Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Always said there is nothing to stop them doing it, put their own money in it, keep educational standards – but don’t want it to come to State for money to keep it going. Never commit myself to saying whether independent schools are better than state ones or not … As soon as one says one welcomes this, they say what practical form does your welcome take?

  SIR KEITH JOSEPH: Only Royal Charters.

  EDWARD HEATH: No.

  MRS THATCHER: Can’t get finance until they are sure they will get Royal Charter.

  GEOFFREY RIPPON: Thatcher University Limited.

  MRS THATCHER: That is the Open University [invented by Harold Wilson] for which we are refusing money …

  EDWARD HEATH: … If you like to say they have right to set up independent university and if they reach standard, Privy Council will approve.

  ANTHONY BARBER: Suggest we welcome it ‘at no cost to the State’.

  EDWARD HEATH: So unrealistic.

  MRS THATCHER: If I can do it in a speech – they are desperately anxious to get a Royal Charter.

  EDWARD HEATH: Not committing myself to a Royal Charter. Wouldn’t trust Max Beloff for a minute [Beloff came from the left and at this time was in the Liberal Party, moving fast to the right]. Already got too many universities.127

  On the greater issues, most notably how to handle the questions of prices and incomes, Selsdon did not resolve matters. But, thanks to Wilson’s free publicity, the conference looked quite good, and the Conservatives stood high in the polls.

  By May, this lead had reversed, and on 22 May 1970 Harold Wilson seized the chance to call a general election for 18 June. The Conservative manifesto, A Better Tomorrow, emphasized practicality. Launching it, Heath invoked ‘modern techniques’ and promised to change ‘the whole style of government’. He made very little of what was to prove his most important single achievement – Britain’s plan to enter the EEC. In the launch press conference, there was no question about education. The manifesto section on the subject began with the words ‘In education above all the problem of resources is crucial,’ and promised more spending on primary school buildings, the expansion of nursery schools and the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen. On the vexed matter of comprehensives, the manifesto supported the freedom of local education authorities to decide, but ventured that ‘in most cases the age of 11 is too early to make final decisions which might affect a child’s whole future’. It added, however, that comprehensivization ‘on rigid lines is contrary to local democracy and contrary to the best interests of the children’. In short, it tried to have it both ways.

  Mrs Thatcher was lined up to appear in party political broadcasts for the election, but after a pilot in which she was considered to have performed badly, being too stiff and unnatural,128 she was withdrawn from the front line. She spent most of the campaign, which she expected the Conservatives to lose, in Finchley, focusing on economic woes, law and order, and – coding her criticism of mass immigration – conserving ‘our British character’.129 The choice for the British people, she said in a letter issued to the press on 1 June, was between ‘two essentially different ways of life’, one in which the state grabbed more and more power and the other in which ‘the role of the State is to help people discharge their own responsibilities’. Mrs Thatcher’s main foray outside the constituency was to Scarborough, to address the conference of the National Association of Head Teachers on 25 May. Still an ingénue in media matters, she failed to deliver a key part of her text because of the lateness of the hour, and was verbally roughed up by journalists who insisted on being allowed to report it all the same.130 It proved to be the most controversial passage: ‘There are those who wish only to read the comic strip and the headline, whose problems, stemming sometimes from home backgrounds, cannot be overcome, however dedicated the teacher …’* Labour tried to make something of this in the campaign, claiming that she was writing off a third of children as ineducable. It made little impact. To the confusion of the opinion polls, the Conservatives won the election with an overall majority of thirty-one. The Finchley result was as follows:

  Mrs Margaret Thatcher (Conservative) 25,480

  Michael Freeman (Labour) 14,295

  G. Mitchell (Liberal) 7,614

  Conservative majority 11,185

  Both Mrs Thatcher’s vote and her majority were up. Hearing late that night on the car radio that the Conservatives were winning, the Thatchers, who were driving to Lamberhurst, turned round, and went to the Daily Telegraph party at the Savoy.131

  9

  Milksnatcher

  ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’

  Margaret Thatcher duly entered the Cabinet for the first time, as Edward Heath’s secretary of state for education and science, accepting the appointment on 20 June 1970. Although she often referred to the fact that she was a scientist, she made very little of the fact that she had, briefly, been a teacher. She had not much enjoyed the experience.

