The Joseph paper caused consternation in the Shadow Cabinet, though Mrs Thatcher supported it. The official minutes express the disagreements gently. There was ‘some anxiety’, they say, about Joseph’s rejection of consensus, and ‘it was generally felt that the Conservative Government of 1970–4 had, on the whole, tried to do the right things, but had failed to explain its intentions adequately.’32 But Lord Hailsham kept his own private, less discreet record of some of the dialogue:
REGGIE [Maudling]: I do NOT agree with ONE little bit.
GILMOUR: Up to 1970 consensus was a Conservative consensus, not a Labour one.
HOWE: 1970 manifesto was a departure from consensus. It does not differ from the present document. What we failed to do was to explain it and present it properly.
MARGARET: Ian, do you believe in capitalism?
IAN: That is almost blasphemy.* I don’t believe in Socialism.
KEITH: The hundred years of relative decline (since the Great Exhibition) is objectively demonstrable.
RAISON:† Too much misery in Keith’s paper. There are matters on which we have got to operate a consensus e.g. We must persuade Healey to produce a sensible budget.
MAUDE: That is not on. The right of the Lab. Pty. will always let us down.
PYM: Society is moving more left. There must be continuity – which means a broad measure of agreement – The Keith paper is a recipe for disaster.
HESELTINE: On TV we don’t look like anyone people know.
WW [Whitelaw]: The most fatal thing in politics is to try and look different from what we are. People always complain that I look very large on TV. What wd: they say if I appeared in a bathing dress?
Hailsham concluded, dead-pan, ‘There was hardly a dull moment.’33
Joseph raised the spectre of ‘Finlandization’, as the West’s quietism towards Soviet Communism was then known, and Mrs Thatcher presciently warned that ‘a serious crisis could well occur were the Government forced to borrow from abroad on terms which were unacceptable to the Left.’34 But there was, to use the word she so disapproved of, no consensus within the senior ranks of the Conservatives about the analysis of the basic problems, and therefore no agreement about most of the possible solutions. In the coming few weeks, the Shadow Cabinet split, along similar lines, on the question of proportional representation (Mrs Thatcher adamantly opposed) and on that of a wages freeze (Jim Prior in favour). These splits persisted, and the latter was a very important one.
Part of Mrs Thatcher’s difficulty was that the current political situation did not present obvious, immediate opportunities. The precariousness of the Labour majority meant that yet another election could be precipitated at any time, but this would be unlikely to work to the advantage of the Tories. The sense of crisis made party politics a hard game to play. At a time when wages and prices were shooting up (the retail price index for June 1975 recorded an annual inflation rate of 26 per cent), it could be made to seem unpatriotic and irresponsible to oppose a policy to keep them down. The urgent language of emergency weighed more heavily with the public than the seemingly abstract ideas of monetary control and free collective bargaining. Mrs Thatcher therefore showed an untypical desire to remain silent, and tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid making a speech in the big economic debate in the House of Commons on 22 May. By her own account, the speech she did make was ‘not … able to provide a coherent alternative to the Government’s policy’.35 Public opinion strongly backed a prices and incomes policy, and so did her most outspoken opponents in her own party, Peter Walker and Ted Heath. When the Labour government came up with a proposal in July for maximum wage increases of £6 per week, backed by the threat of statute if necessary, Mrs Thatcher felt able to criticize the Chancellor, Denis Healey, for having only half a package,36 but she agreed that her party should abstain rather than be tarred with opposing wage restraint. She could not get a purchase on events.
