Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  This was easier said than done, to put it mildly. But successive British governments had set themselves the task of trying to do it, and Mrs Thatcher accepted the essential principles of Beveridge. In fact, more strenuously than most, she sought to apply the spirit of the report – that need be answered, but idleness discouraged and independence not crushed. ‘The Beveridge Report never meant to oust the voluntary principle,’ she said in later years,68 and this was true. Partly through her Methodist background, she knew something about the rise of voluntary associations of self-help in the nineteenth century, of friendly societies and ‘ragged schools’, and she was strongly in favour of such community projects, seeing them as the collective embodiment of the principle of ‘Do as you would be done by’.69 But she also believed that the increasing mobility and mass urbanization of British society had meant that not everything could be done by local knowledge and co-operation. Beveridge, in her view, joined up the dots, or, to use a metaphor more common in the debate, provided a floor but not a ceiling. She was and remained in favour of a basic state pension, and she agreed with Beveridge’s idea that National Insurance should be exactly that, rather than tax by another name. As for the social problems of welfare, ‘The dependency culture’, she remembered in the 1990s, ‘was not thought of then.’70 Her attitude to questions of welfare was never one of pure free-marketry or devil-take-the-hindmost. It was more old fashioned, more influenced by the war, surprisingly confident that government was fit for the task. She wanted the state to mobilize to help the unfortunate, and always believed that there was no full private substitute for this, but she always feared two things – that the ‘shirkers’ would tend to benefit at the expense of the workers, and that the cost, if not carefully controlled, would produce national ruin.*

  Mrs Thatcher’s job at MPNI was to help to make Beveridge work. She had to deal with ‘the difficulties which flowed from the gap between Beveridge’s original conception and the way in which the system – and with it public expectations – had developed’.71 These included the effects of inflation, the low flat rate of the state pension, the punitive effect of the earnings rule and the inevitable clash between the demands of all for higher, non-means-tested benefits and of some for more money in response to particular need. The evidence of Mrs Thatcher’s time at the Ministry of Pensions is that she was aware of these problems but that it was above her pay grade to try to solve them. One of the reasons that she so admired John Boyd-Carpenter† is that he had addressed some of the more difficult questions in the field since he took up the job in 1955, notably by allowing people with reasonable private pension provision to contract out of the state earnings-related pension scheme and receive a rebate from their NI contributions. But Boyd-Carpenter was promoted out of MPNI less than a year after Mrs Thatcher joined him, and neither of his successors, Niall Macpherson and Richard Wood, had the desire or the political clout to effect further reform. Besides, the government was in political decline from 1962 and so lacked collective will. Mrs Thatcher’s response to these constrictions was to work extremely hard at precise tasks, always bearing in mind that the Ministry had already become the second largest-spending government department (after Defence), and that she had to control costs.

  Mrs Thatcher spent three years in post, ending only with the general election of October 1964, and she would have liked to have been promoted before then. But she enjoyed the work, and looked back on it as a positive time in her life. She immediately discovered her natural appetite for administration, and found scope for her combative qualities. Unlike Tory grandees, she received an education in the engine-room of government rather than the officers’ mess, which proved to be to her advantage. She admired the senior officials with whom she worked, and they admired her too, though, as Clive Bossom, her parliamentary private secretary (PPS)* in 1961, put it, ‘they did not love her.’ One night, Bossom was with her in the Ministry when she was contemplating a pile of letters presented for her signature. As she read them, she ripped each one at the top of the page. ‘I’m not sending these off,’ she said, ‘they’re double Dutch.’ Bossom also heard the official’s response, out of Mrs Thatcher’s hearing: ‘Bloody woman. Her job is to sign them, not read them.’72

