Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The problem of union power also took particularly contentious form in the course of 1977 because of the dispute at Grunwick. The firm, a photographic processing plant in north-west London, had dismissed a number of workers in a dispute the previous year. Some of those dismissed had then joined the APEX trade union which demanded ‘recognition’ from Grunwick, and the reinstatement of the sacked workers. A court upheld the legality of the dismissals, and a secret ballot at Grunwick showed that 80 per cent of those working at the plant did not want to join any union. By the summer of 1977, the dispute had become a cause célèbre with the left, with huge pickets trying to prevent workers and mail going in and out of the plant. The pickets were briefly joined by two supposedly moderate Cabinet ministers, Shirley Williams and Fred Mulley, and the Labour government stood back from condemning the scenes of violence. Although the row was not strictly about union membership, it came to be seen as a battle about the closed shop which, it was expected, APEX would seek to impose on Grunwick if it prevailed. It also brought home to people the street-power of the left – the sense, as with the Saltley coke depot under Heath, that government and police did not have the power or the will to impose order in the face of industrial intimidation.

  Mrs Thatcher was shocked by Grunwick, and everyone knew where her sympathies lay. She sent Adam Butler and Barney Hayhoe,* an MP close to Jim Prior, to accompany the workers to the plant so that they could accurately report the level of intimidation to her. But it was not in any way due to her that the plant kept in business. The National Association for Freedom, which the murdered Ross McWhirter had helped set up to counter what it saw as left-wing intimidation, managed to smuggle out Grunwick’s mail which had been illegally blacked by the postmen’s union. The Conservatives, while naturally condemning violence and lawlessness, kept their distance. In part this was because of doubts raised by other industrialists about George Ward, the owner of Grunwick. In his weekly letter to Mrs Thatcher, John Sparrow warned her of strong reaction to press stories that she was personally close to Ward: ‘There would be quite a lot of unhappiness if it were felt that there was a close relationship between you and Mr Ward.’87 Partly this was because Ward’s personal business behaviour was criticized, but the wider reason was that a great many businessmen, particularly those in large companies, were in favour of the closed shop. They told the Conservatives that they found it simpler to negotiate with only one group of people.

  This irritated Mrs Thatcher, who considered such people spineless, but it also inclined her to listen more to Jim Prior about the need to go slowly in trying to change trade union law. Indeed, objectively, though not emotionally, she moved closer to the Prior position than to that of Keith Joseph. While she was in the United States for her second visit there as party leader in early September 1977, Lord Scarman’s inquiry into the Grunwick dispute recommended the reinstatement of the dismissed (now APEX) workers. This caused a public disagreement between Prior and Joseph. Joseph condemned Scarman and appeared to call for the outlawing of the closed shop. Mrs Thatcher, at a disadvantage because she was in Washington, was forced to pronounce. She felt she had little choice but to support Prior who was, after all, her party’s spokesman on the subject. ‘We do not like the closed shop,’ she told a press conference hijacked by this subject when she wanted it to be about her meeting with President Jimmy Carter. ‘We do not think it is right. We are against it … But because I do not like it, and think it is against the freedom of the individual, does not necessarily mean that I can pass legislation about it.’88 Her interview on Weekend World the following Sunday, the first of many she was to have with Brian Walden, illustrated the delicacy of her situation. Walden began by saying that the Grunwick dispute raised the question ‘If we vote Margaret Thatcher into No. 10 … will we be voting for a disastrous and futile confrontation between the government and the unions?’ Asked about trade union legislation, Mrs Thatcher played it down, saying that it would be ‘Not of the kind that Ted had … It didn’t work.’ The only legislation on the closed shop would be against its ‘worst aspects’. Walden pursued her about what would happen if a Conservative government were again confronted by the miners as in February 1974. Without having squared this with colleagues in advance, Mrs Thatcher came up with the arresting idea that if – which she claimed was unlikely – agreement could not be reached, the issue could be put to a referendum, on the grounds that ‘all of the people of this country are shareholders in miners’. She quoted her own remarks about the 1975 referendum on remaining in the EEC to argue that this was a legitimate way, for constitutional issues, of ‘letting the people speak’.89 Her line enabled her to reach over the heads of trade union leaders and claim that rank-and-file trade unionists would be on her side. It also enabled her to deflect press attention from the Joseph–Prior disagreements about union reform. But it was no solution to those disagreements and it was, in essence, a different way of asking the ‘Who governs Britain?’ question that had caused the Heath government so much grief. A working group looked into the referendum idea, and Mrs Thatcher later referred to it from time to time, but it never became, in her view or anyone else’s, the answer.