The first big political campaign of her leadership also offered her no very useful opportunities. This was the referendum on continuing Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community, an idea of Harold Wilson’s born out of his need to balance the divided factions on the subject within his own party. Like almost all senior Conservatives (Edward Du Cann turned out to be a last-minute exception), Mrs Thatcher supported a ‘yes’ vote, but she did not pretend to any great expertise in the subject and she therefore asked Ted Heath to lead the Conservative contribution to the ‘yes’ campaign for the referendum to be held on 5 June. From a party point of view, this was both a sensible and a generous thing for her to do, and although Heath technically refused her invitation, preferring an informal role, it was he who made the most prominent Tory speeches on the subject. At the campaign launch on 16 April 1975, Mrs Thatcher sat next to Heath on the platform and said that ‘Naturally, it’s with some temerity that the pupil speaks before the master.’37 Heath did not respond with similar generosity.
In her speech that day Mrs Thatcher repeated rather uninterestingly the standard pro-European lines – ‘Are the French any less French?’ and so on – and it has been suggested by some supporters of her subsequent Euroscepticism that her heart was not in it. It is true that she never manifested great excitement in the European arguments of the period, and was mildly criticized for this at the time. Harold Wilson called her ‘the reluctant debutante’. Those close to her remembered her sitting watching the rather amateurish ‘no’ campaign broadcast and saying ‘Gosh, that was good,’38 and when polling day came she told a member of her staff she wished she didn’t have to vote at all.39 It is also true that she never bought the more visionary version of Europeanism. In a television interview three days before the poll, she rejected the notion of a federal Europe, saying that ‘The United States of America is a different thing from the United States of Europe’ and that all she favoured was ‘closer co-operation’;40 but she defended membership on the grounds that British loss of sovereignty was largely ‘technical’ and that the nation was ‘getting far more than you’re giving up’.41 She strongly subscribed to the prevailing Tory view of the time that the EEC could be made to work as a bulwark against Communism and that a victory for the ‘no’ campaign would be, as she told the audience at the campaign launch, ‘a victory for the tribunes of the Left’. The convincing endorsement of continuing membership by nearly two-thirds of those voting did her no harm politically, and no good. But the campaign helped to restore Ted Heath’s reputation, reminded people that he was more of a statesman than she and rekindled in some minds the idea that he might yet return, or at least that she might go. Because the ‘yes’ campaign had been a cross-party coalition, secretly supported by the BBC and backed by most of the establishment, it provided a possible model for the way the country could be run if there were to be a coalition of national unity to deal with the economic crisis. Such a coalition would have been the end of Margaret Thatcher.
Faced with these difficulties in the high politics of her party and the position in the House of Commons, Mrs Thatcher worked out a way of getting round them. In May 1975, her friend Gordon Reece was seconded from EMI to work for her once more.
In an unpublished memoir which he wrote in the late 1990s, Reece explained how, in 1975, he approached the task of persuading more people to vote Conservative. The traditional political wisdom was that people voted on issues – tax, defence and so on:
Mrs Thatcher was advised by me that this was not true. Ordinary people, she was told, voted on impressions. Issues … were just some of the strands which made up a voting intention.
Another factor … would be an answer to the question: ‘Do I like or admire or respect one of the candidates more than another?’ Television, itself a medium of impressions, had revolutionised political campaigning, putting more emphasis on the presidential character, the leader being the face of the political party.
Reece believed that most floating voters, in particular, were not very interested in politics:
Mrs Thatcher was advised by m
e that the majority of the electorate in the late 70s voted for what they perceived to be their own best interests, the party that would do best for them and their families … Mrs Thatcher saw that the middle class divide was breaking down, and she decided to concentrate upon the voters who had the greatest need or ambition to improve their lives. Priority was given to women in Labour-voting households, the people who actually spent the family budget, the people most at risk from economic mismanagement. Secondly priority was given to skilled and semi-skilled workers, those who had the best opportunity to benefit from increasing prosperity. And thirdly to first-time voters, people who would not just hope for a better life but vote for one.
