Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The last straw came just before Christmas 1971. A DES official caught up with the fact that the Department had put out its milk Circular incorrectly, suggesting that local authorities could remit the charge ‘in suitable circumstances’. If this had been true, the whole purpose of the Bill could have been nullified. Pile wrote almost abjectly to Mrs Thatcher on 23 December, informing her of the error: ‘I want to apologise unreservedly for this mistake which should never have happened. It adds a further embarrassment in an area which is already causing you much trouble.’ Mrs Thatcher agreed to issue a correction at once and added that ‘No. 10 ought to be informed.’62 She was so angry with Pile that at the office Christmas party to which she had brought him a present she turned and whispered to an official: ‘Put that Christmas present away. I cannot give it to him now.’63 Perhaps because of the Christmas break, however, the correction of the Circular went out without publicity, and at this point the defiance of the milk edict rather mysteriously melted away. By 9 January 1972 Britain was embroiled in the first of the Heath government’s miners’ strikes and the media had lost interest in milk.

  It was at this point that Ted Heath, showing a concern for which Mrs Thatcher always remained grateful, took matters in hand. Given that she had attracted so much bad publicity over milk for so small a financial saving, and that her public image was poor, she was in a vulnerable position. Heath could have decided to sack her, and there had been rumours that he was thinking of doing so. Instead he backed her. On 12 January he had her, Pile and other senior officials to Chequers to effect a reconciliation between them – Heath later recalled that she had been agitating to get Pile moved to another department64 – and to plan a new direction for her tenure of the post. Heath had been impressed by Mrs Thatcher’s tenacity, culminating in her victory in Cabinet over funds for school building in June 1971, in getting more money for her department. The deal, in essence, was to take the heat out of education, and to put money into it. The milk row had shown that the educational establishment was lining up against Mrs Thatcher. So had a smaller, but also bitter and eventually humiliating, dispute in which she had urged reform of the system by which subscriptions to the National Union of Students were automatically made from students’ grants regardless of their wishes. Left-wing students had barracked her all over the country about the matter, led by the future Labour Foreign Secretary and Lord Chancellor Jack Straw, who was then president of the National Union of Students; and, in a period when confrontation was dreaded, she had received no backing from vice-chancellors for her attempt to abolish this government-funded closed shop. With the exception of Keith Joseph, Cabinet ministers had been lukewarm in her support when they discussed it in Cabinet in August 1971, fearing a needlessly bloody political battle. On 10 January 1972 she announced postponement of the question for a year. As for the question of comprehensives, the minutes of the Chequers meeting show agreement that ‘If the procedure for local objections was allowed to influence policy … the Government might get the worst of both worlds.’65 From now on, she would concentrate instead on those areas on which people could agree – more primary schools (on which she had already made a good start), further education, more polytechnics, raising the school leaving age, an expansion of nursery education and a White Paper to set out the bright future.66

  Following the Chequers meeting, Heath praised Mrs Thatcher in the House of Commons. She used this, and her private knowledge of his support, for what is nowadays called a relaunch. A spate of press interviews in January and February presented her as someone who had learnt from her ordeal and bounced back. She emphasized her ordinariness: ‘Whenever I go over a school the teachers always say to me, “You’re not at all how we expected.” ’67 To the journalist Lynda Lee Potter, with a touching glimmering of self-awareness, she said, ‘The strange thing is, people do resent it when you know the answers.’68 ‘I’m afraid I’ll be remembered for milk,’ she told the Liverpool Daily Post. ‘But I’d like to be remembered as the Minister who actually, actually did raise the school leaving age instead of just talking about it,’ and she added, ‘I must confess the record really is pretty impressive. I think the Prime Minister thinks so too.’69 The school leaving age was raised from fifteen to sixteen with effect from September 1973. By May 1972 she was dropping hints about the expansion of nursery schools. She was effective in her fight with the Treasury – officials remembered that ‘it was almost literally true that Tony Barber [the Chancellor of the Exchequer] walked backwards when he saw her coming’70 – and at the party conference at Blackpool in October she was able to trail her coming ‘programme for the systematic expansion of nursery education’.

