Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  No wonder, then, that even some feminists, who generally hated Mrs Thatcher, felt uneasy. The left-wing writer Clare Ramsaran, then in her late teens, thought that Mrs Thatcher was simply ‘a whole new excuse for men on the left to stop feeling guilty about sexism’. But ‘if you didn’t laugh,’ she wrote, ‘you weren’t just a humourless feminist, but – horror of horrors – a TORY’. Times changed, of course, but the hint of misogyny never went away. When Mrs Thatcher died in 2013, the song adopted by hard-left activists to mark her demise came from The Wizard of Oz. The title said it all: ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’.48

  4

  No Money, Margaret Thatcher!

  Happily for us, Margaret Thatcher – a strong man like yourself – is about to come to power. As she stomps the country, invoking the glorious example of such great Englishmen from our island story as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Pidgeon,fn1 the streets ring with the sound of do-gooders breaking wind and taking to the boats.

  Henry Root to the President of Pakistan,

  General Zia, 26 April 1979, in Henry Root,

  The Henry Root Letters (1980)

  Mrs Thatcher has set her course. There can be no going back now.

  EITHER SHE SUCCEEDS – OR WE BUST.

  Daily Mirror, 13 June 1979

  On the evening of Sunday 30 September 1979, the most popular sitcom of the age made its debut on BBC1. To the Manor Born is the story of Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, whose family has owned Grantleigh Manor, in the heart of rural Somerset, for the last 400 years. But when her husband dies leaving crippling debts, Audrey discovers that blue blood is no defence against bankruptcy. In desperation, she sells up and moves into the lodge at the end of the drive. But to her horror, Grantleigh is snapped up by Richard DeVere, the self-made owner of a supermarket chain. To make matters worse, Audrey discovers that not only is DeVere nouveau riche, he is not even English, having arrived as a refugee from Czechoslovakia in 1939. In just a few days her world has been turned upside down. ‘To think that Grantleigh is in the hands of a man who has no interest in farming, doesn’t go to church and now, it turns out, hasn’t even heard of Winnie the Pooh,’ she snaps at her suavely unruffled successor. ‘You think A. A. Milne is a motoring organisation, I suppose.’

  Despite glorious performances from Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles, some critics were very sniffy about To the Manor Born. ‘Here we are in the midst of a recession,’ wrote The Times’s Stanley Reynolds in December 1979, ‘with starvation in Cambodia, boat people in Vietnam and the Mullahs on the warpath … and there is Penelope Keith as Mrs fforbes-Hamilton, the gentry widow, about to burst her tweed seams because a Jew has moved into the manor and is acting like the squire.’ It was, he thought, all too ‘safe and secure and snug’. But the public loved it. Thanks to an ITV strike, the initial viewing figures were tremendous, and once people started watching, they never stopped. The finale of the first series, which went out on 29 November, commanded 24 million viewers, the highest dramatic audience of the 1970s. A poll in the Mirror, meanwhile, found that the Christmas special had been the most popular programme of the season.1

  ‘What has Audrey fforbes-Hamilton got to say that is so special to the people of Britain?’ the veteran anatomist of Britain, Anthony Sampson, wondered in the Observer. A lot of it, he thought, was down to a yearning for the lost certainties of hierarchy and order – but not all of it.

  The spell of Audrey fforbes-Hamilton is surely more, much more, than the spirit of nostalgia. There she sits, all too terribly contemporary, fingering her invitation to the hunt ball and fending off the bank manager, watching with her binoculars the comings and goings of the upstart foreigner De Vere at the Manor, and preposterously trying to keep up appearances with her old Rolls-Royce, her bogus visits to Spain, and her botched-up Christmas crib for the local church, which is hopelessly outdone by the electronic crib provided by De Vere.

  The more we see of her, the more we realise that she sees herself as the very spirit of Britain, preserving her dignity and status while leaving it to the foreigner to dirty his fingers with trade, confident that her values will win out in the end.

