Margaret Thatcher
THE PATH TO POWER
This book is dedicated to the
memory of
KEITH JOSEPH
PART ONE
CHAPTER I A Provincial Childhood Grantham 1925 to 1943
My first distinct memory is of traffic. I was being pushed in a pram through the town to the park on a sunny day, and I must have encountered the bustle of Grantham on the way. The occasion stays in my mind as an exciting mixture of colour, vehicles, people and thunderous noise — yet, perhaps paradoxically, the memory is a pleasant one. I must have liked this first conscious plunge into the outside world.
As for indistinct memories, most of us probably recall our earliest years as a sort of blur. Mine was an idyllic blur in which the sun was always shining through the leaves of the lime tree into our living room and someone — my mother, my sister, one of the people working in the shop — was always nearby to cuddle me or pacify me with a sweet. Family tradition has it that I was a very quiet baby, which my political opponents might have some difficulty in believing. But I had not been born into a quiet family.
Four generations of the Roberts family had been shoemakers in Northamptonshire, at that time a great centre of the shoe industry. My father, who had wanted to be a teacher, had to leave school at thirteen because the family could not afford for him to stay on. He went instead to work at Oundle, one of the better public (i.e. private) schools. Years later, when I was answering questions in the House of Commons, Eric Heffer, a left-wing Labour MP and regular sparring partner of mine, tried to pull working-class rank by mentioning that his father had been a carpenter at Oundle. He was floored when I was able to retort that mine had worked in the tuck shop there.
My father had a number of jobs, I think most of them in the grocery trade, until in 1913 he was offered the post of manager of a grocery store in Grantham. In later years he would say that of the fourteen shillings a week he received, twelve shillings paid for his board and lodging, one shilling he saved, and only then did he spend the remaining shilling. The First World War broke out a year later. My father, a deeply patriotic man, tried to enlist in the army no fewer than six times, but was rejected on each occasion on medical grounds. His younger brother, Edward, did enlist, and died on active service in Salonika in 1917. Few British families escaped such a bereavement, and Remembrance Day after the war was observed throughout the country both strictly and intensely.
Four years after arriving in Grantham my father met my mother, Beatrice Ethel Stephenson, through the local Methodist church. She had her own business as a dressmaker. They were married in that church in May 1917 and my sister, Muriel, was born in 1921.
My mother was quite a saver too, and by 1919 they were able to take out a mortgage to buy their own shop in North Parade. Our home was over this shop. In 1923 my father opened a second shop in Huntingtower Road — opposite the primary school which I would later attend. On 13 October 1925 I was born over the shop at North Parade.
That same year, my father expanded his business further, taking in two adjoining buildings in North Parade. Our shop and house were situated at a busy crossroads and the main railway line — Grantham was an important junction — was just a hundred yards away. We could set our clocks by the ‘Flying Scotsman’ as it thundered through. What I most regretted was that at this time we could not have a garden. Not until the end of the Second World War did my father buy a house with a long garden further along North Parade, on which the family had set our hearts some years previously.
Life ‘over the shop’ is much more than a phrase. It is something which those who have lived it know to be quite distinctive. For one thing, you are always on duty. People would knock on the door at almost any hour of the night or weekend if they ran out of bacon, sugar, butter or eggs. Everyone knew that we lived by serving the customer; it was pointless to complain — and so nobody did. These orders were, of course, on top of the regular ones. My father or his staff — we had three staff at North Parade and someone else at Huntingtower — would generally go out and collect these. But sometimes my mother would do so, and then she might take Muriel and me along too. My sister and I knew a lot of people in the town as a result.
There was, of course, no question of closing down the shop for long family holidays. We used to go to the local seaside resort, Skegness. But my father and mother had to take their holidays at different times, with my father taking a week off every year to play his favourite game, competing in the bowls tournament at Skegness. Living over the shop, children see far more of their parents than in most other walks of life. I saw my father at breakfast, lunch, high tea and supper. We had much more time to talk than some other families, for which I have always been grateful.
My father was a specialist grocer. He always aimed to supply the best-quality produce, and the shop itself suggested this. Behind the counter there were three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers with sparkling brass handles, and on top of these stood large, black, lacquered tea canisters. One of the tasks I sometimes shared was the weighing out of tea, sugar and biscuits from the sacks and boxes in which they arrived into Ilb and 2lb bags. In a cool back room we called ‘the old bake house’ hung sides of bacon which had to be boned and cut up for slicing. Wonderful aromas of spices, coffee and smoked hams would waft through the house.
I was born into a home which was practical, serious and intensely religious. My father and mother were both staunch Methodists; indeed, my father was much in demand as a lay preacher in and around Grantham. He was a powerful preacher whose sermons contained a good deal of intellectual substance. But he was taken aback one day when I asked him why he put on a ‘sermon voice’ on these occasions. I don’t think he realized that he did this. It was an unconscious homage to the biblical message, and quite different to the more prosaic tones in which he despatched council business and current affairs.
Our lives revolved around Methodism. The family went to Sunday Morning Service at 11 o’clock, but before that I would have gone to morning Sunday School. There was Sunday School again in the afternoon; later, from about the age of twelve, I played the piano for the smaller children to sing the hymns. Then my parents would usually go out again to Sunday Evening Service.
This I found somewhat too much of a good thing, and on a few occasions I remember trying to get out of going. But when I said to my father that my friends were able to go out for a walk instead and I would like to join them, he would reply: ‘Never do things just because other people do them.’ In fact, this was one of his favourite expressions — used when I wanted to learn dancing, or sometimes when I wanted to go to the cinema, or out for the day somewhere. Whatever I felt at the time, the sentiment stood me in good stead, as it did my father.
My father’s sense of duty, however, always had its gentler side. This was not true of everyone. Life for poor people in the years before the Second World War was very difficult; and it was not much easier for those who had worked hard, accumulated a nest egg, and achieved a precarious respectability. They lived on a knife-edge and feared that if some accident hit them, or if they relaxed their standards of thrift and diligence, they might be plunged into debt and poverty. This precariousness often made otherwise good people hard and unforgiving. I remember a discussion between my father and a church-goer about the ‘prodigal son’ of a friend who, after running through his parents’ savings, had turned up penniless and with a young family on their doorstep. The church-goer was clear: the boy was no good, would never be any good, and should be shown the door. My father’s reply is vivid in my mind. No, he said. A son remained a son, and he must be greeted with all the love and warmth of his family when he turned to them. Whatever happens, you must always be able to come home.
As this suggests, my father was a man of firm principles — ‘Your father always sticks to his principles,’ as my mother would say — but he did not believe in applying these principles in a way which made life wretched for everyone else. He showed this in his dealings as a local councillor and later alderman with the vexed question of what could be done on the Sabbath. In those days in Grantham and in most places cinemas were closed on Sundays, but during the war — adopting a utilitarian rather than a dogmatic approach — he supported Sunday opening because it gave the servicemen stationed near the town somewhere to go, without disturbing others who wanted a quieter, more contemplative Sabbath. At the same time he strongly (though in the end unsuccessfully) opposed the opening of the parks for the playing of games, which he felt would ruin other people’s peace and quiet. He wanted to keep Sunday a special day, but he was flexible about how it should be done. For my own part, I was unpersuaded, even as a girl, of the need for these restrictions: but I can now appreciate how much this highly principled man was prepared to bend on the matter when circumstances made it sensible.
These upright qualities, which entailed a refusal to alter your convictions just because others disagreed or because you became unpopular, were instilled into me from the earliest days. In 1936, when I was eleven, I was given a special edition of Bibby’s Annual. Joseph Bibby was a Liverpool food manufacturer who used part of his considerable self-made fortune to edit a religious magazine which was an odd combination of character building, homespun philosophy and religion; it also contained beautiful reproductions of great pictures. I was too young at the time to know that the underlying approach was Theosophist;[1] but the Annual was one of my most treasured possessions. Above all, it taught me some verses which I still use in off-the-cuff speeches because they came to embody for me so much of what I was brought up to feel.
One ship drives East, and another drives West,
By the self-same gale that blows;
’Tis the set of the sail, and not the gale,
That determines the way she goes.
Or again:
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Whether it was that early exposure to Bibby’s Annual or just a natural bent, I was soon fascinated by poetry. Aged ten, I was the proud winner of a prize at the Grantham Eisteddfod for reciting poetry. (I read John Drinkwater’s ‘Moonlit Apples’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Travellers’.) One day soon afterwards, when I called at a door to collect an order for groceries, I was given an edition of Milton by someone who knew how much poetry meant to me: I have treasured the book ever since. In the first years of the war I would go out as part of a concert party to the surrounding villages and recite from my Oxford Book of English Verse — another book which even now is never far from reach. Methodism itself, of course, has, in the form of the Wesley hymns, some really fine religious poetry.
Religious life in Grantham was very active and, in the days before Christian ecumenism, competitive and fuelled by a spirit of rivalry. There were three Methodist chapels, St Wulfram’s Anglican church — the sixth-highest steeple in England, according to local legend — and a Roman Catholic church just opposite our house. From a child’s standpoint, the Catholics seemed to have the most light-hearted time of all. I used to envy the young Catholic girls making their first communion, dressed in white party dresses with bright ribbons, and carrying baskets of flowers. The Methodist style was much plainer, and if you wore a ribboned dress an older chapel-goer would shake his head and warn against ‘the first step to Rome’.
Even without ribbons, however, Methodism was far from dour, as people are inclined to imagine today. It placed great emphasis on the social side of religion and on music, both of which gave me plenty of opportunities to enjoy life, even if it was in what might seem a rather solemn way. Our friends from church would often come in to cold supper on Sunday evenings, or we would go to them. I always enjoyed the adults’ conversation, which ranged far wider than religion or happenings in Grantham to include national and international politics. And one of the unintended consequences of the temperance side of Methodism was that Methodists tended to devote more time and attention to eating. ‘Keeping a good table’ was a common phrase, and many of the social occasions were built around tea parties and suppers. There was also a constant round of church events, organized either to keep the young people happy or to raise funds for one purpose or other.
It was, I confess, the musical side of Methodism which I liked best. We sang special hymns on the occasion of Sunday School anniversaries. The Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School (KGGS) carol service — and the weeks of practice which preceded it — was something I always looked forward to. Our church had an exceptionally good choir. Every other year we would perform an oratorio: Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s Creation or Mendelssohn’s Elijah. We would have professionals from London to sing the more difficult solo parts. But what made an impression on me was the latent richness of musical talent which serious training and practice could develop. My family also belonged to a music society and three or four times a year there would be a chamber music concert.
We were a musical family. From the age of five my parents had me learn the piano: my mother played too. In fact, I turned out to be quite good, and I was fortunate enough to have excellent teachers and won several prizes at local music festivals. The piano on which I was taught was made by my great uncle, John Roberts, in Northampton. He also made church organs. When I was ten I visited him and was thrilled to be allowed to play one of the two he had built in a cavernous barn-like building in his garden. Sadly, at sixteen I found it necessary to stop music lessons when I was cramming for my university entrance, and I still regret that I never took the piano up again. At this time, however, it was I who played the piano at home, while my father (who had a good bass voice) and mother (a contralto) and sometimes friends sang the old favourites of an evening — ‘The Holy City’, ‘The Lost Chord’, Gilbert and Sullivan, etc.
Perhaps the biggest excitement of my early years was a visit to London when I was twelve years old. I came down by train in the charge of a friend of my mother’s, arriving at King’s Cross, where I was met by the Rev. Skinner and his wife, two family friends who were going to look after me. The first impact of London was overwhelming: King’s Cross itself was a giant bustling cavern; the rest of the city had all the dazzle of a commercial and imperial capital. For the first time in my life I saw people from foreign countries, some in the traditional native dress of India and Africa. The sheer volume of traffic and of pedestrians was exhilarating; they seemed to generate a sort of electricity. London’s buildings were impressive for another reason; begrimed with soot, they had a dark imposing magnificence which constantly reminded me that I was at the centre of the world.
I was taken by the Skinners to all the usual sites. I fed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; I rode the Underground — a slightly forbidding experience for a child; I visited the Zoo, where I rode on an elephant and recoiled from the reptiles — an early portent of my relations with Fleet Street; I was disappointed by Oxford Street, which was much narrower than the boulevard of my imagination; made a pilgrimage to St Paul’s, where John Wesley had prayed on the morning of his conversion; and of course, to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, which did not disappoint at all; and I went to look at Downing Street, but unlike the young Harold Wilson did not have the prescience to have my photograph taken outside No. 10.
All this was enjoyable beyond measure. But the high point was my first visit to the Catford Theatre in Lewisham where we saw Sigmund Romberg’s famous musical The Desert Song. For three hours I lived in another world, swept away as was the heroine by the daring Red Shadow — so much so that I bought the score and played it at home, perhaps too often.
I could hardly drag myself away from London or from the Skinners, who had been such indulgent hosts. Their kindness had given me a glimpse of, in Talleyrand’s words, ‘la douceur de la vie‘ — how sweet life could be.
Our religion was not only musical and sociable — it was also intellectually stimulating. The ministers were powerful characters with strong views. The general political tendency among Methodists and other Nonconformists in our town was somewhat to the left wing and even pacifist. Methodists in Grantham were prominent in organizing the ‘Peace Ballot’ of 1935, circulating a loaded questionnaire to the electorate, which was then declared overwhelmingly to have ‘voted for peace’. It is not recorded how far Hitler and Mussolini were moved by this result; we had our own views about that in the Roberts household. The Peace Ballot was a foolish idea which must take some of the blame nationally for delaying the rearmament necessary to deter and ultimately defeat the dictators. On this question and others, being staunchly Conservative, we were the odd family out. Our friend the Rev. Skinner was an enthusiast for the Peace Ballot. He was the kindest and holiest man, and he married Denis and me at Wesley’s Chapel in London many years later. But personal virtue is no substitute for political hard-headedness.
The sermons we heard every Sunday made a great impact on me. It was an invited Congregationalist minister, the Rev. Childe, who brought home to me the somewhat advanced notion for those days that whatever the sins of the fathers (and mothers) they must never be visited on the children. I still recall his denunciation of the Pharisaical tendency to brand children born outside marriage as ‘illegitimate’. All the town knew of some children without fathers; listening to the Rev. Childe, we felt very guilty about thinking of them as different. Times have changed. We have since removed the stigma of illegitimacy not only from the child but also from the parent — and perhaps increased the number of disadvantaged children thereby. We still have to find some way of combining Christian charity with sensible social policy.
When war broke out and death seemed closer to everybody, the sermons became more telling. In one, just after the Battle of Britain, the preacher told us that it is ‘always the few who save the many’: so it was with Christ and the apostles. I was also inspired by the theme of another sermon: history showed how it was those who were born at the depths of one great crisis who would be able to cope with the next. This was proof of God’s benevolent providence and a foundation for optimism about the future, however dark things now looked. The values instilled in church were faithfully reflected in my home.
So was the emphasis on hard work. In my family we were never idle — partly because idleness was a sin, partly because there was so much work to be done, and partly no doubt because we were just that sort of people. As I have mentioned, I would help whenever necessary in the shop. But I also learned from my mother just what it meant to cope with a household so that everything worked like clockwork, even though she had to spend so many hours serving behind the counter. Although we had a maid before the war — and later a cleaning lady a couple of days a week — my mother did much of the work herself, and of course there was a great deal more than in a modern home. She showed me how to iron a man’s shirt in the correct way and to press embroidery without damaging it. Large flat-irons were heated over the fire and I was let in on the secret of how to give a special finish to linen by putting just enough candle wax to cover a sixpenny piece on the iron. Most unusually for those times, at my secondary school we had to study domestic science — everything from how to do laundry properly to the management of the household budget. So I was doubly equipped to lend a hand with the domestic chores. The whole house at North Parade was not just cleaned daily and weekly: a great annual spring clean was intended to get to all those parts which other cleaning could not reach. Carpets were taken up and beaten. The mahogany furniture — always good quality which my mother had bought in auction sales — was washed down with a mixture of warm water and vinegar before being repolished. Since this was also the time of the annual stocktaking in the shop, there was hardly time to draw breath.
Nothing in our house was wasted, and we always lived within our means. The worst you could say about another family was that they ‘lived up to the hilt’. Because we had always been used to such a careful regime, we could cope with wartime rationing, though we used to note down the hints on the radio about the preparation of such stodgy treats as ‘Lord Woolton’s potato pie’, an economy dish named after the wartime Minister for Food. My mother was an excellent cook and a highly organized one. Twice a week she had her big bake — bread, pastry, cakes and pies. Her home-made bread was very famous, as were her Grantham gingerbreads. Before the war there were roasts on Sunday, which became cold cuts on Monday and disappeared into rissoles on Tuesday. With wartime, however, the Sunday roast became almost meatless stew or macaroni cheese.
Small provincial towns in those days had their own networks of private charity. In the run-up to Christmas as many as 150 parcels were made up in our shop, containing tinned meat, Christmas cake and pudding, jam and tea — all purchased for poorer families by one of the strongest social and charitable institutions in Grantham, the Rotary Club. There was always something from those Thursday or Sunday bakes which was sent out to elderly folk living alone or who were sick. As grocers, we knew something about the circumstances of our customers.
Clothes were never a problem for us. My mother had been a professional seamstress and made most of what we wore. In those days there were two very good pattern services, Vogue and Butterick’s; and in the sales at Grantham and Nottingham we could get the best-quality fabrics at reduced prices. So we got excellent value for money and were, by Grantham standards, rather fashionable. For my father’s mayoral year, my mother made both her daughters new dresses — a blue velvet for my sister and a dark green velvet for me — and herself a black moiré silk gown. But in wartime the ethos of frugality was almost an obsession. Even my mother and I were taken aback by one of our friends, who told us that she never threw away her tacking cottons but re-used them: ‘I consider it my duty to do so,’ she said. After that, so did we. We were not Methodists for nothing.
I had less leisure time than other children. But I used to enjoy going for long walks, often on my own. Grantham lies in a little hollow surrounded by hills, unlike most of Lincolnshire which is very flat. I loved the beauty of the countryside and being alone with my thoughts in those surroundings. Sometimes I used to walk out of the town by Manthorpe Road and cut across on the north side to return down the Great North Road. I would also walk up Hall’s Hill, where in wartime we were given a week off school to go and gather rose hips and blackberries. There was tobogganing there when it snowed.
I did not play much sport, though I soon learned to swim, and at school I was a somewhat erratic hockey player. At home we played the usual games, like Monopoly and Pit — a noisy game based on the Chicago Commodities Exchange. In a later visit to America I visited the Exchange; but my dabbling in commodities ended there.
It was, however, the coming of the cinema to Grantham which really brightened my life. We were fortunate in having among our customers the Campbell family who owned three cinemas in Grantham. They would sometimes invite me around to their house to play the gramophone, and I got to know their daughter Judy, later to be a successful actress who partnered Noel Coward in his wartime comedy Present Laughter and made famous the song ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. Because we knew the Campbells, the cinema was more acceptable to my parents than it might otherwise have been. They were content that I should go to ‘good’ films, a classification which fortunately included Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and the films of Alexander Korda. They rarely went with me — though on a Bank Holiday we would go together to the repertory theatre in Nottingham or to one of the big cinemas there — so usually I would be accompanied by friends of my own age. Even then, however, there were limits. Ordinarily there was a new film each week; but since some of these did not sustain enough interest to last six days, another one was shown from Thursday. Some people would go along to the second film, but that was greatly frowned on in our household.
Perhaps that was a fortunate restraint; for I was entranced with the romantic world of Hollywood. These were, after all, its Golden Years. For 9d you had a comfortable seat in the darkness while the screen showed first the trailer for forthcoming attractions, then the British Movietone News with its chirpy optimistic commentary, after that a short public service film on a theme like Crime Does Not Pay, and finally the Big Picture. These ran the gamut from imperialistic adventures like The Four Feathers and Drum, to sophisticated comedies like The Women (with every female star in the business), to the four-handkerchief weepies like Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas or Ingrid Bergman in anything. Nor was I entirely neglecting my political education ‘at the pictures’. My views on the French Revolution were gloriously confirmed by Leslie Howard and lovely Merle Oberon in The Scarlet Pimpernel. I saw my father’s emphasis on the importance of standing up for your principles embodied by James Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington. I rejoiced to see Soviet communism laughed out of court when Garbo, a stern Commissar, was seduced by a lady’s hat in Ninotchka. And my grasp of history was not made more difficult by the fact that William Pitt the Younger was played by Robert Donat and, in Marie Walewska, Napoleon was played by the great French charmer Charles Boyer.
I often reflect how fortunate I was to have been born in 1925 and not twenty years earlier. Until the 1930s, there was no way that a young girl living in a small English provincial town could have had access to this extraordinary range of talent, dramatic form, human emotion, sex appeal, spectacle and style. To a girl born twenty years later these offerings were commonplace and, inevitably, taken much more for granted. Grantham was a small town, but on my visits to the cinema I roamed to the most fabulous realms of the imagination. It gave me the determination to roam in reality one day.
For my parents the reality which mattered was here and now, not that of romance. Yet it was not really a dislike of pleasure which shaped their attitude. They made a very important distinction between mass-and self-made entertainment, which is just as valid in the age of constant soap operas and game shows — perhaps more so. They felt that entertainment that demanded something of you was preferable to being a passive spectator. At times I found this irksome, but I also understood the essential point.
When my mother, sister and I went on holiday together, usually to Skegness, there was always the same emphasis on being active, rather than sitting around day-dreaming. We would stay in a self-catering guesthouse, much better value than a hotel, and first thing in the morning I went out with the other children for PT exercises arranged in the public gardens. There was plenty to keep us occupied and, of course, there were buckets and spades and the beach. In the evening we would go to the variety shows and reviews, very innocent entertainments by today’s standards, with comedians, jugglers, acrobats, ‘old tyme’ singers, ventriloquists and lots of audience participation when we joined in singing the latest hit from Henry Hall’s Guest Night. My parents considered that such shows were perfectly acceptable, which in itself showed how attitudes changed: we would never have gone to the variety while Grandmother Stephenson, who lived with us till I was ten, was still alive.
That may make my grandmother sound rather forbidding. Again, not at all. She was a warm presence in the life of myself and my sister. Dressed in the grandmotherly style of those days — long black sateen beaded dress — she would come up to our bedrooms on warm summer evenings and tell us stories of her life as a young girl. She would also make our flesh creep with old wives’ tales of how earwigs would crawl under your skin and form carbuncles. With time on her hands, she had plenty to spare for us. Her death at the age of eighty-six was the first time I had ever encountered death. As was the custom in those days, I was sent to stay with friends until the funeral was over and my grandmother’s belongings had all been packed away. In fact, life is very much a day-to-day experience for a child, and I recovered reasonably quickly. But Mother and I went to tend her grave on half-day closing days. I never knew either of my grandfathers, who died before I was born, and I saw Grandmother Roberts only twice, on holidays down to Ringstead in Northamptonshire. Less stately than Grandmother Stephenson, she was a bustling, active little old lady who kept a fine garden. I remember particularly that she kept a store of Cox’s orange pippins in an upstairs room from which my sister and I were invited to select the best.
My father was a great bowls player, and he smoked (which was very bad for him because of his weak chest). Otherwise, his leisure and entertainment always seemed to merge into duty. We had no alcohol in the house until he became mayor at the end of the war, and then only sherry and cherry brandy, which for some mysterious reason was considered more respectable than straight brandy, to entertain visitors. (Years of electioneering also later taught me that cherry brandy is very good for the throat.)
Like the other leading businessmen in Grantham, my father was a Rotarian. The Rotary motto, ‘Service Above Self’, was engraved on his heart. He spoke frequently and eloquently at Rotary functions, and we could read his speeches reported at length in the local paper. The Rotary Club was constantly engaged in fund raising for the town’s different charities. My father would be involved in similar activity, not just through the church but as a councillor and in a private capacity. One such event which I used to enjoy was the League of Pity (now NSPCC) Children’s Christmas party, which I would go to in one of the party dresses beautifully made by my mother, to raise money for children who needed help.
Apart from home and church, the other centre of my life was, naturally enough, school. Here too I was very lucky. Huntingtower Road Primary School had a good reputation in the town. It had quite new buildings and excellent teachers. By the time I went there I had already been taught simple reading by my parents, and even when I was very young I enjoyed learning. Like all children, I suspect, these days remain vividly immediate for me. I remember a heart-stopping moment at the age of five when I was asked how to pronounce W-R-A-P; I got it right, but I thought ‘They always give me the difficult ones.’ Later, in General Knowledge, I first came across the mystery of ‘proverbs’. I already had a logical and indeed somewhat literal mind — perhaps I have not changed much in this regard — and I was perplexed by the metaphorical element of phrases like ‘Look before you leap’. I thought it would be far better to say ‘Look before you cross’ — a highly practical point given the dangerous road I must traverse on my way to school. And like other children before and after I triumphantly pointed out the contradiction between that proverb and ‘He who hesitates is lost’.
It was in the top class at primary school that I first came across the work of Kipling, who died that January of 1936. I immediately became fascinated by his poems and stories and often asked my parents for a Kipling book at Christmas. His poems, themselves wonderfully accessible, gave a child access to a wider world — indeed wider worlds — of the Empire, work, English history and the animal kingdom. Like the Hollywood films later, Kipling offered glimpses into the romantic possibilities of life outside Grantham. By now I was probably reading more widely than most of my classmates, doubtless through my father’s influence, and it showed on occasion. I can still recall writing an essay about Kipling and burning with childish indignation at being accused of having copied down the word ‘nostalgia’ from some book, whereas I had used it quite naturally and easily.
From Huntingtower Road I went on to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School. It was in a different part of town, but what with coming home for lunch, which was more economical than the school lunch, I still walked four miles a day back and forth. Our uniform was saxe-blue and navy and so we were called ‘the girls in blue’. (When Camden Girls’ School from London was evacuated to Grantham for part of the war they were referred to as ‘the girls in green’.) The headmistress was Miss Williams, a petite, upright, grey-haired lady, who had started the school as headmistress in 1910, inaugurated certain traditions such as that all girls however academic had to take domestic science for four years, and whose quiet authority by now dominated everything. I greatly admired the special outfits Miss Williams used to wear on important days, such as at the annual school fête or prize-giving, when she appeared in beautiful silk, softly tailored, looking supremely elegant. But she was very practical. The advice to us was never to buy a low-quality silk when the same amount of money would purchase a very good-quality cotton. ‘Never aspire to a cheap fur coat when a well-tailored wool coat would be a better buy.’ The rule was always to go for quality within your own income.
My teachers had a genuine sense of vocation and were highly respected by the whole community. The school was small enough — about 350 girls — for us to get to know them and one another, within limits. The girls were generally from middle-class backgrounds; but that covered a fairly wide range of occupations from town and country. My closest friend, indeed, came in daily from a rural village about ten miles distant, where her father was a builder. I used to stay with her family from time to time. Her parents, no less keen than mine to add to a daughter’s education, would take us out for rural walks, identifying the wild flowers and the species of birds and birdsongs.
I had a particularly inspiring History teacher, Miss Harding, who gave me a taste for the subject which, unfortunately, I never fully developed. I found myself with absolute recall remembering her account of the Dardanelles campaign so many years later when, as Prime Minister, I walked over the tragic battlegrounds of Gallipoli.
But the main academic influence on me was undoubtedly Miss Kay, who taught Chemistry, in which I decided to specialize. It was not unusual — in an all-girls’ school, at least — for a girl to concentrate on science, even before the war. My natural enthusiasm for the sciences was whetted by reports of breakthroughs which were occurring — for example in the splitting of the atom and the development of plastics. It was clear that a whole new scientific world was opening up. I wanted to be part of it. Moreover, as I knew that I would have to earn my own living, this seemed an exciting way to do so.
As my father had left school at the age of thirteen, he was determined to make up for this and to see that I took advantage of every educational opportunity. We would both go to hear ‘Extension Lectures’ from the University of Nottingham about current and international affairs, which were given in Grantham regularly. After the talk would come a lively question time in which I and many others would take part: I remember, in particular, questions from a local RAF man, Wing-Commander Millington, who later captured Chelmsford for Common Wealth — a left-wing party of middle-class protest — from the Churchill coalition in a by-election towards the end of the war.
My parents took a close interest in my schooling. Homework always had to be completed — even if that meant doing it on Sunday evening. During the war, when the Camden girls were evacuated to Grantham and a shift system was used for teaching at our school, it was necessary to put in extra hours at the weekend which were religiously performed. My father, in particular, who was an all the more avid reader for being a self-taught scholar, would discuss what we read at school. On one occasion he found that I did not know Walt Whitman’s poetry; this was quickly remedied, and Whitman is still a favourite author of mine. I was also encouraged to read the classics — the Brontes, Jane Austen and, of course, Dickens: it was the latter’s A Tale of Two Cities, with its strong political flavour, that I liked best. My father also used to subscribe to the Hibbert Journal — a philosophical journal. But this, though I struggled, I found heavy going.
Beyond home, church and school lay the community which was Grantham itself. We were immensely proud of our town; we knew its history and traditions; we were glad to be part of its life. Grantham was established in Saxon times, though it was the Danes who made it an important regional centre. During the twelfth century the Great North Road was re-routed to run through the town, literally putting Grantham on the map. Communications were always the town’s lifeblood. In the eighteenth century the canal was cut to carry coke, coal and gravel into Grantham and corn, malt, flour and wool out of it. But the real expansion had come with the arrival of the railways in 1850.
Our town’s most imposing structure I have already mentioned — the spire of St Wulfram’s Church, which could be seen from all directions. But most characteristic and significant for us was the splendid Victorian Guildhall and, in front of it, the statue of Grantham’s most famous son, Sir Isaac Newton. It was from here, on St Peter’s Hill, that the Remembrance Day parades began to process en route to St Wulfram’s. I would watch from the windows of the Guildhall Ballroom as (preceded by the Salvation Army band and the band from Ruston and Hornsby’s locomotive works) the mayor, aldermen and councillors with robes and regalia, followed by Brownies, Cubs, Boys’ Brigade, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Freemasons, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, Working Men’s Clubs, trade unions, British Legion, soldiers, airmen, the Red Cross, the St John’s Ambulance and representatives of every organization which made up our rich civic life filed past. It was also on the green at St Peter’s Hill that every Boxing Day we gathered to watch the pink coats of the Belvoir Hunt hold their meet (followed by the traditional tipple) and cheered them as they set off.
1935 was a quite exceptional and memorable year for the town. We celebrated King George V’s Silver Jubilee along with Grantham’s Centenary as a borough. Lord Brownlow, whose family (the Custs) with the Manners family (the Dukes of Rutland) were the most distinguished aristocratic patrons of the town, became mayor. The town itself was heavily decorated with blue and gold waxed streamers — our local colours — across the main streets. Different streets vied to outdo one another in the show they put on. I recall that it was the street with some of the poorest families in the worst housing, Vere Court, which was most attractively turned out. Everyone made an effort. The brass bands played throughout the day, and Grantham’s own ‘Carnival Band’ — a rather daring innovation borrowed from the United States and called ‘The Grantham Gingerbreads’ — added to the gaiety of the proceedings. The schools took part in a great open-air programme and we marched in perfect formation under the watchful eye of the wife of the headmaster of the boys’ grammar school to form the letters ‘G-R-A-N-T-H-A-M’. And, appropriately enough, I was part of the ‘M’.
My father’s position as a councillor, Chairman of the Borough Finance Committee, then alderman[2] and finally in 1945–46 mayor meant that I heard a great deal about the town’s business and knew those involved in it. Politics was a matter of civic duty and party was of secondary importance. The Labour councillors we knew were respected and friendly and, whatever the battles in the council chamber or at election time, they came to our shop and there was no partisan bitterness. My father understood that politics has limits — an insight which is all too rare among politicians. His politics would perhaps be best described as ‘old-fashioned liberal’. Individual responsibility was his watchword and sound finance his passion. He was an admirer of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Like many other business people he had, as it were, been left behind by the Liberal Party’s acceptance of collectivism. He stood for the council as a rate-payer’s candidate. In those days, before comprehensive schools became an issue and before the general advance of Labour politics into local government, local council work was considered as properly non-partisan. But I never remember him as anything other than a staunch Conservative.
I still recall with great sorrow the day in 1952 when Labour, having won the council elections, voted my father out as an alderman. This was roundly condemned at the time for putting party above community. Nor can I forget the dignity with which he behaved. After the vote in the council chamber was taken, he rose to speak: ‘It is now almost nine years since I took up these robes in honour, and now I trust in honour they are laid down.’ And later, after receiving hundreds of messages from friends, allies and even old opponents, he issued a statement which said: ‘Although I have toppled over I have fallen on my feet. My own feeling is that I was content to be in and I am content to be out.’ Years later, when something not too dissimilar happened to me, and after my father was long dead, I tried to take as an example the way he left public life.
But this is to anticipate. Perhaps the main interest which my father and I shared while I was a girl was a thirst for knowledge about politics and public affairs. I suspect that we were better informed than many families. We read the Daily Telegraph every day, The Methodist Recorder, Picture Post and John O’London’s Weekly every week, and when we were small we took The Children’s Newspaper. Occasionally we read The Times.
And then came the day my father bought our first wireless — a Philips of the kind you sometimes now see in the less pretentious antique shops. I knew what he was planning and ran much of the way home from school in my excitement. I was not disappointed. It changed our lives. From then on it was not just Rotary, church and shop which provided the rhythm of our day: it was the radio news. And not just the news. During the war after the 9 o’clock news on Sundays there was Postscript, a short talk on a topical subject, often by J.B. Priestley, who had a unique gift of cloaking left-wing views as solid, down to earth, Northern homespun philosophy, and sometimes an American journalist called Quentin Reynolds who derisively referred to Hitler by one of his family names, ‘Mr Schicklgruber’. There was The Brains Trust, an hour-long discussion of current affairs by four intellectuals, of whom the most famous was Professor C.E.M. Joad, whose answer to any question always began ‘It all depends what you mean by…’. On Friday evenings there were commentaries by people like Norman Birkett in the series called Encounter. I loved the comedy ITMA with its still serviceable catchphrases and its cast of characters like the gloomy charlady ‘Mona Lott’ and her signature line ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.’
As for so many families, the unprecedented immediacy of radio broadcasts gave special poignancy to great events — particularly those of wartime. I recall sitting by our radio with my family at Christmas dinner and listening to the King’s broadcast in 1939. We knew how he struggled to overcome his speech impediment and we knew that the broadcast was live. I found myself thinking just how miserable he must have felt, not able to enjoy his own Christmas dinner, knowing that he would have to broadcast. I remember his slow voice reciting those famous lines:
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’[3]
I was almost fourteen by the time war broke out, and already old enough and informed enough to understand the background to it and to follow closely the great events of the next six years. My grasp of what was happening in the political world during the thirties was less sure. But certain things I did take in. The years of the Depression — the first but not the last economic catastrophe resulting from misguided monetary policy — had less effect on Grantham itself than on the surrounding agricultural communities, and of course much less than on Northern towns dependent on heavy industry. Most of the town’s factories kept going — the largest, Ruston and Hornsby, making locomotives and steam engines. We even attracted new investment, partly through my father’s efforts: Aveling-Barford built a factory to make steamrollers and tractors. Our family business was also secure: people always have to eat, and our shops were well run. The real distinction in the town was between those who drew salaries for what today would be called ‘white collar’ employment and those who did not, with the latter being in a far more precarious position as jobs became harder to get. On my way to school I would pass a long queue waiting at the Labour Exchange, seeking work or claiming the dole. We were lucky in that none of our closest friends was unemployed, but naturally we knew people who were. We also knew — and I have never forgotten — how neatly turned out the children of those unemployed families were. Their parents were determined to make the sacrifices that were necessary for them. The spirit of self-reliance and independence was very strong in even the poorest people of the East Midlands towns. It meant that they never dropped out of the community and, because others quietly gave what they could, the community remained together. Looking back, I realize just what a decent place Grantham was.
So I did not grow up with the sense of division and conflict between classes. Even in the Depression there were many things which bound us all together. The monarchy was certainly one. And my family like most others was immensely proud of the Empire. We felt that it had brought law, good administration and order to lands which would never otherwise have known them. I had a romantic fascination for out-of-the-way countries and continents and what benefits we British could bring to them. As a child, I heard with wonder a Methodist missionary describing his work in Central America with a tribe so primitive that they had never written down their language until he did it for them. Later, I seriously considered going into the Indian Civil Service, for to me the Indian Empire represented one of Britain’s greatest achievements. (I had no interest in being a civil servant in Britain.) But when I discussed it with my father he said, all too perceptively as it turned out, that by the time I was ready to join it the Indian Civil Service would probably not exist.
As for the international scene, everyone’s recollections of the thirties, not least those of a child, are heavily influenced by what came later. But I recall when I was very young my parents expressing unease about the weakness of the League of Nations and its failure to come to the aid of Abyssinia when Italy invaded it in 1935. We had a deep distrust of the dictators.
We did not know much about the ideology of communism and fascism at this time. But, unlike many conservative-minded people, my father was fierce in rejecting the argument, put forward by some supporters of Franco, that fascist regimes had to be backed as the only way to defeat communists. He believed that the free society was the better alternative to both. This too was a conviction I quickly made my own. Well before war was declared, we knew just what we thought of Hitler. On the cinema newsreels I would watch with distaste and incomprehension the rallies of strutting brownshirts, so different from the gentle self-regulation of our own civic life. We also read a good deal about the barbarities and absurdities of the Nazi regime.
But none of this meant, of course, that we viewed war with the dictators as anything other than an appalling prospect, which should be avoided if possible. In our attic there was a trunk full of magazines showing, among other things, the famous picture from the Great War of a line of British soldiers blinded by mustard gas walking to the dressing station, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front to guide him. Hoping for the best, we prepared for the worst. As early as September 1938 — the time of Munich — my mother and I went out to buy yards of blackout material. My father was heavily involved in organizing the town’s air raid precautions. As he would later say, ‘ARP’ stood for ‘Alf Roberts’ Purgatory’, because it was taking up so much time that he had none to spare for other things.
The most pervasive myth about the thirties is perhaps that it was the Right rather than the Left which most enthusiastically favoured appeasement. Not just from my own experience in a highly political right-wing family, but from my recollection of how Labour actually voted against conscription even after the Germans marched into Prague, I have never been prepared to swallow this. But in any case it is important to remember that the atmosphere of the time was so strongly pacifist that the practical political options were limited.
The scale of the problem was demonstrated in the general election of 1935 — the contest in which I cut my teeth politically, at the age of ten. It will already be clear that we were a highly political family. And for all the serious sense of duty which underlay it, politics was fun. I was too young to canvass for my father during council elections, but I was put to work folding the bright red election leaflets extolling the merits of the Conservative candidate, Sir Victor Warrender. The red came off on my sticky fingers and someone said, ‘There’s Lady Warrender’s lipstick.’ I had no doubt at all about the importance of seeing Sir Victor returned. On election day itself, I was charged with the responsible task of running back and forth between the Conservative committee room and the polling station (our school) with information about who had voted. Our candidate won, though with a much reduced majority, down from 16,000 to 6,000.
I did not grasp at the time the arguments about rearmament and the League of Nations, but this was a very tough election, fought in the teeth of opposition from the enthusiasts of the Peace Ballot and with the Abyssinian war in the background. Later, in my teens, I used to have fierce arguments with other Conservatives about whether Baldwin had culpably misled the electorate during the campaign, as was widely alleged, in not telling them the dangers the country faced. In fact, had the National Government not been returned at that election there is no possibility that rearmament would have happened faster, and it is very likely that Labour would have done less. Nor could the League have ever prevented a major war.
We had mixed feelings about the Munich Agreement of September 1938, as did many people who were opposed to appeasement. At the time, it was impossible not to be pulled in two directions. On the one hand, we knew by now a good deal about Hitler’s regime and probable intentions — something brought home to my family especially by the fact that Hitler had crushed Rotary in Germany, which my father always considered one of the greatest tributes Rotary could ever be paid. Dictators, we learned, could no more tolerate Burke’s ‘little platoons’ — the voluntary bodies which help make up civil society — than they could individual rights under the law. Dr Jauch, of German extraction and probably the town’s best doctor, received a lot of information from Germany which he passed on to my father, and he in turn discussed it all with me.
I knew just what I thought of Hitler. Near our house was a fish and chip shop where I was sent to buy our Friday evening meal. Fish and chip queues were always a good forum for debate. On one occasion the topic was Hitler. Someone suggested that at least he had given Germany some self-respect and made the trains run on time. I vigorously argued the opposite, to the astonishment and doubtless irritation of my elders. The woman who ran the shop laughed and said: ‘oh, she’s always debating.’
My family understood particularly clearly Hitler’s brutal treatment of the Jews. At school we were encouraged to have foreign penfriends. Mine was a French girl called Colette: alas, I did not keep up contact with her. But my sister, Muriel, had an Austrian Jewish penfriend called Edith. After the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria, Edith’s father, a banker, wrote to mine asking whether we could take his daughter, since he very clearly foresaw the way events were leading. We had neither the time — having to run the shops — nor the money to accept such a responsibility alone; but my father won the support of the Grantham Rotarians for the idea, and Edith came to stay with each of our families in turn until she went to live with relatives in South America. She was seventeen, tall, beautiful, well-dressed, evidently from a well-to-do family, and spoke good English. She told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: the Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.
We wanted to see Hitler’s wickedness ended, even by war if that proved necessary. From that point of view Munich was nothing to be proud of. We knew too that by the Munich Agreement Britain had complicity in the great wrong that had been done to Czechoslovakia. When fifty years later as Prime Minister I visited Czechoslovakia I addressed the Federal Assembly in Prague and told them: ‘We failed you in 1938 when a disastrous policy of appeasement allowed Hitler to extinguish your independence. Churchill was quick to repudiate the Munich Agreement, but we still remember it with shame.’ British foreign policy is at its worst when it is engaged in giving away other people’s territory.
But equally we all understood the lamentable state of unpreparedness in Britain and France to fight a major war, and during the Munich crisis war had seemed so close at one point that when the settlement was announced we were simply relieved not to have to fight. Also, unfortunately, some were taken in by the German propaganda and actually believed that Hitler was acting to defend the Sudeten Germans from Czech oppression. If we had gone to war at that point, moreover, we would not have been supported by all of the Dominions. It was the Germans’ subsequent dismemberment of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 that finally convinced almost everyone that appeasement had been a disaster and that war would soon be necessary to defeat Hitler’s ambitions. Even then, as I have pointed out, Labour voted against conscription the following month. There was strong anti-war feeling in Grantham too: many Methodists opposed the official recruiting campaign of May 1939, and right up to the outbreak of war and beyond pacifists were addressing meetings in the town.
In any case, the conflict was soon upon us. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. When Hitler refused to withdraw by 11 a.m. on Sunday 3 September in accordance with Britain’s ultimatum we were waiting by the radio, desperate for the news. It was the only Sunday in my youth when I can remember not attending church. Neville Chamberlain’s fateful words, relayed live from the Cabinet Room at No. 10, told us that we were at war.
It was natural at such times to ask oneself how we had come to such a pass. Each week my father would take two books out of the library, a ‘serious’ book for himself (and me) and a novel for my mother. As a result, I found myself reading books which girls of my age would not generally read. I soon knew what I liked — anything about politics and international affairs. I read, for instance, John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, which had first appeared in 1932. The contents of this fashionable communist analysis, which predicted that capitalism was shortly to be superseded by socialism, seemed to many of my generation exciting and new.
But both by instinct and upbringing I was always a ‘true blue’ Conservative. No matter how many left-wing books I read or left-wing commentaries I heard, I never doubted where my political loyalties lay. Such an admission is probably unfashionable. But though I had great friends in politics who suffered from attacks of doubt about where they stood and why, and though of course it would take many years before I came to understand the philosophical background to what I believed, I always knew my mind. In this I can see now that I was probably unusual. For the Left were setting the political agenda throughout the thirties and forties, even though the leadership of Churchill concealed it during the years of the war itself. This was evident from many of the books which were published at about this time. The Left had been highly successful in tarring the Right with appeasement, most notably in Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, the so-called ‘yellow books’. One in particular had enormous impact: Guilty Men, co-authored by Michael Foot, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ just after Dunkirk in 1940.
Robert Bruce Lockhart’s best-selling Guns or Butter? appeared in the autumn of 1938, after Munich. Lockhart’s travels through Europe led him to Austria (now Nazi-controlled after the Anschluss) and then to Germany itself at the height of Hitler’s triumph. There the editor of a German national newspaper is reported as telling him that ‘Germany wanted peace, but she wanted it on her own terms.’ The book ends with Lockhart, woken by ‘the tramp of two thousand feet in unison’, looking out of his window onto a misty dawn, where ‘Nazi Germany was already at work’.
A more original variation on the same theme was Douglas Reed’s Insanity Fair. This made a deep impression on me. Reed witnessed the persecution of the Jews which accompanied the advance of Nazi influence. He described the character and mentality — alternately perverted, unbalanced and calculating — of the Nazi leaders. He analysed and blisteringly denounced that policy of appeasement by Britain and France which paved the way for Hitler’s successes. Written on the eve of the Anschluss, it was powerfully prophetic.
Out of the Night by Jan Valtin — pen name for the German communist Richard Krebs — was lent to my father by our future MP Denis Kendall. It was such strong meat that my father forbade me to read it — but in vain. When he went out to meetings I would take it down from the shelf on which it was hidden and read its spine-chilling account of totalitarianism in action. It is, in truth, an unsuitable book for a girl of sixteen, full of scenes of sadistic violence whose authenticity makes them still more horrifying. The appalling treatment by the Nazis of their victims is undoubtedly the most powerful theme. But underlying it is another, just as significant. For it describes how the communists set out in cynical alliance with the Nazis to subvert the fragile democracy of Germany by violence in the late twenties and early thirties. That same alliance against democracy would, of course, be replicated in the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 to 1941 which destroyed Poland, the Baltic states and Finland and plunged the world into war. The book undoubtedly contributed to my growing belief that Nazism (national socialism) and communism (international socialism) were but two sides of the same coin.
A book which had a particular influence on me was the American Herbert Agar’s A Time for Greatness, which appeared in 1944. This was a strangely powerful analysis of how the West’s moral failure allowed the rise of Hitler and the war which had followed. It urged a return to Western liberal democratic values and — though I liked this less — a fair amount of left-wing social engineering. For me the important message of Agar’s book was that the fight against Hitler had a significance for civilization and human destiny which exceeded the clash of national interests or spheres of influence or access to resources or any of the other — doubtless important — stuff of power politics.
Agar also wrote of the need, as part of the moral regeneration which must flow from fighting the war, to solve what he called ‘the Negro problem’. I had never heard of this ‘problem’ at all. Although I had seen some coloured people on my visit to London, there were almost none living in Grantham. Friends of ours once invited two American servicemen — one black, one white — stationed in Grantham back to tea and had been astonished to detect tension and even hostility between them. We were equally taken aback when our friends told us about it afterwards. This sort of prejudice was simply outside our experience or imagination.
Like many other young girls in wartime, I read Barbara Cart-land’s Ronald Cartland, the life of her brother, a young, idealistic Conservative MP, who had fought appeasement all the way and who was killed at Dunkirk in 1940. In many ways her most romantic book, it was a striking testament to someone who had no doubt that the war was not only necessary but right, and whose thinking throughout his short life was ‘all of a piece’, something which I always admired. But the sense that the war had a moral significance which underlay the fear and suffering — or in our family’s case in Grantham the material dreariness and mild deprivation — which accompanied it, was perhaps most memorably conveyed by Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy. The author — a young pilot — portrays the struggle which had claimed the lives of so many of his friends, and which would claim his own less than a year later, as one which was also being fought out in the human heart. It was a struggle for a better life in the sense of simple decency.
A generation which, unlike Richard Hillary, survived the war felt this kind of desire to put things right with themselves, their country and the world. As I would come to learn when dealing with my older political colleagues, no one who fought came out of it quite the same person as went in. Less frequently understood, perhaps, is that war affected deeply, if inevitably less powerfully, people like me who while old enough to understand what was happening in the conflict were not themselves in the services. Those who grow up in wartime always turn out to be a serious-minded generation. But we all see these great calamities with different eyes, and so their impact upon us is different. It never seemed to me, for example, as it apparently did to many others, that the ‘lesson’ of wartime was that the state must take the foremost position in our national life and summon up a spirit of collective endeavour in peace as in war.
The ‘lessons’ I drew were quite different. The first was that the kind of life that the people of Grantham had lived before the war was a decent and wholesome one, and its values were shaped by the community rather than by the government. Second, since even a cultured, developed, Christian country like Germany had fallen under Hitler’s sway, civilization could never be taken for granted and had constantly to be nurtured, which meant that good people had to stand up for the things they believed in. Third, I drew the obvious political conclusion that it was appeasement of dictators which had led to the war, and that had grown out of wrong-headed but decent impulses, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. One can never do without straightforward common sense in matters great as well as small. And finally I have to admit that I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.
Our life in wartime Grantham — until I went up to Oxford in 1943 — must have been very similar to that of countless other families. There was always voluntary work to do of one kind or another in the Service canteens and elsewhere. Our thoughts were at the front; we devoured voraciously every item of available news; and we ourselves, though grateful for being more or less safe, knew that we were effectively sidelined. But we had our share of bombing. There were altogether twenty-one German air raids on the town, and seventy-eight people were killed. The town munitions factory — the British Manufacturing and Research Company (B.M.A.R.Co., or ‘British Marcs’ as we called it) — which came to the town in 1938, was an obvious target, as was the junction of the Great North Road and the Northern Railway Line — the latter within a few hundred yards of our house. My father was frequently out in the evenings on air raid duty. During air raids we would crawl under the table for shelter — we had no outside shelter for we had no garden — until the ‘all clear’ sounded. On one occasion, coming back from school with my friends, carrying our gas masks, we made a dive for the shelter of a large tree as someone called out that the aircraft overhead was German. After bombs fell on the town in January 1941 I asked my father if I could walk down to see the damage. He would not let me go. Twenty-two people died in that raid. We were also concerned for my sister Muriel, who was working day and night in the Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham: Birmingham was, of course, very badly bombed.
In fact, Grantham itself was playing a more dramatic role than I knew at the time. Bomber Command’s 5 Group was based in Grantham, and it was from a large house off Harrowby Road that much of the planning was done of the bombing raids on Germany; the officers’ mess was in Elm House in Elmer Street, which I used to pass walking to school. The Dambusters flew from near Grantham — my father met their commander, Squadron Leader Guy Gibson. I always felt that Bomber Harris — himself based in Grantham in the early part of the war — had not been sufficiently honoured. I would remember what Winston Churchill wrote to him at the end of the war:
For over two years Bomber Command alone carried the war to the heart of Germany, bringing hope to the peoples of Occupied Europe and to the enemy a foretaste of the mighty power which was rising against him…
All your operations were planned with great care and skill. They were executed in the face of desperate opposition and appalling hazards. They made a decisive contribution to Germany’s final defeat. The conduct of these operations demonstrated the fiery gallant spirit which animated your air crews and the high sense of duty of all ranks under your command. I believe that the massive achievements of Bomber Command will long be remembered as an example of duty nobly done.
In Grantham, at least, politics did not stand still in the war years. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 sharply altered the attitudes of the Left to the war. Pacifist voices suddenly became silent. Anglo-Soviet friendship groups sprouted. We attended, not without some unease, Anglo-Soviet evenings held at the town hall. It was the accounts of the suffering and bravery of the Russians at Stalingrad in 1942–43 which had most impact on us.
Although it can now be seen that 1941 — with Hitler’s attack on Russia in June and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor which brought America into the war in December — sowed the seeds of Germany’s ultimate defeat, the news was generally bad, and especially so in early 1942. This almost certainly contributed to the outcome of the by-election held in Grantham on 27 February 1942, after Victor Warrender was elevated to the Lords as Lord Bruntisfield, to become an Admiralty spokesman. Our town had the dubious distinction of being the first to reject a government candidate during the war. Denis Kendall stood as an Independent against our Conservative candidate, Sir Arthur Longmore. Kendall fought an effective populist campaign in which he skilfully used his role as General Manager of British Marcs to stress the theme of an all-out drive for production for the war effort and the need for ‘practical’ men to promote it. To our great surprise, he won by 367 votes. Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency. A closer analysis of the limited number of by-elections should have alerted us to the likelihood of the Socialist landslide which materialized in 1945.
Unusually, I took little part in the campaign because I was working very hard, preparing for examinations which I hoped would get me into Somerville College, Oxford. In particular, my evenings were spent cramming the Latin which was required for the entrance exam. Our school did not teach Latin. Fortunately, our new headmistress, Miss Gillies, herself a classicist, was able to arrange Latin lessons for me from a teacher at the boys’ grammar school, and to lend me her own books, including a textbook written by her father. The hard work helped keep my mind off the ever more dismal news about the war. In particular, there was a series of blows in the Far East — the loss of Malaya, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, the fall of Hong Kong and then Singapore, the retreat through Burma and the Japanese threat to Australia. One evening in the spring of 1942 when I had gone for a walk with my father I turned and asked him when — and how — it would all end. He replied very calmly: ‘We don’t know how, we don’t know when; but we have no doubt that we shall win.’
In spite of my efforts to get into Somerville, I failed to win the scholarship I wanted. It was not too surprising, for I was only seventeen, but it was something of a blow. I knew that if I was not able to go up in 1943 I would not be allowed to do more than a two-year ‘wartime degree’ before I was called up for national service at the age of twenty. But there was nothing I could do about it, and so at the end of August 1943 I entered the third-year sixth and became Joint Head of School. Then, suddenly, a telegram arrived offering me a place at Somerville in October. Someone else had dropped out. And so it was that I suddenly found myself faced with the exciting but daunting prospect of leaving home, almost for the first time, for a totally different world.
CHAPTER II Gowns-woman Oxford 1943 to 1947
Oxford does not set out to please. Freshmen arrive there for the Michaelmas term in the misty gloom of October. Monumental buildings impress initially by their size rather than their exquisite architecture. Everything is cold and strangely forbidding. Or so it seemed to me.
It had been at Somerville during bitterly cold mid-winter days that I had taken my Oxford entrance exams. But I had seen little of my future college and less still of the university as a whole before I arrived, rather homesick and apprehensive, to begin my first term. In fact, Somerville always takes people by surprise. Many incurious passers-by barely know it is there, for the kindest thing to say of its external structure is that it is unpretentious. But inside it opens up into a splendid green space onto which many rooms face. I was to live both my first and second years in college, moving from the new to the older buildings. In due course, a picture or two, a vase and finally an old armchair brought back from Grantham allowed me to feel that the rooms were in some sense mine. In my third and fourth years I shared digs with two friends in Walton Street.
Both Oxford and Somerville were strongly if indirectly affected by the war. For whatever reason, Oxford was not bombed, in spite of the presence of the motor works at Cowley which had become a centre for aircraft repair. But like everywhere else, both town and university were subject to the blackout (‘dim-out’ from 1944) and much affected by wartime stringencies. Stained-glass windows were boarded up. Large static water tanks — as in Somerville’s East Quad off the Woodstock Road — stood ready for use in case of fire. Most of our rations were allocated direct to the college which provided our unexciting fare in hall, though on rare occasions I would be asked out to dinner. There were a few coupons left over for jam and other things. One of the minor benefits to my health and figure of such austerities was that I ceased having sugar in my tea — though only many years later would I deny my ever-sweet tooth the pleasure of sugared coffee (not that there was over-much coffee for some time either). There were tight controls over the use of hot water. For example, there must be no more than five inches of water in the bath — a line was painted round at the right level — and of course I rigidly observed this, though coming from a family where the relationship between cleanliness and Godliness was no laughing matter. Not that we ever felt like complaining. After all, we were the lucky ones.
Moreover, though I was not the first member of my family to go to university — my cousin had gone to London — I was the first Roberts to go to Oxbridge and I knew that, however undemonstrative they might be, my parents were extremely proud of the fact. Before I went up to Oxford, I had a less clear idea of what the place would be like than did many of my contemporaries. But I regarded it as being quite simply the best, and if I was serious about getting on in life that is what I should always strive for. There was no point in lowering my sights. So, excellent as it was, particularly in the sciences, I was never tempted to opt for Nottingham, our ‘local’ university, even though I would have been able to live so much nearer my home, family and friends. Another aspect of Oxford which appealed to me then — and still does — is the collegiate system. Oxford is divided into colleges, though it also has some central university institutions such as the Bodleian Library. In my day, life centred on the college (where you ate and slept and received many of your tutorials) and around other institutions — church and societies — which had more or less a life of their own. As a scientist, my life probably revolved more around university institutions and facilities, such as the chemistry laboratories, than did that of students in other disciplines. Still, my experience of college life contributed to my later conviction that if you wish to bring the best out of people they should be encouraged to be part of smaller, human-scale communities rather than be left to drift on a sea of impersonality.
Perhaps the most obvious way in which wartime conditions affected the ‘feel’ of university life was the fact that so many of us were very young — only seventeen or just eighteen, and at that age an extra year can mean a great difference in outlook and maturity. Later, from 1944, the feel of Oxford changed again as older people, invalided out, started coming back from the services either to complete a shortened wartime degree or to begin a full degree course. They had been through so much more than we had. As Kipling wrote (in ‘The Scholars’) of young naval officers returning to Cambridge after the Great War to continue their studies:
Far have they steamed and much have they known, and most would they fain forget;
But now they are come to their joyous own with all the world in their debt.
By the time I left I found myself dealing with friends and colleagues who had seen much more of the world than I had. And I gained a great deal from the fact that Oxford at the end of the war was a place of such mixed views and experience.
I began by keeping myself to myself, for I felt shy and ill at ease in this quite new environment. I continued, as in Grantham, to take long walks on my own, around Christ Church Meadow, through the university parks and along the Cherwell or the Thames, enjoying my own company and thoughts. But I soon started to appreciate Oxford life. My first years there coincided with the end of the war; so it is perhaps not surprising that my pleasures were the slightly Nonconformist ones I had brought with me from Grantham. I was a member of a Methodist Study Group which gave and attended tea parties. My mother would send me cakes through the post and on a Saturday morning I would join the queue outside the ‘cake factory’ in north Oxford for an hour or so to buy the sustenance for tea that Sunday. I joined the Bach Choir, conducted by Sir Thomas Armstrong (by a nice coincidence Robert Armstrong’s father), whose repertoire was wider than its name suggested. I especially remember our performance of the St Matthew Passion in the Sheldonian Theatre, which Wren might have designed for the purpose. We also sang Prince Igor, Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande, and Hoist’s Hymn of Jesus. Sometimes I went to listen rather than to sing: I heard Kathleen Ferrier in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.
With the end of the war and the return of the servicemen, the pace of entertainment quickened. Eights Week was revived and I went down to the river to watch the races. It was at this time that I first went out to dances and even on occasion drank a little wine (I had previously only tasted sherry and did not like it; nor do I now). I smoked my first cigarettes. I did not like them much either, though I knew I would get the taste if I persisted. I decided not to, to save the money and buy The Times every day instead. I now went to my first commem ball, and like the girl in the song danced all night. I saw Chekhov and Shakespeare at the Playhouse and the New Theatre. (Christopher Fry’s first plays were being performed at that time.) And I saw a wonderful OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society) production which was performed in a college garden and featured Kenneth Tynan, Oxford’s latest dandy. I cannot remember the play, partly because it was always difficult to distinguish Ken Tynan on stage from Ken Tynan in everyday life.
I might have had a more glittering Oxford career, but I had little money to spare and would have been hard put to make ends meet if it had not been for a number of modest grants secured for me from the college at the instance of my ever-helpful tutor, the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin. I was also assisted by some educational trusts. I might have been able to supplement my income further from such sources if I had been prepared to give an undertaking to go into teaching. But I knew I had no such calling; and I did and do believe that good teachers need a vocation which most people just do not have. In fact, I did teach science for one vacation at a school in Grantham in the summer of 1944: this earned the money for that luxury in Grantham but near-necessity in Oxford — a bicycle. It was while I was teaching there that Paris was liberated. The headmaster called the school together, announced that Paris was free again and told us how the brave Resistance fighters had helped the Allies by rising up against the German occupiers. It was a thrilling moment. The war was evidently being won; I felt somehow less guilty for not being able to play a larger part; and I shared the joy of the British people that the French Resistance had restored French honour and pride. We may have had an exaggerated view in those days of the universality of resistance — we told each other stories of how the customers of a cafe would tap out ‘V for Victory’ in morse code on their glasses when a German soldier entered the cafe — but we had no doubt that every true Frenchman wanted to be free.
I threw myself into intensely hard work. In Dorothy Hodgkin the college was fortunate to have a brilliant scientist and a gifted teacher, working in the comparatively new field of X-ray crystallography. Mrs Hodgkin was a Fellow of the Royal Society and later made a decisive contribution towards discovering the structure of penicillin, the first antibiotic — work for which she won the Nobel Prize in 1964. (Penicillin itself had been discovered and given its first trials in the Radcliffe Infirmary, which stands just beside Somerville, two years before I went up to Oxford.) In my fourth and final year (1946–47) I worked with a refugee German scientist, Gerhard Schmidt, under Dorothy Hodgkin’s direction, on the simple protein Gramicidin B as the research project required to complete Part II of my chemistry course. Through the Cosmos Club and the Scientific Club I also came across other budding young scientists and heard many well-known scientists speak, including J.D. Bernal. His politics were very left wing, as indeed were those of many other scientists at that time. But they would never have dreamt of carrying their politics over into their professional relationships with their students.
Religion also figured large in my Oxford life. There are many tales of young people entering university and, partly through coming into contact with scepticism and partly for less wholesome reasons, losing their faith. I never felt in any danger of that. Methodism provided me with an anchor of stability and, of course, contacts and friends who looked at the world as I did. I usually attended the Wesley Memorial Church on Sundays. There was, as in Grantham, a warmth and a sober but cheerful social life which I found all the more valuable in my initially somewhat strange surroundings. The church had a very vigorous Students’ Fellowship. After Sunday Evening Service there was usually a large gathering over coffee in the minister’s house, where there would be stimulating discussion of religious and other matters. Occasionally I would go to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin to listen to a particularly interesting university sermon — though that church has about it a certain ‘official’ formality which makes it a somewhat cold place of worship. Sometimes I would go to the college chapel, especially when I knew that Miss Helen Darbishire, who was Principal and a distinguished scholar of Milton and Wordsworth when I first went up to Somerville, was preaching.
Generally speaking, though, I did not go to Anglican churches. But oddly enough — or perhaps not so oddly when one considers the great impact he had on so many of my generation — it was the religious writing of that High Anglican C.S. Lewis which had most impact upon my intellectual religious formation. The power of his broadcasts, sermons and essays came from a combination of simple language with theological depth. Who has ever portrayed more wittily and convincingly the way in which Evil works on our human weaknesses than he did in The Screwtape Letters? Who has ever made more accessible the profound concepts of Natural Law than he did in The Abolition of Man and in the opening passages of Mere Christianity? I remember most clearly the impact on me of Christian Behaviour (republished in Mere Christianity, but originally appearing as radio talks). This went to the heart of the appalling disparity between the way in which we Christians behave and the ideals we profess. One of C.S. Lewis’s messages was that the standards of Christianity are not just binding on the saints. As he put it:
Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when we drive; but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars.
Similarly, I was helped by what he wrote of the application of that sublime principle of Christian charity which seems to most of us so impossible of fulfilment. Lewis did not for a moment contest or diminish the sublimeness; but he very helpfully set out what charity is not.
…what [does] loving your neighbour as yourself [mean?] I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself? Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently ‘Love your neighbour’ does not mean ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive’… I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do… Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery… Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves — to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another be cured: in fact, to wish his good.
Such words had a special poignancy, of course, at this time.
The main contribution one can make as a student to one’s country in peace or wartime is to study hard and effectively, not to daydream about what else one might be doing. But we all also tried to do something more directly. For my part, I would serve one or two evenings a week at the Forces canteen in Carfax. British soldiers and American airmen from the nearby bases at Upper Heyford were among our main customers. It was hot, sticky and very hard on the feet. But the work was also good fun, with plenty of company and wisecracking humour.
Reports of the D-day landings in July 1944, though, brought both apprehension and anxiety. The deadly struggle on those exposed beaches, carried on by so many of about my own age, made us deeply uneasy. For perhaps the only time I wondered whether I was right to be at Oxford.
In fact we were now within a year of the end of the war in Europe. There were still the battle of the Bulge and the tragedy of Arnhem to come. But slowly the emphasis came to be on preparing for peace. And among the peacetime activities which began to take an increasing amount of my time was politics.
Almost as soon as I came up to Oxford I had joined the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), which was founded in the 1920s under the inspiration of a don at Christ Church — Keith Feiling, the historian of the Tory Party and later biographer of Neville Chamberlain. Although the national agreement to suspend party political electoral contests for the duration of the war had no direct implications for politics at the universities, in practice political life in Oxford was a good deal quieter than it had been in the 1930s. But, for all that, OUCA activities quickly became a focus for my life. In those days the Oxford Union, in which star speakers would come to debate issues of the highest importance as well as ones of unbelievable triviality, did not admit women to its membership, though I used sometimes to listen to debates. But I would never have excelled in the kind of brilliant, brittle repartee which the Union seemed to encourage. I preferred the more serious forensic style of our discussions in OUCA and of the real hustings. OUCA also provided a further network of acquaintance and often friendship. It was, indeed, an effective forum for matchmaking, as a number of my OUCA colleagues demonstrated.
Oxford politics was a nursery for talent. I made friends in university politics who, as in the novels of Anthony Powell, kept reappearing in my life as the years passed by. Much the closest was Edward Boyle who, though he moved easily in a sophisticated social and political world which I had only glimpsed, shared with me a serious interest in politics. At this time Edward, the wealthy and cultivated son of a Liberal MP, was himself a classical liberal whose views chimed in pretty well with my own provincial middle-class conservatism. Although we were later to diverge politically, we remained dear friends until his tragically early death from cancer.
William Rees-Mogg, whom I knew in my final year, was a distinguished editor of The Times from a very early age. I was never as close to William as I was to Edward, but one sensed that there was something formidable behind his somewhat formal exterior and that he was marked out for higher things.
Robin Day was a prominent Liberal. Like Edward he was a leading light in the Oxford Union, and we later met as lawyers in the same chambers. One sometimes wondered what career would be open to the brilliant wits of the Union, until Robin Day invented a new one by pioneering television interviewing — after which our paths and our swords crossed frequently.
Another star was Tony Benn, at that time still rattling his full complement of syllables as the Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn. From start to finish he and I have rarely agreed on anything, but he was always a courteous and effective debater, an English patriot, and as time has made socialism more and more a thing of the past, even a traditional figure. But perhaps we enjoy a sympathy based on our religious roots. When Tony became President of the Union I was invited to a celebration, attended by his father Viscount Stansgate, which, true to Tony’s Nonconformist principles, was teetotal.
Kenneth Harris was another leading debater, who along with Edward Boyle and Tony Benn spent several months touring the United States giving demonstration debates. He subsequently had a distinguished career in political journalism. We met again many times, notably when he wrote my biography.
As an officer in OUCA I was naturally taken up with the 1945 general election campaign. In Oxford I was busy campaigning for the city’s MP Quintín Hogg until term ended, when I returned to Grantham to work for Squadron Leader Worth in his attempt to dislodge the sitting Independent Member, Denis Kendall.
In retrospect, we should all have known what to expect. By some mysterious but inexorable law, wars always seem to advance state control and those who advocate it. My husband Denis’s view, which he explained to me after we were married, was that in the services people from totally different backgrounds mix in an unprecedented way and that the result is an acute twinge of social conscience and a demand for the state to step in and ameliorate social conditions. But, in any case, the Conservatives had done uniformly badly in the limited number of wartime electoral contests, and there was a general tendency for our share of the vote to fall. Nobody paid much attention to opinion polls then: but they too told the same story. As I have noted, the Left were extremely effective after Dunkirk in portraying the Conservatives as exclusively responsible for appeasement, and managed, by skilful sleight of hand, to distance Churchill from the party he led. Nor did people remember that Labour had opposed even the limited rearmament carried out by Baldwin and Chamberlain.
But there were also other influences at work. The command economy required in wartime conditions had habituated many people to an essentially socialist mentality. Within the Armed Forces it was common knowledge that left-wing intellectuals had exerted a powerful influence through the Army Education Corps, which as Nigel Birch observed was ‘the only regiment with a general election among its battle honours’. At home, broadcasters like J.B. Priestley gave a comfortable yet idealistic gloss to social progress in a left-wing direction. It is also true that Conservatives, with Churchill in the lead, were so preoccupied with the urgent imperatives of war that much domestic policy, and in particular the drawing-up of the agenda for peace, fell largely to the socialists in the Coalition Government. Churchill himself would have liked to continue the National Government at least until Japan had been beaten and, in the light of the fast-growing threat from the Soviet Union, perhaps beyond then. But the Labour Party had other thoughts and understandably wished to come into its own collectivist inheritance.
In 1945, therefore, we Conservatives found ourselves confronting two serious and, as it turned out, insuperable problems. First, the Labour Party had us fighting on their ground and were always able to outbid us. Churchill had been talking about post-war ‘reconstruction’ for some two years, and as part of that programme Rab Butler’s Education Act was on the Statute Book. Further, our manifesto committed us to the so-called ‘full employment’ policy of the 1944 Employment White Paper, a massive house-building programme, most of the proposals for National Insurance benefits made by the great Liberal social reformer Lord Beveridge and a comprehensive National Health Service. Moreover, we were not able effectively to take the credit (so far as this was in any case appropriate to the Conservative Party) for victory, let alone to castigate Labour for its irresponsibility and extremism, because Attlee and his colleagues had worked cheek by jowl with the Conservatives in government since 1940. In any event, the war effort had involved the whole population.
I vividly remember sitting in the student common room in Somerville listening to Churchill’s famous (or notorious) election broadcast to the effect that socialism would require ‘some sort of Gestapo’ to enforce it, and thinking, ‘He’s gone too far.’ However logically unassailable the connection between socialism and coercion was, in our present circumstances the line would not be credible. I knew from political argument on similar lines at an election meeting in Oxford what the riposte would be: ‘Who’s run the country when Mr Churchill’s been away? Mr Attlee.’ And such, I found, was the reaction now.
Back in Grantham, I was one of the ‘warm-up’ speakers for the Conservative candidate at village meetings. In those days, many more people turned out to public meetings than today, and they expected their money’s worth. I would frequently be speaking at half a dozen meetings an evening. Looking back at the reports in the local newspapers of what I said at the time, there is little with which I would disagree now. Germany must be disarmed and brought to justice. There must be co-operation with America and (somewhat less realistically) with the Soviet Union. The British Empire, the most important community of peoples that the world had ever known, must never be dismembered. (Perhaps not very realistic either — but my view of Britain’s imperial future was not uncommon in the aftermath of victory.) The main argument I advanced for voting Conservative was that by doing so we would keep Winston Churchill in charge of our foreign policy. And indeed perhaps if Churchill had been able to see through the July 1945 Potsdam Conference the post-war world might have looked at least a little different.
Like many other members of OUCA, I had received lessons in public speaking from Conservative Central Office’s Mrs Stella Gatehouse. Her emphasis was on simplicity and clarity of expression and as little jargon as possible. In fact, at election meetings, when you never knew how long you would have to speak before the candidate arrived, a touch more long-windedness would have been very useful. Most valuable of all for me personally, however, was the experience of having to think on my feet when answering questions from a good-humoured but critical audience. I recall a point made by an elderly man at one such meeting that had a lasting effect on my views about welfare: ‘Just because I’ve saved a little bit of money of my own, “Assistance” won’t help me. If I’d spent everything, they would.’ It was an early warning of the hard choices that the new Welfare State would shortly place before politicians.
Three weeks after polling day, by which time the overseas and service votes had been returned, I went to the election count at Sleaford. As we waited for the Grantham result, news trickled in of what was happening elsewhere. It was bad, and it became worse — a Labour landslide with Tory Cabinet ministers falling one after the other. Then our own candidate lost too. I was shocked and upset. I returned to Grantham to see more results coming through on the screen at the Picture House cinema. The prospect did not improve. I simply could not understand how the electorate could do this to Churchill. On my way back home I met a friend, someone who I had always thought was a staunch Conservative, and said how shocked I was by the terrible news. He was not shocked at all. In fact, he said he thought the news was rather good. Incomprehension deepened. At the time I felt that the British electorate’s treatment of the man who more than anyone else secured their liberty was shameful. But was it not Edmund Burke who said: ‘A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world’? In retrospect, the election of the 1945–51 Labour Government seems the logical fulfilment of the collectivist spirit that came to dominate wartime Britain. It was to be about thirty-five years before this collectivism would run its course — shaping and distorting British society in the process, before it collapsed in 1979’s Winter of Discontent.
At the time, it was clear to everyone that fundamental reassessment of Conservative principles and policies was required. We felt this as much in Oxford as anywhere else. It lay behind the preparation of a report of the OUCA Policy Sub-Committee which I co-authored in Michaelmas term 1945 with Michael Kinchin-Smith and Stanley Moss. The report contained no more profound insights than any other Tory undergraduate paper. And its two themes we have heard many times since — more policy research and better presentation.
There may have been some merit in this recommendation. Perhaps the main problem as regards what we would now call the ‘image’ of the Conservative Party was that we seemed to have lost our way and, to the extent that our policies did have coherence, they seemed to be devised for the wealthy rather than for ordinary people. As our OUCA paper put it: ‘Conservative policy has come to mean in the eyes of the public little more than a series of administrative solutions to particular problems, correlated in certain fields by a few unreasoning prejudices and the selfish interests of the moneyed classes.’ The accusation was, of course, unfair. If the Conservatives had won in 1945 we would still have had a Welfare State — doubtless with less immediate public expenditure and certainly with greater scope for private and voluntary initiative. But the idea that Conservatism was simply that — conserving the interests of the status quo against change and reform — was immensely powerful at this time.
In March 1946 I became Treasurer of OUCA and later that month went as one of the Oxford representatives to the Federation of University Conservative and Unionist Associations (FUCUA) Conference at the Waldorf Hotel in London. It was my first such conference and I enjoyed it hugely. When I spoke it was in support of more involvement by people from working-class backgrounds in university Conservative politics. I felt that we had to get away from the perception of Conservatism as both stuffy and frivolous. It was not so much that I wanted a classless society, as the socialists (somewhat disingenuously) said they did, but rather that I could not see that class was important. Everyone had something unique to offer in life and their responsibility was to develop those gifts — and heroes come from all backgrounds. As I put it to the FUCUA Conference: ‘We have heard all about this being the age of the common man — but do not forget the need for the uncommon man.’ Or, I suppose I might have added, ‘woman’.
In October 1946 I was elected President of OUCA — the third woman to hold the position. I had done my final exams that summer and was now beginning the research project which constituted the fourth and last year of the Chemistry degree, so I had a little more time to spend on politics. For example, I attended my first Conservative Party Conference, held that year in Blackpool. I was immediately entranced. So often in Grantham and in Oxford it had felt unusual to be a Conservative. Now suddenly I was with hundreds of other people who believed as I did and who shared my insatiable appetite for talking politics.
The Conference had a most extraordinary atmosphere. From my humble position as a ‘representative’, I had the sense that the Party leadership — with the notable exception of the Party Leader — had arrived at Blackpool prepared to reconcile itself and Conservatism to the permanence of socialism in Britain. A perceptive observer of the 1946 Conference, Bertrand de Jouvenal, wrote of our Front Bench: ‘These great, intelligent thoroughbreds, trained from their earliest years to prudent administration and courteous debate, were in their hearts not far from accepting as definitive their electoral defeat in 1945.’[4] This was decidedly not what the rank and file wanted to hear. Indeed, there was open dissent from the floor. A request on the first day for a general debate on questions of philosophy and policy was refused by the chairman. There was a lukewarm reaction to the consensus approach of speeches from the platform, though these became notably tougher the longer the Conference went on, as Shadow ministers perceived our discontent. My instincts were with the rank and file, though I had not yet fully digested the strong intellectual case against collectivism, as I was to do in the next few years.
Back in Oxford I had organized a very full programme of speakers. Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home) urged support for Ernest Bevin’s foreign policy — support we readily gave. Bob Boothby — a wonderful speaker, with great style — declaimed against the ‘revolutionary totalitarian absolutism of Moscow’. David Maxwell-Fyfe, whose daughter Pamela was at Oxford at the time, attacked nationalization and urged a property-owning democracy. Peter Thorneycroft put forward what seemed the very advanced views of the ‘Tory Reform’ wing in a debate with the University Labour Club at the Union. Lady (Mimi) Davidson told us how it felt to be the only Conservative woman Member of the House of Commons. Anthony Eden charmed and impressed us all over sherry. Each term we had a lively debate with the other political clubs at the Oxford Union, particularly the Labour Club, which at the time was very left wing and included some famous names like Anthony Crosland — who even in those days could condescend to a Duchess — and Tony Benn. Generally, however, OUCA met in the Taylorian Institute on a Friday evening, entertaining the speaker to dinner beforehand at the Randolph Hotel. So it was there that I first rubbed shoulders with the great figures of the Tory Party — and, in fact, I kept in touch with many of them over the years.
Such activity, though, was insignificant as regards the overall position of the Conservative Party nationally. Looking back, one can see that there were two alternative strategies for the Party to have followed. Either it could have accommodated the collectivism of the times, though seeking to lessen its impact where possible, trying to slow down the leftward march through our institutions and to retain some scope for individual choice and free enterprise. Or it could have fought collectivism root and branch, seeking to persuade national opinion that 1945 represented a wrong turning from the country’s destined path. In fact, it sought to do both. Voices were raised in favour of a radical onslaught against collectivism, but in opposition the predominant view was that pragmatism represented the best path back to government.
The Party document which came nearest to embodying the pragmatic approach was The Industrial Charter, which appeared in May 1947. In a sense, it was no new departure: indeed, continuity and consensus were its underlying themes. Just as the wartime 1944 Employment Policy White Paper represented a compromise with Keynesianism — combining the emphasis on counter-cyclical public spending to sustain demand and employment with more orthodox observations about efficiency, competitiveness and mobility — so The Industrial Charter represented a compromise between corporatism and free enterprise. The Industrial Charter defended economic planning, industrial ‘partnership’ and workers’ ‘consultation’; but it continued to emphasize the need for fewer controls, fewer civil servants and modestly lower taxation. And this tension continued in the Conservative Party throughout the 1950s and sixties. The Industrial Charter gave us all something to say, and it kept the Party united. But such documents hardly made the pulse beat faster. Nor were they important in returning the Party to power. It was, in fact, the economic failures of the Labour Government — in particular the February 1947 fuel crisis and the devaluation of sterling in 1949 — rather than Conservative Party initiatives which turned the political tide in our favour.
Documents like The Industrial Charter gingerly avoided the real battleground on which socialism ultimately had to be defeated. In the end, Churchill was right. Whether socialism needed a ‘Gestapo’ as it did in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or just those banal and bureaucratic instruments of coercion, confiscatory taxation, nationalization and oppressive regulation employed in the West, ultimately depended only on the degree of socialism desired. In diminishing economic freedom, the socialists had embarked on a course which, if pursued to its ultimate destination, would mean the extinction of all freedom. I had no doubt myself about the truth of this proposition. But for some Tories it was always a difficult argument to take. The traditional economic liberalism which constituted so important a part of my political make-up — and which Edmund Burke himself embraced — was often alien and uncongenial to Conservatives from a more elevated social background. It was, after all, none other than Harold Macmillan who in 1938 proposed in his influential book The Middle Way to extend state control and planning over a wide range of production and services. Other Conservatives were inhospitable to theory of any kind. They took J.S. Mill’s appellation ‘the stupid party’ as a compliment. Not surprisingly, therefore, the most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state which I read at this time, and to which I have returned so often since, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, is dedicated famously ‘To the socialists of all parties’.
I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at this time. It was only in the mid-1970s, when Hayek’s works were right at the top of the reading list given me by Keith Joseph, that I really came to grips with the ideas he put forward. Only then did I consider his arguments from the point of view of the kind of state Conservatives find congenial — a limited government under a rule of law — rather than from the point of view of the kind of state we must avoid — a socialist state where bureaucrats rule by discretion. At this stage it was the (to my mind) unanswerable criticisms of socialism in The Road to Serfdom which had an impact. Hayek saw that Nazism — national socialism — had its roots in nineteenth-century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning further into other sectors. He alerted us to the profound, indeed revolutionary, implications of state planning for Western civilization as it had grown up over the centuries.
Nor did Hayek mince his words about the monopolistic tendencies of the planned society which professional groups and trade unions would inevitably seek to exploit. Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion from such benefits of those outside the particular privileged group — and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. Eventually, in such a situation everyone will lose. Perhaps because he did not come from a British Conservative background and did not in fact ever consider himself a Conservative at all, Hayek had none of the inhibitions which characterized the agonized social conscience of the English upper classes when it came to speaking bluntly about such things.
Hayek was unusual and unpopular, but he was not quite alone in root and branch criticism of socialism. I also read at this time and later the polemical journalist Colm Brogan’s writings. Where Hayek deployed philosophy, Brogan relied on withering irony and mordant wit. In 1943 in Who Are ‘The People’? Brogan wrote the unthinkable — namely that it was precisely the ‘progressive’ Left which had created the circumstances for Hitler’s rise to power and been most thoroughly duped by him. The progressives did not by and large come from, and had little real claim to represent, the ‘working class’. They applied the most blatant and culpable double standards when it came to the Soviet Union. The real interest which they represented was that of a burgeoning bureaucracy determined to exploit every opportunity to increase its numbers and enlarge its power. In Our New Masters, which appeared in 1947, Brogan widened his attack on socialism. He refused to see the 1945 election result as anything other than a collective loss of common sense.
[The people] have been deceived, most certainly, but they wanted to be deceived… they have voted against that modest expectation in life which is all that a sober public man can ever strive for. They have voted to eat their cake and have it, to save it for a rainy day and to give it away. They have voted for high wages and low production and a world of plenty. They have voted like the courtiers of King Canute who planted his seat before the encroaching waves and commanded them to retire by authority of the royal and unimpeachable will. The people are able to fill the seat with the sovereign of their own choosing. Nobody denies their right. But the tide keeps coming in.
Brogan therefore saw the disillusionment with Labour, which was already manifest at the time he wrote, as being the socialists’ inevitable nemesis for raising so wildly expectations which no one — let alone they with the wrong policy prescriptions — could fulfil. As Brogan said in a classic attack: ‘Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness, grass never grows again.’
But Brogan also saw socialism as a force for disorder and disintegration, a kind of poison threatening to corrupt the whole body politic, and the Labour Party as ‘a feeble and querulous thing, equally unfit to govern because of the intemperance of its mind and the childish unreality of its view of life’. They were sentiments which many of us felt, but which it generally seemed imprudent to express with quite such vigour.
The tension between these two possible approaches to resisting collectivism — gradualist and radical — would be played out throughout my time in active Conservative politics. But the specific issues which meant most to me in these early post-war years concerned foreign rather than domestic affairs.
I was in Blackpool visiting my sister (who had gone there from the Birmingham Orthopaedic Hospital) when I learned from the radio news on that fateful 6 August 1945 that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. It had been known for some time that we were on the eve of a breakthrough in the technology of weapons of mass destruction. My own academic study and the fascination exerted on me by issues relating to the practical application of science probably meant that I was better informed than most about the developments lying behind the manufacture of the atomic bomb. The following year I was able to read (and largely understand) the very full account contained in Atomic Energy for Military Purposes published by the United States. Yet — cliché as it may be — I was immediately aware on hearing the preliminary reports of Hiroshima that with the advent of the A-bomb ‘somehow the world had changed’. Or as Churchill himself would put it in his majestic memoirs The Second World War: ‘Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.’
The full scientific, strategic and political implications of the nuclear weapon would take some years to assess; moreover, like the science involved, they would continue to change and develop. But the direct human and environmental consequences of the use of atomic weapons were more quickly grasped. In the winter of 1946 I read the American journalist John Hersey’s report on Hiroshima, first submitted to the New Yorker and subsequently published as a Penguin Special. Oddly enough, even more affecting than the accounts of the hideous injuries, the fire, the fall-out and the radiation sickness was the bitter-sweet image of weeds and wild flowers sprouting through the ashes — their growth unnaturally stimulated by radiation from the bomb.
Yet neither on that first evening reflecting on the matter in the train home from Blackpool, nor later when I read accounts and saw the pictures of the overwhelming devastation, did I have any doubt about the rightness of the decision to use the bomb. I considered it justified primarily because it would avoid the losses inevitable if Allied forces were to take by assault the main islands of Japan. The Japanese still had 2½ million men under arms. We had already seen the fanatical resistance which they had put up during the Battle of Okinawa. Only the scale of the Allies’ technological military superiority, demonstrated first at Hiroshima and then at Nagasaki, could persuade the Japanese leadership that resistance was hopeless. And so one week after Hiroshima, and after a second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered.
Britain had, of course, been closely involved in the development of the bomb, though because of the breakdown of Anglo-American nuclear co-operation after the war it was not till 1952 that we ourselves were able to explode one. Churchill and Truman, as we now know, were duped by Stalin at Potsdam when the American President ‘broke the news’ of the bomb to the Soviet leader, who knew about it already and promptly returned to Moscow to urge his own scientists to speed up their atomic programme. But the fact remains, as I used to remind the Soviets when I became Prime Minister, that the most persuasive proof of the essential benevolence of the United States was that in those few crucial years when it alone possessed the military means to enforce its will upon the world, it refrained from doing so.
If the atomic bomb raised one set of questions about Britain’s role in the post-war world, the situation in India raised another. The subject retained its fascination for me. I knew that Churchill, for whom my admiration by now knew no bounds, had fought ferociously against the moves to appease nationalist opinion in India, which had been implemented in the Government of India Act of 1935. The situation in India had deteriorated sharply in the war years and it seemed highly unlikely that even the earlier prospect of Dominion status would seriously lessen the pressure for independence. This was, moreover, against the background, which we did not yet all fully understand, of a much less significant world role for Britain after the war. The two material circumstances which had allowed us to fight Hitler all but alone — the existence of huge accumulated overseas investments and the most successful and extensive empire the world had seen — had been lost or greatly diminished as the price of victory in that great struggle.
For all that, people of my age — even those committed to the links with Empire developing into a Commonwealth — took a more positive view of what was happening in India than did many of our elders. I myself read at about this time two books which emphasized the role of Britain, not just as guarantor of sound administration and humane justice in our Imperial territories, but rather as a kind of midwife for their birth, growth and maturity as responsible members of the international community. Leo Amery’s Thoughts on the Constitution (lectures delivered at Oxford) emphasized the crucial need to ensure Imperial ‘unity of thought and purpose’ through free co-operation: such thinking also, for a time at least, attracted me towards ideas of Imperial Preference as a means of sustaining our community of interest. I also read Lord Elton’s Imperial Commonwealth which saw our evolving Empire as an example of unity and co-operation:
To have spread organized political freedom across the world; three times to have saved Europe, and twice the world as well, from a tyrant; to have ended slavery, and taught other nations to end it too; to have been so reluctant to acquire territory, and so often to have acquired it in the interests of others; to have learned wisdom from adversity and to have held a giant’s power without using it like a giant… all this has richly earned the Empire survival hitherto, and has given it abundant titles to the gratitude of mankind… And it may well be that the island from which the world learned the art of freedom will yet teach it the art of unity. It may well be that her present sufferings have finally fitted Britain for that role.
In retrospect, much of this was self-deception. We could not both give independence to the colonies and continue to determine their future afterwards. At that time, however, such ideas seemed to promise a continued world role for Britain, without either the burden or the guilt of empire.
Between the spring 1946 mission of Stafford Cripps to India to seek agreement among Indians on the future of their country and the summer of 1947, when the Government finally endorsed a settlement based on partition, I followed events closely. I felt that there was much to criticize in the means, but that the ends of our policy were right and in the direction of progress for Britain, India and the wider Commonwealth. But the Labour Government and Mountbatten as Viceroy undoubtedly tried to move too fast. In a tragic sense the civil war which now broke out, in which a million people died, showed the degree to which British rule had been the guarantee of Indian unity and peace.
These thoughts, however, seemed out of place in a post-war world in which the new global institutions were the UN, the IMF and the World Bank, and in which the European colonial empires had a very limited future. Indeed, we have still not achieved a full and successful transition from a stable colonial to a stable post-colonial world. As crises like Somalia demonstrate, there are parts of Africa and Asia where order cannot be provided locally, but for which the international institutions have no remedy — certainly no remedy as effective as colonial rule was a century ago.
But the greatest transformation affecting Britain at the time — and the one which would have a great impact on my political life — was the change of the Soviet Union from comrade in arms to deadly enemy. It is important to stress how little understanding most people in the West had at this time of conditions within the USSR. True, many of the facts were available if anyone had cared to investigate and report them. But by and large and for a variety of reasons they did not. As I have described, I was never tempted to sympathize with communism. But my opposition to it was at this time more visceral than intellectual. It was much later that I thought and read more deeply about the communist system and saw precisely where its weaknesses and wickednesses lay. And it is interesting to note that when Hayek came to write a new preface to The Road to Serfdom in 1976 he too felt that he had ‘under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia’.
So too, by and large, did the newspapers. For example, the Daily Telegraph gave little prominence to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, and even after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in August 1939 oddly interpreted the Russian invasion of eastern Poland as a sign of ‘tension’ with Hitler. In wartime, Anglo-Soviet friendship societies bloomed. Smiling, soft-hearted Uncle Joe, the creation as much of Western wishful thinking as of Soviet propaganda, concealed the reality of the paranoid tyrant. Douglas Hyde’s I Believed (which appeared in 1950, and which I read) reveals the extent to which British communists infiltrated, manipulated and distorted so as subtly to shape political debate. Hyde’s account shows too how the war of disinformation in Britain was as ruthlessly and directly controlled from Moscow as were the communist movements which worked in Eastern Europe alongside the advancing Red Army to impose Stalin’s grip on countries whose liberties we had fought the war against Hitler to defend.
A strong case can be made to mitigate Churchill’s and Britain’s role in the abandonment of Central and Eastern Europe. The famous half sheet of paper on which Churchill scribbled his proposals for shared spheres of influence in the Balkans when he met Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 does indeed have a whiff of cynical realpolitik about it, as Churchill himself accepted when he described it as a ‘naughty document’. It clearly flies in the face of the proclaimed principles of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. But it recognized the reality that the Red Army had occupied a large part of Eastern Europe — and it may have helped to preserve Greek independence. Churchill at least saw, as the Americans did not, that the precipitate withdrawal of our troops in the face of the Red Army would leave the central zone of Germany in Soviet hands and effectively remove any chance at all of our being able to influence the fate of Eastern Europe.
That said, there is a difference between recognizing reality and legitimizing it. For legitimacy tends to set injustice in concrete. So the Conservatives who abstained or voted against the Government on the issue of the Yalta Agreement of February 1945 — among them Alec Douglas-Home — were right. My own unease was transformed into opposition on hearing a powerful speech by Lord De L’Isle and Dudley to OUCA in the Taylorian. It would certainly have been difficult, and perhaps impossible, to force the Soviets to respect democracy and the right of national self-determination in the countries which they now occupied. It was understandable that weary and wounded American and British forces wanted to put the horrors of war behind them and not to risk some new conflict with their former ally. But to set a seal of approval on agreements which we knew in our hearts would not be honoured — let alone to try to force the exiled non-communist government of Poland to accept them — was wrong.
Yalta made me begin to think hard about the military aspect of the communist threat. Little by little, I was also piecing together in my own mind other features of the reality of communism. For example, I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon with its poignant account of a communist show trial. Unlike Valtin’s description of Gestapo brutality, Koestler’s book allowed me for the first time to get inside, as it were, the mentality of the communist. Even more subtly, it showed that through the eyes of the communist himself the communist system makes no sense. Koestler’s character, Rubashov, reflects:
The Party denied the free will of the individual — and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives — and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil — and at the same time it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced — and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.
Years later, when as Leader of the Opposition I met Koestler, I said how powerful I had found his book. I asked him how he had been able to imagine Rubashov and his tormentors. He told me no imagination was required. They were real.
As with the whole question of the atomic bomb, so with the (alleged) theoretical basis of Marxism: the fact that I was a scientist gave me a somewhat different insight into some of the arguments. It was in fact after I left university that I read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper, whose analysis in many ways complemented that of Hayek, approached Marxism from the point of view of the philosopher of the natural sciences. This meant that he was ideally equipped to expose the fraudulent claim of Marxists to have discovered immutable laws of history, social development or ‘progress’ — laws which were comparable to the laws of natural science. It was not just that the ‘inevitable’ course of events which Marx had prophesied had not occurred and showed no signs of occurring. Marx and Marxists had not even understood the scientific method, let alone practised it in their analysis. Unlike the Marxists — whether historians, economists or social scientists — who tried to ‘prove’ their theories by accumulating more and more facts to sustain them, ‘the method of science is rather to look out for facts which may refute the theory… and the fact that all tests of the theory are attempted falsifications of predictions derived with its help furnishes the clue to scientific method’. The political consequences of this basic error — perhaps more properly described as basic fraud — were summed up by Popper in the dedication of his later book The Poverty of Historicism: ‘In memory of the countless men, women and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.’
With such a background of reading, it is therefore easy to imagine how I reacted to Churchill’s speech of 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri. It is, of course, rightly famous for its powerful warning that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’, and that in these Russian-dominated states ‘police governments’ were prevailing. But no less significant in my eyes was Churchill’s evocation of the special relationship between Britain and the United States, and of the idealistic ‘message of the British and American peoples to mankind’ which lay behind it. The ideas of liberty found their fullest development in the political traditions and institutions of our two countries. The speech is now rightly seen as extraordinarily prescient. But at the time it was bitterly criticized as warmongering hyperbole by commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. It would not be long, however, before their tone started to change, as Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe and Greece became unmistakably clear.
By the time I left Oxford with a second-class degree in Chemistry under my belt, I knew a great deal more about the world and particularly about the world of politics. My character had not changed; nor had my beliefs. But I had a clearer idea of where I stood in relation to other people, their ambitions and opinions. I had, in short, grown up. And, by that mysterious process which leads people to every kind of prominent or obscure vocation, I had discovered what I really wanted to do with my life.
Shortly before my university days came to an end I went back to Corby Glen, a village some ten miles from Grantham, to a dance. Afterwards a few of us gathered for coffee and a sandwich in the kitchen of the house where I was staying. Not unusually, I was talking about politics. Something I said, or perhaps the way I said it, prompted one of the men to remark: ‘What you really want to do is to be an MP, isn’t it?’ Almost without thinking I said: ‘Yes: that really is what I want to do.’ I had never said it before — not even to myself. When I went to bed that night I found that I had a lot on my mind.
CHAPTER III
House Bound
Marriage, Family, Law and Politics 1947–1959
MY POLITICAL APPRENTICESHIP
If going up to Oxford is one sort of shock, coming down is quite another. I had made many like-minded friends at Oxford, I had enjoyed my adventures in chemistry and I was passionately interested in university politics. It was a wrench to leave all that behind.
The newly created Oxford University Appointments Committee, which helped new graduates to find suitable jobs, arranged several interviews for me, including one at a Northern ICI plant, I think at Billingham. We hopefuls were interviewed by several managers whose written comments were passed on to the general manager, who gave us our final interview. The remarks on me were lying on the table at the interview, and I could not resist using my faculty for reading upside down. They were both encouraging and discouraging; one manager had written: ‘This young woman has much too strong a personality to work here.’ In fact, I had three or four interviews with other companies and, though I was unsuccessful, I enjoyed them all. Not only was I given entry to a new world of industry, but the interviewers in those days were invariably courteous and interested in one’s own hopes and ambitions. Eventually I was taken on by BX Plastics at Manningtree just outside Colchester to work in their research and development section. BX produced a full range of plastics both for industrial use and consumer use, including for films.
Very few people greatly enjoy the early stages of a new job, and in this I was no exception. It had been understood when we originally discussed the position that it would involve my being in effect Personal Assistant to the Research and Development Director. I had been looking forward to this because I thought it would allow me to get to know more of how the company as a whole operated and also to use the talents I had, over and above my knowledge of chemistry. But on my arrival it was decided that there was not enough to do in that capacity and so I found myself donning my white coat again and immersing myself in the wonderful world of plastics. The Research and Development Section had only just been created as a separate unit and its teething troubles compounded mine. But by the time Christmas 1947 was approaching I had made one or two friends and things became easier. My supervisor helped me along. The Section moved into a separate and rather pleasant house in nearby Lawford. Like many others at the company, I lived in Colchester — a town which I increasingly came to like and where I had found comfortable lodgings. A bus took us all out to Lawford every day.
And, as always with me, there was politics. I immediately joined the Conservative Association and threw myself into the usual round of Party activities. In particular, I thoroughly enjoyed what was called the “39–’45’ discussion group, where Conservatives of the war generation met to exchange views and argue about the political topics of the day. I also kept in touch, in so far as I could, with friends like Edward Boyle, who was later adopted for a Birmingham seat in the 1950 election. It was as a representative of the Oxford University Graduate Conservative Association (OUGCA) that I went to the Llandudno Conservative Party Conference in October 1948.
It had originally been intended that I should speak at the Conference, seconding an OUGCA motion deploring the abolition of university seats. At that time universities had separate representation in Parliament, and graduates had the right to vote in their universities as well as in the constituency where they lived. (I supported separate university representation, but not the principle that graduates should have more than one vote; my view was that graduates should be able to choose to vote in one or the other constituency.) It would have been my first Conference speech, but in the end the seconder chosen was a City man, because the City seats were also to be abolished.
My disappointment at this was, however, very quickly overcome and in a most unexpected way. After one of the debates, I found myself engaged in one of those speculative conversations which young people have about their future prospects. An Oxford friend, John Grant, said he supposed that one day I would like to be a Member of Parliament. ‘Well, yes,’ I replied, ‘but there’s not much hope of that. The chances of my being selected are just nil at the moment.’ I might have added that with no private income of my own there was no way I could have afforded to be an MP on the salary then available. I had not even tried to get on the Party’s list of approved candidates.
Later in the day, John Grant happened to be sitting next to the Chairman of the Dartford Conservative Association, John Miller. The Association was in search of a candidate. I learned afterwards that the conversation went something like this: ‘I understand that you’re still looking for a candidate at Dartford?’ (In fact, Conservative Central Office was becoming exasperated at Dartford’s failure to pick someone to fight the seat in an election that had to take place in 1950 and might be called before then.)
‘That’s right. Any suggestions?’
‘Well, there’s a young woman, Margaret Roberts, that you might look at. She’s very good.’
‘Oh, but Dartford is a real industrial stronghold. I don’t think a woman would do at all.’
‘Well, you know best of course. But why not just look at her?’
And they did. I was invited to have lunch with John Miller and his wife, Phee, and the Dartford Women’s Chairman, Mrs Fletcher, on the Saturday on Llandudno Pier. Presumably, and in spite of any reservations about the suitability of a woman candidate for their seat, they liked what they saw. I certainly got on well with them. The Millers were to become close friends and I quickly developed a healthy respect for the dignified Mrs Fletcher. After lunch we walked back along the pier to the Conference Hall in good time for a place to hear Winston Churchill give the Party Leader’s speech. It was the first we had seen of him that week, because in those days the Leader did not attend the Conference itself, appearing only at a final rally on the Saturday. Foreign affairs naturally dominated his speech — it was the time of the Berlin blockade and the Western airlift — and his message was sombre, telling us that only American nuclear weapons stood between Europe and communist tyranny and warning of ‘what seems a remorselessly approaching third world war’.
I did not hear from Dartford until December, when I was asked to attend an interview at Palace Chambers, Bridge Street — then housing Conservative Central Office — not far from Parliament itself. With a large number of other hopefuls I turned up on the evening of Thursday 30 December for my first Selection Committee. Very few outside the political arena know just how nerve-racking such occasions are. The interviewee who is not nervous and tense is very likely to perform badly: for, as any chemist will tell you, the adrenaline needs to flow if one is to perform at one’s best. I was lucky in that at Dartford there were some friendly faces around the table, and it has to be said that on such occasions there are advantages as well as disadvantages to being a young woman making her way in the political world.
I found myself short-listed, and was asked to go to Dartford itself for a further interview. Finally, I was invited to the Bull Hotel in Dartford on Monday 31 January 1949 to address the Association’s Executive Committee of about fifty people. As one of five would-be candidates, I had to give a fifteen-minute speech and answer questions for a further ten minutes.
It was the questions which were more likely to cause me trouble. There was a good deal of suspicion of women candidates, particularly in what was regarded as a tough industrial seat like Dartford. This was quite definitely a man’s world into which not just angels feared to tread. There was, of course, little hope of winning it for the Conservatives, though this is never a point that the prospective candidate even in a Labour seat as safe as Ebbw Vale would be advised to make. The Labour majority was an all but unscalable 20,000. But perhaps this unspoken fact turned to my favour. Why not take the risk of adopting the young Margaret Roberts? There was not much to lose, and some good publicity for the Party to gain.
The most reliable sign that a political occasion has gone well is that you have enjoyed it. I enjoyed that evening at Dartford, and the outcome justified my confidence. I was selected. Afterwards I stayed behind for drinks and something to eat with the officers of the Association. The candidate is not the only one to be overwhelmed by relief on these occasions. The selectors too can stop acting as critics and start to become friends. The happy if still slightly bewildered young candidate is deluged with advice, information and offers of help. Such friendly occasions provide at least part of the answer to that question put to all professional politicians: ‘Why on earth do you do it?’
My next step was to be approved by the national Party. Usually Party approval precedes selection, but when I went to Central Office the day after to meet the Women’s Chairman, Miss Marjorie Maxse, I had no difficulties. A few weeks afterwards I was invited to dinner to meet the Party Chairman Lord Woolton, his deputy J.P.L. Thomas, Miss Maxse and the Area Agent, Miss Beryl Cook. Over the next few years Marjorie Maxse and Beryl Cook proved to be strong supporters and they gave me much useful advice.
After selection comes adoption. The formal adoption meeting is the first opportunity a candidate has to impress him or herself on the rank and file of the Association. It is therefore a psychologically important occasion. It is also a chance to gain some good local publicity, for the press are invited too. Perhaps what meant most to me, however, was the presence of my father. For the first time he and I stood on the same platform to address a meeting. He recalled how his family had always been Liberal, but that now it was the Conservatives who stood for the old Liberalism. In my own speech I too took up a theme which was Gladstonian in content if not quite style (or length), urging that ‘the Government should do what any good housewife would do if money was short — look at their accounts and see what’s wrong’.
After the adoption meeting at the end of February I was invited back by two leading lights of the Association, Mr and Mrs Soward, to a supper party they had arranged in my honour. Their house was at the Erith end of the constituency, not far from the factory of the Atlas Preservative Company, which made paint and chemicals, where Stanley Soward was a director. His boss, the Managing Director, had been at my adoption meeting and was one of the dinner guests: and so it was that I met Denis.
It was clear to me at once that Denis was an exceptional man. He knew at least as much about politics as I did and a good deal more about economics. His professional interest in paint and mine in plastics may seem an unromantic foundation for friendship, but it also enabled us right away to establish a joint interest in science. And as the evening wore on I discovered that his views were no-nonsense Conservatism.
After the evening was over he drove me back to London so that I could catch the midnight train to Colchester. It was not a long drive at that time of night, but long enough to find that we had still more in common. Denis is an avid reader, especially of history, biography and detective novels. He seemed to have read every article in The Economist and The Banker, and we found that we both enjoyed music — Denis with his love of opera, and me with mine of choral music.
From then on we met from time to time at constituency functions, and began to see more of each other outside the constituency. He had a certain style and dash. He had a penchant for fast cars and drove a Jaguar and, being ten years older, he simply knew more of the world than I did. At first our meetings revolved around political discussion. But as we saw more of each other, we started going to the occasional play and had dinner together. Like any couple, we had our favourite restaurants, small pasta places in Soho for normal dates, the wonderful White Tower in Fitzrovia, the Écu de France in Jermyn Street and The Ivy for special occasions. I was very flattered by Denis’s attentions, but I first began to suspect he might be serious when the Christmas after my first election campaign at Dartford I received from him a charming present of a crystal powder bowl with a silver top, which I still treasure.
We might perhaps have got married sooner, but my passion for politics and his for rugby football — Saturdays were never available for a date — both got in the way. He more than made up for this, however, by being an immense help in the constituency — problems were solved in a trice and all the logistics taken care of. Indeed, the fact that he had proposed to me and that we had become engaged was one final inadvertent political service, because unbe known to me Beryl Cook leaked the news just before election day to give my campaign a final boost.
When Denis asked me to be his wife, I thought long and hard about it. I had so much set my heart on politics that I really hadn’t figured marriage in my plans. I suppose I pushed it to the back of my mind and simply assumed that it would occur of its own accord at some time in the future. I know that Denis too, because a wartime marriage had ended in divorce, only asked me to be his wife after much reflection. But the more I considered, the surer I was. There was only one possible answer. More than forty years later I know that my decision to say ‘yes’ was one of the best I ever made.
I had in any case been thinking of leaving BX Plastics and Colchester for some time. It was my selection for Dartford that persuaded me I had to look for a new job in London. I had told the Selection Committee that I would fight Dartford with all the energy at my disposal, and I meant it. Nor was I temperamentally inclined to do otherwise. So I began to look for a London-based job which would give me about £500 a year — not a princely sum even in those days, but one which would allow me to live comfortably if modestly. I went for several interviews, but found that they were not keen to take on someone who was hoping to leave to take up a political career. I was certainly not going either to disguise my political ambitions or agree to drop them; so I just kept on looking. Finally, I was taken on by the laboratories of J. Lyons in Hammersmith as a food research chemist. There was a stronger theoretical side to my work there, which made it more satisfying than my position at BX had been.
I moved into lodgings in the constituency. Indeed, Dartford became my home in every sense. The families I lived with fussed over me and could not have been kinder, their natural good nature undoubtedly supplemented by the fact that they were ardent Tories. The Millers also took me under their wing. After evening meetings I would regularly go back to their house to unwind over a cup of coffee. While I was still working and living in Colchester I would stay at their house at weekends. It was a cheerful household in which everyone seemed to be determined to enjoy themselves after the worst of the wartime stringencies were over. We regularly went out to political and non-political functions, and the ladies made an extra effort to wear something smart. John Miller’s father — a widower — lived with the family and was a great friend to me: whenever there was a party he would send me a pink carnation as a buttonhole.
I also used to drive out to the neighbouring North Kent constituencies: the four Associations — Dartford, Bexley Heath (where Ted Heath was the candidate), Chislehurst (Pat Hornsby-Smith) and Gravesend (John Lowe) — worked closely together and had a joint President in Morris Wheeler. From time to time he would bring us all together at his large house, ‘Franks’, at Horton Kirby.
Of the four constituencies, Dartford at that time was by far the least winnable, and therefore doubtless in the eyes of its neighbours — though not Dartford’s — the least important. But there is always good political sense in linking safe or at least winnable constituencies on the one hand with hopeless cases on the other. If an active organization can be built up in the latter there is a good chance of drawing away your opponents’ party workers from the political territory you need to hold. This was one of the services which Central Office expected of us to help Ted Heath in the winnable seat of Bexley.
It was thus that I met Ted. He was already the candidate for Bexley, and Central Office asked me to speak in the constituency. By now Ted was an established figure. He had fought in the war, ending up as a Lieutenant-Colonel; his political experience went back to the late 1930s when he had supported an anti-Munich candidate in the Oxford by-election; and he had won the respect of Central Office and the four Associations. When we met I was struck by his crisp and logical approach — he always seemed to have a list of four aims, or five methods of attack. Though friendly with his constituency workers, he was always very much the man in charge, ‘the candidate’, or ‘the Member’, and this made him seem, even when at his most affable, somewhat aloof and alone.
Pat Hornsby-Smith, his next-door neighbour at Chislehurst, could not have been a greater contrast. She was a fiery, vivacious redhead and perhaps the star woman politician of the time. She had brought the Tory Conference to its feet with a rousing right-wing speech in 1946, and was always ready to lend a hand to other young colleagues: she spoke all around the country. She and I became great friends, and had long political talks at her informal supper parties.
Well before the 1950 election we were all conscious of a Conservative revival. This was less the result of fundamental rethinking within the Conservative Party than of a strong reaction both among Conservatives and in the country at large against the socialism of the Attlee Government. Aneurin Bevan’s description in July 1948 of Conservatives as ‘lower than vermin’ gave young Tories like me a great opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance in the long English tradition of ironic self-deprecation. We went around wearing ‘vermin’ badges — a little blue rat. A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as ‘vile vermin’; if you recruited twenty you were ‘very vile vermin’. There was a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.
Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show. His was a genuinely radical and reforming government. The 1945 Labour manifesto was in fact a very left-wing document. That is clearer now than it was then. Straight after the war much of the talk of planning and state control echoed wartime rhetoric, and so its full implications were not grasped. In fact, it was a root and branch assault on business, capitalism and the market. It took as its essential intellectual assumption that ‘it is doubtful whether we have ever, except in war, used the whole of our productive capacity. This must be corrected.’ The state was regarded as uniquely competent to judge where resources should and should not be employed in the national interest. It was not solely or even primarily on social grounds that nationalization, controls and planning were advanced, but on economic grounds. Harmful monopolies were seen as occurring only in the private sector. So nationalization of iron and steel was justified on the argument that ‘only if public ownership replaces private monopoly can the industry become efficient’. Most radical of all, perhaps, was the Labour Party’s attitude to land, where it was made clear that compulsory purchase by local authorities was only the beginning of a wider programme, for ‘Labour believes in land nationalization and will work towards it.’
As regards the specific promises of the Labour manifesto, the Labour Government had been remarkably bold in giving them effect. No one could have questioned Labour’s record in implementing socialism. Rather, it was the economic consequences of socialism — devaluation and a return of inflation — which were the obvious targets for attack. Very heavy public spending had kept the standard rate of income tax almost at wartime levels — nine shillings in the pound. Far from being dismantled, wartime controls had if anything been extended — for example rationing was extended to bread in 1946 and even potatoes a year later. It was therefore possible to fight the 1950 election campaign on precisely the kind of issues which are most dangerous for a sitting government — and ones with which I personally felt most at ease — that is, a combination of high ideological themes with more down to earth ‘bread and butter’ matters.
The 1950 Conservative manifesto was a cleverly crafted document which combined a devastating indictment of socialism in theory and in practice with a prudent list of specific pledges to reverse it. It stressed the effects of inflation, the evidence of economic mismanagement and waste and bureaucracy. I was particularly pleased with its robust statement on foreign affairs, which noted:
Socialism abroad has been proved to be the weakest obstacle to communism and in many countries of Eastern Europe has gone down before it. We are not prepared to regard those ancient states and nations which have already fallen beneath the Soviet yoke as lost for ever.
But Conservatives were careful not to promise an immediate end to rationing, large-scale reversal of nationalization, or anything too controversial on social security or the Health Service; and there was a positively cloying reference to the trade union ‘movement’, which was described as ‘essential to the proper working of our economy and of our industrial life’. All of us knew that the three areas on which we were likely to be most vulnerable were unemployment (where the voters remembered the high unemployment of the thirties, but not that it had risen under the second Labour Government and fallen under the National Government), the Welfare State (which many people thought we wanted to dismantle) and alleged ‘war-mongering’ (where there was a danger that the Labour Government’s robust line would make Churchill’s Cold War rhetoric seem extreme rather than prescient, as it was). I found myself dealing with all these questions at public meetings in the course of the 1950 and 1951 campaigns.
The 1950 election campaign was the most exhausting few weeks I had ever spent. So much was new to me; and novelty always drains the stamina. Unlike today’s election campaigns, we had well-attended public meetings almost every night, and so I would have to prepare my speech some time during the day. I also wrote my letters to prospective constituents. Then, most afternoons, it was a matter of doorstep canvassing and, as a little light relief, blaring out the message by megaphone. I was well supported by my family: my father came to speak and my sister to help.
Before the election Lady Williams (wife of Sir Herbert Williams, veteran tariff reformer and a Croydon MP for many years) told candidates that we should make a special effort to identify ourselves by the particular way we dressed when we were campaigning. I took this very seriously and spent my days in a tailored black suit and a hat which I bought in Bourne and Hollingsworth in Oxford Street specially for the occasion. And just to make sure I put a black and white ribbon around it with some blue inside the bow.
Quite whether these precautions were necessary is another matter. How many other twenty-four-year-old girls could be found standing on a soapbox in Erith Shopping Centre? In those days it was not often done for women candidates to canvass in factories. But I did — inside and outside. There was always a lively if sometimes noisy reception. The socialists in Dartford became quite irked until it turned out that their candidate — the sitting MP Norman Dodds — would have had the same facilities extended to him if they had thought of asking. It was only the pubs that I did not like going into, and indeed would not do so alone. Some inhibitions die hard.
I was lucky to have an opponent like Norman Dodds, a genuine and extremely chivalrous socialist of the old school. He knew that he was going to win, and he was a big enough man to give an ambitious young woman with totally different opinions a chance. Soon after I was adopted he challenged me to a debate in the hall of the local grammar school and, of course, I eagerly accepted. He and I made opening speeches, there were questions and then we each wound up our case. Each side had its own supporters, and the noise was terrific. Later in the campaign there was an equally vigorous and inconclusive re-run. What made it all such fun was that the argument was about issues and facts, not personalities. On one occasion, a national newspaper reported that Norman Dodds thought a great deal of my beauty but not a lot of my election chances — or of my brains. This perfect socialist gentleman promptly wrote to me disclaiming the statement — or at least the last part.
My own public meetings were also well attended. It was not unusual for the doors of our hall to be closed twenty minutes before the meeting was due to start because so many people were crowding in. Certainly, in those days one advantage of being a woman was that there was a basic courtesy towards us on which we could draw — something which today’s feminists have largely dissipated. So, for example, on one occasion I arrived at a public meeting from another in a different part of the constituency to find the visiting speaker, the former Air Minister Lord Balfour of Inchrye, facing a minor revolution from hecklers in the audience — to such an extent indeed that the police had already been sent for. I told the organizers to cancel the request, and sure enough once I took my place on the platform and started to speak the tumult subsided and order — if not exactly harmony — was restored.
I was also fortunate in the national and indeed international publicity which my candidature received. At twenty-four, I was the youngest woman candidate fighting the 1950 campaign, and as such was an obvious subject for comment. I was asked to write on the role of women in politics. My photograph made its way into Life magazine, the Illustrated London News where it rubbed shoulders with those of the great men of politics, and even the West German press where I was described as a ‘junge Dame mit Charme‘ (perhaps for the last time).
The slogans, coined by me, gained in directness whatever they lacked in subtlety — ‘Vote Right to Keep What’s Left’ and, still more to the point, ‘Stop the Rot, Sack the Lot’. My speeches, even then, pulled no ideological punches. I told a meeting in the Church Hall, Lowfield Street:
We are going into one of the biggest battles this country has ever known — a battle between two ways of life, one which leads inevitably to slavery and the other to freedom. Our opponents like to try and make you believe that Conservatism is a privilege of the few. But Conservatism conserves all that is great and best in our national heritage. What is one of the first tenets of Conservatism? It is that of national unity. We say one nation, not one class against another. You cannot build a great nation or a brotherhood of man by spreading envy or hatred.
Our policy is not built on envy or hatred, but on liberty for the individual man or woman. It is not our policy to suppress success: our policy is to encourage it and encourage energy and initiative. In 1940 it was not the cry of nationalization that made this country rise up and fight totalitarianism. It was the cry for freedom and liberty.
I felt that our hard work had been worthwhile when I heard the result at the count in the local grammar school. I had cut the Labour majority by 6,000. It was in the early hours at Lord Cam-rose’s Daily Telegraph party at the Savoy Hotel — to which candidates, MPs, ministers, Opposition figures and social dignitaries were in those days all invited — that I experienced the same bittersweet feeling about the national result, where the Conservatives had cut Labour’s overall majority from 146 to 5 seats. But victory, as yet at least, it was not.
I should recall, however, one peculiar experience I had as candidate for Dartford. I was asked to open a Conservative fête in Orpington and was reluctantly persuaded to have my fortune told while I was there. Some fortune tellers have a preference for crystal balls. This one apparently preferred jewellery. I was told to take off my string of pearls so that they could be felt and rubbed as a source of supernatural inspiration. The message received was certainly optimistic: ‘You will be great — great as Churchill.’ Most politicians have a superstitious streak; even so, this struck me as quite ridiculous. Still, so much turns on luck that anything which seems to bring a little with it is more than welcome. From then on I regarded my pearls as lucky. And, all in all, they seem to have proved so.
MARRIAGE, FAMILY AND LAW
As I have said, the 1950 result was inconclusive. After the initial exhilaration dies away such results leave all concerned with a sense of anti-climax. There seemed little doubt that Labour had been fatally wounded and that the coup de grace would be administered in a second general election fairly shortly. But in the meantime there was a good deal of uncertainty nationally. For me too in Dartford it was inconvenient. If I were to pursue my political career further I needed to set about finding a winnable seat. But I felt morally bound to fight the Dartford constituency again. It would be wrong to leave them to find another candidate at such short notice. Moreover, it was difficult to imagine that I would be able to make the kind of impact in a second campaign that I had in the one just concluded. I was also extremely tired and, though no one with political blood in their veins shies away from the excitement of electioneering, another campaign within a short while was not an attractive prospect.
I had also decided to move to London. With a little more money to spend from my job with J. Lyons, I had found a very small flat in St George’s Square Mews, in Pimlico. Mr Soward (Senior) came down from Dartford to help me decorate it. I was able to see a good deal more of Denis and in more relaxing conditions than in the hubbub of Conservative activism in Dartford.
I also learned to drive and acquired my first car. My sister, Muriel, had a pre-war Ford Prefect which my father had bought her for £129, and I now inherited it. My Ford Prefect became well known around Dartford, where I was re-adopted, and did me excellent service until I sold it for about the same sum when I got married.
The general election came in October 1951. This time I shaved another 1,000 votes off Norman Dodds’ majority and was hugely delighted to discover when all the results were in that the Conservatives now had an overall majority of seventeen.
During my time at Dartford I had continued to widen my acquaintanceship with senior figures in the Party. I had spoken as proposer of a vote of thanks to Anthony Eden (whom I had first met in Oxford) when he addressed a large and enthusiastic rally at Dartford football ground in 1949. The following year I spoke as seconder of a motion applauding the leadership of Churchill and Eden at a rally of Conservative Women at the Albert Hall, to which Churchill himself replied in vintage form. This was a great occasion for me — to meet in the flesh and talk to the leader whose words had so inspired me as I sat with my family around our wireless in Grantham. In 1950 I was appointed as representative of the Conservative Graduates to the Conservative Party’s National Union Executive, which gave me my first insight into Party organization at the national level.
But it was always policy rather than organization which interested me. In my holidays I would attend courses at Swinton College,[5] where the Director, Reggie Northam — a man of great generosity of spirit and a friend of John Maynard Keynes, who in the 1930s had gone to South Wales to experience for himself the life of the unemployed — would instil into us that the real political battle was for ‘the hearts and minds of the people’. At Swinton and at the various Conservative Political Centre (CPC) meetings in different constituencies, to which I was frequently asked to speak, I was made to think through the real implications for policy of such widely toted concepts as ‘One Nation’, ‘the property-owning democracy’ and ‘the safety net’ (of Social Security benefits).
The greatest social events in my diary were the Eve of (parliamentary) Session parties held by Sir Alfred Bossom, the Member for Maidstone, at his magnificent house, No. 5 Carlton Gardens. Several marquees were put up, brilliantly lit and comfortably heated, in which the greatest and the not so great — like one Margaret Roberts — would mingle convivially. Sir Alfred Bossom would cheerily describe himself as the day’s successor to Lady Londonderry, the great Conservative hostess of the inter-war years. You would hardly have guessed that behind his amiable and easygoing exterior was a genius who had devised the revolutionary designs of some of the first skyscrapers in New York. He was specially kind and generous to me. It was his house from which I was married, and there that our reception was held; and it was he who proposed the toast to our happiness.
I was married on a cold and foggy December day at Wesley’s Chapel, City Road. It was more convenient for all concerned that the ceremony take place in London, but it was the Methodist minister from Grantham, our old friend the Rev. Skinner, who assisted the Rev. Spivey, the minister at City Road. Then all our friends — from Grantham, Dartford, Erith and London — came back to Sir Alfred Bossom’s. Finally, Denis swept me off to our honeymoon in Madeira, where I quickly recovered from the bone-shaking experience of my first and last aquatic landing in a seaplane to begin my married life against the background of that lovely island.
On our return from Madeira I moved into Denis’s flat in Swan Court, Flood Street in Chelsea. It was a light, sixth-floor flat with a fine view of London. It was also the first time I learned the convenience of living all on one level. As I would find again in the flat at 10 Downing Street, this makes life far easier to run. There was plenty of space — a large room which served as a sitting room and dining room, two good-sized bedrooms, another room which Denis used as a study and so on. Denis drove off to Erith every morning and would come back quite late in the evening. But I found that I had plenty to do: this was the first time I had had to keep house. We quickly made friends with our neighbours; one advantage of living in a block of flats with a lift is that you meet everyone. By the end of the month I knew most of my neighbours, some of whom were rather distinguished. Late at night there was always the possibility of hearing Dame Sybil Thorndike’s unmistakable contralto booming around the courtyard as she returned from a show. During the time we were there we did a good deal of entertaining, with drinks in the evening or supper at the weekend.
To be a young married woman in comfortable circumstances must always be a delight if the marriage is a happy one, as mine was. But to be a young married woman in those circumstances in the 1950s was very heaven. I am always astonished when people refer to that period as a time of repression, dullness or conformity — the Age of Anxiety, etc. The 1950s were, in a thousand different ways, the reawakening of normal happy life after the trials of wartime and the petty indignities of post-war austerity. Rationing came to an end. Wages and salaries started to rise. Bananas, grapes and fruits I had never heard of suddenly reappeared in the shops. After the drabness of Utility clothing, fashion recovered its confidence and colour with Dior’s wide skirts, strapless evening dresses, and Ascot hats. Italian restaurants popped up where boarded-up shop fronts had been before. Coffee bars, selling cappuccino, instantly christened ‘frothy coffee’, spread down high streets. Teenagers were invented. Ordinary homes began to accommodate fridges, Hoovers and electric washing machines. Billboards sprouted fewer Government notices and more commercial advertising (‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints. Too-good-to-hurry mints’). TV aerials multiplied across the rooftops of England. Hollywood responded to the expansive mood of those years with the invention of wide-screen Cinemascope and big films to go with it, whether biblical epics like Quo Vadis or picturesque musicals like South Pacific. And people who had never thought to afford a foreign holiday discovered Spain.
It was the age of affluence, and with affluence came a relaxation of all the restrictions that had marked English life since wartime and, even beforehand, the Grantham of my youth. I cannot pretend to have liked, or even understood, all the expressions of this new popular freedom. When rock and roll was imported from America, along with names like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, I assumed it would be a nine days’ journalistic wonder. (It has never eclipsed The Desert Song in my affection.) The Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama also appeared to challenge the West End. Again, I assumed that this too would disappear in short order and, besides, I had had too much of kitchen sinks in real life to want to visit them on my night out. I little imagined that I would one day read John Osborne with approval and become a good friend of Kingsley Amis, grateful for his support in the culture wars of my administration. And as Ascot, the Derby, Henley and Wimbledon recovered their old style in those years, the gossip columnists who lived off them re-emerged from their post-war hiding places in Obituaries or Garden Notes. Reading them was a somewhat shameful taste, like gorging on liqueur chocolates. But I have to admit it was a taste few could resist. Readers made the acquaintance of new household names like Lady Docker, Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos; and Monte Carlo once again became a synonym for high life.
People felt that after all the sacrifices of the previous twenty years, they wanted to enjoy themselves, to get a little fun out of life. Although I may have been perhaps rather more serious than my contemporaries, Denis and I enjoyed ourselves quite as much as most, and more than some. We went to the theatre, we took holidays in Rome and Paris (albeit in very modest hotels), we gave parties and went to them, we had a wonderful time.
But the high point of our lives at that time was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in June 1953. Those who had televisions — we did not — held house parties to which all their friends came to watch the great occasion. Denis and I, passionate devotees of the monarchy that we were, decided the occasion merited the extravagance of a seat in the covered stand erected in Parliament Square just opposite the entrance to Westminster Abbey. The tickets were an even wiser investment than Denis knew when he bought them, for it poured all day and most people in the audience were drenched — not to speak of those in the open carriages of the great procession. The Queen of Tonga never wore that dress again. Mine lived to see another day.
Pleasant though married life was in London, I still had time enough after housework to pursue a long-standing intellectual interest in the law. As with my fascination with politics, it was my father who had been responsible for stimulating this interest. Although he was not a magistrate, as Mayor of Grantham in 1945–46 my father would automatically sit on the Bench. During my university vacations I would go along with him to the Quarter Sessions (where many minor criminal offences were tried), at which an experienced lawyer would be in the chair as Recorder. On one such occasion my father and I lunched with him, a King’s Counsel called Norman Winning. I was captivated by what I saw in court, but I was enthralled by Norman Winning’s conversation about the theory and practice of law. At one point I blurted out: ‘I wish I could be a lawyer; but all I know about is chemistry and I can’t change what I’m reading at Oxford now.’ But Norman Winning said that he himself had read physics for his first degree at Cambridge before changing to law as a second degree. I objected that there was no way I could afford to stay on all those extra years at university. He replied that there was another way, perfectly possible but very hard work, which was to get a job in or near London, join one of the Inns of Court and study for my law exams in the evenings. And this in 1950 is precisely what I had done. Now with Denis’s support I could afford to concentrate on legal studies without taking up new employment. There was a great deal to read, and I also attended courses at the Council of Legal Education.
I had decided that what with running a home and reading for the Bar I would have to put my political ambitions on ice for some time to come. At twenty-six I could afford to do that and I told Conservative Central Office that such was my intention. But as a young woman candidate I still attracted occasional public attention. For example, in February 1952 an article of mine appeared in the Sunday Graphic on the position of women ‘At the Dawn of the New Elizabethan Era’. I was also on the list of sought-after Party speakers and was invited to constituencies up and down the country. In any case, try as I would, my fascination for politics got the better of all contrary resolutions.
I talked it over with Denis and he said that he would support me all the way. So in June I went to see Beryl Cook at Central Office and told her: ‘It’s no use. I must face it. I don’t like being left out of the political stream.’ As I knew she would, ‘Auntie Beryl’ gave me her full support and referred me to John Hare, the Party Vice-Chairman for Candidates. In the kindest possible way, he told me about the pressures which membership of the House of Commons placed on family life, but I said that Denis and I had talked it through and this was something we were prepared to face. I said that I would like to have the chance of fighting a marginal or safe seat next time round. We both agreed that, given my other commitments, this should be in London itself or within a radius of thirty miles. I promptly asked to be considered for Canterbury, which was due to select a candidate. I left Central Office very pleased with the outcome — though I did not get Canterbury.
The question which John Hare had raised with me about how I would combine my home life with politics was soon to become even more sensitive. For in August 1953 the twins, Mark and Carol, put in an appearance. Late one Thursday night, some six weeks before what we still called ‘the baby’ was due, I began to have pains. I had seen the doctor that day and he asked me to come back on the Monday for an X-ray because there was something he wanted to check. Now Monday seemed a very long way away, and off I was immediately taken to hospital. I was given a sedative which helped me sleep through the night. Then on Friday morning the X-ray was taken and to the great surprise of all it was discovered that I was to be the mother of twins. Unfortunately, that was not the whole story. The situation required a Caesarean operation the following day. The two tiny babies — a boy and a girl — had to wait a little before they saw their father. For Denis, imagining that all was progressing smoothly, had very sensibly gone to the Oval to watch the Test Match and it proved quite impossible to contact him. On that day he received two pieces of good but equally surprising news. England won the Ashes, and he found himself the proud father of twins.
I had to stay in hospital for over a fortnight: indeed, one was expected in those days to wait three weeks before coming out. This meant that after the first few uncomfortable days of recovery I found myself with time on my hands. We had, of course, been expecting only one addition to the Thatcher household. Consequently, the first and most immediate task was to telephone all the relevant stores to order two rather than just one of everything. Oddly enough, the very depth of the relief and happiness at having brought Mark and Carol into the world made me uneasy. The pull of a mother towards her children is perhaps the strongest and most instinctive emotion we have. I was never one of those people who regarded being ‘just’ a mother or indeed ‘just’ a housewife as second best. Indeed, whenever I heard such implicit assumptions made both before and after I became Prime Minister it would make me very angry indeed. Of course, to be a mother and a housewife is a vocation of a very high kind. But I simply felt that it was not the whole of my vocation. I knew that I also wanted a career. A phrase that Irene Ward, MP for Tynemouth, and I often used was that ‘while the home must always be the centre of one’s life, it should not be the boundary of one’s ambitions’. Indeed, I needed a career because, quite simply, that was the sort of person I was. And not just any career. I wanted one which would keep me mentally active and prepare me for the political future for which I believed I was well suited.
So it was that at the end of my first week in hospital I came to a decision. I had the application form for my Bar finals in December sent to me. I filled it in and sent off the money for the exam, knowing that this little psychological trick I was playing on myself would ensure that I plunged into legal studies on my return to Swan Court with the twins, and that I would have to organize our lives so as to allow me to be both a mother and a professional woman.
This was not, in fact, as difficult as it might sound. The flat at Swan Court was large enough, even though it was not ideal: being on the sixth floor, we had to have bars put on all the windows. Without a garden, the twins had to be taken out twice a day to Ranelagh Gardens. But this turned out to be good for them because they became used to meeting and playing with other children — though early on, when we did not know the rules, we had our ball confiscated by the Park Superintendent. Usually, however, it was the nanny, Barbara, who took Mark and Carol to the park, except at weekends when I took over. Barbara had been trained at Dr Barnardo’s and turned out to be a marvellous friend to the children.
The fifties marked the start of a major change in the role of women. Until then they tended to be well into middle age when the last child of an often large family fled the nest; work within the house, without the benefit of labour-saving devices, took much longer; and home was also a more social place, visited throughout the day by a wide range of tradesmen, from the milkman to the window cleaner, each perhaps stopping off for a chat or cup of tea. Consequently, fewer women had the opportunity or felt the need to go out to work. The fifties marked the beginning of the end of this world, and by the eighties it had changed out of recognition. Women were younger when the children left home because families were smaller; domestic work was lighter owing to new home appliances; and home deliveries were replaced by a weekly visit to the mall or supermarket. And the 1980s saw yet another twist: the trend whereby women started to remain at work in the early years of marriage, but to leave the workforce to have children for a time in their thirties.
These changes led to a powerful and largely middle-class lobby for tax allowances for child care — either nannies or play groups or, in educational disguise, nursery provision. As Prime Minister I resisted this pressure. I did not believe that working wives, who would presumably be bringing more money into the family anyway, should in effect be subsidized by the taxes paid by couples where the woman looked after the children at home and there was only one income. This was a straightforward matter of fairness.
Of course, these general arguments were not ones which affected my own decisions as a young mother. I was especially fortunate in being able to rely on Denis’s income to hire a nanny to look after the children in my absences. I could combine being a good mother with being an effective professional woman, as long as I organized everything intelligently down to the last detail. It was not enough to have someone in to mind the children; I had to arrange my own time to ensure that I could spend a good deal of it with them. As regards being a barrister after I had become qualified, I would have a certain amount of latitude in the cases I took on, so I could to some extent adjust my workload in line with the demands of family. As regards politics, we lived in London, my husband worked in the London area, Parliament was in London — clearly, I must seek a constituency which was also in or near London. It was only this unusual combination of circumstances which enabled me to consider becoming an MP while I had young children.
Not long after I had the twins, John Hare wrote to me from Central Office:
I was delighted to hear that you had had twins. How very clever of you. How is this going to affect your position as a candidate? I have gaily been putting your name forward; if you would like me to desist, please say so.
I replied thanking him and noting:
Having unexpectedly produced twins — we had no idea there were two of them until the day they were born — I think I had better not consider a candidature for at least six months. The household needs considerable reorganization and a reliable nurse must be found before I can feel free to pursue such other activities with the necessary fervour.
So my name was, as John Hare put it, kept ‘in cold storage for the time being’. It was incumbent on me to say when I would like to come onto the active list of candidates again.
My self-prescribed six months of political limbo were quickly over. I duly passed my Bar finals. I had begun by considering specializing in patent law because I thought I would be able to make use of my industrial and scientific knowledge. But it seemed that the opportunities there were very limited and so perhaps tax law would be a better bet. In any case, I would need a foundation in the criminal law first. So in December 1953 I joined Frederick Lawton’s Chambers in the Inner Temple for a six months’ pupillage. Fred Lawton’s was a common law Chambers. He was, indeed, one of the most brilliant criminal lawyers I ever knew. He was witty, with no illusions about human nature or his own profession, extraordinarily lucid in exposition, and a kind guide to me.
In fact, I was to go through no fewer than four sets of Chambers, partly because I had to gain a grounding in several fields before I was competent to specialize in tax. So I witnessed the rhetorical fireworks of the Criminal Bar, admired the precise draftsmanship of the Chancery Bar and then delved into the details of company law. But I became increasingly confident that tax law could be my forte. It was a meeting point with my interest in politics; it offered the right mixture of theory and practical substance; and of one thing we could all be sure — there would never be a shortage of clients desperate to cut their way out of the jungle of over-complex and constantly changing tax law.
Studying, observing, discussing and eventually practising law had a profound effect on my political outlook. In this I was probably unusual. Familiarity with the law usually breeds if not contempt, at least a large measure of cynicism. For me, however, it gave a richer significance to that expression ‘the rule of law’ which so easily tripped off the Conservative tongue.
From my reading at university and earlier I had gained a clear idea that what distinguished free from un-free regimes was that law ruled in the first and force in the second. But what was the essence of this ‘law’? By what process had it evolved? And why did it have such deep roots in Britain and, as recent history showed, such shallow ones elsewhere? The legal textbooks that I now studied were not by and large intended to provide answers to such points. But the principles of law which they expounded continually raised in my mind these questions. Similarly, as I read about the great judges of the formative periods of English law, I was increasingly fascinated by the mysterious and cumulative process by which the courts of England had laid the foundations for English freedom.
But it was A.V. Dicey whose writing — above all his classic textbook The Law of the Constitution — had most impact on me. It had long been fashionable to attack Dicey for his doctrinaire opposition to the new administrative state, and there are plenty of learned commentators still inclined to do so. But I found myself immediately at home with what he said — it is not perhaps without significance that though Dicey’s was a great legal mind, he was at heart a classical liberal. The ‘law of the constitution’ was, in Dicey’s words, the result of two ‘guiding principles, which had been gradually worked out by the more or less conscious efforts of generations of English statesmen and lawyers’. The first of these principles was the sovereignty of Parliament. The second was the rule of law, which I will summarize briefly and inadequately as the principle that no authority is above the law of the land.[6] For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through reading Hayek’s masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think of this principle as having wider application.
When politics is in your blood, every circumstance seems to lead you back to it. Whether pondering Dicey, poring over the intricacies of tax law or discussing current issues with other members of the Inns of Court Conservative Society, political questions insisted on taking centre stage in my imagination. So when in December 1954 I heard that there was a vacancy for the Conservative candidature in Orpington — which of course, being next to my old constituency of Dartford, I knew, and which was not too far from London — I telephoned Central Office and asked to have my name put forward. I was interviewed and placed on the short-list. Sitting just outside the selection meeting with Denis, I heard Donald Sumner, the local candidate (and Association Chairman), advancing in his speech the decisive argument that in Orpington what they really needed was ‘a Member who really knows what is going on in the constituency — who knows the state of the roads in Locksbottom’. Denis and I roared with laughter. But Donald Sumner got the seat.
I was naturally disappointed by the decision, because Orpington would have been an ideal constituency for me. It seemed extremely unlikely now that a similarly suitable seat would become available before what looked liked an increasingly imminent general election. So I wrote to John Hare to say that I would now ‘continue at the Bar with no further thought of a parliamentary career for many years’. Knowing me better than I knew myself perhaps, he wrote back urging me at least to reconsider if a winnable seat in Kent became available. But I was adamant, though I made it clear that I would always be available to speak in constituencies and would of course be active in the general election campaign.
Although I was in general a loyal Conservative, I had felt for some time that the Government could have moved further and faster in dismantling socialism and installing free-enterprise policies. But it had not been easy for them to persuade popular opinion — or indeed themselves — that a somewhat stronger brew would be palatable. In fact, by 1955 a good deal of modest progress had been made as regards the removal of controls and, even more modestly, returning nationalized industries to the private sector. The rationing of food had finally been brought to an end. Large steps had been taken towards restoring the convertibility of the currency. Iron and steel nationalization had been halted and a start made in selling road haulage. Above all, the proportion of GNP taken by the state had been reduced steadily in the years from 1951. And there was one development of great importance for the future: the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting and the beginning of commercial television.
SUEZ AND AFTER
Conservative thinking about policy matters was also becoming more self-confident and more radical. This can be illustrated by a comparison between the two most influential publications produced by the Party over these years — One Nation (October 1950) and Change is our Ally (May 1954). Both were written by an overlapping group of remarkably gifted young Members of Parliament, including Enoch Powell, Angus Maude, Robert Carr and (One Nation only) Ted Heath and Iain Macleod. Admittedly, One Nation dealt with social policy which, particularly at a time when it was clear that a Conservative government would have to rein back on public expenditure, was a tricky topic. But still the relative blandness of that document — which emphasized (soundly enough, of course) Conservative commitment to a ‘safety net’ of benefits securing a living standard below which none must fall, and to Anthony Eden’s notion of the strengthening of the weak rather than the weakening of the strong — suggested a defensive exercise and indeed a defensive mentality.
Change is our Ally is a far more exciting document which, when I re-read it in the late 1980s, I found to contain very much the same analysis as that we had adopted since I became Party Leader. It began by tracing the growth of collectivism in the British economy between the wars. It then boldly attacked the notion that the planning of the Second World War economy could appropriately be extended into peacetime. It even pointed out — what everyone knew to be true, but what for years after the war went largely unsaid — that the wartime system of planning had been inefficient, wasteful and bureaucratic, however necessary in the emergency the nation faced at the time. The follies and absurdities of the economic plan, with its detailed predictions and quantified targets, were further exposed by retrospective comparisons between the assumptions made in Lord Beveridge’s unofficial study Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944, and the situation a decade later. It was all admirably commonsensical. What the authors of Change is our Ally, and indeed those of the following year’s Conservative manifesto, did not do — and I certainly claim no credit for thinking at the time that they should have done — was to propose the root and branch dismantling of collectivism in industry or fundamental reform in the Welfare State. But in the mid–1950s the Conservative Party was at least playing with a consistent free market analysis which would, in due course and given the opportunities of government, have led to free market policies. This, however, was not how matters were to develop.
In April 1955 Churchill resigned as Prime Minister to be succeeded by Anthony Eden, and there was in quick succession a snap general election, a new Conservative Government, the débâcle of Suez and the arrival at No. 10 of Harold Macmillan, the wizard of change.
During the general election campaign of May 1955 I spoke in a number of constituencies. But for me it was generally a dull affair. Once you have been a candidate everything else palls. Moreover, there was very little doubt of the outcome on this occasion. Sure enough, the Conservatives won an overall majority of fifty-eight. But the Eden administration’s political honeymoon turned out to be a short one. It quickly appeared that Rab Butler’s pre-election Budget had been too loose, and there followed a much tighter emergency Budget in October, which badly damaged Butler’s reputation — he was replaced as Chancellor by Harold Macmillan six months later — and seriously dented the Government’s. But it was, of course, to be foreign affairs which would be Eden’s real undoing.
The background to the Suez crisis of July to November 1956 has been much discussed. At the time the general feeling, at least among Conservatives, was that Britain was a great power which should not be pushed around by Nasser’s Egypt and that the latter needed to be taught a lesson, not least pour encourager les autres. Many of the details, for example the degree of collusion between Britain and France on the one hand and Israel on the other, were not available to the wider public at the time. To us, therefore, it appeared almost incomprehensible that first Anthony Nutting and then my old friend Edward Boyle should resign from the Government in protest at the intervention. Now their actions are more understandable, though even all these years later I could not endorse them.
The balance of interest and principle in the Suez affair is not a simple one. I had no qualms about Britain’s right to respond to Nasser’s illegal seizure of an international waterway — if only action had been taken quickly and decisively. Over the summer, however, we were outmanoeuvred by a clever dictator into a position where our interests could only be protected by bending our legal principles. Among the many reasons for criticizing the Anglo-French-Israeli collusion is that it was bound to tarnish our case when it became known, as it assuredly would and did. At the same time, Suez was the last occasion when the European powers might have withstood and brought down a Third World dictator who had shown no interest in international agreements, except where he could profit from them. Nasser’s victory at Suez had among its fruits the overthrow of the pro-Western regime in Iraq, the Egyptian occupation of the Yemen, and the encirclement of Israel which led to the Six Day War — and the bills were still coming in when I left office.
As I came to know more about it, I drew four lessons from this sad episode. First, we should not get into a military operation unless we were determined and able to finish it. Second, we should never again find ourselves on the opposite side to the United States in a major international crisis affecting Britain’s interests. Third, we should ensure that our actions were in accord with international law. And finally, he who hesitates is lost.
At the time, I fiercely supported the Suez campaign in argument. I was repelled by what seemed to me the opportunism of the Labour Party in turning against the operation after initially supporting it. Denis and I were among the thousands of readers who cancelled the Observer and pledged never to read it again because of its opposition to Suez. This is not to say that I had no misgivings. Even though in those days I was much less conscious of international legal niceties than I later became, I did think it slightly rum that the evening paper which I dashed across Chancery Lane in a downpour to secure blared out the headline ‘Ultimatum!’ Britain and France were demanding that the Egyptians and Israelis withdraw from the canal and allow an Anglo-French force to separate them and protect the waterway. It was not quite clear to me how the British could issue an ultimatum to the Egyptians to withdraw from their own territory. Still, I swallowed my hesitations and supported Eden.
Politically, the failure of the Suez operation came as a body blow. Although it took many years for the full picture to emerge, it was immediately clear that the Government had been incompetent, and that its incompetence had been exposed in the most humiliating fashion. For a Conservative government — particularly one led by someone whose reputation was founded on the conduct of foreign affairs — the outcome was particularly damaging. There was a mood of dismay bordering on despair among Conservative supporters. Denis’s reaction, as an ex-officer in the Royal Artillery, was sharpened by anger that our troops had been let down when the operation was halted close to completion. As he said to me: ‘You never announce a ceasefire when your troops are out on patrol.’ I would remember this: politicians must never take decisions in war without full consideration of what they mean to our forces on the ground.
We also blamed harshly the conduct of the United States. Some Conservatives never forgave the Americans, and the fact that anti-Americanism lingered on in some generally right-wing circles when I was Prime Minister must be in part attributed to this. I too felt that we had been let down by our traditional ally — though at the time, of course, I did not realize that Eisenhower felt equally let down by the Anglo-French decision to launch military operations on the eve of a Presidential election in which he was running on a peace ticket. But in any case I also felt that the ‘special relationship’ with our transatlantic cousins had foundations too solid to be eroded by even such a crisis as Suez. Some people argued that Suez demonstrated that the Americans were so hostile to Britain’s imperial role, and were now so much a superpower, that they could not be trusted and that closer European integration was the only answer. But, as I have argued, there was an alternative — and quite contrary — conclusion. This was that British foreign policy could not long be pursued without ensuring for it the support of the United States. Indeed, in retrospect I can see that Suez was an unintended catalyst in the peaceful and necessary transfer of power from Britain to America as the ultimate upholder of Western interests and the liberal international economic system.
I was not so preoccupied with Suez as to be unconscious of the wicked ruthlessness of the Soviet Union’s behaviour in crushing the Hungarian revolution in November 1956 — even under bouncy Nikita Khrushchev, who had visited Britain with his amiable wife just a few months earlier. I never imagined that communism even with a human face could somehow generate a human heart. But at the time it seemed extraordinary to me that the Soviet Union should be prepared to undo all the efforts it had made since the death of Stalin to improve its image by such a crude and barbarous affront to decency. Some years later I discussed my reaction with Bob Conquest, who was to provide me with so much wise advice when I became Leader of the Opposition and whose The Great Terror in the late 1960s first fully exposed the scale of Stalin’s murders. He said that the classic error we all made in dealing with the Soviets was in assuming that they would behave as Westerners would in their circumstances. They were shaped by a very different and much more brutal political culture. It was my recollection of all this that led me, after Iraq attacked Iran in September 1980, to ask our Intelligence Services to look back over events like Hungary, which we had not foreseen because we had failed to penetrate the psychology of the aggressor, and draw out any conclusions for future action.
Yet there is little we could have done to prevent the Hungarian tragedy — and no way that NATO would have risked a major war for Hungary, with or without Suez. But many Hungarians thought that they had been encouraged to think otherwise, which added to their bitterness at our betrayal. I remember a Sunday newspaper interview with a Hungarian woman sheltering in a basement. She said: ‘The West will not come and help. Freedom is very selfish.’ I burned at the reproach. Whatever we were or were not in a position to do, it seemed to me that a world divided into spheres of influence which condemned this woman to live under communism was one which had to be changed.
After the fiasco of Suez it was clear that Anthony Eden could not remain as Prime Minister. He fell ill during the crisis and resigned in January 1957. There was much speculation in the circles in which I moved as to who would succeed — in those days, of course, Conservative Leaders ‘emerged’ rather than being elected. My Conservative friends in Chambers were convinced that Rab Butler would never be summoned by the Queen because he was too left wing. By contrast, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of Suez, Harold Macmillan, was considered to be the right-wing candidate. All of which shows how little we knew of the past and present convictions of both men — particularly the brilliant, elusive figure who was shortly to become Prime Minister.
Harold Macmillan had the strengths and weaknesses of the consummate politician. He cultivated a languorous and almost antediluvian style which was not — and was not intended to be — sufficiently convincing to conceal the shrewdness behind it. He was a man of masks. It was impossible to tell, for instance, that behind the cynical Edwardian façade was one of the most deeply religious souls in politics.
Harold Macmillan’s great and lasting achievement was to repair the relationship with the United States. This was the essential condition for Britain to restore her reputation and standing. Unfortunately, he was unable to repair the damage inflicted by Suez on the morale of the British political class — a veritable ‘Suez syndrome’. They went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing. This was always a grotesque exaggeration. At that time we were a middle-ranking diplomatic power after America and the Soviet Union, a nuclear power, a leading member of NATO, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the centre of a great Commonwealth.
Macmillan’s impact on domestic affairs was mixed. Under his leadership there was the 1957 decontrol of private sector rents — which greatly reduced the scope of the rent control that had existed in one form or another since 1915 — a necessary, though far from popular move. Generally, however, Macmillan’s leadership edged the Party in the direction of state intervention, a trend which would become much more marked after 1959.
Even at the time some developments made me uneasy. When Peter Thorneycroft, Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch — Macmillan’s entire Treasury team — resigned over a £50 million increase in public expenditure in January 1958, Macmillan talked wittily of ‘little local difficulties’. I felt in no position to judge the rights and wrongs of the dispute itself. But the husbanding of public money did not strike me as an ignoble cause over which to resign. The first steps away from the path of financial rectitude always make its final abandonment that much easier. And that abandonment brings its own adverse consequences. Such was the case in the years that followed.
Yet in Macmillan the Party certainly had an immensely shrewd and able politician. As early as the summer of 1957 he had understood that the living standards of ordinary people had been rising fast, and that this offered the best hope of political success. It was then that he observed that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.[7]
The Labour Party and the critics pounced on this as an example of Macmillan’s complacency and materialism. But in fact it was true and politically potent. There was a feeling that things never had been better, and that this was attributable to private enterprise rather than planning. The last thing the country wanted was to return to hair-shirted austerity. So the attacks on ‘Super-Mac’ rebounded.
That said, the political recovery was by no means immediate. At the time of the October 1957 Party Conference — one of the very few that I did not attend — the opinion polls were showing Labour at 52 per cent and the Conservatives at 33 per cent. On top of that, the Liberal Party dealt us a severe blow by winning the Torrington by-election in March 1958.
It was not until the late summer of that year that the Conservatives caught up with Labour in the opinion polls. By the time of the 1959 general election the two main parties were unashamedly competing to appeal to the nation’s desire for material self-advancement. The Conservative manifesto bluntly stated: ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives, don’t let Labour ruin it.’ It went on to promise a doubling of the British standard of living in a generation. As for Labour, a few days into the campaign the Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell promised that there would be no rise in income tax in spite of all the extra spending Labour planned — even in that political climate of optimism, a fatally incredible pledge.
THE FINCHLEY ROAD
Well before this I myself had re-entered the fray. In February 1956 I wrote to Donald Kaberry, the Party Vice-Chairman in charge of candidates:
For some time now I have been feeling the temptation to return to active politics. I had intended, when I was called to the Bar, to concentrate entirely on legal work but a little experience at the Revenue Bar, and in Company matters, far from turning my attention from politics has served to draw my attention more closely to the body which is responsible for the legislation about which I have come to hold strong views.
I went to see Donald Kaberry the following month. There was no problem in my being put back on the list of candidates — this time to be considered for safe Conservative-held seats only. I was all the more delighted because I found in Donald Kaberry a constant and dependable source of wise advice and friendship — no small thing for an aspiring candidate.
I was less fortunate in the reception I received from Selection Committees. It had begun at Orpington in 1954. It was the same at Beckenham, Hemel Hempstead and then Maidstone in 1957 and 1958. I would be short-listed for the seat, would make what was generally acknowledged to be a good speech — and then the questions, most of them having the same purpose, would begin. With my family commitments, would I have time enough for the constituency? Did I realize how much being a Member of Parliament would keep me away from home? Might it not be better to wait for a year or two before trying to get into the House? And sometimes more bluntly still: did I really think that I could fulfil my duties as a mother with young children to look after and as an MP?
I felt that Selection Committees had every right to ask me these questions. I explained our family circumstances and that I already had the help of a first-class nanny. I also used to describe how I had found it possible to be a professional woman and a mother by organizing my time properly. What I resented, however, was that beneath some of the criticism I detected a feeling that the House of Commons was not really the right place for a woman anyway. Perhaps some of the men at Selection Committees entertained this prejudice, but I found then and later that it was the women who came nearest to expressing it openly. Not for the first time the simplistic left-wing concept of ‘sex discrimination’ had got it all wrong.
I was hurt and disappointed by these experiences. They were, after all, an attack on me not just as a candidate but as a wife and mother. But I refused to be put off by them. I was confident that I had something to offer in politics. I knew that many others who had crossed my political path very much wanted me to get into the House. And most important of all, Denis never had any doubts. He was always there to comfort and support me.
In April 1958 I had another long talk with Donald Kaberry at Central Office. He told me about the constituencies which were likely to select soon and I, for my part, spoke frankly about the difficulties I had faced as a woman with the Selection Committees. Unfortunately, this is not one of the topics on which even the wisest male friend can give very useful counsel. But Donald Kaberry did give me advice on what to wear on these sensitive occasions — something smart but not showy. In fact, looking me up and down, he said he thought the black coat dress with brown trim which I was wearing would be just fine. His sartorial judgement would soon be put to the test. For I now entered my name for — and in July was called to interview at — the safe Conservative seat of Finchley, North London, whose MP was retiring.
Finchley was not an area of London that I knew particularly well. But like any enthusiastic would-be candidate I set to work to find out all there was to know about it. I was determined that no one would know the Finchley equivalent of Locksbottom better than I. But one advantage of an urban seat, particularly a London seat, is that you know that the most topical issues locally will correspond very closely to the most important political issues nationally. And that is not always the case with a rural or regional seat. So, for example, rent decontrol was bound to be controversial in Finchley, as nationally. Immigration too was just starting to figure on the political landscape — it was to lead to the first Notting Hill riots just a few weeks later. The state of the economy, and which party was more likely to keep living standards rising and services improving, were bound to be at the forefront of people’s minds in Finchley as elsewhere. On all of these things I knew exactly where I stood and what I would say.
I was one of a ‘long list’ of some 150 applicants, which contained a number of my future colleagues in the House. I was also one of those called for preliminary interview by the Constituency Selection Committee. I could tell that I had a good deal of support, which was satisfying but hardly grounds for confidence. Being the most popular person on these occasions can sometimes be less important than being the least unpopular person. If, as the weaker candidates are eliminated, all their support goes to your opponent it is quite possible to fall at the last fence — and we were barely out of the paddock.
It was arranged that the final four of us — three men and myself — should go before the Executive Council of the Association. I knew I would have a large number of friends, but I was also pretty sure that I could expect some fierce opposition; it would be a fight.
I prepared myself as best I could. I felt reasonably confident that I knew the constituency. I had no doubt that I could cope with even quite abstruse questions of economic or foreign policy, for I had voraciously read the newspapers and all the briefing I could obtain. I prepared my speech until it was word perfect, and I had mastered the technique of talking without notes. Equally important was that I should put myself in the right state of mind — confident but not too confident. I decided to obey instructions and wear the black coat dress. I saw no harm either in courting the fates: so I wore not just my lucky pearls but also a lucky brooch which had been given to me by my Conservative friends in Dartford.
There was, however, one piece of thoroughly bad luck. This was that on the date of the meeting — Monday 14 July — it was quite impossible for Denis to come with me. Indeed, so quick was the whole selection process that he knew nothing whatever about it. Every year he would go away on a foreign sales tour for a month or so, and at this point his whereabouts were only ‘somewhere in Africa’. By contrast, the other candidates were accompanied by their spouses. So as I entered the packed meeting on that warm July evening and took my place beside the chairman I felt very much alone.
But as soon as I was on my feet the inhibitions fell away. As always, I quickly became too taken up with the thrust of my argument to worry too much about what other people were thinking. The applause when I sat down seemed warm and genuine. As I had expected, it was at questions that the trouble began.
Could a mother with young children really effectively represent Finchley? What about the strains on my family life? I gave my usual answers, and as usual too a section of the audience was determinedly unconvinced. And doubtless it was easier for them because poor Denis at that moment was absent. At least he did not have to hear it all. But I wished he were with me all the same.
I rejoined the other candidates and their wives, where the tension was only relieved by that over-polite inconsequential small talk which such occasions always seem to generate. Once the last of us had performed, it seemed an endless wait until one of the officers came through to tell us the result. And when he did, it was to me that he spoke. There was no time to feel relief, pleasure or even exhaustion, because it was now necessary to return to receive the congratulations of the Executive.
It was only afterwards that I knew the precise result. The first round of voting gave me thirty-five votes as against thirty-four for my nearest rival. On the second round, when the two other candidates had dropped out, I had forty-six against his forty-three. It was then expected that, for form’s sake and to show that there was no ill feeling, the Executive should unanimously vote to select me as their candidate. Unfortunately, some of those who opposed my candidature had no such intentions. So I inherited an Association which I would have to unite behind me, and this would mean winning over people who had not disguised their disapproval.
But that was for tomorrow. First I must break the good news to my family back in Grantham. Denis was entirely incommunicado, blissfully unaware of what I had been through at Finchley. I had written him a letter some time before about the prospects, but he never received it. A couple of days later he was on his way from Johannesburg to Lagos via Kano in northern Nigeria. On changing planes he picked up a copy of the London Evening Standard which someone had left behind, and as he leafed through it he discovered the astonishing news that his wife had been selected for the safe seat of Finchley. I always seemed to be giving him surprises.
My first opportunity to impress myself on the Finchley Association as a whole was at the Adoption Meeting early the following month. This time I again appeared in a plain black outfit with a small black hat. I received what I afterwards learned was an almost embarrassingly glowing introduction from Bertie Blatch, the constituency chairman, who was to be a great patron and protector. (It was an added advantage then and later that Bertie owned the most important local newspaper, the Finchley Press.) As I entered the hall, I was met with warm applause. I used the occasion to speak at some length about both international and domestic affairs. I pulled out every stop. I knew that though I was the only duly selected candidate, this adoption meeting was not, as it should have been, a mere formality. There was still some die-hard opposition to my candidature, centred on one woman and her little coterie, who were trying to have the contest re-run. I was determined to overcome this. There were no problems in dealing with the three questions from the body of the hall. As Conservatives do on such occasions, they gave me a terrific reception. But at the end — and contrary to the newspaper report of the occasion — a few of those present refused to vote for my adoption, which was overwhelming but not (that magic word) ‘unanimous’. I left the meeting knowing that I had secured my candidature and confident of the loyalty of the great majority of the Association, but aware too that some were still determined to make life as difficult as possible.
I went as far as to write to Ted Heath, then Chief Whip but previously my near neighbour in Dartford, about the problems I was having. Partly as a result of his assistance, and partly because I used my own personal contacts, I managed to attract a distinguished field of speakers to come and speak on my behalf between my adoption and election day. Iain Macleod, Keith Joseph, Peter Thorneycroft and John Boyd-Carpenter — all people around whom my future political life would soon revolve — were among them. Denis’s belated but extremely welcome arrival on the scene also helped in a rather different way. Bertie Blatch gave me constant and unstinting support.
Finchley had been run with a degree of gentlemanly disengagement that was neither my style nor warranted by political realities. I intended to work and then campaign as if Finchley were a marginal seat, and I hoped and expected that others would follow my lead. From now on I was in the constituency two or three times a week and regularly went out canvassing in each of the wards, returning afterwards to get to know the Party activists over a drink in the local pub or someone’s house.
