Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Mrs Thatcher had no less an appetite for drier economic reading. By the time she met Alan Walters in America in September 1977, she had read his Money in Boom and Slump.28 According to Douglas Hague, who had first advised her when she was in Ted Heath’s Shadow Cabinet in the late 1960s, she was a keen student, ‘good on finance, very good on law, not very good on economics’. She settled down to read his A Textbook of Economic Theory and proved herself to have ‘the best memory I’ve ever met in anybody’.29 After becoming leader, she complained to him that ‘This chap Adam Ridley writes the most appalling stuff about economics’30 and asked Hague to be her economic adviser in 1975, but he was working for the Price Commission and could not give her his full attention until he left it in 1978. Hague and she shared a Methodist background and both had, at different times, attended the Wesley Memorial Church in Oxford. Hague reminded her of the famous advice of John Wesley – ‘Get all you can; save all you can; give all you can’ – and she deployed it in public argument. He would prove important later in persuading Mrs Thatcher to lift exchange controls. In addition to Hague’s valued but intermittent help, she received more technical advice on the workings of money from Gordon Pepper,* a senior partner at Greenwell’s, the stockbrokers. Pepper would spend two hours with her before each Budget and would sometimes go over to see her informally at Scotney because he lived close by. He said that her reputation for ‘chewing people up’ arose from what was really her ‘thirst for knowledge’ and he was struck by her unusual combination of an appetite for minutiae and a passionate conviction. He found that their technical discussions were usually preceded by ten minutes of diatribe from Mrs Thatcher in which she would express her ‘moral hatred of inflation’ and her associated belief in the importance of saving.31 Pepper helped deepen her suspicion of the Bank of England and the doctrines prevailing there at that time. She did not take to Gordon Richardson,† the Governor, describing him as ‘a peacock of a man’.32

  For more practical, business-based advice, Mrs Thatcher roped in John Sparrow,‡ the head of the investment department at Morgan Grenfell, early in 1977. She wanted his views on ‘the steps that need to be taken to turn us from a wealth-distributing to a wealth-creating country again’.33 Seconded to her office from his bank, Sparrow quickly found that he was more help to her if he stayed in the City, rather than working in Parliament. From there, he sent her weekly reports about what was actually happening in the economy and business, which were followed up by weekly meetings. Sparrow considered that, in terms of economic and business knowledge, Mrs Thatcher had led ‘a fairly cloistered life’, but that she had a ‘tremendously good intuition’.34 He did much to buttress Mrs Thatcher’s instinctive dislike of high interest rates, a view which was to prove a constant source of disagreement with her Chancellors when she reached office. He believed that the country was suffering from an excessive supply of money not an excessive demand, and argued that banks should have their credit limited, as in Germany, to a multiple of reserves. Like Douglas Hague, he consistently advocated a loosening of exchange controls. His task, in part, was to tell her what the City thought. This was sometimes depressing for her, but she listened. After the IMF package was put in place, he reported, ‘The dominant theme in City minds was … that … for the time being, we are probably best off with an emasculated Labour government carrying out Conservative (or IMF) policies.’ Many people in the City, he added, actually wanted a pay policy.35

  An important subsection of the movement which might be called Intellectuals for Margaret was composed of converts from socialism. It was sometimes easier for those who had come from the left to see the threat that socialism posed than it was for Tories who had never been tempted. Woodrow Wyatt,* for example, a journalist and former Labour MP, had been involved in the fight to resist Communist takeover of the Electricians Union in the early 1960s. Brian Walden,† considered the most eloquent of his generation of Labour MPs, but disillusioned by the rise of the left in the Labour Party, was more clear-sighted than most in seeing that Mrs Thatcher stood for real change. As a grammar school meritocrat who had originally looked for social progress from the Labour Party, Walden recognized her as offering what he sought. Soon after she won the leadership, Jim Prior told him, ‘She is, of course, completely potty, Brian. She won’t last six months,’36 but Walden disagreed. In May 1975 he had lunch with Humphrey Atkins and offered to cross the floor and bring six Labour right-wingers with him.37 Nothing came of this – although, in a separate development, Reg Prentice,‡ Labour’s former Education Secretary, did defect to the Conservatives – and Walden left Parliament in 1977 to take up a career as a television interviewer. His interviews with Mrs Thatcher became famous for the rapport he established with her, and his perceptiveness about the elemental force of Thatcherism. ‘The only way the Tories can lose the next election’, he told the whip Bernard Weatherill early in 1978, ‘is if they are not Conservative enough,’38 exactly the opposite approach to that of many centrist Tories.

