Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  It is hard to exaggerate the sheer strangeness, as it seemed at the time, of the event. Geoffrey Howe, whom Mrs Thatcher had just soundly beaten, described the scene when, two days after her election, she appeared in Committee Room 14 to address the regular meeting of the 1922 Committee: ‘The new leader, escorted by the chairman Edward Du Cann, entered the room through a door opening on to the platform. She was flanked only by the all-male officers of the Committee. Suddenly she looked very beautiful and very frail as the half-dozen knights of the shires towered over her. It was a moving, almost feudal, occasion. Tears came to my eyes.’1 The oldest, grandest, in many people’s eyes the stuffiest political party in the world had chosen a leader whose combination of class, inexperience and sex would previously have ruled her out. And it was not obvious that it had really meant to do so, or that it was confident of its choice. ‘As the Conservative Party now begins to take stock,’ reported an official at the US Embassy in London, ‘its mood is a curious mixture of relief, excitement, guilt, and misgivings.’2 Apart from anything else, the instant change in verbal and visual style produced by a woman leader was bewildering. What was the issue on which she had won, the press asked Mrs Thatcher in Conservative Central Office on the day of her triumph? ‘I like to think it was merit,’ she answered. ‘Could you expand on that?’ they asked. ‘No, it doesn’t need expansion. You chaps don’t like short answers, or direct answers. Men like long, rambly, waffly answers.’ Interviewed by Michael Cockerell on the BBC’s Midweek, she described her reaction to the news of her victory. With an intense, almost sensual expression, she said, ‘I almost wept when they told me. I did weep.’ Such ways of speaking would have been unknown and unthought of in a Conservative leader twenty-four hours earlier. Would her ‘dream’ – which, for her establishment opponents, was a nightmare – turn out to be waking reality, or would it vanish in the cold light of normal politics?

  Mrs Thatcher was at least as conscious of this problem as anyone else. On the day of her victory, she dined with the Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, in his room in the Commons, to discuss how to compose her Shadow Cabinet. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher says, ‘I told Humphrey that although there were some people, like Keith Joseph and Airey Neave, to whom I felt a special obligation, I did not want to make a clean sweep of the existing team.’3 But she also told Atkins that she was aware of Joseph’s shortcomings and of Neave’s unpopularity in some quarters. She toyed with the idea of keeping Neave running her office until such time as she could give him a peerage.4

  The most urgent and delicate part of the discussions in the Chief Whip’s room concerned Ted Heath. In the course of her campaign, Mrs Thatcher had promised to offer Heath a place in her Shadow Cabinet, but she naturally hoped that this offer would be refused. Seeking to appear correct and polite, and to settle the matter without delay, she conveyed a message to Heath that she would like to call on him at once and talk about what he was going to do. Heath was advised by his friends – Willie Whitelaw, Lord Carrington (who was in Australia) and Francis Pym – that it would be better to let her settle down in the job and for him to join the team six months later, so a message came back from Heath’s people indicating that an offer at this stage was not a good idea.5 Mrs Thatcher was determined, however, to be seen to fulfil her promise, and so told Heath’s office that she would call on him in Wilton Street on the morning after her victory. Heath received her in his study off the hall, without getting up. ‘He was like a bird who’s broken its wing,’ Mrs Thatcher remembered. ‘He was hurt, and so would I have been. I offered him whichever post he wanted in the Shadow Cabinet. He just said “No.” ’6 Heath’s memory was different: ‘She offered me nothing.’7 Tim Kitson, who was present, and getting coffee, recalled: ‘Ted made it quite clear that he wouldn’t take a job, and therefore she didn’t actually offer him one.’8 The meeting was over so quickly that the coffee had not even arrived. Heath withdrew without ceremony. Mrs Thatcher felt she could not leave at once in case the press thought there had been a row: ‘I really couldn’t walk straight out, so I had a natter with Tim in the kitchen. I’ve had no private conversation with Ted since then, which is sad.’9* She left the house and told Joan Hall, who was driving her: ‘Ted won’t come into my Shadow Cabinet. Well, that’s that.’10 Thus began Ted Heath’s self-exclusion from contact with his successor which became known as ‘the incredible sulk’, and which lasted, with one or two tiny deviations, until his death in 2005.