  She had found herself in the role because of the war. In a reorganization of the academic year to allow Lincolnshire pupils more time to help with the potato harvest in the autumn, the county’s schools resumed for the Michaelmas term in the middle of August, after a break of only two weeks. In 1944 this allowed Margaret, whose long vacation from Oxford began in early June, to earn money and help the war effort by teaching at Grantham’s Central School for Boys, which was short of staff, for nearly two months of the summer term, and then, until she returned to Oxford early for fire-watching duties there, for three weeks of the following term. Still aged only eighteen, she taught science, but also maths, and, under protest, other things too. ‘School has not gone down any too well this past week,’ she wrote to Muriel. ‘We are working terrifically hard and I have no free periods at all. Also the marking is heavy. I have a set of English essays to mark this weekend as well as some algebra and physics and I’ve never seen such appalling tripe in all my life.’1 She also had to take the boys for swimming lessons at the Grantham baths: ‘We don’t go in with them during the lessons, but stay on the bank and try to teach them by yelling at them what they are doing wrong. I don’t think it is a very satisfactory method personally, but still I don’t think I’d like to appear in front of them in a bathing costume with my present figure.’2

  In addition to her formal duties, Margaret also took on the personal coaching of David, a would-be naval cadet, who needed cramming for his maths exams. ‘I’m afraid he’s not a very smart kid at all,’ she told Muriel. ‘He is alright while I am sitting over him watching everything that he does but the moment I leave him to his own devices everything begins to go wrong.’3 Later she complained, ‘… I cannot make up for his lack of intelligence,’4 and she did not ‘hold out much hope for him because while he has improved a great deal since I have had him, – he still doesn’t know his tables properly and nothing I can do for him can ever make up for that. I think teaching him has been the hardest earned £2-2s I’ve ever had or hope to have in my life.’ She went on, ‘I was relieved to have finished teaching on Friday evening. It was like being released to freedom once more.’5 The school, however, was enthusiastic: ‘Mr Thorpe [the headmaster] was awfully nice the last day and thanked me … all in front of the school who clapped wildly for what seemed like ages. ’ She added, untruthfully, ‘I was quite glad when the ceremony was over.’ Margaret was happily conscious of having caused some excitement in the place: ‘It has been quite a novelty for them to be taught by an Oxford undergraduate and I heard quite a deal of the “Oxford accent” being talked behind my back.’6 Gerald Nicklem, a pupil at the school, remembered Margaret appreciatively as ‘an English rose’ who had ‘a lovely skin and hair attractively done, so we boys thought it a great treat to have this young lady teaching us.’7

  No doubt it was wise of Mrs Thatcher not to dwell in later life on her experience as a teacher, though she did mention it if asked. Such a short stint at such a young age would never have stood comparison with the work of people who had given thei
r life to the profession. But those few weeks were nevertheless of some importance to her. They gave her a certain respect for the hardships that teachers endure and reinforced her belief in the importance of making sure that children learn things properly. They also confirmed the feeling, which had earlier driven her to refuse the chance of the full bursary at Oxford that went with the promise to teach later, that she lacked the pedagogical vocation. To the observer of her reactions, her stint as a teacher provides evidence of (to put it kindly) her gift for leadership or (to put it unkindly) her bossiness. It is an early example of her belief, later so familiar to Cabinet colleagues, that people, particularly men, never did anything very well unless you stood over them while they did it. Mrs Thatcher always approached education with an odd mixture of feelings – a solemn conviction that it was overwhelmingly important for civilization and for the individual, combined with a certain impatience. Carol remembered that Mrs Thatcher, who was generally quite indulgent as a mother, did get ‘very upset if we had bad reports from school’. She would upbraid her children strongly if this happened: ‘I’d twigged before the Russians that she was the Iron Lady.’8