  And that, of course, was the attitude that Margaret Thatcher had come into office to overturn.2

  Although To the Manor Born had been written before Mrs Thatcher took office, it was to become indelibly associated with the mood of her first term. A few years earlier, critics had remarked on her resemblance to The Good Life’s aspirational super-snob Margo Leadbetter. It was equally tempting to see her reflected in Audrey’s cut-glass accent, withering putdowns and unashamed jingoism. Yet, as Sampson pointed out, To the Manor Born’s politics are a bit more complicated. As the tweedy representative of the old elite, Audrey is actually much closer to paternalist patricians such as Sir Ian Gilmour. It is DeVere, the self-made millionaire, who is the show’s genuinely Thatcherite figure. To Audrey, he is merely ‘trade’; at one point she even calls him a ‘grocer’. That was precisely the kind of snobbery that the Grantham grocer’s daughter had come to expect from her colleagues. Of course the series has a happy ending. Watched by more than 21 million people in 1981, the wedding of Audrey and Richard represents the union of the old aristocracy and the new entrepreneurs, the estate owners and the estate agents. But restoring peace to Grantleigh was easier than bringing unity to Westminster. Audrey fforbes-Hamilton might have vanquished her prejudices. But hell would have frozen over before Margaret Thatcher tied the knot with Sir Ian Gilmour.

  No sooner had Downing Street’s new chatelaine picked up the keys to her home than she was thinking about her staff. And among the letters that poured into Number 10 in the first weeks of May 1979 was one from an admirer with strong views about the people she needed. It was vital, wrote the fictional wet-fish merchant Henry Root, to ‘form a Cabinet of hard-nosed men to prosecute our number 1 priority: the crackdown on the unions, the work-shy, law-breakers and homosexuals’. He advised her against appointing ‘too many Oxbridge men’, who had trouble ‘discovering what day of the week it is’. Among various eclectic suggestions, Root recommended the Southampton football manager Lawrie McMenemy as Defence Secretary, on the grounds that the Saints had recently played in Europe, ‘so he’s had invaluable experience of “kicking the foreigners into the stands”’.fn2 For Home Secretary, he suggested Mary Whitehouse, ‘a mother like yourself’. He had been impressed by a Sun report that Mrs Whitehouse had visited Mrs Thatcher in the Commons, ‘and how you showed each other pornographic pictures and knelt on the floor and prayed together. That was moving.’ But he ended with a word of warning: ‘I don’t think we should have any bachelors in our Cabinet unless it’s entirely necessary.’3

  If Mrs Thatcher had had the sense to follow Henry Root’s advice, history might have been very different. Bafflingly, however, there was no place for Whitehouse or McMenemy, although she did find room for bachelors and Oxbridge men. The truth was that although she had won the election, she was not secure enough to appoint the ‘hard-nosed’ Cabinet Root wanted. As she told the Canadian premier Joe Clark, her priority was to form ‘what I call a “well-balanced Government” … to give a certain confidence that one is determined to take the middle ground’.4

  When the names were announced, therefore, the striking thing was just how ‘well-balanced’ her Cabinet was. Almost all of Edward Heath’s lieutenants had senior jobs, most obviously Lord Carrington, who was Foreign Secretary, and Willie Whitelaw, who was Home Secretary. Whitelaw, in particular, was a figure of colossal importance. As runner-up in the leadership contest four years earlier, he could probably have roused the Cabinet against her at any point in the first few years. Instead, this big, shambling former tank commander served her with what one writer calls ‘an almost military sense of subordination’. There were also places for Heath loyalists such as Jim Prior (Employment), Francis Pym (Defence), Peter Walker (Agriculture), Michael Heseltine (Environment), Sir Ian Gilmour (Lord Privy Seal), Christopher Soames (Lord President of the Council) and Lord Hailsham (Lo
rd Chancellor). There was no room, though, for thrusting young Thatcherites such as Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson or Nicholas Ridley, who had to be content with junior roles. Had Heath still been in charge, he would probably have picked much the same crew.5