By the time I arrived as candidate, there was a good deal of concern that the Liberals in Finchley were becoming strongly entrenched. They were always excellent campaigners, particularly effective in local government elections. A few years before, there had been a famous local scandal over the barring of Jews from membership of Finchley Golf Club, in which a number of local Conservatives had been involved: the Liberals never missed an opportunity to remind people of it. I simply did not understand anti-semitism myself, and I was upset that the Party should have been tainted by it. I also thought that the potential Conservative vote was not being fully mobilized because of this. So I set out to make it absolutely clear that we wanted new members, especially Jewish Conservatives, in our branch organizations. Though I did not know it at the time, I was subsequently to find some of my closest political friends and associates among Jews. What was clear was that the potential Conservative vote was not being fully exploited, and that however many feathers might be ruffled in the process it was vital to strengthen our branch organization. I also put a good deal of effort into strengthening the Young Conservative organization in the constituency: I was sure that it was by attracting energetic young people that we could most surely resist the challenge of activist Liberals. By the time the election was called in September 1959 the constituency organization was looking in better shape, and I had begun to feel very much at home.
I also felt that the Party was on course for winning the general election. There had been a large number of Tory gains in the local elections in May, and conditions looked increasingly favourable for a Conservative general election victory. In Finchley we got on with our final preparations. In fact, I was on holiday with Denis and the twins on the Isle of Wight when the general election was called, and so I hurried back to London. The campaign itself, though the issues of Suez and rent decontrol were thrown back at me, was largely about which party could better secure and manage prosperity. In the debates I held with the other candidates in the churches and synagogues of Finchley that was always the underlying question. This was favourable territory. For, as we claimed, life really was better with the Conservatives — in Finchley as elsewhere. On top of the sense of prosperity, there was an awareness that in Harold Macmillan Britain had a statesman capable of acting a distinguished role on the international stage, whether it was in the United States or the Soviet Union or Continental Europe.
My first general election polling day in Finchley in October 1959 was very much to set the pattern for the nine such polling days which would succeed it. Soon after the opening of the poll I would vote in my own home constituency — Orpington in 1959, Chelsea and Westminster in later elections — and then drive up to Finchley with Denis. I visited each of the polling stations and our committee rooms, breaking for lunch with Bertie Blatch and others in a hotel. There I rigorously paid just for my own food and drink, to avoid the accusation of ‘treating’ electors, terror of which is instilled by Conservative Central Office into all our candidates. From five o’clock I carefully avoided visiting committee rooms, which should all be sending out workers to summon our supporters to the polls, just dropping into a polling station or two to show the flag. Then at close of poll Denis and I went to the Blatches for something to eat, visited the constituency offices to catch the latest largely anecdotal news, and finally attended the count — on this occasion at Christ’s College, though later all nine constituency counts would be held at Barnet Town Hall.
At the school, I found that each of the candidates had been allocated a room where he or she with a select band of supporters who had tickets for the count could get something to eat and drink and where we had access to that miracle of modern political life — a television. The 1959 campaign had, in fact, been the first in which television played a serious part. And it was the television results service which now told me how the Party was faring in the country. I divided my time between watching the growing piles of ballot papers, candidate by candidate, on the long tables in the body of the hall, and slipping back to my room to catch the equally satisfactory results coming in across the country as a whole.
At about 12.30 a.m. I was told that the Finchley results were shortly to be announced, and was asked to join the Electoral Returning Officer with the other candidates on the platform. Perhaps some people in a safe seat when the Tories were on course for a national victory would have been confident or even complacent. Not me. Throughout my time in politics, whether from some sixth sense or perhaps — who knows? — from mere superstition, I have associated such attitudes with imminent disaster. So I stood by the side of Denis with a fixed smile and tried not to look as I felt.
The Returning Officer began: ‘Deakins, Eric Petro: thirteen thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven.’ (Labour cheers.) ‘Spence, Henry Ivan: twelve thousand, seven hundred and one.’ (Liberal cheers.) And finally we reached: ‘Thatcher, Margaret Hilda: twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and ninety-seven.’ I was home and dry — and not just with plenty to spare but with a majority of 16,260, almost 3,500 more than my predecessor. The cheers, always more controlled from Tory than from Liberal or socialist lips, rose. I made my short speech of acceptance, thanked all my splendid helpers, received a warm hug from Denis and walked down from the platform — the elected Member for Finchley.
In an unguarded moment, shortly after I had been selected for Finchley, I had told the twins that once I became an MP they could have tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. From then on the plaintive request had been: ‘Aren’t you there yet, Mummy? It’s taking a long time.’ I had known the feeling. It had seemed so very long for me too. But I now knew that within weeks I would take my seat on the green leather benches of the House of Commons.
It was the first step.
MY POLITICAL APPRENTICESHIP
If going up to Oxford is one sort of shock, coming down is quite another. I had made many like-minded friends at Oxford, I had enjoyed my adventures in chemistry and I was passionately interested in university politics. It was a wrench to leave all that behind.
The newly created Oxford University Appointments Committee, which helped new graduates to find suitable jobs, arranged several interviews for me, including one at a Northern ICI plant, I think at Billingham. We hopefuls were interviewed by several managers whose written comments were passed on to the general manager, who gave us our final interview. The remarks on me were lying on the table at the interview, and I could not resist using my faculty for reading upside down. They were both encouraging and discouraging; one manager had written: ‘This young woman has much too strong a personality to work here.’ In fact, I had three or four interviews with other companies and, though I was unsuccessful, I enjoyed them all. Not only was I given entry to a new world of industry, but the interviewers in those days were invariably courteous and interested in one’s own hopes and ambitions. Eventually I was taken on by BX Plastics at Manningtree just outside Colchester to work in their research and development section. BX produced a full range of plastics both for industrial use and consumer use, including for films.
Very few people greatly enjoy the early stages of a new job, and in this I was no exception. It had been understood when we originally discussed the position that it would involve my being in effect Personal Assistant to the Research and Development Director. I had been looking forward to this because I thought it would allow me to get to know more of how the company as a whole operated and also to use the talents I had, over and above my knowledge of chemistry. But on my arrival it was decided that there was not enough to do in that capacity and so I found myself donning my white coat again and immersing myself in the wonderful world of plastics. The Research and Development Section had only just been created as a separate unit and its teething troubles compounded mine. But by the time Christmas 1947 was approaching I had made one or two friends and things became easier. My supervisor helped me along. The Section moved into a separate and rather pleasant house in nearby Lawford. Like many others at the company, I lived in Colchester — a town which I increasingly came to like and where I had found comfortable lodgings. A bus took us all out to Lawford every day.
And, as always with me, there was politics. I immediately joined the Conservative Association and threw myself into the usual round of Party activities. In particular, I thoroughly enjoyed what was called the “39–’45’ discussion group, where Conservatives of the war generation met to exchange views and argue about the political topics of the day. I also kept in touch, in so far as I could, with friends like Edward Boyle, who was later adopted for a Birmingham seat in the 1950 election. It was as a representative of the Oxford University Graduate Conservative Association (OUGCA) that I went to the Llandudno Conservative Party Conference in October 1948.
It had originally been intended that I should speak at the Conference, seconding an OUGCA motion deploring the abolition of university seats. At that time universities had separate representation in Parliament, and graduates had the right to vote in their universities as well as in the constituency where they lived. (I supported separate university representation, but not the principle that graduates should have more than one vote; my view was that graduates should be able to choose to vote in one or the other constituency.) It would have been my first Conference speech, but in the end the seconder chosen was a City man, because the City seats were also to be abolished.
My disappointment at this was, however, very quickly overcome and in a most unexpected way. After one of the debates, I found myself engaged in one of those speculative conversations which young people have about their future prospects. An Oxford friend, John Grant, said he supposed that one day I would like to be a Member of Parliament. ‘Well, yes,’ I replied, ‘but there’s not much hope of that. The chances of my being selected are just nil at the moment.’ I might have added that with no private income of my own there was no way I could have afforded to be an MP on the salary then available. I had not even tried to get on the Party’s list of approved candidates.
Later in the day, John Grant happened to be sitting next to the Chairman of the Dartford Conservative Association, John Miller. The Association was in search of a candidate. I learned afterwards that the conversation went something like this: ‘I understand that you’re still looking for a candidate at Dartford?’ (In fact, Conservative Central Office was becoming exasperated at Dartford’s failure to pick someone to fight the seat in an election that had to take place in 1950 and might be called before then.)
‘That’s right. Any suggestions?’
‘Well, there’s a young woman, Margaret Roberts, that you might look at. She’s very good.’
‘Oh, but Dartford is a real industrial stronghold. I don’t think a woman would do at all.’
‘Well, you know best of course. But why not just look at her?’
And they did. I was invited to have lunch with John Miller and his wife, Phee, and the Dartford Women’s Chairman, Mrs Fletcher, on the Saturday on Llandudno Pier. Presumably, and in spite of any reservations about the suitability of a woman candidate for their seat, they liked what they saw. I certainly got on well with them. The Millers were to become close friends and I quickly developed a healthy respect for the dignified Mrs Fletcher. After lunch we walked back along the pier to the Conference Hall in good time for a place to hear Winston Churchill give the Party Leader’s speech. It was the first we had seen of him that week, because in those days the Leader did not attend the Conference itself, appearing only at a final rally on the Saturday. Foreign affairs naturally dominated his speech — it was the time of the Berlin blockade and the Western airlift — and his message was sombre, telling us that only American nuclear weapons stood between Europe and communist tyranny and warning of ‘what seems a remorselessly approaching third world war’.
I did not hear from Dartford until December, when I was asked to attend an interview at Palace Chambers, Bridge Street — then housing Conservative Central Office — not far from Parliament itself. With a large number of other hopefuls I turned up on the evening of Thursday 30 December for my first Selection Committee. Very few outside the political arena know just how nerve-racking such occasions are. The interviewee who is not nervous and tense is very likely to perform badly: for, as any chemist will tell you, the adrenaline needs to flow if one is to perform at one’s best. I was lucky in that at Dartford there were some friendly faces around the table, and it has to be said that on such occasions there are advantages as well as disadvantages to being a young woman making her way in the political world.
I found myself short-listed, and was asked to go to Dartford itself for a further interview. Finally, I was invited to the Bull Hotel in Dartford on Monday 31 January 1949 to address the Association’s Executive Committee of about fifty people. As one of five would-be candidates, I had to give a fifteen-minute speech and answer questions for a further ten minutes.
It was the questions which were more likely to cause me trouble. There was a good deal of suspicion of women candidates, particularly in what was regarded as a tough industrial seat like Dartford. This was quite definitely a man’s world into which not just angels feared to tread. There was, of course, little hope of winning it for the Conservatives, though this is never a point that the prospective candidate even in a Labour seat as safe as Ebbw Vale would be advised to make. The Labour majority was an all but unscalable 20,000. But perhaps this unspoken fact turned to my favour. Why not take the risk of adopting the young Margaret Roberts? There was not much to lose, and some good publicity for the Party to gain.
The most reliable sign that a political occasion has gone well is that you have enjoyed it. I enjoyed that evening at Dartford, and the outcome justified my confidence. I was selected. Afterwards I stayed behind for drinks and something to eat with the officers of the Association. The candidate is not the only one to be overwhelmed by relief on these occasions. The selectors too can stop acting as critics and start to become friends. The happy if still slightly bewildered young candidate is deluged with advice, information and offers of help. Such friendly occasions provide at least part of the answer to that question put to all professional politicians: ‘Why on earth do you do it?’
My next step was to be approved by the national Party. Usually Party approval precedes selection, but when I went to Central Office the day after to meet the Women’s Chairman, Miss Marjorie Maxse, I had no difficulties. A few weeks afterwards I was invited to dinner to meet the Party Chairman Lord Woolton, his deputy J.P.L. Thomas, Miss Maxse and the Area Agent, Miss Beryl Cook. Over the next few years Marjorie Maxse and Beryl Cook proved to be strong supporters and they gave me much useful advice.
After selection comes adoption. The formal adoption meeting is the first opportunity a candidate has to impress him or herself on the rank and file of the Association. It is therefore a psychologically important occasion. It is also a chance to gain some good local publicity, for the press are invited too. Perhaps what meant most to me, however, was the presence of my father. For the first time he and I stood on the same platform to address a meeting. He recalled how his family had always been Liberal, but that now it was the Conservatives who stood for the old Liberalism. In my own speech I too took up a theme which was Gladstonian in content if not quite style (or length), urging that ‘the Government should do what any good housewife would do if money was short — look at their accounts and see what’s wrong’.
After the adoption meeting at the end of February I was invited back by two leading lights of the Association, Mr and Mrs Soward, to a supper party they had arranged in my honour. Their house was at the Erith end of the constituency, not far from the factory of the Atlas Preservative Company, which made paint and chemicals, where Stanley Soward was a director. His boss, the Managing Director, had been at my adoption meeting and was one of the dinner guests: and so it was that I met Denis.
It was clear to me at once that Denis was an exceptional man. He knew at least as much about politics as I did and a good deal more about economics. His professional interest in paint and mine in plastics may seem an unromantic foundation for friendship, but it also enabled us right away to establish a joint interest in science. And as the evening wore on I discovered that his views were no-nonsense Conservatism.
After the evening was over he drove me back to London so that I could catch the midnight train to Colchester. It was not a long drive at that time of night, but long enough to find that we had still more in common. Denis is an avid reader, especially of history, biography and detective novels. He seemed to have read every article in The Economist and The Banker, and we found that we both enjoyed music — Denis with his love of opera, and me with mine of choral music.
From then on we met from time to time at constituency functions, and began to see more of each other outside the constituency. He had a certain style and dash. He had a penchant for fast cars and drove a Jaguar and, being ten years older, he simply knew more of the world than I did. At first our meetings revolved around political discussion. But as we saw more of each other, we started going to the occasional play and had dinner together. Like any couple, we had our favourite restaurants, small pasta places in Soho for normal dates, the wonderful White Tower in Fitzrovia, the Écu de France in Jermyn Street and The Ivy for special occasions. I was very flattered by Denis’s attentions, but I first began to suspect he might be serious when the Christmas after my first election campaign at Dartford I received from him a charming present of a crystal powder bowl with a silver top, which I still treasure.
We might perhaps have got married sooner, but my passion for politics and his for rugby football — Saturdays were never available for a date — both got in the way. He more than made up for this, however, by being an immense help in the constituency — problems were solved in a trice and all the logistics taken care of. Indeed, the fact that he had proposed to me and that we had become engaged was one final inadvertent political service, because unbe known to me Beryl Cook leaked the news just before election day to give my campaign a final boost.
When Denis asked me to be his wife, I thought long and hard about it. I had so much set my heart on politics that I really hadn’t figured marriage in my plans. I suppose I pushed it to the back of my mind and simply assumed that it would occur of its own accord at some time in the future. I know that Denis too, because a wartime marriage had ended in divorce, only asked me to be his wife after much reflection. But the more I considered, the surer I was. There was only one possible answer. More than forty years later I know that my decision to say ‘yes’ was one of the best I ever made.
I had in any case been thinking of leaving BX Plastics and Colchester for some time. It was my selection for Dartford that persuaded me I had to look for a new job in London. I had told the Selection Committee that I would fight Dartford with all the energy at my disposal, and I meant it. Nor was I temperamentally inclined to do otherwise. So I began to look for a London-based job which would give me about £500 a year — not a princely sum even in those days, but one which would allow me to live comfortably if modestly. I went for several interviews, but found that they were not keen to take on someone who was hoping to leave to take up a political career. I was certainly not going either to disguise my political ambitions or agree to drop them; so I just kept on looking. Finally, I was taken on by the laboratories of J. Lyons in Hammersmith as a food research chemist. There was a stronger theoretical side to my work there, which made it more satisfying than my position at BX had been.
I moved into lodgings in the constituency. Indeed, Dartford became my home in every sense. The families I lived with fussed over me and could not have been kinder, their natural good nature undoubtedly supplemented by the fact that they were ardent Tories. The Millers also took me under their wing. After evening meetings I would regularly go back to their house to unwind over a cup of coffee. While I was still working and living in Colchester I would stay at their house at weekends. It was a cheerful household in which everyone seemed to be determined to enjoy themselves after the worst of the wartime stringencies were over. We regularly went out to political and non-political functions, and the ladies made an extra effort to wear something smart. John Miller’s father — a widower — lived with the family and was a great friend to me: whenever there was a party he would send me a pink carnation as a buttonhole.
I also used to drive out to the neighbouring North Kent constituencies: the four Associations — Dartford, Bexley Heath (where Ted Heath was the candidate), Chislehurst (Pat Hornsby-Smith) and Gravesend (John Lowe) — worked closely together and had a joint President in Morris Wheeler. From time to time he would bring us all together at his large house, ‘Franks’, at Horton Kirby.
Of the four constituencies, Dartford at that time was by far the least winnable, and therefore doubtless in the eyes of its neighbours — though not Dartford’s — the least important. But there is always good political sense in linking safe or at least winnable constituencies on the one hand with hopeless cases on the other. If an active organization can be built up in the latter there is a good chance of drawing away your opponents’ party workers from the political territory you need to hold. This was one of the services which Central Office expected of us to help Ted Heath in the winnable seat of Bexley.
It was thus that I met Ted. He was already the candidate for Bexley, and Central Office asked me to speak in the constituency. By now Ted was an established figure. He had fought in the war, ending up as a Lieutenant-Colonel; his political experience went back to the late 1930s when he had supported an anti-Munich candidate in the Oxford by-election; and he had won the respect of Central Office and the four Associations. When we met I was struck by his crisp and logical approach — he always seemed to have a list of four aims, or five methods of attack. Though friendly with his constituency workers, he was always very much the man in charge, ‘the candidate’, or ‘the Member’, and this made him seem, even when at his most affable, somewhat aloof and alone.
Pat Hornsby-Smith, his next-door neighbour at Chislehurst, could not have been a greater contrast. She was a fiery, vivacious redhead and perhaps the star woman politician of the time. She had brought the Tory Conference to its feet with a rousing right-wing speech in 1946, and was always ready to lend a hand to other young colleagues: she spoke all around the country. She and I became great friends, and had long political talks at her informal supper parties.
Well before the 1950 election we were all conscious of a Conservative revival. This was less the result of fundamental rethinking within the Conservative Party than of a strong reaction both among Conservatives and in the country at large against the socialism of the Attlee Government. Aneurin Bevan’s description in July 1948 of Conservatives as ‘lower than vermin’ gave young Tories like me a great opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance in the long English tradition of ironic self-deprecation. We went around wearing ‘vermin’ badges — a little blue rat. A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as ‘vile vermin’; if you recruited twenty you were ‘very vile vermin’. There was a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.
Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show. His was a genuinely radical and reforming government. The 1945 Labour manifesto was in fact a very left-wing document. That is clearer now than it was then. Straight after the war much of the talk of planning and state control echoed wartime rhetoric, and so its full implications were not grasped. In fact, it was a root and branch assault on business, capitalism and the market. It took as its essential intellectual assumption that ‘it is doubtful whether we have ever, except in war, used the whole of our productive capacity. This must be corrected.’ The state was regarded as uniquely competent to judge where resources should and should not be employed in the national interest. It was not solely or even primarily on social grounds that nationalization, controls and planning were advanced, but on economic grounds. Harmful monopolies were seen as occurring only in the private sector. So nationalization of iron and steel was justified on the argument that ‘only if public ownership replaces private monopoly can the industry become efficient’. Most radical of all, perhaps, was the Labour Party’s attitude to land, where it was made clear that compulsory purchase by local authorities was only the beginning of a wider programme, for ‘Labour believes in land nationalization and will work towards it.’
As regards the specific promises of the Labour manifesto, the Labour Government had been remarkably bold in giving them effect. No one could have questioned Labour’s record in implementing socialism. Rather, it was the economic consequences of socialism — devaluation and a return of inflation — which were the obvious targets for attack. Very heavy public spending had kept the standard rate of income tax almost at wartime levels — nine shillings in the pound. Far from being dismantled, wartime controls had if anything been extended — for example rationing was extended to bread in 1946 and even potatoes a year later. It was therefore possible to fight the 1950 election campaign on precisely the kind of issues which are most dangerous for a sitting government — and ones with which I personally felt most at ease — that is, a combination of high ideological themes with more down to earth ‘bread and butter’ matters.
The 1950 Conservative manifesto was a cleverly crafted document which combined a devastating indictment of socialism in theory and in practice with a prudent list of specific pledges to reverse it. It stressed the effects of inflation, the evidence of economic mismanagement and waste and bureaucracy. I was particularly pleased with its robust statement on foreign affairs, which noted:
Socialism abroad has been proved to be the weakest obstacle to communism and in many countries of Eastern Europe has gone down before it. We are not prepared to regard those ancient states and nations which have already fallen beneath the Soviet yoke as lost for ever.
But Conservatives were careful not to promise an immediate end to rationing, large-scale reversal of nationalization, or anything too controversial on social security or the Health Service; and there was a positively cloying reference to the trade union ‘movement’, which was described as ‘essential to the proper working of our economy and of our industrial life’. All of us knew that the three areas on which we were likely to be most vulnerable were unemployment (where the voters remembered the high unemployment of the thirties, but not that it had risen under the second Labour Government and fallen under the National Government), the Welfare State (which many people thought we wanted to dismantle) and alleged ‘war-mongering’ (where there was a danger that the Labour Government’s robust line would make Churchill’s Cold War rhetoric seem extreme rather than prescient, as it was). I found myself dealing with all these questions at public meetings in the course of the 1950 and 1951 campaigns.
The 1950 election campaign was the most exhausting few weeks I had ever spent. So much was new to me; and novelty always drains the stamina. Unlike today’s election campaigns, we had well-attended public meetings almost every night, and so I would have to prepare my speech some time during the day. I also wrote my letters to prospective constituents. Then, most afternoons, it was a matter of doorstep canvassing and, as a little light relief, blaring out the message by megaphone. I was well supported by my family: my father came to speak and my sister to help.
Before the election Lady Williams (wife of Sir Herbert Williams, veteran tariff reformer and a Croydon MP for many years) told candidates that we should make a special effort to identify ourselves by the particular way we dressed when we were campaigning. I took this very seriously and spent my days in a tailored black suit and a hat which I bought in Bourne and Hollingsworth in Oxford Street specially for the occasion. And just to make sure I put a black and white ribbon around it with some blue inside the bow.
Quite whether these precautions were necessary is another matter. How many other twenty-four-year-old girls could be found standing on a soapbox in Erith Shopping Centre? In those days it was not often done for women candidates to canvass in factories. But I did — inside and outside. There was always a lively if sometimes noisy reception. The socialists in Dartford became quite irked until it turned out that their candidate — the sitting MP Norman Dodds — would have had the same facilities extended to him if they had thought of asking. It was only the pubs that I did not like going into, and indeed would not do so alone. Some inhibitions die hard.
I was lucky to have an opponent like Norman Dodds, a genuine and extremely chivalrous socialist of the old school. He knew that he was going to win, and he was a big enough man to give an ambitious young woman with totally different opinions a chance. Soon after I was adopted he challenged me to a debate in the hall of the local grammar school and, of course, I eagerly accepted. He and I made opening speeches, there were questions and then we each wound up our case. Each side had its own supporters, and the noise was terrific. Later in the campaign there was an equally vigorous and inconclusive re-run. What made it all such fun was that the argument was about issues and facts, not personalities. On one occasion, a national newspaper reported that Norman Dodds thought a great deal of my beauty but not a lot of my election chances — or of my brains. This perfect socialist gentleman promptly wrote to me disclaiming the statement — or at least the last part.
My own public meetings were also well attended. It was not unusual for the doors of our hall to be closed twenty minutes before the meeting was due to start because so many people were crowding in. Certainly, in those days one advantage of being a woman was that there was a basic courtesy towards us on which we could draw — something which today’s feminists have largely dissipated. So, for example, on one occasion I arrived at a public meeting from another in a different part of the constituency to find the visiting speaker, the former Air Minister Lord Balfour of Inchrye, facing a minor revolution from hecklers in the audience — to such an extent indeed that the police had already been sent for. I told the organizers to cancel the request, and sure enough once I took my place on the platform and started to speak the tumult subsided and order — if not exactly harmony — was restored.
I was also fortunate in the national and indeed international publicity which my candidature received. At twenty-four, I was the youngest woman candidate fighting the 1950 campaign, and as such was an obvious subject for comment. I was asked to write on the role of women in politics. My photograph made its way into Life magazine, the Illustrated London News where it rubbed shoulders with those of the great men of politics, and even the West German press where I was described as a ‘junge Dame mit Charme‘ (perhaps for the last time).
The slogans, coined by me, gained in directness whatever they lacked in subtlety — ‘Vote Right to Keep What’s Left’ and, still more to the point, ‘Stop the Rot, Sack the Lot’. My speeches, even then, pulled no ideological punches. I told a meeting in the Church Hall, Lowfield Street:
We are going into one of the biggest battles this country has ever known — a battle between two ways of life, one which leads inevitably to slavery and the other to freedom. Our opponents like to try and make you believe that Conservatism is a privilege of the few. But Conservatism conserves all that is great and best in our national heritage. What is one of the first tenets of Conservatism? It is that of national unity. We say one nation, not one class against another. You cannot build a great nation or a brotherhood of man by spreading envy or hatred.
Our policy is not built on envy or hatred, but on liberty for the individual man or woman. It is not our policy to suppress success: our policy is to encourage it and encourage energy and initiative. In 1940 it was not the cry of nationalization that made this country rise up and fight totalitarianism. It was the cry for freedom and liberty.
I felt that our hard work had been worthwhile when I heard the result at the count in the local grammar school. I had cut the Labour majority by 6,000. It was in the early hours at Lord Cam-rose’s Daily Telegraph party at the Savoy Hotel — to which candidates, MPs, ministers, Opposition figures and social dignitaries were in those days all invited — that I experienced the same bittersweet feeling about the national result, where the Conservatives had cut Labour’s overall majority from 146 to 5 seats. But victory, as yet at least, it was not.
I should recall, however, one peculiar experience I had as candidate for Dartford. I was asked to open a Conservative fête in Orpington and was reluctantly persuaded to have my fortune told while I was there. Some fortune tellers have a preference for crystal balls. This one apparently preferred jewellery. I was told to take off my string of pearls so that they could be felt and rubbed as a source of supernatural inspiration. The message received was certainly optimistic: ‘You will be great — great as Churchill.’ Most politicians have a superstitious streak; even so, this struck me as quite ridiculous. Still, so much turns on luck that anything which seems to bring a little with it is more than welcome. From then on I regarded my pearls as lucky. And, all in all, they seem to have proved so.
MARRIAGE, FAMILY AND LAW
As I have said, the 1950 result was inconclusive. After the initial exhilaration dies away such results leave all concerned with a sense of anti-climax. There seemed little doubt that Labour had been fatally wounded and that the coup de grace would be administered in a second general election fairly shortly. But in the meantime there was a good deal of uncertainty nationally. For me too in Dartford it was inconvenient. If I were to pursue my political career further I needed to set about finding a winnable seat. But I felt morally bound to fight the Dartford constituency again. It would be wrong to leave them to find another candidate at such short notice. Moreover, it was difficult to imagine that I would be able to make the kind of impact in a second campaign that I had in the one just concluded. I was also extremely tired and, though no one with political blood in their veins shies away from the excitement of electioneering, another campaign within a short while was not an attractive prospect.
I had also decided to move to London. With a little more money to spend from my job with J. Lyons, I had found a very small flat in St George’s Square Mews, in Pimlico. Mr Soward (Senior) came down from Dartford to help me decorate it. I was able to see a good deal more of Denis and in more relaxing conditions than in the hubbub of Conservative activism in Dartford.
I also learned to drive and acquired my first car. My sister, Muriel, had a pre-war Ford Prefect which my father had bought her for £129, and I now inherited it. My Ford Prefect became well known around Dartford, where I was re-adopted, and did me excellent service until I sold it for about the same sum when I got married.
The general election came in October 1951. This time I shaved another 1,000 votes off Norman Dodds’ majority and was hugely delighted to discover when all the results were in that the Conservatives now had an overall majority of seventeen.
During my time at Dartford I had continued to widen my acquaintanceship with senior figures in the Party. I had spoken as proposer of a vote of thanks to Anthony Eden (whom I had first met in Oxford) when he addressed a large and enthusiastic rally at Dartford football ground in 1949. The following year I spoke as seconder of a motion applauding the leadership of Churchill and Eden at a rally of Conservative Women at the Albert Hall, to which Churchill himself replied in vintage form. This was a great occasion for me — to meet in the flesh and talk to the leader whose words had so inspired me as I sat with my family around our wireless in Grantham. In 1950 I was appointed as representative of the Conservative Graduates to the Conservative Party’s National Union Executive, which gave me my first insight into Party organization at the national level.
But it was always policy rather than organization which interested me. In my holidays I would attend courses at Swinton College,[5] where the Director, Reggie Northam — a man of great generosity of spirit and a friend of John Maynard Keynes, who in the 1930s had gone to South Wales to experience for himself the life of the unemployed — would instil into us that the real political battle was for ‘the hearts and minds of the people’. At Swinton and at the various Conservative Political Centre (CPC) meetings in different constituencies, to which I was frequently asked to speak, I was made to think through the real implications for policy of such widely toted concepts as ‘One Nation’, ‘the property-owning democracy’ and ‘the safety net’ (of Social Security benefits).
The greatest social events in my diary were the Eve of (parliamentary) Session parties held by Sir Alfred Bossom, the Member for Maidstone, at his magnificent house, No. 5 Carlton Gardens. Several marquees were put up, brilliantly lit and comfortably heated, in which the greatest and the not so great — like one Margaret Roberts — would mingle convivially. Sir Alfred Bossom would cheerily describe himself as the day’s successor to Lady Londonderry, the great Conservative hostess of the inter-war years. You would hardly have guessed that behind his amiable and easygoing exterior was a genius who had devised the revolutionary designs of some of the first skyscrapers in New York. He was specially kind and generous to me. It was his house from which I was married, and there that our reception was held; and it was he who proposed the toast to our happiness.
I was married on a cold and foggy December day at Wesley’s Chapel, City Road. It was more convenient for all concerned that the ceremony take place in London, but it was the Methodist minister from Grantham, our old friend the Rev. Skinner, who assisted the Rev. Spivey, the minister at City Road. Then all our friends — from Grantham, Dartford, Erith and London — came back to Sir Alfred Bossom’s. Finally, Denis swept me off to our honeymoon in Madeira, where I quickly recovered from the bone-shaking experience of my first and last aquatic landing in a seaplane to begin my married life against the background of that lovely island.
On our return from Madeira I moved into Denis’s flat in Swan Court, Flood Street in Chelsea. It was a light, sixth-floor flat with a fine view of London. It was also the first time I learned the convenience of living all on one level. As I would find again in the flat at 10 Downing Street, this makes life far easier to run. There was plenty of space — a large room which served as a sitting room and dining room, two good-sized bedrooms, another room which Denis used as a study and so on. Denis drove off to Erith every morning and would come back quite late in the evening. But I found that I had plenty to do: this was the first time I had had to keep house. We quickly made friends with our neighbours; one advantage of living in a block of flats with a lift is that you meet everyone. By the end of the month I knew most of my neighbours, some of whom were rather distinguished. Late at night there was always the possibility of hearing Dame Sybil Thorndike’s unmistakable contralto booming around the courtyard as she returned from a show. During the time we were there we did a good deal of entertaining, with drinks in the evening or supper at the weekend.
To be a young married woman in comfortable circumstances must always be a delight if the marriage is a happy one, as mine was. But to be a young married woman in those circumstances in the 1950s was very heaven. I am always astonished when people refer to that period as a time of repression, dullness or conformity — the Age of Anxiety, etc. The 1950s were, in a thousand different ways, the reawakening of normal happy life after the trials of wartime and the petty indignities of post-war austerity. Rationing came to an end. Wages and salaries started to rise. Bananas, grapes and fruits I had never heard of suddenly reappeared in the shops. After the drabness of Utility clothing, fashion recovered its confidence and colour with Dior’s wide skirts, strapless evening dresses, and Ascot hats. Italian restaurants popped up where boarded-up shop fronts had been before. Coffee bars, selling cappuccino, instantly christened ‘frothy coffee’, spread down high streets. Teenagers were invented. Ordinary homes began to accommodate fridges, Hoovers and electric washing machines. Billboards sprouted fewer Government notices and more commercial advertising (‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints. Too-good-to-hurry mints’). TV aerials multiplied across the rooftops of England. Hollywood responded to the expansive mood of those years with the invention of wide-screen Cinemascope and big films to go with it, whether biblical epics like Quo Vadis or picturesque musicals like South Pacific. And people who had never thought to afford a foreign holiday discovered Spain.
It was the age of affluence, and with affluence came a relaxation of all the restrictions that had marked English life since wartime and, even beforehand, the Grantham of my youth. I cannot pretend to have liked, or even understood, all the expressions of this new popular freedom. When rock and roll was imported from America, along with names like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, I assumed it would be a nine days’ journalistic wonder. (It has never eclipsed The Desert Song in my affection.) The Angry Young Man and kitchen-sink drama also appeared to challenge the West End. Again, I assumed that this too would disappear in short order and, besides, I had had too much of kitchen sinks in real life to want to visit them on my night out. I little imagined that I would one day read John Osborne with approval and become a good friend of Kingsley Amis, grateful for his support in the culture wars of my administration. And as Ascot, the Derby, Henley and Wimbledon recovered their old style in those years, the gossip columnists who lived off them re-emerged from their post-war hiding places in Obituaries or Garden Notes. Reading them was a somewhat shameful taste, like gorging on liqueur chocolates. But I have to admit it was a taste few could resist. Readers made the acquaintance of new household names like Lady Docker, Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos; and Monte Carlo once again became a synonym for high life.
People felt that after all the sacrifices of the previous twenty years, they wanted to enjoy themselves, to get a little fun out of life. Although I may have been perhaps rather more serious than my contemporaries, Denis and I enjoyed ourselves quite as much as most, and more than some. We went to the theatre, we took holidays in Rome and Paris (albeit in very modest hotels), we gave parties and went to them, we had a wonderful time.
But the high point of our lives at that time was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in June 1953. Those who had televisions — we did not — held house parties to which all their friends came to watch the great occasion. Denis and I, passionate devotees of the monarchy that we were, decided the occasion merited the extravagance of a seat in the covered stand erected in Parliament Square just opposite the entrance to Westminster Abbey. The tickets were an even wiser investment than Denis knew when he bought them, for it poured all day and most people in the audience were drenched — not to speak of those in the open carriages of the great procession. The Queen of Tonga never wore that dress again. Mine lived to see another day.
Pleasant though married life was in London, I still had time enough after housework to pursue a long-standing intellectual interest in the law. As with my fascination with politics, it was my father who had been responsible for stimulating this interest. Although he was not a magistrate, as Mayor of Grantham in 1945–46 my father would automatically sit on the Bench. During my university vacations I would go along with him to the Quarter Sessions (where many minor criminal offences were tried), at which an experienced lawyer would be in the chair as Recorder. On one such occasion my father and I lunched with him, a King’s Counsel called Norman Winning. I was captivated by what I saw in court, but I was enthralled by Norman Winning’s conversation about the theory and practice of law. At one point I blurted out: ‘I wish I could be a lawyer; but all I know about is chemistry and I can’t change what I’m reading at Oxford now.’ But Norman Winning said that he himself had read physics for his first degree at Cambridge before changing to law as a second degree. I objected that there was no way I could afford to stay on all those extra years at university. He replied that there was another way, perfectly possible but very hard work, which was to get a job in or near London, join one of the Inns of Court and study for my law exams in the evenings. And this in 1950 is precisely what I had done. Now with Denis’s support I could afford to concentrate on legal studies without taking up new employment. There was a great deal to read, and I also attended courses at the Council of Legal Education.
I had decided that what with running a home and reading for the Bar I would have to put my political ambitions on ice for some time to come. At twenty-six I could afford to do that and I told Conservative Central Office that such was my intention. But as a young woman candidate I still attracted occasional public attention. For example, in February 1952 an article of mine appeared in the Sunday Graphic on the position of women ‘At the Dawn of the New Elizabethan Era’. I was also on the list of sought-after Party speakers and was invited to constituencies up and down the country. In any case, try as I would, my fascination for politics got the better of all contrary resolutions.
I talked it over with Denis and he said that he would support me all the way. So in June I went to see Beryl Cook at Central Office and told her: ‘It’s no use. I must face it. I don’t like being left out of the political stream.’ As I knew she would, ‘Auntie Beryl’ gave me her full support and referred me to John Hare, the Party Vice-Chairman for Candidates. In the kindest possible way, he told me about the pressures which membership of the House of Commons placed on family life, but I said that Denis and I had talked it through and this was something we were prepared to face. I said that I would like to have the chance of fighting a marginal or safe seat next time round. We both agreed that, given my other commitments, this should be in London itself or within a radius of thirty miles. I promptly asked to be considered for Canterbury, which was due to select a candidate. I left Central Office very pleased with the outcome — though I did not get Canterbury.
The question which John Hare had raised with me about how I would combine my home life with politics was soon to become even more sensitive. For in August 1953 the twins, Mark and Carol, put in an appearance. Late one Thursday night, some six weeks before what we still called ‘the baby’ was due, I began to have pains. I had seen the doctor that day and he asked me to come back on the Monday for an X-ray because there was something he wanted to check. Now Monday seemed a very long way away, and off I was immediately taken to hospital. I was given a sedative which helped me sleep through the night. Then on Friday morning the X-ray was taken and to the great surprise of all it was discovered that I was to be the mother of twins. Unfortunately, that was not the whole story. The situation required a Caesarean operation the following day. The two tiny babies — a boy and a girl — had to wait a little before they saw their father. For Denis, imagining that all was progressing smoothly, had very sensibly gone to the Oval to watch the Test Match and it proved quite impossible to contact him. On that day he received two pieces of good but equally surprising news. England won the Ashes, and he found himself the proud father of twins.
I had to stay in hospital for over a fortnight: indeed, one was expected in those days to wait three weeks before coming out. This meant that after the first few uncomfortable days of recovery I found myself with time on my hands. We had, of course, been expecting only one addition to the Thatcher household. Consequently, the first and most immediate task was to telephone all the relevant stores to order two rather than just one of everything. Oddly enough, the very depth of the relief and happiness at having brought Mark and Carol into the world made me uneasy. The pull of a mother towards her children is perhaps the strongest and most instinctive emotion we have. I was never one of those people who regarded being ‘just’ a mother or indeed ‘just’ a housewife as second best. Indeed, whenever I heard such implicit assumptions made both before and after I became Prime Minister it would make me very angry indeed. Of course, to be a mother and a housewife is a vocation of a very high kind. But I simply felt that it was not the whole of my vocation. I knew that I also wanted a career. A phrase that Irene Ward, MP for Tynemouth, and I often used was that ‘while the home must always be the centre of one’s life, it should not be the boundary of one’s ambitions’. Indeed, I needed a career because, quite simply, that was the sort of person I was. And not just any career. I wanted one which would keep me mentally active and prepare me for the political future for which I believed I was well suited.
So it was that at the end of my first week in hospital I came to a decision. I had the application form for my Bar finals in December sent to me. I filled it in and sent off the money for the exam, knowing that this little psychological trick I was playing on myself would ensure that I plunged into legal studies on my return to Swan Court with the twins, and that I would have to organize our lives so as to allow me to be both a mother and a professional woman.
This was not, in fact, as difficult as it might sound. The flat at Swan Court was large enough, even though it was not ideal: being on the sixth floor, we had to have bars put on all the windows. Without a garden, the twins had to be taken out twice a day to Ranelagh Gardens. But this turned out to be good for them because they became used to meeting and playing with other children — though early on, when we did not know the rules, we had our ball confiscated by the Park Superintendent. Usually, however, it was the nanny, Barbara, who took Mark and Carol to the park, except at weekends when I took over. Barbara had been trained at Dr Barnardo’s and turned out to be a marvellous friend to the children.
The fifties marked the start of a major change in the role of women. Until then they tended to be well into middle age when the last child of an often large family fled the nest; work within the house, without the benefit of labour-saving devices, took much longer; and home was also a more social place, visited throughout the day by a wide range of tradesmen, from the milkman to the window cleaner, each perhaps stopping off for a chat or cup of tea. Consequently, fewer women had the opportunity or felt the need to go out to work. The fifties marked the beginning of the end of this world, and by the eighties it had changed out of recognition. Women were younger when the children left home because families were smaller; domestic work was lighter owing to new home appliances; and home deliveries were replaced by a weekly visit to the mall or supermarket. And the 1980s saw yet another twist: the trend whereby women started to remain at work in the early years of marriage, but to leave the workforce to have children for a time in their thirties.
These changes led to a powerful and largely middle-class lobby for tax allowances for child care — either nannies or play groups or, in educational disguise, nursery provision. As Prime Minister I resisted this pressure. I did not believe that working wives, who would presumably be bringing more money into the family anyway, should in effect be subsidized by the taxes paid by couples where the woman looked after the children at home and there was only one income. This was a straightforward matter of fairness.
Of course, these general arguments were not ones which affected my own decisions as a young mother. I was especially fortunate in being able to rely on Denis’s income to hire a nanny to look after the children in my absences. I could combine being a good mother with being an effective professional woman, as long as I organized everything intelligently down to the last detail. It was not enough to have someone in to mind the children; I had to arrange my own time to ensure that I could spend a good deal of it with them. As regards being a barrister after I had become qualified, I would have a certain amount of latitude in the cases I took on, so I could to some extent adjust my workload in line with the demands of family. As regards politics, we lived in London, my husband worked in the London area, Parliament was in London — clearly, I must seek a constituency which was also in or near London. It was only this unusual combination of circumstances which enabled me to consider becoming an MP while I had young children.
Not long after I had the twins, John Hare wrote to me from Central Office:
I was delighted to hear that you had had twins. How very clever of you. How is this going to affect your position as a candidate? I have gaily been putting your name forward; if you would like me to desist, please say so.
I replied thanking him and noting:
Having unexpectedly produced twins — we had no idea there were two of them until the day they were born — I think I had better not consider a candidature for at least six months. The household needs considerable reorganization and a reliable nurse must be found before I can feel free to pursue such other activities with the necessary fervour.
So my name was, as John Hare put it, kept ‘in cold storage for the time being’. It was incumbent on me to say when I would like to come onto the active list of candidates again.
My self-prescribed six months of political limbo were quickly over. I duly passed my Bar finals. I had begun by considering specializing in patent law because I thought I would be able to make use of my industrial and scientific knowledge. But it seemed that the opportunities there were very limited and so perhaps tax law would be a better bet. In any case, I would need a foundation in the criminal law first. So in December 1953 I joined Frederick Lawton’s Chambers in the Inner Temple for a six months’ pupillage. Fred Lawton’s was a common law Chambers. He was, indeed, one of the most brilliant criminal lawyers I ever knew. He was witty, with no illusions about human nature or his own profession, extraordinarily lucid in exposition, and a kind guide to me.
In fact, I was to go through no fewer than four sets of Chambers, partly because I had to gain a grounding in several fields before I was competent to specialize in tax. So I witnessed the rhetorical fireworks of the Criminal Bar, admired the precise draftsmanship of the Chancery Bar and then delved into the details of company law. But I became increasingly confident that tax law could be my forte. It was a meeting point with my interest in politics; it offered the right mixture of theory and practical substance; and of one thing we could all be sure — there would never be a shortage of clients desperate to cut their way out of the jungle of over-complex and constantly changing tax law.
Studying, observing, discussing and eventually practising law had a profound effect on my political outlook. In this I was probably unusual. Familiarity with the law usually breeds if not contempt, at least a large measure of cynicism. For me, however, it gave a richer significance to that expression ‘the rule of law’ which so easily tripped off the Conservative tongue.
From my reading at university and earlier I had gained a clear idea that what distinguished free from un-free regimes was that law ruled in the first and force in the second. But what was the essence of this ‘law’? By what process had it evolved? And why did it have such deep roots in Britain and, as recent history showed, such shallow ones elsewhere? The legal textbooks that I now studied were not by and large intended to provide answers to such points. But the principles of law which they expounded continually raised in my mind these questions. Similarly, as I read about the great judges of the formative periods of English law, I was increasingly fascinated by the mysterious and cumulative process by which the courts of England had laid the foundations for English freedom.
But it was A.V. Dicey whose writing — above all his classic textbook The Law of the Constitution — had most impact on me. It had long been fashionable to attack Dicey for his doctrinaire opposition to the new administrative state, and there are plenty of learned commentators still inclined to do so. But I found myself immediately at home with what he said — it is not perhaps without significance that though Dicey’s was a great legal mind, he was at heart a classical liberal. The ‘law of the constitution’ was, in Dicey’s words, the result of two ‘guiding principles, which had been gradually worked out by the more or less conscious efforts of generations of English statesmen and lawyers’. The first of these principles was the sovereignty of Parliament. The second was the rule of law, which I will summarize briefly and inadequately as the principle that no authority is above the law of the land.[6] For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo-Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through reading Hayek’s masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think of this principle as having wider application.
When politics is in your blood, every circumstance seems to lead you back to it. Whether pondering Dicey, poring over the intricacies of tax law or discussing current issues with other members of the Inns of Court Conservative Society, political questions insisted on taking centre stage in my imagination. So when in December 1954 I heard that there was a vacancy for the Conservative candidature in Orpington — which of course, being next to my old constituency of Dartford, I knew, and which was not too far from London — I telephoned Central Office and asked to have my name put forward. I was interviewed and placed on the short-list. Sitting just outside the selection meeting with Denis, I heard Donald Sumner, the local candidate (and Association Chairman), advancing in his speech the decisive argument that in Orpington what they really needed was ‘a Member who really knows what is going on in the constituency — who knows the state of the roads in Locksbottom’. Denis and I roared with laughter. But Donald Sumner got the seat.
I was naturally disappointed by the decision, because Orpington would have been an ideal constituency for me. It seemed extremely unlikely now that a similarly suitable seat would become available before what looked liked an increasingly imminent general election. So I wrote to John Hare to say that I would now ‘continue at the Bar with no further thought of a parliamentary career for many years’. Knowing me better than I knew myself perhaps, he wrote back urging me at least to reconsider if a winnable seat in Kent became available. But I was adamant, though I made it clear that I would always be available to speak in constituencies and would of course be active in the general election campaign.
Although I was in general a loyal Conservative, I had felt for some time that the Government could have moved further and faster in dismantling socialism and installing free-enterprise policies. But it had not been easy for them to persuade popular opinion — or indeed themselves — that a somewhat stronger brew would be palatable. In fact, by 1955 a good deal of modest progress had been made as regards the removal of controls and, even more modestly, returning nationalized industries to the private sector. The rationing of food had finally been brought to an end. Large steps had been taken towards restoring the convertibility of the currency. Iron and steel nationalization had been halted and a start made in selling road haulage. Above all, the proportion of GNP taken by the state had been reduced steadily in the years from 1951. And there was one development of great importance for the future: the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting and the beginning of commercial television.
SUEZ AND AFTER
Conservative thinking about policy matters was also becoming more self-confident and more radical. This can be illustrated by a comparison between the two most influential publications produced by the Party over these years — One Nation (October 1950) and Change is our Ally (May 1954). Both were written by an overlapping group of remarkably gifted young Members of Parliament, including Enoch Powell, Angus Maude, Robert Carr and (One Nation only) Ted Heath and Iain Macleod. Admittedly, One Nation dealt with social policy which, particularly at a time when it was clear that a Conservative government would have to rein back on public expenditure, was a tricky topic. But still the relative blandness of that document — which emphasized (soundly enough, of course) Conservative commitment to a ‘safety net’ of benefits securing a living standard below which none must fall, and to Anthony Eden’s notion of the strengthening of the weak rather than the weakening of the strong — suggested a defensive exercise and indeed a defensive mentality.
Change is our Ally is a far more exciting document which, when I re-read it in the late 1980s, I found to contain very much the same analysis as that we had adopted since I became Party Leader. It began by tracing the growth of collectivism in the British economy between the wars. It then boldly attacked the notion that the planning of the Second World War economy could appropriately be extended into peacetime. It even pointed out — what everyone knew to be true, but what for years after the war went largely unsaid — that the wartime system of planning had been inefficient, wasteful and bureaucratic, however necessary in the emergency the nation faced at the time. The follies and absurdities of the economic plan, with its detailed predictions and quantified targets, were further exposed by retrospective comparisons between the assumptions made in Lord Beveridge’s unofficial study Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944, and the situation a decade later. It was all admirably commonsensical. What the authors of Change is our Ally, and indeed those of the following year’s Conservative manifesto, did not do — and I certainly claim no credit for thinking at the time that they should have done — was to propose the root and branch dismantling of collectivism in industry or fundamental reform in the Welfare State. But in the mid–1950s the Conservative Party was at least playing with a consistent free market analysis which would, in due course and given the opportunities of government, have led to free market policies. This, however, was not how matters were to develop.
In April 1955 Churchill resigned as Prime Minister to be succeeded by Anthony Eden, and there was in quick succession a snap general election, a new Conservative Government, the débâcle of Suez and the arrival at No. 10 of Harold Macmillan, the wizard of change.
During the general election campaign of May 1955 I spoke in a number of constituencies. But for me it was generally a dull affair. Once you have been a candidate everything else palls. Moreover, there was very little doubt of the outcome on this occasion. Sure enough, the Conservatives won an overall majority of fifty-eight. But the Eden administration’s political honeymoon turned out to be a short one. It quickly appeared that Rab Butler’s pre-election Budget had been too loose, and there followed a much tighter emergency Budget in October, which badly damaged Butler’s reputation — he was replaced as Chancellor by Harold Macmillan six months later — and seriously dented the Government’s. But it was, of course, to be foreign affairs which would be Eden’s real undoing.
The background to the Suez crisis of July to November 1956 has been much discussed. At the time the general feeling, at least among Conservatives, was that Britain was a great power which should not be pushed around by Nasser’s Egypt and that the latter needed to be taught a lesson, not least pour encourager les autres. Many of the details, for example the degree of collusion between Britain and France on the one hand and Israel on the other, were not available to the wider public at the time. To us, therefore, it appeared almost incomprehensible that first Anthony Nutting and then my old friend Edward Boyle should resign from the Government in protest at the intervention. Now their actions are more understandable, though even all these years later I could not endorse them.
The balance of interest and principle in the Suez affair is not a simple one. I had no qualms about Britain’s right to respond to Nasser’s illegal seizure of an international waterway — if only action had been taken quickly and decisively. Over the summer, however, we were outmanoeuvred by a clever dictator into a position where our interests could only be protected by bending our legal principles. Among the many reasons for criticizing the Anglo-French-Israeli collusion is that it was bound to tarnish our case when it became known, as it assuredly would and did. At the same time, Suez was the last occasion when the European powers might have withstood and brought down a Third World dictator who had shown no interest in international agreements, except where he could profit from them. Nasser’s victory at Suez had among its fruits the overthrow of the pro-Western regime in Iraq, the Egyptian occupation of the Yemen, and the encirclement of Israel which led to the Six Day War — and the bills were still coming in when I left office.
As I came to know more about it, I drew four lessons from this sad episode. First, we should not get into a military operation unless we were determined and able to finish it. Second, we should never again find ourselves on the opposite side to the United States in a major international crisis affecting Britain’s interests. Third, we should ensure that our actions were in accord with international law. And finally, he who hesitates is lost.
At the time, I fiercely supported the Suez campaign in argument. I was repelled by what seemed to me the opportunism of the Labour Party in turning against the operation after initially supporting it. Denis and I were among the thousands of readers who cancelled the Observer and pledged never to read it again because of its opposition to Suez. This is not to say that I had no misgivings. Even though in those days I was much less conscious of international legal niceties than I later became, I did think it slightly rum that the evening paper which I dashed across Chancery Lane in a downpour to secure blared out the headline ‘Ultimatum!’ Britain and France were demanding that the Egyptians and Israelis withdraw from the canal and allow an Anglo-French force to separate them and protect the waterway. It was not quite clear to me how the British could issue an ultimatum to the Egyptians to withdraw from their own territory. Still, I swallowed my hesitations and supported Eden.
Politically, the failure of the Suez operation came as a body blow. Although it took many years for the full picture to emerge, it was immediately clear that the Government had been incompetent, and that its incompetence had been exposed in the most humiliating fashion. For a Conservative government — particularly one led by someone whose reputation was founded on the conduct of foreign affairs — the outcome was particularly damaging. There was a mood of dismay bordering on despair among Conservative supporters. Denis’s reaction, as an ex-officer in the Royal Artillery, was sharpened by anger that our troops had been let down when the operation was halted close to completion. As he said to me: ‘You never announce a ceasefire when your troops are out on patrol.’ I would remember this: politicians must never take decisions in war without full consideration of what they mean to our forces on the ground.
We also blamed harshly the conduct of the United States. Some Conservatives never forgave the Americans, and the fact that anti-Americanism lingered on in some generally right-wing circles when I was Prime Minister must be in part attributed to this. I too felt that we had been let down by our traditional ally — though at the time, of course, I did not realize that Eisenhower felt equally let down by the Anglo-French decision to launch military operations on the eve of a Presidential election in which he was running on a peace ticket. But in any case I also felt that the ‘special relationship’ with our transatlantic cousins had foundations too solid to be eroded by even such a crisis as Suez. Some people argued that Suez demonstrated that the Americans were so hostile to Britain’s imperial role, and were now so much a superpower, that they could not be trusted and that closer European integration was the only answer. But, as I have argued, there was an alternative — and quite contrary — conclusion. This was that British foreign policy could not long be pursued without ensuring for it the support of the United States. Indeed, in retrospect I can see that Suez was an unintended catalyst in the peaceful and necessary transfer of power from Britain to America as the ultimate upholder of Western interests and the liberal international economic system.
I was not so preoccupied with Suez as to be unconscious of the wicked ruthlessness of the Soviet Union’s behaviour in crushing the Hungarian revolution in November 1956 — even under bouncy Nikita Khrushchev, who had visited Britain with his amiable wife just a few months earlier. I never imagined that communism even with a human face could somehow generate a human heart. But at the time it seemed extraordinary to me that the Soviet Union should be prepared to undo all the efforts it had made since the death of Stalin to improve its image by such a crude and barbarous affront to decency. Some years later I discussed my reaction with Bob Conquest, who was to provide me with so much wise advice when I became Leader of the Opposition and whose The Great Terror in the late 1960s first fully exposed the scale of Stalin’s murders. He said that the classic error we all made in dealing with the Soviets was in assuming that they would behave as Westerners would in their circumstances. They were shaped by a very different and much more brutal political culture. It was my recollection of all this that led me, after Iraq attacked Iran in September 1980, to ask our Intelligence Services to look back over events like Hungary, which we had not foreseen because we had failed to penetrate the psychology of the aggressor, and draw out any conclusions for future action.
Yet there is little we could have done to prevent the Hungarian tragedy — and no way that NATO would have risked a major war for Hungary, with or without Suez. But many Hungarians thought that they had been encouraged to think otherwise, which added to their bitterness at our betrayal. I remember a Sunday newspaper interview with a Hungarian woman sheltering in a basement. She said: ‘The West will not come and help. Freedom is very selfish.’ I burned at the reproach. Whatever we were or were not in a position to do, it seemed to me that a world divided into spheres of influence which condemned this woman to live under communism was one which had to be changed.
After the fiasco of Suez it was clear that Anthony Eden could not remain as Prime Minister. He fell ill during the crisis and resigned in January 1957. There was much speculation in the circles in which I moved as to who would succeed — in those days, of course, Conservative Leaders ‘emerged’ rather than being elected. My Conservative friends in Chambers were convinced that Rab Butler would never be summoned by the Queen because he was too left wing. By contrast, the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of Suez, Harold Macmillan, was considered to be the right-wing candidate. All of which shows how little we knew of the past and present convictions of both men — particularly the brilliant, elusive figure who was shortly to become Prime Minister.
Harold Macmillan had the strengths and weaknesses of the consummate politician. He cultivated a languorous and almost antediluvian style which was not — and was not intended to be — sufficiently convincing to conceal the shrewdness behind it. He was a man of masks. It was impossible to tell, for instance, that behind the cynical Edwardian façade was one of the most deeply religious souls in politics.
Harold Macmillan’s great and lasting achievement was to repair the relationship with the United States. This was the essential condition for Britain to restore her reputation and standing. Unfortunately, he was unable to repair the damage inflicted by Suez on the morale of the British political class — a veritable ‘Suez syndrome’. They went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing. This was always a grotesque exaggeration. At that time we were a middle-ranking diplomatic power after America and the Soviet Union, a nuclear power, a leading member of NATO, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the centre of a great Commonwealth.
Macmillan’s impact on domestic affairs was mixed. Under his leadership there was the 1957 decontrol of private sector rents — which greatly reduced the scope of the rent control that had existed in one form or another since 1915 — a necessary, though far from popular move. Generally, however, Macmillan’s leadership edged the Party in the direction of state intervention, a trend which would become much more marked after 1959.
Even at the time some developments made me uneasy. When Peter Thorneycroft, Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch — Macmillan’s entire Treasury team — resigned over a £50 million increase in public expenditure in January 1958, Macmillan talked wittily of ‘little local difficulties’. I felt in no position to judge the rights and wrongs of the dispute itself. But the husbanding of public money did not strike me as an ignoble cause over which to resign. The first steps away from the path of financial rectitude always make its final abandonment that much easier. And that abandonment brings its own adverse consequences. Such was the case in the years that followed.
Yet in Macmillan the Party certainly had an immensely shrewd and able politician. As early as the summer of 1957 he had understood that the living standards of ordinary people had been rising fast, and that this offered the best hope of political success. It was then that he observed that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.[7]
The Labour Party and the critics pounced on this as an example of Macmillan’s complacency and materialism. But in fact it was true and politically potent. There was a feeling that things never had been better, and that this was attributable to private enterprise rather than planning. The last thing the country wanted was to return to hair-shirted austerity. So the attacks on ‘Super-Mac’ rebounded.
That said, the political recovery was by no means immediate. At the time of the October 1957 Party Conference — one of the very few that I did not attend — the opinion polls were showing Labour at 52 per cent and the Conservatives at 33 per cent. On top of that, the Liberal Party dealt us a severe blow by winning the Torrington by-election in March 1958.
It was not until the late summer of that year that the Conservatives caught up with Labour in the opinion polls. By the time of the 1959 general election the two main parties were unashamedly competing to appeal to the nation’s desire for material self-advancement. The Conservative manifesto bluntly stated: ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives, don’t let Labour ruin it.’ It went on to promise a doubling of the British standard of living in a generation. As for Labour, a few days into the campaign the Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell promised that there would be no rise in income tax in spite of all the extra spending Labour planned — even in that political climate of optimism, a fatally incredible pledge.
THE FINCHLEY ROAD
Well before this I myself had re-entered the fray. In February 1956 I wrote to Donald Kaberry, the Party Vice-Chairman in charge of candidates:
For some time now I have been feeling the temptation to return to active politics. I had intended, when I was called to the Bar, to concentrate entirely on legal work but a little experience at the Revenue Bar, and in Company matters, far from turning my attention from politics has served to draw my attention more closely to the body which is responsible for the legislation about which I have come to hold strong views.
I went to see Donald Kaberry the following month. There was no problem in my being put back on the list of candidates — this time to be considered for safe Conservative-held seats only. I was all the more delighted because I found in Donald Kaberry a constant and dependable source of wise advice and friendship — no small thing for an aspiring candidate.
I was less fortunate in the reception I received from Selection Committees. It had begun at Orpington in 1954. It was the same at Beckenham, Hemel Hempstead and then Maidstone in 1957 and 1958. I would be short-listed for the seat, would make what was generally acknowledged to be a good speech — and then the questions, most of them having the same purpose, would begin. With my family commitments, would I have time enough for the constituency? Did I realize how much being a Member of Parliament would keep me away from home? Might it not be better to wait for a year or two before trying to get into the House? And sometimes more bluntly still: did I really think that I could fulfil my duties as a mother with young children to look after and as an MP?
I felt that Selection Committees had every right to ask me these questions. I explained our family circumstances and that I already had the help of a first-class nanny. I also used to describe how I had found it possible to be a professional woman and a mother by organizing my time properly. What I resented, however, was that beneath some of the criticism I detected a feeling that the House of Commons was not really the right place for a woman anyway. Perhaps some of the men at Selection Committees entertained this prejudice, but I found then and later that it was the women who came nearest to expressing it openly. Not for the first time the simplistic left-wing concept of ‘sex discrimination’ had got it all wrong.
I was hurt and disappointed by these experiences. They were, after all, an attack on me not just as a candidate but as a wife and mother. But I refused to be put off by them. I was confident that I had something to offer in politics. I knew that many others who had crossed my political path very much wanted me to get into the House. And most important of all, Denis never had any doubts. He was always there to comfort and support me.
In April 1958 I had another long talk with Donald Kaberry at Central Office. He told me about the constituencies which were likely to select soon and I, for my part, spoke frankly about the difficulties I had faced as a woman with the Selection Committees. Unfortunately, this is not one of the topics on which even the wisest male friend can give very useful counsel. But Donald Kaberry did give me advice on what to wear on these sensitive occasions — something smart but not showy. In fact, looking me up and down, he said he thought the black coat dress with brown trim which I was wearing would be just fine. His sartorial judgement would soon be put to the test. For I now entered my name for — and in July was called to interview at — the safe Conservative seat of Finchley, North London, whose MP was retiring.
Finchley was not an area of London that I knew particularly well. But like any enthusiastic would-be candidate I set to work to find out all there was to know about it. I was determined that no one would know the Finchley equivalent of Locksbottom better than I. But one advantage of an urban seat, particularly a London seat, is that you know that the most topical issues locally will correspond very closely to the most important political issues nationally. And that is not always the case with a rural or regional seat. So, for example, rent decontrol was bound to be controversial in Finchley, as nationally. Immigration too was just starting to figure on the political landscape — it was to lead to the first Notting Hill riots just a few weeks later. The state of the economy, and which party was more likely to keep living standards rising and services improving, were bound to be at the forefront of people’s minds in Finchley as elsewhere. On all of these things I knew exactly where I stood and what I would say.
I was one of a ‘long list’ of some 150 applicants, which contained a number of my future colleagues in the House. I was also one of those called for preliminary interview by the Constituency Selection Committee. I could tell that I had a good deal of support, which was satisfying but hardly grounds for confidence. Being the most popular person on these occasions can sometimes be less important than being the least unpopular person. If, as the weaker candidates are eliminated, all their support goes to your opponent it is quite possible to fall at the last fence — and we were barely out of the paddock.
It was arranged that the final four of us — three men and myself — should go before the Executive Council of the Association. I knew I would have a large number of friends, but I was also pretty sure that I could expect some fierce opposition; it would be a fight.
I prepared myself as best I could. I felt reasonably confident that I knew the constituency. I had no doubt that I could cope with even quite abstruse questions of economic or foreign policy, for I had voraciously read the newspapers and all the briefing I could obtain. I prepared my speech until it was word perfect, and I had mastered the technique of talking without notes. Equally important was that I should put myself in the right state of mind — confident but not too confident. I decided to obey instructions and wear the black coat dress. I saw no harm either in courting the fates: so I wore not just my lucky pearls but also a lucky brooch which had been given to me by my Conservative friends in Dartford.
There was, however, one piece of thoroughly bad luck. This was that on the date of the meeting — Monday 14 July — it was quite impossible for Denis to come with me. Indeed, so quick was the whole selection process that he knew nothing whatever about it. Every year he would go away on a foreign sales tour for a month or so, and at this point his whereabouts were only ‘somewhere in Africa’. By contrast, the other candidates were accompanied by their spouses. So as I entered the packed meeting on that warm July evening and took my place beside the chairman I felt very much alone.
But as soon as I was on my feet the inhibitions fell away. As always, I quickly became too taken up with the thrust of my argument to worry too much about what other people were thinking. The applause when I sat down seemed warm and genuine. As I had expected, it was at questions that the trouble began.
Could a mother with young children really effectively represent Finchley? What about the strains on my family life? I gave my usual answers, and as usual too a section of the audience was determinedly unconvinced. And doubtless it was easier for them because poor Denis at that moment was absent. At least he did not have to hear it all. But I wished he were with me all the same.
I rejoined the other candidates and their wives, where the tension was only relieved by that over-polite inconsequential small talk which such occasions always seem to generate. Once the last of us had performed, it seemed an endless wait until one of the officers came through to tell us the result. And when he did, it was to me that he spoke. There was no time to feel relief, pleasure or even exhaustion, because it was now necessary to return to receive the congratulations of the Executive.
It was only afterwards that I knew the precise result. The first round of voting gave me thirty-five votes as against thirty-four for my nearest rival. On the second round, when the two other candidates had dropped out, I had forty-six against his forty-three. It was then expected that, for form’s sake and to show that there was no ill feeling, the Executive should unanimously vote to select me as their candidate. Unfortunately, some of those who opposed my candidature had no such intentions. So I inherited an Association which I would have to unite behind me, and this would mean winning over people who had not disguised their disapproval.
But that was for tomorrow. First I must break the good news to my family back in Grantham. Denis was entirely incommunicado, blissfully unaware of what I had been through at Finchley. I had written him a letter some time before about the prospects, but he never received it. A couple of days later he was on his way from Johannesburg to Lagos via Kano in northern Nigeria. On changing planes he picked up a copy of the London Evening Standard which someone had left behind, and as he leafed through it he discovered the astonishing news that his wife had been selected for the safe seat of Finchley. I always seemed to be giving him surprises.
My first opportunity to impress myself on the Finchley Association as a whole was at the Adoption Meeting early the following month. This time I again appeared in a plain black outfit with a small black hat. I received what I afterwards learned was an almost embarrassingly glowing introduction from Bertie Blatch, the constituency chairman, who was to be a great patron and protector. (It was an added advantage then and later that Bertie owned the most important local newspaper, the Finchley Press.) As I entered the hall, I was met with warm applause. I used the occasion to speak at some length about both international and domestic affairs. I pulled out every stop. I knew that though I was the only duly selected candidate, this adoption meeting was not, as it should have been, a mere formality. There was still some die-hard opposition to my candidature, centred on one woman and her little coterie, who were trying to have the contest re-run. I was determined to overcome this. There were no problems in dealing with the three questions from the body of the hall. As Conservatives do on such occasions, they gave me a terrific reception. But at the end — and contrary to the newspaper report of the occasion — a few of those present refused to vote for my adoption, which was overwhelming but not (that magic word) ‘unanimous’. I left the meeting knowing that I had secured my candidature and confident of the loyalty of the great majority of the Association, but aware too that some were still determined to make life as difficult as possible.
I went as far as to write to Ted Heath, then Chief Whip but previously my near neighbour in Dartford, about the problems I was having. Partly as a result of his assistance, and partly because I used my own personal contacts, I managed to attract a distinguished field of speakers to come and speak on my behalf between my adoption and election day. Iain Macleod, Keith Joseph, Peter Thorneycroft and John Boyd-Carpenter — all people around whom my future political life would soon revolve — were among them. Denis’s belated but extremely welcome arrival on the scene also helped in a rather different way. Bertie Blatch gave me constant and unstinting support.
Finchley had been run with a degree of gentlemanly disengagement that was neither my style nor warranted by political realities. I intended to work and then campaign as if Finchley were a marginal seat, and I hoped and expected that others would follow my lead. From now on I was in the constituency two or three times a week and regularly went out canvassing in each of the wards, returning afterwards to get to know the Party activists over a drink in the local pub or someone’s house.
By the time I arrived as candidate, there was a good deal of concern that the Liberals in Finchley were becoming strongly entrenched. They were always excellent campaigners, particularly effective in local government elections. A few years before, there had been a famous local scandal over the barring of Jews from membership of Finchley Golf Club, in which a number of local Conservatives had been involved: the Liberals never missed an opportunity to remind people of it. I simply did not understand anti-semitism myself, and I was upset that the Party should have been tainted by it. I also thought that the potential Conservative vote was not being fully mobilized because of this. So I set out to make it absolutely clear that we wanted new members, especially Jewish Conservatives, in our branch organizations. Though I did not know it at the time, I was subsequently to find some of my closest political friends and associates among Jews. What was clear was that the potential Conservative vote was not being fully exploited, and that however many feathers might be ruffled in the process it was vital to strengthen our branch organization. I also put a good deal of effort into strengthening the Young Conservative organization in the constituency: I was sure that it was by attracting energetic young people that we could most surely resist the challenge of activist Liberals. By the time the election was called in September 1959 the constituency organization was looking in better shape, and I had begun to feel very much at home.
I also felt that the Party was on course for winning the general election. There had been a large number of Tory gains in the local elections in May, and conditions looked increasingly favourable for a Conservative general election victory. In Finchley we got on with our final preparations. In fact, I was on holiday with Denis and the twins on the Isle of Wight when the general election was called, and so I hurried back to London. The campaign itself, though the issues of Suez and rent decontrol were thrown back at me, was largely about which party could better secure and manage prosperity. In the debates I held with the other candidates in the churches and synagogues of Finchley that was always the underlying question. This was favourable territory. For, as we claimed, life really was better with the Conservatives — in Finchley as elsewhere. On top of the sense of prosperity, there was an awareness that in Harold Macmillan Britain had a statesman capable of acting a distinguished role on the international stage, whether it was in the United States or the Soviet Union or Continental Europe.
My first general election polling day in Finchley in October 1959 was very much to set the pattern for the nine such polling days which would succeed it. Soon after the opening of the poll I would vote in my own home constituency — Orpington in 1959, Chelsea and Westminster in later elections — and then drive up to Finchley with Denis. I visited each of the polling stations and our committee rooms, breaking for lunch with Bertie Blatch and others in a hotel. There I rigorously paid just for my own food and drink, to avoid the accusation of ‘treating’ electors, terror of which is instilled by Conservative Central Office into all our candidates. From five o’clock I carefully avoided visiting committee rooms, which should all be sending out workers to summon our supporters to the polls, just dropping into a polling station or two to show the flag. Then at close of poll Denis and I went to the Blatches for something to eat, visited the constituency offices to catch the latest largely anecdotal news, and finally attended the count — on this occasion at Christ’s College, though later all nine constituency counts would be held at Barnet Town Hall.
At the school, I found that each of the candidates had been allocated a room where he or she with a select band of supporters who had tickets for the count could get something to eat and drink and where we had access to that miracle of modern political life — a television. The 1959 campaign had, in fact, been the first in which television played a serious part. And it was the television results service which now told me how the Party was faring in the country. I divided my time between watching the growing piles of ballot papers, candidate by candidate, on the long tables in the body of the hall, and slipping back to my room to catch the equally satisfactory results coming in across the country as a whole.
At about 12.30 a.m. I was told that the Finchley results were shortly to be announced, and was asked to join the Electoral Returning Officer with the other candidates on the platform. Perhaps some people in a safe seat when the Tories were on course for a national victory would have been confident or even complacent. Not me. Throughout my time in politics, whether from some sixth sense or perhaps — who knows? — from mere superstition, I have associated such attitudes with imminent disaster. So I stood by the side of Denis with a fixed smile and tried not to look as I felt.
The Returning Officer began: ‘Deakins, Eric Petro: thirteen thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven.’ (Labour cheers.) ‘Spence, Henry Ivan: twelve thousand, seven hundred and one.’ (Liberal cheers.) And finally we reached: ‘Thatcher, Margaret Hilda: twenty-nine thousand, six hundred and ninety-seven.’ I was home and dry — and not just with plenty to spare but with a majority of 16,260, almost 3,500 more than my predecessor. The cheers, always more controlled from Tory than from Liberal or socialist lips, rose. I made my short speech of acceptance, thanked all my splendid helpers, received a warm hug from Denis and walked down from the platform — the elected Member for Finchley.
In an unguarded moment, shortly after I had been selected for Finchley, I had told the twins that once I became an MP they could have tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. From then on the plaintive request had been: ‘Aren’t you there yet, Mummy? It’s taking a long time.’ I had known the feeling. It had seemed so very long for me too. But I now knew that within weeks I would take my seat on the green leather benches of the House of Commons.
It was the first step.
CHAPTER IV
The Outer Circle
Backbencher and junior minister 1959–1964
A GARDEN AT LAST
By now my family and I were comfortably installed in a large-ish detached house at Farnborough in Kent. We had decided to buy ‘Dormers’, which we saw advertised in Country Life, after rent decontrol threatened to make it a good deal more expensive to continue renting our flat in Swan Court. In any event, we felt the children needed a garden to play in.
Our new house had seen better days. Though it was structurally sound, the previous owner had not been able to maintain it properly. There was no central heating, and the one and a half acres of garden were heavily overgrown. But I enjoyed setting to work to improve things. In particular I bubbled with enthusiasm for the garden. I had always wanted one, but when my parents finally moved to a house with quite a large garden — very long but narrow — I was no longer living at home. So the garden at ‘Dormers’ was my first real opportunity to don thick gardening gloves and rip out brambles, trundle barrows of leaf-mould from the nearby wood to improve the soil, and plant out flower beds. I read up on the requirements of azaleas, rhododendrons and dahlias. Luckily, in Bertie Blatch I had a constituency chairman who doubled as horticulturist: but for all his tips my roses never quite resembled his.
For the twins, ‘Dormers’ was a seventh heaven. There was the new experience of their own garden, neighbours with children and all the excitement of a wood to walk in — though not alone. The house was part of an estate, so there was no through-traffic and it was safe for the children. I eliminated right at the beginning the dreadful possibility of their falling in the pond by having it filled with earth and turned into a rose bed.
Mark and Carol were six when I became an MP, old enough to get into plenty of trouble if not firmly handled. Nor was Denis at home as much as he would have liked, since his job took him abroad a good deal. Because my parliamentary duties meant that I was not always back before the twins went to bed, I insisted on full family attendance at breakfast. We also had the advantage of the long parliamentary recess and indeed the long parliamentary weekends. But I owe a debt of gratitude to Barbara, the children’s nanny at ‘Dormers’ until she married a local horticulturist who advised me on the garden — and to Abby who replaced her and who in due course became a close family friend. They kept the children in order and I always telephoned from the House shortly before six each evening to see that all was well and to give the children a chance to tell me that it wasn’t.
I had learned from my mother the importance of making every house a home. In particular, I insisted on a warm kitchen, large enough to eat in, as its heart. Although I like somewhere to be clean and tidy, I have no taste for austerity for its own sake. A lived-in house should be both comfortable and attractively furnished — a combination which is less difficult and less expensive than is sometimes thought. Like my mother, I favoured mahogany furniture. And since nothing looks better on a dark mahogany table than silver, Denis and I started to build up a modest collection for a table service.
Antique shops used to cast a dangerous spell over me. Though keeping my sights prudently low and avoiding the grand establishments where, even in those days, price digits seemed to multiply alarmingly, I would spend spare moments from shopping or political work to see what ‘finds’ were on offer. Antique (or reproduction) furniture continued to be a favourite because I felt it was useful and not just attractive. When I lost a sapphire scarf pin one Sunday in Richmond Park — Denis had brought the stones back with him from a business trip in Ceylon — I used the insurance money to buy an antique piece to serve as a cocktail cabinet. Denis thought that I should have bought some more jewellery, but I was annoyed with myself: ‘at least I can’t lose a cocktail cabinet in Richmond Park,’ I told him. And so our house gradually acquired its contents.
It did not, however, acquire many pictures. Apart from a few prints and the addition (in later years) of several drawings and portraits, Denis and I felt that good paintings — and there was no point in hanging bad ones — were just too expensive. Instead, I began to collect porcelain. Porcelain dishes on the walls and figures in display cabinets provided our rooms with plenty of colour, and somehow the purchase of individual pieces always seemed less of an extravagance. I bought my first pieces of Crown Derby at Frinton when we were visiting my sister Muriel and her husband on their farm. On one occasion after an evening’s canvassing in Finchley I discovered that one of our Branch Chairmen had her own impressive little collection that showed her impeccable taste. From then on she would tell me about anything she saw that she thought I would like.
My childhood experiences in Grantham had convinced me that the best way to make a cheerful home is to ensure it is busy and active. This was not difficult. My own life was full to overflowing. Before I became an MP there had been both the law and my search for a parliamentary seat to combine with my duties as wife and mother. Once I was elected the pace was even more hectic. We had a daily help in to do most of the regular housework, but there were some things which I insisted on doing myself. Whatever time the House rose, even in the early hours of the morning, I would drive back to Farnborough so as to be ready to prepare breakfast for Denis and the family — and to grab some fruit and a cup of coffee for myself. I would then take one or both of the twins and sometimes another local child off to their schools — we had a team of mothers who shared out the duties between us. Then I would usually do some shopping before driving the forty-five minutes to Westminster where the House commenced its sitting at 2.30 p.m.
Although there were often constituency duties, the weekends provided the opportunity to sort out the house and usually to do a large bake, just as we had done at home in Grantham. In the summer months Denis and I and the children would work — or in their case play at working — in the garden. But on Saturdays in the rugby season Denis would probably be refereeing or watching a match — an arrangement which from the earliest days of our marriage had been solemnly set down in tablets of stone. Sometimes if he was refereeing an important game I would go along as well, though my concentration on the game was frequently disturbed by the less than complimentary remarks which English crowds are inclined to exchange about the conduct of referees. On Sundays we took the twins to the Family Service at the Farnborough parish church. Denis was an Anglican, but we both felt that it would be confusing for the children if we did not attend the same church. The fact that our local church was Low Church made it easier for the Methodist in me to make the transition. Anyway, John Wesley regarded himself as a member of the Church of England to his dying day. I did not feel that any great theological divide had been crossed.
Weekends, therefore, provided me with an invaluable and invigorating tonic. So did family holidays. I remembered what I had enjoyed — and not enjoyed — about my own holidays at Skegness. My conclusion was that for young children nothing beats buckets and spades and plenty of activity. So we used to take a house on the Sussex coast for a month right by the side of the beach, and there always seemed to be other families with small children nearby. Later we went regularly to a family hotel at Seaview on the Isle of Wight or rented a flat in the village. Crossing the Solent by ferry seemed a great adventure to the children who, like all twins, had a degree of (usually) playful rivalry. On the way down to the coast in the car we always passed through a place called ‘Four Marks’. I was never able to answer Mark’s question about who these four were. Nor could I think up a satisfactory response to Carol who thought that it was all unfair and that there should also be a ‘Four Carols’. Not to be outdone, Mark pointed out that it was no less unfair that Christmas carols had no male equivalent.
In 1960 we had planned to take the children abroad for the summer holidays to Brittany. But at the last moment Mark caught chickenpox and to everyone’s great disappointment the trip had to be cancelled. To compensate, still more adventurously, we decided to go skiing at Lenzerheide in Switzerland at Christmas. None of us had ever skied before, so we joined a ski club in Sloane Square and took a course in skiing from Lillywhites before we went. The holiday was a great success, and we went back to the same hotel year after year. I loved the scenery and the exercise. And I loved the hot chocolate and pastries afterwards even more.
It is a cliché, but no less true for all that, that in family life you have to take the rough with the smooth. Knowing that you have a family to turn to is a great strength in politics, but the other side is one’s emotional vulnerability to their suffering. I was always worried about Mark, who at that time seemed to catch every germ that was going, including pneumonia one winter at Lenzerheide. One of the worst days of my life was when it became clear that he had appendicitis and I had to rush him to the nearby hospital. I spent so much time with him in the weeks which followed that I began to worry that Carol might feel left out. So I bought her a magnificent teddy bear which was christened Humphrey. Whatever Carol thought of her new friend, I became very attached to him, and indeed brought him with me to Downing Street. Only later did he sadly disintegrate when, dismayed by his grubby looks, I tried to wash him. ‘Sic transit gloria Humphri’.
It is hard to know whether one worries more about one’s children when they are within reach or far away. I wanted the twins to be at home when they were young, though I was reconciled to their going to boarding school later. Unfortunately, the nearby day school to which Mark went had to close in 1961, and Denis persuaded me that it was best that he should go to Belmont Preparatory School. At least Belmont was just on the edge of Finchley, so I could take him out to lunch. Also I knew he was not too far away in case of emergencies. But then, of course, not to be left out, Carol decided that she wanted to go to boarding school as well, and did so two years later. The house seemed empty without them.
By now there was another emptiness in my life which could never be filled, and that was the loss of my mother, who died in 1960. She had been a great rock of family stability. She managed the household, stepped in to run the shop when necessary, entertained, supported my father in his public life and as Mayoress, did a great deal of voluntary social work for the church, displayed a series of practical domestic talents such as dressmaking and was never heard to complain. Like many people who live for others, she made possible all that her husband and daughters did. Her life had not been an easy one. Although in later years I would speak more readily of my father’s political influence on me, it was from my mother that I inherited the ability to organize and combine so many different duties of an active life. Her death was a great shock, even though it had not been entirely unexpected. We were all staying with my sister’s family in Essex when my mother fell ill: Denis and I drove her back to Grantham for an emergency operation. But she was never really well again, and died a few months later. Even young children have a keen sense of family grief. After my mother’s funeral, my father came back to stay with us for a while at ‘Dormers’. That evening when I turned back the coverlet of his bed, I found a little note from Mark on the pillow: ‘Dear Grandad, I’m so sorry Granny died.’ It was heartbreaking.
LAW-MAKING FOR BEGINNERS
I was very glad, however, that both my parents had seen their daughter enter the Palace of Westminster as a Member of Parliament — quite literally ‘seen’, because the press contained flattering photographs of me in my new hat on the way to the House. My first real contact with the Conservative Parliamentary Party was when on the day before Parliament opened I went along as a member of the 1922 Committee — the Party committee to which all Conservative backbench MPs belong — to discuss the question of the Speakership of the House. I knew only a relatively small number of the several hundred faces packed into that rumbustious, smoky committee room, but I immediately felt at home.
Everyone in those early days was immensely kind. The Chief Whip would give new Members a talk about the rules of the House and the whipping system. Old-stagers gave me useful hints about dealing with correspondence. They also told me that I should not just concentrate on the big issues like foreign affairs and finance, but also find one or two less popular topics on which I could make a mark. Another piece of good practical advice was to find myself a ‘pair’, which I promptly did in the form of Charlie Pannell, the Labour MP for Leeds West.[8] I had met him years earlier when he lived in Erith, in my old Dartford constituency. He was exactly the sort of good-humoured, decent Labour man I liked.
The Palace of Westminster seems a bewildering labyrinth of corridors to the uninitiated. It was some time before I could find my way with ease around it. The Tea Room, the Library and the main committee rooms were all points of reference for me. There were modestly appointed rooms set apart for the twenty-five women Members — the ‘Lady Members’ Rooms’ — where I would find a desk to work at. Neither taste nor convention suggested my entering the Smoking Room. My formidably efficient secretary, Paddi Victor Smith, had a desk in a large office with a number of other secretaries where we worked on constituency correspondence. But the heart of the House of Commons was, even more than now, the Chamber itself. Early on, I was advised that there was no substitute for hours spent there. Finance and Foreign Affairs Committee meetings might be more informative. The weekly 1922 Committee meetings might be more lively. But it was only by absorbing the atmosphere of the House until its procedures became second nature and its style of debate instinctive that one could become that most respected kind of English politician, a ‘House of Commons man’ (or woman).
So that is what I did. I took my pre-arranged place in the fourth row back below the gangway — where thirty-one years later I chose to sit again after I resigned as Prime Minister. The House itself was — and still is — a very masculine place. This manifested itself above all, I found, in the sheer volume of noise. I was used to university debates and questions at the general election hustings, yet my brief previous visits to the Visitors’ Gallery of the House had never prepared me for this. But when I remarked on it to a colleague he just laughed and said, ‘You should have heard it during Suez!’ Masculinity, I soon found, however, did not degenerate into male prejudice. In different ways I had on occasion been made to feel small because I was a woman in industry, at the Bar and indeed in Tory constituency politics. But in the House of Commons we were all equals; and woe betide ministers who suggest by their demeanour or behaviour that they consider themselves more equal than the rest. I soon saw with appreciation that sincerity, logic and technical mastery of a subject could earn respect from both sides of the House. Shallowness and bluff were quickly exposed. Perhaps every generation of young men and women considers that those it once regarded as great figures had a stature lacked by their equivalents in later years. But I would certainly be hard put now to find on the backbenches the extraordinary range of experience and talents which characterized the House of Commons then. Almost whatever the subject, there would be some figure on either side of the House who would bring massive, specialized knowledge and obvious intuition to bear on it — and be listened to with respect by front and backbenches alike.
As it happens, I had very little opportunity during my first few months as an MP for the relaxed acquisition of experience of the House. With 310 other Members I had entered the Commons ballot for the introduction of Private Members’ Bills. Never previously having so much as won a raffle, I was greatly astonished to find myself drawn second. Only the first few Private Members’ Bills have any chance of becoming legislation, and even then the Government’s attitude towards them is crucial.
I had only given the most general consideration to the topic I would choose, but I now had just a week to make up my mind, for the Bill had to be tabled by 11 November. Clearly, it must be something about which I not only felt strongly but also, preferably, in an area I already knew. I got as far as approving a draft long title for a Bill relating to appeals in contempt of court cases — one of those minor Bills which the Whips’ Office keeps in reserve to pass off on unsuspecting backbenchers. But this seemed rather dry and I could not summon up much enthusiasm for it. So I thought again.
Many of us on the right of the Party — and not just on the right — were becoming very concerned about the abuse of trade union power. I had read and discussed with my lawyer friends a pamphlet on the subject produced by the Inns of Court Conservative Society the previous year. Entitled A Giant’s Strength, it was, I understood, largely the work of a brilliant young Tory barrister called Geoffrey Howe. In particular, I was following throughout this period the lengthy and controversial case of Rookes v Barnard, relating to the closed shop. Rookes had resigned from his trade union which thereupon threatened his employer, the airline BOAC, with a strike if he was not dismissed from his post. BOAC promptly and pusillani-mously complied and Rookes sued the trade union officials. I was outraged by the trampling of what I saw as someone’s basic right to join or not to join a union. I also admired Rookes’s determination and courage. I sought advice about whether I could introduce a Bill which would break or at least weaken the power of the closed shop.
But here again there were difficulties. Although younger Tories and many backbenchers were restive on the issue, the prevailing ethos in the upper ranks of the Conservative Party was still one of accommodating and appeasing the unions. It was therefore extremely unlikely that I could effect the change in the law which I wanted. The Whips made it clear to me that I would not have the Party’s support. Moreover, the case itself was still undecided — and would not finally be determined until 1964. At the time that I was considering introducing a Bill the Appeal Court had ruled against Rookes, but in the end the House of Lords found against the trade union. There were, therefore, strong arguments that the law should not be changed partway through a test case. I bowed to these considerations.
The issue on which I finally alighted was also essentially one of civil liberties under threat from collectivism. As a result of an industrial dispute in the printing industry which began in July 1958, a number of Labour-controlled councils in big cities had denied normal reporting facilities to journalists working on provincial newspapers involved in the dispute. This had highlighted a loophole in the law which many councils used to conceal information from the general public about their activities. The press had a statutory right of admission only to meetings of the full council, not to its committees. By the device of resolving to go into committee, councils could therefore exclude the press from their deliberations. And besides these ‘committees of the whole council’ there were many other committees which were closed. Large sums of ratepayers’ money could be spent — or mis-spent — without outside scrutiny. Nor did members of the public themselves have the right to attend any council or council committee meetings.
My own interest in the question stemmed partly from the fact that it had come to a head because of socialist connivance with trade union power, partly because I knew from Nottingham, not far from Grantham, what was going on, and partly because the present situation offended against my belief in accountability by government for the spending of people’s money. The 1959 Conservative manifesto had contained a promise ‘to make quite sure that the press have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities’. Having read this, I imagined that a Bill to do just that would be welcome to the Government. I was again swiftly disillusioned by the Whips. Apparently, nothing more than a code of practice on the subject had been envisaged. This seemed to me extremely feeble, and so I decided to go ahead.
It quickly became clear that the objection to a measure with teeth came not from ministers at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government but rather from officials, who in turn were doubtless echoing the fierce opposition of the local authorities to any democratic check on their powers. Henry Brooke, the Cabinet minister in charge, was consistently sympathetic. Each Private Member’s Bill is placed under the supervision of a junior minister who either helps or hinders its progress. My Bill was given to Sir Keith Joseph, and it was in examination of the tedious technical intricacies of the measure that I first got to know Keith.
I learned a great deal in a very short time from the experience of devising, refashioning and negotiating for my Bill. Partly because the issue had been a live one for a number of years, but partly also because of senior Members’ kindness towards a new Member, I was able to rely on invaluable assistance from backbench colleagues. Sir Lionel Heald, a former Attorney General, gave me the benefit of his great legal experience. I learned from him and others the techniques of legal draftsmanship which were generally the preserve of the parliamentary draftsmen.
I also witnessed the power of pressure groups. The influence of the local authority lobby made itself felt in a hundred ways, and not only through the Labour Party. I therefore learned to play pressure group against pressure group and made the most of the help offered to me by the Newspaper Editors’ Guild and other press bodies.
In the end, however, there is no substitute for one’s own efforts. I wanted to get as many MPs as possible to the House on a Friday (when most MPs have returned to their constituency) for the Bill’s Second Reading — this was the great hurdle. I have always believed in the impact of a personal handwritten letter — even from someone you barely know. So just before Second Reading I wrote 250 letters to Government backbenchers asking them to attend and vote for my measure.
There were other complications. I had originally envisaged waiting several months to make my maiden speech, because I had been advised first to get the feel of the House. I had had it in mind to speak on Lord Radcliffe’s Report on the Working of the Monetary System which had appeared in the late summer — I was fascinated by the techniques of monetary policy which it outlined. But I did not have the time to prepare such a speech as well as the speech to introduce the Second Reading of my new Bill, so I decided to concentrate on the latter. That in turn faced a further obstacle. Convention dictated that a maiden speech should be a modest, uncontroversial affair, larded with appreciative references to my predecessor and my constituency. This was now impossible, because a maiden speech on the Second Reading of a Bill like mine could not have avoided controversy.
At least, though, I was not short of content. By the time I rose to deliver my speech on Friday 5 February 1960, I knew the arguments by heart. As a result, I could speak for almost half an hour without notes to hand — though not without nerves. The three women members of the Government — Pat Hornsby-Smith, Mervyn Pike and Edith Pitt — showed moral support from the front bench, and the House was very full for a Friday. I was delighted that nearly 200 Members voted, and we won handsomely. I was also genuinely moved by the comments that different MPs made to me personally — particularly Rab Butler, the Leader of the House and a master of ambiguous compliments, whose congratulations on this occasion, however, were straightforward, generous and very welcome to a new Member.
It was clear from the press next day that the speech had been a success and that I was — for the present at least — a celebrity. ‘A new star was born in Parliament’, thrilled the Daily Express. ‘Fame and Margaret Thatcher made friends yesterday’, shrieked the Sunday Dispatch. ‘A triumph’, observed the Daily Telegraph evenly. Feature articles appeared about me and my family. I was interviewed on television. The cameras came down to ‘Dormers’, and in an unguarded moment in answer to one of the more preposterous questions I told a journalist that ‘I couldn’t even consider a Cabinet post until my twins are older.’ But apart from this gaffe it was roses, roses all the way.
Excessive praise? I had no doubt myself that it was. And I was slightly nervous that it might excite the jealousy of colleagues. My speech had been a competent performance, but it was not an epic.
But was it, however, a portent? Some time before the general election I had read John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain. I had not thought more about it until I considered these somewhat overstated headlines. John Buchan’s tale concerns a group of men, including several politicians, who spend Whitsun at a friend’s house where they are enabled by another guest, a mysterious and fatally ill physicist of world renown, to glimpse the contents of a page of The Times one year later. Each sees something affecting his own future. One, a new Conservative MP, reads a brief obituary of himself which notes that he had delivered a brilliant maiden speech that had made him a national figure overnight. And so it turns out. The speech is outstanding, praised and admired on all sides; but after that, deprived of the self-confidence which knowledge of the future gave him, he fails totally and sinks into oblivion, waiting for the end. I shuddered slightly and reached for my lucky pearls.
But my Bill — with the significant addition that members of the general public should have the same rights as the press to attend council meetings, and with committees (apart from committees of the whole council) excluded from its provisions — duly passed into law; and, though my seven-day stardom faded somewhat, I had learned a lot and gained a good deal of confidence.
THE RIGHT LEFT PEOPLE
Life on the backbenches was always exciting — but so hectic that on one occasion, to the consternation of my male colleagues, I fainted in the Members’ Dining Room. I spent as much time as I could in the House and at backbench committees. I also regularly attended the dining club of new Tory Members to which the great figures of the Party — Harold Macmillan, Rab Butler, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell — and brilliant young Tory journalists like Peter Utley would come to speak.
The natural path to promotion and success at this time lay in the centre of politics and on the left of the Conservative Party. Above all, the up-and-coming Tory politician had to avoid being ‘reactionary’. Nothing was likely to be so socially and professionally damaging as to bear that label. Conservatism at this time lacked fire. Even though what are now widely seen as the damaging moral, social and economic developments of the sixties mainly belong to the period of Labour Government after 1964, the first years of the decade also were ones of drift and cynicism, for which Conservatives must be held in large part responsible.
Indeed, Conservatives in the early sixties were living through one of their occasional phases of complacency. Macmillan’s 1959 landslide and the continuous rise in affluence combined to persuade even non-partisan commentators that the Tories were now the party of ‘modernization’ and that Labour, with its ‘cloth cap image’, was in danger of being relegated to permanent opposition. Rab Butler told us at the New Members’ Dining Club one evening that if the Party played its cards well, we would be in power for the next twenty-five years. In these circumstances there was little incentive for either serious forward thinking on policy or philosophical reflection. The main dispute within the Tory Party was over Iain Macleod’s ‘Scramble from Africa’, with the old right complaining that Britain was abandoning its responsibility both to white settlers and to the African majorities of tribal farmers by giving power to rootless urban African politicians who would become dictators in short order. Time has made these fears seem prescient; in the early sixties they looked like a nostalgic hankering for an Empire that had almost passed into history. A passionate minority of Tory MPs embraced these criticisms; most of us, though, thought that Iain Macleod was applying Tory ‘modernization’ to colonial policy and backed him.
The odd thing is, looking back, that Conservatives in the sixties, though increasingly and obsessively worried about being out of touch with contemporary trends and fashions, were beginning to lose touch with the instincts and aspirations of ordinary conservative-minded people. This was true on issues as different as trade unions and immigration, law and order and aid to the Third World. But it was also and most directly important as regards management of the economy.
It was not so much inflation, which was zero throughout the winter of 1959–60 and did not reach 5 per cent until the summer of 1961, but rather the balance of payments that was seen as the main economic constraint on growth. And the means adopted to deal with the problems at this time — credit controls, interest rate rises, the search for international credit to sustain the pound, tax rises and, increasingly, prototype incomes policies — became all too familiar over the next fifteen years.
The rethinking that produced first ‘Selsdon Man’ and later Thatcherism was barely in evidence. Enoch Powell at this time was pushing through his ten-year hospital building programme — one of the largest programmes of public spending presided over by Macmillan. Only a handful of backbenchers — including the recently arrived John Biffen — were prepared to argue the case against incomes policy and for monetary control of inflation. Indeed, an unhealthy concern with inflation (as opposed to unemployment) was seen by the powers-that-be as reflecting the interests of declining sectors of British society, such as fixed-income pensioners, rather than the new and exciting ‘young managers’ of Conservative Central Office’s imagination — at least until the fixed-income pensioners handed us a series of by-election defeats like Orpington and Middlesbrough West in the Tory heartland. These, together with the series of scandals from 1962 onwards, marked the end of the complacent period of Macmillanite Conservatism. Ahead of us lay years of defeat, opposition and (eventually) serious rethinking as Conservatives felt their way instinctively out of paternalism and into a new style of Toryism.
Although no really serious trouble in my relations with the Government and with the prevailing orthodoxy in the Conservative Party ever threatened when I was on the backbenches, I was conscious that, for all the plaudits I had received, I was not one of those young Tories who could expect to rise without trace. I had my own beliefs. I was uneasy about the general direction in which we seemed to be going. It would be wrong to suggest anything stronger than that. But for someone who believed in sound finance, the creative potential of free enterprise and social discipline, there was much to be concerned about.
The more I learned about it, the less impressed I was by our management of the economy. I listened with great care to the speeches of the Tory backbencher Nigel Birch, which were highly critical of the Government’s failure to control public spending. The Government’s argument was that increases could be afforded as long as the economy continued to grow. But this in turn edged us towards policies of injecting too much demand and then pulling back sharply when this produced pressures on the balance of payments or sterling. This is precisely what happened in the summer of 1961 when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd introduced a deflationary Budget and our first incomes policy, the ‘pay pause’. Another effect, of course, was to keep taxation higher than would otherwise be necessary. Chancellors of the Exchequer, wary of increases in basic income tax, laid particular importance on checking tax avoidance and evasion, repeatedly extending Inland Revenue powers to do so. Both as a tax lawyer and from my own instinctive dislike of handing more power to bureaucracies, I felt strongly on the matter and helped to write a critical report by the Inns of Court Conservative Society.
I felt even more strongly that the fashionable liberal tendencies in penal policy should be sharply reversed. So I spoke — and voted — in support of a new clause which a group of us wanted to add on to that year’s Criminal Justice Bill which would have introduced birching or caning for young violent offenders. In the prevailing climate of opinion, this was a line which I knew would expose me to ridicule from the self-consciously high-minded and soft-hearted commentators. But my constituents did not see it that way, and nor did a substantial number of us on the right. Although the new clause was entirely predictably defeated, sixty-nine Tory backbenchers voted against the Government and in support of it. It was the biggest Party revolt since we came to power in 1951, and the Whips’ Office were none too pleased. It was also the only occasion in my entire time in the House of Commons when I voted against the Party line.
The summer of 1961 was a more than usually interesting time in politics. I retained my close interest in foreign affairs, which were dominated by the uneasy developing relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the building by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall (which the House was recalled to discuss) and, closer to home, by the beginning of negotiations for Britain to join the Common Market. There was also speculation about a reshuffle. In spite of my slightly blotted copybook, I had some reason to think that I might be a beneficiary of it. I had remained to a modest degree in the public eye, and not just with my speech on corporal punishment. I gave a press conference with Eirene White, the Labour MP for East Flint, on the lack of provision being made for the needs of pre-school children in high-rise flats, a topic of growing concern at this time when so many of these badly designed monstrosities were being erected. But the main reason why I had hopes of benefiting from the reshuffle was very simple. Pat Hornsby-Smith had decided to resign to pursue her business interests, and it was thought politically desirable to keep up the number of women in the Government. I even had more than an inkling of what my future post might be. It leaked out that there were two jobs available — one at Aviation and the other at Pensions. Much as I would have liked it, I could not see them giving Aviation in those days to a young woman.
That said, I did not try to conceal my delight when the telephone rang and I was summoned to see the Prime Minister. Harold Macmillan was camping out in some style at Admiralty House while 10 Downing Street was undergoing extensive refurbishment. I had already developed my own strong impressions of him, not just from speeches in the House and to the 1922 Committee, but also when he came to speak to our New Members’ Dining Club — on which occasion he had strongly recommended Disraeli’s Sybil and Conings by as political reading. But Disraeli’s style was too ornate for my taste, though I can see why it may have appealed to Harold Macmillan. It is now clear to me that Macmillan was a more complex and sensitive figure than he appeared; but appearance did seem to count for a great deal. Certainly, whether it was striking a bargain and cementing a friendship with President Kennedy, or delivering a deliciously humorous put-down to a ranting Khrushchev, Harold Macmillan was a superb representative of Britain abroad.
In both foreign and home policies Macmillan always prided himself on having a sense of history. In his attempts to establish harmony between the two superpowers, as in his fervent belief that Britain’s destiny lay in Europe, he was much affected by the experience of two world wars. Indeed, as he would remind us, he was one of the few surviving members of the House who had fought in the Great War. In his preference for economic expansion over financial soundness and his long-standing belief in the virtues of planning, he was reacting against the deflation and unemployment of the 1930s which he had seen as MP for Stockton-on-Tees. It is said that when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer Treasury officials kept a tally of how many times he mentioned ‘Stockton’ each week. But history’s lessons usually teach us what we want to learn. It was possible to take a very different view of the causes of war and of the historic achievements of capitalism. Things looked different from the perspective of Grantham than from that of Stockton.
INTO OFFICE…
I sorted out my best outfit, this time sapphire blue, to go and see the Prime Minister. The interview was short. Harold Macmillan charmingly greeted me and offered the expected appointment. I enthusiastically accepted. I wanted to begin as soon as possible and asked him how I should arrange things with the department. Characteristically, he said: ‘Oh well, ring the Permanent Secretary and turn up at about 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, look around and come away. I shouldn’t stay too long.’
So it was the following morning — rather before eleven — that I arrived at the pleasant Georgian house in John Adam Street, just off the Strand, which was at that time the headquarters of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. In a gesture which I much appreciated — and which I myself as a Cabinet minister always emulated — John Boyd-Carpenter, my minister, was there at the front door to meet me and take me up to my new office. John was someone it was easy to like and admire for his personal kindness, grasp of detail and capacity for lucid exposition of a complex case. He was an excellent speaker and debater. All in all, a good model for a novice Parliamentary Secretary to follow. After his promotion to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1962, my new minister was Niall Macpherson, who in turn made way for Richard Wood. I was very lucky in all of them. A Parliamentary Secretary’s job is only as interesting and worthwhile as the senior minister makes it. I felt that they gave me every opportunity. This first day at John Adam Street was more or less a whirl of new faces and unfamiliar issues. There was little time to do more than take my bearings and receive my briefing.
On Friday (my birthday) I was given a prominent place on the platform at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton. The cameras were once more active when I appeared at the Conference emerging, as it was remarked, from a royal blue car and wearing a royal blue dress and hat. Both my appointment and my appearance were something of a contrast to the general mood of the Conference which, like the limited reshuffle itself that had brought Iain Macleod to the Party Chairmanship, was widely seen as moving the Party in a leftward direction.
Back at the Ministry I was not at all displeased to substitute grind for glamour. The issues dealt with by what was then the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and is now the Department of Social Security are more technically complicated than those falling to any other branch of government, with the possible exception of the tax side of the Treasury. It was not just a matter of avoiding being caught out in the House of Commons. If one was to make any serious contribution to the development of policy one had to have mastered both the big principles and the detail. This I now set out to do.
The first step was to re-read the original Beveridge Report in which the philosophy of the post-war system of pensions and benefits was clearly set out. I was already quite well acquainted with its main aspects and I strongly approved of them. At the centre was the concept of a comprehensive ‘social insurance scheme’, which was intended to cover loss of earning power caused by unemployment, sickness or retirement. This would be done by a single system of benefits at subsistence level financed by flat-rate individual contributions. By the side of this there would be a system of National Assistance, financed out of general taxation, to help those who were unable to sustain themselves on National Insurance benefits, either because they had been unable to contribute, or had run out of cover. National Assistance was means tested and had been envisaged as in large part a transitional system, whose scope would diminish as pensions or personal savings rose.
It is easy in retrospect to poke fun at many of Beveridge’s assumptions and predictions. He greatly underestimated the cost of his proposals, though this was partly because the post-war Labour Government introduced full rate old-age pensions immediately, without the twenty-year phasing-in period which Beveridge had envisaged. There were other problems too. The relationship, which in any individual case was always bound to be indirect, between contributions on the one hand and benefits on the other became ever more obscure as pensions were increased and as the proportion of elderly people in the population grew. Far from diminishing, National Assistance and its successors, Supplementary Benefit and Income Support, swelled to become an alarming burden on the taxpayer. Anomalies between the two notionally complementary, but in practice often contradictory, systems became a perpetual headache.
But for all that, Beveridge had sought to guard against the very problems which later governments more or less ignored and which have now returned to plague us, in particular the debilitating effects of welfare dependency and the loss of private and voluntary effort. Whatever the effects in practice, the Beveridge Report’s rhetoric has what would later be considered a Thatcherite ring to it:
…The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organizing security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family. [Paragraph 9]… The insured persons should not feel that income for idleness, however caused, can come from a bottomless purse. [Paragraph 22]
…Material progress depends upon technical progress which depends upon investment and ultimately upon savings… It is important that part of the additional resources going to wage-earners and others of limited means should be saved by them instead of being spent forthwith. [Paragraph 376]
Much of our time at the Ministry was taken up both with coping with the effects of and finding remedies to the difficulties which flowed from the gap between Beveridge’s original conception and the way in which the system — and with it public expectations — had developed. So, for example, in those days before inflation took hold and benefits were annually up-rated to cope with it, there were cries of disapproval when National Insurance pensions were increased and National Assistance, which made up your income to a certain level, was not. People also increasingly came to expect something better than a subsistence-level pension to retire upon, but the contribution levels or financing from general taxation which this would require seemed prohibitive. This lay behind John Boyd-Carpenter’s idea of the ‘graduated pensions’ scheme, whereby the payment of higher contributions could secure a somewhat higher pension, and provision was made for the encouragement of private occupational pension schemes. Another constant source of difficulty for which we found no ultimate (affordable) answer was the ‘earnings rule’ whereby pensioners who worked would at a certain level of income lose part or all of their pension payments. As I shall explain, it was the impact of this on pensioner widows which caused me most difficulty and not a little heart-searching.
Three other questions, which were to trouble governments for many years to come, had also already begun to loom. There was the issue of how to ensure decent levels of incomes for elderly pensioners who had not paid in sufficient contributions to be able to claim a full National Insurance pension. There was the continual search for greater ‘selectivity’ (as the jargon had it) in Social Security benefits generally — that is, concentrating them on the most needy rather than on the general broad range of benefit recipients. (In fact, as our current debates on ‘targeting benefits’ — in today’s jargon — shows, this has proved a largely fruitless exercise.) Finally, there was the whole argument about the ‘stigma’ attached to National Assistance and the means test. As I frequently pointed out, this had two sides to it. On the one hand, of course, people living in real poverty ought to be encouraged to take the state help which is on offer. On the other hand, the self-respect of those people I used to refer to as ‘the proud ones’, who were not going to take hand-outs from anyone, was morally admirable and, as can now be seen all too clearly, a check on dependency whose removal could ultimately have devastating social consequences.
Apart from the Beveridge Report and other general briefing from the department, it was the case work — that is the investigation of particular people’s problems raised in letters — which taught me most about the Social Security system. I was not prepared to sign a reply if I did not feel that I properly understood the background. Consequently, a stream of officials came in and out of my modest office to give me the benefit of their matchless knowledge of each topic. I adopted a similar approach to parliamentary questions, which would be shared out between the ministers. I was not content to know the answer or the line to take. I wanted to know why. The weekend before my first appearance at the Despatch Box to answer questions was, I fear, almost as nerve-racking for my Private Secretary as it was for me, since I was all the time on the telephone to him for explanations.
Apart from some peppery exchanges with the civil servants allocated to deal with my Private Member’s Bill, it was at Pensions that I had my first professional dealings with the civil service. The Permanent Secretary of the department in practice wields a good deal more power than a junior minister. It was made clear to me early on that he was answerable only to the ministerial head of the department. The two successive Permanent Secretaries during my time at Pensions, Eric Bowyer and Clifford Jarrett, were representatives of the civil service at its best — clever, conscientious and of complete integrity. But the real experts were likely to be found further down the hierarchy. I quickly discovered that the infallible source of information on pensions was a Deputy Secretary, John Walley. Generally, the calibre of the officials I met impressed me.
Having served as a junior minister to three different ministers in the same department I was interested to see that the advice tendered to the ministers by civil servants differed, even though it was on the same topic. So I complained when both Niall Mac-pherson and Richard Wood received policy submissions proposing approaches that I knew had not been put to their predecessor, John Boyd-Carpenter. I remember saying afterwards: ‘That’s not what you advised the previous minister.’ They replied that they had known that he would never accept it. I decided then and there that when I was in charge of a department I would insist on an absolutely frank assessment of all the options from any civil servants who would report to me. Arguments should be from first principles.
I also learned another lesson. There was a good deal of pressure to remove the earnings rule as regards widowed mothers. I sympathized with it strongly. Indeed, this was one of the issues upon which, as a new MP, I had publicly stated my position. I thought that if a woman who had lost her husband but still had children to support decided to try to earn a little more through going out to work she should not lose pension for doing so. Perhaps as a woman I had a clearer idea of what problems widows faced. Perhaps it was my recollection of the heartbreaking sight of a recently widowed mother eking out her tiny income buying bruised fruit at my father’s shop in Grantham. But I found it almost impossible to defend the Government line against Opposition attack. I raised the matter with officials and with my minister. On one occasion, I even raised it with Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister when he came to speak to a group of junior ministers. But although he seemed sympathetic, I never got anywhere.
The argument from officials in the department was always that ending the earnings rule for even this most deserving group would have ‘repercussions’ elsewhere. And, of course, they were logically correct. But how I came to hate that word ‘repercussions’. Ministers were wrong to take such arguments at face value and not to apply political judgement to them. It was no surprise to me that one of the first acts of the incoming Labour Government in 1964 was to make the change for which I had been arguing, and to get the credit too. The moral was clear to me: bureaucratic logic is no substitute for ministerial judgement. Forget that as a politician, and the political ‘repercussions’ will be on you.
My days at Pensions were full. Although I shared a ministerial car with my colleague, the junior minister who dealt with war pensions, I generally drove myself in from Farnborough in the mornings. At the Ministry the day might begin with the two junior ministers meeting John Boyd-Carpenter to discuss the larger policy issues or the current political situation. Then there would be batches of letters for me to sign or on which I would seek advice. I might have a meeting about particular areas of responsibility which my minister had given me, such as working out reciprocal arrangements on pensions with other countries. I would have meetings with officials in preparation for papers on forward planning in Social Security — a task which was as necessary as it was difficult. In the afternoon a deputation from the pressure groups, which even in those days abounded in the social services field, might arrive to put its case to me for the correction of some alleged anomaly or the increase of some benefit. I sometimes visited regional Social Security offices, talking to the staff about the problems they faced and listening to suggestions. I would dine at the House or perhaps with political friends — an invitation to dinner with Ernest Marples, the ebullient and original politician who made a name for himself as Transport Minister, and his wife was always a guarantee of superb food and fine wine, as well as jovial company. If there was a division, I would often be in the House to vote at 10 o’clock, before driving back home with two or three red boxes full of draft letters and policy papers to read into the early hours.
I retained my taste for the Chamber of the Commons, developed during my two years on the backbenches. We faced no mean opponents on the Labour benches. Dick Crossman had one of the finest minds in politics, if also one of the most wayward, and Douglas Houghton a formidable mastery of his brief. I liked both of them, but I was still determined to win any argument. I enjoyed the battle of facts and figures when our policies were under fire at Question Time and when I was speaking in debates — though sometimes I should have trod more warily. One day at the Despatch Box I was handed a civil service note giving new statistics about a point raised in the debate. ‘Now,’ I said triumphantly, ‘I have the latest red hot figure.’ The House dissolved into laughter, and it took a moment for me to realize my double entendre.
As luck would have it, at Pensions we were due to answer questions on the Monday immediately after the notorious Cabinet reshuffle in July 1962 which became known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. John Boyd-Carpenter departed to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Niall Macpherson had not yet replaced him at Pensions. Since most of the questions on the Order Paper related to my side of the department’s activities, rather than War Pensions, I would have to answer in the place of the senior minister for nearly an hour. That meant another nerve-racking weekend for me and for the officials I had to pester. The Labour Party was in rumbustious mood and Iain Macleod was the only Cabinet minister in the Chamber. But I got through, saying when asked about future policy that I would refer the matter to my minister — ‘when I had one’.
…AND OUT AGAIN
But would the Government get through? As I was to experience myself many years later, every Cabinet reshuffle contains its own unforeseen dangers. But no difficulties I ever faced — even in 1989 — matched the appalling damage to the Government done by ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, in which one third of the Cabinet, including the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were despatched and a new generation including Reggie Maudling, Keith Joseph and Edward Boyle found themselves in the front line of politics. One of the lessons I learned from the affair was that one should try to bring in some younger people to the Government at each reshuffle so as to avoid a log-jam. But in any case the handling of the changes was badly botched by Macmillan, whose standing never really recovered.
We were already in trouble for a number of obvious — and some less obvious — reasons. Inflation had started to rise quite sharply. Incomes policy in the form of the ‘pay pause’ and then the ‘guiding light’ had been employed in an attempt to control it. Industrial disputes, especially the engineering and shipbuilding strikes, led to more days being lost due to strikes in 1962 than in any year since the General Strike of 1926. Rather than deal with the roots of the problem, which lay in trade union power, the Government moved towards corporatist deals with organized labour by setting up the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) — shortly to be supplemented by a National Incomes Commission (NIC) — so accepting a fundamentally collectivist analysis of what was wrong with Britain.
Above all, out in the country there had grown up a detectable feeling that the Conservatives had been in power too long and had lost their way. That most dangerous time for a government had arrived when most people feel, perhaps only in some vague way, that it is ‘time for a change’. Later in the autumn of 1962 the Government ran into squalls of a different kind. The Vassall spy case, the flight of Philby to the Soviet Union, confirming suspicions that he had been a KGB double-agent since the 1930s, and in the summer of 1963 the Profumo scandal — all served to enmesh the Government in rumours of sleaze and incompetence. These might have been shrugged off by a government in robust health. But the significance attached to these embarrassments was the greater because of the general malaise.
Europe was one of the main reasons for that malaise. In October 1961 Ted Heath had been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the difficult negotiations for British membership of the European Economic Community. Not least because of Ted’s tenacity and dedication, most of the problems, such as what to do about Britain’s agriculture and about trade links with the Commonwealth, seemed eminently soluble. Then in January 1963 General de Gaulle vetoed our entry. No great popular passions about Europe were aroused at this time in Britain. There was a general sense, which I shared, that in the past we had underrated the potential advantage to Britain of access to the Common Market, that neither the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) nor our links with the Common wealth and the United States offered us the trading future we needed, and that the time was right for us to join the EEC. I was an active member of the European Union of Women — an organization founded in Austria in 1953 to promote European integration — and sat on its ‘Judicial Panel’ which debated issues relating to law and the family. But I saw the EEC as essentially a trading framework — a Common Market — and neither shared nor took very seriously the idealistic rhetoric with which ‘Europe’ was already being dressed in some quarters. In fact, it is now clear to me that General de Gaulle was much more perceptive than we were at this time when, to our great chagrin and near universal condemnation, he noted:
England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones… In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the Continentals…
But he also said:
If the Brussels negotiations were shortly not to succeed, nothing would prevent the conclusion between the Common Market and Great Britain of an accord of association designed to safeguard exchanges, and nothing would prevent close relations between England and France from being maintained, nor the pursuit and development of their direct cooperation in all kinds of fields…
It is evident that if this is what de Gaulle was indeed offering, it would have been a better reflection of British interests than the terms of British membership that were eventually agreed a decade later. We may have missed the best European bus that ever came along. At the time, however, so much political capital had been invested by Harold Macmillan in the European venture that its undignified collapse deprived our foreign policy of its main current objective and contributed to the impression that the Government had lost its sense of direction.
The Labour Party had suffered a tragedy when Hugh Gaitskell died young in January 1963. Harold Wilson was elected as Leader. Though lacking the respect which Gaitskell had won, Wilson was in himself a new and deadly threat to the Government. He was a formidable parliamentary debater with a rapier wit. He knew how to flatter the press to excellent effect. He could coin the kind of ambiguous phrase to keep Labour united (e.g. ‘planned growth of incomes’ rather than ‘incomes policy’), and he could get under Harold Macmillan’s skin in a way Hugh Gaitskell never could. While Gaitskell was more of a statesman than Wilson, Wilson was an infinitely more accomplished politician.
As a result of all these factors, the Conservatives’ standing in the polls fell alarmingly as the dismal course of 1963 unfolded. In July Labour were some 20 per cent ahead. In early October at the Labour Party Conference Harold Wilson’s brilliant but shallow speech about the ‘white heat’ of scientific revolution caught the imagination of the country, or at least of the commentators. And then just a few days later — a bombshell — a resignation statement from Harold Macmillan’s hospital bed was read out by Alec Douglas-Home to the Party Conference at Blackpool, which was immediately transformed into a kind of gladiatorial combat by the leadership candidates.
This made Blackpool the most exciting Tory Conference anyone has ever witnessed. There was an atmosphere of ‘buzz, buzz, buzz’ as the contenders — at first Rab Butler and Quintin Hogg — and their supporters manoeuvred for advantage. As a junior minister, I was very much on the outside of even the outer ring of the magic circle. But I felt that the victory was Rab’s for the taking. He was a statesman of vast experience and some vision who had missed the leadership by a whisker six years before. Quintin Hogg, or as he still was and later became Lord Hailsham, had more flair and great powers of oratory, but also a reputation at that time for erratic judgement. In brief, Rab failed to grasp the opportunity which was there, making a pedestrian speech at the final rally; while Quintin grabbed and ran off with an opportunity that had never existed in the first place. So when the politicians entrained for London that Saturday, the contest was still undecided.
But the real battle for the Conservative leadership — if a military metaphor can be applied to the subtle processes by which Tory leaders at that time ‘emerged’ — was taking place elsewhere. The subtlest process of all was the way in which Harold Macmillan let it be known that he favoured Hogg over Butler, thus stopping any bandwagon for the latter and preparing the ground for the ‘emergence’ of Alec Douglas-Home. Iain Macleod was to write devastatingly in the Spectator about the way in which the magic circle of the Party ignored Butler and at Macmillan’s behest engineered this. I admired Iain Macleod, as I did Enoch Powell, both of whom subsequently refused to serve in the new Prime Minister’s Cabinet. But I did not agree with their criticisms either of the process or of the choice. I thought at the time there was something to be said for avoiding the public divisions in the Party which open elections would necessitate. I am not in general a believer in changing customs and conventions simply because rationalizing critics demand it. The way in which a Party Leader is chosen seemed to me of much less importance than whether the right person came out on top — and I thought that the right person had come out on top.
The Monday following the Conference I received a phone call from the Whips’ Office to gauge my views on the leadership. I first told them that I would support Rab over Quintin, because he was simply the more qualified of the two. I was then asked my view of Alec. This opened up a possibility I had not envisaged. ‘Is it constitutionally possible?’ I asked. Assured that it was, I did not hesitate. I replied: ‘Then I am strongly in favour of Alec.’
My only reservation, which I expressed at the time, was that there was something dubious about assuming the result of an election — Alec would have to disclaim his peerage and fight a by-election — when asking the monarch to choose a Prime Minister. But I also said that I left that question for others better qualified to consider. In retrospect, though, I would have to add one other qualification. Events in fact showed that the magic circle no longer provided the legitimacy for the men who emerged. It was a handicap to Alec as Prime Minister. By the time a new system was announced I too had come to see the need for it.
My admiration for Alec Douglas-Home was not the result of a recent conversion. When he became Foreign Secretary in June i960 I had expressed doubts to Bettie Harvie-Anderson (MP for Renfrewshire East). I thought that there surely ought to be a suitable candidate for the post among the ministers in the Commons. Moreover, Anthony Eden had, I recalled, ostensibly refused to give the Foreign Secretaryship to Lord Salisbury on these grounds. But Betty told me that Alec was quite outstanding and deserved the job. So I decided to read the new Foreign Secretary’s first speech in Hansard. It was a masterly survey of East-West relations, which emphasized the need for deterrence as well as negotiation with the Soviets and stressed the importance of our relationship with the United States. Alec now and later managed, most unusually, to combine skill in diplomacy with clarity of vision. He exhibited none of those tendencies, so characteristic of those who aspire to be Foreign Secretary, towards regarding the processes of negotiation as an end in themselves. Yet he had the charm, polish and eye for detail of the perfect negotiator.
Moreover, Alec Douglas-Home was a manifestly good man — and goodness is not to be underrated as a qualification for those considered for powerful positions. He was also in the best possible way ‘classless’. You always felt that he treated you not as a category but as a person. And he actually listened — as I found when I took up with him the vexed question of the widowed mothers’ allowance.
But the press were cruelly, ruthlessly and almost unanimously against him. He was easy to caricature as an out-of-touch aristocrat, a throwback to the worst sort of reactionary Toryism. Inverted snobbery was always to my mind even more distasteful than the straightforward self-important kind. By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class. And how they laughed when Alec said self-deprecatingly that he used matchsticks to work out economic concepts. What a contrast with the economic models with which the technically brilliant mind of Harold Wilson was familiar. No one stopped to question whether the weaknesses of the British economy were fundamentally simple and only superficially complex. In fact, if politicians had been compelled to use more honest language and simple illustrations to ensure that people understood their policies, we might well have avoided Britain’s slither into relative decline.
For all that — in spite of the media criticism, in spite of the chaotic end of the Macmillan Government, in spite of the correct but appallingly timed abolition of Retail Price Maintenance which so offended small-business support for the Conservatives — we very nearly won the 1964 general election. This recovery was not because of any economic improvement, for inflation worsened and the balance of payments deficit yawned. Nor was it because of our 1964 manifesto, with its heavy emphasis on corporatism as the way out of the country’s economic problems — territory on which the socialists were bound to be more convincing. In part it was because the closer one looked at the Labour Party’s programme and its Leader, the less substantial they seemed. But mainly the credit for our political recovery should go to Alec. It is ironic that he had already been cast in the role of scapegoat for the defeat many thought inevitable.
There had been some press speculation that I might not hold Finchley. The Liberals, never reticent in talking up their chances, began predicting another Orpington. They had secured a tight grip on the old Finchley council, though in May 1964 they had done rather less well in the elections for the new Barnet borough council. The Golf Club scandal kept rumbling on. The Liberals’ new, energetic candidate, John Pardoe, campaigned principally on local issues while I mainly stuck to national ones — above all, how to secure prosperity without inflation. The Party asked me to speak in a number of constituencies in and around London. I answered attacks on the Government’s record on pensions and benefits at a noisy, hostile meeting of women at Bethnal Green. I wrote in an article in the Evening Standard on ‘good housekeeping’ as the test for sound policies.
But it was understood by Conservative Central Office that most of my effort should go into Finchley. It was my usual schedule of campaigning — daily canvassing, answering letters and a full programme of visits and public meetings, at which it seemed to me that not only did the numbers grow but also my support. I am always anxious on election day; but in 1964 my anxieties were, in spite of the predictions of my defeat at the start of the campaign, much greater for the Party nationally than for me in Finchley.
The results bore this out. I found myself with a majority over John Pardoe of almost 9,000. But I had seen the last of the Ministry at John Adam Street, for Labour had secured an overall majority of four seats. Thirteen years of Conservative Government were over and a period of fundamental rethinking of Conservative philosophy was about to begin — alas, not for the last time.
A GARDEN AT LAST
By now my family and I were comfortably installed in a large-ish detached house at Farnborough in Kent. We had decided to buy ‘Dormers’, which we saw advertised in Country Life, after rent decontrol threatened to make it a good deal more expensive to continue renting our flat in Swan Court. In any event, we felt the children needed a garden to play in.
Our new house had seen better days. Though it was structurally sound, the previous owner had not been able to maintain it properly. There was no central heating, and the one and a half acres of garden were heavily overgrown. But I enjoyed setting to work to improve things. In particular I bubbled with enthusiasm for the garden. I had always wanted one, but when my parents finally moved to a house with quite a large garden — very long but narrow — I was no longer living at home. So the garden at ‘Dormers’ was my first real opportunity to don thick gardening gloves and rip out brambles, trundle barrows of leaf-mould from the nearby wood to improve the soil, and plant out flower beds. I read up on the requirements of azaleas, rhododendrons and dahlias. Luckily, in Bertie Blatch I had a constituency chairman who doubled as horticulturist: but for all his tips my roses never quite resembled his.
For the twins, ‘Dormers’ was a seventh heaven. There was the new experience of their own garden, neighbours with children and all the excitement of a wood to walk in — though not alone. The house was part of an estate, so there was no through-traffic and it was safe for the children. I eliminated right at the beginning the dreadful possibility of their falling in the pond by having it filled with earth and turned into a rose bed.
Mark and Carol were six when I became an MP, old enough to get into plenty of trouble if not firmly handled. Nor was Denis at home as much as he would have liked, since his job took him abroad a good deal. Because my parliamentary duties meant that I was not always back before the twins went to bed, I insisted on full family attendance at breakfast. We also had the advantage of the long parliamentary recess and indeed the long parliamentary weekends. But I owe a debt of gratitude to Barbara, the children’s nanny at ‘Dormers’ until she married a local horticulturist who advised me on the garden — and to Abby who replaced her and who in due course became a close family friend. They kept the children in order and I always telephoned from the House shortly before six each evening to see that all was well and to give the children a chance to tell me that it wasn’t.
I had learned from my mother the importance of making every house a home. In particular, I insisted on a warm kitchen, large enough to eat in, as its heart. Although I like somewhere to be clean and tidy, I have no taste for austerity for its own sake. A lived-in house should be both comfortable and attractively furnished — a combination which is less difficult and less expensive than is sometimes thought. Like my mother, I favoured mahogany furniture. And since nothing looks better on a dark mahogany table than silver, Denis and I started to build up a modest collection for a table service.
Antique shops used to cast a dangerous spell over me. Though keeping my sights prudently low and avoiding the grand establishments where, even in those days, price digits seemed to multiply alarmingly, I would spend spare moments from shopping or political work to see what ‘finds’ were on offer. Antique (or reproduction) furniture continued to be a favourite because I felt it was useful and not just attractive. When I lost a sapphire scarf pin one Sunday in Richmond Park — Denis had brought the stones back with him from a business trip in Ceylon — I used the insurance money to buy an antique piece to serve as a cocktail cabinet. Denis thought that I should have bought some more jewellery, but I was annoyed with myself: ‘at least I can’t lose a cocktail cabinet in Richmond Park,’ I told him. And so our house gradually acquired its contents.
It did not, however, acquire many pictures. Apart from a few prints and the addition (in later years) of several drawings and portraits, Denis and I felt that good paintings — and there was no point in hanging bad ones — were just too expensive. Instead, I began to collect porcelain. Porcelain dishes on the walls and figures in display cabinets provided our rooms with plenty of colour, and somehow the purchase of individual pieces always seemed less of an extravagance. I bought my first pieces of Crown Derby at Frinton when we were visiting my sister Muriel and her husband on their farm. On one occasion after an evening’s canvassing in Finchley I discovered that one of our Branch Chairmen had her own impressive little collection that showed her impeccable taste. From then on she would tell me about anything she saw that she thought I would like.
My childhood experiences in Grantham had convinced me that the best way to make a cheerful home is to ensure it is busy and active. This was not difficult. My own life was full to overflowing. Before I became an MP there had been both the law and my search for a parliamentary seat to combine with my duties as wife and mother. Once I was elected the pace was even more hectic. We had a daily help in to do most of the regular housework, but there were some things which I insisted on doing myself. Whatever time the House rose, even in the early hours of the morning, I would drive back to Farnborough so as to be ready to prepare breakfast for Denis and the family — and to grab some fruit and a cup of coffee for myself. I would then take one or both of the twins and sometimes another local child off to their schools — we had a team of mothers who shared out the duties between us. Then I would usually do some shopping before driving the forty-five minutes to Westminster where the House commenced its sitting at 2.30 p.m.
Although there were often constituency duties, the weekends provided the opportunity to sort out the house and usually to do a large bake, just as we had done at home in Grantham. In the summer months Denis and I and the children would work — or in their case play at working — in the garden. But on Saturdays in the rugby season Denis would probably be refereeing or watching a match — an arrangement which from the earliest days of our marriage had been solemnly set down in tablets of stone. Sometimes if he was refereeing an important game I would go along as well, though my concentration on the game was frequently disturbed by the less than complimentary remarks which English crowds are inclined to exchange about the conduct of referees. On Sundays we took the twins to the Family Service at the Farnborough parish church. Denis was an Anglican, but we both felt that it would be confusing for the children if we did not attend the same church. The fact that our local church was Low Church made it easier for the Methodist in me to make the transition. Anyway, John Wesley regarded himself as a member of the Church of England to his dying day. I did not feel that any great theological divide had been crossed.
Weekends, therefore, provided me with an invaluable and invigorating tonic. So did family holidays. I remembered what I had enjoyed — and not enjoyed — about my own holidays at Skegness. My conclusion was that for young children nothing beats buckets and spades and plenty of activity. So we used to take a house on the Sussex coast for a month right by the side of the beach, and there always seemed to be other families with small children nearby. Later we went regularly to a family hotel at Seaview on the Isle of Wight or rented a flat in the village. Crossing the Solent by ferry seemed a great adventure to the children who, like all twins, had a degree of (usually) playful rivalry. On the way down to the coast in the car we always passed through a place called ‘Four Marks’. I was never able to answer Mark’s question about who these four were. Nor could I think up a satisfactory response to Carol who thought that it was all unfair and that there should also be a ‘Four Carols’. Not to be outdone, Mark pointed out that it was no less unfair that Christmas carols had no male equivalent.
In 1960 we had planned to take the children abroad for the summer holidays to Brittany. But at the last moment Mark caught chickenpox and to everyone’s great disappointment the trip had to be cancelled. To compensate, still more adventurously, we decided to go skiing at Lenzerheide in Switzerland at Christmas. None of us had ever skied before, so we joined a ski club in Sloane Square and took a course in skiing from Lillywhites before we went. The holiday was a great success, and we went back to the same hotel year after year. I loved the scenery and the exercise. And I loved the hot chocolate and pastries afterwards even more.
It is a cliché, but no less true for all that, that in family life you have to take the rough with the smooth. Knowing that you have a family to turn to is a great strength in politics, but the other side is one’s emotional vulnerability to their suffering. I was always worried about Mark, who at that time seemed to catch every germ that was going, including pneumonia one winter at Lenzerheide. One of the worst days of my life was when it became clear that he had appendicitis and I had to rush him to the nearby hospital. I spent so much time with him in the weeks which followed that I began to worry that Carol might feel left out. So I bought her a magnificent teddy bear which was christened Humphrey. Whatever Carol thought of her new friend, I became very attached to him, and indeed brought him with me to Downing Street. Only later did he sadly disintegrate when, dismayed by his grubby looks, I tried to wash him. ‘Sic transit gloria Humphri’.
It is hard to know whether one worries more about one’s children when they are within reach or far away. I wanted the twins to be at home when they were young, though I was reconciled to their going to boarding school later. Unfortunately, the nearby day school to which Mark went had to close in 1961, and Denis persuaded me that it was best that he should go to Belmont Preparatory School. At least Belmont was just on the edge of Finchley, so I could take him out to lunch. Also I knew he was not too far away in case of emergencies. But then, of course, not to be left out, Carol decided that she wanted to go to boarding school as well, and did so two years later. The house seemed empty without them.
By now there was another emptiness in my life which could never be filled, and that was the loss of my mother, who died in 1960. She had been a great rock of family stability. She managed the household, stepped in to run the shop when necessary, entertained, supported my father in his public life and as Mayoress, did a great deal of voluntary social work for the church, displayed a series of practical domestic talents such as dressmaking and was never heard to complain. Like many people who live for others, she made possible all that her husband and daughters did. Her life had not been an easy one. Although in later years I would speak more readily of my father’s political influence on me, it was from my mother that I inherited the ability to organize and combine so many different duties of an active life. Her death was a great shock, even though it had not been entirely unexpected. We were all staying with my sister’s family in Essex when my mother fell ill: Denis and I drove her back to Grantham for an emergency operation. But she was never really well again, and died a few months later. Even young children have a keen sense of family grief. After my mother’s funeral, my father came back to stay with us for a while at ‘Dormers’. That evening when I turned back the coverlet of his bed, I found a little note from Mark on the pillow: ‘Dear Grandad, I’m so sorry Granny died.’ It was heartbreaking.
LAW-MAKING FOR BEGINNERS
I was very glad, however, that both my parents had seen their daughter enter the Palace of Westminster as a Member of Parliament — quite literally ‘seen’, because the press contained flattering photographs of me in my new hat on the way to the House. My first real contact with the Conservative Parliamentary Party was when on the day before Parliament opened I went along as a member of the 1922 Committee — the Party committee to which all Conservative backbench MPs belong — to discuss the question of the Speakership of the House. I knew only a relatively small number of the several hundred faces packed into that rumbustious, smoky committee room, but I immediately felt at home.
Everyone in those early days was immensely kind. The Chief Whip would give new Members a talk about the rules of the House and the whipping system. Old-stagers gave me useful hints about dealing with correspondence. They also told me that I should not just concentrate on the big issues like foreign affairs and finance, but also find one or two less popular topics on which I could make a mark. Another piece of good practical advice was to find myself a ‘pair’, which I promptly did in the form of Charlie Pannell, the Labour MP for Leeds West.[8] I had met him years earlier when he lived in Erith, in my old Dartford constituency. He was exactly the sort of good-humoured, decent Labour man I liked.
The Palace of Westminster seems a bewildering labyrinth of corridors to the uninitiated. It was some time before I could find my way with ease around it. The Tea Room, the Library and the main committee rooms were all points of reference for me. There were modestly appointed rooms set apart for the twenty-five women Members — the ‘Lady Members’ Rooms’ — where I would find a desk to work at. Neither taste nor convention suggested my entering the Smoking Room. My formidably efficient secretary, Paddi Victor Smith, had a desk in a large office with a number of other secretaries where we worked on constituency correspondence. But the heart of the House of Commons was, even more than now, the Chamber itself. Early on, I was advised that there was no substitute for hours spent there. Finance and Foreign Affairs Committee meetings might be more informative. The weekly 1922 Committee meetings might be more lively. But it was only by absorbing the atmosphere of the House until its procedures became second nature and its style of debate instinctive that one could become that most respected kind of English politician, a ‘House of Commons man’ (or woman).
So that is what I did. I took my pre-arranged place in the fourth row back below the gangway — where thirty-one years later I chose to sit again after I resigned as Prime Minister. The House itself was — and still is — a very masculine place. This manifested itself above all, I found, in the sheer volume of noise. I was used to university debates and questions at the general election hustings, yet my brief previous visits to the Visitors’ Gallery of the House had never prepared me for this. But when I remarked on it to a colleague he just laughed and said, ‘You should have heard it during Suez!’ Masculinity, I soon found, however, did not degenerate into male prejudice. In different ways I had on occasion been made to feel small because I was a woman in industry, at the Bar and indeed in Tory constituency politics. But in the House of Commons we were all equals; and woe betide ministers who suggest by their demeanour or behaviour that they consider themselves more equal than the rest. I soon saw with appreciation that sincerity, logic and technical mastery of a subject could earn respect from both sides of the House. Shallowness and bluff were quickly exposed. Perhaps every generation of young men and women considers that those it once regarded as great figures had a stature lacked by their equivalents in later years. But I would certainly be hard put now to find on the backbenches the extraordinary range of experience and talents which characterized the House of Commons then. Almost whatever the subject, there would be some figure on either side of the House who would bring massive, specialized knowledge and obvious intuition to bear on it — and be listened to with respect by front and backbenches alike.
As it happens, I had very little opportunity during my first few months as an MP for the relaxed acquisition of experience of the House. With 310 other Members I had entered the Commons ballot for the introduction of Private Members’ Bills. Never previously having so much as won a raffle, I was greatly astonished to find myself drawn second. Only the first few Private Members’ Bills have any chance of becoming legislation, and even then the Government’s attitude towards them is crucial.
I had only given the most general consideration to the topic I would choose, but I now had just a week to make up my mind, for the Bill had to be tabled by 11 November. Clearly, it must be something about which I not only felt strongly but also, preferably, in an area I already knew. I got as far as approving a draft long title for a Bill relating to appeals in contempt of court cases — one of those minor Bills which the Whips’ Office keeps in reserve to pass off on unsuspecting backbenchers. But this seemed rather dry and I could not summon up much enthusiasm for it. So I thought again.
Many of us on the right of the Party — and not just on the right — were becoming very concerned about the abuse of trade union power. I had read and discussed with my lawyer friends a pamphlet on the subject produced by the Inns of Court Conservative Society the previous year. Entitled A Giant’s Strength, it was, I understood, largely the work of a brilliant young Tory barrister called Geoffrey Howe. In particular, I was following throughout this period the lengthy and controversial case of Rookes v Barnard, relating to the closed shop. Rookes had resigned from his trade union which thereupon threatened his employer, the airline BOAC, with a strike if he was not dismissed from his post. BOAC promptly and pusillani-mously complied and Rookes sued the trade union officials. I was outraged by the trampling of what I saw as someone’s basic right to join or not to join a union. I also admired Rookes’s determination and courage. I sought advice about whether I could introduce a Bill which would break or at least weaken the power of the closed shop.
But here again there were difficulties. Although younger Tories and many backbenchers were restive on the issue, the prevailing ethos in the upper ranks of the Conservative Party was still one of accommodating and appeasing the unions. It was therefore extremely unlikely that I could effect the change in the law which I wanted. The Whips made it clear to me that I would not have the Party’s support. Moreover, the case itself was still undecided — and would not finally be determined until 1964. At the time that I was considering introducing a Bill the Appeal Court had ruled against Rookes, but in the end the House of Lords found against the trade union. There were, therefore, strong arguments that the law should not be changed partway through a test case. I bowed to these considerations.
The issue on which I finally alighted was also essentially one of civil liberties under threat from collectivism. As a result of an industrial dispute in the printing industry which began in July 1958, a number of Labour-controlled councils in big cities had denied normal reporting facilities to journalists working on provincial newspapers involved in the dispute. This had highlighted a loophole in the law which many councils used to conceal information from the general public about their activities. The press had a statutory right of admission only to meetings of the full council, not to its committees. By the device of resolving to go into committee, councils could therefore exclude the press from their deliberations. And besides these ‘committees of the whole council’ there were many other committees which were closed. Large sums of ratepayers’ money could be spent — or mis-spent — without outside scrutiny. Nor did members of the public themselves have the right to attend any council or council committee meetings.
My own interest in the question stemmed partly from the fact that it had come to a head because of socialist connivance with trade union power, partly because I knew from Nottingham, not far from Grantham, what was going on, and partly because the present situation offended against my belief in accountability by government for the spending of people’s money. The 1959 Conservative manifesto had contained a promise ‘to make quite sure that the press have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities’. Having read this, I imagined that a Bill to do just that would be welcome to the Government. I was again swiftly disillusioned by the Whips. Apparently, nothing more than a code of practice on the subject had been envisaged. This seemed to me extremely feeble, and so I decided to go ahead.
It quickly became clear that the objection to a measure with teeth came not from ministers at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government but rather from officials, who in turn were doubtless echoing the fierce opposition of the local authorities to any democratic check on their powers. Henry Brooke, the Cabinet minister in charge, was consistently sympathetic. Each Private Member’s Bill is placed under the supervision of a junior minister who either helps or hinders its progress. My Bill was given to Sir Keith Joseph, and it was in examination of the tedious technical intricacies of the measure that I first got to know Keith.
I learned a great deal in a very short time from the experience of devising, refashioning and negotiating for my Bill. Partly because the issue had been a live one for a number of years, but partly also because of senior Members’ kindness towards a new Member, I was able to rely on invaluable assistance from backbench colleagues. Sir Lionel Heald, a former Attorney General, gave me the benefit of his great legal experience. I learned from him and others the techniques of legal draftsmanship which were generally the preserve of the parliamentary draftsmen.
I also witnessed the power of pressure groups. The influence of the local authority lobby made itself felt in a hundred ways, and not only through the Labour Party. I therefore learned to play pressure group against pressure group and made the most of the help offered to me by the Newspaper Editors’ Guild and other press bodies.
In the end, however, there is no substitute for one’s own efforts. I wanted to get as many MPs as possible to the House on a Friday (when most MPs have returned to their constituency) for the Bill’s Second Reading — this was the great hurdle. I have always believed in the impact of a personal handwritten letter — even from someone you barely know. So just before Second Reading I wrote 250 letters to Government backbenchers asking them to attend and vote for my measure.
There were other complications. I had originally envisaged waiting several months to make my maiden speech, because I had been advised first to get the feel of the House. I had had it in mind to speak on Lord Radcliffe’s Report on the Working of the Monetary System which had appeared in the late summer — I was fascinated by the techniques of monetary policy which it outlined. But I did not have the time to prepare such a speech as well as the speech to introduce the Second Reading of my new Bill, so I decided to concentrate on the latter. That in turn faced a further obstacle. Convention dictated that a maiden speech should be a modest, uncontroversial affair, larded with appreciative references to my predecessor and my constituency. This was now impossible, because a maiden speech on the Second Reading of a Bill like mine could not have avoided controversy.
At least, though, I was not short of content. By the time I rose to deliver my speech on Friday 5 February 1960, I knew the arguments by heart. As a result, I could speak for almost half an hour without notes to hand — though not without nerves. The three women members of the Government — Pat Hornsby-Smith, Mervyn Pike and Edith Pitt — showed moral support from the front bench, and the House was very full for a Friday. I was delighted that nearly 200 Members voted, and we won handsomely. I was also genuinely moved by the comments that different MPs made to me personally — particularly Rab Butler, the Leader of the House and a master of ambiguous compliments, whose congratulations on this occasion, however, were straightforward, generous and very welcome to a new Member.
It was clear from the press next day that the speech had been a success and that I was — for the present at least — a celebrity. ‘A new star was born in Parliament’, thrilled the Daily Express. ‘Fame and Margaret Thatcher made friends yesterday’, shrieked the Sunday Dispatch. ‘A triumph’, observed the Daily Telegraph evenly. Feature articles appeared about me and my family. I was interviewed on television. The cameras came down to ‘Dormers’, and in an unguarded moment in answer to one of the more preposterous questions I told a journalist that ‘I couldn’t even consider a Cabinet post until my twins are older.’ But apart from this gaffe it was roses, roses all the way.
Excessive praise? I had no doubt myself that it was. And I was slightly nervous that it might excite the jealousy of colleagues. My speech had been a competent performance, but it was not an epic.
But was it, however, a portent? Some time before the general election I had read John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain. I had not thought more about it until I considered these somewhat overstated headlines. John Buchan’s tale concerns a group of men, including several politicians, who spend Whitsun at a friend’s house where they are enabled by another guest, a mysterious and fatally ill physicist of world renown, to glimpse the contents of a page of The Times one year later. Each sees something affecting his own future. One, a new Conservative MP, reads a brief obituary of himself which notes that he had delivered a brilliant maiden speech that had made him a national figure overnight. And so it turns out. The speech is outstanding, praised and admired on all sides; but after that, deprived of the self-confidence which knowledge of the future gave him, he fails totally and sinks into oblivion, waiting for the end. I shuddered slightly and reached for my lucky pearls.
But my Bill — with the significant addition that members of the general public should have the same rights as the press to attend council meetings, and with committees (apart from committees of the whole council) excluded from its provisions — duly passed into law; and, though my seven-day stardom faded somewhat, I had learned a lot and gained a good deal of confidence.
THE RIGHT LEFT PEOPLE
Life on the backbenches was always exciting — but so hectic that on one occasion, to the consternation of my male colleagues, I fainted in the Members’ Dining Room. I spent as much time as I could in the House and at backbench committees. I also regularly attended the dining club of new Tory Members to which the great figures of the Party — Harold Macmillan, Rab Butler, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell — and brilliant young Tory journalists like Peter Utley would come to speak.
The natural path to promotion and success at this time lay in the centre of politics and on the left of the Conservative Party. Above all, the up-and-coming Tory politician had to avoid being ‘reactionary’. Nothing was likely to be so socially and professionally damaging as to bear that label. Conservatism at this time lacked fire. Even though what are now widely seen as the damaging moral, social and economic developments of the sixties mainly belong to the period of Labour Government after 1964, the first years of the decade also were ones of drift and cynicism, for which Conservatives must be held in large part responsible.
Indeed, Conservatives in the early sixties were living through one of their occasional phases of complacency. Macmillan’s 1959 landslide and the continuous rise in affluence combined to persuade even non-partisan commentators that the Tories were now the party of ‘modernization’ and that Labour, with its ‘cloth cap image’, was in danger of being relegated to permanent opposition. Rab Butler told us at the New Members’ Dining Club one evening that if the Party played its cards well, we would be in power for the next twenty-five years. In these circumstances there was little incentive for either serious forward thinking on policy or philosophical reflection. The main dispute within the Tory Party was over Iain Macleod’s ‘Scramble from Africa’, with the old right complaining that Britain was abandoning its responsibility both to white settlers and to the African majorities of tribal farmers by giving power to rootless urban African politicians who would become dictators in short order. Time has made these fears seem prescient; in the early sixties they looked like a nostalgic hankering for an Empire that had almost passed into history. A passionate minority of Tory MPs embraced these criticisms; most of us, though, thought that Iain Macleod was applying Tory ‘modernization’ to colonial policy and backed him.
The odd thing is, looking back, that Conservatives in the sixties, though increasingly and obsessively worried about being out of touch with contemporary trends and fashions, were beginning to lose touch with the instincts and aspirations of ordinary conservative-minded people. This was true on issues as different as trade unions and immigration, law and order and aid to the Third World. But it was also and most directly important as regards management of the economy.
It was not so much inflation, which was zero throughout the winter of 1959–60 and did not reach 5 per cent until the summer of 1961, but rather the balance of payments that was seen as the main economic constraint on growth. And the means adopted to deal with the problems at this time — credit controls, interest rate rises, the search for international credit to sustain the pound, tax rises and, increasingly, prototype incomes policies — became all too familiar over the next fifteen years.
The rethinking that produced first ‘Selsdon Man’ and later Thatcherism was barely in evidence. Enoch Powell at this time was pushing through his ten-year hospital building programme — one of the largest programmes of public spending presided over by Macmillan. Only a handful of backbenchers — including the recently arrived John Biffen — were prepared to argue the case against incomes policy and for monetary control of inflation. Indeed, an unhealthy concern with inflation (as opposed to unemployment) was seen by the powers-that-be as reflecting the interests of declining sectors of British society, such as fixed-income pensioners, rather than the new and exciting ‘young managers’ of Conservative Central Office’s imagination — at least until the fixed-income pensioners handed us a series of by-election defeats like Orpington and Middlesbrough West in the Tory heartland. These, together with the series of scandals from 1962 onwards, marked the end of the complacent period of Macmillanite Conservatism. Ahead of us lay years of defeat, opposition and (eventually) serious rethinking as Conservatives felt their way instinctively out of paternalism and into a new style of Toryism.
Although no really serious trouble in my relations with the Government and with the prevailing orthodoxy in the Conservative Party ever threatened when I was on the backbenches, I was conscious that, for all the plaudits I had received, I was not one of those young Tories who could expect to rise without trace. I had my own beliefs. I was uneasy about the general direction in which we seemed to be going. It would be wrong to suggest anything stronger than that. But for someone who believed in sound finance, the creative potential of free enterprise and social discipline, there was much to be concerned about.
The more I learned about it, the less impressed I was by our management of the economy. I listened with great care to the speeches of the Tory backbencher Nigel Birch, which were highly critical of the Government’s failure to control public spending. The Government’s argument was that increases could be afforded as long as the economy continued to grow. But this in turn edged us towards policies of injecting too much demand and then pulling back sharply when this produced pressures on the balance of payments or sterling. This is precisely what happened in the summer of 1961 when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd introduced a deflationary Budget and our first incomes policy, the ‘pay pause’. Another effect, of course, was to keep taxation higher than would otherwise be necessary. Chancellors of the Exchequer, wary of increases in basic income tax, laid particular importance on checking tax avoidance and evasion, repeatedly extending Inland Revenue powers to do so. Both as a tax lawyer and from my own instinctive dislike of handing more power to bureaucracies, I felt strongly on the matter and helped to write a critical report by the Inns of Court Conservative Society.
I felt even more strongly that the fashionable liberal tendencies in penal policy should be sharply reversed. So I spoke — and voted — in support of a new clause which a group of us wanted to add on to that year’s Criminal Justice Bill which would have introduced birching or caning for young violent offenders. In the prevailing climate of opinion, this was a line which I knew would expose me to ridicule from the self-consciously high-minded and soft-hearted commentators. But my constituents did not see it that way, and nor did a substantial number of us on the right. Although the new clause was entirely predictably defeated, sixty-nine Tory backbenchers voted against the Government and in support of it. It was the biggest Party revolt since we came to power in 1951, and the Whips’ Office were none too pleased. It was also the only occasion in my entire time in the House of Commons when I voted against the Party line.
The summer of 1961 was a more than usually interesting time in politics. I retained my close interest in foreign affairs, which were dominated by the uneasy developing relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the building by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall (which the House was recalled to discuss) and, closer to home, by the beginning of negotiations for Britain to join the Common Market. There was also speculation about a reshuffle. In spite of my slightly blotted copybook, I had some reason to think that I might be a beneficiary of it. I had remained to a modest degree in the public eye, and not just with my speech on corporal punishment. I gave a press conference with Eirene White, the Labour MP for East Flint, on the lack of provision being made for the needs of pre-school children in high-rise flats, a topic of growing concern at this time when so many of these badly designed monstrosities were being erected. But the main reason why I had hopes of benefiting from the reshuffle was very simple. Pat Hornsby-Smith had decided to resign to pursue her business interests, and it was thought politically desirable to keep up the number of women in the Government. I even had more than an inkling of what my future post might be. It leaked out that there were two jobs available — one at Aviation and the other at Pensions. Much as I would have liked it, I could not see them giving Aviation in those days to a young woman.
That said, I did not try to conceal my delight when the telephone rang and I was summoned to see the Prime Minister. Harold Macmillan was camping out in some style at Admiralty House while 10 Downing Street was undergoing extensive refurbishment. I had already developed my own strong impressions of him, not just from speeches in the House and to the 1922 Committee, but also when he came to speak to our New Members’ Dining Club — on which occasion he had strongly recommended Disraeli’s Sybil and Conings by as political reading. But Disraeli’s style was too ornate for my taste, though I can see why it may have appealed to Harold Macmillan. It is now clear to me that Macmillan was a more complex and sensitive figure than he appeared; but appearance did seem to count for a great deal. Certainly, whether it was striking a bargain and cementing a friendship with President Kennedy, or delivering a deliciously humorous put-down to a ranting Khrushchev, Harold Macmillan was a superb representative of Britain abroad.
In both foreign and home policies Macmillan always prided himself on having a sense of history. In his attempts to establish harmony between the two superpowers, as in his fervent belief that Britain’s destiny lay in Europe, he was much affected by the experience of two world wars. Indeed, as he would remind us, he was one of the few surviving members of the House who had fought in the Great War. In his preference for economic expansion over financial soundness and his long-standing belief in the virtues of planning, he was reacting against the deflation and unemployment of the 1930s which he had seen as MP for Stockton-on-Tees. It is said that when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer Treasury officials kept a tally of how many times he mentioned ‘Stockton’ each week. But history’s lessons usually teach us what we want to learn. It was possible to take a very different view of the causes of war and of the historic achievements of capitalism. Things looked different from the perspective of Grantham than from that of Stockton.
INTO OFFICE…
I sorted out my best outfit, this time sapphire blue, to go and see the Prime Minister. The interview was short. Harold Macmillan charmingly greeted me and offered the expected appointment. I enthusiastically accepted. I wanted to begin as soon as possible and asked him how I should arrange things with the department. Characteristically, he said: ‘Oh well, ring the Permanent Secretary and turn up at about 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, look around and come away. I shouldn’t stay too long.’
So it was the following morning — rather before eleven — that I arrived at the pleasant Georgian house in John Adam Street, just off the Strand, which was at that time the headquarters of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. In a gesture which I much appreciated — and which I myself as a Cabinet minister always emulated — John Boyd-Carpenter, my minister, was there at the front door to meet me and take me up to my new office. John was someone it was easy to like and admire for his personal kindness, grasp of detail and capacity for lucid exposition of a complex case. He was an excellent speaker and debater. All in all, a good model for a novice Parliamentary Secretary to follow. After his promotion to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1962, my new minister was Niall Macpherson, who in turn made way for Richard Wood. I was very lucky in all of them. A Parliamentary Secretary’s job is only as interesting and worthwhile as the senior minister makes it. I felt that they gave me every opportunity. This first day at John Adam Street was more or less a whirl of new faces and unfamiliar issues. There was little time to do more than take my bearings and receive my briefing.
On Friday (my birthday) I was given a prominent place on the platform at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton. The cameras were once more active when I appeared at the Conference emerging, as it was remarked, from a royal blue car and wearing a royal blue dress and hat. Both my appointment and my appearance were something of a contrast to the general mood of the Conference which, like the limited reshuffle itself that had brought Iain Macleod to the Party Chairmanship, was widely seen as moving the Party in a leftward direction.
Back at the Ministry I was not at all displeased to substitute grind for glamour. The issues dealt with by what was then the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and is now the Department of Social Security are more technically complicated than those falling to any other branch of government, with the possible exception of the tax side of the Treasury. It was not just a matter of avoiding being caught out in the House of Commons. If one was to make any serious contribution to the development of policy one had to have mastered both the big principles and the detail. This I now set out to do.
The first step was to re-read the original Beveridge Report in which the philosophy of the post-war system of pensions and benefits was clearly set out. I was already quite well acquainted with its main aspects and I strongly approved of them. At the centre was the concept of a comprehensive ‘social insurance scheme’, which was intended to cover loss of earning power caused by unemployment, sickness or retirement. This would be done by a single system of benefits at subsistence level financed by flat-rate individual contributions. By the side of this there would be a system of National Assistance, financed out of general taxation, to help those who were unable to sustain themselves on National Insurance benefits, either because they had been unable to contribute, or had run out of cover. National Assistance was means tested and had been envisaged as in large part a transitional system, whose scope would diminish as pensions or personal savings rose.
It is easy in retrospect to poke fun at many of Beveridge’s assumptions and predictions. He greatly underestimated the cost of his proposals, though this was partly because the post-war Labour Government introduced full rate old-age pensions immediately, without the twenty-year phasing-in period which Beveridge had envisaged. There were other problems too. The relationship, which in any individual case was always bound to be indirect, between contributions on the one hand and benefits on the other became ever more obscure as pensions were increased and as the proportion of elderly people in the population grew. Far from diminishing, National Assistance and its successors, Supplementary Benefit and Income Support, swelled to become an alarming burden on the taxpayer. Anomalies between the two notionally complementary, but in practice often contradictory, systems became a perpetual headache.
But for all that, Beveridge had sought to guard against the very problems which later governments more or less ignored and which have now returned to plague us, in particular the debilitating effects of welfare dependency and the loss of private and voluntary effort. Whatever the effects in practice, the Beveridge Report’s rhetoric has what would later be considered a Thatcherite ring to it:
…The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organizing security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family. [Paragraph 9]… The insured persons should not feel that income for idleness, however caused, can come from a bottomless purse. [Paragraph 22]
…Material progress depends upon technical progress which depends upon investment and ultimately upon savings… It is important that part of the additional resources going to wage-earners and others of limited means should be saved by them instead of being spent forthwith. [Paragraph 376]
Much of our time at the Ministry was taken up both with coping with the effects of and finding remedies to the difficulties which flowed from the gap between Beveridge’s original conception and the way in which the system — and with it public expectations — had developed. So, for example, in those days before inflation took hold and benefits were annually up-rated to cope with it, there were cries of disapproval when National Insurance pensions were increased and National Assistance, which made up your income to a certain level, was not. People also increasingly came to expect something better than a subsistence-level pension to retire upon, but the contribution levels or financing from general taxation which this would require seemed prohibitive. This lay behind John Boyd-Carpenter’s idea of the ‘graduated pensions’ scheme, whereby the payment of higher contributions could secure a somewhat higher pension, and provision was made for the encouragement of private occupational pension schemes. Another constant source of difficulty for which we found no ultimate (affordable) answer was the ‘earnings rule’ whereby pensioners who worked would at a certain level of income lose part or all of their pension payments. As I shall explain, it was the impact of this on pensioner widows which caused me most difficulty and not a little heart-searching.
Three other questions, which were to trouble governments for many years to come, had also already begun to loom. There was the issue of how to ensure decent levels of incomes for elderly pensioners who had not paid in sufficient contributions to be able to claim a full National Insurance pension. There was the continual search for greater ‘selectivity’ (as the jargon had it) in Social Security benefits generally — that is, concentrating them on the most needy rather than on the general broad range of benefit recipients. (In fact, as our current debates on ‘targeting benefits’ — in today’s jargon — shows, this has proved a largely fruitless exercise.) Finally, there was the whole argument about the ‘stigma’ attached to National Assistance and the means test. As I frequently pointed out, this had two sides to it. On the one hand, of course, people living in real poverty ought to be encouraged to take the state help which is on offer. On the other hand, the self-respect of those people I used to refer to as ‘the proud ones’, who were not going to take hand-outs from anyone, was morally admirable and, as can now be seen all too clearly, a check on dependency whose removal could ultimately have devastating social consequences.
Apart from the Beveridge Report and other general briefing from the department, it was the case work — that is the investigation of particular people’s problems raised in letters — which taught me most about the Social Security system. I was not prepared to sign a reply if I did not feel that I properly understood the background. Consequently, a stream of officials came in and out of my modest office to give me the benefit of their matchless knowledge of each topic. I adopted a similar approach to parliamentary questions, which would be shared out between the ministers. I was not content to know the answer or the line to take. I wanted to know why. The weekend before my first appearance at the Despatch Box to answer questions was, I fear, almost as nerve-racking for my Private Secretary as it was for me, since I was all the time on the telephone to him for explanations.
Apart from some peppery exchanges with the civil servants allocated to deal with my Private Member’s Bill, it was at Pensions that I had my first professional dealings with the civil service. The Permanent Secretary of the department in practice wields a good deal more power than a junior minister. It was made clear to me early on that he was answerable only to the ministerial head of the department. The two successive Permanent Secretaries during my time at Pensions, Eric Bowyer and Clifford Jarrett, were representatives of the civil service at its best — clever, conscientious and of complete integrity. But the real experts were likely to be found further down the hierarchy. I quickly discovered that the infallible source of information on pensions was a Deputy Secretary, John Walley. Generally, the calibre of the officials I met impressed me.
