It went down very well indeed. The audience loved it. The press reported it joyfully. Now I am Leader, she told her immediate supporters.5 Millar saw another side of her, though. He found her looking tired and drawn. This speech had been alright, but what about the next one? Was this going to be the best she could do? 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...’6
We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stand up and with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough’.
--THATCHER
This was the year that Denis Thatcher retired from the management of Burmah Oil, the company that had bought the family firm and where he had become director, at great profit to himself. While he did not retire from all his business interests – his active directorship of other companies topped up the family’s by now considerable fortune – he was available to support Mrs. Thatcher throughout the trying years in opposition and in government. The children were grown up. The Thatchers spent the week at their flat in Flood Street, and the weekends in the Dower Flat at Scotney Castle at Lambourne that had replaced the large and underused house. Like most working women, Margaret Thatcher still had domestic responsibilities, but as the partner of a rich man, these were light. Denis Thatcher was possibly even more of an individualist Tory than she was herself, with extensive business interests, knowledge and contacts, who had reached a stage where his time could be used flexibly to support his wife. His support was both public and private. If he felt a speech was going badly, he would sit at the back of the hall and clap and shout his agreement. Usually others would follow suit and the tone of the meeting would be changed. He would collect his wife from meetings or conferences that were continuing late, tapping his watch and saying ‘Margaret, time for Bedfordshire’.7 He was the closest advisor Margaret Thatcher ever had, or who she would listen to – constantly beside her in the years to come.
During the next years, she needed his support. She had not only to convince the world and her party that a woman could lead a major Western democracy, she also had to develop and make convincing a whole new ideological perspective on practical policy-making. As she was no match for Harold Wilson in parliamentary debate, she had to look for other ways to make her presence known. She approached the task with typical Thatcher decision and precision. She began with herself. Margaret Roberts had been a successful middle-class girl, earning her place through hard work. Margaret Thatcher must appear to have her place by right and ability. She started with her voice – like many women she had to talk loudly in order to make herself heard in male-dominated political debate, and simply raising the volume had made her sound shrill. This, and the last remnants of her Lincolnshire accent, were taken to a voice coach, and even to the actor Laurence Olivier for advice. The result was a slower, more enunciated and more resonant delivery, reminiscent of the kind of dignified pre-war woman teachers she would remember well. Her hair changed, not only because she had little time and soft, thick hair but also because she had a personal assistant available at all times with heated rollers. Her dress sense began to take account of camera angles and the need to make a strong personal statement. She was fully conscious of the effect of her appearance. Christened the ‘Iron Lady’ by the official Soviet news agency Tass, after her attacks on defence cuts she said: Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you tonight in my green chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved... The Iron Lady of the Western World.8 She used the sobriquet often in the future – the contrast between the image and her toughness was useful.
The ‘Iron Lady’ was not the only nickname Margaret Thatcher acquired in her career. The Liberal MP and broadcaster Clement Freud christened her ‘Attila the Hen’, her colleague Norman St John Stevas called her ‘The Immaculate Misconception’ and the Conservative MP Julian Critchley once referred to her as ‘The Great She-Elephant’, somewhat to the displeasure of his constituency association.
Care of her image went hand in hand with selling the message to the country, through personal appearances and newspaper articles. She was guided by Gordon Reece, part of her full-time staff and an ex-television producer. He could jolly her along to accept things she would otherwise have rejected. He thought that the message should be put to all the electorate, not just readers of heavyweight papers. He even argued that traditionally Labour newspapers like the Sun and the News of the World would report new ideas, if only to argue against them. This was revolutionary thinking – no leader of either party had set out to woo the press to get a political philosophy in front of all voters. And this was a personal wooing: he [Reece] 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.9
It is unlikely that she needed much persuasion. To her, changing political course was a mission bordering on a religion. It was not only a practical answer to Britain’s problems, it was also a way to defend people from the harm that socialism did to their lives, their prospects and their characters. To Margaret Thatcher, the trade unions were quickly becoming the best possible example of the damage socialism could do. How the unions would deal with the Conservatives after Edward Heath’s defeat at their hands was at the centre of party policy-making over the next years. In 1976, Margaret Thatcher reshuffled her Shadow Cabinet. John Biffen joined – a strong critic of Heath’s corporatist approach. Douglas Hurd, one of Heath’s closest aides, became party spokesman on Europe. Willie Whitelaw became Shadow Home Secretary, and Ian Gilmour moved to defence. This was still not a purely monetarist and individualist group, but it did allow Keith Joseph, still head of research and policy, Geoffrey Howe, Jim Prior and Margaret Thatcher to approach the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to discuss possible futures. The result horrified her: These men were managers who had lost all hope of ever really managing their companies again.10 While she could not accept such defeatism, the experience did convince her that she must show herself able to work with trade unions. Accordingly, she told the Young Conservatives in early February that it would not be difficult to work with responsible trade union leadership. She did not specify what she might see as responsible leadership.