  Alfred Sherman, himself originally from the extreme left, made it his business to cultivate defectors. He advocated a strategy of taking the initiative and saying, ‘We are the heirs to the Social Democratic heritage.’ This would outflank ‘fainéant pseudo D’Israelians [sic], and give us a truly central position in British politics’.39 Mrs Thatcher enthusiastically supported the idea, and made a great deal of time available to see the converts and flatter them. One such was Hugh Thomas,* the historian of the Spanish Civil War, who had become a socialist while at university, and now repented of his ways, partly because of his concern about the Communist threat. Sherman kept Mrs Thatcher informed about Thomas’s pilgrimage, telling her in the summer of 1978 that he was lying low: ‘Like the nightingale (per Horace) he sings most sweetly from the shade of the thicket.’40 In fact, Thomas, accompanied by Leon Brittan,† who was in charge of the party’s efforts to engage with academics, had lunched with Mrs Thatcher in the spring of 1975, and again with her and Sherman in November of that year. She used his materials on ‘The Ideals of an Open Society’ as the basic text of her speech of that title to the Bow Group in May 1978, and drew on him for advice on foreign policy, particularly the Communist threat in southern Africa. Thomas was always a strong European, but this did not trouble Mrs Thatcher at the time. She happily took up his call for a European defence capability to share more of the burden of resisting the Soviets with the Americans. As well as Thomas and Robert Conquest (see above), Mrs Thatcher also roped in distinguished historians and thinkers such as Leonard Schapiro,‡ Michael Howard§ and Isaiah Berlin¶ – all three of whom also advised the Liberal Party at the time – to give her ideas on subjects relating to the nature and danger of Soviet Communism. ‘She was interested to know how historians saw things, though she hadn’t done much background reading.’41

  Hugh Thomas, in turn, was influential with his old friend Paul Johnson (though Johnson claimed that the process worked more the other way). By the mid-1970s Johnson was increasingly disenchanted with the growing power of the left, particularly the trade unions, and in 1977 brought together his discontents in a book called Enemies of Society, a list of Britain’s ills which accorded very closely with Mrs Thatcher’s own analysis. By 1980, he felt happy enough with the way things were going to write a book called The Recovery of Freedom. From 1975 he talked to her sometimes about policy (‘She was completely at sea’), and about history, ideas and what books she should read: ‘I got her to read David Watkin’s Morality and Architecture. She said she found it hard going.’ Although a strong Thatcherite, Johnson looked down on Mrs Thatcher somewhat. He described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but she was touchingly aware of her ignorance, being ‘the eternal scholarship girl’. He summed up by saying, ‘I always liked her, but she always bored me a bit.’42

  Johnson’s support was valuable to Mrs Thatcher, however, as his prolific journalism, notably in the Daily Mail and the Spectator, made a great impact.
He was one of many newspaper journalists whose support helped change the conversation of what later became known as the chattering classes. Others included John O’Sullivan,* Frank Johnson and T. E. Utley,† all of the Daily Telegraph, Andrew Alexander of the Daily Mail, George Gale of the Daily Express and, later in the process, Bernard Levin of The Times. Samuel Brittan, the main economic commentator of the Financial Times, though by no means a Thatcherite politically, was her chief economic guru in the press, and his weekly column was the only piece of journalism which she read without fail.43 Collectively, these writers contributed to an exciting feeling that the tide of ideas was changing away from collectivism and that, at last, ‘everything was possible’.44 Mrs Thatcher celebrated some conversions in public. In her party conference speech in October 1977, she concluded with words by Paul Johnson, acclaiming his ‘writer’s clarity’, about why he had deserted the left: ‘I have come to appreciate … the overwhelming strength of my attachment to the individual spirit.’45

  A similar excitement pervaded the proceedings of the Conservative Philosophy Group, an informal society, set up by Hugh Fraser and Jonathan Aitken, which mingled politicians and men of the world with writers and thinkers. Organized on the academic side by Roger Scruton* and John Casey,† the group would meet in Fraser’s or, later, Aitken’s house to hear papers read on a wide range of subjects from immigration, or religion, or the monarchy, to the money supply or nuclear weapons. Initially suspicious of the group, because of its link with her defeated rival, Fraser, Mrs Thatcher then asked to come to its meetings, and did so several times in opposition. Among other things, the group provided a place where she could meet Enoch Powell, now an Ulster Unionist MP, on neutral ground. Mrs Thatcher was particularly taken with a talk, which she heard on her only visit to the group as prime minister, by Edward Norman,‡ the Dean of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in which he predicted that the issue of nuclear weapons, which had fallen comparatively quiet since the early 1960s, would soon reappear as a great moral struggle in the West. Norman argued that the moral objections to nuclear weapons were not different in kind from those to any other weapons, and that it was a worthy object of policy for the West to resist the philosophical materialism of Soviet Communism.46 Those present remembered Mrs Thatcher shouting out, in the discussion after the talk, ‘I agree with Dr Norman: we must defend Christian values with the ATOM BOMB.’47 As this shortly predated the great CND battles of the early 1980s, she was much impressed by Norman’s powers of prediction, later referring to him as a ‘prophet’ and consulting him both on the ethics of the nuclear question and in her search for Christian justifications for capitalism. These last had long been active in her mind. In an almost philosophical speech to the Zurich Economic Society, Mrs Thatcher claimed the moral high ground for her economic beliefs. ‘Choice is the essence of ethics,’ she said, and ‘The economic results [of the Western way of life] are better because the moral philosophy is superior.’ 48