  As a political tactic, Mrs Thatcher’s readiness to shut up and spend worked well. Ted Heath, increasingly beleaguered with economic and industrial problems, was happy to have quiet on the schools front. The educational interest groups were placated, and it became known that Mrs Thatcher was persistent in arguing the case for better pay for teachers in Cabinet. Max Morris, a Communist who became vice-president of the NUT in 1972, and a pioneer thinker in the comprehensivist movement in the 1930s, remembered Mrs Thatcher as ‘very expeditious and businesslike’ and, despite her dislike of comprehensives, ‘very pragmatic’. He was pleased that she avoided confrontation with the union over the report into teacher training which she had commissioned from Lord James of Rusholme, the former high master of Manchester Grammar School, who delivered it in January 1972. In later years, she expressed dissatisfaction with the report’s emphasis on structures rather than content of education, but at the time she was extremely cautious, and did not press ahead with its plan to have ‘licensed’ student teachers in the classroom, an idea hated by the union because it would undermine their sense of their own professionalism if students were permitted to teach alone without being fully qualified.71

  The Department began to feel at ease once more. The White Paper, provisionally entitled Education – A Framework for Expansion by Michael James (no relation of Lord James), the young official who drafted it, and preserving that name almost to the end of the process because ‘No one gave a stuff what it was called,’72 was really a Sir Humphrey’s dream, creating new work for officials for years to come, and projecting not far short of a 50 per cent rise in expenditure over the coming decade (£2,162 million in 1971–2 to £3,120 million in 1981–2). In fact, because of the priority of nursery education, the plans included some economies about teacher numbers and restraining admission to universities in favour of polytechnics, which were cheaper, and, in her eyes, crucial to the expansion of higher education. But when the Cabinet considered the proposals on 30 November 1972 – virtually the only Cabinet discussion of education policy in Heath’s entire administration – it was agreed to play economies down and, for propaganda reasons, to restore the title, A Framework for Expansion, which had been dropped in favour of ‘A Framework for Advance’. Edward Heath declared to his Cabinet colleagues that it was ‘the most important White Paper [on the subject] since 1944’, but he also told them that the government should ‘Make clear that the White Paper is concerned with the structure, not with the content of education’.73 So Mrs Thatcher’s urgings about content had got precisely nowhere. When it was published in December 1972, the White Paper identified five areas – nursery education, school building, staffing standards in schools, teacher training and higher education – where expenditure ‘will continue to increase substantially in real terms over the coming decade’ – and devoted most of the rest of the document to setting out the various projections. Although always following matters with her customary thoroughness, Mrs Thatcher did not inject many of her own ideas into the White Paper.74 There was nothing about parental choice, little about standards, little that represented an ideology. The document was essentially a bureaucratic product, arising from a cross-government exercise invented by Heath called Programme Analysis and Review (PAR). It stated an official view of matters – quantitive, not qualitative, but one which, for political reasons,
Mrs Thatcher was happy to endorse. Officials, by now appreciative of her energy and communicative talents,* were very pleased with the way she presented the Framework to the world, but what she presented was not discernibly different from what any other secretary of state for education in those years would have offered. As she said at the press conference to launch the White Paper on 6 December, ‘there is little that can be accomplished in education without money,’ and really money was all that it was about. She won a great deal of it for education. At the press conference, Mrs Thatcher also said, ‘Most of you … must have felt that over the last year or so I … have had very little hard news to put before you.’ This quietism had been intentional, and it had succeeded, but it is doubtful if Mrs Thatcher enjoyed it very much. She found herself almost bored, and would have liked to move jobs.75 Her emollient tactic had ensured her political survival, but the price – the loss of her distinctive voice – was high. Interviews and speeches of the period show her adopting a banal, goody-goody tone which does not suit her character. The Guardian was now praising her for being ‘more than half-way towards a respectable socialist education policy’, and she told the Illustrated London News how pleased she was that the atmosphere in primary schools was ‘much better … much more progressive’,76 whereas in private she complained to inspectors that such education was ‘all rag dolls and rolling on the floor’.77 Floor speakers at the Conservative Party conference in October 1972 complained vociferously that not enough was being done to protect grammar schools and permit parental choice.

