by Alwyn Turner
What all these fictional accounts failed to allow for was the possibility that a woman might rise in the normal way to become the leader of a major political party and thereafter prime minister. And yet, of course, that was precisely what happened.
Perhaps the gap between fiction and reality was not too surprising, for the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as the leader of the opposition was far from being an inevitable development in British politics. The preeminence of Edward Heath was such that even after the disaster of February 1974 he remained unchallenged as Conservative leader, despite having now lost two of the three elections he had contested. Few at the time registered the deep-running feelings of the right wing of the party, the hopes for Selsdon Man and thus the smouldering sense of betrayal when the principles outlined therein were betrayed. ‘I naively assumed that the conversion of both Ted Heath and the Party to the Selsdon programme was one of deeply rooted conviction,’ remembered Norman Tebbit. ‘In doing so I overestimated Ted Heath’s conviction.’ He was not the only one.
‘We believe the Conservative Party now has an opportunity, indeed a duty,’ Rhodes Boyson had written after Heath’s 1970 victory, ‘to govern our people in such a way that they will so consciously enjoy the benefits of the free market in a free society that the only chance for Labour to return to power will be when that party ceases to be socialist in its aims.’ He went on to outline many of the issues that would become closely associated with the social agenda of Thatcherism: low taxation is a moral imperative; private schooling and healthcare are virtues that demonstrate self-reliance; choice is inherently good; patriotism is to be encouraged; welfare provision was out of control and was fostering dependence; permissiveness had gone too far and freedom become licence; the views of ordinary folk on Europe and immigration had been ignored. Underlying it all was a belief that the silent majority of middle England was crying out for a strong, right-wing brand of Toryism. ‘We shall not have completed our work,’ declared Boyson, ‘until a future leader of the Labour Party in an election broadcast can proclaim with moral fervour: “We are all capitalists now.”’ That may have seemed absurdly ambitious at the time, but ultimately the dream was very nearly realized; in 1998 (shortly before his first resignation from Tony Blair’s cabinet) the Labour Party strategist and trade secretary Peter Mandelson wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph about his proposals on competitiveness, which he heralded as ‘the most business-friendly document any Labour government has ever produced’, and which the newspaper felt able to summarize with the headline: WE ARE ALL CAPITALISTS NOW.
Tebbit and Boyson were then in a minority, and for the moment they were powerless. The absence of Enoch Powell from the short parliament of 1974 temporarily strengthened Heath’s hand, removing his most acerbic critic, though there were mutterings of dissident voices to be heard for those who were listening. Alan Clark argued that there was an urgent need for ‘a rethinking of Tory Party attitudes and philosophy’, while Edward du Cann, chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs, insisted that: ‘In the eyes of the general public, our party seems to lack a clear philosophy and therefore credibility. So intellectually bankrupt have we become that the language of most political debate, in university or public bar, is now habitually the socialistic language of the left.’ And one of the journalists most in tune with the malcontents, Peregrine Worsthorne, identified the roadblock on the path to the future: ‘The personality of Mr Heath does not make it easy for the Tory leaders to engage in the kind of policy reappraisal which the party so urgently requires. In the frosty climate created by his company, ideas do not burst into blossom.’
Most importantly, the current of pure monetarism that Powell espoused was to make its presence felt in the shape of former social services secretary Sir Keith Joseph. In a series of speeches over the summer of 1974, Joseph broke ranks with Heath’s vision of Conservatism to announce that ‘Inflation is threatening to destroy our society,’ and that the only way forward was the rigid control of the money supply. For those who didn’t entirely grasp the essence of this new creed of monetarism, the most succinct articulation had come even before the February election from the most unlikely of sources, Alf Garnett’s socialist son-in-law, Mike: ‘You want to know something about inflation and what causes it?’ he asked. ‘It’s them printing more of their paper money than we’ve got goods for in the shops.’ Joseph arrived at the same conclusion slightly later, but he did so with all the fervour of a convert. (‘I have heard of death-bed repentance,’ sneered Powell about his distanced disciple, ‘but it would perhaps be more appropriate to refer to post-mortem repentance.’)
Joseph’s campaign over those months was the clarion call that was to usher in the Thatcherite revolution, and in the context of the subsequent agenda there’s a certain irony that his motivation was an awareness of Europe: ‘I never focused on America – I thought they were outside our culture and our reach,’ Joseph said later, ‘but our ruddy neighbours. Why should they do so much better, particularly when they had been prostrate and flat on their back after the war?’ And in the speech launching the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank which was to provide the intellectual backbone for Thatcherism, he elaborated on the theme: ‘Compare our position today with that of our neighbours in Germany, Sweden, Holland, France. They are no more talented than we are. Yet, compared with them, we have the longest working hours, the lowest pay and the lowest production per head. We have the highest taxes and the lowest investment. We have the least prosperity, the most poor and the lowest pensions.’ The impoverished position of Britain relative to its nearest competitors was by now recognized everywhere, it seemed, except at the very highest political level: ‘He never goes abroad other than under the artificial circumstances of a prime ministerial visit, so he is unaware of the growth and strength of countries like France,’ wrote Bernard Donoughue despairingly of Harold Wilson. ‘He takes his holidays in the Scillies, which is unchanged since 1950, so he thinks the world is unchanged.’