  Perhaps burnt by this experience of internal disagreement publicly displayed, Mrs Thatcher became increasingly protective of Jim Prior’s exclusive right to pronounce on trade union matters. At the beginning of January 1978, Geoffrey Howe sent her a draft of a speech which he proposed to make about the unions. Her notes on it are almost the angriest she penned while leader of the Opposition. She disliked both what she saw as his weakness in being too nice to the unions and his unwisdom in trespassing into the subject at all. When Howe wrote, ‘These questions do not involve any special criticism of trade unions,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘Ha, ha!’ When he said that change should be made ‘step by step’, she wrote ‘Why.’ ‘Too defensive,’ she scrawled, ‘– If you can only be defensive – leave it alone!’ ‘Geoffrey – This is not your subject. Why go on with it – the press will crucify you for this … It would be better if Jim Prior said these things.’90 Much frustration is contained in her notes – at the hesitations of policy, at the need for those hesitations, at Shadow Cabinet indiscipline, and at the personality of poor Geoffrey Howe himself. His text was not delivered.

  The uncomfortableness of the whole subject of the trade unions in the period of opposition comes through very clearly in the diaries and memory of John Hoskyns. Hoskyns, who had no previous association with the Conservative Party, had sold his successful computer company to devote himself to finding some way of rescuing Britain from its economic malaise. He had come on the scene through the agency of Keith Joseph. After a successful first meeting, set up by Joseph, between Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, and Mrs Thatcher, in August 1976, a second, in which they were to offer her their thoughts for her party conference speech, was a disaster. Sitting, with Margaret and Denis, in what Hoskyns described in his diary as ‘her rather boringly elegant drawing room’ in Flood Street, they tried to give her a speech structure about how ‘change and recovery were possible if people believed it enough to act on that assumption’. ‘She nitpicked Norman’s semantics … defensively holding forth, lecturing us on things we were quite well aware of. I showed slight irritation once & Mr T looked at me, stunned that I shouldn’t be party to the inevitable mild sycophancy which makes her feel she’s so much more remarkable than she is. She is a limited, pedantic bore, with no lateral grasp, very little humour. I may be wrong but that was my view. God help the Tories …’91* Hoskyns and Strauss persisted, however. Their aim was to get it into Tory heads that the unions had to be confronted in order to bring about the economic changes required. At the same time, they were as aware as anyone that the prospect of confrontation was electorally disastrous, and that a confrontation for which a Conservative government was not prepared would be even worse than no confrontation at all. In a letter to Joseph in June 1977, Hoskyns wrestled with the problem of how to implement the right economic policies. The ‘key question’, he
said, was ‘What political innovation is needed to remove the political constraints on government’s freedom to pursue such policies?’92