In Reece’s view, such people were not much to be found among the readers of broadsheet newspapers and the watchers of serious political programmes and the longer, night-time, news bulletins: ‘The people we had to reach would read the Mirror, increasingly the Sun, the Express, the Mail, the People, the News of the World, they would watch Coronation Street, Jimmy Savile, Top of the Pops, they listened to Jimmy Young on the wireless. And any aspiring Prime Minister had better go to them, and not expect them to come to her.’42
Mrs Thatcher aspired passionately to be prime minister. She accepted this advice, and acted upon it, although much of it was resisted by Central Office, and the full flowering of the Reece strategy did not take place until the summer of 1978. She spoke to Jean Rook in the Daily Express, and to Woman’s Own; she appeared on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 and The Jimmy Young Show on Radio 2. After she appeared on Jimmy Savile’s Jim’ll Fix It, in December 1976, the two struck up a friendly acquaintance.* Bearing in mind her target of women who actually managed the family budget, she frequently spoke as a woman who did just that, and related her own experience to that of the entire nation as it struggled with inflation. In some ways, she was not a natural with the media. She had an instinctive distrust of the press and a dislike of television. Because Parliament was still not televised, or even, until 1978, broadcast regularly on the radio, she had a limited experience of the medium, and was used to constructing her public utterances as formal speeches or sharp debates. She was also intensely serious and high-minded, and touchingly cut off from some of the coarser aspects of daily life. She was in West Germany – her first visit abroad as leader, and her first ever visit to Germany – on 26 June 1975 when the news came through that the Conservatives had gained Woolwich West in a by-election. Mrs Thatcher was naturally delighted, particularly as she felt that her decision to break the old custom by which leaders did not campaign in by-election constituencies had paid off. She expressed her pleasure by making a ‘V for victory’ sign to the cameras. To the dismay of Reece, she did the sign the wrong way round, turning it into the well-known obscene gesture. She had no idea of the mistake, and so great was her innocence that ‘Even when we had explained it, she still didn’t really understand what she had done.’43
But, for all her lack of vulgarity, Mrs Thatcher was not detached from other aspects of normal daily life. She was perfectly genuine in her housewifely attitudes and her interest in the prices in the shops. She always had the gift of very direct speech, free of jargon, and she had an instinct for placing herself on the side of the person without power, rather than the official or the union boss. The actressy side to her character made her extremely effective in walkabouts and factory visits; far from dreading these encounters, she found that they energized her. And she well understood how to play to the huge interest in her which resulted from the fact of her sex. A week after her victory, she kept an engagement inherited from Heath to visit Scotland. In later years, Scotland was to be the part of the United Kingdom where she was probably least popular, but on this occasion she was overwhelmed in Princes Street, Edinburgh, by a friendly crowd so large that she had to take refuge in a shop to escape the crush.
In her attitude to her image, and to communicating with the public, Mrs Thatcher showed a remarkable humility and professionalism. ‘Gordon Reece taught me’, she said later, ‘that television is a conversation, not a lecture,’44 though this was not a lesson she invariably remembered in front of the cameras. She was nervous of television, and Reece used to bring a microphone to rehearsals so that she could practise being at the right distance to it. He told her to get up close in order to sound more ‘sexy, confidential and reasonable’.45 ‘Your voice goes slightly tight and high-pitched,’ she recalled him saying, ‘you must consciously keep it down.’ She learnt that ‘Every speech should tell a story or a fable’ and that ‘A speech is to be heard,’ a living performance which the speaker must enact with hands, eyes and voice as well as verbal content.46 For his part, though full of charm and good at flattery, Reece was frank with Mrs Thatcher about the changes that were required. He told her that her clothes were too fussy; her hats should go; she wore too much jewellery for television; her hair was too frizzy for a potential prime minister.47 She must also flatter Fleet Street editors. To the end of her life, Mrs Thatcher remembered her lessons from Reece, and would repeat them enthusiastically as essential truths. She would say, ‘You must wear plain, tailored clothes on television’ rather in the same tone of voice as she would say, ‘You must have liberty – and not just liberty, but law-based liberty.’