She was less circumspect in discussion of defence policy. She saw Soviet communism as an ideological and a practical threat. In Kensington in January, she made this crystal-clear: 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 ever seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not 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 super power in only one sense – the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms.11 This open criticism of another power and of government defence policy was breathtakingly undiplomatic, but popular in the country: her personal popularity rating shot up by seven points. Her call for strong defence and her scepticism of government foreign policy was finally too much for Reginald Maudling, the Shadow Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary. He complained that Margaret Thatcher had unilaterally committed the Shadow Cabinet to massive re-armament. He lost his post a few weeks later. But in truth Margaret Thatcher was not taking her personal policies from the Shadow Cabinet. As she saw it, she was still a trailblazer slowly establishing a following rather than a spokesperson for a united front. The real debate in the Shadow Cabinet was leading to the publication of The Right Approach in October 1976, the first Conservative publication to begin to lay down the practical alternatives to socialism.
Meanwhile, the Labour majority in Parliament was shrinking. In March 1976, Harold Wilson resigned and was replaced by Jim Callaghan. She was no more successful in the H
ouse against Callaghan than she had been against Wilson, appearing nervous and gauche in the face of his huge experience. But within weeks he gave her the opportunity to cause real trouble. There was a close-run vote on the devolution of Scotland, which the government might lose. Many MPs had pairing arrangements and therefore were not voting, but the government would be one vote short at the crucial lobby. Government whips seized a reluctant Labour pair, and pushed him through the voting lobby. This would have been a bad breach of parliamentary etiquette at any time, but the vote won by the single disputed vote nationalised the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. The Conservatives immediately called off pairing and all other business arrangements with the government. Callaghan was forced to re-run the vote, but now it was an outright victory and nationalisation continued.
The counterpart of the withdrawal of government from interference in prices and profits in the private sector which both we and you want to see, is inevitably the withdrawal of government from interference in wage bargaining. There can be no selective return to personal responsibility.
--THATCHER
The state of the economy was worsening. The sterling crises of 1976 forced the government to impose spending cuts that Margaret Thatcher had to support, and gave Callaghan the chance to remind electors that Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph had been high spenders in Heath’s government. By March 1977 only a Liberal/Labour pact kept Callaghan in government. It was becoming a real possibility that the Conservative Party would be in power and Margaret Thatcher would be Prime Minister. The party conference in September would be a crucial test of her leadership, and economic policy still divided the Shadow Cabinet. The paper before the conference was the right approach to the economy – she described it as a rather unhappy compromise document.12 The conference passed without major incident, but the issue of how to deal with the unions did not go away. Geoffrey Howe made a speech in January 1978 attacking the role of trade unions in Britain, but without Shadow Cabinet endorsement. Margaret Thatcher made a much less precise attack a few days later, saying: The counterpart of the withdrawal of government from interference in prices and profits in the private sector which both we and you want to see, is inevitably the -withdrawal of government from interference in wage bargaining. There can be no selective return to personal responsibility.13 The speech was made to Scottish industrialists. Innocuous as it sounds, it drew huge criticism from the press and from economists – a mark, perhaps, of how far there was to go for the new philosophy to be understood, much less accepted.
It was not just economic policy that set Margaret Thatcher apart from many, if not most, in her party and led to division in the Shadow Cabinet. On immigration, she spoke about colour-blind capitalism in which she placed her faith. This was not the multi-culturalism of mainstream thinking: in this, as in issues of class or gender, Margaret Thatcher’s credo was that people were worth something as individuals, and should be supported for their individual contribution, not because of their membership of a group. She was not in favour of Scottish devolution, which was a Heath pledge and a Callaghan/Wilson policy. She was ‘ridiculously intransigent’, as one senior Shadow Cabinet colleague despaired, against proportional representation when Lord Hailsham warned that the first-past-the-post system resulted in ‘elective dictatorship’.14 She was as adamantly opposed to a coalition government as she had been at the end of Heath’s time in office.