  The Department of Education and Science did not stand high in the pecking order of Whitehall. First in Curzon Street, Mayfair, and then, in the latter part of Mrs Thatcher’s term of office, south of the river in the astonishingly ugly new tower of Elizabeth House near Waterloo, it was geographically separated from the centre of power. Although Mrs Thatcher remembered the ‘splendid old quarters’ in Curzon Street with affection, the condition of their entrance was so squalid and the doormen so surly that officials used to arrange to meet visitors in the street outside and escort them quickly through, so they would not have to endure the horrors of the lobby for too long.9 Many of the DES officials, including the Permanent Secretary, Sir William Pile, who came from the Home Office to take over in the month that Mrs Thatcher arrived in the job, would have preferred to be in other government departments. In part, this reflected the cultural assumption that education was a ‘woman’s subject’, not worthy of the full attention of men whose job it was to rule.* More, it arose from the fact that education was organized in such a way that the Department had very little power. Pile’s predecessor, Sir Herbert Andrew, described its work as ‘like steering a boat with a rubber tiller’. According to one official’s pardonable exaggeration, the Department ‘ran only the V&A, Apsley House [the London home of the 1st Duke of Wellington, now a museum] and the Science Museum directly’,10 and even the arts and museums, for which Mrs Thatcher found herself nominally responsible, were handled by a separate minister, Lord Eccles, and on an ‘arm’s length principle’. Virtually everything in education was delegated, or mediated, universities receiving their money via the University Grants Committee and schools through local education authorities. These local authorities received an automatic central government grant worth 75 per cent of their spending.

  In parliamentary answers to Education Questions throughout her time in office, Mrs Thatcher’s most common reply begins with the words: ‘I have no direct control …’ The idea that central government should intervene directly in the curriculum, or even to ensure the quality of teachers, was seen as an affront to local and professional autonomy. The only aspect of the content of teaching prescribed by law, and therefore the responsibility of the Secretary of State, was religious education, and even here the task was delegated to experts and churches. The Department produced money – for school building and for teachers’ salaries in particular – but not ideas. Mrs Thatcher was later to claim that she protested about this. She remembered that she had said to Pile when she arrived: ‘I’m worried about the content in schools, rather than the structure.’11 It is true that there were a few occasions, especially towards the end of her time at the Department, when she mentioned this problem in speeches and interviews. In Cabinet, she sometimes complained of the automaticity of grants to local authorities. But there is no evidence that she made a serious attempt to change the balance of power. Indeed, her most immediately controversial policy – her scrapping of the Labour Circulars 10/65 and 10/66 which tried to force comprehensivization – took its stand on the principle of local independence. She never said that she was opposed to comprehensives in principle: instead she argued that good existing schools should be defended and that parents and local authorities should be able to make decisions for themselves, rather than be compelled to change.

  Mrs Thatcher withdrew the Labour Circulars at once, telling her officials on her first working day (Monday 22 June 1970) that she would do so, and making the public announcement on 30 June. For this speed she was criticized. Wilma Hart, the Department’s deputy secretary and éminence grise, tried to dissuade her from introducing a ‘blanket policy’.12 Unions and local authorities complained of the lack of consultation. Worse, from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view, 10 Downing Street indicated displeasure at her failure to discuss the matter in Cabinet first.13 Her very readiness to act was taken as a danger signal by those around Ted Heath, an example of the ‘instant government’ which he deplored. In his introductory remarks at his very first Cabinet meeting on 23 June, Heath urged ministers, ‘Don’t be rushed into hasty decisions of policy’:14 Mrs Thatcher had just rushed into one the day before. John Hedger, one of her private secretaries, remembered a conversation with a No. 10 counterpart at the time: ‘God, this woman is really right wing.’15 The feeling was that she was getting above herself. In her own view, however, Mrs Thatcher was simply doing what she had promised. The withdrawal of the Circulars had been in the election manifesto, and she regarded the election, she told the Commons when introducing her Circular, as ‘the biggest consultation of all’. There was no need for legislation to effect their withdrawal. Therefore it should happen at once. In retrospect, she felt let down by the Department in the matter. No one told her, she complained, that to withdraw one Circular, you had to issue a replacement, so she hurriedly drafted one herself.16

