Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Perhaps the least satisfied customer of the policy was Mrs Thatcher herself. Even she found the details of so many plans exhausting to deal with and, through overconscientiousness and anxiety about political consequences, lingered too long over many of them.24 And although she genuinely believed that it was a bad idea that central government should decree the nature of every school in the country, she had little practical faith in the capacity of the only other source of power available at the time, the local authorities, to make the right decisions. ‘She really hated it,’ one senior official remembered. ‘She chafed against her own policy that local authorities were free.’25 This was noticed. The Times Educational Supplement, which was the voice of the educational establishment and Mrs Thatcher’s opponent throughout, complained that she continued ‘to hide behind the autonomy of the local authorities … when it suits her, but as soon as they use their autonomy in a way she does not like, out comes the big stick.’26 As for other policy solutions, she lacked the official support, the intellectual preparation and the political clout to produce any of her own. She rejected voucher schemes providing for real parental choice, on the grounds that their effects would be unmanageable. She warmly supported the existing direct grant schools, which mixed central government bursaries with fee-paying, but she did not dare to extend their number beyond the 176 schools already operating. In essence, she found herself presiding over a vast change of educational structure whose underlying egalitarian principles she did not support, but which she was powerless to reverse.

  This sense of frustration was fed by a sense of isolation. At the DES, she did not feel among friends. In her memoirs, she describes the prevailing atmosphere there as ‘self-righteously socialist’.27 One of her first complaints on arriving at the Department was that she had seen lots of Marxist books for sale in Dillons, the London University bookshop. The officials’ puzzlement at how to react to a matter which had nothing to do with them was interpreted by Mrs Thatcher as a sort of complicity in the act.28* After she had had Bill Pile and his wife to lunch at her home in Lamberhurst, she was irritated not to receive a thank-you letter from Pile’s left-wing wife. Irritated, but not surprised: ‘What do you expect,’ she complained to an official. ‘She’s Communist Party. She’s CP.’29 On 12 September 1970, Ted Heath was called away at the last minute by the Palestinian hijacking crisis involving Leila Khaled, and Mrs Thatcher had to substitute for him as the speaker for the centenary dinner of the National Union of Teachers at Guildhall. She professed herself shocked by what she saw that night of the crony relationship between her officials and the NUT. ‘It’s a closed world,’ she remembered thinking. ‘I saw how closely some of our top civil servants were in with the NUT.’30 This particularly worried her because of Communist influence in the NUT, a subject which she later raised in the Cabinet.

  Mrs Thatcher’s directly political accusations against her Department were somewhat unfair. One of the officials she most roundly attacked for his politics was, in private life, a member of the Conservative Party.31 On the other hand, Toby Weaver, standard-bearer for the advancement of polytechnics and one of the few whom Mrs Thatcher greatly admired, was a declared socialist, but he was redeemed in her eyes by his equally unconcealed Christianity. There was certainly not a pro-Labour atmosphere at the Department. Officials had found Ted Short, Mrs Thatcher’s predecessor, pedantic, prickly and slow witted. They rejoiced to have a minister who was more intelligent and determined, ready in the despatch of business and much less inclined to stand on ceremony. ‘You came out from a conversation with her feeling that you’d had three very hard sets of tennis,’ said Nick Stuart.32 Most liked her ‘generous personality’, which was attentive to personal troubles, gave parties to thank people for doing well and treated juniors as well as seniors attentively.33 Many admired her charms as a woman; some, according to John Hedger, were even ‘bowled over’.

  There was, nevertheless, what might be called a cultural gap, some of which may have related to her sex. Pile, who always rather looked down on Mrs Thatcher and, according to a fellow senior official, ‘never missed a chance to slag her off behind her back’,34 decided that ‘it didn’t look right’ that the word ‘hairdresser’ should appear in her departmental diary, and so the coiffeur’s name was substituted.35 And it was not only the fact that she was a woman, but such a carefully turned out, utterly Tory woman at that. John Banks, private secretary at the beginning of her time in office, found her ‘difficult to relate to’ because of her ‘mannerized [sic] style of talking to civil servants’. It struck officials, partly with amusement and partly with irritation, that Mrs Thatcher had never for a second considered sending her own children to state schools. (The twins were by this time sixth-formers. Carol was at St Paul’s and Mark was at Harrow. Carol found it particularly difficult that her mother was education secretary while she was being educated.)36 One day, Mrs Thatcher and Banks were driving past Pimlico Comprehensive in London, then a new and famous school. He said that he might send his son there. ‘Oh John,’ said Mrs Thatcher, ‘you couldn’t think of sending your child to that glasshouse.’37 On a trip to Cambridge, she gave John Hedger a long talk about the importance of choosing the right house at a school for one’s son. He found this noteworthy because she assumed (a) that one’s son would go to a private school, (b) that he would board and (c) that there was no need to mention one’s daughter. As Hedger put it, ‘The department respected her enormously, but were bothered by her prejudices.’38 In her turn, Mrs Thatcher was irritated by the opposite prejudices among her officials. One of her first acts on coming into office was to question the work of the Department’s Consultative Committee on Research into Comprehensive Education. An official minuted smoothly: ‘I do not think that the Secretary of State need feel concerned about the completion of the research programme. It is not a propaganda exercise but a professional research programme conducted by a reputable research organisation.’ Less than a week in the job, Mrs Thatcher scribbled at the bottom of the minute: ‘This is one of the most disappointing and frustrating documents I have read. Not a penny after Dec. 1971.’39 She remembered calling in a chief inspector of schools (she was not sure which) and saying to him: ‘You’re absolutely against grammar schools. They’re being made to feel guilty but they’re doing well … They need a bit of praise from people like you,’40 and she accused public-school educated men like Banks (Eton) and Nick Stuart (Harrow) of acting out of feelings of guilt induced by their privilege.41 It is probably wrong to claim that the Department’s officials were dedicated to building an egalitarian New Jerusalem. It would be nearer the mark to say that they shared the attitudes of the post-war settlement in education, and were resistant to change, especially from a woman, new to the Cabinet and from outside their own tribe, whose own ideas on the subject, while markedly different from their own, were not fully formed.* This slightly edgy relationship with her own Department helps to explain the fiasco which made her a household name for the first time and came quite close to aborting her political career.

