was sitting, in my room at the House of Commons.
A fortnight after the Party Conference we moved into the old dower flat in Scotney Castle at Lamberhurst (we had stayed in the village after selling ‘The Mount’, renting a flat at Court Lodge in the interim). Our friend Thelma Cazalet-Keir, a former MP who also had a flat there, often gave lunch parties and seemed to know everyone for miles around. My old friend Edward Boyle had a house not far away. Other neighbours were the Longfords, Edward Crankshaw (the historian of the Habsburgs) and Malcolm Muggeridge. But it was around Thelma Cazalet-Keir’s table that the most stimulating discussions occurred. It was a break from the intense, hothouse atmosphere of Westminster party politics. I would often come away determined to find out more about some topic or widen my reading. For example, in the course of a discussion of communism, Malcolm Muggeridge said that its whole mentality was spelt out in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. ‘Read it,’ he told me. I did, found he was right, and went on to delve more deeply into Russian thought and literature.
Our first Christmas at Scotney passed pleasantly enough. But I had no doubt that 1976 would be a testing year. Britain was in the grip of a serious economic crisis that in due course would draw the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into a direct role in running the British economy. The Labour Government was ill-equipped to deal with this, not least because it was on the verge of losing its already slim parliamentary majority. But we on the Conservative benches had difficulties in turning this situation to our advantage, notably because the trade unions were seen by people as all-powerful. So we were constantly put at a disadvantage by the question: How would you deal with the unions? Or more ominously: How would the unions deal with you?
On top of this there had been widespread criticism of the performance of the Shadow Cabinet, including of course my own, and I decided that some changes were necessary. I reshuffled the pack on 15 January 1976. Reshuffles in Opposition had strong elements of farce. The layout of the Leader of the Opposition’s suite of rooms in the Commons was such that it was almost impossible to manage the entrances and exits of fortunate and unfortunate colleagues with suitable delicacy. Embarrassing encounters were inevitable. But on this occasion there was not too much blood on the carpet.
I was delighted that John Biffen was now prepared to join the Shadow Cabinet as Energy spokesman. He had been perhaps the most eloquent and effective critic on the backbenches at the time of the Heath Government U-turn and I welcomed his presence. If the promotion of John Biffen demonstrated that we were serious about correcting the corporatist mistakes of the past, so the promotion of Douglas Hurd, one of Ted’s closest aides, to be Party spokesman on Europe, showed that whatever Ted himself might feel I had no grudges against those who had served him. I made Willie Shadow Home Secretary in place of Ian Gilmour, whom I moved to Defence where he proved an extremely robust and effective Shadow spokesman; if he had limited himself to that, life would have been easier for all concerned. The rest was musical chairs. Patrick Jenkin I moved sideways to Social Services, replacing Norman Fowler who became Transport spokesman outside the Shadow Cabinet. Francis Pym returned after his illness to Agriculture.
In the remodelled Shadow Cabinet we faced three major strategic problems. The first, already mentioned, was the question, repeated mantra-like by the commentators, ‘How will you get on with the trade unions if you form a government?’ We urgently had to come up with a convincing answer because, as 1976 wore on, there seemed an increasing possibility of the Labour Government collapsing.
Our problem was made worse because we could not rely on many of the large industrialists prominent in the CBI, whose nerve had been badly shaken by the three-day week and the Heath Government’s fall. Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and I met the CBI leaders in January 1976. We heard an extraordinary tale. CBI members would apparently be ‘horrified’ if we did not support the Government’s incomes policy. They themselves were committed to supporting a second and possibly a third year of it. They did not like dividend controls and they were desperate to break free of price controls. This was all well and good. But it was obvious that they were not being entirely candid either with me or with themselves. Not only were their nerves shaken; in their demoralized state, they were positively attracted to wage controls — and indeed to the entire corporatist paraphernalia of the ‘little neddys’ (the NEDC sector working parties). These men were managers who had lost all hope of the possibility of ever really managing their companies again.
I could not go along with such defeatism. Still, I was convinced by Jim Prior’s arguments that we had to show that we could, if we formed the government, achieve some sort of working relationship with the unions. I took up the theme in a speech in early February to the Young Conservatives in Scarborough, noting that ‘the bigger majority we have, the more it would be obvious that many members of trade unions have voted Conservative’. It would therefore ‘not be difficult to work with responsible trade union leadership’. Admittedly, this did not get us very far.
The following Friday, 13 February, we held an all-day Shadow Cabinet discussion, much of which was based on a paper by Jim Prior. This urged us both to show the electorate that the TUC was being consulted in the formation of our policies, and to show the TUC that those policies would bring prosperity and jobs. But could this be achieved without sacrificing necessary reforms? I had my doubts, but I kept stressing that we were both willing and able to get on with the trade unions, using interviews and speeches in February to do so. This caused some rumbles of discontent among my supporters on the right. But it was not their opposition which finally scuttled this approach, but the failure of the TUC to respond in any meaningful way. A year after Jim’s paper, in 1977, I met the leaders of the TUC privately for informal talks. The meeting itself was amicable enough, but not surprisingly there was no real meeting of minds. In any case, the Grunwick dispute and the controversy over the closed shop had by then begun to cast clouds over our relations.[39] Whatever the tactical benefits of the ‘opening’ to the trade unions in which Jim believed, it bore no worthwhile fruit. And when the Winter of Discontent came along in 1978/79, our bad relations with the TUC were a positive advantage.
Our second problem was how to use to best effect the steady shrinkage and final disappearance in April 1976 of the Government’s original majority of three over all other parties combined. This was obviously a help to the Opposition, but it contained hidden difficulties. The press were inclined to exaggerate our chances of actually defeating a Government which, after all, still had a considerable margin of votes over the Conservatives. So when some measure squeaked through, our supporters in the country became depressed and resentful and looked for someone to blame.
More important, our occasional victories did not seem to lead anywhere. The Government remained insecurely in place. On Wednesday 11 February (on the first anniversary of my becoming Leader) we won a division on a motion to reduce the Industry Secretary Eric Varley’s salary by £1,000 — a formal means of expressing rejection of policies. Then, in the midst of the sterling crisis of March 1976, the Government was defeated as a resu
lt of a left-wing revolt on a vote on its public expenditure plans. And, as one does on these occasions, I demanded that the Prime Minister should resign. I never imagined that he would. But the following Tuesday Harold Wilson did just that, letting me know of his decision in a note I received just before the announcement was made.
I can say little in favour of either of Harold Wilson’s terms as Prime Minister. Doubtless he had principles, but they were so obscured by artful dodging that it was difficult for friends and opponents alike to decide what they might be. Yet I regretted his departure for several reasons. I had always liked him personally, I had appreciated his sense of humour, and I was aware of his many kindnesses. He was a master of Commons repartee, and I usually scored nothing better than a draw against him in the House.
This would continue to be the case with his successor, Jim Callaghan. He adopted in the House a manner that appeared avuncular, was in fact patronizing and made it hard for me to advance serious criticism of Government policy without appearing to nag. In a larger sense, Mr Callaghan in those years was a sort of moderate disguise for his left-wing party and its trade union backers. As a result, he articulated views and attitudes — on education, family policy, law and order etc. — which were never embodied in government policy. Tactically brilliant, he was strategically unsuccessful — until eventually in the Winter of Discontent the entire house of cards that was Labour moderation collapsed. Until then, however, he proved extremely talented as a party manager; he had a real feel for public opinion during the three years he was Prime Minister; and under the pressure of economic crisis, he made a brave public break with the Keynesian economics that had underpinned Government policy since the war. He was a formidable opponent.
The Path to Power m-2 Page 36
