Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Home’s committee suggested two significant rule changes. Both, as it turned out, were to have notable effects on Mrs Thatcher’s later career. The first was that it should be possible to challenge a sitting leader once a year. The second was that, to win on the first ballot, the leading candidate needed not an absolute majority plus a margin of 15 per cent over his nearest rival (as was provided for in the 1965 rules), but only a 15 per cent margin over his nearest rival, with that percentage being calculated as one of all those eligible to vote. In short, the barrier any challenger to Heath needed to jump had been lowered. This was ‘Alec’s revenge’. The committee’s recommendations could not be voted on and implemented until the new year, so the exact date of the contest remained uncertain. On 19 December, Nigel Fisher organized a meeting of Du Cann supporters in which all present, including Neave, signed a letter urging him to stand. ‘I said’, recorded Neave, ‘that if Du Cann did not stand … we should all support Margaret but there is no unanimity. She has less chance at present. Heath’s stock is rising again.’59

  On Christmas Day itself, Neave was fretting: ‘Not too happy about E. Du Cann since his bank, Keyser Ullmann, is clearly in difficulties. I plan to ring him in a week’s time to discover whether he has decided to stand. If not, we must back Margaret.’60 Three days later, he wrote to Mrs Thatcher suggesting a meeting in the New Year. Well before this took place, though, Du Cann himself had seen her. As he remembered the meeting, she came to his house accompanied by Denis. They sat on the sofa together, so that ‘It was like interviewing a housekeeper and her husband.’61 She had come to the meeting saying that she would back Du Cann as the leadership candidate if he would make her his shadow chancellor, but he told her that he would not stand. This account is probably not completely accurate. Mrs Thatcher, in her memoirs, considered that the conversation with Du Cann showed him ‘undecided’.62 On 5 January 1975, Neave and Du Cann talked on the telephone for forty minutes. Neave records Du Cann as saying that:

  He thought her naïve but admired her character. He still had not made up his mind whether to stand. He thought we should organise a ‘head count’ as soon as possible so that we knew what the probable figures were … I said it was difficult to commit myself entirely to Margaret and he said I must do what was right for the country! But this does not help. Until we know how many will back Margaret Thatcher I do not think any decisions will be made.

  It was time for lunch with Mrs Thatcher. The meeting took place on 9 January. Neave noted it in some detail:

  drove to 19 Flood Street where we [Neave went with his wife Diana] lunched alone with Margaret Thatcher. A very nice house, a bit too tidy, and everything wrapped in cellophane. However M looked well, rather fatter and in good form. We discussed Historic Houses [their tax exemption was being debated] …

  We then got on to the leadership. She said G. Howe and one or two other Shadow Cabinet members supported her. A change was essential. No real talks on policy and when in office it had never been a ‘real Cabinet’. Ted never confided in anyone. She agreed that a headcounting must come first and that it was possible that she and E. Du Cann might get the same type of support. There was so far no campaign structure. I said this was not possible until a provisional assessment of the figures could be made. She had heard from the press that E. Heath would get 120. (He would have to get 159 to win on the first ballot.) I said 70 or 80 was more like it. The numbers for E. Du Cann and her could be close in which case they would have to settle whether both should stand. I find it difficult because having promised her support, I have also signed the letter to E Du Cann but we do not yet know if he will stand. We also discussed whether W. Whitelaw who is ambitious would stand. I did not fancy his chances but it was possible that Central Office would influence MPs on his behalf through their constituency associations.63

  Three days later, Du Cann was still dithering. At his flat, Neave ‘found a private note from Nigel Fisher saying Edward was still undecided. His wife did not want to give up their beautiful house in Somerset which they could not afford without the Bank.’64 The next day, Neave rang Mrs Thatcher and told her he would give her a definite view of how to proceed by Thursday 16 January. On the Tuesday, he at last got a decision out of Du Cann: ‘Du Cann told me he would definitely not stand: he could not “let down” his wife.’65 The following evening, during a division on the committee stage of the Finance Bill, on which Mrs Thatcher was leading for the Conservatives, Neave ‘agreed with Nigel Fisher that I should chair a new group to support Margaret Thatcher’.66

  A meeting was held in Interview Room J to discuss aspects of organization, but even at this late stage ‘Several “anti-women” voices’ were raised. ‘Afterwards I spoke to Fergus Montgomery who has been running Margaret Thatcher’s “organisation” (which hardly exists) and arranged with W. Shelton* to hold a meeting to discuss “identification” of her supporters on Monday at 9 p.m.’67 The next day, 16 January, the 1922 Committee approved the Home committee’s recommended change of rules for the leadership elections.