  One of the first actions of Edward Heath’s new government was to inaugurate a review of all public spending. Mrs Thatcher immediately applied herself to this with the literal-mindedness in which, contrary to widespread belief, there always lurked an element of deliberate self-parody. Lord Belstead,† her most junior minister in the Department, attended the meeting in the DES when she announced her plan to issue Circular 10/70. ‘Off you go to your rooms,’ she said as she ended. Belstead made his way to the tobacco-stained office of the Permanent Secretary to discuss something. Then he heard a voice behind him, the distinctive tones of his new boss, directed at Pile: ‘The PM says we must take extreme care with spending, so therefore there will be no redecoration here without permission from me.’42 Pile gave his opinion of this style of leadership in later years: ‘She is the only person I know who I don’t think I ever heard say, “I wonder whether …” … she never delegated anything.’43

  But Mrs Thatcher did fight her Depar
tment’s corner. At a time when school rolls were rising and almost the only power she had was her ability to spend, she was determined to increase the DES budget. Her tactic for doing so was to accept short-term cuts in exchange for long-term growth, and cuts in non-educational aspects of her budget in favour of increases in truly educational spending. The Treasury’s attention focused on removing the subsidy for school meals in two stages and abolishing the long-standing provision of free milk for health reasons to all primary school pupils for their morning break. (In an earlier economy measure, the previous Labour government had abolished the milk for secondary school pupils.) The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Maurice Macmillan, wrote to Mrs Thatcher about this on 31 July 1970,44 calculating that the saving on the milk would be £9.5 million in 1971–2 and £14.4 million in 1972–3. He added that the change would involve legislation. While happy enough with the general drift, Mrs Thatcher immediately made it clear that she would not accept complete withdrawal because it ‘would be too drastic a step and would arouse more public antagonism than the saving justifies’. She proposed instead that milk still be issued to children up to the age of seven,45 and she suggested that the savings made should be redirected into the 1972–3 and 1973–4 primary school rebuilding programme which was her most trumpeted measure. When Macmillan demurred, pleading that he was not getting enough cuts elsewhere, she replied: ‘… I am bound to withdraw my acceptance of your original proposals for savings … I simply cannot accept that education should be treated more harshly because you have been disappointed in your expectations from other quarters.’46 This forced the issue to discussion in Cabinet, and on 29 September Mrs Thatcher told the Cabinet that she had reached agreement to retain school milk for infants, as she had insisted all along. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber (who had taken up the post when Iain Macleod died suddenly little more than a month after the election), announced his public spending package at the end of October, Mrs Thatcher was judged to have handled matters well. In addition to the promise to increase spending on primary school buildings, she had contrived to save the Open University, an invention of Harold Wilson’s which most Tories disliked but which she believed would be ‘a means of getting good teaching on television’ and extend educational opportunity.47 At a Cabinet meeting at the end of July, she had successfully fought for the Open University against most of the Cabinet, arguing that ‘We can’t make education our first sacrifice,’ although Heath complained that the OU was ‘not a university at all’.48 This saving of the Open University, in defiance of her seniors, was a considerable achievement for an entirely untried Cabinet minister. When the outcome of the spending exercise emerged in the autumn, even the Guardian spoke of ‘a remarkably light raid on the education budget’.49