  Mrs Thatcher had more success, on the same day, with Willie Whitelaw. In accordance with his regimental attitude to his role, he had made clear his readiness to serve her as soon as his defeat had been announced, and she duly offered him the post of deputy leader. He accepted, reportedly on the condition that Keith Joseph not be made shadow Chancellor.11 On 17 February 1975, however, Joseph told her that he wanted the shadow Chancellorship or nothing12 – the same position, oddly enough, in which he had found himself with Ted Heath – but she dissuaded him skilfully and he was satisfied with being made her number three, in charge of policy and research. Geoffrey Howe became shadow Chancellor, though she had first dangled the post before Edward Du Cann, who preferred to remain chairman of the ’22 and continue to earn money in the City. The prominent Heathites Robert Carr and Peter Walker were removed, but there was no general purge of the left of the party. Jim Prior took on employment. Francis Pym accepted agriculture, though he was to give up the post, following a nervous breakdown, a few weeks later. Ian Gilmour was promoted to shadow home secretary, and Mrs Thatcher brought back Reggie Maudling to the front bench as shadow foreign secretary. Airey Neave, at his request, was made shadow secretary for Northern Ireland. Keen to have the backing of the elder statesmen of the party, she kept Lord Hailsham and Lord Carrington in the team, the first without portfolio, and the second as leader of the Lords, and accepted Willie Whitelaw’s suggestion that his cousin, Lord Thorneycroft, should become party chairman. Mrs Thatcher chose her Shadow Cabinet for their variety of opinion. Of the twenty-four who met round the table, perhaps four – Neave, Joseph, Angus Maude and Sally Oppenheim – had voted for her, and only two of these – Neave and Joseph – had been her leading supporters. In a memo to Joseph in April, the founder-director of the Centre for Policy Studies, Nigel Vinson,† questioned the need for the CPS’s continued existence ‘now that the Tory Party is in the hands of true believers’.13 But it wasn’t, and Mrs Thatcher did not feel nearly strong enough yet to make sure that it would be.

  Nor was her own entourage, at the beginning, a source of strength. Following his defeat, Willie Whitelaw replied to a message of commiseration from Robert Carr, saying, ‘Of course it is now becoming clear that her cohorts have a. little talent and b. have no idea at all about running a party.’14 Although she would not have phrased it thus, Mrs Thatcher did not really dissent. Thanking her old friend Edward Boyle for his letter of congratulation, she wrote that she had ‘too few people of high calibre to spot what is important and to alert me in time’.15 Few thought much of her PPSs William Shelton and Fergus Montgomery, and it quickly, though privately, became rumoured that Montgomery had been involved in the homosexual scandal involving the Soviet spy John Vassall in the early 1960s. His exposure was feared. Within a fortnight of the leadership election, Neave, whom Mrs Thatcher made titular head of her private office, had recruited Richard Ryder,* a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, to run the operation day to day. Ryder was highly intelligent and competent, but he was also only twenty-five years old and not, at first, vested with much authority by his new boss. In theory, Airey Neave ran the office, but in practice he attended to his Shadow Cabinet portfolio of Northern Ireland, and Ryder did all the work. Mrs Thatcher also recruited the ‘very attractive, bright and sexy’16 Caroline Stephens,† who had previously worked for Heath, as her private papers secretary. The only important member of her staff who had worked for her before her promotion was her secretary, Alison Ward. Among the existing staffs at Conservative Central Office in Smith Square and the Conservative Res
earch Department, which at that time existed more or less independently in Old Queen Street, she had few friends. Ian Gilmour she quickly replaced as chairman of the CRD with Angus Maude, but Chris Patten stayed on as director.‡