  The government machine in which Margaret Thatcher was a minor cog nearly derailed. As early as 1960, inflation and the growth of government spending stoked up the demand for higher wages which produced the ‘pay pause’ for public employees, the first shadow of the incomes policies which were to weaken government after government until 1979. Economic growth started to slow. In March 1962, the Liberals won an astonishing victory at the Orpington by-election, gaining the seat from the Conservatives with a majority of nearly 15,000. On 14 January 1963, General Charles de Gaulle, President of France, finally rejected the British application, painstakingly negotiated by Edward Heath, to join the European Economic Community or, as everyone then called it, the Common Market. And in June of the same year, John Profumo, Minister for War, had to resign after he was discovered to have lied to the House of Commons about his affair with Christine Keeler, a prostitute who was alleged to have been carrying on at the same time with the Soviet naval attaché. Then, as Harold Macmillan’s government started to totter, Macmillan himself fell ill. Stricken with prostate problems, and wrongly advised by a temporary doctor that he could not make a full recovery, Macmillan dramatically resigned on 10 October 1963, just as his party’s annual conference met in Blackpool.

  In this sequence of events, Margaret Thatcher played virtually no part. Her public pronouncements were loyal. She supported Common Market entry, though without any of the high rhetoric of the Euro-enthusiast. For her, it was a matter of access to greater markets. ‘To enter into commercial obligations and treaties is an exercise of sovereignty, not a derogation from it,’ she told Finchley Conservatives,73 and she saw the EEC, although it had no declared military aspirations at that time, as part of the defence of Western Europe, especially West Berlin, against Soviet Communism. Her tone on the subject was calm, almost detached. ‘The end of the world has not come if we don’t go into it, but it would be far better if we did,’ she said at a local Finchley ‘Any Questions?’ in August 1962.74 She defended the pay pause. As Macmillan came under attack for mishandling Profumo, she described him as ‘a man of the highest integrity and honour [who] should not, therefore, suffer for someone whose standards were not as high as his own’.75 Not even in private did she offer a sustained critique of the Macmillanite direction.

  Nevertheless, it is possible to discern the emergence of a distinct set of views not wholly at one with the top of the government. In her only parliamentary speech on the floor of the House before she became a minister, apart from those promoting her own Bill, Mrs Thatcher entered an economic debate, calling for the separate taxation of working women and noting that the current means of controlling public expenditure were inadequate.76 She tended to take a stand in favour of financial stringency and a refusal to give in to demands for more public spending: ‘You would think you were not bringing up your child properly if you said “yes” to everything they asked for. What sort of government would that be?’ she asked the Finchley Conservative Women.77 And in the matter of trade unions, where most ministerial pronouncements were extremely cautious, she made it clear where she stood: ‘We are approaching a time when trade union laws ought to be revised.’78 She also made it clear that she trusted the Old (white) Commonwealth better than the New, and she defended, against considerable protest from Jewish constituents, the right of Sir Oswald Mosley, the fascist orator, to hold a rally in Trafalgar Square. ‘If Mosley’s meetings are banned,’ she told Finchley Tories, ‘it means any meeting which the Communists do not like could be banned.’79 Sitting in a surgery waiting for the doctor to look at Mark’s boils, she wrote, exasperated, to her father, ‘The constituency correspondence continues unabated with every Jew in the area demanding more curbs on freedom of speech.’80

  As for the leadership itself, her support for H
arold Macmillan was not enthusiastic. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher says she was at odds with the Keynesian expansionism of ‘Supermac’. This is probably true, if one speaks of underlying beliefs, but there is little evidence that such thoughts were strong in her mind at the time. Her greater concern seemed to be a sense that Macmillan was beginning to fail as a decisive leader, and perhaps a mild dislike of his rather patronizing manner towards her. He was the sort of person, she said many years later in reference to his handling of Profumo, ‘who thought things could be dealt with quietly and smoothed over’.81 She did not mean this as a compliment. In July 1963, she had a party of Finchley Conservative women to tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. While saying that Macmillan could, of course, continue as leader (to say anything else in public would have been treasonable), she dropped strong hints about her admiration for R. A. Butler, applauding his work in sorting out the problems of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (soon to go spectacularly wrong), and praising his ‘wisdom of years of experience’ and ‘terrific capacity for work’.82 In the same month, Macmillan’s PPS, Knox Cunningham, included Mrs Thatcher on a list of four junior ministers who were ‘not in full support’.83 When the leadership crisis broke in October 1963, she initially favoured Butler as Macmillan’s successor, preferring him to Quintin Hailsham. ‘RAB really had been the think tank,’ she recalled, referring to his encouragement of the Conservative Research Department after the war; ‘it would have been wrong in a way not to support him … he’d done so much.’84