It is tempting to see Margaret Thatcher during these years in the way in which she described herself in her memoirs, as a lone voice in the wilderness, single-mindedly preparing her party to follow her into government. Like many other things though, emergent Thatcherism was clearer in what it was against rather than what it was for, and less cohesive and coherent than it appeared. Some strands were clear, on both personal and political lines. Margaret Thatcher hated socialism, although she admired individual socialists like Clement Attlee. She reacted against collectivism emotionally – to her, it was the antithesis of the solid middle-class values that she saw and prized in Grantham. She hated the politics of socialism, with its emphasis on collective workers’ rights and government responsibility for intervention. She believed what she had read of Hayek and Solzhenitsyn who both saw the mechanisms of socialism as akin to those of slavery. She saw the work of Friedman and monetarist economics as the way forward, but was not yet able either to see or speak about how they might be implemented. Indeed, she may not have completely understood the concepts she was organising in her escape from socialism – certainly, her memoirs do not indicate the kind of theoretical understanding that would have made this possible. She was not an economist, she was a lawyer with the ability to master vast bodies of knowledge, but not necessarily great breadth of vision. Allied with economic fervour were a raft of beliefs and prejudices translated into policy. Absolute individualism can lead to individual policies: Margaret Roberts had seen widows forced to buy bruised fruit in her father’s shop, and so, when cutting welfare, she protected widows’ benefits. It did not occur to her that benefits as a whole should be protected, any more than it would have occurred to Alfred Roberts to give widows the bruised fruit from his shop for free. It was this difficulty in joined-up thinking, as much as the new ideas she was developing, that lead to uncertainty in her party.
‘Labour isn’t working.’
--CONSERVATIVE SLOGAN, 1979
But ready or not, united or not, the Conservative Party was soon to be embroiled in an election. They expected it to be called in October 1978, but at the last minute Callaghan changed his mind. This was a welcome reprieve for the Conservatives – the summer of 1978 was perhaps the lowest period of the opposition years, with polls showing them lagging in popularity. Callaghan’s stewardship was steady and conservative in a non-political sense. It was Margaret Thatcher, with her hatred of socialism, who seemed to be extreme. Her personal popularity rating was consistently lower than Callaghan’s. The economic outlook was improving, and the April budget brought tax cuts.
But deferring the election turned out to be a bad move for the Labour Party. In January 1979, the lorry drivers went on strike, presaging the ‘Winter of Discontent’ with refuse collectors’ strikes, miners’ strikes, transport strikes, and even gravediggers’ strikes. Margaret Thatcher’s tough line on unions began to gain credibility in the party and in the country. In March, Margaret Thatcher forced a vote of no-confidence in the government. The announcement of a May election was inevitable. That March was perhaps the only time in her hard working and responsible life that Margaret Thatcher, preparing to give a television interview, became unavailable at the last moment. Two days after the announcement she was preparing for her first election address when she was told that a bomb had gone off under a car in the garage of the House of Commons. Airey Neave was dead. He was her friend and had supported her during her bid for leadership and the opposition years. Unlike the death of Ross McWhirter in 1975, whom she knew and liked and which had resulted in her being given police protection, this death was closer to home.
The 1979 election was Margaret Thatcher’s one chance – and despite the loss of Airey Neave, she grasped it with both hands. This was the election where Saatchi and Saatchi used their famous advertising ‘Labour isn’t working’ over pictures of an increasing queue at the labour exchange. She dominated the press campaign – making a point of reaching voters wherever possible. With Denis at her side, she rode the campaign bus and grabbed every photo opportunity available. But the key to this election was the new toughness in her manifesto about reform of trade union law. In the wake of the ‘Winter of Discontent’, and perhaps to the surprise of the Conservatives, Margaret Thatcher won the election and was Prime Minister.
Part Two
THE LEADERSHIP
Chapter 5: Thatcherism at Home
At 53 years of age, Margaret Thatcher was the first woman leader of a major Western democracy. She was proud of being the first chemist to do so. She represented a new political dawn – the first post-war prime minister to e
nter the job with a political philosophy that was actively opposed to collectivism. As Peregrine Worsthorne put it, she was the first political evangelist to occupy Downing Street since Labour’s post-war landslide. She had spent 20 years in Parliament, but had held only one post in government.
The call from the Palace came at about 2.45 in the afternoon. There had already been celebration at Central Office, freesias everywhere, and a big chocolate cake shaped like the door of Number 10. Margaret Thatcher drove to the Palace with Denis. They returned in the Prime Ministerial car, and this time the guards saluted her. She was able to practise what she wanted to say as she walked through the crowds to Downing Street. Her opening speech is famous: I know full well the responsibilities that await me as I enter the door of No. 10 and I’ll strive unceasingly to try to fulfil the trust and confidence that the British people have placed in me and the things in which I believe. And I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope’... . And finally, one last thing: in the words of Airey Neave whom we had hoped to bring here with us, ‘There is now work to be done’.1 And work there was! Over the years, Margaret Thatcher had schooled herself to sleep for only four hours a night. Watching the election results she had only a couple of hour’s rest.
‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope’
Thatcher Page 6