  The result was a process known as Stepping Stones designed to produce a plan for preparing the ground, campaigning and then governing. Hoskyns explained to Joseph that he was following the business concept of the ‘critical path’. By mid-November 1977 the first report was ready. It said that the ‘one major obstacle’ to the national recovery which the Tories sought was ‘the negative role of the trade unions’ and that ‘To compete with Labour in peaceful coexistence with an unchanged union movement will ensure continued economic decline.’93 What Hoskyns called the ‘secret garden’ had a key marked ‘trade union power’.94 Stepping Stones tried to establish a project, both to unstitch the unions in public debate and to get the Tories to make explicit commitments to trade union reform which would give them an electoral mandate on which the Civil Service would have to work if they won office.95 At a working supper in the Commons which Hoskyns regarded as the ‘turning-point’, Mrs Thatcher endorsed the report. On this occasion, Hoskyns saw her virtues more clearly, but some of his criticisms stood: ‘Margaret’s key contribution is guts and determination and a complete lack of the self-importance and pomposity which would make it so hard for many politicians to take advice of this kind. She is quite limited intellectually … and philosophically. The problem intellectually … is that she is unaware of the fact that other people’s intelligence may be superior to her own.’96 Emboldened, Stepping Stones then set up small groups to investigate details such as the payment of benefits to strikers’ families, involving people like Nigel Lawson, David Howell and Norman Lamont.

  A battle then ensued, along fairly predictable lines, with Jim Prior, Lord Thorneycroft, Ian Gilmour and Chris Patten most opposed. Their opposition was ideological, but also tactical. Patten saw Stepping Stones as the work of the CPS, which he greatly disliked. Many years later, he described the document as an ‘inflexible strategy’ which ‘read as though it lay somewhere between a management consultant’s brief and a plan of battle. It showed little political understanding or touch.’97 In a paper called ‘Further Thoughts on Strategy’ written at the end of February 1978, he tried to push Stepping Stones to one side: ‘The authors of “Stepping Stones” have described their political strategy in terms of painstakingly building a model of St Paul’s with matchsticks. I would use a different metaphor. A successful strategy is like an artillery bombardment with half a dozen properly targeted heavy guns.’ Stepping Stones should therefore be confined to an ‘up-market campaign’ ‘without interfering with any of our other plans’.98 Patten’s ‘heavy guns’ would aim at tax, law and order, housing, education and other matters. On the subject of the unions, they were silent. Although Patten used the word ‘strategy’, his approach was not strategic, but tactical.

  As the Patten paper approached, Hoskyns confided his fears to his diary:

  the breathtaking vision and innovation which the situation calls for is [sic] not going to come from Thatcher – of that I am almost certain. Alfred has been warning of a ‘putsch’ against her from Prior, Whitelaw, Gilmour – but this seems unlikely at such a time. Pym is seen as the successor … it seems a preposterous fear. But there’s no doubt she does not lead and manage her Shadow Cabinet. There is much press criticism (leaks by Patten, Alfred says) of this and of her failure to debate policy and philosophy.99

  Had Hoskyns been allowed to attend the meeting of the Steering Committee on 30 January 1978, he would have been even more depressed. With a remarkable frankness which led Mrs Thatcher to write on them a note to Ryder saying ‘Richard – please keep in safe,’ the minutes recorded her as saying that there was ‘too much detail in the “Stepping Stones” paper … it was generally desirable for members to exercise self-discipline on the problem of the unions. Mrs Thatcher stressed that Mr Prior would lead the campaign and would speak where appropriate.’ They went on: ‘When Mr Davies [John Davies, who had replaced Reggie Maudling as shadow foreign secretary] argued that if we told the truth about the unions we should certainly lose the election, Mrs Thatcher acknowledged that this could not be the centrepiece of our strategy.’100 In the end, bursting with frustration, Hoskyns and Strauss went to see Mrs Thatcher to tell her to get rid of Prior. She naturally refused and ‘thought we were naive’,101 but ‘She was not too put out by it. I think she sees Jim as a disaster in the context of any really intelligent and resolute plan for recovery … Now he’s in a very strong position and, with an election pending, she can do nothing.’102