  In reality, the issuing of Circular 10/70, as her new policy was called, was more the signal of a change of tone than a reform of huge importance. It was not able, and it was not even intended, to stop the flow of new comprehensives in its tracks. ‘We shall … expect plans to be based on educational considerations rather than on the comprehensive principle,’ she told the Daily Telegraph,17 but, regardless of the principle, the comprehensive practice was so far advanced that not much could be done to stop it. On the day when Mrs Thatcher took office, there were 1,137 comprehensive schools in England and Wales, and hundreds of comprehensive schemes were pending. When she left it in March 1974, she had approved 3,286 comprehensive schemes and rejected only 326; she had saved ninety-four grammar schools. As she pursued her policy, Mrs Thatcher accepted the trend of the age, telling The Times that non-selective education was coming ‘with increasing speed’.18 She developed the argument that the Butler Act of 1944 had provided for a ‘comprehensive’ education service – the word appears in the Act – but that this did not necessarily mean that all schools had to take the same, comprehensive (that is, non-selective) form: comprehensiveness could be offered across an area, and was better if it included parental choice of types of school.19 When she addressed her party’s conference that autumn, she did not take her stand on the virtues of grammar schools, let alone the vices of comprehensives. Instead she spoke about the value of a ‘variety of choice’ and she did not make the theme the centrepiece of her speech, preferring to emphasize the building of new primary schools. All that 10/70 ensured was that no local authority was compelled to go comprehensive. It did not give Mrs Thatcher new powers to shape education: indeed, she made much of repudiating the very idea. Her sole legal power over whether an old school closed or a new one opened derived from Section 13 of the Butler Act itself. Early in her time in office, she continued her predecessors’ habit of considering local education authority schemes for school reorganization as a whole, but from April 1971 she desisted. Always careful to follow a legally precise posit
ion, she decided to concentrate on the only thing which Section 13 provided for – the fate of individual schools. When her Labour shadow, Ted Short, complained that this way of proceeding could make ‘nonsense of the whole area scheme’,20 she did not disagree with him, but insisted that she must perform her statutory duties.

  There were successes. Mrs Thatcher prevented the compulsory comprehensivization of Birmingham which was already in train when she arrived in office, and after Labour took control of Birmingham Council in 1972 she was able to back the strong feeling in favour of many of the grammar schools in the city, saving nearly half of them. In general, however, the policy did not really please enough people enough. Particularly awkward were those areas controlled by Conservatives which wanted to go comprehensive. ‘Look at who fought me,’ she would lament in later years.21 One of these was true-blue Surrey where, according to Short, she had organized an unsuccessful ‘tennis court plot’ at a ‘secret’ meeting with grammar school supporters in a tennis club to prevent comprehensives, which her own party had foiled. When she addressed the National Union of Teachers conference in Blackpool in April 1972, Mrs Thatcher found herself in the piquant situation of facing a boycott led by Surrey teachers, followed by a walk-out of about a hundred militant teachers during her speech. The left-wing union executive, resenting the discourtesy, led a standing ovation to her from the platform.22

  Worse still was the problem in her own constituency, caused because Barnet Council wished to go comprehensive. In June 1971, Mrs Thatcher vetoed the part of Barnet’s ‘Plan C’ which linked Woodhouse Grammar with Friern Barnet County School, and also forbade Whitefield School, Cricklewood, to go comprehensive, on the grounds of a split site and, in the latter case, the unsuitability of accommodation. Earlier in the year, she had already stopped other Barnet ‘Plan C’ schemes, although a consultation organized by the council had produced 86 per cent support for ‘Plan C’ from 28,000 replies. The normally loyal Finchley Press reported the local teachers as ‘staggered’ and quoted attacks on Mrs Thatcher by a prominent and usually friendly Conservative councillor, Vic Usher, who was chairman of the council’s education committee. Usher expressed his ‘tremendous disappointment’23 and complained that an unrepresentative group had won the battle for ‘Mrs Thatcher’s ear’. There tended, in Conservative areas, to be a split between the education committees of councils, whose members saw things more from an overall organizational point of view and therefore wanted the tidiness of wholesale comprehensivization, and the Tory rank and file, many of whom worried greatly about educational standards and felt strongly about particular schools.*