The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  She found a much more effective champion of her religious views in the person of the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, whose robust preaching of clear Old Testament values reminded her of her father. She frequently stated her admiration of the way the Jews in her constituency looked after their own community, without relying on the state. ‘In the thirty-three years that I represented it’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘I never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to one of my constituency surgeries… I often wished that… Christians… would take closer note of the Jewish emphasis on self-help and acceptance of personal responsibility.’31 The number of ministers of Jewish extraction in her Cabinets – Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, Leon Brittan, David Young, Malcolm Rifkind and later Michael Howard – and also among her private advisers, attracted some notice and even suggestions of favouritism; but it was largely accidental. She certainly liked clever, classless outsiders, which many of these people were; but the description also covered plenty of others not Jewish. There is no suggestion that she showed undue favour towards Jews, only that she was, as Nigel Lawson wrote, unusually free of ‘the faintest trace of anti-Semitism’.32 She was very far from being uncritically supportive of the State of Israel. But she did find it politically useful to hold up Jakobovits as a model by which implicitly to criticise Runcie. She knighted him – rather incongruously – in 1981; and wanted to send him to the House of Lords to balance the Anglican bishops there, but with curious deference to protocol was not sure she could, until she finally took the plunge – to general applause – in 1988.

  ‘Academic poison’

  The Prime Minister might grumble about the bishops, but she could not do very much about them: and perhaps they did not greatly matter anyway. The case of the universities was different. If the nation’s institutions of higher education were obstructing the realisation of the Government’s vision, it was within the Government’s power to bring them to heel. And that was precisely what she set out to do.

  Mrs Thatcher’s relations with the academic community were paradoxical. Though not herself an intellectual, she used intellectuals to advise her more systematically and effectively than any previous Prime Minister. She used the deliberately homely language of housewife economics to lead the most ideologically driven government of the century. And Thatcherism prevailed: she won the ideological argument and shifted the political agenda decisively in her direction for a generation. Ideas that had been derided when she and Keith Joseph first began to argue them in 1975 were taken for granted by a Labour Government twenty-five years later. Yet the intellectuals never forgave her. Of course, she had her academic supporters. But Thatcherite academics were always a minority – if, by the end of the decade, a highly visible and vocal one. The great majority of university teachers loathed her, and she equally despised them.

  Her experience as Education Secretary in the early 1970s, visiting universities at the height of student radicalism and being shouted down by left-wing demonstrators who mindlessly denounced all Tory ministers as ‘Fascists’, confirmed both her dim view of the quality of education being taught and her contempt for the trendy professors and craven vice chancellors who permitted this sort of intolerance to go on. Remembering her own student days of hard work and plain living, she regarded modern students and most of their lecturers as idle parasites who lived off the taxpayer while abusing the hand that fed them. But she blamed the students less than their tutors. ‘Revolutionary doctrines like communism,’ she told Brian Walden in 1988, ‘usually came from intellectuals and academics… Some academics and intellectuals… are putting out what I call poison. Some young people, who were thrilled to bits to get to university, had every decent value pounded out of them.’33

  She resented the universities’ claims to intellectual autonomy while expecting to be funded by the state, and complained of their anti-capitalist culture. Only two institutions were exempt from this blanket condemnation. The Open University, which she had saved from being strangled at birth in 1970, gave good value for the Government’s money by turning out graduates more cheaply than conventional residential universities; she worried about left-wing bias in some of its correspondence material, but at least its students were highly motivated adults who did not waste their time on drink, sex and campus politics. Better still, the independent University College of Buckingham, founded in 1974, was a private university on the American model which got no funding from the Government at all.

  Keith Joseph had tried to convert the universities to the beauty of the free market by his brave campaign around the campuses between 1975 and 1979, during which he was regularly abused, spat at and shouted down. Once in power Mrs Thatcher adopted more direct methods, first by simply cutting their budgets, later by taking them under direct political control, forcing them on the one hand to seek alternative sources of income and on the other to process more students with fewer staff and resources.

  Curiously some of the heaviest cuts fell on science. Part of the problem was that the increasing emphasis on profitable development diverted money away from pure research. The result was that over the five years 1981 – 6 the proportion of national GDP devoted to research and development together fell from 0.72 per cent – which already compared poorly with other European countries – to 0.62 per cent.34 Now Mrs Thatcher realised that if she was going to be her own Minister of Science she must be seen to do something. So she set up a Cabinet committee, with herself in the chair, to try to redirect resources to pure science. But the damage was done. The squeeze on the universities in general and science in particular had already driven many of the country’s best scientists to move to the United States.