  In reshaping all these arrangements, Mrs Thatcher was cautious – partly because of the weakness of her political position, partly because of her lack of organizational experience, and partly because, for all her courage at critical moments, caution was always an important part of her character. There was yet another reason, too – a sense of social inferiority. Although she was to acquire a reputation as the scourge of the Tory grandees, and she certainly hated to be patronized by anyone, she was by nature deferential to social systems and respected the way that the Conservative Party had been run. In many ways, her beau idéal of a Tory leader was Alec Douglas-Home – ‘Alec would still be there if he had learnt how to communicate his message,’ she declared extravagantly in the late 1990s. ‘He was a marvellous man.’17 Her romantic sense of history and her dislike of dreary mediocrity drew her instinctively to aristocratic patterns of behaviour, though she had too much integrity and earnestness to try to imitate them. She wanted to observe the proprieties, and had no desire to turn everything upside down. Those who worked for her noticed how worried she always was by all matters of dress and protocol. Not long after becoming leader, for example, she was invited to dinner with the Carringtons at their house in Ovington Square. Since the dinner was formal, Mrs Thatcher became filled with anxiety about whether or not she should wear gloves for it, and would not rest until her office had telephoned Lady Carrington for guidance.18 Writing to the Queen for the first time as leader, she got in a tizz about how to end the letter. Caroline Stephens advised her simply to write ‘yours sincerely’, an error which prompted Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, to tell Caroline (‘very sweetly’) the proper form, and ask her to convey it to her boss.19*

  The party grandees were carefully watched by Mrs Thatcher’s team for how well they treated her. Lord Carrington did pretty well. Willie Whitelaw ‘behaved beautifully to her face though he would make snide comments behind her back’.20 Ian Gilmour was favoured at first, but increasingly seen – he was very tall – as ‘lofty’. Christopher Soames, at that time a European commissioner, but actively looking for a return to British politics, was considered ‘top of the list of snobs’.21 For their part, the old establishment watched the new Leader with a mixture of fascination, admiration, repugnance and bemusement. Some doubted whether she would last; others genuinely wanted to help her and to break down what they saw as her isolation, as they had once embraced the equally lower-middle-class Heath. Humphrey Atkins and other party managers well disposed to her sought ways to furnish her with a group of friends she could trust – people like Carrington, Whitelaw and Thorneycroft – but there was always the problem, compounded by her sex, class and personality, that she found it hard to relax in such company. They were struck by her extreme privacy, which went right down, they thought, to a reluctance to have others assist her with matters like her clothes and domestic help.22 There was a cultural gulf. Chris Patten, though himself of what the grandees would have considered humble birth, sided culturally and politically with them. He and his colleagues in the Conservative Research Department used to express their humorous exasperation with their Leader by referring to her by her starchy Victorian second name, ‘Hilda’,23 or sometimes ‘Milksnatcher’.24

  But before the impression is collected that Margaret Thatcher as the new Leader was some little girl lost, it should be pointed out that she had something that compensated for all these disadvantages. In her speech to the 1922 Committee after her election, she had turned her weakness into a strength by telling her MPs that she was a frail little woman who needed the help of strong men such as they.25 She was not as vulnerable as she wished to seem, however. She had a burning sense of mission. On the day of her election, she had told ITN News that ‘You don’t exist as a party unless you have a clear philosophy and a clear message.’ She was confident from the first that she could supply both. The propagation of ideas was one of her greatest strengths.

  In her speech on 20 February 1975 formally accepting the leadership from the wider party, Mrs Thatcher appealed to the nation’s past. With a slight nod in the direction of Queen Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury, she declared that the country would never have embarked on the Elizabethan expeditions, or enunciated great legal principles, or founded parliamentary democracy, or made sure that ‘liberty did not perish’, if it had lived only for the moment. There was a need for more forthright and visionary leadership, ‘more emphasis on principle’. There was urgency too, because Britain now had the unpleasant experience of being treated ‘as a poor nation whose only greatness lies in the past’.* If Labour won the next election, Britain would be ‘irretrievably on the path to a socialist state’. It is notable that, from the start, Mrs Thatcher used party meetings as the occasions for enunciating her convictions, preferring a less missionary tone in Parliament. On 15 March she told the Conservative Central Council to resist ‘those [the trade unions] who use their weight to push others around’ and declared that ‘the individual is the sun and the state is the moon which shines with borrowed light’. On 25 March, she enthused the Federation of Conservative Students by telling them that ‘This Party of ours has been on the defensive for too long.’ ‘If we can win the battle of ideas, then the war will already be half won.’ To her Heathite critics in the party, it was this language that proved her dangerous. Jim Prior privately opined that it was ‘wrong to speak of winning an intellectual argument because that implied you had a body of doctrine’.26 But it was her readiness for the battle of ideas which sustained her, directed her, won her support from outside her party and riveted public attention upon her.

