Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Her next visit to the US took place at the request of the English Speaking Union (ESU), a non-political association dedicated to strengthening links among English-speaking people around the world, who invited Mrs Thatcher to deliver a series of lectures. Ted Heath was reluctant to spare her from the political fray at home in the course of 1968, so the trip eventually took place in March 1969, which meant that she missed the conference on the first draft of the party’s manifesto for the next general election. Before she set out, she had to clear up a few troublesome logistics. The first problem was financial. ‘Mrs Thatcher is not in the least grasping,’ a London-based ESU official minuted her US colleague, ‘but I gather from her secretary, (in Confidence) that the last time she visited the United States on a Leader Grant, she had occasionally to walk from A to B as she had not been provided with any money, or the wherewithall [sic] to take any form of transport, and in some cases her hotel bill was not taken care of. I have naturally assured the secretary that Mrs Thatcher will be very well looked after.’100 A second issue concerned her preferred form of address: ‘… Mrs Thatcher has asked me to say … that as a member of parliament in her own right, she likes to be described as Mrs Margaret Thatcher MP although she is not a widow. She noticed that Mrs D. Thatcher had been put on the itinerary … Perhaps in all future communications to your branches you could tell them this.’101 Mrs Thatcher toured America once more. She had two setpiece speeches for the ESU, delivered on several occasions across the nation. One, called ‘Challenge to Democracy’, appears to have recapitulated some of the themes of her CPC Lecture. The other, ‘Preparing for the future: Britain and America’, ‘explains the special relationship between our two countries in the past and its relevance to the future. It discusses the tendency towards nationalism and separatism in the nations of the world, and its significance in the coming years. Bearing in mind the inability of each nation to impress its theories on others, each pursues its own ends. What can we do as nations to solve these problems?’102 It is a pity that neither speech survives. All we know about them is the ecstatic reaction they or, perhaps more likely, Mrs Thatcher’s personality engendered: ‘She came, She saw, She conquered!’ wrote the secretary of the ESU’s central Florida branch to HQ in New York, making the nomenclatural mistake in her excitement, ‘which, of course, can only mean one person – the stunning Mrs Dennis [sic] Thatcher … There were 150 members and guests present, and each and every one was charmed not only by the speaker’s good looks but her very brilliant talk.’103

  When she paid her first visit to the Soviet Union in 1969, therefore, Mrs Thatcher had a clear standard of superpower comparison. She travelled with her fellow Conservative MP, Paul Channon,* later a minister in her Cabinet, and his wife Ingrid. Although an official guest, as opposition transport spokesman, of the Soviet government, she took a tip from a colleague and paid her own fare to make herself less beholden to her hosts. She visited the Kremlin, where she said that when her hosts asked her if NATO had not become irrelevant, she replied ‘Certainly not.’ She went to Moscow University and to GUM, the huge Moscow department store with ‘pathetically little in it’.104 She had lunch at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and demanded to see inside churches, which were purged of all religion. In Moscow, her interpreter showed her a sculpture of a man beating a sword into a ploughshare. ‘That’s communism,’ he told her. ‘It’s not, you know,’ she replied. ‘It’s the Bible.’* She travelled by train from Moscow to Leningrad (as St Petersburg was then called). There she was shown the docks, and a housing block where she noted that the people ate communally and there was little scope for family life. Even her taste for dry facts was exhausted by the ‘endless statistics of production’ recited by her hosts. Visiting one of the palaces on the edge of the city, she fell into conversation with an attendant. She asked him where his family was. ‘In America.’ ‘Wouldn’t they like to come back?’ ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ As she boarded the plane for home, she remembered thinking to herself, ‘Oh, the relief!’