Having served as a junior minister to three different ministers in the same department I was interested to see that the advice tendered to the ministers by civil servants differed, even though it was on the same topic. So I complained when both Niall Mac-pherson and Richard Wood received policy submissions proposing approaches that I knew had not been put to their predecessor, John Boyd-Carpenter. I remember saying afterwards: ‘That’s not what you advised the previous minister.’ They replied that they had known that he would never accept it. I decided then and there that when I was in charge of a department I would insist on an absolutely frank assessment of all the options from any civil servants who would report to me. Arguments should be from first principles.
I also learned another lesson. There was a good deal of pressure to remove the earnings rule as regards widowed mothers. I sympathized with it strongly. Indeed, this was one of the issues upon which, as a new MP, I had publicly stated my position. I thought that if a woman who had lost her husband but still had children to support decided to try to earn a little more through going out to work she should not lose pension for doing so. Perhaps as a woman I had a clearer idea of what problems widows faced. Perhaps it was my recollection of the heartbreaking sight of a recently widowed mother eking out her tiny income buying bruised fruit at my father’s shop in Grantham. But I found it almost impossible to defend the Government line against Opposition attack. I raised the matter with officials and with my minister. On one occasion, I even raised it with Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister when he came to speak to a group of junior ministers. But although he seemed sympathetic, I never got anywhere.
The argument from officials in the department was always that ending the earnings rule for even this most deserving group would have ‘repercussions’ elsewhere. And, of course, they were logically correct. But how I came to hate that word ‘repercussions’. Ministers were wrong to take such arguments at face value and not to apply political judgement to them. It was no surprise to me that one of the first acts of the incoming Labour Government in 1964 was to make the change for which I had been arguing, and to get the credit too. The moral was clear to me: bureaucratic logic is no substitute for ministerial judgement. Forget that as a politician, and the political ‘repercussions’ will be on you.
My days at Pensions were full. Although I shared a ministerial car with my colleague, the junior minister who dealt with war pensions, I generally drove myself in from Farnborough in the mornings. At the Ministry the day might begin with the two junior ministers meeting John Boyd-Carpenter to discuss the larger policy issues or the current political situation. Then there would be batches of letters for me to sign or on which I would seek advice. I might have a meeting about particular areas of responsibility which my minister had given me, such as working out reciprocal arrangements on pensions with other countries. I would have meetings with officials in preparation for papers on forward planning in Social Security — a task which was as necessary as it was difficult. In the afternoon a deputation from the pressure groups, which even in those days abounded in the social services field, might arrive to put its case to me for the correction of some alleged anomaly or the increase of some benefit. I sometimes visited regional Social Security offices, talking to the staff about the problems they faced and listening to suggestions. I would dine at the House or perhaps with political friends — an invitation to dinner with Ernest Marples, the ebullient and original politician who made a name for himself as Transport Minister, and his wife was always a guarantee of superb food and fine wine, as well as jovial company. If there was a division, I would often be in the House to vote at 10 o’clock, before driving back home with two or three red boxes full of draft letters and policy papers to read into the early hours.
I retained my taste for the Chamber of the Commons, developed during my two years on the backbenches. We faced no mean opponents on the Labour benches. Dick Crossman had one of the finest minds in politics, if also one of the most wayward, and Douglas Houghton a formidable mastery of his brief. I liked both of them, but I was still determined to win any argument. I enjoyed the battle of facts and figures when our policies were under fire at Question Time and when I was speaking in debates — though sometimes I should have trod more warily. One day at the Despatch Box I was handed a civil service note giving new statistics about a point raised in the debate. ‘Now,’ I said triumphantly, ‘I have the latest red hot figure.’ The House dissolved into laughter, and it took a moment for me to realize my double entendre.
As luck would have it, at Pensions we were due to answer questions on the Monday immediately after the notorious Cabinet reshuffle in July 1962 which became known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. John Boyd-Carpenter departed to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Niall Macpherson had not yet replaced him at Pensions. Since most of the questions on the Order Paper related to my side of the department’s activities, rather than War Pensions, I would have to answer in the place of the senior minister for nearly an hour. That meant another nerve-racking weekend for me and for the officials I had to pester. The Labour Party was in rumbustious mood and Iain Macleod was the only Cabinet minister in the Chamber. But I got through, saying when asked about future policy that I would refer the matter to my minister — ‘when I had one’.
…AND OUT AGAIN
But would the Government get through? As I was to experience myself many years later, every Cabinet reshuffle contains its own unforeseen dangers. But no difficulties I ever faced — even in 1989 — matched the appalling damage to the Government done by ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, in which one third of the Cabinet, including the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were despatched and a new generation including Reggie Maudling, Keith Joseph and Edward Boyle found themselves in the front line of politics. One of the lessons I learned from the affair was that one should try to bring in some younger people to the Government at each reshuffle so as to avoid a log-jam. But in any case the handling of the changes was badly botched by Macmillan, whose standing never really recovered.
We were already in trouble for a number of obvious — and some less obvious — reasons. Inflation had started to rise quite sharply. Incomes policy in the form of the ‘pay pause’ and then the ‘guiding light’ had been employed in an attempt to control it. Industrial disputes, especially the engineering and shipbuilding strikes, led to more days being lost due to strikes in 1962 than in any year since the General Strike of 1926. Rather than deal with the roots of the problem, which lay in trade union power, the Government moved towards corporatist deals with organized labour by setting up the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) — shortly to be supplemented by a National Incomes Commission (NIC) — so accepting a fundamentally collectivist analysis of what was wrong with Britain.
Above all, out in the country there had grown up a detectable feeling that the Conservatives had been in power too long and had lost their way. That most dangerous time for a government had arrived when most people feel, perhaps only in some vague way, that it is ‘time for a change’. Later in the autumn of 1962 the Government ran into squalls of a different kind. The Vassall spy case, the flight of Philby to the Soviet Union, confirming suspicions that he had been a KGB double-agent since the 1930s, and in the summer of 1963 the Profumo scandal — all served to enmesh the Government in rumours of sleaze and incompetence. These might have been shrugged off by a government in robust health. But the significance attached to these embarrassments was the greater because of the general malaise.
Europe was one of the main reasons for that malaise. In October 1961 Ted Heath had been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the difficult negotiations for British membership of the European Economic Community. Not least because of Ted’s tenacity and dedication, most of the problems, such as what to do about Britain’s agriculture and about trade links with the Commonwealth, seemed eminently soluble. Then in January 1963 General de Gaulle vetoed our entry. No great popular passions about Europe were aroused at this time in Britain. There was a general sense, which I shared, that in the past we had underrated the potential advantage to Britain of access to the Common Market, that neither the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) nor our links with the Common wealth and the United States offered us the trading future we needed, and that the time was right for us to join the EEC. I was an active member of the European Union of Women — an organization founded in Austria in 1953 to promote European integration — and sat on its ‘Judicial Panel’ which debated issues relating to law and the family. But I saw the EEC as essentially a trading framework — a Common Market — and neither shared nor took very seriously the idealistic rhetoric with which ‘Europe’ was already being dressed in some quarters. In fact, it is now clear to me that General de Gaulle was much more perceptive than we were at this time when, to our great chagrin and near universal condemnation, he noted:
England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones… In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the Continentals…
But he also said:
If the Brussels negotiations were shortly not to succeed, nothing would prevent the conclusion between the Common Market and Great Britain of an accord of association designed to safeguard exchanges, and nothing would prevent close relations between England and France from being maintained, nor the pursuit and development of their direct cooperation in all kinds of fields…
It is evident that if this is what de Gaulle was indeed offering, it would have been a better reflection of British interests than the terms of British membership that were eventually agreed a decade later. We may have missed the best European bus that ever came along. At the time, however, so much political capital had been invested by Harold Macmillan in the European venture that its undignified collapse deprived our foreign policy of its main current objective and contributed to the impression that the Government had lost its sense of direction.
The Labour Party had suffered a tragedy when Hugh Gaitskell died young in January 1963. Harold Wilson was elected as Leader. Though lacking the respect which Gaitskell had won, Wilson was in himself a new and deadly threat to the Government. He was a formidable parliamentary debater with a rapier wit. He knew how to flatter the press to excellent effect. He could coin the kind of ambiguous phrase to keep Labour united (e.g. ‘planned growth of incomes’ rather than ‘incomes policy’), and he could get under Harold Macmillan’s skin in a way Hugh Gaitskell never could. While Gaitskell was more of a statesman than Wilson, Wilson was an infinitely more accomplished politician.
As a result of all these factors, the Conservatives’ standing in the polls fell alarmingly as the dismal course of 1963 unfolded. In July Labour were some 20 per cent ahead. In early October at the Labour Party Conference Harold Wilson’s brilliant but shallow speech about the ‘white heat’ of scientific revolution caught the imagination of the country, or at least of the commentators. And then just a few days later — a bombshell — a resignation statement from Harold Macmillan’s hospital bed was read out by Alec Douglas-Home to the Party Conference at Blackpool, which was immediately transformed into a kind of gladiatorial combat by the leadership candidates.
This made Blackpool the most exciting Tory Conference anyone has ever witnessed. There was an atmosphere of ‘buzz, buzz, buzz’ as the contenders — at first Rab Butler and Quintin Hogg — and their supporters manoeuvred for advantage. As a junior minister, I was very much on the outside of even the outer ring of the magic circle. But I felt that the victory was Rab’s for the taking. He was a statesman of vast experience and some vision who had missed the leadership by a whisker six years before. Quintin Hogg, or as he still was and later became Lord Hailsham, had more flair and great powers of oratory, but also a reputation at that time for erratic judgement. In brief, Rab failed to grasp the opportunity which was there, making a pedestrian speech at the final rally; while Quintin grabbed and ran off with an opportunity that had never existed in the first place. So when the politicians entrained for London that Saturday, the contest was still undecided.
But the real battle for the Conservative leadership — if a military metaphor can be applied to the subtle processes by which Tory leaders at that time ‘emerged’ — was taking place elsewhere. The subtlest process of all was the way in which Harold Macmillan let it be known that he favoured Hogg over Butler, thus stopping any bandwagon for the latter and preparing the ground for the ‘emergence’ of Alec Douglas-Home. Iain Macleod was to write devastatingly in the Spectator about the way in which the magic circle of the Party ignored Butler and at Macmillan’s behest engineered this. I admired Iain Macleod, as I did Enoch Powell, both of whom subsequently refused to serve in the new Prime Minister’s Cabinet. But I did not agree with their criticisms either of the process or of the choice. I thought at the time there was something to be said for avoiding the public divisions in the Party which open elections would necessitate. I am not in general a believer in changing customs and conventions simply because rationalizing critics demand it. The way in which a Party Leader is chosen seemed to me of much less importance than whether the right person came out on top — and I thought that the right person had come out on top.
The Monday following the Conference I received a phone call from the Whips’ Office to gauge my views on the leadership. I first told them that I would support Rab over Quintin, because he was simply the more qualified of the two. I was then asked my view of Alec. This opened up a possibility I had not envisaged. ‘Is it constitutionally possible?’ I asked. Assured that it was, I did not hesitate. I replied: ‘Then I am strongly in favour of Alec.’
My only reservation, which I expressed at the time, was that there was something dubious about assuming the result of an election — Alec would have to disclaim his peerage and fight a by-election — when asking the monarch to choose a Prime Minister. But I also said that I left that question for others better qualified to consider. In retrospect, though, I would have to add one other qualification. Events in fact showed that the magic circle no longer provided the legitimacy for the men who emerged. It was a handicap to Alec as Prime Minister. By the time a new system was announced I too had come to see the need for it.
My admiration for Alec Douglas-Home was not the result of a recent conversion. When he became Foreign Secretary in June i960 I had expressed doubts to Bettie Harvie-Anderson (MP for Renfrewshire East). I thought that there surely ought to be a suitable candidate for the post among the ministers in the Commons. Moreover, Anthony Eden had, I recalled, ostensibly refused to give the Foreign Secretaryship to Lord Salisbury on these grounds. But Betty told me that Alec was quite outstanding and deserved the job. So I decided to read the new Foreign Secretary’s first speech in Hansard. It was a masterly survey of East-West relations, which emphasized the need for deterrence as well as negotiation with the Soviets and stressed the importance of our relationship with the United States. Alec now and later managed, most unusually, to combine skill in diplomacy with clarity of vision. He exhibited none of those tendencies, so characteristic of those who aspire to be Foreign Secretary, towards regarding the processes of negotiation as an end in themselves. Yet he had the charm, polish and eye for detail of the perfect negotiator.
Moreover, Alec Douglas-Home was a manifestly good man — and goodness is not to be underrated as a qualification for those considered for powerful positions. He was also in the best possible way ‘classless’. You always felt that he treated you not as a category but as a person. And he actually listened — as I found when I took up with him the vexed question of the widowed mothers’ allowance.
But the press were cruelly, ruthlessly and almost unanimously against him. He was easy to caricature as an out-of-touch aristocrat, a throwback to the worst sort of reactionary Toryism. Inverted snobbery was always to my mind even more distasteful than the straightforward self-important kind. By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class. And how they laughed when Alec said self-deprecatingly that he used matchsticks to work out economic concepts. What a contrast with the economic models with which the technically brilliant mind of Harold Wilson was familiar. No one stopped to question whether the weaknesses of the British economy were fundamentally simple and only superficially complex. In fact, if politicians had been compelled to use more honest language and simple illustrations to ensure that people understood their policies, we might well have avoided Britain’s slither into relative decline.
For all that — in spite of the media criticism, in spite of the chaotic end of the Macmillan Government, in spite of the correct but appallingly timed abolition of Retail Price Maintenance which so offended small-business support for the Conservatives — we very nearly won the 1964 general election. This recovery was not because of any economic improvement, for inflation worsened and the balance of payments deficit yawned. Nor was it because of our 1964 manifesto, with its heavy emphasis on corporatism as the way out of the country’s economic problems — territory on which the socialists were bound to be more convincing. In part it was because the closer one looked at the Labour Party’s programme and its Leader, the less substantial they seemed. But mainly the credit for our political recovery should go to Alec. It is ironic that he had already been cast in the role of scapegoat for the defeat many thought inevitable.
There had been some press speculation that I might not hold Finchley. The Liberals, never reticent in talking up their chances, began predicting another Orpington. They had secured a tight grip on the old Finchley council, though in May 1964 they had done rather less well in the elections for the new Barnet borough council. The Golf Club scandal kept rumbling on. The Liberals’ new, energetic candidate, John Pardoe, campaigned principally on local issues while I mainly stuck to national ones — above all, how to secure prosperity without inflation. The Party asked me to speak in a number of constituencies in and around London. I answered attacks on the Government’s record on pensions and benefits at a noisy, hostile meeting of women at Bethnal Green. I wrote in an article in the Evening Standard on ‘good housekeeping’ as the test for sound policies.
But it was understood by Conservative Central Office that most of my effort should go into Finchley. It was my usual schedule of campaigning — daily canvassing, answering letters and a full programme of visits and public meetings, at which it seemed to me that not only did the numbers grow but also my support. I am always anxious on election day; but in 1964 my anxieties were, in spite of the predictions of my defeat at the start of the campaign, much greater for the Party nationally than for me in Finchley.
The results bore this out. I found myself with a majority over John Pardoe of almost 9,000. But I had seen the last of the Ministry at John Adam Street, for Labour had secured an overall majority of four seats. Thirteen years of Conservative Government were over and a period of fundamental rethinking of Conservative philosophy was about to begin — alas, not for the last time.
CHAPTER V
A World of Shadows
Opposition 1964–1970
CHANGING THE PIANIST
The Conservative Party has never been slow to shoot the pianist as a substitute for changing its tune. So it proved in the wake of our narrow 1964 election defeat. Anyone seriously thinking about the way forward for Conservatism would have started by examining whether the established tendency to fight on socialist ground with corporatist weapons had not something to do with the Party’s predicament. Then and only then — after a more or less inevitable second election defeat, for there was a general sense in the country that Labour needed a larger working majority if it were to carry out its programme — would have been the time to consider a leadership change. I had hoped and indeed naively expected that the Party would soldier on under Alec Douglas-Home. I later heard that the supporters of Ted Heath and others anxious to oust Alec had been busy behind the scenes; but I never ventured into the Smoking Room and so I was unaware of these mysterious cabals until it was too late. I was stunned and upset when Alec told the 1922 Committee that he intended to stand down to make way for someone else; I was all the more distressed by his evident unhappiness. I kept on saying to people, ‘Why didn’t he let his supporters know? We might have been able to help.’
Reggie Maudling and Ted Heath were generally accepted as the only two figures in serious contention for the leadership, which for the first time would be decided by a ballot of MPs. Iain Macleod was considered too left wing and by many, in Lord Salisbury’s jibe, as ‘too clever by half’. Enoch Powell, who did indeed put his name forward, had no large following at this time. Of the two serious contenders, Reggie Maudling was thought to have the better chance. Although his performance as Chancellor of the Exchequer had incurred serious and in some ways justified criticism, there was no doubting Reggie’s experience, brilliant intellect and command of the House. His main weakness, which grew more evident in later years, was a certain laziness — something which is a frequent temptation to those who know that they are naturally and effortlessly cleverer than those around them.
Ted had a very different character. He too had a very well organized mind. He was methodical, forceful and, at least on the one question which mattered to him above all others — Europe — a man of unyielding determination. As Shadow Chancellor he had the opportunity to demonstrate his capabilities in attacking the 1965 Finance Bill, which in those days was taken on the floor of the House. Ted was regarded as being somewhat to the right of Reggie, but they were both essentially centrists in Party terms. Something could be made of the different approaches they took to Europe, with Reggie regarding EFTA more favourably and Ted convinced that membership of the EEC was essential. But their attitudes to specific policies hardly affected the question of which to support.
I did not start with any particularly strong views on the matter. I knew both of them — Reggie Maudling as a neighbouring MP for Barnet and Ted Heath over a longer period when we were candidates for Kent constituencies. At this time I knew Reggie better. I liked his combination of laid-back charm and acute intellect. My acquaintanceship with Ted, though there was none of that bitter hostility which would develop in later years, had never risked developing into friendship. Although we came from not dissimilar backgrounds, neither of us having enjoyed the educational and social advantages of the traditional Tory politician, we were totally different sorts of people. Ted, of course, had fought with distinction in the war while I was a student at Somerville. He had been part of that generation which had been ineradicably affected by the rise of Nazism and fascism and the question of appeasement in the 1930s. So, of course, was I; but rather differently. Ted, to my mind, had swallowed a good deal of the fashionable interpretation of what had gone wrong in the world between the wars. For him, I imagine, as for many others who were to become passionate advocates of all things European, the evil genius of those times was nationalism. Consequently, Britain now had a duty to help create a Europe-wide structure which would supplant the nation state, provide an alternative focus for loyalties and so prevent war. For me, such grandiose visions had little appeal. I saw the principal cause of the conflict as being the appeasement of dictators — something which Ted himself had courageously opposed at Oxford — and I saw the principal victor of the conflict, whose health was itself the best guarantee of peace, as being the spirit and unity of the English-speaking world. Ted’s character seemed to me in many ways admirable. But he was not charming — nor, to be fair, did he set out to be. He was probably more at ease talking to men than women. But it was not just women who found him difficult to get on with. I felt that though I had known him for years, there was a sense in which I did not know him at all. Perhaps I never would. I was not conscious at this time of any hostility, simply of a lack of human warmth. I did not either then or later regard amiability as an indispensable or even particularly important attribute of leadership. Yet, all things considered, I thought that I would vote for Reggie Maudling.
It was Keith Joseph who persuaded me to change my mind. By now Keith was a friend, not just a senior colleague whom I liked. We worked together, though with him very much as the senior partner, on pensions policy in 1964—65. Like everyone else who came to know him, I was deeply impressed by the quality of his mind and the depth of his compassion. Keith had gone into politics for the same reason that many on the left had done so — he wanted to improve the lot of ordinary people, particularly those he saw living deprived, stunted, unfulfilled lives. Many jokes would be made — and the best of them by Keith himself — about the way in which he changed his mind and reversed his policies on matters ranging from housing to health to social benefits. But the common thread was his relentless search for the right answer to the practical problems of human suffering. So I took him very seriously when he telephoned to say that while he knew I was currently intending to vote for Reggie, I should think again. Keith understood Reggie’s weaknesses, and as a long-time colleague in Government and the Shadow Cabinet he had seen these weaknesses at close hand. But it was Ted’s strengths that he wanted to speak about. He summed them up: ‘Ted has a passion to get Britain right.’ And, of course, so did Keith, and so did I.
This was decisive for me. To the disappointment and surprise of Reggie Maudling and his PPS, Neil Marten, I told them that Ted Heath would be getting my vote. Sufficient numbers thought similarly. Ted emerged with a clear majority on the first ballot, Reggie withdrawing to make a second ballot unnecessary.
I was not displeased to be given a different portfolio by the new Leader, exchanging my role as Shadow spokesman on Pensions for that of Housing and Land under my old boss, John Boyd-Carpenter. I would always regard my knowledge of the Social Security system as one of the most important aspects of what turned out to be my training to become Prime Minister. Now that we were in Opposition, however, it was not easy to oppose the large pension and benefit increases which the Labour Government was making: only later would the full financial implications of this spending spree become evident. So it was a relief to me to be moved to Housing and Land, where I was able to set about attacking with a will one of the most ideological socialist measures — the setting-up of the Land Commission, a means of achieving the socialist obsession of nationalizing development gains. It was in this role also that I first became fully acquainted with the complexities and anomalies of the rating system, whose fate seemed destined to be inextricably intertwined with mine.[9] One of my early tasks was to devise and explain to a sceptical Conservative Party Conference how we intended to reform domestic rates by a combination of moving some expenditure onto central government and introducing rate rebates. It was my first Conference speech. At least those who heard it would have appreciated that I grasped the problems. But it would be too much to claim that I offered any very satisfactory solutions. It was only a succès d’estime.
AGAINST THE TREASURY
As was widely expected, Harold Wilson called an early snap election at the end of March 1966. The result — a Conservative rout and an overall Labour majority of ninety-seven — was equally expected. We fought an uninspiring campaign on the basis of a flimsy manifesto entitled Action not Words, which accurately summed up Ted’s impact on politics. This was widely seen as a completion of Wilson’s 1964 victory, and Ted was not blamed. I largely concentrated my efforts on Finchley and was not displeased to keep a healthy majority of 9,464, this time over the Labour Party which had beaten the Liberals into third place. But it was a depressing time. Denis knew my mood and went out to buy me an eternity ring to cheer me up.
I received a further fillip when Ted Heath made me Treasury spokesman on Tax under the Shadow Chancellor, Iain Macleod. There had been some speculation in the press that I would be promoted to the Shadow Cabinet myself. But I was not expecting it. I now know, having read Jim Prior’s memoirs,[10] that I was indeed considered but that Ted, rather presciently, decided against it because if they got me in ‘they would never get [me] out again’.
In any case, I was better placed to make an impact as Treasury spokesman outside the Shadow Cabinet than as something else within it. As a tax lawyer I already knew my way around my new brief. Although I had no formal training in economic theory, I felt naturally at ease with the concepts. I had always had strong convictions about the way in which public money should be handled. As I had found when junior minister responsible for pensions, I was lucky enough to have the sort of mind to grasp technical detail and understand quite complex figuring fairly easily. None of which meant, however, that I could afford to relax. Debating Finance Bills from Opposition, necessarily without the technical assistance available from the civil service, and relying on the help of a few outside experts and colleagues in the House, is immensely demanding.
Luckily, the family’s domestic arrangements permitted me to keep to my rigorous parliamentary schedule. By now, Mark and Carol were away at boarding school. Denis was still very active in business, although in 1965 he had sold the family firm to Castrol, which itself was soon bought by Burmah Oil. We felt that it would now make life much easier for us both to rent a flat in Westminster Gardens, not far from the House of Commons. We also sold our home in Farnborough and bought ‘The Mount’, a mock-Tudor house with a large garden in Lamberhurst, near Tunbridge Wells. One of my very few hobbies is interior decorating, and I now spent most of my free time painting and papering the bedrooms — all eight of them. But even I was defeated by the large hall and staircase and had to bring in the professionals. One reason why we bought the house was to have somewhere in the country for the children when they came back from boarding school in the holidays. But at this age they seemed to prefer staying in London with their friends. So ‘The Mount’ was not as much used as I would have liked. My programme of repairs and redecoration was not wasted, however: in 1972 we sold it, and out of the proceeds bought the house in Flood Street (Chelsea) which would be my home until in 1979 I moved into the flat above 10 Downing Street.
I not only felt well-suited to my new job: it was also an exciting time to begin it. The incoherence and irresponsibility of socialist economic management had become apparent. The optimistic projections of George Brown’s National Plan, published in September 1965, were an albatross to hang around Labour’s neck, as forecasts of economic growth were not met. Labour’s pre-election promises of ‘no severe increases in taxation’ were broken with the announcement in the Budget of May 1966 that a new Selective Employment Tax (SET) would be introduced, in effect a payroll tax falling particularly heavily on service industries: it was a major part of my brief to oppose it. The Labour Government’s reliance on its alleged special relationship with the trade unions to secure voluntary incomes restraint as a means of controlling inflation had already lost credibility with the failure of the Government-TUC joint Declaration of Intent, which had first been proclaimed amid fanfares in December 1964. In July 1966 the ‘voluntary’ approach was jettisoned. It was announced that there would be a six months’ wage freeze followed by six months of ‘severe restraint’. Prices would be frozen for a year, and a plea was made for limits to be applied to dividends over the same period. The National Board of Prices and Incomes, which Labour had established, was given powers to require one month’s advance notification of any price and wage increases and powers to delay increases by Order-inCouncil for up to three months. The Government might take power to direct that specified price and wage increases should not be made. Fighting this policy in general and, under Iain Macleod’s leadership, opposing the ‘Standstill orders’ which came before the House of Commons, were the other important aspects of my brief.
In preparing myself for my first major Commons speech in my new role, I got out from the House of Commons Library every Budget speech and Finance Bill since the war and read them. I was thus able to demonstrate to a somewhat bemused Jim Calla-ghan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Jack Diamond, his Chief Secretary, that this was the only Budget which had failed to make even a minor concession in the social services area. Then I sunk my teeth into the SET. It was riddled with absurdities which I took great pleasure in exposing. The attempt to distinguish between manufacturing and service industries, shifting the tax burden onto the second and handing the money back as subsidies to the first, was a demonstrably inefficient, anomaly-ridden procedure. As I put it in the House: ‘Whatever the payroll tax is, it is thoroughly bad administration… I only wish that Gilbert and Sullivan were alive today so that we could have an opera about it.’
Our side of the House liked it. I got a good press, the Daily Telegraph observing that ‘it has taken a woman… to slam the faces of the Government’s Treasury ministers in the mud and then stamp on them’. Iain Macleod himself wrote some generous lines about the performance in another paper.
He did the same after my speech that autumn to the Party Conference in Blackpool, my first real Conference success. I put a special effort into it — though the nine hours of work I did would have seemed culpable idleness compared with the time I took for Conference speechwriting as Party Leader. That autumn, however, I spoke from notes, which gives extra spontaneity and the flexibility to insert a joke or jibe on the spur of the moment. Although the debate I was answering was on taxation, the cheers came in response to what I said about the way in which the Government was undermining the rule of law by the arbitrary powers it had taken through incomes policy and tax policy. With more than a touch of hyperbole, it must be admitted, I said: ‘All this is fundamentally wrong for Britain. It is a step not merely towards socialism but towards communism.’ Some of the more squeamish journalists demurred. But not the new and still left-of-centre Sun, which noted: ‘A Fiery Blonde Warns of the Road to Ruin’.
I was right to see a connection between the socialist approach to public expenditure and taxation on the one hand and to incomes policy on the other. They were both aspects of the same collectivist programme which, if taken to its ultimate conclusion, would jeopardize not just economic but political freedom as well. But what I and almost all of my colleagues at this time failed to do was to think through the full implications for our own policies. Although we wanted lower and simpler taxes on people and businesses, we were still inclined to assume — and not just for public presentation, but because we really thought it — that faster economic growth would allow us to cut taxes, as public expenditure measured as a share of GDP fell. We had some proposals to reduce public expenditure on socialist projects and waste. But we thought that we could create an atmosphere favourable to enterprise and so establish what was called a ‘virtuous circle’ in which higher growth allowed larger tax revenues with lower tax rates, which in turn stimulated further growth. Consequently, we were not as serious about making real public expenditure cuts as we should have been. Indeed, over the whole of this period — whether in 1956, 1966 or above all in 1976 — real cuts in public spending were only made by governments of either party under the exigent circumstances of a sterling crisis, a gilt strike or the arrival on the scene of the International Monetary Fund. This approach was only finally changed when in the run-up to the 1979 election the Conservative Opposition actually planned for public expenditure cuts because we believed in them.
Our failure in the 1960s to consider as an alternative government where we really stood on incomes policy was at least as serious. As Iain Macleod and I demonstrated by our vigorous opposition to Labour’s statutory incomes policy, we knew what we were against, but we were much less clear about what we were for. There was good reason for this, because the Shadow Cabinet itself was sharply divided. Ted Heath, true to the pragmatic, problem-solving approach which he prided himself on taking, was never able to give the lead required on this question. Probably the only member of the Shadow Cabinet who was opposed in principle to all kinds of incomes policy — voluntary or involuntary — was Enoch Powell, and he had failed to persuade his colleagues by the time I entered the Shadow Cabinet in 1967.
But Enoch was right. He had made the two intellectual leaps in economic policy which Keith Joseph and I would only make some years later. First, he had grasped that it was not the unions which caused inflation by pushing up wages, but rather the Government which did so by increasing the supply of money in the economy. Consequently, incomes policies — quite apart from their other effects of diminishing incentives, imposing distortions and leading to strikes which pitted the state against organized labour — were a supreme irrelevance to anti-inflation policy. In effect, Government was creating a problem which it then blamed on others. The only aspect of the matter which Enoch then and later failed sufficiently to grasp was the importance of the indirect link between trade union power and inflation. This lay in the fact that over-powerful trade unions could raise real wages well above market levels, but that in turn priced their own members out of jobs, and inflicted unemployment on both union and non-union workers alike. Governments, supremely sensitive to the length of dole queues, would then react by lowering interest rates and expanding the money supply. This would increase demand and jobs for a time, but it also increased inflation. All these effects would prompt the trade unions to ratchet up wages once more. And the whole process would start up again, from a higher level of inflation. But this could only be tackled by tightening monetary policy and by reducing the power of the unions — the first to halt inflation, the second to prevent the unions from creating unemployment. We would therefore at some point have to tackle trade union law. That said, Enoch’s insight into the cause of inflation was of supreme importance.
Secondly, he had seen that the consensus economic policy nurtured another damaging delusion. This concerned the ‘constraint’ allegedly exercised by the current account of the balance of payments. It was in order to increase exports and reduce imports that corporatist, interventionist industrial policies were considered necessary. But the real ‘constraint’, which was assumed and not challenged, was that imposed by a pegged exchange rate. If sterling were allowed to float freely, as Enoch advocated, the alleged constraint of the balance of payments disappeared. And so did some of the pressure for other kinds of interventionism. As he put it in a seminal Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet in 1967: ‘The control of the international price of currencies, like every other suppression of market prices, leads to other controls, which make a mockery of the individual’s freedom to trade, travel or invest.’[11]
True, in abandoning pegged exchange rates, one loses the anchor of the dollar (or gold). True too, a country which persists in running a large trade deficit may well be one with a weak economy which needs radical restructuring. (Though that may not always be so: a current account deficit may be evidence of large inflows of private capital into an economy which, because of reforms, has a high rate of return on investment.)
None of these qualifications, however, diminishes the fundamental importance of Enoch Powell’s contribution. By showing that it was government monetary policy rather than wages which caused inflation, and that freely floating exchange rates would break free of the ‘constraint’ allegedly exercised by the current account of the balance of payments, Enoch permitted a radical revision of Conservative economic policy. He allowed us to break out of the mind-set which seemed to condemn Britain to an increasingly planned economy and society.
In October 1967 Ted made me front-bench spokesman on Fuel and Power and a member of the Shadow Cabinet. It may be that my House of Commons performances and perhaps Iain Macleod’s recommendation overcame any temperamental reluctance on Ted’s part. My first task was to read through all the evidence given to the inquiry about the causes of the terrible Aberfan disaster the previous year, when 116 children and 28 adults were killed by a slag tip which slipped onto a Welsh mining village. Many of the parents of the victims were in the gallery for the debate, and I felt for them. Very serious criticisms had been made of the National Coal Board and as a result someone, I thought, should have resigned, though I held back from stating this conclusion with complete clarity in my first speech to the House as Shadow spokesman. What was revealed by the report made me realize how very easy it is in any large organization to assume that someone else has taken the requisite action and will assume responsibility. This is a problem which, as later tragedies have demonstrated, industrial civilization has yet to solve.
Outside the House, my main interest was in trying to find a framework for privatization of electricity generation. To this end I visited power stations and sought all the advice I could from business contacts. But it turned out to be a fruitless enterprise, and I had not come up with what I considered acceptable answers by the time my portfolio was changed again — to Transport — in October 1968. Transport was not one of the more interesting portfolios, because Parliament had just passed a major Transport Bill reorganizing the railways, nationalizing the bus companies, setting up a new National Freight Authority — in effect, implementing most of the Government’s transport programme in one measure. In the brief period during which I shadowed Transport I argued our case against nationalization of the ports. But, all in all, Transport proved a brief with limited possibilities.
TED AND ENOCH
As a member of the Shadow Cabinet I attended its weekly discussions, usually on a Wednesday, in Ted’s room in the House. Discussion was generally not very stimulating. We would begin by looking ahead to the parliamentary business for the week and agreeing who was to speak and on what line. There might be a paper from a colleague which he would introduce. But, doubtless because we knew that there were large divisions between us, particularly on economic policy, issues of principle were not usually openly debated. Ted was a competent chairman. On matters which really interested him, like Europe and trade union legislation, he would lead the discussion. But generally he allowed the spokesman to make the running on whatever subject was being considered.
For my part, I did not make a particularly important contribution to Shadow Cabinet. Nor was I asked to do so. For Ted and perhaps others I was principally there as the statutory woman whose main task was to explain what ‘women’ — Kiri Te Kanawa, Barbara Cartland, Esther Rantzen, Stella Rimington and all the rest of our uniform, undifferentiated sex — were likely to think and want on troublesome issues. I had, of course, great affection for Alec Douglas-Home, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, and got on perfectly well with most of my colleagues, but I had only three real friends around the table–Keith Joseph, Peter Thomas and Edward Boyle. And Edward by now was very much on the opposite wing of the Party from me.
The atmosphere at our meetings was certainly made more difficult by the fact that the most senior figures now had somewhat tense relations with each other. Ted was settling into the role of Party Leader with determination, but without any real or easy assurance. Reggie Maudling, Deputy Leader, had never really recovered from his unexpected defeat for the leadership. Iain Macleod was the most politically acute of us, with a special understanding of how whatever line we took would be interpreted by the press. But though a superb public orator he was in truth a rather private and reserved character. He was also growing out of sympathy with his old friend Enoch Powell, who was increasingly concerned about immigration, a topic about which Iain felt equally strongly on the other side. Undoubtedly, Enoch was our finest intellect — classicist, historian, economist and biblical scholar. In a quite different way from Iain, he was a powerful public orator and able to command the House of Commons, or indeed any audience, with his remorseless logic and controlled passion. But as regards the Shadow Cabinet, by this stage he had largely withdrawn into himself. He was disliked and probably feared by Ted Heath. He had fought and lost his battle against the chimera of incomes policy. As Defence spokesman, he had the uneasy task of attacking Labour’s policy of withdrawal of British troops from east of Suez when he himself believed such withdrawal was inevitable. Above all, as a West Midlands MP witnessing the effect of large-scale immigration in his constituency he was frustrated by the Party’s failure to take a tougher stance on the question.
The first modern immigration control measure had been introduced by Rab Butler in 1961. Hitherto, Commonwealth citizens had not been subject to the controls which applied to the admission of alien immigrants from foreign countries. The Commonwealth Immigrants’ Act 1962, bitterly opposed by Labour and the Liberals, introduced an annual quota of employment vouchers to limit the inflow, a system subsequently tightened up by the Labour Government in 1965. During 1967 the Kenyan Government’s discriminatory policies against Kenya’s Asians resulted in a large inflow of immigrants into Britain. This raised awareness both of the scale and impact of past immigration and fears about its unchecked future size. There was particular worry about UK passport holders who were not connected by birth or descent with the United Kingdom. In February 1968 Jim Callaghan announced legislation to deal with this. The issue was also closely linked to the introduction of race relations legislation, which became the Race Relations Act 1968, aimed at curbing discrimination on grounds of colour. This was opposed by many on the right who saw in it a danger of making immigrants a legally privileged community which would have no incentive to integrate fully into British society.
On Monday 26 February 1968 Shadow Cabinet discussed the Government’s Commonwealth Immigrants’ Bill to introduce the new controls. A statement had been issued the previous week setting out the principles on which we would judge the measure. Ted Heath said that it was now up to Shadow Cabinet to decide whether the Bill came sufficiently within those terms. In fact, it did some of the things which we advocated. But it did not provide for registration of dependants, nor for appeal by those refused entry, nor for financial help for voluntary repatriation. It was decided to support the Bill, but also to move amendments where possible and appropriate. Iain Macleod, however, said that he would vote against the Bill, and he was as good as his word.
On Wednesday 10 April Shadow Cabinet discussed the other side of the Government’s policy, the Race Relations Bill. Ted again opened the discussion. He said that though the Bill itself appeared to have many faults he thought that some legal machinery would be necessary to help improve the prospects for coloured immigrants in Britain. Quintin Hogg, the Shadow Home Secretary, outlined his own views in some detail. He thought that legislation was necessary, but that we should move amendments. However, he noted that our backbenchers were very hostile to the Bill. Reggie Maudling agreed with Quintin on both points. In the discussion which followed, in which I did not participate, the main point in dispute was whether, flawed as the Bill was, to vote against it at Second Reading would be misinterpreted as racist. Shadow Cabinet’s view was that the best assurance for good race relations was confidence that future numbers of immigrants would not be too great and that the existing law of the land would be upheld. In the end it was decided that a reasoned amendment would be drafted and there would be a two-line whip. Keith Joseph, Edward Boyle and Robert Carr, on the liberal wing, reserved their positions until they had seen the terms of the amendment. In the event they all supported it, though there were to be a number of abstentions by backbenchers.
On Sunday 21 April 1968 — two days before the debate — I woke up to find the front pages of the newspapers dominated by reports of a speech Enoch Powell had made in Birmingham on immigration the previous afternoon. It was strong meat, and there were some lines which had a sinister ring about them. But I strongly sympathized with the gravamen of his argument about the scale of New Commonwealth immigration into Britain. I too thought this threatened not just public order but also the way of life of some communities, themselves already beginning to be demoralized by insensitive housing policies, Social Security dependence and the onset of the ‘permissive society’. I was also quite convinced that, however selective quotations from his speech may have sounded, Enoch was no racist.
At about eleven o’clock the telephone rang. It was Ted Heath. He said: ‘I am ringing round all the Shadow Cabinet. I have come to the conclusion that Enoch must go.’ It was more statement than enquiry. But I said that I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis. Ted was having none of it. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘He absolutely must go, and most people think he must go.’ In fact, I understood later that several members of the Shadow Cabinet would have resigned if Enoch had not gone.
Yet for several reasons it was a tragedy. In the short term it prevented our gaining the political credit for our policy of controlling immigration more strictly. This was an issue which crossed the political and social divide, as was demonstrated when London dockers marched in support of Enoch. Moreover, in practical terms there was very little to choose between the policies of Ted and Enoch on the matter. Although it is true that as a result of the speech the official Conservative line on immigration became more specific, essentially we all wanted strict limits on further New Commonwealth immigration and we were all prepared to support financial assistance for those who wanted to return to their country of origin.
But the longer-term consequences of Enoch’s departure on this issue and under these circumstances extended far beyond immigration policy. He was free to develop a philosophical approach to a range of policies, uninhibited by the compromises of collective responsibility. This spanned both economic and foreign affairs and embraced what would come to be called ‘monetarism’, deregulation, denationalization, an end to regional policy, and culminated in his opposition to British membership of the Common Market. Having Enoch preaching to such effect in the wilderness carried advantages and disadvantages for those of us on the right in the Shadow Cabinet and later the Cabinet. On the one hand, he shifted the basis of the political argument to the right and so made it easier to advance sound doctrines without being accused of taking an extreme position. On the other hand, so bitter was the feud between Ted and Enoch that querying any policy advanced by the leadership was likely to be branded disloyalty. Moreover, the very fact that Enoch advanced all his positions as part of a coherent whole made it more difficult to express agreement with one or two of them. For example, the arguments against prices and incomes policies, intervention and corporatism might have been better received if they had not been associated with Enoch’s views about immigration or Europe.
At this time, as it happens, other Conservatives were moving independently in the same direction, with the notable exception of Europe, and Ted gave me an opportunity to chart this way ahead. The annual Conservative Political Centre lecture is designed to give some intellectual meat to those attending the Tory Party Conference. The choice of speaker is generally reserved to the Party Leader. It was doubtless a pollster or Party adviser who suggested that it might be a good idea to have me talk about a subject which would appeal to ‘women’. Luckily, I was free to choose my subject, and I decided on something more topical which might appeal to thinking people of both sexes: I spoke on ‘What’s Wrong With Politics?’
There is no better way to clarify your own thinking than to try to explain it clearly to someone else. I was conscious that there were great issues being discussed in politics at this time. Whatever else can be said of the sixties they were intellectually lively, even if too many of the ideas motivating change originated on the left. I took armfuls of books on philosophy, politics and history, White Papers, Hansard Society publications and speeches down to Lamberhurst. I had no one to guide or help me so I just plunged in. Like the proverbial iceberg, most of the work lay below the surface of the document I finally wrote.
I began by listing the reasons why there was so much disillusionment with politics. Some of these really consisted of the growth of a critical spirit through the effects of education and the mass media. But others were the fault of the politicians themselves. Political programmes were becoming dominated by a series of promises whose impact was all the greater because of the growth of the Welfare State. This led me on to what I considered the main cause of the public’s increasing alienation from political parties — too much government. The competition between the parties to offer ever higher levels of economic growth and the belief that government itself could deliver these had provided the socialists with an opportunity massively to extend state control and intervention. This in turn caused ordinary people to feel that they had insufficient say in their own and their families’ lives. The Left claimed that the answer was the creation of structures which would allow more democratic ‘participation’ in political decisions. But the real problem was that politics itself was intruding into far too many decisions that were properly outside its scope. Alongside the expansion of government had developed a political obsession with size — the notion that large units promoted efficiency. In fact, the opposite was true. Smaller units — small businesses, families and ultimately individuals — should once again be the focus of attention.
Apart from these general reflections, my CPC lecture also contained a section about prices and incomes policy. Although I stuck to the Shadow Cabinet line of condemning a compulsory policy while avoiding the issue of a voluntary one, I included a passage which reads:
We now put so much emphasis on the control of incomes that we have too little regard for the essential role of government which is the control of the money supply and management of demand [emphasis added]. Greater attention to this role and less to the outward detailed control would have achieved more for the economy. It would mean, of course, that the government had to exercise itself some of the disciplines on expenditure it is so anxious to impose on others. It would mean that expenditure in the vast public sector would not have to be greater than the amount which could be financed out of taxation plus genuine saving.
In retrospect, it is clear to me that this summed up how far my understanding of these matters had gone — and how far it still needed to go. I had come to see that the money supply was central to any policy to control inflation. But I had not seen either that this made any kind of incomes policy irrelevant or that monetary policy itself was the way in which demand should be managed.
Partly as a result, I suspect, of the attention I received for the CPC lecture, I was asked to contribute two articles on general political philosophy to the Daily Telegraph early the following year. In these I developed some of the same themes. In particular, I argued the case for the ideological clash of opposing political parties as essential to the effective functioning of democracy. The pursuit of ‘consensus’, therefore, was fundamentally subversive of popular choice. It was wrong to talk of taking the big issues ‘out of politics’ or to imply that different approaches to a subject involved ‘playing polities’. I applied this specifically to the question of nationalization versus free enterprise. But I could have done so on a range of other matters, not least education, which was soon to become my main political concern and where the ruthless pursuit by the socialists of comprehensivization was threatening not just Britain’s schools but long-term social progress. The fraudulent appeal of consensus was a theme to which I would return again and again, both as Leader of the Opposition and as Prime Minister.
JOURNEYS TO THE FUTURE
By now (1968) the left-of-centre consensus on economic policy was being challenged and would continue to be. But the new liberal consensus on moral and social matters was not. That is to say that people in positions of influence in government, the media and universities managed to impose metropolitan liberal views on a society that was still largely conservative morally. The 1960s saw in Britain the beginning of what has become an almost complete separation between traditional Christian values and the authority of the state. Some politicians regarded this as a coherent programme. But for the great majority, myself included, it was a matter of reforms to deal with specific problems, in some cases cruel or unfair provisions.
So it was that I voted in 1966 for Leo Abse’s Bill proposing that homosexual conduct in private between consenting adults over twenty-one should no longer be a criminal offence. In the same year I voted for David Steel’s Bill to allow abortion if there was substantial risk that a child would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped, or ‘where the woman’s capacity as a mother would be severely overstrained’. On both these issues I was strongly influenced by my own experience of other people’s suffering. For example, when I was a barrister I had been moved by the humiliation I had seen inflicted in the dock on a man of considerable local standing who had been found engaging in homosexual conduct.
On the other hand, some aspects of the liberal agenda, even at the time, seemed to me to go too far. Divorce law reform was such a case. I had talked in my constituency surgeries to women subjected to a life of misery from their brutal husbands and for whom marriage had become a prison from which, in my view, they should be released. In these circumstances divorce might be the only answer. But if divorce became too easy it might undermine marriages simply going through a bad patch. If people can withdraw lightly from their responsibilities they are likely to be less serious about entering into the initial obligation. I was concerned about the spouse who was committed to make the marriage work and was deserted. I was also very concerned about what would become of the family of the first marriage when the man (or woman) chose to start a second family. So in 1968 I was one of the minority who voted against a Bill to make divorce far easier. Divorce would be possible where it was judged that there had been an ‘irretrievable breakdown’, broadly defined, in the marriage. I also supported two amendments, the first of which made available a special form of marriage that was indissoluble (except by judicial separation). The second would seek to ensure that in any conflict of interest between the legal wife and children of the first marriage and a common-law wife and her children, the former should have priority.
Similarly, I voted against Sydney Silverman’s Bill to abolish the death penalty for murder in 1965. Like all the other measures listed above this was passed by Parliament, but subject to a Conservative amendment to the effect that the Act was to expire at the end of July 1970 unless Parliament determined otherwise. I then voted against the motion in December 1969 to make the Act permanent.
As I had shown in my earlier speech as a backbencher on corporal punishment, I believed that the state had not just a right but a duty to deter and punish violent crime and to protect the law-abiding public. However sparingly it is used, the power to deprive an individual of liberty, and under certain circumstances of life itself, is inseparable from the sovereignty of the state. I never had the slightest doubt that in nearly all cases the supreme deterrent would be an influence on the potential murderer. And the deterrent effect of capital punishment is at least as great on those who go armed on other criminal activities, such as robbery. To my mind, the serious difficulty in the issue lay in the possibility of the conviction and execution of an innocent man — which has certainly happened in a small number of cases. Against these tragic cases, however, must be set the victims of convicted murderers who have been released after their sentence was served only to be convicted of murder a second time — who have certainly numbered many more. Despite all the uncertainties and complexities, for example of forensic evidence, I believe that the potential victim of the murderer deserves that highest protection which only the existence of the death penalty gives. The notion of certain particularly heinous murders as ‘capital murders’ (as under the 1957 Act) — a concept which now again underlies changes in the system relating to life sentences — seems to me the right model. I have consistently voted in Parliament for a return of capital punishment for such murders.
As regards abortion, homosexuality, and divorce reform it is easy to see that matters did not turn out as was intended. For most of us in Parliament — and certainly for me — the thinking underlying these changes was that they dealt with anomalies or unfairnesses which occurred in a minority of instances, or that they removed uncertainties in the law itself. Or else they were intended to recognize in law what was in any case occurring in fact. Instead, it could be argued that they have paved the way towards a more callous, selfish and irresponsible society. Reforming the law on abortion was primarily intended to stop young women being forced to have back-street abortions. It was not meant to make abortion simply another ‘choice’. Yet in spite of the universal availability of artificial contraception the figures for abortion have kept on rising. Homosexual activists have moved from seeking a right of privacy to demanding social approval for the ‘gay’ lifestyle, equal status with the heterosexual family and even the legal right to exploit the sexual uncertainty of adolescents. Divorce law reform has contributed to — though it is by no means the only cause of-a very large increase in the incidence of marriage breakdown which has left so many children growing up without the continual care and guidance of two parents.
Knowing how matters have turned out, would I have voted differently on any of these measures? I now see that we viewed them too narrowly. As a lawyer and indeed as a politician who believed so strongly in the rule of law, I felt that the prime considerations were that the law should be enforceable and its application fair to those who might run foul of it. But laws also have a symbolic significance: they are signposts to the way society is developing — and the way the legislators of society envisage that it should develop. Moreover, taking all of the ‘liberal’ reforms of the 1960s together they amount to more than their individual parts. They came to be seen as providing a radically new framework within which the younger generation would be expected to behave.
Indeed, this was a period of obsessive and naive interest in ‘youth’. Parents worried so much about the ‘generation gap’ that even teenagers began to take it seriously. A whole ‘youth culture’ of misunderstood Eastern mysticism, bizarre clothing and indulgence in hallucinatory drugs emerged. I found Chelsea a very different place when we moved back to London in 1970. I had mixed feelings about what was happening. There was vibrancy and talent, but this was also in large degree a world of make-believe. A perverse pride was taken in Britain about our contribution to these trends. Carnaby Street in Soho, the Beatles, the mini-skirt and the maxiskirt were the new symbols of ‘Swinging Britain’. And they did indeed prove good export earners. Harold Wilson was adept at taking maximum political credit for them. The trouble was that they concealed the real economic weaknesses which even a talented fashion industry and entrepreneurial recording companies could not counter-balance. As Desmond Donnelly remarked, ‘My greatest fear is that Britain will sink giggling into the sea.’[12]
Although Britain gave a distinctive gloss to these trends, the affluent consumer society to which they catered was above all to be found in the United States. I had made my first visit to the USA in 1967 on one of the ‘Leadership’ programmes run by the American Government to bring rising young leaders from politics and business over to the US. For six weeks I travelled the length and breadth of the United States. The excitement which I felt has never really subsided. At each stop-over I was met and accommodated by friendly, open, generous people who took me into their homes and lives and showed me their cities and townships with evident pride. The high point was my visit to the NASA Space Center at Houston. I saw the astronaut training programme which would just two years later help put a man on the moon. As a living example of the ‘brain drain’ from which over-regulated, high-taxed Britain was suffering, I met someone from my constituency of Finchley who had gone to NASA to make full use of his talents. I saw nothing wrong with that, and indeed was glad that a British scientist was making such an important contribution. But there was no way Britain could hope to compete even in more modest areas of technology if we did not learn the lessons of an enterprise economy.
Two years after that I went on a week-long visit to the Soviet Union. I had already come up against the obstinate contempt for human rights which was so characteristic of the USSR in the case of the detention of my constituent, the lecturer Gerald Brooke, for alleged ‘subversive criminal activities’ (i.e. smuggling in anti-Soviet pamphlets). I repeatedly raised the case both with the Government and in the House of Commons, though to no avail. Mr Brooke had become a pawn in the game the Soviets were trying to play to have their spies, the Krogers, released to them. (Eventually an exchange took place in 1969.) One good thing which came out of my work on Gerald Brooke’s behalf was that I made contact with the AngloSoviet Parliamentary Group. To my great surprise, when I went along to it I found MPs with equally strong anti-communist instincts as mine, but who unlike me were real experts in the field. In particular, Cyril Osborne began my education in assessing and countering Soviet tactics. It was he who before I went to the Soviet Union advised me that first of all I should not allow the Soviets to pay for my fare, and second that I should insist on visiting some churches. I took his advice. He also told me that the only way to win any respect from them was to make it clear that one was no soft touch. This entirely accorded with my own inclinations.
I travelled to Moscow with the amiable Paul Channon and his wife. We had a full schedule including not just the sights of Moscow but also Leningrad (formerly, and now once again, St Petersburg) and Stalingrad (Volgograd). But though the names might vary, the propaganda was the same. It was relentless, an endless flow of statistics proving the industrial and social superiority of the Soviet Union over the West. At least to the visitor, the sheer unimaginative humourlessness of it was an open invitation to satire. Outside an art gallery I visited there was a sculpture of a blacksmith beating a sword with a hammer. ‘That represents communism,’ my guide proudly observed. ‘Actually, it doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘It’s from the Old Testament — “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks”.’ Collapse of stout aesthete. Methodist Sunday School has its uses. I reflected, however, that at least it was a better work of art than the usual lantern-jawed, muscle-bound Stakhanovite outside the factories.
On another occasion I was asked rhetorically whether since it must be the aim of all peoples to live together in peace and harmony, surely NATO, that symbol of Cold War hostility, could be dispensed with. ‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘NATO has kept the peace and we have to keep it strong.’ A similar line was taken with me at Stalingrad where the local politicians complained that Coventry had severed its connections with them since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year. I was not going to apologize for that either. Indeed, as sanctions went, it was hardly such as to strike terror into the Kremlin.
Yet, behind the official propaganda, the grey streets, all but empty shops and badly maintained workers’ housing blocks, Russian humanity peeped out. There was no doubt about the genuineness of the tears when the older people at Leningrad and Stalingrad told me about their terrible sufferings in the War. The young people I talked to from Moscow University, though extremely cautious about what they said in the full knowledge that they were under KGB scrutiny, were clearly fascinated to learn all they could about the West. And even bureaucracy can prove human. When I visited the manager of the Moscow passenger transport system he explained to me at great length how decisions about new development had to go from committee to committee in what seemed — as I said — an endless chain of non-decision-making. I caught the eye of a young man, perhaps the chairman’s assistant, standing behind him and he could not repress a broad smile.
The other abiding impression I had of Russia, which would be strengthened on my subsequent visits, was of the contrast between the exquisite cultural achievement, admittedly stemming from the old Russia but excellently conserved by the communists, on the one hand and the hardness of life for ordinary people on the other. Leningrad housed the extraordinary Hermitage collection and the Kirov Ballet, both of which I visited. And it was in Leningrad, from the window of my hotel bedroom, that at six thirty on a cold, dark morning I would see all the working mothers crossing the square with their children hanging on to them to place them all day in the state crèche whence they would be collected some twelve hours later. At Moscow airport while waiting for my delayed flight home I bought an exquisite coral-green porcelain tea service, the pride of my collection. Whenever I see it I also think of the grinding, hopeless toil which the system that produced it exacted. There could be no more poignant demonstration that communism was the regime for the privileged élite, capitalism the creed for the common man.
SELSDON WOMAN
On my return to London I was moved to the Education portfolio in the Shadow Cabinet. Edward Boyle was leaving politics to become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. There was by now a good deal of grassroots opposition at Party Conferences to what was seen as his weakness in defence of the grammar schools. Although our views had diverged, I was sorry to see him go. He was my oldest friend in politics and I knew I would miss his intellect, sensitivity and integrity. But for me this was definitely a promotion, even though, as I have since learned, I was in fact the reserve candidate, after Keith Joseph who was the first choice to succeed Edward: I got the job because Reggie Maudling refused to take over Keith’s job as Trade and Industry Shadow.
I was delighted with my new role. I knew that I had risen to my present position as a result of free (or nearly free) good education, and I wanted others to have the same chance. Socialist education policies, by equalizing downwards and denying gifted children the opportunity to get on, were a major obstacle to that. I was also fascinated by the scientific side — the portfolio in those days being to shadow the Department of Education and Science. Moreover, I suspect that women, or at least mothers, have an instinctive interest in the education of children.
Education was by now one of the main battlegrounds of politics. Since their election in 1964 Labour had been increasingly committed to making the whole secondary school system comprehensive, and had introduced a series of measures to make local education authorities (LEAs) submit plans for such a change. (The process culminated in legislation, introduced a few months after I took over as Education Shadow.) The difficulties Edward had faced in formulating and explaining our response soon became clear to me.
The Shadow Cabinet and the Conservative Party were deeply split over the principle of selection in secondary education and, in particular, over the examination by which children were selected at the age of eleven, the 11-Plus. To over-simplify a little, it was possible to distinguish four different attitudes among Conservatives. First, there were those who had no real interest in state education in any case because they themselves and their children went to private schools. This was an important group, all too likely to be swayed by arguments of political expediency. Second, there were those who, themselves or their children, had failed to get into grammar school and had been disappointed with the education received at a secondary modern. Third, there were those Conservatives who, either because they themselves were teachers or through some other contact with the world of education, had absorbed a large dose of the fashionable egalitarian doctrines of the day. Finally, there were people like me who had been to good grammar schools, were strongly opposed to their destruction and felt no inhibitions at all about arguing for the 11-Plus.
Within the Shadow Cabinet I was aware of a broadly similar range of views. Shadow ministers in general did not want to make education a major issue in the forthcoming election. Nor was this necessarily a foolish view. Both the Party’s own internal polling and published polls showed that the 11-Plus was widely unpopular and that people were at least prepared to say that they supported comprehensive schools. Whether they would have felt the same if they had been asked about re-organizing specific local schools on comprehensive lines and whether, in any case, they understood what was meant by ‘comprehensivization’ were of course different matters. There was, for example, a large difference between the full expression of the comprehensive concept, which was essentially one of social engineering and only secondarily educational, under which there was no streaming at all according to ability, and — on the other hand — a school to which entry was open to all, but which streamed by ability. In fact, as I was to point out in the Second Reading debate of Labour’s Education Bill in February 1970, it was absurd for the socialists to attack the principle of selection, since it would continue to apply in one way or another throughout the system from the age of eleven. I might have added that when you stop selecting by ability you have to select according to some other inevitably less satisfactory criterion. In practice, this would usually be income, because families with sufficient money would move and buy houses in middle-class areas where a well-run school was available for their children. Some Labour Members and many Labour supporters understood all this well enough, and felt betrayed by Harold Wilson’s abandonment of his own personal commitment to keep the grammar schools. When I won a surprise victory in the Committee Stage debate, knocking out Clause 1 of the Bill, it was because two Labour Members absented themselves.
But by the time I took on the Education portfolio, the Party’s policy group had presented its report and the policy itself was largely established. It had two main aspects. We had decided to concentrate on improving primary schools. And in order to defuse as much as possible the debate about the 11-Plus, and in place of Labour’s policy of comprehensivization by coercion, we stressed the autonomy of local education authorities in proposing the retention of grammar schools or the introduction of comprehensive schools.
The good arguments for this programme were that improvements in the education of younger children were vital if the growing tendency towards illiteracy and innumeracy was to be checked and, secondly, that in practice the best way to retain grammar schools was to fight centralization. There were, however, arguments on the other side. There was not much point in spending large sums on nursery and primary schools and the teachers for them, if the teaching methods and attitudes were wrong. Nor, of course, were we in the long run going to be able to defend grammar schools — or, for that matter, private schools, direct grant schools and even streamed comprehensive schools — if we did not fight on grounds of principle.
Within the limits which the agreed policy and political realities allowed me, I went as far as I could. This was a good deal too far for some people, as I learned when, shortly after my appointment, I was the guest of the education correspondents at the Cumberland Hotel in London. I put the case not just for grammar schools but for secondary moderns. Those children who were not able to shine academically could in fact acquire responsibilities and respect at a separate secondary modern school, which they would never have done if in direct and continual competition and contact with the more academically gifted. I was perfectly prepared to see the 11-Plus replaced or modified by testing later in a child’s career, if that was what people wanted. I knew that it was quite possible for late developers at a secondary modern to be moved to the local grammar school so that their abilities could be properly stretched. I was sure that there were too many secondary modern schools which were providing a second-rate education — but this was something which should be remedied by bringing their standards up, rather than grammar school standards down. Only two of those present at the Cumberland Hotel lunch seemed to agree. Otherwise I was met by a mixture of hostility and blank incomprehension. It was not just that they thought me wrong: they could not imagine that I could seriously believe such things. It opened my eyes to the dominance of socialist thinking among those whose task it was to provide the public with information about education.
There were still some relatively less important issues in Conservative education policy to be decided. I fought hard to have an unqualified commitment to raising the school leaving age to sixteen inserted into the manifesto, and succeeded against some doubts from the Treasury team. I also met strong opposition from Ted Heath when at our discussions at Selsdon Park in early 1970 I argued that the manifesto should endorse the proposed new independent University of Buckingham. In spite of backing from Keith Joseph and others, I lost this battle but was at least finally permitted to make reference to the university in a speech. Quite why Ted felt so passionately against it I have never fully understood.
The Selsdon Park policy weekend at the end of January and beginning of February was a success, but not for the reasons usually given. The idea that Selsdon Park was the scene of debate which resulted in a radical rightward shift in Party policy is false. The main lines of policy had already been agreed and incorporated into a draft manifesto which we spent our time considering in detail. Our line on immigration had also been carefully spelt out. Our proposals for trade union reform had been published in Fair Deal at Work. On incomes policy, a rightward but somewhat confused shift was in the process of occurring. Labour had effectively abandoned its own policy. There was no need, therefore, to enter into the vexed question of whether some kind of ‘voluntary’ incomes policy might be pursued. But it was clear that Reggie Maudling was unhappy that we had no proposals to deal with what was still perceived as ‘wage inflation’. In fact, the manifesto, in a judicious muddle, avoided either a monetarist approach or a Keynesian one and said simply: ‘The main causes of rising prices are Labour’s damaging policies of high taxation and devaluation. Labour’s compulsory wage control was a failure and we will not repeat it.’
This in turn led us into some trouble later. During the election campaign the fallacious assertion that high taxes caused inflation inspired a briefing note from Central Office. This note allowed the Labour Party to claim subsequently that we had said that we would cut prices ‘at a stroke’ by means of tax cuts.
Thanks to the blanket press coverage of Selsdon Park, we seemed to be a serious alternative Government committed to long-term thinking about the policies for Britain’s future. We were also helped by Harold Wilson’s attack on ‘Selsdon Man’. It gave us an air of down-to-earth right-wing populism which countered the somewhat aloof image conveyed by Ted. Above all, both Selsdon Park and the Conservative manifesto, A Better Tomorrow, contrasted favourably with the deviousness, inconsistency and horse trading which by now characterized the Wilson Government, especially since the abandonment of In Place of Strife under trade union pressure.[13]
Between our departure from Selsdon Park and the opening of the general election campaign in May, however, there was a reversal of the opinion poll standing of the two parties. At Selsdon we were in the lead and we thought we would win. In May quite suddenly we lost ground and appeared to be several points behind. Influenced by the short-term change in the polls, Harold Wilson called the election for 10 June — a mistake I never forgot when I became Prime Minister. But at the time most of us — including myself — thought that we would lose. The gloom steadily deepened. During the campaign I called in one day at the Conservative Research Department offices in Old Queen Street for some briefing material and was struck by how depressed everybody seemed.
Quite why this turnaround had occurred (or indeed how real it actually was) is hard to know. With the prospect of a general election there is always a tendency for disillusioned supporters to resume their party allegiance. But it is also true — and it is something that we would pay dearly for in Government — that we had not seriously set out to win the battle of ideas against socialism during our years in Opposition. And indeed, although we did not realize it, our rethinking of policy had not been as fundamental as it should have been.
The campaign itself was largely taken up with Labour attacks on our policies. We for our part, like any Opposition, but with more cause and opportunity than most, highlighted the long list of Labour’s broken promises — ‘steady industrial growth all the time’, ‘no stop-go measures’, ‘no increase in taxation’, ‘no increase in unemployment’, ‘the pound in your pocket not devalued’, ‘economic miracle’ and many more. This was the theme I pursued in my campaign speeches. But I also used a speech to a dinner organized by the National Association of Head Teachers in Scarborough to outline our education policies.
It is hard to know just what turned the tide, if indeed there was a tide against us to turn. Paradoxically perhaps, the Conservative figures who made the greatest contribution were those two fierce enemies Ted Heath and Enoch Powell. No one could describe Ted as a great communicator, not least because for the most part he paid such little attention to communication. But as the days went by he came across as a decent man, someone with integrity and a vision — albeit a somewhat technocratic one — of what he wanted for Britain. It seemed, to use Keith’s words to me five years earlier, that he had ‘a passion to get Britain right’. This was emphasized in Ted’s powerful introduction to the manifesto in which he attacked Labour’s ‘cheap and trivial style of government’ and ‘government by gimmick’ and promised ‘a new style of government’. Ted’s final Party Election Broadcast also showed him as an honest patriot who cared deeply about his country and wanted to serve it. Though it would not have saved him had we lost, he had fought a good campaign.
So had Enoch Powell. There had been much speculation as to whether he would endorse the Conservative leadership and programme. Attitudes towards Enoch remained sharply polarized. When he came in March to speak to my Association we were subject to strong criticism and I decided to issue a statement to the effect that: ‘Those who use this country’s great tradition of freedom of speech should not seek to deny that same freedom to others, especially to those who, like Mr Powell, spent their war years in distinguished service in the Forces.’
In the June campaign Enoch made three powerful speeches on the economic failure of the Labour Government, law and order, and Europe, urging people to vote Conservative. Furthermore, a bitter personal attack on Enoch by Tony Benn, linking him to fascism, probably rallied many otherwise unsympathetic voters to his standard. There is some statistical evidence that Enoch’s intervention helped tip the balance in the West Midlands in a close election.
When my own result was announced to a tremendous cheer at Hendon College of Technology, it appeared that I had increased my majority to over 11,000 over Labour. Then I went down to the Daily Telegraph party at the Savoy, where it quite soon became clear that the opinion polls had been proved wrong and that we were on course for an overall majority.
Friday was spent in my constituency clearing up and writing the usual thank-you letters. I thought that probably Ted would have at least one woman in his Cabinet, and that since he had got used to me in the Shadow Cabinet I would be the lucky girl. On the same logic, I would probably get the Education brief.
On Saturday morning the call from the No. 10 Private Secretary came through. Ted wanted to see me. When I went in to the Cabinet Room I began by congratulating him on his victory. But not much time was spent on pleasantries. He was as ever brusque and businesslike, and he offered me the job of Education Secretary, which I accepted.
I went back to the flat at Westminster Gardens with Denis and we drove to Lamberhurst. Sadly my father was not alive to share the moment. Shortly before his death in February, I had gone up to Grantham to see him. Having always had a weak chest, he had now developed emphysema and had oxygen beside the bed. My stepmother, Cissy, whom he had married several years earlier and with whom he had been very happy, was constantly at his bedside. While I was there, friends from the church, business, local politics, the Rotary and bowling club, kept dropping in ‘just to see how Alf was’. I hoped that at the end of my life I too would have so many good friends.
I understand that my father had been listening to me as a member of a panel on a radio programme just before he died. He never knew that I would become a Cabinet minister, and I am sure that he never imagined I would eventually become Prime Minister. He would have wanted these things for me because politics was so much a part of his life and because I was so much his daughter. But nor would he have considered that political power was the most important or even the most effective thing in life. In searching through my papers to assemble the material for this volume I came across some of my father’s loose sermon notes slipped into the back of my sixth-form chemistry exercise book.
Men, nations, races or any particular generation cannot be saved by ordinances, power, legislation. We worry about all this, and our faith becomes weak and faltering. But all these things are as old as the human race — all these things confronted Jesus 2,000 years ago… This is why Jesus had to come.
My father lived these convictions to the end.
CHANGING THE PIANIST
The Conservative Party has never been slow to shoot the pianist as a substitute for changing its tune. So it proved in the wake of our narrow 1964 election defeat. Anyone seriously thinking about the way forward for Conservatism would have started by examining whether the established tendency to fight on socialist ground with corporatist weapons had not something to do with the Party’s predicament. Then and only then — after a more or less inevitable second election defeat, for there was a general sense in the country that Labour needed a larger working majority if it were to carry out its programme — would have been the time to consider a leadership change. I had hoped and indeed naively expected that the Party would soldier on under Alec Douglas-Home. I later heard that the supporters of Ted Heath and others anxious to oust Alec had been busy behind the scenes; but I never ventured into the Smoking Room and so I was unaware of these mysterious cabals until it was too late. I was stunned and upset when Alec told the 1922 Committee that he intended to stand down to make way for someone else; I was all the more distressed by his evident unhappiness. I kept on saying to people, ‘Why didn’t he let his supporters know? We might have been able to help.’
Reggie Maudling and Ted Heath were generally accepted as the only two figures in serious contention for the leadership, which for the first time would be decided by a ballot of MPs. Iain Macleod was considered too left wing and by many, in Lord Salisbury’s jibe, as ‘too clever by half’. Enoch Powell, who did indeed put his name forward, had no large following at this time. Of the two serious contenders, Reggie Maudling was thought to have the better chance. Although his performance as Chancellor of the Exchequer had incurred serious and in some ways justified criticism, there was no doubting Reggie’s experience, brilliant intellect and command of the House. His main weakness, which grew more evident in later years, was a certain laziness — something which is a frequent temptation to those who know that they are naturally and effortlessly cleverer than those around them.
Ted had a very different character. He too had a very well organized mind. He was methodical, forceful and, at least on the one question which mattered to him above all others — Europe — a man of unyielding determination. As Shadow Chancellor he had the opportunity to demonstrate his capabilities in attacking the 1965 Finance Bill, which in those days was taken on the floor of the House. Ted was regarded as being somewhat to the right of Reggie, but they were both essentially centrists in Party terms. Something could be made of the different approaches they took to Europe, with Reggie regarding EFTA more favourably and Ted convinced that membership of the EEC was essential. But their attitudes to specific policies hardly affected the question of which to support.
I did not start with any particularly strong views on the matter. I knew both of them — Reggie Maudling as a neighbouring MP for Barnet and Ted Heath over a longer period when we were candidates for Kent constituencies. At this time I knew Reggie better. I liked his combination of laid-back charm and acute intellect. My acquaintanceship with Ted, though there was none of that bitter hostility which would develop in later years, had never risked developing into friendship. Although we came from not dissimilar backgrounds, neither of us having enjoyed the educational and social advantages of the traditional Tory politician, we were totally different sorts of people. Ted, of course, had fought with distinction in the war while I was a student at Somerville. He had been part of that generation which had been ineradicably affected by the rise of Nazism and fascism and the question of appeasement in the 1930s. So, of course, was I; but rather differently. Ted, to my mind, had swallowed a good deal of the fashionable interpretation of what had gone wrong in the world between the wars. For him, I imagine, as for many others who were to become passionate advocates of all things European, the evil genius of those times was nationalism. Consequently, Britain now had a duty to help create a Europe-wide structure which would supplant the nation state, provide an alternative focus for loyalties and so prevent war. For me, such grandiose visions had little appeal. I saw the principal cause of the conflict as being the appeasement of dictators — something which Ted himself had courageously opposed at Oxford — and I saw the principal victor of the conflict, whose health was itself the best guarantee of peace, as being the spirit and unity of the English-speaking world. Ted’s character seemed to me in many ways admirable. But he was not charming — nor, to be fair, did he set out to be. He was probably more at ease talking to men than women. But it was not just women who found him difficult to get on with. I felt that though I had known him for years, there was a sense in which I did not know him at all. Perhaps I never would. I was not conscious at this time of any hostility, simply of a lack of human warmth. I did not either then or later regard amiability as an indispensable or even particularly important attribute of leadership. Yet, all things considered, I thought that I would vote for Reggie Maudling.
It was Keith Joseph who persuaded me to change my mind. By now Keith was a friend, not just a senior colleague whom I liked. We worked together, though with him very much as the senior partner, on pensions policy in 1964—65. Like everyone else who came to know him, I was deeply impressed by the quality of his mind and the depth of his compassion. Keith had gone into politics for the same reason that many on the left had done so — he wanted to improve the lot of ordinary people, particularly those he saw living deprived, stunted, unfulfilled lives. Many jokes would be made — and the best of them by Keith himself — about the way in which he changed his mind and reversed his policies on matters ranging from housing to health to social benefits. But the common thread was his relentless search for the right answer to the practical problems of human suffering. So I took him very seriously when he telephoned to say that while he knew I was currently intending to vote for Reggie, I should think again. Keith understood Reggie’s weaknesses, and as a long-time colleague in Government and the Shadow Cabinet he had seen these weaknesses at close hand. But it was Ted’s strengths that he wanted to speak about. He summed them up: ‘Ted has a passion to get Britain right.’ And, of course, so did Keith, and so did I.
This was decisive for me. To the disappointment and surprise of Reggie Maudling and his PPS, Neil Marten, I told them that Ted Heath would be getting my vote. Sufficient numbers thought similarly. Ted emerged with a clear majority on the first ballot, Reggie withdrawing to make a second ballot unnecessary.
I was not displeased to be given a different portfolio by the new Leader, exchanging my role as Shadow spokesman on Pensions for that of Housing and Land under my old boss, John Boyd-Carpenter. I would always regard my knowledge of the Social Security system as one of the most important aspects of what turned out to be my training to become Prime Minister. Now that we were in Opposition, however, it was not easy to oppose the large pension and benefit increases which the Labour Government was making: only later would the full financial implications of this spending spree become evident. So it was a relief to me to be moved to Housing and Land, where I was able to set about attacking with a will one of the most ideological socialist measures — the setting-up of the Land Commission, a means of achieving the socialist obsession of nationalizing development gains. It was in this role also that I first became fully acquainted with the complexities and anomalies of the rating system, whose fate seemed destined to be inextricably intertwined with mine.[9] One of my early tasks was to devise and explain to a sceptical Conservative Party Conference how we intended to reform domestic rates by a combination of moving some expenditure onto central government and introducing rate rebates. It was my first Conference speech. At least those who heard it would have appreciated that I grasped the problems. But it would be too much to claim that I offered any very satisfactory solutions. It was only a succès d’estime.
AGAINST THE TREASURY
As was widely expected, Harold Wilson called an early snap election at the end of March 1966. The result — a Conservative rout and an overall Labour majority of ninety-seven — was equally expected. We fought an uninspiring campaign on the basis of a flimsy manifesto entitled Action not Words, which accurately summed up Ted’s impact on politics. This was widely seen as a completion of Wilson’s 1964 victory, and Ted was not blamed. I largely concentrated my efforts on Finchley and was not displeased to keep a healthy majority of 9,464, this time over the Labour Party which had beaten the Liberals into third place. But it was a depressing time. Denis knew my mood and went out to buy me an eternity ring to cheer me up.
I received a further fillip when Ted Heath made me Treasury spokesman on Tax under the Shadow Chancellor, Iain Macleod. There had been some speculation in the press that I would be promoted to the Shadow Cabinet myself. But I was not expecting it. I now know, having read Jim Prior’s memoirs,[10] that I was indeed considered but that Ted, rather presciently, decided against it because if they got me in ‘they would never get [me] out again’.
In any case, I was better placed to make an impact as Treasury spokesman outside the Shadow Cabinet than as something else within it. As a tax lawyer I already knew my way around my new brief. Although I had no formal training in economic theory, I felt naturally at ease with the concepts. I had always had strong convictions about the way in which public money should be handled. As I had found when junior minister responsible for pensions, I was lucky enough to have the sort of mind to grasp technical detail and understand quite complex figuring fairly easily. None of which meant, however, that I could afford to relax. Debating Finance Bills from Opposition, necessarily without the technical assistance available from the civil service, and relying on the help of a few outside experts and colleagues in the House, is immensely demanding.
Luckily, the family’s domestic arrangements permitted me to keep to my rigorous parliamentary schedule. By now, Mark and Carol were away at boarding school. Denis was still very active in business, although in 1965 he had sold the family firm to Castrol, which itself was soon bought by Burmah Oil. We felt that it would now make life much easier for us both to rent a flat in Westminster Gardens, not far from the House of Commons. We also sold our home in Farnborough and bought ‘The Mount’, a mock-Tudor house with a large garden in Lamberhurst, near Tunbridge Wells. One of my very few hobbies is interior decorating, and I now spent most of my free time painting and papering the bedrooms — all eight of them. But even I was defeated by the large hall and staircase and had to bring in the professionals. One reason why we bought the house was to have somewhere in the country for the children when they came back from boarding school in the holidays. But at this age they seemed to prefer staying in London with their friends. So ‘The Mount’ was not as much used as I would have liked. My programme of repairs and redecoration was not wasted, however: in 1972 we sold it, and out of the proceeds bought the house in Flood Street (Chelsea) which would be my home until in 1979 I moved into the flat above 10 Downing Street.
I not only felt well-suited to my new job: it was also an exciting time to begin it. The incoherence and irresponsibility of socialist economic management had become apparent. The optimistic projections of George Brown’s National Plan, published in September 1965, were an albatross to hang around Labour’s neck, as forecasts of economic growth were not met. Labour’s pre-election promises of ‘no severe increases in taxation’ were broken with the announcement in the Budget of May 1966 that a new Selective Employment Tax (SET) would be introduced, in effect a payroll tax falling particularly heavily on service industries: it was a major part of my brief to oppose it. The Labour Government’s reliance on its alleged special relationship with the trade unions to secure voluntary incomes restraint as a means of controlling inflation had already lost credibility with the failure of the Government-TUC joint Declaration of Intent, which had first been proclaimed amid fanfares in December 1964. In July 1966 the ‘voluntary’ approach was jettisoned. It was announced that there would be a six months’ wage freeze followed by six months of ‘severe restraint’. Prices would be frozen for a year, and a plea was made for limits to be applied to dividends over the same period. The National Board of Prices and Incomes, which Labour had established, was given powers to require one month’s advance notification of any price and wage increases and powers to delay increases by Order-inCouncil for up to three months. The Government might take power to direct that specified price and wage increases should not be made. Fighting this policy in general and, under Iain Macleod’s leadership, opposing the ‘Standstill orders’ which came before the House of Commons, were the other important aspects of my brief.
In preparing myself for my first major Commons speech in my new role, I got out from the House of Commons Library every Budget speech and Finance Bill since the war and read them. I was thus able to demonstrate to a somewhat bemused Jim Calla-ghan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Jack Diamond, his Chief Secretary, that this was the only Budget which had failed to make even a minor concession in the social services area. Then I sunk my teeth into the SET. It was riddled with absurdities which I took great pleasure in exposing. The attempt to distinguish between manufacturing and service industries, shifting the tax burden onto the second and handing the money back as subsidies to the first, was a demonstrably inefficient, anomaly-ridden procedure. As I put it in the House: ‘Whatever the payroll tax is, it is thoroughly bad administration… I only wish that Gilbert and Sullivan were alive today so that we could have an opera about it.’
Our side of the House liked it. I got a good press, the Daily Telegraph observing that ‘it has taken a woman… to slam the faces of the Government’s Treasury ministers in the mud and then stamp on them’. Iain Macleod himself wrote some generous lines about the performance in another paper.
He did the same after my speech that autumn to the Party Conference in Blackpool, my first real Conference success. I put a special effort into it — though the nine hours of work I did would have seemed culpable idleness compared with the time I took for Conference speechwriting as Party Leader. That autumn, however, I spoke from notes, which gives extra spontaneity and the flexibility to insert a joke or jibe on the spur of the moment. Although the debate I was answering was on taxation, the cheers came in response to what I said about the way in which the Government was undermining the rule of law by the arbitrary powers it had taken through incomes policy and tax policy. With more than a touch of hyperbole, it must be admitted, I said: ‘All this is fundamentally wrong for Britain. It is a step not merely towards socialism but towards communism.’ Some of the more squeamish journalists demurred. But not the new and still left-of-centre Sun, which noted: ‘A Fiery Blonde Warns of the Road to Ruin’.
I was right to see a connection between the socialist approach to public expenditure and taxation on the one hand and to incomes policy on the other. They were both aspects of the same collectivist programme which, if taken to its ultimate conclusion, would jeopardize not just economic but political freedom as well. But what I and almost all of my colleagues at this time failed to do was to think through the full implications for our own policies. Although we wanted lower and simpler taxes on people and businesses, we were still inclined to assume — and not just for public presentation, but because we really thought it — that faster economic growth would allow us to cut taxes, as public expenditure measured as a share of GDP fell. We had some proposals to reduce public expenditure on socialist projects and waste. But we thought that we could create an atmosphere favourable to enterprise and so establish what was called a ‘virtuous circle’ in which higher growth allowed larger tax revenues with lower tax rates, which in turn stimulated further growth. Consequently, we were not as serious about making real public expenditure cuts as we should have been. Indeed, over the whole of this period — whether in 1956, 1966 or above all in 1976 — real cuts in public spending were only made by governments of either party under the exigent circumstances of a sterling crisis, a gilt strike or the arrival on the scene of the International Monetary Fund. This approach was only finally changed when in the run-up to the 1979 election the Conservative Opposition actually planned for public expenditure cuts because we believed in them.
Our failure in the 1960s to consider as an alternative government where we really stood on incomes policy was at least as serious. As Iain Macleod and I demonstrated by our vigorous opposition to Labour’s statutory incomes policy, we knew what we were against, but we were much less clear about what we were for. There was good reason for this, because the Shadow Cabinet itself was sharply divided. Ted Heath, true to the pragmatic, problem-solving approach which he prided himself on taking, was never able to give the lead required on this question. Probably the only member of the Shadow Cabinet who was opposed in principle to all kinds of incomes policy — voluntary or involuntary — was Enoch Powell, and he had failed to persuade his colleagues by the time I entered the Shadow Cabinet in 1967.
But Enoch was right. He had made the two intellectual leaps in economic policy which Keith Joseph and I would only make some years later. First, he had grasped that it was not the unions which caused inflation by pushing up wages, but rather the Government which did so by increasing the supply of money in the economy. Consequently, incomes policies — quite apart from their other effects of diminishing incentives, imposing distortions and leading to strikes which pitted the state against organized labour — were a supreme irrelevance to anti-inflation policy. In effect, Government was creating a problem which it then blamed on others. The only aspect of the matter which Enoch then and later failed sufficiently to grasp was the importance of the indirect link between trade union power and inflation. This lay in the fact that over-powerful trade unions could raise real wages well above market levels, but that in turn priced their own members out of jobs, and inflicted unemployment on both union and non-union workers alike. Governments, supremely sensitive to the length of dole queues, would then react by lowering interest rates and expanding the money supply. This would increase demand and jobs for a time, but it also increased inflation. All these effects would prompt the trade unions to ratchet up wages once more. And the whole process would start up again, from a higher level of inflation. But this could only be tackled by tightening monetary policy and by reducing the power of the unions — the first to halt inflation, the second to prevent the unions from creating unemployment. We would therefore at some point have to tackle trade union law. That said, Enoch’s insight into the cause of inflation was of supreme importance.
Secondly, he had seen that the consensus economic policy nurtured another damaging delusion. This concerned the ‘constraint’ allegedly exercised by the current account of the balance of payments. It was in order to increase exports and reduce imports that corporatist, interventionist industrial policies were considered necessary. But the real ‘constraint’, which was assumed and not challenged, was that imposed by a pegged exchange rate. If sterling were allowed to float freely, as Enoch advocated, the alleged constraint of the balance of payments disappeared. And so did some of the pressure for other kinds of interventionism. As he put it in a seminal Institute of Economic Affairs pamphlet in 1967: ‘The control of the international price of currencies, like every other suppression of market prices, leads to other controls, which make a mockery of the individual’s freedom to trade, travel or invest.’[11]
True, in abandoning pegged exchange rates, one loses the anchor of the dollar (or gold). True too, a country which persists in running a large trade deficit may well be one with a weak economy which needs radical restructuring. (Though that may not always be so: a current account deficit may be evidence of large inflows of private capital into an economy which, because of reforms, has a high rate of return on investment.)
None of these qualifications, however, diminishes the fundamental importance of Enoch Powell’s contribution. By showing that it was government monetary policy rather than wages which caused inflation, and that freely floating exchange rates would break free of the ‘constraint’ allegedly exercised by the current account of the balance of payments, Enoch permitted a radical revision of Conservative economic policy. He allowed us to break out of the mind-set which seemed to condemn Britain to an increasingly planned economy and society.
In October 1967 Ted made me front-bench spokesman on Fuel and Power and a member of the Shadow Cabinet. It may be that my House of Commons performances and perhaps Iain Macleod’s recommendation overcame any temperamental reluctance on Ted’s part. My first task was to read through all the evidence given to the inquiry about the causes of the terrible Aberfan disaster the previous year, when 116 children and 28 adults were killed by a slag tip which slipped onto a Welsh mining village. Many of the parents of the victims were in the gallery for the debate, and I felt for them. Very serious criticisms had been made of the National Coal Board and as a result someone, I thought, should have resigned, though I held back from stating this conclusion with complete clarity in my first speech to the House as Shadow spokesman. What was revealed by the report made me realize how very easy it is in any large organization to assume that someone else has taken the requisite action and will assume responsibility. This is a problem which, as later tragedies have demonstrated, industrial civilization has yet to solve.
Outside the House, my main interest was in trying to find a framework for privatization of electricity generation. To this end I visited power stations and sought all the advice I could from business contacts. But it turned out to be a fruitless enterprise, and I had not come up with what I considered acceptable answers by the time my portfolio was changed again — to Transport — in October 1968. Transport was not one of the more interesting portfolios, because Parliament had just passed a major Transport Bill reorganizing the railways, nationalizing the bus companies, setting up a new National Freight Authority — in effect, implementing most of the Government’s transport programme in one measure. In the brief period during which I shadowed Transport I argued our case against nationalization of the ports. But, all in all, Transport proved a brief with limited possibilities.
TED AND ENOCH
As a member of the Shadow Cabinet I attended its weekly discussions, usually on a Wednesday, in Ted’s room in the House. Discussion was generally not very stimulating. We would begin by looking ahead to the parliamentary business for the week and agreeing who was to speak and on what line. There might be a paper from a colleague which he would introduce. But, doubtless because we knew that there were large divisions between us, particularly on economic policy, issues of principle were not usually openly debated. Ted was a competent chairman. On matters which really interested him, like Europe and trade union legislation, he would lead the discussion. But generally he allowed the spokesman to make the running on whatever subject was being considered.
For my part, I did not make a particularly important contribution to Shadow Cabinet. Nor was I asked to do so. For Ted and perhaps others I was principally there as the statutory woman whose main task was to explain what ‘women’ — Kiri Te Kanawa, Barbara Cartland, Esther Rantzen, Stella Rimington and all the rest of our uniform, undifferentiated sex — were likely to think and want on troublesome issues. I had, of course, great affection for Alec Douglas-Home, then Shadow Foreign Secretary, and got on perfectly well with most of my colleagues, but I had only three real friends around the table–Keith Joseph, Peter Thomas and Edward Boyle. And Edward by now was very much on the opposite wing of the Party from me.
The atmosphere at our meetings was certainly made more difficult by the fact that the most senior figures now had somewhat tense relations with each other. Ted was settling into the role of Party Leader with determination, but without any real or easy assurance. Reggie Maudling, Deputy Leader, had never really recovered from his unexpected defeat for the leadership. Iain Macleod was the most politically acute of us, with a special understanding of how whatever line we took would be interpreted by the press. But though a superb public orator he was in truth a rather private and reserved character. He was also growing out of sympathy with his old friend Enoch Powell, who was increasingly concerned about immigration, a topic about which Iain felt equally strongly on the other side. Undoubtedly, Enoch was our finest intellect — classicist, historian, economist and biblical scholar. In a quite different way from Iain, he was a powerful public orator and able to command the House of Commons, or indeed any audience, with his remorseless logic and controlled passion. But as regards the Shadow Cabinet, by this stage he had largely withdrawn into himself. He was disliked and probably feared by Ted Heath. He had fought and lost his battle against the chimera of incomes policy. As Defence spokesman, he had the uneasy task of attacking Labour’s policy of withdrawal of British troops from east of Suez when he himself believed such withdrawal was inevitable. Above all, as a West Midlands MP witnessing the effect of large-scale immigration in his constituency he was frustrated by the Party’s failure to take a tougher stance on the question.
The first modern immigration control measure had been introduced by Rab Butler in 1961. Hitherto, Commonwealth citizens had not been subject to the controls which applied to the admission of alien immigrants from foreign countries. The Commonwealth Immigrants’ Act 1962, bitterly opposed by Labour and the Liberals, introduced an annual quota of employment vouchers to limit the inflow, a system subsequently tightened up by the Labour Government in 1965. During 1967 the Kenyan Government’s discriminatory policies against Kenya’s Asians resulted in a large inflow of immigrants into Britain. This raised awareness both of the scale and impact of past immigration and fears about its unchecked future size. There was particular worry about UK passport holders who were not connected by birth or descent with the United Kingdom. In February 1968 Jim Callaghan announced legislation to deal with this. The issue was also closely linked to the introduction of race relations legislation, which became the Race Relations Act 1968, aimed at curbing discrimination on grounds of colour. This was opposed by many on the right who saw in it a danger of making immigrants a legally privileged community which would have no incentive to integrate fully into British society.
On Monday 26 February 1968 Shadow Cabinet discussed the Government’s Commonwealth Immigrants’ Bill to introduce the new controls. A statement had been issued the previous week setting out the principles on which we would judge the measure. Ted Heath said that it was now up to Shadow Cabinet to decide whether the Bill came sufficiently within those terms. In fact, it did some of the things which we advocated. But it did not provide for registration of dependants, nor for appeal by those refused entry, nor for financial help for voluntary repatriation. It was decided to support the Bill, but also to move amendments where possible and appropriate. Iain Macleod, however, said that he would vote against the Bill, and he was as good as his word.
On Wednesday 10 April Shadow Cabinet discussed the other side of the Government’s policy, the Race Relations Bill. Ted again opened the discussion. He said that though the Bill itself appeared to have many faults he thought that some legal machinery would be necessary to help improve the prospects for coloured immigrants in Britain. Quintin Hogg, the Shadow Home Secretary, outlined his own views in some detail. He thought that legislation was necessary, but that we should move amendments. However, he noted that our backbenchers were very hostile to the Bill. Reggie Maudling agreed with Quintin on both points. In the discussion which followed, in which I did not participate, the main point in dispute was whether, flawed as the Bill was, to vote against it at Second Reading would be misinterpreted as racist. Shadow Cabinet’s view was that the best assurance for good race relations was confidence that future numbers of immigrants would not be too great and that the existing law of the land would be upheld. In the end it was decided that a reasoned amendment would be drafted and there would be a two-line whip. Keith Joseph, Edward Boyle and Robert Carr, on the liberal wing, reserved their positions until they had seen the terms of the amendment. In the event they all supported it, though there were to be a number of abstentions by backbenchers.
On Sunday 21 April 1968 — two days before the debate — I woke up to find the front pages of the newspapers dominated by reports of a speech Enoch Powell had made in Birmingham on immigration the previous afternoon. It was strong meat, and there were some lines which had a sinister ring about them. But I strongly sympathized with the gravamen of his argument about the scale of New Commonwealth immigration into Britain. I too thought this threatened not just public order but also the way of life of some communities, themselves already beginning to be demoralized by insensitive housing policies, Social Security dependence and the onset of the ‘permissive society’. I was also quite convinced that, however selective quotations from his speech may have sounded, Enoch was no racist.
At about eleven o’clock the telephone rang. It was Ted Heath. He said: ‘I am ringing round all the Shadow Cabinet. I have come to the conclusion that Enoch must go.’ It was more statement than enquiry. But I said that I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis. Ted was having none of it. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘He absolutely must go, and most people think he must go.’ In fact, I understood later that several members of the Shadow Cabinet would have resigned if Enoch had not gone.
Yet for several reasons it was a tragedy. In the short term it prevented our gaining the political credit for our policy of controlling immigration more strictly. This was an issue which crossed the political and social divide, as was demonstrated when London dockers marched in support of Enoch. Moreover, in practical terms there was very little to choose between the policies of Ted and Enoch on the matter. Although it is true that as a result of the speech the official Conservative line on immigration became more specific, essentially we all wanted strict limits on further New Commonwealth immigration and we were all prepared to support financial assistance for those who wanted to return to their country of origin.
But the longer-term consequences of Enoch’s departure on this issue and under these circumstances extended far beyond immigration policy. He was free to develop a philosophical approach to a range of policies, uninhibited by the compromises of collective responsibility. This spanned both economic and foreign affairs and embraced what would come to be called ‘monetarism’, deregulation, denationalization, an end to regional policy, and culminated in his opposition to British membership of the Common Market. Having Enoch preaching to such effect in the wilderness carried advantages and disadvantages for those of us on the right in the Shadow Cabinet and later the Cabinet. On the one hand, he shifted the basis of the political argument to the right and so made it easier to advance sound doctrines without being accused of taking an extreme position. On the other hand, so bitter was the feud between Ted and Enoch that querying any policy advanced by the leadership was likely to be branded disloyalty. Moreover, the very fact that Enoch advanced all his positions as part of a coherent whole made it more difficult to express agreement with one or two of them. For example, the arguments against prices and incomes policies, intervention and corporatism might have been better received if they had not been associated with Enoch’s views about immigration or Europe.
At this time, as it happens, other Conservatives were moving independently in the same direction, with the notable exception of Europe, and Ted gave me an opportunity to chart this way ahead. The annual Conservative Political Centre lecture is designed to give some intellectual meat to those attending the Tory Party Conference. The choice of speaker is generally reserved to the Party Leader. It was doubtless a pollster or Party adviser who suggested that it might be a good idea to have me talk about a subject which would appeal to ‘women’. Luckily, I was free to choose my subject, and I decided on something more topical which might appeal to thinking people of both sexes: I spoke on ‘What’s Wrong With Politics?’
There is no better way to clarify your own thinking than to try to explain it clearly to someone else. I was conscious that there were great issues being discussed in politics at this time. Whatever else can be said of the sixties they were intellectually lively, even if too many of the ideas motivating change originated on the left. I took armfuls of books on philosophy, politics and history, White Papers, Hansard Society publications and speeches down to Lamberhurst. I had no one to guide or help me so I just plunged in. Like the proverbial iceberg, most of the work lay below the surface of the document I finally wrote.
I began by listing the reasons why there was so much disillusionment with politics. Some of these really consisted of the growth of a critical spirit through the effects of education and the mass media. But others were the fault of the politicians themselves. Political programmes were becoming dominated by a series of promises whose impact was all the greater because of the growth of the Welfare State. This led me on to what I considered the main cause of the public’s increasing alienation from political parties — too much government. The competition between the parties to offer ever higher levels of economic growth and the belief that government itself could deliver these had provided the socialists with an opportunity massively to extend state control and intervention. This in turn caused ordinary people to feel that they had insufficient say in their own and their families’ lives. The Left claimed that the answer was the creation of structures which would allow more democratic ‘participation’ in political decisions. But the real problem was that politics itself was intruding into far too many decisions that were properly outside its scope. Alongside the expansion of government had developed a political obsession with size — the notion that large units promoted efficiency. In fact, the opposite was true. Smaller units — small businesses, families and ultimately individuals — should once again be the focus of attention.
Apart from these general reflections, my CPC lecture also contained a section about prices and incomes policy. Although I stuck to the Shadow Cabinet line of condemning a compulsory policy while avoiding the issue of a voluntary one, I included a passage which reads:
We now put so much emphasis on the control of incomes that we have too little regard for the essential role of government which is the control of the money supply and management of demand [emphasis added]. Greater attention to this role and less to the outward detailed control would have achieved more for the economy. It would mean, of course, that the government had to exercise itself some of the disciplines on expenditure it is so anxious to impose on others. It would mean that expenditure in the vast public sector would not have to be greater than the amount which could be financed out of taxation plus genuine saving.
In retrospect, it is clear to me that this summed up how far my understanding of these matters had gone — and how far it still needed to go. I had come to see that the money supply was central to any policy to control inflation. But I had not seen either that this made any kind of incomes policy irrelevant or that monetary policy itself was the way in which demand should be managed.
Partly as a result, I suspect, of the attention I received for the CPC lecture, I was asked to contribute two articles on general political philosophy to the Daily Telegraph early the following year. In these I developed some of the same themes. In particular, I argued the case for the ideological clash of opposing political parties as essential to the effective functioning of democracy. The pursuit of ‘consensus’, therefore, was fundamentally subversive of popular choice. It was wrong to talk of taking the big issues ‘out of politics’ or to imply that different approaches to a subject involved ‘playing polities’. I applied this specifically to the question of nationalization versus free enterprise. But I could have done so on a range of other matters, not least education, which was soon to become my main political concern and where the ruthless pursuit by the socialists of comprehensivization was threatening not just Britain’s schools but long-term social progress. The fraudulent appeal of consensus was a theme to which I would return again and again, both as Leader of the Opposition and as Prime Minister.
JOURNEYS TO THE FUTURE
By now (1968) the left-of-centre consensus on economic policy was being challenged and would continue to be. But the new liberal consensus on moral and social matters was not. That is to say that people in positions of influence in government, the media and universities managed to impose metropolitan liberal views on a society that was still largely conservative morally. The 1960s saw in Britain the beginning of what has become an almost complete separation between traditional Christian values and the authority of the state. Some politicians regarded this as a coherent programme. But for the great majority, myself included, it was a matter of reforms to deal with specific problems, in some cases cruel or unfair provisions.
So it was that I voted in 1966 for Leo Abse’s Bill proposing that homosexual conduct in private between consenting adults over twenty-one should no longer be a criminal offence. In the same year I voted for David Steel’s Bill to allow abortion if there was substantial risk that a child would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped, or ‘where the woman’s capacity as a mother would be severely overstrained’. On both these issues I was strongly influenced by my own experience of other people’s suffering. For example, when I was a barrister I had been moved by the humiliation I had seen inflicted in the dock on a man of considerable local standing who had been found engaging in homosexual conduct.
On the other hand, some aspects of the liberal agenda, even at the time, seemed to me to go too far. Divorce law reform was such a case. I had talked in my constituency surgeries to women subjected to a life of misery from their brutal husbands and for whom marriage had become a prison from which, in my view, they should be released. In these circumstances divorce might be the only answer. But if divorce became too easy it might undermine marriages simply going through a bad patch. If people can withdraw lightly from their responsibilities they are likely to be less serious about entering into the initial obligation. I was concerned about the spouse who was committed to make the marriage work and was deserted. I was also very concerned about what would become of the family of the first marriage when the man (or woman) chose to start a second family. So in 1968 I was one of the minority who voted against a Bill to make divorce far easier. Divorce would be possible where it was judged that there had been an ‘irretrievable breakdown’, broadly defined, in the marriage. I also supported two amendments, the first of which made available a special form of marriage that was indissoluble (except by judicial separation). The second would seek to ensure that in any conflict of interest between the legal wife and children of the first marriage and a common-law wife and her children, the former should have priority.
Similarly, I voted against Sydney Silverman’s Bill to abolish the death penalty for murder in 1965. Like all the other measures listed above this was passed by Parliament, but subject to a Conservative amendment to the effect that the Act was to expire at the end of July 1970 unless Parliament determined otherwise. I then voted against the motion in December 1969 to make the Act permanent.
As I had shown in my earlier speech as a backbencher on corporal punishment, I believed that the state had not just a right but a duty to deter and punish violent crime and to protect the law-abiding public. However sparingly it is used, the power to deprive an individual of liberty, and under certain circumstances of life itself, is inseparable from the sovereignty of the state. I never had the slightest doubt that in nearly all cases the supreme deterrent would be an influence on the potential murderer. And the deterrent effect of capital punishment is at least as great on those who go armed on other criminal activities, such as robbery. To my mind, the serious difficulty in the issue lay in the possibility of the conviction and execution of an innocent man — which has certainly happened in a small number of cases. Against these tragic cases, however, must be set the victims of convicted murderers who have been released after their sentence was served only to be convicted of murder a second time — who have certainly numbered many more. Despite all the uncertainties and complexities, for example of forensic evidence, I believe that the potential victim of the murderer deserves that highest protection which only the existence of the death penalty gives. The notion of certain particularly heinous murders as ‘capital murders’ (as under the 1957 Act) — a concept which now again underlies changes in the system relating to life sentences — seems to me the right model. I have consistently voted in Parliament for a return of capital punishment for such murders.
As regards abortion, homosexuality, and divorce reform it is easy to see that matters did not turn out as was intended. For most of us in Parliament — and certainly for me — the thinking underlying these changes was that they dealt with anomalies or unfairnesses which occurred in a minority of instances, or that they removed uncertainties in the law itself. Or else they were intended to recognize in law what was in any case occurring in fact. Instead, it could be argued that they have paved the way towards a more callous, selfish and irresponsible society. Reforming the law on abortion was primarily intended to stop young women being forced to have back-street abortions. It was not meant to make abortion simply another ‘choice’. Yet in spite of the universal availability of artificial contraception the figures for abortion have kept on rising. Homosexual activists have moved from seeking a right of privacy to demanding social approval for the ‘gay’ lifestyle, equal status with the heterosexual family and even the legal right to exploit the sexual uncertainty of adolescents. Divorce law reform has contributed to — though it is by no means the only cause of-a very large increase in the incidence of marriage breakdown which has left so many children growing up without the continual care and guidance of two parents.
Knowing how matters have turned out, would I have voted differently on any of these measures? I now see that we viewed them too narrowly. As a lawyer and indeed as a politician who believed so strongly in the rule of law, I felt that the prime considerations were that the law should be enforceable and its application fair to those who might run foul of it. But laws also have a symbolic significance: they are signposts to the way society is developing — and the way the legislators of society envisage that it should develop. Moreover, taking all of the ‘liberal’ reforms of the 1960s together they amount to more than their individual parts. They came to be seen as providing a radically new framework within which the younger generation would be expected to behave.
Indeed, this was a period of obsessive and naive interest in ‘youth’. Parents worried so much about the ‘generation gap’ that even teenagers began to take it seriously. A whole ‘youth culture’ of misunderstood Eastern mysticism, bizarre clothing and indulgence in hallucinatory drugs emerged. I found Chelsea a very different place when we moved back to London in 1970. I had mixed feelings about what was happening. There was vibrancy and talent, but this was also in large degree a world of make-believe. A perverse pride was taken in Britain about our contribution to these trends. Carnaby Street in Soho, the Beatles, the mini-skirt and the maxiskirt were the new symbols of ‘Swinging Britain’. And they did indeed prove good export earners. Harold Wilson was adept at taking maximum political credit for them. The trouble was that they concealed the real economic weaknesses which even a talented fashion industry and entrepreneurial recording companies could not counter-balance. As Desmond Donnelly remarked, ‘My greatest fear is that Britain will sink giggling into the sea.’[12]
Although Britain gave a distinctive gloss to these trends, the affluent consumer society to which they catered was above all to be found in the United States. I had made my first visit to the USA in 1967 on one of the ‘Leadership’ programmes run by the American Government to bring rising young leaders from politics and business over to the US. For six weeks I travelled the length and breadth of the United States. The excitement which I felt has never really subsided. At each stop-over I was met and accommodated by friendly, open, generous people who took me into their homes and lives and showed me their cities and townships with evident pride. The high point was my visit to the NASA Space Center at Houston. I saw the astronaut training programme which would just two years later help put a man on the moon. As a living example of the ‘brain drain’ from which over-regulated, high-taxed Britain was suffering, I met someone from my constituency of Finchley who had gone to NASA to make full use of his talents. I saw nothing wrong with that, and indeed was glad that a British scientist was making such an important contribution. But there was no way Britain could hope to compete even in more modest areas of technology if we did not learn the lessons of an enterprise economy.
Two years after that I went on a week-long visit to the Soviet Union. I had already come up against the obstinate contempt for human rights which was so characteristic of the USSR in the case of the detention of my constituent, the lecturer Gerald Brooke, for alleged ‘subversive criminal activities’ (i.e. smuggling in anti-Soviet pamphlets). I repeatedly raised the case both with the Government and in the House of Commons, though to no avail. Mr Brooke had become a pawn in the game the Soviets were trying to play to have their spies, the Krogers, released to them. (Eventually an exchange took place in 1969.) One good thing which came out of my work on Gerald Brooke’s behalf was that I made contact with the AngloSoviet Parliamentary Group. To my great surprise, when I went along to it I found MPs with equally strong anti-communist instincts as mine, but who unlike me were real experts in the field. In particular, Cyril Osborne began my education in assessing and countering Soviet tactics. It was he who before I went to the Soviet Union advised me that first of all I should not allow the Soviets to pay for my fare, and second that I should insist on visiting some churches. I took his advice. He also told me that the only way to win any respect from them was to make it clear that one was no soft touch. This entirely accorded with my own inclinations.
I travelled to Moscow with the amiable Paul Channon and his wife. We had a full schedule including not just the sights of Moscow but also Leningrad (formerly, and now once again, St Petersburg) and Stalingrad (Volgograd). But though the names might vary, the propaganda was the same. It was relentless, an endless flow of statistics proving the industrial and social superiority of the Soviet Union over the West. At least to the visitor, the sheer unimaginative humourlessness of it was an open invitation to satire. Outside an art gallery I visited there was a sculpture of a blacksmith beating a sword with a hammer. ‘That represents communism,’ my guide proudly observed. ‘Actually, it doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘It’s from the Old Testament — “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks”.’ Collapse of stout aesthete. Methodist Sunday School has its uses. I reflected, however, that at least it was a better work of art than the usual lantern-jawed, muscle-bound Stakhanovite outside the factories.
On another occasion I was asked rhetorically whether since it must be the aim of all peoples to live together in peace and harmony, surely NATO, that symbol of Cold War hostility, could be dispensed with. ‘Certainly not,’ I said. ‘NATO has kept the peace and we have to keep it strong.’ A similar line was taken with me at Stalingrad where the local politicians complained that Coventry had severed its connections with them since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous year. I was not going to apologize for that either. Indeed, as sanctions went, it was hardly such as to strike terror into the Kremlin.
Yet, behind the official propaganda, the grey streets, all but empty shops and badly maintained workers’ housing blocks, Russian humanity peeped out. There was no doubt about the genuineness of the tears when the older people at Leningrad and Stalingrad told me about their terrible sufferings in the War. The young people I talked to from Moscow University, though extremely cautious about what they said in the full knowledge that they were under KGB scrutiny, were clearly fascinated to learn all they could about the West. And even bureaucracy can prove human. When I visited the manager of the Moscow passenger transport system he explained to me at great length how decisions about new development had to go from committee to committee in what seemed — as I said — an endless chain of non-decision-making. I caught the eye of a young man, perhaps the chairman’s assistant, standing behind him and he could not repress a broad smile.
The other abiding impression I had of Russia, which would be strengthened on my subsequent visits, was of the contrast between the exquisite cultural achievement, admittedly stemming from the old Russia but excellently conserved by the communists, on the one hand and the hardness of life for ordinary people on the other. Leningrad housed the extraordinary Hermitage collection and the Kirov Ballet, both of which I visited. And it was in Leningrad, from the window of my hotel bedroom, that at six thirty on a cold, dark morning I would see all the working mothers crossing the square with their children hanging on to them to place them all day in the state crèche whence they would be collected some twelve hours later. At Moscow airport while waiting for my delayed flight home I bought an exquisite coral-green porcelain tea service, the pride of my collection. Whenever I see it I also think of the grinding, hopeless toil which the system that produced it exacted. There could be no more poignant demonstration that communism was the regime for the privileged élite, capitalism the creed for the common man.
SELSDON WOMAN
On my return to London I was moved to the Education portfolio in the Shadow Cabinet. Edward Boyle was leaving politics to become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds. There was by now a good deal of grassroots opposition at Party Conferences to what was seen as his weakness in defence of the grammar schools. Although our views had diverged, I was sorry to see him go. He was my oldest friend in politics and I knew I would miss his intellect, sensitivity and integrity. But for me this was definitely a promotion, even though, as I have since learned, I was in fact the reserve candidate, after Keith Joseph who was the first choice to succeed Edward: I got the job because Reggie Maudling refused to take over Keith’s job as Trade and Industry Shadow.
I was delighted with my new role. I knew that I had risen to my present position as a result of free (or nearly free) good education, and I wanted others to have the same chance. Socialist education policies, by equalizing downwards and denying gifted children the opportunity to get on, were a major obstacle to that. I was also fascinated by the scientific side — the portfolio in those days being to shadow the Department of Education and Science. Moreover, I suspect that women, or at least mothers, have an instinctive interest in the education of children.
Education was by now one of the main battlegrounds of politics. Since their election in 1964 Labour had been increasingly committed to making the whole secondary school system comprehensive, and had introduced a series of measures to make local education authorities (LEAs) submit plans for such a change. (The process culminated in legislation, introduced a few months after I took over as Education Shadow.) The difficulties Edward had faced in formulating and explaining our response soon became clear to me.
The Shadow Cabinet and the Conservative Party were deeply split over the principle of selection in secondary education and, in particular, over the examination by which children were selected at the age of eleven, the 11-Plus. To over-simplify a little, it was possible to distinguish four different attitudes among Conservatives. First, there were those who had no real interest in state education in any case because they themselves and their children went to private schools. This was an important group, all too likely to be swayed by arguments of political expediency. Second, there were those who, themselves or their children, had failed to get into grammar school and had been disappointed with the education received at a secondary modern. Third, there were those Conservatives who, either because they themselves were teachers or through some other contact with the world of education, had absorbed a large dose of the fashionable egalitarian doctrines of the day. Finally, there were people like me who had been to good grammar schools, were strongly opposed to their destruction and felt no inhibitions at all about arguing for the 11-Plus.
Within the Shadow Cabinet I was aware of a broadly similar range of views. Shadow ministers in general did not want to make education a major issue in the forthcoming election. Nor was this necessarily a foolish view. Both the Party’s own internal polling and published polls showed that the 11-Plus was widely unpopular and that people were at least prepared to say that they supported comprehensive schools. Whether they would have felt the same if they had been asked about re-organizing specific local schools on comprehensive lines and whether, in any case, they understood what was meant by ‘comprehensivization’ were of course different matters. There was, for example, a large difference between the full expression of the comprehensive concept, which was essentially one of social engineering and only secondarily educational, under which there was no streaming at all according to ability, and — on the other hand — a school to which entry was open to all, but which streamed by ability. In fact, as I was to point out in the Second Reading debate of Labour’s Education Bill in February 1970, it was absurd for the socialists to attack the principle of selection, since it would continue to apply in one way or another throughout the system from the age of eleven. I might have added that when you stop selecting by ability you have to select according to some other inevitably less satisfactory criterion. In practice, this would usually be income, because families with sufficient money would move and buy houses in middle-class areas where a well-run school was available for their children. Some Labour Members and many Labour supporters understood all this well enough, and felt betrayed by Harold Wilson’s abandonment of his own personal commitment to keep the grammar schools. When I won a surprise victory in the Committee Stage debate, knocking out Clause 1 of the Bill, it was because two Labour Members absented themselves.
But by the time I took on the Education portfolio, the Party’s policy group had presented its report and the policy itself was largely established. It had two main aspects. We had decided to concentrate on improving primary schools. And in order to defuse as much as possible the debate about the 11-Plus, and in place of Labour’s policy of comprehensivization by coercion, we stressed the autonomy of local education authorities in proposing the retention of grammar schools or the introduction of comprehensive schools.
The good arguments for this programme were that improvements in the education of younger children were vital if the growing tendency towards illiteracy and innumeracy was to be checked and, secondly, that in practice the best way to retain grammar schools was to fight centralization. There were, however, arguments on the other side. There was not much point in spending large sums on nursery and primary schools and the teachers for them, if the teaching methods and attitudes were wrong. Nor, of course, were we in the long run going to be able to defend grammar schools — or, for that matter, private schools, direct grant schools and even streamed comprehensive schools — if we did not fight on grounds of principle.
Within the limits which the agreed policy and political realities allowed me, I went as far as I could. This was a good deal too far for some people, as I learned when, shortly after my appointment, I was the guest of the education correspondents at the Cumberland Hotel in London. I put the case not just for grammar schools but for secondary moderns. Those children who were not able to shine academically could in fact acquire responsibilities and respect at a separate secondary modern school, which they would never have done if in direct and continual competition and contact with the more academically gifted. I was perfectly prepared to see the 11-Plus replaced or modified by testing later in a child’s career, if that was what people wanted. I knew that it was quite possible for late developers at a secondary modern to be moved to the local grammar school so that their abilities could be properly stretched. I was sure that there were too many secondary modern schools which were providing a second-rate education — but this was something which should be remedied by bringing their standards up, rather than grammar school standards down. Only two of those present at the Cumberland Hotel lunch seemed to agree. Otherwise I was met by a mixture of hostility and blank incomprehension. It was not just that they thought me wrong: they could not imagine that I could seriously believe such things. It opened my eyes to the dominance of socialist thinking among those whose task it was to provide the public with information about education.
There were still some relatively less important issues in Conservative education policy to be decided. I fought hard to have an unqualified commitment to raising the school leaving age to sixteen inserted into the manifesto, and succeeded against some doubts from the Treasury team. I also met strong opposition from Ted Heath when at our discussions at Selsdon Park in early 1970 I argued that the manifesto should endorse the proposed new independent University of Buckingham. In spite of backing from Keith Joseph and others, I lost this battle but was at least finally permitted to make reference to the university in a speech. Quite why Ted felt so passionately against it I have never fully understood.
The Selsdon Park policy weekend at the end of January and beginning of February was a success, but not for the reasons usually given. The idea that Selsdon Park was the scene of debate which resulted in a radical rightward shift in Party policy is false. The main lines of policy had already been agreed and incorporated into a draft manifesto which we spent our time considering in detail. Our line on immigration had also been carefully spelt out. Our proposals for trade union reform had been published in Fair Deal at Work. On incomes policy, a rightward but somewhat confused shift was in the process of occurring. Labour had effectively abandoned its own policy. There was no need, therefore, to enter into the vexed question of whether some kind of ‘voluntary’ incomes policy might be pursued. But it was clear that Reggie Maudling was unhappy that we had no proposals to deal with what was still perceived as ‘wage inflation’. In fact, the manifesto, in a judicious muddle, avoided either a monetarist approach or a Keynesian one and said simply: ‘The main causes of rising prices are Labour’s damaging policies of high taxation and devaluation. Labour’s compulsory wage control was a failure and we will not repeat it.’
This in turn led us into some trouble later. During the election campaign the fallacious assertion that high taxes caused inflation inspired a briefing note from Central Office. This note allowed the Labour Party to claim subsequently that we had said that we would cut prices ‘at a stroke’ by means of tax cuts.
Thanks to the blanket press coverage of Selsdon Park, we seemed to be a serious alternative Government committed to long-term thinking about the policies for Britain’s future. We were also helped by Harold Wilson’s attack on ‘Selsdon Man’. It gave us an air of down-to-earth right-wing populism which countered the somewhat aloof image conveyed by Ted. Above all, both Selsdon Park and the Conservative manifesto, A Better Tomorrow, contrasted favourably with the deviousness, inconsistency and horse trading which by now characterized the Wilson Government, especially since the abandonment of In Place of Strife under trade union pressure.[13]
Between our departure from Selsdon Park and the opening of the general election campaign in May, however, there was a reversal of the opinion poll standing of the two parties. At Selsdon we were in the lead and we thought we would win. In May quite suddenly we lost ground and appeared to be several points behind. Influenced by the short-term change in the polls, Harold Wilson called the election for 10 June — a mistake I never forgot when I became Prime Minister. But at the time most of us — including myself — thought that we would lose. The gloom steadily deepened. During the campaign I called in one day at the Conservative Research Department offices in Old Queen Street for some briefing material and was struck by how depressed everybody seemed.
Quite why this turnaround had occurred (or indeed how real it actually was) is hard to know. With the prospect of a general election there is always a tendency for disillusioned supporters to resume their party allegiance. But it is also true — and it is something that we would pay dearly for in Government — that we had not seriously set out to win the battle of ideas against socialism during our years in Opposition. And indeed, although we did not realize it, our rethinking of policy had not been as fundamental as it should have been.
The campaign itself was largely taken up with Labour attacks on our policies. We for our part, like any Opposition, but with more cause and opportunity than most, highlighted the long list of Labour’s broken promises — ‘steady industrial growth all the time’, ‘no stop-go measures’, ‘no increase in taxation’, ‘no increase in unemployment’, ‘the pound in your pocket not devalued’, ‘economic miracle’ and many more. This was the theme I pursued in my campaign speeches. But I also used a speech to a dinner organized by the National Association of Head Teachers in Scarborough to outline our education policies.
It is hard to know just what turned the tide, if indeed there was a tide against us to turn. Paradoxically perhaps, the Conservative figures who made the greatest contribution were those two fierce enemies Ted Heath and Enoch Powell. No one could describe Ted as a great communicator, not least because for the most part he paid such little attention to communication. But as the days went by he came across as a decent man, someone with integrity and a vision — albeit a somewhat technocratic one — of what he wanted for Britain. It seemed, to use Keith’s words to me five years earlier, that he had ‘a passion to get Britain right’. This was emphasized in Ted’s powerful introduction to the manifesto in which he attacked Labour’s ‘cheap and trivial style of government’ and ‘government by gimmick’ and promised ‘a new style of government’. Ted’s final Party Election Broadcast also showed him as an honest patriot who cared deeply about his country and wanted to serve it. Though it would not have saved him had we lost, he had fought a good campaign.
So had Enoch Powell. There had been much speculation as to whether he would endorse the Conservative leadership and programme. Attitudes towards Enoch remained sharply polarized. When he came in March to speak to my Association we were subject to strong criticism and I decided to issue a statement to the effect that: ‘Those who use this country’s great tradition of freedom of speech should not seek to deny that same freedom to others, especially to those who, like Mr Powell, spent their war years in distinguished service in the Forces.’
In the June campaign Enoch made three powerful speeches on the economic failure of the Labour Government, law and order, and Europe, urging people to vote Conservative. Furthermore, a bitter personal attack on Enoch by Tony Benn, linking him to fascism, probably rallied many otherwise unsympathetic voters to his standard. There is some statistical evidence that Enoch’s intervention helped tip the balance in the West Midlands in a close election.
When my own result was announced to a tremendous cheer at Hendon College of Technology, it appeared that I had increased my majority to over 11,000 over Labour. Then I went down to the Daily Telegraph party at the Savoy, where it quite soon became clear that the opinion polls had been proved wrong and that we were on course for an overall majority.
Friday was spent in my constituency clearing up and writing the usual thank-you letters. I thought that probably Ted would have at least one woman in his Cabinet, and that since he had got used to me in the Shadow Cabinet I would be the lucky girl. On the same logic, I would probably get the Education brief.
On Saturday morning the call from the No. 10 Private Secretary came through. Ted wanted to see me. When I went in to the Cabinet Room I began by congratulating him on his victory. But not much time was spent on pleasantries. He was as ever brusque and businesslike, and he offered me the job of Education Secretary, which I accepted.
I went back to the flat at Westminster Gardens with Denis and we drove to Lamberhurst. Sadly my father was not alive to share the moment. Shortly before his death in February, I had gone up to Grantham to see him. Having always had a weak chest, he had now developed emphysema and had oxygen beside the bed. My stepmother, Cissy, whom he had married several years earlier and with whom he had been very happy, was constantly at his bedside. While I was there, friends from the church, business, local politics, the Rotary and bowling club, kept dropping in ‘just to see how Alf was’. I hoped that at the end of my life I too would have so many good friends.
I understand that my father had been listening to me as a member of a panel on a radio programme just before he died. He never knew that I would become a Cabinet minister, and I am sure that he never imagined I would eventually become Prime Minister. He would have wanted these things for me because politics was so much a part of his life and because I was so much his daughter. But nor would he have considered that political power was the most important or even the most effective thing in life. In searching through my papers to assemble the material for this volume I came across some of my father’s loose sermon notes slipped into the back of my sixth-form chemistry exercise book.
Men, nations, races or any particular generation cannot be saved by ordinances, power, legislation. We worry about all this, and our faith becomes weak and faltering. But all these things are as old as the human race — all these things confronted Jesus 2,000 years ago… This is why Jesus had to come.
My father lived these convictions to the end.
CHAPTER VI
Teacher’s Pest
The Department of Education 1970–1974
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
On Monday 22 June 1970 I arrived at the Department of Education and Science (DES) in its splendid old quarters in Curzon Street (alas, in 1973 we moved to a hideous new office block at Waterloo). I was met by the Permanent Secretary, Bill (later Sir William) Pile and the outgoing Permanent Secretary, Sir Herbert Andrew. They gave me a warm greeting and showed me up to my impressive private office. It was all too easy to slip once more into the warm water of civil service respect for ‘the minister’, but I was very conscious that hard work lay ahead. I was generally satisfied with the ministerial team I had been allotted: one friendly, one hostile and one neutral. My old friend Lord Eccles, as Paymaster General, was responsible for the Arts. Bill Van Straubenzee, a close friend of Ted’s, dealt with Higher Education. Lord Belstead answered for the department in the Lords. I was particularly pleased that David Eccles, a former Minister of Education, was available, though installed in a separate building, to give me private advice based on his knowledge of the department.
My difficulties with the department, however, were not essentially about personalities. Nor, after the first culture shock, did they stem from the opposition between my own executive style of decision-making and the more consultative style to which they were accustomed. Indeed, by the time I left I was aware that I had won a somewhat grudging respect because I knew my own mind and expected my decisions to be carried out promptly and efficiently. The real problem was — in the widest sense — one of politics.
I do not know and did not enquire how the senior civil servants around me voted. But the ethos of the DES was self-righteously socialist. For the most part, these were people who retained an almost reflex belief in the ability of central planners and social theorists to create a better world. There was nothing cynical about this. Years after many people in the Labour Party had begun to have their doubts, the educationalists retained a sense of mission. Equality in education was not only the overriding good, irrespective of the practical effects of egalitarian policies on particular schools; it was a stepping stone to achieving equality in society, which was itself an unquestioned good. It was soon clear to me that on the whole I was not among friends.
The counter-argument would presumably be that since I was seeking to challenge the conventional wisdom in education, I could hardly complain when I met with opposition. There are, however, two considerations which must be weighed against that. First, civil servants owe ministers honest, accurate advice based on fact, rather than slanted submissions based on preconceptions that the Government (and the electorate) have rejected. Second, it is highly damaging, even judged by the narrow criteria of good and impartial administration, for a department to become as closely connected with its clients as the DES was with the teaching unions, in particular the National Union of Teachers (NUT). I saw this in the flesh quite early on when on Saturday 12 September 1970 I was deputed at the last moment, because of the Leila Khalid affair,[14] to deliver Ted Heath’s speech at a Guildhall dinner to celebrate the centenary of the NUT. There were a large number of DES senior civil servants present and it was immediately clear to me that they and the NUT leaders were on the closest of terms. There were all those in-jokes, unstated allusions, and what is now called ‘body language’ which signify not just common courtesy but rather a common sympathy.
My difficulties with the civil service were compounded by the fact that we had been elected in 1970 with a set of education policies which were perhaps less clear than they appeared. During the campaign I had hammered away at seven points:
• a shift of emphasis onto primary schools
• the expansion of nursery education (which fitted in with Keith Joseph’s theme of arresting the ‘cycle of deprivation’)
• in secondary education, the right of local education authorities to decide what was best for their areas, while warning against making ‘irrevocable changes to any good school unless… the alternative is better’
• raising the school leaving age to sixteen
• encouraging direct grant schools and retaining private schools[15]
• expanding higher and further education
• holding an inquiry into teacher training
But those pledges did not reflect a clear philosophy. As I have already indicated, different people and different groups within the Conservative Party favoured very different approaches to education, in particular to secondary education and the grammar schools. On the one hand, there were some Tories who had a commitment to comprehensive education which barely distinguished them from moderate socialists. On the other, the authors of the so-called Black Papers on education had, to their credit, started to spell out a radically different approach, based on discipline, choice and standards (including the retention of existing grammar schools with high standards). Their case was strongly founded in well-informed criticisms of the present system. We were caught between these two opposing views. And for all our talk of coherent strategies and deliberate decision-making, this was not a government which felt any inclination to resolve fundamental contradictions. I was very conscious that in any struggle with the civil service I might not be able to count on the support of all my Cabinet colleagues.
GRAMMATICALLY INCORRECT
On that first day at the department I brought with me a list of about fifteen points for action which I had written down over the weekend at Lamberhurst in an old exercise book. After enlarging upon them, I tore out the pages and gave them to Bill Pile. The most immediate action point was the withdrawal of Tony Crosland’s Circular 10/65, under which local authorities were required to submit plans for reorganizing secondary education on completely comprehensive lines, and Circular 10/66, issued the following year, which withheld capital funding from local education authorities that refused to go comprehensive.
The department must have known that this was in our manifesto — they always scrutinize the Opposition parties’ policies during an election campaign. But apparently they thought that the policy could be watered down, or at least its implementation postponed. I, for my part, knew that the pledge to stop pressuring local authorities to go comprehensive was of great importance to our supporters, that any delay would be taken as a sign of weakness, and that it was important to act speedily in order to end uncertainty. Consequently, even before I had given Bill Pile my fifteen points, I had told the press that I would immediately withdraw Labour’s Circulars. I even indicated that this would have happened by the time of the Queen’s Speech. The alarm this provoked seems to have made its way to No. 10, for I was reminded that I should have Cabinet’s agreement to the policy, though of course this was only a formality.
More seriously, I had not understood that the withdrawal of one Circular requires the issue of another. This was a technicality, but it was one which those who disagreed with the-policy inside and outside the department used to maximum effect. My civil servants made no secret of the fact that they considered that a Circular should contain a good deal of material setting out the department’s views on its preferred shape for secondary education in the country as a whole. This might take for ever, and in any event I did not see things that way. The essence of our policy was to encourage variety and choice rather than ‘plan’ the system. Moreover, to the extent that it was necessary to lay down from the centre the criteria by which local authorities’ reorganization proposals would be judged, this could be done now in general terms, with any further elaboration taking place later. It was immensely difficult to persuade them that I was serious. I eventually succeeded by doing an initial draft myself: they quickly decided that cooperation was the better part of valour. And in the end a very short Circular — referred to as Circular 10/70 — was issued on Tuesday 30 June in good time for the Education Debate on the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday 8 July.
I now came under fierce attack from the educational establishment because I had failed to engage in the ‘normal consultation’ which took place before a Circular was issued. I felt no need to apologize. As I put it in my speech in the House, we had after all ‘just completed the biggest consultation of all’, that is a general election. But this carried little weight with those who had spent the last twenty-five years convinced that they knew best. Ted Short, Labour’s Education spokesman, himself a former schoolmaster, even went so far as to suggest that, in protest, teachers should refuse to mark 11-Plus exam papers. A delegation from the NUT came to see me to complain about what I. had done. Significantly, the brunt of their criticism was that I had ‘resigned responsibility for giving shape to education’. If indeed that had been my responsibility, I do not think the NUT would have liked the shape I would have given it.
In fact, the policy which I now pursued was more nuanced than the caricatures it attracted — though a good deal could have been said for the positions caricatured. Circular 10/70 withdrew the relevant Labour Government Circulars and then went on: ‘The Secretary of State will expect educational considerations in general, local needs and wishes in particular and the wise use of resources to be the main principles determining the local pattern.’ It also made it clear that the presumption was basically against upheaval: ‘where a particular pattern of organization is working well and commands general support the Secretary of State does not wish to cause further change without good reason’.
Strange though it may seem, although local education authorities had been used to sending in general plans for reorganization of all the schools under their control, neither these nor the Secretary of State’s comments on them had any legal standing. The law only entered the picture when the notices were issued under Section 13 of the 1944 Education Act. This required local education authorities to give public notice — and notice to the department — of their intention to close or open a school, significantly alter its character, or change the age range of its pupils. Locally, this gave concerned parents, school governors and residents two months in which to object. Nationally, it gave me, as Secretary of State, the opportunity to intervene. It read: ‘Any proposals submitted to the Secretary of State under this section may be approved by him after making such modifications therein, if any, as appear to him desirable.’
The use of these powers to protect particular good schools against sweeping reorganization was not only a departure from Labour policy; it was also a conscious departure from the line taken by Edward Boyle, who had described Section 13 as ‘reserve powers’. But as a lawyer myself and as someone who believed that decisions about changing and closing schools should be sensitive to local opinion, I thought it best to base my policy on the Section 13 powers rather than on exhortation through Circulars. This may sound arbitrary, but in fact I was very conscious that my actions were subject to the scrutiny of the courts and that the grounds on which I could intervene were limited. And by the time I made my speech in the debate I was in a position to spell out more clearly how this general approach would be implemented.
My policy had a further advantage, though it was not one that it would have been politically prudent to expound. At a time when even Conservative education authorities were bitten with the bug of comprehensivization, it offered the best chance of saving good local grammar schools. The administrative disadvantage was that close scrutiny of large numbers of individual proposals meant delays in giving the department’s response. Inevitably, I was attacked on the grounds that I was holding back in order to defer the closure of more grammar schools. But in this the critics were unjust. I took a close interest in speeding up the responses. It was just that we were deluged.
A further point I dealt with in that first Commons debate as Education Secretary was the argument, constantly advanced by the proponents of wholesale comprehensivization, that it was impossible to have a ‘mixed’ system of both comprehensive and grammar schools. Although, in truth, this was just a more sophisticated version of the argument that the egalitarian educationalist knows best, it was superficially persuasive. It is, after all, impossible in theory to divide a given group of children between grammars and secondary moderns and to mix them all together in one comprehensive school. Either the children will not be selected or they will not be mixed. But this theoretical argument ignored the fact that, given a large enough ‘catchment’ area, it was possible to have selective schools and schools with the full range of ability in operation at the same time. As I pointed out in answer to Ted Short in the debate:
Certainly, with a small rural area, I do not believe that it would be possible to have a comprehensive school and a grammar school, but in some of the very large urban areas it is possible, because the grammar school and direct grant school have quite different catchment areas from the comprehensive school. [Hon. Members: ‘Impossible.’] It is of little avail for Hon. Gentlemen opposite to say that this is impossible, because it happens now. Some of the best comprehensive schools are in areas where there are very good selective schools.
For all the political noise which arose from this change of policy, its practical effects were limited. During the whole of my time as Education Secretary we considered some 3,600 proposals for reorganization — the great majority of them proposals for comprehensivization — of which I rejected only 325, or about 9 per cent. In the summer of 1970 it had seemed possible that many more authorities might decide to reverse or halt their plans. For example, Conservative-controlled Birmingham was one of the first education authorities to welcome Circular 10/70. A bitter fight had been carried on to save the city’s thirty-six grammar schools. But in 1972 Labour took control and put forward its own plans for comprehensivization. I rejected sixty of the council’s 112 proposals in June 1973, saving eighteen of the city’s grammar schools.
Similarly, Richmond Council in Surrey had refused to come forward with a scheme under the Labour Government’s Circular 10/65, but in September 1970 voted by a large majority to end selection. I had no choice but to give my approval to the change the following year.
Perhaps the most awkward decisions I had to make related to Barnet, which included my own constituency. The Conservative-controlled Barnet Council decided to go comprehensive in October 1970, having conducted a survey of parents in which 79 per cent apparently favoured ending selection. (In fact, other national opinion polls showed a great deal of confusion on the issue, with a majority of people favouring both comprehensive education and the retention of grammar schools.) There was fierce opposition to Barnet’s scheme, and in January 1971 I received 5,400 letters of protest. The following month I approved a scheme which ended two grammar schools, but I saved a third on the grounds that the proposed merger would lead to an inconvenient divided-site school. In April I saved another grammar school and in June blocked two more schemes, thus saving a good secondary modern and another grammar school. The Conservative Party locally was split and I was censured by the local council. Most of the borough’s secondary schools in fact went comprehensive that September. The local authority kept reformulating its plans. Christ’s College and Woodhouse Grammar Schools were the main bones of contention. They were still grammar schools when I became Leader of the Opposition in 1975; they only became part of a comprehensive system (in Woodhouse’s case, a sixth-form college) in 1978 after Labour’s 1976 Education Act scrapped Section 13 and attempted to impose a comprehensive system from the centre on England and Wales.
In retrospect, it is clear that a near obsessive concern with educational structures characterized the 1960s and seventies. It is not that structures — either at the level of administration or at the level of schools — are unimportant. But educational theorists manifest a self-confidence which events have done nothing to justify when they claim that there is one system which in all circumstances and for all individuals is better than another. During my time at the DES I came across this attitude above all when dealing with plans for secondary school reorganization, in the prejudice against grammar schools: they even wanted to eliminate streaming by ability within schools. I tried to convince Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools (HMI) that whatever their theories might suggest, they should at least recognize that there were large numbers of excellent teachers in grammar schools doing a first-class job, and that they were having the heart taken out of them by the tone of so many HMI Reports.
The view that a Utopian, monolithic structure could be devised and implemented without trauma was also exploded time and again as I heard the experience of individual parents. People living in a crime-ridden council estate with a comprehensive ‘community school’, to which their catchment area under local authority regulation required them to send their children, were often desperate to get out. The lucky few who had a direct grant school in the vicinity might be able to do so. But some socialist local education authorities refused to take up places allocated to them at direct grant schools because they objected to independent schools on doctrinaire grounds. I had to intervene to ensure that these places were filled. But in any case only a limited number of parents and children could escape from bad conditions in this way. I found it heartbreaking to tell mothers that there was little or nothing I could do under the present system.
Only later — first with the Assisted Places Scheme and then with grant-maintained schools — could I, as Prime Minister, do something substantial to help.[16] Not that this situation, which continues today, is entirely satisfactory. We need to make it easier to start up new schools so as to widen parental choice. And the argument for education vouchers becomes stronger every day. They would finally bridge the gap between the independent and state sectors.
There is a further consideration which I have only come to appreciate in recent years. In defending grammar schools, Con servatives were rightly defending an existing institution that provided a fine education for children of all backgrounds. But we were also defending a principle — namely, that the state should select children by the single criterion of ability and direct them to one of only two sorts of school — that is far more consonant with socialism and collectivism than with the spontaneous social order associated with liberalism and conservatism. State selection by ability is, after all, a form of manpower planning. And variety and excellence in education are far more securely founded, and far more politically defensible, when parental choice rather than state selection of children by ability is their justification.
Be that as it may, by the end of 1970 it was already becoming clear that there would be no swing away from comprehensive education.
SCIENCE AND TEACHER TRAINING
I arrived at the Department of Education with a strong personal interest in science, and the science responsibilities of the DES were mine alone. At that time a block sum was allocated on the advice of scientists between five research councils — covering science and engineering, medicine, agriculture, the environment and social science. But discussion of science policy was soon dominated by the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS or ‘think tank’) Report which formed the basis of the White Paper of July 1972, A Framework for Government Research and Development. Its central recommendation was that a proportion of this money should henceforth be allocated to the relevant Government department so that it could decide the projects to be financed by its own council — the so-called ‘customer-contractor’ principle. Although I did not oppose the principle, I was worried that it would reduce the amount of money at the direct disposal of the research councils — unless there was an increase in the total science budget.
All this may seem of limited importance. And indeed in terms of overall science policy it was. That was part of the problem. Arguments about the precise relations between departments and research councils were irrelevant to the wider and crucially impor tant question of the Government’s strategic role in scientific research. Ted’s view was that pure research was not really work for Government-funded research and development, though he recognized that in any research establishment there was bound to be some proportion of pure or basic research. My view was precisely the opposite. It was only years later, when I was Prime Minister, that I was able to formulate my own answer to the problem, which was that Government should concentrate on funding basic science and leave its application and development to the private sector. But I already felt deeply uneasy about any policy that threatened to starve pure science of funds.
In one particular instance, I was involved directly in supporting a large and expensive project on the frontiers of science. This was the decision to join in European plans for a giant proton accelerator, or ‘atom smasher’, to elucidate the ultimate structure of matter, a project from which the previous Labour Government had withdrawn in 1968. As part of the Government’s early spending curbs we too had drawn back from this project, which some people considered too expensive, given its theoretical nature. But I was haunted by the knowledge that if Britain had not pressed ahead with some nuclear research even in the cash-strapped thirties, Britain and America would not have developed the atomic bomb which first secured victory in the Second World War and later protected Western Europe against Stalin. It was a vital lesson. So in September 1970 I went with Sir Brian Flowers, Chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council, to the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva to see for myself what was envisaged and learn more about the science and its possibilities. I came back convinced that if we could ensure sound financial control the twelve-nation project was worth backing, and managed to convince my colleagues to this effect.
Generally, though, I did not feel that the Government’s approach to science was radical or imaginative enough. I suspect that many scientists — and not just those with a professional axe to grind — thought so too. On Tuesday 26 June 1973 Ted held a dinner at No. 10 for British Nobel Prize winners in science — among them my old Oxford tutor, Dorothy Hodgkin. Naturally, I attended as well. For several reasons it was an illuminating occasion. Ted set the discussion against the background of Britain’s entry into the European Community, which he thought historians would conclude was the greatest achievement of his administration. He presented science as something to be applied so as to allow British industry to take advantage of access to the European market. There was some support for this view, but there were also some criticisms which represented my own standpoint. Essentially, this was that government should fund pure science, rather than organizing Europe’s scientists together in vast projects to make European economies technologically more competitive. Science was already international; the expansion of the European Community would not make a good deal of difference; and international science depended upon a number of people working separately in different countries. Arguably the less they were officially organized, the better the results would be. A commonsense exception to this rule was when the investment required was so costly that no one nation could afford it — hence my support for CERN.
So I was somewhat sceptical about the science policy that I as minister had to implement. But the policy never amounted to much. Science is less amenable to political direction than politicians like to think. Indeed, the history of science is in many ways more similar to the history of imaginative art than to economic history. The great scientific advances have not come from ‘practical’ plans for research and development but from creative scientific minds — the sort of minds which were around the dinner table that evening with Ted and me — people who by pushing outward at the frontiers of knowledge unlock the secrets of the universe. Politicians are reluctant to accept this; they want a quick technological fix and a quick pay-off into the bargain. Scientists rightly take a longer view. When Gladstone met Michael Faraday, he asked him whether his work on electricity would be of any use. ‘Yes, sir,’ remarked Faraday with prescience. ‘One day you will tax it.’
My second area of frustration was that of teacher training. As I have already mentioned, the manifesto had committed us to set up an inquiry into it. This was one of the points which figured large on the list I handed to Bill Pile on my first day in the department. I already held strong views on the subject. It seemed to me that the large increase in the number of teachers had to some extent been at the expense of quality. Although there were continuing difficulties about finding enough student teachers wanting to go into mathematics and sciences, there was not much substance to the complaints about ‘teacher shortages’. The real shortage was in the number of good teachers. Changing the salary structure of the profession would help by rewarding and encouraging long-serving and senior teachers, though the NUT was very wary of increased differentials. But teacher training was the key.
I wanted a serious investigation into whether trainee teachers were being taught the right subjects in the right way and at the right level. So I appointed Lord James of Rusholme, a former Headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, one of the country’s great schools, as Chairman of an inquiry into teacher training. I insisted that those who served with him should work virtually fulltime and that their report be completed within a year; it was duly published in January 1972. The report was workmanlike and made a number of sensible suggestions. It placed the greater emphasis I wanted on in-service training so that teachers really knew how to cope with a class full of children. Second, it proposed a new, two-year Diploma in Higher Education — for which I had also pressed — in which future teachers would study side by side with others who intended going into industry or the professions. But the fact that it confined itself to the structure rather than the curriculum content of teacher training limited its value. In effect, I got nowhere in my attempts to get the curriculum of the teacher training institutions discussed within the planned inquiry. It was still regarded as taboo for politicians to become involved in such matters. Fifteen years later the situation had not materially improved. As Prime Minister, I would still be puzzling about how to raise the quality of the teaching profession.
Still, although I was very critical of the outlook of many teacher trade unionists (who were in some cases more trade unionists than teachers), my final impression gained from my years at the DES was of the sincerity and commitment of most teachers. Sometimes teachers from the most difficult schools dealing with ‘problem’ children (who could usually be traced back to ‘problem’ parents) would come in to the department to tell me of their experience. On other occasions, I would talk to them in their schools and see something of what they had to cope with in their classrooms.
The teacher can never be a sufficient substitute for the family: yet a good teacher cannot ignore what happens to the child when he or she goes home, perhaps to be ill-treated. On one occasion, someone put the dilemma to me:
At 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon when the other children have gone home, one child clings to you and begs not to leave. You feel sure — but you cannot prove — that something is seriously wrong. Perhaps there is violence or neglect, or just deep unhappiness from one source or another. Do you walk the child home and tell his parents that he seems a bit off-colour; saying, of course, that he has not complained or been a nuisance; but gently enquiring if anything is wrong? You don’t know whether the child may be beaten as soon as you leave. Do you alert the authorities? That may have even more traumatic consequences. Or do you do nothing and hope that it’s just a temporary problem which will sort itself out? Well, Mrs Thatcher, what would you do?
There is no single good answer to this question. And despite our agonizings over such cases, we have still not found a solution that is right for all circumstances. We need teachers, social workers and policemen who are trained to recognize the symptoms of abuse, while remembering the commonsense reality that most parents love their children. Of the three, teachers are by far the most important because they know the child personally and see him or her almost every day. If they are to carry out this delicate and important task they can do so only if their authority is fully restored, not only over the child but also in the eyes of the parent. And when that happens, the bad parent is more likely to be held in check.
MILKING PUBLICITY
In one respect at least, the Department of Education was an excellent preparation for the premiership. I came under savage and unremitting attack that was only distantly related to my crimes.
But it did not begin like that. I have described the arguments about grammar schools and comprehensives. Yet these caused me only limited trouble, partly because many people — and not just Conservatives — agreed with me and partly because I was the bringer of good tidings in other matters. For example, I was hailed in a modest way as the saviour of the Open University. In Opposition both Iain Macleod and Edward Boyle, who thought that there were educational priorities more deserving of Government help, had committed themselves in public against it. And although its abolition was not in the manifesto, many people expected it to perish. But I was genuinely attracted to the concept of a ‘University of the Airwaves’, as it was often called, because I thought that it was an inexpensive way of giving wider access to higher education, because I thought that trainee teachers in particular would benefit from it, because I was alert to the opportunities offered by technology to bring the best teaching to schoolchildren and students, and above all because it gave people a second chance in life. In any case, the university was due to take its first students that autumn, and cancellation would have been both expensive and a blow to many hopes. On condition that I agreed to reduce the immediate intake of students and find other savings, my Cabinet colleagues allowed the Open University to go ahead.
There were more discussions of public expenditure that autumn of 1970. The Treasury had its little list of savings for the education budget — including charges for libraries, museums, school meals and school milk. I knew from my own experience in Grantham how vital it was to have access to books. So I persuaded the Cabinet to drop the proposed library charges, while reluctantly accepting entry charges for museums and galleries. (We kept one free day.) But pressure for more cuts was maintained, and I had to come up with a list of priority targets.
Savings on school meals and school milk were, I had to admit, an obvious candidate. There seemed no reason why families who could afford to do so should not make a larger contribution to the cost of school meals. I thought that I could defend such cuts if I could demonstrate that some of the money saved would go towards meeting the priority which we had set, namely the primary school building programme. And within the Department of Education budget it seemed logical that spending on education should come before ‘welfare’ spending, which should in principle fall to Keith Joseph’s department, Social Services.
As for milk, there were already mixed views on health grounds about the advantage of providing it. When I was at Huntingtower Road Primary School my parents paid 2½d a week for my school milk: and there were no complaints. By 1970 very few children were so deprived that school milk was essential for their nourishment. Tony Barber, who became Chancellor in July 1970, after the death of Iain Macleod, wanted me to abolish free school milk altogether. But I was more cautious, both on political and on welfare grounds. I managed to hold the line at an increased price for school meals and the withdrawal of free milk from primary school children over the age of seven. These modest changes came with safeguards: children in need of milk for medical reasons continued to receive it until they went to secondary school. All in all, I had defended the education budget effectively.
Nor was this lost on the press. The Daily Mail said that I had emerged as a ‘new heroine’. The Daily Telegraph drew attention to my plans to improve 460 of the oldest primary schools. The Guardian noted: ‘School meals and milk were the main casualties in a remarkably light raid on the education budget. Mrs Thatcher has won her battle to preserve a high school-building programme and turn it to the replacement of old primary schools.’
It was pleasant while it lasted.
The trouble was, it didn’t last long. Six months later we had to introduce a Bill to remove the legal duty for local education authorities to provide free milk and allow them discretion to make it available for a small charge. This gave Labour the parliamentary opportunity to cause havoc.
Even before that, however, the newspapers had unearthed the potential in stories about school meals. One report claimed that some local education authorities were going to charge children who brought sandwiches to school for their lunch. ‘Sandwich Kids In “Fines” Storm’ was how the Sun put it. Labour provided a parliamentary chorus. I introduced a circular to prevent the practice. But that story in turn restored attention to the increase in school meal charges. Overnight the number of children eating such meals became a politically sensitive indicator. The old arguments about the ‘stigma’ of means-tested benefits, which I had come to know so well as a Parliamentary Secretary in the 1960s, surfaced again. It was said that children from families poor enough to be entitled to free school meals would be humiliated when better-off classmates paid for their own. Probably unwisely, I came up with a suggestion in a television programme that this could be avoided if mothers sent dinner money to schools in envelopes. The teachers could put the change back in the envelope. A poor child entitled to free meals would bring an envelope with coins that would just be put back again by the teacher. This, of course, just added a new twist to the story.
In any case, it was not long before the great ‘milk row’ dwarfed debate about meals. Newspapers which had congratulated me on my success in protecting the education budget at the expense of cuts in milk and meals suddenly changed their tune. The Guardian described the Education (Milk) Bill as ‘a vindictive measure which should never have been laid before Parliament’. The Daily Mail told me to ‘think again’. The Sun demanded to know: ‘Is Mrs Thatcher Human?’ But it was a speaker at the Labour Party Conference who seems to have suggested to the press the catchy title ‘Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher’.
When the press discover a rich vein they naturally exhaust it. After all, editors and journalists have a living to earn, and politicians are fair game. So it seemed as if every day some variant of the theme would emerge. For example, a Labour council was discovered to be considering buying its own herd of cows to provide milk for its children. Local education authorities sought to evade the legislation by serving up milky drinks but not milk. Councils which were not education authorities took steps to provide free milk for children aged seven to eleven under powers contained in the Local Government Act 1963. Only in Scotland and Wales did the action of councils involve a breach of the law, and it was for my Cabinet colleagues in the Scottish and Welsh departments to deal with the consequences of that rather than for me. But there was no doubt where the blame for it all was felt to lie. The campaign against me reached something of a climax in November 1971 when the Sun voted me ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.
Perhaps I had been naive in thinking that doing what was generally agreed to be best for education was likely to count in argument about the sacrifices required. The local authorities, for blatantly political reasons, were unwilling to sell milk to the children, and it was almost impossible to force them to do so. I learned a valuable lesson. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit. I and my colleagues were caught up in battles with local authorities for months, during which we suffered constant sniping in the media, all for a saving of £9 million which could have been cut from the capital budget with scarcely a ripple. I resolved not to make the same mistake again. In future if I were to be hanged, it would be for a sheep, not a lamb, still less a cow.
By now I was hurt and upset, somewhat sadder but considerably wiser. It is probably true that a woman — even a woman who has lived a professional life in a man’s world — is more emotionally vulnerable to personal abuse than most men. The image which my opponents and the press had painted of me as callously attacking the welfare of young children was one which, as someone who was never happier than in children’s company, I found deeply wounding. But any politician who wants to hold high office must be prepared to go through something like this. Some are broken by it, others strengthened. Denis, always the essence of commonsense, came through magnificently. If I survived, it was due to his love and support. I later developed the habit of not poring over articles and profiles in the newspapers about myself. I came to rely instead on briefings and summaries. If what the press wrote was false, I could ignore it; and if it was true, I already knew it.
Throughout 1971 as the assault on me was being mounted over the issue of school milk, I was locked in battle within the Cabinet on public spending. It was politically vital to my argument about school meals and milk that the primary school building programme — crucial to the emphasis our policy placed on primary education generally — should go ahead as envisaged. So within the department I rejected early suggestions of compromise with the Treasury budget cutters. In a note to Bill Pile in April 1971 I laid down our last-ditch position: ‘We cannot settle for less than last year in real terms.’
This was more than political realism. I felt that other colleagues, who had not delivered the painful savings I had made, had been allowed to get away with it. In return for the cuts in meals and milk I had obtained agreement on the size of the school building programme for just one year ahead. But since it takes several years to plan and build a school, the promise had implications for future years. Others had won agreement for continuing expenditure over the whole five-year period of our public expenditure planning, the so-called Public Expenditure Survey Committee (PESC) system. Moreover, my department was now offering savings of over £100 million on higher education to the Treasury, while huge sums were still being paid out in industrial subsidies.
I could not reach agreement with Maurice Macmillan, then Chief Secretary, and so appealed, as any Cabinet minister has a right to do, to Cabinet. But I was then irritated to learn that No. 10 had decided that I would not be allowed to put in a paper. I wrote a sharply worded letter to Ted pointing out the pressures I was under to announce the 1973/74 school building programme. The letter concluded:
You are constantly urging us to improve departmental administration. At present I am being prevented from doing just that on the capital building side.
I urgently need a good 73/74 programme which takes into account my last year’s extensive cuts. The third, fourth and fifth years can be left to the PESC meetings but I hope to agree them then.
I’m afraid this letter sounds terse, but you would be critical if it were long. May I see you when you return from Paris?
I won his agreement to put in my paper in June 1971 — and I got my way. At Cabinet later that month I succeeded in obtaining almost everything that I wanted for the school building programme. It was just in time to announce to the annual conference of the Association of Education Committees in Eastbourne and prompted such headlines as ‘Record Programme to Improve Old Primary Schools’.
On my arrival at the DES, that really had been the priority for me. Because of it, as I have just explained, I had to make (or at least accept) spending decisions which made life extraordinarily difficult. I felt that in the 1970s it was wrong for schools still to have leaky roofs, primitive equipment and outside lavatories. Moreover, now that the demographic ‘bulge’ of primary-school-age children had more or less been accommodated — the peak was in 1973 — there was some financial leeway to improve the quality of the often very old and gloomy schools which had been kept in use.
It was, however, graphically demonstrated to me when I visited a new school in south London that there was a lot more to improving education than bricks and mortar. The teachers who showed me round were obviously members of the academic awkward squad. One of them told me that the children at this school were upset that some of their friends had to go to an old school in the neighbourhood. And indeed most of the children had clearly been well coached to support this view. But one of them spoke up, to the teachers’ evident embarrassment, to challenge this, saying: ‘Oh, I am not sure that’s right. Before I came here I went to a school which was older than this and smaller; but it was cosier, more friendly, and we knew where we were.’ As time went by, I too felt increasingly strongly about the importance of smaller schools. I also came to consider in later years that we had all of us been too interested in the ‘inputs’ (new buildings, expensive equipment and, above all, more and more teachers) rather than the ‘outputs’ (quality of teaching, levels of achievement and standards of behaviour).
Oddly, perhaps, it was not mainly by reading thoughtful analyses or arguing with perceptive critics that I gradually formed my views about what was wrong with the educational system — and the educational establishment which lived off it — but rather by practical, almost random, experience of what was actually happening in schools.
Take primary school education. Few would quarrel with the assertion that those first years of schooling are essential to a child’s formation. But what were these young children actually to be taught — and how? The Plowden Report commissioned by the previous Conservative Minister of Education, Edward Boyle, and regarded by almost everyone as the last word in expert opinion, leaned strongly in favour of teaching in small groups and even one-to-one, rather than classes. I had no strong views on the matter when I arrived at the DES, and the report was well argued. But I now suspect that it sent primary schools in the wrong direction for a generation. Again, my doubts only started to surface when I visited schools and found that in reality individual children were often not being taught in a group, let alone in a class, but were largely left to their own — not necessarily very useful — devices. I saw how in large, open-plan classrooms, groups were inclined to disintegrate into a disorderly hubbub in which quieter children felt lost and even intimidated. I came back to the department and told the Ministry’s architects’ department not to encourage this type of open-plan school.
What I rejected right from the start was the idea, fashionable among the middle classes as much as among experts, that the best way for a child to learn was by self-discovery. This belief entailed the abandonment of the kind of education my generation had had as mere ‘learning by rote’. In fact, any worthwhile education involves the teaching of knowledge, memory training, the ability to apply what one has learned and the self-discipline required for all of these. In all the frenzy of theorizing, these truths were forgotten.
STUDENT PRINCES
Whether or not the acclaim for my defence of the primary school building programme was justified, it soon faded away as a new agitation over the financing of student unions got under way. Unlike the controversy over school milk, this was largely a campaign organized by the hard Left. It was, therefore, less politically dangerous. But it was very vicious. Nor was it just directed against me. My daughter Carol, reading Law at University College, London, also had a hard time. I was thankful she was living at home.
In both Europe and the United States this was the height of the period of ‘student revolution’. Looking back, it is extraordinary that so much notice should have been taken of the kindergarten Marxism and egocentric demands which characterized it. In part, it was a development of that youth cult of the 1960s whereby the young were regarded as a source of pure insight into the human condition. In response, many students accordingly expected their opinions to be treated with reverence.
Yet the student protests of the time, far from being in the vanguard of progress, were phenomena of a world which was about to pass away. The universities had been expanded too quickly in the 1960s. In many cases standards had fallen and the traditional character of the universities had been lost. Moreover, this had occurred at a time when market principles were in retreat and the assumption was near-universal that everyone had a right to a job and the state had the power to give it to them. So these rootless young people lacked both the authority which had been imposed on their predecessors in the 1950s and the discipline which the need to qualify for a good job would place on students in the eighties.
The Left had managed to gain control of many student unions, and therefore of the public money which financed them, using this position to mount campaigns of disruption which infuriated ordinary taxpayers and ratepayers and even many students who simply wanted to study. There were two aspects: first, the financing of student bodies, and second what those bodies did. On the first, the main source of money for student unions was subscriptions out of mandatory grants received from their local education authorities. Union membership was normally obligatory and the union subscription was then paid direct to the student union. As regards activities, some student unions took advantage of this to spend the revenue on partisan purposes, often in defiance of both their constitution and the wishes of their members.
In July 1971 I put proposals to the Home and Social Affairs Committee of the Cabinet (HS) for reform. I had considered setting up a Registrar of student unions, but that would have required legislation. So I limited myself to proposing something more modest. In future, the union subscription should not be included in the fees payable to colleges and universities. The student maintenance grant would be increased slightly to enable students to join particular clubs or societies on a voluntary basis. Responsibility for providing student union facilities would then be placed on each academic institution. The facilities of each union would be open to all students, whether or not they were members of the union. Besides dealing with the question of accountability for public money, these changes would also abolish the closed-shop element in student unions which I found deeply objectionable on grounds of principle. HS was not prepared to go along with my proposals immediately, but I came back to the argument, fully recognizing how controversial they would be, and gained the Committee’s approval.
Bill Van Straubenzee was the minister directly responsible for dealing with consultations on the proposals. But I was the one immediately marked down as the hate-figure to be targeted for them. Student mobs hounded me wherever I went. In early November in Leeds, where I was laying a stone to mark the construction of new buildings, about 500 students tried to shout me down. Later that month 2,000 screaming students tried to prevent my presenting the designation document of the South Bank Polytechnic at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A dozen mounted police had to protect my car. In December the student protesters found time from their studies to organize a nationwide day of protest. My effigy was burnt at various universities.
By now many of the Vice-Chancellors and college authorities were giving tacit approval to the protests. Edward Boyle even addressed a mass meeting of students at Leeds to declare his opposition to my proposals. Since these had only been put out for consultation — though ‘consultation’ is not the most obvious description of what had occurred — it was perfectly possible to allow tempers to cool and to delay action, which I did. The main problem was that until university authorities themselves were prepared to uphold the values of a university and exert some authority, no proposal for reform was likely to succeed. This was also the time when freedom of speech began to be denied by groups of students, who were then indulged by nervous university authorities. University intolerance was at its most violent in the early seventies. But, less visible and more institutionalized, the same censorship continues today.
TRYING, STILL TRYING…
1971 had been a crucial year for the Government and for me personally. The pressures which mounted were all the more intolerable because they were cumulative. As I shall describe, the Government’s self-confidence broke in early 1972.[17] Somehow, although under greater strain than at any time before or since, my own held.
But a number of commentators, with varying mixtures of relish and regret, thought that I was done for. On my return after the Christmas holiday at Lamberhurst, I was able to read my fate openly discussed in the newspapers. One described me as ‘The Lady Nobody Loves’. Another published a thoughtful article entitled ‘Why Mrs Thatcher is so Unpopular’. But I pushed the stuff aside and concentrated on my red boxes.
In fact, it was not long before the tide — for me personally, though not for the Government — began to turn. Probably the ‘milk snatcher’ campaign had in any case come to the end of its natural life. The far more serious issues of 1972 were now upon us — the miners’ strike and the various elements of the U-turn[18] — and these dwarfed the personal campaign against me. And, of course, I was evidently not going to buckle or depart — at least voluntarily. But I owe a debt of gratitude to Ted Heath as well.