  For the first and almost the only time in her political career, Mrs Thatcher started to face more attacks from the right than from the left. From time to time, she gave interviews and made speeches designed to show that her Tory heart remained in the right place over education. She expressed concerns about standards of reading, and commissioned a report from the historian and moderately left-wing Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Sir Alan Bullock, on the subject. She worried that ‘We are feeding doubts into our children not beliefs,’78 she attacked ‘levelling down’,79 and she maintained rhetorical, though not practical, support for parental choice. Privately, she felt that the school curriculum was ‘going off the rails’.80 But in public she became bland. Her period at Education after 1972 is the only time in her career when her contributions in the House of Commons largely lose their combative tone. She became the loyal, careful and on the whole strictly departmental spokesman of a government that found itself in more and more trouble. As the economic prospect darkened, all spending plans came under closer scrutiny and in the course of 1973 it became clear the Framework ideas were a wish-list which could not be met. On 12 November the National Union of Mineworkers announced an overtime ban in pursuit of a pay claim, and the following day, worried about power supply, the government proclaimed a state of emergency. One of the consequent cuts planned was of heating in schools. Mrs Thatcher was not told about this, and the first she heard about it was on the BBC’s Today programme. She went straight round in person to the Department of Trade and Industry to complain, and within twelve hours the order was stopped. Mrs Thatcher was at pains to reveal this decisive intervention to the world.81 If the equivalent to the milk row was looming, she wanted this time to be on the right side of the fence.

  The coming struggle that was to engulf the country and the Conservative Party made school milk seem a very small matter indeed.

  10

  Who Governs Britain?

  ‘The extreme left is well in command’

  In the general election campaign of May/June 1970, the Conservative manifesto had declared: ‘We utterly reject the philosophy of compulsory wage control.’ Although the manifesto had concentrated more on Heath’s desire for a ‘new style of government’ than on an ideologically coherent programme, it was informed by a preference for free-market liberal economics, one which Heath himself, at that time at least, shared.* He believed, and the manifesto argued, that free collective bargaining in industry – as unregulated pay negotiation between management and trade unions was known – could exist happily, provided that there was ‘a new context of labour law’.1 This meant a curbing of the legal privileges of the trade unions, and the introduction of a new Industrial Relations Act. The manifesto was equally firm in its condemnation of inflation, which it attributed to ‘Labour’s damaging policies of high taxation and devaluation’. Government spending had risen from a 44 per cent share of Gross Domestic Product in 1964 to 50 per cent in 1969. That drift, the Tories had argued, had to stop and be replaced by a downward pressure and by a political direction which would be maintained. ‘Nothing has done Britain more harm’, said the manifesto, ‘… than the endless backing and filling we have seen in recent years.’ The Conservatives who won in 1970 were committed to a smaller state, and a freer economy, and to the urgency of these matters. They failed, and their failure created the conditions for Margaret Thatcher to become their leader.

  It is beyond the scope of this book to give a full account of the Heath government and its economic U-turn which culminated in the introduction of an incomes policy in 1972. Numerous factors contributed. The early death of Iain Macleod meant that Heath had, in Anthony Barber, a politically weak Chancellor of the Exchequer, who did not bring important thinking of his own to economic policy and was therefore a prisoner of the Keynesian dominance of the age. Much more than later prime ministers, Heath was his own chancellor, and the men with whom he worked most closely – Robert Armstrong,* his principal private secretary, Sir Burke Trend, the Cabinet Secretary, and, above all, the head of the home Civil Service, Sir William Armstrong – were all opposed to liberal, free-market economics. Government-engineered increases in growth were seen as answering the problems of economic sluggishness. The fact that the most articulate Tory advocate of liberal economics was also Heath’s most hated rival, Enoch Powell, meant that criticism of policy too quickly became connected with personal disloyalty. World conditions, including President Richard Nixon’s adoption of emergency economic measures in August 1971, and the oil-price shocks which followed the Yom Kippur War of 1973, did not help. Nor did the Conservative fear of unemployment as electorally lethal to the party associated with privilege and with the sufferings of the 1930s: there was alarm when the figure passed 1 million in January 1972. But by far the biggest difficulty the government faced was that of industrial relations; pay and trade unions, particularly in the nationalized industries, dominated the scene from the beginning. Union leaders who had seen off Harold Wilson in his attempt to reform industrial relations in 1969 were not going to make it easier for a new prime minister who led the party to which they were opposed. From the start, they flexed their muscles.