  It was this more than anything else which provoked Oxford to the unprecedented snub of refusing the Prime Minister an honorary degree. All her recent Oxford-educated predecessors, from Attlee to Heath, had received this honour within a year of taking office. But the university had missed the moment in 1979 because it was already embroiled in controversy over an honorary degree to President Bhutto of Pakistan. It funked it again in 1983 and by the time the proposal came up for a third time in 1985 the opposition had grown formidable. Supporters of the award argued that the university would look petty in the eyes of the world if it denied the customary honour to a Prime Minister who – like her or loathe her – was not only the first woman but already one of the longest-serving holders of the office. Opponents, however – with scientists to the fore – argued that it would be monstrous to award such an honour to the head of a government which had inflicted ‘deep and systematic damage to the whole public education system in Britain, from the provision for the youngest child up to the most advanced research programme’. By a majority of more than two to one – 738 to 319 – the dons voted to withhold the degree. The inevitable effect was to extinguish any lingering affection for her alma mater. ‘I went to Oxford University,’ she only half joked at the 1989 party conference, ‘but I’ve never let it hold me back.’35 A decade later, when she had finished her memoirs, she pointedly donated her papers to Cambridge.

  ‘Trotskyists’ in the BBC

  All Prime Ministers become paranoid about the BBC. As problems mount and their popularity slides, they invariably accuse the media of turning against them, unfairly criticising the Government while giving the opposition a soft ride. Margaret Thatcher was no exception. It is in the nature of governments to resent criticism, particularly at the hands of a state-owned broadcaster. But Mrs Thatcher disliked the BBC on principle, long before she became Prime Minister, just because it was state-owned and publicly financed. She saw it as a nationalised industry, subsidised, anti-commercial and self-righteous: like the universities, she believed, it poisoned the national debate with woolly liberalism and moral permissiveness at the taxpayers’ expense.

  She was always particularly concerned about the reporting of terrorism. Her first public criticism of the BBC as Prime Minister was provoked by a contentious edition of Panorama in November 1979 which showed masked IRA men enforcing road
blocks in Northern Ireland: the allegation was that the programme makers had set up the incident in order to film it. She was still more outraged by the reporting – particularly the BBC’s – of the Falklands war. She thought that in this crisis the Corporation was not just anti-Government and anti-Conservative, as usual, but anti-British, as exemplified by programmes examining in great detail alternative possible landing places on the islands and above all by the broadcasters’ punctilious insistence on referring objectively to ‘British forces’ instead of ‘our forces’ as she expected.

  The truth was that she did not really understand the idea of journalistic freedom. At a Chequers seminar with some of her favourite academics in January 1981, she worried about the penetration of the media by subversives. The historian Professor Michael Howard tried to assure her that the people she objected to were not Communists, just healthily opposition-minded sceptics exercising a hallowed British tradition of dissent; but she was not convinced.36 She believed not only that in time of war the broadcasters should form part of the nation’s war effort, but that in the context of terrorism and the Cold War the BBC had a duty to be on ‘our’ side. Instead she believed it gave ‘covert support’ to unilateralism and was ‘ambivalent’ in its coverage of the IRA.37

  Mrs Thatcher had two means to discipline the BBC: first by exercising the Government’s power to appoint the chairman and governors, who in turn appointed the Director-General; and second by keeping it on a tight financial rein. Over five years she was able to appoint three chairmen and nine new governors who gave the board ‘a more hostile and opinionated composition’.38 She also made no secret of her dislike of the licence fee – ‘a compulsory levy on those who have television sets’, whether they watched the BBC or not – but in March 1985 she was constrained to renew it for another five years, pegged for the first two years but rising in line with inflation after that, while making clear in the Commons that ‘we do not rule out the possibility of changes’ – specifically not excluding advertising – in the future.39 The same month Leon Brittan set up a departmental committee which was expected to recommend funding the BBC by advertising. In the event the Peacock Committee came down in favour of the status quo, mainly because studies showed that there was not enough advertising to go round.40 Mrs Thatcher was ‘greatly disappointed’41 and was obliged to back down; but she still hoped to reopen the matter in five years’ time.

  Friends in Fleet Street

  The constantly simmering conflict between Mrs Thatcher and the BBC certainly contrasted with – and arguably balanced – the generally reliable support she enjoyed from most of the printed media. Of course there were exceptions. Among the broadsheets, the Guardian was the house magazine of the progressive establishment, read by all those Labour and Alliance-voting teachers, lecturers, social workers and local-government officers who most hated her: in her view the printed equivalent of the BBC, but without the BBC’s obligation to at least appear impartial. Among the tabloids, the Daily Mirror remained solidly Labour, in opposition to its deadly rival the Sun. But the bulk of Fleet Street[l] from the relatively highbrow Times and Telegraph through the crucial mid-market Mail and Express – all with their Sunday sisters – to the soaraway Thatcherite Sun and the even more populist Daily Star, was firmly, if not always uncritically, in the Tory camp. Measured by total circulation, the press supported the Government in the 1987 election by a margin of roughly three to one.42

  Mrs Thatcher was naturally very happy with this situation. She was not worried by the Guardian’s hostility, but rather welcomed its opposition as confirmation that she was doing all right. She expected her enemies to oppose her, just as she expected her allies to support her. But she took it for granted that anyone not for her was against her.When a new broadsheet, the Independent, was founded in 1986 she quickly classed it as an enemy. ‘It is not independent at all,’ she told Wyatt in 1989. ‘It is dedicated to trying to destroy me.’43 The corollary was that she took great care to keep her supporters loyal.