Ted asked me and my officials down to Chequers on Wednesday 12 January to have a general discussion about education. I took with me an aide-mémoire summing up the situation and looking ahead. In spite of all the difficulties, there was only one pre-election commitment which still remained to be implemented: the expansion of nursery education. More money was needed if something substantial was to be achieved. The other area in which our supporters were disappointed was secondary school organization. There the problem was, as I put it, ‘many of our own local councils are running with the comprehensive tide. The question is what sort of balance should be struck between defending existing grammar schools and leaving local education authorities free to make their own decisions?’ We discussed both these points at Chequers, as well as other irritants such as school milk and student unions. Ted was clearly interested. He was keen on nursery education; he had been pressing for action on student unions; and he very reasonably asked whether we could not use educational arguments in justifying our policy on selection, rather than just resting on the arguments about local authority autonomy.
From my point of view, however, at least as important as the discussion was the fact that by inviting me down with my officials Ted implied that there was no intention to move me from Education in the foreseeable future. This was a useful, indeed — facing the problems I did — a vital reinforcement for my authority. Ted went on a few days later in the House to list my achievements. Why did he give me such strong support? Some felt that he needed a woman in the Cabinet and it was difficult to find a credible alternative candidate. But I like to think that it also showed Ted’s character at its admirable best. He knew that the policies for which I had been so roundly attacked were essentially policies which I had reluctantly accepted under pressure from the Treasury and the requirements of public finance. He also knew that I had not tried to shift the blame onto others. However unreliable his adherence to particular policies, he always stood by people who did their best for him and his Government. This was one of the better reasons why his Cabinet reciprocated by remaining united behind him.
Ted’s expressions of support provided me with no more than a breathing space. But it was enough. From the spring of 1972 the chilly political climate in which I had been living began noticeably to thaw. My speech to the NUT in April was well received, not just by most of the audience (which cheered me at the end) but, more importantly, by the press in general. Unusually, the proposals it contained appealed across the political spectrum. I announced an increase in the school building programme, now running at a record level. I also announced the setting-up of a committee to inquire into the teaching of reading in schools and the use of English — matters which were already the subject of widespread concern. I hinted at a further expansion of nursery education, though drawing attention to the problem of financing it. But what seized the imagination of the commentators was my criticism of giant comprehensive schools. (I elaborated on this last point at a press conference after the speech, noting that I had just rejected plans for a school for 2,700 pupils in Wiltshire.)
As I stood up to speak, there was an ill-mannered walk-out by a number of left-wing delegates. But this turned out to be an added bonus. The media not only liked the emphasis on the merits of smaller schools, but had some harsh things to say about the example given to their pupils by teachers who were not even prepared to hear the arguments. In May the same newspaper column which had described me as ‘The Lady Nobody Loves’ was celebrating ‘The Mellowing of Margaret’. And the irony was that the theme which had struck home — my advocacy of small schools — was one which I had held to since my days as a schoolgirl in Grantham.
It was, however, the Education White Paper, published in December 1972, which restored the fortunes of our education policy. The decision to publish it stemmed from discussions of the three Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) Reports which we had prepared in the department.[19] The title was the result of a last-minute decision at Cabinet. Education: A Framework for Advance was the original suggestion but, in a change which appears in retrospect to be all too typical of these over-ambitious, high-spending years, this became Education: A Framework for Expansion. The White Paper set out a ten-year plan for higher spending and better provision. There were six main points to it. There was a programme for improving or replacing old secondary schools. The building programme for special schools for handicapped children would be increased. There would be a modest improvement in school staffing ratios. To help pay for this, the rate of expansion of higher education would be restrained. We published our response to the James Committee’s recommendations on teacher training. But the most important aspect was the announcement of a major expansion of nursery education. This would be provided for up to 90 per cent of four-year-olds and 50 per cent of three-year olds, subject to demand, with priority being given in the early stages to deprived areas. In retrospect, the White Paper marks the high-point of the attempts by Government to overcome the problems inherent in Britain’s education system by throwing money at them.
The White Paper received a disconcertingly rapturous reception. The Daily Telegraph, although making some criticisms about the lack of proposals for student loans or vouchers, said that the White Paper established me ‘as one of our most distinguished reforming -and spending — Ministers of Education’. The Daily Mail described it as a ‘Quiet Revolution’ and commented, ‘there has been nothing like it since the war’. More unsettling was the Guardian’s praise for a ‘progressive programme’ and the comment — I hoped tongue in cheek — that ‘apart from not mandatorily ending 11-Plus segregation, Mrs Thatcher is more than half way towards a respectably socialist education policy’.
REALITY BITES
With the exception of some vigorous exchanges with Labour’s new and highly articulate Education spokesman, Roy Hattersley, about the rate of increase of education expenditure, the early months of 1973 were as near as any at the DES to being quiet. But the consequences of the Government’s fiscal and monetary policies were shortly to catch up with us. The first instalment was in May — a round of public expenditure cuts designed to cool the overheated economy. Capital spending in education, particularly the less politically sensitive area of higher education, was an obvious target. In the event, I staved off Treasury pressure and my building programmes were not cut.
But there were other problems in the DES budget. As inflationary pressures pushed up prices in the construction industry, an increasingly alarmed Treasury refused to sanction higher spending. The rest of the school building programme had to be slowed down as well. As October — the time for firm public expenditure decisionmaking — approached it was increasingly clear to me that public expenditure cuts were essential, and that it made political sense to agree early with Patrick Jenkin, the new Chief Secretary, on reductions in my education budget. In the event, there were cuts in the school building plans and in teacher training, and school meal prices were increased.
Nor was this the end of the search for savings. As the effects of the oil crisis and the miners’ strike bit in December, Tony Barber began a frantic search for further cuts.[20] Capital spending is the only area in which large immediate public expenditure cuts can be made. So ministers were required to reduce their capital programmes by a fifth and their procurement of supplies and other current expenditure on goods and services by a tenth. Accordingly, I implemented further cuts in the school and higher education building programmes, including most painfully a moratorium on replacing older primary schools; for the longer term there would also be a reduction in the rate of expansion of student numbers. The reduction in the DES budget for 1974/75 was £182 million — out of £1,200 million total cuts in public spending. But I did manage for the time being to salvage the nursery school programme and also building programmes for special schools.
By now, however, my mind was fast focusing on the cataclysmic events overtaking the Government. It was not long before I would have to mount my soapbox and defend the policies I had pursued in my years at Education. I found no difficulty in doing so, for on almost every front the record was one of advance. And if the measures by which ‘advance’ at this time was assessed — resources committed rather than results achieved — are accepted, it was also a record of genuine improvement. Nearly 2,000 out-of-date primary schools in England and Wales were replaced or improved. There was a substantial expansion of nursery education. I pushed through the raising of the school leaving age, which the Labour Party had had to postpone. Fewer pupils were now taught in very large classes. There were more qualified teachers and more students in higher education. But too much of my time at Education had been spent arguing about structures and resources, too little in addressing the crucial issue of the contents of education.
Equally, it was clear by the time of the general election that both the figures and more fundamentally the approach of A Framework for Expansion had been by-passed by events. There was no way that a programme of universal nursery education was affordable. Schools would have to make do with leaky roofs for many more years, until declining pupil numbers and school closures allowed resources to be better used. The Robbins Report principle — that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them’ (paragraph 31) — would have to take second place to the demands of financial stringency.
However frustrating it was to watch the shrinkage of my cherished plans and programmes, I can now see that it was unavoidable. And it may have had the side effect of forcing us to think creatively about how to get the best value from our suddenly limited resources. In the economic sphere, the crises of 1973 to 1976 led to a deep scepticism about the value of Keynesian demand management and to a new appreciation of the classical liberal economic approach of balanced budgets, low taxes and free markets. Similarly, in education and in other areas of social policy too, the realization that remedies must be found other than increased public expenditure opened up a whole new world. Fundamental questions began to be asked about whether the education system in its present form could deliver the results expected of it. Did it not in practice largely exist for the benefit of those who ran it, rather than those who received it? Was the state — whether the DES or local education authorities — doing too much, rather than too little? What did the — often superior — results of other countries’ education systems and methods have to teach us? It was becoming necessary to rethink these policies; and we were shortly to be granted plenty of time to think.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
On Monday 22 June 1970 I arrived at the Department of Education and Science (DES) in its splendid old quarters in Curzon Street (alas, in 1973 we moved to a hideous new office block at Waterloo). I was met by the Permanent Secretary, Bill (later Sir William) Pile and the outgoing Permanent Secretary, Sir Herbert Andrew. They gave me a warm greeting and showed me up to my impressive private office. It was all too easy to slip once more into the warm water of civil service respect for ‘the minister’, but I was very conscious that hard work lay ahead. I was generally satisfied with the ministerial team I had been allotted: one friendly, one hostile and one neutral. My old friend Lord Eccles, as Paymaster General, was responsible for the Arts. Bill Van Straubenzee, a close friend of Ted’s, dealt with Higher Education. Lord Belstead answered for the department in the Lords. I was particularly pleased that David Eccles, a former Minister of Education, was available, though installed in a separate building, to give me private advice based on his knowledge of the department.
My difficulties with the department, however, were not essentially about personalities. Nor, after the first culture shock, did they stem from the opposition between my own executive style of decision-making and the more consultative style to which they were accustomed. Indeed, by the time I left I was aware that I had won a somewhat grudging respect because I knew my own mind and expected my decisions to be carried out promptly and efficiently. The real problem was — in the widest sense — one of politics.
I do not know and did not enquire how the senior civil servants around me voted. But the ethos of the DES was self-righteously socialist. For the most part, these were people who retained an almost reflex belief in the ability of central planners and social theorists to create a better world. There was nothing cynical about this. Years after many people in the Labour Party had begun to have their doubts, the educationalists retained a sense of mission. Equality in education was not only the overriding good, irrespective of the practical effects of egalitarian policies on particular schools; it was a stepping stone to achieving equality in society, which was itself an unquestioned good. It was soon clear to me that on the whole I was not among friends.
The counter-argument would presumably be that since I was seeking to challenge the conventional wisdom in education, I could hardly complain when I met with opposition. There are, however, two considerations which must be weighed against that. First, civil servants owe ministers honest, accurate advice based on fact, rather than slanted submissions based on preconceptions that the Government (and the electorate) have rejected. Second, it is highly damaging, even judged by the narrow criteria of good and impartial administration, for a department to become as closely connected with its clients as the DES was with the teaching unions, in particular the National Union of Teachers (NUT). I saw this in the flesh quite early on when on Saturday 12 September 1970 I was deputed at the last moment, because of the Leila Khalid affair,[14] to deliver Ted Heath’s speech at a Guildhall dinner to celebrate the centenary of the NUT. There were a large number of DES senior civil servants present and it was immediately clear to me that they and the NUT leaders were on the closest of terms. There were all those in-jokes, unstated allusions, and what is now called ‘body language’ which signify not just common courtesy but rather a common sympathy.
My difficulties with the civil service were compounded by the fact that we had been elected in 1970 with a set of education policies which were perhaps less clear than they appeared. During the campaign I had hammered away at seven points:
• a shift of emphasis onto primary schools
• the expansion of nursery education (which fitted in with Keith Joseph’s theme of arresting the ‘cycle of deprivation’)
• in secondary education, the right of local education authorities to decide what was best for their areas, while warning against making ‘irrevocable changes to any good school unless… the alternative is better’
• raising the school leaving age to sixteen
• encouraging direct grant schools and retaining private schools[15]
• expanding higher and further education
• holding an inquiry into teacher training
But those pledges did not reflect a clear philosophy. As I have already indicated, different people and different groups within the Conservative Party favoured very different approaches to education, in particular to secondary education and the grammar schools. On the one hand, there were some Tories who had a commitment to comprehensive education which barely distinguished them from moderate socialists. On the other, the authors of the so-called Black Papers on education had, to their credit, started to spell out a radically different approach, based on discipline, choice and standards (including the retention of existing grammar schools with high standards). Their case was strongly founded in well-informed criticisms of the present system. We were caught between these two opposing views. And for all our talk of coherent strategies and deliberate decision-making, this was not a government which felt any inclination to resolve fundamental contradictions. I was very conscious that in any struggle with the civil service I might not be able to count on the support of all my Cabinet colleagues.
GRAMMATICALLY INCORRECT
On that first day at the department I brought with me a list of about fifteen points for action which I had written down over the weekend at Lamberhurst in an old exercise book. After enlarging upon them, I tore out the pages and gave them to Bill Pile. The most immediate action point was the withdrawal of Tony Crosland’s Circular 10/65, under which local authorities were required to submit plans for reorganizing secondary education on completely comprehensive lines, and Circular 10/66, issued the following year, which withheld capital funding from local education authorities that refused to go comprehensive.
The department must have known that this was in our manifesto — they always scrutinize the Opposition parties’ policies during an election campaign. But apparently they thought that the policy could be watered down, or at least its implementation postponed. I, for my part, knew that the pledge to stop pressuring local authorities to go comprehensive was of great importance to our supporters, that any delay would be taken as a sign of weakness, and that it was important to act speedily in order to end uncertainty. Consequently, even before I had given Bill Pile my fifteen points, I had told the press that I would immediately withdraw Labour’s Circulars. I even indicated that this would have happened by the time of the Queen’s Speech. The alarm this provoked seems to have made its way to No. 10, for I was reminded that I should have Cabinet’s agreement to the policy, though of course this was only a formality.
More seriously, I had not understood that the withdrawal of one Circular requires the issue of another. This was a technicality, but it was one which those who disagreed with the-policy inside and outside the department used to maximum effect. My civil servants made no secret of the fact that they considered that a Circular should contain a good deal of material setting out the department’s views on its preferred shape for secondary education in the country as a whole. This might take for ever, and in any event I did not see things that way. The essence of our policy was to encourage variety and choice rather than ‘plan’ the system. Moreover, to the extent that it was necessary to lay down from the centre the criteria by which local authorities’ reorganization proposals would be judged, this could be done now in general terms, with any further elaboration taking place later. It was immensely difficult to persuade them that I was serious. I eventually succeeded by doing an initial draft myself: they quickly decided that cooperation was the better part of valour. And in the end a very short Circular — referred to as Circular 10/70 — was issued on Tuesday 30 June in good time for the Education Debate on the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday 8 July.
I now came under fierce attack from the educational establishment because I had failed to engage in the ‘normal consultation’ which took place before a Circular was issued. I felt no need to apologize. As I put it in my speech in the House, we had after all ‘just completed the biggest consultation of all’, that is a general election. But this carried little weight with those who had spent the last twenty-five years convinced that they knew best. Ted Short, Labour’s Education spokesman, himself a former schoolmaster, even went so far as to suggest that, in protest, teachers should refuse to mark 11-Plus exam papers. A delegation from the NUT came to see me to complain about what I. had done. Significantly, the brunt of their criticism was that I had ‘resigned responsibility for giving shape to education’. If indeed that had been my responsibility, I do not think the NUT would have liked the shape I would have given it.
In fact, the policy which I now pursued was more nuanced than the caricatures it attracted — though a good deal could have been said for the positions caricatured. Circular 10/70 withdrew the relevant Labour Government Circulars and then went on: ‘The Secretary of State will expect educational considerations in general, local needs and wishes in particular and the wise use of resources to be the main principles determining the local pattern.’ It also made it clear that the presumption was basically against upheaval: ‘where a particular pattern of organization is working well and commands general support the Secretary of State does not wish to cause further change without good reason’.
Strange though it may seem, although local education authorities had been used to sending in general plans for reorganization of all the schools under their control, neither these nor the Secretary of State’s comments on them had any legal standing. The law only entered the picture when the notices were issued under Section 13 of the 1944 Education Act. This required local education authorities to give public notice — and notice to the department — of their intention to close or open a school, significantly alter its character, or change the age range of its pupils. Locally, this gave concerned parents, school governors and residents two months in which to object. Nationally, it gave me, as Secretary of State, the opportunity to intervene. It read: ‘Any proposals submitted to the Secretary of State under this section may be approved by him after making such modifications therein, if any, as appear to him desirable.’
The use of these powers to protect particular good schools against sweeping reorganization was not only a departure from Labour policy; it was also a conscious departure from the line taken by Edward Boyle, who had described Section 13 as ‘reserve powers’. But as a lawyer myself and as someone who believed that decisions about changing and closing schools should be sensitive to local opinion, I thought it best to base my policy on the Section 13 powers rather than on exhortation through Circulars. This may sound arbitrary, but in fact I was very conscious that my actions were subject to the scrutiny of the courts and that the grounds on which I could intervene were limited. And by the time I made my speech in the debate I was in a position to spell out more clearly how this general approach would be implemented.
My policy had a further advantage, though it was not one that it would have been politically prudent to expound. At a time when even Conservative education authorities were bitten with the bug of comprehensivization, it offered the best chance of saving good local grammar schools. The administrative disadvantage was that close scrutiny of large numbers of individual proposals meant delays in giving the department’s response. Inevitably, I was attacked on the grounds that I was holding back in order to defer the closure of more grammar schools. But in this the critics were unjust. I took a close interest in speeding up the responses. It was just that we were deluged.
A further point I dealt with in that first Commons debate as Education Secretary was the argument, constantly advanced by the proponents of wholesale comprehensivization, that it was impossible to have a ‘mixed’ system of both comprehensive and grammar schools. Although, in truth, this was just a more sophisticated version of the argument that the egalitarian educationalist knows best, it was superficially persuasive. It is, after all, impossible in theory to divide a given group of children between grammars and secondary moderns and to mix them all together in one comprehensive school. Either the children will not be selected or they will not be mixed. But this theoretical argument ignored the fact that, given a large enough ‘catchment’ area, it was possible to have selective schools and schools with the full range of ability in operation at the same time. As I pointed out in answer to Ted Short in the debate:
Certainly, with a small rural area, I do not believe that it would be possible to have a comprehensive school and a grammar school, but in some of the very large urban areas it is possible, because the grammar school and direct grant school have quite different catchment areas from the comprehensive school. [Hon. Members: ‘Impossible.’] It is of little avail for Hon. Gentlemen opposite to say that this is impossible, because it happens now. Some of the best comprehensive schools are in areas where there are very good selective schools.
For all the political noise which arose from this change of policy, its practical effects were limited. During the whole of my time as Education Secretary we considered some 3,600 proposals for reorganization — the great majority of them proposals for comprehensivization — of which I rejected only 325, or about 9 per cent. In the summer of 1970 it had seemed possible that many more authorities might decide to reverse or halt their plans. For example, Conservative-controlled Birmingham was one of the first education authorities to welcome Circular 10/70. A bitter fight had been carried on to save the city’s thirty-six grammar schools. But in 1972 Labour took control and put forward its own plans for comprehensivization. I rejected sixty of the council’s 112 proposals in June 1973, saving eighteen of the city’s grammar schools.
Similarly, Richmond Council in Surrey had refused to come forward with a scheme under the Labour Government’s Circular 10/65, but in September 1970 voted by a large majority to end selection. I had no choice but to give my approval to the change the following year.
Perhaps the most awkward decisions I had to make related to Barnet, which included my own constituency. The Conservative-controlled Barnet Council decided to go comprehensive in October 1970, having conducted a survey of parents in which 79 per cent apparently favoured ending selection. (In fact, other national opinion polls showed a great deal of confusion on the issue, with a majority of people favouring both comprehensive education and the retention of grammar schools.) There was fierce opposition to Barnet’s scheme, and in January 1971 I received 5,400 letters of protest. The following month I approved a scheme which ended two grammar schools, but I saved a third on the grounds that the proposed merger would lead to an inconvenient divided-site school. In April I saved another grammar school and in June blocked two more schemes, thus saving a good secondary modern and another grammar school. The Conservative Party locally was split and I was censured by the local council. Most of the borough’s secondary schools in fact went comprehensive that September. The local authority kept reformulating its plans. Christ’s College and Woodhouse Grammar Schools were the main bones of contention. They were still grammar schools when I became Leader of the Opposition in 1975; they only became part of a comprehensive system (in Woodhouse’s case, a sixth-form college) in 1978 after Labour’s 1976 Education Act scrapped Section 13 and attempted to impose a comprehensive system from the centre on England and Wales.
In retrospect, it is clear that a near obsessive concern with educational structures characterized the 1960s and seventies. It is not that structures — either at the level of administration or at the level of schools — are unimportant. But educational theorists manifest a self-confidence which events have done nothing to justify when they claim that there is one system which in all circumstances and for all individuals is better than another. During my time at the DES I came across this attitude above all when dealing with plans for secondary school reorganization, in the prejudice against grammar schools: they even wanted to eliminate streaming by ability within schools. I tried to convince Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools (HMI) that whatever their theories might suggest, they should at least recognize that there were large numbers of excellent teachers in grammar schools doing a first-class job, and that they were having the heart taken out of them by the tone of so many HMI Reports.
The view that a Utopian, monolithic structure could be devised and implemented without trauma was also exploded time and again as I heard the experience of individual parents. People living in a crime-ridden council estate with a comprehensive ‘community school’, to which their catchment area under local authority regulation required them to send their children, were often desperate to get out. The lucky few who had a direct grant school in the vicinity might be able to do so. But some socialist local education authorities refused to take up places allocated to them at direct grant schools because they objected to independent schools on doctrinaire grounds. I had to intervene to ensure that these places were filled. But in any case only a limited number of parents and children could escape from bad conditions in this way. I found it heartbreaking to tell mothers that there was little or nothing I could do under the present system.
Only later — first with the Assisted Places Scheme and then with grant-maintained schools — could I, as Prime Minister, do something substantial to help.[16] Not that this situation, which continues today, is entirely satisfactory. We need to make it easier to start up new schools so as to widen parental choice. And the argument for education vouchers becomes stronger every day. They would finally bridge the gap between the independent and state sectors.
There is a further consideration which I have only come to appreciate in recent years. In defending grammar schools, Con servatives were rightly defending an existing institution that provided a fine education for children of all backgrounds. But we were also defending a principle — namely, that the state should select children by the single criterion of ability and direct them to one of only two sorts of school — that is far more consonant with socialism and collectivism than with the spontaneous social order associated with liberalism and conservatism. State selection by ability is, after all, a form of manpower planning. And variety and excellence in education are far more securely founded, and far more politically defensible, when parental choice rather than state selection of children by ability is their justification.
Be that as it may, by the end of 1970 it was already becoming clear that there would be no swing away from comprehensive education.
SCIENCE AND TEACHER TRAINING
I arrived at the Department of Education with a strong personal interest in science, and the science responsibilities of the DES were mine alone. At that time a block sum was allocated on the advice of scientists between five research councils — covering science and engineering, medicine, agriculture, the environment and social science. But discussion of science policy was soon dominated by the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS or ‘think tank’) Report which formed the basis of the White Paper of July 1972, A Framework for Government Research and Development. Its central recommendation was that a proportion of this money should henceforth be allocated to the relevant Government department so that it could decide the projects to be financed by its own council — the so-called ‘customer-contractor’ principle. Although I did not oppose the principle, I was worried that it would reduce the amount of money at the direct disposal of the research councils — unless there was an increase in the total science budget.
All this may seem of limited importance. And indeed in terms of overall science policy it was. That was part of the problem. Arguments about the precise relations between departments and research councils were irrelevant to the wider and crucially impor tant question of the Government’s strategic role in scientific research. Ted’s view was that pure research was not really work for Government-funded research and development, though he recognized that in any research establishment there was bound to be some proportion of pure or basic research. My view was precisely the opposite. It was only years later, when I was Prime Minister, that I was able to formulate my own answer to the problem, which was that Government should concentrate on funding basic science and leave its application and development to the private sector. But I already felt deeply uneasy about any policy that threatened to starve pure science of funds.
In one particular instance, I was involved directly in supporting a large and expensive project on the frontiers of science. This was the decision to join in European plans for a giant proton accelerator, or ‘atom smasher’, to elucidate the ultimate structure of matter, a project from which the previous Labour Government had withdrawn in 1968. As part of the Government’s early spending curbs we too had drawn back from this project, which some people considered too expensive, given its theoretical nature. But I was haunted by the knowledge that if Britain had not pressed ahead with some nuclear research even in the cash-strapped thirties, Britain and America would not have developed the atomic bomb which first secured victory in the Second World War and later protected Western Europe against Stalin. It was a vital lesson. So in September 1970 I went with Sir Brian Flowers, Chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council, to the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva to see for myself what was envisaged and learn more about the science and its possibilities. I came back convinced that if we could ensure sound financial control the twelve-nation project was worth backing, and managed to convince my colleagues to this effect.
Generally, though, I did not feel that the Government’s approach to science was radical or imaginative enough. I suspect that many scientists — and not just those with a professional axe to grind — thought so too. On Tuesday 26 June 1973 Ted held a dinner at No. 10 for British Nobel Prize winners in science — among them my old Oxford tutor, Dorothy Hodgkin. Naturally, I attended as well. For several reasons it was an illuminating occasion. Ted set the discussion against the background of Britain’s entry into the European Community, which he thought historians would conclude was the greatest achievement of his administration. He presented science as something to be applied so as to allow British industry to take advantage of access to the European market. There was some support for this view, but there were also some criticisms which represented my own standpoint. Essentially, this was that government should fund pure science, rather than organizing Europe’s scientists together in vast projects to make European economies technologically more competitive. Science was already international; the expansion of the European Community would not make a good deal of difference; and international science depended upon a number of people working separately in different countries. Arguably the less they were officially organized, the better the results would be. A commonsense exception to this rule was when the investment required was so costly that no one nation could afford it — hence my support for CERN.
So I was somewhat sceptical about the science policy that I as minister had to implement. But the policy never amounted to much. Science is less amenable to political direction than politicians like to think. Indeed, the history of science is in many ways more similar to the history of imaginative art than to economic history. The great scientific advances have not come from ‘practical’ plans for research and development but from creative scientific minds — the sort of minds which were around the dinner table that evening with Ted and me — people who by pushing outward at the frontiers of knowledge unlock the secrets of the universe. Politicians are reluctant to accept this; they want a quick technological fix and a quick pay-off into the bargain. Scientists rightly take a longer view. When Gladstone met Michael Faraday, he asked him whether his work on electricity would be of any use. ‘Yes, sir,’ remarked Faraday with prescience. ‘One day you will tax it.’
My second area of frustration was that of teacher training. As I have already mentioned, the manifesto had committed us to set up an inquiry into it. This was one of the points which figured large on the list I handed to Bill Pile on my first day in the department. I already held strong views on the subject. It seemed to me that the large increase in the number of teachers had to some extent been at the expense of quality. Although there were continuing difficulties about finding enough student teachers wanting to go into mathematics and sciences, there was not much substance to the complaints about ‘teacher shortages’. The real shortage was in the number of good teachers. Changing the salary structure of the profession would help by rewarding and encouraging long-serving and senior teachers, though the NUT was very wary of increased differentials. But teacher training was the key.
I wanted a serious investigation into whether trainee teachers were being taught the right subjects in the right way and at the right level. So I appointed Lord James of Rusholme, a former Headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, one of the country’s great schools, as Chairman of an inquiry into teacher training. I insisted that those who served with him should work virtually fulltime and that their report be completed within a year; it was duly published in January 1972. The report was workmanlike and made a number of sensible suggestions. It placed the greater emphasis I wanted on in-service training so that teachers really knew how to cope with a class full of children. Second, it proposed a new, two-year Diploma in Higher Education — for which I had also pressed — in which future teachers would study side by side with others who intended going into industry or the professions. But the fact that it confined itself to the structure rather than the curriculum content of teacher training limited its value. In effect, I got nowhere in my attempts to get the curriculum of the teacher training institutions discussed within the planned inquiry. It was still regarded as taboo for politicians to become involved in such matters. Fifteen years later the situation had not materially improved. As Prime Minister, I would still be puzzling about how to raise the quality of the teaching profession.
Still, although I was very critical of the outlook of many teacher trade unionists (who were in some cases more trade unionists than teachers), my final impression gained from my years at the DES was of the sincerity and commitment of most teachers. Sometimes teachers from the most difficult schools dealing with ‘problem’ children (who could usually be traced back to ‘problem’ parents) would come in to the department to tell me of their experience. On other occasions, I would talk to them in their schools and see something of what they had to cope with in their classrooms.
The teacher can never be a sufficient substitute for the family: yet a good teacher cannot ignore what happens to the child when he or she goes home, perhaps to be ill-treated. On one occasion, someone put the dilemma to me:
At 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon when the other children have gone home, one child clings to you and begs not to leave. You feel sure — but you cannot prove — that something is seriously wrong. Perhaps there is violence or neglect, or just deep unhappiness from one source or another. Do you walk the child home and tell his parents that he seems a bit off-colour; saying, of course, that he has not complained or been a nuisance; but gently enquiring if anything is wrong? You don’t know whether the child may be beaten as soon as you leave. Do you alert the authorities? That may have even more traumatic consequences. Or do you do nothing and hope that it’s just a temporary problem which will sort itself out? Well, Mrs Thatcher, what would you do?
There is no single good answer to this question. And despite our agonizings over such cases, we have still not found a solution that is right for all circumstances. We need teachers, social workers and policemen who are trained to recognize the symptoms of abuse, while remembering the commonsense reality that most parents love their children. Of the three, teachers are by far the most important because they know the child personally and see him or her almost every day. If they are to carry out this delicate and important task they can do so only if their authority is fully restored, not only over the child but also in the eyes of the parent. And when that happens, the bad parent is more likely to be held in check.
MILKING PUBLICITY
In one respect at least, the Department of Education was an excellent preparation for the premiership. I came under savage and unremitting attack that was only distantly related to my crimes.
But it did not begin like that. I have described the arguments about grammar schools and comprehensives. Yet these caused me only limited trouble, partly because many people — and not just Conservatives — agreed with me and partly because I was the bringer of good tidings in other matters. For example, I was hailed in a modest way as the saviour of the Open University. In Opposition both Iain Macleod and Edward Boyle, who thought that there were educational priorities more deserving of Government help, had committed themselves in public against it. And although its abolition was not in the manifesto, many people expected it to perish. But I was genuinely attracted to the concept of a ‘University of the Airwaves’, as it was often called, because I thought that it was an inexpensive way of giving wider access to higher education, because I thought that trainee teachers in particular would benefit from it, because I was alert to the opportunities offered by technology to bring the best teaching to schoolchildren and students, and above all because it gave people a second chance in life. In any case, the university was due to take its first students that autumn, and cancellation would have been both expensive and a blow to many hopes. On condition that I agreed to reduce the immediate intake of students and find other savings, my Cabinet colleagues allowed the Open University to go ahead.
There were more discussions of public expenditure that autumn of 1970. The Treasury had its little list of savings for the education budget — including charges for libraries, museums, school meals and school milk. I knew from my own experience in Grantham how vital it was to have access to books. So I persuaded the Cabinet to drop the proposed library charges, while reluctantly accepting entry charges for museums and galleries. (We kept one free day.) But pressure for more cuts was maintained, and I had to come up with a list of priority targets.
Savings on school meals and school milk were, I had to admit, an obvious candidate. There seemed no reason why families who could afford to do so should not make a larger contribution to the cost of school meals. I thought that I could defend such cuts if I could demonstrate that some of the money saved would go towards meeting the priority which we had set, namely the primary school building programme. And within the Department of Education budget it seemed logical that spending on education should come before ‘welfare’ spending, which should in principle fall to Keith Joseph’s department, Social Services.
As for milk, there were already mixed views on health grounds about the advantage of providing it. When I was at Huntingtower Road Primary School my parents paid 2½d a week for my school milk: and there were no complaints. By 1970 very few children were so deprived that school milk was essential for their nourishment. Tony Barber, who became Chancellor in July 1970, after the death of Iain Macleod, wanted me to abolish free school milk altogether. But I was more cautious, both on political and on welfare grounds. I managed to hold the line at an increased price for school meals and the withdrawal of free milk from primary school children over the age of seven. These modest changes came with safeguards: children in need of milk for medical reasons continued to receive it until they went to secondary school. All in all, I had defended the education budget effectively.
Nor was this lost on the press. The Daily Mail said that I had emerged as a ‘new heroine’. The Daily Telegraph drew attention to my plans to improve 460 of the oldest primary schools. The Guardian noted: ‘School meals and milk were the main casualties in a remarkably light raid on the education budget. Mrs Thatcher has won her battle to preserve a high school-building programme and turn it to the replacement of old primary schools.’
It was pleasant while it lasted.
The trouble was, it didn’t last long. Six months later we had to introduce a Bill to remove the legal duty for local education authorities to provide free milk and allow them discretion to make it available for a small charge. This gave Labour the parliamentary opportunity to cause havoc.
Even before that, however, the newspapers had unearthed the potential in stories about school meals. One report claimed that some local education authorities were going to charge children who brought sandwiches to school for their lunch. ‘Sandwich Kids In “Fines” Storm’ was how the Sun put it. Labour provided a parliamentary chorus. I introduced a circular to prevent the practice. But that story in turn restored attention to the increase in school meal charges. Overnight the number of children eating such meals became a politically sensitive indicator. The old arguments about the ‘stigma’ of means-tested benefits, which I had come to know so well as a Parliamentary Secretary in the 1960s, surfaced again. It was said that children from families poor enough to be entitled to free school meals would be humiliated when better-off classmates paid for their own. Probably unwisely, I came up with a suggestion in a television programme that this could be avoided if mothers sent dinner money to schools in envelopes. The teachers could put the change back in the envelope. A poor child entitled to free meals would bring an envelope with coins that would just be put back again by the teacher. This, of course, just added a new twist to the story.
In any case, it was not long before the great ‘milk row’ dwarfed debate about meals. Newspapers which had congratulated me on my success in protecting the education budget at the expense of cuts in milk and meals suddenly changed their tune. The Guardian described the Education (Milk) Bill as ‘a vindictive measure which should never have been laid before Parliament’. The Daily Mail told me to ‘think again’. The Sun demanded to know: ‘Is Mrs Thatcher Human?’ But it was a speaker at the Labour Party Conference who seems to have suggested to the press the catchy title ‘Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher’.
When the press discover a rich vein they naturally exhaust it. After all, editors and journalists have a living to earn, and politicians are fair game. So it seemed as if every day some variant of the theme would emerge. For example, a Labour council was discovered to be considering buying its own herd of cows to provide milk for its children. Local education authorities sought to evade the legislation by serving up milky drinks but not milk. Councils which were not education authorities took steps to provide free milk for children aged seven to eleven under powers contained in the Local Government Act 1963. Only in Scotland and Wales did the action of councils involve a breach of the law, and it was for my Cabinet colleagues in the Scottish and Welsh departments to deal with the consequences of that rather than for me. But there was no doubt where the blame for it all was felt to lie. The campaign against me reached something of a climax in November 1971 when the Sun voted me ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.
Perhaps I had been naive in thinking that doing what was generally agreed to be best for education was likely to count in argument about the sacrifices required. The local authorities, for blatantly political reasons, were unwilling to sell milk to the children, and it was almost impossible to force them to do so. I learned a valuable lesson. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit. I and my colleagues were caught up in battles with local authorities for months, during which we suffered constant sniping in the media, all for a saving of £9 million which could have been cut from the capital budget with scarcely a ripple. I resolved not to make the same mistake again. In future if I were to be hanged, it would be for a sheep, not a lamb, still less a cow.
By now I was hurt and upset, somewhat sadder but considerably wiser. It is probably true that a woman — even a woman who has lived a professional life in a man’s world — is more emotionally vulnerable to personal abuse than most men. The image which my opponents and the press had painted of me as callously attacking the welfare of young children was one which, as someone who was never happier than in children’s company, I found deeply wounding. But any politician who wants to hold high office must be prepared to go through something like this. Some are broken by it, others strengthened. Denis, always the essence of commonsense, came through magnificently. If I survived, it was due to his love and support. I later developed the habit of not poring over articles and profiles in the newspapers about myself. I came to rely instead on briefings and summaries. If what the press wrote was false, I could ignore it; and if it was true, I already knew it.
Throughout 1971 as the assault on me was being mounted over the issue of school milk, I was locked in battle within the Cabinet on public spending. It was politically vital to my argument about school meals and milk that the primary school building programme — crucial to the emphasis our policy placed on primary education generally — should go ahead as envisaged. So within the department I rejected early suggestions of compromise with the Treasury budget cutters. In a note to Bill Pile in April 1971 I laid down our last-ditch position: ‘We cannot settle for less than last year in real terms.’
This was more than political realism. I felt that other colleagues, who had not delivered the painful savings I had made, had been allowed to get away with it. In return for the cuts in meals and milk I had obtained agreement on the size of the school building programme for just one year ahead. But since it takes several years to plan and build a school, the promise had implications for future years. Others had won agreement for continuing expenditure over the whole five-year period of our public expenditure planning, the so-called Public Expenditure Survey Committee (PESC) system. Moreover, my department was now offering savings of over £100 million on higher education to the Treasury, while huge sums were still being paid out in industrial subsidies.
I could not reach agreement with Maurice Macmillan, then Chief Secretary, and so appealed, as any Cabinet minister has a right to do, to Cabinet. But I was then irritated to learn that No. 10 had decided that I would not be allowed to put in a paper. I wrote a sharply worded letter to Ted pointing out the pressures I was under to announce the 1973/74 school building programme. The letter concluded:
You are constantly urging us to improve departmental administration. At present I am being prevented from doing just that on the capital building side.
I urgently need a good 73/74 programme which takes into account my last year’s extensive cuts. The third, fourth and fifth years can be left to the PESC meetings but I hope to agree them then.
I’m afraid this letter sounds terse, but you would be critical if it were long. May I see you when you return from Paris?
I won his agreement to put in my paper in June 1971 — and I got my way. At Cabinet later that month I succeeded in obtaining almost everything that I wanted for the school building programme. It was just in time to announce to the annual conference of the Association of Education Committees in Eastbourne and prompted such headlines as ‘Record Programme to Improve Old Primary Schools’.
On my arrival at the DES, that really had been the priority for me. Because of it, as I have just explained, I had to make (or at least accept) spending decisions which made life extraordinarily difficult. I felt that in the 1970s it was wrong for schools still to have leaky roofs, primitive equipment and outside lavatories. Moreover, now that the demographic ‘bulge’ of primary-school-age children had more or less been accommodated — the peak was in 1973 — there was some financial leeway to improve the quality of the often very old and gloomy schools which had been kept in use.
It was, however, graphically demonstrated to me when I visited a new school in south London that there was a lot more to improving education than bricks and mortar. The teachers who showed me round were obviously members of the academic awkward squad. One of them told me that the children at this school were upset that some of their friends had to go to an old school in the neighbourhood. And indeed most of the children had clearly been well coached to support this view. But one of them spoke up, to the teachers’ evident embarrassment, to challenge this, saying: ‘Oh, I am not sure that’s right. Before I came here I went to a school which was older than this and smaller; but it was cosier, more friendly, and we knew where we were.’ As time went by, I too felt increasingly strongly about the importance of smaller schools. I also came to consider in later years that we had all of us been too interested in the ‘inputs’ (new buildings, expensive equipment and, above all, more and more teachers) rather than the ‘outputs’ (quality of teaching, levels of achievement and standards of behaviour).
Oddly, perhaps, it was not mainly by reading thoughtful analyses or arguing with perceptive critics that I gradually formed my views about what was wrong with the educational system — and the educational establishment which lived off it — but rather by practical, almost random, experience of what was actually happening in schools.
Take primary school education. Few would quarrel with the assertion that those first years of schooling are essential to a child’s formation. But what were these young children actually to be taught — and how? The Plowden Report commissioned by the previous Conservative Minister of Education, Edward Boyle, and regarded by almost everyone as the last word in expert opinion, leaned strongly in favour of teaching in small groups and even one-to-one, rather than classes. I had no strong views on the matter when I arrived at the DES, and the report was well argued. But I now suspect that it sent primary schools in the wrong direction for a generation. Again, my doubts only started to surface when I visited schools and found that in reality individual children were often not being taught in a group, let alone in a class, but were largely left to their own — not necessarily very useful — devices. I saw how in large, open-plan classrooms, groups were inclined to disintegrate into a disorderly hubbub in which quieter children felt lost and even intimidated. I came back to the department and told the Ministry’s architects’ department not to encourage this type of open-plan school.
What I rejected right from the start was the idea, fashionable among the middle classes as much as among experts, that the best way for a child to learn was by self-discovery. This belief entailed the abandonment of the kind of education my generation had had as mere ‘learning by rote’. In fact, any worthwhile education involves the teaching of knowledge, memory training, the ability to apply what one has learned and the self-discipline required for all of these. In all the frenzy of theorizing, these truths were forgotten.
STUDENT PRINCES
Whether or not the acclaim for my defence of the primary school building programme was justified, it soon faded away as a new agitation over the financing of student unions got under way. Unlike the controversy over school milk, this was largely a campaign organized by the hard Left. It was, therefore, less politically dangerous. But it was very vicious. Nor was it just directed against me. My daughter Carol, reading Law at University College, London, also had a hard time. I was thankful she was living at home.
In both Europe and the United States this was the height of the period of ‘student revolution’. Looking back, it is extraordinary that so much notice should have been taken of the kindergarten Marxism and egocentric demands which characterized it. In part, it was a development of that youth cult of the 1960s whereby the young were regarded as a source of pure insight into the human condition. In response, many students accordingly expected their opinions to be treated with reverence.
Yet the student protests of the time, far from being in the vanguard of progress, were phenomena of a world which was about to pass away. The universities had been expanded too quickly in the 1960s. In many cases standards had fallen and the traditional character of the universities had been lost. Moreover, this had occurred at a time when market principles were in retreat and the assumption was near-universal that everyone had a right to a job and the state had the power to give it to them. So these rootless young people lacked both the authority which had been imposed on their predecessors in the 1950s and the discipline which the need to qualify for a good job would place on students in the eighties.
The Left had managed to gain control of many student unions, and therefore of the public money which financed them, using this position to mount campaigns of disruption which infuriated ordinary taxpayers and ratepayers and even many students who simply wanted to study. There were two aspects: first, the financing of student bodies, and second what those bodies did. On the first, the main source of money for student unions was subscriptions out of mandatory grants received from their local education authorities. Union membership was normally obligatory and the union subscription was then paid direct to the student union. As regards activities, some student unions took advantage of this to spend the revenue on partisan purposes, often in defiance of both their constitution and the wishes of their members.
In July 1971 I put proposals to the Home and Social Affairs Committee of the Cabinet (HS) for reform. I had considered setting up a Registrar of student unions, but that would have required legislation. So I limited myself to proposing something more modest. In future, the union subscription should not be included in the fees payable to colleges and universities. The student maintenance grant would be increased slightly to enable students to join particular clubs or societies on a voluntary basis. Responsibility for providing student union facilities would then be placed on each academic institution. The facilities of each union would be open to all students, whether or not they were members of the union. Besides dealing with the question of accountability for public money, these changes would also abolish the closed-shop element in student unions which I found deeply objectionable on grounds of principle. HS was not prepared to go along with my proposals immediately, but I came back to the argument, fully recognizing how controversial they would be, and gained the Committee’s approval.
Bill Van Straubenzee was the minister directly responsible for dealing with consultations on the proposals. But I was the one immediately marked down as the hate-figure to be targeted for them. Student mobs hounded me wherever I went. In early November in Leeds, where I was laying a stone to mark the construction of new buildings, about 500 students tried to shout me down. Later that month 2,000 screaming students tried to prevent my presenting the designation document of the South Bank Polytechnic at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A dozen mounted police had to protect my car. In December the student protesters found time from their studies to organize a nationwide day of protest. My effigy was burnt at various universities.
By now many of the Vice-Chancellors and college authorities were giving tacit approval to the protests. Edward Boyle even addressed a mass meeting of students at Leeds to declare his opposition to my proposals. Since these had only been put out for consultation — though ‘consultation’ is not the most obvious description of what had occurred — it was perfectly possible to allow tempers to cool and to delay action, which I did. The main problem was that until university authorities themselves were prepared to uphold the values of a university and exert some authority, no proposal for reform was likely to succeed. This was also the time when freedom of speech began to be denied by groups of students, who were then indulged by nervous university authorities. University intolerance was at its most violent in the early seventies. But, less visible and more institutionalized, the same censorship continues today.
TRYING, STILL TRYING…
1971 had been a crucial year for the Government and for me personally. The pressures which mounted were all the more intolerable because they were cumulative. As I shall describe, the Government’s self-confidence broke in early 1972.[17] Somehow, although under greater strain than at any time before or since, my own held.
But a number of commentators, with varying mixtures of relish and regret, thought that I was done for. On my return after the Christmas holiday at Lamberhurst, I was able to read my fate openly discussed in the newspapers. One described me as ‘The Lady Nobody Loves’. Another published a thoughtful article entitled ‘Why Mrs Thatcher is so Unpopular’. But I pushed the stuff aside and concentrated on my red boxes.
In fact, it was not long before the tide — for me personally, though not for the Government — began to turn. Probably the ‘milk snatcher’ campaign had in any case come to the end of its natural life. The far more serious issues of 1972 were now upon us — the miners’ strike and the various elements of the U-turn[18] — and these dwarfed the personal campaign against me. And, of course, I was evidently not going to buckle or depart — at least voluntarily. But I owe a debt of gratitude to Ted Heath as well.
Ted asked me and my officials down to Chequers on Wednesday 12 January to have a general discussion about education. I took with me an aide-mémoire summing up the situation and looking ahead. In spite of all the difficulties, there was only one pre-election commitment which still remained to be implemented: the expansion of nursery education. More money was needed if something substantial was to be achieved. The other area in which our supporters were disappointed was secondary school organization. There the problem was, as I put it, ‘many of our own local councils are running with the comprehensive tide. The question is what sort of balance should be struck between defending existing grammar schools and leaving local education authorities free to make their own decisions?’ We discussed both these points at Chequers, as well as other irritants such as school milk and student unions. Ted was clearly interested. He was keen on nursery education; he had been pressing for action on student unions; and he very reasonably asked whether we could not use educational arguments in justifying our policy on selection, rather than just resting on the arguments about local authority autonomy.
From my point of view, however, at least as important as the discussion was the fact that by inviting me down with my officials Ted implied that there was no intention to move me from Education in the foreseeable future. This was a useful, indeed — facing the problems I did — a vital reinforcement for my authority. Ted went on a few days later in the House to list my achievements. Why did he give me such strong support? Some felt that he needed a woman in the Cabinet and it was difficult to find a credible alternative candidate. But I like to think that it also showed Ted’s character at its admirable best. He knew that the policies for which I had been so roundly attacked were essentially policies which I had reluctantly accepted under pressure from the Treasury and the requirements of public finance. He also knew that I had not tried to shift the blame onto others. However unreliable his adherence to particular policies, he always stood by people who did their best for him and his Government. This was one of the better reasons why his Cabinet reciprocated by remaining united behind him.
Ted’s expressions of support provided me with no more than a breathing space. But it was enough. From the spring of 1972 the chilly political climate in which I had been living began noticeably to thaw. My speech to the NUT in April was well received, not just by most of the audience (which cheered me at the end) but, more importantly, by the press in general. Unusually, the proposals it contained appealed across the political spectrum. I announced an increase in the school building programme, now running at a record level. I also announced the setting-up of a committee to inquire into the teaching of reading in schools and the use of English — matters which were already the subject of widespread concern. I hinted at a further expansion of nursery education, though drawing attention to the problem of financing it. But what seized the imagination of the commentators was my criticism of giant comprehensive schools. (I elaborated on this last point at a press conference after the speech, noting that I had just rejected plans for a school for 2,700 pupils in Wiltshire.)
As I stood up to speak, there was an ill-mannered walk-out by a number of left-wing delegates. But this turned out to be an added bonus. The media not only liked the emphasis on the merits of smaller schools, but had some harsh things to say about the example given to their pupils by teachers who were not even prepared to hear the arguments. In May the same newspaper column which had described me as ‘The Lady Nobody Loves’ was celebrating ‘The Mellowing of Margaret’. And the irony was that the theme which had struck home — my advocacy of small schools — was one which I had held to since my days as a schoolgirl in Grantham.
It was, however, the Education White Paper, published in December 1972, which restored the fortunes of our education policy. The decision to publish it stemmed from discussions of the three Programme Analysis and Review (PAR) Reports which we had prepared in the department.[19] The title was the result of a last-minute decision at Cabinet. Education: A Framework for Advance was the original suggestion but, in a change which appears in retrospect to be all too typical of these over-ambitious, high-spending years, this became Education: A Framework for Expansion. The White Paper set out a ten-year plan for higher spending and better provision. There were six main points to it. There was a programme for improving or replacing old secondary schools. The building programme for special schools for handicapped children would be increased. There would be a modest improvement in school staffing ratios. To help pay for this, the rate of expansion of higher education would be restrained. We published our response to the James Committee’s recommendations on teacher training. But the most important aspect was the announcement of a major expansion of nursery education. This would be provided for up to 90 per cent of four-year-olds and 50 per cent of three-year olds, subject to demand, with priority being given in the early stages to deprived areas. In retrospect, the White Paper marks the high-point of the attempts by Government to overcome the problems inherent in Britain’s education system by throwing money at them.
The White Paper received a disconcertingly rapturous reception. The Daily Telegraph, although making some criticisms about the lack of proposals for student loans or vouchers, said that the White Paper established me ‘as one of our most distinguished reforming -and spending — Ministers of Education’. The Daily Mail described it as a ‘Quiet Revolution’ and commented, ‘there has been nothing like it since the war’. More unsettling was the Guardian’s praise for a ‘progressive programme’ and the comment — I hoped tongue in cheek — that ‘apart from not mandatorily ending 11-Plus segregation, Mrs Thatcher is more than half way towards a respectably socialist education policy’.
REALITY BITES
With the exception of some vigorous exchanges with Labour’s new and highly articulate Education spokesman, Roy Hattersley, about the rate of increase of education expenditure, the early months of 1973 were as near as any at the DES to being quiet. But the consequences of the Government’s fiscal and monetary policies were shortly to catch up with us. The first instalment was in May — a round of public expenditure cuts designed to cool the overheated economy. Capital spending in education, particularly the less politically sensitive area of higher education, was an obvious target. In the event, I staved off Treasury pressure and my building programmes were not cut.
But there were other problems in the DES budget. As inflationary pressures pushed up prices in the construction industry, an increasingly alarmed Treasury refused to sanction higher spending. The rest of the school building programme had to be slowed down as well. As October — the time for firm public expenditure decisionmaking — approached it was increasingly clear to me that public expenditure cuts were essential, and that it made political sense to agree early with Patrick Jenkin, the new Chief Secretary, on reductions in my education budget. In the event, there were cuts in the school building plans and in teacher training, and school meal prices were increased.
Nor was this the end of the search for savings. As the effects of the oil crisis and the miners’ strike bit in December, Tony Barber began a frantic search for further cuts.[20] Capital spending is the only area in which large immediate public expenditure cuts can be made. So ministers were required to reduce their capital programmes by a fifth and their procurement of supplies and other current expenditure on goods and services by a tenth. Accordingly, I implemented further cuts in the school and higher education building programmes, including most painfully a moratorium on replacing older primary schools; for the longer term there would also be a reduction in the rate of expansion of student numbers. The reduction in the DES budget for 1974/75 was £182 million — out of £1,200 million total cuts in public spending. But I did manage for the time being to salvage the nursery school programme and also building programmes for special schools.
By now, however, my mind was fast focusing on the cataclysmic events overtaking the Government. It was not long before I would have to mount my soapbox and defend the policies I had pursued in my years at Education. I found no difficulty in doing so, for on almost every front the record was one of advance. And if the measures by which ‘advance’ at this time was assessed — resources committed rather than results achieved — are accepted, it was also a record of genuine improvement. Nearly 2,000 out-of-date primary schools in England and Wales were replaced or improved. There was a substantial expansion of nursery education. I pushed through the raising of the school leaving age, which the Labour Party had had to postpone. Fewer pupils were now taught in very large classes. There were more qualified teachers and more students in higher education. But too much of my time at Education had been spent arguing about structures and resources, too little in addressing the crucial issue of the contents of education.
Equally, it was clear by the time of the general election that both the figures and more fundamentally the approach of A Framework for Expansion had been by-passed by events. There was no way that a programme of universal nursery education was affordable. Schools would have to make do with leaky roofs for many more years, until declining pupil numbers and school closures allowed resources to be better used. The Robbins Report principle — that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them’ (paragraph 31) — would have to take second place to the demands of financial stringency.
However frustrating it was to watch the shrinkage of my cherished plans and programmes, I can now see that it was unavoidable. And it may have had the side effect of forcing us to think creatively about how to get the best value from our suddenly limited resources. In the economic sphere, the crises of 1973 to 1976 led to a deep scepticism about the value of Keynesian demand management and to a new appreciation of the classical liberal economic approach of balanced budgets, low taxes and free markets. Similarly, in education and in other areas of social policy too, the realization that remedies must be found other than increased public expenditure opened up a whole new world. Fundamental questions began to be asked about whether the education system in its present form could deliver the results expected of it. Did it not in practice largely exist for the benefit of those who ran it, rather than those who received it? Was the state — whether the DES or local education authorities — doing too much, rather than too little? What did the — often superior — results of other countries’ education systems and methods have to teach us? It was becoming necessary to rethink these policies; and we were shortly to be granted plenty of time to think.
CHAPTER VII
No End of a Lesson
The Heath Government 1970–1974
GLAD CONFIDENT MORNING
Shortly before 11 o’clock on Tuesday 23 June 1970 my new ministerial car dropped me in Downing Street, where with other colleagues I ran the gauntlet of press and television outside No. 10. The hubbub in the ante-room was of enthusiasm and laughter. There was a spring in our step as we filed into the Cabinet Room where Ted Heath, with the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend beside him, awaited us. I found my place at the Cabinet table, but my mind was at least as much on the department[21] as on the large strategic issues before the Government. As I shall explain, it remained there — perhaps excessively so. But I felt an exhilaration which was prompted by more than the fact that this was my first ever Cabinet meeting: I felt, as I suspect we all did, that this was a decisive moment in the life of the country.
It was an impression which Ted himself did everything to justify. Speaking with the same intensity which had suffused his introduction to the manifesto on which we had just fought the election, he announced his intention of establishing a new style of administration and a fresh approach to the conduct of public business. The emphasis was to be upon deliberation and the avoidance of hasty or precipitate reactions. There was to be a clean break and a fresh start and new brooms galore.
The tone was just what we would all have expected from Ted. He had a great belief in the capacity of open-minded politicians to resolve fundamental problems if the processes and structures of government were right and advice of the right technical quality was available and properly used. This was the approach which would lie behind the decision that autumn to set up the Central Policy Review Staff under Victor Rothschild, to reconstruct the machinery of government on more ‘rational’ lines (including the setting up of the mammoth Department of the Environment) and the establishment of the PAR system. More generally, it inspired what turned out to be an excessive confidence in the Government’s ability to shape and control events.
Inevitably, this account contains a large measure of hindsight. I was not a member of the key Economic Policy Committee (EPC) of the Cabinet, though I would sometimes attend if teachers’ pay or spending on schools was an issue. More frequently, I attended Terence Higgins’s sub-committee on pay when the full rigours of a detailed statutory prices and incomes policy — the policy our manifesto pledged us to avoid — were applied, and made some contributions there. And, naturally, I was not a member of Ted’s inner circle where most of the big decisions originated. The role of the Cabinet itself was generally of reduced importance after the first year of the Heath Government until its very end. The full account of these years will, therefore, have to await Ted Heath’s own memoirs.
This, however, is said in explanation not exculpation. As a member of the Cabinet I must take my full share of responsibility for what was done under the Government’s authority. Reviewing the events of this period with the benefit of two decades’ hindsight (including more than one of these as Prime Minister), I can see more clearly how Ted Heath, an honest man whose strength of character made him always formidable, whether right or wrong, took the course he did. And as time went on, he was wrong, not just once but repeatedly. His errors — our errors, for we went along with them — did huge harm to the Conservative Party and to the country. But it is easy to comprehend the pressures upon him.
It is also important to remember that the policies Ted pursued between the spring of 1972 and February 1974 were urged on him by most influential commentators and for much of the time enjoyed a wide measure of public support. The Nixon administration in the United States adopted a broadly similar approach, as did other European countries. There were brave and far-sighted critics who were proved right. But they were an embattled, isolated group. Although my reservations steadily grew, I was not at this stage among them.
But some of us (though never Ted, I fear) learned from these mistakes. I can well understand how after I became Leader of the Conservative Party Enoch Powell, who with a small number of other courageous Tory backbenchers had protested at successive U-turns, claimed that: ‘If you are looking for somebody to pick up principles trampled in the mud, the place to look is not among the tramplers.’
But Enoch was wrong. In Rudyard Kipling’s words, Keith Joseph and I had ‘had no end of a lesson’:
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should;
We have had no end of a lesson; it will do us no end of good.[22]
In this sense, we owed our later successes to our inside knowledge and to our understanding of the earlier failures. The Heath Government showed, in particular, that socialist policies pursued by Tory politicians are if anything even more disastrous than socialist policies pursued by Labour politicians. Collectivism, without even the tincture of egalitarian idealism to redeem it, is a deeply unattractive creed.
How did it happen? I have already outlined some of the background. In spite of the acclaim for the Selsdon Park manifesto, we had thought through our policies a good deal less thoroughly than appeared. In particular that was true of our economic policy. We had no clear theory of inflation or the role of wage settlements within it. And without such a theory we drifted into the superstition that inflation was the direct result of wage increases and the power of trade unions. So we were pushed inexorably along the path of regulating incomes and prices.
Ted was also impatient. I share this characteristic. I am often impatient with people. But I knew — partly of course by seeing what happened under Ted — that, in a broader sense, patience is required if a policy for long-term change is to work. This is especially true if, like Ted’s Government in 1970 and mine in 1979, you are committed to a non-interventionist economic policy that relies on setting a framework rather than designing a plan. Sudden shifts of direction, taken because the results are too long in appearing, can have devastating effects in undermining the credibility of the strategy. And so a government which came to power proud of its principle and consistency left behind it, among other embarrassing legacies, a host of quips about ‘the U-turn’. Ted’s own words in his introduction to the 1970 manifesto came back to haunt him:
Once a decision is made, once a policy is established, the Prime Minister and his colleagues should have the courage to stick to it. Nothing has done Britain more harm in the world than the endless backing and filling which we have seen in recent years.
At another level, however — the level of day-to-day human experience in government — the explanation of what happened is to be found within the events themselves, in the forces which buffeted us and in our reactions to them. We thought we were well enough prepared to face these. But we were not. Little by little we were blown off course until eventually, in a fit of desperation, we tore up the map, threw the compass overboard and, sailing under new colours but with the same helmsman, still supremely confident of his navigational sense, set off towards unknown and rock-strewn waters.
The squalls began early. Within weeks of taking office the Government had been forced to declare a State of Emergency[23] as a national docks strike began to bite. At the same time a Court of Inquiry was set up to find an expensive solution. Although the strike evaporated within a fortnight, it was an ambiguous triumph.
The following month the crisis was international. On Sunday 6 September terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four aircraft (none of them British) and demanded that they be flown to Jordan. Three of the hijacks were successful, but on the fourth — an Israeli plane en route to London — the hijackers were overpowered by security men. The surviving terrorist, Leila Khalid, was arrested at Heathrow.
The PFLP demanded her release, and just before Cabinet met on Wednesday 9 September they hijacked a British aircraft in order to bring more pressure to bear. The plane was flying to Beirut as we met. It was explained to Cabinet that we had already acquiesced in an American suggestion to offer the release of Leila Khalid in return for the freedom of the hostages. Over the next few weeks Cabinet discussed the question many times as negotiations ran on. Meanwhile, Jordan itself fell into a state of civil war as King Hussein fought the Palestinians for control of his country and the Syrians invaded and occupied much of the north. Ted resisted any British involvement on the King’s side and was certain that we were right to negotiate with the PFLP. Though it went against the grain to release Khalid, in the end the deal was made. In due course all the hostages were released, though the hijacked aircraft were blown up by the terrorists, and King Hussein survived the events of ‘Black September’ — barely but triumphantly.
But by then the Government had already suffered a blow from which, perhaps, we never fully recovered. In mid-July Iain Macleod had gone into hospital for a small abdominal operation. It had been a success and he had returned to No. 11 for a few days’ rest. At about midnight on Monday 20 July my telephone rang. It was Francis Pym, the Chief Whip. He said that Ted had asked him to ring round to tell us all that Iain had suffered a heart attack that evening and had just died. He was only fifty-six.
I felt the blow personally, for Iain had always been a generous and kind man for whom to work. I knew that he had given me my chance to shine and so make my way into the Shadow and then the real Cabinet. But I also immediately recognized that we had lost our shrewdest political intellect and best communicator. How Iain would have performed as Chancellor I do not know. But if one accepts, as I did and do, that the worst mistakes of economic policy derived from Ted’s overruling the Treasury, it is reasonable to suppose that matters might have turned out better if Iain had lived. He was succeeded by Tony Barber, a man of considerable intellectual ability, who by and large had an unhappy time at the Treasury. The economic problems of the next few years were founded in this transition. Although Tony may have had sounder economic instincts, Iain boxed at a much higher political weight.
The Cabinet which met after Iain Macleod’s death was a sombre one. Around the Cabinet table already sat nearly all of those who would be my colleagues over the next four and a half years. Their personal qualities would be severely tested. Tony Barber was an old if not particularly close friend from the Bar, an able tax lawyer, but not someone to stand up against Ted. Reggie Maudling, Home Secretary until his resignation over the Poulson affair in 1972,[24] was still interested in and had strong views about economic policy. By contrast, he was less than fascinated by his new brief. Technically still extremely competent, he was unlikely to oppose any shift back towards a more interventionist economic policy, which indeed he had always favoured.
Alec Douglas-Home had returned effortlessly to his old Foreign Office brief where, however, plenty of effort was soon required in giving effect to our promises made in Opposition to lift the arms embargo on South Africa and in trying to devise an affordable way of retaining a British military presence east of Suez. He was unlikely to take much part in domestic political affairs now, any more than he had in Shadow Cabinet. Quintin Hailsham had found his ideal role as Lord Chancellor, beginning a long spell in that office under Ted and then me, where he managed to combine his old sense of mischief and theatre with the sedate traditions of the Upper House. Peter Carrington was Defence Secretary, a post for which he was well suited and which he filled with aplomb. I knew that he was close to Ted. He doubtless became still closer when later as Party Chairman and Energy Secretary he had a crucial role in dealing with the final miners’ strike which precipitated the general election of February 1974. He was one of Ted’s ‘inner circle’.
Keith Joseph, by contrast, though a senior Cabinet figure and someone whose views had always to be taken seriously, was certainly not part of that circle and was never, so far as I know, invited to join it. Having been appointed to be Secretary of State for Social Services, Keith’s compassionate, social reforming side had become uppermost at the expense of his more conservative economic convictions, though he retained a profound distrust of corporatism in all its forms. His passion became the need to tackle the problem of the ‘cycle of deprivation’ which condemned successive generations to poverty. Like me, Keith had been given a high-spending ‘social’ department, and there was a natural opposition between what he (also like me) wanted for his own preferred programmes and the requirements of tight public expenditure control. Whether by chance or calculation, Ted had ensured that the two most economically conservative members of his Cabinet were kept well out of economic decision-making, which was left to those over whom he could wield maximum influence.
John Davies, the former Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) (who knew nothing of politics when he was summoned after Iain Macleod’s death to become Minister of Technology), certainly fell into that category. John was someone I liked and indeed appointed later to a post in my Shadow Cabinet. But his warmest admirer would have been hard put to make a case for his handling of the turbulent industrial politics which would now become his responsibility. John also represented ‘business’, a concept which Ted, with his latent corporatism, considered had some kind of ‘role’ in government.
With Tony Barber and John Davies, Robert Carr was, as Employment Secretary, the third key figure responsible for economic strategy under Ted. He was a good deal senior to me and we had different views and temperaments. He was a decent, hard working though not a colourful personality. But he had a difficult, arguably impossible, brief in trying to make the flawed Industrial Relations Act work. His reputation as a left winger in Conservative terms was less useful than some might have expected; trade unionists used to regard left-wing Conservatives not as more compassionate but merely as less candid. As Employment Secretary at the time of the first (1972) miners’ strike and Home Secretary at the time of the second (1974), few people faced greater difficulties during these years.
One who did was Willie Whitelaw as, successively, Leader of the House, Northern Ireland Secretary and finally Employment Secretary at the time of the three-day week. Willie was part of the generation which had fought the war. We seemed to have little in common and neither of us, I am sure, suspected how closely our political destinies would come to be linked. Since Education was not a department requiring at this time a heavy legislative programme, our paths rarely crossed. But I was already aware of Willie as a wise, reassuring figure whose manner, voice and stature made him an excellent Leader of the House. By the end of the Government his judgement and qualities were playing a role second in significance only to Ted’s own. Willie’s bluff public persona, however, concealed a shrewd political intelligence and instinct for managing men.
After Iain Macleod’s untimely death, Geoffrey Rippon was given responsibility for negotiating the terms of our entry into the European Economic Community. Although we had superficially similar backgrounds — both having been Presidents of OUCA and barristers — Geoffrey and I were never close. It always seemed to me that he tried to overwhelm opponents with the force of his personality rather than with the force of his argument. This may have been because Ted had given him the task of getting the best deal he could in negotiations with the EEC — and that deal was not always in our best long-term interests. This was something we were to realize more and more as time went on.
My impression was that the two members of Cabinet Ted trusted most were Jim Prior and Peter Walker. Both had proved their loyalty, Jim as Ted’s PPS in Opposition, and Peter as organizer of his 1965 leadership campaign. Jim was Agriculture Minister, a post which his farming background and rubicund features helped him make his own, before becoming Deputy Chairman of the Party under Peter Carrington in April 1972. Peter Walker’s thirst for the ‘modernization’ of British institutions must have helped draw him closer to Ted. He soon became Secretary of State for the huge new Department of the Environment, where he embarked with vigour upon the most unpopular local government reforms until my own Community Charge — and at the cost of far greater bureaucracy. Later he would go to the other conglomerate, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Jim and, still more so, Peter were younger than me, but both had far more influence over the general direction of Government. Although their political views were very different from mine, I respected their loyalty to Ted and their political effectiveness.
The other members of Cabinet — Gordon Campbell at Scotland, George Jellicoe as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Lords, Peter Thomas, a close parliamentary neighbour and friend, as Secretary of State for Wales and Party Chairman, and Michael Noble briefly at Trade — did not figure large in discussions. I therefore found myself with just one political friend in Cabinet — Keith. Although I generally had polite and pleasant relations with my other colleagues, I knew that we were not soulmates. Doubtless they knew it too. Such things often show through more clearly in casual conversation and spontaneous reactions than in argument. What with the formidable difficulties I faced in Education, I therefore had little incentive to try to win wider strategic points in Cabinet.
Ted’s mastery of the Cabinet was complete and unchallenged. He had won the 1970 election against all expectations and by means of a very personal campaign. We were aware of this and so was he. Moreover, argument from first principles was alien to his nature and disagreeable to his temperament. Until 1972—73 and the events of the U-turn, the unity of Cabinet under Ted’s leadership was at least in part simply recognition that he was Prime Minister and had a right to expect support in carrying through the programme. Once the programme itself was abandoned and an exercise in corporate interventionism adopted in its stead, the atmosphere grew worse, not manifesting itself in dissent but in the occasional leaked grumble. We knew we were locked in.
A ROLLS-ROYCE POLICY
For all the difficulties which were quickly upon us that summer and autumn of 1970, such melancholy reflections were still far from our thoughts. Indeed, Ted Heath, Tony Barber, Robert Carr and John Davies set out on the course of radical reform with impressive zeal; and the rest of us in the Cabinet were enthusiastic cheerleaders.
First, the Government embarked with a will on cutting public spending. (In fact this review was to be the only sustained Cabinet-level exercise of the kind during the entire period of 1970–74; the cuts of December 1973 would be made at speed and without detailed discussion in Cabinet.) Discussions began at the end of July. A target was agreed of £1,700 million net reduction in planned spending by 1974/75, and Ted circulated a paper on the economy to show his commitment to the strategy. The cuts were to fall most heavily on industrial spending, though as already noted I had my own departmental spending battles at Education. Investment grants were ended. The Industrial Re-organization Corporation (IRC) would be closed down. Aircraft and space projects would be subject to the closest scrutiny. Even with the reprieve of the hugely expensive Concorde project, largely on European policy grounds, it was an impressive free-market economic programme. And it made possible a tax-cutting Budget in October, which reduced the standard rate of income tax by 6d, down from 8s.3d in the pound (just over 4ip), and made reductions in corporation tax to take effect at the beginning of the next financial year.
Nor was there any delay in bringing forward the other key feature of our economic programme — the Industrial Relations Bill. The framework of the Bill was already familiar: this was one of the areas of policy most thoroughly worked out in Opposition and we had published our proposals in 1968. It was to be an ambitiously comprehensive attempt to provide a new basis for industrial relations. The main principles were that collective bargaining agreements should be legally enforceable unless the parties to them agreed otherwise, and that the unions’ historic immunities from civil action should be both significantly narrowed and confined to those whose rule books met certain minimum standards (‘registered unions’).
Cases brought under this legislation would be dealt with by a new system of industrial courts and tribunals, headed by a branch of the High Court — the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC). The Bill also gave new powers to the Secretary of State for Employment, as a last resort when negotiation had failed, to apply to the NIRC either for an order deferring industrial action for up to sixty days — a ‘cooling off’ period — or for one requiring a secret ballot of the workers involved before a strike.
There was a good deal in the Bill that actively favoured trade unionism, for all the hostility it encountered on the Left. For the first time in English law there would be a legally enforceable right to belong (or not to belong) to a trade union. There would be statutory protection against unfair dismissal — again, a new principle in English law. Finally, the Bill would repeal provisions under previous legislation that made it a criminal offence for gas, water and electricity workers to strike during the lifetime of their contracts.
At the time I was a strong supporter of the Bill, although I had doubts about particular parts, such as the measure on essential services. We were all conscious that the previous Labour Government had backed off from its In Place of Strife proposals for trade union reform under a mixture of union and Party pressure. We were, therefore, doubly determined to make the changes required.
In retrospect, the philosophy of the Bill was muddled. It assumed that if the unions were in general confirmed in their powers they would both discipline their own members industrially, reducing wildcat strikes for instance, and use their industrial strength in a regulated and orderly fashion on the American model. But it also contained provisions to strengthen the powers of individuals against the unions. So the Bill was in part corporatist and in part libertarian.
Specifically there were four flaws. First, the Bill was full of loopholes. By refusing to sign agreements unless the employer conceded that they need not be legally binding, the unions effectively bypassed one legal sanction. They also discovered an effective tactic to stymie the Bill’s ambition to transform the nature of British industrial relations — many simply de-registered and went on behaving as if they still possessed the old immunities, defying anyone damaged by their activities to bring an action, and defying the courts on the rare occasions when actions were brought.
Second, we were not clear how the Industrial Relations Act fitted into our overall economic strategy. Our movement towards a ‘voluntary’ incomes policy — starting with the so-called ‘n–i’ policy[25] which had begun even before the Bill was introduced — increased the occasions for disputes about pay and put the fledgling Act under huge pressures. Eventually, the Industrial Relations Act was shelved, at least tacitly, as part of the attempt to stitch up a deal with the trade unions on pay.
Third, if we were to rely so heavily on the law to improve the climate of industrial relations, we should have avoided creating so many new institutions and procedures all at once. This allowed our opponents to claim that the system was rigged against them. And when we used the new powers to impose ‘cooling off’ periods and strike ballots, these were promptly discredited as disputes heated up and the votes went against us.
Finally, we naively assumed that our opponents would play by the same rules as we did. In particular, we imagined that there would not be either mass opposition to laws passed by a democratically elected government or mass infringement of the criminal law, as in the miners’ strike of 1972. We did not recognize that we were involved in a struggle with unscrupulous people whose principal objectives lay not in industrial relations but in politics. Had we understood this we might have embarked upon a step-by-step approach, fighting on our own territory at our own timing, as we were to do after 1979. It was later, as Leader of the Opposition, that I realized how far the extreme Left had penetrated into trade union leaderships and why that ‘giant’s strength’, of which the Tory pamphlet had spoken in the late 1950s, was now being used in such a ruthless manner. The communists knew that they could not be returned to Parliament, so they chose to advance their cause by getting into office in the trade union movement. And the fact that both the Wilson and Heath Governments had stood up to the unions and then lost increased their influence more than if we had not challenged their power in the first place.
But at this early stage we pressed ahead. The TUC was told by Robert Carr in October 1970 that the central aspects of the Industrial Relations Bill were not negotiable. The Bill was published and had its Second Reading in December. February and March 1971 saw mass protests and strikes against it. Labour used every device to fight the Bill, but in August 1971 it duly reached the Statute Book. The TUC Congress passed a resolution instructing unions to de-register. It therefore remained to be seen, when the Act came into force at the end of February 1972, what its practical effects would be — revolution, reform or business as usual. We were soon to find out.
Meanwhile other problems preoccupied us. It is sometimes suggested — and was at the time by Enoch Powell — that the Government’s decision in February 1971 to take control of the aerospace division of Rolls-Royce marked the first U-turn. This is not so. Shortly before the company told the Government of the impossible financial problems it faced (as a result of the escalating cost of the contract with Lockheed to build the RB–211 engine for its Tri-star aircraft), a constituent of mine had told me that he was worried about the company. So I asked Denis to look at the figures. I arrived home late one evening to find him surrounded by six years’ accounts. He told me that Rolls-Royce had been treating research and development costs as capital, rather than charging it to the profit and loss account. This spelt real trouble.
A few days later I was suddenly called to a Cabinet meeting and found Fred Corfield, the Aviation Minister, waiting in the Cabinet ante-room. ‘What are you here for, Fred?’ I asked. I wasn’t surprised when he replied gloomily: ‘Rolls-Royce.’ His expression said it all. At the meeting itself we heard the full story. To the amazement of my colleagues I confirmed the analysis, based on what Denis had told me. We decided without much debate to let the company itself go into liquidation but to nationalize the aerospace division. Over the next few months there were many more complicated discussions as we renegotiated the original contract with Lockheed, which was then itself in financial difficulties. One could argue — and people did — about the terms and the sum which needed to be provided. But I do not think any of us doubted that on defence grounds it was important to keep an indigenous aircraft engine capability. And in the long term, of course, this was one ‘lame duck’ which eventually found the strength to fly away again into the private sector, when I was Prime Minister.
The Rolls-Royce controversy proved to be of short duration, and it was to be a year before the serious economic U-turns — reflation, subsidies to industry, prices and incomes policy — occurred, and began the alienation of the Conservative right in Parliament and of many Tory supporters outside it. The failure of these U-turns to deliver success divided the Party still further and had other consequences. It created an inflationary boom which caused property prices to soar and encouraged a great deal of dubious financial speculation, tarnishing capitalism and, in spite of all the disclaimers, the Conservative Party with it. I shall return to the economic developments which led to all this shortly. But it is important not to underrate the impact on the Party of two non-economic issues — Europe and immigration.
FROM EMPIRE TO EUROPE
I was wholeheartedly in favour of British entry into the EEC for reasons which I have already outlined. General de Gaulle’s departure from the Elysée Palace in April 1969 had transformed the prospects. His successor, Georges Pompidou, was keen to have Britain in; and, of course, no one on our side of the Channel was keener than the new Prime Minister, Ted Heath. There was never any doubt what the incoming Conservative Government’s position would be; but nor was there doubt that many people across the political spectrum would oppose it. These included seme of the most effective parliamentarians such as Michael Foot, Peter Shore and Enoch Powell. But the worlds of business, the media and fashionable opinion generally were strongly in favour, for a variety of high-and low-minded reasons.
Talks formally opened in Brussels at the end of October 1970, with Geoffrey Rippon reporting back to Ted and a Cabinet Committee and, on occasion, to the rest of us in full Cabinet. Twice in December we had detailed discussions of our negotiating position on the EEC budget. There was no doubt that the financial cost of entry would be high. It was estimated that the best we could hope for would be a gross British contribution of 17 per cent of total EEC expenditure, with a five-year transition, and three years of so-called ‘correctives’ after that (to hold it at 17 per cent). To defuse the inevitable criticism, Geoffrey Rippon also hoped to negotiate a special review provision which we could invoke at any time if the burden of our net contributions to the budget threatened to become intolerable; but he seemed to attach little significance to it, and assumed that we could reopen the question whether there was a formal review mechanism or not.
At the time Ted resolved discussion about the costs of entry by saying that no one was arguing that the burden would be so intolerable that we should break off negotiations. But this whole question of finance should have been considered more carefully. It came to dominate Britain’s relations with the EEC for more than a decade afterwards, and it did not prove so easy to reopen. Though the Community made a declaration during the entry negotiations that ‘should an unacceptable situation arise within the present Community or an enlarged Community, the very survival of the Community would demand that the Institutions find equitable solutions’, the net British contribution quickly grew. The Labour Government of 1974–79 made no progress in reducing it. It was left to me to do so later.
Cabinet discussed the matter again in early May 1971, by which time the talks were reported to be ‘deadlocked’. There were difficulties outstanding on preferential arrangements for New Zealand products (butter and lamb) and Commonwealth sugar, and shadow-boxing by the French about the role of sterling as an international currency. But the budget was still the real problem. We had an idea what deal might be on offer: promises to cut the cost of the Common Agricultural Policy and the creation of a Regional Development Fund from which Britain would benefit disproportionately. It was still not the settlement we would have wanted — and anyway promises are not bankable — but at the time none of us foresaw how large the burden would turn out to be. Ted ended the discussion by telling us that he was planning a summit with President Pompidou in Paris to cut through the argument.
Ted spent two days talking to the French President. In view of all the past difficulties with the French, the summit was seen as a veritable triumph for him. Negotiations were completed rapidly afterwards — other than for the Common Fisheries Policy, which took years to resolve — and the terms approved by Cabinet the following month. Parliamentary approval could not be assumed, for both parties were deeply split and Labour had reversed its former support for British entry, arguing that the present terms were unacceptable. In the end, the Government decided that there would be a free vote on the Conservative side on the principle of entry. This embarrassed Labour, especially when sixty-nine Labour MPs ignored their own party whip and voted in favour, giving a majority of 112 for entry. But when it came to the terms rather than the principle of entry, the argument was far from won. The Second Reading of the European Communities Bill in February 1972 was only passed by 309 to 301, with the Liberals backing the Government and after much arm-twisting by Conservative Whips. The Bill itself was enacted in October.
The dog that barely barked at the time was the issue of sovereignty — both national and parliamentary — which as the years have gone by has assumed ever greater importance. There was some discussion of the question in Cabinet in July 1971, but only in the context of the general presentation of the case for entry in the White Paper. The resulting passages of the document — paragraphs 29—32 — can now be read in the light of events, and stand out as an extraordinary example of artful confusion to conceal fundamental issues. In particular, two sentences are masterpieces:
There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty; what is proposed is a sharing and an enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the general interest.
And:
The common law will remain the basis of our legal system, and our Courts will continue to operate as they do at present.
I can claim to have had no special insight into these matters at the time. It then seemed to me, as it did to my colleagues, that the arguments about sovereignty which were advanced by Enoch Powell and others were theoretical points used as rhetorical devices.
In the debate on Clause 2 of the Bill, Geoffrey Howe, as Solicitor-General, gave what appeared to be satisfactory assurances on the matter in answer to criticisms from Derek Walker-Smith, saying that ‘at the end of the day if repeal [of the European Communities Act], lock, stock and barrel, was proposed, the ultimate sovereignty of Parliament must remain intact’. Asking himself the question: ‘What will happen if there is a future Act of Parliament which inadvertently, to a greater or lesser extent, may be in conflict with Community law?’ Geoffrey said: ‘The courts would… try in accordance with the traditional approach to interpret Statute in accordance with our international obligations.’ But what if they could not be reconciled? He went on, elliptically:
One cannot do more than that to reconcile the inescapable and enduring sovereignty of Parliament at the end of the road with the proposition that we should give effect to our treaty obligations to provide for the precedence of Community law… If through inadvertence any such conflict arose, that would be a matter for consideration by the Government and Parliament of the day…[26]
The decision of the European Court that the Merchant Shipping Act, 1988, is in contravention of the Treaty of Rome has made it impossible to put off consideration of these matters any longer.[27]
It was not, however, this question which was to make the Common Market such a difficult issue for the Government. The main political error was to overplay the advantages due to come from membership. As regards the Government itself, this tendency led ministers to adopt and excuse unsound policies. In order to ‘equip’ British industry to meet the challenges of Europe, subsidies and intervention were said to be necessary — reasoning which was endorsed in the 1972 Budget speech. Still worse, loose monetary and fiscal policies were justified on the grounds that high levels of economic growth — of the order of 5 per cent or so — were now sustainable within the new European market of some 300 million people. It was also suggested that competition from Europe would compel the trade unions to act more responsibly. As regards the general public, expectations of the benefits of membership rose — and then were sharply dashed as economic conditions deteriorated and industrial disruption worsened. Yet the White Paper had promised that ‘membership of the enlarged Community will lead to much improved efficiency and productivity in British industry, with a higher rate of investment and a faster growth of real wages’.
The success of the negotiations for British entry and their ratification by Parliament also seemed to have a psychological effect on Ted Heath. His enthusiasm for Europe had already developed into a passion. As the years went by it was to become an obsession — one increasingly shared by the great and the good. The argument became less and less about what was best for Britain and more and more about the importance of being good Europeans.
There was a mood of euphoria in the Establishment. It reached a peak with the ‘Fanfare for Europe’ celebrations of January 1973, held to mark Britain’s accession to the Common Market. After a gala performance by British and international figures at the Royal Opera House, where among many other performances our former next-door neighbour Sybil Thorndike recited Browning, Denis and I were among hundreds invited to a State Banquet at Lancaster House. I could not help but be reminded of two madrigals sung at one of Ted’s Downing Street dinners a couple of years before: ‘All creatures are merry, merry-minded’ and, more particularly, ‘Late is my rash accounting’.
The other issue which alienated many Conservative supporters, particularly in the West Midlands, was immigration. As I have suggested, Ted’s and the Government’s line on this was in fact extremely firm. Our Immigration Bill which received its Second Reading in March 1971 proposed a single system of control for Commonwealth citizens and aliens, while giving free entry to ‘patrials’, that is those with a right of abode.[28] Admittedly, the pledge on grants for voluntary repatriation was effectively shelved. But then it is doubtful whether any such system would have had much impact on net immigration.
The trouble arose when in August 1972 President Idi Amin of Uganda announced the mass expulsion of Asians who had prudently held on to their British passports following independence. In September a full Cabinet was devoted to the Ugandan Asian question. In the back of our minds was the possibility that Asian UK passport holders might also now be expelled from Kenya and Tanzania. My first thoughts when I arrived at Cabinet were that we should hold fast to our manifesto commitment that there should be ‘no further large-scale immigration’. But Ted opened by saying that there was no question of our refusing to admit the expelled British passport holders. The Attorney-General, Peter Rawlinson, explained that we were under an obligation in international law to accept them — regardless of domestic immigration laws. After this there could not be much argument. Later I came to feel that the decision was right on other grounds. There was just no way of evading the humanitarian duty we had — a duty that no one else would accept. I found the Asians who came to my constituency admirable, hard-working people. And this measure really did turn out to be an exception to the rule of strict immigration control, rather than the first step towards its abandonment.
My instincts, however, had accurately reflected Party feeling. There was deep disquiet about the decision. Enoch Powell spoke strongly against it at that year’s Party Conference. In late November the Government was defeated as a result of a large backbench revolt on new immigration rules. Ted himself had been shaken and was convinced that public opinion would not tolerate a repetition. He set up a small group of ministers to consider legislation to prevent another influx, but when it reported back in December — favouring not a Bill but a ‘declaration’ that Britain would not necessarily accept future expellees in large numbers but would consult internationally — Cabinet was divided and the idea fell. It was one of the few occasions on which the Prime Minister did not get his way.
The immigration issue itself, as we recognized in discussion in Cabinet after the Commons defeat, had been fuelled by discontent on a whole range of other issues. To understand how this had occurred it is necessary to turn back to economic matters.
REVERSING COURSE
January and February 1972 saw three events which together tried the Government’s resolve and found it wanting — the miners’ strike, the financial problems of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) and the unemployment total reaching one million. It is always a shock when unemployment reaches a new high figure, especially one as dramatic as a million. Unemployment is what economists call a lagging indicator. Although we did not know it at the time, it had just peaked and was to begin a downward trend. The rise of unemployment in 1971 was in fact the consequence of Roy Jenkins’ tight fiscal and monetary policies of 1969–70. Since monetary policy had already been significantly eased in 1971, largely as a result of financial decontrol, we could have sat tight and waited for it to work through in lower unemployment from 1972 onwards. In fact, Ted never bought this analysis, and he greatly underestimated the stimulating effects of removing credit controls. He felt that emergency fiscal measures were necessary to boost demand and reduce unemployment. And this conviction influenced his decisions across the board. Ironically, because it led to higher inflation whose main effects were suffered under the following Labour Government, and because inflation destroys jobs rather than preserves them, it ultimately led to higher unemployment as well.
In particular, the approach of the Government to Upper Clyde Shipbuilders flowed from fear of the consequences of higher unemployment. But because it was also seen as caving in to the threats of left-wing militants, it added a new charge against us. When we first discussed the company’s problems in December 1970 the Cabinet gave a fairly robust response. It was agreed that existing Government support for the UCS Group would not be continued, though there was a lifeline: we would continue with credit guarantees so long as the management agreed to close the Clydebank yard and separate out Yarrow Shipbuilders from the rest of the group. Yarrow — an important Royal Navy supplier — seemed salvageable. But by June 1971 the UCS Group was insolvent and its liquidation was announced. There followed a protest strike on Clydeside. In July trade unionists led by militant shop stewards occupied the four UCS shipyards.
There was further discussion in Cabinet in the autumn of 1971, and the Government allowed itself to be sucked into talks with the trade unions, who it was believed might be able to influence the militant shop stewards behind the occupation. The Economic Committee of the Cabinet had agreed that money should be provided to keep open the yards while the liquidator sought a solution, but only on condition that the unions gave credible undertakings of serious negotiations on new working practices. There was strong criticism of this from some of my colleagues, rightly alert to the danger of seeming to give in on the basis of worthless undertakings. But the money was provided and negotiations went ahead.
It was the unemployment prospect rather than the prospects for shipbuilding which by now were undisguisedly foremost. In November Ted Heath affirmed in a Party Political Broadcast that the ‘Government is committed completely and absolutely to expanding the economy and bringing unemployment down’. The fateful one million mark was passed on 20 January 1972. On 24 February at Cabinet we heard that the Economic Committee had agreed the previous day to provide £35 million to keep three of the four yards open. John Davies openly admitted to us that the new group had little chance of making its way commercially and that if the general level of unemployment had been lower and the economy reviving faster, he would not have recommended this course. There was tangible unease. It was pointed out that we could expect a rough reception from our supporters for the decision. But Cabinet endorsed it and at the end of February John announced the decision. It was a small but memorably inglorious episode. I discussed it all privately with Jock Bruce-Gardyne, who was scathing about the decision. He regarded it as a critical, unforgivable U-turn. I was deeply troubled.
But by now we all had other things to worry about. In framing the Industrial Relations Act we had given too much emphasis to achieving the best possible legal framework and not enough to how the attacks on our proposals were to be repelled. The same mentality prevailed as regards the threat which the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) posed to the Government and the country. We knew, of course, that the miners and the power workers held an almost unbeatable card in pay negotiations, because they could turn off the electricity supply to industry and people. Industrial action by the power workers in December 1970 had been settled after the setting-up of a Court of Inquiry under Lord Wilberforce which recommended a large increase in February the following year. Within the NUM, however, there was a large militant faction at least as interested in bringing down the Conservative Government as in flexing industrial muscle to increase miners’ earnings. The NUM held a strike ballot in October 1970 and narrowly turned down an offer from the National Coal Board (NCB). Fearing unofficial action, Cabinet authorized the NCB to offer a productivity bonus to be paid in mid-1971. The NUM again turned the offer down, following which Derek Ezra, the NCB Chairman, without consulting ministers, offered to pay the bonus at once and without strings attached to productivity. Cabinet accepted this fait accompli. Perhaps John Davies and other ministers continued to monitor events. If they did I heard nothing about it. Nor does what subsequently happened suggest that any monitoring was accompanied by forward thinking.
Only in early December 1971 did the issue of miners’ pay surface at Cabinet, and then in what seemed a fairly casual way. The NUM’s annual conference earlier that year had significantly revised the rules which provided for an official strike, so that now only a 55 per cent, as opposed to a two-thirds, majority was required. The NUM ballot, which was still going on, had, it was thought, resulted in a 59 per cent majority vote for strike action. Yet nobody seemed too worried. We were all reassured that coal stocks were in any case high.
Such complacency proved unwarranted. At the last Cabinet before Christmas Robert Carr confirmed to us that the NUM was indeed calling a national strike to begin on 9 January 1972. There was more trouble over pay in the gas and electricity industries. And we only needed to glance outside to know that winter was closing in, with all that meant for power consumption. But there was no real discussion and we all left for the Christmas break.
There was still some suggestion over Christmas that the strike might not be solid and would be concentrated in the more militant areas. But two days after it began it was all too clear that the action was total. There was then discussion in Cabinet about whether we should use the ‘cooling off’ provisions of the Industrial Relations Act. But it was said to be difficult to satisfy the legal tests involved — ‘cooling off’ orders would only be granted by the courts if there was a serious prospect that they would facilitate a settlement, which in this case was doubtful. The possibility of using the ballot provisions of the Act remained. But there was no particular reason to think that a ballot forced on the NUM would lead to anything other than a continuation of the strike, and perhaps also a hardening of attitudes. It was an acutely uncomfortable demonstration of the fragility of the principal weapons with which the Act had equipped us. Moreover, important parts of the Act had yet to come into force, and we were also aware that there was a good deal of public sympathy with the miners.
The pressure on the Government to intervene directly to try to end the dispute now increased. Looking back, and comparing 1972 with the threatened miners’ strike of 1981 and the year-long strike of 1984—85, it is extraordinary how little attention we gave to ‘endurance’ — the period of time we could keep the power stations and the economy running with limited or no coal supplies — and how easily Cabinet was fobbed off by assurances that coal stocks were high, without considering whether those stocks were in the right locations to be usable, i.e. actually at the power stations. The possibility of effective mass picketing, which would prevent oil and coal getting to power stations, was simply not on the agenda. Instead, our response was to discuss the prospects for conciliation by Robert Carr and the use of ‘emergency powers’ which would allow us to conserve power station stocks a few weeks longer by imposing power cuts. There was a great deal of useless talk about ‘keeping public opinion on our side’. But what could public opinion do to end the strike? This was one more thing I learned from the Heath years — and anyway, on the whole public opinion wasn’t on our side. A further lesson from this period — when no fewer than five States of Emergency were called — was that for all the sense of urgency and decision that the phrase ‘emergency powers’ conveys they could not be relied upon to change the basic realities of an industrial dispute.
The situation steadily worsened. The crunch came on the morning of Thursday 10 February when we were all in Cabinet. A State of Emergency had been declared the previous day. By now Robert Carr was directly involved with the NCB and the NUM in trying to find a way out. But it was John Davies who dropped the bombshell. He told us that picketing had now immobilized a large part of the remaining coal stocks, and that the supplies still available might not even suffice beyond the end of the following week. Thereafter electricity output would fall to as little as 25 per cent of normal supply. Drastic power cuts were inevitable, and large parts of industry would be laid off. The Attorney-General reported that the provisions of the Industrial Relations Act against secondary boycotts, blacking of supplies and the inducement of other workers to take action resulting in the frustration of a commercial contract, would not come into force until 28 February. He thought that most of the picketing which had taken place during the strike was lawful. As regards the criminal law, some arrests had been made but, as he put it, ‘the activities of pickets confronted the police with very difficult and sensitive decisions’.
This was something of an understatement. The left-wing leader of the Yorkshire miners, Arthur Scargill, who was to organize the politically motivated miners’ strike I faced in 1984–85, was already busy winning his militant’s spurs. In the course of Cabinet a message came through to the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, which he read out. The Chief Constable of Birmingham had asked that the West Midlands Gas Board’s Saltley Coke Depot be closed because lorries were being prevented from entering by 7,000 ‘pickets’ who were facing just 500 police.
There was no disguising that this was a victory for violence. To the Left it came to assume legendary proportions. To large numbers of politicians and commentators it proved that no one could hope to stand up to the miners. Police self-confidence was shattered. From now on many senior policemen put greater emphasis on maintaining ‘order’ than on upholding the law. In practice, that meant failing to uphold the rights of individuals against the rule of the mob — though to be fair the police lacked the equipment as much as the stomach for the action required. For me, what happened at Saltley took on no less significance than it did for the Left. I understood, as they did, that the struggle to bring trade unions properly within the rule of law would be decided not in the debating chamber of the House of Commons, nor even on the hustings, but in and around the pits and factories where intimidation had been allowed to prevail.
Ted now sounded the retreat. He appointed a Court of Inquiry under the ubiquitous Lord Wilberforce. By now the power crisis had reached such proportions that we sat in Cabinet debating whether we had time to wait for the NUM to ballot its members on ending a strike; a ballot might take over a week to organize. There was therefore no inclination to quibble when Wilberforce recommended a massive pay increase, way beyond the level allowed for in the ‘n—1’ voluntary pay policy already in force.
But we were stunned when the militant majority on the NUM Executive rejected the court’s recommendation, demanding still more money and a ragbag of other concessions — ‘a list as long as your arm’, in the words of the miners’ President, Joe Gormley.
Ted summoned us all together on the evening of Friday 18 February to decide what to do. The dispute simply had to be ended quickly. If we had to go an additional mile, so be it. Later that night Ted called the NUM and the NCB to No. 10 and persuaded the union to drop the demand for more money, while conceding the rest. The NUM Executive accepted, and just over a week later so did the miners in a ballot. The dispute was over. But the devastation it had inflicted on the Government and indeed on British politics as a whole lived on.
The immediate effect was to convince bien pensant opinion that in a country like Britain there was simply no alternative to corporatism. The Sunday Times leader of 20 February put the point crisply:
After the Wilberforce settlement, there is only one course for the Government to adopt if it is to derive any profit from the ruin of its wages policy. It must open formal and serious talks with the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress to plot a way forward towards an organized policy for incomes. This will involve all sides of industry, but above all the Government itself, in the liquidation of old nostrums. But far from losing face, the Government would thereby seize the best chance to rebuild its economic policy.
Such a message found a ready hearing from shocked and bewildered ministers. The combination of the rise in unemployment, the events at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and the Government’s humiliation by the miners resulted in a fundamental reassessment of policy. I suspect that this took place in Ted’s own mind first, with other ministers and the Cabinet very much second. It was not so much that he jettisoned the whole Selsdon approach, but rather that he abandoned some aspects of it, emphasized others and added a heavy dose of statism which probably appealed to his temperament and his Continental European sympathies. We had always been keen advocates of economic growth: but now we promoted growth at the expense of sound finance. We had always been in favour of industrial and technological modernization: but now we relied on government intervention rather than competition to ensure it. We had always entertained a basic confusion between a ‘monetarist’ and a wage-push theory of inflation: we now ignored the first and swallowed the second to such an extent that we introduced the most comprehensively regulated system of wages and prices that peacetime Britain has known.
None of this pleased me. But our inability to resist trade union power, whether exerted through irresponsible wage demands which forced companies into liquidation and workers out of jobs, or through strikes which brought the country to a halt, was now manifest. The Industrial Relations Act itself already seemed hollow: it was soon to be discredited entirely. Like most Conservatives, I was prepared to give at least a chance to a policy which retained some of the objectives we had set out in 1969/70. I was even prepared to go along with a statutory prices and incomes policy, for a time, to try to limit the damage inflicted by the arrogant misuse of trade union power. But I was wrong. State intervention in the economy is not ultimately an answer to over-mighty vested interests: for it soon comes to collude with them.
It is unusual to hold Cabinets on a Monday, and I had arranged a long-standing scientific engagement for Monday 20 March 1972, so I was not present at the Cabinet which discussed the Budget and the new Industry White Paper on that day. Both of them signalled a change in strategy, each complementing the other. The Budget was highly reflationary, comprising large cuts in income tax and purchase tax, increased pensions and social security benefits and extra investment incentives for industry, It was strongly rumoured that Tony Barber and the Treasury were very unhappy with the Budget and that it had been imposed on them by Ted. The fact that the Budget speech presented these measures as designed to help Britain meet the challenge opened up by membership of the EEC in a small way confirms this. It was openly designed to provide a large boost to demand, which it was argued would not involve a rise in inflation, in conditions of high unemployment and idle resources. Monetary policy was mentioned, but only to stress its ‘flexibility’; no numerical targets for monetary growth were set.
On Wednesday 22 March John Davies published his White Paper on Industry and Regional Development, which was the basis for the 1972 Industry Act. Even more than the Budget, this was seen by our supporters and opponents alike as an obvious U-turn. Keith and I and probably others in the Cabinet were extremely unhappy, and some of this found its way into the press. As far as I can recall there had been no prior discussion of the White Paper in Cabinet: it was presented to the Commons in the Budget statement and its preparation within Government was subject to all the secrecy usually applied to Budget measures. From this point on I was conscious that on the Labour benches enmity had been transformed into contempt. I was not in the House at the time, but I read The Times report which sums up the reaction to John Davies’s speech on the Bill:
Lame ducks never looked healthier as Mr Davies, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, opened today’s debate on the Second Reading of the Industry Bill with possibly the most remarkable speech heard in the Commons during the life of the present Government. At the end, the cheers from the Labour benches and the almost total silence from Conservative MPs showed more clearly than anything the Opposition could say how complete had been the Government volte face on intervention in industry and on aid to the regions.
I was not, I know, the only Conservative to squirm on reading stuff like this. Should I have resigned? Perhaps so. But those of us who disliked what was happening had not yet either fully analysed the situation or worked out an alternative approach. Nor, realistically speaking, would my resignation have made a great deal of difference. I was not senior enough for it to be other than the littlest ‘local difficulty’. All the more reason for me to pay tribute to people like Jock Bruce-Gardyne, John Biffen, Nick Ridley and, of course, Enoch Powell who did expose the folly of what was happening in Commons speeches and newspaper articles.
There is also a direct connection between the policies pursued from March 1972 and the very different approach of my own administration later. A brilliant, but little-known, monetary economist called Alan Walters resigned from the CPRS and delivered not only scathing criticism of the Government’s approach but also accurate predictions of where it would lead.[29]
One more blow to the approach we adopted in 1970 had still to fall: and it was not long in coming. This was the effective destruction of the Industrial Relations Act. It had never been envisaged that the Act would result in individual trade unionists going to gaol. Of course, no legal provisions can be proof against some remote possibility of that happening if troublemakers are intent on martyrdom. It was a long-running dispute between employers and dockers about ‘containerization’ which provided the occasion for this to happen. In March 1972 the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) fined the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) £5,000 for defying an order to grant access to Liverpool Docks. The following month the union was fined £50,000 for contempt on the matter of secondary action at the docks. The TGWU maintained that it was not responsible for the action of its shop stewards, but the NIRC ruled against this in May. Then, out of the blue, the Court of Appeal reversed these judgements and ruled that the TGWU was not responsible, and so the shop stewards themselves were personally liable. This was extremely disturbing, for it opened up the possibility of trade unionists going to jail. The following month three dockers involved in blacking were threatened with arrest for refusing to appear before the NIRC. 35,000 trade unionists were now on strike. At the last moment the Official Solicitor applied to the Court of Appeal to prevent the dockers’ arrest. But then in July another five dockers were jailed for contempt.
The Left were merciless. Ted was shouted down in the House. Sympathetic strikes spread, involving the closure of national newspapers for five days. The TUC called a one-day general strike. On 26 July, however, the House of Lords reversed the Court of Appeal decision and confirmed that unions were accountable for the conduct of their members. The NIRC then released the five dockers.
This was more or less the end of the Industrial Relations Act, though it was not the end of trouble in the docks. A national dock strike ensued and another State of Emergency was declared. This only ended — very much on the dockers’ terms — in August. In September the TUC General Congress rubbed salt into the wound by expelling thirty-two small unions which had refused, against TUC instructions, to de-register under the Act. Having shared to the full the Party’s enthusiasm for the Act, I was appalled.
A U-TURN TOO FAR
In the summer of 1972 the third aspect — after reflation and industrial intervention — of the new economic approach was revealed to us. This was the pursuit of an agreement on prices and incomes through ‘tripartite’ talks with the CBI and the TUC. Although there had been no explicit pay policy, we had been living in a world of ‘norms’ since the autumn of 1970 when the ‘n—1’ was formulated in the hope that there would be deceleration from the ‘going rate’ figure in successive pay rounds. The miners’ settlement had breached that policy spectacularly, but Ted drew the conclusion that we should go further rather than go back. From the summer of 1972 a far more elaborate prices and incomes policy was the aim, and more and more the centre of decision-making moved away from Cabinet and Parliament. I can only, therefore, give a partial account of the way in which matters developed. Cabinet simply received reports from Ted on what policies had effectively been decided elsewhere, though individual ministers became increasingly bogged down in the details of shifting and complicated pay negotiations. This almost obsessive interest in the minutiae of pay awards was matched by a large degree of impotence over the deals finally struck. In fact, the most important result was to distract ministers from the big economic issues and blind us with irrelevant data when we should have been looking ahead to the threats which loomed.
The period of the tripartite talks with the TUC and the CBI from early July to the end of October did not get us much further as regards the Government’s aim of controlling inflation by keeping down wage demands. It did, however, move us down other slippery slopes. In exchange for the CBI’s offer to secure ‘voluntary’ price restraint by 200 of Britain’s largest firms, limiting their price increases to 5 per cent during the following year, we embarked on the costly and self-defeating policy of holding nationalized industry price increases to the same level, even though this meant that they continued to make losses. The TUC, for its part, used the role it had been accorded by the tripartite discussions to set out its own alternative economic policy. In flat contradiction to the policies we had been elected to implement, they wanted action to keep down council rents (which would sabotage our Housing Finance Act — intended to bring them closer to market levels). They urged the control of profits, dividends and prices, aimed at securing the redistribution of income and wealth (in other words the implementation of socialism), and the repeal of the Industrial Relations Act. These demands, made at the TUC Congress in September, were taken sufficiently seriously by Ted for him to agree studies of methods by which the pay of low-paid workers could be improved without entailing proportionate increases to other workers. We had, in other words, moved four-square onto the socialist ground that ‘low pay’ — however that might be defined — was a ‘problem’ which it was for government rather than the workings of the market to resolve. In fact, the Government proposed a £2 a week limit on pay increases over the following year, with the CBI agreeing maximum 4 per cent price increases over the same period and the extension of the Government’s ‘target’ of 5 per cent economic growth.
In any case, it was not enough. The TUC was not willing — and probably not able — to deliver wage restraint. At the end of October we had a lengthy discussion of the arguments for now proceeding to a statutory policy, beginning with a pay freeze. It is an extraordinary comment on the state of mind that we had reached that, as far as I can recall, neither now nor later did anyone at Cabinet raise the objection that this was precisely the policy we had ruled out in our 1970 general election manifesto. Yet no one could accuse Ted of not being willing to go the extra mile. Only with the greatest reluctance did he accept that the TUC were unpersuadable. And so on Friday 3 November 1972 Cabinet made the fateful decision to introduce a statutory policy beginning with a ninety-day freeze of prices and incomes. No one ever spoke a truer word than Ted when he concluded by warning that we faced a troubled prospect.
The change in economic policy was accompanied by a Cabinet reshuffle. Maurice Macmillan — Harold’s son — had already taken over at Employment from Robert Carr in July 1972, when the latter replaced Reggie Maudling at the Home Office. Ted now promoted his younger disciples. He sent Peter Walker to replace John Davies at the DTI and promoted Jim Prior to be Leader of the House. Geoffrey Howe, an instinctive economic liberal, was brought into the Cabinet but given the poisoned chalice of overseeing prices and incomes policy. It has been said that I was thought of for the job; if so, I can only be thankful that I wasn’t asked.
For a growing number of backbenchers the new policy was a U-turn too far. When Enoch Powell asked in the House whether the Prime Minister had ‘taken leave of his senses’, he was publicly cold-shouldered, but many privately agreed with him. Still more significant was the fact that staunch opponents of our policy like Nick Ridley, Jock Bruce-Gardyne and John Biffen were elected to chairmanships or vice-chairmanships of important backbench committees, and Edward du Cann, on the right of the Party and a sworn opponent of Ted, became Chairman of the 1922 Committee.
As the freeze — Stage 1 — came to an end we devised Stage 2. This extended the pay and price freeze until the end of April 1973; for the remainder of 1973 workers could expect £1 a week and 4 per cent, with a maximum pay rise of £250 a year — a formula designed to favour the low-paid. A Pay Board and a Prices Commission were set up to administer the policy. Our backbench critics were more perceptive than most commentators, who considered that all this was a sensible and pragmatic response to trade union irresponsibility. In the early days it seemed that the commentators were right. A challenge to the policy by the gas workers was defeated at the end of March. The miners — as we hoped and expected after their huge increase the previous year — rejected a strike (against the advice of their Executive) in a ballot on 5 April. The number of working days lost because of strikes fell sharply. Unemployment was at its lowest since 1970. Generally, the mood in Government grew more relaxed. Ted clearly felt happier wearing his new collectivist hat than he ever had in the disguise of Selsdon.
Our sentiments should have been very different. The effects of the reflationary Budget of March 1972 and the loose financial policy it typified were now becoming apparent. The Treasury, at least, had started to worry about the economy, which was growing at a clearly unsustainable rate of well over 5 per cent. The money supply, as measured by M3 (broad money), was growing too fast — though the (narrower) Mi, which the Government preferred, less so.[30] The March 1973 Budget did nothing to cool the overheating and was heavily distorted by the need to keep down prices and charges so as to support the ‘counter-inflation policy’, as the prices and incomes policy was hopefully called. In May modest public expenditure reductions were agreed. But it was too little, and far too late. Although inflation rose during the first six months of 1973, Minimum Lending Rate (MLR) was steadily cut and a temporary mortgage subsidy was introduced. The Prime Minister also ordered that preparations be made to take statutory control of the mortgage rate if the building societies failed to hold it down when the subsidy ended. These fantastic proposals only served to distract us from the need to tackle the growing problem of monetary laxity. Only in July was MLR raised from 7.5 per cent, first to 9 per cent and then to 11.5 per cent. We were actually ahead of Labour in the opinion polls in June 1973, for the first time since 1970. But in July the Liberals took Ely and Ripon from us at by-elections. Economically and politically we had, without knowing it, already begun to reap the whirlwind.
Over the summer of 1973 Ted held more talks with the TUC, seeking their agreement to Stage 3. The detailed work was done by a group of ministers chaired by Ted, and the rest of us knew little about it. Nor did I know at the time that close attention was already being given to the problem which might arise with the miners. Like most of my colleagues, I imagine, I believed that they had had their pound of flesh already and would not come back for more.
I hope, though, that I would have given a great deal more attention than anyone seems to have done to building up coal stocks against the eventuality, however remote, of another miners’ strike. The miners either had to be appeased or beaten. Yet, for all its technocratic jargon, this was a government which signally lacked a sense of strategy. Ted apparently felt no need of one since, as we now know, he had held a secret meeting with Joe Gormley in the garden of No. 10 and thought he had found a formula to square the miners — extra payment for ‘unsocial hours’. But this proved to be a miscalculation. The miners’ demands could not be accommodated within Stage 3.
In October Cabinet duly endorsed the Stage 3 White Paper. It was immensely complicated and represented the high-point — if that is the correct expression — of the Heath Government’s collectivism. Pay increases were to be limited to £2.25 a week or 7 per cent with a maximum £350 per annum; there were complex provisions to pay shift workers more for ‘unsocial hours’, and room was made for additional payments in respect of productivity agreements and moves towards equal pay for women. In addition, there were ‘threshold payments’ to be made if inflation rose to specified levels — we made some rosy assumptions about future rates of inflation — and there was also money for pensioners and a new mortgage subsidy for first-time buyers. But the most significant new development– and one whose necessity ultimately demonstrated the futility of the kind of approach we were pursuing — was the provision that the Pay Board should set up an inquiry into ‘relativities’ between groups of workers, with the aim of accommodating grievances on this score in Stage 4. All possible eventualities, you might have thought, were catered for. But as experience of past pay policies ought to have demonstrated, you would have been wrong.
My only direct involvement in the working of this new, detailed pay policy was when I attended from time to time the relevant Cabinet Economic Sub-Committee, usually chaired by Terence Higgins, a Treasury Minister of State. Even those attracted by the concept of incomes policy on grounds of ‘fairness’ begin to have their doubts when they see its provisions applied to individual cases. My visits to the Higgins Committee were usually necessitated by questions of teachers’ pay. But on one occasion when I found myself there with Sir William Armstrong, the Head of the civil service, it was to discuss the pay of Under-Secretaries. I knew that it was at this level in my department that the most important policy work was carried on, and I saw that with inflation running at about 10 per cent and differentials squeezed as a result of union power and government pay policy, these people needed proper motivation through a decent pay rise. Of course, the same could have been said of many groups. What struck me though was that no one doubted that this particular group needed a larger pay increase than pay policy allowed. And what was true for Under-Secretaries in the civil service was true for innumerable other groups throughout the economy. Our pay policy was not just absurd: far from being ‘fair’, it was fundamentally unjust. It was, in fact, an excellent demonstration that market forces, operating within the right framework, make for fairness, and that even beneficent state control only makes for equality.
On another sublime occasion we found ourselves debating the proper rate of pay for MPs’ secretaries. This was the last straw. I said that I hadn’t come into politics to make decisions like this, and that I would pay my secretary what was necessary to keep her. Other ministers agreed. But then, they knew their secretaries; they did not know the other people whose pay they were deciding.
In any case, reality soon started to break in. Two days after the announcement of Stage 3 the NUM rejected an NCB offer worth 16.5 per cent in return for a productivity agreement. The Government immediately took charge of the negotiations. (The days of our ‘not intervening’ had long gone.) Ted met the NUM at No. 10. But no progress was made. In early November the NUM began an overtime ban. Maurice Macmillan told us that though an early strike ballot seemed unlikely and, if held, would not give the necessary majority for a strike, an overtime ban would cut production sharply. The general feeling in Cabinet was still that the Government could not afford to acquiesce in a breach of the recently introduced pay code. Instead, we should make a special effort to demonstrate what was possible within it. The miners were not the only ones threatening trouble. The firemen, electricians and engineers were all in differing stages of dispute. It is one of the penalties of pay policy that you have to fight on too many fronts.
Similarly, it is an unavoidable weakness of the planned economy to which we were now rapidly moving that economic plans take little or no account of external events. The argument that all of us used in February 1974 (and some people continued to use long afterwards) to explain the failure of the Heath Government’s economic strategy was that the quadrupling of the oil price resulting from the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 shattered our policy when it was just beginning to work. This is plainly false. Loose monetary policy had already sown the seeds of inflation, which was to surge under the incoming Labour Government. Incomes policy, which does no more than redistribute inflation through time, could do little about this. Whatever limited successes it achieved would, like those of all other incomes policies, have unwound in the form of higher demands and settlements later. Moreover, the level of economic growth, particularly for an economy still unreformed by deregulation, privatization or reductions in trade union power, was far too high to be sustainable. Public expenditure had risen too fast as well, and we were already discussing cuts before the full implications of the oil price rise were known. We had not, in fact, ‘modernized’ British industry as we had boasted — not least because only industry, not Government, can efficiently ‘modernize’ itself. Worse, by fuelling inflation and taking too many decisions out of the hands of managers and wage bargainers we had created precisely the wrong climate for industrial success.
Yet, even ignoring all of this, the basic proposition that the oil price hike was just ‘bad luck’ is fundamentally mistaken. It is the very fact that governments cannot take all relevant circumstances into account that militates against economic planning. And it is because a properly operating market economy adjusts so sensitively to every signal that it avoids those sharp dislocations when cumulative pressures break through.
Admittedly, the threatened oil embargo and oil price rises resulting from the Arab-Israeli war that autumn made things far worse. As the effects of the miners’ industrial action bit deeper, the sense that we were no longer in control of events deepened. Somehow we had to break out. This made a quick general election increasingly attractive. Quite what we would have done if we had been re-elected is, of course, problematic. Perhaps Ted would have liked to go further towards a managed economy. Others would probably have liked to find a way to pay the miners their Danegeld and seek a quieter political life. Keith and I and a large part of the Parliamentary Conservative Party would have wanted to discard the corporatist and statist trappings with which the Government was now surrounded and try to get back to the free market approach from which we had allowed ourselves to be diverted in early 1972.
Indeed, quite apart from our exchanges about the shortcomings of economic policy, Keith and I had also been intensely irritated by the posture the Government took during the Arab-Israeli war. In the hope of securing favourable treatment from the oil-producing states — which were limiting oil supplies to Western nations — the Government refused to condemn the Arab states which had broken the 1967 ceasefire and we applied an arms embargo to both sides, depriving the Israelis of the spare parts they needed. The Government also refused to allow the Americans to use British bases to resupply Israel.
As MP for Finchley, I knew at first hand what the Jewish community in Britain felt about our policies. The early days of the war were particularly bad for Israel — the situation was far worse than in 1967 — and I followed the news hour by hour. There were some difficult discussions in Cabinet with Alec Douglas-Home defending the policy courteously and Ted exercising a rigid determination to control an issue which — as he saw it — would determine the success or failure of our whole economic strategy. Finally, he told us bluntly that he was having a note circulated laying down the public line ministers were expected to take.
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
At Cabinet on Tuesday 13 November it was all gloom as the crisis accelerated on every front. Tony Barber told us that the October trade figures that day would show another large deficit. There was talk of public expenditure cuts and tax increases. (MLR was in fact raised to a record 13 per cent.) A declaration of yet another State of Emergency would have to be made. Orders would be laid restricting lighting and heating in commercial premises. There was even talk of issuing petrol coupons. What I did not know was that included in the measures were plans to stop electrical heating in schools. In fact I only heard about it on the next day’s radio news. I was furious, partly because it was a politically stupid act and partly because I had not been consulted. I went in to see Tom Boardman, the Industry Minister, and after what the diplomats would describe as frank exchanges had it stopped.
The disagreement over school heating was, however, part of a wider argument which continued up to and beyond the calling of the election. Should we err on the side of stringency or of liberality when it came to deciding on measures to conserve energy? This was not something which could be settled on technical grounds alone; for we could not know how long the miners’ overtime ban would last, when or whether it would escalate into a strike, or how well industry would be able to cope with power shortages. In these circumstances, it was natural to look at least as closely at the political impact. But here too there were large uncertainties. Adopting the most stringent measures would certainly help convince the general public that this was a real emergency provoked by union militancy at a time of grave international economic problems. But there was a risk that people would become angry with the restrictions, particularly any which seemed needlessly petty — such as the decision to close down television broadcasting at 10.30 at night. And then, of course, any subsequent relaxation would be met with the retort that it showed we had overreacted, doubtless for party political reasons, in the first place.
One shrewd move on Ted’s part at the beginning of December was to bring Willie Whitelaw back from Northern Ireland to become Employment Secretary in place of Maurice Macmillan. Willie was both conciliatory and cunning, a combination of qualities which was particularly necessary if some way were to be found out of the struggle with the miners. The Government’s hand was also strengthened by the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, the opinion polls were now showing us with a clear lead over Labour as the public reacted indignantly to the miners’ actions. In these circumstances, all but the most militant trade unionists would be fearful of a confrontation precipitating a general election. Speculation on these lines soon began to grow in the press.
On Thursday 13 December Ted announced the introduction of a three-day working week to conserve energy. He also gave a broadcast that evening. This gave an impression of crisis which polarized opinion in the country. At first industrial output remained more or less the same, itself an indication of the inefficiency and overmanning of so much of British industry. But we did not know this at the time. Nor could we know how long even a three-day week would be sustainable. I found strong support among Conservatives for the measures taken. There was also understanding of the need for the £1.2 billion public spending cuts, which were announced a few days later.
At this stage we believed that we could rely on business leaders. Shortly before Christmas, Denis and I went to a party at a friend’s house in Lamberhurst. There was a power cut and so night lights had been put in jam jars to guide people up the steps. There was a touch of wartime spirit about it all. The businessmen there were of one mind: ‘Stand up to them. Fight it out. See them off. We can’t go on like this.’ It was all very heartening. For the moment.
There still seemed no honourable or satisfactory way out of the dispute itself. Negotiations with the NUM got nowhere. The Government offer of an immediate inquiry into the future of the mining industry and miners’ pay if the NUM went back to work on the basis of the present offer was turned down flat. One possible opportunity was missed when Tony Barber rejected an offer by the TUC, made at the NEDC on 9 January 1974, that they would not use a larger offer to the NUM as an argument in negotiations for other settlements. Tony explained to us the next day that he considered this had been a propaganda exercise rather than a serious offer. Although Cabinet agreed afterwards that we should follow up the offer, and the TUC were invited to No. 10 for several long meetings, the damage had been done: it looked as if we were not interested. We might have done better to accept it and put the TUC on the spot. As it was, the TUC offer undoubtedly put us on the defensive. The incident taught me neither to accept nor to reject any offer until the consequences had been fully weighed.
By candlelight in the flat in Flood Street, Denis and I talked through the predicament in which the Government found itself. It was clear that many mistakes had been made, and that if and when we managed to come through the present crisis, fundamental questions would need to be asked about the Government’s direction. Yet, whatever we might have done differently, there was no doubting that we now faced a struggle which had to be won. The miners, backed in varying degrees by other trade unions and the Labour Party, were flouting the law made by Parliament. The militants were clearly out to bring down the Government and to demonstrate once and for all that Britain could only be governed with the consent of the trade union movement. This was intolerable not just to me as a Conservative Cabinet minister but to millions of others who saw the fundamental liberties of the country under threat. Denis and I, our friends and most of my Party workers, felt that we now had to pick up the gauntlet and that the only way to do that was by calling and winning a general election. From now on, this was what I urged whenever I had the opportunity.
I was, though, surprised and frustrated by Ted Heath’s attitude. He seemed out of touch with reality. He was still more interested in the future of Stage 3 and in the oil crisis than he was in the pressing question of the survival of the Government. Cabinet discussions concentrated on tactics and details, never the fundamental strategy. Such discussions were perhaps taking place in some other forum; but I rather doubt it. Certainly, there was a strange lack of urgency. I suspect it was because Ted was secretly desperate to avoid an election and did not seriously wish to think about the possibility of one. In the end, perhaps — as some of us speculated — because his inner circle was split on the issue, Ted finally did ask some of us in to see him, in several small groups, on Monday 14 January in his study at No. 10.
By this stage we were only days away from the deadline for calling a 7 February election — the best and most likely ‘early’ date. At No. 10 in our group John Davies and I did most of the talking. We both strongly urged Ted to face up to the fact that we could not have the unions flouting the law and the policies of a democratically elected Government in this way. We should have an early election and fight unashamedly on the issue of ‘Who governs Britain?’ Ted said very little. He seemed to have asked us in for form’s sake, rather than anything else. I gathered that he did not agree, though he did not say as much. I went away feeling depressed. I still believe that if he had gone to the country earlier we would have scraped in, because we might have been able to focus the campaign on the issue of trade union power.
On Thursday 24 January Cabinet met twice. Peter Carrington, now both Secretary of State for Energy and Party Chairman, urged some relaxation of the power restrictions. But many of us were worried about any such move, for the reasons I have outlined earlier. The second meeting of the day, held in the evening, took place after the NUM Executive had decided on a strike ballot. This more or less tipped the balance in favour of caution, though there was some minor easing of restrictions. It seemed likely to me that there would be a sufficient vote for a strike, and in this case that a general election campaign would follow.
The following Wednesday, 30 January, with the ballot still pending, an emergency Cabinet was called. Ted told us that the Pay Board’s report on relativities had now been received. The question was whether we should accept the report and set up new machinery to investigate ‘relativities’ claims. The miners had always claimed to be demanding an improvement in their relative pay — hence their rejection of Ted’s ‘unsocial hours’ provision, which applied to all shift workers. The Pay Board report might provide a basis for them to settle within the incomes policy — all the more so because it specifically endorsed the idea that changes in the relative importance of an industry due to ‘external events’ could also be taken into account when deciding pay. The rapidly rising price of oil was just such an ‘external event’.
We felt that the Government had no choice but to set up the relativities machinery. Not to do so — having commissioned the relativities report in the first place — would make it seem as if we were actively trying to prevent a settlement with the miners. And with an election now likely we had to consider public opinion at every step.
But there were important tactical questions as to how we did this. We could demand that the TUC accept the principle of pay policy as a condition. We could require that the miners go back to work and accept the NCB’s existing offer while the Pay Board undertook its inquiry. These were not unreasonable conditions in the circumstances, but they were very unlikely to be acceptable to either the TUC or the NUM.
Ted and a group of ministers had drafted a letter to the TUC and CBI that made the reference conditional on the miners accepting the existing NCB offer and returning to work. The letter invited the TUC and the CBI for talks. I suspect that Ted was less than happy with this tough draft. In his heart of hearts he wanted a settlement and up to the very last moment believed he could achieve it. But by this stage even some of his closest friends in Cabinet wanted to bring matters to a head with the miners. The split within the inner circle of the Government had already been exposed on the issue of an early election: I assumed that the same divisions existed in the group which drafted the letter.
In the end Cabinet watered down the contents of the letter, removing the condition that the miners accept the NCB offer and attaching no strings to the proposal that the TUC meet ministers for talks. The letter was published. When we met again the following day there was a general feeling that the press coverage had been good and that we had regained some of the initiative lost over the TUC offer earlier in the month. But in practice we were committed now to accepting the relativities machinery and any offer that it might come up with. There was no hiding the fact that the miners were likely to win a large increase. If we went ahead and held an election, the prospect was that we would face another Wilberforce immediately afterwards. At the time it made tactical sense. But looking back I have to believe that others were preparing the ground to buy the miners off.
An election became all but certain when, on Tuesday 5 February, we learned that 81 per cent of those voting in the NUM ballot had supported a strike. Election speculation reached fever pitch from which there was no going back. I suspect none of us was surprised when Ted told us at Cabinet two days later that he had decided to go to the country. The general election would take place on Thursday 28 February — that is, as soon as possible.
Willie proposed formally to refer the miners’ claim to the Pay Board for a relativities study. He couched his argument for this course entirely in terms of its giving us something to say during the election in reply to the inevitable question: How will you solve the miners’ dispute if you win? Cabinet then made the fateful decision to agree to Willie’s proposal.
Because of the emergency nature of the election, I had not been involved in the early drafts of even the education section of the manifesto, which was now published within days. There was little new to say, though the record was set out. In any case, the dominant theme of the document — the need for firm and fair government at a time of crisis — was clear and stark. The main new pledge was to change the system whereby Social Security benefits were paid to strikers’ families. Apart from the questions of inflation and trade union power, the mortgage rate of 11 per cent created political difficulties for us. Naturally, I was mainly questioned about education matters, as when Willie Whitelaw and I joined Robin Day on Election Call in the course of the campaign. But in answer to one questioner I set out my strongly held views on a coalition government: ‘I think it’s a false assumption that if you get a government of all the best brains, the best brains will agree what to do. You can get two experts on anything and they will not in fact agree on what the solution is… You have in a coalition government to drop many of your own beliefs.’
This statement was to be unexpectedly relevant to the period after the election when the Conservative leadership, licking its wounds and seeking some new vehicle to carry it back to power, was attracted by the notion of a ‘Government of National Unity’. I might also have added that if you have no beliefs, or if you have already abandoned them, ‘Government of National Unity’ has rather more attractions.
During most of the campaign I was reasonably confident that we would win. Conservative supporters who had been alienated by the U-turns started drifting back to us. Indeed, their very frustrations at what they saw as our past weaknesses made them all the more determined to back us now that we had decided, as they saw it, to stand up to trade union militancy. Harold Wilson set out Labour’s approach in the context of a ‘social contract’ with the unions. Those who longed for a quiet life could be expected to be seduced by that. But I felt that if we could stick to the central issue summed up by the phrase ‘Who governs?’ we would win the argument, and with it the election.
I felt victory — almost tangibly — slip away from us in the last week. I just could not believe it when I heard on the radio of the leak of evidence taken by the Pay Board which purported to show that the miners could have been paid more within Stage 3, with the implication that the whole general election was unnecessary. The Government’s attempts to deny this — and there did indeed turn out to have been a miscalculation — were stumbling and failed to carry conviction. We had become caught up in the complexities of pay policy and finally been strangled by them. From now on it was relentlessly downhill.
Two days later, Enoch Powell urged people to vote Labour in order to secure a referendum on the Common Market. I could understand the logic of his position, which was that membership of the Common Market had abrogated British sovereignty and that the supreme issue in politics was therefore how to restore it. But what shocked me was his manner of doing it — announcing only on the day the election was called that he would not be contesting his Wolverhampton seat and then dropping this bombshell at the end of the campaign. It seemed to me that to betray one’s local supporters and constituency workers in this way was heartless. I suspect that Enoch’s decision in February 1974, like his earlier intervention in 1970, had a crucial effect.
Then three days later there was another blow. Campbell Adam-son, the Director General of the CBI, publicly called for the repeal of the Industrial Relations Act. It was all too typical of the way in which Britain’s industrial leaders were full of bravado before battle was joined, but lacked the stomach for a fight. I must admit, though, that our own interventionist policies had hardly encouraged British businessmen and managers to accept the risks and responsibilities of freedom.
Partly because of these developments, but partly too no doubt because it was bound to be difficult to focus on just one issue for a three-week campaign, we lost our momentum. I still thought that we might possibly win, but I was aware of a slackening of enthusiasm for our cause and confusion about our objectives. I also knew from the opinion polls and soundings in my own constituency that the Liberals were posing a serious threat. So by polling day my optimism had been replaced by unease.
That sentiment grew as I heard from Finchley and elsewhere around the country of a surprisingly heavy turn-out of voters to the polls that morning. I would have liked to think that these were all angry Conservatives, coming out to demonstrate their refusal to be blackmailed by trade union power. But it seemed more likely that they were voters from the Labour-dominated council estates who had come out to teach the Tories a lesson. I was glad to be wearing a spray of blue flowers in my buttonhole instead of the usual paper rosette. They had been given me by Mark and they stayed fresh all day, helping to keep up my spirits.
The results themselves quickly showed that we had nothing to be cheerful about. We lost thirty-three seats. It would be a hung Parliament. Labour had become the largest party with 301 seats — seventeen short of a majority; we were down to 296, though with a slightly higher percentage of the vote than Labour; the Liberals had gained almost 20 per cent of the vote with fourteen seats, and smaller parties, including the Ulster Unionists, held twenty-three. My own majority in Finchley was down from 11,000 to 6,000, though some of that decline was the result of boundary changes in the constituency.
I was upset at the result. We had finally squared up to the unions and the people had not supported us. Moreover, I had enjoyed my time as Education Secretary, or most of it. I would miss the workload and the decisions, and of course the conveniences like the ministerial car: from now on I would be driving myself around once more in my Vauxhall Viva. At least the painful process of clearing out desks and cupboards full of personal belongings was largely spared me. I had never taken much personal clutter to the DES in any case and, prudently, I had brought most of what there was back home at the start of the campaign and popped into the office to sign urgent letters when in central London. I could make a more or less clean break.
On Friday afternoon we met, a tired and downcast fag-end of a Cabinet, to be asked by Ted Heath for our reactions as to what should now be done. There were a number of options. Ted could advise the Queen to send for Harold Wilson as the leader of the largest single party. Or the Government could face Parliament and see whether it could command support for its programme. Or he could try to do a deal with the smaller parties for a programme designed to cope with the nation’s immediate difficulties. Having alienated the Ulster Unionists through our Northern Ireland policy, this in effect meant a deal with the Liberals — though even that would not have given us a majority. There was little doubt from the way Ted spoke that this was the course he favoured. We argued in circles about these possibilities.
My own instinctive feeling was that the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons was justified in expecting that they would be called to try to form a government. But Ted argued that with the Conservatives having won the largest number of votes, he was duty bound to explore the possibility of coalition. So he offered the Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe a place in a coalition Government and promised a Speaker’s conference on electoral reform. Thorpe went away to consult his party. Although I wanted to remain Secretary of State for Education, I did not want to do so at the expense of the Conservative Party’s never forming a majority government again. Yet that is what the introduction of proportional representation, which the Liberals would be demanding, might amount to. I was also conscious that this horse-trading was making us look ridiculous. The British dislike nothing more than a bad loser. It was time to go.
When we met again on Monday morning Ted gave us a full account of his discussions with the Liberals. They had in any case not been willing to go along with what Jeremy Thorpe wanted. A formal reply from him was still awaited. But it now seemed almost certain that Ted would have to tender his resignation. The final Cabinet was held at 4.45 that afternoon. By now Jeremy Thorpe’s reply had been received. From what Ted said, there were clues that his mind was already turning to the idea of a National Government of all parties, something which would increasingly attract him. It did not, of course, attract me at all. In any case, the Liberals were not going to join a coalition Government with us. There was nothing more to say.
I left Downing Street, sad but with some sense of relief. I had given little thought to the future. But I knew in my heart that it was time not just for a change in government but for a change in the Conservative Party.
GLAD CONFIDENT MORNING
Shortly before 11 o’clock on Tuesday 23 June 1970 my new ministerial car dropped me in Downing Street, where with other colleagues I ran the gauntlet of press and television outside No. 10. The hubbub in the ante-room was of enthusiasm and laughter. There was a spring in our step as we filed into the Cabinet Room where Ted Heath, with the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend beside him, awaited us. I found my place at the Cabinet table, but my mind was at least as much on the department[21] as on the large strategic issues before the Government. As I shall explain, it remained there — perhaps excessively so. But I felt an exhilaration which was prompted by more than the fact that this was my first ever Cabinet meeting: I felt, as I suspect we all did, that this was a decisive moment in the life of the country.
It was an impression which Ted himself did everything to justify. Speaking with the same intensity which had suffused his introduction to the manifesto on which we had just fought the election, he announced his intention of establishing a new style of administration and a fresh approach to the conduct of public business. The emphasis was to be upon deliberation and the avoidance of hasty or precipitate reactions. There was to be a clean break and a fresh start and new brooms galore.
The tone was just what we would all have expected from Ted. He had a great belief in the capacity of open-minded politicians to resolve fundamental problems if the processes and structures of government were right and advice of the right technical quality was available and properly used. This was the approach which would lie behind the decision that autumn to set up the Central Policy Review Staff under Victor Rothschild, to reconstruct the machinery of government on more ‘rational’ lines (including the setting up of the mammoth Department of the Environment) and the establishment of the PAR system. More generally, it inspired what turned out to be an excessive confidence in the Government’s ability to shape and control events.
Inevitably, this account contains a large measure of hindsight. I was not a member of the key Economic Policy Committee (EPC) of the Cabinet, though I would sometimes attend if teachers’ pay or spending on schools was an issue. More frequently, I attended Terence Higgins’s sub-committee on pay when the full rigours of a detailed statutory prices and incomes policy — the policy our manifesto pledged us to avoid — were applied, and made some contributions there. And, naturally, I was not a member of Ted’s inner circle where most of the big decisions originated. The role of the Cabinet itself was generally of reduced importance after the first year of the Heath Government until its very end. The full account of these years will, therefore, have to await Ted Heath’s own memoirs.
This, however, is said in explanation not exculpation. As a member of the Cabinet I must take my full share of responsibility for what was done under the Government’s authority. Reviewing the events of this period with the benefit of two decades’ hindsight (including more than one of these as Prime Minister), I can see more clearly how Ted Heath, an honest man whose strength of character made him always formidable, whether right or wrong, took the course he did. And as time went on, he was wrong, not just once but repeatedly. His errors — our errors, for we went along with them — did huge harm to the Conservative Party and to the country. But it is easy to comprehend the pressures upon him.
It is also important to remember that the policies Ted pursued between the spring of 1972 and February 1974 were urged on him by most influential commentators and for much of the time enjoyed a wide measure of public support. The Nixon administration in the United States adopted a broadly similar approach, as did other European countries. There were brave and far-sighted critics who were proved right. But they were an embattled, isolated group. Although my reservations steadily grew, I was not at this stage among them.
But some of us (though never Ted, I fear) learned from these mistakes. I can well understand how after I became Leader of the Conservative Party Enoch Powell, who with a small number of other courageous Tory backbenchers had protested at successive U-turns, claimed that: ‘If you are looking for somebody to pick up principles trampled in the mud, the place to look is not among the tramplers.’
But Enoch was wrong. In Rudyard Kipling’s words, Keith Joseph and I had ‘had no end of a lesson’:
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should;
We have had no end of a lesson; it will do us no end of good.[22]
In this sense, we owed our later successes to our inside knowledge and to our understanding of the earlier failures. The Heath Government showed, in particular, that socialist policies pursued by Tory politicians are if anything even more disastrous than socialist policies pursued by Labour politicians. Collectivism, without even the tincture of egalitarian idealism to redeem it, is a deeply unattractive creed.
How did it happen? I have already outlined some of the background. In spite of the acclaim for the Selsdon Park manifesto, we had thought through our policies a good deal less thoroughly than appeared. In particular that was true of our economic policy. We had no clear theory of inflation or the role of wage settlements within it. And without such a theory we drifted into the superstition that inflation was the direct result of wage increases and the power of trade unions. So we were pushed inexorably along the path of regulating incomes and prices.
Ted was also impatient. I share this characteristic. I am often impatient with people. But I knew — partly of course by seeing what happened under Ted — that, in a broader sense, patience is required if a policy for long-term change is to work. This is especially true if, like Ted’s Government in 1970 and mine in 1979, you are committed to a non-interventionist economic policy that relies on setting a framework rather than designing a plan. Sudden shifts of direction, taken because the results are too long in appearing, can have devastating effects in undermining the credibility of the strategy. And so a government which came to power proud of its principle and consistency left behind it, among other embarrassing legacies, a host of quips about ‘the U-turn’. Ted’s own words in his introduction to the 1970 manifesto came back to haunt him:
Once a decision is made, once a policy is established, the Prime Minister and his colleagues should have the courage to stick to it. Nothing has done Britain more harm in the world than the endless backing and filling which we have seen in recent years.
At another level, however — the level of day-to-day human experience in government — the explanation of what happened is to be found within the events themselves, in the forces which buffeted us and in our reactions to them. We thought we were well enough prepared to face these. But we were not. Little by little we were blown off course until eventually, in a fit of desperation, we tore up the map, threw the compass overboard and, sailing under new colours but with the same helmsman, still supremely confident of his navigational sense, set off towards unknown and rock-strewn waters.
The squalls began early. Within weeks of taking office the Government had been forced to declare a State of Emergency[23] as a national docks strike began to bite. At the same time a Court of Inquiry was set up to find an expensive solution. Although the strike evaporated within a fortnight, it was an ambiguous triumph.
The following month the crisis was international. On Sunday 6 September terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four aircraft (none of them British) and demanded that they be flown to Jordan. Three of the hijacks were successful, but on the fourth — an Israeli plane en route to London — the hijackers were overpowered by security men. The surviving terrorist, Leila Khalid, was arrested at Heathrow.
The PFLP demanded her release, and just before Cabinet met on Wednesday 9 September they hijacked a British aircraft in order to bring more pressure to bear. The plane was flying to Beirut as we met. It was explained to Cabinet that we had already acquiesced in an American suggestion to offer the release of Leila Khalid in return for the freedom of the hostages. Over the next few weeks Cabinet discussed the question many times as negotiations ran on. Meanwhile, Jordan itself fell into a state of civil war as King Hussein fought the Palestinians for control of his country and the Syrians invaded and occupied much of the north. Ted resisted any British involvement on the King’s side and was certain that we were right to negotiate with the PFLP. Though it went against the grain to release Khalid, in the end the deal was made. In due course all the hostages were released, though the hijacked aircraft were blown up by the terrorists, and King Hussein survived the events of ‘Black September’ — barely but triumphantly.
But by then the Government had already suffered a blow from which, perhaps, we never fully recovered. In mid-July Iain Macleod had gone into hospital for a small abdominal operation. It had been a success and he had returned to No. 11 for a few days’ rest. At about midnight on Monday 20 July my telephone rang. It was Francis Pym, the Chief Whip. He said that Ted had asked him to ring round to tell us all that Iain had suffered a heart attack that evening and had just died. He was only fifty-six.
I felt the blow personally, for Iain had always been a generous and kind man for whom to work. I knew that he had given me my chance to shine and so make my way into the Shadow and then the real Cabinet. But I also immediately recognized that we had lost our shrewdest political intellect and best communicator. How Iain would have performed as Chancellor I do not know. But if one accepts, as I did and do, that the worst mistakes of economic policy derived from Ted’s overruling the Treasury, it is reasonable to suppose that matters might have turned out better if Iain had lived. He was succeeded by Tony Barber, a man of considerable intellectual ability, who by and large had an unhappy time at the Treasury. The economic problems of the next few years were founded in this transition. Although Tony may have had sounder economic instincts, Iain boxed at a much higher political weight.
The Cabinet which met after Iain Macleod’s death was a sombre one. Around the Cabinet table already sat nearly all of those who would be my colleagues over the next four and a half years. Their personal qualities would be severely tested. Tony Barber was an old if not particularly close friend from the Bar, an able tax lawyer, but not someone to stand up against Ted. Reggie Maudling, Home Secretary until his resignation over the Poulson affair in 1972,[24] was still interested in and had strong views about economic policy. By contrast, he was less than fascinated by his new brief. Technically still extremely competent, he was unlikely to oppose any shift back towards a more interventionist economic policy, which indeed he had always favoured.
Alec Douglas-Home had returned effortlessly to his old Foreign Office brief where, however, plenty of effort was soon required in giving effect to our promises made in Opposition to lift the arms embargo on South Africa and in trying to devise an affordable way of retaining a British military presence east of Suez. He was unlikely to take much part in domestic political affairs now, any more than he had in Shadow Cabinet. Quintin Hailsham had found his ideal role as Lord Chancellor, beginning a long spell in that office under Ted and then me, where he managed to combine his old sense of mischief and theatre with the sedate traditions of the Upper House. Peter Carrington was Defence Secretary, a post for which he was well suited and which he filled with aplomb. I knew that he was close to Ted. He doubtless became still closer when later as Party Chairman and Energy Secretary he had a crucial role in dealing with the final miners’ strike which precipitated the general election of February 1974. He was one of Ted’s ‘inner circle’.
Keith Joseph, by contrast, though a senior Cabinet figure and someone whose views had always to be taken seriously, was certainly not part of that circle and was never, so far as I know, invited to join it. Having been appointed to be Secretary of State for Social Services, Keith’s compassionate, social reforming side had become uppermost at the expense of his more conservative economic convictions, though he retained a profound distrust of corporatism in all its forms. His passion became the need to tackle the problem of the ‘cycle of deprivation’ which condemned successive generations to poverty. Like me, Keith had been given a high-spending ‘social’ department, and there was a natural opposition between what he (also like me) wanted for his own preferred programmes and the requirements of tight public expenditure control. Whether by chance or calculation, Ted had ensured that the two most economically conservative members of his Cabinet were kept well out of economic decision-making, which was left to those over whom he could wield maximum influence.
John Davies, the former Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) (who knew nothing of politics when he was summoned after Iain Macleod’s death to become Minister of Technology), certainly fell into that category. John was someone I liked and indeed appointed later to a post in my Shadow Cabinet. But his warmest admirer would have been hard put to make a case for his handling of the turbulent industrial politics which would now become his responsibility. John also represented ‘business’, a concept which Ted, with his latent corporatism, considered had some kind of ‘role’ in government.
With Tony Barber and John Davies, Robert Carr was, as Employment Secretary, the third key figure responsible for economic strategy under Ted. He was a good deal senior to me and we had different views and temperaments. He was a decent, hard working though not a colourful personality. But he had a difficult, arguably impossible, brief in trying to make the flawed Industrial Relations Act work. His reputation as a left winger in Conservative terms was less useful than some might have expected; trade unionists used to regard left-wing Conservatives not as more compassionate but merely as less candid. As Employment Secretary at the time of the first (1972) miners’ strike and Home Secretary at the time of the second (1974), few people faced greater difficulties during these years.
One who did was Willie Whitelaw as, successively, Leader of the House, Northern Ireland Secretary and finally Employment Secretary at the time of the three-day week. Willie was part of the generation which had fought the war. We seemed to have little in common and neither of us, I am sure, suspected how closely our political destinies would come to be linked. Since Education was not a department requiring at this time a heavy legislative programme, our paths rarely crossed. But I was already aware of Willie as a wise, reassuring figure whose manner, voice and stature made him an excellent Leader of the House. By the end of the Government his judgement and qualities were playing a role second in significance only to Ted’s own. Willie’s bluff public persona, however, concealed a shrewd political intelligence and instinct for managing men.
After Iain Macleod’s untimely death, Geoffrey Rippon was given responsibility for negotiating the terms of our entry into the European Economic Community. Although we had superficially similar backgrounds — both having been Presidents of OUCA and barristers — Geoffrey and I were never close. It always seemed to me that he tried to overwhelm opponents with the force of his personality rather than with the force of his argument. This may have been because Ted had given him the task of getting the best deal he could in negotiations with the EEC — and that deal was not always in our best long-term interests. This was something we were to realize more and more as time went on.
My impression was that the two members of Cabinet Ted trusted most were Jim Prior and Peter Walker. Both had proved their loyalty, Jim as Ted’s PPS in Opposition, and Peter as organizer of his 1965 leadership campaign. Jim was Agriculture Minister, a post which his farming background and rubicund features helped him make his own, before becoming Deputy Chairman of the Party under Peter Carrington in April 1972. Peter Walker’s thirst for the ‘modernization’ of British institutions must have helped draw him closer to Ted. He soon became Secretary of State for the huge new Department of the Environment, where he embarked with vigour upon the most unpopular local government reforms until my own Community Charge — and at the cost of far greater bureaucracy. Later he would go to the other conglomerate, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Jim and, still more so, Peter were younger than me, but both had far more influence over the general direction of Government. Although their political views were very different from mine, I respected their loyalty to Ted and their political effectiveness.
The other members of Cabinet — Gordon Campbell at Scotland, George Jellicoe as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Lords, Peter Thomas, a close parliamentary neighbour and friend, as Secretary of State for Wales and Party Chairman, and Michael Noble briefly at Trade — did not figure large in discussions. I therefore found myself with just one political friend in Cabinet — Keith. Although I generally had polite and pleasant relations with my other colleagues, I knew that we were not soulmates. Doubtless they knew it too. Such things often show through more clearly in casual conversation and spontaneous reactions than in argument. What with the formidable difficulties I faced in Education, I therefore had little incentive to try to win wider strategic points in Cabinet.
Ted’s mastery of the Cabinet was complete and unchallenged. He had won the 1970 election against all expectations and by means of a very personal campaign. We were aware of this and so was he. Moreover, argument from first principles was alien to his nature and disagreeable to his temperament. Until 1972—73 and the events of the U-turn, the unity of Cabinet under Ted’s leadership was at least in part simply recognition that he was Prime Minister and had a right to expect support in carrying through the programme. Once the programme itself was abandoned and an exercise in corporate interventionism adopted in its stead, the atmosphere grew worse, not manifesting itself in dissent but in the occasional leaked grumble. We knew we were locked in.
A ROLLS-ROYCE POLICY
For all the difficulties which were quickly upon us that summer and autumn of 1970, such melancholy reflections were still far from our thoughts. Indeed, Ted Heath, Tony Barber, Robert Carr and John Davies set out on the course of radical reform with impressive zeal; and the rest of us in the Cabinet were enthusiastic cheerleaders.
First, the Government embarked with a will on cutting public spending. (In fact this review was to be the only sustained Cabinet-level exercise of the kind during the entire period of 1970–74; the cuts of December 1973 would be made at speed and without detailed discussion in Cabinet.) Discussions began at the end of July. A target was agreed of £1,700 million net reduction in planned spending by 1974/75, and Ted circulated a paper on the economy to show his commitment to the strategy. The cuts were to fall most heavily on industrial spending, though as already noted I had my own departmental spending battles at Education. Investment grants were ended. The Industrial Re-organization Corporation (IRC) would be closed down. Aircraft and space projects would be subject to the closest scrutiny. Even with the reprieve of the hugely expensive Concorde project, largely on European policy grounds, it was an impressive free-market economic programme. And it made possible a tax-cutting Budget in October, which reduced the standard rate of income tax by 6d, down from 8s.3d in the pound (just over 4ip), and made reductions in corporation tax to take effect at the beginning of the next financial year.
Nor was there any delay in bringing forward the other key feature of our economic programme — the Industrial Relations Bill. The framework of the Bill was already familiar: this was one of the areas of policy most thoroughly worked out in Opposition and we had published our proposals in 1968. It was to be an ambitiously comprehensive attempt to provide a new basis for industrial relations. The main principles were that collective bargaining agreements should be legally enforceable unless the parties to them agreed otherwise, and that the unions’ historic immunities from civil action should be both significantly narrowed and confined to those whose rule books met certain minimum standards (‘registered unions’).
Cases brought under this legislation would be dealt with by a new system of industrial courts and tribunals, headed by a branch of the High Court — the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC). The Bill also gave new powers to the Secretary of State for Employment, as a last resort when negotiation had failed, to apply to the NIRC either for an order deferring industrial action for up to sixty days — a ‘cooling off’ period — or for one requiring a secret ballot of the workers involved before a strike.
There was a good deal in the Bill that actively favoured trade unionism, for all the hostility it encountered on the Left. For the first time in English law there would be a legally enforceable right to belong (or not to belong) to a trade union. There would be statutory protection against unfair dismissal — again, a new principle in English law. Finally, the Bill would repeal provisions under previous legislation that made it a criminal offence for gas, water and electricity workers to strike during the lifetime of their contracts.
At the time I was a strong supporter of the Bill, although I had doubts about particular parts, such as the measure on essential services. We were all conscious that the previous Labour Government had backed off from its In Place of Strife proposals for trade union reform under a mixture of union and Party pressure. We were, therefore, doubly determined to make the changes required.
In retrospect, the philosophy of the Bill was muddled. It assumed that if the unions were in general confirmed in their powers they would both discipline their own members industrially, reducing wildcat strikes for instance, and use their industrial strength in a regulated and orderly fashion on the American model. But it also contained provisions to strengthen the powers of individuals against the unions. So the Bill was in part corporatist and in part libertarian.
Specifically there were four flaws. First, the Bill was full of loopholes. By refusing to sign agreements unless the employer conceded that they need not be legally binding, the unions effectively bypassed one legal sanction. They also discovered an effective tactic to stymie the Bill’s ambition to transform the nature of British industrial relations — many simply de-registered and went on behaving as if they still possessed the old immunities, defying anyone damaged by their activities to bring an action, and defying the courts on the rare occasions when actions were brought.
Second, we were not clear how the Industrial Relations Act fitted into our overall economic strategy. Our movement towards a ‘voluntary’ incomes policy — starting with the so-called ‘n–i’ policy[25] which had begun even before the Bill was introduced — increased the occasions for disputes about pay and put the fledgling Act under huge pressures. Eventually, the Industrial Relations Act was shelved, at least tacitly, as part of the attempt to stitch up a deal with the trade unions on pay.
Third, if we were to rely so heavily on the law to improve the climate of industrial relations, we should have avoided creating so many new institutions and procedures all at once. This allowed our opponents to claim that the system was rigged against them. And when we used the new powers to impose ‘cooling off’ periods and strike ballots, these were promptly discredited as disputes heated up and the votes went against us.
Finally, we naively assumed that our opponents would play by the same rules as we did. In particular, we imagined that there would not be either mass opposition to laws passed by a democratically elected government or mass infringement of the criminal law, as in the miners’ strike of 1972. We did not recognize that we were involved in a struggle with unscrupulous people whose principal objectives lay not in industrial relations but in politics. Had we understood this we might have embarked upon a step-by-step approach, fighting on our own territory at our own timing, as we were to do after 1979. It was later, as Leader of the Opposition, that I realized how far the extreme Left had penetrated into trade union leaderships and why that ‘giant’s strength’, of which the Tory pamphlet had spoken in the late 1950s, was now being used in such a ruthless manner. The communists knew that they could not be returned to Parliament, so they chose to advance their cause by getting into office in the trade union movement. And the fact that both the Wilson and Heath Governments had stood up to the unions and then lost increased their influence more than if we had not challenged their power in the first place.
But at this early stage we pressed ahead. The TUC was told by Robert Carr in October 1970 that the central aspects of the Industrial Relations Bill were not negotiable. The Bill was published and had its Second Reading in December. February and March 1971 saw mass protests and strikes against it. Labour used every device to fight the Bill, but in August 1971 it duly reached the Statute Book. The TUC Congress passed a resolution instructing unions to de-register. It therefore remained to be seen, when the Act came into force at the end of February 1972, what its practical effects would be — revolution, reform or business as usual. We were soon to find out.
Meanwhile other problems preoccupied us. It is sometimes suggested — and was at the time by Enoch Powell — that the Government’s decision in February 1971 to take control of the aerospace division of Rolls-Royce marked the first U-turn. This is not so. Shortly before the company told the Government of the impossible financial problems it faced (as a result of the escalating cost of the contract with Lockheed to build the RB–211 engine for its Tri-star aircraft), a constituent of mine had told me that he was worried about the company. So I asked Denis to look at the figures. I arrived home late one evening to find him surrounded by six years’ accounts. He told me that Rolls-Royce had been treating research and development costs as capital, rather than charging it to the profit and loss account. This spelt real trouble.
A few days later I was suddenly called to a Cabinet meeting and found Fred Corfield, the Aviation Minister, waiting in the Cabinet ante-room. ‘What are you here for, Fred?’ I asked. I wasn’t surprised when he replied gloomily: ‘Rolls-Royce.’ His expression said it all. At the meeting itself we heard the full story. To the amazement of my colleagues I confirmed the analysis, based on what Denis had told me. We decided without much debate to let the company itself go into liquidation but to nationalize the aerospace division. Over the next few months there were many more complicated discussions as we renegotiated the original contract with Lockheed, which was then itself in financial difficulties. One could argue — and people did — about the terms and the sum which needed to be provided. But I do not think any of us doubted that on defence grounds it was important to keep an indigenous aircraft engine capability. And in the long term, of course, this was one ‘lame duck’ which eventually found the strength to fly away again into the private sector, when I was Prime Minister.
The Rolls-Royce controversy proved to be of short duration, and it was to be a year before the serious economic U-turns — reflation, subsidies to industry, prices and incomes policy — occurred, and began the alienation of the Conservative right in Parliament and of many Tory supporters outside it. The failure of these U-turns to deliver success divided the Party still further and had other consequences. It created an inflationary boom which caused property prices to soar and encouraged a great deal of dubious financial speculation, tarnishing capitalism and, in spite of all the disclaimers, the Conservative Party with it. I shall return to the economic developments which led to all this shortly. But it is important not to underrate the impact on the Party of two non-economic issues — Europe and immigration.
FROM EMPIRE TO EUROPE
I was wholeheartedly in favour of British entry into the EEC for reasons which I have already outlined. General de Gaulle’s departure from the Elysée Palace in April 1969 had transformed the prospects. His successor, Georges Pompidou, was keen to have Britain in; and, of course, no one on our side of the Channel was keener than the new Prime Minister, Ted Heath. There was never any doubt what the incoming Conservative Government’s position would be; but nor was there doubt that many people across the political spectrum would oppose it. These included seme of the most effective parliamentarians such as Michael Foot, Peter Shore and Enoch Powell. But the worlds of business, the media and fashionable opinion generally were strongly in favour, for a variety of high-and low-minded reasons.
Talks formally opened in Brussels at the end of October 1970, with Geoffrey Rippon reporting back to Ted and a Cabinet Committee and, on occasion, to the rest of us in full Cabinet. Twice in December we had detailed discussions of our negotiating position on the EEC budget. There was no doubt that the financial cost of entry would be high. It was estimated that the best we could hope for would be a gross British contribution of 17 per cent of total EEC expenditure, with a five-year transition, and three years of so-called ‘correctives’ after that (to hold it at 17 per cent). To defuse the inevitable criticism, Geoffrey Rippon also hoped to negotiate a special review provision which we could invoke at any time if the burden of our net contributions to the budget threatened to become intolerable; but he seemed to attach little significance to it, and assumed that we could reopen the question whether there was a formal review mechanism or not.
At the time Ted resolved discussion about the costs of entry by saying that no one was arguing that the burden would be so intolerable that we should break off negotiations. But this whole question of finance should have been considered more carefully. It came to dominate Britain’s relations with the EEC for more than a decade afterwards, and it did not prove so easy to reopen. Though the Community made a declaration during the entry negotiations that ‘should an unacceptable situation arise within the present Community or an enlarged Community, the very survival of the Community would demand that the Institutions find equitable solutions’, the net British contribution quickly grew. The Labour Government of 1974–79 made no progress in reducing it. It was left to me to do so later.
Cabinet discussed the matter again in early May 1971, by which time the talks were reported to be ‘deadlocked’. There were difficulties outstanding on preferential arrangements for New Zealand products (butter and lamb) and Commonwealth sugar, and shadow-boxing by the French about the role of sterling as an international currency. But the budget was still the real problem. We had an idea what deal might be on offer: promises to cut the cost of the Common Agricultural Policy and the creation of a Regional Development Fund from which Britain would benefit disproportionately. It was still not the settlement we would have wanted — and anyway promises are not bankable — but at the time none of us foresaw how large the burden would turn out to be. Ted ended the discussion by telling us that he was planning a summit with President Pompidou in Paris to cut through the argument.
Ted spent two days talking to the French President. In view of all the past difficulties with the French, the summit was seen as a veritable triumph for him. Negotiations were completed rapidly afterwards — other than for the Common Fisheries Policy, which took years to resolve — and the terms approved by Cabinet the following month. Parliamentary approval could not be assumed, for both parties were deeply split and Labour had reversed its former support for British entry, arguing that the present terms were unacceptable. In the end, the Government decided that there would be a free vote on the Conservative side on the principle of entry. This embarrassed Labour, especially when sixty-nine Labour MPs ignored their own party whip and voted in favour, giving a majority of 112 for entry. But when it came to the terms rather than the principle of entry, the argument was far from won. The Second Reading of the European Communities Bill in February 1972 was only passed by 309 to 301, with the Liberals backing the Government and after much arm-twisting by Conservative Whips. The Bill itself was enacted in October.
The dog that barely barked at the time was the issue of sovereignty — both national and parliamentary — which as the years have gone by has assumed ever greater importance. There was some discussion of the question in Cabinet in July 1971, but only in the context of the general presentation of the case for entry in the White Paper. The resulting passages of the document — paragraphs 29—32 — can now be read in the light of events, and stand out as an extraordinary example of artful confusion to conceal fundamental issues. In particular, two sentences are masterpieces:
There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty; what is proposed is a sharing and an enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the general interest.
And:
The common law will remain the basis of our legal system, and our Courts will continue to operate as they do at present.
I can claim to have had no special insight into these matters at the time. It then seemed to me, as it did to my colleagues, that the arguments about sovereignty which were advanced by Enoch Powell and others were theoretical points used as rhetorical devices.
In the debate on Clause 2 of the Bill, Geoffrey Howe, as Solicitor-General, gave what appeared to be satisfactory assurances on the matter in answer to criticisms from Derek Walker-Smith, saying that ‘at the end of the day if repeal [of the European Communities Act], lock, stock and barrel, was proposed, the ultimate sovereignty of Parliament must remain intact’. Asking himself the question: ‘What will happen if there is a future Act of Parliament which inadvertently, to a greater or lesser extent, may be in conflict with Community law?’ Geoffrey said: ‘The courts would… try in accordance with the traditional approach to interpret Statute in accordance with our international obligations.’ But what if they could not be reconciled? He went on, elliptically:
One cannot do more than that to reconcile the inescapable and enduring sovereignty of Parliament at the end of the road with the proposition that we should give effect to our treaty obligations to provide for the precedence of Community law… If through inadvertence any such conflict arose, that would be a matter for consideration by the Government and Parliament of the day…[26]
The decision of the European Court that the Merchant Shipping Act, 1988, is in contravention of the Treaty of Rome has made it impossible to put off consideration of these matters any longer.[27]
It was not, however, this question which was to make the Common Market such a difficult issue for the Government. The main political error was to overplay the advantages due to come from membership. As regards the Government itself, this tendency led ministers to adopt and excuse unsound policies. In order to ‘equip’ British industry to meet the challenges of Europe, subsidies and intervention were said to be necessary — reasoning which was endorsed in the 1972 Budget speech. Still worse, loose monetary and fiscal policies were justified on the grounds that high levels of economic growth — of the order of 5 per cent or so — were now sustainable within the new European market of some 300 million people. It was also suggested that competition from Europe would compel the trade unions to act more responsibly. As regards the general public, expectations of the benefits of membership rose — and then were sharply dashed as economic conditions deteriorated and industrial disruption worsened. Yet the White Paper had promised that ‘membership of the enlarged Community will lead to much improved efficiency and productivity in British industry, with a higher rate of investment and a faster growth of real wages’.
The success of the negotiations for British entry and their ratification by Parliament also seemed to have a psychological effect on Ted Heath. His enthusiasm for Europe had already developed into a passion. As the years went by it was to become an obsession — one increasingly shared by the great and the good. The argument became less and less about what was best for Britain and more and more about the importance of being good Europeans.
There was a mood of euphoria in the Establishment. It reached a peak with the ‘Fanfare for Europe’ celebrations of January 1973, held to mark Britain’s accession to the Common Market. After a gala performance by British and international figures at the Royal Opera House, where among many other performances our former next-door neighbour Sybil Thorndike recited Browning, Denis and I were among hundreds invited to a State Banquet at Lancaster House. I could not help but be reminded of two madrigals sung at one of Ted’s Downing Street dinners a couple of years before: ‘All creatures are merry, merry-minded’ and, more particularly, ‘Late is my rash accounting’.