  Douglas Hurd,† who ran Heath’s political office in Downing Street from the election until the winter of 1973, recorded that ‘there is no doubt what swallowed up most of my working time. The government’s handling of public sector disputes was the dominant theme.’2 This was true from the first, not only in the later, darker days. As soon as the government came into office, there was a dock strike, requiring the declaration of a state of emergency. It was settled at a very high price. In November 1970, arbitrators awarded what was seen as a shockingly large 14 per cent increase to local authority workers. In the following month, regular power cuts began, as power-station employees worked to rule.* In January 1971 there was a postal strike. In March there was a serious dispute at the Ford Motor Company.

  A similar, related pattern emerged in government dealings with ailing industry, whether nationalized, private or – as was often, and complicatedly, the case – somewhere between the two. In February 1971 the aero-engine company Rolls-Royce informed the government that it could not afford to complete the RB211 engine and was insolvent. Heath rescued the company in the interest of national defence. On 14 June that year he announced to the Cabinet that Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, a partly government-backed conglomerate on which depended 15,000 jobs, mainly in Scotland, was going to apply for liquidation that day. There w
as no question of a bail-out, he said. But over the summer, as union militants began a ‘work-in’ at the Clydeside yard, refusing to leave the premises, and the police authorities warned that they might not be able to preserve order, Heath weakened. On 19 October the Cabinet agreed to rescue the consortium. And the following February the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, John Davies,† used a parliamentary debate on unemployment to proclaim the final rescue package for the company, thus explicitly linking government rescues with jobless totals, an act which even Heath came to regard as a mistake.3

  By this time, the government was already immersed in its most significant industrial dispute, and with its most symbolically important foe. In July 1971 the National Union of Mineworkers had made a demand for a wage increase of 45 per cent, which was rejected. In December the union revised its rules, reducing the percentage required to vote for a strike to 55 per cent. Fifty-nine per cent voted that way, and on 9 January 1972 the first national miners’ strike for nearly fifty years began. The government considered that it had enough stocks of coal to weather the dispute. The problem lay in their distribution. Union picketing could prevent the movement of stocks from their depots and also the movement of oil to power stations. On 10 February a session of the Cabinet was interrupted by a message for Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, from the Chief Constable of Birmingham. The message stated that he had asked for the closure of the Saltley coke depot because lorry drivers there were being prevented from entering the depot by the huge pickets. The 500 police deployed were not in a position to restrain the violent threats of the 10,000 or so pickets, who were led by the rising star of the hard left in the NUM, Arthur Scargill.* Saltley was, remembered Heath, ‘the most vivid, direct and terrifying challenge to the rule of law that I could ever recall emerging from within our own country’,4 and it came at a time when the shortage of power, which had already put much of industry on a three-day week,† threatened a total blackout. Mrs Thatcher later identified Saltley as the turning point for Heath: ‘Until Saltley, Ted gave a strong lead and made up his mind. Then he made up his mind the other way.’5 Heath’s response to Saltley – and probably by then he had little choice – was to find a way of giving in. He invited the judge Lord Wilberforce to conduct a hurried inquiry into the dispute. Wilberforce recommended a punishingly generous settlement of more than 20 per cent, but even this the miners rejected. Heath intervened in person, inviting the miners’ leaders to 10 Downing Street and negotiating with them into the small hours. In the end, they accepted the Wilberforce pay offer, but pocketed from Heath an additional improvement in their substantial fringe benefits, such as longer holidays, so extravagant as to be the equivalent of the extra wages they had sought.