  But in the course of the chaotic party conference which followed Macmillan’s announcement of his departure, it became clear that, while Hailsham had overplayed his hand, Butler had underplayed his. Under the system of selecting a Conservative leader that then prevailed, no one, not even Members of Parliament, had a vote. The leader ‘emerged’ from a process of consultation. Following his successful speech to the conference, and the confidence that he inspired as being trustworthy and disinterested, Lord Home, the Foreign Secretary, began to emerge. Assisted by the fact that Macmillan himself, always opposed to Butler, now had severe doubts about Hailsham, the candidate he had originally preferred, Home’s supporters grew in strength and number. Like Hailsham, Home was a member of the House of Lords, from which it was no longer considered possible to lead the Conservative Party, but this was not an insuperable objection since the law had just changed to permit heirs to seats in the Lords to disclaim them.* When Mrs Thatcher saw the party whips on the Monday morning after the party conference, the day after her thirty-eighth birthday, she told them that she preferred RAB, but ‘I was then asked my view of Alec. “Is it constitutionally possible?” I asked. Assured that it was, I did not hesitate. I replied: “Then I am strongly in favour of Alec.” ’85 Although it is certain that Mrs Thatcher’s view made no difference to the matter, Macmillan did what she wanted, and advised the Queen to send for Home.

  Mrs Thatcher had then, and retained, a very high regard for the man who, on ceasing to be the 14th Earl of Home, became known as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. She always referred to him as ‘Alec’, while never referring to Macmillan as ‘Harold’, and she respected his judgment, his thoughtfulness and his personal goodness. She believed that the long illness which had kept him out of the war had given him time to deepen his understanding: ‘I think he read everything, thought about everything and, as he would start to speak to you, he would speak with a depth, speak not in party political terms, but in depth of the history of England … of the United Kingdom and of the Empire.’86 His only defect in her eyes was his manifest unsuitability for the television age. He ‘was an extremely nice person but … not one the populace could take to … Television isn’t kind to some people, although no one ever inspired more loyalty than Alec Douglas-Home.’87 And although she was disappointed not to be promoted by the new Prime Minister, she was genuinely pleased by his arrival. A month after Home became prime minister in October, she wrote to her father to describe a lunch he had recently given at No. 10 for all his ministers: ‘I got two menus signed personally by Alec Douglas-Home for the twins. They were very thrilled with them. I feel certain we shall be happy under the new administration. Home is a much more approachable person than Harold Mac ever was.’88 Home was, in a way, the sort of man she most liked – someone whose birth might cause him to look down on her, and yet didn’t, her ideal of a gentleman. In later years, she reserved particular scorn for the press attacks on Home: ‘inverted snobbery is the worst thing. If anyone could accept me, I could accept them.’89*

  The means by which Home became Tory leader caused mockery and anger among the more radical Conservatives. In a famous article in the Spectator on 17 January 1964, the editor, Iain Macleod,† a Tory MP and former party chairman who had refused to serve under Home, attacked ‘the magic circle’ of Tory grandees who controlled the process of choosing the leader, an assault which led to a change in the rules of selection of the leader and in the class composition of the party in Parliament. Mrs Thatcher disagreed with Macleod. Although, by her own admission, ‘very much on the outside of even the outer ring of the magic circle’,90 she saw nothing wrong in principle with its way of proceeding, believing that the important thing was to get the right man, not how you got him. She did admit that ‘the magic circle no longer provided the legitimacy for the men who emerged,’91 but she was not pleased at its passing. ‘It worked,’ was her simple view. As for Macleod’s article: ‘It seemed to me like treachery.’92

  Douglas-Home’s premiership came late in the Parliament, and lasted, in the event, for less than a year, so its chief purpose was to enable Conservative recovery in time for the general election. In this, Mrs Thatcher played an energetic, though not very important, part. She told the people of Whetstone Ward to ‘forget that Alec Home is the 14th Earl’ (a fact that was constantly used against him by his Labour opponent Harold Wilson) and to recognize him as ‘a tremendous patriot’ with a ‘quite extraordinary ability to see the wood as well as the trees’.93 She loyally supported the government’s record, including measures, such as the establishment of the National Economic Development Council, the National Incomes Commission and selective government help to industry, which she was later to decry.94 Although clearly on the free-enterprise side of the party, she approached this subject more as a practical-minded, class-based politician than as an economist or an ideologist. ‘We should always be wary of socialist promises,’ she told Finchley Conservative Women. ‘They are usually made with private enterprise money. It is the people, we the middle classes, who will have to pay the penalty of socialism in increased taxes.’95 When the government, led on the subject by Ted Heath, set out to abolish most of the remaining price controls known as Resale Price Maintenance, Mrs Thatcher supported it, not with the arguments of free-market theory, but with reference to her father’s attitudes: ‘When small shopkeepers write and say: “I’m afraid it will put us out of business,” I can only say that my father would have said the same thing 10 years ago. But Resale Price Maintenance has virtually gone from the grocery trade, and opportunities for small shops have increased.’96 The grocer’s daughter believed in letting business get the rewards of hard work, and was always opposed to heavy state control, but she was much less adamantly anti-protectionist, and the influence of her wartime experience inclined her to think that the state could play a useful role in setting some priorities in the economy. Privately, she was highly critical of Heath’s campaign against Resale Price Maintenance, because of its timing. ‘Resale Price Maintenance lost us the election,’ she said while preparing her memoirs thirty years later. ‘It was right, but you don’t do it in the last year. Every single little grocer was right against it.’97 When she later came to overturn the post-war economic consensus she did so because she believed it had failed, not because she had never believed in it in the first place.

  When the general election was called for 15 October 1964, the political scientists David Butler and Anthony King chose Finchley as one of the constituencies which they wished
to cover in depth for their book about the election.98 They did so in the belief, which turned out to be erroneous, that Finchley was going to be ‘another Orpington’, scene of a dramatic Liberal revival under the party’s glamorous young candidate, John Pardoe.* The young Bernard Donoughue,† later senior policy adviser to Harold Wilson and James Callaghan at 10 Downing Street in the 1970s, was sent to cover the constituency. His report began with the words: ‘Finchley is a sprawling suburb of North-west London whose most striking social characteristics are prosperity, femininity and intellect.’ In the borough elections of 1962, the Liberals had swept the board in Finchley and taken three out of five wards in Friern Barnet, also part of Mrs Thatcher’s constituency, but had fallen back in the Barnet borough council elections of May 1964. Donoughue described Mrs Thatcher as ‘an attractive mother of twins’ and ‘formidable’, with a high recognition factor and the ability to answer questions with ‘a barrage of official statistics’. Following the Jewish vote, he noted that a survey of Jews shortly before the election had suggested proportions of six Labour to three Conservative to one Liberal, but that, in the eventual result, the effect of Mrs Thatcher’s campaign was to alter the proportions in her party’s favour to 2:2:1. Remembering the same campaign more than forty years later, Donoughue said that Mrs Thatcher had seemed ‘very intelligent, rather narrow, a little bit nervous … a pushy, lower-middle-class businesswoman with a lot of energy and ability’. She presented herself as ‘a scientist, barrister and mother of two’. Her face was ‘very well made’, ‘almost Japanese’ in its perfection of form: ‘No one would have thought “I’m not sure if I can trust her.” ’ He particularly remembered a wet night at a public meeting in a school. Mrs Thatcher ‘came in like one of the Valkyrie, rolled her raincoat up and tossed it over her shoulder to a man without looking at him.’99 It was Donoughue’s first sight of Denis.