The other issue which alienated many Conservative supporters, particularly in the West Midlands, was immigration. As I have suggested, Ted’s and the Government’s line on this was in fact extremely firm. Our Immigration Bill which received its Second Reading in March 1971 proposed a single system of control for Commonwealth citizens and aliens, while giving free entry to ‘patrials’, that is those with a right of abode.[28] Admittedly, the pledge on grants for voluntary repatriation was effectively shelved. But then it is doubtful whether any such system would have had much impact on net immigration.
The trouble arose when in August 1972 President Idi Amin of Uganda announced the mass expulsion of Asians who had prudently held on to their British passports following independence. In September a full Cabinet was devoted to the Ugandan Asian question. In the back of our minds was the possibility that Asian UK passport holders might also now be expelled from Kenya and Tanzania. My first thoughts when I arrived at Cabinet were that we should hold fast to our manifesto commitment that there should be ‘no further large-scale immigration’. But Ted opened by saying that there was no question of our refusing to admit the expelled British passport holders. The Attorney-General, Peter Rawlinson, explained that we were under an obligation in international law to accept them — regardless of domestic immigration laws. After this there could not be much argument. Later I came to feel that the decision was right on other grounds. There was just no way of evading the humanitarian duty we had — a duty that no one else would accept. I found the Asians who came to my constituency admirable, hard-working people. And this measure really did turn out to be an exception to the rule of strict immigration control, rather than the first step towards its abandonment.
My instincts, however, had accurately reflected Party feeling. There was deep disquiet about the decision. Enoch Powell spoke strongly against it at that year’s Party Conference. In late November the Government was defeated as a result of a large backbench revolt on new immigration rules. Ted himself had been shaken and was convinced that public opinion would not tolerate a repetition. He set up a small group of ministers to consider legislation to prevent another influx, but when it reported back in December — favouring not a Bill but a ‘declaration’ that Britain would not necessarily accept future expellees in large numbers but would consult internationally — Cabinet was divided and the idea fell. It was one of the few occasions on which the Prime Minister did not get his way.
The immigration issue itself, as we recognized in discussion in Cabinet after the Commons defeat, had been fuelled by discontent on a whole range of other issues. To understand how this had occurred it is necessary to turn back to economic matters.
REVERSING COURSE
January and February 1972 saw three events which together tried the Government’s resolve and found it wanting — the miners’ strike, the financial problems of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) and the unemployment total reaching one million. It is always a shock when unemployment reaches a new high figure, especially one as dramatic as a million. Unemployment is what economists call a lagging indicator. Although we did not know it at the time, it had just peaked and was to begin a downward trend. The rise of unemployment in 1971 was in fact the consequence of Roy Jenkins’ tight fiscal and monetary policies of 1969–70. Since monetary policy had already been significantly eased in 1971, largely as a result of financial decontrol, we could have sat tight and waited for it to work through in lower unemployment from 1972 onwards. In fact, Ted never bought this analysis, and he greatly underestimated the stimulating effects of removing credit controls. He felt that emergency fiscal measures were necessary to boost demand and reduce unemployment. And this conviction influenced his decisions across the board. Ironically, because it led to higher inflation whose main effects were suffered under the following Labour Government, and because inflation destroys jobs rather than preserves them, it ultimately led to higher unemployment as well.
In particular, the approach of the Government to Upper Clyde Shipbuilders flowed from fear of the consequences of higher unemployment. But because it was also seen as caving in to the threats of left-wing militants, it added a new charge against us. When we first discussed the company’s problems in December 1970 the Cabinet gave a fairly robust response. It was agreed that existing Government support for the UCS Group would not be continued, though there was a lifeline: we would continue with credit guarantees so long as the management agreed to close the Clydebank yard and separate out Yarrow Shipbuilders from the rest of the group. Yarrow — an important Royal Navy supplier — seemed salvageable. But by June 1971 the UCS Group was insolvent and its liquidation was announced. There followed a protest strike on Clydeside. In July trade unionists led by militant shop stewards occupied the four UCS shipyards.
There was further discussion in Cabinet in the autumn of 1971, and the Government allowed itself to be sucked into talks with the trade unions, who it was believed might be able to influence the militant shop stewards behind the occupation. The Economic Committee of the Cabinet had agreed that money should be provided to keep open the yards while the liquidator sought a solution, but only on condition that the unions gave credible undertakings of serious negotiations on new working practices. There was strong criticism of this from some of my colleagues, rightly alert to the danger of seeming to give in on the basis of worthless undertakings. But the money was provided and negotiations went ahead.
It was the unemployment prospect rather than the prospects for shipbuilding which by now were undisguisedly foremost. In November Ted Heath affirmed in a Party Political Broadcast that the ‘Government is committed completely and absolutely to expanding the economy and bringing unemployment down’. The fateful one million mark was passed on 20 January 1972. On 24 February at Cabinet we heard that the Economic Committee had agreed the previous day to provide £35 million to keep three of the four yards open. John Davies openly admitted to us that the new group had little chance of making its way commercially and that if the general level of unemployment had been lower and the economy reviving faster, he would not have recommended this course. There was tangible unease. It was pointed out that we could expect a rough reception from our supporters for the decision. But Cabinet endorsed it and at the end of February John announced the decision. It was a small but memorably inglorious episode. I discussed it all privately with Jock Bruce-Gardyne, who was scathing about the decision. He regarded it as a critical, unforgivable U-turn. I was deeply troubled.
But by now we all had other things to worry about. In framing the Industrial Relations Act we had given too much emphasis to achieving the best possible legal framework and not enough to how the attacks on our proposals were to be repelled. The same mentality prevailed as regards the threat which the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) posed to the Government and the country. We knew, of course, that the miners and the power workers held an almost unbeatable card in pay negotiations, because they could turn off the electricity supply to industry and people. Industrial action by the power workers in December 1970 had been settled after the setting-up of a Court of Inquiry under Lord Wilberforce which recommended a large increase in February the following year. Within the NUM, however, there was a large militant faction at least as interested in bringing down the Conservative Government as in flexing industrial muscle to increase miners’ earnings. The NUM held a strike ballot in October 1970 and narrowly turned down an offer from the National Coal Board (NCB). Fearing unofficial action, Cabinet authorized the NCB to offer a productivity bonus to be paid in mid-1971. The NUM again turned the offer down, following which Derek Ezra, the NCB Chairman, without consulting ministers, offered to pay the bonus at once and without strings attached to productivity. Cabinet accepted this fait accompli. Perhaps John Davies and other ministers continued to monitor events. If they did I heard nothing about it. Nor does what subsequently happened suggest that any monitoring was accompanied by forward thinking.
Only in early December 1971 did the issue of miners’ pay surface at Cabinet, and then in what seemed a fairly casual way. The NUM’s annual conference earlier that year had significantly revised the rules which provided for an official strike, so that now only a 55 per cent, as opposed to a two-thirds, majority was required. The NUM ballot, which was still going on, had, it was thought, resulted in a 59 per cent majority vote for strike action. Yet nobody seemed too worried. We were all reassured that coal stocks were in any case high.
Such complacency proved unwarranted. At the last Cabinet before Christmas Robert Carr confirmed to us that the NUM was indeed calling a national strike to begin on 9 January 1972. There was more trouble over pay in the gas and electricity industries. And we only needed to glance outside to know that winter was closing in, with all that meant for power consumption. But there was no real discussion and we all left for the Christmas break.
There was still some suggestion over Christmas that the strike might not be solid and would be concentrated in the more militant areas. But two days after it began it was all too clear that the action was total. There was then discussion in Cabinet about whether we should use the ‘cooling off’ provisions of the Industrial Relations Act. But it was said to be difficult to satisfy the legal tests involved — ‘cooling off’ orders would only be granted by the courts if there was a serious prospect that they would facilitate a settlement, which in this case was doubtful. The possibility of using the ballot provisions of the Act remained. But there was no particular reason to think that a ballot forced on the NUM would lead to anything other than a continuation of the strike, and perhaps also a hardening of attitudes. It was an acutely uncomfortable demonstration of the fragility of the principal weapons with which the Act had equipped us. Moreover, important parts of the Act had yet to come into force, and we were also aware that there was a good deal of public sympathy with the miners.
The pressure on the Government to intervene directly to try to end the dispute now increased. Looking back, and comparing 1972 with the threatened miners’ strike of 1981 and the year-long strike of 1984—85, it is extraordinary how little attention we gave to ‘endurance’ — the period of time we could keep the power stations and the economy running with limited or no coal supplies — and how easily Cabinet was fobbed off by assurances that coal stocks were high, without considering whether those stocks were in the right locations to be usable, i.e. actually at the power stations. The possibility of effective mass picketing, which would prevent oil and coal getting to power stations, was simply not on the agenda. Instead, our response was to discuss the prospects for conciliation by Robert Carr and the use of ‘emergency powers’ which would allow us to conserve power station stocks a few weeks longer by imposing power cuts. There was a great deal of useless talk about ‘keeping public opinion on our side’. But what could public opinion do to end the strike? This was one more thing I learned from the Heath years — and anyway, on the whole public opinion wasn’t on our side. A further lesson from this period — when no fewer than five States of Emergency were called — was that for all the sense of urgency and decision that the phrase ‘emergency powers’ conveys they could not be relied upon to change the basic realities of an industrial dispute.
The situation steadily worsened. The crunch came on the morning of Thursday 10 February when we were all in Cabinet. A State of Emergency had been declared the previous day. By now Robert Carr was directly involved with the NCB and the NUM in trying to find a way out. But it was John Davies who dropped the bombshell. He told us that picketing had now immobilized a large part of the remaining coal stocks, and that the supplies still available might not even suffice beyond the end of the following week. Thereafter electricity output would fall to as little as 25 per cent of normal supply. Drastic power cuts were inevitable, and large parts of industry would be laid off. The Attorney-General reported that the provisions of the Industrial Relations Act against secondary boycotts, blacking of supplies and the inducement of other workers to take action resulting in the frustration of a commercial contract, would not come into force until 28 February. He thought that most of the picketing which had taken place during the strike was lawful. As regards the criminal law, some arrests had been made but, as he put it, ‘the activities of pickets confronted the police with very difficult and sensitive decisions’.
This was something of an understatement. The left-wing leader of the Yorkshire miners, Arthur Scargill, who was to organize the politically motivated miners’ strike I faced in 1984–85, was already busy winning his militant’s spurs. In the course of Cabinet a message came through to the Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, which he read out. The Chief Constable of Birmingham had asked that the West Midlands Gas Board’s Saltley Coke Depot be closed because lorries were being prevented from entering by 7,000 ‘pickets’ who were facing just 500 police.
There was no disguising that this was a victory for violence. To the Left it came to assume legendary proportions. To large numbers of politicians and commentators it proved that no one could hope to stand up to the miners. Police self-confidence was shattered. From now on many senior policemen put greater emphasis on maintaining ‘order’ than on upholding the law. In practice, that meant failing to uphold the rights of individuals against the rule of the mob — though to be fair the police lacked the equipment as much as the stomach for the action required. For me, what happened at Saltley took on no less significance than it did for the Left. I understood, as they did, that the struggle to bring trade unions properly within the rule of law would be decided not in the debating chamber of the House of Commons, nor even on the hustings, but in and around the pits and factories where intimidation had been allowed to prevail.
Ted now sounded the retreat. He appointed a Court of Inquiry under the ubiquitous Lord Wilberforce. By now the power crisis had reached such proportions that we sat in Cabinet debating whether we had time to wait for the NUM to ballot its members on ending a strike; a ballot might take over a week to organize. There was therefore no inclination to quibble when Wilberforce recommended a massive pay increase, way beyond the level allowed for in the ‘n—1’ voluntary pay policy already in force.
But we were stunned when the militant majority on the NUM Executive rejected the court’s recommendation, demanding still more money and a ragbag of other concessions — ‘a list as long as your arm’, in the words of the miners’ President, Joe Gormley.
Ted summoned us all together on the evening of Friday 18 February to decide what to do. The dispute simply had to be ended quickly. If we had to go an additional mile, so be it. Later that night Ted called the NUM and the NCB to No. 10 and persuaded the union to drop the demand for more money, while conceding the rest. The NUM Executive accepted, and just over a week later so did the miners in a ballot. The dispute was over. But the devastation it had inflicted on the Government and indeed on British politics as a whole lived on.
The immediate effect was to convince bien pensant opinion that in a country like Britain there was simply no alternative to corporatism. The Sunday Times leader of 20 February put the point crisply:
After the Wilberforce settlement, there is only one course for the Government to adopt if it is to derive any profit from the ruin of its wages policy. It must open formal and serious talks with the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress to plot a way forward towards an organized policy for incomes. This will involve all sides of industry, but above all the Government itself, in the liquidation of old nostrums. But far from losing face, the Government would thereby seize the best chance to rebuild its economic policy.
Such a message found a ready hearing from shocked and bewildered ministers. The combination of the rise in unemployment, the events at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and the Government’s humiliation by the miners resulted in a fundamental reassessment of policy. I suspect that this took place in Ted’s own mind first, with other ministers and the Cabinet very much second. It was not so much that he jettisoned the whole Selsdon approach, but rather that he abandoned some aspects of it, emphasized others and added a heavy dose of statism which probably appealed to his temperament and his Continental European sympathies. We had always been keen advocates of economic growth: but now we promoted growth at the expense of sound finance. We had always been in favour of industrial and technological modernization: but now we relied on government intervention rather than competition to ensure it. We had always entertained a basic confusion between a ‘monetarist’ and a wage-push theory of inflation: we now ignored the first and swallowed the second to such an extent that we introduced the most comprehensively regulated system of wages and prices that peacetime Britain has known.
None of this pleased me. But our inability to resist trade union power, whether exerted through irresponsible wage demands which forced companies into liquidation and workers out of jobs, or through strikes which brought the country to a halt, was now manifest. The Industrial Relations Act itself already seemed hollow: it was soon to be discredited entirely. Like most Conservatives, I was prepared to give at least a chance to a policy which retained some of the objectives we had set out in 1969/70. I was even prepared to go along with a statutory prices and incomes policy, for a time, to try to limit the damage inflicted by the arrogant misuse of trade union power. But I was wrong. State intervention in the economy is not ultimately an answer to over-mighty vested interests: for it soon comes to collude with them.
It is unusual to hold Cabinets on a Monday, and I had arranged a long-standing scientific engagement for Monday 20 March 1972, so I was not present at the Cabinet which discussed the Budget and the new Industry White Paper on that day. Both of them signalled a change in strategy, each complementing the other. The Budget was highly reflationary, comprising large cuts in income tax and purchase tax, increased pensions and social security benefits and extra investment incentives for industry, It was strongly rumoured that Tony Barber and the Treasury were very unhappy with the Budget and that it had been imposed on them by Ted. The fact that the Budget speech presented these measures as designed to help Britain meet the challenge opened up by membership of the EEC in a small way confirms this. It was openly designed to provide a large boost to demand, which it was argued would not involve a rise in inflation, in conditions of high unemployment and idle resources. Monetary policy was mentioned, but only to stress its ‘flexibility’; no numerical targets for monetary growth were set.
On Wednesday 22 March John Davies published his White Paper on Industry and Regional Development, which was the basis for the 1972 Industry Act. Even more than the Budget, this was seen by our supporters and opponents alike as an obvious U-turn. Keith and I and probably others in the Cabinet were extremely unhappy, and some of this found its way into the press. As far as I can recall there had been no prior discussion of the White Paper in Cabinet: it was presented to the Commons in the Budget statement and its preparation within Government was subject to all the secrecy usually applied to Budget measures. From this point on I was conscious that on the Labour benches enmity had been transformed into contempt. I was not in the House at the time, but I read The Times report which sums up the reaction to John Davies’s speech on the Bill:
Lame ducks never looked healthier as Mr Davies, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, opened today’s debate on the Second Reading of the Industry Bill with possibly the most remarkable speech heard in the Commons during the life of the present Government. At the end, the cheers from the Labour benches and the almost total silence from Conservative MPs showed more clearly than anything the Opposition could say how complete had been the Government volte face on intervention in industry and on aid to the regions.
I was not, I know, the only Conservative to squirm on reading stuff like this. Should I have resigned? Perhaps so. But those of us who disliked what was happening had not yet either fully analysed the situation or worked out an alternative approach. Nor, realistically speaking, would my resignation have made a great deal of difference. I was not senior enough for it to be other than the littlest ‘local difficulty’. All the more reason for me to pay tribute to people like Jock Bruce-Gardyne, John Biffen, Nick Ridley and, of course, Enoch Powell who did expose the folly of what was happening in Commons speeches and newspaper articles.
There is also a direct connection between the policies pursued from March 1972 and the very different approach of my own administration later. A brilliant, but little-known, monetary economist called Alan Walters resigned from the CPRS and delivered not only scathing criticism of the Government’s approach but also accurate predictions of where it would lead.[29]
One more blow to the approach we adopted in 1970 had still to fall: and it was not long in coming. This was the effective destruction of the Industrial Relations Act. It had never been envisaged that the Act would result in individual trade unionists going to gaol. Of course, no legal provisions can be proof against some remote possibility of that happening if troublemakers are intent on martyrdom. It was a long-running dispute between employers and dockers about ‘containerization’ which provided the occasion for this to happen. In March 1972 the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) fined the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) £5,000 for defying an order to grant access to Liverpool Docks. The following month the union was fined £50,000 for contempt on the matter of secondary action at the docks. The TGWU maintained that it was not responsible for the action of its shop stewards, but the NIRC ruled against this in May. Then, out of the blue, the Court of Appeal reversed these judgements and ruled that the TGWU was not responsible, and so the shop stewards themselves were personally liable. This was extremely disturbing, for it opened up the possibility of trade unionists going to jail. The following month three dockers involved in blacking were threatened with arrest for refusing to appear before the NIRC. 35,000 trade unionists were now on strike. At the last moment the Official Solicitor applied to the Court of Appeal to prevent the dockers’ arrest. But then in July another five dockers were jailed for contempt.
The Left were merciless. Ted was shouted down in the House. Sympathetic strikes spread, involving the closure of national newspapers for five days. The TUC called a one-day general strike. On 26 July, however, the House of Lords reversed the Court of Appeal decision and confirmed that unions were accountable for the conduct of their members. The NIRC then released the five dockers.
This was more or less the end of the Industrial Relations Act, though it was not the end of trouble in the docks. A national dock strike ensued and another State of Emergency was declared. This only ended — very much on the dockers’ terms — in August. In September the TUC General Congress rubbed salt into the wound by expelling thirty-two small unions which had refused, against TUC instructions, to de-register under the Act. Having shared to the full the Party’s enthusiasm for the Act, I was appalled.
A U-TURN TOO FAR
In the summer of 1972 the third aspect — after reflation and industrial intervention — of the new economic approach was revealed to us. This was the pursuit of an agreement on prices and incomes through ‘tripartite’ talks with the CBI and the TUC. Although there had been no explicit pay policy, we had been living in a world of ‘norms’ since the autumn of 1970 when the ‘n—1’ was formulated in the hope that there would be deceleration from the ‘going rate’ figure in successive pay rounds. The miners’ settlement had breached that policy spectacularly, but Ted drew the conclusion that we should go further rather than go back. From the summer of 1972 a far more elaborate prices and incomes policy was the aim, and more and more the centre of decision-making moved away from Cabinet and Parliament. I can only, therefore, give a partial account of the way in which matters developed. Cabinet simply received reports from Ted on what policies had effectively been decided elsewhere, though individual ministers became increasingly bogged down in the details of shifting and complicated pay negotiations. This almost obsessive interest in the minutiae of pay awards was matched by a large degree of impotence over the deals finally struck. In fact, the most important result was to distract ministers from the big economic issues and blind us with irrelevant data when we should have been looking ahead to the threats which loomed.
The period of the tripartite talks with the TUC and the CBI from early July to the end of October did not get us much further as regards the Government’s aim of controlling inflation by keeping down wage demands. It did, however, move us down other slippery slopes. In exchange for the CBI’s offer to secure ‘voluntary’ price restraint by 200 of Britain’s largest firms, limiting their price increases to 5 per cent during the following year, we embarked on the costly and self-defeating policy of holding nationalized industry price increases to the same level, even though this meant that they continued to make losses. The TUC, for its part, used the role it had been accorded by the tripartite discussions to set out its own alternative economic policy. In flat contradiction to the policies we had been elected to implement, they wanted action to keep down council rents (which would sabotage our Housing Finance Act — intended to bring them closer to market levels). They urged the control of profits, dividends and prices, aimed at securing the redistribution of income and wealth (in other words the implementation of socialism), and the repeal of the Industrial Relations Act. These demands, made at the TUC Congress in September, were taken sufficiently seriously by Ted for him to agree studies of methods by which the pay of low-paid workers could be improved without entailing proportionate increases to other workers. We had, in other words, moved four-square onto the socialist ground that ‘low pay’ — however that might be defined — was a ‘problem’ which it was for government rather than the workings of the market to resolve. In fact, the Government proposed a £2 a week limit on pay increases over the following year, with the CBI agreeing maximum 4 per cent price increases over the same period and the extension of the Government’s ‘target’ of 5 per cent economic growth.
In any case, it was not enough. The TUC was not willing — and probably not able — to deliver wage restraint. At the end of October we had a lengthy discussion of the arguments for now proceeding to a statutory policy, beginning with a pay freeze. It is an extraordinary comment on the state of mind that we had reached that, as far as I can recall, neither now nor later did anyone at Cabinet raise the objection that this was precisely the policy we had ruled out in our 1970 general election manifesto. Yet no one could accuse Ted of not being willing to go the extra mile. Only with the greatest reluctance did he accept that the TUC were unpersuadable. And so on Friday 3 November 1972 Cabinet made the fateful decision to introduce a statutory policy beginning with a ninety-day freeze of prices and incomes. No one ever spoke a truer word than Ted when he concluded by warning that we faced a troubled prospect.
The change in economic policy was accompanied by a Cabinet reshuffle. Maurice Macmillan — Harold’s son — had already taken over at Employment from Robert Carr in July 1972, when the latter replaced Reggie Maudling at the Home Office. Ted now promoted his younger disciples. He sent Peter Walker to replace John Davies at the DTI and promoted Jim Prior to be Leader of the House. Geoffrey Howe, an instinctive economic liberal, was brought into the Cabinet but given the poisoned chalice of overseeing prices and incomes policy. It has been said that I was thought of for the job; if so, I can only be thankful that I wasn’t asked.
For a growing number of backbenchers the new policy was a U-turn too far. When Enoch Powell asked in the House whether the Prime Minister had ‘taken leave of his senses’, he was publicly cold-shouldered, but many privately agreed with him. Still more significant was the fact that staunch opponents of our policy like Nick Ridley, Jock Bruce-Gardyne and John Biffen were elected to chairmanships or vice-chairmanships of important backbench committees, and Edward du Cann, on the right of the Party and a sworn opponent of Ted, became Chairman of the 1922 Committee.
As the freeze — Stage 1 — came to an end we devised Stage 2. This extended the pay and price freeze until the end of April 1973; for the remainder of 1973 workers could expect £1 a week and 4 per cent, with a maximum pay rise of £250 a year — a formula designed to favour the low-paid. A Pay Board and a Prices Commission were set up to administer the policy. Our backbench critics were more perceptive than most commentators, who considered that all this was a sensible and pragmatic response to trade union irresponsibility. In the early days it seemed that the commentators were right. A challenge to the policy by the gas workers was defeated at the end of March. The miners — as we hoped and expected after their huge increase the previous year — rejected a strike (against the advice of their Executive) in a ballot on 5 April. The number of working days lost because of strikes fell sharply. Unemployment was at its lowest since 1970. Generally, the mood in Government grew more relaxed. Ted clearly felt happier wearing his new collectivist hat than he ever had in the disguise of Selsdon.
Our sentiments should have been very different. The effects of the reflationary Budget of March 1972 and the loose financial policy it typified were now becoming apparent. The Treasury, at least, had started to worry about the economy, which was growing at a clearly unsustainable rate of well over 5 per cent. The money supply, as measured by M3 (broad money), was growing too fast — though the (narrower) Mi, which the Government preferred, less so.[30] The March 1973 Budget did nothing to cool the overheating and was heavily distorted by the need to keep down prices and charges so as to support the ‘counter-inflation policy’, as the prices and incomes policy was hopefully called. In May modest public expenditure reductions were agreed. But it was too little, and far too late. Although inflation rose during the first six months of 1973, Minimum Lending Rate (MLR) was steadily cut and a temporary mortgage subsidy was introduced. The Prime Minister also ordered that preparations be made to take statutory control of the mortgage rate if the building societies failed to hold it down when the subsidy ended. These fantastic proposals only served to distract us from the need to tackle the growing problem of monetary laxity. Only in July was MLR raised from 7.5 per cent, first to 9 per cent and then to 11.5 per cent. We were actually ahead of Labour in the opinion polls in June 1973, for the first time since 1970. But in July the Liberals took Ely and Ripon from us at by-elections. Economically and politically we had, without knowing it, already begun to reap the whirlwind.
Over the summer of 1973 Ted held more talks with the TUC, seeking their agreement to Stage 3. The detailed work was done by a group of ministers chaired by Ted, and the rest of us knew little about it. Nor did I know at the time that close attention was already being given to the problem which might arise with the miners. Like most of my colleagues, I imagine, I believed that they had had their pound of flesh already and would not come back for more.
I hope, though, that I would have given a great deal more attention than anyone seems to have done to building up coal stocks against the eventuality, however remote, of another miners’ strike. The miners either had to be appeased or beaten. Yet, for all its technocratic jargon, this was a government which signally lacked a sense of strategy. Ted apparently felt no need of one since, as we now know, he had held a secret meeting with Joe Gormley in the garden of No. 10 and thought he had found a formula to square the miners — extra payment for ‘unsocial hours’. But this proved to be a miscalculation. The miners’ demands could not be accommodated within Stage 3.
In October Cabinet duly endorsed the Stage 3 White Paper. It was immensely complicated and represented the high-point — if that is the correct expression — of the Heath Government’s collectivism. Pay increases were to be limited to £2.25 a week or 7 per cent with a maximum £350 per annum; there were complex provisions to pay shift workers more for ‘unsocial hours’, and room was made for additional payments in respect of productivity agreements and moves towards equal pay for women. In addition, there were ‘threshold payments’ to be made if inflation rose to specified levels — we made some rosy assumptions about future rates of inflation — and there was also money for pensioners and a new mortgage subsidy for first-time buyers. But the most significant new development– and one whose necessity ultimately demonstrated the futility of the kind of approach we were pursuing — was the provision that the Pay Board should set up an inquiry into ‘relativities’ between groups of workers, with the aim of accommodating grievances on this score in Stage 4. All possible eventualities, you might have thought, were catered for. But as experience of past pay policies ought to have demonstrated, you would have been wrong.
My only direct involvement in the working of this new, detailed pay policy was when I attended from time to time the relevant Cabinet Economic Sub-Committee, usually chaired by Terence Higgins, a Treasury Minister of State. Even those attracted by the concept of incomes policy on grounds of ‘fairness’ begin to have their doubts when they see its provisions applied to individual cases. My visits to the Higgins Committee were usually necessitated by questions of teachers’ pay. But on one occasion when I found myself there with Sir William Armstrong, the Head of the civil service, it was to discuss the pay of Under-Secretaries. I knew that it was at this level in my department that the most important policy work was carried on, and I saw that with inflation running at about 10 per cent and differentials squeezed as a result of union power and government pay policy, these people needed proper motivation through a decent pay rise. Of course, the same could have been said of many groups. What struck me though was that no one doubted that this particular group needed a larger pay increase than pay policy allowed. And what was true for Under-Secretaries in the civil service was true for innumerable other groups throughout the economy. Our pay policy was not just absurd: far from being ‘fair’, it was fundamentally unjust. It was, in fact, an excellent demonstration that market forces, operating within the right framework, make for fairness, and that even beneficent state control only makes for equality.
On another sublime occasion we found ourselves debating the proper rate of pay for MPs’ secretaries. This was the last straw. I said that I hadn’t come into politics to make decisions like this, and that I would pay my secretary what was necessary to keep her. Other ministers agreed. But then, they knew their secretaries; they did not know the other people whose pay they were deciding.
In any case, reality soon started to break in. Two days after the announcement of Stage 3 the NUM rejected an NCB offer worth 16.5 per cent in return for a productivity agreement. The Government immediately took charge of the negotiations. (The days of our ‘not intervening’ had long gone.) Ted met the NUM at No. 10. But no progress was made. In early November the NUM began an overtime ban. Maurice Macmillan told us that though an early strike ballot seemed unlikely and, if held, would not give the necessary majority for a strike, an overtime ban would cut production sharply. The general feeling in Cabinet was still that the Government could not afford to acquiesce in a breach of the recently introduced pay code. Instead, we should make a special effort to demonstrate what was possible within it. The miners were not the only ones threatening trouble. The firemen, electricians and engineers were all in differing stages of dispute. It is one of the penalties of pay policy that you have to fight on too many fronts.
Similarly, it is an unavoidable weakness of the planned economy to which we were now rapidly moving that economic plans take little or no account of external events. The argument that all of us used in February 1974 (and some people continued to use long afterwards) to explain the failure of the Heath Government’s economic strategy was that the quadrupling of the oil price resulting from the Arab-Israeli war of 1973 shattered our policy when it was just beginning to work. This is plainly false. Loose monetary policy had already sown the seeds of inflation, which was to surge under the incoming Labour Government. Incomes policy, which does no more than redistribute inflation through time, could do little about this. Whatever limited successes it achieved would, like those of all other incomes policies, have unwound in the form of higher demands and settlements later. Moreover, the level of economic growth, particularly for an economy still unreformed by deregulation, privatization or reductions in trade union power, was far too high to be sustainable. Public expenditure had risen too fast as well, and we were already discussing cuts before the full implications of the oil price rise were known. We had not, in fact, ‘modernized’ British industry as we had boasted — not least because only industry, not Government, can efficiently ‘modernize’ itself. Worse, by fuelling inflation and taking too many decisions out of the hands of managers and wage bargainers we had created precisely the wrong climate for industrial success.
Yet, even ignoring all of this, the basic proposition that the oil price hike was just ‘bad luck’ is fundamentally mistaken. It is the very fact that governments cannot take all relevant circumstances into account that militates against economic planning. And it is because a properly operating market economy adjusts so sensitively to every signal that it avoids those sharp dislocations when cumulative pressures break through.
Admittedly, the threatened oil embargo and oil price rises resulting from the Arab-Israeli war that autumn made things far worse. As the effects of the miners’ industrial action bit deeper, the sense that we were no longer in control of events deepened. Somehow we had to break out. This made a quick general election increasingly attractive. Quite what we would have done if we had been re-elected is, of course, problematic. Perhaps Ted would have liked to go further towards a managed economy. Others would probably have liked to find a way to pay the miners their Danegeld and seek a quieter political life. Keith and I and a large part of the Parliamentary Conservative Party would have wanted to discard the corporatist and statist trappings with which the Government was now surrounded and try to get back to the free market approach from which we had allowed ourselves to be diverted in early 1972.
Indeed, quite apart from our exchanges about the shortcomings of economic policy, Keith and I had also been intensely irritated by the posture the Government took during the Arab-Israeli war. In the hope of securing favourable treatment from the oil-producing states — which were limiting oil supplies to Western nations — the Government refused to condemn the Arab states which had broken the 1967 ceasefire and we applied an arms embargo to both sides, depriving the Israelis of the spare parts they needed. The Government also refused to allow the Americans to use British bases to resupply Israel.
As MP for Finchley, I knew at first hand what the Jewish community in Britain felt about our policies. The early days of the war were particularly bad for Israel — the situation was far worse than in 1967 — and I followed the news hour by hour. There were some difficult discussions in Cabinet with Alec Douglas-Home defending the policy courteously and Ted exercising a rigid determination to control an issue which — as he saw it — would determine the success or failure of our whole economic strategy. Finally, he told us bluntly that he was having a note circulated laying down the public line ministers were expected to take.
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
At Cabinet on Tuesday 13 November it was all gloom as the crisis accelerated on every front. Tony Barber told us that the October trade figures that day would show another large deficit. There was talk of public expenditure cuts and tax increases. (MLR was in fact raised to a record 13 per cent.) A declaration of yet another State of Emergency would have to be made. Orders would be laid restricting lighting and heating in commercial premises. There was even talk of issuing petrol coupons. What I did not know was that included in the measures were plans to stop electrical heating in schools. In fact I only heard about it on the next day’s radio news. I was furious, partly because it was a politically stupid act and partly because I had not been consulted. I went in to see Tom Boardman, the Industry Minister, and after what the diplomats would describe as frank exchanges had it stopped.
The disagreement over school heating was, however, part of a wider argument which continued up to and beyond the calling of the election. Should we err on the side of stringency or of liberality when it came to deciding on measures to conserve energy? This was not something which could be settled on technical grounds alone; for we could not know how long the miners’ overtime ban would last, when or whether it would escalate into a strike, or how well industry would be able to cope with power shortages. In these circumstances, it was natural to look at least as closely at the political impact. But here too there were large uncertainties. Adopting the most stringent measures would certainly help convince the general public that this was a real emergency provoked by union militancy at a time of grave international economic problems. But there was a risk that people would become angry with the restrictions, particularly any which seemed needlessly petty — such as the decision to close down television broadcasting at 10.30 at night. And then, of course, any subsequent relaxation would be met with the retort that it showed we had overreacted, doubtless for party political reasons, in the first place.
One shrewd move on Ted’s part at the beginning of December was to bring Willie Whitelaw back from Northern Ireland to become Employment Secretary in place of Maurice Macmillan. Willie was both conciliatory and cunning, a combination of qualities which was particularly necessary if some way were to be found out of the struggle with the miners. The Government’s hand was also strengthened by the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, the opinion polls were now showing us with a clear lead over Labour as the public reacted indignantly to the miners’ actions. In these circumstances, all but the most militant trade unionists would be fearful of a confrontation precipitating a general election. Speculation on these lines soon began to grow in the press.
On Thursday 13 December Ted announced the introduction of a three-day working week to conserve energy. He also gave a broadcast that evening. This gave an impression of crisis which polarized opinion in the country. At first industrial output remained more or less the same, itself an indication of the inefficiency and overmanning of so much of British industry. But we did not know this at the time. Nor could we know how long even a three-day week would be sustainable. I found strong support among Conservatives for the measures taken. There was also understanding of the need for the £1.2 billion public spending cuts, which were announced a few days later.
At this stage we believed that we could rely on business leaders. Shortly before Christmas, Denis and I went to a party at a friend’s house in Lamberhurst. There was a power cut and so night lights had been put in jam jars to guide people up the steps. There was a touch of wartime spirit about it all. The businessmen there were of one mind: ‘Stand up to them. Fight it out. See them off. We can’t go on like this.’ It was all very heartening. For the moment.
There still seemed no honourable or satisfactory way out of the dispute itself. Negotiations with the NUM got nowhere. The Government offer of an immediate inquiry into the future of the mining industry and miners’ pay if the NUM went back to work on the basis of the present offer was turned down flat. One possible opportunity was missed when Tony Barber rejected an offer by the TUC, made at the NEDC on 9 January 1974, that they would not use a larger offer to the NUM as an argument in negotiations for other settlements. Tony explained to us the next day that he considered this had been a propaganda exercise rather than a serious offer. Although Cabinet agreed afterwards that we should follow up the offer, and the TUC were invited to No. 10 for several long meetings, the damage had been done: it looked as if we were not interested. We might have done better to accept it and put the TUC on the spot. As it was, the TUC offer undoubtedly put us on the defensive. The incident taught me neither to accept nor to reject any offer until the consequences had been fully weighed.
By candlelight in the flat in Flood Street, Denis and I talked through the predicament in which the Government found itself. It was clear that many mistakes had been made, and that if and when we managed to come through the present crisis, fundamental questions would need to be asked about the Government’s direction. Yet, whatever we might have done differently, there was no doubting that we now faced a struggle which had to be won. The miners, backed in varying degrees by other trade unions and the Labour Party, were flouting the law made by Parliament. The militants were clearly out to bring down the Government and to demonstrate once and for all that Britain could only be governed with the consent of the trade union movement. This was intolerable not just to me as a Conservative Cabinet minister but to millions of others who saw the fundamental liberties of the country under threat. Denis and I, our friends and most of my Party workers, felt that we now had to pick up the gauntlet and that the only way to do that was by calling and winning a general election. From now on, this was what I urged whenever I had the opportunity.
I was, though, surprised and frustrated by Ted Heath’s attitude. He seemed out of touch with reality. He was still more interested in the future of Stage 3 and in the oil crisis than he was in the pressing question of the survival of the Government. Cabinet discussions concentrated on tactics and details, never the fundamental strategy. Such discussions were perhaps taking place in some other forum; but I rather doubt it. Certainly, there was a strange lack of urgency. I suspect it was because Ted was secretly desperate to avoid an election and did not seriously wish to think about the possibility of one. In the end, perhaps — as some of us speculated — because his inner circle was split on the issue, Ted finally did ask some of us in to see him, in several small groups, on Monday 14 January in his study at No. 10.
By this stage we were only days away from the deadline for calling a 7 February election — the best and most likely ‘early’ date. At No. 10 in our group John Davies and I did most of the talking. We both strongly urged Ted to face up to the fact that we could not have the unions flouting the law and the policies of a democratically elected Government in this way. We should have an early election and fight unashamedly on the issue of ‘Who governs Britain?’ Ted said very little. He seemed to have asked us in for form’s sake, rather than anything else. I gathered that he did not agree, though he did not say as much. I went away feeling depressed. I still believe that if he had gone to the country earlier we would have scraped in, because we might have been able to focus the campaign on the issue of trade union power.
On Thursday 24 January Cabinet met twice. Peter Carrington, now both Secretary of State for Energy and Party Chairman, urged some relaxation of the power restrictions. But many of us were worried about any such move, for the reasons I have outlined earlier. The second meeting of the day, held in the evening, took place after the NUM Executive had decided on a strike ballot. This more or less tipped the balance in favour of caution, though there was some minor easing of restrictions. It seemed likely to me that there would be a sufficient vote for a strike, and in this case that a general election campaign would follow.
The following Wednesday, 30 January, with the ballot still pending, an emergency Cabinet was called. Ted told us that the Pay Board’s report on relativities had now been received. The question was whether we should accept the report and set up new machinery to investigate ‘relativities’ claims. The miners had always claimed to be demanding an improvement in their relative pay — hence their rejection of Ted’s ‘unsocial hours’ provision, which applied to all shift workers. The Pay Board report might provide a basis for them to settle within the incomes policy — all the more so because it specifically endorsed the idea that changes in the relative importance of an industry due to ‘external events’ could also be taken into account when deciding pay. The rapidly rising price of oil was just such an ‘external event’.
We felt that the Government had no choice but to set up the relativities machinery. Not to do so — having commissioned the relativities report in the first place — would make it seem as if we were actively trying to prevent a settlement with the miners. And with an election now likely we had to consider public opinion at every step.
But there were important tactical questions as to how we did this. We could demand that the TUC accept the principle of pay policy as a condition. We could require that the miners go back to work and accept the NCB’s existing offer while the Pay Board undertook its inquiry. These were not unreasonable conditions in the circumstances, but they were very unlikely to be acceptable to either the TUC or the NUM.
Ted and a group of ministers had drafted a letter to the TUC and CBI that made the reference conditional on the miners accepting the existing NCB offer and returning to work. The letter invited the TUC and the CBI for talks. I suspect that Ted was less than happy with this tough draft. In his heart of hearts he wanted a settlement and up to the very last moment believed he could achieve it. But by this stage even some of his closest friends in Cabinet wanted to bring matters to a head with the miners. The split within the inner circle of the Government had already been exposed on the issue of an early election: I assumed that the same divisions existed in the group which drafted the letter.
In the end Cabinet watered down the contents of the letter, removing the condition that the miners accept the NCB offer and attaching no strings to the proposal that the TUC meet ministers for talks. The letter was published. When we met again the following day there was a general feeling that the press coverage had been good and that we had regained some of the initiative lost over the TUC offer earlier in the month. But in practice we were committed now to accepting the relativities machinery and any offer that it might come up with. There was no hiding the fact that the miners were likely to win a large increase. If we went ahead and held an election, the prospect was that we would face another Wilberforce immediately afterwards. At the time it made tactical sense. But looking back I have to believe that others were preparing the ground to buy the miners off.
An election became all but certain when, on Tuesday 5 February, we learned that 81 per cent of those voting in the NUM ballot had supported a strike. Election speculation reached fever pitch from which there was no going back. I suspect none of us was surprised when Ted told us at Cabinet two days later that he had decided to go to the country. The general election would take place on Thursday 28 February — that is, as soon as possible.
Willie proposed formally to refer the miners’ claim to the Pay Board for a relativities study. He couched his argument for this course entirely in terms of its giving us something to say during the election in reply to the inevitable question: How will you solve the miners’ dispute if you win? Cabinet then made the fateful decision to agree to Willie’s proposal.
Because of the emergency nature of the election, I had not been involved in the early drafts of even the education section of the manifesto, which was now published within days. There was little new to say, though the record was set out. In any case, the dominant theme of the document — the need for firm and fair government at a time of crisis — was clear and stark. The main new pledge was to change the system whereby Social Security benefits were paid to strikers’ families. Apart from the questions of inflation and trade union power, the mortgage rate of 11 per cent created political difficulties for us. Naturally, I was mainly questioned about education matters, as when Willie Whitelaw and I joined Robin Day on Election Call in the course of the campaign. But in answer to one questioner I set out my strongly held views on a coalition government: ‘I think it’s a false assumption that if you get a government of all the best brains, the best brains will agree what to do. You can get two experts on anything and they will not in fact agree on what the solution is… You have in a coalition government to drop many of your own beliefs.’
This statement was to be unexpectedly relevant to the period after the election when the Conservative leadership, licking its wounds and seeking some new vehicle to carry it back to power, was attracted by the notion of a ‘Government of National Unity’. I might also have added that if you have no beliefs, or if you have already abandoned them, ‘Government of National Unity’ has rather more attractions.
During most of the campaign I was reasonably confident that we would win. Conservative supporters who had been alienated by the U-turns started drifting back to us. Indeed, their very frustrations at what they saw as our past weaknesses made them all the more determined to back us now that we had decided, as they saw it, to stand up to trade union militancy. Harold Wilson set out Labour’s approach in the context of a ‘social contract’ with the unions. Those who longed for a quiet life could be expected to be seduced by that. But I felt that if we could stick to the central issue summed up by the phrase ‘Who governs?’ we would win the argument, and with it the election.
I felt victory — almost tangibly — slip away from us in the last week. I just could not believe it when I heard on the radio of the leak of evidence taken by the Pay Board which purported to show that the miners could have been paid more within Stage 3, with the implication that the whole general election was unnecessary. The Government’s attempts to deny this — and there did indeed turn out to have been a miscalculation — were stumbling and failed to carry conviction. We had become caught up in the complexities of pay policy and finally been strangled by them. From now on it was relentlessly downhill.
Two days later, Enoch Powell urged people to vote Labour in order to secure a referendum on the Common Market. I could understand the logic of his position, which was that membership of the Common Market had abrogated British sovereignty and that the supreme issue in politics was therefore how to restore it. But what shocked me was his manner of doing it — announcing only on the day the election was called that he would not be contesting his Wolverhampton seat and then dropping this bombshell at the end of the campaign. It seemed to me that to betray one’s local supporters and constituency workers in this way was heartless. I suspect that Enoch’s decision in February 1974, like his earlier intervention in 1970, had a crucial effect.
Then three days later there was another blow. Campbell Adam-son, the Director General of the CBI, publicly called for the repeal of the Industrial Relations Act. It was all too typical of the way in which Britain’s industrial leaders were full of bravado before battle was joined, but lacked the stomach for a fight. I must admit, though, that our own interventionist policies had hardly encouraged British businessmen and managers to accept the risks and responsibilities of freedom.
Partly because of these developments, but partly too no doubt because it was bound to be difficult to focus on just one issue for a three-week campaign, we lost our momentum. I still thought that we might possibly win, but I was aware of a slackening of enthusiasm for our cause and confusion about our objectives. I also knew from the opinion polls and soundings in my own constituency that the Liberals were posing a serious threat. So by polling day my optimism had been replaced by unease.
That sentiment grew as I heard from Finchley and elsewhere around the country of a surprisingly heavy turn-out of voters to the polls that morning. I would have liked to think that these were all angry Conservatives, coming out to demonstrate their refusal to be blackmailed by trade union power. But it seemed more likely that they were voters from the Labour-dominated council estates who had come out to teach the Tories a lesson. I was glad to be wearing a spray of blue flowers in my buttonhole instead of the usual paper rosette. They had been given me by Mark and they stayed fresh all day, helping to keep up my spirits.
The results themselves quickly showed that we had nothing to be cheerful about. We lost thirty-three seats. It would be a hung Parliament. Labour had become the largest party with 301 seats — seventeen short of a majority; we were down to 296, though with a slightly higher percentage of the vote than Labour; the Liberals had gained almost 20 per cent of the vote with fourteen seats, and smaller parties, including the Ulster Unionists, held twenty-three. My own majority in Finchley was down from 11,000 to 6,000, though some of that decline was the result of boundary changes in the constituency.
I was upset at the result. We had finally squared up to the unions and the people had not supported us. Moreover, I had enjoyed my time as Education Secretary, or most of it. I would miss the workload and the decisions, and of course the conveniences like the ministerial car: from now on I would be driving myself around once more in my Vauxhall Viva. At least the painful process of clearing out desks and cupboards full of personal belongings was largely spared me. I had never taken much personal clutter to the DES in any case and, prudently, I had brought most of what there was back home at the start of the campaign and popped into the office to sign urgent letters when in central London. I could make a more or less clean break.
On Friday afternoon we met, a tired and downcast fag-end of a Cabinet, to be asked by Ted Heath for our reactions as to what should now be done. There were a number of options. Ted could advise the Queen to send for Harold Wilson as the leader of the largest single party. Or the Government could face Parliament and see whether it could command support for its programme. Or he could try to do a deal with the smaller parties for a programme designed to cope with the nation’s immediate difficulties. Having alienated the Ulster Unionists through our Northern Ireland policy, this in effect meant a deal with the Liberals — though even that would not have given us a majority. There was little doubt from the way Ted spoke that this was the course he favoured. We argued in circles about these possibilities.
My own instinctive feeling was that the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons was justified in expecting that they would be called to try to form a government. But Ted argued that with the Conservatives having won the largest number of votes, he was duty bound to explore the possibility of coalition. So he offered the Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe a place in a coalition Government and promised a Speaker’s conference on electoral reform. Thorpe went away to consult his party. Although I wanted to remain Secretary of State for Education, I did not want to do so at the expense of the Conservative Party’s never forming a majority government again. Yet that is what the introduction of proportional representation, which the Liberals would be demanding, might amount to. I was also conscious that this horse-trading was making us look ridiculous. The British dislike nothing more than a bad loser. It was time to go.
When we met again on Monday morning Ted gave us a full account of his discussions with the Liberals. They had in any case not been willing to go along with what Jeremy Thorpe wanted. A formal reply from him was still awaited. But it now seemed almost certain that Ted would have to tender his resignation. The final Cabinet was held at 4.45 that afternoon. By now Jeremy Thorpe’s reply had been received. From what Ted said, there were clues that his mind was already turning to the idea of a National Government of all parties, something which would increasingly attract him. It did not, of course, attract me at all. In any case, the Liberals were not going to join a coalition Government with us. There was nothing more to say.
I left Downing Street, sad but with some sense of relief. I had given little thought to the future. But I knew in my heart that it was time not just for a change in government but for a change in the Conservative Party.
CHAPTER VIII
Seizing the Moment
The October 1974 general election and the campaign for the Tory Leadership
THE 9½ PER CENT SOLUTION
It is never easy to go from government to opposition. But for several reasons it was particularly problematical for the Conservatives led by Ted Heath. First, of course, we had up until almost the last moment expected to win. Whatever the shortcomings of our Government’s economic strategy, every department had its own policy programme stretching well into the future. This now had to be abandoned for the rigours of Opposition. Secondly, Ted himself desperately wanted to continue as Prime Minister. He had been unceremoniously ejected from 10 Downing Street and for some months had to take refuge in the flat of his old friend and PPS Tim Kitson, having no home of his own — from which years later I drew the resolution that when my time came to depart I would at least have a house to go to. Ted’s passionate desire to return as Prime Minister lay behind much of the talk of coalitions and Governments of National Unity which came to disquiet the Party, though doubtless there was a measure of genuine conviction as well. Indeed, the more that the Tory Party moved away from Ted’s own vision, the more he wanted to see it tamed by coalition. Thirdly, and worst of all perhaps, the poisoned legacy of our U-turns was that we had no firm principles, let alone much of a record, on which to base our arguments. And in Opposition argument is everything.
For my part, I was glad that Ted did not ask me to cover my old department at Education but gave me the Environment portfolio instead. I had learned during our previous period in Opposition in the 1960s that there are difficulties in attacking proposals many of which will have been in some stage of gestation within one’s own department. Moreover, I was convinced from my own soundings in the course of the general election campaign that both rates and housing — particularly the latter — were issues which had contributed to our defeat. The task of devising and presenting sound and popular policies in these areas appealed to me.
There were rumblings about Ted’s own position, though that is what they largely remained. This was partly because most of us expected an early general election to be called in order to give Labour a working majority, and it hardly seemed sensible to change leaders now. But there were other reasons as well. Ted still inspired nervousness, even fear among many of his colleagues. In a sense, even the U-turns contributed to the aura around him. For he had single-handedly and with barely a publicly expressed murmur of dissent reversed Conservative policies and had gone far, with his lieutenants, in reshaping the Conservative Party. Paradoxically too, both those committed to Ted’s approach and those — like Keith and me and many on the backbenches — who thought very differently agreed that the vote-buying policies which the Labour Party was now pursuing would inevitably lead to economic collapse. Just what the political consequences of that would be was uncertain. But there were many Tory wishful thinkers who thought that it might result in the Conservative Party somehow returning to power with a ‘doctor’s mandate’. And Ted had no doubt of his own medical credentials.
He did not, though, make the concessions to his critics in the Party which would have been required. He might have provided effectively against future threats to his position if he had changed his approach in a number of ways. He might have shown at least some willingness to admit and learn from the Government’s mistakes. He might have invited talented backbench critics to join him as Shadow spokesmen and contribute to the rethinking of policy. He might have changed the overall complexion of the Shadow Cabinet to make it more representative of parliamentary opinion.
But he did none of these things. He replaced Tony Barber — who announced that he intended to leave the Commons though he would stay on for the present in the Shadow Cabinet without portfolio — with Robert Carr, who was even more committed to the interventionist approach that had got us into so much trouble. He promoted to the Shadow Cabinet during the year those MPs like Michael Heseltine and Paul Channon who were seen as his acolytes, and were unrepresentative of backbench opinion of the time. Only John Davies and Joe Godber, neither of whom was ideologically distinct, were dropped. Above all, he set his face against any policy rethinking that would imply that his Government’s economic and industrial policy had been seriously flawed. When Keith Joseph was not made Shadow Chancellor, he said he wanted no portfolio but rather to concentrate on research for new policies — something which would prove as dangerous to Ted as it was fruitful for the Party. Otherwise, these were depressing signals of ‘more of the same’ when the electorate had clearly demonstrated a desire for something different. Added to this, the important Steering Committee of Shadow Ministers was formed even more in Ted’s image. I was not at this stage invited to join it, and of its members only Keith and perhaps Geoffrey Howe were likely to oppose Ted’s wishes.
With everyone expecting another election before the end of the year — October being the favoured date — the Tory Party entered on an almost frantic search for attractive policies to be deployed in our next manifesto. These had to meet two criteria: they had to be novel, and they had to cast no doubt on the underlying correctness of the recent Conservative Government’s policies. I added a third complication: as far as my area of responsibility was concerned, the new policies also had to be recognisably Conservative. Meeting all these criteria involved us in some extremely testing acrobatics.
Between the February and October 1974 elections most of my time was taken up with work on housing and the rates. I had an effective housing policy group of MPs working with me. Hugh Rossi, a friend and neighbouring MP, was a great housing expert, with experience of local government. Michael Latham and John Stanley were well versed in the building industry. The brilliant Nigel Lawson, newly elected, always had his own ideas. We also had the help of people from the building societies and construction industry. It was a lively group which I enjoyed chairing.
The political priority was clearly lower mortgage rates. The technical problem was how to achieve these without open-ended subsidy. Of course, the purist view would be that artificially controlling the price of borrowing for house purchase was bound to be counterproductive. And in this matter the purist, as so often, was right. If we had pursued a responsible economic policy there would have been no boom and bust of property prices, and rising inflation would not have driven up mortgage rates. Policies providing for sound money and the release of sufficient quantities of development land are the proper way to ensure an orderly housing market. But of course we had not pursued policies of that sort. And Labour was already embarking on a vendetta against property development. In these circumstances, holding the mortgage rate down below the level the market — or more precisely the building societies — would otherwise have set made short-term political sense. In Government we had introduced a mortgage subsidy, and there had even been talk of taking powers to control the mortgage rate. The Labour Government quickly came up with its own scheme devised by Harold Lever to make large cheap short-term loans to the building societies. Our task was to devise something more attractive.
As well as having an eye for a politically attractive policy, I had reasons of conviction for action on the mortgage rate and for the other measures we devised to help homebuyers. I had always believed in a property-owning democracy and wider home ownership. At this point too, I was acutely aware of how much the middle classes were suffering. Because of the inflation which we and the Labour Party had conspired to create, the value of people’s savings had been eroded by negative real interest rates. On top of that, by 1974 house values had slumped. So had the stock market: the FT Ordinary Share index went down to 146, the lowest level for twenty years. Trade union power and left-wing socialism were in the ascendant. Tax increases were bearing down on businesses and people.
In such circumstances, it can be right to make modest temporary provision for the interests of the middle classes of a country on whom future prosperity largely depends. Moreover, it is cheaper to assist people to buy homes with a mortgage — whether by a subsidized mortgage rate, or by help with the deposit, or just by mortgage interest tax relief — than it is to build more council houses or to buy up private houses through municipalization. I used to quote the results of a Housing Research Foundation study which observed: ‘On average each new council house now costs roughly £900 a year in subsidy in taxes and rates (including the subsidy from very old council houses)… Tax relief on an ordinary mortgage, if this be regarded as a subsidy, averages about £280 a year.’
My housing policy group met regularly on Mondays. Housing experts and representatives from the building societies gave their advice. I reported from time to time to Shadow Cabinet where, in the absence of real agreement on economic policy or much constructive thinking on anything else, attention focused heavily on my areas of responsibility. It was clear to me that Ted and others were determined to make our proposals on housing and possibly rates the centrepiece of the next election campaign, which we expected sooner rather than later. For example, at the Shadow Cabinet on Friday 3 May we had an all-day discussion of policies for the manifesto. I reported on housing and was authorized to set up a rates policy group. But this meeting was more significant for another reason. At it Keith Joseph argued at length but in vain for a broadly ‘monetarist’ approach to dealing with inflation.
The question of the rates was a far more difficult one than any aspect of housing policy, and I had a slightly different group to help me. There was a huge amount of technical information to master. Moreover, reform, let alone abolition, of the rates had profound implications for the relations between central and local government and for the different local authority services, particularly education. I drew on the advice of the experts — municipal treasurers proved the best source, and gave readily of their technical advice. But working as I was under tight pressure of time and close scrutiny by Ted and others who expected me to deliver something radical, popular and defensible, my task was not an easy one.
That said, I could well understand how much was at stake politically. For example, on Tuesday 21 May I met 350 protesters from Northamptonshire — one from every town and village in the county — who were furious about rate rises of between 30 and 100 per cent. Several factors combined to raise the issue to such political prominence: there was the basic unfairness of a system which taxed a single widow at the same rate as a family with three grown-up working sons; our own rating revaluation in 1973 had led to inordinate rate rises;[31] and, more recently, Labour’s rate support grant settlement had treated the rural shire counties particularly harshly. There was, in short, on the rates issue as on housing, a full-scale middle-class anti-socialist revolt, and it was essential that it be harnessed, not dissipated. This I was determined to do.
The housing policy group had already held its seventh meeting and our proposals were well developed by the time the rates group started work on 10 June. I knew Ted and his advisers wanted a firm promise that we would abolish the rates. But I was loath to make such a pledge until we were clear about what to put in their place. Anyway, if there was to be an autumn election, there was by now little chance of doing more than finding a sustainable line to take in the manifesto.
Meanwhile, throughout that summer of 1974 I received far more publicity than I had ever previously experienced, mainly as a result of our housing policy. Some of this was inadvertent. The interim report of the housing policy group which I circulated to Shadow Cabinet appeared on the front page of The Times on Monday 24 June. On the previous Friday Shadow Cabinet had spent the morning discussing the fourth draft of the manifesto. By now the main lines of my proposed housing policy were agreed. The mortgage rate would be held down to some unspecified level by cutting the composite rate of tax paid by building societies on depositors’ accounts, in other words by subsidy disguised as tax relief. A grant would be given to first-time buyers saving for a deposit, though again no figure was specified. There would be a high-powered inquiry into building societies; this was an idea I modelled on the James Inquiry into teachers’ training. I hoped it might produce a long-term answer to the problem of high mortgage rates and yet save us from an open-ended subsidy.
The final point related to the right of tenants to buy their council houses. Of all our proposals this was to prove the most far-reaching and the most popular. The February 1974 manifesto had offered council tenants the chance to buy their houses, but retained a right of appeal for the council against sale, and had not offered a discount. We all wanted to go further than this; the question was how far. Peter Walker constantly pressed for the ‘Right to Buy’ to be extended to council tenants at the lowest possible prices. My instinct was on the side of caution. It was not that I underrated the benefits of wider property ownership. Rather, I was wary of alienating the already hard-pressed families who had scrimped to buy a house on one of the new private estates at the market price and who had seen the mortgage rate rise and the value of their house fall. These people were the bedrock Conservative voters for whom I felt a natural sympathy. They would, I feared, strongly object to council house tenants who had made none of their sacrifices suddenly receiving what was in effect a large capital sum from the Government. We might end up losing more support than we gained. In retrospect, this argument seems both narrow and unimaginative. And it was. But there was a lot to be said politically for it in 1974 at a time when the value of people’s houses had slumped so catastrophically.
In the event, we went a long way in Peter’s direction. The October 1974 manifesto offered council tenants who had been in their homes for three years or more the right to buy them at a price a third below market value. If the tenant sold again within five years he would surrender part of any capital gain. Also by the time the manifesto reached its final draft we had quantified the help to be given to first-time buyers of private houses and flats. We would contribute £1 for every £2 saved for the deposit up to a given ceiling. (We ducked the question of rent decontrol.)
It was, however, the question of how low a maximum mortgage interest rate we would promise in the manifesto that caused me most trouble. Although, for the reasons I have already outlined, I had convinced myself that some kind of pledge in this area was justified, I was very aware of how the cost to the Exchequer might escalate alarmingly if inflation and interest rates kept on rising. Ted and those around him seemed to entertain no such caution. On Thursday 1 August he summoned me back from Lamberhurst for a meeting at his new house in Wilton Street with Peter Walker, Ian Gilmour and Robert Carr. I was put under great pressure to go beyond the phrase which had by now been agreed for the manifesto of pegging the mortgage rate at a ‘reasonable’ level. Ted and the others wanted a specific figure. I argued strongly against, but in the end I had to concede a pledge that we would hold the rate ‘below 10 per cent’. Beyond that, I did not agree to a specific figure. I hoped it would be the end of the matter.
But when I was in the car on the way from London to Tonbridge on Wednesday 28 August in order to record a Party Political Broadcast the bleeper signalled that I must telephone urgently. Ted apparently wanted a word. Willie Whitelaw answered the phone and it was clear that the two of them, and doubtless others of the inner circle, were meeting. Ted came on the line. He asked me to announce on the PPB the precise figure to which we would hold down mortgages, and to take it down as low as I could. I said I could understand the psychological point about going below 10 per cent. That need could be satisfied by a figure of 9½ per cent, and in all conscience I could not take it down any further. To do so would have a touch of rashness about it. I was already worried about the cost. I did not like this tendency to pull figures out of the air for immediate political impact without proper consideration of where they would lead. So I stuck at 9½ per cent.
It was a similar story on the rates. When we had discussed the subject at our Shadow Cabinet meeting on Friday 21 June I had tried to avoid any firm pledge. I suggested that our line should be one of reform to be established on an all-party basis through a Select Committee. I was the first to admit that this was not likely to set the world on fire. But even more than housing, this was not an area in which precipitate pledges were sensible. Ted would have none of this and said I should think again. The need for something clearer was indeed demonstrated by the Commons debate on the rates a few days later. We called for fundamental reform, some interim rate relief and a provision that water charges should qualify for rate rebate. In my speech I also argued for central government having the power to cap local government spending and then for a general inquiry into the rates. But though I emerged with my reputation as a parliamentarian intact, Tony Crosland, the Environment Secretary, arguing for an increased central government subsidy to local authorities without major reform of the system, was generally thought to have had the better of the debate. His victory was pyrrhic. For increased subsidies led not to lower rates but to higher local spending. Within a year Mr Crosland was announcing sternly: ‘The party is over.’
In July Charles Bellairs at the Conservative Research Department and I worked on a draft rates section for the manifesto. We were still thinking in terms of an inquiry and an interim rate relief scheme. I went along to discuss our proposals at the Shadow Cabinet Steering Committee. I argued for the transfer of teachers’ salaries — the largest item of local spending — from local government onto the Exchequer. Another possibility I raised was the replacement of rates with a system of block grants, with local authorities retaining discretion over spending but within a total set by central government. Neither of these possibilities was particularly attractive. But at least discussion revealed to those present that ‘doing something’ about the rates was a very different matter from knowing what to do.
On Saturday 10 August I used my speech to the Candidates’ Conference at the St Stephen’s Club to publicize our policies. I argued for total reform of the rating system to take into account individual ability to pay, and suggested the transfer of teachers’ salaries and better interim relief as ways to achieve this. It was a good time of the year — a slack period for news — to unveil new proposals, and we gained some favourable publicity.
It seemed to me that this proved that we could fight a successful campaign without being more specific; indeed, looking back, I can see that we were already a good deal too specific because, as I was to discover fifteen years later, such measures as transferring the cost of services from local to central government do not in themselves lead to lower local authority rates.
I had hoped to have a pleasant family holiday at Lamberhurst away from the sticky heat of London and the demands of politics. It would have been the first for three years. It was not to be. The telephone kept ringing, with Ted and others urging me to give more thought to new schemes. Then I was called back for another meeting at Wilton Street on Friday 16 August. Ted, Robert Carr, Jim Prior, Willie Whitelaw and Michael Wolff from Central Office were all there. It was soon clear what the purpose was — to bludgeon me into accepting a commitment in the manifesto to abolish the rates altogether within the lifetime of a Parliament. I argued against this for very much the same reason that I argued against the ‘9½ per cent’ pledge on the mortgage rate. But so shell-shocked by their unexpected defeat in February were Ted and his inner circle that in their desire for re-election they were clutching at straws, or what in the jargon were described as manifesto ‘nuggets’.
There were various ways to raise revenue for expenditure on local purposes. We were all uneasy about moving to a system whereby central government just provided block grants to local government. So I had told Shadow Cabinet that I thought a reformed property tax seemed to be the least painful option. But in the back of my mind I had the additional idea of supplementing the property tax with a locally collected tax on petrol. Of course, there were plenty of objections to both, but at least they were better than putting up income tax.
In any case, what mattered to my colleagues was clearly the pledge to abolish the rates, and at Wilton Street Ted insisted on it. I felt bruised and resentful to be bounced again into policies which had not been properly thought out. But I thought that if I combined caution on the details with as much presentational bravura as I could muster I could make our rates and housing policies into vote-winners for the Party. This I now concentrated my mind on doing.
It was at a press conference on the afternoon of Wednesday 28 August that I unveiled our final proposals. I delivered the package of measures — built around 9½ per cent mortgages and the abolition of the rates — without a scintilla of doubt, which as veteran Evening Standard reporter Robert Carvel said, ‘went down with hardened reporters almost as well as the sherry’ served by Central Office. We dominated the news. It was by general consent the best fillip the Party had had since losing the February election. There was even some talk of the Conservatives being back in the lead in the opinion polls, though this was over-optimistic. The Building Societies’ Association welcomed the proposals for 9½ per cent mortgages but questioned my figures about the cost. In fact, as I indignantly told them, it was their sums which were wrong and they subsequently retracted. Some on the economic right were understandably critical, but among the grassroots Conservatives that we had to win back the mortgage proposal was extremely popular. So too was the pledge on the rates. The Labour Party was rattled and unusually the party-giving Tony Crosland was provoked into overreaction, describing the proposals as ‘Margaret’s midsummer madness’. All this publicity was good for me personally as well. Although I was not to know it at the time, this period up to and during the October 1974 election campaign allowed me to make a favourable impact on Conservatives in the country and in Parliament without which my future career would doubtless have been very different.
FIRST SECOND THOUGHTS
Although it was my responsibilities as Environment spokesman which took up most of my time and energy, from late June I had become part of another enterprise which would have profound consequences for the Conservative Party, for the country and for me. The setting-up of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) is really part of Keith Joseph’s story rather than mine. Keith had emerged from the wreckage of the Heath Government determined on the need to rethink our policies from first principles. If this was to be done, Keith was the ideal man to do it. He had the intellect, the integrity and not least the humility required. He had a deep interest in both economic and social policy. He had long experience of government. He had an extraordinary ability to form relationships of friendship and respect with a wide range of characters with different viewpoints and backgrounds. Although he could, when he felt strongly, speak passionately and persuasively, it was as a listener that he excelled. Moreover, Keith never listened passively. He probed arguments and assertions and scribbled notes which you knew he would go home to ponder. He was so impressive because his intellectual self-confidence was the fruit of continual self-questioning. His bravery in adopting unpopular positionsbefore a hostile audience evoked the admiration of his friends, because we all knew that he was naturally shy and even timid. He was almost too good a man for politics, except that without a few good men politics would be intolerable.
I could not have become Leader of the Opposition, or achieved what I did as Prime Minister, without Keith. But nor, it is fair to say, could Keith have achieved what he did without the Centre for Policy Studies and Alfred Sherman. Apart from the fact of their being Jewish, Alfred and Keith had little in common, and until one saw how effectively they worked together it was difficult to believe that they could cooperate at all.
I understand that Keith and Alfred first met in 1962 when Keith was Housing Minister and Alfred covered local government matters at the Daily Telegraph. From time to time they were in touch, and then after a discussion at the Reform Club Keith asked Alfred’s thoughts about a speech draft he had with him. From then on Keith took to asking for Alfred’s suggestions. During the early years of the Heath Government they had less contact, but it was during the three-day week that Keith met Alfred to discuss the Middle East, on which Alfred was something of an expert, writing for the main Hebrew-language daily in Israel.
Alfred had his own kind of brilliance. He brought his convert’s zeal (as an ex-communist), his breadth of reading and his skills as a ruthless polemicist to the task of plotting out a new kind of free-market Conservatism. He was more interested, it seemed to me, in the philosophy behind policies than the policies themselves. He was better at pulling apart sloppily constructed arguments than at devising original proposals. But the force and clarity of his mind, and his complete disregard for other people’s feelings or opinion of him, made him a formidable complement and contrast to Keith. Alfred helped Keith to turn the Centre for Policy Studies into the powerhouse of alternative Conservative thinking on economic and social matters.
I was not involved at the beginning, though I gathered from Keith that he was thinking hard about how to turn his Shadow Cabinet responsibilities for research on policy into constructive channels. In March Keith had won Ted’s approval for the setting-up of a research unit to make comparative studies with other European economies, particularly the so-called ‘social market economy’ as practised in West Germany. Ted had Adam Ridley put on the board of directors of the CPS (Adam acted as his economic adviser from within the Conservative Research Department), but otherwise Keith was left very much to his own devices. Nigel Vinson, a successful entrepreneur with strong free-enterprise convictions, was made responsible for acquiring a home for the Centre, which was found in Wilfred Street, close to Victoria. Simon Webley, who ran the British/North American Research Association, ensured that the Centre’s publications never forgot the realities of industry and commerce amid the economic theories. Later in 1974 Gerry Frost, the present Director, also joined the CPS and established some administrative order out of what might have been a chaos of intellectuals. Other figures who made crucial contributions from time to time were Jock Bruce-Gardyne and Peter Utley. A further reason for the Centre’s success was the dedication of secretaries and cooks who twice a week provided some of the best low-cost meals in London. (Perhaps not always low-cost: Gerry Frost once complained in a memo: ‘We seem to be bent on disproving the dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch.’) Increasingly, the CPS acted as a focus for a large group of free-market thinkers, by no means all of them Conservative, who sought to change the climate of opinion and achieve wider understanding of the role of the market and the shortcomings of statism.
It was at the end of May 1974 that I first became directly involved with the CPS. Whether Keith ever considered asking any other members of the Shadow Cabinet to join him at the Centre I do not know: if he had they certainly did not accept. His was a risky, exposed position, and the fear of provoking the wrath of Ted and the derision of left-wing commentators was a powerful disincentive. But I jumped at the chance to become Keith’s Vice-Chairman.
The CPS was the least bureaucratic of institutions. It could not properly be called a ‘think tank’ for it had none of the corporate grandeur of the prestigious American foundations which that term evokes. Alfred Sherman has caught the feel of it by saying that it was an ‘animator, agent of change, and political enzyme’. The original proposed social market approach did not prove particularly fruitful and was eventually quietly forgotten, though a pamphlet called Why Britain Needs a Social Market Economy was published. The concept of the social market was — like other terms of foreign provenance too literally translated — bedevilled with problems. How much was it simply a matter of restating the truth that only a successful market economy can sustain social improvement? How much did it signify a market economy with a high degree of ‘social protection’, i.e. regulation? Even its most prominent exponent, West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, apparently had his doubts about the way it was being implemented in later years.
What the Centre then developed was the drive to expose the follies and self-defeating consequences of government intervention. It continued to engage the political argument in open debate at the highest intellectual level. The objective was to effect change — change in the climate of opinion and so in the limits of the ‘possible’. In order to do this it had, to employ another of Alfred’s phrases, to ‘think the unthinkable’. It was not long before more than a few feathers began to be ruffled by that approach.
Keith had decided that he would make a series of speeches over the summer and autumn of 1974 in which he would set out the alternative analysis of what had gone wrong and what should be done. The first of these, which was also intended to attract interest among potential fund-raisers, was delivered at Upminster on Saturday 22 June. Alfred was the main draftsman. But as with all Keith’s speeches — except the fateful Edgbaston speech which I shall describe shortly — he circulated endless drafts for comment. All the observations received were carefully considered and the language pared down to remove every surplus word. Keith’s speeches always put rigour of analysis and exactitude of language above style, but taken as a whole they managed to be powerful rhetorical instruments as well.
The Upminster speech infuriated Ted and the Party establishment because Keith lumped in together the mistakes of Conservative and Labour Governments, talking about the ‘thirty years of socialistic fashions’. The last time anyone had been bold enough to speak like this was when Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944. Keith pre-empted the criticism which would inevitably be levelled at him by accepting now and later his full share of the blame for what had gone wrong. One after the other he led the sacred cows to the abattoir. He said of the frantic pursuit of economic growth: ‘Growth is welcome, but we just do not know how to accelerate its pace. Perhaps faster growth, like happiness, should not be a prime target but only a by-product of other policies.’
He said bluntly that the public sector had been ‘draining away the wealth created by the private sector’, and challenged the value of public ‘investment’ in tourism and the expansion of the universities. He condemned the socialist vendetta against profits and noted the damage done by rent controls and council housing to labour mobility. Finally — and, in the eyes of the advocates of consensus, unforgivably — he talked about the ‘inherent contradictions [of the]… mixed economy’. It was a short speech but it had a mighty impact, not least because people knew that there was more to come.
A distinctive feature of Keith’s approach was that he went out of his way to avoid suggesting that malice had prompted the excessive state spending, nationalization, regulation, taxation and trade union power which had done so much harm to Britain. On the contrary, he argued, all this had occurred with the best of intentions. Perhaps in this he was over-generous, attributing his own high-mindedness to others. But the patent sincerity and charity which accompanied his devastating criticism of the politics of the last thirty years increased the effect. He returned to the same theme at Leith in August, by which time I was myself more actively involved in the CPS, attending Keith’s meetings, commenting on his suggestions and preparing my own notes and papers on the areas of education and social services which I knew best.
From Keith and Alfred I learned a great deal. I renewed my reading of the seminal works of liberal economics and conservative thought. I also regularly attended lunches at the Institute of Economic Affairs where Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, Alan Walters and others — in other words all those who had been right when we in Government had gone so badly wrong — were busy marking out a new non-socialist economic and social path for Britain. I lunched from time to time with Professor Douglas Hague, the economist, who would later act as one of my unofficial economic advisers.
At about this time I also made the acquaintance of a polished and amusing former television producer called Gordon Reece, who was advising the Party on television appearances and who had, it seemed to me, an almost uncanny insight into that medium. In fact, by the eve of the October 1974 general election I had made a significant number of contacts with those on whom I would come to rely so heavily during my years as Party Leader.
The third of Keith’s troika of policy speeches was delivered in Preston on Thursday 5 September (by which time he was Shadow Home Secretary). After some early inconclusive discussion in Shadow Cabinet of Keith’s various ideas, Ted had refused the general economic re-evaluation and discussion which Keith wanted. Keith decided that he was not prepared to be either stifled or ignored, and gave notice that he was intending to make a major speech on economic policy. Ted and most of our colleagues were desperate to prevent this. Geoffrey Howe and I, as the two members of Shadow Cabinet considered most likely to be able to influence Keith, were accordingly dispatched to try to persuade him not to go ahead, or at least to tone down what he intended to say. In any case, Keith showed me an early draft. It was one of the most powerful and persuasive analyses I have ever read. I made no suggestions for changes. Nor, as far as I know, did Geoffrey. The Preston speech must still be considered as one of the very few speeches which have fundamentally affected a political generation’s way of thinking.
It set out in much greater detail than ever before the monetarist approach. It began with the sombre statement: ‘Inflation is threatening to destroy our society.’ At most times this would have seemed hyperbole, but at this time, with inflation at 17 per cent and rising, people were obsessed with its impact on their lives. That only made more explosive Keith’s admission that successive governments bore the responsibility for allowing it to get such a grip. He rejected the idea embraced by the Shadow Cabinet that inflation had been ‘imported’ and was the result of rocketing world prices. In fact, it was the result of excessive growth of the money supply. Explaining as he did that there was a time lag of ‘many months, or even as much as a year or two’ between loose monetary policy and rising inflation, he also implicitly — and of course accurately — blamed the Heath Government for the inflation which was now beginning to take off and which would rise to even more ruinous levels the following year. He also rejected the use of incomes policy as a means of containing it. The analysis was subtle, detailed and devastating.
Incomes policy alone [the word ‘alone’ being a minor concession I suppose to the official Shadow Cabinet line] as a way to abate inflation caused by excessive money supply is like trying to stop water coming out of a leaky hose without turning off the tap; if you stop one hole it will find two others… But long before this year, we knew all the arguments. We had used them in Opposition in 1966–70. Why then did we try incomes policy again? I suppose that we desperately wanted to believe in it because we were so apprehensive about the alternative: sound money policies.
(Of course I too in my 1968 CPC lecture had accepted the monetarist analysis: so I felt that this applied equally to me.)
Keith then put his finger on the fundamental reason why we had embarked on our disastrous U-turns — fear of unemployment. It had been when registered unemployment rose to one million that the Heath Government’s nerve broke. But Keith explained that the unemployment statistics concealed as much as they revealed because they included ‘frictional unemployment’ — that is, people who were temporarily out of work moving between jobs — and a large number of people who were more or less unemployable for one reason or another. Similarly, there was a large amount of fraudulent unemployment, people who were drawing benefit while earning. In fact, noted Keith, the real problem had been labour shortages, not surpluses. He said that we should be prepared to admit that control of the money supply to beat inflation would temporarily risk some increase in unemployment. But if we wanted to bring down inflation (which itself destroyed jobs, though this was an argument to which Keith and I would subsequently have to return on many occasions), monetary growth had to be curbed. Keith did not argue that if we got the money supply right, everything else would be right. He specifically said that this was not his view. But if we did not achieve monetary control we would never be able to achieve any of our other economic objectives.
The Preston speech had a huge impact. It was, of course, highly embarrassing for Ted and the Party establishment. Some still hoped that a combination of dire warnings about socialism, hints of a National Government and our new policies on mortgages and the rates would see us squeak back into office — an illusion fostered by the fact that on the very day of Keith’s speech an opinion poll showed us two points ahead of Labour. The Preston speech blew this strategy out of the water, for it was clear that the kind of reassessment Keith was advocating was highly unlikely to occur if the Conservatives returned to government with Ted Heath as Prime Minister. Keith himself discreetly decided to spend more time at the CPS in Wilfred Street than at Westminster, where some of his colleagues were furious. For my part, I did not think that there was any serious chance of our winning the election. In the short term I was determined to fight as hard as I could for the policies which it was now my responsibility to defend. In the longer term I was convinced that we must turn the Party around towards Keith’s way of thinking, preferably under Keith’s leadership.
TED’S LAST THROW
The Conservative Party manifesto was published early, on Tuesday 10 September — about a week before the election was announced — because of a leak to the press. I was taken by surprise by a question on it when I was opening the Chelsea Antiques Fair. The release of the manifesto in this way was not a good start to the campaign, particularly because we had so little new to say. It was clear, however, from the course of the Shadow Cabinet two days later, that what was really worrying Ted and his circle was what Keith — and to a lesser extent I — was likely to say. Ted laid down the law: we must speak to the manifesto and nothing else, and any amplification of policies must be made only after discussions between the relevant spokesmen, the Party Chairman and himself. Shadow Cabinet members must concentrate particularly on their own subjects. No one had the slightest doubt about the target for these remarks.
I was effectively on the campaign trail even before the formal announcement the following Wednesday of a general election to take place on Thursday 10 October. On Monday I spoke in the north-west for Fergus Montgomery, my splendid PPS (a frontbencher’s eyes and ears in the Commons). On Tuesday I was answering questions about our policies at a meeting of the House-builders’ Federation. On Wednesday itself I gave an interview to a magazine called Pre-Retirement Choice: this was, as I shall explain, to come back to haunt me. On Thursday there was a further general discussion of the campaign in Shadow Cabinet. The following day Parliament was dissolved and the campaign got properly under way with MPs leaving for their constituencies.
I had never had so much exposure to the media as in this campaign. The Labour Party recognized that our housing and rates proposals were just about the only attractive ones in our manifesto, and consequently they set out to rubbish them as soon as possible. On Tuesday 24 September Tony Crosland described them as ‘a pack of lies’. (This was the same press conference at which Denis Healey made his notorious claim that inflation was running at 8.4 per cent, calculating the figure on a three-month basis when the annual rate was in fact 17 per cent.) I immediately issued a statement rebutting the accusation, and in order to keep the argument going, for it would highlight our policies, I said at Finchley that evening that the cut in mortgage rates would be among the first actions of a new Conservative Government. Then, in pursuit of the same goal, and having consulted Ted and Robert Carr, the Shadow Chancellor, I announced at the morning press conference at Central Office on Friday that the mortgage rate reduction would occur ‘by Christmas’ if we won. The main morning papers led with the story the following day — ‘Santa Thatcher’ — and it was generally said that we had taken the initiative for the first time during the campaign. On the following Monday I described this on a Party Election Broadcast as a ‘firm, unshakeable promise’. And the brute political fact was that, despite my reservations about the wisdom of the pledge, we would have had to honour it at almost any cost.
It was at this point that the way in which I was presenting our housing and rates policies first began to run up against the general approach Ted wanted to take in the campaign. At his insistence I had made the policies I was offering as hard and specific as possible. But the manifesto, particularly in the opening section, deliberately conveyed the impression that the Conservatives might consider some kind of National Government and would therefore be flexible on the policies we were putting forward. The passage read:
The Conservative Party, free from dogma and free from dependence upon any single interest, is broadly based throughout the nation. It is our objective to win a clear majority in the House of Commons in this election. But we will use that majority above all to unite the nation. We will not govern in a narrow partisan spirit. After the election we will consult and confer with the leaders of other parties and with the leaders of the great interests in the nation, in order to secure for the Government’s policies the consent and support of all men and women of goodwill. We will invite people from outside the ranks of our party to join with us in overcoming Britain’s difficulties. [Emphasis added.]
These undefined people who would join the Conservatives in government might include, one presumed, some members of the right wing of the Labour Party and perhaps the Liberals. The latter had all along been openly campaigning for a coalition government. This kind of rhetoric made me deeply uneasy. It was not just that, like Disraeli’s England, I did not like coalitions. In practical terms, such talk reduced the credibility of the pledges I was making in my own area. For who could tell what inter-party horse-trading might do to them?
At the Conservative press conference on Friday 2 October Ted stressed his willingness as Prime Minister to bring non-Conservatives into a government of ‘all the talents’ (party and talent being in this context considered synonyms). This tension between firm pledges and implied flexibilities was in danger of making nonsense of our campaign and dividing Shadow ministers.
We were now entering the last week. I still did not believe we were likely to win. The opinion polls had shown us well behind since the beginning of the campaign. But I felt that in spite of criticism in the heavyweight press my housing and rates policies had proved a political success. I also thought that we might manage to get by with the present somewhat ambiguous attitude to National Governments for the few days remaining.
On Thursday I continued when campaigning in the London areas with the vigorous defence of our housing policies and combined this with attacks on ‘creeping socialism’ through municipalization. In the evening I was asked to come and see Ted at Wilton Street. His advisers had apparently been urging him to go further and actually start talking about the possibility of a Coalition Government. Because I was known to be firmly against this for both strategic and tactical reasons, and because I was due to appear on the radio programme Any Questions in Southampton the following evening, I had been called in to have the new line spelt out to me. Ted said that he was now prepared to call for a Government of National Unity which, apparently, ‘the people’ wanted. I was extremely angry. He had himself, after all, insisted on making the housing and rates policies I had been advocating as specific as possible: now at almost the end of the campaign he was effectively discarding the pledges in the manifesto because that seemed to offer a better chance of his returning to Downing Street.
Why, in any case, he imagined that he himself would be a Coalition Government’s likely Leader quite escaped me. Ted at this time was a divisive figure, and although he had somehow convinced himself that he represented the ‘consensus’, this accorded with neither his record, nor his temperament, nor indeed other people’s estimation. For myself, I was not going to retreat from the policies which at his insistence I had been advocating. I went away highly disgruntled.
On Any Questions I conceded that if there were no clear majority, a coalition would probably be necessary. But I qualified this by saying that I myself could never sit in a government with left wingers like Michael Foot or Tony Benn. I might have added that the likelihood of Keith Joseph and my being included in a coalition of the great and the good was tiny — hardly greater in fact than Ted himself leading it.
The last few days of the campaign were dominated by all the awkward questions which talk of coalitions brings. But I stuck to my own brief, repeating the manifesto pledges sitting alongside Ted Heath at the last Conservative press conference on Tuesday 7 October. The general election result two days later suggested that in spite of the natural desire of electors to give the minority Labour Government a chance to govern effectively, there was still a good deal of distrust of them. Labour finished up with an overall majority of three, which was unlikely to see them through a full term. But the Conservative result — 277 seats compared with Labour’s 319 — though it might have been worse, was hardly any kind of endorsement for our approach.
KEITH BOWS OUT
I myself had fared quite well, though my majority fell a little in Finchley. I was thought to have had a good campaign. Talk of my even possibly becoming Leader of the Party, a subject which had already excited some journalists a great deal more than it convinced me, started to grow. I felt sorry for Ted Heath personally. He had his music and a small circle of friends, but politics was his life. That year, moreover, he had suffered a series of personal blows. His yacht, Morning Cloud, had sunk and his godson had been among those lost. The election defeat was a further blow.
Nonetheless, I had no doubt that Ted now ought to go. He had lost three elections out of four. He himself could not change and he was too defensive of his own past record to see that a fundamental change of policies was needed. So my reluctance to confirm suggestions that I might myself become Leader had little to do with keeping Ted in his present position. It had everything to do with seeing Keith take over from him. Indeed, by the weekend I had virtually become Keith’s informal campaign manager. Accordingly I discouraged speculation about my own prospects. For example, I told the London Evening News on Friday 11 October: ‘You can cross my name off the list.’
Similarly I told the Evening Standard on Tuesday 15 October: ‘I think it would be extremely difficult for a woman to make it to the top… I have always taken the view that to get to the very top one has to have experience in one of the three important posts…[32] they give you confidence in yourself and give others confidence in you.’
Then on Saturday 19 October Keith spoke at Edgbaston in Birmingham. It was not intended as part of the series of major speeches designed to alter the thinking of the Conservative Party, and perhaps for this reason had not been widely circulated among Keith’s friends and advisers: certainly, I had no inkling of the text. The Edgbaston speech is generally reckoned to have destroyed Keith’s leadership chances. It was the section containing the assertion that ‘the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened’, and going on to lament the high and rising proportion of children being born to mothers ‘least fitted to bring children into the world’, having been ‘pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5’, which did the damage. Ironically, the most incendiary phrases came not from Keith’s own mouth, but from passages taken from an article by two left-wing sociologists published by the Child Poverty Action Group. This distinction, however, was lost upon the bishops, novelists, academics, socialist politicians and commentators who rushed to denounce Keith as a mad eugenicist.
On the other hand, there was an outpouring of public support for Keith in opinion polls and five bulging mail bags. One of these letters, a sample of which was analysed by Diana Spearman in the Spectator, summed up the feeling. In an unlettered hand, it read simply:
Dear Sir Joseph,
You are dead right.
For, with the exception of those few unfortunate phrases, the speech sent out powerful messages about the decline of the family, the subversion of moral values and the dangers of the permissive society, connecting all these things with socialism and egalitarianism, and proposing the ‘remoralization of Britain’ as a long-term aim. It was an attempt to provide a backbone for Conservative social policy, just as Keith had started to do for economic policy. The trouble was 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 Edgbaston speech was bound to be dynamite, but it might at least have been a controlled explosion. Unfortunately, that is not how it happened. The speech was due to be given on Saturday night, and so the text was issued in advance with an embargo for media use. But the Evening Standard, for whatever reason, broke the embargo and launched a fierce attack on Keith, distorting what he said. I read its version on Waterloo Station and my heart sank. Afterwards Keith himself did not help his cause by constantly explaining, qualifying and apologizing. The Party establishment could barely contain their glee. Keith had been found guilty of that one mortal sin in the eyes of mediocrities — he had shown ‘lack of judgement’, i.e. willingness to think for himself. The press camped outside his house and refused to leave him or his family alone. He had probably never experienced anything quite like it. Having been vilified as the ‘milk snatcher’, I felt his hurt as if it were my own. But there was nothing to do except hope that it would all die down.
Doubtless as a result of all this, Ted felt a good deal more secure. He even told us in Shadow Cabinet the following Tuesday that the election campaign had been ‘quite a good containment exercise and that the mechanics had worked well’. A strange unreality pervaded our discussions. Everyone except Ted knew that the main political problem was the fact that he was still Leader. But he thought that we should now concentrate on Scotland, on how to improve our appeal to the young and on how to increase our support among working-class voters. Even on its own terms this analysis was flawed. As I was to point out two days later in an interview with Max Hastings in the Evening Standard, which appeared under the headline ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Twilight of the Middle Classes’, we should be trying to re-establish our middle-class support, for ‘[being middle class] has never been simply a matter of income, but a whole attitude to life, a will to take responsibility for oneself’. And I was surely not the only one present at Shadow Cabinet who felt that our recent election defeat was hardly a cause for even modest self-congratulation.
Ted was now locked in a bitter battle with the 1922 Executive. In reply to their demands for a leadership contest — and indeed for reform of the leadership election procedure — he disputed their legitimacy as representatives of the backbenches on the grounds that they had been elected during the previous Parliament and must themselves first face re-election by Tory MPs. Ted and his advisers hoped that they might be able to have his opponents thrown off the Executive and replaced by figures more amenable to him. As part of a somewhat belated attempt to win over backbenchers, Ted also proposed that extra front bench spokesmen should be appointed from among them and that officers of the Parliamentary Committees might speak from the front bench on some occasions. It was also widely rumoured that there would shortly be a reshuffle of the Shadow Cabinet.
Not for the first time, I found the press more optimistic about my prospects than I was. The Sunday Express and the Observer on 3 November ran stories that I was to be appointed Shadow Chancellor. This was a nice thought and I would have loved the job; but I regarded it as extremely unlikely that Ted would give it to me. That was more or less confirmed by stories in the Financial Times and the Daily Mirror on the Monday which said that I would get a top economic job, but not the Shadow Chancellorship. And so indeed it turned out. I was appointed Robert Carr’s deputy with special responsibility for the Finance Bill and also made a member of the Steering Committee. Some of my friends were annoyed that I had not received a more important portfolio. But I knew from the years when I worked under Iain Macleod on the Finance Bill that this was a position in which I could make the most of my talents. What neither Ted nor I knew was just how important that would be over the next three months. The reshuffle as a whole demonstrated something of the weakness of Ted’s political standing. Edward du Cann refused to join the Shadow Cabinet, which was therefore no more attractive to the right of the Party, some of whom at least Ted needed to win over. Tim Raison and Nicholas Scott who did come in were more or less on the left and, though able, not people who carried great political weight.
The re-election of all the members of the 1922 Executive, including Edward du Cann, on the day of the reshuffle — Thursday 7 November — was bad news for Ted. A leadership contest could no longer be avoided. He wrote to Edward saying that he was now willing to discuss changes to the procedure for electing the Party Leader. From now on it was probably in Ted’s interest to have the election over as soon as possible, before any alternative candidate could put together an effective campaign.
At this time I started to attend the Economic Dining Group which Nick Ridley had formed in 1972 and which largely consisted of sound money men like John Biffen, Jock Bruce-Gardyne, John Nott and others. Above all, I buried myself in the details of my new brief. It was a challenging time to take it up, for on Tuesday 12 November Denis Healey introduced one of his quarterly Budgets. It was a panic reaction to the rapidly growing problems of industry and consisted of cuts in business taxation to the tune of £775 million (£495 million of new business taxes having been imposed only six months before) and some curbs on subsidies to nationalized industries. Ted’s reply — in which, against the background of an audible gasp from Tory backbenchers, he criticized the Chancellor for allowing nationalized industry prices to rise towards market levels — did him no good at all.
My chance came the following Thursday when I spoke for the Opposition in the Budget Debate. I had done my homework and I set about contrasting the Labour Government’s past statements with its present actions. Some of the speech was quite technical and detailed, as it had to be. But it was my answers to the interruptions which had the backbenchers roaring support. I was directly answering Harold Lever (without whom Labour would have been still more economically inept) when he interrupted early in my speech to put me right on views I had attributed to him. Amid a good deal of merriment, not least from Harold Lever himself, a shrewd businessman from a wealthy family, I replied: ‘I always felt that I could never rival him [Lever] at the Treasury because there are four ways of acquiring money. To make it. To earn it. To marry it. And to borrow it. He seems to have experience of all four.’
At another point I was interrupted by a pompously irate Denis Healey when I quoted the Sunday Telegraph which reported him as saying: ‘I never save. If I get any money I go out and buy something for the house.’ Denis Healey was most indignant, so I was pleased to concede the point, saying (in reference to the fact that like other socialist politicians he had his own country house): ‘I am delighted that we have got on record the fact that the Chancellor is a jolly good saver. I know that he believes in buying houses in good Tory areas.’
No one has ever claimed that House of Commons repartee must be subtle in order to be effective. This performance boosted the shaky morale of the Parliamentary Party and with it my reputation.
Meanwhile, Alec Douglas-Home, now returned to the Lords as Lord Home, had agreed to chair a review of the procedure for the Leadership election. On Wednesday 20 November I received a note from Geoffrey Finsberg, a neighbouring MP and friend, which said: ‘If you contest the leadership you will almost certainly win — for my part I hope you will stand and I will do all I can to help.’ But I still could not see any likelihood of this happening. It seemed to me that for all of the brouhaha caused by his Edgbaston speech Keith must be our candidate.
The following afternoon I was working in my room in the House, briefing myself on the Finance Bill, when the telephone rang. It was Keith to check I was there because he had something he wanted to come along and tell me. As soon as he entered, I could see it was serious. He told me: ‘I am sorry, I just can’t run. Ever since I made that speech the press have been outside the house. They have been merciless. Helen [his wife] can’t take it and I have decided that I just can’t stand.’
There was no mistaking his mood. His mind was quite made up. I was on the edge of despair. We just could not abandon the Party and the country to Ted’s brand of politics. I heard myself saying: ‘Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.’
There was nothing more to say. My mind was already a whirl. I had no idea of my chances. I knew nothing about leadership campaigns. I just tried to put the whole thing to the back of my mind for the moment and concentrate on the Finance Bill. Somehow or other the news got out and I started to receive telephone calls and notes of support from MP friends. Late that night I went back to Flood Street and told Denis of my intention.
‘You must be out of your mind,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got a hope.’ He had a point. But I never had any doubt that he would support me all the way.
The following day Fergus Montgomery telephoned me, and I told him that Keith was not going to stand but that I would. I wondered how best to break the news to Ted. Fergus thought I should see him personally. I spent the weekend at Lamberhurst retreating from the press comment and speculation which now swirled about. There was plenty to think about. The main thing was that though I had few ideas about how to proceed, I was sure my reaction to Keith had been the right one. Ted had to go, and that meant that someone had to challenge him. If he won, I was politically finished. That would be sad but bearable; there are worse places than the backbenches. And it seemed to me most unlikely that I would win. But I did think that by entering the race, I would draw in other stronger candidates who, even if they did not think like Keith and me, would still be open to persuasion about changing the disastrous course on which the Party was set.
I arranged to see Ted on Monday 25 November. He was at his desk in his room at the House. I need not have worried about hurting his feelings. I went in and said: ‘I must tell you that I have decided to stand for the leadership.’ He looked at me coldly, turned his back, shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘If you must.’ I slipped out of the room.
Monday was, therefore, the first day I had to face the press as a declared contender for the Tory Leadership. I was glad to be able to rely on the help and advice of Gordon Reece, who had now become a friend and who sat in on some of my early press interviews, which went quite well. It was, of course, still the fact that I was a woman that was the main topic of interest. The evening was spent in the somewhat tense and awkward circumstances of Shadow Cabinet and the Steering Committee. Looking around the table, I felt that apart from Keith I would find few supporters here. I suspect that it was only due to the fact that they considered my decision ridiculous that there was not more open hostility. No such inhibitions were evident when I attended the Conservative Board of Finance shortly afterwards. I felt like the female equivalent of ‘the man who said he wanted to be Tory Leader’, with enraged colonels and indignant dowagers exploding about him in one of Bateman’s more excruciating cartoons.
Ted’s coterie and, I believe, at least one Central Office figure had in any case alighted on something which they hoped would destroy me as effectively as had happened to Keith. In the interview I had given to Pre-Retirement Choice more than two months before I had given what I considered to be practical advice to elderly people trying to make ends meet in circumstances where food prices were rising sharply. I said that it made sense to stock up on tinned food. This was precisely the sort of advice I myself had been given as a girl. Any good housewife shops around and buys several items at a time when prices are low, rather than dashing out at the last minute to buy the same thing at a greater cost.
But to my horror the press on Wednesday 27 November was full of stories of my ‘hoarding’ food. Someone had clearly used this obscure interview in order to portray me as mean, selfish and above all ‘bourgeois’. In its way it was cleverly done. It allowed the desired caricature to be brought out to the full. It played to the snobbery of the Conservative Party, because the unspoken implication was that this was all that could be expected of a grocer’s daughter. It reminded the public of all that had been said and written about me as the ‘milk snatcher’ at Education.
A veritable circus of indignation was now staged. Pressure groups were prompted to complain. A deputation of housewives was said to be travelling from Birmingham to urge me to give them the tins. Food chemists gave their views about the consequences of keeping tinned food too long in the larder. Martin Redmayne, the former Chief Whip, reliable Party establishment figure and now Deputy Chairman of Harrods, appeared on television to say that ‘any sort of inducement to panic buying was… against the public interest’ — although Lord Redmayne’s larder probably contained something more enticing than a few tins of salmon and corned beef. There was nothing for it but to invite the cameramen in and have them check the contents of my Flood Street larder and cupboards. This may have convinced some of the Tory hierarchy that my and my family’s tastes and standards were not at all what should be expected from someone who aspired to lead their party. But it certainly showed that the ‘hoarding’ allegation was malicious nonsense.
Finally, in order to keep the dying story alive my opponents went too far. On Friday 29 November I was in John Cope’s South Gloucestershire constituency when my secretary, Alison Ward, telephoned to say that the radio was now broadcasting that I had been seen in a shop on the Finchley Road buying up large quantities of sugar. (There was a sugar shortage at the time.) Alison had already checked and discovered that in fact no such shop existed; in any case the family consumption of sugar was minimal. It was just a straightforward lie. A firm denial prevented its circulation in the press, and marked the effective end of this surreal campaign.
I suspect that it ultimately backfired. It demonstrated to women throughout the country how ignorant male politicians were about what constituted ordinary housekeeping. It showed many people from modest backgrounds like mine how close to the surface of the Tory grandees lay an ugly streak of contempt for those they considered voting fodder. Most seriously for my opponents, it evoked a good deal of sympathy from fair-minded Conservative MPs who could see that I had been made the target of false and silly attacks.
At the time, however, I was bitterly upset by it. Sometimes I was near to tears. Sometimes I was shaking with anger. But as I told Bill Shelton, the MP for Streatham and a friend: ‘I saw how they destroyed Keith. Well, they’re not going to destroy me.’
What had happened made me all the more determined to throw my hat into the ring. But there was also much talk of Edward du Cann’s putting himself forward as a candidate. As Chairman of the 1922 Committee — and a man — he might reasonably be expected to command more support than me. On Thursday 5 December, with the hoarding story having more or less run its course, I was in Robert Adley’s constituency of Christchurch for a Party function. He was a great du Cann supporter and told me that he thought Edward was going to stand. I said that if he did, I would have to think again about my position. We must not split the right-wing vote.
One of Edward du Cann’s chief supporters, Airey Neave, the MP for Abingdon and a colleague of Edward’s on the 1922 Executive, was someone whom I already knew quite well. Our paths had crossed many times. As barristers we had shared the same Chambers, and he had been a neighbour at Westminster Gardens. When I was Opposition Social Security spokesman I had helped him with his Bill to make provision for pensions for the over-eighties. We both had a strong interest in science. As Secretary of State for Education and Science I had helped persuade Airey to stay on as Chairman of the Select Committee on Science and Technology when he was thinking of resigning.
Airey was a man of contrasts. His manner was quiet yet entirely self-assured. As a writer and a war hero who escaped from Colditz there was an air of romance about him. He had seen much more of the world than most MPs, and suffered a good deal too. He had the benefit, in Diana, of a marvellous political wife who backed him loyally. He had briefly been a junior minister in the late 1950s but had to resign because of ill health, and I understand Ted had unfeelingly told him that that was the end of his career. It was difficult to pin down Airey’s politics. I did not consider him ideologically a man of the right. He probably did not look at the world in those terms. We got on well and I was conscious of mutual respect, but we were not yet the close friends we were to become.
Airey had come to see me shortly after my decision to stand was known. He hoped to persuade Edward du Cann to stand, but Edward himself remained undecided. Excluded by Ted from high office, he had devoted himself to a City career he was now reluctant to give up. Until Edward decided one way or the other it was not, of course, possible for Airey to support me actively, but I knew that I could rely on his advice and he promised to stay in touch, which we did: he came to my room in the House to exchange notes on several occasions between then and the end of the year. The whole ‘hoarding’ episode certainly demonstrated how tough a battle I could expect. If I did finally and formally enter the lists, Airey was the sort of person it would be good to have on my side.
A new factor that weakened Ted and strengthened his potential rivals was the announcement of the Home Committee’s conclusions on Tuesday 7 December. There would be annual elections for the Tory Leader, challengers needed only a proposer and a seconder to put themselves forward, and the majority required to win on the first ballot was significantly increased to 50 per cent plus 15 per cent of those eligible to vote. It was in effect an incentive to challengers, since it meant that a Leader in difficulties needed to retain the confidence of a super-majority of those voting.
Still, Christmas at Lamberhurst that year was less festive than on some other occasions. We could not even walk as much as we usually did; the weather was awful. I knew that I could expect a trying time when I returned to Westminster, whether I actually stood for the Leadership or not. Denis also had business worries because Burmah Oil had run into deep trouble. Neither of us was too confident about what the future held.
SMALL EARTHQUAKE IN WESTMINSTER
On my return to London I resolved to clarify matters as regards the leadership. I invited Airey to lunch at Flood Street to have a proper discussion. I also found waiting for me a letter from Robert Adley urging that Edward du Cann and I should sort out which of us should stand rather than split the vote. The trouble was that this was impossible until Edward knew what he wanted to do, and it was clear from a conversation with him that he remained undecided. This was still the case when Airey and I had our lunch on Thursday 9 January 1975. I told him that I thought Geoffrey Howe might support me. I also told him how impossible proper discussion was under Ted’s chairmanship. Airey gave me his own account of his recent talks with Ted. It was clear to both of us that there had to be a change, and the only question was whether Edward du Cann or I was better placed to effect it. Interestingly and shrewdly, as it turned out, Airey thought that Ted’s support in the Parliamentary Party was overrated.
On Wednesday 15 January Edward du Cann made it publicly known that he would not run for the leadership. The way was therefore open for me. It was now vitally necessary to have an effective campaign team.
Events began to move fast. That same afternoon I was leading for the Opposition on the Committee Stage of the Finance Bill. Fergus had just learned that he would have to go on a parliamentary visit to South Africa, though he still thought (wrongly as it turned out) that he would be back in time for the leadership first ballot. He therefore asked Bill Shelton, when they met in the Division Lobby, to run my campaign in his absence, and Bill agreed. I was delighted when Bill told me, for I knew he was loyal and would be a skilful campaigner. Then, as I learned later, in the course of a subsequent vote Airey approached Bill and said: ‘You know that I have been running Edward du Cann’s campaign? Edward is withdrawing. If we could come to some agreement I will bring Edward’s troops behind Margaret.’ In fact, the ‘agreement’ simply consisted of Airey taking over the running of my campaign with Bill assisting him.
This arrangement was confirmed when Airey came up to see me in my room, and we performed a diplomatic minuet. Slightly disingenuously, he asked me who was running my campaign. Hardly less so, I replied that I didn’t really have a campaign. Airey said: ‘I think I had better do it for you.’ I agreed with enthusiasm. I knew that this meant he would swing as many du Cann supporters as possible behind me. Suddenly much of the burden of worry I had been carrying around fell away. From now on Airey, with Bill as his chief lieutenant, went to work quietly and remorselessly on their colleagues to win me support.
When I began to make suggestions to Airey about people to contact, he told me firmly not to bother about any of that, to leave it to him and to concentrate on my work on the Finance Bill. This was good advice, not least because both in the upstairs Committee Room and on the floor of the Chamber I had every opportunity to show my paces. It was, after all, the members of the Parliamentary Conservative Party who would ultimately make the decision about the Conservative leadership, and they were just as likely to be impressed by what I said in debate as by anything else. The campaign team began as a small group of about half a dozen, though it swelled rapidly and by the second ballot had become almost too large, consisting of as many as forty or fifty. Canvassing was done with great precision, and MPs might be approached several times by different people in order to verify their allegiances. Airey and his colleagues knew that there was no short cut to this process, and day after day it went on, with Bill Shelton crossing off names and keeping the tally. From time to time Airey would report to me on the position, though with the caveats which any shrewd canvasser always adds. The campaign group would also come to Flood Street, usually on the Sunday, to discuss with me articles, speeches and other initiatives for the week.
During these early days I was encouraged by the number of backbenchers who came up to offer me their support. One of the first was Peter Morrison, later to become my PPS at Downing Street, who told me that three years earlier his father, Lord Marga-dale, a former Chairman of the 1922 Committee, had said of me: ‘That woman will be the next leader of the Tory Party.’ This may be the first recorded instance of the phrase ‘that woman’.
Meanwhile, dealings with the media were suddenly becoming important. In these Gordon Reece was invaluable. Angus Maude, a journalist who combined profound insights with pithy wit and who had been unceremoniously sacked from the front bench by Ted for writing a critical article in the Spectator in 1966, helped me with the crucial Daily Telegraph article called ‘My Kind of Tory Party’. (I also received useful advice from a group of Telegraph journalists such as Peter Utley, John O’Sullivan and Frank Johnson — and of course Alfred Sherman — who were advocates of my cause in spite of their newspaper giving Ted reluctant endorsement.) George Gardiner, who was one of the February 1974 intake of MPs, a journalist himself and as editor of Conservative News party to some of the Central Office gossip, also helped me with drafting. It was a lively team.
In fact, the attitude towards my candidature was tangibly changing. I spoke on Tuesday 21 January to a lunch in St Stephen’s Tavern of the Guinea Club, consisting of leading national and provincial newspaper journalists. By this time as a result of the soundings Airey had taken I was actually beginning to feel that I was in with a chance. I said to them wryly at one point: ‘You know, I really think you should begin to take me seriously.’ They looked back in amazement, and perhaps some of them soon started to do so. For by the weekend articles had begun to appear reappraising my campaign in a different light.
Nor were my prospects harmed by another exchange in the Commons the following day with the ever-obliging Denis Healey. In bitter but obscure vein he described me as the ‘La Pasionaria of privilege’. I jotted down a reply and delivered it a few moments later with relish: ‘Some Chancellors are microeconomic. Some Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap.’ The Tory benches loved it.
With just a week to go, Airey, Keith and Bill came round to Flood Street on Sunday 26 January to discuss the latest position. The number of pledges — mine at around 120 and Ted’s less than eighty — looked far too optimistic. People would need to be revisited and their intentions re-examined. Presumably the Heath campaign, in which Peter Walker and Ted’s PPSs Tim Kitson and Ken Baker were the main figures, was receiving equally or even more optimistic information; but they made the mistake of believing it. Certainly, in marked contrast to Airey’s public demeanour, they were loudly predicting a large victory on the first ballot.
At Flood Street it was agreed that I should address my core campaigners in Committee Room 13 on Monday night. I could not tell them anything about campaigning. They had forgotten far more about political tactics and indeed political skulduggery than I would ever know. So instead I spoke and answered questions on my vision of a Conservative society from 10.30 till midnight. It was marvellous to be able to speak from the heart about what I believed, and to feel that those crucial to my cause were listening. Apparently my audience felt the same way; several MPs told me that they had never heard any senior Tory discuss policy in such philosophical terms. Plainly it was not I alone who was dispirited by the directionless expediency of the previous few years.
The Heath camp now changed the direction of their campaign, but still failed to get to the point. Ridicule had failed. Instead, the accusation became that the sort of Conservatism I represented might appeal to the middle-class rank and file supporters of the Party, particularly in the South, but would never win over the uncommitted. My article in the Daily Telegraph, which appeared on Thursday 30 January, took this head-on:
I was attacked [as Education Secretary] for fighting a rearguard action in defence of ‘middle-class interests’. The same accusation is levelled at me now, when I am leading Conservative opposition to the socialist Capital Transfer Tax proposals. Well, if ‘middle-class values’ include the encouragement of variety and individual choice, the provision of fair incentives and rewards for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the state and a belief in the wide distribution of individual private property, then they are certainly what I am trying to defend… If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it. Indeed one of the reasons for our electoral failure is that people believe too many Conservatives have become socialists already. Britain’s progress towards socialism has been an alternation of two steps forward with half a step back… And why should anyone support a party that seems to have the courage of no convictions?
This theme — the return to fundamental Conservative principles and the defence of middle-class values — was enormously popular in the Party. I repeated it when speaking to my Constituency Association the following day. I rejected the idea that my candidature was representative of a faction. I emphasized that I was speaking up for all those who felt let down by recent Conservative Governments. I was also prepared to accept my share of the blame for what had gone wrong under Ted.
But [I added] I hope I have learned something from the failures and mistakes of the past and can help to plan constructively for the future… There is a widespread feeling in the country that the Conservative Party has not defended [Conservative] ideals explicitly and toughly enough, so that Britain is set on a course towards inevitable socialist mediocrity. That course must not only be halted, it must be reversed.
It was in an open letter to the Chairman of my constituency released on Saturday afternoon, however, that I really summed up the gravamen of the charge against Ted and his leadership. Ted was a political paradox. He combined a belief in strong leadership (especially his own) with a record of buckling under the pressure of events. He was always talking about reaching out to win over the support of people from other parties, but he had no willingness to listen to the Conservative Party. By contrast, I said that what was required was a ‘leadership that listens’, adding that ‘in office… we allowed ourselves to become detached from many who had given us their support and trust’.
I knew from my talks with Conservative MPs that there were many contradictory factors which would influence their votes. Some would support Ted simply because he was the Leader in situ. Many would not dare go against him because, even after two successive election defeats, he inspired fear that there would be no forgiveness for mutiny. Moreover, many thought that I was inexperienced — and as I had publicly admitted, there was more than a little truth in that. There was also some suspicion of me as too doctrinaire and insensitive. And then, of course, there was the rather obvious fact that I was a woman.
As a result of these conflicting considerations, many MPs were undecided. They wanted to be able to talk to me, to find out what I was like and where I stood. Airey and his team would send these Members along to see me in the room of Robin Cooke — one of our team — in the House where, singly or in small groups, over a glass of claret or a cup of tea, I would try to answer their points as best I could. Ted, by contrast, preferred lunch parties of MPs where, I suspect, there was not much straight talking — at least not from the guests. Doubtless his campaign team marked them down as supporters, which many were not.
The press on Monday 3 February was full of the fact that the National Union of the Party had reported that 70 per cent of Constituency Associations favoured Ted Heath and that the great majority of Conservative supporters agreed with them. We were not surprised by this. The Conservative Associations, nudged by Central Office, were understandably loyal to the existing Leader: and the opinion poll results reflected the fact that I was a relatively unknown quantity outside the House of Commons. But obviously it did not help, and it certainly boosted confidence in the Heath camp. Indeed, there was evidence of a late surge of support for Ted among MPs. Airey’s and Bill’s final canvass returns suggested that I was neck and neck with Ted, with the third candidate, the gallant and traditionalist Hugh Fraser, picking up a few right-wing misogynist votes. But I was told that I came over quite well on the World in Action television programme that night.
On Tuesday 4 February, the day of the first ballot, I was up early to prepare Denis’s breakfast and see him off to work before driving from Flood Street to the House of Commons, exhibiting what I hoped was a confident smile and a few friendly words for the press gathered outside. For me it was another day on the Finance Bill Committee, while in another House of Commons Committee Room the voting for the leadership took place. The ballot was due to close at 3.30. I went up to Airey Neave’s room to await the result. Bill Shelton represented me at the count and Tim Kitson represented Ted. I believe that even after they had heard the sombre news of the outcome of that day’s voting the Heath camp had hoped that the proxy votes, counted last, would see Ted through. But most of the proxies also went to me. I was trying to concentrate on anything other than the future when the door opened and Airey came in. Softly, but with a twinkle in his eye, he told me: ‘It’s good news. You’re ahead in the poll. You’ve got 130 votes to Ted’s 119.’ Hugh Fraser had sixteen.
I could barely believe it. Although I was thirty-one votes short of the required margin to win outright on the first ballot — 50 per cent plus a lead of 15 per cent of those eligible to vote — and therefore there would have to be a second round, I was nonetheless decisively ahead. I had no doubt that if I had failed against Ted that would have been the end of me in politics. As it was, I might be Leader. Who knows? I might even be Prime Minister. I went downstairs and someone opened some champagne. But I had to keep a clear head, for I was soon back to the Finance Bill amid a certain raillery from friends and opponents alike, for the news had spread like wildfire. Later that evening I went back to Airey’s flat for a council of war.
My own surprise at the result was as nothing compared to the shattering blow it had delivered to the Conservative establishment. I felt no sympathy for them. They had fought me unscrupulously all the way. But I did feel sorry for Ted, who quickly announced his decision to resign as Leader and not to contest the second ballot. Willie Whitelaw now put his name forward and immediately became the favourite. I myself thought that Willie had a very good chance of winning; and though I could not seriously imagine him changing the direction of the Party as I wished, it did please me to think that between us there would be none of the bitterness which had soured my relations with Ted. Jim Prior, John Peyton and Geoffrey Howe also entered the contest. I was a little worried about Geoffrey’s candidature because he held similar views to mine and might split the right-wing vote, which in a close contest could be crucial. Hugh Fraser withdrew and urged his supporters to vote for Willie.
In fact, without knowing it, I had what the Americans call ‘momentum’. I had always reckoned that a substantial number of those voting for me in the first round would only do so as a tactical way of removing Ted and putting in someone more acceptable but still close to his way of thinking, such as Willie. But in fact, far from draining away, my support actually hardened. Perhaps there was an odd sense of gratitude to me for having done what no one else dared, that is to remove from the leadership someone who quite simply made the Party unelectable. Perhaps a sufficient number of my colleagues genuinely felt that the way forward for the Party was the root and branch reconsideration that Keith and I advocated. Perhaps there was a feeling that it was ‘a bit offside’ for those who had failed to challenge Ted when he looked unbeatable to step in to scoop up the prize once he had lost it. There were probably also doubts about whether Willie, for all his amiable qualities, was the right man to rethink Conservatism in the face of a Labour Government with a newly militant and aggressive left wing.
Certainly, many people in the Party at Westminster and outside it were now desperately anxious to bring the whole process to a swift end. The very circumstances which had counted against me in the first ballot now assisted me as the leading candidate in the second. The Daily Telegraph, an important barometer of Tory grassroots feeling, swung decisively onto my side. When I talked with Willie at a dinner organized by the British-American Parliamentary Group at Lancaster House on Thursday 6 February he seemed fairly confident that he was the front-runner. The new canvass returns which Airey and his team were making strongly suggested otherwise. But I was cautious. There had been some whispers that I was secretly anti-Common Market, which it was thought might damage me. So at George Gardiner’s suggestion I made a short statement of my views endorsing Europe. I also continued to see — and sometimes communicate by note with — MPs who needed reassurance on particular points.
Willie and I both attended the Young Conservative Conference at Eastbourne on Saturday 8 February. One woman on the platform was dressed in funereal black and glowering. I was rather concerned and asked her whether anything was wrong. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m in mourning for Mr Heath.’ There were few other mourners present. Willie and I were photographed as we kissed for the cameras. I remarked: ‘Willie and I have been friends for years. I’ve done that to Willie many times and he to me. It was not that difficult for him to do it, I think.’ Willie replied: ‘I’ve kissed her often. But we have not done it on a pavement outside a hotel in Eastbourne before.’ It was all good fun and the atmosphere lightened.
I used my own speech to the Conference to give a full-blooded rendering of my views. I said:
You can get your economic policies right, and still have the kind of society none of us would wish. I believe we should judge people on merit and not on background. I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax. That we should back the workers and not the shirkers: that it is not only permissible but praiseworthy to want to benefit your own family by your own efforts.
Conservatives had not heard this sort of message for many years, and it went down well.
Airey, Keith, my other advisers and I looked at the situation after the first ballot. Our general approach was to concentrate on the electorate — the 276 Tory MPs — pointing out that I had already won a near majority of them, that I was pulling steadily away from the field and that my four rivals were fighting for second place. In these circumstances we felt that I had little to gain from debates with the other candidates. But a slight stir was created when I decided not to appear on Panorama with them. They went ahead without me. But this was Hamlet without a Princess. It merely emphasized my status as the front-runner.
And then on Tuesday the second ballot took place. Again I waited nervously in Airey’s room. And again it was Airey who came to give me the news. This time it was subtly but decisively different. He smiled and said: ‘You are now Leader of the Opposition.’ I had obtained 146 votes to Willie’s seventy-nine. The other candidates were out of the picture.[33]
I rapidly scribbled some thoughts in the back of my diary because I knew I would now have to go and give my first press conference as Party Leader. The first item was ‘TED’, because it was most important to pay tribute to his leadership.
I now had to hurry down to the Grand Committee Room, off Westminster Hall, where the press were waiting. I told them: ‘To me it is like a dream that the next name in the lists after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, is Margaret Thatcher. Each has brought his own style of leadership and stamp of greatness to his task. I shall take on the work with humility and dedication.’
Then it was off for the Leader’s traditional first visit to Conservative Central Office. On entering, I could not help remembering how hard some of the people there had worked to stop my becoming Leader. I shook hands with a line of Party officials, stopping to kiss Russell Lewis, the Conservative Political Centre Director who I knew had actually wanted me to win. I have no doubt there were many anxious thoughts behind the polite, smiling faces that evening. And not without reason. For though I was not interested in paying off old scores, I was already sure that changes must be made.
Then I was driven back to Bill Shelton’s house in Pimlico for a celebration with my friends. Denis was there. I had tried to telephone the news through to him myself, but somehow the Press Association beat me to it. Mark learned the news while he was at work as a trainee accountant. As for Carol, she could not be disturbed until she had finished the solicitors’ exam she was taking that afternoon.
Only much later that night, after I had returned from dinner with the Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, could all of the family celebrate the good news. It was wonderful to be together. I suspect that they knew, as I did, that from this moment on our lives would never be quite the same again.
Nor would the Conservative Party, as a perceptive leader in the Daily Telegraph the following morning observed:
What kind of leadership Mrs Thatcher will provide remains to be seen… But one thing is clear enough at this stage. Mrs Thatcher is a bonny fighter. She believes in the ethic of hard work and big rewards for success. She has risen from humble origins by effort and ability and courage. She owes nothing to inherited wealth or privilege. She ought not to suffer, therefore, from that fatal and characteristic twentieth-century Tory defect of guilt about wealth. All too often this has meant that the Tories have felt themselves to be at a moral disadvantage in the defence of capitalism against socialism. This is one reason why Britain has travelled so far down the collectivist road. What Mrs Thatcher ought to be able to offer is the missing moral dimension to the Tory attack on socialism. If she does so, her accession to the leadership could mark a sea-change in the whole character of the party political debate in this country.
It was a mighty challenge. At the time I did not realize how mighty.
THE 9½ PER CENT SOLUTION
It is never easy to go from government to opposition. But for several reasons it was particularly problematical for the Conservatives led by Ted Heath. First, of course, we had up until almost the last moment expected to win. Whatever the shortcomings of our Government’s economic strategy, every department had its own policy programme stretching well into the future. This now had to be abandoned for the rigours of Opposition. Secondly, Ted himself desperately wanted to continue as Prime Minister. He had been unceremoniously ejected from 10 Downing Street and for some months had to take refuge in the flat of his old friend and PPS Tim Kitson, having no home of his own — from which years later I drew the resolution that when my time came to depart I would at least have a house to go to. Ted’s passionate desire to return as Prime Minister lay behind much of the talk of coalitions and Governments of National Unity which came to disquiet the Party, though doubtless there was a measure of genuine conviction as well. Indeed, the more that the Tory Party moved away from Ted’s own vision, the more he wanted to see it tamed by coalition. Thirdly, and worst of all perhaps, the poisoned legacy of our U-turns was that we had no firm principles, let alone much of a record, on which to base our arguments. And in Opposition argument is everything.
For my part, I was glad that Ted did not ask me to cover my old department at Education but gave me the Environment portfolio instead. I had learned during our previous period in Opposition in the 1960s that there are difficulties in attacking proposals many of which will have been in some stage of gestation within one’s own department. Moreover, I was convinced from my own soundings in the course of the general election campaign that both rates and housing — particularly the latter — were issues which had contributed to our defeat. The task of devising and presenting sound and popular policies in these areas appealed to me.
There were rumblings about Ted’s own position, though that is what they largely remained. This was partly because most of us expected an early general election to be called in order to give Labour a working majority, and it hardly seemed sensible to change leaders now. But there were other reasons as well. Ted still inspired nervousness, even fear among many of his colleagues. In a sense, even the U-turns contributed to the aura around him. For he had single-handedly and with barely a publicly expressed murmur of dissent reversed Conservative policies and had gone far, with his lieutenants, in reshaping the Conservative Party. Paradoxically too, both those committed to Ted’s approach and those — like Keith and me and many on the backbenches — who thought very differently agreed that the vote-buying policies which the Labour Party was now pursuing would inevitably lead to economic collapse. Just what the political consequences of that would be was uncertain. But there were many Tory wishful thinkers who thought that it might result in the Conservative Party somehow returning to power with a ‘doctor’s mandate’. And Ted had no doubt of his own medical credentials.
He did not, though, make the concessions to his critics in the Party which would have been required. He might have provided effectively against future threats to his position if he had changed his approach in a number of ways. He might have shown at least some willingness to admit and learn from the Government’s mistakes. He might have invited talented backbench critics to join him as Shadow spokesmen and contribute to the rethinking of policy. He might have changed the overall complexion of the Shadow Cabinet to make it more representative of parliamentary opinion.
But he did none of these things. He replaced Tony Barber — who announced that he intended to leave the Commons though he would stay on for the present in the Shadow Cabinet without portfolio — with Robert Carr, who was even more committed to the interventionist approach that had got us into so much trouble. He promoted to the Shadow Cabinet during the year those MPs like Michael Heseltine and Paul Channon who were seen as his acolytes, and were unrepresentative of backbench opinion of the time. Only John Davies and Joe Godber, neither of whom was ideologically distinct, were dropped. Above all, he set his face against any policy rethinking that would imply that his Government’s economic and industrial policy had been seriously flawed. When Keith Joseph was not made Shadow Chancellor, he said he wanted no portfolio but rather to concentrate on research for new policies — something which would prove as dangerous to Ted as it was fruitful for the Party. Otherwise, these were depressing signals of ‘more of the same’ when the electorate had clearly demonstrated a desire for something different. Added to this, the important Steering Committee of Shadow Ministers was formed even more in Ted’s image. I was not at this stage invited to join it, and of its members only Keith and perhaps Geoffrey Howe were likely to oppose Ted’s wishes.
With everyone expecting another election before the end of the year — October being the favoured date — the Tory Party entered on an almost frantic search for attractive policies to be deployed in our next manifesto. These had to meet two criteria: they had to be novel, and they had to cast no doubt on the underlying correctness of the recent Conservative Government’s policies. I added a third complication: as far as my area of responsibility was concerned, the new policies also had to be recognisably Conservative. Meeting all these criteria involved us in some extremely testing acrobatics.
Between the February and October 1974 elections most of my time was taken up with work on housing and the rates. I had an effective housing policy group of MPs working with me. Hugh Rossi, a friend and neighbouring MP, was a great housing expert, with experience of local government. Michael Latham and John Stanley were well versed in the building industry. The brilliant Nigel Lawson, newly elected, always had his own ideas. We also had the help of people from the building societies and construction industry. It was a lively group which I enjoyed chairing.
The political priority was clearly lower mortgage rates. The technical problem was how to achieve these without open-ended subsidy. Of course, the purist view would be that artificially controlling the price of borrowing for house purchase was bound to be counterproductive. And in this matter the purist, as so often, was right. If we had pursued a responsible economic policy there would have been no boom and bust of property prices, and rising inflation would not have driven up mortgage rates. Policies providing for sound money and the release of sufficient quantities of development land are the proper way to ensure an orderly housing market. But of course we had not pursued policies of that sort. And Labour was already embarking on a vendetta against property development. In these circumstances, holding the mortgage rate down below the level the market — or more precisely the building societies — would otherwise have set made short-term political sense. In Government we had introduced a mortgage subsidy, and there had even been talk of taking powers to control the mortgage rate. The Labour Government quickly came up with its own scheme devised by Harold Lever to make large cheap short-term loans to the building societies. Our task was to devise something more attractive.
As well as having an eye for a politically attractive policy, I had reasons of conviction for action on the mortgage rate and for the other measures we devised to help homebuyers. I had always believed in a property-owning democracy and wider home ownership. At this point too, I was acutely aware of how much the middle classes were suffering. Because of the inflation which we and the Labour Party had conspired to create, the value of people’s savings had been eroded by negative real interest rates. On top of that, by 1974 house values had slumped. So had the stock market: the FT Ordinary Share index went down to 146, the lowest level for twenty years. Trade union power and left-wing socialism were in the ascendant. Tax increases were bearing down on businesses and people.
In such circumstances, it can be right to make modest temporary provision for the interests of the middle classes of a country on whom future prosperity largely depends. Moreover, it is cheaper to assist people to buy homes with a mortgage — whether by a subsidized mortgage rate, or by help with the deposit, or just by mortgage interest tax relief — than it is to build more council houses or to buy up private houses through municipalization. I used to quote the results of a Housing Research Foundation study which observed: ‘On average each new council house now costs roughly £900 a year in subsidy in taxes and rates (including the subsidy from very old council houses)… Tax relief on an ordinary mortgage, if this be regarded as a subsidy, averages about £280 a year.’
My housing policy group met regularly on Mondays. Housing experts and representatives from the building societies gave their advice. I reported from time to time to Shadow Cabinet where, in the absence of real agreement on economic policy or much constructive thinking on anything else, attention focused heavily on my areas of responsibility. It was clear to me that Ted and others were determined to make our proposals on housing and possibly rates the centrepiece of the next election campaign, which we expected sooner rather than later. For example, at the Shadow Cabinet on Friday 3 May we had an all-day discussion of policies for the manifesto. I reported on housing and was authorized to set up a rates policy group. But this meeting was more significant for another reason. At it Keith Joseph argued at length but in vain for a broadly ‘monetarist’ approach to dealing with inflation.
The question of the rates was a far more difficult one than any aspect of housing policy, and I had a slightly different group to help me. There was a huge amount of technical information to master. Moreover, reform, let alone abolition, of the rates had profound implications for the relations between central and local government and for the different local authority services, particularly education. I drew on the advice of the experts — municipal treasurers proved the best source, and gave readily of their technical advice. But working as I was under tight pressure of time and close scrutiny by Ted and others who expected me to deliver something radical, popular and defensible, my task was not an easy one.
That said, I could well understand how much was at stake politically. For example, on Tuesday 21 May I met 350 protesters from Northamptonshire — one from every town and village in the county — who were furious about rate rises of between 30 and 100 per cent. Several factors combined to raise the issue to such political prominence: there was the basic unfairness of a system which taxed a single widow at the same rate as a family with three grown-up working sons; our own rating revaluation in 1973 had led to inordinate rate rises;[31] and, more recently, Labour’s rate support grant settlement had treated the rural shire counties particularly harshly. There was, in short, on the rates issue as on housing, a full-scale middle-class anti-socialist revolt, and it was essential that it be harnessed, not dissipated. This I was determined to do.
The housing policy group had already held its seventh meeting and our proposals were well developed by the time the rates group started work on 10 June. I knew Ted and his advisers wanted a firm promise that we would abolish the rates. But I was loath to make such a pledge until we were clear about what to put in their place. Anyway, if there was to be an autumn election, there was by now little chance of doing more than finding a sustainable line to take in the manifesto.
Meanwhile, throughout that summer of 1974 I received far more publicity than I had ever previously experienced, mainly as a result of our housing policy. Some of this was inadvertent. The interim report of the housing policy group which I circulated to Shadow Cabinet appeared on the front page of The Times on Monday 24 June. On the previous Friday Shadow Cabinet had spent the morning discussing the fourth draft of the manifesto. By now the main lines of my proposed housing policy were agreed. The mortgage rate would be held down to some unspecified level by cutting the composite rate of tax paid by building societies on depositors’ accounts, in other words by subsidy disguised as tax relief. A grant would be given to first-time buyers saving for a deposit, though again no figure was specified. There would be a high-powered inquiry into building societies; this was an idea I modelled on the James Inquiry into teachers’ training. I hoped it might produce a long-term answer to the problem of high mortgage rates and yet save us from an open-ended subsidy.
The final point related to the right of tenants to buy their council houses. Of all our proposals this was to prove the most far-reaching and the most popular. The February 1974 manifesto had offered council tenants the chance to buy their houses, but retained a right of appeal for the council against sale, and had not offered a discount. We all wanted to go further than this; the question was how far. Peter Walker constantly pressed for the ‘Right to Buy’ to be extended to council tenants at the lowest possible prices. My instinct was on the side of caution. It was not that I underrated the benefits of wider property ownership. Rather, I was wary of alienating the already hard-pressed families who had scrimped to buy a house on one of the new private estates at the market price and who had seen the mortgage rate rise and the value of their house fall. These people were the bedrock Conservative voters for whom I felt a natural sympathy. They would, I feared, strongly object to council house tenants who had made none of their sacrifices suddenly receiving what was in effect a large capital sum from the Government. We might end up losing more support than we gained. In retrospect, this argument seems both narrow and unimaginative. And it was. But there was a lot to be said politically for it in 1974 at a time when the value of people’s houses had slumped so catastrophically.
In the event, we went a long way in Peter’s direction. The October 1974 manifesto offered council tenants who had been in their homes for three years or more the right to buy them at a price a third below market value. If the tenant sold again within five years he would surrender part of any capital gain. Also by the time the manifesto reached its final draft we had quantified the help to be given to first-time buyers of private houses and flats. We would contribute £1 for every £2 saved for the deposit up to a given ceiling. (We ducked the question of rent decontrol.)
It was, however, the question of how low a maximum mortgage interest rate we would promise in the manifesto that caused me most trouble. Although, for the reasons I have already outlined, I had convinced myself that some kind of pledge in this area was justified, I was very aware of how the cost to the Exchequer might escalate alarmingly if inflation and interest rates kept on rising. Ted and those around him seemed to entertain no such caution. On Thursday 1 August he summoned me back from Lamberhurst for a meeting at his new house in Wilton Street with Peter Walker, Ian Gilmour and Robert Carr. I was put under great pressure to go beyond the phrase which had by now been agreed for the manifesto of pegging the mortgage rate at a ‘reasonable’ level. Ted and the others wanted a specific figure. I argued strongly against, but in the end I had to concede a pledge that we would hold the rate ‘below 10 per cent’. Beyond that, I did not agree to a specific figure. I hoped it would be the end of the matter.
But when I was in the car on the way from London to Tonbridge on Wednesday 28 August in order to record a Party Political Broadcast the bleeper signalled that I must telephone urgently. Ted apparently wanted a word. Willie Whitelaw answered the phone and it was clear that the two of them, and doubtless others of the inner circle, were meeting. Ted came on the line. He asked me to announce on the PPB the precise figure to which we would hold down mortgages, and to take it down as low as I could. I said I could understand the psychological point about going below 10 per cent. That need could be satisfied by a figure of 9½ per cent, and in all conscience I could not take it down any further. To do so would have a touch of rashness about it. I was already worried about the cost. I did not like this tendency to pull figures out of the air for immediate political impact without proper consideration of where they would lead. So I stuck at 9½ per cent.
It was a similar story on the rates. When we had discussed the subject at our Shadow Cabinet meeting on Friday 21 June I had tried to avoid any firm pledge. I suggested that our line should be one of reform to be established on an all-party basis through a Select Committee. I was the first to admit that this was not likely to set the world on fire. But even more than housing, this was not an area in which precipitate pledges were sensible. Ted would have none of this and said I should think again. The need for something clearer was indeed demonstrated by the Commons debate on the rates a few days later. We called for fundamental reform, some interim rate relief and a provision that water charges should qualify for rate rebate. In my speech I also argued for central government having the power to cap local government spending and then for a general inquiry into the rates. But though I emerged with my reputation as a parliamentarian intact, Tony Crosland, the Environment Secretary, arguing for an increased central government subsidy to local authorities without major reform of the system, was generally thought to have had the better of the debate. His victory was pyrrhic. For increased subsidies led not to lower rates but to higher local spending. Within a year Mr Crosland was announcing sternly: ‘The party is over.’
In July Charles Bellairs at the Conservative Research Department and I worked on a draft rates section for the manifesto. We were still thinking in terms of an inquiry and an interim rate relief scheme. I went along to discuss our proposals at the Shadow Cabinet Steering Committee. I argued for the transfer of teachers’ salaries — the largest item of local spending — from local government onto the Exchequer. Another possibility I raised was the replacement of rates with a system of block grants, with local authorities retaining discretion over spending but within a total set by central government. Neither of these possibilities was particularly attractive. But at least discussion revealed to those present that ‘doing something’ about the rates was a very different matter from knowing what to do.
On Saturday 10 August I used my speech to the Candidates’ Conference at the St Stephen’s Club to publicize our policies. I argued for total reform of the rating system to take into account individual ability to pay, and suggested the transfer of teachers’ salaries and better interim relief as ways to achieve this. It was a good time of the year — a slack period for news — to unveil new proposals, and we gained some favourable publicity.
It seemed to me that this proved that we could fight a successful campaign without being more specific; indeed, looking back, I can see that we were already a good deal too specific because, as I was to discover fifteen years later, such measures as transferring the cost of services from local to central government do not in themselves lead to lower local authority rates.
I had hoped to have a pleasant family holiday at Lamberhurst away from the sticky heat of London and the demands of politics. It would have been the first for three years. It was not to be. The telephone kept ringing, with Ted and others urging me to give more thought to new schemes. Then I was called back for another meeting at Wilton Street on Friday 16 August. Ted, Robert Carr, Jim Prior, Willie Whitelaw and Michael Wolff from Central Office were all there. It was soon clear what the purpose was — to bludgeon me into accepting a commitment in the manifesto to abolish the rates altogether within the lifetime of a Parliament. I argued against this for very much the same reason that I argued against the ‘9½ per cent’ pledge on the mortgage rate. But so shell-shocked by their unexpected defeat in February were Ted and his inner circle that in their desire for re-election they were clutching at straws, or what in the jargon were described as manifesto ‘nuggets’.
There were various ways to raise revenue for expenditure on local purposes. We were all uneasy about moving to a system whereby central government just provided block grants to local government. So I had told Shadow Cabinet that I thought a reformed property tax seemed to be the least painful option. But in the back of my mind I had the additional idea of supplementing the property tax with a locally collected tax on petrol. Of course, there were plenty of objections to both, but at least they were better than putting up income tax.
In any case, what mattered to my colleagues was clearly the pledge to abolish the rates, and at Wilton Street Ted insisted on it. I felt bruised and resentful to be bounced again into policies which had not been properly thought out. But I thought that if I combined caution on the details with as much presentational bravura as I could muster I could make our rates and housing policies into vote-winners for the Party. This I now concentrated my mind on doing.
It was at a press conference on the afternoon of Wednesday 28 August that I unveiled our final proposals. I delivered the package of measures — built around 9½ per cent mortgages and the abolition of the rates — without a scintilla of doubt, which as veteran Evening Standard reporter Robert Carvel said, ‘went down with hardened reporters almost as well as the sherry’ served by Central Office. We dominated the news. It was by general consent the best fillip the Party had had since losing the February election. There was even some talk of the Conservatives being back in the lead in the opinion polls, though this was over-optimistic. The Building Societies’ Association welcomed the proposals for 9½ per cent mortgages but questioned my figures about the cost. In fact, as I indignantly told them, it was their sums which were wrong and they subsequently retracted. Some on the economic right were understandably critical, but among the grassroots Conservatives that we had to win back the mortgage proposal was extremely popular. So too was the pledge on the rates. The Labour Party was rattled and unusually the party-giving Tony Crosland was provoked into overreaction, describing the proposals as ‘Margaret’s midsummer madness’. All this publicity was good for me personally as well. Although I was not to know it at the time, this period up to and during the October 1974 election campaign allowed me to make a favourable impact on Conservatives in the country and in Parliament without which my future career would doubtless have been very different.
FIRST SECOND THOUGHTS
Although it was my responsibilities as Environment spokesman which took up most of my time and energy, from late June I had become part of another enterprise which would have profound consequences for the Conservative Party, for the country and for me. The setting-up of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) is really part of Keith Joseph’s story rather than mine. Keith had emerged from the wreckage of the Heath Government determined on the need to rethink our policies from first principles. If this was to be done, Keith was the ideal man to do it. He had the intellect, the integrity and not least the humility required. He had a deep interest in both economic and social policy. He had long experience of government. He had an extraordinary ability to form relationships of friendship and respect with a wide range of characters with different viewpoints and backgrounds. Although he could, when he felt strongly, speak passionately and persuasively, it was as a listener that he excelled. Moreover, Keith never listened passively. He probed arguments and assertions and scribbled notes which you knew he would go home to ponder. He was so impressive because his intellectual self-confidence was the fruit of continual self-questioning. His bravery in adopting unpopular positionsbefore a hostile audience evoked the admiration of his friends, because we all knew that he was naturally shy and even timid. He was almost too good a man for politics, except that without a few good men politics would be intolerable.
I could not have become Leader of the Opposition, or achieved what I did as Prime Minister, without Keith. But nor, it is fair to say, could Keith have achieved what he did without the Centre for Policy Studies and Alfred Sherman. Apart from the fact of their being Jewish, Alfred and Keith had little in common, and until one saw how effectively they worked together it was difficult to believe that they could cooperate at all.
I understand that Keith and Alfred first met in 1962 when Keith was Housing Minister and Alfred covered local government matters at the Daily Telegraph. From time to time they were in touch, and then after a discussion at the Reform Club Keith asked Alfred’s thoughts about a speech draft he had with him. From then on Keith took to asking for Alfred’s suggestions. During the early years of the Heath Government they had less contact, but it was during the three-day week that Keith met Alfred to discuss the Middle East, on which Alfred was something of an expert, writing for the main Hebrew-language daily in Israel.
Alfred had his own kind of brilliance. He brought his convert’s zeal (as an ex-communist), his breadth of reading and his skills as a ruthless polemicist to the task of plotting out a new kind of free-market Conservatism. He was more interested, it seemed to me, in the philosophy behind policies than the policies themselves. He was better at pulling apart sloppily constructed arguments than at devising original proposals. But the force and clarity of his mind, and his complete disregard for other people’s feelings or opinion of him, made him a formidable complement and contrast to Keith. Alfred helped Keith to turn the Centre for Policy Studies into the powerhouse of alternative Conservative thinking on economic and social matters.
I was not involved at the beginning, though I gathered from Keith that he was thinking hard about how to turn his Shadow Cabinet responsibilities for research on policy into constructive channels. In March Keith had won Ted’s approval for the setting-up of a research unit to make comparative studies with other European economies, particularly the so-called ‘social market economy’ as practised in West Germany. Ted had Adam Ridley put on the board of directors of the CPS (Adam acted as his economic adviser from within the Conservative Research Department), but otherwise Keith was left very much to his own devices. Nigel Vinson, a successful entrepreneur with strong free-enterprise convictions, was made responsible for acquiring a home for the Centre, which was found in Wilfred Street, close to Victoria. Simon Webley, who ran the British/North American Research Association, ensured that the Centre’s publications never forgot the realities of industry and commerce amid the economic theories. Later in 1974 Gerry Frost, the present Director, also joined the CPS and established some administrative order out of what might have been a chaos of intellectuals. Other figures who made crucial contributions from time to time were Jock Bruce-Gardyne and Peter Utley. A further reason for the Centre’s success was the dedication of secretaries and cooks who twice a week provided some of the best low-cost meals in London. (Perhaps not always low-cost: Gerry Frost once complained in a memo: ‘We seem to be bent on disproving the dictum that there is no such thing as a free lunch.’) Increasingly, the CPS acted as a focus for a large group of free-market thinkers, by no means all of them Conservative, who sought to change the climate of opinion and achieve wider understanding of the role of the market and the shortcomings of statism.
It was at the end of May 1974 that I first became directly involved with the CPS. Whether Keith ever considered asking any other members of the Shadow Cabinet to join him at the Centre I do not know: if he had they certainly did not accept. His was a risky, exposed position, and the fear of provoking the wrath of Ted and the derision of left-wing commentators was a powerful disincentive. But I jumped at the chance to become Keith’s Vice-Chairman.
The CPS was the least bureaucratic of institutions. It could not properly be called a ‘think tank’ for it had none of the corporate grandeur of the prestigious American foundations which that term evokes. Alfred Sherman has caught the feel of it by saying that it was an ‘animator, agent of change, and political enzyme’. The original proposed social market approach did not prove particularly fruitful and was eventually quietly forgotten, though a pamphlet called Why Britain Needs a Social Market Economy was published. The concept of the social market was — like other terms of foreign provenance too literally translated — bedevilled with problems. How much was it simply a matter of restating the truth that only a successful market economy can sustain social improvement? How much did it signify a market economy with a high degree of ‘social protection’, i.e. regulation? Even its most prominent exponent, West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, apparently had his doubts about the way it was being implemented in later years.
What the Centre then developed was the drive to expose the follies and self-defeating consequences of government intervention. It continued to engage the political argument in open debate at the highest intellectual level. The objective was to effect change — change in the climate of opinion and so in the limits of the ‘possible’. In order to do this it had, to employ another of Alfred’s phrases, to ‘think the unthinkable’. It was not long before more than a few feathers began to be ruffled by that approach.
Keith had decided that he would make a series of speeches over the summer and autumn of 1974 in which he would set out the alternative analysis of what had gone wrong and what should be done. The first of these, which was also intended to attract interest among potential fund-raisers, was delivered at Upminster on Saturday 22 June. Alfred was the main draftsman. But as with all Keith’s speeches — except the fateful Edgbaston speech which I shall describe shortly — he circulated endless drafts for comment. All the observations received were carefully considered and the language pared down to remove every surplus word. Keith’s speeches always put rigour of analysis and exactitude of language above style, but taken as a whole they managed to be powerful rhetorical instruments as well.
The Upminster speech infuriated Ted and the Party establishment because Keith lumped in together the mistakes of Conservative and Labour Governments, talking about the ‘thirty years of socialistic fashions’. The last time anyone had been bold enough to speak like this was when Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944. Keith pre-empted the criticism which would inevitably be levelled at him by accepting now and later his full share of the blame for what had gone wrong. One after the other he led the sacred cows to the abattoir. He said of the frantic pursuit of economic growth: ‘Growth is welcome, but we just do not know how to accelerate its pace. Perhaps faster growth, like happiness, should not be a prime target but only a by-product of other policies.’
He said bluntly that the public sector had been ‘draining away the wealth created by the private sector’, and challenged the value of public ‘investment’ in tourism and the expansion of the universities. He condemned the socialist vendetta against profits and noted the damage done by rent controls and council housing to labour mobility. Finally — and, in the eyes of the advocates of consensus, unforgivably — he talked about the ‘inherent contradictions [of the]… mixed economy’. It was a short speech but it had a mighty impact, not least because people knew that there was more to come.
A distinctive feature of Keith’s approach was that he went out of his way to avoid suggesting that malice had prompted the excessive state spending, nationalization, regulation, taxation and trade union power which had done so much harm to Britain. On the contrary, he argued, all this had occurred with the best of intentions. Perhaps in this he was over-generous, attributing his own high-mindedness to others. But the patent sincerity and charity which accompanied his devastating criticism of the politics of the last thirty years increased the effect. He returned to the same theme at Leith in August, by which time I was myself more actively involved in the CPS, attending Keith’s meetings, commenting on his suggestions and preparing my own notes and papers on the areas of education and social services which I knew best.
From Keith and Alfred I learned a great deal. I renewed my reading of the seminal works of liberal economics and conservative thought. I also regularly attended lunches at the Institute of Economic Affairs where Ralph Harris, Arthur Seldon, Alan Walters and others — in other words all those who had been right when we in Government had gone so badly wrong — were busy marking out a new non-socialist economic and social path for Britain. I lunched from time to time with Professor Douglas Hague, the economist, who would later act as one of my unofficial economic advisers.
At about this time I also made the acquaintance of a polished and amusing former television producer called Gordon Reece, who was advising the Party on television appearances and who had, it seemed to me, an almost uncanny insight into that medium. In fact, by the eve of the October 1974 general election I had made a significant number of contacts with those on whom I would come to rely so heavily during my years as Party Leader.
The third of Keith’s troika of policy speeches was delivered in Preston on Thursday 5 September (by which time he was Shadow Home Secretary). After some early inconclusive discussion in Shadow Cabinet of Keith’s various ideas, Ted had refused the general economic re-evaluation and discussion which Keith wanted. Keith decided that he was not prepared to be either stifled or ignored, and gave notice that he was intending to make a major speech on economic policy. Ted and most of our colleagues were desperate to prevent this. Geoffrey Howe and I, as the two members of Shadow Cabinet considered most likely to be able to influence Keith, were accordingly dispatched to try to persuade him not to go ahead, or at least to tone down what he intended to say. In any case, Keith showed me an early draft. It was one of the most powerful and persuasive analyses I have ever read. I made no suggestions for changes. Nor, as far as I know, did Geoffrey. The Preston speech must still be considered as one of the very few speeches which have fundamentally affected a political generation’s way of thinking.
It set out in much greater detail than ever before the monetarist approach. It began with the sombre statement: ‘Inflation is threatening to destroy our society.’ At most times this would have seemed hyperbole, but at this time, with inflation at 17 per cent and rising, people were obsessed with its impact on their lives. That only made more explosive Keith’s admission that successive governments bore the responsibility for allowing it to get such a grip. He rejected the idea embraced by the Shadow Cabinet that inflation had been ‘imported’ and was the result of rocketing world prices. In fact, it was the result of excessive growth of the money supply. Explaining as he did that there was a time lag of ‘many months, or even as much as a year or two’ between loose monetary policy and rising inflation, he also implicitly — and of course accurately — blamed the Heath Government for the inflation which was now beginning to take off and which would rise to even more ruinous levels the following year. He also rejected the use of incomes policy as a means of containing it. The analysis was subtle, detailed and devastating.
Incomes policy alone [the word ‘alone’ being a minor concession I suppose to the official Shadow Cabinet line] as a way to abate inflation caused by excessive money supply is like trying to stop water coming out of a leaky hose without turning off the tap; if you stop one hole it will find two others… But long before this year, we knew all the arguments. We had used them in Opposition in 1966–70. Why then did we try incomes policy again? I suppose that we desperately wanted to believe in it because we were so apprehensive about the alternative: sound money policies.
(Of course I too in my 1968 CPC lecture had accepted the monetarist analysis: so I felt that this applied equally to me.)
Keith then put his finger on the fundamental reason why we had embarked on our disastrous U-turns — fear of unemployment. It had been when registered unemployment rose to one million that the Heath Government’s nerve broke. But Keith explained that the unemployment statistics concealed as much as they revealed because they included ‘frictional unemployment’ — that is, people who were temporarily out of work moving between jobs — and a large number of people who were more or less unemployable for one reason or another. Similarly, there was a large amount of fraudulent unemployment, people who were drawing benefit while earning. In fact, noted Keith, the real problem had been labour shortages, not surpluses. He said that we should be prepared to admit that control of the money supply to beat inflation would temporarily risk some increase in unemployment. But if we wanted to bring down inflation (which itself destroyed jobs, though this was an argument to which Keith and I would subsequently have to return on many occasions), monetary growth had to be curbed. Keith did not argue that if we got the money supply right, everything else would be right. He specifically said that this was not his view. But if we did not achieve monetary control we would never be able to achieve any of our other economic objectives.
The Preston speech had a huge impact. It was, of course, highly embarrassing for Ted and the Party establishment. Some still hoped that a combination of dire warnings about socialism, hints of a National Government and our new policies on mortgages and the rates would see us squeak back into office — an illusion fostered by the fact that on the very day of Keith’s speech an opinion poll showed us two points ahead of Labour. The Preston speech blew this strategy out of the water, for it was clear that the kind of reassessment Keith was advocating was highly unlikely to occur if the Conservatives returned to government with Ted Heath as Prime Minister. Keith himself discreetly decided to spend more time at the CPS in Wilfred Street than at Westminster, where some of his colleagues were furious. For my part, I did not think that there was any serious chance of our winning the election. In the short term I was determined to fight as hard as I could for the policies which it was now my responsibility to defend. In the longer term I was convinced that we must turn the Party around towards Keith’s way of thinking, preferably under Keith’s leadership.
TED’S LAST THROW
The Conservative Party manifesto was published early, on Tuesday 10 September — about a week before the election was announced — because of a leak to the press. I was taken by surprise by a question on it when I was opening the Chelsea Antiques Fair. The release of the manifesto in this way was not a good start to the campaign, particularly because we had so little new to say. It was clear, however, from the course of the Shadow Cabinet two days later, that what was really worrying Ted and his circle was what Keith — and to a lesser extent I — was likely to say. Ted laid down the law: we must speak to the manifesto and nothing else, and any amplification of policies must be made only after discussions between the relevant spokesmen, the Party Chairman and himself. Shadow Cabinet members must concentrate particularly on their own subjects. No one had the slightest doubt about the target for these remarks.
I was effectively on the campaign trail even before the formal announcement the following Wednesday of a general election to take place on Thursday 10 October. On Monday I spoke in the north-west for Fergus Montgomery, my splendid PPS (a frontbencher’s eyes and ears in the Commons). On Tuesday I was answering questions about our policies at a meeting of the House-builders’ Federation. On Wednesday itself I gave an interview to a magazine called Pre-Retirement Choice: this was, as I shall explain, to come back to haunt me. On Thursday there was a further general discussion of the campaign in Shadow Cabinet. The following day Parliament was dissolved and the campaign got properly under way with MPs leaving for their constituencies.
I had never had so much exposure to the media as in this campaign. The Labour Party recognized that our housing and rates proposals were just about the only attractive ones in our manifesto, and consequently they set out to rubbish them as soon as possible. On Tuesday 24 September Tony Crosland described them as ‘a pack of lies’. (This was the same press conference at which Denis Healey made his notorious claim that inflation was running at 8.4 per cent, calculating the figure on a three-month basis when the annual rate was in fact 17 per cent.) I immediately issued a statement rebutting the accusation, and in order to keep the argument going, for it would highlight our policies, I said at Finchley that evening that the cut in mortgage rates would be among the first actions of a new Conservative Government. Then, in pursuit of the same goal, and having consulted Ted and Robert Carr, the Shadow Chancellor, I announced at the morning press conference at Central Office on Friday that the mortgage rate reduction would occur ‘by Christmas’ if we won. The main morning papers led with the story the following day — ‘Santa Thatcher’ — and it was generally said that we had taken the initiative for the first time during the campaign. On the following Monday I described this on a Party Election Broadcast as a ‘firm, unshakeable promise’. And the brute political fact was that, despite my reservations about the wisdom of the pledge, we would have had to honour it at almost any cost.
It was at this point that the way in which I was presenting our housing and rates policies first began to run up against the general approach Ted wanted to take in the campaign. At his insistence I had made the policies I was offering as hard and specific as possible. But the manifesto, particularly in the opening section, deliberately conveyed the impression that the Conservatives might consider some kind of National Government and would therefore be flexible on the policies we were putting forward. The passage read:
The Conservative Party, free from dogma and free from dependence upon any single interest, is broadly based throughout the nation. It is our objective to win a clear majority in the House of Commons in this election. But we will use that majority above all to unite the nation. We will not govern in a narrow partisan spirit. After the election we will consult and confer with the leaders of other parties and with the leaders of the great interests in the nation, in order to secure for the Government’s policies the consent and support of all men and women of goodwill. We will invite people from outside the ranks of our party to join with us in overcoming Britain’s difficulties. [Emphasis added.]
These undefined people who would join the Conservatives in government might include, one presumed, some members of the right wing of the Labour Party and perhaps the Liberals. The latter had all along been openly campaigning for a coalition government. This kind of rhetoric made me deeply uneasy. It was not just that, like Disraeli’s England, I did not like coalitions. In practical terms, such talk reduced the credibility of the pledges I was making in my own area. For who could tell what inter-party horse-trading might do to them?
At the Conservative press conference on Friday 2 October Ted stressed his willingness as Prime Minister to bring non-Conservatives into a government of ‘all the talents’ (party and talent being in this context considered synonyms). This tension between firm pledges and implied flexibilities was in danger of making nonsense of our campaign and dividing Shadow ministers.
We were now entering the last week. I still did not believe we were likely to win. The opinion polls had shown us well behind since the beginning of the campaign. But I felt that in spite of criticism in the heavyweight press my housing and rates policies had proved a political success. I also thought that we might manage to get by with the present somewhat ambiguous attitude to National Governments for the few days remaining.
On Thursday I continued when campaigning in the London areas with the vigorous defence of our housing policies and combined this with attacks on ‘creeping socialism’ through municipalization. In the evening I was asked to come and see Ted at Wilton Street. His advisers had apparently been urging him to go further and actually start talking about the possibility of a Coalition Government. Because I was known to be firmly against this for both strategic and tactical reasons, and because I was due to appear on the radio programme Any Questions in Southampton the following evening, I had been called in to have the new line spelt out to me. Ted said that he was now prepared to call for a Government of National Unity which, apparently, ‘the people’ wanted. I was extremely angry. He had himself, after all, insisted on making the housing and rates policies I had been advocating as specific as possible: now at almost the end of the campaign he was effectively discarding the pledges in the manifesto because that seemed to offer a better chance of his returning to Downing Street.
Why, in any case, he imagined that he himself would be a Coalition Government’s likely Leader quite escaped me. Ted at this time was a divisive figure, and although he had somehow convinced himself that he represented the ‘consensus’, this accorded with neither his record, nor his temperament, nor indeed other people’s estimation. For myself, I was not going to retreat from the policies which at his insistence I had been advocating. I went away highly disgruntled.
On Any Questions I conceded that if there were no clear majority, a coalition would probably be necessary. But I qualified this by saying that I myself could never sit in a government with left wingers like Michael Foot or Tony Benn. I might have added that the likelihood of Keith Joseph and my being included in a coalition of the great and the good was tiny — hardly greater in fact than Ted himself leading it.
The last few days of the campaign were dominated by all the awkward questions which talk of coalitions brings. But I stuck to my own brief, repeating the manifesto pledges sitting alongside Ted Heath at the last Conservative press conference on Tuesday 7 October. The general election result two days later suggested that in spite of the natural desire of electors to give the minority Labour Government a chance to govern effectively, there was still a good deal of distrust of them. Labour finished up with an overall majority of three, which was unlikely to see them through a full term. But the Conservative result — 277 seats compared with Labour’s 319 — though it might have been worse, was hardly any kind of endorsement for our approach.
KEITH BOWS OUT
I myself had fared quite well, though my majority fell a little in Finchley. I was thought to have had a good campaign. Talk of my even possibly becoming Leader of the Party, a subject which had already excited some journalists a great deal more than it convinced me, started to grow. I felt sorry for Ted Heath personally. He had his music and a small circle of friends, but politics was his life. That year, moreover, he had suffered a series of personal blows. His yacht, Morning Cloud, had sunk and his godson had been among those lost. The election defeat was a further blow.
Nonetheless, I had no doubt that Ted now ought to go. He had lost three elections out of four. He himself could not change and he was too defensive of his own past record to see that a fundamental change of policies was needed. So my reluctance to confirm suggestions that I might myself become Leader had little to do with keeping Ted in his present position. It had everything to do with seeing Keith take over from him. Indeed, by the weekend I had virtually become Keith’s informal campaign manager. Accordingly I discouraged speculation about my own prospects. For example, I told the London Evening News on Friday 11 October: ‘You can cross my name off the list.’
Similarly I told the Evening Standard on Tuesday 15 October: ‘I think it would be extremely difficult for a woman to make it to the top… I have always taken the view that to get to the very top one has to have experience in one of the three important posts…[32] they give you confidence in yourself and give others confidence in you.’
Then on Saturday 19 October Keith spoke at Edgbaston in Birmingham. It was not intended as part of the series of major speeches designed to alter the thinking of the Conservative Party, and perhaps for this reason had not been widely circulated among Keith’s friends and advisers: certainly, I had no inkling of the text. The Edgbaston speech is generally reckoned to have destroyed Keith’s leadership chances. It was the section containing the assertion that ‘the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened’, and going on to lament the high and rising proportion of children being born to mothers ‘least fitted to bring children into the world’, having been ‘pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5’, which did the damage. Ironically, the most incendiary phrases came not from Keith’s own mouth, but from passages taken from an article by two left-wing sociologists published by the Child Poverty Action Group. This distinction, however, was lost upon the bishops, novelists, academics, socialist politicians and commentators who rushed to denounce Keith as a mad eugenicist.
On the other hand, there was an outpouring of public support for Keith in opinion polls and five bulging mail bags. One of these letters, a sample of which was analysed by Diana Spearman in the Spectator, summed up the feeling. In an unlettered hand, it read simply:
Dear Sir Joseph,
You are dead right.
For, with the exception of those few unfortunate phrases, the speech sent out powerful messages about the decline of the family, the subversion of moral values and the dangers of the permissive society, connecting all these things with socialism and egalitarianism, and proposing the ‘remoralization of Britain’ as a long-term aim. It was an attempt to provide a backbone for Conservative social policy, just as Keith had started to do for economic policy. The trouble was 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 Edgbaston speech was bound to be dynamite, but it might at least have been a controlled explosion. Unfortunately, that is not how it happened. The speech was due to be given on Saturday night, and so the text was issued in advance with an embargo for media use. But the Evening Standard, for whatever reason, broke the embargo and launched a fierce attack on Keith, distorting what he said. I read its version on Waterloo Station and my heart sank. Afterwards Keith himself did not help his cause by constantly explaining, qualifying and apologizing. The Party establishment could barely contain their glee. Keith had been found guilty of that one mortal sin in the eyes of mediocrities — he had shown ‘lack of judgement’, i.e. willingness to think for himself. The press camped outside his house and refused to leave him or his family alone. He had probably never experienced anything quite like it. Having been vilified as the ‘milk snatcher’, I felt his hurt as if it were my own. But there was nothing to do except hope that it would all die down.
