Rare was the intellectual who did not have strong feelings about Mrs Thatcher. Sir Isaiah Berlin* joked that it was a lack in himself that he could not muster passion against Mrs Thatcher or Ronald Reagan: ‘I wish I could get up some kind of personal negative emotion against them in my breast, but I cannot. That is what some of my friends and allies have against me.’78
The locus classicus for the conflict between Mrs Thatcher and intellectuals was the row over her honorary degree at Oxford in 1985. This had been foreshadowed in 1983, when the Royal Society, the country’s most eminent scientific academy, decided to elect Mrs Thatcher, as the first scientist prime minister, to its fellowship. Forty-four Fellows of the Royal Society wrote to the magazine Nature to complain that it would be ‘damaging to the good name’ of the Society to grant her an honorary fellowship.79 They did not prevail, although Mrs Thatcher’s cause only narrowly won the two-thirds majority needed when the Society met to vote. Some of those who opposed her had cited her National Health Service policies and cuts in medical research funding. In 1981, the sums allocated by the government-funded University Grants Committee had been cut by 18 per cent over three years, to which Keith Joseph added a further 2 per cent cut in 1983. This led, by administrative complication rather than political intent, to a disproportionate cutting of the money for ‘pure’ (that is, non-applied) science. Academic feeling against these trends ran high. When Oxford’s Hebdomadal Council proposed Mrs Thatcher for an honorary degree late in 1984, some of those who had tried, and failed, to stop her at the Royal Society tried again.
Mrs Thatcher herself was not well informed about the state of Oxford opinion. The proposal for her honorary degree would almost certainly have been uncontroversial if it had been made when she first became prime minister in 1979. The passage of time, however, had made it more controversial, because more resentment had accumulated against her. When she received the official invitation to allow her name to go forward for the degree, she also got a letter from the Conservative historian Robert Blake,* who was Provost of the Queen’s College, Oxford. He said how delighted he was, and told her not to worry about the proviso that a vote on the matter might be taken in Congregation (that is, among all the university’s academic staff): ‘it is conceivable that some left-wing don might mount a challenge. I personally think it is very unlikely, but I might be wrong. I am confident, however, that if there were a vote, you would win it.’80 Her principal private secretary, Robin Butler, was not so sure. He wrote a note accompanying Blake’s letter warning her that ‘left-wingers in the University will take the opportunity of running a campaign against you before the vote in Congregation.’81 He advised her to reconsider the invitation at a later date. Mrs Thatcher appeared to acquiesce, but following a subsequent meeting with Lord Blake on 14 December she was persuaded to let her name go forward. She felt almost overawed by her old university. Answering Butler’s anxiety, she said, ‘Robin, if Oxford wants to confer an honorary degree on me, who am I to make terms about it?’82 In her letter of acceptance, she said that the proposal gave her ‘the greatest pride and pleasure’,83 which was true.
Her opponents were more diligent than her supporters. Drawing particularly on scientists and the faculty of Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE), they collected 275 protest signatures, including 11 Fellows of the Royal Society. Their statement said that Mrs Thatcher’s government had done ‘deep and systematic damage to the whole public education system in Britain’.
Their campaign took off. It drew strength from several factors – the usual anger that people feel when they receive less government money than in the past, a rejection of a vision of the universities which was considered too utilitarian, and a particular feeling against Mrs Thatcher heightened by the long-drawn-out struggle of the miners’ strike, just then visibly moving towards defeat for Arthur Scargill. Following the constitution of the university, Oxford’s Congregation met to debate the issue at the Sheldonian Theatre on 29 January 1985. Denis Noble,* a leading physiologist, argued against the degree. ‘Virtually everyone’, he said, ‘who knows what is happening in the science laboratories of this country is extremely alarmed and deeply worried.’84 He described the ‘week to week’ chaos about money in which the Research Councils found themselves as ‘simply unbelievable’. But he also made a more general case: ‘We are here to protect the intellectual heritage of hundreds of years’: history would probably judge this as ‘the watershed in determining whether we are philistine [his emphasis] enough to let this particular national heritage crumble’. That was more important, he argued, than the ‘cosy tradition’ of conferring honorary degrees on prime ministers.
That word ‘philistine’ tapped into the intellectuals’ feeling against Mrs Thatcher which went much wider than Oxford. Peter Pulzer,† a political scientist, and another leader of the anti-Thatcher camp, reflected in after years that there had been a strong ‘aesthetic’ objection to Mrs Thatcher: ‘It certainly weighed with me, and it weighed with a lot of other people … it was probably the biggest single common factor.’85 He denied that this was because dons looked down on Mrs Thatcher socially. On the contrary, said Pulzer, who himself came from a modest grammar-school background, ‘There was if anything this feeling that “She ought to be one of us, but isn’t.” ’86 Ill prepared for the level of controversy, the Council’s leaders had not campaigned hard enough before the vote,* and did not really know how to fight back against the campaign. Congregation rejected an honorary degree for Mrs Thatcher by 738 votes to 319. No women spoke in the debate.