  A further complication entered Neave’s calculations: ‘Having told me that he would not stand, Hugh Fraser has now changed his mind. He would certainly take votes off Margaret and Heath but what would it avail?’68 Fraser, a charming, romantic man, and a long-standing critic of Heath, had been tempted to throw his hat in the ring by various favourable mentions in the press. His wife, Lady Antonia, described by Neave as ‘beautiful, arrogant like Lady Glencora Palliser [heroine of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser sequence of novels, which, at that time, was a hugely successful BBC television serialization with Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora]’, recorded in her own diary at this time her husband’s ‘argument for’ standing: ‘to call public attention to his continued existence in the world of politics. This needs not many votes but some. Programme: to call attention to the continued existence of another kind of Toryism, radical, right, patriotic, non-Socialist. Under Heath Toryism becoming extinct as did Liberals.’69 Publicity made Hugh Fraser feel optimistic. ‘Thinks he may get as many as 50 votes,’ Lady Antonia wrote on 19 January. ‘I think 35.’ Two days later she recorded: ‘Dinner with Hugh at the H of C … Norman St. J S [St John-Stevas]* (camply): “I’m voting for Hugh so that you can grace No. 10.” ’†

  The Fraser intervention was not considered very serious, and Neave continued with his plans. On Sunday 19 January he spoke to Mrs Thatcher on the telephone and told her the names of the people in the group which had been backing Du Cann: ‘She said I should consult Keith Joseph who would back her. This means that supporters of Joseph, Thatcher and Du Cann are now united. I told her to forget about it [that is, not worry about the leadership campaign] and stick to the Finance Bill.’70 The following evening Neave and Shelton met to seal the pact and record the extent of her support. ‘So the balloon has gone up,’ wrote Neave. ‘The Campaign group is formed of people of all shades of thought in the party.’71

  Neave had not been exaggerating when he said that Mrs Thatcher’s campaign team hardly existed. Before the Neave alliance, her only two known lieutenants had been William Shelton and Fergus Montgomery, neither of whom stood high in parliamentary seniority or reputation. Shelton was considered a lightweight and, by some, ‘fond of the bottle’,72 and Montgomery, in an age when these things mattered much more than today, was thought effeminate. He had a ‘mincing walk’,73 and looked like ‘a pantomime drag queen’.74 Montgomery himself was engagingly self-critical about his efforts – ‘It was just Bill Shelton and me, and we were useless’75 – and, in the climactic days of the campaign, he went off on a long-planned parliamentary jaunt to South Africa. The third man helping Mrs Thatcher from the start was not in the Commons at all – Gordon Reece. Reece believed that the MP who was most important in winning support for Mrs Thatcher was Peter Morrison: ‘It was he and he alone who persuaded a significant section of the knights of the shires that she was an acceptable alternative to Ted Heath.’76 Morrison was undoubtedly important. It is unlikely, though, that someone
who had entered the House of Commons only in February of that year could have carried enough weight.

  Where Reece was right was in his view that the ‘Knights of the Shires’ – the name traditionally given to the mainly rural, mainly gentry backbone of the Conservative parliamentary party – represented the key constituency Mrs Thatcher had to win. In later years, it was often written (particularly often by Julian Critchley,* who had voted for Mrs Thatcher but later became a full-time critic) that Mrs Thatcher’s supporters were ‘garagistes’ taking on the landed gentry in the party, and that she won because of a ‘peasants’ revolt’. This is not the case. There was not really a class war in the Tory Party at this time and, to the extent that there was, ‘Grocer’ Heath (as the satirical magazine Private Eye christened him) was just as likely to be the victim of it as the grocer’s daughter Margaret Thatcher. The Knights of the Shires were men who came mostly from public schools, very large numbers of whom had served in the Second World War. Some were aristocratic; some were ‘petty gentry’; some were from the professions and some from business. What they tended to share was a rather regimental, officers’-mess attitude to the party and a strong, though vague, patriotism much more powerful than any definite ideology which could be called left or right.