Doubtless as a result of all this, Ted felt a good deal more secure. He even told us in Shadow Cabinet the following Tuesday that the election campaign had been ‘quite a good containment exercise and that the mechanics had worked well’. A strange unreality pervaded our discussions. Everyone except Ted knew that the main political problem was the fact that he was still Leader. But he thought that we should now concentrate on Scotland, on how to improve our appeal to the young and on how to increase our support among working-class voters. Even on its own terms this analysis was flawed. As I was to point out two days later in an interview with Max Hastings in the Evening Standard, which appeared under the headline ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Twilight of the Middle Classes’, we should be trying to re-establish our middle-class support, for ‘[being middle class] has never been simply a matter of income, but a whole attitude to life, a will to take responsibility for oneself’. And I was surely not the only one present at Shadow Cabinet who felt that our recent election defeat was hardly a cause for even modest self-congratulation.
Ted was now locked in a bitter battle with the 1922 Executive. In reply to their demands for a leadership contest — and indeed for reform of the leadership election procedure — he disputed their legitimacy as representatives of the backbenches on the grounds that they had been elected during the previous Parliament and must themselves first face re-election by Tory MPs. Ted and his advisers hoped that they might be able to have his opponents thrown off the Executive and replaced by figures more amenable to him. As part of a somewhat belated attempt to win over backbenchers, Ted also proposed that extra front bench spokesmen should be appointed from among them and that officers of the Parliamentary Committees might speak from the front bench on some occasions. It was also widely rumoured that there would shortly be a reshuffle of the Shadow Cabinet.
Not for the first time, I found the press more optimistic about my prospects than I was. The Sunday Express and the Observer on 3 November ran stories that I was to be appointed Shadow Chancellor. This was a nice thought and I would have loved the job; but I regarded it as extremely unlikely that Ted would give it to me. That was more or less confirmed by stories in the Financial Times and the Daily Mirror on the Monday which said that I would get a top economic job, but not the Shadow Chancellorship. And so indeed it turned out. I was appointed Robert Carr’s deputy with special responsibility for the Finance Bill and also made a member of the Steering Committee. Some of my friends were annoyed that I had not received a more important portfolio. But I knew from the years when I worked under Iain Macleod on the Finance Bill that this was a position in which I could make the most of my talents. What neither Ted nor I knew was just how important that would be over the next three months. The reshuffle as a whole demonstrated something of the weakness of Ted’s political standing. Edward du Cann refused to join the Shadow Cabinet, which was therefore no more attractive to the right of the Party, some of whom at least Ted needed to win over. Tim Raison and Nicholas Scott who did come in were more or less on the left and, though able, not people who carried great political weight.
The re-election of all the members of the 1922 Executive, including Edward du Cann, on the day of the reshuffle — Thursday 7 November — was bad news for Ted. A leadership contest could no longer be avoided. He wrote to Edward saying that he was now willing to discuss changes to the procedure for electing the Party Leader. From now on it was probably in Ted’s interest to have the election over as soon as possible, before any alternative candidate could put together an effective campaign.
At this time I started to attend the Economic Dining Group which Nick Ridley had formed in 1972 and which largely consisted of sound money men like John Biffen, Jock Bruce-Gardyne, John Nott and others. Above all, I buried myself in the details of my new brief. It was a challenging time to take it up, for on Tuesday 12 November Denis Healey introduced one of his quarterly Budgets. It was a panic reaction to the rapidly growing problems of industry and consisted of cuts in business taxation to the tune of £775 million (£495 million of new business taxes having been imposed only six months before) and some curbs on subsidies to nationalized industries. Ted’s reply — in which, against the background of an audible gasp from Tory backbenchers, he criticized the Chancellor for allowing nationalized industry prices to rise towards market levels — did him no good at all.
My chance came the following Thursday when I spoke for the Opposition in the Budget Debate. I had done my homework and I set about contrasting the Labour Government’s past statements with its present actions. Some of the speech was quite technical and detailed, as it had to be. But it was my answers to the interruptions which had the backbenchers roaring support. I was directly answering Harold Lever (without whom Labour would have been still more economically inept) when he interrupted early in my speech to put me right on views I had attributed to him. Amid a good deal of merriment, not least from Harold Lever himself, a shrewd businessman from a wealthy family, I replied: ‘I always felt that I could never rival him [Lever] at the Treasury because there are four ways of acquiring money. To make it. To earn it. To marry it. And to borrow it. He seems to have experience of all four.’
At another point I was interrupted by a pompously irate Denis Healey when I quoted the Sunday Telegraph which reported him as saying: ‘I never save. If I get any money I go out and buy something for the house.’ Denis Healey was most indignant, so I was pleased to concede the point, saying (in reference to the fact that like other socialist politicians he had his own country house): ‘I am delighted that we have got on record the fact that the Chancellor is a jolly good saver. I know that he believes in buying houses in good Tory areas.’
No one has ever claimed that House of Commons repartee must be subtle in order to be effective. This performance boosted the shaky morale of the Parliamentary Party and with it my reputation.
Meanwhile, Alec Douglas-Home, now returned to the Lords as Lord Home, had agreed to chair a review of the procedure for the Leadership election. On Wednesday 20 November I received a note from Geoffrey Finsberg, a neighbouring MP and friend, which said: ‘If you contest the leadership you will almost certainly win — for my part I hope you will stand and I will do all I can to help.’ But I still could not see any likelihood of this happening. It seemed to me that for all of the brouhaha caused by his Edgbaston speech Keith must be our candidate.
The following afternoon I was working in my room in the House, briefing myself on the Finance Bill, when the telephone rang. It was Keith to check I was there because he had something he wanted to come along and tell me. As soon as he entered, I could see it was serious. He told me: ‘I am sorry, I just can’t run. Ever since I made that speech the press have been outside the house. They have been merciless. Helen [his wife] can’t take it and I have decided that I just can’t stand.’
There was no mistaking his mood. His mind was quite made up. I was on the edge of despair. We just could not abandon the Party and the country to Ted’s brand of politics. I heard myself saying: ‘Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.’
There was nothing more to say. My mind was already a whirl. I had no idea of my chances. I knew nothing about leadership campaigns. I just tried to put the whole thing to the back of my mind for the moment and concentrate on the Finance Bill. Somehow or other the news got out and I started to receive telephone calls and notes of support from MP friends. Late that night I went back to Flood Street and told Denis of my intention.
‘You must be out of your mind,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got a hope.’ He had a point. But I never had any doubt that he would support me all the way.
The following day Fergus Montgomery telephoned me, and I told him that Keith was not going to stand but that I would. I wondered how best to break the news to Ted. Fergus thought I should see him personally. I spent the weekend at Lamberhurst retreating from the press comment and speculation which now swirled about. There was plenty to think about. The main thing was that though I had few ideas about how to proceed, I was sure my reaction to Keith had been the right one. Ted had to go, and that meant that someone had to challenge him. If he won, I was politically finished. That would be sad but bearable; there are worse places than the backbenches. And it seemed to me most unlikely that I would win. But I did think that by entering the race, I would draw in other stronger candidates who, even if they did not think like Keith and me, would still be open to persuasion about changing the disastrous course on which the Party was set.
I arranged to see Ted on Monday 25 November. He was at his desk in his room at the House. I need not have worried about hurting his feelings. I went in and said: ‘I must tell you that I have decided to stand for the leadership.’ He looked at me coldly, turned his back, shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘If you must.’ I slipped out of the room.
Monday was, therefore, the first day I had to face the press as a declared contender for the Tory Leadership. I was glad to be able to rely on the help and advice of Gordon Reece, who had now become a friend and who sat in on some of my early press interviews, which went quite well. It was, of course, still the fact that I was a woman that was the main topic of interest. The evening was spent in the somewhat tense and awkward circumstances of Shadow Cabinet and the Steering Committee. Looking around the table, I felt that apart from Keith I would find few supporters here. I suspect that it was only due to the fact that they considered my decision ridiculous that there was not more open hostility. No such inhibitions were evident when I attended the Conservative Board of Finance shortly afterwards. I felt like the female equivalent of ‘the man who said he wanted to be Tory Leader’, with enraged colonels and indignant dowagers exploding about him in one of Bateman’s more excruciating cartoons.
Ted’s coterie and, I believe, at least one Central Office figure had in any case alighted on something which they hoped would destroy me as effectively as had happened to Keith. In the interview I had given to Pre-Retirement Choice more than two months before I had given what I considered to be practical advice to elderly people trying to make ends meet in circumstances where food prices were rising sharply. I said that it made sense to stock up on tinned food. This was precisely the sort of advice I myself had been given as a girl. Any good housewife shops around and buys several items at a time when prices are low, rather than dashing out at the last minute to buy the same thing at a greater cost.
But to my horror the press on Wednesday 27 November was full of stories of my ‘hoarding’ food. Someone had clearly used this obscure interview in order to portray me as mean, selfish and above all ‘bourgeois’. In its way it was cleverly done. It allowed the desired caricature to be brought out to the full. It played to the snobbery of the Conservative Party, because the unspoken implication was that this was all that could be expected of a grocer’s daughter. It reminded the public of all that had been said and written about me as the ‘milk snatcher’ at Education.
A veritable circus of indignation was now staged. Pressure groups were prompted to complain. A deputation of housewives was said to be travelling from Birmingham to urge me to give them the tins. Food chemists gave their views about the consequences of keeping tinned food too long in the larder. Martin Redmayne, the former Chief Whip, reliable Party establishment figure and now Deputy Chairman of Harrods, appeared on television to say that ‘any sort of inducement to panic buying was… against the public interest’ — although Lord Redmayne’s larder probably contained something more enticing than a few tins of salmon and corned beef. There was nothing for it but to invite the cameramen in and have them check the contents of my Flood Street larder and cupboards. This may have convinced some of the Tory hierarchy that my and my family’s tastes and standards were not at all what should be expected from someone who aspired to lead their party. But it certainly showed that the ‘hoarding’ allegation was malicious nonsense.
Finally, in order to keep the dying story alive my opponents went too far. On Friday 29 November I was in John Cope’s South Gloucestershire constituency when my secretary, Alison Ward, telephoned to say that the radio was now broadcasting that I had been seen in a shop on the Finchley Road buying up large quantities of sugar. (There was a sugar shortage at the time.) Alison had already checked and discovered that in fact no such shop existed; in any case the family consumption of sugar was minimal. It was just a straightforward lie. A firm denial prevented its circulation in the press, and marked the effective end of this surreal campaign.
I suspect that it ultimately backfired. It demonstrated to women throughout the country how ignorant male politicians were about what constituted ordinary housekeeping. It showed many people from modest backgrounds like mine how close to the surface of the Tory grandees lay an ugly streak of contempt for those they considered voting fodder. Most seriously for my opponents, it evoked a good deal of sympathy from fair-minded Conservative MPs who could see that I had been made the target of false and silly attacks.
At the time, however, I was bitterly upset by it. Sometimes I was near to tears. Sometimes I was shaking with anger. But as I told Bill Shelton, the MP for Streatham and a friend: ‘I saw how they destroyed Keith. Well, they’re not going to destroy me.’
What had happened made me all the more determined to throw my hat into the ring. But there was also much talk of Edward du Cann’s putting himself forward as a candidate. As Chairman of the 1922 Committee — and a man — he might reasonably be expected to command more support than me. On Thursday 5 December, with the hoarding story having more or less run its course, I was in Robert Adley’s constituency of Christchurch for a Party function. He was a great du Cann supporter and told me that he thought Edward was going to stand. I said that if he did, I would have to think again about my position. We must not split the right-wing vote.
One of Edward du Cann’s chief supporters, Airey Neave, the MP for Abingdon and a colleague of Edward’s on the 1922 Executive, was someone whom I already knew quite well. Our paths had crossed many times. As barristers we had shared the same Chambers, and he had been a neighbour at Westminster Gardens. When I was Opposition Social Security spokesman I had helped him with his Bill to make provision for pensions for the over-eighties. We both had a strong interest in science. As Secretary of State for Education and Science I had helped persuade Airey to stay on as Chairman of the Select Committee on Science and Technology when he was thinking of resigning.
Airey was a man of contrasts. His manner was quiet yet entirely self-assured. As a writer and a war hero who escaped from Colditz there was an air of romance about him. He had seen much more of the world than most MPs, and suffered a good deal too. He had the benefit, in Diana, of a marvellous political wife who backed him loyally. He had briefly been a junior minister in the late 1950s but had to resign because of ill health, and I understand Ted had unfeelingly told him that that was the end of his career. It was difficult to pin down Airey’s politics. I did not consider him ideologically a man of the right. He probably did not look at the world in those terms. We got on well and I was conscious of mutual respect, but we were not yet the close friends we were to become.
Airey had come to see me shortly after my decision to stand was known. He hoped to persuade Edward du Cann to stand, but Edward himself remained undecided. Excluded by Ted from high office, he had devoted himself to a City career he was now reluctant to give up. Until Edward decided one way or the other it was not, of course, possible for Airey to support me actively, but I knew that I could rely on his advice and he promised to stay in touch, which we did: he came to my room in the House to exchange notes on several occasions between then and the end of the year. The whole ‘hoarding’ episode certainly demonstrated how tough a battle I could expect. If I did finally and formally enter the lists, Airey was the sort of person it would be good to have on my side.
A new factor that weakened Ted and strengthened his potential rivals was the announcement of the Home Committee’s conclusions on Tuesday 7 December. There would be annual elections for the Tory Leader, challengers needed only a proposer and a seconder to put themselves forward, and the majority required to win on the first ballot was significantly increased to 50 per cent plus 15 per cent of those eligible to vote. It was in effect an incentive to challengers, since it meant that a Leader in difficulties needed to retain the confidence of a super-majority of those voting.
Still, Christmas at Lamberhurst that year was less festive than on some other occasions. We could not even walk as much as we usually did; the weather was awful. I knew that I could expect a trying time when I returned to Westminster, whether I actually stood for the Leadership or not. Denis also had business worries because Burmah Oil had run into deep trouble. Neither of us was too confident about what the future held.
SMALL EARTHQUAKE IN WESTMINSTER
On my return to London I resolved to clarify matters as regards the leadership. I invited Airey to lunch at Flood Street to have a proper discussion. I also found waiting for me a letter from Robert Adley urging that Edward du Cann and I should sort out which of us should stand rather than split the vote. The trouble was that this was impossible until Edward knew what he wanted to do, and it was clear from a conversation with him that he remained undecided. This was still the case when Airey and I had our lunch on Thursday 9 January 1975. I told him that I thought Geoffrey Howe might support me. I also told him how impossible proper discussion was under Ted’s chairmanship. Airey gave me his own account of his recent talks with Ted. It was clear to both of us that there had to be a change, and the only question was whether Edward du Cann or I was better placed to effect it. Interestingly and shrewdly, as it turned out, Airey thought that Ted’s support in the Parliamentary Party was overrated.
On Wednesday 15 January Edward du Cann made it publicly known that he would not run for the leadership. The way was therefore open for me. It was now vitally necessary to have an effective campaign team.
Events began to move fast. That same afternoon I was leading for the Opposition on the Committee Stage of the Finance Bill. Fergus had just learned that he would have to go on a parliamentary visit to South Africa, though he still thought (wrongly as it turned out) that he would be back in time for the leadership first ballot. He therefore asked Bill Shelton, when they met in the Division Lobby, to run my campaign in his absence, and Bill agreed. I was delighted when Bill told me, for I knew he was loyal and would be a skilful campaigner. Then, as I learned later, in the course of a subsequent vote Airey approached Bill and said: ‘You know that I have been running Edward du Cann’s campaign? Edward is withdrawing. If we could come to some agreement I will bring Edward’s troops behind Margaret.’ In fact, the ‘agreement’ simply consisted of Airey taking over the running of my campaign with Bill assisting him.
This arrangement was confirmed when Airey came up to see me in my room, and we performed a diplomatic minuet. Slightly disingenuously, he asked me who was running my campaign. Hardly less so, I replied that I didn’t really have a campaign. Airey said: ‘I think I had better do it for you.’ I agreed with enthusiasm. I knew that this meant he would swing as many du Cann supporters as possible behind me. Suddenly much of the burden of worry I had been carrying around fell away. From now on Airey, with Bill as his chief lieutenant, went to work quietly and remorselessly on their colleagues to win me support.
When I began to make suggestions to Airey about people to contact, he told me firmly not to bother about any of that, to leave it to him and to concentrate on my work on the Finance Bill. This was good advice, not least because both in the upstairs Committee Room and on the floor of the Chamber I had every opportunity to show my paces. It was, after all, the members of the Parliamentary Conservative Party who would ultimately make the decision about the Conservative leadership, and they were just as likely to be impressed by what I said in debate as by anything else. The campaign team began as a small group of about half a dozen, though it swelled rapidly and by the second ballot had become almost too large, consisting of as many as forty or fifty. Canvassing was done with great precision, and MPs might be approached several times by different people in order to verify their allegiances. Airey and his colleagues knew that there was no short cut to this process, and day after day it went on, with Bill Shelton crossing off names and keeping the tally. From time to time Airey would report to me on the position, though with the caveats which any shrewd canvasser always adds. The campaign group would also come to Flood Street, usually on the Sunday, to discuss with me articles, speeches and other initiatives for the week.
During these early days I was encouraged by the number of backbenchers who came up to offer me their support. One of the first was Peter Morrison, later to become my PPS at Downing Street, who told me that three years earlier his father, Lord Marga-dale, a former Chairman of the 1922 Committee, had said of me: ‘That woman will be the next leader of the Tory Party.’ This may be the first recorded instance of the phrase ‘that woman’.
Meanwhile, dealings with the media were suddenly becoming important. In these Gordon Reece was invaluable. Angus Maude, a journalist who combined profound insights with pithy wit and who had been unceremoniously sacked from the front bench by Ted for writing a critical article in the Spectator in 1966, helped me with the crucial Daily Telegraph article called ‘My Kind of Tory Party’. (I also received useful advice from a group of Telegraph journalists such as Peter Utley, John O’Sullivan and Frank Johnson — and of course Alfred Sherman — who were advocates of my cause in spite of their newspaper giving Ted reluctant endorsement.) George Gardiner, who was one of the February 1974 intake of MPs, a journalist himself and as editor of Conservative News party to some of the Central Office gossip, also helped me with drafting. It was a lively team.
In fact, the attitude towards my candidature was tangibly changing. I spoke on Tuesday 21 January to a lunch in St Stephen’s Tavern of the Guinea Club, consisting of leading national and provincial newspaper journalists. By this time as a result of the soundings Airey had taken I was actually beginning to feel that I was in with a chance. I said to them wryly at one point: ‘You know, I really think you should begin to take me seriously.’ They looked back in amazement, and perhaps some of them soon started to do so. For by the weekend articles had begun to appear reappraising my campaign in a different light.
Nor were my prospects harmed by another exchange in the Commons the following day with the ever-obliging Denis Healey. In bitter but obscure vein he described me as the ‘La Pasionaria of privilege’. I jotted down a reply and delivered it a few moments later with relish: ‘Some Chancellors are microeconomic. Some Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap.’ The Tory benches loved it.
With just a week to go, Airey, Keith and Bill came round to Flood Street on Sunday 26 January to discuss the latest position. The number of pledges — mine at around 120 and Ted’s less than eighty — looked far too optimistic. People would need to be revisited and their intentions re-examined. Presumably the Heath campaign, in which Peter Walker and Ted’s PPSs Tim Kitson and Ken Baker were the main figures, was receiving equally or even more optimistic information; but they made the mistake of believing it. Certainly, in marked contrast to Airey’s public demeanour, they were loudly predicting a large victory on the first ballot.
At Flood Street it was agreed that I should address my core campaigners in Committee Room 13 on Monday night. I could not tell them anything about campaigning. They had forgotten far more about political tactics and indeed political skulduggery than I would ever know. So instead I spoke and answered questions on my vision of a Conservative society from 10.30 till midnight. It was marvellous to be able to speak from the heart about what I believed, and to feel that those crucial to my cause were listening. Apparently my audience felt the same way; several MPs told me that they had never heard any senior Tory discuss policy in such philosophical terms. Plainly it was not I alone who was dispirited by the directionless expediency of the previous few years.
The Heath camp now changed the direction of their campaign, but still failed to get to the point. Ridicule had failed. Instead, the accusation became that the sort of Conservatism I represented might appeal to the middle-class rank and file supporters of the Party, particularly in the South, but would never win over the uncommitted. My article in the Daily Telegraph, which appeared on Thursday 30 January, took this head-on:
I was attacked [as Education Secretary] for fighting a rearguard action in defence of ‘middle-class interests’. The same accusation is levelled at me now, when I am leading Conservative opposition to the socialist Capital Transfer Tax proposals. Well, if ‘middle-class values’ include the encouragement of variety and individual choice, the provision of fair incentives and rewards for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the state and a belief in the wide distribution of individual private property, then they are certainly what I am trying to defend… If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it. Indeed one of the reasons for our electoral failure is that people believe too many Conservatives have become socialists already. Britain’s progress towards socialism has been an alternation of two steps forward with half a step back… And why should anyone support a party that seems to have the courage of no convictions?
This theme — the return to fundamental Conservative principles and the defence of middle-class values — was enormously popular in the Party. I repeated it when speaking to my Constituency Association the following day. I rejected the idea that my candidature was representative of a faction. I emphasized that I was speaking up for all those who felt let down by recent Conservative Governments. I was also prepared to accept my share of the blame for what had gone wrong under Ted.
But [I added] I hope I have learned something from the failures and mistakes of the past and can help to plan constructively for the future… There is a widespread feeling in the country that the Conservative Party has not defended [Conservative] ideals explicitly and toughly enough, so that Britain is set on a course towards inevitable socialist mediocrity. That course must not only be halted, it must be reversed.
It was in an open letter to the Chairman of my constituency released on Saturday afternoon, however, that I really summed up the gravamen of the charge against Ted and his leadership. Ted was a political paradox. He combined a belief in strong leadership (especially his own) with a record of buckling under the pressure of events. He was always talking about reaching out to win over the support of people from other parties, but he had no willingness to listen to the Conservative Party. By contrast, I said that what was required was a ‘leadership that listens’, adding that ‘in office… we allowed ourselves to become detached from many who had given us their support and trust’.
I knew from my talks with Conservative MPs that there were many contradictory factors which would influence their votes. Some would support Ted simply because he was the Leader in situ. Many would not dare go against him because, even after two successive election defeats, he inspired fear that there would be no forgiveness for mutiny. Moreover, many thought that I was inexperienced — and as I had publicly admitted, there was more than a little truth in that. There was also some suspicion of me as too doctrinaire and insensitive. And then, of course, there was the rather obvious fact that I was a woman.
As a result of these conflicting considerations, many MPs were undecided. They wanted to be able to talk to me, to find out what I was like and where I stood. Airey and his team would send these Members along to see me in the room of Robin Cooke — one of our team — in the House where, singly or in small groups, over a glass of claret or a cup of tea, I would try to answer their points as best I could. Ted, by contrast, preferred lunch parties of MPs where, I suspect, there was not much straight talking — at least not from the guests. Doubtless his campaign team marked them down as supporters, which many were not.
The press on Monday 3 February was full of the fact that the National Union of the Party had reported that 70 per cent of Constituency Associations favoured Ted Heath and that the great majority of Conservative supporters agreed with them. We were not surprised by this. The Conservative Associations, nudged by Central Office, were understandably loyal to the existing Leader: and the opinion poll results reflected the fact that I was a relatively unknown quantity outside the House of Commons. But obviously it did not help, and it certainly boosted confidence in the Heath camp. Indeed, there was evidence of a late surge of support for Ted among MPs. Airey’s and Bill’s final canvass returns suggested that I was neck and neck with Ted, with the third candidate, the gallant and traditionalist Hugh Fraser, picking up a few right-wing misogynist votes. But I was told that I came over quite well on the World in Action television programme that night.
On Tuesday 4 February, the day of the first ballot, I was up early to prepare Denis’s breakfast and see him off to work before driving from Flood Street to the House of Commons, exhibiting what I hoped was a confident smile and a few friendly words for the press gathered outside. For me it was another day on the Finance Bill Committee, while in another House of Commons Committee Room the voting for the leadership took place. The ballot was due to close at 3.30. I went up to Airey Neave’s room to await the result. Bill Shelton represented me at the count and Tim Kitson represented Ted. I believe that even after they had heard the sombre news of the outcome of that day’s voting the Heath camp had hoped that the proxy votes, counted last, would see Ted through. But most of the proxies also went to me. I was trying to concentrate on anything other than the future when the door opened and Airey came in. Softly, but with a twinkle in his eye, he told me: ‘It’s good news. You’re ahead in the poll. You’ve got 130 votes to Ted’s 119.’ Hugh Fraser had sixteen.
I could barely believe it. Although I was thirty-one votes short of the required margin to win outright on the first ballot — 50 per cent plus a lead of 15 per cent of those eligible to vote — and therefore there would have to be a second round, I was nonetheless decisively ahead. I had no doubt that if I had failed against Ted that would have been the end of me in politics. As it was, I might be Leader. Who knows? I might even be Prime Minister. I went downstairs and someone opened some champagne. But I had to keep a clear head, for I was soon back to the Finance Bill amid a certain raillery from friends and opponents alike, for the news had spread like wildfire. Later that evening I went back to Airey’s flat for a council of war.
My own surprise at the result was as nothing compared to the shattering blow it had delivered to the Conservative establishment. I felt no sympathy for them. They had fought me unscrupulously all the way. But I did feel sorry for Ted, who quickly announced his decision to resign as Leader and not to contest the second ballot. Willie Whitelaw now put his name forward and immediately became the favourite. I myself thought that Willie had a very good chance of winning; and though I could not seriously imagine him changing the direction of the Party as I wished, it did please me to think that between us there would be none of the bitterness which had soured my relations with Ted. Jim Prior, John Peyton and Geoffrey Howe also entered the contest. I was a little worried about Geoffrey’s candidature because he held similar views to mine and might split the right-wing vote, which in a close contest could be crucial. Hugh Fraser withdrew and urged his supporters to vote for Willie.
In fact, without knowing it, I had what the Americans call ‘momentum’. I had always reckoned that a substantial number of those voting for me in the first round would only do so as a tactical way of removing Ted and putting in someone more acceptable but still close to his way of thinking, such as Willie. But in fact, far from draining away, my support actually hardened. Perhaps there was an odd sense of gratitude to me for having done what no one else dared, that is to remove from the leadership someone who quite simply made the Party unelectable. Perhaps a sufficient number of my colleagues genuinely felt that the way forward for the Party was the root and branch reconsideration that Keith and I advocated. Perhaps there was a feeling that it was ‘a bit offside’ for those who had failed to challenge Ted when he looked unbeatable to step in to scoop up the prize once he had lost it. There were probably also doubts about whether Willie, for all his amiable qualities, was the right man to rethink Conservatism in the face of a Labour Government with a newly militant and aggressive left wing.
Certainly, many people in the Party at Westminster and outside it were now desperately anxious to bring the whole process to a swift end. The very circumstances which had counted against me in the first ballot now assisted me as the leading candidate in the second. The Daily Telegraph, an important barometer of Tory grassroots feeling, swung decisively onto my side. When I talked with Willie at a dinner organized by the British-American Parliamentary Group at Lancaster House on Thursday 6 February he seemed fairly confident that he was the front-runner. The new canvass returns which Airey and his team were making strongly suggested otherwise. But I was cautious. There had been some whispers that I was secretly anti-Common Market, which it was thought might damage me. So at George Gardiner’s suggestion I made a short statement of my views endorsing Europe. I also continued to see — and sometimes communicate by note with — MPs who needed reassurance on particular points.
Willie and I both attended the Young Conservative Conference at Eastbourne on Saturday 8 February. One woman on the platform was dressed in funereal black and glowering. I was rather concerned and asked her whether anything was wrong. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m in mourning for Mr Heath.’ There were few other mourners present. Willie and I were photographed as we kissed for the cameras. I remarked: ‘Willie and I have been friends for years. I’ve done that to Willie many times and he to me. It was not that difficult for him to do it, I think.’ Willie replied: ‘I’ve kissed her often. But we have not done it on a pavement outside a hotel in Eastbourne before.’ It was all good fun and the atmosphere lightened.
I used my own speech to the Conference to give a full-blooded rendering of my views. I said:
You can get your economic policies right, and still have the kind of society none of us would wish. I believe we should judge people on merit and not on background. I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax. That we should back the workers and not the shirkers: that it is not only permissible but praiseworthy to want to benefit your own family by your own efforts.
Conservatives had not heard this sort of message for many years, and it went down well.
Airey, Keith, my other advisers and I looked at the situation after the first ballot. Our general approach was to concentrate on the electorate — the 276 Tory MPs — pointing out that I had already won a near majority of them, that I was pulling steadily away from the field and that my four rivals were fighting for second place. In these circumstances we felt that I had little to gain from debates with the other candidates. But a slight stir was created when I decided not to appear on Panorama with them. They went ahead without me. But this was Hamlet without a Princess. It merely emphasized my status as the front-runner.
And then on Tuesday the second ballot took place. Again I waited nervously in Airey’s room. And again it was Airey who came to give me the news. This time it was subtly but decisively different. He smiled and said: ‘You are now Leader of the Opposition.’ I had obtained 146 votes to Willie’s seventy-nine. The other candidates were out of the picture.[33]
I rapidly scribbled some thoughts in the back of my diary because I knew I would now have to go and give my first press conference as Party Leader. The first item was ‘TED’, because it was most important to pay tribute to his leadership.
I now had to hurry down to the Grand Committee Room, off Westminster Hall, where the press were waiting. I told them: ‘To me it is like a dream that the next name in the lists after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, is Margaret Thatcher. Each has brought his own style of leadership and stamp of greatness to his task. I shall take on the work with humility and dedication.’
Then it was off for the Leader’s traditional first visit to Conservative Central Office. On entering, I could not help remembering how hard some of the people there had worked to stop my becoming Leader. I shook hands with a line of Party officials, stopping to kiss Russell Lewis, the Conservative Political Centre Director who I knew had actually wanted me to win. I have no doubt there were many anxious thoughts behind the polite, smiling faces that evening. And not without reason. For though I was not interested in paying off old scores, I was already sure that changes must be made.
Then I was driven back to Bill Shelton’s house in Pimlico for a celebration with my friends. Denis was there. I had tried to telephone the news through to him myself, but somehow the Press Association beat me to it. Mark learned the news while he was at work as a trainee accountant. As for Carol, she could not be disturbed until she had finished the solicitors’ exam she was taking that afternoon.
Only much later that night, after I had returned from dinner with the Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, could all of the family celebrate the good news. It was wonderful to be together. I suspect that they knew, as I did, that from this moment on our lives would never be quite the same again.
Nor would the Conservative Party, as a perceptive leader in the Daily Telegraph the following morning observed:
What kind of leadership Mrs Thatcher will provide remains to be seen… But one thing is clear enough at this stage. Mrs Thatcher is a bonny fighter. She believes in the ethic of hard work and big rewards for success. She has risen from humble origins by effort and ability and courage. She owes nothing to inherited wealth or privilege. She ought not to suffer, therefore, from that fatal and characteristic twentieth-century Tory defect of guilt about wealth. All too often this has meant that the Tories have felt themselves to be at a moral disadvantage in the defence of capitalism against socialism. This is one reason why Britain has travelled so far down the collectivist road. What Mrs Thatcher ought to be able to offer is the missing moral dimension to the Tory attack on socialism. If she does so, her accession to the leadership could mark a sea-change in the whole character of the party political debate in this country.
It was a mighty challenge. At the time I did not realize how mighty.
CHAPTER IX
A Bumpy Ride
Leader of the Opposition February 1975–March 1977
SHADOW CABINET-MAKING
My first task was to compose the Shadow Cabinet. I met Humphrey Atkins, the Chief Whip, in the Leader of the Opposition’s room in the House of Commons where we had an excellent dinner prepared by his wife Maggie. Humphrey Atkins had, of course, been Ted’s appointment, and occupying the position he did had not declared his support for one side or the other in the leadership contest. But he was amiable and amenable and, as Chief Whip, was possessed of the unique fund of knowledge and gossip so essential when making high political appointments. I told Humphrey that although there were some people, like Keith Joseph and Airey Neave, to whom I felt a special obligation, I did not want to make a clean sweep of the existing team. After the bitterness of the contest with Ted there had to be sufficient continuity to keep the Party together.
The more we talked, however, the clearer it became to both of us that all the other dispositions depended upon Ted. If he wished to serve under my leadership — and I had publicly committed myself to offering him the opportunity during the leadership campaign — he might decide that he wanted one of the three main Shadow posts, or possibly a post without portfolio. In fact, I privately hoped that he would not take up my offer at all. Although none of us knew how enduring his sense of injury would be, it was already hard to imagine Ted behaving like Alec Douglas-Home and fitting in as a loyal and distinguished member of his successor’s team. In any case, the newspapers were saying that Ted had no intention of serving. But I had to know for myself. I had thought of going to see him that evening, but all things considered it seemed better that Humphrey should make the first approach. Having sounded Ted out and received the impression that the speculation about his intentions was accurate, Humphrey reported back to me. But I had said I would make the offer, and the following morning I was driven to Ted’s house in Wilton Street to do it in person.
Tim Kitson, Ted’s PPS, showed me into the downstairs study, facing onto the garden. Ted was sitting at his desk. He did not get up; and I sat down without waiting to be asked. There was no point in pleasantries. I could guess what he thought about recent events and about me. Without offering a specific post, I asked him whether he would join the Shadow Cabinet. He said no, he would stay on the backbenches. The interview was effectively at an end. For my part, I had no wish to prolong the meeting. I knew that it must be painful and probably humiliating for him. But I also knew that if I walked out of Wilton Street past the assembled press after just a few minutes, the lunchtime news would be dominated by stories of snubs and splits. Also, I had not finished my coffee. So I spun things out a little by asking his views about Labour’s promised referendum on Britain’s continuing membership of the European Economic Community and, in particular, whether he would lead the Conservative campaign.[34] Again, he said no. I had done all I decently could to keep Ted within the fold and to ensure the meeting did not end too abruptly. But only five minutes or so had elapsed when I left Ted’s study. So Tim Kitson (who was equally aware of the risk of bad publicity) and I talked inconsequentially for another quarter of an hour to fill out the time before I left the house. Respecting, as I thought, Ted’s confidence, I did not even tell Airey Neave, who was setting up my office, the details of what had transpired. I made it public later only in order to set the record straight.[35] I returned to the House of Commons and told Humphrey Atkins that Ted would indeed not be in the Shadow Cabinet.
Next, Robert Carr, who had been acting Leader of the Party during the leadership campaign, wanted to see me. He had, of course, been close to Ted and was identified with the corporatist tendency in the Party. I could well understand if he did not relish the prospect of serving under me. In fact, when I saw him he made it quite clear that the only post he would accept was that of Shadow Foreign Secretary. I said that I could not promise him that. Not only was I unwilling to have my hands tied before I had properly considered the shape of the team as a whole: I was not convinced that Robert Carr would have a place in it.
By contrast, Willie Whitelaw definitely had. He had demonstrated his popularity in the leadership election. He was immensely experienced and his presence would be a reassuring guarantee to many on the backbenches that evolution rather than revolution was the order of the day. Perhaps both of us already sensed that we could form a strong political partnership, our strengths and weaknesses complementing one another’s. Although I could not as yet offer him a particular portfolio, I asked Willie to be Deputy Leader of the Party, and he accepted. But his loyalty was not contingent on that; he was loyal from the first.
There was much male chauvinist hilarity — ‘Give us a kiss, Maggie,’ etc. — when I came into the Chamber to hear the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, make a statement. I took my place on the front bench between Willie and Robert Carr. Jim Prior, Geoffrey Howe and John Peyton — the other defeated leadership candidates — were also there, though Ted was not. I received the wittily barbed congratulations of the Prime Minister and replied somewhat less wittily to them. Harold Wilson was at his still incomparable best in the House. As I listened, I reflected that as a new Leader of a shaken and still badly split party, and as a woman striving for dominance in this noisy, boisterous, masculine world, I could expect difficulties ahead. And so it proved.
That evening I chaired the Shadow Cabinet for the first time. The meeting had a slightly unreal atmosphere since none of those present had yet been formally reappointed, and some would not be. Quintin Hailsham congratulated me on the Shadow Cabinet’s behalf and pledged their loyalty and cooperation. I felt that he at least probably meant it. I said that Willie had agreed to be Deputy Leader and that Ted had turned down my offer of a place in the Shadow Cabinet. Willie then said that he had accepted the Deputy Leadership at once and looked forward to serving in this capacity. The formalities thus indicated a kind of armed truce between the competing views and personalities.
The following evening, I made my first appearance as Leader at the 1922 Committee meeting. My relations with the wider Parliamentary Party were much easier than with the Shadow Cabinet. As I entered, everyone rose to their feet. Edward du Cann presented me with an unsigned Valentine card (a day early) which would join the other Valentines and roses that accumulated at Flood Street. In addressing the 1922 Committee it is the Leader’s mood and bearing rather than the content of a speech which matter most. But they seemed to like the message as well — namely, the need to distinguish the Conservative approach clearly from that of the socialists, to return to traditional values of independence and self-help and to challenge the assumption that the onward march of the Left was irreversible. I sat down amid much clapping, banging of desks and that curious deep braying with which the Parliamentary Conservative Party expresses its approval.
In the next few days my time was taken up in meeting journalists, discussing arrangements for my office and fulfilling long-standing constituency engagements. There were few opportunities to sit down with Humphrey and Willie to discuss Shadow Cabinet membership. In any case, I wanted the weekend to make my final decisions. But the delay encouraged speculation. According to the press a battle was under way to prevent Keith Joseph becoming Shadow Chancellor. In fact, he did not ask for the position nor did I offer it.
My Shadow Cabinet-making was smoothed by the fact that Peter Thomas and Geoffrey Rippon made it clear that they did not want to continue. That meant two more vacancies to play with. I spent Saturday and Sunday at Flood Street making and remaking the list, consulting Humphrey or Willie on particular points. On Monday I made the appointments in a series of meetings with colleagues at my room in the Commons.
Willie was the first to come in. I gave him a roving brief which included the issue of devolution — which already spelt political difficulties he, as both a former Chief Whip and a Scot representing an English seat, might be able to tackle. Then I saw Keith Joseph, whom I asked to continue with his Shadow Cabinet responsibility for policy and research. In a sense, Willie and Keith were the two key figures, one providing the political brawn and the other the policy-making brains of the team. I also felt that Keith must continue his intellectual crusade from the Centre for Policy Studies for wider understanding and acceptance of free-enterprise economics. I was under no illusion that my victory in the leadership election represented a wholesale conversion. Our ability to change Party policy, as the first step towards making changes in government, depended upon using our positions to change minds. Unfortunately, on his forays into the universities Keith was to find a readier hearing from the Militant Tendency in his avowedly left-wing audiences than he would from the cynical tendency among his colleagues.
My next visitor was Reggie Maudling. I suspect that, although he had made it clear publicly that he was willing to serve, he was as surprised as the press when I made him Shadow Foreign Secretary. Though widely praised at the time, this was not a good appointment. I had always admired Reggie’s intellect and regretted that he had had to resign over the Poulson affair in 1972. Also bringing Reggie back to deal with foreign affairs appeared a convincing answer to those who had contrasted Ted’s experience with my own lack of it. But it soon became clear that Reggie was not prepared to modify his own views, a problem compounded by the fact that, more broadly, he had an only thinly disguised contempt for the monetarist approach which Keith and I wanted to pursue. I would have done better to appoint someone who shared my instincts on defence and foreign policy.
Still less of a soulmate was Ian Gilmour. I suspect that when he learned that I wanted to see him he expected the worst. He had been a strong partisan of Ted, and he lacked the support or standing which might have made him politically costly to dispense with. But I valued his intelligence. I felt that he could make a useful contribution as long as he was kept out of an economic post, to which in spite of his later reputation as one of the foremost advocates of ‘reflation’ neither his training nor his aptitudes suited him. I asked him to be Shadow Home Secretary.
Michael Heseltine, who now came in to see me, had a much more flamboyant personality than Ian’s, although they shared many of the same views. He too had long been a Heath supporter, but it had always been assumed that the cause he most strongly advocated was his own. My campaign team believed him to have been an abstainer in the first round of the leadership contest. To do Michael credit, he was always refreshingly open about his ambitions. I asked him to stay on as Shadow Industry Secretary. It was a portfolio which fascinated him and which gave full scope to his talent for Opposition, since it fell to him to fight the Labour Government’s main nationalization proposals. What I did not fully grasp at this time was how ideologically committed he was to an interventionist approach in industry which I could not accept.
After a lunchtime meeting of small businessmen at the National Chamber of Trade, where I made my first public speech as Leader, I returned to my room at the House for more Shadow Cabinet carpentry. I asked Peter Carrington to stay on as Leader of the House of Lords. Again, I had no illusions about Peter’s position in the Tory Party’s political spectrum: he was not of my way of thinking. He had, of course, been in Ted’s inner circle making the political decisions about the miners’ strike and the February 1974 election. But since we lost office he had proved an extremely effective Opposition Leader in the Upper House, and as a former Defence Minister and an international businessman he had wide experience of foreign affairs. Admittedly, he was likely in Shadow Cabinet to be on the opposite side to me on economic policy. But he never allowed economic disagreements to get in the way of his more general responsibilities. He brought style, experience, wit and — politically incorrect as the thought may be — a touch of class.
Geoffrey Howe had his own droll wit. But in most other ways he was a very different politician from my other appointments that day. I would in any case have felt obliged to give Geoffrey a Shadow Cabinet post, simply because he was a candidate against me and I wished to unify the Party as much as possible. But it was a calculated gamble to make him Shadow Chancellor. I knew that as an immensely hard-working lawyer he would make the effort required to master his brief. I also knew that, in spite of his role in implementing the Heath Government’s prices and incomes policy as Minister for Trade and Consumer Affairs, he had a well-deserved reputation as a believer in free-market economics. As such, he was very much a rarity in the upper ranks of the Conservative Party. Once I had decided that Keith would be better employed overseeing policy rethinking, Geoffrey seemed the best candidate. Very few who come new to such a demanding portfolio find it trouble-free. Geoffrey was to have a difficult time both trying to resolve our divisions on economic policy and in defending our case in the House. I would be put under a good deal of pressure to remove him and find someone better able to take on the Chancellor, Denis Healey. But I knew that Geoffrey’s difficulties, like mine, were more the result of circumstances than lack of native talent. By the time our period in Opposition was approaching its end he had become indispensable.
After careful thought I decided to keep Jim Prior as Shadow Employment Secretary. This was rightly taken as a signal that I had no immediate plans for a fundamental reform of trade union law. Jim’s suitability for the job is only understandable in the light of the Heath Government’s poisoned legacy. In the 1972 Industrial Relations Act Ted had attempted the most far-reaching reforms of trade union law since 1906: its failure made Conservatives right across the Party very wary of pursuing the same course again. Moreover, after Ted had taken on the militants and lost in February 1974, the main question in the public’s mind was whether any Conservative Government could establish a working relationship with the unions, which were now seen as having an effective veto on policy. It was Jim’s strong conviction that our aim should be to establish both that we accepted the existing trade union law, with perhaps a few alterations, and that we saw the union leaders as people with whom we could deal.
Such an approach made more sense at the beginning of the period in Opposition than at the end of it. But in any case it left two important questions unanswered. First, how would we react if events demonstrated that the theoretical shortcomings of the present law, as amended by the socialists, were having malign practical effects? (The circumstances of the Grunwick dispute[36] and of the strikes of the winter of 1978/79 would demonstrate precisely that.) Secondly, since the trade union leaders were at least as much socialist politicians as they were workers’ representatives, why should they cooperate willingly with Conservatives? There was a basic incompatibility between their economic approach and ours, and indeed between their political allegiance and ours. So how valuable would any amount of personal diplomacy between Jim and the TUC turn out to be? Probably not very. For the present, though, he was the right man in the right position.
Airey Neave had already privately told me that the only portfolio he wanted was that of Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. His intelligence contacts, proven physical courage and shrewdness amply qualified him for this testing and largely thankless task.
The other appointments were less strategically crucial. Quintin Hailsham had no portfolio, but was in effect the Lord Chancellor in waiting. Francis Pym stayed on at Agriculture, though a few months later he had to give this up on health grounds. My old friend Patrick Jenkin I kept at Energy. Norman St John-Stevas, whom I had got to know from my days at the Department of Education and who was both a lively wit and one of my few open supporters on the second ballot of the leadership election, shadowed Education. Norman Fowler, a former journalist and a Member for the politically crucial West Midlands, came in as Shadow Social Services Secretary. I had no clear view about where precisely any of these stood in relation to the balance of opinion between left and right of the Party. But in appointing Tim Raison as Shadow Environment Secretary I knew that I was promoting someone associated with the left of centre, but who was tough-minded, thoughtful and knowledgeable about social policy in general. I believed he would be an asset. Two offers of Shadow Cabinet posts were turned down — one to John Biffen, who would in fact join later, and the other to Edward du Cann, whose early campaign team had provided the nucleus of mine. Edward stayed on as Chairman of the 1922 Committee, which was probably far more useful to me.
The next day (Tuesday) I had some less pleasant business to transact. At 10.30 Peter Walker came in. We had known each other since he had succeeded me as candidate for Dartford. But those days were long gone and there was no personal warmth between us. He had been one of the most effective members of Ted’s inner circle, and he opposed with vigour and eloquence the approach which Keith and I were committed to adopt. He clearly had to go. I found it a distasteful business breaking such news; over the years it was one of the things I most dreaded. But at least Peter can hardly have expected anything else. He became a consistent critic on the backbenches.
I confirmed in a discussion with Geoffrey Rippon, who now came into my room, that he did not wish to serve: that suited us both. I then saw Nicholas Scott, who had shadowed Housing. He too was on the left of the Party. The conversation was made slightly easier by the fact that I had absorbed the Housing portfolio into the wider Environment one. His job had been shot from under him.
I left to last the interview with Robert Carr. I told him that I had given the Shadow Foreign Secretary post to Reggie Maudling, which he presumably knew already. Perhaps he had just bid too high, or perhaps he might have been persuaded to stay in another capacity. But I was not keen to have another strong opponent in any position on the team. So I made it clear that I could not ask him to be in the Shadow Cabinet. After a difficult few minutes he left and told the press of his worries about ‘those people who seem to think [monetary policy] is some automatic mechanism’. Not too many guesses were required about who ‘those people’ were.
The published Shadow Cabinet list (to which Peter Thorneycroft as Party Chairman and Angus Maude as Chairman of the Conservative Research Department would later be added) was rightly seen as a compromise. As such, it annoyed the left of the Party who disliked my dropping of Robert Carr, Peter Walker and Nicholas Scott: it also disappointed the right who worried about Reggie Maudling’s return, the fact that Geoffrey and not Keith was Shadow Chancellor and the lack of any new right-wing faces from the backbenches. In fact, given the fragility as yet of my position and the need to express a balance of opinion in the Shadow Cabinet to bring the Party together, it was a relatively successful operation. It created a Treasury team that shared my and Keith’s views on the free-market economy, shifted the balance of opinion within the Shadow Cabinet as a whole somewhat in my direction, and yet gave grounds for loyalty to those I had retained from Ted’s regime. I felt I could expect support (within limits) from such a team, but I knew I could not assume agreement — even on basic principles.
MACHINE POLITICS
It is said that when Ted Heath was offered a Junior Whip’s job in 1950, he asked the advice of Lord Swinton, the Tory Party’s elder statesman, as to whether he should accept it. ‘Get in on the machine — at however squalid a level,’ said Lord Swinton. Ted had taken this advice to heart, and I, in my still vulnerable position as head of the machine, could not afford to neglect it. So I set out to get some control of it.
Airey Neave and I decided that there would have to be changes at Conservative Central Office. Constitutionally, Central Office is the Leader of the Party’s office: events during the leadership campaign had convinced me that it would be very difficult for some of those there to act in that capacity under me.
At Central Office I wanted as Chairman an effective administrator, one preferably with business connections, who would be loyal to me. I had always admired Peter Thorneycroft and in retrospect I thought that his courageous resignation on the issue of public expenditure in 1958 had signalled a wrong turning for the post-war Conservative Party. As part of that older generation which had been leading the Party when I first entered Parliament, and as chairman of several large companies, Peter seemed to me to fit the bill. But how to persuade him? It turned out that Willie Whitelaw was related to him, and Willie persuaded him to take the job. It would have taxed the energy of a much younger man, for the Party Chairman has to keep up morale even in the lowest periods, of which there would be several. Peter had the added problem that at this stage most of the Party in the country accepted my leadership only on sufferance. This would gradually change after the 1975 Party Conference. But it took a good deal longer — and some painful and controversial personnel changes — before I felt that the leading figures at Central Office had any real commitment to me. Peter gradually replaced them with loyalists; I never enquired how.
Alistair McAlpine’s arrival as Party Treasurer certainly helped. The existing Treasurers, Lords Ashdown and Chelmer, told me that they had decided to resign. Airey Neave had suggested that Alistair, who had been Treasurer for ‘Britain in Europe’ during the referendum campaign, had the personality, energy and connections to do the job. He was right. Although a staunch Tory from a family of Tories, Alistair had to turn himself into something of a politician overnight. I told him that he would have to give up his German Mercedes for a British Jaguar and he immediately complied. But I had not prepared him for the host of minor but irritating examples of obstructive behaviour which confronted him at Central Office, nor for the great difficulties he would encounter in trying to persuade businessmen that in spite of the years of Heathite corporatism we were still a free-enterprise Party worth supporting.
Some people expected me to make even more substantial changes at the Conservative Research Department. The CRD was in theory a department of Central Office, but largely because of its geographical separateness (in Old Queen Street) and its intellectually distinguished past, it had a specially important role, particularly in Opposition. In a sense, the Centre for Policy Studies had been set up as an alternative to the Research Department. Now that I was Leader, however, the CRD and the CPS would have to work together. The Director of the Research Department, Chris Patten, I knew to be on the left of the Party. Much bitterness and rivalry had built up between the CRD and the CPS. In the eyes of many on the right it was precisely the consensus-oriented, generalist approach epitomized by the CRD which had left us directionless and — in the words of Keith Joseph — ‘stranded on the middle ground’. I decided to replace Ian Gilmour with Angus Maude as Chairman of the Research Department, who would work with Keith on policy, but leave Chris Patten as Director and Adam Ridley, Ted’s former economic adviser, as his deputy. These were good decisions. I came to have a high regard for the work of the department, particularly when it was fulfilling its role as Secretariat to the Shadow Cabinet rather than devising policy. Even though there were occasional squalls, the CRD moved further and further in the direction that Keith and I were taking.
Meanwhile, Airey Neave and I had to assemble a small personal staff who would run my office. The day after the leadership election result I met the secretaries who had worked for Ted. They were clearly upset, and I detected some hostility. This was quite understandable; indeed, I thought it a tribute to their loyalty. But I asked them to stay on if they felt able to, and most of them did, for a time at least. In those days the Leader of the Opposition had the present Home Secretary’s office in the House. There was one large room with a small ante-room for two secretaries, and some other small rooms upstairs. There was not enough space, and as summer approached it all became very hot and airless. (It was only later in the summer of 1976 that we moved into the rather more spacious accommodation previously used as the flat of the Serjeant-at-Arms, where the secretaries I had inherited from Ted were joined by my lively and reliable constituency secretary Alison Ward.)
A flood of letters followed my becoming Leader, sometimes 800 a day. Girls would come across from Central Office to help sort out the post, but usually this was the task of my four secretaries, who sat on the floor in the main room opening envelopes and categorizing the letters. They did their best, but it was hopelessly unsystematic. Then Alistair McAlpine suggested that I ask David Wolfson to take charge of the correspondence section. Alistair thought that if David, as the man responsible for the mail-order section of Great Universal Stores, could not bring order out of this chaos no one could. In fact, both in Opposition and then at 10 Downing Street David’s talents were put to a good deal wider use than sorting the mail: he gave insights into what business was thinking, provided important contacts and proved particularly adept at smoothing ruffled political feathers.
But I also needed a full-time head of my office, who had to be industrious, dependable and, with the number of speeches, articles and letters to draft, above all literate. It was my old friend and colleague, providentially translated to the editorship of the Daily Telegraph, Bill Deedes who suggested Richard Ryder, then working on Peterborough, the Telegraph’s respectable gossip column. Richard joined me at the end of April — to begin work alongside Caroline Stephens, one of the secretaries I inherited from Ted, who would later become Caroline Ryder.
Richard Ryder ran this small office very effectively on a shoestring. It was a happy ship, and some entertaining characters served on their way to better things. Matthew Parris, who was in charge of replying to my correspondence, showed a talent for the sketch-writing he was later to perform for The Times when, on the eve of the 1979 election campaign, answering an aggrieved letter from a woman rejecting our policy of selling council houses and simultaneously complaining about what was wrong with her own, he told her that she was fortunate to have been given a home paid for by the rest of us out of taxation. Like Queen Victoria, I was not amused — especially when the Daily Mirror published the letter at the very beginning of the campaign. But Matthew survived.
A month after Richard’s arrival Gordon Reece, on secondment from EMI for a year, joined my full-time staff to help in dealing with the press and much else. Gordon was a Godsend. An ebullient former TV producer whose good humour never failed, he was able to jolly me along to accept things I would have rejected from other people. His view was that in getting my message across we must not concentrate simply on heavyweight newspapers, The Times and the Daily Telegraph, but be just as concerned about the mid-market populars, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express and — the real revolution — about the Sun and the News of the World. Moreover, he believed that even newspapers which supported the Labour Party in their editorial line would be prepared to give us fair treatment if we made a real attempt to provide them with interesting copy. He was right on both counts. The Sun and the News of the World were crucial in communicating Conservative values to traditionally non-Conservative voters. The left wing Sunday Mirror also gave me fair and full coverage, however critical the comments. Gordon regularly talked to the editors. But he also persuaded me that the person they really wanted to see and hear from was me. So, whatever the other demands on my diary, when Gordon said that we must have lunch with such-and-such an editor, that was the priority.
Gordon also performed another invaluable service. Every politician has to decide how much he or she is prepared to change manner and appearance for the sake of the media. It may sound grittily honourable to refuse to make any concessions, but such an attitude in a public figure is most likely to betray a lack of seriousness about winning power or even, paradoxically, the pride that apes humility. When Gordon suggested some changes in my style of hair and clothes in order to make a better impression, he was calling upon his experience in television. ‘Avoid lots of jewellery near the face. Edges look good on television. Watch out for background colours which clash with your outfit.’ It was quite an education.
There was also the matter of my voice. In the House of Commons one has to speak over the din to get a hearing. This is more difficult the higher the pitch of one’s voice, because in increasing its volume one automatically goes up the register. This poses an obvious problem for most women. Somehow one has to learn to project the voice without shrieking. Even outside the House, when addressing an audience my voice was naturally high-pitched, which can easily become grating. I had been told about this in earlier years and had deliberately tried to lower its tone. The result, unfortunately, whatever improvement there may have been for the audience, was to give me a sore throat — an even greater problem for a regular public speaker. Gordon found me an expert who knew that the first thing to do was to get your breathing right, and then to speak not from the back of the throat but from the front of the mouth. She was a genius. Her sympathetic understanding for my difficulties, which was a great help, was only matched by that for her ailing cat. Unfortunately, the cat would sometimes fall sick just before my lesson and force its cancellation. Fortunately, I too like cats. And so we finished the course.
On one occasion Gordon took me to meet Sir Laurence Olivier to see whether he had any tips which might be useful. He was quite complimentary, telling me that I had a good gaze out to the audience, which was important, and that my voice was perfectly all right, which — no thanks to the cat — it now probably was. Above all, he understood the difference between speaking someone else’s script and climbing into someone else’s character, and delivering a speech reflecting one’s own views and projecting one’s own personality. Indeed, as a result of our conversation, I became interested in the differences as well as the similarities between the techniques of the political speaker and the actor. For example, I was later told that most stage actors would rather hear an audience’s reaction without seeing the audience, buried in the gloom. But I always insisted that from any public platform I must be able to see as well as hear how my words were being received. I could then speed up, or slow down, or throw in what we later came to call a ‘clap line’ (i.e. a line which had previously got loud applause) if the speech seemed to be going over badly. So Gordon would always try to ensure that even in a darkened hall I could see the front rows of the audience when I spoke.
Getting all these things right took me several months. But all in all the general system never let me down. The real political tests of Opposition Leadership, however, still lay ahead.
SHACKLES OF THE RECENT PAST
My first real experience of the public aspects of being Leader of the Opposition came when I visited Scotland on Friday 21 February. From the time that I stepped off the aircraft at Edinburgh Airport, where a waggish piper played ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’, I received an enthusiastic Scottish welcome. Everywhere huge crowds turned out to see me. My planned walkabout in the centre of Edinburgh had to be abandoned altogether. Several hundred people had been expected, but 3,000 packed into the arcade of the St James’s Centre near Princes Street and there were only half a dozen policemen trying in vain to hold them back. Several women fainted and others were in tears. There was a real risk of tragedy as crowds were forced against the shop windows. It was impossible to go on and I had to take refuge in a jeweller’s shop, where I saw an opal (my birthstone) that I later had made into a ring. The occasion was a demonstration both to the police and to me that from now on there could be nothing amateurish about the way in which the logistics of my visits were organized.
I could always be sure of a friendly reception from grassroots Scottish Tories, whose embattled position seems to sharpen their zeal. More generally, however, the honeymoon did not last long and ordinary political life resumed with a vengeance. The opinion polls, which in February had given the Conservatives a 4 percentage point lead over Labour, showed a 2 per cent Labour lead just a month later — not statistically significant perhaps, but a check on any premature tendency to euphoria. It also soon became clear that powerful elements in the Party were out to make trouble for me. In early April Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath made speeches to a conference of Young Conservatives, warning against shifting the Conservative Party to the right. The European referendum campaign placed the focus on European issues, and this in turn gave a fillip to advocates of coalition government. All this created more difficulties for me.
My first major parliamentary performance in which I crossed swords with Harold Wilson, in a debate on the economy on Thursday 22 May, was heavily and justly criticized for not spelling out convincingly the Conservative alternative. The difficulty was that at this point we had no credible alternative to offer. Imprisoned by the requirement of defending the indefensible record of the Heath Government, we were unable as yet to break through to a proper free-market alternative.
Even so, however, on this and several other occasions I did not make a good speech. Leading for the Opposition in set-piece debates, one is not able to make a wide-ranging speech on the basis of a few notes, something which I was good at and liked. A front-bench speech has to be a fully prepared text, available to the press. But at the same time it has to be very different from the kind of texted speech that is appropriate to a large sympathetic audience where the only interruptions are from applause. And, of course, you need to have acquired considerable authority in the House — the sort usually accorded only to Prime Ministers, and not always to them — to get through reading a text without a barrage of barracking and interruption.
The root of all our problems, however, lay in the unresolved contradictions of policy. With Keith Joseph and Angus Maude having overall responsibility, I could have confidence that the policy-making process would now be organized along lines which I approved. But the decisive influences would never be theoretical or technical but rather personal and political. However long we argued about the rights and wrongs of public expenditure, incomes policy and industrial subsidies, some of us (probably a minority) in the Shadow Cabinet firmly believed that the free-market approach would work, while the others were equally convinced that it would not — or at least that it would only work at a political and social cost that would be unsustainable. Similarly, we were not discussing these things in a vacuum. The Labour Government in those years was producing a succession of economic packages. Each one of these forced us to define where we stood, to agree on the grounds on which we opposed their policies and to sharpen our alternative approach.
In March 1975 we discussed a paper from Keith and Angus on policy-making. They proposed involving both backbench committees and sympathetic outside experts; and this was accepted. The number of policy groups continued to multiply, and some were more useful than others. They were generally chaired by the relevant front-bench spokesmen. Geoffrey Howe’s Economic Reconstruction Group was the main forum for hashing over economic policy. From time to time, there would be whole-day Shadow Cabinet policy discussions, which I myself would chair. The full Shadow Cabinet approved, rather than devised, policy on the basis of papers put to it by the chief Shadow spokesmen and their policy groups.
The Centre for Policy Studies and a range of outside advisers, particularly on economic matters, fed in ideas and suggestions to Keith and me (Keith also had a number of lunchtime meetings with other Shadow Cabinet colleagues on policy). And on top of all that I would sometimes advance a new policy in a speech or interview — not always to the applause of my colleagues.
As a system of decision-taking the structure had a somewhat ramshackle feel to it. But then, no amount of institutional neatness could resolve the fundamental questions we had to decide. The fact that by the time we took office in May 1979 so many of the big issues had been satisfactorily resolved, and Shadow ministers had as clear an idea of their priorities as any incoming post-war British Government, shows that in the most important sense this policymaking system ‘worked’.
The foremost policy issue was how to deal with inflation, which soared to 26.9 per cent in August 1975 before beginning to fall, going below 10 per cent in January 1978. Time and again inflation registered in the opinion polls as the public’s top priority for action, though often in tandem with strong support for pay policy as supposedly the only means of fighting it. But unemployment was never far behind, and one of the main attacks we had to face from Labour was that our policy for disinflation would result in still higher unemployment.
Discussion of how inflation was caused and cured also necessarily involved making a judgement about the Heath Government. If inflation was the result of an increase in the money supply, which takes approximately eighteen months to work through in the form of higher prices, then the prime responsibility for the high inflation during the first eighteen months or so of the Labour Government should be laid at the door of the Conservatives. If, however, the cause of high inflation was excessive wage awards after the collapse of the previous Conservative Government’s incomes policy and Labour’s abdication of authority to the trade unions, then political life in Opposition would be easier. We might not have any credible solutions to offer, but we could at least blame everything on the Government. This approach was likely to be particularly favoured by those of my colleagues who prided themselves on being sceptics about all kinds of economic theory. In fact, the case that the Heath Government’s monetary incontinence was to blame for inflation seemed to me convincingly argued by Alan Walters, whose devastating indictment and predictions, first published in June 1972, were circulated by Keith as background for a discussion with Shadow Cabinet colleagues in March 1975. But if I had publicly accepted this it would have provoked even more trouble from Ted Heath and his supporters.
Our failure to be explicit about the overriding importance of monetary policy did, however, open up our flank to attack on incomes policy. For if wage rises were the cause of inflation, as our rhetoric in defence of the Heath years implied, then the question arose: how would we in Government be able to contain such rises? Would we do so by a statutory policy — which would not only move us towards the very interventionist approach I wanted to avoid, but would also run up against fierce trade union opposition? Or by a voluntary policy — on which Labour’s traditional links with the unions and willingness to trade socialist measures to cement them put us at a political disadvantage?
The October 1974 Conservative manifesto had committed the Party to seek a voluntary policy for prices and incomes, with the qualification that it might be necessary to move to a statutory policy if voluntary support were not achieved. I could only gradually wean the Party away from this position. My task was made more difficult both by the fact that wages and prices were soaring alarmingly, and by Ted Heath and Peter Walker putting me under heavy public pressure to support successive stages of the Labour Government’s incomes policy. In an interview with Robin Day in May 1975 I said that under some circumstances a pay freeze might be necessary, but not as a prelude to a permanent statutory incomes policy. Wages had, after all, been growing at some 30 per cent a year since Labour took office. But I never saw even a short wage freeze as having more than a transitional role in any realistic strategy to bring down inflation, which must be based on control of the money supply and government borrowing. In fact, there were already some early signs that the Government had woken up to the need for some financial discipline. The April 1975 Budget announced cuts in planned spending levels and raised the basic rate of income tax by two pence — to 35 per cent — in order to reduce the swelling deficit which was expected to reach £9,000 million in 1975/76.
This did not prevent the Government accepting the hugely ambitious and ill-conceived Ryder plan to rescue British Leyland with £ 1,400 million of taxpayers’ money. Yet, however irresponsible the decision, it was the Conservative Opposition which had most difficulty in responding. BL was a crucial source of income and jobs in West Midlands seats which we had to win in order to form a government. But resources committed to an unprofitable nationalized car industry must have been diverted, through taxation or higher interest rates or inflation, from successful businesses, among other taxpayers. Keith Joseph, Michael Heseltine and I all gave non-committal reactions in public statements, but the variation in tone, particularly between Keith and Michael, was obvious to all.
If public expenditure was one aspect of the debate about counter-inflation policy, trade union power was another. On this matter, the line-up in the Shadow Cabinet over these years was slightly different from that on the question of voluntary/statutory incomes policy versus ‘free collective bargaining’. Geoffrey Howe was the most consistently hawkish on trade unions. Right from the beginning, he emphasized in our discussions the need to shift the balance of power in industrial relations: indeed, I suspect that he would ideally have liked to get back to the Industrial Relations Act framework which he had devised. Keith Joseph and I shared that approach, though I remained extremely wary about committing ourselves to more changes than we could deliver. Jim Prior and most of the other Shadow Cabinet members could be found in the opposite camp.
On incomes policy, however, Geoffrey and Jim, supported by Ian Gilmour, were the strongest advocates of some kind of national understanding with the trade unions. Geoffrey’s view was that we should seek to emulate the alleged successes of the West German approach of ‘concerted action’, whose purpose was to educate ‘both sides’ of industry in the realities of the state of the economy and win some kind of consent to limit wages. This did not in itself involve a renunciation of monetarism, to which Geoffrey, in contrast with Jim and Ian, was increasingly committed. But it did involve a large element of corporatism and centralized economic decision-making, to which Keith was fiercely opposed and which I too disliked.
The most convinced opponent of monetarism and all its works was Reggie Maudling who, when he put his mind to it, actually had the grasp of economics to give his arguments weight. Reggie was the most ardently committed to a statutory incomes policy. As he put it in a dissenting paper to the Shadow Cabinet in May: ‘To the economic purist, no doubt, prices are only a symptom of inflation, but to us as politicians they are the real problem, because it is rising prices that are breaking the country in half.’ With such divisions in our midst it is not surprising that for much of the time our economic policies were felt to lack coherence.
The difficulties I had faced in the Economic Debate on Thursday 22 May — when for these reasons I had not been able to present a coherent alternative to Government policy — persuaded me of the urgent need to sort out our position. Further public differences confirmed this. In June I spoke to the Welsh Party Conference in Aberystwyth expressing strong reservations about statutory wage controls: the same day Reggie Maudling spoke in Chislehurst implying that we might support a statutory policy. A few days later Keith made a speech casting severe doubt on the value of even a wage freeze, suggesting that it would be used as an excuse for not cutting public spending and taking the other necessary economic steps. On the same day Peter Walker called for a statutory pay policy — and was himself rebutted by Keith, who said bluntly that wage freezes did not work. Not surprisingly, Conservative splits figured large in the press. The fact that these divisions were more than replicated on the Government side was of only limited comfort.
I decided that even if we could not as yet all agree an analysis, we must at least agree to stick to a form of words that would paper over the cracks. After we had heard Denis Healey’s 1 July statement foreshadowing Labour’s introduction of an incomes policy based on sanctions against employers rather than unions, Shadow Cabinet met to discuss our reaction. The crucial question was whether, when it came to a vote in the House, we should support the Government, abstain or vote against. The problem was compounded by the fact that the Chancellor had only given a preliminary indication of what he intended. We would have to wait for the promised White Paper before we even knew whether the policy could properly be described as voluntary or statutory. On the other hand, we did not want to be in the position of flatly refusing support for measures to bring down inflation, even if they included a statutory policy.
Now the Chief Whip told us that there were at least thirty Tory MPs who were opposed in principle to statutory controls and would expect us to oppose them too. I summed up as best I could. Our public line at this stage must be that although the Party would always support measures it believed to be in the national interest, the Chancellor’s statement was high on intentions and low on details. Moreover, he had said nothing about public expenditure cuts or about dropping policies for further nationalization, both of which were directly relevant to the control of inflation.
I found from my own soundings that Conservative opinion in the country was strongly opposed to employers having to bear the brunt of anti-inflation measures. Our supporters wanted us to be tough on Labour. The following day the Backbench Finance Committee met and Bill Shelton reported to me their concerns. While very few wanted us to vote against the Government’s package outright, there was widespread anxiety lest by supporting it we would also be endorsing a continuation of the socialist programme.
At Shadow Cabinet on Monday 7 July, Jim Prior and Keith Joseph argued their conflicting cases. But the crucial question was still which Division Lobby the Party should enter, if any. By now the safest, if least glorious, course appeared to be to abstain. The risk was that such a tactic would dismay both wings of the Parliamentary Party and we could find ourselves with a three-way split.
Whatever the tactics to employ, I also needed to be clear in my own mind whether the Healey measures were a genuine step towards financial discipline or a smokescreen. So the day after the Shadow Cabinet discussion I had a working supper in my room in the House with Willie, Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and a number of economists and City experts, including people like Alan Walters, Brian Griffiths, Gordon Pepper and Sam Brittan who were in regular touch with me and on whose opinions I set a high value.[37] Although we would have to look at the package as a whole, especially the monetary and fiscal side, as Geoffrey said at the start of the evening, I came away feeling still less inclined to lend support to flimsy and possibly harmful proposals.
The White Paper, containing the details, was published on Friday 11 July. It was, as expected, a curate’s egg, containing measures like cash limits which we approved but not matching these with any real public expenditure cuts. The centrepiece was a £6 limit on pay increases for the coming year. The most astonishing omission was that the Government refused to publish the draft Bill it claimed to have drawn up which would introduce statutory controls if the voluntary limits were ignored. By the time it came to a vote, backbench and Shadow Cabinet opinion favoured abstention and this was now agreed. My own speech in the debate did not go particularly well — unsurprisingly, given the protean case I had to present. That might have been awkward, but Ted bailed me out by regretting that we were not supporting the Government and then refusing to back our critical amendment.
If one good thing came out of these travails, it was that the Shadow Cabinet was pushed towards an agreed line on incomes policy. This was that the conquest of inflation required that all economic policies must be pulling in the same anti-inflationary direction, in particular public spending and monetary policy. An incomes policy might play a useful part as one of a comprehensive package of policies, but was not to be considered as an alternative to the others, and could not be expected to achieve much on its own. While hardly qualifying as an original (or even true) economic insight, this at least provided a temporary refuge.
In any case, the Government’s July package was rightly judged to be insufficient to deal with the looming economic crisis. Inflation that summer reached an all-time high of 26.9 per cent.
We fled to Brittany in August for a holiday canal-cruising. For my holiday reading I took a book on British Prime Ministers. I was still away when Harold Wilson launched the incomes policy in a television broadcast asking people to give ‘a year for Britain’ by sticking to the £6 limit. In my absence, Willie Whitelaw replied the following evening giving this nonsense a rather warmer welcome than I could have been persuaded to do.
PROBLEMS OF OPPOSITION
In spite of the difficulties I had faced in the months since I became Leader, I approached that autumn’s Party Conference in reasonably good spirits. Ted and his friends seemed likely to continue being as difficult as possible, but my foreign visits had boosted my own standing.[38] The Government’s economic policy was in ruins. The Conservatives were 23 per cent ahead of Labour, according to a pre-Conference opinion poll. The task at Blackpool was to consolidate all this by showing that I could command the support of the Party in the country.
The Leader’s speech at a Party Conference is quite unlike the Conference speeches of other front-bench spokesmen. It has to cover a sufficiently wide number of subjects to avoid the criticism that one has ‘left out’ some burning issue. Yet each section of the speech has to have a thematic correspondence with all the other sections. Otherwise, you finish up with what I used to call a ‘Christmas tree’, on which pledges and achievements are hung and where each new topic is classically announced by the mind-numbing phrase ‘I now turn to…’. A powerful speech of the sort required to inspire the Party faithful, as well as easing the worries of the doubters, is in some ways more like a piece of poetry than prose. Not that one should be tempted to use flowery language, but rather that it is the ideas, sentiments and mood below the surface which count. Material which could easily form a clear and persuasive article may be altogether inappropriate for a speech. And although one has to scrutinize a text to ensure the removal of dangerous ambiguities, an effective speech may afterwards read almost lamely in cold print. I was to learn all these things over the next few years. But I had barely begun to grasp them when I started work on my first Leader’s Conference speech in 1975.
I told my speech-writers that I was not going to make just an economic speech. The economy had gone wrong because something else had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically. The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation. But when I discussed the kind of draft I wanted with Chris Patten and others from the Research Department, I felt they were just not getting the message I wanted to despatch. So I sat down at home over the weekend and wrote out sixty pages of my large handwriting. I found no difficulty: it flowed and flowed. But was it a speech? I was reading it all through and redrafting on Sunday morning when Woodrow Wyatt — a former Labour MP turned entrepreneur, author, sympathizer and close friend — telephoned. I told him what I was doing and he suggested I come round to his house for supper so that he could look at it. The experienced journalist’s eye saw all that I had not. So the two of us began to cut and shape and reorganize. By the time I arrived in Blackpool I had the beginnings of a Conference speech. I also found that Chris Patten and others had written new material. We married the two and a first draft was accordingly produced.
It was Ted who had overturned the convention that the Party Leader only turned up at the end of the Conference, descending from on high to deliver his speech to an adoring, servile throng. I took this a stage further. As well as arriving early, I also, particularly on this first occasion, used every opportunity to meet the constituency representatives, whose loyalty I knew I would have to earn. In fact, I carried this to what the Conference organizers considered extreme lengths by spending my time talking to people down in the body of the hall when I was expected to be up on the platform.
In between receptions and visits to the debates I would go in to see how the speech-writers were proceeding. Adam Ridley helped with the economics. Angus Maude, who like Woodrow had the journalist’s knack of making material bright and interesting simply by reordering it, also came in from time to time. Richard Ryder was the keeper of the text. Gordon Reece’s expertise was in coaching me on how to deliver it, seeing for example that I did not cut short applause after a clap line by moving on too quickly — a perennial temptation for a speaker who is inexperienced or lacks confidence.
But by Wednesday it was clear to me that none of those working away in my suite was what in the jargon is known as a ‘wordsmith’. We had the structure, the ideas and even the foundations for some good jokes. But we needed someone with a feel for the words themselves who could make the whole text flow along. Gordon suggested that the playwright Ronnie Millar, who had drafted material in the past for Ted’s broadcasts, was the man to help. So the whole text was urgently sent to Ronnie to be (what I would always later describe as) ‘Ronnie-fled’. It came back transformed. More precisely, it came back a speech. Then there was more cutting and retyping throughout Thursday night. It was about 4.30 on Friday morning when the process was complete and I felt I could turn in for an hour or so’s sleep.
Earlier on Thursday evening, when I was reading through the latest draft, I had been called to the telephone to speak to Willie Whitelaw. Willie told me that Ted had arrived and was staying at the same hotel (the Imperial). His suite was a couple of floors below mine. For several months a number of Ted’s friends had been urging him to bury the hatchet. Willie, doubtless prompted by them, thought that this would be a perfect time for a reconciliation. He explained to me that pride was involved in these matters and Ted could not really come and see me. Would I therefore come and see him? I replied at once that of course I would. Willie said that that was ‘absolutely splendid’ and that he would ring me back to confirm. Meanwhile, I plunged back into the draft. About an hour and a half went by with no telephone call. Since it was now about 10 o’clock and there was still much to do on my speech, I thought that we must really get on with our ‘reconciliation’. So I rang Willie and asked what was happening. I was then told that Ted had had second thoughts. The hatchet would evidently remain unburied.
The Winter Gardens is a grand popular palace in the self-confident style of the mid-Victorians when Blackpool really blossomed into a seaside resort. It has cafés, restaurants, bars, a theatre and the Empress Ballroom where the main proceedings of the Tory Conference took place. ‘Ballroom’ scarcely does justice to the ornate and opulent splendour of the vast hall with its high ceilings, ample balcony, gilt, stucco and red plush. It has warmth and atmosphere that seem to welcome a speaker, and I always preferred it to the cold and clinical neatness of more modern conference facilities. The climax of the Conservative Conference creates a special electricity at Blackpool. For my part, though I had had almost no sleep, I was confident of my text and resolved to put everything into its delivery.
The speech had two main purposes. First, it was to contain a conclusive indictment not just of Labour policies or even the Labour Government, but rather of the whole socialist approach which was destructive of freedom. Secondly, I would use it to spell out a Conservative vision that did not merely employ phrases like ‘the free market’ and ‘personal independence’ for form’s sake, but took them seriously as the foundation of future policy. Reading it through almost twenty years later, there is nothing substantial that I would change — least of all the section about my personal creed and convictions.
Let me give you my vision: a man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master — these are the British inheritance… We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery — not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped… I believe that, just as each of us has an obligation to make the best of his talents, so governments have an obligation to create the framework within which we can do so… We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stop and with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough’.
I was relieved when, as I got into my speech, I began to be interrupted by applause and cheers. Fun is often poked at the stage-management of Conservative Conferences. But one can distinguish, if one has a mind to do so, between support which is genuine and that which is contrived. This struck me as genuine. It was also quite unlike any reception I had ever had myself and, so the commentators said, quite unlike the Conferences of recent years. I had apparently struck a chord, not so much by the way I delivered the speech as by the self-confident Conservative sentiments it expressed. The representatives on the floor were hearing their own opinions expressed from the platform and they responded with great enthusiasm. I picked up some of their excitement in turn. On both the floor and the platform there was a sense that something new was happening.
But would it play outside the Empress Ballroom? I hoped, and in my heart believed, that the Daily Mail’s leader comment on the contents of the speech was correct: ‘If this is “lurching to the right”, as her critics claim, 90 per cent of the population lurched that way long ago.’
By the end of that first year as Leader of the Opposition I felt that I had found my feet. I still had difficulties adjusting to my new role in the House of Commons. But I had established a good rapport with the Party in Parliament and in the country. I was pleased with the way my little team in the office were working together. I only wished the Shadow Cabinet could be persuaded to do likewise.
I had also settled into a new domestic routine. Denis had officially retired from Burmah, though his other business interests kept him fully occupied. The twins, now aged twenty-two, were living very much their own lives: Carol was finishing her training as a solicitor and would take a job as a journalist in Australia in 1977; Mark was continuing his accountancy training. Flood Street remained our London home. I would entertain there or, during the week when the House was sitting, in my room at the House of Commons.
A fortnight after the Party Conference we moved into the old dower flat in Scotney Castle at Lamberhurst (we had stayed in the village after selling ‘The Mount’, renting a flat at Court Lodge in the interim). Our friend Thelma Cazalet-Keir, a former MP who also had a flat there, often gave lunch parties and seemed to know everyone for miles around. My old friend Edward Boyle had a house not far away. Other neighbours were the Longfords, Edward Crankshaw (the historian of the Habsburgs) and Malcolm Muggeridge. But it was around Thelma Cazalet-Keir’s table that the most stimulating discussions occurred. It was a break from the intense, hothouse atmosphere of Westminster party politics. I would often come away determined to find out more about some topic or widen my reading. For example, in the course of a discussion of communism, Malcolm Muggeridge said that its whole mentality was spelt out in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. ‘Read it,’ he told me. I did, found he was right, and went on to delve more deeply into Russian thought and literature.
Our first Christmas at Scotney passed pleasantly enough. But I had no doubt that 1976 would be a testing year. Britain was in the grip of a serious economic crisis that in due course would draw the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into a direct role in running the British economy. The Labour Government was ill-equipped to deal with this, not least because it was on the verge of losing its already slim parliamentary majority. But we on the Conservative benches had difficulties in turning this situation to our advantage, notably because the trade unions were seen by people as all-powerful. So we were constantly put at a disadvantage by the question: How would you deal with the unions? Or more ominously: How would the unions deal with you?
On top of this there had been widespread criticism of the performance of the Shadow Cabinet, including of course my own, and I decided that some changes were necessary. I reshuffled the pack on 15 January 1976. Reshuffles in Opposition had strong elements of farce. The layout of the Leader of the Opposition’s suite of rooms in the Commons was such that it was almost impossible to manage the entrances and exits of fortunate and unfortunate colleagues with suitable delicacy. Embarrassing encounters were inevitable. But on this occasion there was not too much blood on the carpet.
I was delighted that John Biffen was now prepared to join the Shadow Cabinet as Energy spokesman. He had been perhaps the most eloquent and effective critic on the backbenches at the time of the Heath Government U-turn and I welcomed his presence. If the promotion of John Biffen demonstrated that we were serious about correcting the corporatist mistakes of the past, so the promotion of Douglas Hurd, one of Ted’s closest aides, to be Party spokesman on Europe, showed that whatever Ted himself might feel I had no grudges against those who had served him. I made Willie Shadow Home Secretary in place of Ian Gilmour, whom I moved to Defence where he proved an extremely robust and effective Shadow spokesman; if he had limited himself to that, life would have been easier for all concerned. The rest was musical chairs. Patrick Jenkin I moved sideways to Social Services, replacing Norman Fowler who became Transport spokesman outside the Shadow Cabinet. Francis Pym returned after his illness to Agriculture.
In the remodelled Shadow Cabinet we faced three major strategic problems. The first, already mentioned, was the question, repeated mantra-like by the commentators, ‘How will you get on with the trade unions if you form a government?’ We urgently had to come up with a convincing answer because, as 1976 wore on, there seemed an increasing possibility of the Labour Government collapsing.
Our problem was made worse because we could not rely on many of the large industrialists prominent in the CBI, whose nerve had been badly shaken by the three-day week and the Heath Government’s fall. Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and I met the CBI leaders in January 1976. We heard an extraordinary tale. CBI members would apparently be ‘horrified’ if we did not support the Government’s incomes policy. They themselves were committed to supporting a second and possibly a third year of it. They did not like dividend controls and they were desperate to break free of price controls. This was all well and good. But it was obvious that they were not being entirely candid either with me or with themselves. Not only were their nerves shaken; in their demoralized state, they were positively attracted to wage controls — and indeed to the entire corporatist paraphernalia of the ‘little neddys’ (the NEDC sector working parties). These men were managers who had lost all hope of the possibility of ever really managing their companies again.
I could not go along with such defeatism. Still, I was convinced by Jim Prior’s arguments that we had to show that we could, if we formed the government, achieve some sort of working relationship with the unions. I took up the theme in a speech in early February to the Young Conservatives in Scarborough, noting that ‘the bigger majority we have, the more it would be obvious that many members of trade unions have voted Conservative’. It would therefore ‘not be difficult to work with responsible trade union leadership’. Admittedly, this did not get us very far.
The following Friday, 13 February, we held an all-day Shadow Cabinet discussion, much of which was based on a paper by Jim Prior. This urged us both to show the electorate that the TUC was being consulted in the formation of our policies, and to show the TUC that those policies would bring prosperity and jobs. But could this be achieved without sacrificing necessary reforms? I had my doubts, but I kept stressing that we were both willing and able to get on with the trade unions, using interviews and speeches in February to do so. This caused some rumbles of discontent among my supporters on the right. But it was not their opposition which finally scuttled this approach, but the failure of the TUC to respond in any meaningful way. A year after Jim’s paper, in 1977, I met the leaders of the TUC privately for informal talks. The meeting itself was amicable enough, but not surprisingly there was no real meeting of minds. In any case, the Grunwick dispute and the controversy over the closed shop had by then begun to cast clouds over our relations.[39] Whatever the tactical benefits of the ‘opening’ to the trade unions in which Jim believed, it bore no worthwhile fruit. And when the Winter of Discontent came along in 1978/79, our bad relations with the TUC were a positive advantage.
Our second problem was how to use to best effect the steady shrinkage and final disappearance in April 1976 of the Government’s original majority of three over all other parties combined. This was obviously a help to the Opposition, but it contained hidden difficulties. The press were inclined to exaggerate our chances of actually defeating a Government which, after all, still had a considerable margin of votes over the Conservatives. So when some measure squeaked through, our supporters in the country became depressed and resentful and looked for someone to blame.
More important, our occasional victories did not seem to lead anywhere. The Government remained insecurely in place. On Wednesday 11 February (on the first anniversary of my becoming Leader) we won a division on a motion to reduce the Industry Secretary Eric Varley’s salary by £1,000 — a formal means of expressing rejection of policies. Then, in the midst of the sterling crisis of March 1976, the Government was defeated as a result of a left-wing revolt on a vote on its public expenditure plans. And, as one does on these occasions, I demanded that the Prime Minister should resign. I never imagined that he would. But the following Tuesday Harold Wilson did just that, letting me know of his decision in a note I received just before the announcement was made.
I can say little in favour of either of Harold Wilson’s terms as Prime Minister. Doubtless he had principles, but they were so obscured by artful dodging that it was difficult for friends and opponents alike to decide what they might be. Yet I regretted his departure for several reasons. I had always liked him personally, I had appreciated his sense of humour, and I was aware of his many kindnesses. He was a master of Commons repartee, and I usually scored nothing better than a draw against him in the House.
This would continue to be the case with his successor, Jim Callaghan. He adopted in the House a manner that appeared avuncular, was in fact patronizing and made it hard for me to advance serious criticism of Government policy without appearing to nag. In a larger sense, Mr Callaghan in those years was a sort of moderate disguise for his left-wing party and its trade union backers. As a result, he articulated views and attitudes — on education, family policy, law and order etc. — which were never embodied in government policy. Tactically brilliant, he was strategically unsuccessful — until eventually in the Winter of Discontent the entire house of cards that was Labour moderation collapsed. Until then, however, he proved extremely talented as a party manager; he had a real feel for public opinion during the three years he was Prime Minister; and under the pressure of economic crisis, he made a brave public break with the Keynesian economics that had underpinned Government policy since the war. He was a formidable opponent.
Within weeks of Jim Callaghan’s becoming Prime Minister, relations between Government and Opposition chilled to freezing point as a result of Labour chicanery on a Bill nationalizing the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. After a long campaign by one of our backbenchers, Robin Maxwell-Hyslop, the Speaker had finally ruled that the Bill was ‘hybrid’ and so subject to special (and time-consuming) Commons procedures. Labour announced that they would ask the House to set aside the relevant Standing Orders, effectively nullifying the Speaker’s ruling. This was bad enough, but there was more to come. That night several MPs on each side were unwell and were paired. It so happened that Labour had one more sick MP than we had, and he was absent unpaired. There were two divisions that evening, the second following immediately after the first. The first was tied. By precedent the Speaker cast his vote for the status quo and the Government lost. But this revealed to the Government Whips that they were one vote short for the next — and crucial — division. So they went out and found a Labour MP who was paired — that is he had agreed with a Tory MP that neither of them would vote that night. They pushed him into the Labour lobby, as a result of which the Government won by a single vote.
Since the Labour Party had in fact lost its majority, the temptation to do this sort of thing was obviously great. But to nationalize two great industries by a single vote, breaking agreements into the bargain, was completely unacceptable. Tempers ran high on both sides. Michael Heseltine, our Industry spokesman who had led for the Opposition in the debate and felt personally affronted, grabbed the Mace and tried to present it to the Labour benches to symbolize their breach of the conventions.[40] This in itself was a grave offence to the order of the House, as Michael recognized as soon as he was calmed down by Jim Prior.
Less dramatically, I called off all pairing arrangements and withdrew cooperation over Commons business, demanding that the Government hold the division again. This was designed to cause the Government maximum difficulty: not only did all their MPs — however eminent — have to turn up for important divisions, but the Government could not know how long to allow for its business, much of which passes by agreement with the Opposition. Government business slowed down to a snail’s pace. This continued for almost a month until Mr Callaghan asked to see me and said somewhat huffily that we could not go on in this way. I told him that I could. In the end we agreed that the Government and Opposition Chief Whips should investigate what had happened, and when their report showed that we were in the right the Prime Minister conceded a second division on the disputed question. The Labour whips made certain that all their Members were present that night and accordingly won.
Against this background of ill-feeling, we decided to propose a Motion of No Confidence in the Government. Had we not done so, we would have been accused of failing to press home the attack on a Government which was resorting to chicanery because it had lost its majority. But the other side of the coin was that we would be made to look foolish if we failed, as we were very likely to do because the minority parties feared an early general election and anyway might be tempted by blandishments from the Government Whips. And, of course, this is what happened. It was not until almost three years later that the Government’s lack of a majority finally brought it down.
Meanwhile, the state of the economy was worsening. In February 1976 the Government had announced spending cuts of £1,600 million for 1977/78 and £3,000 million for 1978/79 (in today’s terms the equivalent of £6,000 million and £11,500 million). Impressive though this might sound, it amounted to no more than a modest cut in large planned increases. In December 1975 the International Monetary Fund had granted an application for stand-by credit to tide over Britain’s finances. Even so, in March there was a full-scale sterling crisis. The pound came under heavy pressure yet again in June, and more international stand-by credit had to be obtained, repayable in six months, failing which Britain agreed to apply again to the IMF. Inflation was falling by then, but large negative interest rates, combined with the failure to make real cuts in public spending and borrowing, prevented the Government from getting to grips with its underlying financial and economic problems. The new sterling crisis in September, which would lead to the humiliating abdication of control over our economy to the IMF, was the final result of an entirely justified loss of confidence by international markets in the Labour Government’s handling of the economy.
It might be expected that all of this would make an Opposition’s life easier, no matter how bad it was for the country. But that was not so.
And this was our third problem. For we were expected to support the Labour Government’s hesitant and belated moves to apply financial discipline. That was fair enough. But we were also under a more general pressure to be ‘responsible’ in dealing with the Labour Government’s self-contrived tribulations. However commendable, this inevitably cramped my attacking style.
For example, the 1976 Party Conference, held against the background of an uncontainable financial crisis, ought to have been a triumph. But it was not. All of us in Brighton were almost neurotically conscious of the need for responsibility and caution. Of course, in practice nothing I said about the Government’s economic policy was likely to give the financial markets a worse opinion of it than they already had. But interest rates were raised to 15 per cent on the day before my speech. I called a Shadow Cabinet meeting at Brighton to see what our stance should be before I did the final draft. Reggie Maudling helped me rewrite the already tortured economic passages. But it was a poor text and, probably because I lacked confidence in it, I delivered it badly in the uncongenial atmosphere of a cramped temporary hall — before going next door to the overflow of the Conference and delivering an off-the-cuff speech, praised by the few journalists who heard it but which, being untexted, sank without trace.
All in all, the regular Party politics of 1976 were frustrating and inconclusive. Despite the large Tory lead in the opinion polls and the disappearing Labour majority in the Commons, the Government managed to stagger on. Our opening to the TUC ran into the sand, and with the IMF superintending economic policy, the air of extreme crisis began to subside. At a more fundamental level, however, things were looking up.
ON THE HIGH GROUND
The Right Approach, which we published on the eve of the 1976 Conference, gave a persuasive account of the new Conservatism. Indeed, it still reads well and, stylistically at least, ranks with Change is our Ally as one of the best-written documents produced by the post-war Conservative Party. The credit for this must go to Chris Patten and Angus Maude who, with Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe and Jim Prior, drafted it.
It was helped by the fact that a truce had been reached in the internal arguments about where we all stood on incomes policy. A speech by Geoffrey Howe to the Bow Group (a Conservative ginger group) in May 1976 provided an agreed ‘line to take’ which was broadly followed in The Right Approach. The document pointed out that prices and incomes policies did not offer a long-term solution to inflation, while noting that it would be unwise ‘flatly and permanently’ to reject the idea, and nodding favourably in the direction of the West German system of ‘concerted action’. It was a fudge — but temporarily palatable.
But it was the fact that The Right Approach concentrated on the big general arguments, restating what differentiated our approach from that of socialism, that made it the success it was. It received a good press, not least because I and my colleagues put in considerable effort to explain it to the editors beforehand. The confident, authoritative tone of the opening sections pleasantly surprised the critics, lifting their vision above daily political infighting and the Government’s obsession with ever-changing ‘norms’.
The success of The Right Approach illustrates an important paradox about the whole of this period. For a variety of reasons, we were not a particularly successful Opposition in the ordinary sense of the word. Differences kept on emerging between us. We were usually unsuccessful in the House of Commons. We found it difficult to capitalize on the Government’s mistakes. Yet on the higher plane of belief, conviction and philosophy we were extremely effective. We were winning the battle of ideas which was the necessary preliminary not just to winning the election but to winning enduring popular support for the change of direction we wanted to make.
Keith Joseph’s speeches continued to put over the powerful themes he developed in the CPS. In March he delivered a speech in Harrow which took head-on the Government’s claim that high public expenditure was necessary for high levels of employment. In fact, as Keith pointed out:
Government overspending is a major and continued cause of unemployment. Immediate cuts in runaway state expenditure are essential if we are to save the economy now, and eventually restore a high and stable level of employment… Several Peters go on the dole for every Paul kept in a protected job. Several wealth-creating private-sector Peters are thrown out of work to keep each wealth-consuming public sector Paul in make-work. The saved jobs are identifiable and concentrated: the lost jobs are anonymous and dispersed.
I wrote the introduction to the published version of Keith’s Stockton Lecture, entitled Monetarism is Not Enough, which appeared a few months later. Since monetarism was far from accepted by most members of the Shadow Cabinet, this title was a deliberately bold way of expressing an important truth. It was ‘not enough’ to exert monetary control alone. That would indeed bring down inflation. But if we also failed to cut public expenditure and public borrowing, the whole burden of disinflation would then be placed on the wealth-creating private sector.
Alfred Sherman, who had assisted Keith with his Stockton Lecture, helped me draft the speech I made to the Zurich Economic Society on Monday 14 March 1977. Although delivered in Switzerland, it was aimed very much at the domestic audience. Alfred and I worked particularly hard on the text, which, in spite of the economic crisis in Britain, took an optimistic view of Britain’s future, arguing that:
The tide is beginning to turn against collectivism… and this turn is rooted in a revulsion against the sour fruit of socialist experience. The tide flows away from failure. But it will not automatically float us to our desired destination… It is up to us to give intellectual content and political direction… If we fail, the tide will be lost. But if it is taken, the last quarter of our century can initiate a new renaissance matching anything in our island’s long and outstanding history.
It played well in Zurich to the bankers, who were joined by Carol and my friends Douglas and Eleanor Glover — Douglas had been for many years the MP for Ormskirk. But it was how it played in London that mattered. In fact, it was extremely important that I should reach out for the high ground at such a time because there were more than enough difficulties on the low ground of Westminster politics.
I have already described some of the tactical difficulties which the economic crisis now engulfing Britain presented to us. A new one now arose. There was a growing crisis of confidence in Labour, and the polls showed us more than ten points ahead. By-election victories at Walsall North and Workington with big swings to us would shortly confirm the picture. It was at this juncture that talk of a coalition began again among those Conservatives determined at all costs to snatch defeat for me from the jaws of victory.
Harold Macmillan went on television to call for a ‘Government of National Unity’. Nor, it seemed, was there much doubt in his mind about who should be called back to lead it. I thought that I had better go and talk to him to see what he really thought, and it was arranged that we should meet in Maurice Macmillan’s house in Catherine Place. I arrived early and waited upstairs in the sitting room. I heard Maurice’s father arrive and say to him: ‘Has the call come?’ Maurice said: ‘No, not quite.’ He had to make do with me. Our meeting was pleasantly inconclusive, with Macmillan urging me not to be too critical of the Government at a time of crisis. And the only call was that eventually made to the IMF.
I now decided to make some changes of my own. Reggie Maudling’s performance as Shadow Foreign Secretary had long been a source of embarrassment. He did not agree with my approach to either the economy or foreign affairs; he was increasingly unwilling to disguise his differences with me; and he was laid back.[41] But when I told him that he had to go, he summoned up enough energy to be quite rude. Still, out he went.
I also wanted to move Michael Heseltine out of Industry and replace him with John Biffen. When not overreacting, Michael was an effective scourge of the Government, and he was certainly passionately interested in his brief at Industry. The trouble was that his outlook was completely different from mine, and from anything recognizably Conservative. For example, in January 1976 he made a speech criticizing Labour ministers for failing to meet sufficiently often ‘to agree and develop an industrial strategy for this nation’. His real criticism seemed to be that the Labour Party intervened in industry and picked losers whereas he would intervene and pick winners. The notion that the state did not and could not know who would win or lose, and that in intervening to back its own judgement with taxpayers’ money it was impoverishing the economy as a whole, seemed never to have occurred to him. Again, however, when I asked Michael to leave Industry and go to Environment, he said that he preferred not to. I sent my PPS, John Stanley, who knew him well, off to negotiate, and Michael reluctantly agreed to make way for John Biffen on the understanding that he would not have to be Secretary of State for the Environment once we were in power. That settled, the rest of the changes could now go ahead. I asked John Davies to take over from Reggie on Foreign Affairs, where until illness tragically struck him down, he worked hard and effectively.
It was important to have an energetic and effective front-bench team because there seemed a growing likelihood that we might soon be asked to become a government. On Wednesday 15 December Denis Healey introduced a further mini-Budget. He announced deep cuts in public spending and borrowing, and targets for the money supply (though expressed in terms of domestic credit expansion), as part of the deal agreed with the IMF. It was, in fact, a monetarist approach of the sort which Keith Joseph and I believed in, and it outflanked on the right those members of my own Shadow Cabinet who were still clinging to the outdated nostrums of Keynesian demand management. True to the tactic of not opposing measures necessary to deal with the crisis, we abstained in the vote on the measures. The IMF-imposed package was a turning point, for under the new financial discipline the economy began to recover. But in party political terms this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, discontent with the Government’s economic stewardship would diminish and support was likely to swing back towards Labour. On the other, we could now argue that socialism as an economic doctrine was totally discredited and that even the socialists were having to accept that reality was Conservative. The precise electoral implications of all that would have to be seen.
The political uncertainty made everyone jittery. The Government no longer had an overall majority. No one knew how members of the smaller parties might vote on any particular issue. It was frustrating enough even for those of us who were kept informed of the changing parliamentary arithmetic by the Whips. But it was all but incomprehensible to Conservative supporters in the country, who could not understand why we were unable to inflict a fatal defeat and bring about a general election. In fact, on Tuesday 22 February 1977 the Government was defeated on a guillotine on the Scotland and Wales Bill. The end of any immediate hope of achieving devolution in Scotland and Wales caused the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists to withdraw their support from the Government. A new parliamentary crisis — one in which the Government had ceased to have even a working majority — was upon us.
TOWARDS LIB-LABBERY
Before describing the outcome of that crisis, it is necessary to trace something of the background to the arguments about devolution, which would resurface with a vengeance later. For the devolution issue — at least until the final dénouement in March 1979– had brought almost as much grief to the Conservative Party as it had to Labour.
Ted had originally committed the Conservatives to devolution at the Scottish Party Conference in May 1968, following a surge in support for the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) — a short-lived surge, as it turned out. Ted’s ‘Perth Declaration’ came as a shock to most Conservatives, including those in Scotland. I was never happy with the policy and there was little enthusiasm for it among English Tories generally. But Ted pressed on. He set up a Party Committee under Alec Douglas-Home to draft a detailed plan. Alec’s proposals were agreed at the Scottish Party Conference on the eve of the 1970 general election, finding their way into the manifesto. (There was no commitment for devolution in Wales.) In office between 1970–74 the devolution commitment was, however, quietly dropped. Although the Kilbrandon Royal Commission on the Constitution, which proposed an elaborate devolution scheme, reported in October 1973, our February manifesto just committed the Party to study it. Labour on the other hand committed itself to legislate.
After the general election, Ted became convinced that the Party should offer devolution to Scotland as a way of winning back lost support and appointed Alick Buchanan-Smith as Shadow Scottish Secretary with a brief to do so. At the Scottish Party Conference in May, Ted resurrected our devolution policy, promising a Scottish Development Fund financed by North Sea oil and going beyond the Home proposals in finance. This was the policy upon which we fought the October 1974 election — which, notwithstanding what was proposed on devolution, saw our support in Scotland diminish further. Indeed, for the first time ever we finished in third place in the popular vote.
Anxieties about the way in which the Party had been bounced into the new policy had never been far below the surface. There was in particular a small group of Scottish Tory MPs, including my old friend Bettie Harvie-Anderson, who began to make their views known with increasing vigour after October 1974. They saw the proposal for a Scottish Assembly as one which would threaten the Union, not consolidate it. They also saw no reason to go along with Labour Party policy, let alone try to outbid it. The Scottish party itself was deeply split, with the critics of devolution representing much grassroots opinion pitted against the left-leaning Scottish party leadership of people like Alick Buchanan-Smith, Malcolm Rifkind and George Younger.
This was the situation which I inherited as Leader. Ted had impaled the Party on an extremely painful hook from which it would be my unenviable task to set it free. As an instinctive Unionist, I disliked the devolution commitment. But I realized that so much capital had by now been invested in it that I could not change the policy immediately. Had I done so, there would have been resignations which I simply could not afford. For the moment I would have to live with the commitment.
I asked Willie Whitelaw to chair a devolution policy group. In the Shadow Cabinet we duly discussed Willie’s proposals for a directly elected Assembly and agreed them, though without committing ourselves one way or the other to proportional representation.[42] Many of the Tory devolutionists wanted PR, fearing a future SNP victory in Scotland under the first-past-the-post electoral system and not being averse perhaps to the prospect of coalition politics, north or south of the border. On this I would not budge.
At the Scottish Party Conference in Dundee in May 1975 I repeated the commitment to a directly elected Assembly as briefly as I decently could. Talking to people at the Conference brought home more clearly than ever the fact that there were some Scottish Tories who bitterly disagreed with their leaders about the whole question. My unease grew — and so did that of other people. During the summer, English Tory MPs began to express doubts about Scottish devolution, partly because of its implications for the Union but also on sound tactical grounds. Scotland would be vastly over-represented in the Westminster Parliament if it had an Assembly as well as its present (somewhat generous) quota of MPs. Moreover, Labour was itself hopelessly divided over devolution, and it was clear that the tactical balance of advantage had swung away from proclaiming its virtues towards using it as an issue on which to embarrass the Government. I held a series of meetings with backbenchers. Their worries both echoed and increased mine. By the end of 1975 opinion on the backbenches was strongly against devolution. At the same time Alick Buchanan-Smith and Malcolm Rifkind, getting ever more out of touch, were flirting with the idea of a separate Scottish executive. That went yet further beyond the Home proposals and took us well into Labour territory.
The Government’s White Paper which proposed directly elected Assemblies for both Scotland and Wales was published in November. But the Shadow Cabinet was deeply divided as to how to deal with it. In the run-up to the debate on the White Paper in January 1976 Alick Buchanan-Smith and Ian Gilmour pressed for mention of the Conservative commitment to an Assembly in the wording of our Amendment, while the anti-devolutionists argued that if we avoided restating the commitment, abstentions from Labour opponents of devolution might give us victory. For the present, I bowed to Alick Buchanan-Smith’s line.
The arguments continued in 1976. Julian Amery and Maurice Macmillan proved effective leaders of the anti-devolution Tory camp. Willie devised a formula around which it was hoped the Party could unite, which I used at the Scottish Party Conference in Perth in May, repeating support for a directly elected Scottish Assembly, but making it clear that we would oppose any scheme based upon the Government’s White Paper. I added, for good measure: ‘I could not support an Assembly — none of us could support an Assembly — if we thought it was likely to jeopardize the Union.’ The Perth speech was well received, but of course it did not resolve the Party dispute.
I now began to harden our opposition. In November, when the Bill was published, I had dinner with a constitutional lawyer, Professor Yardley of Birmingham, to discuss its details. I also saw a good deal of the constitutional scholar Nevil Johnson. The more I heard and the more closely I read the Bill, the more dangerous it appeared to the Union. It was a prescription for bureaucracy and wrangling, and the idea that it would appease those Scots who wanted independence was becoming ever more absurd. Moreover, a private poll conducted for the Party in November 1976 confirmed my suspicion of the electoral arguments for devolution. Scottish opinion was highly fragmented: the Government’s devolution plans had only 22 per cent support less than our own (26 per cent), and less even than ‘no change’ (23 per cent). Only 14 per cent favoured independence. A far-reaching constitutional change required much more public support than that.
In November/December 1976, with the Bill about to come before the House for Second Reading, there were four long discussions in Shadow Cabinet about whether or not to impose a three-line whip against it. Our position could be fudged no longer. In addition to the overwhelming majority of our backbenchers, most Shadow ministers were by now opposed to devolution, at least on any lines similar to those contained in the White Paper. But there was a rooted belief among its supporters that devolution was the only way of heading off independence, and even some of those who disliked it intensely were wary of appearing to be anti-Scottish or of being seen to overrule the Scottish Tory leaders. In the end, however, in a marathon meeting ending in the early hours of Thursday 2 December we decided — with a significant dissenting minority including Alick Buchanan-Smith — that we would oppose the Bill on a three-line whip.
I had no illusion that this could be done without some resignations. I wanted to minimize them, but not at the expense of failing to lance the devolution boil. The morning after the Shadow Cabinet meeting Malcolm Rifkind, George Younger, John Corrie, Hector Munro, Hamish Gray and Russell Fairgrieve (Scottish Party Chairman) came to see me, saying that Alick Buchanan-Smith must be given a special dispensation to abstain in the vote or else all six of them would resign from their front-bench posts. I could not agree to this. To my irritation, what was said at the meeting appeared in the next morning’s Financial Times. The Tory Reform Group, which represented the left of the Party — when it was set up I had written in assumed innocence to Robert Carr, one of its founders, to ask precisely what it thought it was going to ‘reform’ — described us as ‘set to commit electoral suicide in Scotland’. The backbenchers felt very differently. There were loud cheers when the whipping decision was announced at the 1922 Committee that evening. It was, of course, no surprise when Ted Heath popped up four days later in Glasgow to say that he himself would not vote against the Bill. Alick Buchanan-Smith duly resigned as Shadow Scottish Secretary, along with Malcolm Rifkind. Four other front benchers wanted to go, but I refused their resignations and even allowed one of them to speak against our line in the debate and vote with the Government. No Party leader could have done more. To replace Alick Buchanan-Smith I moved Teddy Taylor, whose robust patriotism and soundness had long impressed me, from Trade to become Shadow Scottish Secretary.
It is generally an unnerving experience to have to speak from the front bench when you know that the debate, and in all probability the vote, will expose divisions on your own side. But the speech I had to give on Monday 13 December at the Bill’s Second Reading debate was exactly the sort of forensic operation that I enjoyed. I said as little as possible about our proposals, making only minimal reference to our residual commitment to an Assembly in Scotland, and saying a great deal about the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of the legislation. At the end of the debate twenty-seven Conservatives, including Ted Heath and Peter Walker, abstained. Five voted with the Government, including Alick Buchanan-Smith, Malcolm Rifkind and Hamish Gray. But Labour were also divided: twenty-nine Labour MPs abstained and ten voted with us. The forty-five-vote majority at Second Reading thus concealed great unhappiness on the Labour side as well as our own over the issue, which was to resurface. In the course of the debate the Prime Minister hinted that the Government would concede a referendum in Scotland and Wales — a commitment that in the end proved fatal to the whole devolution enterprise.
Francis Pym had by now taken over from Willie the task of front-bench spokesman on devolution. But he held radically different views from Teddy Taylor about how to treat the Bill, Francis wanting to make it ‘workable’ and Teddy wanting to bury it. In the end burial was its fate, as the Government’s guillotine motion was defeated by a majority of twenty-nine (with twenty-two Labour MPs voting with us) in February 1977. Suddenly the Government found itself deprived of Nationalist support, which in practice had given it a working majority while devolution was in the offing. Though Labour was to introduce new devolution legislation later in the year, their immediate prospects were encouragingly grim.
Precisely what would happen now was far from clear. On Thursday 17 March 1977 the Government refused to contest our motion to adjourn the House following a debate on public expenditure, for fear of a defection of left-wing Labour MPs. I promptly described this almost unheard-of breach of orderly procedure as ‘defeat with dishonour’. We tabled, as we had to, a Motion of No Confidence in the Government. If it succeeded, there would be a general election. In spite of my natural caution, I thought that it would. I used the speech I made to the Central Council at Torquay that Saturday to put the Party on the alert for an imminent campaign.
These were days of intense manoeuvring between the parties and their Whips. But I refused to engage in it. David Steel, the Liberal Party Leader, had already indicated that he might be prepared to keep Labour in power if the terms and conditions were judged right. Legislation for direct elections to the European Assembly on a proportional representation basis, ‘industrial democracy’ and tax reform were the topics publicly mentioned, but no one believed that the Liberals’ decision as to whether or not to support the Labour Government would be determined by secondary issues. For the Liberals there were two large questions they had to answer. Would they be blamed for keeping an unpopular Government in power? Or would they be credited with moderating its policies? I did not myself believe that they would sign up to a pact with the Government — certainly not unless there was a formal coalition with several Liberals as Cabinet ministers, which it was difficult to imagine the left of the Labour Party being prepared to tolerate.
In fact, my calculation of the political equation was broadly correct; but I left out the crucial element of vanity. Although the Lib-Lab Pact did the Liberals a good deal of harm, while doing Jim Callaghan no end of good, it did allow Liberal Party spokesmen the thrilling illusion that they were important.
After the vote on the Opposition Motion of No Confidence I was attacked in some quarters for not having been prepared to offer some kind of deal to the Liberals. But I was untempted by this beforehand and unrepentant afterwards. The undignified attempts to gain Liberal support for a minority Conservative Government after the February 1974 defeat conclusively showed the dangers. Moreover, it would be hard enough to drag the left wing of the Conservative Party and sections of the present Shadow Cabinet into supporting the measures which I knew would be required in government to set Britain right, without the burden of arrangements with the irresponsible eccentrics of the Liberal Party.
There was, of course, even less prospect of winning the support of the Nationalist parties, now that we had turned our back on devolution. The conservative-minded Ulster Unionists should have supported us. In Airey Neave and me they knew that they had strong supporters of the Union. Their demand for extra parliamentary seats at Westminster to make up for the Province’s under-representation was likely to be supported by any Government, because the case on grounds of equity was so strong. But the Unionists’ general resentment of the Heath Government’s abolition of Stormont — the devolved government that ran Ulster from 1920 to 1972, which they had dominated — and the personal bitterness of Enoch Powell, who was now representing South Down for the Unionists, meant that we could not in practice rely on their support.
In fact, there was very little that could be done by us to influence the vote. The minority parties would decide where they stood according to whether they thought that a general election was in their interests or not. In assessing that, each would look to the opinion polls. These suggested that a Conservative Government with an overall majority would be elected, which would greatly reduce the ability of a few disparate individuals to influence Government policy.
I was told some hours before I was due to propose the No Confidence Motion in the House that the Liberals would support the Government. I was astonished that they had signed up to such a bad deal. The pact would apparently last initially for the rest of the parliamentary session. The Liberals would not be members of the Government, but would liaise with individual ministers and send representatives to a joint consultative committee chaired by Michael Foot, the Leader of the House. The Government gave undertakings on direct elections to the European Assembly and devolution (accepting free votes on PR), promised to find time for a Liberal Bill on homelessness and agreed to limit the scope of planned legislation on local authority direct-labour organizations. It was a lacklustre shopping list. But, knowing that we were looking at certain defeat, with all the recriminations which would follow from the press and our supporters, it drained me of inspiration.
Angus Maude had helped me with the drafting of the speech. We decided to make it very short. In fact, it was too short. Moreover, it had been drafted when it seemed that we might be facing an immediate general election, so that positive statements of our policies had appeared preferable to detailed attacks on the Government’s. It received the worst press of any speech I have given. Of course, if I had read out the Westminster telephone directory and we had won at the end of the day no one would have bothered. But in politics, as in life, the ‘ifs’ offer no consolation. As I drove back to Flood Street later that night it was not my poor reception in the House or even the Government’s majority of twenty-four which most depressed me. It was the fact that after all our efforts the chance to begin turning Britain round seemed no nearer than before.
SHADOW CABINET-MAKING
My first task was to compose the Shadow Cabinet. I met Humphrey Atkins, the Chief Whip, in the Leader of the Opposition’s room in the House of Commons where we had an excellent dinner prepared by his wife Maggie. Humphrey Atkins had, of course, been Ted’s appointment, and occupying the position he did had not declared his support for one side or the other in the leadership contest. But he was amiable and amenable and, as Chief Whip, was possessed of the unique fund of knowledge and gossip so essential when making high political appointments. I told Humphrey that although there were some people, like Keith Joseph and Airey Neave, to whom I felt a special obligation, I did not want to make a clean sweep of the existing team. After the bitterness of the contest with Ted there had to be sufficient continuity to keep the Party together.
The more we talked, however, the clearer it became to both of us that all the other dispositions depended upon Ted. If he wished to serve under my leadership — and I had publicly committed myself to offering him the opportunity during the leadership campaign — he might decide that he wanted one of the three main Shadow posts, or possibly a post without portfolio. In fact, I privately hoped that he would not take up my offer at all. Although none of us knew how enduring his sense of injury would be, it was already hard to imagine Ted behaving like Alec Douglas-Home and fitting in as a loyal and distinguished member of his successor’s team. In any case, the newspapers were saying that Ted had no intention of serving. But I had to know for myself. I had thought of going to see him that evening, but all things considered it seemed better that Humphrey should make the first approach. Having sounded Ted out and received the impression that the speculation about his intentions was accurate, Humphrey reported back to me. But I had said I would make the offer, and the following morning I was driven to Ted’s house in Wilton Street to do it in person.
Tim Kitson, Ted’s PPS, showed me into the downstairs study, facing onto the garden. Ted was sitting at his desk. He did not get up; and I sat down without waiting to be asked. There was no point in pleasantries. I could guess what he thought about recent events and about me. Without offering a specific post, I asked him whether he would join the Shadow Cabinet. He said no, he would stay on the backbenches. The interview was effectively at an end. For my part, I had no wish to prolong the meeting. I knew that it must be painful and probably humiliating for him. But I also knew that if I walked out of Wilton Street past the assembled press after just a few minutes, the lunchtime news would be dominated by stories of snubs and splits. Also, I had not finished my coffee. So I spun things out a little by asking his views about Labour’s promised referendum on Britain’s continuing membership of the European Economic Community and, in particular, whether he would lead the Conservative campaign.[34] Again, he said no. I had done all I decently could to keep Ted within the fold and to ensure the meeting did not end too abruptly. But only five minutes or so had elapsed when I left Ted’s study. So Tim Kitson (who was equally aware of the risk of bad publicity) and I talked inconsequentially for another quarter of an hour to fill out the time before I left the house. Respecting, as I thought, Ted’s confidence, I did not even tell Airey Neave, who was setting up my office, the details of what had transpired. I made it public later only in order to set the record straight.[35] I returned to the House of Commons and told Humphrey Atkins that Ted would indeed not be in the Shadow Cabinet.
Next, Robert Carr, who had been acting Leader of the Party during the leadership campaign, wanted to see me. He had, of course, been close to Ted and was identified with the corporatist tendency in the Party. I could well understand if he did not relish the prospect of serving under me. In fact, when I saw him he made it quite clear that the only post he would accept was that of Shadow Foreign Secretary. I said that I could not promise him that. Not only was I unwilling to have my hands tied before I had properly considered the shape of the team as a whole: I was not convinced that Robert Carr would have a place in it.
By contrast, Willie Whitelaw definitely had. He had demonstrated his popularity in the leadership election. He was immensely experienced and his presence would be a reassuring guarantee to many on the backbenches that evolution rather than revolution was the order of the day. Perhaps both of us already sensed that we could form a strong political partnership, our strengths and weaknesses complementing one another’s. Although I could not as yet offer him a particular portfolio, I asked Willie to be Deputy Leader of the Party, and he accepted. But his loyalty was not contingent on that; he was loyal from the first.
There was much male chauvinist hilarity — ‘Give us a kiss, Maggie,’ etc. — when I came into the Chamber to hear the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, make a statement. I took my place on the front bench between Willie and Robert Carr. Jim Prior, Geoffrey Howe and John Peyton — the other defeated leadership candidates — were also there, though Ted was not. I received the wittily barbed congratulations of the Prime Minister and replied somewhat less wittily to them. Harold Wilson was at his still incomparable best in the House. As I listened, I reflected that as a new Leader of a shaken and still badly split party, and as a woman striving for dominance in this noisy, boisterous, masculine world, I could expect difficulties ahead. And so it proved.
That evening I chaired the Shadow Cabinet for the first time. The meeting had a slightly unreal atmosphere since none of those present had yet been formally reappointed, and some would not be. Quintin Hailsham congratulated me on the Shadow Cabinet’s behalf and pledged their loyalty and cooperation. I felt that he at least probably meant it. I said that Willie had agreed to be Deputy Leader and that Ted had turned down my offer of a place in the Shadow Cabinet. Willie then said that he had accepted the Deputy Leadership at once and looked forward to serving in this capacity. The formalities thus indicated a kind of armed truce between the competing views and personalities.
The following evening, I made my first appearance as Leader at the 1922 Committee meeting. My relations with the wider Parliamentary Party were much easier than with the Shadow Cabinet. As I entered, everyone rose to their feet. Edward du Cann presented me with an unsigned Valentine card (a day early) which would join the other Valentines and roses that accumulated at Flood Street. In addressing the 1922 Committee it is the Leader’s mood and bearing rather than the content of a speech which matter most. But they seemed to like the message as well — namely, the need to distinguish the Conservative approach clearly from that of the socialists, to return to traditional values of independence and self-help and to challenge the assumption that the onward march of the Left was irreversible. I sat down amid much clapping, banging of desks and that curious deep braying with which the Parliamentary Conservative Party expresses its approval.
In the next few days my time was taken up in meeting journalists, discussing arrangements for my office and fulfilling long-standing constituency engagements. There were few opportunities to sit down with Humphrey and Willie to discuss Shadow Cabinet membership. In any case, I wanted the weekend to make my final decisions. But the delay encouraged speculation. According to the press a battle was under way to prevent Keith Joseph becoming Shadow Chancellor. In fact, he did not ask for the position nor did I offer it.
My Shadow Cabinet-making was smoothed by the fact that Peter Thomas and Geoffrey Rippon made it clear that they did not want to continue. That meant two more vacancies to play with. I spent Saturday and Sunday at Flood Street making and remaking the list, consulting Humphrey or Willie on particular points. On Monday I made the appointments in a series of meetings with colleagues at my room in the Commons.
Willie was the first to come in. I gave him a roving brief which included the issue of devolution — which already spelt political difficulties he, as both a former Chief Whip and a Scot representing an English seat, might be able to tackle. Then I saw Keith Joseph, whom I asked to continue with his Shadow Cabinet responsibility for policy and research. In a sense, Willie and Keith were the two key figures, one providing the political brawn and the other the policy-making brains of the team. I also felt that Keith must continue his intellectual crusade from the Centre for Policy Studies for wider understanding and acceptance of free-enterprise economics. I was under no illusion that my victory in the leadership election represented a wholesale conversion. Our ability to change Party policy, as the first step towards making changes in government, depended upon using our positions to change minds. Unfortunately, on his forays into the universities Keith was to find a readier hearing from the Militant Tendency in his avowedly left-wing audiences than he would from the cynical tendency among his colleagues.
My next visitor was Reggie Maudling. I suspect that, although he had made it clear publicly that he was willing to serve, he was as surprised as the press when I made him Shadow Foreign Secretary. Though widely praised at the time, this was not a good appointment. I had always admired Reggie’s intellect and regretted that he had had to resign over the Poulson affair in 1972. Also bringing Reggie back to deal with foreign affairs appeared a convincing answer to those who had contrasted Ted’s experience with my own lack of it. But it soon became clear that Reggie was not prepared to modify his own views, a problem compounded by the fact that, more broadly, he had an only thinly disguised contempt for the monetarist approach which Keith and I wanted to pursue. I would have done better to appoint someone who shared my instincts on defence and foreign policy.
Still less of a soulmate was Ian Gilmour. I suspect that when he learned that I wanted to see him he expected the worst. He had been a strong partisan of Ted, and he lacked the support or standing which might have made him politically costly to dispense with. But I valued his intelligence. I felt that he could make a useful contribution as long as he was kept out of an economic post, to which in spite of his later reputation as one of the foremost advocates of ‘reflation’ neither his training nor his aptitudes suited him. I asked him to be Shadow Home Secretary.
Michael Heseltine, who now came in to see me, had a much more flamboyant personality than Ian’s, although they shared many of the same views. He too had long been a Heath supporter, but it had always been assumed that the cause he most strongly advocated was his own. My campaign team believed him to have been an abstainer in the first round of the leadership contest. To do Michael credit, he was always refreshingly open about his ambitions. I asked him to stay on as Shadow Industry Secretary. It was a portfolio which fascinated him and which gave full scope to his talent for Opposition, since it fell to him to fight the Labour Government’s main nationalization proposals. What I did not fully grasp at this time was how ideologically committed he was to an interventionist approach in industry which I could not accept.
After a lunchtime meeting of small businessmen at the National Chamber of Trade, where I made my first public speech as Leader, I returned to my room at the House for more Shadow Cabinet carpentry. I asked Peter Carrington to stay on as Leader of the House of Lords. Again, I had no illusions about Peter’s position in the Tory Party’s political spectrum: he was not of my way of thinking. He had, of course, been in Ted’s inner circle making the political decisions about the miners’ strike and the February 1974 election. But since we lost office he had proved an extremely effective Opposition Leader in the Upper House, and as a former Defence Minister and an international businessman he had wide experience of foreign affairs. Admittedly, he was likely in Shadow Cabinet to be on the opposite side to me on economic policy. But he never allowed economic disagreements to get in the way of his more general responsibilities. He brought style, experience, wit and — politically incorrect as the thought may be — a touch of class.
Geoffrey Howe had his own droll wit. But in most other ways he was a very different politician from my other appointments that day. I would in any case have felt obliged to give Geoffrey a Shadow Cabinet post, simply because he was a candidate against me and I wished to unify the Party as much as possible. But it was a calculated gamble to make him Shadow Chancellor. I knew that as an immensely hard-working lawyer he would make the effort required to master his brief. I also knew that, in spite of his role in implementing the Heath Government’s prices and incomes policy as Minister for Trade and Consumer Affairs, he had a well-deserved reputation as a believer in free-market economics. As such, he was very much a rarity in the upper ranks of the Conservative Party. Once I had decided that Keith would be better employed overseeing policy rethinking, Geoffrey seemed the best candidate. Very few who come new to such a demanding portfolio find it trouble-free. Geoffrey was to have a difficult time both trying to resolve our divisions on economic policy and in defending our case in the House. I would be put under a good deal of pressure to remove him and find someone better able to take on the Chancellor, Denis Healey. But I knew that Geoffrey’s difficulties, like mine, were more the result of circumstances than lack of native talent. By the time our period in Opposition was approaching its end he had become indispensable.
After careful thought I decided to keep Jim Prior as Shadow Employment Secretary. This was rightly taken as a signal that I had no immediate plans for a fundamental reform of trade union law. Jim’s suitability for the job is only understandable in the light of the Heath Government’s poisoned legacy. In the 1972 Industrial Relations Act Ted had attempted the most far-reaching reforms of trade union law since 1906: its failure made Conservatives right across the Party very wary of pursuing the same course again. Moreover, after Ted had taken on the militants and lost in February 1974, the main question in the public’s mind was whether any Conservative Government could establish a working relationship with the unions, which were now seen as having an effective veto on policy. It was Jim’s strong conviction that our aim should be to establish both that we accepted the existing trade union law, with perhaps a few alterations, and that we saw the union leaders as people with whom we could deal.
Such an approach made more sense at the beginning of the period in Opposition than at the end of it. But in any case it left two important questions unanswered. First, how would we react if events demonstrated that the theoretical shortcomings of the present law, as amended by the socialists, were having malign practical effects? (The circumstances of the Grunwick dispute[36] and of the strikes of the winter of 1978/79 would demonstrate precisely that.) Secondly, since the trade union leaders were at least as much socialist politicians as they were workers’ representatives, why should they cooperate willingly with Conservatives? There was a basic incompatibility between their economic approach and ours, and indeed between their political allegiance and ours. So how valuable would any amount of personal diplomacy between Jim and the TUC turn out to be? Probably not very. For the present, though, he was the right man in the right position.
Airey Neave had already privately told me that the only portfolio he wanted was that of Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. His intelligence contacts, proven physical courage and shrewdness amply qualified him for this testing and largely thankless task.
The other appointments were less strategically crucial. Quintin Hailsham had no portfolio, but was in effect the Lord Chancellor in waiting. Francis Pym stayed on at Agriculture, though a few months later he had to give this up on health grounds. My old friend Patrick Jenkin I kept at Energy. Norman St John-Stevas, whom I had got to know from my days at the Department of Education and who was both a lively wit and one of my few open supporters on the second ballot of the leadership election, shadowed Education. Norman Fowler, a former journalist and a Member for the politically crucial West Midlands, came in as Shadow Social Services Secretary. I had no clear view about where precisely any of these stood in relation to the balance of opinion between left and right of the Party. But in appointing Tim Raison as Shadow Environment Secretary I knew that I was promoting someone associated with the left of centre, but who was tough-minded, thoughtful and knowledgeable about social policy in general. I believed he would be an asset. Two offers of Shadow Cabinet posts were turned down — one to John Biffen, who would in fact join later, and the other to Edward du Cann, whose early campaign team had provided the nucleus of mine. Edward stayed on as Chairman of the 1922 Committee, which was probably far more useful to me.
The next day (Tuesday) I had some less pleasant business to transact. At 10.30 Peter Walker came in. We had known each other since he had succeeded me as candidate for Dartford. But those days were long gone and there was no personal warmth between us. He had been one of the most effective members of Ted’s inner circle, and he opposed with vigour and eloquence the approach which Keith and I were committed to adopt. He clearly had to go. I found it a distasteful business breaking such news; over the years it was one of the things I most dreaded. But at least Peter can hardly have expected anything else. He became a consistent critic on the backbenches.
I confirmed in a discussion with Geoffrey Rippon, who now came into my room, that he did not wish to serve: that suited us both. I then saw Nicholas Scott, who had shadowed Housing. He too was on the left of the Party. The conversation was made slightly easier by the fact that I had absorbed the Housing portfolio into the wider Environment one. His job had been shot from under him.
I left to last the interview with Robert Carr. I told him that I had given the Shadow Foreign Secretary post to Reggie Maudling, which he presumably knew already. Perhaps he had just bid too high, or perhaps he might have been persuaded to stay in another capacity. But I was not keen to have another strong opponent in any position on the team. So I made it clear that I could not ask him to be in the Shadow Cabinet. After a difficult few minutes he left and told the press of his worries about ‘those people who seem to think [monetary policy] is some automatic mechanism’. Not too many guesses were required about who ‘those people’ were.
The published Shadow Cabinet list (to which Peter Thorneycroft as Party Chairman and Angus Maude as Chairman of the Conservative Research Department would later be added) was rightly seen as a compromise. As such, it annoyed the left of the Party who disliked my dropping of Robert Carr, Peter Walker and Nicholas Scott: it also disappointed the right who worried about Reggie Maudling’s return, the fact that Geoffrey and not Keith was Shadow Chancellor and the lack of any new right-wing faces from the backbenches. In fact, given the fragility as yet of my position and the need to express a balance of opinion in the Shadow Cabinet to bring the Party together, it was a relatively successful operation. It created a Treasury team that shared my and Keith’s views on the free-market economy, shifted the balance of opinion within the Shadow Cabinet as a whole somewhat in my direction, and yet gave grounds for loyalty to those I had retained from Ted’s regime. I felt I could expect support (within limits) from such a team, but I knew I could not assume agreement — even on basic principles.
MACHINE POLITICS
It is said that when Ted Heath was offered a Junior Whip’s job in 1950, he asked the advice of Lord Swinton, the Tory Party’s elder statesman, as to whether he should accept it. ‘Get in on the machine — at however squalid a level,’ said Lord Swinton. Ted had taken this advice to heart, and I, in my still vulnerable position as head of the machine, could not afford to neglect it. So I set out to get some control of it.
Airey Neave and I decided that there would have to be changes at Conservative Central Office. Constitutionally, Central Office is the Leader of the Party’s office: events during the leadership campaign had convinced me that it would be very difficult for some of those there to act in that capacity under me.
At Central Office I wanted as Chairman an effective administrator, one preferably with business connections, who would be loyal to me. I had always admired Peter Thorneycroft and in retrospect I thought that his courageous resignation on the issue of public expenditure in 1958 had signalled a wrong turning for the post-war Conservative Party. As part of that older generation which had been leading the Party when I first entered Parliament, and as chairman of several large companies, Peter seemed to me to fit the bill. But how to persuade him? It turned out that Willie Whitelaw was related to him, and Willie persuaded him to take the job. It would have taxed the energy of a much younger man, for the Party Chairman has to keep up morale even in the lowest periods, of which there would be several. Peter had the added problem that at this stage most of the Party in the country accepted my leadership only on sufferance. This would gradually change after the 1975 Party Conference. But it took a good deal longer — and some painful and controversial personnel changes — before I felt that the leading figures at Central Office had any real commitment to me. Peter gradually replaced them with loyalists; I never enquired how.
Alistair McAlpine’s arrival as Party Treasurer certainly helped. The existing Treasurers, Lords Ashdown and Chelmer, told me that they had decided to resign. Airey Neave had suggested that Alistair, who had been Treasurer for ‘Britain in Europe’ during the referendum campaign, had the personality, energy and connections to do the job. He was right. Although a staunch Tory from a family of Tories, Alistair had to turn himself into something of a politician overnight. I told him that he would have to give up his German Mercedes for a British Jaguar and he immediately complied. But I had not prepared him for the host of minor but irritating examples of obstructive behaviour which confronted him at Central Office, nor for the great difficulties he would encounter in trying to persuade businessmen that in spite of the years of Heathite corporatism we were still a free-enterprise Party worth supporting.
Some people expected me to make even more substantial changes at the Conservative Research Department. The CRD was in theory a department of Central Office, but largely because of its geographical separateness (in Old Queen Street) and its intellectually distinguished past, it had a specially important role, particularly in Opposition. In a sense, the Centre for Policy Studies had been set up as an alternative to the Research Department. Now that I was Leader, however, the CRD and the CPS would have to work together. The Director of the Research Department, Chris Patten, I knew to be on the left of the Party. Much bitterness and rivalry had built up between the CRD and the CPS. In the eyes of many on the right it was precisely the consensus-oriented, generalist approach epitomized by the CRD which had left us directionless and — in the words of Keith Joseph — ‘stranded on the middle ground’. I decided to replace Ian Gilmour with Angus Maude as Chairman of the Research Department, who would work with Keith on policy, but leave Chris Patten as Director and Adam Ridley, Ted’s former economic adviser, as his deputy. These were good decisions. I came to have a high regard for the work of the department, particularly when it was fulfilling its role as Secretariat to the Shadow Cabinet rather than devising policy. Even though there were occasional squalls, the CRD moved further and further in the direction that Keith and I were taking.
Meanwhile, Airey Neave and I had to assemble a small personal staff who would run my office. The day after the leadership election result I met the secretaries who had worked for Ted. They were clearly upset, and I detected some hostility. This was quite understandable; indeed, I thought it a tribute to their loyalty. But I asked them to stay on if they felt able to, and most of them did, for a time at least. In those days the Leader of the Opposition had the present Home Secretary’s office in the House. There was one large room with a small ante-room for two secretaries, and some other small rooms upstairs. There was not enough space, and as summer approached it all became very hot and airless. (It was only later in the summer of 1976 that we moved into the rather more spacious accommodation previously used as the flat of the Serjeant-at-Arms, where the secretaries I had inherited from Ted were joined by my lively and reliable constituency secretary Alison Ward.)
A flood of letters followed my becoming Leader, sometimes 800 a day. Girls would come across from Central Office to help sort out the post, but usually this was the task of my four secretaries, who sat on the floor in the main room opening envelopes and categorizing the letters. They did their best, but it was hopelessly unsystematic. Then Alistair McAlpine suggested that I ask David Wolfson to take charge of the correspondence section. Alistair thought that if David, as the man responsible for the mail-order section of Great Universal Stores, could not bring order out of this chaos no one could. In fact, both in Opposition and then at 10 Downing Street David’s talents were put to a good deal wider use than sorting the mail: he gave insights into what business was thinking, provided important contacts and proved particularly adept at smoothing ruffled political feathers.
But I also needed a full-time head of my office, who had to be industrious, dependable and, with the number of speeches, articles and letters to draft, above all literate. It was my old friend and colleague, providentially translated to the editorship of the Daily Telegraph, Bill Deedes who suggested Richard Ryder, then working on Peterborough, the Telegraph’s respectable gossip column. Richard joined me at the end of April — to begin work alongside Caroline Stephens, one of the secretaries I inherited from Ted, who would later become Caroline Ryder.
Richard Ryder ran this small office very effectively on a shoestring. It was a happy ship, and some entertaining characters served on their way to better things. Matthew Parris, who was in charge of replying to my correspondence, showed a talent for the sketch-writing he was later to perform for The Times when, on the eve of the 1979 election campaign, answering an aggrieved letter from a woman rejecting our policy of selling council houses and simultaneously complaining about what was wrong with her own, he told her that she was fortunate to have been given a home paid for by the rest of us out of taxation. Like Queen Victoria, I was not amused — especially when the Daily Mirror published the letter at the very beginning of the campaign. But Matthew survived.
A month after Richard’s arrival Gordon Reece, on secondment from EMI for a year, joined my full-time staff to help in dealing with the press and much else. Gordon was a Godsend. An ebullient former TV producer whose good humour never failed, he was able to jolly me along to accept things I would have rejected from other people. His view was that in getting my message across we must not concentrate simply on heavyweight newspapers, The Times and the Daily Telegraph, but be just as concerned about the mid-market populars, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express and — the real revolution — about the Sun and the News of the World. Moreover, he believed that even newspapers which supported the Labour Party in their editorial line would be prepared to give us fair treatment if we made a real attempt to provide them with interesting copy. He was right on both counts. The Sun and the News of the World were crucial in communicating Conservative values to traditionally non-Conservative voters. The left wing Sunday Mirror also gave me fair and full coverage, however critical the comments. Gordon regularly talked to the editors. But he also persuaded me that the person they really wanted to see and hear from was me. So, whatever the other demands on my diary, when Gordon said that we must have lunch with such-and-such an editor, that was the priority.
Gordon also performed another invaluable service. Every politician has to decide how much he or she is prepared to change manner and appearance for the sake of the media. It may sound grittily honourable to refuse to make any concessions, but such an attitude in a public figure is most likely to betray a lack of seriousness about winning power or even, paradoxically, the pride that apes humility. When Gordon suggested some changes in my style of hair and clothes in order to make a better impression, he was calling upon his experience in television. ‘Avoid lots of jewellery near the face. Edges look good on television. Watch out for background colours which clash with your outfit.’ It was quite an education.
There was also the matter of my voice. In the House of Commons one has to speak over the din to get a hearing. This is more difficult the higher the pitch of one’s voice, because in increasing its volume one automatically goes up the register. This poses an obvious problem for most women. Somehow one has to learn to project the voice without shrieking. Even outside the House, when addressing an audience my voice was naturally high-pitched, which can easily become grating. I had been told about this in earlier years and had deliberately tried to lower its tone. The result, unfortunately, whatever improvement there may have been for the audience, was to give me a sore throat — an even greater problem for a regular public speaker. Gordon found me an expert who knew that the first thing to do was to get your breathing right, and then to speak not from the back of the throat but from the front of the mouth. She was a genius. Her sympathetic understanding for my difficulties, which was a great help, was only matched by that for her ailing cat. Unfortunately, the cat would sometimes fall sick just before my lesson and force its cancellation. Fortunately, I too like cats. And so we finished the course.
On one occasion Gordon took me to meet Sir Laurence Olivier to see whether he had any tips which might be useful. He was quite complimentary, telling me that I had a good gaze out to the audience, which was important, and that my voice was perfectly all right, which — no thanks to the cat — it now probably was. Above all, he understood the difference between speaking someone else’s script and climbing into someone else’s character, and delivering a speech reflecting one’s own views and projecting one’s own personality. Indeed, as a result of our conversation, I became interested in the differences as well as the similarities between the techniques of the political speaker and the actor. For example, I was later told that most stage actors would rather hear an audience’s reaction without seeing the audience, buried in the gloom. But I always insisted that from any public platform I must be able to see as well as hear how my words were being received. I could then speed up, or slow down, or throw in what we later came to call a ‘clap line’ (i.e. a line which had previously got loud applause) if the speech seemed to be going over badly. So Gordon would always try to ensure that even in a darkened hall I could see the front rows of the audience when I spoke.
Getting all these things right took me several months. But all in all the general system never let me down. The real political tests of Opposition Leadership, however, still lay ahead.
SHACKLES OF THE RECENT PAST
My first real experience of the public aspects of being Leader of the Opposition came when I visited Scotland on Friday 21 February. From the time that I stepped off the aircraft at Edinburgh Airport, where a waggish piper played ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’, I received an enthusiastic Scottish welcome. Everywhere huge crowds turned out to see me. My planned walkabout in the centre of Edinburgh had to be abandoned altogether. Several hundred people had been expected, but 3,000 packed into the arcade of the St James’s Centre near Princes Street and there were only half a dozen policemen trying in vain to hold them back. Several women fainted and others were in tears. There was a real risk of tragedy as crowds were forced against the shop windows. It was impossible to go on and I had to take refuge in a jeweller’s shop, where I saw an opal (my birthstone) that I later had made into a ring. The occasion was a demonstration both to the police and to me that from now on there could be nothing amateurish about the way in which the logistics of my visits were organized.
I could always be sure of a friendly reception from grassroots Scottish Tories, whose embattled position seems to sharpen their zeal. More generally, however, the honeymoon did not last long and ordinary political life resumed with a vengeance. The opinion polls, which in February had given the Conservatives a 4 percentage point lead over Labour, showed a 2 per cent Labour lead just a month later — not statistically significant perhaps, but a check on any premature tendency to euphoria. It also soon became clear that powerful elements in the Party were out to make trouble for me. In early April Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath made speeches to a conference of Young Conservatives, warning against shifting the Conservative Party to the right. The European referendum campaign placed the focus on European issues, and this in turn gave a fillip to advocates of coalition government. All this created more difficulties for me.
My first major parliamentary performance in which I crossed swords with Harold Wilson, in a debate on the economy on Thursday 22 May, was heavily and justly criticized for not spelling out convincingly the Conservative alternative. The difficulty was that at this point we had no credible alternative to offer. Imprisoned by the requirement of defending the indefensible record of the Heath Government, we were unable as yet to break through to a proper free-market alternative.
Even so, however, on this and several other occasions I did not make a good speech. Leading for the Opposition in set-piece debates, one is not able to make a wide-ranging speech on the basis of a few notes, something which I was good at and liked. A front-bench speech has to be a fully prepared text, available to the press. But at the same time it has to be very different from the kind of texted speech that is appropriate to a large sympathetic audience where the only interruptions are from applause. And, of course, you need to have acquired considerable authority in the House — the sort usually accorded only to Prime Ministers, and not always to them — to get through reading a text without a barrage of barracking and interruption.
The root of all our problems, however, lay in the unresolved contradictions of policy. With Keith Joseph and Angus Maude having overall responsibility, I could have confidence that the policy-making process would now be organized along lines which I approved. But the decisive influences would never be theoretical or technical but rather personal and political. However long we argued about the rights and wrongs of public expenditure, incomes policy and industrial subsidies, some of us (probably a minority) in the Shadow Cabinet firmly believed that the free-market approach would work, while the others were equally convinced that it would not — or at least that it would only work at a political and social cost that would be unsustainable. Similarly, we were not discussing these things in a vacuum. The Labour Government in those years was producing a succession of economic packages. Each one of these forced us to define where we stood, to agree on the grounds on which we opposed their policies and to sharpen our alternative approach.
In March 1975 we discussed a paper from Keith and Angus on policy-making. They proposed involving both backbench committees and sympathetic outside experts; and this was accepted. The number of policy groups continued to multiply, and some were more useful than others. They were generally chaired by the relevant front-bench spokesmen. Geoffrey Howe’s Economic Reconstruction Group was the main forum for hashing over economic policy. From time to time, there would be whole-day Shadow Cabinet policy discussions, which I myself would chair. The full Shadow Cabinet approved, rather than devised, policy on the basis of papers put to it by the chief Shadow spokesmen and their policy groups.
The Centre for Policy Studies and a range of outside advisers, particularly on economic matters, fed in ideas and suggestions to Keith and me (Keith also had a number of lunchtime meetings with other Shadow Cabinet colleagues on policy). And on top of all that I would sometimes advance a new policy in a speech or interview — not always to the applause of my colleagues.
As a system of decision-taking the structure had a somewhat ramshackle feel to it. But then, no amount of institutional neatness could resolve the fundamental questions we had to decide. The fact that by the time we took office in May 1979 so many of the big issues had been satisfactorily resolved, and Shadow ministers had as clear an idea of their priorities as any incoming post-war British Government, shows that in the most important sense this policymaking system ‘worked’.
The foremost policy issue was how to deal with inflation, which soared to 26.9 per cent in August 1975 before beginning to fall, going below 10 per cent in January 1978. Time and again inflation registered in the opinion polls as the public’s top priority for action, though often in tandem with strong support for pay policy as supposedly the only means of fighting it. But unemployment was never far behind, and one of the main attacks we had to face from Labour was that our policy for disinflation would result in still higher unemployment.
Discussion of how inflation was caused and cured also necessarily involved making a judgement about the Heath Government. If inflation was the result of an increase in the money supply, which takes approximately eighteen months to work through in the form of higher prices, then the prime responsibility for the high inflation during the first eighteen months or so of the Labour Government should be laid at the door of the Conservatives. If, however, the cause of high inflation was excessive wage awards after the collapse of the previous Conservative Government’s incomes policy and Labour’s abdication of authority to the trade unions, then political life in Opposition would be easier. We might not have any credible solutions to offer, but we could at least blame everything on the Government. This approach was likely to be particularly favoured by those of my colleagues who prided themselves on being sceptics about all kinds of economic theory. In fact, the case that the Heath Government’s monetary incontinence was to blame for inflation seemed to me convincingly argued by Alan Walters, whose devastating indictment and predictions, first published in June 1972, were circulated by Keith as background for a discussion with Shadow Cabinet colleagues in March 1975. But if I had publicly accepted this it would have provoked even more trouble from Ted Heath and his supporters.
Our failure to be explicit about the overriding importance of monetary policy did, however, open up our flank to attack on incomes policy. For if wage rises were the cause of inflation, as our rhetoric in defence of the Heath years implied, then the question arose: how would we in Government be able to contain such rises? Would we do so by a statutory policy — which would not only move us towards the very interventionist approach I wanted to avoid, but would also run up against fierce trade union opposition? Or by a voluntary policy — on which Labour’s traditional links with the unions and willingness to trade socialist measures to cement them put us at a political disadvantage?
The October 1974 Conservative manifesto had committed the Party to seek a voluntary policy for prices and incomes, with the qualification that it might be necessary to move to a statutory policy if voluntary support were not achieved. I could only gradually wean the Party away from this position. My task was made more difficult both by the fact that wages and prices were soaring alarmingly, and by Ted Heath and Peter Walker putting me under heavy public pressure to support successive stages of the Labour Government’s incomes policy. In an interview with Robin Day in May 1975 I said that under some circumstances a pay freeze might be necessary, but not as a prelude to a permanent statutory incomes policy. Wages had, after all, been growing at some 30 per cent a year since Labour took office. But I never saw even a short wage freeze as having more than a transitional role in any realistic strategy to bring down inflation, which must be based on control of the money supply and government borrowing. In fact, there were already some early signs that the Government had woken up to the need for some financial discipline. The April 1975 Budget announced cuts in planned spending levels and raised the basic rate of income tax by two pence — to 35 per cent — in order to reduce the swelling deficit which was expected to reach £9,000 million in 1975/76.
This did not prevent the Government accepting the hugely ambitious and ill-conceived Ryder plan to rescue British Leyland with £ 1,400 million of taxpayers’ money. Yet, however irresponsible the decision, it was the Conservative Opposition which had most difficulty in responding. BL was a crucial source of income and jobs in West Midlands seats which we had to win in order to form a government. But resources committed to an unprofitable nationalized car industry must have been diverted, through taxation or higher interest rates or inflation, from successful businesses, among other taxpayers. Keith Joseph, Michael Heseltine and I all gave non-committal reactions in public statements, but the variation in tone, particularly between Keith and Michael, was obvious to all.
If public expenditure was one aspect of the debate about counter-inflation policy, trade union power was another. On this matter, the line-up in the Shadow Cabinet over these years was slightly different from that on the question of voluntary/statutory incomes policy versus ‘free collective bargaining’. Geoffrey Howe was the most consistently hawkish on trade unions. Right from the beginning, he emphasized in our discussions the need to shift the balance of power in industrial relations: indeed, I suspect that he would ideally have liked to get back to the Industrial Relations Act framework which he had devised. Keith Joseph and I shared that approach, though I remained extremely wary about committing ourselves to more changes than we could deliver. Jim Prior and most of the other Shadow Cabinet members could be found in the opposite camp.
On incomes policy, however, Geoffrey and Jim, supported by Ian Gilmour, were the strongest advocates of some kind of national understanding with the trade unions. Geoffrey’s view was that we should seek to emulate the alleged successes of the West German approach of ‘concerted action’, whose purpose was to educate ‘both sides’ of industry in the realities of the state of the economy and win some kind of consent to limit wages. This did not in itself involve a renunciation of monetarism, to which Geoffrey, in contrast with Jim and Ian, was increasingly committed. But it did involve a large element of corporatism and centralized economic decision-making, to which Keith was fiercely opposed and which I too disliked.
The most convinced opponent of monetarism and all its works was Reggie Maudling who, when he put his mind to it, actually had the grasp of economics to give his arguments weight. Reggie was the most ardently committed to a statutory incomes policy. As he put it in a dissenting paper to the Shadow Cabinet in May: ‘To the economic purist, no doubt, prices are only a symptom of inflation, but to us as politicians they are the real problem, because it is rising prices that are breaking the country in half.’ With such divisions in our midst it is not surprising that for much of the time our economic policies were felt to lack coherence.
The difficulties I had faced in the Economic Debate on Thursday 22 May — when for these reasons I had not been able to present a coherent alternative to Government policy — persuaded me of the urgent need to sort out our position. Further public differences confirmed this. In June I spoke to the Welsh Party Conference in Aberystwyth expressing strong reservations about statutory wage controls: the same day Reggie Maudling spoke in Chislehurst implying that we might support a statutory policy. A few days later Keith made a speech casting severe doubt on the value of even a wage freeze, suggesting that it would be used as an excuse for not cutting public spending and taking the other necessary economic steps. On the same day Peter Walker called for a statutory pay policy — and was himself rebutted by Keith, who said bluntly that wage freezes did not work. Not surprisingly, Conservative splits figured large in the press. The fact that these divisions were more than replicated on the Government side was of only limited comfort.
I decided that even if we could not as yet all agree an analysis, we must at least agree to stick to a form of words that would paper over the cracks. After we had heard Denis Healey’s 1 July statement foreshadowing Labour’s introduction of an incomes policy based on sanctions against employers rather than unions, Shadow Cabinet met to discuss our reaction. The crucial question was whether, when it came to a vote in the House, we should support the Government, abstain or vote against. The problem was compounded by the fact that the Chancellor had only given a preliminary indication of what he intended. We would have to wait for the promised White Paper before we even knew whether the policy could properly be described as voluntary or statutory. On the other hand, we did not want to be in the position of flatly refusing support for measures to bring down inflation, even if they included a statutory policy.
Now the Chief Whip told us that there were at least thirty Tory MPs who were opposed in principle to statutory controls and would expect us to oppose them too. I summed up as best I could. Our public line at this stage must be that although the Party would always support measures it believed to be in the national interest, the Chancellor’s statement was high on intentions and low on details. Moreover, he had said nothing about public expenditure cuts or about dropping policies for further nationalization, both of which were directly relevant to the control of inflation.
I found from my own soundings that Conservative opinion in the country was strongly opposed to employers having to bear the brunt of anti-inflation measures. Our supporters wanted us to be tough on Labour. The following day the Backbench Finance Committee met and Bill Shelton reported to me their concerns. While very few wanted us to vote against the Government’s package outright, there was widespread anxiety lest by supporting it we would also be endorsing a continuation of the socialist programme.
At Shadow Cabinet on Monday 7 July, Jim Prior and Keith Joseph argued their conflicting cases. But the crucial question was still which Division Lobby the Party should enter, if any. By now the safest, if least glorious, course appeared to be to abstain. The risk was that such a tactic would dismay both wings of the Parliamentary Party and we could find ourselves with a three-way split.
Whatever the tactics to employ, I also needed to be clear in my own mind whether the Healey measures were a genuine step towards financial discipline or a smokescreen. So the day after the Shadow Cabinet discussion I had a working supper in my room in the House with Willie, Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and a number of economists and City experts, including people like Alan Walters, Brian Griffiths, Gordon Pepper and Sam Brittan who were in regular touch with me and on whose opinions I set a high value.[37] Although we would have to look at the package as a whole, especially the monetary and fiscal side, as Geoffrey said at the start of the evening, I came away feeling still less inclined to lend support to flimsy and possibly harmful proposals.
The White Paper, containing the details, was published on Friday 11 July. It was, as expected, a curate’s egg, containing measures like cash limits which we approved but not matching these with any real public expenditure cuts. The centrepiece was a £6 limit on pay increases for the coming year. The most astonishing omission was that the Government refused to publish the draft Bill it claimed to have drawn up which would introduce statutory controls if the voluntary limits were ignored. By the time it came to a vote, backbench and Shadow Cabinet opinion favoured abstention and this was now agreed. My own speech in the debate did not go particularly well — unsurprisingly, given the protean case I had to present. That might have been awkward, but Ted bailed me out by regretting that we were not supporting the Government and then refusing to back our critical amendment.
If one good thing came out of these travails, it was that the Shadow Cabinet was pushed towards an agreed line on incomes policy. This was that the conquest of inflation required that all economic policies must be pulling in the same anti-inflationary direction, in particular public spending and monetary policy. An incomes policy might play a useful part as one of a comprehensive package of policies, but was not to be considered as an alternative to the others, and could not be expected to achieve much on its own. While hardly qualifying as an original (or even true) economic insight, this at least provided a temporary refuge.
In any case, the Government’s July package was rightly judged to be insufficient to deal with the looming economic crisis. Inflation that summer reached an all-time high of 26.9 per cent.
We fled to Brittany in August for a holiday canal-cruising. For my holiday reading I took a book on British Prime Ministers. I was still away when Harold Wilson launched the incomes policy in a television broadcast asking people to give ‘a year for Britain’ by sticking to the £6 limit. In my absence, Willie Whitelaw replied the following evening giving this nonsense a rather warmer welcome than I could have been persuaded to do.
PROBLEMS OF OPPOSITION
In spite of the difficulties I had faced in the months since I became Leader, I approached that autumn’s Party Conference in reasonably good spirits. Ted and his friends seemed likely to continue being as difficult as possible, but my foreign visits had boosted my own standing.[38] The Government’s economic policy was in ruins. The Conservatives were 23 per cent ahead of Labour, according to a pre-Conference opinion poll. The task at Blackpool was to consolidate all this by showing that I could command the support of the Party in the country.
The Leader’s speech at a Party Conference is quite unlike the Conference speeches of other front-bench spokesmen. It has to cover a sufficiently wide number of subjects to avoid the criticism that one has ‘left out’ some burning issue. Yet each section of the speech has to have a thematic correspondence with all the other sections. Otherwise, you finish up with what I used to call a ‘Christmas tree’, on which pledges and achievements are hung and where each new topic is classically announced by the mind-numbing phrase ‘I now turn to…’. A powerful speech of the sort required to inspire the Party faithful, as well as easing the worries of the doubters, is in some ways more like a piece of poetry than prose. Not that one should be tempted to use flowery language, but rather that it is the ideas, sentiments and mood below the surface which count. Material which could easily form a clear and persuasive article may be altogether inappropriate for a speech. And although one has to scrutinize a text to ensure the removal of dangerous ambiguities, an effective speech may afterwards read almost lamely in cold print. I was to learn all these things over the next few years. But I had barely begun to grasp them when I started work on my first Leader’s Conference speech in 1975.
I told my speech-writers that I was not going to make just an economic speech. The economy had gone wrong because something else had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically. The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation. But when I discussed the kind of draft I wanted with Chris Patten and others from the Research Department, I felt they were just not getting the message I wanted to despatch. So I sat down at home over the weekend and wrote out sixty pages of my large handwriting. I found no difficulty: it flowed and flowed. But was it a speech? I was reading it all through and redrafting on Sunday morning when Woodrow Wyatt — a former Labour MP turned entrepreneur, author, sympathizer and close friend — telephoned. I told him what I was doing and he suggested I come round to his house for supper so that he could look at it. The experienced journalist’s eye saw all that I had not. So the two of us began to cut and shape and reorganize. By the time I arrived in Blackpool I had the beginnings of a Conference speech. I also found that Chris Patten and others had written new material. We married the two and a first draft was accordingly produced.
It was Ted who had overturned the convention that the Party Leader only turned up at the end of the Conference, descending from on high to deliver his speech to an adoring, servile throng. I took this a stage further. As well as arriving early, I also, particularly on this first occasion, used every opportunity to meet the constituency representatives, whose loyalty I knew I would have to earn. In fact, I carried this to what the Conference organizers considered extreme lengths by spending my time talking to people down in the body of the hall when I was expected to be up on the platform.
In between receptions and visits to the debates I would go in to see how the speech-writers were proceeding. Adam Ridley helped with the economics. Angus Maude, who like Woodrow had the journalist’s knack of making material bright and interesting simply by reordering it, also came in from time to time. Richard Ryder was the keeper of the text. Gordon Reece’s expertise was in coaching me on how to deliver it, seeing for example that I did not cut short applause after a clap line by moving on too quickly — a perennial temptation for a speaker who is inexperienced or lacks confidence.
But by Wednesday it was clear to me that none of those working away in my suite was what in the jargon is known as a ‘wordsmith’. We had the structure, the ideas and even the foundations for some good jokes. But we needed someone with a feel for the words themselves who could make the whole text flow along. Gordon suggested that the playwright Ronnie Millar, who had drafted material in the past for Ted’s broadcasts, was the man to help. So the whole text was urgently sent to Ronnie to be (what I would always later describe as) ‘Ronnie-fled’. It came back transformed. More precisely, it came back a speech. Then there was more cutting and retyping throughout Thursday night. It was about 4.30 on Friday morning when the process was complete and I felt I could turn in for an hour or so’s sleep.
Earlier on Thursday evening, when I was reading through the latest draft, I had been called to the telephone to speak to Willie Whitelaw. Willie told me that Ted had arrived and was staying at the same hotel (the Imperial). His suite was a couple of floors below mine. For several months a number of Ted’s friends had been urging him to bury the hatchet. Willie, doubtless prompted by them, thought that this would be a perfect time for a reconciliation. He explained to me that pride was involved in these matters and Ted could not really come and see me. Would I therefore come and see him? I replied at once that of course I would. Willie said that that was ‘absolutely splendid’ and that he would ring me back to confirm. Meanwhile, I plunged back into the draft. About an hour and a half went by with no telephone call. Since it was now about 10 o’clock and there was still much to do on my speech, I thought that we must really get on with our ‘reconciliation’. So I rang Willie and asked what was happening. I was then told that Ted had had second thoughts. The hatchet would evidently remain unburied.
The Winter Gardens is a grand popular palace in the self-confident style of the mid-Victorians when Blackpool really blossomed into a seaside resort. It has cafés, restaurants, bars, a theatre and the Empress Ballroom where the main proceedings of the Tory Conference took place. ‘Ballroom’ scarcely does justice to the ornate and opulent splendour of the vast hall with its high ceilings, ample balcony, gilt, stucco and red plush. It has warmth and atmosphere that seem to welcome a speaker, and I always preferred it to the cold and clinical neatness of more modern conference facilities. The climax of the Conservative Conference creates a special electricity at Blackpool. For my part, though I had had almost no sleep, I was confident of my text and resolved to put everything into its delivery.
The speech had two main purposes. First, it was to contain a conclusive indictment not just of Labour policies or even the Labour Government, but rather of the whole socialist approach which was destructive of freedom. Secondly, I would use it to spell out a Conservative vision that did not merely employ phrases like ‘the free market’ and ‘personal independence’ for form’s sake, but took them seriously as the foundation of future policy. Reading it through almost twenty years later, there is nothing substantial that I would change — least of all the section about my personal creed and convictions.
Let me give you my vision: a man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master — these are the British inheritance… We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery — not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped… I believe that, just as each of us has an obligation to make the best of his talents, so governments have an obligation to create the framework within which we can do so… We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stop and with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough’.
I was relieved when, as I got into my speech, I began to be interrupted by applause and cheers. Fun is often poked at the stage-management of Conservative Conferences. But one can distinguish, if one has a mind to do so, between support which is genuine and that which is contrived. This struck me as genuine. It was also quite unlike any reception I had ever had myself and, so the commentators said, quite unlike the Conferences of recent years. I had apparently struck a chord, not so much by the way I delivered the speech as by the self-confident Conservative sentiments it expressed. The representatives on the floor were hearing their own opinions expressed from the platform and they responded with great enthusiasm. I picked up some of their excitement in turn. On both the floor and the platform there was a sense that something new was happening.
But would it play outside the Empress Ballroom? I hoped, and in my heart believed, that the Daily Mail’s leader comment on the contents of the speech was correct: ‘If this is “lurching to the right”, as her critics claim, 90 per cent of the population lurched that way long ago.’