  It might have been a comfort to Hoskyns to have known that some people on the other side of this argument felt equally uneasy. In an interview given privately that summer, Chris Patten said that the moderates dominated the Shadow Cabinet and the draft of the manifesto, but ‘had to lie low because of the impossible behaviour of Ted’. Patten set up Mrs Thatcher’s future behaviour towards Adam Ridley as the litmus test of her own moderation.103 As the election expected in October 1978 approached, the Tories fought themselves to a stalemate. Mrs Thatcher’s heart was with Joseph, Stepping Stones and taking on the unions. She realized that Stepping Stones ‘gave her a clear, practical and intellectual path which she didn’t have before’.104 But her head was with those – who included the ideologically supportive Gordon Reece – who argued that a fuzzier, more cautious approach was electorally necessary. As late as 22 August, Airey Neave told David Butler in a private interview that it had taken eighteen months’ work to move Mrs Thatcher towards centre position on the trade unions and to accept the Prior approach.105 She was trapped in moderation. But Jim Callaghan’s decision about the date of the election was to make a huge difference to the type of campaign she eventually felt able to fight.

  14

  Labour Isn’t Working

  ‘I know what. You tell me how’

  In the autumn of 1977, Arnold Ashdown, one of the joint treasurers of the Conservative Party, died, and a memorial service was held for him in north London, attended by all living Tory leaders. Ashdown was Jewish, and so all the men, as well as Mrs Thatcher, wore hats for the ceremony. In appearance, each leader fulfilled his popular caricature. Harold Macmillan wore an Edwardian silk top hat. Alec Home had on the more modest Homburg that had been customary in his youth. Ted Heath forgot that a hat was needed at all, and had to borrow a paper yarmulke from the Jewish organizers. Mrs Thatcher, in the view of those present, stole the show, looking striking all in black, with a hat with a very large brim.1 The occasion was a small example of how she was successfully achieving a presence on the public stage.

  For all her inexperience, nervousness and social insecurity, she had undoubted public impact. She displayed the conspicuousness and panache which are inseparable from leadership. This was partly because of the uniqueness of her sex in her chosen sphere, but also owed much to her physical presence and her force of character. There were others within her party who had enjoyed far longer and more distinguished careers than she, but there was none, with the partial exception of Heath, who could rival the hold on the popular imagination which she was beginning to exert. She liked being seen; she liked being noticed; she liked leading. Michael Portillo,* then a young employee of the Conservative Research Department, was detailed to help in the campaign for the Cambridge by-election of November 1976. He had to meet Mrs Thatcher and her team early in the morning outside a pub in Trumpington. As she got hurriedly out of the car, she flashed her eyes at him and said, ‘Take me to the battle!’ Although it was a semi-comic moment, it also impressed him deeply: ‘She had a thing about needing to look and play the part of leader.’2

  No leader can play the part of future prime minister without a presence on the international stage. It was the beginnings of this that Mrs Thatcher had sought – and achieved – with her visit as party leader to the United States in 1975. She had complemented this, in policy terms, with her ‘Iron Lady’ speech the following year. She needed to overcome the disadvantage that when s
he became leader, as Lord Carrington unkindly put it, ‘She hardly knew where Calais was.’3* In the ensuing years, she visited European capitals, the Middle East, China† and Australasia. All these helped to some extent to build her reputation, and certainly increased her knowledge, but none had great impact on the public. More important, though not wholly successful, was her second visit to the United States. The victory of the Democrat, Jimmy Carter, over Gerald Ford, in the US presidential election of 1976, had been marginally unhelpful to Mrs Thatcher’s cause. Although she did not have a very high opinion of Ford, her links to Republicans were better than those to Democrats. Besides, Carter, with his rather starry-eyed belief that the hearts of dictators could be changed by the expression of the West’s sincere desire for peace, was emotionally at odds with her alert suspicion of the Soviet Union. So she saw the need for new work – to establish friendly relations with the President and to maintain a flattering profile in a United States whose policy elites were now more likely to be in sympathy with the right wing of the Labour Party than with her.