  To the doubters, this was a sign that Mrs Thatcher was, after all, going to govern from the centre ground. One of the most prominent sceptics, for example, was Jim Prior, the new Employment Secretary. It was no secret that Prior considered her economic policies ‘dogmatic’ and ‘simplistic’, to use his own words. But when he looked around the Cabinet table, he felt reassured that her radical ambitions would be ‘moderated by the realities of Government’. What he had overlooked, though, was that the crucial economic ministries were all in Thatcherite hands. The new Chancellor was Sir Geoffrey Howe, supported by fellow monetarists, John Biffen and Nigel Lawson, as Chief Secretary and Financial Secretary. The conscience of the right, Sir Keith Joseph, took the Department of Industry, while the impeccably loyal John Nott went to the Department of Trade. What was more, Mrs Thatcher had no intention of having economic debates in Cabinet, where her inner circle might be outvoted. Instead, policy was decided at the Cabinet’s E Committee, to which few sceptics were invited, or at weekly breakfast meetings with trusted allies. Later, Sir Ian Gilmour complained that the dissenters had been frozen out by a ‘secretive monetarist clique’. But this was clever political management, the hallmark of a Prime Minister playing her hand with meticulous care.6

  Even so, Mrs Thatcher’s reputation for pitiless cunning can be a bit overstated. She had surrounded herself with Heath’s old fan club because she had to, not because she wanted to. The result was a Cabinet that looked decidedly old-fashioned, not to say old-school. Of its twenty-two members, all but one were male, all but three had been to public schools, and only one – in flagrant contravention of Henry Root’s advice – had gone to a university other than Oxford or Cambridge. Six had been to Eton and three to Winchester; five were barristers; five had served in the Guards and two in the cavalry; several owned landed estates; three were baronets and three more were hereditary peers. On top of all that, nine had fought in the Second World War, three of whom – Whitelaw and Pym, as well as Carrington – had won the Military Cross. When the journalist Louis Heren saw them at a Westminster drinks party, he thought they seemed the embodiment of privileged complacency, beaming with ‘self-confidence and well-being’. In this company Mrs Thatcher was the outsider. She had not just gone to the wrong school: she had done the wrong subject at Oxford, had never served in the war and did not belong to the right clubs. She was not even a man.7

  Among Mrs Thatcher’s allies, her isolation was cause for serious concern. In November 1979 her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow, told Alan Clark that she was ‘out-numbered three to one in the cabinet’, with most of her ministers ‘mutely or vociferously hostile’. The Tory backbencher Anthony Royle said the same a few days later. ‘Look at the people round her,’ he told Clark. ‘Carrington – hates her; Prior – hates her; Gilmour – hates her; Heseltine – hates her; Walker – loathes her, makes no secret of it; Willie – completely even-handed, would never support her against the old gang; Geoffrey Howe – no personal loyalties – durable politburo man, will serve under anyone.’

  Clark thought this was about right. Few people, he mused, realized ‘how precarious’ her position was, or how easily a revolt of the ‘old guard heavies’ would open the way for the ‘ageing, sulky, shapeless but still expectant Edward Heath’. Of course we know that Heath would never return to front-line politics, but nobody knew that then. After all, it was barely five years since he had been running the ship. Still in his early sixties, he made no secret of his belief that his old crew would soon come to their senses and recall him to the bridge. And throughout Mrs Thatcher’s first term, he was the Trotsky to her Stalin: a focus for opposition, a reminder of her insecurity, a shadow from which she could never fully escape.8

  Outnumbered in her own Cabinet, Mrs Thatcher relied on a little court of advisers, friends and hangers-on, much like Harold Wilson’s inner circle in the 1960s. The former Conservative researcher John Ranelagh called them ‘Thatcher’s people’. Self-made, competitive, impatient, chafing at what they saw as the defeatism of the Establishment, they were ‘driven by an intellectual and programmatic dislike of their own country’. A striking number came from Jewish backgrounds: not just the former Communist Alfred Sherman, who ran the Centre for Policy Studies, or even advisers and officials such as Norman Strauss, David Wolfson and Stephen Sherbourne, but ministers such as Sir Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan and Nigel Lawson. Why? Strauss thought that because Jews were outsiders, they were often personally loyal to her, not the party. Others thought it was because Jews tended to be ‘entrepreneurial’ and to believe in ‘thrift and savings and doing things by your own efforts’, as she did. As John Biffen put it, she saw in the Jewish community another version of the ‘Methodist values of Grantham’.9