  When Heath made Mrs Thatcher his shadow education minister on 21 October 1969, he was pitching her into an area where Conservative principles seemed to conflict with what many real live Conservatives actually wanted. The difficulty lay in the comprehensivization of secondary schools, which was by then happening fast. This was the process which abolished selection at the age of eleven, and got rid of the 1944 division between grammar schools, attended by the more intellectually able, and secondary moderns, which educated the less academic majority. It was natural for Conservatives to favour the continued existence of the grammar schools. They represented excellence, they benefited from the exercise of parental choice, and they were the best ladder of advancement ever devised for bright children from poor backgrounds. Both Mrs Thatcher and Heath himself were classic products of the grammar school meritocracy. ‘People like me’, Mrs Thatcher remembered in the 1990s, ‘had to have access to grammar schools so that we could compete with people like Shirley Williams.’105† But two great difficulties presented themselves.

  The first was that state education at that time was largely out of the hands of the central government. Under the provisions of R. A. Butler’s 1944 Education Act, which was esteemed by all parties, local education authorities, chosen from local government, decided on the provision of schools, and teachers decreed what went on in them. The arrangement was known as ‘a national service locally delivered’. The role of Whitehall was an arm’s-length one of paying for new school building and negotiating and paying – via grants to the local authorities – the salaries of teachers. This distance from schools themselves was treasured, and no one seriously attempted to overthrow it. As early as the 1950s, the comprehensive ideal had gained ground, and the very first comprehensive experiment, in 1957, was conducted by Leicestershire County Council, which was Conservative controlled. The Labour Party developed a fiercely ideological commitment to comprehensives, and translated this into central government pressure, but even without this the trend to comprehensivization was considered unstoppable. By the time Mrs Thatcher took up her position, almost a quarter of children were already in comprehensives, and all but about 30 of the 163 education authorities had submitted plans to comprehensivize. No central government, therefore, had the power to reverse this without new legislation and a battle with local government. Besides, the great majority of the local education authorities were Conservative controlled.

  The other problem for the Conservatives was numerical. Just under a fifth of all children attended grammar schools. The parents of those who did not were much less satisfied, and much more likely to favour a system which was heralded as giving a chance to all. The big objection to grammar schools was the notion that children could be ‘branded a failure’ at the age of eleven. This fear of failing, Mrs Thatcher remembered in old age, was ‘the fever that gripped education’.106 Many Conservative voters had children who had failed or, they expected, would fail the eleven-plus, the examination which, as its name suggests, determined entry to secondary school at that age. For every Tory desperate to preserve the grammar school system, there might well be one desperate to get rid of it. In June 1966, for example, the Shadow Cabinet discussed an NOP poll which showed 65 per cent of the public in favour of comprehensives, and Conservative voters split exactly in half on the issue.107

  The consequent mental paralysis afflicting the Conservative Party on the subject had, by the time Mrs Thatcher arrived on the scene, achieved the status of a policy. In a paper which he submitted to the Shadow Cabinet, Edward Boyle said that the issue was about ‘the separation of children by ability at the age of 11’. ‘Far more Tories than we always realise have been genuinely worried about the implications of 11-plus selection for their children.’ In particular, parents feared their children being shunted away from the path that could lead them to university. Boyle went on to argue that ‘The important thing is to ensure that this institutional change does not entail the sacrifice of the traditions of learning and intellectual discipline
long associated with these schools [that is, grammar schools].’108* This was to prove easier said than done.

  The policy therefore concentrated on resisting the ‘rapid and universal imposition’ of comprehensives by central government, a line which had some resonance because, in the controversial Circulars 10/65 and 10/66 which gave central government instructions to education authorities, Labour education ministers had attempted to put more pressure on local authorities to go comprehensive.† Under Circular 10/66, grants for new school building were tied to the progress of a council’s schemes for comprehensives. The Tory fight became more a defence of the independence of local government, therefore, than a stand on the quality of education. The buzz phrase for what the Conservatives did not like was ‘botched-up schemes’. Ideas of parental choice, such as vouchers, were formally considered only to be rejected. The party felt happier with the simple statistics which showed that whereas there had been 7 million children of school age in 1964, there would be 9.1 million in 1974. The task that politicians most wanted to talk about was spending more money on more buildings, more teachers and – a Labour promise which they had postponed and the Conservatives had adopted – the raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen.

