Yet her position remained insecure for the whole period 1975 – 9. Though Whitelaw and Carrington made sure there was no overt move against her, a powerful section of the party, including most of Heath’s senior colleagues whom she was obliged to retain in the Shadow Cabinet, remained conspicuously uncommitted to her.They were not greatly worried by her tendency to embrace simplistic panaceas like monetarism since they took it for granted, as experienced politicians, that no one could take such nonsense seriously for long. If she did become Prime Minister, the combination of Civil Service advice and the realities of office would quickly educate her.All parties, they assured themselves, tend to play to their extremes in opposition, but they return to the centre ground when back in government.
Mrs Thatcher was formally elected Leader of the Conservative party at a meeting of MPs, candidates, peers and party officials on 20 February, her nomination proposed by Lord Carrington and seconded by Lord Hailsham. Before that she had already been rapturously acclaimed by the 1922 Committee and presided rather awkwardly over a meeting of the existing Shadow Cabinet, minus only Heath himself. Owing to the circumstances of her election, however, her room for reshuffling the personnel she had inherited from Heath was very limited; just because they had almost all voted against her, paradoxically she was bound to keep most of his colleagues in post.
It was the backbenchers, not her front bench colleagues, who had made Mrs Thatcher leader; and for the first ten years of her leadership at least she never forgot it. She was determined not to repeat Heath’s mistake. Ironically in view of her ultimate fate, she welcomed the new rules requiring the leader to be re-elected every year, believing that the regular renewal of her mandate made her position stronger.1,2 Her official channel for communicating with her backbenchers was the 1922 Committee, via its chairman Edward du Cann who had guaranteed access to her. In these early years du Cann found her very approachable and anxious to listen.
Awkward baptism
Moving out from Westminster to the country at large, Mrs Thatcher had next to sell herself to the party in the constituencies. She began well, with a tumultuous visit to Scotland ten days after her election. She was mobbed by a crowd of 3,000 in a shopping centre in Edinburgh and had to abandon a planned walkabout on police advice. That evening she spoke at a packed rally in Glasgow with overflow meetings in two additional halls near by. Yet somehow she never created the same excitement again. A similar walkabout in Cardiff drew only minimal crowds. John Moore, who accompanied her on a number of constituency visits, remembers the first two years as ‘an uphill struggle’, with a lot of ‘ghastly trips’ north of Watford, where the party was still demoralised and doubtful; there was no supportive network, poor response to her efforts to arouse enthusiasm, and little belief that she would be leader very long. In the first few weeks and months she addressed every sort of sectional and regional conference within the Tory party: Scottish Conservatives, Welsh Conservatives, Conservative women, Conservative trade unionists, the Federation of Conservative Students and the Conservative Central Council. She gave them all ringing patriotic statements of her determination to halt Britain’s decline by reawakening the virtues of freedom, enterprise, individual opportunity and self-reliance. For all her rousing rhetoric, however, she was careful to present her policies as simple common sense: moderation contrasted with Labour’s extremism. Wealth must be created before it could be distributed; the country could not consume more than it produced; taxes should be cut to increase incentives. These were the familiar axioms of Tory leaders, not the blueprint for a counter-revolution. As a result she was politely rather than rapturously received.
Mrs Thatcher faced a peculiarly awkward baptism just weeks after her election in the form of the imminent referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the Common Market. Suspected of being a good deal less keen on Europe than her predecessor, she nevertheless had no choice but to campaign for a vote to confirm the one unquestioned achievement of Heath’s Government – even though a ‘yes’ vote would also help to get Wilson off the hook on which the Labour party had been impaled for the past four years. It was a no-win situation for a new leader anxious to set her own agenda. Her difficulty was somewhat relieved by Heath declining her invitation to lead the Conservative campaign, preferring to conduct his own under the umbrella of the all-party organisation, Britain in Europe, chaired by Roy Jenkins. Then Wilson elected to take a back seat, placing the Government’s authority officially behind the ‘Yes’ campaign while playing little active part himself, which lent a sort of symmetry to Mrs Thatcher doing the same. Nevertheless, her low profile drew a good deal of criticism.
In her memoirs Lady Thatcher blamed herself for going along too tamely with the Establishment consensus in favour of continued membership, ducking the hard questions about Britain’s constitutional integrity and national identity which would come back to haunt her a decade and a half later.3 At the time, however, she was under pressure to dispel the persistent impression that she was privately cool about Europe. She did so emphatically on 8 April in the Commons debate approving the referendum with a characteristically practical but wholly positive case for staying in the Community. ‘Mrs Thatcher stills anti-Europe clamour’, The Times reported.4 She based her case on four arguments: security; guaranteed food supplies; access to the expanded European market; and the prospect of a wider world role. ‘The Community opens windows on the world for us which since the war have been closing.’5
All in all she did just enough. She was able to hail the decisive result as a ‘really thrilling’ vindication of the Tory party’s long-standing vision, compared with Labour’s record of unprincipled somersaults, while feeling privately relieved that the divisive issue was shelved for the foreseeable future.6 Right up to 1979 she continued to take a positive line on Europe, repeatedly berating the Government for failing to make the most of Britain’s membership by being too negative and adversarial.