The reaction was excited, and polarized. Both sides in the argument saw themselves as bravely rebellious. Those who opposed the honorary degree thought they were standing up for the integrity of education against the powerful. The high Tory Peregrine Worsthorne,† though critical of Oxford for its vote, thought that Mrs Thatcher had partly brought it upon herself. ‘Listening to Mrs Thatcher,’ he wrote on the Sunday after the vote, ‘one might be forgiven for supposing that the civilised governing class is part of the enemy which she, with the help of the people, is determined to eradicate – a real case of throwing out the Tory baby with the socialist bathwater.’87
Those who supported the honorary degree thought that the dons who voted it down were resentful of the loss of their privileged status in society as intellectuals automatically deferred to and subsidized by governments and saw Mrs Thatcher as a parvenue. The Spectator commented that the decision to snub a graduate of Somerville who had become the first woman prime minister ‘will confirm many in their view that Oxford represents the “Establishment” and Mrs Thatcher is, as she prides herself, an outsider’.88 Harold Macmillan had been elected chancellor of Oxford while prime minister and still held the position. What qualification did he have for that post that Mrs Thatcher lacked for a mere honorary degree? ‘We can only think of one – a vanity equal to that of his alma mater.’89
In a general assessment of Mrs Thatcher’s place in history (written after her third general election victory), Professor John Vincent,* one of the few prominent academics to sympathize with Mrs Thatcher’s subversive conservatism, and himself a victim of attack from the left in the 1980s, identified why she was such an object of hatred.
It was because she offered ‘earnest and practical dissent’ to progressive orthodoxy. Mrs Thatcher is the point at which all snobberies meet: intellectual snobbery, social snobbery, the snobbery of Brooks’s [the whiggish London club], the snobbery about scientists among those educated in the arts, the snobbery of the metropolis about the provincial, the snobbery of the South about the North, and the snobbery of men about career women.90
Both sides were able to adduce good arguments. But what seems most strange in retrospect is how little prominence was given to the point about Mrs Thatcher being Oxford’s own, and the first of her sex. One needs to imagine Harvard refusing an honorary degree to America’s first black president Barack Obama (who attended Harvard Law School) because of disagreement with his education policies, to
see how extraordinary the Oxford decision looks today – and looked even at the time – to the wider world. Robin Butler’s wife, Jill, an Oxford graduate, was clear: ‘They would never have done this to a man.’91 Her husband, who much later became the Master of University College, Oxford, and therefore experienced the consequences at first hand, recalled that Oxford’s decision had ‘a disastrous effect upon fund-raising for the university, especially in the United States’.92
Mrs Thatcher’s own public reaction was laconic: ‘If they do not wish to confer the honour, I am the last person who would wish to receive it.’93 But Robin Butler felt that privately ‘The degree of hurt was huge.’94 Although she had not been exactly happy at Oxford, it had been the foundation of her public career, and she had a reverence for the place. To Anthony Quinton, the President of Trinity College, who had supported her, she wrote that, although she was ‘naturally disappointed … I am not unaccustomed to rebuffs: and I am bound to say that my peace of mind is founded more upon my success in graduating successfully from the university than what is involved in gaining or failing to gain an honorary degree.’95 To her friend Daphne Park, the Principal of her old college, Somerville, she wrote: ‘I do assure you that the vote does not detract one jot from the affection I feel for the university which I knew, especially for Somerville. It was such a privilege to be there. Without that, I should never have been here [that is, in Downing Street].’96*
Mrs Thatcher later suggested that the story of her honorary degree showed the comfort family could bring. When the news came through, she said, Mark was in America, and saw it on television. He rang her at once and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mummy,’ and ‘within about two hours there were some flowers here.’97 ‘This kind of closeness’, she said, ‘… is part of my life, every day.’ That she cited this example indicates how much the degree refusal had upset her.
She certainly got full support from Denis, who was outraged. He wrote a real-life ‘Dear Bill’ letter to Bill Deedes. ‘Why anybody takes this terrible job and lives in this awful atmosphere only our God knows. I literally wept. Bless you.’98 ‘I share your distress,’ his friend and golfing partner replied, ‘but let neither of you take this too much to heart. Oxford, alas, no longer implants a special culture of its own … On the contrary, she is prey to alien influences which infect less renowned seats of learning … Forgive the typewriter, but when I am cross my writing wobbles.’99 Looking back on her years in office, Denis told the present author, he reckoned that the saga of the Oxford degree upset his wife more than anything else that happened to her in office, apart from her exit.100†
When told, in 1991, that Mrs Thatcher had been genuinely hurt by the vote, her leading Oxford opponent Peter Pulzer said: ‘I have no sympathy with that. I think that a politician like her, who loses no time lecturing absolutely everybody on absolutely everything, must be prepared to accept snubs.’101
This snubbed woman, so suburban, harsh and philistine in many literary and academic minds, presented a very different persona to those who worked for her every day. On the whole, her staff – as opposed to her much bullied Cabinet colleagues – found it a much more pleasurable experience than, given her rather terrifying reputation, they had expected. This was true not only of those who performed the relatively humble tasks of driving, cooking, typing and so on; with these, Mrs Thatcher had always been friendly, direct and solicitous. It applied also to senior civil servants, a breed of whom, en masse, she was suspicious.