  Of Mrs Thatcher’s own views on the subject, there was never any doubt. As early as 1965, she had told her Finchley Association’s annual general meeting that she was ‘very concerned indeed about the Government’s intention to reorganise secondary education on comprehensive lines’.109 ‘I am a firm believer in grammar schools,’ she told Friern Barnet Young Conservatives. ‘For many years now they have been the ladder from the bottom to the top … I note that the leaders of both Conservative and Labour parties, as well as the new chairman of the Conservative Party [Anthony Barber], all went to grammar schools.’110 But, by the time she took up her post, a general election was expected within the year. There was no time to rethink a subject in which, the Conservatives believed, they had simply to maintain their historic lead over Labour. The Conservative Research Department’s review of education policy, produced a week after she arrived, put the matter rather complacently: ‘Tory image on education still very good so that a more positive and distinctive programme may not be required.’111 Besides, Heath evinced no interest in education.

  So Mrs Thatcher decided to be the loyal executant of the existing policy, while adopting a somewhat different tone to that of her predecessor, Sir Edward Boyle. It was not a question, she told the press on her appointment, of comprehensives ‘versus’ grammars: what she was against was ‘imposing’ comprehensives.112 She told the Commons that the Conservatives had always been ‘forward-looking’ on education – with the Butler Act, the expansion of universities, the improvement of primary schools – and she did not seek confrontation: ‘the true relationship between Government and local authorities is that of partnership of both and not dictatorship by one.’113 This partnership was to give her (and the local authorities) little joy in years to come. As for the teachers themselves, she felt quite kindly towards them. When they went on strike in London in November 1969, she condemned them in public, but in private she saw them as victims of the prices and incomes policy. She told the Shadow Cabinet that ‘it was difficult not to sympathise with their case.’114 Her slightly precarious stance was eased by the fact that the government tried to press ahead with comprehensives, this time by legislation compelling their introduction. By a great stroke of luck, while the Bill was in committee, two Labour MPs failed to attend for a crucial vote on 14 April 1970. The government was defeated, and the imminent election meant that there was no time to get the Bill back on track. In this atmosphere of government ideological zeal mixed with incompetence, Mrs Thatcher had the chance to promote her criticisms of the comprehensive ideal without actually having to turn against the whole process. She pushed the cause of the existing ‘direct grant’ schools, which were outside local authority control, emphasized problems of size and geography with many comprehensives, and spoke encouragingly to those local authorities which did not want to go comprehensive. She could assault Labour’s absolutism in the matter, and also its motives: ‘As I listen to our educational debates, I think that the Labour Party must hate the middle class, because every time the worst they can say about a school … is that a large proportion of the middle class get through there.’115

  On 10 February 1970, Alfred Roberts died, aged seventy-seven, shortly after listening to his daughter’s appearance on BBC Radio’s women’s discussion programme Petticoat Line,* an interview she had recorded several days earlier. He had been ill for some time with emphysema, which had led to weakness in his heart. He also suffered from a cataract which could not be operated on because of his heart condition. In his last months he felt sorrowful and neglected, complaining, of his public work for Grantham, ‘it is surprising how quickly it is all forgotten.’116 He also lamented that ‘I never hear anything from Margaret either by letter or by phone.’117 Margaret did visit him in his last illness, and was much impressed by the number of friends and neighbours who came and cared for him (‘How remarkable to finish up your life with so many genuine friends’).118 Carol remembered Margaret dropping in on her dying father when on the way to Scotland, and being ‘very tearful’ about the state of his health,119 but her mother was not with him when he died. She was in London, receiving a delegation from the anti-comprehensive group the National Education Association (‘She impressed us far more than Sir Edward Boyle ever managed to’).120 Two days later, she spoke in the Commons debate on the second reading of the ill-fated Education Bill. Alfred’s funeral took place in Grantham on 16 February. According to Margaret’s sister, Muriel Cullen, Margaret did not attend it. ‘When we went to my father’s funeral,’ she recalled, ‘of course she didn’t go, did she? She’d got something on.’121