All leading politicians, of course, worry about their image, and it is a well-known criticism of spin-doctors (as they later came to be called) that they are not interested in presenting the truth or in what their principals’ principles are. But one reason why the Reece treatment worked so well with Mrs Thatcher was that he himself was in accord with the moral and ideological thrust of what became known as Thatcherism and believed from the first in her character as the vehicle for advancing it. This meant that he warmly welcomed her openness to intellectuals, commentators and assorted policy mavericks, and had none of the instinctive hostility to such people that is bound to exist in party bureaucracies. Chris Patten, at the Conservative Research Department, saw the existence of the Centre for Policy Studies as a ‘provocation’.48 Reece saw the CPS as an ally. He did his best to help Mrs Thatcher make the eggheads feel at home with her. When, for example, she received Robert Conquest,* the historian of Stalin’s purges and critic of rapprochement with the Soviet Union, Reece had warned her in advance that her visitor liked plenty to drink. Reece had arranged for Conquest to arrive at nine-thirty in the morning, but Mrs Thatcher enjoyed the conversation so much that it was still going strong at noon: because of Reece’s advice, she was able to go to the fridge and produce champagne.49†
Avoiding the delicate domestic political situation, Mrs Thatcher chose to make the first highly controversial speech of her leadership on the Cold War. She felt that, as the new leader, she should establish a position on ‘Britain’s role in the world’. This was a normal thing to do, but it was not at all normal to dive in so deep and swim so strongly against the tide. In 1975, the dominant mood of the Western elites towards the Soviet Union was one of rapprochement, against a background of weakness. The American disengagement from Vietnam, seen as dishonourable by some and overdue by others, had produced its logical conclusion in the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, to the Communist forces in April. The buzz word for the policy was détente. The Western allies had committed themselves to the Helsinki process of talks which began in 1973 and were due for completion in a ‘Final Act’ in August 1975. Helsinki was designed to trade an acceptance of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe for the improvement of human rights in the Soviet bloc. The process had been initiated by President Richard Nixon, and so support for it came from Republicans in the United States, and from Conservatives in Britain, as well as from the centre and the left. It was considered maverick right wing to question the whole thing.
Mrs Thatcher, however, chose to do so, and asked Conquest to draft her speech. She particularly wanted to know from him whether the Soviets had the long-term aim of getting rid of Western democracy – ‘The answer was yes’ – and whether the Soviet Union was, in the long term, viabl
e – ‘The answer was no.’50 She also feared that the effect of Communism at home, chiefly through influence on students, media and trade unions, was to undermine the national will. The result of these discussions was her speech to Chelsea Conservative Association on 26 July 1975. She identified a threat to freedom all over the world. Communists were attempting to undermine the new democracy in Portugal, she said; Cambodia and Vietnam had been lost (‘Where are the protest marchers now?’). Despite the fact that the Soviets had ‘more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together’, the Labour government was pulling the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean and ditching its base at Simonstown in South Africa. It was wrong to pretend, as the Helsinki Final Act approached, that there was ‘peace and trust’ between East and West: ‘the fact remains that throughout this decade of détente, the armed forces of the Soviet Union have increased, are increasing and show no signs of diminishing.’ The power of NATO, she said, was ‘already at its lowest safe limit’, and if the allies did not maintain enough conventional weapons, they would be confronted, in the face of Soviet aggression, with the appalling choice of either surrender or ‘early use of nuclear weapons’. This language was strong enough, but what really separated Mrs Thatcher’s approach was not so much its hawkishness about Soviet military intentions as its definition of the nature of the Soviet threat. She was not content to see this in traditional terms of the rivalry between global powers, and the consequent need to strike a deal and achieve a balance. She saw the Soviet Union as, by its nature, an attack on the West. The Soviets were ‘arrayed against every principle for which we stand,’ she declared, and she judged them not just by their arsenal, but by the sufferings they inflicted upon their own people:
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Page 42