  Unlike many Prime Ministers she did not actually read the papers very much. She received a daily digest from Bernard Ingham first thing every morning, which gave her the flavour and told her what he thought she ought to know. She was well aware of the importance of the press – particularly the Sun and the Daily Mail – in maintaining a swell of support for her personality and policies. She liked to have her attention drawn to helpful or supportive articles. But she did not often give interviews to favoured editors. If she did meet editors, it was not to learn what was on their mind but to tell them what was on hers.

  On the other hand she was shameless in rewarding supportive editors with knighthoods and their proprietors with peerages. The great exception to this plethora of inky nobility was Rupert Murdoch, who could not be offered a peerage because he had become an American citizen and would probably not have accepted anyway. But Mrs Thatcher did everything else she could to show her appreciation of his support. In November 1979 she marked the tenth anniversary of News International’s acquisition of the Sun with a glowing message of congratulation, making clear that she saw the paper as a loyal ally, or even partner. In return she did all she could to advance Murdoch’s ever-expanding media interests.

  First she helped him to snap up The Times and Sunday Times when Lord Thomson relinquished them in 1981. The rest of Fleet Street was dismayed and the Establishment horrified at seeing the former ‘top people’s paper’, known around the world as ‘The Times of London’, sold to a brash Australian who already owned the Sun, the New York Post and a whole stable full of other titles in Australia and the US. Though Murdoch gave assurances of editorial independence, and elaborate safeguards were erected to try to ensure that he observed them, in practice they quickly turned out to be worthless.

  Second, the Government was very helpful towards Murdoch’s battle with the print unions when he moved his entire operation to Wapping in 1985. Like the miners’ strike, this was another symbolic struggle between old-style trade unionism, defending jobs – and in the printers’ case grotesque overmanning and the systematic blackmail of a peculiarly vulnerable industry – and management’s right to manage. As in the coalfields, angry pickets tried to prevent Murdoch’s new workforce getting to work, turning the streets around ‘Fortress Wapping’ into a nightly battleground. The Government was fully entitled to treat it as a law-and-order issue which had to be won; but at the same time it was an intensely political confrontation and another vital test of Thatcherism on the ground. According to Andrew Neil – editor of the Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994 – Murdoch obtained Mrs Thatcher’s personal assurance before the dispute began that ‘enough police would be available to allow us to go about our lawful business. She assured him that there would be… and she kept her word.’44 As with the NUM, she wanted victory, not compromise.

  The curiosity of Mrs Thatcher’s gushing support for Murdoch is how she squared it with her dislike of pornography. Had she ever turned the pages of the Sun, she would have been appalled; but Ingham’s daily digest spared her this embarrassment. Of course she knew about the topless Page Three girls; but she frankly closed her eyes to the rest of the paper’s daily diet of sleazy sex in exchange for its robust support, rationalising it as the price of freedom.

  In 1990 she once again showed Murdoch outrageous favouritism by allowing him to hijack satellite television in its infancy by buying out the competition, without reference to the Monopolies Commission. Her anxiety to keep Murdoch’s newspapers on side, and her willingness to bend the regulations to buy their continuing support, was the grubbiest face of Thatcherism. Murdoch enjoyed a special place in the Prime Minister’s circle of the elect – not a courtier but a powerful independent ally and family friend, rather like Ronald Reagan – who had direct access to her whenever he sought it. He was the only newspaper proprietor invited to the Downing Street lunch to mark her tenth anniversary in 1989, and was several times invited to spend Christmas with the family at Chequers. Yet she never once mentioned him in her m
emoirs.

  The arts in the market place

  Mrs Thatcher had an educated person’s proper respect for the arts, but she had little feel for them. Like Christianity, the great books, paintings and music of the past provided a cultural heritage to be praised and raided for validation of the present. From her diligent childhood she retained a superficial familiarity with the major English classics; she could still quote from memory large chunks of poetry she had learned at school; and having both played the piano as a girl and sung in the Oxford Bach Choir at university she had a better than average knowledge of music. Within the fairly narrow limits of what she liked, she was by no means a philistine. As Prime Minister she occasionally went to the opera. She collected porcelain and (with advice from experts) Chinese scrolls. And if she did not have much time or taste for reading fiction – beyond the occasional Freddie Forsyth or John le Carré thriller, or Solzhenitsyn read as homework on the Soviet Union – she did read an astonishing amount of serious non-fiction (philosophy, theology, science and history) not directly related to the business of government.

  Yet her taste in the arts was characteristically simple and relentlessly functional. She had no patience with complexity or ambiguity, no time for imagination. She thought art should be beautiful, positive and improving, not disturbing or subversive. She liked books which told her things she needed to know. She had a retentive memory and liked to be able to quote things that she had read long ago. But she could not talk about the arts. The paintings she really liked were the portraits of national heroes – Nelson,Wellington, Churchill – and great British scientists – Newton, Faraday – with which she filled the walls of Number Ten; and she always took visitors on a tour of the pictures, pointing the political moral of each one. Her idea of art was essentially didactic.