  It would seem extraordinarily and untypically undutiful of Margaret not to have attended, and in fact she did go to the funeral. Her two engagement diaries of the period have her down for a meeting of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in Paris that day, but in both versions a line is run through the Paris entries, and through the whole day, though no mention is made of the funeral. The Grantham Journal also recorded her presence. In further conversation, Muriel remembered that Cissie Hubbard, the local farmer’s widow whom Alfred Roberts had married after Beatrice’s death, had arranged for his will to be read just before the funeral, which Mrs Cullen thought ‘odd’. At this Victorian scene, Mrs Cullen remembered, Cissie invited Muriel and Margaret to pick any bits of furniture, antiques and pictures that they wanted. Margaret simply said: ‘I want something that was my mother’s.’ Muriel was more forceful, saying, by her own account, ‘I’ll have that and I’ll have that …’ Afterwards, ‘Margaret told me off. She said, “You were a bit blunt, weren’t you?” ’122 It seems impossible, then, that Margaret would have gone to Grantham for the reading of the will and then failed to attend the funeral service immediately afterwards. The correct explanation is that she attended the church service, but not the ensuing cremation. The cremation was organized by Cissie, who upset Muriel by telling her that ‘Family are going’ and then adding, ‘I suppose you’re family.’123 Margaret might have wanted no part in this. It is more probable, though, that, far from home, she took the train back to London in order – as her diaries indicate happened – to keep her appointments for the following day. It was typical of Margaret’s attitude to her father when he was alive to behave correctly but perfunctorily, sometimes with a touch of impatience. In later years, perhaps feeling some guilt about this, she celebrated his influence and his memory more and more. In 1970, she was in too much of a hurry.*

  From the beginning of 1970, the Conservatives felt they should be ready for a general election. Conscious that the party’s policies still lacked final form, Ted Heath called a two-day conference of the Shadow Cabinet at the Selsdon Park Hotel in Croydon, beginning on 30 January. The conference became famous, though its fame was unjustified. Seekin
g to portray his opponents as right wing, Harold Wilson invented a figure called ‘Selsdon Man’ who, he claimed, had emerged from the conference as the hard-hatted, free-market, devil-take-the-hindmost spirit of Heath’s Toryism. In speaking as he did, Wilson probably did the Conservatives a favour by portraying them as more distinctive, more aggressive and more united round a set of beliefs than they actually were. In his memoirs, Heath himself says, ‘I can think of no major new departure which emerged from Selsdon Park.’124 He rejects, with justification, the subsequent belief on the Tory right that Selsdon had raised the standard of what later became Thatcherism.

  Heath does claim, however, that Mrs Thatcher talked ‘a good deal of the interests of the middle class at Selsdon’.125 The minutes, which are in a sort of abbreviated verbatim, provide little evidence of this. What they do indicate is that she brought into play her practical, female knowledge. When it was proposed that family allowances be paid only to the needy, she warned of the stigma that would be attached to collecting them from the Post Office in such circumstances. And when it was suggested that they be paid through the tax system rather than through direct handout, she said that if the allowance went to the husband and not the wife, ‘it ceases to be a family allowance.’126

  Most of her interventions, however, concerned her own area. She warned against singling out teachers for a battle over public sector productivity. Forbidden by Heath from any general discussion of education policy – he said that the party had already ‘got our education policy’ – she engaged in only one set-to with him and colleagues. It concerned the proposal for an independent university, favoured by free-marketeers and those worried by the trends in higher education, led by Max Beloff, an academic and Oxford contemporary of Heath’s. The minutes show Mrs Thatcher asking, ‘Can I make a speech giving it a fair wind?’ Worried about the cost, Heath fights shy of this, and adds: