Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  While there was certainly nothing disloyal in anything Mrs Thatcher told her Blackpool audience, it was nevertheless quite an artful performance politically. Her speech tapped into a growing unease about Heath’s approach, a questioning of the merely technocratic leadership which tried to minimize all ideological differences and failed to offer an alternative account of economics or, indeed, of the purpose of government itself. It marked the speaker out as a person of principle, and of combative conviction. It also positioned her carefully in the rows within the party over its most controversial figure, Enoch Powell.

  Earlier in the year, Powell had finally broken with Heath. Always stiff-necked and solitary, always far more intellectually original than his colleagues, Powell had carved out an increasingly distinctive place in the Conservative Party. When the leadership had leant towards centrism and corporatism, Powell had produced eloquent attacks on the idea that industry and government could successfully improve the British economy by working hand in hand. He had developed, too, the doctrines of what came to be called monetarism and heaped scorn on the idea that prices and incomes policies could control inflation. A heretic on defence, on which he was the party’s shadow minister, he had raised questions about the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence and had suggested that Britain should withdraw its military presence east of Suez. There had been rows between him and his fellow frontbenchers, and Powell felt that he was being sidelined in the Shadow Cabinet, but it was on none of these subjects that the great break came.

  In Birmingham, on 20 April 1968, Powell spoke to the city’s CPC in a speech that he chose not to clear with Heath in advance, and which appeared to break a Shadow Cabinet consensus on the subject reached ten days earlier. That subject was immigration. Powell quoted a constituent of his who had told him that he wanted to leave Britain because ‘in this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ Using the Registrar-General’s projections for the growth of the immigrant population and its descendants, he declared: ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants … It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’ He attacked the Labour government’s coming Race Relations Bill as the means by which the immigrant community would be able to ‘agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens’, and he ended with his vision of the apocalypse: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

  Margaret had always been an admirer of Enoch Powell, ever since first meeting him in Essex in the late 1940s. The two were not personally close, partly because Powell was awkward in the company of women, and did not approve of women in politics, but they were on friendly terms, the two couples dining together occasionally. Always an admirer of intellectual attainment, and surprisingly humble about what she considered her own lack of it, Mrs Thatcher was in awe of Powell’s brain (‘His intellect was second to none’) and drawn to his arguments. In later years she said, ‘Enoch got us on to the right argument about inflation.’76 She had never been deeply interested in questions of immigration, although such views as she had expressed in public were in favour of tight control of numbers. She considered it an ‘irony’ that Powell himself had admitted many immigrants, when he had been minister of health, to work in British hospitals.77 On the Sunday morning when Powell’s speech was reported in the newspapers, Ted Heath rang round Shadow Cabinet colleagues to tell them that he proposed to sack Powell. By her account, Heath said to Mrs Thatcher: ‘Enoch must go.’ She replied, ‘Ted, I wouldn’t heighten what he said too much,’ recommending that he leave time for things to cool down. But Heath replied: ‘No, no. Most people think he must go.’78 Go he did, never to return to the front bench.

  It was never likely, of course, that such a stripling member of the Shadow Cabinet as Mrs Thatcher could have dissuaded Heath from his chosen course of action, and the evidence does not suggest that she tried particularly hard to do so. The moment was significant for her, nonetheless. She contrived, without any disloyalty, to make it clear in party circles that she was quite sympathetic to Powell and, when invited to criticize him in the ensuing months, rather than doing so she would simply say how much she hoped that he would put forward his views in party forums. In her CPC Lecture, she prayed in aid the name of Enoch Powell, but she did so to point out the limits of private provision. Hospitals, she argued, were something the state could provide and the citizen could not, and she quoted Powell’s ten-year hospital plan as minister of health to that effect. This was a cunning way to link herself with the great rebel: the leadership could not complain, and yet the link had been made. As the general election of 1970 approached, Mrs Thatcher continued quietly to maintain the connection with Powell. On the second night of the Selsdon Park Conference to hammer out the party’s pre-election programme, on 31 January 1970, instead of dining at Selsdon with the Shadow Cabinet she chose to attend part of a dinner of her Finchley association at which Powell was the guest of honour.79 She later publicly defended the invitation to the rebellious Powell, on the grounds of freedom of speech and because he had spent his ‘war years in distinguished service in the Forces’.80 During the 1970 election campaign itself Powell made a series of speeches about the ‘hidden enemy within’ – the leftist agitators, including the future Labour Cabinet minister, Peter Hain, who were trying to stop the South African cricket tour in Britain because of their opposition to apartheid. When the Home Secretary, Callaghan, who had been moved to the post after the devaluation of 1967, finally decided to stop the tour, Powell denounced him, feverishly comparing the capitulation to the sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales in 1941, for having ‘surrendered the rule of law to buy off the demonstrators’. Heath’s office privately described the speech as ‘fascist’. The journalist Andrew Alexander, a close associate of Powell, happened to call on Mrs Thatcher at home on 13 June to discuss the election campaign. She asked him to come with a copy of the Evening Standard which reported the speech. She read it and then said to Alexander: ‘I agree with every word of it.’81 Powell’s phrase ‘the enemy within’ was one that, when she became prime minister, she did not forget. Much later, she was to make it famous and controversial as her description of the extremist leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers.

  Margaret Thatcher, the crypto-Powellite of the CPC Lecture, began to attract wider attention. She was seen as a respectable voice of the Tory right. In the spring of 1969 the Daily Telegraph published pieces by her, called ‘Consensus – or choice?’ and ‘Participation – in what?’82 By then the party’s reluctant transport spokesman, Mrs Thatcher ranged over far wider issues. Developing her CPC themes, she launched into further criticism of the Tory record: ‘we were not as successful in controlling public expenditure as we might have been, we were slow to get on to trade union law reform, we left surtax* too high and estate duty at confiscatory levels.’ She attacked the consensus which ‘would be to do nothing’ and argued for ‘the Right-wing approach, which is to increase the private sector’. Her attack on the chatter about ‘participation’ was that, in practice, this meant yet more politics. She preferred solutions which kept people clear of politicians and state power; ‘it is important that young couples purchase their own home as early as possible. The chances are that they will never then come to be dependent on the State.’

  There is every reason to think that Mrs Thatcher was sincere in her beliefs. They were newly articulated, perhaps, but she had always privately held them. They also helped her career. The Powell effect had been to threaten a split between the rather centrist, consensual and sometimes de haut en bas party leadership and the rank and file, who wanted more clearly Conservative positions. Mrs Thatcher could offer the rank and file some comfort. Combative and right-wing, and, through her sex and background, a figure from outside the establishment, she put fire in Tory bellies without any threat of disloyalty to Heath. It was therefore
fitting and symbolic that, when, in October 1969, her old Oxford friend Edward Boyle, dispirited by what he saw as the rightward drift of the party under the pressure of Powellism, resigned as education spokesman to take up an academic career, Mrs Thatcher should succeed him.

  Like most British people of her generation, except for those who had served in the forces, Margaret Thatcher had travelled abroad very little. She first visited Continental Europe on her honeymoon, and her subsequent visits had largely been confined to skiing holidays. She had never been to the United States, or outside Europe at all. Denis travelled extensively on business, particularly in Africa, but the demands of career and children never gave her the time to accompany him, even if she had wanted to. Political or government business had not taken her abroad. In the period of 1964–70, this changed. Her growing seniority, and the freedom offered by opposition, allowed her to travel more. In those years, her foreign trips included visits to Israel in June 1965, to Sweden in 1968, to the Soviet Union in 1969 and to the United States in February–March 1967 and March 1969.

  Her eight-day trip to Israel, the natural result of Jewish connections in Finchley, made a strongly favourable impression upon her. She toured the whole of the country and admired the purposeful activity everywhere. ‘They don’t pay people for being idle in Israel,’ she reported,83 rather implying that, nearer home, they did. And her Christian sensibility was moved by seeing the sights that Jesus would have seen: ‘I stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.’84 She reinforced her uncomplicated belief that Israel was a good country which wanted peace with its neighbours: ‘Israel holds out the hand of friendship to all who will accept.’85

  By far her longest and most important visits, however, were to America. The first, the more significant, lasted for nearly six weeks, the second for a month. Her first trip was on the State Department’s International Visitor Program, a large-scale scheme, which exists to this day, to give prominent non-US citizens an extended opportunity to get to know the country. The programme paid all travel expenses and a per-diem living allowance of $25. Mrs Thatcher had been nominated for it by William J. Galloway, first secretary and political officer at the US Embassy in London, whose job was to cover British politics, particularly the Conservative Party. He noted her ‘very strong will’, her ‘high standards of ethics and morals’ and her rising political star.86 In August 1966, when Mrs Thatcher was shadow Treasury spokesman, Galloway drew up a list of matters that he understood she wished to pursue on her trip, which she approved. Her main interests were listed as financial and economic matters, social security, insurance, industry and women’s organizations. She expressed a particular wish to meet ‘some women members of the Congress’ and to ‘gain impressions of the political atmosphere in various parts of the United States’.87*

  Mrs Thatcher left London on 20 February 1967. The original plan had been for Denis to accompany her. Denis was always interested in America but, in the end, he decided that he could not afford to be away from his business for such a length of time. So Mrs Thatcher travelled alone. Her trip began, as was customary, in Washington DC. As was also customary, given the political orientation of the State Department, she was steered towards people to the left of her own views. She rushed through innumerable meetings in the capital. She met Senator Joseph Clark, a liberal Democrat who attacked President Johnson’s record in Vietnam, and Margaret Chase Smith, the first ever woman to be elected to both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Her most prominent interlocutor was to have been Walt Rostow, then President Johnson’s National Security Advisor, but Rostow passed her on to his deputy, Francis Bator, at the last minute.88 To Rostow, Mrs Thatcher was an Opposition MP, who was not yet even a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Understandably, he decided his time was better spent elsewhere. No record survives of the content of her meetings. But according to John Campbell’s biography, her meeting with senior officials of the International Monetary Fund showed that ‘she did not always know how to behave’ on such occasions: ‘A senior [British] Treasury official serving in Washington was horrified by the way she lectured the Director of the IMF, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer – a languid, cigarette-smoking French intellectual of the type she had probably never encountered before – on subjects he knew far more about than she did – and altogether behaved “like a bull in a china shop”.’89*

  In fact, as she went round the country, Mrs Thatcher appears to have known perfectly well ‘how to behave’. One of her hosts wrote to an official at the US Embassy in London to say that she was ‘undoubtedly one of the most delightful and competent visitors we have had. She has charmed and impressed local sponsors from coast to coast.’90 She visited the Du Pont chemical factory in Wilmington, Delaware, and was impressed by Palm Beach, Florida, when staying in Delray near by. She then headed north to Atlanta, where she was struck by the progress in civil rights for blacks, and by the white mayor who told her ‘I have no time to hate.’* In Houston, the NASA manned-spacecraft centre, with its wealth of cutting-edge technology, enthused her more than anything else in the entire trip. She was shown round by John Hodges, a former constituent of hers, now lost to the ‘Brain Drain’ which, she believed, Labour’s tax policies had created. From Houston, she flew to San Francisco, sending a card to her sister Muriel saying that ‘This is the most beautiful of them all.’ Shocked to hear that most visitors just wanted to see the hippies, she went out to the redwood forests and was shown round a school, where she found the American children ‘very, very articulate’, and the Kaiser Foundation Hospital. In Los Angeles, she visited the NBC Color City, where she witnessed what she called the ‘genuine artificiality’ of the first colour-television studio in the world. She went also to the Strategic Air Command at Omaha, Nebraska, which prompted her to reflect that ‘American casualness is misleading. There is nothing casual about their science and technology’. In Chicago, she saw the grain-trading market known as the Pit. Then she flew east, meeting the great economist Paul Samuelson, who was working on the control of inflation, at Harvard. Thence to Montclair, New Jersey, which was twinned with Finchley, and finally to New York City, whence she flew to Albany for the day to meet the state Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who was later to become Gerald Ford’s vice-president.91 Mrs Thatcher’s sponsors’ reports for San Francisco and New York survive. The former found her ‘an extremely charming person, was very enthusiastic about her visit to the Bay Area’. The latter said that the people she met ‘could hardly bear to part with her’.92

  As she travelled, Mrs Thatcher gave speeches and interviews, of which a few were reported. The Houston Post, with a byline from the ‘Women’s staff’, began: ‘A gracious lady member of British Parliament pulled on velvet gloves when quizzed Wednesday about English trade with North Vietnam.’ Mrs Thatcher defended this trade. Someone at the Houston press conference asked if the Common Market would bring ruin to Britain. ‘ “Nothing will bring ruin to Great Britain,” Mrs Thatcher replied briskly. “The Common Market is political as well as economic … if we went in for political reasons – the concept of a united Europe or prolonged peace – I believe we should.” ’ She said that sterling’s weakness was caused by excessive public spending, but the Houston Post described her as one ‘who approves of the Keynes theory of economics because “we’ve found none better” ’.93 Almost nothing in her programme, or in her published thoughts, indicated much of the political figure that she would become.

  Mrs Thatcher’s own feelings about her visit were uncomplicatedly positive. Despite her fairly prominent position in British politics, she behaved essentially like an energetic tourist rather than a politician dealing with professional counterparts. Indeed, it is notable that Heath felt that he could afford her absence for so long, and that he appears not to have charged her with any political tasks. She was slightly dismayed at first. Grace Belt, who managed her trip in New York, reported that when Mrs Thatcher arrived in Washington she ‘was perturbed not to have known in advance what hotel she was staying in, had not realized
that we would not have planned her evenings and did not know that the second day would fall on a holiday … I gather she felt pretty lonely during that time.’94 She also had not expected Washington would be hot and had to rush out and buy a couple of summer dresses.95 But, apart from this, she loved virtually every moment of her trip. She was receptive and charming, and was charmed and well received in return. She enjoyed American courtesy, American warmth and American technology, business know-how and political culture. Her reactions contain little depth, plenty of clichés; nothing about them suggests that she was looking for anything very specific in the way of politics, ideas or contacts. Essentially, she approached the country with the innocent optimism of the first-time visitor, and was not disappointed. In her memoirs she wrote, ‘The excitement which I felt has never really subsided.’96 This was the simple truth. She loved America, felt at ease there and wanted to go back.

  But she certainly took back political lessons from her trip. From that time on, her speeches began to draw on American examples, often contrasting them favourably with the situation in Britain. Within months of her return, she spoke, on different occasions, about the joys of America’s simple tax forms for low earners,97 of its methods for reviving the coal industry98 and, in her CPC Lecture, of its concern to protect personal privacy from government computers. Above all, she noticed the contrast between a society with bearable tax rates and free markets, and the alternative: ‘The maximum rate of tax on personal incomes in the United Kingdom is 91.25 per cent … and for a married couple with two small children it starts at an income of £18,900. The same marginal rate in the United States … is 60 per cent, and it does not start until an income of £77,000.’99