  This was a group of men (more than 90 per cent of them were men) for whom the habits of politics were those of a club. By the autumn of 1974, large numbers of them were coming to the conclusion that Heath had let down the regiment, weakened the spirit of the club and offended their patriotism. They felt cross that he had so often overlooked their own talents and, through sheer bad manners, snubbed them, and they were bewildered at the way his policies had failed to prevent socialism taking a grip of the country they loved. As Sara Morrison put it, ‘The men with double-barrelled names never really took to Ted.’77 Mrs Thatcher admired the values of this club – she had more or less married into it – but was not herself part of it: ‘I was conscious of being a woman and being of a different social background, although they never made me feel it … Airey had the contacts I didn’t have.’78 It would not have occurred to most of the Knights of the Shires, unprompted, that a woman could lead the Conservative Party, but when the proposition was brought to their attention they were surprisingly unworried by it. A significant minority of them were softened by Mrs Thatcher’s sex appeal,79 and a larger number rather took to her character. Her parliamentary performance and the manner of her challenge convinced them that she had the quality they admired above everything else – courage.

  In the run-up to his own leadership bid in 1965, Ted Heath had distinguished himself in the role of debating the Finance Bill in committee. This had taken place as ‘a committee of the whole House’ (as opposed to a ‘select’ or ‘standing’ committee) and therefore gave MPs an opportunity to shine in the large forum of the Chamber, while deploying a mastery of detail. The same was true in 1974–5. Parliamentary proceedings were not televised at that time, or even broadcast on the radio: MPs felt they were addressing an intimate audience of their colleagues and performance on television was much less important than in the House of Commons, a view which, before the end of the twentieth century, was to be reversed. Taking the opportunity that Heath had inadvertently given her by making her the Treasury number two, Mrs Thatcher threw herself wholeheartedly into the assault on Denis Healey and his Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Joel Barnett (a man of whom, as so often with Jews, especially those with good economic brains, she was very fond). In the debate on the second reading, she railed against Healey’s inflation and delighted her troops with her attack on his proposals for capital taxes: ‘a capital transfer tax does not redistribute wealth, nor does a wealth tax. They concentrate wealth in the hands of the Government, which is the very opposite of distribution.’80 From 15 January to 11 February 1975, including the days of both of the leadership ballots, Mrs Thatcher spoke in twelve Finance Bill Committee debates, often very late at night, and almost always to good effect. She combined an astonishing mastery of the technical facts with a sure sense of the emotions aroused among voters by tax, inflation and economic mismanagement. She kept pushing the idea, for example, that any policy of encouraging savings must welcome a vital motive to save – that of wanting to safeguard one’s posterity. ‘Fathers saved for them [their children] and then’, she said sarcastically, ‘did an awful thing – handing those savings to their children,’ for which they were now to be penalized.81 On 22 January, Mrs Thatcher reiterated her attacks on a grander scale. Healey responded to her criticisms by saying that her ‘whole speech was a defiant reassertion of birth and privilege’: ‘she emerged in this debate as La Pasionaria [a reference to the eloquent Communist orator and broadcaster in the Spanish Civil War] of privilege. She showed that she has decided … to see her party tagged as the party of the rich few.’ Mrs Thatcher was equal to this: ‘I wish I could say that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had done himself less than justice. Unfortunately, I can only say that I believe he has done himself justice. Some Chancellors are macro-economic. Other Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap.’ She emphasized that she was born ‘with no privilege at all’.82 Her combativeness, particularly against the able and aggressive Healey, won her much admiration.

  It was Airey Neave who knew how to turn all this to good electoral effect among his colleagues, not least because his own mindset was similar to that of the men he was trying to win over. Though much more intelligent than most of them, he shared the career disappointments, the grumpy solidarity of the cash-poor upper-middle class, the experience of war and the dismay at the country’s steep decline. He also, despite his hesitancy in backing her candidacy, had always liked Margaret Thatcher. He had known her since they had been young candidates together and also at the Bar. In the 1970 Parliament, Neave had found her an ally, sharing an interest in science (which came within her departmental responsibilities) and in nuclear power. In 1972, Mrs Thatcher helped persuade him to stay on as chairman of the Select Committee on Science and Technology ‘since the establishment would be only too keen to get rid of a “strong man” ’.83 In the course of that year, the Thatchers twice went to stay with the Neaves in the country, once to visit the nuclear power station at Harwell (‘Margaret made a hit with the scientists’).84* Neave found her physically attractive, provoking, according to their daughter, a small gleam of jealousy from his wife Diana.85 He was less charmed by Denis – ‘an awkward, complaining character very jealous of his wife – who is really beautiful and brilliant’.86