Cold Warrior
But Europe was never a subject on which Mrs Thatcher was going to be able to speak with conviction. By contrast the Cold War, and the need for strong defence in the face of the ever-present threat of Soviet expansionism, was a cause close to her heart, and one she determined very early on to make her own. There was no inconsistency with her primary domestic mission, since she regarded the core problem of the British economy as too much socialism, which was merely a weaker local variant of Communism. Her immediate purpose might be freeing the British economy, but her ultimate ambition was to eradicate not just the symptoms of socialism, but the virus itself, whose source and breeding ground was the Soviet Union. Thus the struggle for the British economy was part of the global struggle against Communism. Moreover, it was a good deal easier for an opposition leader to define the battleground rhetorically in terms of the grand abstractions of Freedom against Tyranny than by getting bogged down in petty arguments about incomes policy and trade union law.
In particular she saw the forthcoming Helsinki conference, at which Western leaders were preparing to offer Russia all sorts of aid and recognition in exchange for promises of improved human rights, as a second Munich in the making; and could see a role for herself as the clear-sighted Churchill figure whose mission was to warn the West of impending disaster before it was too late.
Just before the Helsinki conference convened, therefore, she resolved to make a speech. The only Tory elder she consulted was Lord Home, whose unblinking view of Soviet intentions she had long respected. Replying to his congratulations on her election, she asked him for a meeting; and after Easter they began a series of informal conversations whenever he was in London. In June she specifically asked his help with her proposed speech: ‘It is time I made a comprehensive speech about “Britain’s Place in the World”,’ she wrote. ‘I wonder if you would give me some advice about it.’7 Afterwards she thanked him ‘first for providing the framework… and then for going through it so carefully. It gave me all the confidence I should otherwise have lacked.’8 Home in turn congra
tulated her. ‘One always hopes that the communists will change their spots but they have not done so yet, and until there is firm evidence of change people must be warned.’9
A second expert to whom she turned for help was the British historian Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror is still the most comprehensive exposé of Stalin’s purges. Her third inspiration was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then at the height of his prestige in the West following his expulsion from the Soviet Union the previous year. It was Solzhenitsyn’s dramatic assertion the year before that the West had been losing the Third World War ever since 1945, and had now ‘irrevocably lost it’, that gripped her imagination. Mrs Thatcher did not swallow the whole of this nightmare vision; but she was already repeating the essence of his warning before the end of 1975, and the Russian prophet quickly joined her gallery of heroes. She finally met him in 1983.
She delivered her speech to a hastily arranged meeting of the Chelsea Conservative Association on 26 July, two days before Wilson left for Helsinki. It was quite short but stunningly direct. She started from the premise that ‘Freedom has taken a major battering in the last few months’. The background to Helsinki, she asserted, was that the Soviet Union was spending 20 per cent more than the United States each year on military research and development; 25 per cent more on weapons and equipment; 60 per cent more on strategic nuclear forces; while the Soviet navy possessed more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together. ‘Can anyone truly describe this as a defensive weapon?’
Détente sounds a fine word. And to the extent that there really has been a relaxation in international tension, it is a fine thing. But the fact remains throughout this decade of détente, the armed forces of the Soviet Union have increased, are increasing and show no signs of diminishing.
She recalled the crushing of the Czechoslovak spring just seven years before, and the Soviet writers and scientists – Solzhenitsyn among them – jailed for voicing their belief in freedom. The Soviet leaders, she declared uncompromisingly, were ‘in principle arrayed against everything for which we stand’. The power of NATO was ‘already at its lowest safe limit’, she concluded. ‘Let us accept no proposals which would tip the balance of power still further against the West.’10
This was a speech of extraordinary simplicity and power. It expressed Mrs Thatcher’s own uncompromising but essentially optimistic view of the Cold War. She had no time for the static view that the best outcome to be hoped for was a managed stand-off between two equally balanced superpowers; still less did she accept any moral equivalence between the two sides. She always believed, instinctively and passionately, that the Cold War should and could be won by the unwavering assertion of Western values backed by military strength. She boldly declared her position as a newly elected opposition leader more than five years before Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. She held to it unflinchingly as Prime Minister, in alliance with Reagan, throughout the 1980s, and saw it triumphantly vindicated just before she left office. She made other, more celebrated speeches over the next few years; but she never essentially departed from the position she took up at Chelsea in July 1975.
By contrast the new Leader of the Opposition failed to shine in the House of Commons, either at Prime Minister’s Questions or in debate. The fact was that the sort of simple certainties that went down well with party audiences cut no ice at Westminster. As a result she spoke less and less frequently in the House. Apart from certain fixed occasions in the parliamentary calendar which she could not avoid, she made no more than seven major speeches in the next two years and only one in 1977 – 8. She spoke slightly more over the winter of 1978 – 9 as the Labour Government began to crumble, but still much less than Heath had done when he was Leader of the Opposition. Her neglect of Parliament continued even after she became Prime Minister, when she had all the information and authority needed to command the House but still spoke as rarely as she could and never memorably.
‘Quite a dame’
If her voice was carrying little weight at home, however, Mrs Thatcher was nevertheless determined that it should be heard in the wider world. Against the advice of the experienced heads around her, she insisted on going to America at the earliest opportunity to announce herself as a robust new partner in the Western alliance. British opposition leaders have often been humiliated by the lack of attention paid to them in Washington. Not so Margaret Thatcher. Her public relations wizard, Gordon Reece, went ahead of her to stir up media interest. By the time Mrs Thatcher flew into New York in the middle of September – she made a point of flying by Freddie Laker’s free enterprise airline – the novelty of her sex and the unusual clarity of her message did the rest.
Her first speech, for the most part a perfectly standard lecture to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in New York on the evils of excessive taxation, was beefed up at the last minute by Adam Ridley in breach of the convention that opposition leaders do not criticise their own country when speaking abroad. Mrs Thatcher did not scruple to paint a grim picture of the British economy groaning under socialism, graphically endorsing the common American perception that Britain was going down the tube. Rebuked by James Callaghan for running Britain down, she retorted that she was ‘not knocking Britain: I’m knocking socialism’.11
By the time she moved on to Washington, she had captured the media’s attention. She met President Ford, had breakfast with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and had talks with both Treasury and Defense Secretaries. Her next speech, to the National Press Club, was broadcast live on CBS television. She seized the opportunity with both hands. First she put her own gloss on Solzhenitsyn’s warning that the West was losing the ideological struggle by default.
No, we did not lose the Cold War. But we are losing the Thaw in a subtle and disturbing way. We are losing confidence in ourselves and in our case. We are losing the Thaw politically.
Then she answered the critics of her earlier speech by emphasising her faith in Britain’s potential to surmount its problems, stressing the huge windfall of North Sea oil and her favourite measure of British genius, the proud tally of seventy-two scientific Nobel Prize winners. She claimed to see a new willingness to reject the easy options. ‘We may suffer from a British sickness now, but our constitution is sound and we have the heart and will to win through.’12
This combination of Churchill and Mrs Miniver went down a storm. Hard-nosed bankers were heard to declare that Britain’s alternative Prime Minister was ‘quite a dame’.13 This first American trip marked the beginning of a love affair between Margaret Thatcher and the American press and public which lasted with ever-increasing enthusiasm for the next twenty years. It also greatly boosted her self-confidence. To journalists on the flight home she boasted: ‘The very thing I was said to be weak in – international affairs – I’ve succeeded in.’14 She felt she had now proved herself on the international stage.
The one domestic forum where Mrs Thatcher could unfailingly project her faith and rouse a large audience to enthusiasm was the Tory party’s annual conference in October. Unlike any other Tory leader, Mrs Thatcher had always loved the Tories’ annual seaside jamboree, ever since she first attended it in 1946.The annual conference speech henceforth became the high point of her year, a shameless festival of orchestrated leader-worship for which she prepared with meticulous care. The latent actress in her responded instinctively to the cameras and the razzmatazz, the flagwaving and Elgar, and her speech was almost always intensely patriotic, associating Labour relentlessly with national decline and looking forward to the recovery of ‘greatness’ under the Conservatives.
‘Ronnified’
Her first conference speech as leader was a critical test. Over the summer she had made two poorly received economic speeches in the House of Commons, and one controversial outburst on defence. Blackpool in October was her first major opportunity to tell the party and, via television, the whole country what she was about. She was determined that she did not want to
make ‘just an economic speech. So I sat down at home over the weekend and wrote out sixty pages of my large handwriting. I found no difficulty: it just flowed and flowed.’15 Then, on the Wednesday of conference, week she summoned Ronald Millar to Blackpool for the final rewrite.
Millar was a popular West End playwright who had written occasional material for Ted Heath. He responded reluctantly, but he was instantly captivated. He read her some material which he had hastily prepared, ending with some lines of Abraham Lincoln:
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer…
When he had finished Mrs Thatcher said nothing, but produced from her handbag a piece of yellowing newsprint containing the same lines. ‘It goes wherever I go,’ she told him.16 In that moment they clicked. For the next fifteen years no major speech of hers was complete until it had been ‘Ronnified’.
With his experience of the theatre, Millar also coached her in how to deliver her lines, writing in the pauses and emphases she should observe. ‘I’m not a performer, dear,’ she told him once;17 but she was, and much of his success with her was due to the fact that he handled her like a highly-strung actress. As she delivered this first conference speech, Millar stood in the wings, feeling like Henry Higgins watching Eliza Doolittle at Ascot. But the speech was a triumph.
She began with nicely judged humility, recalling her first conference in the same hall in 1946, when Churchill was leader and she never dreamed that she might one day speak from the same platform, paying tribute in turn to Eden, Macmillan, Home and Heath (‘who successfully led the party to victory in 1970 and brilliantly led the nation into Europe in 1973’). Getting into her stride, however, she repeated her defence of her speeches in America. She damned the Labour Government not just for high unemployment, high taxation, low productivity and record borrowing but, more fundamentally, for threatening the British way of life itself. ‘Let me give you my vision’, she went on – with characteristic disregard for feminism:
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