Joseph’s emphasis on the defeat of inflation being the absolute priority was intended as a rejection of the previous administration, and was taken as such. ‘Your analysis of the government’s record has left me heartbroken,’ Heath told him, in unusually emotional terms. But Joseph went much further, with a denunciation of the whole political consensus that had dominated British politics since 1945. ‘The path to Benn,’ he proclaimed, ‘is paved with thirty years of intervention, thirty years of good intentions, thirty years of disappointment.’ Boyson was subsequently to bring the two themes together, claiming that the Heath government had served as ‘John the Baptist for Wedgwood Benn’. This obsessive focus on Tony Benn was crucial; politics in Britain were polarizing rapidly, and the right needed to find a rival who could present a coherent challenge to Benn’s espousal of shop steward democracy in a centralized economy. In the vacuum created by Powell’s defection, Joseph looked the only plausible standard-bearer for such a movement, despite his inability to rouse the public and despite his habitual appearance – as ’80s impressionist Phil Cool pointed out – of being ‘someone who’d put his finger through the toilet paper’.
Against this background of hardening positions, there was also a counter-demand for a moderate coalitionist force. In 1971, a full decade before the SDP came into existence, Benn had identified the trend that would lead to its birth. ‘There is a small group of highly dedicated Marketeers led by Roy Jenkins,’ he wrote of his colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party. ‘This group, working with the conservative Europeans, really represents a new political party under the surface in Britain.’ On New Year’s Day 1975 Jenkins confided to his friend Ronnie McIntosh that he felt his moment of destiny approaching. ‘He wants a coalition government and expects to see one in the first half of this year,’ reported McIntosh. ‘He wouldn’t mind whether Wilson or Callaghan led the new government but made it clear that he would expect to succeed whichever of them took it on – and implied that he would expect to do this quite soon.�
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The appeal of a new force was understood in many quarters. At one end of the social spectrum there was Len Fairclough in Coronation Street, who served as an independent on Weatherfield Council and who insisted that ‘It’s party politics that’s strangling this country. It’s out of date.’ And at the other end there was the Queen herself. ‘Different people have different views, deeply and sincerely felt, about our problems and how they should be solved,’ she was to have said in her Christmas broadcast for 1973. ‘Let us remember, however, that what we have in common is more important than what divides us.’ Those words were never broadcast, because Heath asked that the passage be deleted, for fear of it being interpreted politically, but in the period between the two elections of 1974, there was renewed talk of the possibility of a government of national unity, bringing together Tories and Liberals, and possibly even the right wing of the Labour Party. Several leading Conservatives, including future members of Thatcher’s cabinets like Nigel Lawson, Ian Gilmour and Peter Walker, floated the idea of a coalition, and Heath himself was clearly attracted to it. The problem was, of course, that the people were no longer attracted to him, and while he remained as Tory leader no such coalition was possible; he regarded himself as a unifying force in the country, but the country simply didn’t agree.
Even so, the concept was to remain through to the next decade, sometimes lurking in the depths of political discourse, sometimes forcing its way to the surface. ‘In November 1976,’ wrote Cyril Smith, ‘I called for the foundation of a new party of the centre to be joined, I hoped, by such political heavyweights as Edward Heath, Peter Walker, Shirley Williams, Reg Prentice, David Steel and John Pardoe.’ And behind it all was the reality that this was to be in essence an anti-Benn alliance, so great was the fear of the forces he represented. ‘For the last three years, ever since the miners brought down Ted Heath,’ Smith claimed, ‘there have been long and passionate discussions in all the rooms of Westminster except the chamber of the House of Commons, in the bars, in the restaurants, even in the splendid marble halls of the toilets, about the possibility of revolution in this country. I am by no means the only MP who thinks that it is not only possible, but, in fact, quite likely if the present situation is allowed to drift.’
The answer to this drift, however, was ultimately to be found not in vague proposals for coalition but in those speeches of Keith Joseph. The impact of his contribution was temporarily eclipsed by the October election of 1974, but once that was over, and the need for a regeneration of the Conservative Party had become clear (it had now shed 3 million votes since 1970, and achieved its lowest share of the poll since 1906), he resumed the offensive. ‘He will have to go’ was the Daily Mail’s verdict on Heath after he lost his second general election in a row, and his third in total, and Joseph was the right’s front-runner in the succession stakes, an intelligent, if awkward, man who had already distanced himself from the failures of the past and who offered a clear, determined direction forward.