By the end of that first year as Leader of the Opposition I felt that I had found my feet. I still had difficulties adjusting to my new role in the House of Commons. But I had established a good rapport with the Party in Parliament and in the country. I was pleased with the way my little team in the office were working together. I only wished the Shadow Cabinet could be persuaded to do likewise.
I had also settled into a new domestic routine. Denis had officially retired from Burmah, though his other business interests kept him fully occupied. The twins, now aged twenty-two, were living very much their own lives: Carol was finishing her training as a solicitor and would take a job as a journalist in Australia in 1977; Mark was continuing his accountancy training. Flood Street remained our London home. I would entertain there or, during the week when the House was sitting, in my room at the House of Commons.
A fortnight after the Party Conference we moved into the old dower flat in Scotney Castle at Lamberhurst (we had stayed in the village after selling ‘The Mount’, renting a flat at Court Lodge in the interim). Our friend Thelma Cazalet-Keir, a former MP who also had a flat there, often gave lunch parties and seemed to know everyone for miles around. My old friend Edward Boyle had a house not far away. Other neighbours were the Longfords, Edward Crankshaw (the historian of the Habsburgs) and Malcolm Muggeridge. But it was around Thelma Cazalet-Keir’s table that the most stimulating discussions occurred. It was a break from the intense, hothouse atmosphere of Westminster party politics. I would often come away determined to find out more about some topic or widen my reading. For example, in the course of a discussion of communism, Malcolm Muggeridge said that its whole mentality was spelt out in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. ‘Read it,’ he told me. I did, found he was right, and went on to delve more deeply into Russian thought and literature.
Our first Christmas at Scotney passed pleasantly enough. But I had no doubt that 1976 would be a testing year. Britain was in the grip of a serious economic crisis that in due course would draw the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into a direct role in running the British economy. The Labour Government was ill-equipped to deal with this, not least because it was on the verge of losing its already slim parliamentary majority. But we on the Conservative benches had difficulties in turning this situation to our advantage, notably because the trade unions were seen by people as all-powerful. So we were constantly put at a disadvantage by the question: How would you deal with the unions? Or more ominously: How would the unions deal with you?
On top of this there had been widespread criticism of the performance of the Shadow Cabinet, including of course my own, and I decided that some changes were necessary. I reshuffled the pack on 15 January 1976. Reshuffles in Opposition had strong elements of farce. The layout of the Leader of the Opposition’s suite of rooms in the Commons was such that it was almost impossible to manage the entrances and exits of fortunate and unfortunate colleagues with suitable delicacy. Embarrassing encounters were inevitable. But on this occasion there was not too much blood on the carpet.
I was delighted that John Biffen was now prepared to join the Shadow Cabinet as Energy spokesman. He had been perhaps the most eloquent and effective critic on the backbenches at the time of the Heath Government U-turn and I welcomed his presence. If the promotion of John Biffen demonstrated that we were serious about correcting the corporatist mistakes of the past, so the promotion of Douglas Hurd, one of Ted’s closest aides, to be Party spokesman on Europe, showed that whatever Ted himself might feel I had no grudges against those who had served him. I made Willie Shadow Home Secretary in place of Ian Gilmour, whom I moved to Defence where he proved an extremely robust and effective Shadow spokesman; if he had limited himself to that, life would have been easier for all concerned. The rest was musical chairs. Patrick Jenkin I moved sideways to Social Services, replacing Norman Fowler who became Transport spokesman outside the Shadow Cabinet. Francis Pym returned after his illness to Agriculture.
In the remodelled Shadow Cabinet we faced three major strategic problems. The first, already mentioned, was the question, repeated mantra-like by the commentators, ‘How will you get on with the trade unions if you form a government?’ We urgently had to come up with a convincing answer because, as 1976 wore on, there seemed an increasing possibility of the Labour Government collapsing.
Our problem was made worse because we could not rely on many of the large industrialists prominent in the CBI, whose nerve had been badly shaken by the three-day week and the Heath Government’s fall. Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and I met the CBI leaders in January 1976. We heard an extraordinary tale. CBI members would apparently be ‘horrified’ if we did not support the Government’s incomes policy. They themselves were committed to supporting a second and possibly a third year of it. They did not like dividend controls and they were desperate to break free of price controls. This was all well and good. But it was obvious that they were not being entirely candid either with me or with themselves. Not only were their nerves shaken; in their demoralized state, they were positively attracted to wage controls — and indeed to the entire corporatist paraphernalia of the ‘little neddys’ (the NEDC sector working parties). These men were managers who had lost all hope of the possibility of ever really managing their companies again.
I could not go along with such defeatism. Still, I was convinced by Jim Prior’s arguments that we had to show that we could, if we formed the government, achieve some sort of working relationship with the unions. I took up the theme in a speech in early February to the Young Conservatives in Scarborough, noting that ‘the bigger majority we have, the more it would be obvious that many members of trade unions have voted Conservative’. It would therefore ‘not be difficult to work with responsible trade union leadership’. Admittedly, this did not get us very far.
The following Friday, 13 February, we held an all-day Shadow Cabinet discussion, much of which was based on a paper by Jim Prior. This urged us both to show the electorate that the TUC was being consulted in the formation of our policies, and to show the TUC that those policies would bring prosperity and jobs. But could this be achieved without sacrificing necessary reforms? I had my doubts, but I kept stressing that we were both willing and able to get on with the trade unions, using interviews and speeches in February to do so. This caused some rumbles of discontent among my supporters on the right. But it was not their opposition which finally scuttled this approach, but the failure of the TUC to respond in any meaningful way. A year after Jim’s paper, in 1977, I met the leaders of the TUC privately for informal talks. The meeting itself was amicable enough, but not surprisingly there was no real meeting of minds. In any case, the Grunwick dispute and the controversy over the closed shop had by then begun to cast clouds over our relations.[39] Whatever the tactical benefits of the ‘opening’ to the trade unions in which Jim believed, it bore no worthwhile fruit. And when the Winter of Discontent came along in 1978/79, our bad relations with the TUC were a positive advantage.
Our second problem was how to use to best effect the steady shrinkage and final disappearance in April 1976 of the Government’s original majority of three over all other parties combined. This was obviously a help to the Opposition, but it contained hidden difficulties. The press were inclined to exaggerate our chances of actually defeating a Government which, after all, still had a considerable margin of votes over the Conservatives. So when some measure squeaked through, our supporters in the country became depressed and resentful and looked for someone to blame.
More important, our occasional victories did not seem to lead anywhere. The Government remained insecurely in place. On Wednesday 11 February (on the first anniversary of my becoming Leader) we won a division on a motion to reduce the Industry Secretary Eric Varley’s salary by £1,000 — a formal means of expressing rejection of policies. Then, in the midst of the sterling crisis of March 1976, the Government was defeated as a result of a left-wing revolt on a vote on its public expenditure plans. And, as one does on these occasions, I demanded that the Prime Minister should resign. I never imagined that he would. But the following Tuesday Harold Wilson did just that, letting me know of his decision in a note I received just before the announcement was made.
I can say little in favour of either of Harold Wilson’s terms as Prime Minister. Doubtless he had principles, but they were so obscured by artful dodging that it was difficult for friends and opponents alike to decide what they might be. Yet I regretted his departure for several reasons. I had always liked him personally, I had appreciated his sense of humour, and I was aware of his many kindnesses. He was a master of Commons repartee, and I usually scored nothing better than a draw against him in the House.
This would continue to be the case with his successor, Jim Callaghan. He adopted in the House a manner that appeared avuncular, was in fact patronizing and made it hard for me to advance serious criticism of Government policy without appearing to nag. In a larger sense, Mr Callaghan in those years was a sort of moderate disguise for his left-wing party and its trade union backers. As a result, he articulated views and attitudes — on education, family policy, law and order etc. — which were never embodied in government policy. Tactically brilliant, he was strategically unsuccessful — until eventually in the Winter of Discontent the entire house of cards that was Labour moderation collapsed. Until then, however, he proved extremely talented as a party manager; he had a real feel for public opinion during the three years he was Prime Minister; and under the pressure of economic crisis, he made a brave public break with the Keynesian economics that had underpinned Government policy since the war. He was a formidable opponent.
Within weeks of Jim Callaghan’s becoming Prime Minister, relations between Government and Opposition chilled to freezing point as a result of Labour chicanery on a Bill nationalizing the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. After a long campaign by one of our backbenchers, Robin Maxwell-Hyslop, the Speaker had finally ruled that the Bill was ‘hybrid’ and so subject to special (and time-consuming) Commons procedures. Labour announced that they would ask the House to set aside the relevant Standing Orders, effectively nullifying the Speaker’s ruling. This was bad enough, but there was more to come. That night several MPs on each side were unwell and were paired. It so happened that Labour had one more sick MP than we had, and he was absent unpaired. There were two divisions that evening, the second following immediately after the first. The first was tied. By precedent the Speaker cast his vote for the status quo and the Government lost. But this revealed to the Government Whips that they were one vote short for the next — and crucial — division. So they went out and found a Labour MP who was paired — that is he had agreed with a Tory MP that neither of them would vote that night. They pushed him into the Labour lobby, as a result of which the Government won by a single vote.
Since the Labour Party had in fact lost its majority, the temptation to do this sort of thing was obviously great. But to nationalize two great industries by a single vote, breaking agreements into the bargain, was completely unacceptable. Tempers ran high on both sides. Michael Heseltine, our Industry spokesman who had led for the Opposition in the debate and felt personally affronted, grabbed the Mace and tried to present it to the Labour benches to symbolize their breach of the conventions.[40] This in itself was a grave offence to the order of the House, as Michael recognized as soon as he was calmed down by Jim Prior.
Less dramatically, I called off all pairing arrangements and withdrew cooperation over Commons business, demanding that the Government hold the division again. This was designed to cause the Government maximum difficulty: not only did all their MPs — however eminent — have to turn up for important divisions, but the Government could not know how long to allow for its business, much of which passes by agreement with the Opposition. Government business slowed down to a snail’s pace. This continued for almost a month until Mr Callaghan asked to see me and said somewhat huffily that we could not go on in this way. I told him that I could. In the end we agreed that the Government and Opposition Chief Whips should investigate what had happened, and when their report showed that we were in the right the Prime Minister conceded a second division on the disputed question. The Labour whips made certain that all their Members were present that night and accordingly won.
Against this background of ill-feeling, we decided to propose a Motion of No Confidence in the Government. Had we not done so, we would have been accused of failing to press home the attack on a Government which was resorting to chicanery because it had lost its majority. But the other side of the coin was that we would be made to look foolish if we failed, as we were very likely to do because the minority parties feared an early general election and anyway might be tempted by blandishments from the Government Whips. And, of course, this is what happened. It was not until almost three years later that the Government’s lack of a majority finally brought it down.
Meanwhile, the state of the economy was worsening. In February 1976 the Government had announced spending cuts of £1,600 million for 1977/78 and £3,000 million for 1978/79 (in today’s terms the equivalent of £6,000 million and £11,500 million). Impressive though this might sound, it amounted to no more than a modest cut in large planned increases. In December 1975 the International Monetary Fund had granted an application for stand-by credit to tide over Britain’s finances. Even so, in March there was a full-scale sterling crisis. The pound came under heavy pressure yet again in June, and more international stand-by credit had to be obtained, repayable in six months, failing which Britain agreed to apply again to the IMF. Inflation was falling by then, but large negative interest rates, combined with the failure to make real cuts in public spending and borrowing, prevented the Government from getting to grips with its underlying financial and economic problems. The new sterling crisis in September, which would lead to the humiliating abdication of control over our economy to the IMF, was the final result of an entirely justified loss of confidence by international markets in the Labour Government’s handling of the economy.
It might be expected that all of this would make an Opposition’s life easier, no matter how bad it was for the country. But that was not so.
And this was our third problem. For we were expected to support the Labour Government’s hesitant and belated moves to apply financial discipline. That was fair enough. But we were also under a more general pressure to be ‘responsible’ in dealing with the Labour Government’s self-contrived tribulations. However commendable, this inevitably cramped my attacking style.
For example, the 1976 Party Conference, held against the background of an uncontainable financial crisis, ought to have been a triumph. But it was not. All of us in Brighton were almost neurotically conscious of the need for responsibility and caution. Of course, in practice nothing I said about the Government’s economic policy was likely to give the financial markets a worse opinion of it than they already had. But interest rates were raised to 15 per cent on the day before my speech. I called a Shadow Cabinet meeting at Brighton to see what our stance should be before I did the final draft. Reggie Maudling helped me rewrite the already tortured economic passages. But it was a poor text and, probably because I lacked confidence in it, I delivered it badly in the uncongenial atmosphere of a cramped temporary hall — before going next door to the overflow of the Conference and delivering an off-the-cuff speech, praised by the few journalists who heard it but which, being untexted, sank without trace.
All in all, the regular Party politics of 1976 were frustrating and inconclusive. Despite the large Tory lead in the opinion polls and the disappearing Labour majority in the Commons, the Government managed to stagger on. Our opening to the TUC ran into the sand, and with the IMF superintending economic policy, the air of extreme crisis began to subside. At a more fundamental level, however, things were looking up.
ON THE HIGH GROUND
The Right Approach, which we published on the eve of the 1976 Conference, gave a persuasive account of the new Conservatism. Indeed, it still reads well and, stylistically at least, ranks with Change is our Ally as one of the best-written documents produced by the post-war Conservative Party. The credit for this must go to Chris Patten and Angus Maude who, with Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe and Jim Prior, drafted it.
It was helped by the fact that a truce had been reached in the internal arguments about where we all stood on incomes policy. A speech by Geoffrey Howe to the Bow Group (a Conservative ginger group) in May 1976 provided an agreed ‘line to take’ which was broadly followed in The Right Approach. The document pointed out that prices and incomes policies did not offer a long-term solution to inflation, while noting that it would be unwise ‘flatly and permanently’ to reject the idea, and nodding favourably in the direction of the West German system of ‘concerted action’. It was a fudge — but temporarily palatable.
But it was the fact that The Right Approach concentrated on the big general arguments, restating what differentiated our approach from that of socialism, that made it the success it was. It received a good press, not least because I and my colleagues put in considerable effort to explain it to the editors beforehand. The confident, authoritative tone of the opening sections pleasantly surprised the critics, lifting their vision above daily political infighting and the Government’s obsession with ever-changing ‘norms’.
The success of The Right Approach illustrates an important paradox about the whole of this period. For a variety of reasons, we were not a particularly successful Opposition in the ordinary sense of the word. Differences kept on emerging between us. We were usually unsuccessful in the House of Commons. We found it difficult to capitalize on the Government’s mistakes. Yet on the higher plane of belief, conviction and philosophy we were extremely effective. We were winning the battle of ideas which was the necessary preliminary not just to winning the election but to winning enduring popular support for the change of direction we wanted to make.
Keith Joseph’s speeches continued to put over the powerful themes he developed in the CPS. In March he delivered a speech in Harrow which took head-on the Government’s claim that high public expenditure was necessary for high levels of employment. In fact, as Keith pointed out:
Government overspending is a major and continued cause of unemployment. Immediate cuts in runaway state expenditure are essential if we are to save the economy now, and eventually restore a high and stable level of employment… Several Peters go on the dole for every Paul kept in a protected job. Several wealth-creating private-sector Peters are thrown out of work to keep each wealth-consuming public sector Paul in make-work. The saved jobs are identifiable and concentrated: the lost jobs are anonymous and dispersed.
I wrote the introduction to the published version of Keith’s Stockton Lecture, entitled Monetarism is Not Enough, which appeared a few months later. Since monetarism was far from accepted by most members of the Shadow Cabinet, this title was a deliberately bold way of expressing an important truth. It was ‘not enough’ to exert monetary control alone. That would indeed bring down inflation. But if we also failed to cut public expenditure and public borrowing, the whole burden of disinflation would then be placed on the wealth-creating private sector.
Alfred Sherman, who had assisted Keith with his Stockton Lecture, helped me draft the speech I made to the Zurich Economic Society on Monday 14 March 1977. Although delivered in Switzerland, it was aimed very much at the domestic audience. Alfred and I worked particularly hard on the text, which, in spite of the economic crisis in Britain, took an optimistic view of Britain’s future, arguing that:
The tide is beginning to turn against collectivism… and this turn is rooted in a revulsion against the sour fruit of socialist experience. The tide flows away from failure. But it will not automatically float us to our desired destination… It is up to us to give intellectual content and political direction… If we fail, the tide will be lost. But if it is taken, the last quarter of our century can initiate a new renaissance matching anything in our island’s long and outstanding history.
It played well in Zurich to the bankers, who were joined by Carol and my friends Douglas and Eleanor Glover — Douglas had been for many years the MP for Ormskirk. But it was how it played in London that mattered. In fact, it was extremely important that I should reach out for the high ground at such a time because there were more than enough difficulties on the low ground of Westminster politics.
I have already described some of the tactical difficulties which the economic crisis now engulfing Britain presented to us. A new one now arose. There was a growing crisis of confidence in Labour, and the polls showed us more than ten points ahead. By-election victories at Walsall North and Workington with big swings to us would shortly confirm the picture. It was at this juncture that talk of a coalition began again among those Conservatives determined at all costs to snatch defeat for me from the jaws of victory.
Harold Macmillan went on television to call for a ‘Government of National Unity’. Nor, it seemed, was there much doubt in his mind about who should be called back to lead it. I thought that I had better go and talk to him to see what he really thought, and it was arranged that we should meet in Maurice Macmillan’s house in Catherine Place. I arrived early and waited upstairs in the sitting room. I heard Maurice’s father arrive and say to him: ‘Has the call come?’ Maurice said: ‘No, not quite.’ He had to make do with me. Our meeting was pleasantly inconclusive, with Macmillan urging me not to be too critical of the Government at a time of crisis. And the only call was that eventually made to the IMF.
I now decided to make some changes of my own. Reggie Maudling’s performance as Shadow Foreign Secretary had long been a source of embarrassment. He did not agree with my approach to either the economy or foreign affairs; he was increasingly unwilling to disguise his differences with me; and he was laid back.[41] But when I told him that he had to go, he summoned up enough energy to be quite rude. Still, out he went.
I also wanted to move Michael Heseltine out of Industry and replace him with John Biffen. When not overreacting, Michael was an effective scourge of the Government, and he was certainly passionately interested in his brief at Industry. The trouble was that his outlook was completely different from mine, and from anything recognizably Conservative. For example, in January 1976 he made a speech criticizing Labour ministers for failing to meet sufficiently often ‘to agree and develop an industrial strategy for this nation’. His real criticism seemed to be that the Labour Party intervened in industry and picked losers whereas he would intervene and pick winners. The notion that the state did not and could not know who would win or lose, and that in intervening to back its own judgement with taxpayers’ money it was impoverishing the economy as a whole, seemed never to have occurred to him. Again, however, when I asked Michael to leave Industry and go to Environment, he said that he preferred not to. I sent my PPS, John Stanley, who knew him well, off to negotiate, and Michael reluctantly agreed to make way for John Biffen on the understanding that he would not have to be Secretary of State for the Environment once we were in power. That settled, the rest of the changes could now go ahead. I asked John Davies to take over from Reggie on Foreign Affairs, where until illness tragically struck him down, he worked hard and effectively.
It was important to have an energetic and effective front-bench team because there seemed a growing likelihood that we might soon be asked to become a government. On Wednesday 15 December Denis Healey introduced a further mini-Budget. He announced deep cuts in public spending and borrowing, and targets for the money supply (though expressed in terms of domestic credit expansion), as part of the deal agreed with the IMF. It was, in fact, a monetarist approach of the sort which Keith Joseph and I believed in, and it outflanked on the right those members of my own Shadow Cabinet who were still clinging to the outdated nostrums of Keynesian demand management. True to the tactic of not opposing measures necessary to deal with the crisis, we abstained in the vote on the measures. The IMF-imposed package was a turning point, for under the new financial discipline the economy began to recover. But in party political terms this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, discontent with the Government’s economic stewardship would diminish and support was likely to swing back towards Labour. On the other, we could now argue that socialism as an economic doctrine was totally discredited and that even the socialists were having to accept that reality was Conservative. The precise electoral implications of all that would have to be seen.
The political uncertainty made everyone jittery. The Government no longer had an overall majority. No one knew how members of the smaller parties might vote on any particular issue. It was frustrating enough even for those of us who were kept informed of the changing parliamentary arithmetic by the Whips. But it was all but incomprehensible to Conservative supporters in the country, who could not understand why we were unable to inflict a fatal defeat and bring about a general election. In fact, on Tuesday 22 February 1977 the Government was defeated on a guillotine on the Scotland and Wales Bill. The end of any immediate hope of achieving devolution in Scotland and Wales caused the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists to withdraw their support from the Government. A new parliamentary crisis — one in which the Government had ceased to have even a working majority — was upon us.
TOWARDS LIB-LABBERY
Before describing the outcome of that crisis, it is necessary to trace something of the background to the arguments about devolution, which would resurface with a vengeance later. For the devolution issue — at least until the final dénouement in March 1979– had brought almost as much grief to the Conservative Party as it had to Labour.
Ted had originally committed the Conservatives to devolution at the Scottish Party Conference in May 1968, following a surge in support for the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) — a short-lived surge, as it turned out. Ted’s ‘Perth Declaration’ came as a shock to most Conservatives, including those in Scotland. I was never happy with the policy and there was little enthusiasm for it among English Tories generally. But Ted pressed on. He set up a Party Committee under Alec Douglas-Home to draft a detailed plan. Alec’s proposals were agreed at the Scottish Party Conference on the eve of the 1970 general election, finding their way into the manifesto. (There was no commitment for devolution in Wales.) In office between 1970–74 the devolution commitment was, however, quietly dropped. Although the Kilbrandon Royal Commission on the Constitution, which proposed an elaborate devolution scheme, reported in October 1973, our February manifesto just committed the Party to study it. Labour on the other hand committed itself to legislate.
After the general election, Ted became convinced that the Party should offer devolution to Scotland as a way of winning back lost support and appointed Alick Buchanan-Smith as Shadow Scottish Secretary with a brief to do so. At the Scottish Party Conference in May, Ted resurrected our devolution policy, promising a Scottish Development Fund financed by North Sea oil and going beyond the Home proposals in finance. This was the policy upon which we fought the October 1974 election — which, notwithstanding what was proposed on devolution, saw our support in Scotland diminish further. Indeed, for the first time ever we finished in third place in the popular vote.
Anxieties about the way in which the Party had been bounced into the new policy had never been far below the surface. There was in particular a small group of Scottish Tory MPs, including my old friend Bettie Harvie-Anderson, who began to make their views known with increasing vigour after October 1974. They saw the proposal for a Scottish Assembly as one which would threaten the Union, not consolidate it. They also saw no reason to go along with Labour Party policy, let alone try to outbid it. The Scottish party itself was deeply split, with the critics of devolution representing much grassroots opinion pitted against the left-leaning Scottish party leadership of people like Alick Buchanan-Smith, Malcolm Rifkind and George Younger.
This was the situation which I inherited as Leader. Ted had impaled the Party on an extremely painful hook from which it would be my unenviable task to set it free. As an instinctive Unionist, I disliked the devolution commitment. But I realized that so much capital had by now been invested in it that I could not change the policy immediately. Had I done so, there would have been resignations which I simply could not afford. For the moment I would have to live with the commitment.
I asked Willie Whitelaw to chair a devolution policy group. In the Shadow Cabinet we duly discussed Willie’s proposals for a directly elected Assembly and agreed them, though without committing ourselves one way or the other to proportional representation.[42] Many of the Tory devolutionists wanted PR, fearing a future SNP victory in Scotland under the first-past-the-post electoral system and not being averse perhaps to the prospect of coalition politics, north or south of the border. On this I would not budge.
At the Scottish Party Conference in Dundee in May 1975 I repeated the commitment to a directly elected Assembly as briefly as I decently could. Talking to people at the Conference brought home more clearly than ever the fact that there were some Scottish Tories who bitterly disagreed with their leaders about the whole question. My unease grew — and so did that of other people. During the summer, English Tory MPs began to express doubts about Scottish devolution, partly because of its implications for the Union but also on sound tactical grounds. Scotland would be vastly over-represented in the Westminster Parliament if it had an Assembly as well as its present (somewhat generous) quota of MPs. Moreover, Labour was itself hopelessly divided over devolution, and it was clear that the tactical balance of advantage had swung away from proclaiming its virtues towards using it as an issue on which to embarrass the Government. I held a series of meetings with backbenchers. Their worries both echoed and increased mine. By the end of 1975 opinion on the backbenches was strongly against devolution. At the same time Alick Buchanan-Smith and Malcolm Rifkind, getting ever more out of touch, were flirting with the idea of a separate Scottish executive. That went yet further beyond the Home proposals and took us well into Labour territory.
The Government’s White Paper which proposed directly elected Assemblies for both Scotland and Wales was published in November. But the Shadow Cabinet was deeply divided as to how to deal with it. In the run-up to the debate on the White Paper in January 1976 Alick Buchanan-Smith and Ian Gilmour pressed for mention of the Conservative commitment to an Assembly in the wording of our Amendment, while the anti-devolutionists argued that if we avoided restating the commitment, abstentions from Labour opponents of devolution might give us victory. For the present, I bowed to Alick Buchanan-Smith’s line.
The arguments continued in 1976. Julian Amery and Maurice Macmillan proved effective leaders of the anti-devolution Tory camp. Willie devised a formula around which it was hoped the Party could unite, which I used at the Scottish Party Conference in Perth in May, repeating support for a directly elected Scottish Assembly, but making it clear that we would oppose any scheme based upon the Government’s White Paper. I added, for good measure: ‘I could not support an Assembly — none of us could support an Assembly — if we thought it was likely to jeopardize the Union.’ The Perth speech was well received, but of course it did not resolve the Party dispute.
I now began to harden our opposition. In November, when the Bill was published, I had dinner with a constitutional lawyer, Professor Yardley of Birmingham, to discuss its details. I also saw a good deal of the constitutional scholar Nevil Johnson. The more I heard and the more closely I read the Bill, the more dangerous it appeared to the Union. It was a prescription for bureaucracy and wrangling, and the idea that it would appease those Scots who wanted independence was becoming ever more absurd. Moreover, a private poll conducted for the Party in November 1976 confirmed my suspicion of the electoral arguments for devolution. Scottish opinion was highly fragmented: the Government’s devolution plans had only 22 per cent support less than our own (26 per cent), and less even than ‘no change’ (23 per cent). Only 14 per cent favoured independence. A far-reaching constitutional change required much more public support than that.
In November/December 1976, with the Bill about to come before the House for Second Reading, there were four long discussions in Shadow Cabinet about whether or not to impose a three-line whip against it. Our position could be fudged no longer. In addition to the overwhelming majority of our backbenchers, most Shadow ministers were by now opposed to devolution, at least on any lines similar to those contained in the White Paper. But there was a rooted belief among its supporters that devolution was the only way of heading off independence, and even some of those who disliked it intensely were wary of appearing to be anti-Scottish or of being seen to overrule the Scottish Tory leaders. In the end, however, in a marathon meeting ending in the early hours of Thursday 2 December we decided — with a significant dissenting minority including Alick Buchanan-Smith — that we would oppose the Bill on a three-line whip.
I had no illusion that this could be done without some resignations. I wanted to minimize them, but not at the expense of failing to lance the devolution boil. The morning after the Shadow Cabinet meeting Malcolm Rifkind, George Younger, John Corrie, Hector Munro, Hamish Gray and Russell Fairgrieve (Scottish Party Chairman) came to see me, saying that Alick Buchanan-Smith must be given a special dispensation to abstain in the vote or else all six of them would resign from their front-bench posts. I could not agree to this. To my irritation, what was said at the meeting appeared in the next morning’s Financial Times. The Tory Reform Group, which represented the left of the Party — when it was set up I had written in assumed innocence to Robert Carr, one of its founders, to ask precisely what it thought it was going to ‘reform’ — described us as ‘set to commit electoral suicide in Scotland’. The backbenchers felt very differently. There were loud cheers when the whipping decision was announced at the 1922 Committee that evening. It was, of course, no surprise when Ted Heath popped up four days later in Glasgow to say that he himself would not vote against the Bill. Alick Buchanan-Smith duly resigned as Shadow Scottish Secretary, along with Malcolm Rifkind. Four other front benchers wanted to go, but I refused their resignations and even allowed one of them to speak against our line in the debate and vote with the Government. No Party leader could have done more. To replace Alick Buchanan-Smith I moved Teddy Taylor, whose robust patriotism and soundness had long impressed me, from Trade to become Shadow Scottish Secretary.
It is generally an unnerving experience to have to speak from the front bench when you know that the debate, and in all probability the vote, will expose divisions on your own side. But the speech I had to give on Monday 13 December at the Bill’s Second Reading debate was exactly the sort of forensic operation that I enjoyed. I said as little as possible about our proposals, making only minimal reference to our residual commitment to an Assembly in Scotland, and saying a great deal about the internal contradictions and inconsistencies of the legislation. At the end of the debate twenty-seven Conservatives, including Ted Heath and Peter Walker, abstained. Five voted with the Government, including Alick Buchanan-Smith, Malcolm Rifkind and Hamish Gray. But Labour were also divided: twenty-nine Labour MPs abstained and ten voted with us. The forty-five-vote majority at Second Reading thus concealed great unhappiness on the Labour side as well as our own over the issue, which was to resurface. In the course of the debate the Prime Minister hinted that the Government would concede a referendum in Scotland and Wales — a commitment that in the end proved fatal to the whole devolution enterprise.
Francis Pym had by now taken over from Willie the task of front-bench spokesman on devolution. But he held radically different views from Teddy Taylor about how to treat the Bill, Francis wanting to make it ‘workable’ and Teddy wanting to bury it. In the end burial was its fate, as the Government’s guillotine motion was defeated by a majority of twenty-nine (with twenty-two Labour MPs voting with us) in February 1977. Suddenly the Government found itself deprived of Nationalist support, which in practice had given it a working majority while devolution was in the offing. Though Labour was to introduce new devolution legislation later in the year, their immediate prospects were encouragingly grim.
Precisely what would happen now was far from clear. On Thursday 17 March 1977 the Government refused to contest our motion to adjourn the House following a debate on public expenditure, for fear of a defection of left-wing Labour MPs. I promptly described this almost unheard-of breach of orderly procedure as ‘defeat with dishonour’. We tabled, as we had to, a Motion of No Confidence in the Government. If it succeeded, there would be a general election. In spite of my natural caution, I thought that it would. I used the speech I made to the Central Council at Torquay that Saturday to put the Party on the alert for an imminent campaign.
These were days of intense manoeuvring between the parties and their Whips. But I refused to engage in it. David Steel, the Liberal Party Leader, had already indicated that he might be prepared to keep Labour in power if the terms and conditions were judged right. Legislation for direct elections to the European Assembly on a proportional representation basis, ‘industrial democracy’ and tax reform were the topics publicly mentioned, but no one believed that the Liberals’ decision as to whether or not to support the Labour Government would be determined by secondary issues. For the Liberals there were two large questions they had to answer. Would they be blamed for keeping an unpopular Government in power? Or would they be credited with moderating its policies? I did not myself believe that they would sign up to a pact with the Government — certainly not unless there was a formal coalition with several Liberals as Cabinet ministers, which it was difficult to imagine the left of the Labour Party being prepared to tolerate.
In fact, my calculation of the political equation was broadly correct; but I left out the crucial element of vanity. Although the Lib-Lab Pact did the Liberals a good deal of harm, while doing Jim Callaghan no end of good, it did allow Liberal Party spokesmen the thrilling illusion that they were important.
After the vote on the Opposition Motion of No Confidence I was attacked in some quarters for not having been prepared to offer some kind of deal to the Liberals. But I was untempted by this beforehand and unrepentant afterwards. The undignified attempts to gain Liberal support for a minority Conservative Government after the February 1974 defeat conclusively showed the dangers. Moreover, it would be hard enough to drag the left wing of the Conservative Party and sections of the present Shadow Cabinet into supporting the measures which I knew would be required in government to set Britain right, without the burden of arrangements with the irresponsible eccentrics of the Liberal Party.
There was, of course, even less prospect of winning the support of the Nationalist parties, now that we had turned our back on devolution. The conservative-minded Ulster Unionists should have supported us. In Airey Neave and me they knew that they had strong supporters of the Union. Their demand for extra parliamentary seats at Westminster to make up for the Province’s under-representation was likely to be supported by any Government, because the case on grounds of equity was so strong. But the Unionists’ general resentment of the Heath Government’s abolition of Stormont — the devolved government that ran Ulster from 1920 to 1972, which they had dominated — and the personal bitterness of Enoch Powell, who was now representing South Down for the Unionists, meant that we could not in practice rely on their support.
In fact, there was very little that could be done by us to influence the vote. The minority parties would decide where they stood according to whether they thought that a general election was in their interests or not. In assessing that, each would look to the opinion polls. These suggested that a Conservative Government with an overall majority would be elected, which would greatly reduce the ability of a few disparate individuals to influence Government policy.
I was told some hours before I was due to propose the No Confidence Motion in the House that the Liberals would support the Government. I was astonished that they had signed up to such a bad deal. The pact would apparently last initially for the rest of the parliamentary session. The Liberals would not be members of the Government, but would liaise with individual ministers and send representatives to a joint consultative committee chaired by Michael Foot, the Leader of the House. The Government gave undertakings on direct elections to the European Assembly and devolution (accepting free votes on PR), promised to find time for a Liberal Bill on homelessness and agreed to limit the scope of planned legislation on local authority direct-labour organizations. It was a lacklustre shopping list. But, knowing that we were looking at certain defeat, with all the recriminations which would follow from the press and our supporters, it drained me of inspiration.
Angus Maude had helped me with the drafting of the speech. We decided to make it very short. In fact, it was too short. Moreover, it had been drafted when it seemed that we might be facing an immediate general election, so that positive statements of our policies had appeared preferable to detailed attacks on the Government’s. It received the worst press of any speech I have given. Of course, if I had read out the Westminster telephone directory and we had won at the end of the day no one would have bothered. But in politics, as in life, the ‘ifs’ offer no consolation. As I drove back to Flood Street later that night it was not my poor reception in the House or even the Government’s majority of twenty-four which most depressed me. It was the fact that after all our efforts the chance to begin turning Britain round seemed no nearer than before.
CHAPTER X
Détente or Defeat?
Foreign policy and visits 1975–1979
EUROPE
The first major political challenge I faced on becoming Leader was the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community, promised by Labour in Opposition as a way of keeping their party together. For a number of reasons I would have preferred a challenge on some other topic. Europe was very much Ted’s issue. He considered that his greatest achievement was to take Britain into the EEC and, now that he had lost the leadership, it was only natural that he would engage even more passion in the cause. As had become evident during the leadership campaign, there was some suspicion that I was less enthusiastic. Compared with Ted, perhaps, that was true. But I did genuinely believe that it would be foolish to leave the Community; I thought it provided an economic bond with other Western European countries, which was of strategic significance; and above all I welcomed the larger opportunities for trade which membership gave. I did not, however, see the European issue as a touchstone for everything else. Although I thought it best for Britain to stay inside the Community and make the best we could of it, I could equally well understand others who, on balance, took a contrary view. It did not seem to me that high-flown rhetoric about Britain’s European destiny, let alone European identity, was really to the point, though I had on occasion to employ a little on public platforms. For all these reasons, I was more than happy for Ted to take the leading public role on our side in the referendum campaign and for Willie to be the Conservative Vice-President of ‘Britain in Europe’ — the ‘Yes’ campaign organization which was set up in cooperation with pro-European Labour MPs and the Liberals, and of which Con O’Neill and later Roy Jenkins was President.
This arrangement had two advantages and two disadvantages. The advantages were that, though I would make some high-profile public appearances at the beginning and end of the campaign, I would have time for other things; and secondly, that the most committed Europeans of the Party would be able to throw all their energies into the front line. The two disadvantages, which perhaps I should have foreseen, were that Ted’s appetite for a return to power would be whetted, and that the forces inside and outside the Conservative Party which were determined to get rid of me would seek to use the all-party coalition campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote as the nucleus of a movement for a coalition of the ‘centre’.
I also faced a further unexpected intellectual difficulty. The position I inherited from Ted was that of outright opposition to the whole idea of a referendum on the grounds that it was an unconstitutional and un-British practice. There was no time to change this even if I had wanted to; only a fortnight after my accession to the leadership, the Government published its Referendum White Paper. It was, moreover, a rich source of party political advantage to attack the referendum as a constitutional monstrosity devised simply to keep the Labour Cabinet together. I was, however, uneasy. First, there was the obvious practical point that if, whatever protests the Conservative Opposition made, we were to have a referendum anyway, we would soon have to take it seriously — and be seen to do so — if we wanted to secure the right result. Secondly, and only vaguely as yet, I thought that it might be necessary at some time in the future to call for a referendum when a single issue divided the nation but not the parties, making a general election an inappropriate instrument for settling it. Similarly, a Conservative Opposition might seek one if a far-left government, supported by militant trade unions, sought to challenge fundamental freedoms under the cloak of constitutional convention.
I decided to read up all there was on the subject. The idea of a referendum had quite a long pedigree in British politics. From the 1890s to the 1930s it had variously been advanced — sometimes by Conservative Leaders — in connection with Irish Home Rule, the powers of the House of Lords, and the imposition of food tariffs. In 1945 Churchill had mooted the possibility of a referendum on extending the life of Parliament until Japan was defeated. In none of these cases had a referendum in fact been held. But it was clearly wrong to treat the case for it anything other than seriously. I was particularly taken with the assertion in the revised eighth edition of Dicey’s The Law of the Constitution that: ‘The referendum is the people’s veto; the nation is sovereign and may well decree that the constitution shall not be changed without the direct sanction of the nation.’
I consulted Michael Havers, shadow spokesman on legal affairs, about these arguments. His reply, which at the time seemed to me a powerful one, was that, reviewing the cases on which the Conservative Party had supported a referendum, we could say that apart from the case of food tariffs, where the Party was trying to avoid a damaging rift (as Labour was now), the issues were all constitutional. Moreover, in none had Parliament already decided the issue and in none were we risking the breaking of a treaty unilaterally. He concluded that past precedent offered no justification for a referendum on EEC membership.
I had, therefore, thought through the issue thoroughly by the time I spoke in the House in the Referendum Debate on Tuesday 11 March. It would be my maiden speech as Leader of the Opposition. In spite of the reservations I had about the case I was making, it was the kind of speech I enjoyed. The main intellectual weakness of the Government’s case was the confusion about whether and how the referendum would be ‘binding’ on Parliament. If it was binding, then parliamentary sovereignty, which mattered a good deal to anti-Marketeers on both sides of the House, was infringed. If it was not binding, then what was its force? I did not in my speech rule out the use of referenda, but I urged that it would be necessary to consider the full constitutional implications. I rejected the argument put forward by the Government that the case of continued membership of the EEC was unique and thus a referendum was required. I said:
To use the referendum device at all is to ask the question: to what category of measure should referenda apply? Presumably the answer would be: in cases of constitutional change. But it is hard to define such a change in the British tradition because so much depends on convention and precedent.
A referendum may, however, become acceptable if given a proper constitutional foundation — that is to say, if the conditions under which it could be used were defined. But that would mean, like many other democratic countries, going as far as a written constitution or at least part of the way. The implications for parliamentary sovereignty are profound. But if our sense of constitutional rules and conventions is weakening, there may come a time when some such course should be considered.
Although there are some other passages of that speech with which I would not now agree, these assertions still seem a good starting point for consideration of the case for a referendum on, say, the Maastricht Treaty or a single European currency.[43] What I had not grasped at this time, though some others had, was that the conditions for a referendum which I had outlined had more or less already been met. The subordination of UK law to European Community law, which flowed from accession to the Treaty of Rome and which both successive treaty changes and the practices of Community institutions would accelerate, did entail a constitutional change. And we had gone ‘at least part of the way’ towards a written constitution by accepting the contents of the Treaty of Rome and a special European Court of Justice, which could strike down laws passed by Parliament which conflicted with it.
The Commons passed the proposal for a referendum by 312 votes to 248. But it was the outcome of the debate on Wednesday 9 April on the substantive issue of continued EEC membership which was a foretaste of things to come: Ayes 396, Noes 170. From now on until Thursday 5 June, the day set for the referendum, the formidable power of business, the leaderships of both parties and the wider, respectable establishment combined to extol the merits of Community membership, to elaborate fears of job losses, to warn of a third world war originating in intra-European conflict and to ridicule the odd combination of Labour left-wingers and Tory reactionaries which constituted the ‘No’ lobby. The ‘Yes’ campaign was well organized and very well funded — not least as a result of the efforts of Alistair McAlpine, whom I would shortly recruit to be Conservative Party Treasurer. For all the talk of a ‘great debate’ it was really a contest between David and Goliath, which Goliath won. The substantial issues often went by default.
Most distasteful of all to me was the patent opportunism of the Labour leadership. The ‘renegotiation’ of Britain’s terms of entry, which had been concluded in March at the Dublin European Council where a special ‘Financial Mechanism’ had been agreed to prevent Britain shouldering too heavy a financial burden, was simply not serious: the mechanism was never triggered and so never yielded a penny piece. Yet the booklet distributed to all households by the Government abandoned all of the Euro-sceptical rhetoric which Labour, particularly the Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, had employed at the general election. It contained such assurances as:
As a result of these negotiations the Common Market’s agricultural policy (known as CAP) now works more flexibly to the benefit of both housewives and farmers in Britain… Under the previous terms, Britain’s contribution to the Common Market budget imposed too heavy a burden on us. The new terms ensure that Britain will pay a fairer share… There was a threat to employment in Britain from the movement in the Common Market towards an Economic and Monetary Union… This threat has been removed… To say that membership could force Britain to eat Euro-bread or drink Euro-beer is nonsense… It is the Council of Ministers, and not the Market’s officials, who take the important decisions.
I duly launched the Conservative pro-Market campaign at the St Ermin’s Hotel, at a press conference presided over by Ted Heath, even describing myself as ‘the pupil speaking before the master’. I spoke in my constituency and elsewhere. I contributed an article on the eve of poll to the Daily Telegraph. I felt that I did my share of campaigning. But others did not see it that way. There was criticism in the press — the Sun, for example, commenting:
Missing: one Tory Leader. Answers to the name of Margaret Thatcher. Mysteriously disappeared from the Market Referendum Campaign eleven days ago. Has not been seen since. Will finder kindly wake her up and remind her she is failing the nation in her duty as Leader of the Opposition?
Some of this was undoubtedly being fed to the press by people who had other axes to grind at my expense. But Alistair McAlpine, a supporter soon to become a friend, was sufficiently concerned to tell Willie Whitelaw that I should take a more active role. Unfortunately, on the prearranged day for me to hold a press conference at Central Office as part of the campaign, Edward du Cann, the 1922 Committee Chairman, came out with a call for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum. I learned about this shortly before I had to face the press. Caught between Edward Scylla and Edward Charybdis, I had to weave and tack rather than steer directly towards Brussels.
The referendum result itself was no surprise, with 67 per cent voting ‘Yes’ and 33 per cent ‘No’. Less predictable were the effects on the political scene as a whole. The result was a blow to the left of the Labour Party; and Harold Wilson, whose cunning tactical ploy the whole exercise had been, used it to move Tony Benn from Industry, where he had proved a political liability, to Energy where his scope for mischief was more limited. For the Conservatives, it was naturally Ted and his friends who won most of the plaudits. I myself paid tribute to him in the House. He made no response. That came later.
Soon the press was full of accounts of Ted’s earlier meeting with me at Wilton Street, but given in such a way as to suggest that I had not made a serious offer to him to join the Shadow Cabinet. These stories were accompanied by suggestions that he now intended to use the position gained through the referendum campaign to make his way back — presumably at my expense — to power. Ted’s ambitions were his own affair. But at least the real facts about the Wilton Street meeting should be known. Consequently, I told them to George Hutchinson of The Times — not a supporter of mine, but a journalist of great integrity — and the account duly appeared.
No doubt Ted’s hopes were buoyed up by two other things. First, I could not fail to be aware that all sorts of well-informed commentators were predicting that my tenure of the leadership would not last; indeed, that I would be gone by Christmas. Secondly, the deepening economic crisis into which a combination of the Heath Government’s earlier financial irresponsibility and the Wilson Government’s present anti-enterprise policies were plunging Britain might conceivably lead to that National Government on which Ted’s prospects were deemed to ride. And perhaps too, the introduction of proportional representation might keep a centrist coalition in power — and people like me out of it — permanently.
In fact, the chances of any of this happening were less than the commentators imagined. It was not just that I had no intention of relinquishing the leadership, nor even that Tory backbenchers were unprepared to tolerate Ted’s return. Neither was there any prospect of a shrewd, self-assured politician like Harold Wilson stepping aside gracefully to allow the sort of self-important figures he despised a free hand to sort Britain’s problems out. If he went he would do so on his terms and at his timing: this of course is what subsequently occurred.[44] A further aspect not widely grasped at the time was that, for all the criticism levelled at me for my alleged failure to beat the European drum with sufficient vigour, I emerged from the campaign as a unifying figure for the Party. The anti-Market Tory MPs felt no bitterness towards me. The majority of backbenchers also felt very much as I did about Europe, viewing it as a framework within which Britain could prosper rather than a crusade. The issue of whether Britain should or should not be a member of the European Community had been settled for the foreseeable future. But the real question now was what sort of Community should that be? On this issue a rather different coalition of opinions within the Conservative Party would emerge.
Two short foreign visits which I made in the course of the European referendum campaign provided me with food for thought. At the end of April I visited Luxembourg and attended the European Assembly, which was already demanding to be termed a ‘Parliament’. A lacklustre debate on some trivial issue was in progress, after which the best I could say to an eager press corps was that the institution was obviously ‘very valuable’ and that its members worked ‘very hard’. At this time the members of the Assembly were still nominated MPs from the constituent countries. We all ought probably to have thought more carefully about whether it was right to end this system in favour of direct elections. At least under the old system there was close contact between the members of the national Parliament and members of the European Assembly; they were, indeed, the same people. The Assembly had a limited role for which full-time MEPs were unnecessary. When the latter appeared on the scene they demanded a wider role, in part in order to justify their salaries, generous expenses and existence, and this was to cause no end of problems. My main conclusion from the visit to Luxembourg, however, was that such an Assembly in which people did not speak the same language or share the same traditions illustrated the shortcomings of attempts to create artificial Europe-wide institutions. Peter Kirk, the Conservative Leader in the Assembly, who organized a reception for me in Luxembourg, was doing his best to import British parliamentary attitudes and impose some financial discipline. But it would take more than this to create a real European Parliament.
The following month I was invited to Paris as the guest of the Gaullist Party — then called the UDR, later the RPR. It was on this visit that I first met Jacques Chirac, the Prime Minister, with whom I had lunch at the Hôtel Matignon (his office and official residence), and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom I saw later at the Elysée Palace. In spite of the marked differences of character between the two — the Prime Minister’s charismatic exuberance was the complete opposite of the President’s chilly precision — both the Matignon and the Elysée made the same statement of the historic grandeur and national pride of France. French identity and interests would always come first in the Community or any other forum. Some people might have felt aggrieved at this, but I found it oddly reassuring: you knew where you stood.
Three different but connected developments from now on commanded my attention in Europe. First, there was the matter of the speed and extent of European integration: in particular, we had to consider the arrangements for direct elections to the European Assembly and our policy towards the European Monetary System. Secondly, there was the feeling, which I shared, that the right-of-centre parties in Europe ought to cooperate more closely, providing a kind of answer to the Socialist International. Thirdly, it was necessary to establish what Western Europe’s role should be in East-West relations, particularly in the light of the Helsinki process — something which is best examined later.[45]
At the beginning of July Leo Tindemans, the Belgian Prime Minister, came to Britain, having been asked by the heads of Government at the Paris Summit of December 1974 to draw up a report on ‘European Union’. I met him with Reggie Maudling and others in a room at the House of Commons. I had set up a committee under Reggie on which Sir Anthony Royle, a former diplomat, and others sat, to look at such matters. But I emphasized to M. Tindemans that it would be best if the Community developed organically rather than according to some pre-ordained structure. This was intended as a warning that, although I envisaged that Britain under a Conservative Government would adopt a more positive attitude to the Community than had been the case under Labour, our partners should not imagine that we were keen on grand plans imposed from the centre.
Within the Conservative Party, debate about Europe focused increasingly on direct elections. I received regular reports on Party opinion. A group of MPs led by Neil Marten argued a powerful case against having direct elections at all. A larger group of MPs reluctantly accepted that the pass had been sold and that the real question was when the elections should take place and under what electoral system. A third group was keen to create a real European Parliament to provide a check on the actions of the Council of Ministers and the Commission. Luckily, the divisions on the Government side were at least as large as on ours, and we were able to unite in blaming them for the delay in bringing the requisite legislation before the House. Equally satisfactorily, the Government proposal to use proportional representation, a gesture to sustain the Lib-Lab Pact, was soundly defeated in December 1977. Consequently, the first direct elections took place — under a first-past-the-post system — in 1979 when I was Prime Minister.
The pressure for political integration was to have its economic counterpart. The first ambitious plans for European economic and monetary union were embodied in the so-called ‘Snake’ set up in 1972. Britain had joined under Ted as one earnest of his iron-clad commitment to Europe; he had to pull out within six weeks. But the economic planners were only stimulated by failure, and at the end of 1978 the European Monetary System (EMS) was agreed and eight of the nine Community currencies joined. Britain alone stayed out. Her Majesty’s Opposition under my leadership would have been less than human not to take advantage of this as evidence that sterling was too weak to join as a result of Labour’s mismanagement of the economy. That was a fair enough tactical position, but it was more difficult to judge what a Conservative Government itself should do.
At the end of October 1978 Geoffrey Howe sent me a note outlining the case for and against joining. He felt that if we were now the Government and had committed ourselves to the right financial and economic policies, we would have been able to join. Geoffrey also believed that we needed to maintain the Party’s stock of European goodwill and feared that the alternative meant ‘surrendering the direction of the EEC and its policies to the Franco-German high table’. Nigel Lawson, a junior Treasury spokesman, also sent me a searching analysis at the end of October. He understood that the EMS was seen by the French and Germans as having a political objective, the next stage in the progress of European unity. He shrewdly noted that ‘those who support UK membership of the EMS as part of their devotion to the EEC cause should pause to reflect whether adherence to the discipline which is its sole merit might not in practice prove so unpopular as to make support of continuing EEC membership political suicide’. Nigel’s reluctant conclusion was that we should join anyway: but his ‘best hope’ was that the system would collapse shortly thereafter, not due to the weakness of sterling but because of pressures on other currencies, and that we could then propose some more sensible framework for European economic convergence. I was impressed by the quality of both these analyses. My thinking on this was still evolving, but I decided at this point that we should continue to adopt a positive general approach to the EMS while avoiding making any specific commitments.
The second important European theme — the closer cooperation of the right-of-centre parties — eventually led to the foundation in 1978 of the European Democratic Union (EDU). But this modestly useful organization was less significant than the political impulses which lay behind it. The mid-1970s was a time of advance by the Left, both democratic and non-democratic, in many areas and ways. Communist parties seemed to be on the verge of entering government in Mediterranean Europe. And everywhere the Left was encouraged by the feeling that history and Soviet military power were pushing the world in its direction. This was something which could only ultimately be combated and reversed by NATO decisions and under reinvigorated American leadership. In the meantime, the European Right had to fight a fierce battle on the political front.
Nowhere was it fiercer than in Portugal. Within weeks of my becoming Leader I had a long talk with Professor Diogo Freitas do Amaral, the leader of the Social Democratic Centre (CDS), the only party to the right of the ruling coalition. He was a gentle intellectual, clearly involved in politics for the highest motives. He was also, when I saw him, in deep despair. Since the overthrow of the dictatorship of Dr Caetano in April 1974, communists and other radical leftists in the army, in cahoots with the Portuguese Communist Party, had successfully manipulated their way to almost total power. This they used ruthlessly to extinguish opposition. The CDS was denied access to the media and its rallies were broken up by force. Professor do Amaral knew that under these conditions there was no hope of a successful result in the forthcoming elections. He half wondered whether it was worth his going back to Portugal at all. But we both agreed that in spite of all the difficulties he had to return and see it through. He did so. But he was fighting impossible odds. His party received less than 8 per cent of the vote. There would probably be no democracy in Portugal even now if brave men and women like Professor do Amaral had not risen up against the arrogance of the communists in northern Portugal and prevented the forcible attempt to seize the peasants’ land and turn the country into a Cuban-style state. It was a frightening insight into the ambitions and methods of the Left, which were by no means confined to Portugal. Indeed, the British Labour Left, intoxicated by the prospects of a European revolution, supported the communists.
Neighbouring Spain was more fortunate, enjoying a more or less smooth transition from dictatorship after General Franco’s death in November 1975. There, doubtless observing the Portuguese resistance offered to too blatant an attempt to seize power, the Spanish Communist Party from the date of its legalization in 1977 preferred to emulate its Italian and French counterparts by adopting the disguise of ‘Euro-communism’. I always considered Eurocommunism as a tactical ploy to be understood in very much the same way as, to take an earlier parallel, the Popular Fronts in the 1930s. It did indeed show a recognition of the force of liberal public opinion and foreshadowed the coming collapse of communism’s internal self-confidence. But it did not represent any abandonment of the essential goals of Marxism-Leninism. Of course, the only ‘proof’ of this could be found in an assessment of the real attitudes and intentions of the Euro-communist leaderships. But in any case the effect of any advance by Euro-communists was to reduce the willingness and ability of the West to meet the growing Soviet threat; for it would have been unpardonably irresponsible to assume that any government in which a Communist Party shared power could be depended upon in a crisis.
I made these points wherever I went in Europe. But I did so with particular force when I addressed the West German Christian Democrat Union (CDU) Party Conference in Hanover on Tuesday 25 May 1976:
In some European countries we now see communist parties dressed in democratic clothes and speaking with soft voices. Of course, we hope that their oft-proclaimed change of heart is genuine. But every child in Europe knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood and what happened to her in her grandmother’s cottage in the forest. Despite the new look of these communist parties, despite the softness of their voices, we should be on the watch for the teeth and appetite of the wolf.
It was clear to me from the uproarious applause which greeted this remark that Little Red Riding Hood had a cousin somewhere in the Black Forest.
I had been keen to visit West Germany for several reasons. It was, of course, right on the frontier of freedom in Europe at a time when the perimeter of freedom globally was steadily contracting. The West’s strategy for defence depended to an important degree upon the policies of West Germany’s political leaders and the will of the West German people. Konrad Adenauer and his successor Chancellors of the German Federal Republic had staunchly resisted the blandishments and threats of the Soviet Union and its East German satellite. But Willi Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the hidden agenda of which was German reunification on Eastern terms, had shaken many assumptions. It had the unintended effects of promoting neutralist attitudes in West Germany (including in the ruling SPD) and of endorsing the legitimacy of the governments in Eastern Europe. Doubts about Ostpolitik and the soundness of the SPD lingered on, in spite of the robustness of Willi Brandt’s successor Helmut Schmidt, who soon set about strengthening Atlantic links with his call for NATO’s stationing of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. In turn, Helmut Schmidt conceived an increasing distrust for the meanderings of US foreign policy under Jimmy Carter.
The other reason I was eager to make the trip was the importance of the CDU itself, which was, with the Conservatives, the other largest right-of-centre European party. The idea of setting up a joint organization — what became the EDU — originally came from the Austrian (Christian Democrat) People’s Party leader, Alois Mock. But the Germans and ourselves were bound to be the two key elements in it. Although I was later to discover the important differences between the German Christian Democrat and British Conservative traditions, these were not nearly as great as those between Christian Democrats in countries like Italy or Belgium and ourselves. In Germany the social-market approach pioneered by Ludwig Erhard had imposed a more free-enterprise orientation than on most other Christian Democrat parties, which remained heavily confessional and usually somewhat directionless in economics.
My first visit to West Germany as Leader was from Thursday 26 June to Saturday 28 June 1975. That first Thursday evening at the British Ambassador’s residence in Bonn my mind was focused, however, on what was happening back home, where the count for the Woolwich West by-election was under way. Unlike my predecessors, I had decided to campaign personally in by-elections, which carried risks but which was an advantage when things went well, as they did on this occasion, for we won the seat on a swing of 7.6 per cent. Since, as usual, the Party was strapped for cash, I was not accompanied by a press officer and, knowing this, Gordon Reece had advised me what to say and do in the event of the expected success. We agreed that I would say something on the lines of ‘This is the first step on the road to the end of socialism,’ and then I would make a Churchillian victory sign — all the more appropriate since I was in Germany. Gordon did not consider coaching me in the gesture itself. So when, the following day, I was asked to comment on the result I smiled and raised two fingers, unfortunately the wrong way round, which was taken by delighted cameramen as an expression of lighthearted if vulgar contempt for the Labour Party rather than satisfaction with our own success.
Later that day I had my first meeting with the socialist Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. By the end of our discussion I was concluding that he was a good deal less socialist than some members of my own Shadow Cabinet, two impressions which did not diminish as the years went by. We did, though, disagree about the role of trade unions. On the basis of German experience, Helmut Schmidt could not understand why in Britain we did not just get all the union leaders around a table and work things out sensibly. I pointed out that thanks to the reforms which the British occupying power had made in the structure of German trade unions after the war, reducing their number and making them industry-based rather than craft-based, this was a practical possibility in Bonn. In London a small stadium would be required. (My knowledge of these reforms was due to Paul Chambers, the British member of the Control Commission which had run the Western sectors of Germany during the Allied occupation: I had known him since the 1960s.) I was tempted to add that most British trade union leaders, unlike their German equivalents, were at least as interested in socialist politics as sensible wage bargaining. But I decided that could wait for another occasion.
A late lunch had been arranged for me by my CDU hosts. The three German celebrities present were Helmut Kohl, the CDU leader and Chancellor-candidate for the following year’s federal elections, Kurt Biedenkopf, the CDU General Secretary and — most celebrated of all — Ludwig Erhard, the great German Finance Minister of the 1950s and sixties. I had had some discussions with Helmut Kohl earlier in the day. My first impression was that he was amiable and instinctively sound on the important issues. But neither of us spoke the other’s language and our discussion tended, therefore, to be somewhat halting. For the next decade, however, we were to be broadly on the same wavelength on the East-West issues that dominated European politics. Professor Biedenkopf was a more cosmopolitan character, fluent to a fault, deeply intelligent and extraordinarily energetic. He bubbled with ideas and reflections so that I found it difficult to get a word in. He was plainly determined, as I was, that when his party returned to power it would do so with a cohesive and well thought-out programme for government. Ludwig Erhard had by this time retired from any involvement in active politics, but apparently he had heard that my politics (and economics) were sufficiently different (that is to say similar to his own) to make a discussion appealing. I was glad to discover that the former Chancellor, as well as being the architect of German prosperity, had a considerable presence and shrewdness. He asked me a number of searching questions about my economic approach, at the end of which he seemed satisfied. I felt I had performed well in an important tutorial. In their different ways these three men symbolized the considerable strengths of German Christian Democracy and I went away feeling that our two parties, both in opposition but both preparing for power, had much in common.
My reception on my next visit the following year at the CDU Conference, which I have already described, in part confirmed this. But I could never quite adjust to the style of West German politics which I witnessed there. Successive speakers approached the microphone and, from an inch or two away, bellowed into it at great length. The technique for evoking applause appeared to be to shout at such volume that words were lost amid the crackling of overstrained loudspeakers. Neither a Conservative Party Conference, nor in all probability Conservative Central Office equipment, would have stood it.
Meanwhile, discussions between European conservative and Christian Democrat parties continued about the formation of the EDU. I tried to persuade the less enthusiastic parties, nervous of being seen as right-wing in countries where a tradition of coalition governments had blunted principled politics. In December 1976 I visited The Hague for talks with Dutch politicians — an occasion of longer-term personal importance to me because this was when I first met Ruud Lubbers, the then Economics Minister and future Prime Minister with whom in the years to come I was to strike up a mutually beneficial friendship. I also spoke to the British Chamber of Commerce there:
I am anxious that… there should be a closer cooperation between like-minded political parties across the Community. Of course I understand that history has put difficulties in our way… Nevertheless, I feel sure that as we examine our policies we will find that the common ground is much greater than we supposed at the outset.
In June 1977 I paid a flying visit to Rome. This too resulted in some valuable contacts and discussions, notably with the grand old man of Christian Democracy, Professor Amintore Fanfani, and also with one of Italy’s most clever and effective Finance Ministers, Filippo Pandolfi. My visit concluded with a private audience with Pope Paul VI — my first experience of the Vatican. These are always very private occasions. With Pope Paul VI and later with Pope John Paul II I discussed Northern Ireland; and with John Paul II, whose election as Pope has always struck me as providential, I held in addition a discussion about the irreligious nature of communism and the challenge it presented to Christian statesmanship. It is no secret that I greatly admire the role played by John Paul II in the liberation of his country, Poland, and of the other countries of Eastern Europe from the legions of communists that proved no match for his spiritual authority.
In public speeches on this visit I called for the involvement of the Italian Christian Democrats in the nascent EDU: I recognized that the word ‘conservative’ had a different and pejorative significance in Italy, but urged my hosts to consider instead the reality of our similar policies. I made the point in person to Aldo Moro, then the Christian Democrat party leader. He was an aloof, academic figure on the left of his party, and I did not feel he was very sympathetic to what I was saying. Alas, there was no occasion to return to the subject, for within a year Signor Moro was kidnapped and murdered.
In retrospect, I can see that the Italians were quite right in thinking that they and we saw the world very differently. Christian Democracy served a useful purpose in many European countries, where it was important for all shades of moderate opinion to combine in order to resist fascism and communism. Catholic social teaching provided a valuable framework — for Protestants as well — in societies where no strong secular centre-right political tradition existed. The trouble was that, whatever their merits as a view of life, such ideas were not in themselves sufficient to give an ideological basis for the practical policies required in the late twentieth century. This was particularly true of economic policy, where anything from full-blooded free enterprise on the one hand to corporatism on the other could be dressed up in the language of Christian Democracy. Some Christian Democrat parties, like the German CDU, have gone at least part of the way towards making up for such deficiencies by adopting free-market rhetoric (if not always free-market policies). Others, like the Italian Christian Democrats, have gone the way of all dinosaurs. Christian Democracy has also shown itself incapable of shedding light on the great question of the post-Cold War world — the long-term relationship between nation states and supra-national institutions. I conclude that however much individual Christian Democrats may command our respect and deserve our support, Conservatives have little to learn from them.
In any case, Christian Democrat and conservative parties from Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Britain did agree to found the European Democratic Union. I was present at the launch in Salzburg in April 1978. Among other party leaders there were Helmut Kohl and Franz Josef Strauss — the leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and, after Herr Kohl’s narrow defeat in the elections in October 1976, the Chancellor-candidate of the German right. The contrast between the two of them interested me. Both were very large and very German. But Herr Strauss was a mercurial intellectual, had a lively wit and was an accomplished orator. He also lacked Helmut Kohl’s caution and, when pitted against Helmut Schmidt, his impulsiveness, and a not altogether deserved reputation for extremism later defeated him. It was a glittering occasion at the Klessheim Castle and the Austrians, whose brainchild the EDU was, were magnificent hosts. And for me it was also a useful platform at an important time.
As I have mentioned, the third pressing European question was the role of the countries of the Community in East–West relations. Although this issue preoccupied me from soon after my becoming Leader, I only tackled it directly on one occasion — in a speech, drafted with the help of Hugh Thomas, to the Grandes Conferences Catholiques in Brussels on Friday 23 June 1978. The theme was ‘Principles of Foreign Policy’, covering a wide canvas, including the need to advance democracy throughout the world so as to reduce the risk of war. But the part of the speech which received greatest attention concerned the political role of the European Community. I did not regard the EEC as merely an economic entity: it had a wider strategic purpose. As a zone of democracy, stability and prosperity adjoining Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, it was both a showcase for the Western way of life and a magnet drawing politicians and peoples away from communism. Moreover, Western European countries should not be tempted to govern their relations with the Soviet Union and its satellites on economic grounds alone, but rather with full regard to the effects of technology transfer and cheap credits in oiling the Russian war machine.
We must see our relationships with the Soviet Union as a whole. The supply by the West of credit, grain and technology; the negotiation of different aspects of security and disarmament; Soviet and satellite activities in Africa, Asia and the Pacific are all features of one landscape. Unless we learn, as the Soviet Union has learned, to look at the landscape as a whole we shall be consistently out-manoeuvred.
In order to grasp how we had arrived at such a pass it is necessary to consider the East-West balance more generally.
EAST-WEST
One of the first foreign statesmen I met after becoming Leader was Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State. Over the years my respect for Dr Kissinger steadily grew and — though starting from different perspectives — our analysis of international events increasingly converged. At this time, however, I was uneasy about the direction of Western policy towards the Soviet Union, of which he was acknowledged to be the impresario.
I did indeed recognize the importance of the ‘opening to China’ achieved under Richard Nixon in the power-play with the Soviets. It was a crucial element of victory in the Cold War to detach China permanently from the Soviet Union. As for ‘linkage’ — that is to recognize the links between one issue and another in bilateral relations between states, in Henry Kissinger’s own words ‘to create a network of incentives and penalties to produce the most favourable outcome’[46] — I took the view that its prospects had been undermined by President Nixon’s domestic weakness induced by Watergate. But I had serious doubts about the strategy of ‘détente’.
My gut instinct was that this was one of those soothing foreign terms which conceal an ugly reality that plain English would expose. It was difficult to see any difference between appeasement and détente as it began to evolve under the conditions of American paralysis after the election of a post-Watergate Congress dominated by ultra-liberal Democrats and the collapsing position in South Vietnam. Although so many obeisances had been paid to the concept that it was not prudent to attack it directly, I came as near as I could. This was not just a reflection of my preference for plain speaking: it was also the result of my conviction that too many people in the West had been lulled into believing that their way of life was secure, when it was in fact under mortal threat.
The first condition for meeting and overcoming that threat was that the Alliance should perceive what was happening; the second and equally important condition was that we should summon up the will to change it. Even in Britain’s parlous economic state we still had the resources to fight back, as part of NATO and under the leadership of the United States. But we could not assume that that would always be so. At some point decline — not just relative but absolute and not just limited to one sphere but in every sphere, economic, military, political and psychological — might become irreversible. Urgent action was required and urgency entails risks. Accordingly, my first major foreign affairs speech was a risk.
Events continued to confirm my analysis. In March the Labour Government’s Defence White Paper announced sharp cuts in the defence budget, £4,700 million over the next ten years. In the same month Alexander Shelepin, previously head of the KGB and now in charge of the Soviet Union’s ‘trade unions’, arrived in Britain as a guest of the TUC. The following month saw the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese communists amid scenes of chaos, adding to America’s woes. Cuban ‘advisers’ were beginning to arrive to support the communist MPLA faction in Angola. It was, however, what I heard and read about the preparations for the Helsinki Summit that triggered my decision to speak.
The idea for Helsinki had come from the Soviets, was warmly welcomed by Chancellor Brandt’s West Germany as a contribution to Ostpolitik, and was then accepted on to the Nixon Administration’s agenda. The West wanted the Soviets to enter into talks to reduce their military superiority in Europe — Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) — and to respect the human rights of their subject peoples. But what did the Soviets want? This was by far the most interesting question, since even if, as the sceptics suggested, they would not honour their agreements anyway, they still would not have taken this trouble unless something important for them would result. Respectability could be the only answer. If the Soviet Union and its satellites — particularly the more potentially fragile regimes in Eastern Europe — could receive the international seal of approval they would feel more secure.
But did we want them to feel more secure? Arguably, one of the most exploitable weaknesses of totalitarian dictatorships is the paranoid insecurity which flows from the lack of consent to the regime itself and which results in inefficiency and even paralysis of decision-taking. If the Soviets felt more secure, if their new-found respectability gave them greater access to credit and technology, if they were treated with tolerant respect rather than suspicious hostility, how would they use these advantages?
That led, of course, to the further question: what was the fundamental impulse of the Soviet Union? If the Soviet leaders were reasonable people, a little hidebound perhaps but open to persuasion, not so very different from the political elites of our countries, the lessening of tension with the West would indeed lead to a more peaceful and stable world. The trouble was that no one with real knowledge of the Soviet system believed that this was so. That system was founded upon an ideology which moulded every person and institution within it according to techniques of varying sophistication and crudity. The evidence for this was the ruthlessness with which it dealt with the tiny minority who dared to challenge it. The fate of the dissidents was not just something to evoke Western compassion or outrage: it was a statement about the nature and objectives of the system which regarded them as such a threat to its existence.
But it was not necessary to listen to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to learn the truth about the Soviet Union — though, as I shall describe, his words had a powerful effect on me. One need only turn to the leaden prose of Pravda to establish how the Soviet leaders perceived détente and the Helsinki initiative which flowed from it:
Peaceful coexistence does not signify the end of the struggle between the two world social systems. The struggle will continue… until the complete and final victory of communism on a world scale. [Pravda, 22 August 1973.]
In other words, there would be no letting-up in the promotion of Soviet power and communist revolution worldwide. If such statements were a true reflection of Soviet intentions — and there was a great deal of evidence to show that they were — any weakening of external pressure on the Soviets would simply result in their having more resources and opportunities to ‘bury us’.
If I was to challenge the accepted wisdom on these matters I needed expert help. But most of the experts had jumped aboard the Sovietology gravy train which ran on official patronage, conferences with ‘approved’ Soviet academics, visa journalism and a large dose of professional complacency. I had, however, through John O’Sullivan of the Daily Telegraph, heard about Robert Conquest, a British historian and fearless critic of the USSR. I asked him to help me and together we wrote the speech which I delivered on Saturday 26 July 1975 in Chelsea. The occasion itself was only arranged a few days in advance. I did not speak to Reggie Maudling or anyone else in the Shadow Cabinet about it beforehand, because I knew that all I would receive were obstruction and warnings, which would doubtless be leaked afterwards — particularly if things went wrong.
I began by setting the large military imbalance between the West and the Soviet Union against the background of the retreat of Western power. I drew particular attention to the Soviet naval build-up, describing the Soviet navy as a global force with more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together and more surface ships than could possibly be needed to protect the USSR’s coast and merchant shipping. I argued that nothing was more important to our security than the American commitment to Europe, adding that an isolationist Britain would encourage an isolationist America.
I then dealt with the imminent Helsinki Summit. I did not attack détente directly, indeed I called for a ‘real’ détente. But I quoted Leonid Brezhnev speaking in June 1972 to illustrate the Soviets’ true intentions. Brezhnev had affirmed that peaceful coexistence ‘in no way implies the possibility of relaxing the ideological struggle. On the contrary we must be prepared for this struggle to be intensified and become an even sharper form of confrontation between the systems.’
I also drew attention to the importance of human rights as a further measure of the nature of the regime with which we were dealing:
When the Soviet leaders gaol a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a country that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.
Human rights would, we already knew, be the subject of far reaching verbal undertakings in the so-called ‘Basket Three’ of the Helsinki package — ‘Cooperation in humanitarian and other fields’. But I placed no trust in the Soviets’ good faith: indeed, since their whole system depended upon repression, it was difficult to see how they could comply. I suspected that for many of those present at Helsinki — and not just on the communist side — the undertakings about human rights would be regarded as uplifting rhetoric rather than clear conditions to be rigorously monitored. So I noted:
We must work for a real relaxation of tension, but in our negotiations with the Eastern bloc we must not accept words or gestures as a substitute for genuine détente. No flood of words emanating from a summit conference will mean anything unless it is accompanied by some positive action by which the Soviet leaders show that their ingrained attitudes are really beginning to change.
That is why we so strongly support all those European and American spokesmen, who have insisted that no serious advance towards a stable peace can be made unless some progress at least is seen in the free movement of people and of ideas.
The reaction to this speech confirmed that I was the odd woman out. The Helsinki Agreement was widely welcomed. I could imagine the shaking of wise heads at my impulsive imprudence. Reggie Maudling came round at once to see me in Flood Street to express both his anger at my delivering such a speech without consulting him and his disagreement with its content. I gave no ground. Indeed, Mr Brezhnev’s evident satisfaction at what Helsinki achieved helped convince me that I must return to the subject: he described it as ‘a necessary summing up of the political outcome of the Second World War’. In other words he regarded it — not least perhaps the commitment not to alter European borders except ‘by peaceful means and by agreement’ — as recognizing and legitimizing the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe which they had obtained by force and fraud at the end of the war.
The Helsinki Summit of 1975 is now viewed in a favourable light because the dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe used its provisions as a programme for which to fight in their long struggle with the communist State. And indeed by making human rights a matter of treaty obligations rather than domestic law it gave the dissidents leverage which they employed to the full. Their bravery would have been of little account, however, without the subsequent Western, particularly American, renewal of resolve and defence build-up. These halted the expansion that had given Soviet communism the psychological prestige of historical inevitability, exerted an external pressure on communist regimes that diverted them from domestic repression, and gave heart to the burgeoning resistance movements against communism. This pincer movement — the revived West and the dissidents — more than countered the advantages that the Soviets received from Helsinki in the form of increased legitimacy and Western recognition. Without that, Helsinki would have been just one more step on the road to defeat.
Not surprisingly after the Helsinki speech, I was not invited to the Soviet Union, as perhaps a different Leader of the Opposition would have been. But I felt it important to deepen my knowledge of the communist system in practice. Consequently, when an invitation arrived for me to visit Romania I accepted. I already had some knowledge of that country, gained when I was Education Secretary. Improbable as it may seem, there had grown up a regular Anglo-Romanian seminar on education, held one year in Bucharest and one year in Cambridge. My Romanian opposite number, Mircea Malita, was a distinguished mathematician. Like other ‘cultural’ events under communism, these seminars had a largely political and diplomatic purpose. That said, there was no doubt in my mind about the cultural riches of Romania itself — not only Bucharest, known as ‘the Paris of the Balkans’ (still at that time spared from the later devastation inflicted on it by Ceausescu’s megalomaniac building plans of the 1980s), but also the luminous painted monastery churches of Bukovina, which I visited in September 1971. Not surprisingly, the Romanians were anxious to continue to cultivate me when I became Leader of the Opposition, and for the moment this accorded with my purposes as well.
At the time of my second visit at the beginning of September 1975, Romania occupied a unique position in the communist world. Following in the footsteps of his (already disgraced) predecessor Gheorghe Dej, Nicolae Ceausescu had plotted out an independent path for Romania within the Warsaw Pact. In 1968, for example, he had visited Prague and, apparently sincerely, expressed support for the Polish reform movement and bitterly condemned the Russian suppression of it. The Western view, which I then shared, was that Romania should be accorded discreet support in the hope that its example might lead to further fragmentation in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In fact, Ceausescu was playing a ruthless game in which ethnic tensions (with Hungary), East-West competition (between NATO and the Warsaw Pact) and rivalry within the communist world (between the Soviet Union and China) were exploited as seemed appropriate at any juncture.
Between the conversations I had with Ceausescu in 1971 and 1975 he had further consolidated his position. Although he had become effective leader in 1965, it was not until 1974 that he united the functions of Party Leader and Head of State and Government. From now on he was freer to indulge his political fantasies. For what we Westerners did not sufficiently grasp was that Ceausescu was a throwback both to Stalinism, whose methods he employed, and indeed to a more traditional Balkan despotism for which the promotion of his family and the flaunting of wealth and power were essential trappings. Ceausescu himself never struck me as anything out of the ordinary, just cold, rather dull, spewing forth streams of statistics and possessing that stilted formal courtesy that communists adopted as a substitute for genuine civilization. We discussed the Soviet threat and he gave me a long account, faithfully mirrored later by guides, diplomats and factory managers, of the astonishing successes of the Romanian economy. He was particularly proud of the level of ‘investment’ which, as a share of the national income, certainly dwarfed that of Western countries. In fact, of course, misdirected investment is a classic feature of the planned economy; it was just that Romania, whose people apart from the ruling élite lived in poverty, misdirected more than the others.
I was also shown around a scientific institute specializing in polymer research. My guide was none other than Elena Ceausescu, who had already begun to indulge a personal fantasy world which matched her husband’s in absurdity, if not in human consequences: she was determined to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on polymers. It subsequently emerged that she could barely have distinguished a polymer from a polygon. But behind the defences of translation and communist long-windedness she put up quite a good show.
In other ways, however, Romania did illustrate more characteristic features of the communist system. I visited a factory and heard from those in charge — I presumed they were the management — a litany of the company’s achievements. ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said, ‘but could I speak to the trade union leaders here? Perhaps they may have something to add?’ A look of astonishment spread across their faces. ‘But that’s us!’ they replied. What the individual workers at the factory — or indeed the neighbours across whose houses it was belching thick brown smoke — might have commented is another matter. For, as in the fully developed socialist state, the trade unions of Romania were political not industrial institutions.
A little later I had dinner with Members of the Romanian ‘Parliament’. It was explained to me that one had to be a member of an approved, i.e. reliably communist, trade union in order to stand in a parliamentary election. They showed me the list of some thirty-five such bodies. Looking down it, the ‘beekeepers’ union’ caught my eye. The opportunity was irresistible. In grave fashion I began to interrogate them. How large was the beekeepers’ bloc in Parliament? Who were its leaders? What were the factions? Was there an anti-beekeepers’ faction? The evening slipped by more quickly.
A final practical lesson for me, which any Western politician or businessman visiting the Eastern bloc was well advised to learn as soon as possible, was to assume that someone was always listening. This was an inconvenience for people like me in the country for just a few days. But for the subjects of a communist state it was a kind of intellectual terror. Depriving human beings of their privacy has the intended psychological effect of making them withdrawn, introverted and incapable of the communication based on mutual trust which permits civil society. Thus communism applied sophisticated techniques in the service of a primitive ideology so as to destroy not just potential centres of opposition but rather the final enemy, human personality.
Ceausescu’s Romania already reflected this in an advanced form, though for me and my party it was a matter of farce, not tragedy. I had already been told at the British Embassy how one of our diplomats, anxious to recruit a nanny for his young children and hazy about how to insert a suitable advertisement in a Romanian newspaper, decided that the simplest and most reliable method was to tell an astonished friend on the Embassy telephone of his urgent requirement. Sure enough, and without a blush, in the course of some discussion of a quite different subject a Romanian official suggested a candidate.
Richard Ryder and I were put up in the State Guest House. Interestingly, the sitting-room ceiling consisted of an open wooden grille, doubtless good for ventilation but possibly for other purposes too. I just could not make the television work when I wanted to listen to the news. Richard was no more successful. We were still struggling when a knock on the door announced the arrival of a member of the Guest House staff who helpfully put us right.
Even before this visit, I had few illusions about the oppressive nature of the regime. Whatever Western strategic interests might require, I was determined that the pressure should be kept up to improve respect for human rights, particularly when the ink was barely dry on the Helsinki Agreement. An expatriate Romanian group in Britain, knowing of my impending visit, sent me a list of five political prisoners, asking me to urge their release. I immediately agreed to do so. But somehow the Foreign Office got wind of this and sought determinedly to dissuade me on the grounds that it would alienate Ceausescu to no good purpose. A senior civil servant explained in person the deep unwisdom of my intention. I was not impressed. In Bucharest I gave the Romanians the list and said that these people were wrongly imprisoned and must be set free. I was glad to see that they subsequently were.
Undoubtedly, the most important foreign tour I made in 1975 — probably the most significant during my time as Leader of the Opposition — was to the United States in September. I already, of course, knew something of the States; and I liked and admired most of what I knew. This, however, was my first opportunity to meet all the leading political figures, and do so on something approaching equal terms. I was guaranteed plenty of media attention, if largely for the depressing reason that Britain’s stock had rarely fallen lower. American newspapers, magazines and television programmes were concentrating on the precipitous decline of the British economy, the advance of trade union power, the extension of the socialist state and what was perceived to be a collapse of national self-confidence. Aside from the schadenfreude, also evident was a nagging worry that America, itself suffering a deep but different crisis in the wake of the fall of Vietnam and the trauma of Watergate, might suffer the same fate.[47]
I had discussed the situation with Norman Lamont, an early supporter whose job with Rothschilds enabled him to keep me in touch with what was going on in the City and abroad, and who had just returned from the United States where he had spoken to politicians, officials and opinion-formers. I gained the impression, which proved accurate, that the Ford Administration’s confidence had started modestly to increase, which was giving them all the more opportunity to worry about what was happening in Britain. The Prime Minister, who had recently been in Washington, had done nothing to improve perceptions by claiming that all our difficulties were grossly exaggerated. Something different and more serious was expected. I resolved to provide it.
Gordon Reece flew on ahead of me to New York in order to set up the media arrangements. Just before I left London he telephoned to say that expectations of my visit were now so high that I should make the first speech I was to deliver — to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in New York — a blockbuster rather than, as planned, a low-key performance with the main speech coming later in Washington. This required frenzied last-minute speech-rewriting with Adam Ridley, and it showed in the text. Most of the speech struck exactly the right note. It began by taking head-on the American comments on the sorry state of contemporary Britain and treating them seriously. I then drew attention to what I called ‘the progressive consensus, the doctrine that the state should be active on many fronts in promoting equality: in the provision of social welfare and in the redistribution of wealth and incomes’. There followed a detailed analysis of its effects in the form of over-taxation, the discouragement of enterprise, the squeeze on profits, the defrauding of savers by inflation and negative interest rates and the apparently inexorable growth of the public sector and public spending.
Unfortunately, tacked on to the draft and, far more seriously, to the ‘final’ version issued to the press by Conservative Central Office was a passage about public expenditure constraints requiring tough, painful decisions such as limiting the number of kidney machines. Kidney machines were in fact already limited in number as part of the unacknowledged rationing of health treatment under Labour. Nevertheless, a frank statement of it — particularly in the form of a throwaway line — was asking for trouble. In the helter-skelter preparations Adam and I let it through. Luckily, when Gordon in New York saw a copy of the speech he immediately understood the potential damage and removed the offending part. All press releases are subject to the usually formal qualification ‘check against delivery’, so he was also able to ring round Fleet Street to tell the editors that the page in question, although part of the press release they had received from Central Office, was not being used and so should not be covered. They had sufficient respect for him to comply; and since the front page of the Sun had already provisionally been dominated by the headline ‘Let ‘em Die, Says Maggie’ before it was replaced with something blander, it was a narrow escape.
In fact, the main message of the speech was given maximum attention on both sides of the Atlantic. I was promptly attacked back home by the Labour Government for running Britain down abroad. In fact, the message I was bringing to America about Britain was essentially one of hope, namely that the nation’s potential was great enough to withstand even the effects of socialism. The criticism from the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, who quaintly criticized me later for putting ‘argumentative passages’ into my American speeches, found a faithful echo in the British Embassy where I was staying. A senior member of the Embassy staff briefed the American press against me. Gordon Reece quickly discovered what was happening, and there was a sharp exchange of letters on the subject between me and Jim Callaghan when I returned to England.
Aware of the attempt to try to cast me in this light, I used my speech to the National Press Club in Washington to point out that if the present socialist policies were abandoned, Britain had underlying strengths which would ensure its swift recovery. A shift of popular opinion against the far Left, the extent of our energy reserves and the strength of our scientific potential — shown by seventy-two Nobel Prizes, more than France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium put together — all justified long-term optimism.
Now, slowly, we are finding our way. It is true that the reports about Britain still reflect a serious situation, and they are right to do so. But a change is coming over us… I see some signs that our people are ready to make the tough choice, to follow the harder road. We are still the same people who have fought for freedom, and won. The spirit of adventure, the inventiveness, the determination are still strands in our character. We may suffer from a British sickness now, but our constitution is sound and we have the heart and the will to win through.
In the course of my American visit I met the key figures in the Ford Administration. Dr Kissinger I knew already. But this was the first time that I had met Bill Simon, the free-market-minded Treasury Secretary, who had jettisoned the wage and price controls imposed under President Nixon, and the immensely experienced James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary, the Administration’s principal internal opponent to détente.
I was also received by President Ford himself. He was a large, friendly man, unexpectedly precipitated into high office who, perhaps to his own surprise as well as that of others, had started to relish it. He had assembled or inherited a talented team around him and had already demonstrated to the Europeans America’s continued commitment to their security, in spite of all the upheavals of domestic politics. He had, in fact, both the strengths and weaknesses of what in current political parlance is described as ‘a safe pair of hands’. He was not the kind of man to challenge accepted orthodoxies, which I increasingly believed ought to be challenged. But he was a reassuring and steady figure who helped America heal the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate. After a rocky period in the wake of his pardon for Richard Nixon, his Administration’s fortunes appeared to be improving, and his undeclared bid for the Republican nomination was proceeding against a genially effective campaign by a certain Governor Ronald Reagan. President Ford’s prospects for re-election appeared good. I came away hoping that he would succeed.
I found on my return to London that the coverage given to my American tour had transformed my political standing. Even the Labour Party’s simulated outrage helped. For the more attention was paid to my arguments, the more seriously they were taken. I was soon conscious also of a change of attitude within the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. People who had regarded my accession to the leadership as an irritating but temporary fluke had to think again. Not only was I evidently being treated seriously by some of the most powerful figures in the free world; the warnings I had given in my Helsinki speech looked ever less eccentric and more prescient.
In late September the Cubans, acting as Soviet surrogates, began to pour troops into Angola. In December the US Senate overturned President Ford’s policy of providing assistance to the anti-communist forces there and resistance to the MPLA collapsed. I thought and read more about these things over Christmas and decided that I would make a further speech.
On this occasion I stuck to the conventions and told Reggie Maudling of my decision. It was perhaps a testimony to his unease at the prospect that Reggie went so far as to offer me a draft. Unfortunately, this would not do. As Denis might have said, ‘It was so weak it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.’ Bob Conquest had now departed for the more politically conducive Hoover Institution in California, so I asked Robert Moss to help me. The editor of The Economist’s, Foreign Report, an expert on security and strategic matters, one of the founders of the National Association for Freedom set up to combat overweening trade union power, and destined to be a best-selling novelist, Robert turned out to be an ideal choice.
The speech which I delivered on Monday 19 January at Kensington Town Hall covered similar ground to the previous year’s Chelsea speech, but concentrated more on defence and contained even stronger language about the Soviet menace. It accused the Labour Government of ‘dismantling our defence at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’. It also offered an analysis of Soviet intentions different from that of the proponents of détente.
Russia is ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge, largely land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.
I warned of the imbalance between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Central Europe, where the latter outnumbered us by 150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft. But I emphasized that the West’s defence could not be ensured in Europe alone: NATO’s supply lines had also to be protected. This meant that we could not ignore what Soviet-backed forces were doing in Angola. In any case, if they were allowed their way there, they might well conclude that they could repeat the performance elsewhere.
The reaction to the speech, particularly in the more thoughtful sections of the British press, was much more favourable than to the Chelsea speech. The Daily Telegraph entitled its editorial comment ‘The Truth About Russia’. The Times admitted that ‘there has been complacency in the West’. Nor was the Soviet reaction long in coming. The Soviet Embassy wrote a letter to Reggie Maudling, and the Ambassador called on the Foreign Office to protest in person. A stream of crude invective flowed from the different Soviet propaganda organs. But it was some apparatchik in the office of Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, his imagination surpassing his judgement, who coined the description of me as ‘The Iron Lady’.
It is one of the few defences which free societies have against totalitarian propaganda that totalitarians are inclined to see the Western mind as a mirror image of their own. They are consequently capable from time to time of the most grotesque misjudgements. This was one of them. When Gordon Reece read on the Press Association tapes what Red Star had said he was ecstatic and rushed into my office to tell me about it. I quickly saw that they had inadvertently put me on a pedestal as their strongest European opponent. They never did me a greater favour.
A few days later I visited the British Army on the Rhine, where my Kensington speech ensured me a warm reception. I was photographed driving a tank, which did me no harm at all at home either. What the outside world did not know was that in the course of this visit my career almost ended even more dramatically than it was to in November 1990.
Cranley Onslow, one of the Party’s Defence spokesmen, Richard Ryder and I were shown aboard an elderly two-engine propeller-driven transport aircraft to fly from the British base at Rheindalen to Oerlinghausen where we were to stay the night. (The plan had been to fly by helicopter, but the weather was not good enough.) Shortly after take-off I took my draft speech out of my briefcase and started to work on it. Some time later I became conscious of an irregularity in the noisy drumming of the engines. It was cold in the cabin. Outside there was thick freezing fog, and looking more closely I could see ice forming on the wings. At this point one of the crew came back to say that there was a problem and we would have to return to Rheindalen. I could sense from his manner that it was serious and I pressed to know exactly what the trouble was. It turned out that with the fog so thick the pilot could not be sure of his bearings. There was more. We were apparently now flying blind through a range of mountains. This was why the pilot had kept our speed to the minimum, slowing until the aircraft threatened to stall, in the hope that the fog might break and he could see his way out of trouble. Worse still, the instrument measuring our air speed had failed. I stopped working on the speech and put it away carefully in my briefcase, leaned back, closed my eyes and thought about matters even more important than politics. Somehow, we managed to get back to Rheindalen. I was never more relieved to feel tarmac under my feet.
If my feet were on the ground metaphysically as well, this was in part because I had followed closely the speeches and writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn since he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. But the first time I saw and heard him speak was in an interview he gave to Michael Charlton on the BBC television programme Panorama in March 1976. It made a deep impression on me; I subsequently kept the transcript amid the bundle of papers I regularly referred to when in need of inspiration.
The predominant Western view at the time was that in the end the Soviet system would, by a process of ‘convergence’, turn into something not very different from Western society, which would itself evolve in the direction of social democracy. Solzhenitsyn challenged this complacency. The real question, according to him, was not whether and how the Soviet system would change, but rather whether the West itself could survive. This was not because of the strengths of communism but rather because of the weakness and cowardice of Western leaders. Until a few years before the cause of the dissidents in the USSR had been making real if slow headway. But now the Western nations had allowed the balance to shift dramatically against freedom. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Helsinki process made my own, which had caused such controversy the previous year, pale into banality. Solzhenitsyn asked:
How do you explain that over the last few months there has been hardly any news coming out of the Soviet Union of the continuing persecution of dissidents? If you will forgive me, I will answer this myself. The journalists have bowed to the spirit of Helsinki. I know for a fact that Western journalists in Moscow, who have been given the right of freer movement, in return for this, and because of the spirit of Helsinki, no longer accept information about new persecutions of dissidents in the Soviet Union. What does the spirit of Helsinki and the spirit of détente mean for us within the Soviet Union? The strengthening of totalitarianism.
As I have noted, the revival of Western morale and defence preparedness altered this entire equation. But Solzhenitsyn’s words are an interesting testimony to the corrosive effect of Helsinki under conditions of détente.
Now, however, the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States at the end of 1976 brought to the White House a man who put human rights at the top of his foreign policy agenda. One could at least be sure that he would not make the mistake of his predecessor, who had refused to meet Solzhenitsyn for fear of offending the Soviet Union.
President Carter was soon to be tested. In January 1977 the text of ‘Charter 77’, the manifesto of the Czech dissidents, was smuggled into West Germany and published. The following month Jimmy Carter wrote personally to Professor Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and leading dissident. This change of tone was reassuring.
But I soon became worried about two other aspects of the Carter Administration’s approach to foreign policy. First, human rights issues were treated without reference to broader political and strategic considerations, and indeed with some moral naivete. Even the most idealistic proponent of a policy inspired by moral considerations has to be practical. There were many regimes which abused human rights — for example, some military governments in Latin America and the Middle East — but which may have been less oppressive than the totalitarian alternative.
Moreover, the primary duty a free country owes, not just to itself but to countries which are unfree, is to survive. So there is no need to apologize for supporting an unsavoury regime which temporarily serves larger Western interests, although we should always use our influence to ameliorate its worst abuses. Unfortunately, muddled thinking and divisions within the Carter Administration prevented it from pursuing such a balanced approach. As we shall see, the Carter stress on human rights in Iran helped to undermine the Shah and to replace him with the far more oppressive, and anti-Western, regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. As Pascal points out, the first principle of morality is thinking clearly. And in this case failing to think clearly produced a markedly worse result for both human rights and Western interests.
My second criticism was that human rights policy cannot stand on its own, for the simple reason that rights have ultimately to be defended by force. In the circumstances of the 1970s, this required the United States to be militarily strong enough to resist and reverse the threat to world freedom posed by the Soviet Union. Yet President Carter had a passionate commitment to disarmament, demonstrated both by his early cancellation of the B1 strategic bomber and the renewed impetus he gave to SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), which President Ford had initiated with the Soviets. Ironically, therefore, President Carter found that he could only take action to improve human rights against countries linked to the West, not against countries that were hostile and strong enough to ignore him.
As for the SALT II negotiations, it was possible to argue about the particular formulae, but the really important strategic fact was that the Soviet Union had in recent years been arming far faster than the Americans. Any mere ‘arms limitation’ agreement was bound to stabilize the military balance in such a way as to recognize this. Only deep arms cuts on the one hand, or a renewed drive for stronger American defences on the other, could reverse it. If, however, neither of these was a real possibility in the prevailing state of public opinion, then something on the broad lines of a SALT agreement was to the West’s advantage, since it would at least halt the Soviets’ advance. Either way, the United States had already lost its nuclear superiority at a time when the West had long since abandoned any attempt to keep up with the Warsaw Pact in conventional weapons. Crude as such calculations inevitably are, the scale of the change is shown by the following table:
US and Soviet strategic nuclear forces
Indeed, the position would further worsen as the Soviets produced their Backfire Bombers, multiplied their nuclear submarines and started to deploy SS20 nuclear missiles focused on Western Europe.
These facts and figures were available to anyone who was interested, which far too few journalists were. But did they actually underestimate the danger? I had followed closely the accounts given by Major-General George Keegan, recently retired as Chief of the US Air Force Intelligence, of Soviet research into charged particle beams, which might provide a technology that would revolutionize defence assumptions by providing a far more effective shield against ballistic missiles. The Carter Administration belittled this threat, and only when President Reagan launched his Strategic Defence Initiative were the dangers properly understood and countervailing action taken. As early as March 1977, however, the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology published observations by General Keegan on the dimensions of the overall Soviet threat. He argued that the Americans had consistently underestimated the scale of Soviet military strength and preparedness, coming to the devastating conclusion that ‘the Soviet Union today has a capability to initiate, wage, survive and emerge from a global conflict with far greater effectiveness than the United States and its allies’. It would take the invasion of Afghanistan, two years later, before most Western politicians began to think in these terms.
When I visited the United States again in September 1977, the Carter Administration was still enjoying its political honeymoon. President Carter had brought a new informal style to the White House which appeared to accord with the mood of the times. Although there was unease about some of his appointments, this was largely put down to Washington resentment against outsiders. In Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security Adviser, he had two remarkable assistants, whose differences of outlook were not yet apparent.
I had met Jimmy Carter himself in London in May when he attended the G7 Summit. In spite of my growing doubts about his foreign policy, I liked him and looked forward to meeting him again. At our discussion in the White House the President was most keen to explain and justify his recently launched initiative for a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Although he had clearly mastered the details and was a persuasive advocate, I was not convinced. Believing as I did in the vital importance of a credible nuclear deterrent, and knowing that nuclear weapons had to be tested in order to be credible, I could not go along with the policy.
Equally, I was unable to agree with President Carter, or indeed Cyrus Vance and Andrew Young, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, on their preferred approach to settling the Rhodesian question. The Americans were insisting that the Rhodesian security forces be dismantled. But I knew that would never be acceptable to the white population — who still enjoyed military superiority over the ‘armed struggle’ — without some real guarantee of peace. The Americans were also toying with the idea of imposing sanctions against South Africa, which seemed to me equally ill-judged considering that they needed to have the South African Government on their side if they were to persuade Ian Smith to compromise.[48]
At least on this occasion I did not have to contend with hostile briefing from the Embassy, which was ironic considering that the new Ambassador, Peter Jay, was Jim Callaghan’s son-in-law. There had been loud accusations of nepotism when this appointment had been announced. But I liked and admired Peter Jay personally. His understanding of monetary economics would have made him a welcome recruit to the Shadow Cabinet. Even so, I have to confess that I took a certain mischievous pleasure in quoting an extract from Jim Callaghan’s speech to the previous year’s Labour Party Conference as the introduction to my own speech to the British-American Chamber of Commerce. In it the Labour Prime Minister had said:
We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that this option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist it only worked by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy followed by higher levels of unemployment as the next step.
It was an open secret that this uncharacteristically sound passage had been drafted by none other than Peter Jay.
In fact, the only embarrassment I faced during my American trip resulted from an open disagreement between Jim Prior and Keith Joseph about Lord Scarman’s report on the Grunwick affair and about the right policy towards the closed shop. Members of the press corps were more interested in this than the results of my discussions in Washington, and I had to issue two statements to try to calm the waters. But the important matters of substance could only be sorted out on my return.
Meanwhile, uncertainties about the direction of American policy and the extent of Soviet ambitions had increasingly focused attention on those countries which were balanced uneasily between the two blocs. Of these, Yugoslavia had a special significance. Since Marshal Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia had been in an anomalous but important position. After horrendous early repression and mass murder, Tito and his comrades had become somewhat more liberal because circumstances forced them to look to the West for financial support and security. This gradually moved Yugoslavia in a pseudo-capitalist and quasi-liberal direction. There might have been even more progress of this kind if Tito’s every move had not been greeted with fawning admiration by a particular kind of British socialist. In fact, his real talent was as an illusionist. He persuaded both East and West, and perhaps even a section of Yugoslav opinion, that the country was an important player in the great international game. The high point of this was the formation under Tito’s inspiration of the so-called ‘Non-Aligned’ Movement of Third World countries.
By the mid 1970s the country’s economic problems were growing. The Yugoslavs had financed a consumer boom on the back of Western credit. A kind of chaotic semi-capitalism masquerading as ‘self-management’ had evolved. Living standards were higher than in other communist countries, partly because of remittances from Yugoslav workers overseas; but, correspondingly, the implications for the regime if living standards had to fall might be even more serious.
The fragility of Yugoslavia was both symbolized by and depended upon the state of Tito’s own health. It was an open question whether the Soviets would try to reassert control in the chaos which was widely expected to follow his death. At eighty-five, he was still in control of events, but ailing. I had wanted to visit Yugoslavia for some time, but my visit was twice postponed because Tito was not well enough to receive me.
On a bitter early December day in 1977, however, in the company of Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a comrade in arms and old friend of the Yugoslav President from the Second World War, I arrived in Belgrade. My first duty was to climb the 150 steps up to the huge war memorial on the top of Mount Avala to lay a wreath. I did not have a warm coat with me and so by the time we descended I was chilled to the marrow. The general political reception, though, was warm enough, not just from the politicians but even from the communist newspapers.
As ‘the Iron Lady’, I was seen as someone who understood the fact that the Yugoslavs lived every day under the shadow of possible Soviet intervention. Paradoxically, this was one of the main considerations which kept the country together. Only with the end of the Cold War could the nations of Yugoslavia achieve real self-determination. An illustration of this is that the President of the National Assembly who hosted lunch for me, Kiro Gligorov, is now the President of the newly independent if embattled state of Macedonia.
Fitzroy Maclean and I visited Tito at his Belgrade home. His was a powerful personality, retaining some of the outward panache of his flamboyant partisan past, but leaving no doubt about the inner steel that explained his post-war dominance. We discussed and broadly agreed about the Soviet threat. The looming question of his legacy did not figure in our talks. Perhaps he had already concluded, for all the elaborate constitutional safeguards, that it would indeed be the déluge.
Before I departed for Yugoslavia, Alfred Sherman had asked me to raise with Tito the case of Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former friend and colleague and for many years most insistent domestic critic. Djilas had been one of a number of political prisoners recently freed but was, I understood, the object of continuing harassment. It seemed likely that he would soon disappear back into prison. I decided on a shot across Tito’s bows. I said with studied innocence how pleased I was that Djilas had been released. Tito glowered.
‘Yes, he’s out,’ the President said, ‘but he’s up to his old tricks. And if he goes on upsetting our constitution he will go straight back to gaol.’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘a man like Djilas will do you far more harm in prison than out of it.’
Fitzroy Maclean chipped in, ‘She’s right, you know.’
Tito gave me a hard look. There was a pause in the conversation before he turned to other matters. As far as I know, Djilas stayed out of gaol — only to suffer more harassment for his independent thinking under the brutal regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
From the end of 1977 until the June 1979 general election I found no major reason to reverse the judgements or revise the analysis I had made as a result of my reading and discussions on foreign policy. British, European and American opinion steadily hardened against further compromises with the Soviet Union. The Soviets themselves displayed less and less caution in dealing with internal dissent or planning foreign adventure. By now the Horn of Africa had attracted Soviet ambitions: Colonel Mengistu, ruler of Ethiopia and a Soviet puppet, embarked on a long war with Somalia. In April 1978 Soviet disinformation achieved a major success in forcing President Carter to announce deferment of the production of the neutron bomb, which might have contributed to maintaining the military balance in Europe. The following month the Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov, who had set up the Helsinki Group to monitor the Helsinki accords, was sentenced to seven years in prison. In July the dissidents Anatol Sharansky and Alexander Ginsburg were sentenced respectively to thirteen and eight years in prison and labour camps for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’. For any friend of freedom it was a time of heartbreak. And out of office there was little I could do to change it.
In fact, though I did not know it at the time, three developments were opening up the long-term prospect of turning back the Soviet advance. The first, paradoxically, was that they had become too arrogant. It is a natural and often fatal trait of the totalitarian to despise opponents. The Soviets believed that the failure of Western politicians signified that Western peoples were resigned to defeat. A little more subtlety and forethought might have secured the Soviet leaders far greater gains. As it was, particularly through the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they provoked a Western reaction which finally destroyed the Soviet Union itself.
The second development was the election in September 1978 of a Polish Pope. John Paul II would fire a revolution in Eastern Europe which shook the Soviet Empire to its core.
Finally, there was the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a serious contender for the American Presidency. I had met Governor Reagan shortly after my becoming Conservative Leader in 1975. Even before then, I knew something about him because Denis had returned home one evening in the late 1960s full of praise for a remarkable speech Ronald Reagan had just delivered at the Institute of Directors. I read the text myself and quickly saw what Denis meant. When we met in person I was immediately won over by his charm, sense of humour and directness. In the succeeding years I read his speeches, advocating tax cuts as the root to wealth creation and stronger defences as an alternative to détente. I also read many of his fortnightly broadcasts to the people of California, which his Press Secretary sent over regularly for me. I agreed with them all. In November 1978 we met again in my room in the House of Commons.
In the early years Ronald Reagan had been dismissed by much of the American political élite, though not by the American electorate, as a right-wing maverick who could not be taken seriously. (I had heard that before somewhere.) Now he was seen by many thoughtful Republicans as their best ticket back to the White House. Whatever Ronald Reagan had gained in experience, he had not done so at the expense of his beliefs. I found them stronger than ever. When he left my study I reflected on how different things might look if such a man were President of the United States. But in November 1978 such a prospect seemed a long way off.
THE MIDDLE EAST
The hard-fought Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, changed the way in which Western countries regarded the Middle East. First, cuts in oil production, the huge hike in its price and selective embargoes against oil-producing countries friendly to Israel, imposed by the OPEC cartel of Arab oil producers, damaged the Western economies and caused enormous alarm. The dependence of Western living standards on unpredictable Middle Eastern politics could not have been more effectively demonstrated. Secondly, although the Israeli counter-attack had crossed the Suez Canal and driven Syrian forces to within twenty-five miles of Damascus, the Egyptians and Syrians had fought better than they had in 1967 and the Soviets had threatened to send troops in a ‘peacekeeping’ role. Thirdly, the United States responded by taking the leading part in bringing about disengagement between Israel and the Arab forces. From now on, American diplomacy, beginning with Dr Kissinger and carried on by President Carter, was the prime external force in the search for a Middle Eastern settlement.
For states like Syria, Egypt and Jordan, and for the PLO itself, life became more complicated, though more hopeful. Each had its own priorities, none of which could realistically be achieved by force of arms in the foreseeable future. Those who proved most cooperative in seeking an agreement with Israel were likely to receive the added bonus of American assistance for their economies, which the heavy demands of preparedness for war, combined with strong doses of socialism, had weakened. In such circumstances natural rivalries previously submerged or at least concealed by commitment to the ‘Arab cause’ came to the surface. Such was the Middle Eastern background to the visit I made to Egypt and Syria in January and to Israel in March 1976.
But there was also a tricky domestic political background. British politicians were in Middle Eastern eyes sharply divided between supporters of Israel on the one hand and supporters of the Arab states and the Palestinians on the other. Within the Shadow Cabinet, I was probably in a minority in feeling strong ties of respect and admiration for both Israel and the traditional regimes of the Arab world. Most of my colleagues were traditional Tory ‘Arabists’, although among the younger members of the Parliamentary Party there was considerable support for Israel, based in part upon her fearless pursuit of national self-interest. Jewish groups in Britain scrutinized closely everything the parties said about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hence, when Reggie Maudling, in a Commons debate in November 1975, appeared to call for British recognition of the PLO and the creation of a Palestinian state, this threatened to open Party divisions and I was bombarded by complaints.
I decided to spell out our policy clearly to a meeting of Jewish ex-servicemen in Finchley. This was that the Conservative Party believed that any Middle East settlement must be based upon UN Security Council Resolution 242, which itself stressed two fundamental requirements: the ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’ (i.e. the 1967 Six Day War); and recognition of the right of every state in the area ‘to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force’. I added that we condemned terrorism in whatever form and whatever cause it purported to serve.
For me at least, this position was not just a form of words designed to let us off the hook. I did both believe that Israel must be assured of its security and that the Palestinians had to be treated with respect, which at that time we saw in the context of a confederation with Jordan. Nor were these objectives incompatible. Although in the light of its history Israel understandably wanted defendable borders, there could be no lasting peace without a solution of the Palestinian problem. And both for the Palestinians and the Arab states which in varying degrees supported them the best starting-point was to recognize by deeds as well as words that Israel was there to stay. The flurry over Reggie’s speech, however, confirmed the complexity and diplomatic perils of the visit on which I embarked.
I arrived in Cairo on Wednesday 7 January 1976 and dined that evening with President and Madame Sadat. I had first met him briefly in London only two months earlier. Before dinner we had a long talk. I found him a powerful and direct personality who had a strong grasp of the power relations of the Western world. Sadat still had to play a shrewd diplomatic game, balancing America and the Soviet Union. Having dramatically ejected Soviet advisers in 1972, he had received Soviet support during the 1973 war, but was now inclined once more to look to the United States. Just two months after my visit, Egypt formally abrogated its 1971 Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union.
In our conversations, he claimed to be reasonably satisfied with the state of the Egyptian economy: at this time there were still some expectations that the destruction of Beirut as a financial centre might indirectly benefit Cairo, and he was hoping for help from the Gulf states. But I thought it significant that the President lamented the amount of money which had gone into paying for war which might have been used for the peaceful development of Egypt. He told me that he was ‘very tired’, and I suspected this was said as much on behalf of Egypt as on his own account. He felt that he had a good relationship with President Ford, which perhaps intimated the way his mind was turning. Indeed, he gave the impression that Egypt would remain neutral unless forced into another war. There were also telltale signs in his conversation of Egypt’s well-known rivalry with Syria. He told me that that country was providing arms to both sides in the Lebanese civil war and added that the Syrian Ba’athist Party was hated throughout the Arab world. I formed the impression that Sadat was a formidable man, capable of great boldness, who was contemplating a major departure in his country’s foreign relations; I could not foresee, however, just how dramatic that change would be. Less than two years later he was to make his historic visit to Jerusalem, which led to Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt.
Sightseeing during my short stay in Egypt was a diplomatic necessity as well as a pleasure. But even this contained risks. Having climbed the great Cheops Pyramid, and still a little breathless, I came down to find a small group of cameramen, journalists and officials standing beside a camel. The camel driver’s name was Ibrahim and the camel was called ‘Jack Hulbert’, perhaps so named by an English Tommy after the popular long-jawed British comedian of the 1930s and forties. He was, it seems, a distinguished beast, and had been ridden on a previous visit by Alec Douglas-Home when Foreign Secretary. Everyone seemed to assume that I would follow suit. The possibilities flashed across my mind, not just getting on but staying on. I firmly declined. Ibrahim claimed to be most offended. If Jack Hulbert was good enough for Sir Alec, why not for Mrs Thatcher? I caught a gleam in the driver’s eye and suggested that paying double the fare for no camel ride might suit both of us. With a great show of reluctance he agreed. And so the newspaper photographs in Britain showed me being welcomed by President Sadat, rather than in some less dignified posture.
On Friday afternoon I flew to Damascus. President Assad had recently marked the fifth anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power by a judicious air-drop of gifts in Damascus and large pay rises for civil servants and the army. He was already a proven survivor in a country where previous heads of state had never served for more than two or three years. A member of the Alawite minority, presiding over a government containing people from a wide variety of religions, tribes and political affiliations, Assad had demonstrated a high level of political cunning to attain and hold power. His Ba’athist Party was itself an odd mixture of elements derived from both socialism and Islam, but founded in the 1940s under the slogan of ‘one Arab nation with an eternal mission’. Assad had developed to a fine art that particular mixture of radicalism, pragmatism and ruthlessness which success in the violent, turbulent world of Middle Eastern politics required. He was considered the most anti-Western leader in the region and was held responsible not just for many of the difficulties in the Arab-Israeli peace process but also for engineering the destruction of Lebanon. Western policy’s main error, which unfortunately continued for many years, was to underrate him and to exclude him from talks. But he made it easier to do this because of his subservience to the Soviet Union and his support for international terrorism.
Syria was a tightly controlled police state. Romanian-style eavesdropping was clearly the order of the day at the official Guest House in which we stayed. On our arrival, Gordon Reece and I went up to our rooms to wash and change. But Gordon found that he had no towels in the bathroom and so knocked on my door and asked to borrow one. I had barely gone to fetch it when a maid scurried up to hand him his own.
That evening our hosts would have found their guests’ private conversation more interesting. The Syrians had without warning invited me to a secret meeting with the PLO the following day. I was not going to agree to this. I would not meet them formally at all, still less in secret, because the PLO had refused to renounce terrorism. But I agreed, indeed welcomed, the opportunity to pay a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp and it was arranged that I would be taken to one on the outskirts of Damascus.
The following day began with a long, bumpy ride to Qunaitra, the last town on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. It had been demolished by the Israeli army when they withdrew in 1974. They were even alleged to have desecrated graves, and the whole town was now a showcase for the evils of Zionism. I was told that there was only one inhabitant now, an old lady who had refused to leave and had lived through the occupation. Predictably, I bumped into her on my way round.
We stopped at the Palestinian camp on our return journey to Damascus. ‘Camp’ turned out to be something of a misnomer. It was an enormous settlement with roads, tents, social halls, shops, hospitals and schools. I was shown one school, where the children were assembled in a large hall, being addressed by a woman teacher with great earnestness. I imagined that this was some kind of prayer assembly and asked my guide what the woman was saying. The answer came: ‘She is reminding these children that they are privileged to be at this school because at least one of their parents has been killed by a Jew.’ Now I understood why it was named the ‘School of the Martyrs’.
That evening after my return I had dinner with the President at his comfortable but modest house. He was obviously highly intelligent and knew precisely what he wanted. Though I was impressed, there was little meeting of minds. We talked about a draft Security Council Resolution which the Arab countries intended to put forward on the Palestinian question. It seemed to me that there was everything to be said for framing this responsibly so as not to attract the American veto. But of course I could not know quite what the Syrian President’s objectives in this matter really were: given Syria’s general stance of opposition to peace talks with Israel, he might well have been happier to have a strong pro-Palestinian Resolution vetoed than a weaker one passed. In any case, it was plain at that time that the Lebanese civil war was his real preoccupation, as he insisted again and again that Syria would never tolerate the partition of Lebanon. I was not surprised a few months later when Syrian troops intervened there in force. But I felt, oddly enough, that we had struck up some kind of relationship of mutual respect. He walked with me to the garden gate and jokingly asked whether I had been woken up early by the muezzin from the nearby mosque. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am up even before the Mullahs.’
I had sought to be the perfect diplomat in both Egypt and Syria, but questions were put to me at my final press conference in Damascus which I felt required greater directness. Members of the Arab press corps pressed me on Britain’s attitude towards the PLO, demanding to know why we did not recognize it. Fresh from my visit to the camp, I set out the balanced policy described above, but I roundly condemned the PLO for its reliance on terrorism and said that you could not have peace between nations unless on the basis of law rather than violence. Their protestations at this provoked me to remind them that they themselves would not be free to ask questions if they did not benefit from some kind of rule of law. I also said that I disagreed fundamentally with the anti-Zionist Resolution, which described Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, passed by the UN General Assembly. One journalist pointedly reminded me that Jewish groups in Palestine had also committed terrorist acts. I was fully aware of that. Any English person of my age remembers only too well the hanging of two Liverpool sergeants and the booby-trapping of their bodies by Irgun in July 1947. But one act of terrorism does not justify another. Some people at the time thought this plain speaking was something of a diplomatic gaffe. That would not have mattered to me, because I felt strongly about the principle. But in fact it would shortly stand me in good stead.
In March I made my third visit to Israel. One of my early meetings was with the former Prime Minister, Golda Meir, whom I had first met when she was in office. I had developed the greatest respect for her and, perhaps as another woman in politics, I particularly understood that strange blend of hardness and softness which made her alternately motherly and commanding. She was deeply pessimistic about the prospects for peace and was particularly apprehensive about the Syrians. But she warmly congratulated me on what she described as my bravery in criticizing Palestinian terrorism in Damascus. She also strongly approved of my speeches on the Soviet threat, which she flatteringly linked with Solzhenitsyn’s statements. In her view the West was not nearly tough enough.
I found that my remarks about the PLO had made a similar impression on the other Israeli politicians to whom I spoke. Now and on later visits as Prime Minister, the fact that I had not flinched from condemning terrorism and had consistently defended Israel’s right to a secure existence allowed me to speak frankly, but as a friend, to the Israelis. In my discussions with Mrs Meir and later with the Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, the Defence Minister Shimon Peres and the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, I relayed my impressions gained from Egypt and Syria that Arab leaders were now thinking along lines which made a settlement possible. I also sought to persuade my hosts to consider not just Israel’s security — which I fully recognized must be their prime objective — but also the long-term need to reach a settlement with moderate Arab regimes. But the politicians I spoke to were generally pessimistic, particularly Prime Minister Rabin, who seemed at this time to have little understanding of the difficulties Arabs faced in dealing with their people’s desire to see justice for the Palestinians.
As always, however, I found much to admire in Israel — the commitment to democracy in a region where it was otherwise unknown, the sacrifices people were prepared to make for their country and the energies which had put the huge sums received from America and the Jewish diaspora to productive use: they really had made the desert bloom. One institution, however, which never appealed to me was the kibbutz. I visited one for lunch close to the Golan Heights. Living in a kibbutz in such areas was partly a requirement of security, partly a matter of economics. For me, however, it was also a rather unnerving and unnatural collectivist social experiment. I admired people who could choose such a life but would never have wanted to be one of them. Not so my daughter Carol. As a teenager with some left-wing leanings she had told Denis and me that she wanted to spend some time in a kibbutz. We were concerned about this, but we knew of one which seemed suitable and finally agreed. Life there was extremely hard and conditions rudimentary. One of Carol’s tasks was to inoculate young chickens. She would take them from one box, inject them and drop them in another. Unfortunately, every now and then a fighter plane would roar over, the chicks would jump up and get mixed together. Carol returned with an unromantic view of the tasks of the farm labourer. Moreover, as Denis remarked to me later, she may not have been very good at inoculating the chickens, but she was certainly inoculated against socialism.
I was taken up on the Golan Heights by an Israeli general — a professor in civilian life. I was impressed by the balance and moderation of his opinions. At one point he told me that where we stood was not Israeli land, but rather held in trust against the day when there was a secure settlement. He was a considerate man, and seeing that I was shivering in the cold wind which swept across the mountains he lent me his flak jacket. I was photographed in this and there followed furious Syrian objections. And so my first major Middle Eastern foray ended amid the endemic misunderstandings of the region.
In retrospect, my visit to the Middle East occurred at an important time of transition between the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1978–79 American-brokered Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement. Although the Camp David Agreements ultimately failed to solve the deeper problems, they were a remarkable tribute to the principal participants — Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the time I became Prime Minister they still seemed to form the best basis for progress. In fact, however, the rise of armed, aggressive Islamic fundamentalism, principally financed by and focused on Iran, was to upset all such calculations.
I was one of the last senior Western politicians to visit Iran while the Shah was still in power. The troubles had already begun. There were riots in Tabriz in February 1978 against the Shah’s programme of Westernizing reforms, which the Mullahs described as impious attacks on Islam and which, alas, ordinary people often experienced as the forced disruption of their traditional ways of life. As the disturbances increased, the Carter Administration vacillated in its attitude to the Shah. At times, it would offer him support as a bastion of Western influence in a strategically important part of the world; at others it would denounce his human rights record and demand the introduction of liberal reforms. What this recommendation failed to bear in mind was well summed up by the Shah himself: ‘I will behave like the King of Sweden when my subjects behave like Swedes.’ In any event, the Carter Administration’s blowing hot and cold only served to undermine the Shah and encourage his opponents — a fact not lost among America’s potential allies in the Middle East.
For my part, I had no doubt about the strategic importance of Iran for the West. Moreover, although by most definitions only peripheral to the Middle East, Iran, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, had a large potential influence in the region. In any case, I admired the Shah personally and believed that his policy of modernization along Western lines was ultimately the right one. In retrospect, I can see that its success depended upon its being carried out more gradually and taking into account the customs and mores of his people. But it was certainly preferable to the retreat into fundamentalism and medieval economics which have reduced the standard of living of the Iranian people and forced the regime to distract them with political and religious adventurism abroad.
All this was in the future, however, when I arrived in Tehran on the evening of Friday 28 April to be met by Tony Parsons, our Ambassador there. I found Iran to be, on the surface, a bustling, prosperous, Western-style country. There were plenty of new cars in the crowded streets. Shops sold luxury goods to sophisticated, well-dressed women. Moreover, the consumer society was underpinned not just by oil but by new industrial investment, as at the ultra-modern Iran National Automobile works which I visited.
Tony briefed me on the situation. Not only was he on good personal terms with the Shah himself: he had a vast detailed knowledge of what was happening throughout the country. At this time the accepted wisdom was that the main threat to the Shah’s strongly pro-Western regime came from the communist-backed opposition, the Tudeh. Judging from his public pronouncements, even the Shah himself seemed to believe this. But Tony Parsons had perceived that the Mullahs and their supporters were also a threat. That turned out to be all too true. Tony is, however, candid enough to admit in his own account that he thought the army would be capable of holding the situation. That turned out to be all too false. But none of us foresaw how quickly the Shah’s position would crumble.
On Saturday morning I was received at the palace by the Minister of the Court, Amir Abbas Hoveyda. Hoveyda was an urbane and distinguished man, who was later executed by the Ayatollah’s regime after a show trial which I saw on television.
When I met the Shah he began by expressing concern about the recent communist-backed coup in Afghanistan: he said he had expected one eventually, but that it had occurred ten years earlier than he envisaged. He talked repeatedly of Iran as being in the front line against communism. He gave no hint of resentment against his wavering Western backers, though he had reason to feel it. Not only was there the uncertainty about the Americans’ commitment to him, but the Iranians also maintained that the Persian-language BBC World Service reports consisted largely of propaganda against the Government. I went away impressed by his grasp of world affairs. But, of course, no amount of such wisdom is proof against the kind of subversion which he was facing at home.
The Shah was a handsome man, with somewhat gaunt features which I later understood were the early signs of the cancer that would kill him. There was nothing in his manner to suggest he believed that time was running out. It was ominous perhaps that when he went to inspect his troops he travelled by helicopter: I was told that nowadays he always travelled that way rather than through the streets because of the threat of attack. I also noticed that on my visit to Isfahan, to see the ancient mosques, my personal security was particularly tight.
On reflection, my impressions of Iran seem to have something of the quality of those paintings in which the French nobility on the eve of the Revolution disport themselves amid contrived pastoral scenes. Within a year, the Shah would have fled the country, the Ayatollah Khomeini would have returned, an Islamic Republic would have been proclaimed, and bloodshed and terror would prevail. Yet here I was, invited to admire the glorious trappings of the Peacock Throne, to wonder at the spectacular crown jewels, to be enthralled by the illuminated grandeur of the ruins of Persepolis.
Could the Shah have been saved? If the Americans had been more robust, if the French had insisted that the Ayatollah refrain from political activity in Iran as a condition of asylum in Paris, if the Shah had appeased moderate Islamic opinion, perhaps things could have turned out differently. As it is, the forces unleashed by the Iranian revolution are still unchecked and represent one of the greatest threats to international peace and stability.
ASIA AND THE FAR EAST
Between the autumn of 1976 and the spring of 1977 I visited no fewer than eight states in Asia and the Far East. This provided me with a range of contacts and a fund of experience which would prove useful when I was Prime Minister. Inevitably, though, since so many countries were fitted into such a short time — among them Pakistan, India, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and China — I received only a series of political snapshots which would have to be supplemented by wider reading and discussion.
As I reflected later on what I had learned, however, it seemed to me that two general themes stood out. First, in varying degrees and from different standpoints, countries throughout the region were becoming more alert to the extension of Soviet power and influence: this would be sharply reinforced in 1979 by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Secondly, it was still an open question as to how China, Japan and possibly India would arrange a new Asian balance of power. In each case, the rise to dominance was distracted at least as much by self-created obstacles as by external circumstances. The years 1976–77, therefore, were ones full of interest for an apprentice Western statesman. And, in spite of criticisms in the British press for spending too much time away from home, I never regretted making these visits.
On Sunday 5 September 1976, very early in the morning, I arrived in Pakistan at Rawalpindi. The following evening I was entertained by Prime Minister Bhutto. He was the best kind of host, never allowing his left-wing views to get in the way of a first-class dinner and serious but amusing conversation. Gordon Reece accompanied me and Mr Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, and some of her friends were present too. Prime Minister Bhutto and I had both been to Oxford and had trained as barristers at Lincoln’s Inn.
Mr Bhutto had been an indifferent Prime Minister in difficult circumstances. He helped Pakistan achieve some self-respect after the previous military regime had lost Bangladesh in its disastrous war with India; Pakistan’s relations with its powerful neighbour were now on a better footing. But he failed to tackle seriously the country’s deeply rooted economic difficulties. Like many other Third World socialist leaders of the period, he tried to escape from domestic economic problems by calling for a ‘just’ new international economic order, which was shorthand for larger transfers of foreign aid from the West. Indeed, he had backed a Third World initiative for this purpose.
Though I expressed my views politely, I was known to be a critic of this kind of international socialism. It was somewhat to the surprise of his civil servants, therefore, that we immediately struck up a rapport. I even found him remarkably understanding — in private at least — about the need to curb Pakistani immigration into Britain.
Mr Bhutto’s ideas of a new international economic order eventually foundered in the 1980s, when the Third World began to understand that free-market economics were the key to prosperity. Long before then, however, he had been overthrown by a military coup. Perhaps, like the Shah, he had become too detached from the religious and cultural values of his own people.
No one may ever know the whole truth about his overthrow, trial and subsequent execution. As Prime Minister I intervened in vain with his successor to spare his life. But the military was determined. So it was a strange feeling when I subsequently met President Zia-Ul-Haq at Tito’s funeral in 1980. He was much more pro-Western than his predecessor, but I had also expected to meet a cold, even brutal, figure. Instead, I found him polished and he made every effort to be friendly. When my son Mark was lost for days in the North African desert in January 1982, General Zia was one of the first to telephone personally to express his concern. And under his rule Pakistan was to prove exceptionally generous to the millions of Afghan refugees driven out by the Soviet occupation.
At the time of my visit, however, Pakistan was enjoying better relations with its neighbours, including India. Indeed, by now the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, and her Government were almost exclusively concerned with domestic problems. The first half of 1975 had seen a massive campaign of opposition against her, leading to the proclamation in June of a State of Emergency, the banning of some political parties, the suspension of fundamental human rights, severe censorship and the arrest of thousands of opponents, including some thirty Indian MPs. At the time I arrived there was a kind of eerie calm. The economy was doing quite well after several bad years, though there were disagreements about whether this was as a result of government policy or of good harvests. But it was not, of course, possible to know the real conditions of the country without a free press; even parliamentary speeches were subject to censorship.
Still, I felt no inhibitions about making my planned visit. India’s ambivalent relationship with the Soviet Union, its strategic significance, as well as the traditional links with Britain which provided huge sums of overseas aid, marked out India as of special importance to me. I did, however, insist that there should be no censorship of my press conferences and that I should be able to meet representatives of the opposition. No objection was made and both conditions were fulfilled. As a consequence, I found myself with a larger British press entourage than usual on these trips, partly because some British papers sent in reporters who would otherwise have been subject to the emergency censorship regulations. They wrote not only about my visit, but about the condition of India more generally, including the sterilization campaign.
I lunched with Indira Gandhi in her own modest home, where she insisted on seeing that her guests were all looked after and clearing away the plates while discussing matters of high politics. Both her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv, were present, although it was the former who had most to say for himself. He had, indeed, allegedly been responsible for many of the abuses such as forced sterilization and compulsory rehousing which had provoked such bitter opposition. But in spite of everything I found myself liking Mrs Gandhi herself. Perhaps I naturally sympathized with a woman politician faced with the huge strains and difficulties of governing a country as vast as India. But, in spite of a long self-justificatory account she gave me of why the State of Emergency had been necessary, I could not approve of her Government’s methods. She had taken a wrong turning and was to discover the fact at her party’s devastating election defeat in 1977.
From India I flew to Singapore for a brief stopover on my way to New Zealand and Australia. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was an old friend from my days as Education Secretary. He and I thought similarly about education. He was a great believer in selection and could never understand why even a socialist wanted to destroy the grammar schools. And the schools and education in Singapore reflected this. More significantly, he was the most important Asian statesman of his generation, an achievement all the more remarkable for being based on the small state of Singapore. He had his own kind of democracy to be sure, but his strong commitment to free-market capitalism had done wonders for the tiny island which he governed. For me, the success of Singapore demonstrated how, given the right economic framework favourable to enterprise, living standards could be transformed. Not surprisingly, Professor Milton Friedman saw in economies like that of Singapore a model which the West should follow. Of course, Lee Kuan Yew enjoyed the advantage of the Chinese people’s cultural predisposition to trading and commerce: the spirit of entrepreneurship comes more easily to some peoples than to others. But I found in my discussions with him now that what really united us was common concern about the advance of Soviet influence throughout the region, which was being exerted through naval deployments disguised as trade or fishing. I was to find myself often relying on Lee Kuan Yew’s wise advice and vast knowledge of world politics in my time as Prime Minister.
From Singapore I went on to New Zealand. It was my second visit and I felt very much at home. Robert Muldoon had recently won a general election. He was a mixed grill of a politician: robust and no-nonsense in manner, but surprisingly confused in economic and political philosophy, and accordingly much more interventionist than the Labour Government which succeeded him eight years later. He was something of a bruiser alongside Malcolm Fraser, the tall rancher who in 1975 had become Prime Minister of Australia after the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, had controversially dismissed Gough Whitlam, the previous Labor Prime Minister. Although I was pleased to see a right-wing government in power in Australia as in New Zealand, I never struck up any real friendship with Malcolm Fraser. Our views and attitudes were too different.
Neither Bob Muldoon nor Malcolm Fraser was committed to the reforms required to create an effective free-enterprise economy. They were both shaped by political cultures which for almost all of this century had been built upon protectionist economics and an advanced welfare state. Ironically, within a decade the Labour Party began to dismantle radically these statist institutions in both countries. But it may be that when I arrived in 1976 public opinion had not yet shifted sufficiently to make this practical politics. I suspected this might be true when I delivered a speech to the Australian Liberal Party (the equivalent of the British Conservative Party) Federal Council in Canberra. I included in my speech some of the more philosophical assertions which I always inserted in such speeches in Britain. Indeed, I was extra keen to do so because I had been reading into the small hours Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle, which I bought at the airport, and which made me reflect on the complex relationship between freedom and democracy. The applause at the end was far from deafening, and from the subsequent comments it became clear to me that conservative-minded audiences in Australia were not used to this sort of unapologetic conservatism.
Another straw in the wind was provided by my visit to Broken Hill, an outback town dominated and largely owned by the miners’ union. The union leaders were delighted and rather surprised to see me. They informed me proudly that no one could live or work in the town without belonging to the union. A bar in the town which had recently challenged the rule had simply been boycotted and forced to close down. My guides were completely unabashed, indeed perversely pleased, about this blatant infraction of liberty. I could not help wondering whether I had had an insight into Britain’s future.
One memory I treasure from this Australian visit was my only meeting with Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister for many years and a great friend of Britain. He was ailing and could no longer walk, but one saw immediately the power and strength of character of Australia’s leading statesman and former member of Churchill’s Imperial War Cabinet, though less of the sarcastic wit that had made him a famous political pugilist. I was flattered when he revealed that he had read most of my recent speeches, especially those warning against renewed aggression by the Soviet Union. I was reminded not for the last time that the political generation that had come to maturity when the British Empire was still a world power retained a global perspective that its more parochial successors lacked. When I found myself complimented by this remarkable man it strengthened me in my conviction that I was right and that the détente establishment was wrong.
I had the same kind of encouraging confirmation from a very different source in April the following year (1977) when I visited China. I was already much better known to the Chinese than they were to me. They had relished my Helsinki and Kensington speeches and regarded me as a valued recruit in opposition to what they described as Soviet ‘hegemonism’. My daughter Carol came too: she had decided to start her career in Australia and I had persuaded her to travel out via China. It was fun having her with me and she was a great antidote to too much official solemnity. There were two others in the party — one of my PPSs, John Stanley, and Douglas Hurd, who had served on the staff of our Embassy in Peking and had a vast store of knowledge and anecdote about China. Douglas christened us ‘the Gang of Four’.
I was greeted at Peking Airport by the Chinese Foreign Minister, Huang Hua, before being driven into Peking itself. It was the middle of the dry season — hot and dusty, with so much static that I had been warned not to bring silk dresses. That evening I was guest of honour at a banquet in one of the side halls of the Great Hall of the People. A Chinese orchestra played a succession of Western old favourites, including the inevitable ‘Greensleeves’. I had more or less mastered the advanced use of chopsticks, but I Still found some Chinese delicacies unappealing. On this occasion, I allowed the sea slugs and fish bellies to pass me by. The Chinese habit, which I was glad to see the British journalists present appreciated, of drinking innumerable toasts of Mao-Tai, a strong grain spirit, posed a more hazardous social problem. Fortunately, however, I gathered that women were permitted to sip rather than down the lethal spirit.
The anti-Soviet rhetoric of Vice-Premier Li Hsien-nien was equally strong. He described the Soviets as ‘sharpening their swords on the sly and stepping up their arms expansion and war preparations’. After this, my own comments about the need for strong defence sounded almost pacifist. This first banquet set one of the themes which was to continue throughout the visit — a fierce verbal assault by the Chinese against the Soviet Union. The following morning’s meeting with various local politicians provided the second theme — a scathing denunciation of the misdeeds of the real ‘Gang of Four’ headed by Mao’s widow. Mao had died in September the previous year, and the disgrace and imprisonment of his widow and the three other radicals the following month dominated the political scene.
Again and again I heard almost identical speeches made on these themes. This itself was significant. The Chinese knew that they had been weakened by the Cultural Revolution at the very time that the Soviets were embarking on an expansion of their influence. In spite of the apparent smiling self-assurance of those I met, there was also an underlying insecurity: would they be purged next, or would the Gang of Four return and wreak revenge? Two days before my arrival official ceremonies to mourn past leaders — ‘The Day of the Dead’ — were cancelled in case demonstrations in favour of the ousted leaders were made under the guise of demonstrations mourning Mao.
It was unclear how many supporters the disgraced radicals still had. Deng Xiao Ping, the symbol of opposition to the Cultural Revolution, though released from prison, was still in internal exile. Official posters showed the late Mao Tse Tung saying to China’s present supreme leader, Hua Guo Feng ‘With you in charge my heart is at ease.’ The Government had allowed people to put up their own posters expressing their views, though only in permitted places and within limits. In fact, though there seemed to be general agreement that the bad old days must not return, no one was quite sure as yet what would succeed them.
The most important talks I had were, naturally, with Chairman Hua Guo Feng. An enamel spittoon was placed between our two chairs, but neither of us, I am glad to say, had occasion to use it. The talks concentrated on the international situation and we found ourselves in broad agreement. The Chinese wanted to see Britain and Western Europe support the United States in balancing Soviet power. There was even a touch of humour, when Chairman Hua complimented me on my energy when visiting the Great Wall of China.
‘He who cannot climb to the top of the Great Wall of China is no true man,’ he said.
I ventured to correct this thought of Chairman Mao: ‘I prefer no true leader.’
I came away feeling that Hua’s position in China was probably secure, and indeed he survived long enough to be one of my first official visitors as Prime Minister. Although in the end he was too closely identified with the old regime and was ousted in 1981, the policies of anti-Sovietism and allowing a measure of free enterprise were not only continued, but intensified.
After three days I flew south to the city of Soochow, a beautiful historic city of parks and gardens, famed for its cuisine which featured the ancient art of carving vegetables. It was good to get out of the heat and bustle of Peking. Thousands of people turned out to greet me in the tree-lined streets. I saw women making silk portraits of Mao, fed the ducks and wandered in the appropriately named Garden of the Futility of Politics. But the peaceful and contemplative atmosphere was deceiving. That evening as we left a banquet given by the Soochow City Revolutionary Committee some photograph displays caught my eye and we left our guides for a moment to look at them. The pictures showed the denunciation of a former local official. A crowd was ‘cross-examining’ him — cat-calling and spitting at the terrified man. The guides quickly bustled us away.
From Soochow I flew to Hangchow, the scene of riots during the Cultural Revolution and full-scale fighting the previous year. Perhaps I was invited there to show to the outside world how thoroughly peace had been restored. It was certainly peaceful enough boating there on the West Lake, where Mao had had a country villa.
From Hangchow I went by train to Shanghai. My first appointment was a visit to a university. Before I left for China two disillusioned former communists who had spent some time in that country had come to see me. They told me that everything I saw on my trip would be specially set up and quite unrepresentative of reality. By chance I was able to put this to the test. I knew that some British students were on an exchange programme at the university. I asked about them and one duly appeared. Everywhere we went the floors were swept and the furniture brightly polished. The university library displayed copies of The Economist and even Hansard. It all seemed too good to be true. And of course it was. I suddenly asked my companion to show me the dormitory in which she lived, and so I left the beaten track. The dormitory was highly uncomfortable and extremely dirty. So were the other rooms. My companion had sheets only because they had been sent from home. She washed them herself. She had never seen a copy of The Economist in the library before.
In appearance, Shanghai was the most Western of the cities I visited: our party was taken up the river by boat and we were all very struck by the Western-style buildings of the old International Settlement, looking much as they must have done when the Japanese invasion effectively ended the colonial concessions in 1941. But the atmosphere in the city was disturbing and alien. There were microphones in the trees blaring out political messages. Shanghai had been the home of three members of the ‘Gang of Four’, but the new regime had been able to establish its authority there with surprising ease. I had lunch with the new mayor who was busy rooting out political opponents; he spoke with a bland ruthlessness. When I raised the question of dissidents he said: ‘We try to show them the error of their ways.’ I remembered the photographs of Soochow.
Through all the excesses of the Cultural Revolution — which included the burning of the British Embassy library, with its irreplaceable collection of Chinese books and manuscripts — some of the greatest treasures had been quietly preserved. My interest in Chinese drawings led me to ask to visit the city museum and gallery. The scrolls and hangings I was shown were too fragile to be on view in sunlight and I saw them in a darkened room. There was also ancient porcelain, which had a special appeal to me, and metalwork. After all the upheavals of Maoism something of the essential China had survived.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
As I read these pages, I notice with some disquiet that I seem to have established amicable relations with a number of rulers whose record on human rights will not bear too close an examination. Indeed, if I had been the Leader of the Opposition in some of these countries, I might not have retained my life, let alone my liberty. How, then, did I contrive to be on reasonably good terms with them?
A number of explanations suggest themselves. The first, and most obvious, is that I was a visiting statesman with a fair prospect of exercising political power in my own country within a few years. They therefore put themselves out to deal with, and even be pleasant towards, me. I was under no illusion about that. Equally, I saw that it was my duty to establish terms on which British interests could, then or later, be protected and advanced. Since they were the rulers of their countries, they were the people with whom I had to deal. Also I can see that certain distinctions can and should be maintained: namely, that rulers with blood on their hands should be treated correctly but no more, while democratic statesmen should be eligible for those additional marks of regard, from an honorary knighthood to an official dinner at Downing Street, which Britain has within her gift. Even so, I am not so naive as to think that this would greatly alter the conduct of authoritarian regimes.
My second consideration is that I was able, on some occasions, to obtain the release or emigration of political prisoners as a sort of quid pro quo for my visit. Those released were never as many as I would have liked; but even a handful was better than none. And every prisoner freed meant hope for ten more. Indeed, it told all those remaining that we had not forgotten them.
Third, we must remember that vice, like virtue, comes in many varieties. It is an odd reflection on human nature that a ruler might order the murder of a political opponent in the morning and yet carry out a pledge he had made in a treaty in the afternoon. Some of those with whom I supped with a long spoon nonetheless kept the promises they had made to Britain and, in one instance, materially helped another country to resist and overcome aggression and occupation.
Finally, international relations is a matter of second-best alternatives rather than the ideal. Even if it had been within my power to replace one ruler with another — which it never was — I would rarely have been able to replace a bad one with a better, and often it would have been with a worse. Those, for instance, who rejoiced in the fall of the Shah must reconcile themselves today to the sad truth that the regime of the Mullahs is more oppressive to its own citizens, and abroad promotes terrorism and subversion, where the Shah was a pillar of stability, if in the end a shaky one.
States tend to act upon their own interests rather than the interests of the peoples of other countries. That is all the more reason for people in democratic countries to pressurize not only foreign governments which suppress human rights, but also their own governments to make improvements in human rights one aim of Western diplomacy. I may sometimes have resented this second sort of criticism of my own actions in power; not long afterwards, however, I was usually glad to have had my elbow jogged.
EUROPE
The first major political challenge I faced on becoming Leader was the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community, promised by Labour in Opposition as a way of keeping their party together. For a number of reasons I would have preferred a challenge on some other topic. Europe was very much Ted’s issue. He considered that his greatest achievement was to take Britain into the EEC and, now that he had lost the leadership, it was only natural that he would engage even more passion in the cause. As had become evident during the leadership campaign, there was some suspicion that I was less enthusiastic. Compared with Ted, perhaps, that was true. But I did genuinely believe that it would be foolish to leave the Community; I thought it provided an economic bond with other Western European countries, which was of strategic significance; and above all I welcomed the larger opportunities for trade which membership gave. I did not, however, see the European issue as a touchstone for everything else. Although I thought it best for Britain to stay inside the Community and make the best we could of it, I could equally well understand others who, on balance, took a contrary view. It did not seem to me that high-flown rhetoric about Britain’s European destiny, let alone European identity, was really to the point, though I had on occasion to employ a little on public platforms. For all these reasons, I was more than happy for Ted to take the leading public role on our side in the referendum campaign and for Willie to be the Conservative Vice-President of ‘Britain in Europe’ — the ‘Yes’ campaign organization which was set up in cooperation with pro-European Labour MPs and the Liberals, and of which Con O’Neill and later Roy Jenkins was President.
This arrangement had two advantages and two disadvantages. The advantages were that, though I would make some high-profile public appearances at the beginning and end of the campaign, I would have time for other things; and secondly, that the most committed Europeans of the Party would be able to throw all their energies into the front line. The two disadvantages, which perhaps I should have foreseen, were that Ted’s appetite for a return to power would be whetted, and that the forces inside and outside the Conservative Party which were determined to get rid of me would seek to use the all-party coalition campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote as the nucleus of a movement for a coalition of the ‘centre’.
I also faced a further unexpected intellectual difficulty. The position I inherited from Ted was that of outright opposition to the whole idea of a referendum on the grounds that it was an unconstitutional and un-British practice. There was no time to change this even if I had wanted to; only a fortnight after my accession to the leadership, the Government published its Referendum White Paper. It was, moreover, a rich source of party political advantage to attack the referendum as a constitutional monstrosity devised simply to keep the Labour Cabinet together. I was, however, uneasy. First, there was the obvious practical point that if, whatever protests the Conservative Opposition made, we were to have a referendum anyway, we would soon have to take it seriously — and be seen to do so — if we wanted to secure the right result. Secondly, and only vaguely as yet, I thought that it might be necessary at some time in the future to call for a referendum when a single issue divided the nation but not the parties, making a general election an inappropriate instrument for settling it. Similarly, a Conservative Opposition might seek one if a far-left government, supported by militant trade unions, sought to challenge fundamental freedoms under the cloak of constitutional convention.
I decided to read up all there was on the subject. The idea of a referendum had quite a long pedigree in British politics. From the 1890s to the 1930s it had variously been advanced — sometimes by Conservative Leaders — in connection with Irish Home Rule, the powers of the House of Lords, and the imposition of food tariffs. In 1945 Churchill had mooted the possibility of a referendum on extending the life of Parliament until Japan was defeated. In none of these cases had a referendum in fact been held. But it was clearly wrong to treat the case for it anything other than seriously. I was particularly taken with the assertion in the revised eighth edition of Dicey’s The Law of the Constitution that: ‘The referendum is the people’s veto; the nation is sovereign and may well decree that the constitution shall not be changed without the direct sanction of the nation.’
I consulted Michael Havers, shadow spokesman on legal affairs, about these arguments. His reply, which at the time seemed to me a powerful one, was that, reviewing the cases on which the Conservative Party had supported a referendum, we could say that apart from the case of food tariffs, where the Party was trying to avoid a damaging rift (as Labour was now), the issues were all constitutional. Moreover, in none had Parliament already decided the issue and in none were we risking the breaking of a treaty unilaterally. He concluded that past precedent offered no justification for a referendum on EEC membership.
I had, therefore, thought through the issue thoroughly by the time I spoke in the House in the Referendum Debate on Tuesday 11 March. It would be my maiden speech as Leader of the Opposition. In spite of the reservations I had about the case I was making, it was the kind of speech I enjoyed. The main intellectual weakness of the Government’s case was the confusion about whether and how the referendum would be ‘binding’ on Parliament. If it was binding, then parliamentary sovereignty, which mattered a good deal to anti-Marketeers on both sides of the House, was infringed. If it was not binding, then what was its force? I did not in my speech rule out the use of referenda, but I urged that it would be necessary to consider the full constitutional implications. I rejected the argument put forward by the Government that the case of continued membership of the EEC was unique and thus a referendum was required. I said:
To use the referendum device at all is to ask the question: to what category of measure should referenda apply? Presumably the answer would be: in cases of constitutional change. But it is hard to define such a change in the British tradition because so much depends on convention and precedent.
A referendum may, however, become acceptable if given a proper constitutional foundation — that is to say, if the conditions under which it could be used were defined. But that would mean, like many other democratic countries, going as far as a written constitution or at least part of the way. The implications for parliamentary sovereignty are profound. But if our sense of constitutional rules and conventions is weakening, there may come a time when some such course should be considered.
Although there are some other passages of that speech with which I would not now agree, these assertions still seem a good starting point for consideration of the case for a referendum on, say, the Maastricht Treaty or a single European currency.[43] What I had not grasped at this time, though some others had, was that the conditions for a referendum which I had outlined had more or less already been met. The subordination of UK law to European Community law, which flowed from accession to the Treaty of Rome and which both successive treaty changes and the practices of Community institutions would accelerate, did entail a constitutional change. And we had gone ‘at least part of the way’ towards a written constitution by accepting the contents of the Treaty of Rome and a special European Court of Justice, which could strike down laws passed by Parliament which conflicted with it.
The Commons passed the proposal for a referendum by 312 votes to 248. But it was the outcome of the debate on Wednesday 9 April on the substantive issue of continued EEC membership which was a foretaste of things to come: Ayes 396, Noes 170. From now on until Thursday 5 June, the day set for the referendum, the formidable power of business, the leaderships of both parties and the wider, respectable establishment combined to extol the merits of Community membership, to elaborate fears of job losses, to warn of a third world war originating in intra-European conflict and to ridicule the odd combination of Labour left-wingers and Tory reactionaries which constituted the ‘No’ lobby. The ‘Yes’ campaign was well organized and very well funded — not least as a result of the efforts of Alistair McAlpine, whom I would shortly recruit to be Conservative Party Treasurer. For all the talk of a ‘great debate’ it was really a contest between David and Goliath, which Goliath won. The substantial issues often went by default.
Most distasteful of all to me was the patent opportunism of the Labour leadership. The ‘renegotiation’ of Britain’s terms of entry, which had been concluded in March at the Dublin European Council where a special ‘Financial Mechanism’ had been agreed to prevent Britain shouldering too heavy a financial burden, was simply not serious: the mechanism was never triggered and so never yielded a penny piece. Yet the booklet distributed to all households by the Government abandoned all of the Euro-sceptical rhetoric which Labour, particularly the Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, had employed at the general election. It contained such assurances as:
As a result of these negotiations the Common Market’s agricultural policy (known as CAP) now works more flexibly to the benefit of both housewives and farmers in Britain… Under the previous terms, Britain’s contribution to the Common Market budget imposed too heavy a burden on us. The new terms ensure that Britain will pay a fairer share… There was a threat to employment in Britain from the movement in the Common Market towards an Economic and Monetary Union… This threat has been removed… To say that membership could force Britain to eat Euro-bread or drink Euro-beer is nonsense… It is the Council of Ministers, and not the Market’s officials, who take the important decisions.
I duly launched the Conservative pro-Market campaign at the St Ermin’s Hotel, at a press conference presided over by Ted Heath, even describing myself as ‘the pupil speaking before the master’. I spoke in my constituency and elsewhere. I contributed an article on the eve of poll to the Daily Telegraph. I felt that I did my share of campaigning. But others did not see it that way. There was criticism in the press — the Sun, for example, commenting:
Missing: one Tory Leader. Answers to the name of Margaret Thatcher. Mysteriously disappeared from the Market Referendum Campaign eleven days ago. Has not been seen since. Will finder kindly wake her up and remind her she is failing the nation in her duty as Leader of the Opposition?
Some of this was undoubtedly being fed to the press by people who had other axes to grind at my expense. But Alistair McAlpine, a supporter soon to become a friend, was sufficiently concerned to tell Willie Whitelaw that I should take a more active role. Unfortunately, on the prearranged day for me to hold a press conference at Central Office as part of the campaign, Edward du Cann, the 1922 Committee Chairman, came out with a call for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum. I learned about this shortly before I had to face the press. Caught between Edward Scylla and Edward Charybdis, I had to weave and tack rather than steer directly towards Brussels.
The referendum result itself was no surprise, with 67 per cent voting ‘Yes’ and 33 per cent ‘No’. Less predictable were the effects on the political scene as a whole. The result was a blow to the left of the Labour Party; and Harold Wilson, whose cunning tactical ploy the whole exercise had been, used it to move Tony Benn from Industry, where he had proved a political liability, to Energy where his scope for mischief was more limited. For the Conservatives, it was naturally Ted and his friends who won most of the plaudits. I myself paid tribute to him in the House. He made no response. That came later.
Soon the press was full of accounts of Ted’s earlier meeting with me at Wilton Street, but given in such a way as to suggest that I had not made a serious offer to him to join the Shadow Cabinet. These stories were accompanied by suggestions that he now intended to use the position gained through the referendum campaign to make his way back — presumably at my expense — to power. Ted’s ambitions were his own affair. But at least the real facts about the Wilton Street meeting should be known. Consequently, I told them to George Hutchinson of The Times — not a supporter of mine, but a journalist of great integrity — and the account duly appeared.
No doubt Ted’s hopes were buoyed up by two other things. First, I could not fail to be aware that all sorts of well-informed commentators were predicting that my tenure of the leadership would not last; indeed, that I would be gone by Christmas. Secondly, the deepening economic crisis into which a combination of the Heath Government’s earlier financial irresponsibility and the Wilson Government’s present anti-enterprise policies were plunging Britain might conceivably lead to that National Government on which Ted’s prospects were deemed to ride. And perhaps too, the introduction of proportional representation might keep a centrist coalition in power — and people like me out of it — permanently.
In fact, the chances of any of this happening were less than the commentators imagined. It was not just that I had no intention of relinquishing the leadership, nor even that Tory backbenchers were unprepared to tolerate Ted’s return. Neither was there any prospect of a shrewd, self-assured politician like Harold Wilson stepping aside gracefully to allow the sort of self-important figures he despised a free hand to sort Britain’s problems out. If he went he would do so on his terms and at his timing: this of course is what subsequently occurred.[44] A further aspect not widely grasped at the time was that, for all the criticism levelled at me for my alleged failure to beat the European drum with sufficient vigour, I emerged from the campaign as a unifying figure for the Party. The anti-Market Tory MPs felt no bitterness towards me. The majority of backbenchers also felt very much as I did about Europe, viewing it as a framework within which Britain could prosper rather than a crusade. The issue of whether Britain should or should not be a member of the European Community had been settled for the foreseeable future. But the real question now was what sort of Community should that be? On this issue a rather different coalition of opinions within the Conservative Party would emerge.
Two short foreign visits which I made in the course of the European referendum campaign provided me with food for thought. At the end of April I visited Luxembourg and attended the European Assembly, which was already demanding to be termed a ‘Parliament’. A lacklustre debate on some trivial issue was in progress, after which the best I could say to an eager press corps was that the institution was obviously ‘very valuable’ and that its members worked ‘very hard’. At this time the members of the Assembly were still nominated MPs from the constituent countries. We all ought probably to have thought more carefully about whether it was right to end this system in favour of direct elections. At least under the old system there was close contact between the members of the national Parliament and members of the European Assembly; they were, indeed, the same people. The Assembly had a limited role for which full-time MEPs were unnecessary. When the latter appeared on the scene they demanded a wider role, in part in order to justify their salaries, generous expenses and existence, and this was to cause no end of problems. My main conclusion from the visit to Luxembourg, however, was that such an Assembly in which people did not speak the same language or share the same traditions illustrated the shortcomings of attempts to create artificial Europe-wide institutions. Peter Kirk, the Conservative Leader in the Assembly, who organized a reception for me in Luxembourg, was doing his best to import British parliamentary attitudes and impose some financial discipline. But it would take more than this to create a real European Parliament.
The following month I was invited to Paris as the guest of the Gaullist Party — then called the UDR, later the RPR. It was on this visit that I first met Jacques Chirac, the Prime Minister, with whom I had lunch at the Hôtel Matignon (his office and official residence), and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom I saw later at the Elysée Palace. In spite of the marked differences of character between the two — the Prime Minister’s charismatic exuberance was the complete opposite of the President’s chilly precision — both the Matignon and the Elysée made the same statement of the historic grandeur and national pride of France. French identity and interests would always come first in the Community or any other forum. Some people might have felt aggrieved at this, but I found it oddly reassuring: you knew where you stood.
Three different but connected developments from now on commanded my attention in Europe. First, there was the matter of the speed and extent of European integration: in particular, we had to consider the arrangements for direct elections to the European Assembly and our policy towards the European Monetary System. Secondly, there was the feeling, which I shared, that the right-of-centre parties in Europe ought to cooperate more closely, providing a kind of answer to the Socialist International. Thirdly, it was necessary to establish what Western Europe’s role should be in East-West relations, particularly in the light of the Helsinki process — something which is best examined later.[45]
At the beginning of July Leo Tindemans, the Belgian Prime Minister, came to Britain, having been asked by the heads of Government at the Paris Summit of December 1974 to draw up a report on ‘European Union’. I met him with Reggie Maudling and others in a room at the House of Commons. I had set up a committee under Reggie on which Sir Anthony Royle, a former diplomat, and others sat, to look at such matters. But I emphasized to M. Tindemans that it would be best if the Community developed organically rather than according to some pre-ordained structure. This was intended as a warning that, although I envisaged that Britain under a Conservative Government would adopt a more positive attitude to the Community than had been the case under Labour, our partners should not imagine that we were keen on grand plans imposed from the centre.
Within the Conservative Party, debate about Europe focused increasingly on direct elections. I received regular reports on Party opinion. A group of MPs led by Neil Marten argued a powerful case against having direct elections at all. A larger group of MPs reluctantly accepted that the pass had been sold and that the real question was when the elections should take place and under what electoral system. A third group was keen to create a real European Parliament to provide a check on the actions of the Council of Ministers and the Commission. Luckily, the divisions on the Government side were at least as large as on ours, and we were able to unite in blaming them for the delay in bringing the requisite legislation before the House. Equally satisfactorily, the Government proposal to use proportional representation, a gesture to sustain the Lib-Lab Pact, was soundly defeated in December 1977. Consequently, the first direct elections took place — under a first-past-the-post system — in 1979 when I was Prime Minister.
The pressure for political integration was to have its economic counterpart. The first ambitious plans for European economic and monetary union were embodied in the so-called ‘Snake’ set up in 1972. Britain had joined under Ted as one earnest of his iron-clad commitment to Europe; he had to pull out within six weeks. But the economic planners were only stimulated by failure, and at the end of 1978 the European Monetary System (EMS) was agreed and eight of the nine Community currencies joined. Britain alone stayed out. Her Majesty’s Opposition under my leadership would have been less than human not to take advantage of this as evidence that sterling was too weak to join as a result of Labour’s mismanagement of the economy. That was a fair enough tactical position, but it was more difficult to judge what a Conservative Government itself should do.
At the end of October 1978 Geoffrey Howe sent me a note outlining the case for and against joining. He felt that if we were now the Government and had committed ourselves to the right financial and economic policies, we would have been able to join. Geoffrey also believed that we needed to maintain the Party’s stock of European goodwill and feared that the alternative meant ‘surrendering the direction of the EEC and its policies to the Franco-German high table’. Nigel Lawson, a junior Treasury spokesman, also sent me a searching analysis at the end of October. He understood that the EMS was seen by the French and Germans as having a political objective, the next stage in the progress of European unity. He shrewdly noted that ‘those who support UK membership of the EMS as part of their devotion to the EEC cause should pause to reflect whether adherence to the discipline which is its sole merit might not in practice prove so unpopular as to make support of continuing EEC membership political suicide’. Nigel’s reluctant conclusion was that we should join anyway: but his ‘best hope’ was that the system would collapse shortly thereafter, not due to the weakness of sterling but because of pressures on other currencies, and that we could then propose some more sensible framework for European economic convergence. I was impressed by the quality of both these analyses. My thinking on this was still evolving, but I decided at this point that we should continue to adopt a positive general approach to the EMS while avoiding making any specific commitments.
The second important European theme — the closer cooperation of the right-of-centre parties — eventually led to the foundation in 1978 of the European Democratic Union (EDU). But this modestly useful organization was less significant than the political impulses which lay behind it. The mid-1970s was a time of advance by the Left, both democratic and non-democratic, in many areas and ways. Communist parties seemed to be on the verge of entering government in Mediterranean Europe. And everywhere the Left was encouraged by the feeling that history and Soviet military power were pushing the world in its direction. This was something which could only ultimately be combated and reversed by NATO decisions and under reinvigorated American leadership. In the meantime, the European Right had to fight a fierce battle on the political front.
Nowhere was it fiercer than in Portugal. Within weeks of my becoming Leader I had a long talk with Professor Diogo Freitas do Amaral, the leader of the Social Democratic Centre (CDS), the only party to the right of the ruling coalition. He was a gentle intellectual, clearly involved in politics for the highest motives. He was also, when I saw him, in deep despair. Since the overthrow of the dictatorship of Dr Caetano in April 1974, communists and other radical leftists in the army, in cahoots with the Portuguese Communist Party, had successfully manipulated their way to almost total power. This they used ruthlessly to extinguish opposition. The CDS was denied access to the media and its rallies were broken up by force. Professor do Amaral knew that under these conditions there was no hope of a successful result in the forthcoming elections. He half wondered whether it was worth his going back to Portugal at all. But we both agreed that in spite of all the difficulties he had to return and see it through. He did so. But he was fighting impossible odds. His party received less than 8 per cent of the vote. There would probably be no democracy in Portugal even now if brave men and women like Professor do Amaral had not risen up against the arrogance of the communists in northern Portugal and prevented the forcible attempt to seize the peasants’ land and turn the country into a Cuban-style state. It was a frightening insight into the ambitions and methods of the Left, which were by no means confined to Portugal. Indeed, the British Labour Left, intoxicated by the prospects of a European revolution, supported the communists.
Neighbouring Spain was more fortunate, enjoying a more or less smooth transition from dictatorship after General Franco’s death in November 1975. There, doubtless observing the Portuguese resistance offered to too blatant an attempt to seize power, the Spanish Communist Party from the date of its legalization in 1977 preferred to emulate its Italian and French counterparts by adopting the disguise of ‘Euro-communism’. I always considered Eurocommunism as a tactical ploy to be understood in very much the same way as, to take an earlier parallel, the Popular Fronts in the 1930s. It did indeed show a recognition of the force of liberal public opinion and foreshadowed the coming collapse of communism’s internal self-confidence. But it did not represent any abandonment of the essential goals of Marxism-Leninism. Of course, the only ‘proof’ of this could be found in an assessment of the real attitudes and intentions of the Euro-communist leaderships. But in any case the effect of any advance by Euro-communists was to reduce the willingness and ability of the West to meet the growing Soviet threat; for it would have been unpardonably irresponsible to assume that any government in which a Communist Party shared power could be depended upon in a crisis.