John Coles, Mrs Thatcher’s foreign affairs private secretary from 1981 to 1984, wrote a short account of his experience working for her shortly after leaving her employment in June 1984.102 In Coles’s experience, the public perception of Mrs Thatcher often differed from the private reality. Physically, Coles found her ‘Slightly dumpy, smaller than the popular imagination would have it.’ She ‘always took great trouble with her clothes, her hair and her make-up’. This care included consideration of the context of her clothes, both televisual and political. When she hosted a large banquet in the Great Hall of the People in Peking* in 1982 ‘she decided to appear in a brilliant scarlet dress, not of course as a sycophantic gesture to communist China but because she had been told that for the Chinese red signified happiness and that it would be an appropriate colour to wear for a celebratory occasion.’ Coles considered that Mrs Thatcher’s physical features were ‘not particularly good, apart from her face which had great mobility; it was capable of an almost spitting fierceness, a beatific calm, flirtatiousness and the deepest concentration. You learned to watch the mood.’
Despite her fondness for expressing the great simplicities and discerning the ‘fundamental principle’ in any situation, Coles felt that ‘everything about [her character] was complex’:103 ‘The dominant characteristic was determination’, but he nevertheless felt that the Iron Lady image was somewhat misleading. Although she did sometimes override all discussion, ‘Much more often her approach to a new problem was hesitant and cautious. It is a mistake to assume that in her case determination meant dogmatism. It meant only that having reached a conclusion … and having rigorously examined the arguments, she then insisted on the application of the conclusion.’
Much of Mrs Thatcher’s behaviour, Coles thought, derived from her unique situation as the only woman in power. This made her feel the need to maintain public toughness. She rarely expressed, for example, a general public compassion for the unemployed, though Coles noticed how often she took up ‘individual cases of hardship’ which came to her attention. She would reject the explanatory draft letters provided by Whitehall and ‘insist that the case be re-examined and more humanity shown’. She feared that, as a woman among men, she would be considered unfit to lead if she made public displays of human emotion or ‘could be shown to be given to unreasonable feminine behaviour’. The men in her Cabinet had resources deriving from male camaraderie in public schools, university, the armed services and clubs. ‘They draw’, wrote Coles, ‘on a reserve of accepted thought and behaviour, of male humour, argument and sign-language from which a woman is excluded … She probably felt that the language of compromise itself had a male quality, the civilised talk of clubland.’ She was outside all of that and had to prevent herself being suffocated by it.
It was well understood that this was so, thought Coles: ‘Less commonly observed is the emotional cost to her of that process and the steps to which she had to resort to defy the conventions.’104 Her situation led her to odd behaviour: ‘To assert her will this very feminine woman had to – or at least chose to – adopt a strident tone with nearly all of her colleagues. At times her style was abusive, rude and unpleasant.’ She was perfectly happy to take advantage of the sexist belief that women are irrational creatures: ‘Not for her the logical chain of argument if she saw the chain leading in the wrong direction.’ When a Cabinet minister threatened to resign, she did not understand – or preferred to ignore – the convention that such threats should elicit a plea to reconsider. On one such occasion, her response was ‘That’s up to you. But you would be extremely unwise to do so.’ In such encounters, wrote Coles, ‘She could display a quite unfeminine toughness and crudeness … But in general I insist on the femininity. She was a loving mother, with a mother’s emotions. And she was devoted to her much older husband, even if their marriage, like most marriages at that age, lacked sparkle. She was easily moved by another’s misfortunes.’
Her mind, too, worked more according to a female stereotype than her professional and educational qualifications implied:
She did not proceed, as the scientist does, by … forming a conclusion only when the evidence clearly justifies it. Nor like the lawyer did she seek to build up a case by logical argument. I would be less than honest if I claimed fully to understand her intellectual processes. There were occasions when she moved with astonishing rapidity to a clear conclusion, apparently without needing any intervening steps. In these cases she had the fastest mind in the Cabinet by a long way. Whether she was guided by instin
ct or whether her agile mind simply concertinaed the chain of thought until it almost failed to exist, I never knew.105
Possibly this quality – and what Coles considered her ‘inadequate literary grounding’ – explained the fact that Mrs Thatcher was often ‘rather incoherent’ in communication. ‘Time and again one saw baffled expressions on the faces of listeners as they attempted to make sense of a succession of sentences which tailed off into the air and seemed to bear little relation to each other.’ Yet, despite this, her impromptu speeches were better than her setpiece ones which, perhaps by being over-prepared, did not have the style or feel for words of a Churchill. ‘I do not think she ever made a great speech,’ but nor did she ever make a bad one: ‘She was always worth listening to. And audience after audience was fired by her conviction, clarity, enthusiasm, and the fact that she used language which, unlike much political jargon, could actually be understood.’
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