  The two most influential figures, though, were not Jewish. The first was her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, who joined in November 1979 from the Department of Energy. Born in 1932, Ingham was a former Hebden Bridge Grammar boy who played up to his image as a curmudgeonly Yorkshireman. At the time, contemporaries were struck by his extraordinary aggressiveness in his mistress’s defence, as well as his enthusiasm for knifing her ministers in off-the-record briefings. But what was really interesting about him was not his manner but his background. As the Tory MP Julian Critchley put it, Ingham came from ‘solid Labour, Nonconformist stock’, all chapel, cricket and the Daily Herald. A former Labour candidate for Leeds City Council, Ingham was one of several people who supported her because he felt that ‘for far too long the British decision-making process had been in the hands of an effete, spoiled, silver-tongued, privileged minority out of touch with most men in the street’. ‘One of the things you and I have in common, Bernard,’ Mrs Thatcher once said, ‘is that neither of us is a smooth person.’10

  The other key figure was the head of her Policy Unit, John Hoskyns. Born into an army family in 1927, Hoskyns lost his father during the fall of France, served for more than a decade in the Rifle Brigade and worked for IBM before setting up his own systems consultancy in 1964. Like Ingham, he was far from being an instinctive Tory, but he was fervently patriotic. By the mid-1970s, convinced that Britain was in deep decline, he had begun work on a series of elaborate charts, which showed what was wrong and how it could be fixed. These caught the attention of Sir Keith Joseph, who introduced him to Mrs Thatcher, and by the election Hoskyns had become an important part of her backroom team.

  In some ways Hoskyns and Mrs Thatcher were a very odd fit. Despite his officer’s charm and his apparently unshakeable belief that a total economic meltdown was only moments away, Hoskyns was basically a systems man, a technocrat for whom the best way to stave off the apocalypse was a flow chart and a 27-point action plan. To Mrs Thatcher, his ‘over-numerical, over-analytical, computerised approach’ often seemed wildly over-ambitious and politically naive. ‘If I asked for a joke for a speech,’ she once remarked, ‘I got back twenty pages of strategic analysis.’ But she admired his radicalism and intellectual integrity. For his part, Hoskyns believed she was the only person who could avert disaster, although he chafed at her caution. Indeed, even in victory he could not shake the feeling that it might all be for nothing. He spent election night watching the results at Conservative Central Office. But in the small hours, as Mrs Thatcher was on her way to celebrate victory, he slipped away to bed. He ‘could not get excited about the victory celebrations’, he recalled, because he knew that ‘the chances of the government achieving anything where so many had failed were small’.11

  On Saturday 5 May Mrs Thatcher’s ministers trooped into Buckingham Palace to kiss hands with the Queen. Later, Sir Geoffrey Howe remembered that they were ‘all much more excited and nervous than we tried to appear’, like ‘new boys at school’. But excitability was not a quali
ty usually associated with Mrs Thatcher’s new Chancellor. Born to a Port Talbot solicitor in 1926, Howe was a scholarship boy, educated at Winchester and Cambridge. After National Service in East Africa, he had been called to the Bar, became a modernizing Tory MP and served as Heath’s Solicitor General. While socially liberal, he was clearly on the free-market right, which is why Mrs Thatcher had made him Shadow Chancellor. At the time, he was generally seen as a safe, earnest, even dull choice. But Howe’s soft-spoken style masked what his friend Nigel Lawson called his ‘fine mind, intellectual conviction, courage, integrity, tenacity, resilience [and] great courtesy, allied to almost ruthless ambition’. Probably no modern politician was so consistently underrated, not least by his own boss. Behind the owlish appearance there was a core of steel.12

  Odd as it may sound, Howe’s world-class boringness was one of his greatest assets. Listening to what Hugo Young called his ‘defensive, narcoleptic monotone’, it was impossible to believe that this methodical, lawyerly figure, blinking behind his thick glasses, could be up to anything radical. He was ‘perfectly cast’, thought The Times’s sketchwriter Frank Johnson. ‘There is nothing meretricious or demagogic about him. He is openly the bearer of bad news … [He] just stands there at the Dispatch Box, announces his [tax] increases, and courteously replies to the Labour baying and general accusations of brutality.’ Yet in terms of practical policy, it was arguably Howe, even more than Mrs Thatcher, who was the real author of the changes in British economic life in the 1980s. He was not just the ‘inexorable tortoise’ of his political generation, wrote Young. He was ‘Thatcherism’s chief mechanic, the indispensable overseer of the machine’. It was Mrs Thatcher who chose the destination, shouted out the directions and posed for photographs behind the wheel. But it was Howe who did much of the driving.13