  It was this quest for the Christian roots of her beliefs, particularly of her economic doctrines, which gave depth and breadth to Mrs Thatcher’s approach to the national crisis. She always had very strong personal Christian beliefs, in what Edward Norman called ‘the English sense’.49 In other words, she was not interested in spirituality, sacraments or questions of authority in the Church, but she was extremely interested in duty to God and in ethics, and had a particular, almost nostalgic idea of a life lived according to the teachings of the Gospel. She had, in Norman’s words, ‘a pre-existing sense of neatness and order in society’ which she derived in large part from her childhood and her father. Alfred Roberts had believed in what Gladstone called ‘effort, honest manful effort’, and it was a combination of Gladstonian economic views of retrenchment and reform with Methodism which animated Mrs Thatcher. Denis Thatcher shared this analysis of her attitudes. He believed that some of what people thought of as his wife’s ‘right-wingery’ actually came from her religious upbringing: ‘She can’t find a sustainable argument that people should be paid for not doing any work.’50 ‘It is noteworthy’, she told the bankers of Zurich, ‘that the Victorian era – the heyday of free enterprise in Britain – was also the era of the rise of selflessness and benefaction’.51 Mrs Thatcher wanted, said Norman, to ‘resuscitate a world we had lost’, and she ‘ransacked’ Christian thought for intellectual backing.

  As leader of the Opposition, she delivered two substantial public accounts along these lines. The first was the Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture in the summer of 1977. Although Jewish, Alfred Sherman, who did much of the drafting, always regarded the term ‘Judaeo-Christian values’ as a cop-out and believed that British Conservatism should be explicitly Christian.52 In her Macleod Lecture, Mrs Thatcher sought the roots of Conservatism not in opposition to socialism, but in an earlier age. It is ‘part of the living flesh of British life’, she said, and it depended on the idea that man is individual and social and spiritual, all at once. Far from being the antithesis of care for others, self-interest worked with it because ‘man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence … “Love your neighbour as yourself” expresses this.’ This is what she always believed, and it is what she meant ten years later when she uttered a phrase constantly held against her: ‘There is no such thing as society.’ The full quotation makes this clear. Interviewed by Woman’s Own in 1987, Mrs Thatcher criticized those who thought it was up to the government to solve all their problems: ‘They’re casting their problem on society. And you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do things except through people … It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.’53 Her Macleod Lecture praised Adam Smith for his view that ‘A moral being is one who exercises his own judgement in choice’ and went on to argue that ‘economic choices have a moral dimension.’54

  In a speech, drafted by T. E. Utley and Simon Webley, from the pulpit of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London the following year, Mrs Thatcher was more explicit about religion. She recalled her upbringing: ‘What mattered fundamentally was Man’s relationship to God, and in the last resort this depended on the response of the individual soul to God’s Grace.’ She went on, ‘I never thought that Christianity equipped me with a political philosophy, but I thought it did equip me with standards to which political actions must, in the end, be referred.’ She said that Christian teaching and worship should not be taken out of schools because ‘To most ordinary people, heaven and hell, right and wrong, good and bad, matter.’ The relief of poverty and suffering was a religious duty, but not one necessarily best performed by the state, she declared, taking her favourite example: ‘I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him?’ The worst political doctrines, notably Marxism (‘utterly inconsistent with the Gospel’), proclaimed the perfectibility of man through politics. She did not, but ‘There is a well-known prayer which refers to God’s service as “perfect freedom”. My wish for the people of this country is that we shall be “free to serve”.’ There was an apparent contradiction, she said, between the idea of interdependence and individual responsibility, but not a real one: ‘the whole of political wisdom consists in getting these two ideas in the right relationship to each other.’55

  The reaction of the intellectuals to all of this was interesting to behold. Some of them fell in love with Mrs Thatcher. John Vaizey,* an educationalist who had moved from the left during her time at the Department of Education, wrote to her to tell her how interesting her voice was to listen to.56 Most were flattered by her enthusiasm and, of course, by her praise for their writing. ‘You just put things so marvellously: I wish I had your gift for words,’ was one of her corny but effective lines. The historian David Dilks,† who met her through Leon Brittan, was struck by her ‘directness, quickness on the point, anxiety to listen to a wide range of views, conscious
exploitation of feminine charm, and a certain motherly quality.’57 He was also impressed by her desire to recapture ‘intellectual capital’ from universities to rebuild Conservative ideas. Some, however, thought her naive. Edward Norman, though an admirer, recalled that she ‘had all that veneration for intellectual life which real intellectuals don’t share’.58 She had ‘no real sense of intellectual inquiry’ and ‘an extraordinarily intelligent, but unformed mind’. Some simply doubted whether she was up to the task. After meeting her for the first time in 1978 – an occasion on which he told her to abolish exchange controls – Milton Friedman wrote to thank his host Ralph Harris: ‘Rose and I both enjoyed our dinner with Margaret Thatcher … very much indeed. She is a very attractive and interesting lady. Whether she really has the capacities that Britain so badly needs at this time, I must confess, seems to me a very open question …’59