  Strictly speaking, Mrs Thatcher was ill equipped for intellectual battle. Despite the brisk efficiency for which she was renowned, she did not have an intellectually orderly mind; nor did she have an original one. Rather than developing ideas of her own, she was a sort of ‘stage-door Johnny’ for the ideas of others – admiring, overexcited. But this was not, in fact, a handicap. Alfred Sherman, who, at this period, supplied so much of the material, developed his theory about Mrs Thatcher’s intellectual character. ‘She wasn’t a woman of ideas,’ he said, ‘she was a woman of beliefs, and beliefs are better than ideas.’27 David Wolfson,* who was to become her chief of staff, described her as ‘a prophet not a king. History remembers prophets long after kings are forgotten.’28 John Hoskyns,† an independent businessman desperately casting around for ways of rescuing Britain from economic collapse, first met her in August 1976. She was so excited by their meeting that she cancelled her lunch so that they could go on talking. Hoskyns was struck by her belief that ‘something simply had to be done’. ‘I don’t think she had any idea what to do, but she had a patriotic impulse and a sense of shame about what had happened to our country.’ He was struck by her combination of ‘insecurity, sense of destiny and reckless courage’.29

  From the first, these qualities constituted a form and style of leadership, and they created the space for ideas to come forward. Keith Joseph and his Centre for Policy Studies were the means of production, distribution and exchange. As Alfred Sherman put it, characteristically: ‘Early Thatcherism was pure Keith, which meant pure Sherman. She lacked coherence.’30 And it was ‘pure Keith’ that the new Shadow Cabinet soon had to consider when Joseph submitted to them a document entitled (echoing T. S. Eliot) ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Policy’.31 It was thoroughgoing, self-lacerating and explosive. Joseph sought to attack the post-war Conservative approach of which he had, he admitted frankly, been a keen supporter: ‘We made things worse when, after the war, we chose the path of consensus. It seems to me that on a number of subjects we have reached the end of that road.’ They had promised too much and been guilty of ‘subordinating the rule of law to the avoidance of conflict’. ‘In short, by ignoring history, instincts, h
uman nature and common-sense, we have intensified the very evils which we believed, with the best of intentions, that we could wipe away.’ There was a need for a strategy to put things right, one which fought shy of any national coalition and of efforts to solve the crisis with a siege economy (‘there is no case for a siege economy when the enemy is within the gates’). This strategy should consider economic problems not in technical isolation but in the light of the threat to the nation which came from economic weakness, the threat of the Soviet Union from without and from Communist subversion within. ‘If we lose independence, we lose all,’ said Joseph, and ‘already we are being disarmed by inflation.’ If we want patriotism, he continued, ‘we must define the patria’, introducing better immigration controls. Both the money supply and public spending must be controlled and price increases must be permitted. Benefits should be removed from strikers’ families and there should be ‘sharply lower direct taxes on earnings and investment’. In a climate of such economic weakness and trade union power, ‘Presumably we do not think that denationalisation is practicable,’ but he did argue that a legal framework for trade union activity ‘will come one day’. The Tories should get rid of regional subsidies, try to arrest the decline of the family because ‘the family … is the sole reliable transmitter of attitudes and culture’, consider education and health vouchers, and perhaps decriminalize drugs (a revolutionary suggestion for a Conservative at that time) and introduce a Bill of Rights.

  With the exception of the last two suggestions and the eventual but at that time unimaginable triumph of privatization, this startling paper furnished the main elements of what came to be called Thatcherism, both in specific policy and in general psychological terms. Building on an atmosphere of crisis and doom, and appealing to a sense of national greatness that had been lost, it set out a straight and narrow path to recovery, deliberately at odds with prevailing views. There was one important respect, however, in which it reflected the difference of character between Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Joseph’s tone was gloomy and dark. Her natural tone, though just as severe about what had gone wrong, was much more optimistic and energetic about how it could be put right. She knew how to inspire hope as well as fear. It was one of the qualities which made her a much better natural leader than Joseph.