  Once he was her campaign manager, Neave saw it as his task to keep Mrs Thatcher out of the fray of intrigue. She should stick to her parliamentary guns, avoiding media interviews until the very late stages, seeing all MPs who wanted to see her, but not ingratiating herself with anyone or acting out of character. With Shelton as the keeper of what turned out to be highly accurate lists, Neave, who loved skulduggery and backstairs work, sidled up to people in the corridors and the Smoking Room, and told broken-down backbenchers that Mrs Thatcher admired them. One trick he used on John Farr,* a fairly typical example of the genre, was to say, ‘Margaret assumes you must have turned down a job offer from Ted.’ Farr: ‘Why?’ Neave: ‘Oh, because you so obviously should have one if you want it.’87 Since Mrs Thatcher had a reputation for naivety, it did her no harm that her campaign manager had a reputation for the opposite which was linked with rumours that he had worked, or even worked still, for the security services. According to Joan Hall,† who had been MP for Keighley until losing her seat in February 1974, and was roped in by Neave to help organize Mrs Thatcher’s campaign, ‘Airey would always clutch to the wall, never walk down the corridor straight,’ whereas Mrs Thatcher was ‘very practical and straightforward’.88 Although Mrs Thatcher gained much of her impetus and her nucleus of support from Keith Joseph and members of the Economic Dining Club such as Nicholas Ridley and John Nott, Neave did not much concern himself with these. He concentrated on the men who sat in the Smoking Room and grumbled – me
n like Robin Cooke,‡ little known then and forgotten now, but men whose votes needed to be won. He also made the most of his acquaintance with Humphrey Atkins, the Chief Whip, supposedly neutral in the contest, but actually inclined towards Mrs Thatcher.89 Atkins resisted pressure from Francis Pym§ to support Heath and almost campaign for him. Atkins privately believed that Heath should withdraw.90

  The Thatcher campaign was greatly assisted by the tactics of the Heath camp. Heath himself was a hopeless campaigner, resenting the very idea and, even more than in the past, extremely bad at affecting an interest in other people. The Tory Party, he told Bernard Weatherill, consists of ‘shits, bloody shits and fucking shits’,91 and he was not successful at concealing this belief from the colleagues whose votes he wanted. According to Tim Kitson, Heath would be persuaded by his team to go into the Smoking Room, but would then pick up the Evening Standard, drink some whisky and not talk to anyone.92 His campaign managers made him give lunches and dinners to backbenchers, but these proved to be sepulchral occasions, only provoking those invited to ask themselves, ‘Why haven’t we been asked over the last five years?’93 Those close to Heath believed that his natural awkwardness in situations of this kind was added to by his resentment of his opponent on grounds of her sex. ‘It was all tied up with Ted’s psychology about women,’ according to his other PPS, Kenneth Baker.94 Heath seldom seemed to enjoy the company of women. He was so surprised at the idea of being challenged by a woman, and found it so distasteful and disloyal, that he could not quite face it or work out how to deal with it. ‘It’s a matter of opinion’, he told Sara Morrison, ‘whether you think she’s a woman or not,’95 but if Mrs Thatcher had not been, he would have found it much easier.

  Although the only electorate in the contest was parliamentary, the attitudes of MPs would obviously be affected by public opinion and the media. Gordon Reece attended to this aspect of the campaign. Since the aim was to pick up the widest range of the disaffected, he wanted a negative campaign in the first stage and ‘nothing on policy at all’.96 Mrs Thatcher needed to look like a winner and ‘This was quite a tall order, particularly as she was not at this stage good at either communicating with people, or on television.’97 There was no question, in the first ballot, of candidates debating with one another on television, because of the doctrine that ‘Conservative must not appear against Conservative.’ For two months Mrs Thatcher gave no press or broadcast interviews whatever, breaking her silence only a week before the first ballot. As the nominations closed, her managers felt it was time for her to go public. Speaking to ITN, she stayed off policy, saying merely that it was time for a contest, and noting that she was the same age as Heath had been when he became leader and that he, like herself now, had been distinguishing himself in the Finance Bill at that time. She compared herself to Mrs Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India (‘a delightful person’).98* Two days later, she appeared in an interview by Michael Cockerell on BBC’s Midweek, and was filmed having her hair done. Antonia Fraser recorded, ‘Margaret Thatcher awful – physically she is not good. Flutters her eyelashes in an unattractive way which is terrible!’99 But these were the words, of course, of a rival’s wife. Most thought that Mrs Thatcher seemed fresh compared with Heath, who was not interviewed, but was shown attacking the new leadership election rules.