And then he threw it away. His first post-election speech was in Edgbaston, not far from the site of the ‘rivers of blood’, and it proved almost as significant as its predecessor in the outrage it provoked. Ever since his time in social services, Joseph had been concerned with what he referred to as ‘cycles of deprivation’, the way in which the stratum of society that would later be termed the underclass was becoming self-perpetuating, dependent on state benefits for generation after generation. ‘A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up,’ he now declared. ‘Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness, which are more important than riches.’ And, in the phrase that damned him, he warned that ‘the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened’. It was that ‘human stock’ that provided his enemies with the rope with which to hang him. Was this not, they asked, a call for eugenics, redolent of the policies of Nazi Germany? Not only that, but his argument was unashamedly based on class; he talked of problems in the socio-economic groups four and five, prompting Labour MP Renée Short to leap to the defence of their impugned honour, claiming that ‘it is not those in the fourth and fifth groups who patronize call girls’, a remark that perhaps revealed more about her knowledge of society than about society itself.
Stripped of its emotive phrasing, Joseph’s Edgbaston speech identified an issue that was to become of ever greater significance to policy-makers over the coming decades. But his message was lost amidst the noise, partly at least because he had nothing to offer those on the right, who might otherwise support him, save remedies that they distrusted. ‘The trouble was,’ wrote Margaret Thatcher, his closest ally in the shadow cabinet, ‘that the only short-term answer suggested by Keith for the social problems he outlined was making contraceptives more widely available – and that tended to drive away those who might have been attracted by his larger moral message.’ The birth control pill was still then seen as a totem of the permissive society of the 1960s, and Joseph’s pragmatic endorsement of it (he had made it available nationally on the NHS) failed to resonate with his natural constituency. Caught between the pill and the pillory, he was assailed on all sides. ‘It’s great fun to see somebody else getting into hot water over a speech,’ chuckled Powell. ‘I almost wondered if the River Tiber was beginning to roll again.’ But unlike Powell, Joseph was ill-equipped for the media onslaught that ensued. ‘Ever since I made that speech the press have been outside the house,’ he told Thatcher. ‘They have been merciless.’ And, he added, he was no longer prepared to challenge Heath for the leadership of the party; he felt unable to put himself and his family under that kind of pressure permanently.
Joseph’s moment had passed and he retreated with a great sigh of relief into the background, to become the éminence grise of Thatcherism. In her government he was to head the industry and education departments for seven years, but he was seldom a front-rank figure in public presentation, being seen primarily as the arid voice of ultra-orthodoxy. His image, such as it was, veered towards a caricature of the right-wing bogeyman, an ascetic fundamentalist nicknamed ‘the Mad Monk’. When, in 1979, Leon Griffiths put together the concept of what would become the series Minder, he identified his two main characters in terms of their political allegiances: the decent, uncomplicated Terry McCann ‘votes Labour because his dad was a docker and “We’ve always been Labour”’, while the small-time crook and would-be businessman Arthur Daley ‘admires Sir Keith Joseph’. Arthur’s perpetual pursuit of a nice little earner was not necessarily what Joseph had in mind when he was so eloquently defending ‘the wealth-creating, job-creating entrepreneur and the wealth-creating, job-creating manager’, and arguing that ‘If they are not treated reasonably, if they do not feel appreciated, they will quit either by way of the brain drain or by the internal brain drain which might be called switching off. There is a great deal of switching off in this country.’
With Joseph ruling himself out of the running, even before the race had started, Thatcher decided to rule herself in, on the grounds that ‘someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand’. In November 1974 she announced that she would be challenging Heath for the leadership.
She was not an obvious choice, partly because she, following Joseph, had begun to espouse the unfashionable cause of monetarism, and partly because the policies she had pursued in her previous incarnation as education secretary under Heath had led to her being dubbed by the Sun ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’. In retrospect, given the controversy she subsequently attracted, this was something of an overstatement. Her supposed offence was absurdly innocuous – under pressure from the Treasury, the statutory provision of free milk for schoolchildren was ended on her watch – but the tabloid sobriquet ‘Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher’ had a pleasing enough ring, and it lingered long in the memory. An entry in Kenne
th Williams’s diary in January 1972 captured some of the reaction to her time at education, as well as offering a foretaste of future protests: ‘There were barriers at Downing Street and mounted police. It depressed me very much. The bawling long-haired youths shouting “Thatcher Out!” and carrying coffins expressing sentiments like “Maggie Dead” etc was the spectacle of only another form of fascism.’
Mostly, though, Thatcher was an improbable candidate for the simple reason that she was a woman. That was, for the media, the overriding issue, and coverage of her tended to be couched in terms of her appearance, with a particular focus on her headwear. When she was education secretary, the Sunday Telegraph had described her as being ‘sometimes rather pretentious and given to the smart hat and neat pearls favoured by suburban ladies coming to Tory conferences for the first time’, and the image still dominated the declaration of her candidacy. ‘Try to forget her plummy voice and her extravagant hats and her Dresden-shepherdess appearance,’ advised the Daily Mirror. ‘She is the toughest member of the Shadow Cabinet, and even if she doesn’t win the battle for the Tory leadership she may yet be responsible for bringing down Ted Heath.’ But even Enoch Powell, who had as good a claim as any to be her trailblazer, had trouble forgetting these things, insisting that the Tories couldn’t possibly elect her: ‘They wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent,’ he shuddered. It was an image of which she was well aware, describing herself defiantly as ‘a middle-aged lady who likes hats’.