  Problems, however, began to grow. According to witnesses present at the relevant early meetings in which the Department had agreed in principle to reducing free milk, no one had raised the political dangers (though the correspondence referred to above shows that Mrs Thatcher herself had some idea of them). These now became more apparent because of the necessity for legislation (also not raised within the Department, but pointed out by the Treasury – see above) to implement the cuts and to permit authorities to sell milk to children who had previously received it free. The original hope was that the milk cuts would be contained – one might almost say concealed – in wider legislation led by Keith Joseph’s Department of Health and Social Security about dental and prescription charges. DES officials believed that this would ‘cushion the political criticism’.50 However, the government managers rejected the plan because of lack of time, and the DES had to forge ahead alone. By May 1971 it became clear that opposition had grown. Education authorities and the Labour Opposition sought a power in the Bill for those authorities that wished to continue to supply the milk free. Short wrote mischievously to Mrs Thatcher, ‘you have said on many occasions that you want local authorities to have more freedom. Here is a chance to give them some.’51 The ‘freedom’ was not something that Mrs Thatcher could grant, since it would have been central government that had to pay for it. But some Conservative backbenchers started to say the same thing, if more politely. By the parliamentary debate on the second reading on 14 June 1971, Short had worked up enough excitement to be able to call the legislation ‘mean, squalid and unworthy of a great country … typical of the philosophy of this astounding, pre-Disraeli Government’.52 Nutrition experts, social workers, the NUT, the Child Poverty Action Group all pitched in against Mrs Thatcher. Here was a subject on which everyone could easily have an opinion and where the case for the cut, however reasonable, could never seem attractive.* The Sun asked, ‘Is Mrs Thatcher human?’53 Several local authorities defied the regulations and continued to issue milk free to their pupils. At the Labour Party conference that September, a floor speaker coined the phrase ‘Mrs Thatcher, milksnatcher’, and it quickly became the only thing that most of the public knew about her.

  All this fuss was peculiarly painful to Mrs Thatcher. It was her first experience of being hated for her public work, and it cut her to the quick that people should think that she – a mother – could be indifferent to the health and happiness of children. She felt the great unfairness of the whole thing and she realized, to her mortification, that she had allowed the press to develop a public character for her which was unattractive and damaging to her career. The signs of this problem had been visible as soon as she came into office. The education press corps, like the DES itself, were predominantly unsympathetic to her political attitudes,* and an informal gathering for them in the summer of 1970 had been, according to a later piece in the Observer, ‘a disaster’ because she had appeared not to understand a number of questions put to her on ordinary matters of policy.54 Another early sign of the caricature that was building was a BBC Panorama documentary which appeared on 23 July 1970. The programme included a perceptive contribution by Shirley Williams which noted Mrs Thatcher’s ‘combination of high intelligence with the fact that she stands really rather on the right … and as such has become something of a heroine figure in the Conservative Party’. But the main purpose of the programme was to depict Mrs Thatcher as an aggressively middle-class Tory woman, able, but fundamentally unsympathetic and in favour of privilege. The camera began with the Education Secretary having her hair done. It continued with a subsequently famous sequence of the Thatchers at The Mount in which Margaret ferociously pruned roses while Denis charged up and down the 2 acres of grass with an enormous lawn-mower. Another sequence showed Mrs Thatcher in the chemistry class of a London comprehensive school in which pupils were learning about sulphur in food-making. Mrs Thatcher chips in with the children: ‘Particularly on breakfast spoons you know, the spoons you use for boiled eggs. You dip in and, if they’re silver, they go brown and Mother has to clean them. So these days we tend to use stainless steel, don’t we?’ Few, if any, of the pupils would have seen any silver at home. This was wonderful propaganda for the left. Mrs Thatcher thought the programme was ‘a wretched little film’.55 It helped to set a media and therefore a public mood which was against her. On 14 May 1971 her speech establishing Liverpool Polytechnic was cut short by protests, including cries of ‘School milk!’ There were many more such scenes. Protesting students used to wait for her train at station platforms and charge up and bang on her window, an experience which made her dislike of trains terminal. Officials remembered her being actually frightened, and were touched by this symptom of human frailty.56* By November, the Sun marked her down as ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.57

  The attacks produced an uncharacteristic self-pity. In an interview in the Guardian, she burst out, ‘Why, why? Why are you doing it?’,58 and she earned a rebuke from the Daily Mail columnist Jean Rook – ‘Show some spunk, Margaret. Remember flaming Barbara Castle when she came back at critics like a blow-lamp’59 – advice which she took to heart. In some interviews about this difficult time, Mrs Thatcher liked to say how it had been worse for Denis
, who had to bear all the attacks without being able to answer back. But really it was she, not he, who found the whole thing almost unbearable. It was Denis, forcing her to decide whether she was tough enough for this sort of thing, who brought her through it.60 What also drove her on was the conviction that the policy was, in essence, right: ‘The idea that most people couldn’t pay a small amount for their children’s milk was to me utterly ridiculous … And it showed up those who were using it not really about school milk, but to try to get me out of Education.’61 In later years, Mrs Thatcher gained a reputation for physical and psychological stamina, but though her determination was always present, the toughness had to be acquired by bitter experience. People who knew her in the 1970s often remarked how tired she seemed, and how upset by attack. ‘Milk’ was her first really big test, and she did not pass it easily. Indeed, once the milksnatcher row was all over, Ted Heath, unbeknownst to her, even raised the idea with colleagues that he should sack her. The chief whip, Francis Pym, told him that he could not dismiss the only woman in his Cabinet. Health dropped the notion.