I made these points wherever I went in Europe. But I did so with particular force when I addressed the West German Christian Democrat Union (CDU) Party Conference in Hanover on Tuesday 25 May 1976:
In some European countries we now see communist parties dressed in democratic clothes and speaking with soft voices. Of course, we hope that their oft-proclaimed change of heart is genuine. But every child in Europe knows the story of Little Red Riding Hood and what happened to her in her grandmother’s cottage in the forest. Despite the new look of these communist parties, despite the softness of their voices, we should be on the watch for the teeth and appetite of the wolf.
It was clear to me from the uproarious applause which greeted this remark that Little Red Riding Hood had a cousin somewhere in the Black Forest.
I had been keen to visit West Germany for several reasons. It was, of course, right on the frontier of freedom in Europe at a time when the perimeter of freedom globally was steadily contracting. The West’s strategy for defence depended to an important degree upon the policies of West Germany’s political leaders and the will of the West German people. Konrad Adenauer and his successor Chancellors of the German Federal Republic had staunchly resisted the blandishments and threats of the Soviet Union and its East German satellite. But Willi Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the hidden agenda of which was German reunification on Eastern terms, had shaken many assumptions. It had the unintended effects of promoting neutralist attitudes in West Germany (including in the ruling SPD) and of endorsing the legitimacy of the governments in Eastern Europe. Doubts about Ostpolitik and the soundness of the SPD lingered on, in spite of the robustness of Willi Brandt’s successor Helmut Schmidt, who soon set about strengthening Atlantic links with his call for NATO’s stationing of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. In turn, Helmut Schmidt conceived an increasing distrust for the meanderings of US foreign policy under Jimmy Carter.
The other reason I was eager to make the trip was the importance of the CDU itself, which was, with the Conservatives, the other largest right-of-centre European party. The idea of setting up a joint organization — what became the EDU — originally came from the Austrian (Christian Democrat) People’s Party leader, Alois Mock. But the Germans and ourselves were bound to be the two key elements in it. Although I was later to discover the important differences between the German Christian Democrat and British Conservative traditions, these were not nearly as great as those between Christian Democrats in countries like Italy or Belgium and ourselves. In Germany the social-market approach pioneered by Ludwig Erhard had imposed a more free-enterprise orientation than on most other Christian Democrat parties, which remained heavily confessional and usually somewhat directionless in economics.
My first visit to West Germany as Leader was from Thursday 26 June to Saturday 28 June 1975. That first Thursday evening at the British Ambassador’s residence in Bonn my mind was focused, however, on what was happening back home, where the count for the Woolwich West by-election was under way. Unlike my predecessors, I had decided to campaign personally in by-elections, which carried risks but which was an advantage when things went well, as they did on this occasion, for we won the seat on a swing of 7.6 per cent. Since, as usual, the Party was strapped for cash, I was not accompanied by a press officer and, knowing this, Gordon Reece had advised me what to say and do in the event of the expected success. We agreed that I would say something on the lines of ‘This is the first step on the road to the end of socialism,’ and then I would make a Churchillian victory sign — all the more appropriate since I was in Germany. Gordon did not consider coaching me in the gesture itself. So when, the following day, I was asked to comment on the result I smiled and raised two fingers, unfortunately the wrong way round, which was taken by delighted cameramen as an expression of lighthearted if vulgar contempt for the Labour Party rather than satisfaction with our own success.
Later that day I had my first meeting with the socialist Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. By the end of our discussion I was concluding that he was a good deal less socialist than some members of my own Shadow Cabinet, two impressions which did not diminish as the years went by. We did, though, disagree about the role of trade unions. On the basis of German experience, Helmut Schmidt could not understand why in Britain we did not just get all the union leaders around a table and work things out sensibly. I pointed out that thanks to the reforms which the British occupying power had made in the structure of German trade unions after the war, reducing their number and making them industry-based rather than craft-based, this was a practical possibility in Bonn. In London a small stadium would be required. (My knowledge of these reforms was due to Paul Chambers, the British member of the Control Commission which had run the Western sectors of Germany during the Allied occupation: I had known him since the 1960s.) I was tempted to add that most British trade union leaders, unlike their German equivalents, were at least as interested in socialist politics as sensible wage bargaining. But I decided that could wait for another occasion.
A late lunch had been arranged for me by my CDU hosts. The three German celebrities present were Helmut Kohl, the CDU leader and Chancellor-candidate for the following year’s federal elections, Kurt Biedenkopf, the CDU General Secretary and — most celebrated of all — Ludwig Erhard, the great German Finance Minister of the 1950s and sixties. I had had some discussions with Helmut Kohl earlier in the day. My first impression was that he was amiable and instinctively sound on the important issues. But neither of us spoke the other’s language and our discussion tended, therefore, to be somewhat halting. For the next decade, however, we were to be broadly on the same wavelength on the East-West issues that dominated European politics. Professor Biedenkopf was a more cosmopolitan character, fluent to a fault, deeply intelligent and extraordinarily energetic. He bubbled with ideas and reflections so that I found it difficult to get a word in. He was plainly determined, as I was, that when his party returned to power it would do so with a cohesive and well thought-out programme for government. Ludwig Erhard had by this time retired from any involvement in active politics, but apparently he had heard that my politics (and economics) were sufficiently different (that is to say similar to his own) to make a discussion appealing. I was glad to discover that the former Chancellor, as well as being the architect of German prosperity, had a considerable presence and shrewdness. He asked me a number of searching questions about my economic approach, at the end of which he seemed satisfied. I felt I had performed well in an important tutorial. In their different ways these three men symbolized the considerable strengths of German Christian Democracy and I went away feeling that our two parties, both in opposition but both preparing for power, had much in common.
My reception on my next visit the following year at the CDU Conference, which I have already described, in part confirmed this. But I could never quite adjust to the style of West German politics which I witnessed there. Successive speakers approached the microphone and, from an inch or two away, bellowed into it at great length. The technique for evoking applause appeared to be to shout at such volume that words were lost amid the crackling of overstrained loudspeakers. Neither a Conservative Party Conference, nor in all probability Conservative Central Office equipment, would have stood it.
Meanwhile, discussions between European conservative and Christian Democrat parties continued about the formation of the EDU. I tried to persuade the less enthusiastic parties, nervous of being seen as right-wing in countries where a tradition of coalition governments had blunted principled politics. In December 1976 I visited The Hague for talks with Dutch politicians — an occasion of longer-term personal importance to me because this was when I first met Ruud Lubbers, the then Economics Minister and future Prime Minister with whom in the years to come I was to strike up a mutually beneficial friendship. I also spoke to the British Chamber of Commerce there:
I am anxious that… there should be a closer cooperation between like-minded political parties across the Community. Of course I understand that history has put difficulties in our way… Nevertheless, I feel sure that as we examine our policies we will find that the common ground is much greater than we supposed at the outset.
In June 1977 I paid a flying visit to Rome. This too resulted in some valuable contacts and discussions, notably with the grand old man of Christian Democracy, Professor Amintore Fanfani, and also with one of Italy’s most clever and effective Finance Ministers, Filippo Pandolfi. My visit concluded with a private audience with Pope Paul VI — my first experience of the Vatican. These are always very private occasions. With Pope Paul VI and later with Pope John Paul II I discussed Northern Ireland; and with John Paul II, whose election as Pope has always struck me as providential, I held in addition a discussion about the irreligious nature of communism and the challenge it presented to Christian statesmanship. It is no secret that I greatly admire the role played by John Paul II in the liberation of his country, Poland, and of the other countries of Eastern Europe from the legions of communists that proved no match for his spiritual authority.
In public speeches on this visit I called for the involvement of the Italian Christian Democrats in the nascent EDU: I recognized that the word ‘conservative’ had a different and pejorative significance in Italy, but urged my hosts to consider instead the reality of our similar policies. I made the point in person to Aldo Moro, then the Christian Democrat party leader. He was an aloof, academic figure on the left of his party, and I did not feel he was very sympathetic to what I was saying. Alas, there was no occasion to return to the subject, for within a year Signor Moro was kidnapped and murdered.
In retrospect, I can see that the Italians were quite right in thinking that they and we saw the world very differently. Christian Democracy served a useful purpose in many European countries, where it was important for all shades of moderate opinion to combine in order to resist fascism and communism. Catholic social teaching provided a valuable framework — for Protestants as well — in societies where no strong secular centre-right political tradition existed. The trouble was that, whatever their merits as a view of life, such ideas were not in themselves sufficient to give an ideological basis for the practical policies required in the late twentieth century. This was particularly true of economic policy, where anything from full-blooded free enterprise on the one hand to corporatism on the other could be dressed up in the language of Christian Democracy. Some Christian Democrat parties, like the German CDU, have gone at least part of the way towards making up for such deficiencies by adopting free-market rhetoric (if not always free-market policies). Others, like the Italian Christian Democrats, have gone the way of all dinosaurs. Christian Democracy has also shown itself incapable of shedding light on the great question of the post-Cold War world — the long-term relationship between nation states and supra-national institutions. I conclude that however much individual Christian Democrats may command our respect and deserve our support, Conservatives have little to learn from them.
In any case, Christian Democrat and conservative parties from Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Britain did agree to found the European Democratic Union. I was present at the launch in Salzburg in April 1978. Among other party leaders there were Helmut Kohl and Franz Josef Strauss — the leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) and, after Herr Kohl’s narrow defeat in the elections in October 1976, the Chancellor-candidate of the German right. The contrast between the two of them interested me. Both were very large and very German. But Herr Strauss was a mercurial intellectual, had a lively wit and was an accomplished orator. He also lacked Helmut Kohl’s caution and, when pitted against Helmut Schmidt, his impulsiveness, and a not altogether deserved reputation for extremism later defeated him. It was a glittering occasion at the Klessheim Castle and the Austrians, whose brainchild the EDU was, were magnificent hosts. And for me it was also a useful platform at an important time.
As I have mentioned, the third pressing European question was the role of the countries of the Community in East–West relations. Although this issue preoccupied me from soon after my becoming Leader, I only tackled it directly on one occasion — in a speech, drafted with the help of Hugh Thomas, to the Grandes Conferences Catholiques in Brussels on Friday 23 June 1978. The theme was ‘Principles of Foreign Policy’, covering a wide canvas, including the need to advance democracy throughout the world so as to reduce the risk of war. But the part of the speech which received greatest attention concerned the political role of the European Community. I did not regard the EEC as merely an economic entity: it had a wider strategic purpose. As a zone of democracy, stability and prosperity adjoining Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, it was both a showcase for the Western way of life and a magnet drawing politicians and peoples away from communism. Moreover, Western European countries should not be tempted to govern their relations with the Soviet Union and its satellites on economic grounds alone, but rather with full regard to the effects of technology transfer and cheap credits in oiling the Russian war machine.
We must see our relationships with the Soviet Union as a whole. The supply by the West of credit, grain and technology; the negotiation of different aspects of security and disarmament; Soviet and satellite activities in Africa, Asia and the Pacific are all features of one landscape. Unless we learn, as the Soviet Union has learned, to look at the landscape as a whole we shall be consistently out-manoeuvred.
In order to grasp how we had arrived at such a pass it is necessary to consider the East-West balance more generally.
EAST-WEST
One of the first foreign statesmen I met after becoming Leader was Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State. Over the years my respect for Dr Kissinger steadily grew and — though starting from different perspectives — our analysis of international events increasingly converged. At this time, however, I was uneasy about the direction of Western policy towards the Soviet Union, of which he was acknowledged to be the impresario.
I did indeed recognize the importance of the ‘opening to China’ achieved under Richard Nixon in the power-play with the Soviets. It was a crucial element of victory in the Cold War to detach China permanently from the Soviet Union. As for ‘linkage’ — that is to recognize the links between one issue and another in bilateral relations between states, in Henry Kissinger’s own words ‘to create a network of incentives and penalties to produce the most favourable outcome’[46] — I took the view that its prospects had been undermined by President Nixon’s domestic weakness induced by Watergate. But I had serious doubts about the strategy of ‘détente’.
My gut instinct was that this was one of those soothing foreign terms which conceal an ugly reality that plain English would expose. It was difficult to see any difference between appeasement and détente as it began to evolve under the conditions of American paralysis after the election of a post-Watergate Congress dominated by ultra-liberal Democrats and the collapsing position in South Vietnam. Although so many obeisances had been paid to the concept that it was not prudent to attack it directly, I came as near as I could. This was not just a reflection of my preference for plain speaking: it was also the result of my conviction that too many people in the West had been lulled into believing that their way of life was secure, when it was in fact under mortal threat.
The first condition for meeting and overcoming that threat was that the Alliance should perceive what was happening; the second and equally important condition was that we should summon up the will to change it. Even in Britain’s parlous economic state we still had the resources to fight back, as part of NATO and under the leadership of the United States. But we could not assume that that would always be so. At some point decline — not just relative but absolute and not just limited to one sphere but in every sphere, economic, military, political and psychological — might become irreversible. Urgent action was required and urgency entails risks. Accordingly, my first major foreign affairs speech was a risk.
Events continued to confirm my analysis. In March the Labour Government’s Defence White Paper announced sharp cuts in the defence budget, £4,700 million over the next ten years. In the same month Alexander Shelepin, previously head of the KGB and now in charge of the Soviet Union’s ‘trade unions’, arrived in Britain as a guest of the TUC. The following month saw the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese communists amid scenes of chaos, adding to America’s woes. Cuban ‘advisers’ were beginning to arrive to support the communist MPLA faction in Angola. It was, however, what I heard and read about the preparations for the Helsinki Summit that triggered my decision to speak.
The idea for Helsinki had come from the Soviets, was warmly welcomed by Chancellor Brandt’s West Germany as a contribution to Ostpolitik, and was then accepted on to the Nixon Administration’s agenda. The West wanted the Soviets to enter into talks to reduce their military superiority in Europe — Mutual Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) — and to respect the human rights of their subject peoples. But what did the Soviets want? This was by far the most interesting question, since even if, as the sceptics suggested, they would not honour their agreements anyway, they still would not have taken this trouble unless something important for them would result. Respectability could be the only answer. If the Soviet Union and its satellites — particularly the more potentially fragile regimes in Eastern Europe — could receive the international seal of approval they would feel more secure.
But did we want them to feel more secure? Arguably, one of the most exploitable weaknesses of totalitarian dictatorships is the paranoid insecurity which flows from the lack of consent to the regime itself and which results in inefficiency and even paralysis of decision-taking. If the Soviets felt more secure, if their new-found respectability gave them greater access to credit and technology, if they were treated with tolerant respect rather than suspicious hostility, how would they use these advantages?
That led, of course, to the further question: what was the fundamental impulse of the Soviet Union? If the Soviet leaders were reasonable people, a little hidebound perhaps but open to persuasion, not so very different from the political elites of our countries, the lessening of tension with the West would indeed lead to a more peaceful and stable world. The trouble was that no one with real knowledge of the Soviet system believed that this was so. That system was founded upon an ideology which moulded every person and institution within it according to techniques of varying sophistication and crudity. The evidence for this was the ruthlessness with which it dealt with the tiny minority who dared to challenge it. The fate of the dissidents was not just something to evoke Western compassion or outrage: it was a statement about the nature and objectives of the system which regarded them as such a threat to its existence.
But it was not necessary to listen to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to learn the truth about the Soviet Union — though, as I shall describe, his words had a powerful effect on me. One need only turn to the leaden prose of Pravda to establish how the Soviet leaders perceived détente and the Helsinki initiative which flowed from it:
Peaceful coexistence does not signify the end of the struggle between the two world social systems. The struggle will continue… until the complete and final victory of communism on a world scale. [Pravda, 22 August 1973.]
In other words, there would be no letting-up in the promotion of Soviet power and communist revolution worldwide. If such statements were a true reflection of Soviet intentions — and there was a great deal of evidence to show that they were — any weakening of external pressure on the Soviets would simply result in their having more resources and opportunities to ‘bury us’.
If I was to challenge the accepted wisdom on these matters I needed expert help. But most of the experts had jumped aboard the Sovietology gravy train which ran on official patronage, conferences with ‘approved’ Soviet academics, visa journalism and a large dose of professional complacency. I had, however, through John O’Sullivan of the Daily Telegraph, heard about Robert Conquest, a British historian and fearless critic of the USSR. I asked him to help me and together we wrote the speech which I delivered on Saturday 26 July 1975 in Chelsea. The occasion itself was only arranged a few days in advance. I did not speak to Reggie Maudling or anyone else in the Shadow Cabinet about it beforehand, because I knew that all I would receive were obstruction and warnings, which would doubtless be leaked afterwards — particularly if things went wrong.
I began by setting the large military imbalance between the West and the Soviet Union against the background of the retreat of Western power. I drew particular attention to the Soviet naval build-up, describing the Soviet navy as a global force with more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together and more surface ships than could possibly be needed to protect the USSR’s coast and merchant shipping. I argued that nothing was more important to our security than the American commitment to Europe, adding that an isolationist Britain would encourage an isolationist America.
I then dealt with the imminent Helsinki Summit. I did not attack détente directly, indeed I called for a ‘real’ détente. But I quoted Leonid Brezhnev speaking in June 1972 to illustrate the Soviets’ true intentions. Brezhnev had affirmed that peaceful coexistence ‘in no way implies the possibility of relaxing the ideological struggle. On the contrary we must be prepared for this struggle to be intensified and become an even sharper form of confrontation between the systems.’
I also drew attention to the importance of human rights as a further measure of the nature of the regime with which we were dealing:
When the Soviet leaders gaol a writer, or a priest, or a doctor or a worker for the crime of speaking freely, it is not only for humanitarian reasons that we should be concerned. For these acts reveal a country that is afraid of truth and liberty; it dare not allow its people to enjoy the freedoms we take for granted, and a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.
Human rights would, we already knew, be the subject of far reaching verbal undertakings in the so-called ‘Basket Three’ of the Helsinki package — ‘Cooperation in humanitarian and other fields’. But I placed no trust in the Soviets’ good faith: indeed, since their whole system depended upon repression, it was difficult to see how they could comply. I suspected that for many of those present at Helsinki — and not just on the communist side — the undertakings about human rights would be regarded as uplifting rhetoric rather than clear conditions to be rigorously monitored. So I noted:
We must work for a real relaxation of tension, but in our negotiations with the Eastern bloc we must not accept words or gestures as a substitute for genuine détente. No flood of words emanating from a summit conference will mean anything unless it is accompanied by some positive action by which the Soviet leaders show that their ingrained attitudes are really beginning to change.
That is why we so strongly support all those European and American spokesmen, who have insisted that no serious advance towards a stable peace can be made unless some progress at least is seen in the free movement of people and of ideas.
The reaction to this speech confirmed that I was the odd woman out. The Helsinki Agreement was widely welcomed. I could imagine the shaking of wise heads at my impulsive imprudence. Reggie Maudling came round at once to see me in Flood Street to express both his anger at my delivering such a speech without consulting him and his disagreement with its content. I gave no ground. Indeed, Mr Brezhnev’s evident satisfaction at what Helsinki achieved helped convince me that I must return to the subject: he described it as ‘a necessary summing up of the political outcome of the Second World War’. In other words he regarded it — not least perhaps the commitment not to alter European borders except ‘by peaceful means and by agreement’ — as recognizing and legitimizing the Soviet hold on Eastern Europe which they had obtained by force and fraud at the end of the war.
The Helsinki Summit of 1975 is now viewed in a favourable light because the dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe used its provisions as a programme for which to fight in their long struggle with the communist State. And indeed by making human rights a matter of treaty obligations rather than domestic law it gave the dissidents leverage which they employed to the full. Their bravery would have been of little account, however, without the subsequent Western, particularly American, renewal of resolve and defence build-up. These halted the expansion that had given Soviet communism the psychological prestige of historical inevitability, exerted an external pressure on communist regimes that diverted them from domestic repression, and gave heart to the burgeoning resistance movements against communism. This pincer movement — the revived West and the dissidents — more than countered the advantages that the Soviets received from Helsinki in the form of increased legitimacy and Western recognition. Without that, Helsinki would have been just one more step on the road to defeat.
Not surprisingly after the Helsinki speech, I was not invited to the Soviet Union, as perhaps a different Leader of the Opposition would have been. But I felt it important to deepen my knowledge of the communist system in practice. Consequently, when an invitation arrived for me to visit Romania I accepted. I already had some knowledge of that country, gained when I was Education Secretary. Improbable as it may seem, there had grown up a regular Anglo-Romanian seminar on education, held one year in Bucharest and one year in Cambridge. My Romanian opposite number, Mircea Malita, was a distinguished mathematician. Like other ‘cultural’ events under communism, these seminars had a largely political and diplomatic purpose. That said, there was no doubt in my mind about the cultural riches of Romania itself — not only Bucharest, known as ‘the Paris of the Balkans’ (still at that time spared from the later devastation inflicted on it by Ceausescu’s megalomaniac building plans of the 1980s), but also the luminous painted monastery churches of Bukovina, which I visited in September 1971. Not surprisingly, the Romanians were anxious to continue to cultivate me when I became Leader of the Opposition, and for the moment this accorded with my purposes as well.
At the time of my second visit at the beginning of September 1975, Romania occupied a unique position in the communist world. Following in the footsteps of his (already disgraced) predecessor Gheorghe Dej, Nicolae Ceausescu had plotted out an independent path for Romania within the Warsaw Pact. In 1968, for example, he had visited Prague and, apparently sincerely, expressed support for the Polish reform movement and bitterly condemned the Russian suppression of it. The Western view, which I then shared, was that Romania should be accorded discreet support in the hope that its example might lead to further fragmentation in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In fact, Ceausescu was playing a ruthless game in which ethnic tensions (with Hungary), East-West competition (between NATO and the Warsaw Pact) and rivalry within the communist world (between the Soviet Union and China) were exploited as seemed appropriate at any juncture.
Between the conversations I had with Ceausescu in 1971 and 1975 he had further consolidated his position. Although he had become effective leader in 1965, it was not until 1974 that he united the functions of Party Leader and Head of State and Government. From now on he was freer to indulge his political fantasies. For what we Westerners did not sufficiently grasp was that Ceausescu was a throwback both to Stalinism, whose methods he employed, and indeed to a more traditional Balkan despotism for which the promotion of his family and the flaunting of wealth and power were essential trappings. Ceausescu himself never struck me as anything out of the ordinary, just cold, rather dull, spewing forth streams of statistics and possessing that stilted formal courtesy that communists adopted as a substitute for genuine civilization. We discussed the Soviet threat and he gave me a long account, faithfully mirrored later by guides, diplomats and factory managers, of the astonishing successes of the Romanian economy. He was particularly proud of the level of ‘investment’ which, as a share of the national income, certainly dwarfed that of Western countries. In fact, of course, misdirected investment is a classic feature of the planned economy; it was just that Romania, whose people apart from the ruling élite lived in poverty, misdirected more than the others.
I was also shown around a scientific institute specializing in polymer research. My guide was none other than Elena Ceausescu, who had already begun to indulge a personal fantasy world which matched her husband’s in absurdity, if not in human consequences: she was determined to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on polymers. It subsequently emerged that she could barely have distinguished a polymer from a polygon. But behind the defences of translation and communist long-windedness she put up quite a good show.
In other ways, however, Romania did illustrate more characteristic features of the communist system. I visited a factory and heard from those in charge — I presumed they were the management — a litany of the company’s achievements. ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said, ‘but could I speak to the trade union leaders here? Perhaps they may have something to add?’ A look of astonishment spread across their faces. ‘But that’s us!’ they replied. What the individual workers at the factory — or indeed the neighbours across whose houses it was belching thick brown smoke — might have commented is another matter. For, as in the fully developed socialist state, the trade unions of Romania were political not industrial institutions.
A little later I had dinner with Members of the Romanian ‘Parliament’. It was explained to me that one had to be a member of an approved, i.e. reliably communist, trade union in order to stand in a parliamentary election. They showed me the list of some thirty-five such bodies. Looking down it, the ‘beekeepers’ union’ caught my eye. The opportunity was irresistible. In grave fashion I began to interrogate them. How large was the beekeepers’ bloc in Parliament? Who were its leaders? What were the factions? Was there an anti-beekeepers’ faction? The evening slipped by more quickly.
A final practical lesson for me, which any Western politician or businessman visiting the Eastern bloc was well advised to learn as soon as possible, was to assume that someone was always listening. This was an inconvenience for people like me in the country for just a few days. But for the subjects of a communist state it was a kind of intellectual terror. Depriving human beings of their privacy has the intended psychological effect of making them withdrawn, introverted and incapable of the communication based on mutual trust which permits civil society. Thus communism applied sophisticated techniques in the service of a primitive ideology so as to destroy not just potential centres of opposition but rather the final enemy, human personality.
Ceausescu’s Romania already reflected this in an advanced form, though for me and my party it was a matter of farce, not tragedy. I had already been told at the British Embassy how one of our diplomats, anxious to recruit a nanny for his young children and hazy about how to insert a suitable advertisement in a Romanian newspaper, decided that the simplest and most reliable method was to tell an astonished friend on the Embassy telephone of his urgent requirement. Sure enough, and without a blush, in the course of some discussion of a quite different subject a Romanian official suggested a candidate.
Richard Ryder and I were put up in the State Guest House. Interestingly, the sitting-room ceiling consisted of an open wooden grille, doubtless good for ventilation but possibly for other purposes too. I just could not make the television work when I wanted to listen to the news. Richard was no more successful. We were still struggling when a knock on the door announced the arrival of a member of the Guest House staff who helpfully put us right.
Even before this visit, I had few illusions about the oppressive nature of the regime. Whatever Western strategic interests might require, I was determined that the pressure should be kept up to improve respect for human rights, particularly when the ink was barely dry on the Helsinki Agreement. An expatriate Romanian group in Britain, knowing of my impending visit, sent me a list of five political prisoners, asking me to urge their release. I immediately agreed to do so. But somehow the Foreign Office got wind of this and sought determinedly to dissuade me on the grounds that it would alienate Ceausescu to no good purpose. A senior civil servant explained in person the deep unwisdom of my intention. I was not impressed. In Bucharest I gave the Romanians the list and said that these people were wrongly imprisoned and must be set free. I was glad to see that they subsequently were.
Undoubtedly, the most important foreign tour I made in 1975 — probably the most significant during my time as Leader of the Opposition — was to the United States in September. I already, of course, knew something of the States; and I liked and admired most of what I knew. This, however, was my first opportunity to meet all the leading political figures, and do so on something approaching equal terms. I was guaranteed plenty of media attention, if largely for the depressing reason that Britain’s stock had rarely fallen lower. American newspapers, magazines and television programmes were concentrating on the precipitous decline of the British economy, the advance of trade union power, the extension of the socialist state and what was perceived to be a collapse of national self-confidence. Aside from the schadenfreude, also evident was a nagging worry that America, itself suffering a deep but different crisis in the wake of the fall of Vietnam and the trauma of Watergate, might suffer the same fate.[47]
I had discussed the situation with Norman Lamont, an early supporter whose job with Rothschilds enabled him to keep me in touch with what was going on in the City and abroad, and who had just returned from the United States where he had spoken to politicians, officials and opinion-formers. I gained the impression, which proved accurate, that the Ford Administration’s confidence had started modestly to increase, which was giving them all the more opportunity to worry about what was happening in Britain. The Prime Minister, who had recently been in Washington, had done nothing to improve perceptions by claiming that all our difficulties were grossly exaggerated. Something different and more serious was expected. I resolved to provide it.
Gordon Reece flew on ahead of me to New York in order to set up the media arrangements. Just before I left London he telephoned to say that expectations of my visit were now so high that I should make the first speech I was to deliver — to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in New York — a blockbuster rather than, as planned, a low-key performance with the main speech coming later in Washington. This required frenzied last-minute speech-rewriting with Adam Ridley, and it showed in the text. Most of the speech struck exactly the right note. It began by taking head-on the American comments on the sorry state of contemporary Britain and treating them seriously. I then drew attention to what I called ‘the progressive consensus, the doctrine that the state should be active on many fronts in promoting equality: in the provision of social welfare and in the redistribution of wealth and incomes’. There followed a detailed analysis of its effects in the form of over-taxation, the discouragement of enterprise, the squeeze on profits, the defrauding of savers by inflation and negative interest rates and the apparently inexorable growth of the public sector and public spending.
Unfortunately, tacked on to the draft and, far more seriously, to the ‘final’ version issued to the press by Conservative Central Office was a passage about public expenditure constraints requiring tough, painful decisions such as limiting the number of kidney machines. Kidney machines were in fact already limited in number as part of the unacknowledged rationing of health treatment under Labour. Nevertheless, a frank statement of it — particularly in the form of a throwaway line — was asking for trouble. In the helter-skelter preparations Adam and I let it through. Luckily, when Gordon in New York saw a copy of the speech he immediately understood the potential damage and removed the offending part. All press releases are subject to the usually formal qualification ‘check against delivery’, so he was also able to ring round Fleet Street to tell the editors that the page in question, although part of the press release they had received from Central Office, was not being used and so should not be covered. They had sufficient respect for him to comply; and since the front page of the Sun had already provisionally been dominated by the headline ‘Let ‘em Die, Says Maggie’ before it was replaced with something blander, it was a narrow escape.
In fact, the main message of the speech was given maximum attention on both sides of the Atlantic. I was promptly attacked back home by the Labour Government for running Britain down abroad. In fact, the message I was bringing to America about Britain was essentially one of hope, namely that the nation’s potential was great enough to withstand even the effects of socialism. The criticism from the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, who quaintly criticized me later for putting ‘argumentative passages’ into my American speeches, found a faithful echo in the British Embassy where I was staying. A senior member of the Embassy staff briefed the American press against me. Gordon Reece quickly discovered what was happening, and there was a sharp exchange of letters on the subject between me and Jim Callaghan when I returned to England.
Aware of the attempt to try to cast me in this light, I used my speech to the National Press Club in Washington to point out that if the present socialist policies were abandoned, Britain had underlying strengths which would ensure its swift recovery. A shift of popular opinion against the far Left, the extent of our energy reserves and the strength of our scientific potential — shown by seventy-two Nobel Prizes, more than France, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium put together — all justified long-term optimism.
Now, slowly, we are finding our way. It is true that the reports about Britain still reflect a serious situation, and they are right to do so. But a change is coming over us… I see some signs that our people are ready to make the tough choice, to follow the harder road. We are still the same people who have fought for freedom, and won. The spirit of adventure, the inventiveness, the determination are still strands in our character. We may suffer from a British sickness now, but our constitution is sound and we have the heart and the will to win through.
In the course of my American visit I met the key figures in the Ford Administration. Dr Kissinger I knew already. But this was the first time that I had met Bill Simon, the free-market-minded Treasury Secretary, who had jettisoned the wage and price controls imposed under President Nixon, and the immensely experienced James Schlesinger, the Defense Secretary, the Administration’s principal internal opponent to détente.
I was also received by President Ford himself. He was a large, friendly man, unexpectedly precipitated into high office who, perhaps to his own surprise as well as that of others, had started to relish it. He had assembled or inherited a talented team around him and had already demonstrated to the Europeans America’s continued commitment to their security, in spite of all the upheavals of domestic politics. He had, in fact, both the strengths and weaknesses of what in current political parlance is described as ‘a safe pair of hands’. He was not the kind of man to challenge accepted orthodoxies, which I increasingly believed ought to be challenged. But he was a reassuring and steady figure who helped America heal the self-inflicted wounds of Watergate. After a rocky period in the wake of his pardon for Richard Nixon, his Administration’s fortunes appeared to be improving, and his undeclared bid for the Republican nomination was proceeding against a genially effective campaign by a certain Governor Ronald Reagan. President Ford’s prospects for re-election appeared good. I came away hoping that he would succeed.
I found on my return to London that the coverage given to my American tour had transformed my political standing. Even the Labour Party’s simulated outrage helped. For the more attention was paid to my arguments, the more seriously they were taken. I was soon conscious also of a change of attitude within the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. People who had regarded my accession to the leadership as an irritating but temporary fluke had to think again. Not only was I evidently being treated seriously by some of the most powerful figures in the free world; the warnings I had given in my Helsinki speech looked ever less eccentric and more prescient.
In late September the Cubans, acting as Soviet surrogates, began to pour troops into Angola. In December the US Senate overturned President Ford’s policy of providing assistance to the anti-communist forces there and resistance to the MPLA collapsed. I thought and read more about these things over Christmas and decided that I would make a further speech.
On this occasion I stuck to the conventions and told Reggie Maudling of my decision. It was perhaps a testimony to his unease at the prospect that Reggie went so far as to offer me a draft. Unfortunately, this would not do. As Denis might have said, ‘It was so weak it wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.’ Bob Conquest had now departed for the more politically conducive Hoover Institution in California, so I asked Robert Moss to help me. The editor of The Economist’s, Foreign Report, an expert on security and strategic matters, one of the founders of the National Association for Freedom set up to combat overweening trade union power, and destined to be a best-selling novelist, Robert turned out to be an ideal choice.
The speech which I delivered on Monday 19 January at Kensington Town Hall covered similar ground to the previous year’s Chelsea speech, but concentrated more on defence and contained even stronger language about the Soviet menace. It accused the Labour Government of ‘dismantling our defence at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’. It also offered an analysis of Soviet intentions different from that of the proponents of détente.
Russia is ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge, largely land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns.
I warned of the imbalance between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Central Europe, where the latter outnumbered us by 150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft. But I emphasized that the West’s defence could not be ensured in Europe alone: NATO’s supply lines had also to be protected. This meant that we could not ignore what Soviet-backed forces were doing in Angola. In any case, if they were allowed their way there, they might well conclude that they could repeat the performance elsewhere.
The reaction to the speech, particularly in the more thoughtful sections of the British press, was much more favourable than to the Chelsea speech. The Daily Telegraph entitled its editorial comment ‘The Truth About Russia’. The Times admitted that ‘there has been complacency in the West’. Nor was the Soviet reaction long in coming. The Soviet Embassy wrote a letter to Reggie Maudling, and the Ambassador called on the Foreign Office to protest in person. A stream of crude invective flowed from the different Soviet propaganda organs. But it was some apparatchik in the office of Red Star, the Red Army newspaper, his imagination surpassing his judgement, who coined the description of me as ‘The Iron Lady’.
It is one of the few defences which free societies have against totalitarian propaganda that totalitarians are inclined to see the Western mind as a mirror image of their own. They are consequently capable from time to time of the most grotesque misjudgements. This was one of them. When Gordon Reece read on the Press Association tapes what Red Star had said he was ecstatic and rushed into my office to tell me about it. I quickly saw that they had inadvertently put me on a pedestal as their strongest European opponent. They never did me a greater favour.
A few days later I visited the British Army on the Rhine, where my Kensington speech ensured me a warm reception. I was photographed driving a tank, which did me no harm at all at home either. What the outside world did not know was that in the course of this visit my career almost ended even more dramatically than it was to in November 1990.
Cranley Onslow, one of the Party’s Defence spokesmen, Richard Ryder and I were shown aboard an elderly two-engine propeller-driven transport aircraft to fly from the British base at Rheindalen to Oerlinghausen where we were to stay the night. (The plan had been to fly by helicopter, but the weather was not good enough.) Shortly after take-off I took my draft speech out of my briefcase and started to work on it. Some time later I became conscious of an irregularity in the noisy drumming of the engines. It was cold in the cabin. Outside there was thick freezing fog, and looking more closely I could see ice forming on the wings. At this point one of the crew came back to say that there was a problem and we would have to return to Rheindalen. I could sense from his manner that it was serious and I pressed to know exactly what the trouble was. It turned out that with the fog so thick the pilot could not be sure of his bearings. There was more. We were apparently now flying blind through a range of mountains. This was why the pilot had kept our speed to the minimum, slowing until the aircraft threatened to stall, in the hope that the fog might break and he could see his way out of trouble. Worse still, the instrument measuring our air speed had failed. I stopped working on the speech and put it away carefully in my briefcase, leaned back, closed my eyes and thought about matters even more important than politics. Somehow, we managed to get back to Rheindalen. I was never more relieved to feel tarmac under my feet.
If my feet were on the ground metaphysically as well, this was in part because I had followed closely the speeches and writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn since he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974. But the first time I saw and heard him speak was in an interview he gave to Michael Charlton on the BBC television programme Panorama in March 1976. It made a deep impression on me; I subsequently kept the transcript amid the bundle of papers I regularly referred to when in need of inspiration.
The predominant Western view at the time was that in the end the Soviet system would, by a process of ‘convergence’, turn into something not very different from Western society, which would itself evolve in the direction of social democracy. Solzhenitsyn challenged this complacency. The real question, according to him, was not whether and how the Soviet system would change, but rather whether the West itself could survive. This was not because of the strengths of communism but rather because of the weakness and cowardice of Western leaders. Until a few years before the cause of the dissidents in the USSR had been making real if slow headway. But now the Western nations had allowed the balance to shift dramatically against freedom. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Helsinki process made my own, which had caused such controversy the previous year, pale into banality. Solzhenitsyn asked:
How do you explain that over the last few months there has been hardly any news coming out of the Soviet Union of the continuing persecution of dissidents? If you will forgive me, I will answer this myself. The journalists have bowed to the spirit of Helsinki. I know for a fact that Western journalists in Moscow, who have been given the right of freer movement, in return for this, and because of the spirit of Helsinki, no longer accept information about new persecutions of dissidents in the Soviet Union. What does the spirit of Helsinki and the spirit of détente mean for us within the Soviet Union? The strengthening of totalitarianism.
As I have noted, the revival of Western morale and defence preparedness altered this entire equation. But Solzhenitsyn’s words are an interesting testimony to the corrosive effect of Helsinki under conditions of détente.
Now, however, the election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States at the end of 1976 brought to the White House a man who put human rights at the top of his foreign policy agenda. One could at least be sure that he would not make the mistake of his predecessor, who had refused to meet Solzhenitsyn for fear of offending the Soviet Union.
President Carter was soon to be tested. In January 1977 the text of ‘Charter 77’, the manifesto of the Czech dissidents, was smuggled into West Germany and published. The following month Jimmy Carter wrote personally to Professor Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear scientist and leading dissident. This change of tone was reassuring.
But I soon became worried about two other aspects of the Carter Administration’s approach to foreign policy. First, human rights issues were treated without reference to broader political and strategic considerations, and indeed with some moral naivete. Even the most idealistic proponent of a policy inspired by moral considerations has to be practical. There were many regimes which abused human rights — for example, some military governments in Latin America and the Middle East — but which may have been less oppressive than the totalitarian alternative.
Moreover, the primary duty a free country owes, not just to itself but to countries which are unfree, is to survive. So there is no need to apologize for supporting an unsavoury regime which temporarily serves larger Western interests, although we should always use our influence to ameliorate its worst abuses. Unfortunately, muddled thinking and divisions within the Carter Administration prevented it from pursuing such a balanced approach. As we shall see, the Carter stress on human rights in Iran helped to undermine the Shah and to replace him with the far more oppressive, and anti-Western, regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini. As Pascal points out, the first principle of morality is thinking clearly. And in this case failing to think clearly produced a markedly worse result for both human rights and Western interests.
My second criticism was that human rights policy cannot stand on its own, for the simple reason that rights have ultimately to be defended by force. In the circumstances of the 1970s, this required the United States to be militarily strong enough to resist and reverse the threat to world freedom posed by the Soviet Union. Yet President Carter had a passionate commitment to disarmament, demonstrated both by his early cancellation of the B1 strategic bomber and the renewed impetus he gave to SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), which President Ford had initiated with the Soviets. Ironically, therefore, President Carter found that he could only take action to improve human rights against countries linked to the West, not against countries that were hostile and strong enough to ignore him.
As for the SALT II negotiations, it was possible to argue about the particular formulae, but the really important strategic fact was that the Soviet Union had in recent years been arming far faster than the Americans. Any mere ‘arms limitation’ agreement was bound to stabilize the military balance in such a way as to recognize this. Only deep arms cuts on the one hand, or a renewed drive for stronger American defences on the other, could reverse it. If, however, neither of these was a real possibility in the prevailing state of public opinion, then something on the broad lines of a SALT agreement was to the West’s advantage, since it would at least halt the Soviets’ advance. Either way, the United States had already lost its nuclear superiority at a time when the West had long since abandoned any attempt to keep up with the Warsaw Pact in conventional weapons. Crude as such calculations inevitably are, the scale of the change is shown by the following table:
Indeed, the position would further worsen as the Soviets produced their Backfire Bombers, multiplied their nuclear submarines and started to deploy SS20 nuclear missiles focused on Western Europe.
These facts and figures were available to anyone who was interested, which far too few journalists were. But did they actually underestimate the danger? I had followed closely the accounts given by Major-General George Keegan, recently retired as Chief of the US Air Force Intelligence, of Soviet research into charged particle beams, which might provide a technology that would revolutionize defence assumptions by providing a far more effective shield against ballistic missiles. The Carter Administration belittled this threat, and only when President Reagan launched his Strategic Defence Initiative were the dangers properly understood and countervailing action taken. As early as March 1977, however, the magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology published observations by General Keegan on the dimensions of the overall Soviet threat. He argued that the Americans had consistently underestimated the scale of Soviet military strength and preparedness, coming to the devastating conclusion that ‘the Soviet Union today has a capability to initiate, wage, survive and emerge from a global conflict with far greater effectiveness than the United States and its allies’. It would take the invasion of Afghanistan, two years later, before most Western politicians began to think in these terms.
When I visited the United States again in September 1977, the Carter Administration was still enjoying its political honeymoon. President Carter had brought a new informal style to the White House which appeared to accord with the mood of the times. Although there was unease about some of his appointments, this was largely put down to Washington resentment against outsiders. In Cyrus Vance, his Secretary of State, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, his National Security Adviser, he had two remarkable assistants, whose differences of outlook were not yet apparent.
I had met Jimmy Carter himself in London in May when he attended the G7 Summit. In spite of my growing doubts about his foreign policy, I liked him and looked forward to meeting him again. At our discussion in the White House the President was most keen to explain and justify his recently launched initiative for a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Although he had clearly mastered the details and was a persuasive advocate, I was not convinced. Believing as I did in the vital importance of a credible nuclear deterrent, and knowing that nuclear weapons had to be tested in order to be credible, I could not go along with the policy.
Equally, I was unable to agree with President Carter, or indeed Cyrus Vance and Andrew Young, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, on their preferred approach to settling the Rhodesian question. The Americans were insisting that the Rhodesian security forces be dismantled. But I knew that would never be acceptable to the white population — who still enjoyed military superiority over the ‘armed struggle’ — without some real guarantee of peace. The Americans were also toying with the idea of imposing sanctions against South Africa, which seemed to me equally ill-judged considering that they needed to have the South African Government on their side if they were to persuade Ian Smith to compromise.[48]
At least on this occasion I did not have to contend with hostile briefing from the Embassy, which was ironic considering that the new Ambassador, Peter Jay, was Jim Callaghan’s son-in-law. There had been loud accusations of nepotism when this appointment had been announced. But I liked and admired Peter Jay personally. His understanding of monetary economics would have made him a welcome recruit to the Shadow Cabinet. Even so, I have to confess that I took a certain mischievous pleasure in quoting an extract from Jim Callaghan’s speech to the previous year’s Labour Party Conference as the introduction to my own speech to the British-American Chamber of Commerce. In it the Labour Prime Minister had said:
We used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you, in all candour, that this option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did exist it only worked by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy followed by higher levels of unemployment as the next step.
It was an open secret that this uncharacteristically sound passage had been drafted by none other than Peter Jay.
In fact, the only embarrassment I faced during my American trip resulted from an open disagreement between Jim Prior and Keith Joseph about Lord Scarman’s report on the Grunwick affair and about the right policy towards the closed shop. Members of the press corps were more interested in this than the results of my discussions in Washington, and I had to issue two statements to try to calm the waters. But the important matters of substance could only be sorted out on my return.
Meanwhile, uncertainties about the direction of American policy and the extent of Soviet ambitions had increasingly focused attention on those countries which were balanced uneasily between the two blocs. Of these, Yugoslavia had a special significance. Since Marshal Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia had been in an anomalous but important position. After horrendous early repression and mass murder, Tito and his comrades had become somewhat more liberal because circumstances forced them to look to the West for financial support and security. This gradually moved Yugoslavia in a pseudo-capitalist and quasi-liberal direction. There might have been even more progress of this kind if Tito’s every move had not been greeted with fawning admiration by a particular kind of British socialist. In fact, his real talent was as an illusionist. He persuaded both East and West, and perhaps even a section of Yugoslav opinion, that the country was an important player in the great international game. The high point of this was the formation under Tito’s inspiration of the so-called ‘Non-Aligned’ Movement of Third World countries.
By the mid 1970s the country’s economic problems were growing. The Yugoslavs had financed a consumer boom on the back of Western credit. A kind of chaotic semi-capitalism masquerading as ‘self-management’ had evolved. Living standards were higher than in other communist countries, partly because of remittances from Yugoslav workers overseas; but, correspondingly, the implications for the regime if living standards had to fall might be even more serious.
The fragility of Yugoslavia was both symbolized by and depended upon the state of Tito’s own health. It was an open question whether the Soviets would try to reassert control in the chaos which was widely expected to follow his death. At eighty-five, he was still in control of events, but ailing. I had wanted to visit Yugoslavia for some time, but my visit was twice postponed because Tito was not well enough to receive me.
On a bitter early December day in 1977, however, in the company of Sir Fitzroy Maclean, a comrade in arms and old friend of the Yugoslav President from the Second World War, I arrived in Belgrade. My first duty was to climb the 150 steps up to the huge war memorial on the top of Mount Avala to lay a wreath. I did not have a warm coat with me and so by the time we descended I was chilled to the marrow. The general political reception, though, was warm enough, not just from the politicians but even from the communist newspapers.
As ‘the Iron Lady’, I was seen as someone who understood the fact that the Yugoslavs lived every day under the shadow of possible Soviet intervention. Paradoxically, this was one of the main considerations which kept the country together. Only with the end of the Cold War could the nations of Yugoslavia achieve real self-determination. An illustration of this is that the President of the National Assembly who hosted lunch for me, Kiro Gligorov, is now the President of the newly independent if embattled state of Macedonia.
Fitzroy Maclean and I visited Tito at his Belgrade home. His was a powerful personality, retaining some of the outward panache of his flamboyant partisan past, but leaving no doubt about the inner steel that explained his post-war dominance. We discussed and broadly agreed about the Soviet threat. The looming question of his legacy did not figure in our talks. Perhaps he had already concluded, for all the elaborate constitutional safeguards, that it would indeed be the déluge.
Before I departed for Yugoslavia, Alfred Sherman had asked me to raise with Tito the case of Milovan Djilas, Tito’s former friend and colleague and for many years most insistent domestic critic. Djilas had been one of a number of political prisoners recently freed but was, I understood, the object of continuing harassment. It seemed likely that he would soon disappear back into prison. I decided on a shot across Tito’s bows. I said with studied innocence how pleased I was that Djilas had been released. Tito glowered.
‘Yes, he’s out,’ the President said, ‘but he’s up to his old tricks. And if he goes on upsetting our constitution he will go straight back to gaol.’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘a man like Djilas will do you far more harm in prison than out of it.’
Fitzroy Maclean chipped in, ‘She’s right, you know.’
Tito gave me a hard look. There was a pause in the conversation before he turned to other matters. As far as I know, Djilas stayed out of gaol — only to suffer more harassment for his independent thinking under the brutal regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.
From the end of 1977 until the June 1979 general election I found no major reason to reverse the judgements or revise the analysis I had made as a result of my reading and discussions on foreign policy. British, European and American opinion steadily hardened against further compromises with the Soviet Union. The Soviets themselves displayed less and less caution in dealing with internal dissent or planning foreign adventure. By now the Horn of Africa had attracted Soviet ambitions: Colonel Mengistu, ruler of Ethiopia and a Soviet puppet, embarked on a long war with Somalia. In April 1978 Soviet disinformation achieved a major success in forcing President Carter to announce deferment of the production of the neutron bomb, which might have contributed to maintaining the military balance in Europe. The following month the Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov, who had set up the Helsinki Group to monitor the Helsinki accords, was sentenced to seven years in prison. In July the dissidents Anatol Sharansky and Alexander Ginsburg were sentenced respectively to thirteen and eight years in prison and labour camps for ‘anti-Soviet agitation’. For any friend of freedom it was a time of heartbreak. And out of office there was little I could do to change it.
In fact, though I did not know it at the time, three developments were opening up the long-term prospect of turning back the Soviet advance. The first, paradoxically, was that they had become too arrogant. It is a natural and often fatal trait of the totalitarian to despise opponents. The Soviets believed that the failure of Western politicians signified that Western peoples were resigned to defeat. A little more subtlety and forethought might have secured the Soviet leaders far greater gains. As it was, particularly through the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they provoked a Western reaction which finally destroyed the Soviet Union itself.
The second development was the election in September 1978 of a Polish Pope. John Paul II would fire a revolution in Eastern Europe which shook the Soviet Empire to its core.
Finally, there was the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a serious contender for the American Presidency. I had met Governor Reagan shortly after my becoming Conservative Leader in 1975. Even before then, I knew something about him because Denis had returned home one evening in the late 1960s full of praise for a remarkable speech Ronald Reagan had just delivered at the Institute of Directors. I read the text myself and quickly saw what Denis meant. When we met in person I was immediately won over by his charm, sense of humour and directness. In the succeeding years I read his speeches, advocating tax cuts as the root to wealth creation and stronger defences as an alternative to détente. I also read many of his fortnightly broadcasts to the people of California, which his Press Secretary sent over regularly for me. I agreed with them all. In November 1978 we met again in my room in the House of Commons.
In the early years Ronald Reagan had been dismissed by much of the American political élite, though not by the American electorate, as a right-wing maverick who could not be taken seriously. (I had heard that before somewhere.) Now he was seen by many thoughtful Republicans as their best ticket back to the White House. Whatever Ronald Reagan had gained in experience, he had not done so at the expense of his beliefs. I found them stronger than ever. When he left my study I reflected on how different things might look if such a man were President of the United States. But in November 1978 such a prospect seemed a long way off.
THE MIDDLE EAST
The hard-fought Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, changed the way in which Western countries regarded the Middle East. First, cuts in oil production, the huge hike in its price and selective embargoes against oil-producing countries friendly to Israel, imposed by the OPEC cartel of Arab oil producers, damaged the Western economies and caused enormous alarm. The dependence of Western living standards on unpredictable Middle Eastern politics could not have been more effectively demonstrated. Secondly, although the Israeli counter-attack had crossed the Suez Canal and driven Syrian forces to within twenty-five miles of Damascus, the Egyptians and Syrians had fought better than they had in 1967 and the Soviets had threatened to send troops in a ‘peacekeeping’ role. Thirdly, the United States responded by taking the leading part in bringing about disengagement between Israel and the Arab forces. From now on, American diplomacy, beginning with Dr Kissinger and carried on by President Carter, was the prime external force in the search for a Middle Eastern settlement.
For states like Syria, Egypt and Jordan, and for the PLO itself, life became more complicated, though more hopeful. Each had its own priorities, none of which could realistically be achieved by force of arms in the foreseeable future. Those who proved most cooperative in seeking an agreement with Israel were likely to receive the added bonus of American assistance for their economies, which the heavy demands of preparedness for war, combined with strong doses of socialism, had weakened. In such circumstances natural rivalries previously submerged or at least concealed by commitment to the ‘Arab cause’ came to the surface. Such was the Middle Eastern background to the visit I made to Egypt and Syria in January and to Israel in March 1976.
But there was also a tricky domestic political background. British politicians were in Middle Eastern eyes sharply divided between supporters of Israel on the one hand and supporters of the Arab states and the Palestinians on the other. Within the Shadow Cabinet, I was probably in a minority in feeling strong ties of respect and admiration for both Israel and the traditional regimes of the Arab world. Most of my colleagues were traditional Tory ‘Arabists’, although among the younger members of the Parliamentary Party there was considerable support for Israel, based in part upon her fearless pursuit of national self-interest. Jewish groups in Britain scrutinized closely everything the parties said about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hence, when Reggie Maudling, in a Commons debate in November 1975, appeared to call for British recognition of the PLO and the creation of a Palestinian state, this threatened to open Party divisions and I was bombarded by complaints.
I decided to spell out our policy clearly to a meeting of Jewish ex-servicemen in Finchley. This was that the Conservative Party believed that any Middle East settlement must be based upon UN Security Council Resolution 242, which itself stressed two fundamental requirements: the ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’ (i.e. the 1967 Six Day War); and recognition of the right of every state in the area ‘to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force’. I added that we condemned terrorism in whatever form and whatever cause it purported to serve.
For me at least, this position was not just a form of words designed to let us off the hook. I did both believe that Israel must be assured of its security and that the Palestinians had to be treated with respect, which at that time we saw in the context of a confederation with Jordan. Nor were these objectives incompatible. Although in the light of its history Israel understandably wanted defendable borders, there could be no lasting peace without a solution of the Palestinian problem. And both for the Palestinians and the Arab states which in varying degrees supported them the best starting-point was to recognize by deeds as well as words that Israel was there to stay. The flurry over Reggie’s speech, however, confirmed the complexity and diplomatic perils of the visit on which I embarked.
I arrived in Cairo on Wednesday 7 January 1976 and dined that evening with President and Madame Sadat. I had first met him briefly in London only two months earlier. Before dinner we had a long talk. I found him a powerful and direct personality who had a strong grasp of the power relations of the Western world. Sadat still had to play a shrewd diplomatic game, balancing America and the Soviet Union. Having dramatically ejected Soviet advisers in 1972, he had received Soviet support during the 1973 war, but was now inclined once more to look to the United States. Just two months after my visit, Egypt formally abrogated its 1971 Friendship Treaty with the Soviet Union.
In our conversations, he claimed to be reasonably satisfied with the state of the Egyptian economy: at this time there were still some expectations that the destruction of Beirut as a financial centre might indirectly benefit Cairo, and he was hoping for help from the Gulf states. But I thought it significant that the President lamented the amount of money which had gone into paying for war which might have been used for the peaceful development of Egypt. He told me that he was ‘very tired’, and I suspected this was said as much on behalf of Egypt as on his own account. He felt that he had a good relationship with President Ford, which perhaps intimated the way his mind was turning. Indeed, he gave the impression that Egypt would remain neutral unless forced into another war. There were also telltale signs in his conversation of Egypt’s well-known rivalry with Syria. He told me that that country was providing arms to both sides in the Lebanese civil war and added that the Syrian Ba’athist Party was hated throughout the Arab world. I formed the impression that Sadat was a formidable man, capable of great boldness, who was contemplating a major departure in his country’s foreign relations; I could not foresee, however, just how dramatic that change would be. Less than two years later he was to make his historic visit to Jerusalem, which led to Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt.
Sightseeing during my short stay in Egypt was a diplomatic necessity as well as a pleasure. But even this contained risks. Having climbed the great Cheops Pyramid, and still a little breathless, I came down to find a small group of cameramen, journalists and officials standing beside a camel. The camel driver’s name was Ibrahim and the camel was called ‘Jack Hulbert’, perhaps so named by an English Tommy after the popular long-jawed British comedian of the 1930s and forties. He was, it seems, a distinguished beast, and had been ridden on a previous visit by Alec Douglas-Home when Foreign Secretary. Everyone seemed to assume that I would follow suit. The possibilities flashed across my mind, not just getting on but staying on. I firmly declined. Ibrahim claimed to be most offended. If Jack Hulbert was good enough for Sir Alec, why not for Mrs Thatcher? I caught a gleam in the driver’s eye and suggested that paying double the fare for no camel ride might suit both of us. With a great show of reluctance he agreed. And so the newspaper photographs in Britain showed me being welcomed by President Sadat, rather than in some less dignified posture.
On Friday afternoon I flew to Damascus. President Assad had recently marked the fifth anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power by a judicious air-drop of gifts in Damascus and large pay rises for civil servants and the army. He was already a proven survivor in a country where previous heads of state had never served for more than two or three years. A member of the Alawite minority, presiding over a government containing people from a wide variety of religions, tribes and political affiliations, Assad had demonstrated a high level of political cunning to attain and hold power. His Ba’athist Party was itself an odd mixture of elements derived from both socialism and Islam, but founded in the 1940s under the slogan of ‘one Arab nation with an eternal mission’. Assad had developed to a fine art that particular mixture of radicalism, pragmatism and ruthlessness which success in the violent, turbulent world of Middle Eastern politics required. He was considered the most anti-Western leader in the region and was held responsible not just for many of the difficulties in the Arab-Israeli peace process but also for engineering the destruction of Lebanon. Western policy’s main error, which unfortunately continued for many years, was to underrate him and to exclude him from talks. But he made it easier to do this because of his subservience to the Soviet Union and his support for international terrorism.
Syria was a tightly controlled police state. Romanian-style eavesdropping was clearly the order of the day at the official Guest House in which we stayed. On our arrival, Gordon Reece and I went up to our rooms to wash and change. But Gordon found that he had no towels in the bathroom and so knocked on my door and asked to borrow one. I had barely gone to fetch it when a maid scurried up to hand him his own.
That evening our hosts would have found their guests’ private conversation more interesting. The Syrians had without warning invited me to a secret meeting with the PLO the following day. I was not going to agree to this. I would not meet them formally at all, still less in secret, because the PLO had refused to renounce terrorism. But I agreed, indeed welcomed, the opportunity to pay a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp and it was arranged that I would be taken to one on the outskirts of Damascus.
The following day began with a long, bumpy ride to Qunaitra, the last town on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. It had been demolished by the Israeli army when they withdrew in 1974. They were even alleged to have desecrated graves, and the whole town was now a showcase for the evils of Zionism. I was told that there was only one inhabitant now, an old lady who had refused to leave and had lived through the occupation. Predictably, I bumped into her on my way round.
We stopped at the Palestinian camp on our return journey to Damascus. ‘Camp’ turned out to be something of a misnomer. It was an enormous settlement with roads, tents, social halls, shops, hospitals and schools. I was shown one school, where the children were assembled in a large hall, being addressed by a woman teacher with great earnestness. I imagined that this was some kind of prayer assembly and asked my guide what the woman was saying. The answer came: ‘She is reminding these children that they are privileged to be at this school because at least one of their parents has been killed by a Jew.’ Now I understood why it was named the ‘School of the Martyrs’.
That evening after my return I had dinner with the President at his comfortable but modest house. He was obviously highly intelligent and knew precisely what he wanted. Though I was impressed, there was little meeting of minds. We talked about a draft Security Council Resolution which the Arab countries intended to put forward on the Palestinian question. It seemed to me that there was everything to be said for framing this responsibly so as not to attract the American veto. But of course I could not know quite what the Syrian President’s objectives in this matter really were: given Syria’s general stance of opposition to peace talks with Israel, he might well have been happier to have a strong pro-Palestinian Resolution vetoed than a weaker one passed. In any case, it was plain at that time that the Lebanese civil war was his real preoccupation, as he insisted again and again that Syria would never tolerate the partition of Lebanon. I was not surprised a few months later when Syrian troops intervened there in force. But I felt, oddly enough, that we had struck up some kind of relationship of mutual respect. He walked with me to the garden gate and jokingly asked whether I had been woken up early by the muezzin from the nearby mosque. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am up even before the Mullahs.’
I had sought to be the perfect diplomat in both Egypt and Syria, but questions were put to me at my final press conference in Damascus which I felt required greater directness. Members of the Arab press corps pressed me on Britain’s attitude towards the PLO, demanding to know why we did not recognize it. Fresh from my visit to the camp, I set out the balanced policy described above, but I roundly condemned the PLO for its reliance on terrorism and said that you could not have peace between nations unless on the basis of law rather than violence. Their protestations at this provoked me to remind them that they themselves would not be free to ask questions if they did not benefit from some kind of rule of law. I also said that I disagreed fundamentally with the anti-Zionist Resolution, which described Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, passed by the UN General Assembly. One journalist pointedly reminded me that Jewish groups in Palestine had also committed terrorist acts. I was fully aware of that. Any English person of my age remembers only too well the hanging of two Liverpool sergeants and the booby-trapping of their bodies by Irgun in July 1947. But one act of terrorism does not justify another. Some people at the time thought this plain speaking was something of a diplomatic gaffe. That would not have mattered to me, because I felt strongly about the principle. But in fact it would shortly stand me in good stead.
In March I made my third visit to Israel. One of my early meetings was with the former Prime Minister, Golda Meir, whom I had first met when she was in office. I had developed the greatest respect for her and, perhaps as another woman in politics, I particularly understood that strange blend of hardness and softness which made her alternately motherly and commanding. She was deeply pessimistic about the prospects for peace and was particularly apprehensive about the Syrians. But she warmly congratulated me on what she described as my bravery in criticizing Palestinian terrorism in Damascus. She also strongly approved of my speeches on the Soviet threat, which she flatteringly linked with Solzhenitsyn’s statements. In her view the West was not nearly tough enough.
I found that my remarks about the PLO had made a similar impression on the other Israeli politicians to whom I spoke. Now and on later visits as Prime Minister, the fact that I had not flinched from condemning terrorism and had consistently defended Israel’s right to a secure existence allowed me to speak frankly, but as a friend, to the Israelis. In my discussions with Mrs Meir and later with the Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, the Defence Minister Shimon Peres and the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, I relayed my impressions gained from Egypt and Syria that Arab leaders were now thinking along lines which made a settlement possible. I also sought to persuade my hosts to consider not just Israel’s security — which I fully recognized must be their prime objective — but also the long-term need to reach a settlement with moderate Arab regimes. But the politicians I spoke to were generally pessimistic, particularly Prime Minister Rabin, who seemed at this time to have little understanding of the difficulties Arabs faced in dealing with their people’s desire to see justice for the Palestinians.
As always, however, I found much to admire in Israel — the commitment to democracy in a region where it was otherwise unknown, the sacrifices people were prepared to make for their country and the energies which had put the huge sums received from America and the Jewish diaspora to productive use: they really had made the desert bloom. One institution, however, which never appealed to me was the kibbutz. I visited one for lunch close to the Golan Heights. Living in a kibbutz in such areas was partly a requirement of security, partly a matter of economics. For me, however, it was also a rather unnerving and unnatural collectivist social experiment. I admired people who could choose such a life but would never have wanted to be one of them. Not so my daughter Carol. As a teenager with some left-wing leanings she had told Denis and me that she wanted to spend some time in a kibbutz. We were concerned about this, but we knew of one which seemed suitable and finally agreed. Life there was extremely hard and conditions rudimentary. One of Carol’s tasks was to inoculate young chickens. She would take them from one box, inject them and drop them in another. Unfortunately, every now and then a fighter plane would roar over, the chicks would jump up and get mixed together. Carol returned with an unromantic view of the tasks of the farm labourer. Moreover, as Denis remarked to me later, she may not have been very good at inoculating the chickens, but she was certainly inoculated against socialism.
I was taken up on the Golan Heights by an Israeli general — a professor in civilian life. I was impressed by the balance and moderation of his opinions. At one point he told me that where we stood was not Israeli land, but rather held in trust against the day when there was a secure settlement. He was a considerate man, and seeing that I was shivering in the cold wind which swept across the mountains he lent me his flak jacket. I was photographed in this and there followed furious Syrian objections. And so my first major Middle Eastern foray ended amid the endemic misunderstandings of the region.
In retrospect, my visit to the Middle East occurred at an important time of transition between the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1978–79 American-brokered Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement. Although the Camp David Agreements ultimately failed to solve the deeper problems, they were a remarkable tribute to the principal participants — Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the time I became Prime Minister they still seemed to form the best basis for progress. In fact, however, the rise of armed, aggressive Islamic fundamentalism, principally financed by and focused on Iran, was to upset all such calculations.
I was one of the last senior Western politicians to visit Iran while the Shah was still in power. The troubles had already begun. There were riots in Tabriz in February 1978 against the Shah’s programme of Westernizing reforms, which the Mullahs described as impious attacks on Islam and which, alas, ordinary people often experienced as the forced disruption of their traditional ways of life. As the disturbances increased, the Carter Administration vacillated in its attitude to the Shah. At times, it would offer him support as a bastion of Western influence in a strategically important part of the world; at others it would denounce his human rights record and demand the introduction of liberal reforms. What this recommendation failed to bear in mind was well summed up by the Shah himself: ‘I will behave like the King of Sweden when my subjects behave like Swedes.’ In any event, the Carter Administration’s blowing hot and cold only served to undermine the Shah and encourage his opponents — a fact not lost among America’s potential allies in the Middle East.
For my part, I had no doubt about the strategic importance of Iran for the West. Moreover, although by most definitions only peripheral to the Middle East, Iran, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, had a large potential influence in the region. In any case, I admired the Shah personally and believed that his policy of modernization along Western lines was ultimately the right one. In retrospect, I can see that its success depended upon its being carried out more gradually and taking into account the customs and mores of his people. But it was certainly preferable to the retreat into fundamentalism and medieval economics which have reduced the standard of living of the Iranian people and forced the regime to distract them with political and religious adventurism abroad.
All this was in the future, however, when I arrived in Tehran on the evening of Friday 28 April to be met by Tony Parsons, our Ambassador there. I found Iran to be, on the surface, a bustling, prosperous, Western-style country. There were plenty of new cars in the crowded streets. Shops sold luxury goods to sophisticated, well-dressed women. Moreover, the consumer society was underpinned not just by oil but by new industrial investment, as at the ultra-modern Iran National Automobile works which I visited.
Tony briefed me on the situation. Not only was he on good personal terms with the Shah himself: he had a vast detailed knowledge of what was happening throughout the country. At this time the accepted wisdom was that the main threat to the Shah’s strongly pro-Western regime came from the communist-backed opposition, the Tudeh. Judging from his public pronouncements, even the Shah himself seemed to believe this. But Tony Parsons had perceived that the Mullahs and their supporters were also a threat. That turned out to be all too true. Tony is, however, candid enough to admit in his own account that he thought the army would be capable of holding the situation. That turned out to be all too false. But none of us foresaw how quickly the Shah’s position would crumble.
On Saturday morning I was received at the palace by the Minister of the Court, Amir Abbas Hoveyda. Hoveyda was an urbane and distinguished man, who was later executed by the Ayatollah’s regime after a show trial which I saw on television.
When I met the Shah he began by expressing concern about the recent communist-backed coup in Afghanistan: he said he had expected one eventually, but that it had occurred ten years earlier than he envisaged. He talked repeatedly of Iran as being in the front line against communism. He gave no hint of resentment against his wavering Western backers, though he had reason to feel it. Not only was there the uncertainty about the Americans’ commitment to him, but the Iranians also maintained that the Persian-language BBC World Service reports consisted largely of propaganda against the Government. I went away impressed by his grasp of world affairs. But, of course, no amount of such wisdom is proof against the kind of subversion which he was facing at home.
The Shah was a handsome man, with somewhat gaunt features which I later understood were the early signs of the cancer that would kill him. There was nothing in his manner to suggest he believed that time was running out. It was ominous perhaps that when he went to inspect his troops he travelled by helicopter: I was told that nowadays he always travelled that way rather than through the streets because of the threat of attack. I also noticed that on my visit to Isfahan, to see the ancient mosques, my personal security was particularly tight.
On reflection, my impressions of Iran seem to have something of the quality of those paintings in which the French nobility on the eve of the Revolution disport themselves amid contrived pastoral scenes. Within a year, the Shah would have fled the country, the Ayatollah Khomeini would have returned, an Islamic Republic would have been proclaimed, and bloodshed and terror would prevail. Yet here I was, invited to admire the glorious trappings of the Peacock Throne, to wonder at the spectacular crown jewels, to be enthralled by the illuminated grandeur of the ruins of Persepolis.
Could the Shah have been saved? If the Americans had been more robust, if the French had insisted that the Ayatollah refrain from political activity in Iran as a condition of asylum in Paris, if the Shah had appeased moderate Islamic opinion, perhaps things could have turned out differently. As it is, the forces unleashed by the Iranian revolution are still unchecked and represent one of the greatest threats to international peace and stability.
ASIA AND THE FAR EAST
Between the autumn of 1976 and the spring of 1977 I visited no fewer than eight states in Asia and the Far East. This provided me with a range of contacts and a fund of experience which would prove useful when I was Prime Minister. Inevitably, though, since so many countries were fitted into such a short time — among them Pakistan, India, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and China — I received only a series of political snapshots which would have to be supplemented by wider reading and discussion.
As I reflected later on what I had learned, however, it seemed to me that two general themes stood out. First, in varying degrees and from different standpoints, countries throughout the region were becoming more alert to the extension of Soviet power and influence: this would be sharply reinforced in 1979 by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Secondly, it was still an open question as to how China, Japan and possibly India would arrange a new Asian balance of power. In each case, the rise to dominance was distracted at least as much by self-created obstacles as by external circumstances. The years 1976–77, therefore, were ones full of interest for an apprentice Western statesman. And, in spite of criticisms in the British press for spending too much time away from home, I never regretted making these visits.
On Sunday 5 September 1976, very early in the morning, I arrived in Pakistan at Rawalpindi. The following evening I was entertained by Prime Minister Bhutto. He was the best kind of host, never allowing his left-wing views to get in the way of a first-class dinner and serious but amusing conversation. Gordon Reece accompanied me and Mr Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, and some of her friends were present too. Prime Minister Bhutto and I had both been to Oxford and had trained as barristers at Lincoln’s Inn.
Mr Bhutto had been an indifferent Prime Minister in difficult circumstances. He helped Pakistan achieve some self-respect after the previous military regime had lost Bangladesh in its disastrous war with India; Pakistan’s relations with its powerful neighbour were now on a better footing. But he failed to tackle seriously the country’s deeply rooted economic difficulties. Like many other Third World socialist leaders of the period, he tried to escape from domestic economic problems by calling for a ‘just’ new international economic order, which was shorthand for larger transfers of foreign aid from the West. Indeed, he had backed a Third World initiative for this purpose.
Though I expressed my views politely, I was known to be a critic of this kind of international socialism. It was somewhat to the surprise of his civil servants, therefore, that we immediately struck up a rapport. I even found him remarkably understanding — in private at least — about the need to curb Pakistani immigration into Britain.
Mr Bhutto’s ideas of a new international economic order eventually foundered in the 1980s, when the Third World began to understand that free-market economics were the key to prosperity. Long before then, however, he had been overthrown by a military coup. Perhaps, like the Shah, he had become too detached from the religious and cultural values of his own people.
No one may ever know the whole truth about his overthrow, trial and subsequent execution. As Prime Minister I intervened in vain with his successor to spare his life. But the military was determined. So it was a strange feeling when I subsequently met President Zia-Ul-Haq at Tito’s funeral in 1980. He was much more pro-Western than his predecessor, but I had also expected to meet a cold, even brutal, figure. Instead, I found him polished and he made every effort to be friendly. When my son Mark was lost for days in the North African desert in January 1982, General Zia was one of the first to telephone personally to express his concern. And under his rule Pakistan was to prove exceptionally generous to the millions of Afghan refugees driven out by the Soviet occupation.
At the time of my visit, however, Pakistan was enjoying better relations with its neighbours, including India. Indeed, by now the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, and her Government were almost exclusively concerned with domestic problems. The first half of 1975 had seen a massive campaign of opposition against her, leading to the proclamation in June of a State of Emergency, the banning of some political parties, the suspension of fundamental human rights, severe censorship and the arrest of thousands of opponents, including some thirty Indian MPs. At the time I arrived there was a kind of eerie calm. The economy was doing quite well after several bad years, though there were disagreements about whether this was as a result of government policy or of good harvests. But it was not, of course, possible to know the real conditions of the country without a free press; even parliamentary speeches were subject to censorship.
Still, I felt no inhibitions about making my planned visit. India’s ambivalent relationship with the Soviet Union, its strategic significance, as well as the traditional links with Britain which provided huge sums of overseas aid, marked out India as of special importance to me. I did, however, insist that there should be no censorship of my press conferences and that I should be able to meet representatives of the opposition. No objection was made and both conditions were fulfilled. As a consequence, I found myself with a larger British press entourage than usual on these trips, partly because some British papers sent in reporters who would otherwise have been subject to the emergency censorship regulations. They wrote not only about my visit, but about the condition of India more generally, including the sterilization campaign.
I lunched with Indira Gandhi in her own modest home, where she insisted on seeing that her guests were all looked after and clearing away the plates while discussing matters of high politics. Both her sons, Sanjay and Rajiv, were present, although it was the former who had most to say for himself. He had, indeed, allegedly been responsible for many of the abuses such as forced sterilization and compulsory rehousing which had provoked such bitter opposition. But in spite of everything I found myself liking Mrs Gandhi herself. Perhaps I naturally sympathized with a woman politician faced with the huge strains and difficulties of governing a country as vast as India. But, in spite of a long self-justificatory account she gave me of why the State of Emergency had been necessary, I could not approve of her Government’s methods. She had taken a wrong turning and was to discover the fact at her party’s devastating election defeat in 1977.
From India I flew to Singapore for a brief stopover on my way to New Zealand and Australia. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was an old friend from my days as Education Secretary. He and I thought similarly about education. He was a great believer in selection and could never understand why even a socialist wanted to destroy the grammar schools. And the schools and education in Singapore reflected this. More significantly, he was the most important Asian statesman of his generation, an achievement all the more remarkable for being based on the small state of Singapore. He had his own kind of democracy to be sure, but his strong commitment to free-market capitalism had done wonders for the tiny island which he governed. For me, the success of Singapore demonstrated how, given the right economic framework favourable to enterprise, living standards could be transformed. Not surprisingly, Professor Milton Friedman saw in economies like that of Singapore a model which the West should follow. Of course, Lee Kuan Yew enjoyed the advantage of the Chinese people’s cultural predisposition to trading and commerce: the spirit of entrepreneurship comes more easily to some peoples than to others. But I found in my discussions with him now that what really united us was common concern about the advance of Soviet influence throughout the region, which was being exerted through naval deployments disguised as trade or fishing. I was to find myself often relying on Lee Kuan Yew’s wise advice and vast knowledge of world politics in my time as Prime Minister.
From Singapore I went on to New Zealand. It was my second visit and I felt very much at home. Robert Muldoon had recently won a general election. He was a mixed grill of a politician: robust and no-nonsense in manner, but surprisingly confused in economic and political philosophy, and accordingly much more interventionist than the Labour Government which succeeded him eight years later. He was something of a bruiser alongside Malcolm Fraser, the tall rancher who in 1975 had become Prime Minister of Australia after the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, had controversially dismissed Gough Whitlam, the previous Labor Prime Minister. Although I was pleased to see a right-wing government in power in Australia as in New Zealand, I never struck up any real friendship with Malcolm Fraser. Our views and attitudes were too different.
Neither Bob Muldoon nor Malcolm Fraser was committed to the reforms required to create an effective free-enterprise economy. They were both shaped by political cultures which for almost all of this century had been built upon protectionist economics and an advanced welfare state. Ironically, within a decade the Labour Party began to dismantle radically these statist institutions in both countries. But it may be that when I arrived in 1976 public opinion had not yet shifted sufficiently to make this practical politics. I suspected this might be true when I delivered a speech to the Australian Liberal Party (the equivalent of the British Conservative Party) Federal Council in Canberra. I included in my speech some of the more philosophical assertions which I always inserted in such speeches in Britain. Indeed, I was extra keen to do so because I had been reading into the small hours Solzhenitsyn’s novel The First Circle, which I bought at the airport, and which made me reflect on the complex relationship between freedom and democracy. The applause at the end was far from deafening, and from the subsequent comments it became clear to me that conservative-minded audiences in Australia were not used to this sort of unapologetic conservatism.
Another straw in the wind was provided by my visit to Broken Hill, an outback town dominated and largely owned by the miners’ union. The union leaders were delighted and rather surprised to see me. They informed me proudly that no one could live or work in the town without belonging to the union. A bar in the town which had recently challenged the rule had simply been boycotted and forced to close down. My guides were completely unabashed, indeed perversely pleased, about this blatant infraction of liberty. I could not help wondering whether I had had an insight into Britain’s future.
One memory I treasure from this Australian visit was my only meeting with Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister for many years and a great friend of Britain. He was ailing and could no longer walk, but one saw immediately the power and strength of character of Australia’s leading statesman and former member of Churchill’s Imperial War Cabinet, though less of the sarcastic wit that had made him a famous political pugilist. I was flattered when he revealed that he had read most of my recent speeches, especially those warning against renewed aggression by the Soviet Union. I was reminded not for the last time that the political generation that had come to maturity when the British Empire was still a world power retained a global perspective that its more parochial successors lacked. When I found myself complimented by this remarkable man it strengthened me in my conviction that I was right and that the détente establishment was wrong.
I had the same kind of encouraging confirmation from a very different source in April the following year (1977) when I visited China. I was already much better known to the Chinese than they were to me. They had relished my Helsinki and Kensington speeches and regarded me as a valued recruit in opposition to what they described as Soviet ‘hegemonism’. My daughter Carol came too: she had decided to start her career in Australia and I had persuaded her to travel out via China. It was fun having her with me and she was a great antidote to too much official solemnity. There were two others in the party — one of my PPSs, John Stanley, and Douglas Hurd, who had served on the staff of our Embassy in Peking and had a vast store of knowledge and anecdote about China. Douglas christened us ‘the Gang of Four’.
I was greeted at Peking Airport by the Chinese Foreign Minister, Huang Hua, before being driven into Peking itself. It was the middle of the dry season — hot and dusty, with so much static that I had been warned not to bring silk dresses. That evening I was guest of honour at a banquet in one of the side halls of the Great Hall of the People. A Chinese orchestra played a succession of Western old favourites, including the inevitable ‘Greensleeves’. I had more or less mastered the advanced use of chopsticks, but I Still found some Chinese delicacies unappealing. On this occasion, I allowed the sea slugs and fish bellies to pass me by. The Chinese habit, which I was glad to see the British journalists present appreciated, of drinking innumerable toasts of Mao-Tai, a strong grain spirit, posed a more hazardous social problem. Fortunately, however, I gathered that women were permitted to sip rather than down the lethal spirit.
The anti-Soviet rhetoric of Vice-Premier Li Hsien-nien was equally strong. He described the Soviets as ‘sharpening their swords on the sly and stepping up their arms expansion and war preparations’. After this, my own comments about the need for strong defence sounded almost pacifist. This first banquet set one of the themes which was to continue throughout the visit — a fierce verbal assault by the Chinese against the Soviet Union. The following morning’s meeting with various local politicians provided the second theme — a scathing denunciation of the misdeeds of the real ‘Gang of Four’ headed by Mao’s widow. Mao had died in September the previous year, and the disgrace and imprisonment of his widow and the three other radicals the following month dominated the political scene.
Again and again I heard almost identical speeches made on these themes. This itself was significant. The Chinese knew that they had been weakened by the Cultural Revolution at the very time that the Soviets were embarking on an expansion of their influence. In spite of the apparent smiling self-assurance of those I met, there was also an underlying insecurity: would they be purged next, or would the Gang of Four return and wreak revenge? Two days before my arrival official ceremonies to mourn past leaders — ‘The Day of the Dead’ — were cancelled in case demonstrations in favour of the ousted leaders were made under the guise of demonstrations mourning Mao.
It was unclear how many supporters the disgraced radicals still had. Deng Xiao Ping, the symbol of opposition to the Cultural Revolution, though released from prison, was still in internal exile. Official posters showed the late Mao Tse Tung saying to China’s present supreme leader, Hua Guo Feng ‘With you in charge my heart is at ease.’ The Government had allowed people to put up their own posters expressing their views, though only in permitted places and within limits. In fact, though there seemed to be general agreement that the bad old days must not return, no one was quite sure as yet what would succeed them.
The most important talks I had were, naturally, with Chairman Hua Guo Feng. An enamel spittoon was placed between our two chairs, but neither of us, I am glad to say, had occasion to use it. The talks concentrated on the international situation and we found ourselves in broad agreement. The Chinese wanted to see Britain and Western Europe support the United States in balancing Soviet power. There was even a touch of humour, when Chairman Hua complimented me on my energy when visiting the Great Wall of China.
‘He who cannot climb to the top of the Great Wall of China is no true man,’ he said.
I ventured to correct this thought of Chairman Mao: ‘I prefer no true leader.’
I came away feeling that Hua’s position in China was probably secure, and indeed he survived long enough to be one of my first official visitors as Prime Minister. Although in the end he was too closely identified with the old regime and was ousted in 1981, the policies of anti-Sovietism and allowing a measure of free enterprise were not only continued, but intensified.
After three days I flew south to the city of Soochow, a beautiful historic city of parks and gardens, famed for its cuisine which featured the ancient art of carving vegetables. It was good to get out of the heat and bustle of Peking. Thousands of people turned out to greet me in the tree-lined streets. I saw women making silk portraits of Mao, fed the ducks and wandered in the appropriately named Garden of the Futility of Politics. But the peaceful and contemplative atmosphere was deceiving. That evening as we left a banquet given by the Soochow City Revolutionary Committee some photograph displays caught my eye and we left our guides for a moment to look at them. The pictures showed the denunciation of a former local official. A crowd was ‘cross-examining’ him — cat-calling and spitting at the terrified man. The guides quickly bustled us away.
From Soochow I flew to Hangchow, the scene of riots during the Cultural Revolution and full-scale fighting the previous year. Perhaps I was invited there to show to the outside world how thoroughly peace had been restored. It was certainly peaceful enough boating there on the West Lake, where Mao had had a country villa.
From Hangchow I went by train to Shanghai. My first appointment was a visit to a university. Before I left for China two disillusioned former communists who had spent some time in that country had come to see me. They told me that everything I saw on my trip would be specially set up and quite unrepresentative of reality. By chance I was able to put this to the test. I knew that some British students were on an exchange programme at the university. I asked about them and one duly appeared. Everywhere we went the floors were swept and the furniture brightly polished. The university library displayed copies of The Economist and even Hansard. It all seemed too good to be true. And of course it was. I suddenly asked my companion to show me the dormitory in which she lived, and so I left the beaten track. The dormitory was highly uncomfortable and extremely dirty. So were the other rooms. My companion had sheets only because they had been sent from home. She washed them herself. She had never seen a copy of The Economist in the library before.
In appearance, Shanghai was the most Western of the cities I visited: our party was taken up the river by boat and we were all very struck by the Western-style buildings of the old International Settlement, looking much as they must have done when the Japanese invasion effectively ended the colonial concessions in 1941. But the atmosphere in the city was disturbing and alien. There were microphones in the trees blaring out political messages. Shanghai had been the home of three members of the ‘Gang of Four’, but the new regime had been able to establish its authority there with surprising ease. I had lunch with the new mayor who was busy rooting out political opponents; he spoke with a bland ruthlessness. When I raised the question of dissidents he said: ‘We try to show them the error of their ways.’ I remembered the photographs of Soochow.
Through all the excesses of the Cultural Revolution — which included the burning of the British Embassy library, with its irreplaceable collection of Chinese books and manuscripts — some of the greatest treasures had been quietly preserved. My interest in Chinese drawings led me to ask to visit the city museum and gallery. The scrolls and hangings I was shown were too fragile to be on view in sunlight and I saw them in a darkened room. There was also ancient porcelain, which had a special appeal to me, and metalwork. After all the upheavals of Maoism something of the essential China had survived.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
As I read these pages, I notice with some disquiet that I seem to have established amicable relations with a number of rulers whose record on human rights will not bear too close an examination. Indeed, if I had been the Leader of the Opposition in some of these countries, I might not have retained my life, let alone my liberty. How, then, did I contrive to be on reasonably good terms with them?
A number of explanations suggest themselves. The first, and most obvious, is that I was a visiting statesman with a fair prospect of exercising political power in my own country within a few years. They therefore put themselves out to deal with, and even be pleasant towards, me. I was under no illusion about that. Equally, I saw that it was my duty to establish terms on which British interests could, then or later, be protected and advanced. Since they were the rulers of their countries, they were the people with whom I had to deal. Also I can see that certain distinctions can and should be maintained: namely, that rulers with blood on their hands should be treated correctly but no more, while democratic statesmen should be eligible for those additional marks of regard, from an honorary knighthood to an official dinner at Downing Street, which Britain has within her gift. Even so, I am not so naive as to think that this would greatly alter the conduct of authoritarian regimes.
My second consideration is that I was able, on some occasions, to obtain the release or emigration of political prisoners as a sort of quid pro quo for my visit. Those released were never as many as I would have liked; but even a handful was better than none. And every prisoner freed meant hope for ten more. Indeed, it told all those remaining that we had not forgotten them.
Third, we must remember that vice, like virtue, comes in many varieties. It is an odd reflection on human nature that a ruler might order the murder of a political opponent in the morning and yet carry out a pledge he had made in a treaty in the afternoon. Some of those with whom I supped with a long spoon nonetheless kept the promises they had made to Britain and, in one instance, materially helped another country to resist and overcome aggression and occupation.
Finally, international relations is a matter of second-best alternatives rather than the ideal. Even if it had been within my power to replace one ruler with another — which it never was — I would rarely have been able to replace a bad one with a better, and often it would have been with a worse. Those, for instance, who rejoiced in the fall of the Shah must reconcile themselves today to the sad truth that the regime of the Mullahs is more oppressive to its own citizens, and abroad promotes terrorism and subversion, where the Shah was a pillar of stability, if in the end a shaky one.
States tend to act upon their own interests rather than the interests of the peoples of other countries. That is all the more reason for people in democratic countries to pressurize not only foreign governments which suppress human rights, but also their own governments to make improvements in human rights one aim of Western diplomacy. I may sometimes have resented this second sort of criticism of my own actions in power; not long afterwards, however, I was usually glad to have had my elbow jogged.
CHAPTER XI
Apprenticeship for Power
Leader of the Opposition March 1977 to March 1979
A PLEASANT INTERLUDE
The Lib-Lab Pact did none of the things subsequently claimed for it by its exponents. It did not halt, let alone reverse, the advance of socialism: indeed, it kept the Labour Government in office and enabled it to complete the nationalization of the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. Nor was it responsible for the frail but real economic recovery which gradually improved the Labour Party’s political standing in 1977/78: that was the result of the financial measures imposed by the IMF several months before the Pact was agreed. It did not help Mr Callaghan to marginalize and defeat the Left; indeed, the Left emerged strong enough to take over the Labour Party within a few years.
The real benefits were quite different and completely unintended. First, the fact that the Liberal Party demonstrated the closeness of its approach to that of Labour gave a salutary warning to potential Conservatives who, for whatever reason, flirted with the idea of voting Liberal as a more civilized alternative to socialism. The Pact therefore hardened our support. Secondly, I can see now that in March 1977 we were not yet ready to form the kind of government which could have achieved a long-term shift away from the policies which had led to Britain’s decline. Neither the Shadow Cabinet, nor the Parliamentary Party, nor in all probability the electorate, would have been prepared to take the necessary but unpalatable medicine, because they had not witnessed how far the disease had spread. It took the strikes of the winter of 1978/79 to change all that. Finally, the Government’s survival was a real, if well disguised, blessing for me. I benefited greatly from the next two gruelling years as Leader of the Opposition. I learned more about how to achieve what I wanted, even though I always felt in a minority in the Shadow Cabinet. Although I had both good and bad days, I also became a more effective debater, public speaker and campaigner, all of which would stand me in good stead as Prime Minister. Above all, perhaps, I had the opportunity to demonstrate both to myself and to others that I had that elusive ‘instinct’ for what ordinary people feel — a quality which, I suspect, one is simply born with or not, but which is sharpened and burnished through adversity.
My disappointment with my speech in the No Confidence debate on Wednesday 23 March 1977 was quickly dispelled by a succession of good news. Politicians sagely remark, when questioned on such matters, that they take little notice of opinion polls; but political life is a great deal easier when they are substantially in your favour. It was quickly apparent that the public did not like the deal which had been stitched up between the Labour and Liberal Parties. The polls showed the Conservatives fifteen to twenty percentage points in the lead over Labour and registered a sharp drop in approval for the Liberals. My speech attacking Denis Healey’s Budget the week after the No Confidence debate reassured the Parliamentary Party: I spoke from rapidly scribbled notes, reaching through the statistical smokescreen to draw out the contradictions which lay behind it. Then the following day we won Birmingham Stechford — Roy Jenkins’s old seat — with a swing of 17.4 per cent. Having watched the result on television at Flood Street, I put out a statement, rubbing in the salt, saying: ‘We are the people’s party now.’
On my return from my visit to the Far East in April, I plunged into campaigning at two more by-elections — first in the Nottinghamshire mining seat of Ashfield and then in the Humberside fishing port of Grimsby. In normal times both would have been safe seats for Labour. I was told that we probably would not win Ashfield but that Grimsby was within our grasp. Talking to voters — over fish and chips in Ashfield and haddock and poached egg in Grimsby — I had a rather different impression. Although we had two good candidates, it was the misfortune of our man in Grimsby, who worked in the fishing industry, to follow in the footsteps of the late Tony Crosland. It was clear that even Conservative voters had appreciated having a rather grand socialist to represent them and would have liked someone similar. In fact, I was right. We won at Ashfield, overturning a Government majority of nearly 23,000, and narrowly failed to take Grimsby, where the voters chose the nearest thing to a grand socialist, the television personality Austin Mitchell. Just a week later we secured large gains in the Metropolitan and County Council elections, recapturing the GLC (Greater London Council) — an important prize which would give us an opportunity, so important to any Opposition, to demonstrate at a local level some of the policies, such as the sale of council houses, which we intended to pursue nationally.
This was a good time for me as well as for the Party. I felt able to alter some policies which I had inherited and to set out my own views more clearly on others. I took advantage of the Scottish Party Conference in May effectively to jettison the commitment to devolution, which passed off remarkably quietly.
Then, delivering the Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture in July, I sought to explain how my own personal philosophy fitted in with the Conservative tradition, and indeed with that religious view of the world which is an essential aspect of Toryism. I always put a special effort into such speeches because I regarded it as crucial to show that Conservatives need feel no unease or inhibitions about taking on their opponents on moral just as on practical grounds.
Later that month, before the House rose for the summer recess, I had a good day speaking in the Economic Debate. It was one of those days when every hostile intervention seems designed to trigger a pungent retort. Somewhat to my own surprise, I found myself knocking down opponents like ducks in a shooting gallery. As one friendly journalist wrote: ‘Margaret Thatcher’s one-woman mass-acre of both the Government and the Liberals could not have come at a better time.’ The press was, for now at least, full of pleasantly flattering discussion of my qualities and prospects. Still more flattering was the reaction of the Labour benches to my next major appearance: total silence intended to disconcert.
But just as the political reality was never as bad as it seemed at the time of the agreement of the Lib-Lab Pact, so we were now in truth facing far more serious problems than even the commentators understood. Our popularity largely reflected widespread reaction against the Government’s manifest failures. Now that some order was being restored to the public finances, which would bring inflation and interest rates down, we would be under more pressure to spell out our own alternative. We would have to win on more than a doctor’s mandate. We would have to set out clearly and persuasively an alternative analysis and set of policies. For my part, I was keen to do just that. But I knew that on such central questions as trade union power, incomes policy and public spending there was still no agreement in Shadow Cabinet between the minority of us who fundamentally rejected the approach pursued between 1970 and 1974 and the majority who more or less wished to continue it. All of the damaging divisions which plagued us over these years, and which we desperately tried to minimize by agreeing on ‘lines to take’, stemmed from that basic problem. Ultimately, it was not one which was amenable to the techniques of political management, only to the infinitely more difficult process of clarifying thoughts and changing minds.
GRUNWICK
So it was that what came to be known as the ‘Grunwick affair’ burst onto the political scene. This was a clear case of the outrageous abuse of trade union power. Paradoxically, it proved almost as politically damaging to us, whom the unions regarded with undisguised hostility, as to the Labour Party, who were their friends and sometime clients.
Grunwick was a medium-sized photographic processing and printing business in north-west London run by a dynamic Anglo-Indian entrepreneur, George Ward, with a largely immigrant workforce. A dispute in the summer of 1976 resulted in a walkout of a number of workers and their subsequent dismissal. This then escalated into a contest between the management and the APEX trade union, which had subsequently signed up the dismissed workers and demanded ‘recognition’. That would have given the union the right to negotiate on behalf of its members working for the company. APEX consequently demanded the reinstatement of those who had been dismissed.
For its part, Grunwick established in the courts that the dismissals had been perfectly legal — even under Labour’s new union legislation, which the unions had virtually written themselves. None of those who had been dismissed could be taken back under existing law unless all were taken back, and in a number of cases there was simply too much bad blood. Grunwick argued too that the behaviour of APEX in other firms suggested that it was out to impose a closed shop. Finally, secret ballots conducted by MORI and Gallup showed that the great majority of the Grunwick workforce — over 80 per cent — did not want to join APEX, or any other union.
A left-wing coalition emerged to support APEX and punish Grunwick. Every part of the socialist world was represented: the local Brent Trades Council, trade union leaders and ‘flying pickets’, the Socialist Workers Party, and leading members of the Labour Party itself, among them Cabinet ministers Shirley Williams and Fred Mulley, and the Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, who dusted off their donkey jackets and joined the Grunwick picket line for a short time, a couple of weeks before the picketing turned violent. Someone called it ‘the Ascot of the Left’.
The National Association for Freedom (NAFF), took up the case of George Ward as part of its campaign against abuses of individual freedom resulting from overweening trade union power. NAFF had been launched in December 1975, shortly after the IRA’s murder of someone who would have been one of its leading lights — Ross McWhirter, whom I had known (along with his twin brother Norris) from Orpington days.[49] NAFF’s Chairman was Bill De L’Isle and Dudley, the war hero and the MP who had spoken to us at Oxford attacking Yalta when I was an undergraduate.[50] The organization quickly become nationally known through its support for three British railwaymen, dismissed for refusing to join a union, who successfully took their case to the European Court of Human Rights. It fought (but eventually lost) an equally prominent action to prevent British Post Office unions boycotting mail to South Africa. I gave NAFF as much support as I could, though a number of my colleagues regarded it with deep distaste and made public criticisms of its activities. Without NAFF, Grunwick would almost certainly have gone under. When the postal union illegally blacked Grunwick’s outgoing mail, which contained the developed films on which the firm’s business depended, NAFF volunteers smuggled it through the pickets, distributed it around Britain, and discreetly posted it in thousands of pillarboxes.
The mass picketing began at the end of June 1977 and continued day after day with terrifying scenes of mob violence, injuries to police and pickets. At times thousands of demonstrators crowded the narrow suburban streets around the Grunwick factory in north-west London, to waylay the coaches laid on by the firm to bring their employees through. So I asked my PPS, Adam Butler, and Jim Prior’s number two, Barney Hayhoe, to join the employees on one of their morning coach journeys through the hail of missiles and abuse. Adam reported back to me on the fear — and the courage — of the people he had been with.
During this period a strange reticence gripped the Government. The Shadow Cabinet organized a number of Private Notice Questions to force ministers to declare their position on the violence. We issued a statement demanding that the Prime Minister state categorically that the police had the Government’s backing in carrying out their duties. But as I wrote to John Gouriet, one of NAFF’s directors, at the time: ‘we feel that the scenes of wild violence portrayed on television plus the wild charges and allegations being thrown about in certain quarters, are enough in themselves to put most of the public on the side of right and are doing more than hours of argument’.
Although the scenes outside the factory seemed to symbolize the consequences of giving trade unions virtually unlimited immunity in civil law, it was in fact the criminal law against violence and intimidation which was being breached. No matter how many new legal provisions might be desirable, the first duty of the authorities was to uphold the existing law. All the more so because the violence at Grunwick was part of a wider challenge posed by the far Left to the rule of law; and no one quite knew how far that challenge would ultimately go. The attitude of Sam Silkin, the Attorney-General, to law-breaking by trade unions had been revealed as at best ambiguous in the case raised by NAFF in January 1977, when two Post Office unions banned telephone calls, mail and telegrams to South Africa.[51] Later he would coin a memorable phrase which summed up the Labour Government’s shifty attitude to the law and individual rights, when he described certain sorts of picketing as ‘lawful intimidation’.[52]
It was also at this time that a new shamelessness on the part of the Left became apparent. Until the early 1970s, Transport House banned members of certain ‘proscribed organizations’ on the far Left from being members of the Labour Party. The lifting of this ban, long sought by the Left, was a very significant landmark in Labour’s drift to extremism. Hard-left Labour MPs saw less reason to conceal their links with communist organizations. The warmth of fraternal relations between trade union leaders and socialist politicians on the one hand and the Soviet bloc on the other was undisguised. High-ranking Soviet visitors were received by both the TUC and the Labour Party. Trotskyist organizations, such as the Militant Tendency, began to gain a grip on Labour Party constituencies. There was an almost tangible sense that, whatever the IMF or Prime Minister Jim Callaghan might think, it was the extreme Left whose programme represented Labour’s future, and that whether the tactics employed to achieve it were violent or peaceful was the only question at issue. In such an atmosphere, the scenes at Grunwick suggested — and not only to the Left itself — that perhaps the revolution had begun.
As well as the assault on the rule of law and the advance of the extreme Left, however, Grunwick also came to symbolize the closed shop. This was because NAFF, which defended Grunwick’s cause, was also vigorously campaigning against the closed shop. Also APEX clearly wished to coerce Grunwick’s employees, probably with a view ultimately to achieving a closed shop in the industry. More broadly, the closed shop represented a secure redoubt of trade union power from which further assaults on liberty could be mounted.
Yet, for all that, Grunwick was not limited to the closed shop; it was about the sheer power of the unions. Appalled as I was by what was happening at Grunwick, I did not believe that the time was yet ripe to depart from the cautious line about trade union reform (which I had agreed with Jim Prior) in order to mount a radical attack on the closed shop. We had to consider a much wider raft of questions, ranging from the unions’ immunity under civil law, to violence and intimidation which only escaped the criminal law because they came under the guise of lawful picketing. Until we had begun to solve some of these problems, we could not effectively outlaw the closed shop. The Prior line, which we had evolved when opposing elements of the Labour Government’s Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts, was to widen the safeguards and improve the compensation for workers who lost their jobs as a result of the closed shop, without trying to ban it as such. (It was widely argued that it would in practice continue to exist as a result of covert understandings between employers and trade unions, whatever we did; moreover, some groups of employers actually favoured the closed shop because it made their lives easier since they could rely on the trade union to discipline the workforce.) And this was the ground on which we uneasily stood.[53]
Jim Prior, himself, stood rather more easily than I did. For him, I suspect, it was a practical question rather than a moral one: the important thing was to be realistic and accept that the trade unions could not be tamed by law. Any reform would need their cooperation. By contrast, Keith Joseph was an unswerving opponent of what he saw as a breach of human rights resulting from collectivist bullying. Jim’s and Keith’s opposing views, expressed in public statements on the Scarman Report on the Grunwick dispute, brought all this out into the open. I have described earlier the problems this caused me on my American visit.[54] At the time, I thought that Keith’s criticisms of Lord Scarman were too sharp, though the Scarman Report itself was anything but a judicial document and had no legal force. Moreover Jim, not Keith, was the spokesman on these matters. Either I sacked Jim, or I moved him (neither of which I could afford to do), or I had to go along with his approach.
That was what I did. In retrospect, Jim and I were wrong and Keith was right. What the whole affair demonstrated was that our careful avoidance of any kind of commitment to changing the law on industrial relations, though it might make sense in normal times, would be weak and unsustainable in a crisis. But I took the decision to support Jim in part because, as yet, the climate was still not right to try to harden our policy. Within the Shadow Cabinet the great majority of my colleagues would not have gone along with me. But some time soon the nettle would have to be grasped.
In reflecting on all this, I came back to the idea of a referendum. On my return from America I knew that I would be pressed hard by Brian Walden, who was making his debut as interviewer on the television programme Weekend World, on what a Conservative Government would do if it were faced with an all-out confrontation with the trade unions. I had to have a convincing answer: and there was not much hope that any amount of discussion within Shadow Cabinet would arrive at one. So on the programme I argued that although such a confrontation was unlikely, yet if such an emergency was reached, then a referendum might be necessary. The suggestion was well received both in the press and — most significantly in the light of the stories of splits and conflicts — got public backing from both wings of the Party. (It helped perhaps that Jim was expecting a rough ride at the Conservative Party Conference over the closed shop.) I set up a Party Committee under Nick Edwards to report on referenda and their possible uses. But, of course, though the suggestion of a referendum bought us vital time, it was not in itself an answer to the problem of trade union power. Assuming that we won a referendum, so demonstrating that the general public backed the Government against the militants, it would still be necessary to frame the measures to reduce trade union power. And so far we had not seriously considered what those measures should be.
EDGING AWAY FROM INCOMES POLICY
The argument about trade union power remained linked to that about incomes policies. At this time the Government’s own incomes policy was looking increasingly fragile. No formal policy could be agreed with the unions after the end of the second year of ‘restraint’, though the TUC exhorted its members not to seek more than one increase in the next twelve months and the Chancellor of the Exchequer pleaded for settlements to be below 10 per cent (backed as before with the threat of sanctions against employers who paid more). But, of course, whatever difficulties the Labour Government had in agreeing incomes policy with the trade unions were likely to pale into insignificance by comparison with ours. Unfortunately, we were committed to produce a document on economic policy, including incomes policy, before the 1977 Party Conference. David Howell, an able journalist of monetarist persuasions and also a front-bench spokesman, was the principal draftsman. And Geoffrey Howe, remorselessly seeking some kind of consensus between the conflicting views in his Economic Reconstruction Group, had by now become thoroughly convinced of the merits of German-style ‘concerted action’ within some kind of economic forum.
I could see trouble coming down the track and I expressed my unease about all of this. Geoffrey tried to convince me of the system’s merits by sending me a paper on how the Germans did it, but I wrote back: ‘This paper frightens me to death even more. We really must avoid some of this terrible jargon. Also we should recognize that the German talking shop works because it consists of Germans.’
Work on the document continued, but among the front-bench economic spokesmen rather than the Shadow Cabinet. By contrast with the Grunwick/closed shop issue, Keith, who shared my misgivings about the ‘forum’, was prepared to compromise more than I would have done. And in the end, the document appeared under the signatures of Keith, Geoffrey, Jim Prior, David Howell and Angus Maude; it was not formally endorsed by the Shadow Cabinet.
I never felt much affection for The Right Approach to the Economy. Unlike The Right Approach of 1976, it made little impact either on the outside world or on the policy we would pursue as a Government. I was careful to ensure that ‘concerted action’ — apart from within the limited framework of the NEDC — never saw the light of day.
So it was that we more or less successfully papered over the policy cracks up to the 1977 Party Conference at Blackpool. The Conference itself taught me an important lesson which Party managers in general find it hard to accept. On the face of it, the Blackpool Conference was a success. Colleagues generally stuck to the agreed lines on controversial issues. Embarrassing splits were avoided. Somewhat in the same spirit was my own speech. It contained many good lines but, for all the spit and polish, it was essentially a rollicking attack on Labour that lacked positive substance. Although the immediate reception was good, it was soon clear that it left the large questions about our policies unanswered; and I was not satisfied with it. My instincts proved correct. Having entered the Conference season several points ahead of Labour in the opinion polls, we finished it running neck and neck. A ‘good’ Conference never avoids rows at the expense of issues.
In any case, January 1978 saw the spotlight turn back onto just those difficult, important issues which the Party managers considered best avoided. Geoffrey Howe, speaking in Swindon, delivered a sharp and comprehensive attack on the role of trade unions in Britain and was met by a barrage of abuse from the union leaders and scarcely concealed irritation from some colleagues. I agreed with Geoffrey and strongly defended him in public. But I was still basically sticking with the Prior line and so I dissuaded him from making a second such speech, noting on the draft: ‘Geoffrey: this is not your subject. Why go on with it? The press will crucify you for this.’
Oddly enough, just a few days later I found myself on the receiving end of almost equally sharp criticism. I had determined to use a speech to a conference of Scottish industrialists in Glasgow to break away from the qualification and obfuscation into which I felt we had been manoeuvred over incomes policy. I said:
The counterpart of the withdrawal of government from interference in prices and profits in the private sector which both we and you want to see, is inevitably the withdrawal of government from interference in wage bargaining. There can be no selective return to personal responsibility.
This was attacked by, among others, The Economist under the timid headline: ‘Mrs Thatcher Takes the Tories into Dangerous Water’.
A kind of torpid socialism had become the conventional wisdom of Britain in those years. But as the old order started to break up, it was increasingly difficult for anyone with the responsibility to think ahead to avoid challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. The succession of crises — economic, fiscal and industrial — under Labour constantly invited us to think thoughts and propose policies that deviated from both the conventional wisdom represented by Economist economists and the agreed line represented by Jim Prior — which as it happens usually amounted to the same thing.
IMMIGRATION
I was soon to offend against Party political wisdom still more fundamentally. Ever since Enoch Powell’s Birmingham speech in April 1968 it had been the mark of civilized high-mindedness among right-of-centre politicians to avoid speaking about immigration and race at all, and if that did not prove possible, then to do so in terms borrowed from the left of the political spectrum, relishing the ‘multi-cultural’, ‘multi-racial’ nature of modern British society. This whole approach glossed over the real problems that immigration sometimes caused and dismissed the anxieties of those who were directly affected as ‘racist’. I had never been prepared to go along with it. It seemed both dishonest and snobbish.
Nothing is more colour-blind than the capitalism in which I placed my faith for Britain’s revival. It was part of my credo that individuals were worthy of respect as individuals, not as members of classes or races; the whole purpose of the political and economic system I favoured was to liberate the talents of those individuals for the benefit of society. I felt no sympathy for rabble rousers, like the National Front, who sought to exploit race. I found it deeply significant that such groups, both now and in the past, were just as much socialist as they were nationalist. All collectivism is always conducive to oppression: it is only the victims who differ.
At the same time, large-scale New Commonwealth immigration over the years had transformed large areas of Britain in a way which the indigenous population found hard to accept. It is one thing for a well-heeled politician to preach the merits of tolerance on a public platform before returning to a comfortable home in a tranquil road in one of the more respectable suburbs, where house prices ensure him the exclusiveness of apartheid without the stigma. It is quite another for poorer people, who cannot afford to move, to watch their neighbourhoods changing and the value of their house falling. Those in such a situation need to be reassured rather than patronized. Nor, as I knew from talking to immigrants in my own constituency, was it just white families who were deeply worried. Those immigrants who had already come here and wanted to be accepted as full members of the community knew that continuing large-scale immigration would provoke a reaction of which they might be victims. The failure to articulate the sentiments of ordinary people like these had left the way open to the extremists. And, of course, the very success of those extremists was something which the Left in all its varieties could turn to its advantage. No matter how much the socialists mismanaged the economy, cut Britain’s defences or failed to uphold law and order, they were at least able to guarantee a sympathetic hearing by condemning their opponents as bigots. For the Left has never been slow to exploit the problems it creates.
Policy work on immigration had been proceeding under Willie Whitelaw’s direction for some time by January 1978. But it had not progressed very far — certainly not as far as many of our supporters, vocal at Party Conferences, wished. This was only partly because Willie himself was instinctively liberal-minded on Home Office matters. The problem was that it was very difficult to see what scope existed to cut down on present and potential future immigration.
Roy Jenkins had changed the immigration rules to allow in male fiances for the purpose of marriage to UK citizens, a provision which had been much abused. Illegal immigration, about whose size one could only speculate, had in effect been encouraged by amnesties. It had become normal practice for those who entered Britain after 1 January 1973 for a ‘temporary’ stay to be accepted later for settlement on removal of the time limit and their dependants also admitted. Work permits were not sufficiently tightly restricted. There was much uncertainty both about the accuracy of the immigration figures and, above all, about the number of potential immigrants and their dependants who had a right to come to Britain. There was, therefore, scope for action in these areas, but that scope was limited. For there were a number of commitments upon which we could not honourably or humanely renege — in particular, to UK passport holders in East Africa and (under the Conservative Government’s 1971 Immigration Act) to the dependants of those immigrants who were ordinarily resident in the UK on 1 January 1973.
Closing loopholes, tightening up administration and some new controls on primary and secondary immigration — all of these offered opportunities to reduce the inflow. But I knew that the single most important contribution we could make to good race relations was to reduce the uncertainties about the future. It was fear of the unknown rather than the awkwardnesses of the present which threatened danger. Willie Whitelaw shared that basic analysis, which is why he had pledged us at the 1976 Party Conference ‘to follow a policy which is clearly designed to work towards the end of immigration as we have seen it in these post-war years’.
Although I had not planned any specific announcement on immigration, I was not surprised when I was asked in an interview on World in Action about the subject. I had been giving it a good deal of thought, having indeed expressed myself strongly in other interviews. Nor, for the reasons that I have outlined, did I feel any inhibitions about doing so. I said:
People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture… So, if you want good race relations you have got to allay people’s fears on numbers… We do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration, except, of course, for compassionate cases. Therefore we have got to look at the numbers who have a right to come in… Everyone who is here must be treated equally under the law and that, I think, is why quite a lot of them too are fearful that their position might be put in jeopardy, or people might be hostile to them, unless we cut down the incoming numbers.
Even I was taken aback by the reaction to these extremely mild remarks. What it quickly showed was the degree to which politicians had become isolated from people’s real worries. I was denounced as ‘appallingly irresponsible’ by David Steel, the Liberal Party Leader, who later added for good measure that my remarks were ‘really quite wicked’. Denis Healey spoke of my ‘cold-blooded calculation in stirring up the muddy waters of racial prejudice… to spread fear and hatred among peaceful communities’. The Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, accused me of ‘making respectable racial hatred’. The bishops joined in. Fifteen years later, this reaction to ideas which were later embodied in legislation and are all but universally accepted seems hysterical.
Even at the time, the reaction in the country, undoubtedly sharpened by the exaggerated rhetoric of critics who imagined they had finally sunk me, was completely different. Before my interview, the opinion polls showed us level-pegging with Labour. Afterwards, they showed the Conservatives with an eleven-point lead. This unintended effect of a spontaneous reply to an interviewer’s question had important political conscquences. Whatever Willie in his heart of hearts and my other colleagues felt about it, it provided a large and welcome boost at an extremely difficult time. It also sharpened up the discussion within Shadow Cabinet of our proposals. Within weeks we had a comprehensive and agreed approach which satisfied all but the diehard advocates of repatriation and which would see us through the general election.[55]
The whole affair was a demonstration that I must trust my own judgement on crucial matters, rather than necessarily hope to persuade my colleagues in advance; for I could expect that somewhere out in the country there would be a following and perhaps a majority for me.
THE NON-ELECTION OF 1978
Quite apart from the immigration issue, 1978 had all the makings of a politically difficult year for the Opposition. As a result of the financial measures introduced under pressure from the IMF, the economic situation improved. In January 1978 inflation fell below 10 per cent for the first time since 1974 and it continued to fall. Unemployment was also falling gradually from its peak in August 1977; although there were sharp increases during the summer of 1978, 1.36 million were registered unemployed by that December, 120,000 fewer than the year before. We succeeded, with support from the Liberals, in forcing a cut of one penny in the basic rate of income tax: but that in itself would probably reduce the gloom about the economy which had played such an important part in Labour’s unpopularity and which had worked to our advantage.
Our assumption was that Jim Callaghan hoped to coast along on these gradual improvements towards an election in the autumn on a platform of ‘safety first’. One large obstacle in his way was that the Liberals now recognized that the Lib-Lab Pact had been politically disastrous for them. But their anxiety to bring it to an end was modified by their reluctance to face the electoral consequences of having sustained Labour in power at all. As for the opinion polls, Labour had drawn almost level with us by the summer and though we pulled away from them in August/September, during October and November (after a difficult Conservative Conference) they were around 5 per cent ahead, with the Liberals not even in double figures.
In these circumstances, I commissioned work on a draft manifesto. It was drawn together by Chris Patten and the Research Department on the basis of Shadow spokesmen’s drafts. When I read it in July I was unimpressed. The large, simple themes had become obscured by lists of costly promises designed to appeal to interest groups. I said that the next draft must put the main emphasis on a few central objectives, like tax cuts and strengthening the country’s internal and external defences. The fulfilment of all other spending pledges was conditional on meeting these pledges first. In truth, I was disagreeably reminded of what little real progress in analysis or policy we had made in Opposition over the last three years. If we continued thinking in these terms, how would we ever manage to turn the country round?
More encouraging, however, was the change which had come over the Party’s publicity. Gordon Reece had returned to become Director of Publicity at Central Office. It was through Gordon that Tim Bell and Saatchi & Saatchi were made responsible for the Party’s advertising. This was a significant departure in our political communications. But I needed no persuading that it was right to obtain the best professionals in their field to put across our message. There was no question of the advertising agency devising what that message was, of course. But politicians should resist the temptation to consider themselves experts in fields where they have no experience. I would frequently reject suggestions for advertising on grounds of taste or sense, but I left the creative work to them. From the first, I found Tim Bell, the Saatchi executive who handled our account, easy to work with: like Gordon, he had a feel for politics and a sense of fun. When I first met Tim I laid down the basis on which we would always cooperate, saying: ‘Politicians usually have a lot of toes and you must be frightfully careful not to tread on them. I, however, have no toes — and you will tell me the truth.’ Of course, I was not always so self-restrained in practice.
Saatchis put new life into the tired format of Party Political Broadcasts. There were the inevitable accusations of frivolity or over-simplification. But PPBs should not be judged on the basis of the comments of the Party faithful, but rather by whether the casual, unpolitical viewer actually chooses to watch them, rather than turning to another channel, and whether he gains a sympathetic impression. On this score, the change was a great improvement.
Most significant, however — and even more important than the work done for the 1979 general election campaign itself — was the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster campaign in the summer of 1978. Tim, Gordon and Ronnie Millar came down to Scotney on a Saturday in June 1978 to get my agreement for a campaign on this theme. Again, it would break new ground. Unemployment, which would be depicted both by the wording and by a picture of a dole queue, though it had risen to almost 1.5 million, was traditionally a ‘Labour issue’. That is to say, it was a topic which we would not normally make a campaign priority because, like the Welfare State, it was one where the Labour Party was generally regarded as stronger than us. The poster would also break with the notion that in party propaganda you should not mention your opponent directly. Saatchis, however, understood — and convinced me — that political advertising of the sort proposed could ignore such considerations. It was designed to undermine confidence in our political opponents, and so it should limit itself to a simple, negative message.
Generally, Governments do well during the summer recess because the political temperature drops. The planned campaign would keep it high and doubtless provoke strong reactions. So after much discussion I agreed that the campaign should go ahead.
As expected, it evoked a response. Denis Healey launched a bombardment. But the more it was condemned by the Labour Party, the greater publicity it got. Simply in order to explain what the controversy was about, the newspapers had to print pictures of the poster, thus multiplying the effect. So successful was it that a further series was developed on other topics, on each of which Labour was ‘not working’. Partly as a result of all this, we came through to the autumn of 1978 in better political shape than might have been expected — and in August-September we were strengthening. That in turn may have been of some significance, insofar as it affected the Prime Minister’s decision on whether to call an election.
Only Jim Callaghan can say precisely why he did not call a general election that autumn. Certainly, I expected that he would, particularly after his speech to the TUC Conference which ended improbably with him bursting into song: ‘There was I, waiting at the church…’ — a teasing refusal to tell them what he was going to do. Then, just two days later, on Thursday 7 September while I was on a visit to Birmingham, the news was telephoned through to me from Downing Street that in the Prime Ministerial broadcast that evening, which we knew was booked, Jim Callaghan would announce that there would not in fact be an election.
The advance warning was given in confidence, which I respected. In fact, we did not even inform the Central Office team. It was an odd feeling, knowing as I did that there would be no immediate campaign, yet receiving the excited good wishes of supporters unaware of this fact. At one factory, opposite a skill training centre I was visiting, the workforce turned out, waving and shouting ‘Good luck, Maggie.’ I had to complete my schedule as stoically and inscrutably as possible, while considering the right response.
I shared the general sense of anti-climax which the Prime Minister’s announcement caused. But I knew that others, who had been working night and day to place the Party on a war footing in what had every sign of being a closely contested struggle, would feel the let-down even more. Later that night I telephoned through to Tim Bell to see how he and Gordon Reece had taken it. In fact, the two of them had restored their spirits over champagne in a West End restaurant and I had clearly woken Tim from the sleep of the just. I was asking where I could find Gordon when suddenly he said, ‘My God, I’ve been burgled.’ And so he had. He had managed to get to bed without noticing.
I gave my reactions the following evening in the slot given to the Leader of the Opposition to reply to a Prime Ministerial broadcast. Ironically, in the light of what subsequently happened, the Prime Minister had sought to justify his refusal to seek a new mandate by arguing that a general election would do nothing to make the situation easier in the forthcoming winter. I replied:
Well, some of us look further ahead than this winter. We don’t believe that Britain has to grind on in bottom gear. The longer he puts things off, the worse they will become, and the worse they become the longer it will take to put them right. But I believe they can be put right, once we’ve a government that has confidence. The confidence of the people and confidence in the people. A government with authority at home, and with authority abroad.
Would we have won a general election in the autumn of 1978? I believe that we might have scraped in with a small overall majority. But it would only have needed one or two mistakes in our campaign to have lost. And even if we had just won, what would have happened next? The Labour Government’s pay policy was now clearly coming apart. The TUC had voted against a renewal of the Social Contract — and the following month’s Labour Party Conference would vote to reject all pay restraint — so even that fig leaf would be removed. A strike of Ford car workers already looked impossible to settle within the Government’s 5 per cent ‘pay norm’. The distortions and frustrations of several years of prices and incomes policy were unwinding, as they had under the Heath Government, amid bitterness and upheaval.
If we had been faced with that over the winter of 1978/79 it might have broken us, as it finally broke the Labour Government. First, I would have had to insist that all the talk about ‘norms’ and ‘limits’ should be dropped immediately. For reasons I shall explain, that would have been very unpopular and perhaps unacceptable to most of the Shadow Cabinet. Secondly, even had we tried to use cash limits in the public sector and market disciplines in the private sector, rather than some kind of pay policy, there would have been a high risk of damaging strikes. Rather than giving us a mandate to curb trade union power, as they would in the following year, these would probably only have confirmed in the public mind the impression left by the three-day week in 1974 that Conservative Governments meant provoking and losing confrontations with the trade unions. Appalling as the scenes of the winter of 1978/79 turned out to be, without them and without their exposure of the true nature of socialism, it would have been far more difficult to achieve what was done in the 1980s.
But in any case, we could afford to wait. Although I cannot claim to have foreseen what followed, I was convinced that the Labour Party’s basic approach was unsustainable. In exchange for agreement with the trade union leaders on pay limits, the Labour Government had pursued policies which extended state control of the economy, reduced the scope for individual enterprise and increased trade union power. At some point such a strategy would collapse. The trade union leaders and the left of the Labour Party would find their power so strengthened that they would no longer have an interest in delivering pay restraint. Nor would union members respond to calls for sacrifice in pursuit of policies that had plainly failed. The effects of socialist policies on the overall performance of the economy would be that Britain would lag further and further behind its competitors on productivity and living standards. Beyond a certain point this could no longer be concealed from the general public — nor from the foreign-exchange markets and foreign investors. Assuming that the basic structures of a free political and economic system were still operating, socialism must then break down. And that, of course, is exactly what happened that winter.
SPLITS AND REBELLIONS
The Conservative Party Conference at Brighton was always likely to be difficult. Most of those present had expected that it would never take place because of the supposedly imminent general election campaign and felt cheated of that victory. The opinion polls showed us falling behind Labour. Above all, the controversy over the Government’s rapidly disintegrating pay policy focused even more attention on our approach, and that was itself threatened with disintegration.
A couple of weeks before the Conference Jim Prior had unwisely made remarks in a radio interview which seemed to offer Conservative backing for the Government’s 5 per cent policy, and not only made clear his support for the principle of a statutory incomes policy but actually revealed that he thought a Conservative Government would be forced to introduce one: ‘I think that may well happen under certain circumstances.’ In my own interviews, I tried to shift the emphasis back towards the link between pay, profits and output and away from norms. Although I made it clear that I was not supporting the Ford strike, I equally blamed the Government’s 5 per cent pay norm for what was happening and said that a statutory policy was not a practical possibility. I was widely interpreted as having called for a return to free collective bargaining, an interpretation I did not seek to deny.
Ted Heath now intervened on the other side. Speaking in the Conference economic debate, while I watched from the platform, he warned of the risks of dogmatism and said of the Government’s 5 per cent policy: ‘It is not yet clear to what extent it has broken down. But if it has broken down, there is nothing here for gloating, nothing for joy. We should grieve for our country.’ Geoffrey Howe made a strong closing speech, handling Ted’s intervention with aplomb and saying that a future Conservative Government would return to ‘realistic, responsible collective bargaining, free from government interference’. But later that evening Ted appeared on television and went further. He warned that ‘free collective bargaining produces massive inflation’, and when asked if the Conservative Party should support the Government’s pay policy at a general election, he replied: ‘If the Prime Minister says he is going to the country and expresses the view that we cannot have another roaring inflation or another free-for-all, I would say I agree with that.’
This was a thinly veiled threat. An open split between the two of us during the general election would cause enormous damage. The question of Ted’s role during an election had long worried the Party, and Peter Thorneycroft had met him quietly to discuss his plans earlier in the year. Humphrey Atkins had also received messages from several MPs close to Ted who told him that he was proving amenable to an approach to help. Arrangements were made to liaise with his office during the campaign. Ted’s intervention had blown all that out of the water.
Moreover, in substance Ted’s view seemed to me entirely misconceived. There was no point in backing a policy which was beyond repair, even if it had been beneficial (which, in anything except the very short term, it was not). Moreover, although opposition to centrally imposed pay policies meant that we would find ourselves with strange bedfellows, including the more extreme trade union militants, the revolt against centralization and egalitarianism was basically healthy. As Conservatives, we should not frown on people being well rewarded for using sharp wits or strong arms to produce what the customer wanted. Of course, when such an approach was described, even by those allegedly on our own side, as being opportunist — and when it was accompanied by open disagreements as now between Shadow Ministers like Jim Prior and Keith Joseph — it was difficult to have the analysis taken seriously. But in fact it was an essential part of my political strategy to appeal directly to those who had not traditionally voted Conservative, but who now wanted more opportunities for themselves and their families. So I addressed much of my Conference speech directly to trade unionists.
You want higher wages, better pensions, shorter hours, more government spending, more investment, more — more — more — more. But where is this ‘more’ to come from? There is no more. There can be, but there will not be, unless we all produce it. You can no more separate pay from output than you can separate two blades of a pair of scissors and still have a sharp cutting edge. And here, let me say plainly to trade union leaders, you are often your own worst enemies. Why isn’t there more? Because too often restrictive practices rob you of the one thing you have to sell — your productivity.
Restrictive practices are encrusted like barnacles on our industrial life. They have been there for almost a century. They were designed to protect you from being exploited, but they have become the chief obstacle to your prosperity… I understand your fears. You’re afraid that producing more goods with fewer people will mean fewer jobs, and those fears are naturally stronger at a time of high unemployment. But you’re wrong. The right way to attack unemployment is to produce more goods more cheaply, and then more people can afford to buy them…
We shall do all that a government can to rebuild a free and prosperous Britain. We believe in realistic, responsible, collective bargaining, free from government interference. Labour does not. We believe in encouraging competition, free enterprise, and profits in firms large and small. Labour does not. We believe in making substantial cuts in the tax on your pay packet. Labour does not. We will create conditions in which the value of the money you earn and the money you save can be protected.
Over the next six months this strategy would be successful. But in the short term it was a liability, because the Party was not united on it and because opinion polls suggested that the public wanted us to support the Government against the unions. And not surprisingly we found ourselves at the end of the Conference season five and a half percentage points behind the Labour Party.
The removal of the prospect of an immediate election, after everyone’s nerves had been screwed up to fight one, led to a breakdown in the ordinary disciplines in both parties. In the Labour Party this focused on economics. With us, it boiled over on Rhodesia, first at the Party Conference and then in the House of Commons.
Within the Shadow Cabinet it was Peter Carrington who argued most strongly against accepting an amendment in the Rhodesian debate at the Party Conference which would commit us to lifting sanctions. Peter’s line was that although sanctions were largely futile, in the eyes of the Patriotic Front lifting them would constitute de facto recognition of the so-called ‘internal settlement’ earlier that year, by which Ian Smith had brought into the Rhodesian Government moderate black parties whose claim to represent the black majority was questioned. Peter argued that it would put us in an extremely weak position in trying to bring together the various parties to the Rhodesian dispute when we had already taken sides in this way. John Davies, who had to defend this contorted and unpopular line, did so in a rambling speech in which he was thrown by loud heckling. He looked exhausted and I could see when he sat down that he was in great distress, rubbing his head. I leaned across and asked him what was wrong: he told me that he had a splitting headache and had not slept for three days. I did not like the sound of this and told him that he must immediately go back to London to have a brain scan. He protested at first but finally agreed, being taken back in my car. There it was discovered that he had a malignant brain tumour, from which tragically he died a few months later.
Events at the debate at the Conference fuelled feeling within the Parliamentary Party. Reggie Maudling was one of a formidable team of backbenchers opposed to the Shadow Cabinet line of abstaining on the Commons order renewing sanctions. I did not like this line overmuch myself and, other things being equal, would have joined them in the ‘No’ lobby. But it was better to have a full-scale backbench revolt than to lose members of the Shadow Cabinet at this delicate juncture. In the end 114 Conservatives rebelled against the whip, including two junior spokesmen who accordingly left the front bench — the largest Conservative rebellion since 1945.
A few days later I reshuffled the Shadow Cabinet — moving in Francis Pym to replace John Davies, bringing back John Biffen to take responsibility for small businesses, and appointing Mark Carlisle to replace Norman St John-Stevas at Education, with Norman becoming Shadow Leader of the House. With an election so close at hand, I kept the various factions more or less in place.
I also did a little before the end of the year to still the embarrassing arguments about pay policy. When we failed to win the Berwick and East Lothian by-election in late October several backbench friends publicly blamed Ted Heath’s Blackpool intervention. I went on ITN and — with perhaps an excess of charity — exonerated him. And in the weeks following the Conference I temporarily bowed to the clamourings of a group of colleagues led by Peter Thorneycroft who urged me to reaffirm the line we had taken on pay policy in The Right Approach to the Economy. I spoke to this effect at Paddington in the week before Christmas.
So a difficult year approached its end. We were behind in the polls and seemed all too willing to behave like a permanent Opposition rather than a potential Government, a failing on which the actual Government readily capitalized. When we successfully defeated the Government’s attempts to impose sanctions on Ford for paying its workers more than the 5 per cent norm in the Commons, the Prime Minister was able to paint a picture of a responsible minority administration being prevented from defending the national interest by Conservative opportunism. And when the following day there was a debate on a Vote of Confidence the Government survived by ten votes — and I made a particularly poor speech.
It was true that we had made some progress towards converting the Party and public opinion in the direction I knew was required. Events too had contributed — the scenes at Grunwick and the failure of the ‘Social Contract’ deal with the unions, particularly. With Labour’s pay policy in ruins, the fact that we were keeping open the option of introducing a pay policy of our own troubled me less than it once had. What mattered far more was that our programme lacked the clear commitment to changes, particularly in trade union law, which I believed were necessary. In that respect, at least, we still had a long way to go.
LABOUR’S NEMESIS
But Labour’s time was running out. Jim Callaghan had been dealt a bad hand by history and Harold Wilson in 1976. Like a brilliant poker player, he had employed skill, gamesmanship and simple bluff to spin out his defeat as long as possible on the chance that an ace or two might suddenly appear from up his sleeve. As 1978 became 1979, however, a succession of deuces tumbled forth. On Tuesday 12 December trade unions representing National Health Service and local authority workers rejected the 5 per cent pay limit and announced that they would strike in the New Year. At the end of December the elements conspired to create more trouble, with heavy snow, gales and floods. On Wednesday 3 January the TGWU called the lorry drivers out on strike in pursuit of a 25 per cent pay rise. Some two million workers faced being laid off. Hospital patients, including terminally ill cancer patients, were denied treatment. Gravediggers went on strike in Liverpool. Refuse piled up in Leicester Square. With Government compliance, trade union shop stewards dispensed permits to allow lorry drivers to transport ‘essential’ goods across picket lines. In short, Britain ground to a halt. What was more damaging even than this to the Labour Government, however, was that it had handed over the running of the country to local committees of trade unionists.
Would we be able to grasp the opportunities this provided? That might depend in part on an operation which had been proceeding in fits and starts, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, since the summer of 1977 and which went under the umbrella title of ‘Stepping Stones’. It was the brainchild of John Hoskyns, an able ex-soldier who had set up one of the first computer software companies, which he had built up and then sold to concentrate on public affairs. John had been in contact with Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies for some time before we were introduced. Together with his colleague Norman Strauss, he had a refreshingly if sometimes irritatingly undisguised scorn for the ad hoc nature of political decision-making in general and the decision-making of the Shadow Cabinet in particular. The two of them argued that we could never succeed unless we fitted all our policies into a single strategy in which we worked out in advance the order in which actions had to be taken — hence the title. The first time I heard all this I was not very impressed. We met over Sunday lunch at Flood Street and the session ended by my remarking on the fact that they had eaten a whole joint of roast beef and I wasn’t sure what I had gained from it all. Alfred Sherman, who was with us, quipped that next time they would bring sandwiches.
But under different circumstances, when long-term thinking was concerned, I came to appreciate the depth and quality of John Hoskyns’ analysis. Ironically, in the light of events, the paper which he and Norman Strauss prepared in the autumn of 1977, whose title ‘Stepping Stones’ came to apply to the framework of discussions which followed, was about persuasion as much as about policy. Its theme was that union reform was at the centre of what we wanted to do; without it the rest of our programme for national recovery would be blocked. But that programme could only be implemented by a Conservative Government that had won the argument. Winning the next election, even by a large majority, would not be enough if the only basis for it was dissatisfaction with Labour’s performance in office since 1974. Therefore, far from avoiding the union issue — as so many of my colleagues wanted — we should seek to open up debate. Moreover, this debate was not something to fear: the unions were an increasing liability to Labour and correspondingly a political asset to us. With intelligence and courage we could turn on its head the inhibiting and often defeatist talk about ‘confrontation’.
I was warming to this analysis and said as much when (along with Keith Joseph, Angus Maude and Willie Whitelaw) I met its authors over drinks and supper at the House of Commons at the end of November 1977. To follow up the report I set up a Stepping Stones Steering Group which met in January 1978, and proposed that small groups of Shadow Ministers and outsiders with relevant knowledge should plan ways to advance the strategy through speeches, pamphlets, articles and so on. There would also be a ‘Policy Search’ group of some of the more solid Shadows, Keith Joseph, David Howell, Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, working alongside John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, to seek new policy initiatives in line with the overall Stepping Stones theme.
But before this work could begin, sceptical and hostile colleagues had to be faced. I held a meeting of the Leader’s Steering Committee at the end of January at which we argued ourselves to a standstill. Colleagues vied with each other in praising the Stepping Stones paper, but then warning against doing anything to follow it up — a well-known technique of evasion. We should avoid being ‘too insensitive or controversial’ (Francis Pym). We were ‘against appeasement and confrontation but there had to be a third way’ (John Peyton). Peter Thorneycroft, Ian Gilmour and Jim Prior all expressed degrees of doubt. John Davies said frankly that ‘if we told the truth about the unions we should certainly lose the election’.
Chris Patten had submitted a paper to the meeting showing deep suspicion of Stepping Stones. Essentially, Chris favoured what he would doubtless consider a pragmatic rather than an ideological approach to Opposition. But I supported the view of the authors of Stepping Stones that it would take more than tactics to transform Britain. The majority at the meeting grasped at the straw provided by Chris’s paper and expressed a nonsensical desire to unify the Patten-Hoskyns approach, to which I had to bow. Effectively they wanted to kill Stepping Stones, but that I would not allow.
It took a month to get Stepping Stones back on track and even then Chris Patten’s work was to go on ‘in parallel’ and opponents of the whole approach, notably Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour, were in control of several of the most important ‘Theme Teams’. John Hoskyns had hoped to persuade Jim Prior to break new ground on the union question but Jim’s promised Stepping Stones speech, when it finally came, was no advance. Though some useful ideas (and some not so good) emerged from the Policy Search group, the crucial question of pay policy was excluded from its remit and by the end of summer 1978 the whole Stepping Stones initiative seemed to have come to a halt. Nor had it had any impact on manifesto work: had we fought an October general election the manifesto would have included no significant measures on union reform.[56]
What rejuvenated the Stepping Stones initiative was the collapse of the Government’s 5 per cent pay policy that autumn. Immediately after the Labour Conference rejected the policy, Keith Joseph came to see Willie Whitelaw and me, expressing his disappointment that we had not got on further. At various times people had suggested that the only way forward was to shift Jim Prior, but now there was obviously an opportunity to move on without taking such a strong step. Accordingly, I arranged another meeting of the Stepping Stones Steering Group for mid-November.
At this and at a later meeting, however, Jim was still able to block proposals for a vigorous campaign on the union question that winter. Peter Thorneycroft gave him strong support. Peter had never been a friend of Stepping Stones: at one point he actually suggested that every copy of the Stepping Stones report should be recalled to Central Office and burned. Even though Party opinion had begun to shift in my direction, no amount of discussion between Shadow ministers, advisers and MPs would have sufficed to persuade the Shadow Cabinet of the need to think seriously about trade union reform, had it not been for the industrial chaos of the ‘Winter of Discontent’.
Even then they would require a lead. This was an area in which we had made little or no advance since 1975. As Shadow Employment spokesman, Jim Prior had been well placed to veto the development of new policy on union reform. Although just before Christmas 1978 we managed to persuade him to accept an extension of our policy of providing state funds for unions voluntarily holding secret ballots — we would offer cash to cover the cost of pre-strike ballots as well as union elections — this really amounted to very little. Indeed, to the average voter our policy on secret ballots would have been hard to distinguish from Labour’s: in November 1978 the Prime Minister was offering to legislate on secret ballots if the unions wanted it.
In December Keith Joseph had tried to reopen the question of benefits paid to strikers’ families. I had agreed to the summoning of a new Policy Group to consider this question, but when it met Jim Prior’s opposition had prevented any progress.
I spent Christmas and New Year anxiously and reflectively at Scotney, watching the crisis build up. As it had at Christmas 1974, the bad weather discouraged us from our usual walks, and besides I had plenty to do. I read through the various Policy Group papers on union questions and I had brought down a bulging file of briefing from the press and interested outsiders. I spent many hours studying a textbook on industrial relations law and went back to the original Acts of Parliament, reading through the most important legislation since 1906. Every time I turned on the radio or the television the news was worse. I came back to London determined on one thing: the time had come to toughen our policy on union reform.
There was no difficulty in finding a platform. I had agreed before Christmas to be interviewed on Sunday 14 January by Brian Walden on Weekend World; the date was brought forward a week to 7 January. When I came back to London in the New Year, I saw Alfred Sherman, Gordon Reece and a few other close advisers to continue my briefing. The industrial situation was changing so fast that it was becoming more and more difficult to keep up to date, but over the next few weeks having the very latest facts to hand gave me vital advantages.
On Wednesday 3 January Jim Prior intervened to prevent a change in policy. Interviewed by Robin Day on radio, he firmly rejected compulsory strike ballots (‘not something that you can make compulsory in any way’), rejected legislation on strikers’ benefits, and commented on the closed shop: ‘we want to take this quite quietly… it is better in these matters to play a quiet game rather than to shout too much’. Asked what he thought of recent criticism of the trade union leadership by David Howell and Michael Heseltine, he said: ‘I don’t think they are being fair to trade union leaders who at the moment are trying to give good advice to the rank and file, and the rank and file is quite often rejecting it.’
On Weekend World I struck rather a different note. ‘Every power implies responsibility, every liberty a duty. The unions have [had] tremendous power over the years… [And] this is what the debate has got to be about — how unions use their power. I’m a parliamentarian, I am not in Parliament to enable them to have a licence to inflict harm, damage and injury on others and be immune from the law, and if I see it happening, then I’ve got to take action.’
Although I was careful not to commit us firmly to individual measures before they had received proper consideration, I ran through with Brian Walden a shopping list of possible changes, which naturally moved them higher on the agenda than some of my colleagues really wanted. I reaffirmed Jim Prior’s announcement that we would make funds available for secret ballots before strikes as well as for union elections. But I hinted at compulsion if needed, holding out the possibility of legislation to refuse Social Security benefits unless there had been a strike ballot. I also mentioned the possibility of restricting strikes in essential services, announced that we would subject short-term Social Security benefits to taxation and made the case for a right of appeal to the courts for people excluded from a union, who faced losing their jobs where there was a closed shop.
On television the following day Jim Prior replied to my interview. He said that nothing had been agreed between us on Social Security benefits for strikers and that he was against compulsory secret ballots. Thankfully, others reacted more positively. I had broken ranks. People could see that I was going to fight. Offers of support, information and new ideas began to flow into my office.
Most significantly, I received a request for a meeting from a former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Lord George-Brown, who came to my office at the Commons on Wednesday 10 January and who on the following Saturday drove down to Scotney for a further conversation with me. George Brown had more knowledge and experience of the labour movement — that is, the unions as well as the party — than almost any of its current leadership. He had resigned from the party in 1976 (sitting as an independent in the Lords) and had become an increasingly hostile critic of the power of the unions, writing effectively in the press. He told me how the hard Left had risen to positions of influence and power within some of Britain’s most important unions. He showed me that the immunities conferred by legislation since 1906 were being used with a new ruthlessness, and made an unanswerable case for a fundamental change in the law.
The strong support that I received for what I said in my Weekend World interview was in marked contrast to the reaction to Jim Callaghan’s remarks on his arrival back three days later from the Guadeloupe summit. His absence from the country at such a critical time had itself been politically damaging, helping to strengthen the impression that the Government was paralysed in the face of the strikes. The press coverage of the summit itself had not helped him; the sight of the Prime Minister sitting with the other leaders in the Caribbean sun, all casually dressed, was a dangerous contrast to events at home. But the final disaster was the impression he left with the press when he flew into Heathrow. Although he never did use those precise words — ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ — the myth faithfully represented his attempt to play down the scale of the problem. His image of unflappability and competence was never restored.
I reflected later on why Jim Callaghan, the most canny of politicians, stumbled into such an error. Partly, no doubt, it was tiredness as a result of the transatlantic flight. That taught me a lesson I never forgot: do not make public statements on arriving back in the country after any lengthy absence or long journey. Yet the misjudgement also had deeper roots. Indeed, I always considered it a kind of nemesis. Jim Callaghan had based his whole political career on alliance with the trade union leaders. For him, if not for the country, it had been a winning formula. Now that the unions could no longer be appeased, he had no other policy in his locker. This alone can explain his helpless reaction to the crisis which overwhelmed him. The Government could not even decide whether to declare a State of Emergency. Although I had seen when a member of Ted Heath’s Cabinet that this was likely to be of limited effectiveness, the Government’s alternative of trying to reach voluntary agreement with the trade unions to limit the effects of the picketing was obviously futile.
What should be our next move? Parliament was due to return on Monday 15 January. I wrote to the Prime Minister demanding a full statement and a debate on the industrial situation. We had a slot already arranged for a PPB on Wednesday 17 January and work began on a script.
The preparations I made for my speech in the debate were perhaps the most thorough I had ever made for an appearance in the Commons. I had allowed others to prepare a text for my speech in the last Confidence debate, a few months before: it had not been a success and I had resolved afterwards that on occasions of such importance I would not do this again. I did not want a written text in any case — I always spoke better from notes. I worked on this speech as if it were a tax brief, amassing my sources, marking them up with coloured pens, and drafting carefully a few pages of handwritten notes which would show me instantly the structure of my speech when I glanced down at them on the despatch box. Front- and backbench colleagues came in to help, some with information about their constituencies, others-particularly Ian Percival and Leon Brittan — to assist on points of law. Sympathetic firms affected by the strikes sent telexes giving their latest news; the CBI was producing a daily briefing; Denis passed on a good deal that he heard; and we all scanned the press.
My original idea had been to make a hard-hitting but essentially conventional speech from the Opposition benches — hammering the Government and demanding that they change course. But at Scotney over the weekend of 13–14 January and on Monday back in London several people urged a different approach. Peter Utley and Peter Thorneycroft sent me suggestions for a speech offering support for the Government if it was prepared to introduce the kind of legislative changes necessary to break the union stranglehold. Ronnie Millar and Chris Patten — working on the PPB script — were urging the same idea.
My own immediate inclination was to avoid offers of cooperation, for several reasons. First, unlike the more coalition-minded of my colleagues, I believed that the job of Oppositions is generally to oppose. We had a fundamentally different approach from that of the Government and our main duty was to explain it and persuade the country of its merits. Secondly, it was dangerous to make an offer of cooperation without having thought through clearly in advance whether we actually wanted it accepted or not. Probably nothing which went to the heart of the problem would — or indeed could — be accepted by Jim Callaghan’s Government. There was, therefore, a risk that in order to make a credible offer of support, we would have to set our sights too low as regards measures of reform. And if the Government then did accept the offer, we would have thrown away, for the time being at least, the opportunity of forcing it out of office. Moreover, reforms in trade union law alone would not suffice to deal with Britain’s underlying economic problems: that would need a much more comprehensive strategy to which the socialists could never agree.
That evening — Monday 15 January — I called a Steering Committee meeting. Most of my senior colleagues favoured the idea of a conditional offer and by this stage I had come round to the idea myself. Reforms were essential; and if the Government were prepared to introduce the necessary measures, how could we oppose them? By offering help we enhanced our moral authority. I believed — as did most of the supporters of the idea — that the offer should be set at a level which, though abundantly justified by events, would be unlikely to be accepted by the Government. This was a difficult matter to judge in detail: the Labour Party might just be persuaded to agree to the negotiation of no-strike agreements in essential services, the payment by the taxpayer of the cost of secret ballots in trade unions and even a code of practice to end secondary picketing — though the last was doubtful. Equally, I was clear that if the Government did accept, we were honour-bound to keep our side of the bargain. For me, however, there was an additional and very important consideration. By agreeing to offer cooperation with the Government on selected measures, Jim Prior and his supporters would find it impossible to refuse support to those same measures if and when a Conservative Government introduced them.
The upshot was that the Steering Committee agreed that the Government could rely on Conservative support if it took firmer action on picketing (to get essential supplies moving), legislated to outlaw secondary picketing and to encourage secret ballots for union elections, and if it made efforts to negotiate non-strike agreements in essential industries. Events are a powerful advocate.
I opened the debate the following day. I began by describing the crisis. Transport of goods by road was widely disrupted, in many cases due to secondary picketing of firms and operators not involved in the actual disputes. British Rail had issued a brief statement: ‘There are no trains today.’ The CBI had reported that many firms were being strangled, due to shortage of materials and inability to move finished goods. There was trouble at the ports, adding to the problems of exporters. At least 125,000 people had been laid off already and the figure was expected to reach a million by the end of the week. The food industry, in particular, was in a shambolic state, with growing shortages of basic supplies like edible oils, yeast, salt and sugar. And all this on top of a winter of strikes — strikes by tanker drivers, bakers, staff at old people’s homes and hospitals; strikes in the press and broadcasting, airports and car plants; a strike of gravediggers.
I pulled no punches in the speech. I made the point put to me by George Brown that the unions had been falling more and more under the control of left-wing militancy. I reminded the archmoderate Shirley Williams that she had joined the Grunwick picket line. I made the conditional offer of support agreed in the Steering Committee, and I also made it a condition of cooperation that the Government should act on the closed shop; I felt too strongly on this subject not to include it.
The Prime Minister spoke next. He began his reply in a surprising way:
I congratulate the Right Honourable lady on a most effective parliamentary performance. It was in the best manner of our debates and the style in which it was delivered was one of which the Right Honourable lady can be proud.
It was a good start. But all that the Prime Minister then had to offer in the body of his speech were further concessions to the unions — exemptions from the 5 per cent pay limit, tighter price controls and extension of the principle of ‘comparability’, under which public sector workers could expect more money. All these were intended as inducements to the unions to sign up to a new pay policy. But he signally failed to address what everyone except the far Left considered the main problem, excessive trade union power.
To my offer the Prime Minister made no direct reply. He had clearly been wrong-footed. The question now was whether I should repeat the offer the following evening in our Party Political Broadcast — or limit myself to attacking the Government’s paralysis and pledging that a Conservative Government would reform trade union law.
I was still uneasy, and toughened the script when I saw it the following day. But after all, the offer had already been made, and the higher the profile we gave it, the more tightly it would bind reluctant colleagues and the more public support we would gain. So we went ahead, filming it in my room at the House of Commons. Again, the Government made no direct reply.
In any case, by now the whole political atmosphere had been transformed. From trailing the Labour Party by several percentage points in the opinion polls before my interview with Brian Walden, we had now opened up a twenty-point lead. From being a liability, our perceived willingness to take on the trade union militants had become an advantage. Within the Shadow Cabinet, the opposition from people like Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour to the approach which Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe and I wanted was effectively silenced — for the time being at least. Personally, I was conscious that in some strange way I was instinctively speaking and feeling in harmony with the great majority of the population. Such moments are as unforgettable as they are rare. They must be seized to change history.
THE FALL OF THE GOVERNMENT
But now Banquo’s ghost came back to haunt the Labour Government. Devolution, which they had embraced solely as a means of staying in power with support from the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, returned to grimace and gibber at Jim Callaghan at his lowest point. Following the defeat of the Scotland and Wales Bill in early 1977 Labour had reintroduced devolution legislation in the form of separate Bills for Scotland and Wales, with provision for referenda in each country before they came into effect. Backbench dissent on their own side led to the passage of a number of amendments, including the crucial additional requirement that a minimum of 40 per cent of those eligible to vote had to support devolution in each case. Although I had not publicly campaigned for a ‘No’ vote in the referenda in Scotland and Wales, that was the result I wanted. When the vote took place on 1 March 1979 in Scotland a bare majority of those voting was in favour — well below the required 40 per cent of the total electorate — and in Wales a large majority of those who voted rejected the proposal. For the moment, devolution was dead: I did not mourn it.
From this point on it seemed likely, though not certain, that the Government would be unable to continue in office; but the circumstances under which a general election would occur were far from predictable. The Prime Minister sought desperately to spin out discussion about devolution rather than go ahead immediately with the repeal of the Devolution Acts. But his potential allies were preparing to desert. The SNP now had no reason to keep Labour in office and wanted an early confidence motion. The Liberals were keen on an early election, even though their standing in the opinion polls was weak; this was principally in order to avoid the embarrassment of the forthcoming trial of their former Leader, Jeremy Thorpe, on a charge of conspiracy to murder, of which he was later acquitted. Admittedly, the Welsh Nationalists, who were more of a socialist party than their Scottish equivalents, might still be persuadable.
That meant that the Northern Irish MPs — ten Ulster Unionists, one member of the Social Democratic and Liberal Party (SDLP) and one Independent Republican — were likely to be decisive. Gerry Fitt, the SDLP Member, had been alienated from the Government by their attempts to court the Ulster Unionists with additional seats for the Province. Frank Maguire, the Independent Republican, was entirely unpredictable. A majority of the Ulster Unionists had been prepared to keep the Government in office until the legislation increasing the representation of Northern Ireland had passed through Parliament: but this it had done by 15 March. There was now much public talk of Unionist demands for a gas pipeline to link the Province to the natural gas network on the mainland and the strengthening of local government powers in Northern Ireland as the price of their support for either of the two parties. Airey Neave, who had by now established close personal links with a number of the Unionists, was responsible for the discussions on our side.
Many of our backbenchers wanted an early confidence motion, but initially the Shadow Cabinet held its fire. One reason was that we would need the support of anti-devolution Labour MPs to make absolutely sure that the order repealing the Devolution Acts went through; we did not quite trust the Government on this question. Moreover, unlike previous occasions when there had seemed a possibility of bringing down the Government in a vote in the House of Commons, we were extremely reluctant to put down a Motion of No Confidence until we were assured of its likely success. A Government victory would strengthen it at a bad time. When we considered the matter at Shadow Cabinet on Wednesday 21 March we decided, indeed, that we would not move such a motion unless the SNP, the Liberals and, if possible, the Welsh Nationalists gave firm assurances of support. But there was still no question, as far as I was concerned, of doing deals which would tie my hands in government.
On Thursday 22 March the Prime Minister made a last effort to keep devolution alive and win over the SNP, making a parliamentary statement offering yet more talks and following it with a Prime Ministerial broadcast that evening. He never had any real chance of success, and when assurances of SNP and Liberal support for our motion seemed to be forthcoming — though there was none from the Welsh Nationalists — I agreed that it should be tabled, which was done a little before 7 p.m. The Conservative Whips now went all out to persuade the minority parties to see that their less reliable members actually joined us in the lobbies. Equally important, of course, was ensuring that there was a full turn-out of Conservative MPs. Luckily, none was seriously ill — though one Member’s car overturned on the motorway as he was driving down and another insisted on voting for us though he had been shattered by the death of his wife the previous day.
Oddly enough, the most intractable problem that evening was caused by the strike of catering staff at the Palace of Westminster. Not even the most blood-curdling threats by the Whips could prevent Tory MPs drifting off to their clubs or to the Savoy for something to eat. Willie Whitelaw and I dined in the Chief Whip’s office with Humphrey Atkins and his colleagues off the contents of two large hampers brought back by Spencer Le Marchant and Tony Berry from Fortnums. But I could not summon up much appetite. The opening speeches of the debate itself had gone, I felt, more or less as expected — neither was a triumph of oratory. But sitting around our improvised supper table, Willie, Humphrey and I knew that the result, on which so much hung, was too close to call. Perhaps because they really felt that way, or perhaps because they did not want to raise my spirits to have them dashed by the narrowest of defeats, I had the impression that they thought the Government would somehow manage once again to survive. In my heart of hearts, I thought so too.
Then we returned to the Chamber to hear the closing speeches. Michael Foot’s for the Government was one of the outstanding performances of a gifted House of Commons orator. But it would take more than rhetoric to persuade the unpredictable Members upon whose decisions the outcome depended.
Amid clamour and confusion we began to file into the lobbies. Having voted, I returned to my place by the side of Willie, Francis and Humphrey and waited to learn our fate. Humphrey had sought to ensure that I had some advance notice of the result. He asked John Stradling Thomas, one of the senior Whips, to go through our lobby very quickly and then stand at the exit of the other one. For some reason, not just when they are in a minority, Conservative MPs go through the lobby more quickly than the Labour Party. As soon as we were all through, the message as to what our numbers were would be given to John Stradling Thomas, who meanwhile was listening to the other (Government) lobby being counted out. As soon as they had finished, he would know whether we had won or not. If we had not won he would come back, and just stand next to the Speaker’s chair. If we had won, he would put up a finger so that Humphrey could tell me. Only later was I let into the secret code. I just saw John Stradling Thomas return — and then Humphrey leaned across to me and with a stage whisper said: ‘We’ve won!’
The announced figures bore it out. ‘Ayes, 311. Noes, 310.’ So at last I had my chance, my only chance. I must seize it with both hands.[57]
AIREY
Two days later I was attending a function in my constituency — a fund-raising event organized by Motability, which provided disabled people with special cars at a modest price. I was to make the presentation. My mind was at least half on the Party Election Broadcast I was due to make that evening, when Derek Howe approached me to say: ‘I think you ought to know that a bomb has gone off in the precincts of the House of Commons, in the garage they think. At least one person has been very seriously injured, but we don’t know who.’
A hundred possibilities — though not the correct one — went through my mind as we drove down to the BBC studios in Portland Place. When I got there, and before I went in to be made up, one of the producers took me aside into a private room and told me who it was. It was Airey Neave. He was critically injured. The Irish National Liberation Army — a breakaway faction from the IRA — had placed a bomb under his car and it had exploded when he drove up the ramp from the House of Commons car park. It was very unlikely that he would survive — indeed, by the time I heard the news he may well have been dead. There was no way I could bring myself to broadcast after that. I telephoned the Prime Minister and explained. I felt only stunned. The full grief would come later. With it came also anger that this man — my friend — who had shrugged off so much danger in his life should be murdered by someone worse than a common criminal.
A PLEASANT INTERLUDE
The Lib-Lab Pact did none of the things subsequently claimed for it by its exponents. It did not halt, let alone reverse, the advance of socialism: indeed, it kept the Labour Government in office and enabled it to complete the nationalization of the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. Nor was it responsible for the frail but real economic recovery which gradually improved the Labour Party’s political standing in 1977/78: that was the result of the financial measures imposed by the IMF several months before the Pact was agreed. It did not help Mr Callaghan to marginalize and defeat the Left; indeed, the Left emerged strong enough to take over the Labour Party within a few years.
The real benefits were quite different and completely unintended. First, the fact that the Liberal Party demonstrated the closeness of its approach to that of Labour gave a salutary warning to potential Conservatives who, for whatever reason, flirted with the idea of voting Liberal as a more civilized alternative to socialism. The Pact therefore hardened our support. Secondly, I can see now that in March 1977 we were not yet ready to form the kind of government which could have achieved a long-term shift away from the policies which had led to Britain’s decline. Neither the Shadow Cabinet, nor the Parliamentary Party, nor in all probability the electorate, would have been prepared to take the necessary but unpalatable medicine, because they had not witnessed how far the disease had spread. It took the strikes of the winter of 1978/79 to change all that. Finally, the Government’s survival was a real, if well disguised, blessing for me. I benefited greatly from the next two gruelling years as Leader of the Opposition. I learned more about how to achieve what I wanted, even though I always felt in a minority in the Shadow Cabinet. Although I had both good and bad days, I also became a more effective debater, public speaker and campaigner, all of which would stand me in good stead as Prime Minister. Above all, perhaps, I had the opportunity to demonstrate both to myself and to others that I had that elusive ‘instinct’ for what ordinary people feel — a quality which, I suspect, one is simply born with or not, but which is sharpened and burnished through adversity.
My disappointment with my speech in the No Confidence debate on Wednesday 23 March 1977 was quickly dispelled by a succession of good news. Politicians sagely remark, when questioned on such matters, that they take little notice of opinion polls; but political life is a great deal easier when they are substantially in your favour. It was quickly apparent that the public did not like the deal which had been stitched up between the Labour and Liberal Parties. The polls showed the Conservatives fifteen to twenty percentage points in the lead over Labour and registered a sharp drop in approval for the Liberals. My speech attacking Denis Healey’s Budget the week after the No Confidence debate reassured the Parliamentary Party: I spoke from rapidly scribbled notes, reaching through the statistical smokescreen to draw out the contradictions which lay behind it. Then the following day we won Birmingham Stechford — Roy Jenkins’s old seat — with a swing of 17.4 per cent. Having watched the result on television at Flood Street, I put out a statement, rubbing in the salt, saying: ‘We are the people’s party now.’
On my return from my visit to the Far East in April, I plunged into campaigning at two more by-elections — first in the Nottinghamshire mining seat of Ashfield and then in the Humberside fishing port of Grimsby. In normal times both would have been safe seats for Labour. I was told that we probably would not win Ashfield but that Grimsby was within our grasp. Talking to voters — over fish and chips in Ashfield and haddock and poached egg in Grimsby — I had a rather different impression. Although we had two good candidates, it was the misfortune of our man in Grimsby, who worked in the fishing industry, to follow in the footsteps of the late Tony Crosland. It was clear that even Conservative voters had appreciated having a rather grand socialist to represent them and would have liked someone similar. In fact, I was right. We won at Ashfield, overturning a Government majority of nearly 23,000, and narrowly failed to take Grimsby, where the voters chose the nearest thing to a grand socialist, the television personality Austin Mitchell. Just a week later we secured large gains in the Metropolitan and County Council elections, recapturing the GLC (Greater London Council) — an important prize which would give us an opportunity, so important to any Opposition, to demonstrate at a local level some of the policies, such as the sale of council houses, which we intended to pursue nationally.
This was a good time for me as well as for the Party. I felt able to alter some policies which I had inherited and to set out my own views more clearly on others. I took advantage of the Scottish Party Conference in May effectively to jettison the commitment to devolution, which passed off remarkably quietly.
Then, delivering the Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture in July, I sought to explain how my own personal philosophy fitted in with the Conservative tradition, and indeed with that religious view of the world which is an essential aspect of Toryism. I always put a special effort into such speeches because I regarded it as crucial to show that Conservatives need feel no unease or inhibitions about taking on their opponents on moral just as on practical grounds.
Later that month, before the House rose for the summer recess, I had a good day speaking in the Economic Debate. It was one of those days when every hostile intervention seems designed to trigger a pungent retort. Somewhat to my own surprise, I found myself knocking down opponents like ducks in a shooting gallery. As one friendly journalist wrote: ‘Margaret Thatcher’s one-woman mass-acre of both the Government and the Liberals could not have come at a better time.’ The press was, for now at least, full of pleasantly flattering discussion of my qualities and prospects. Still more flattering was the reaction of the Labour benches to my next major appearance: total silence intended to disconcert.
But just as the political reality was never as bad as it seemed at the time of the agreement of the Lib-Lab Pact, so we were now in truth facing far more serious problems than even the commentators understood. Our popularity largely reflected widespread reaction against the Government’s manifest failures. Now that some order was being restored to the public finances, which would bring inflation and interest rates down, we would be under more pressure to spell out our own alternative. We would have to win on more than a doctor’s mandate. We would have to set out clearly and persuasively an alternative analysis and set of policies. For my part, I was keen to do just that. But I knew that on such central questions as trade union power, incomes policy and public spending there was still no agreement in Shadow Cabinet between the minority of us who fundamentally rejected the approach pursued between 1970 and 1974 and the majority who more or less wished to continue it. All of the damaging divisions which plagued us over these years, and which we desperately tried to minimize by agreeing on ‘lines to take’, stemmed from that basic problem. Ultimately, it was not one which was amenable to the techniques of political management, only to the infinitely more difficult process of clarifying thoughts and changing minds.
GRUNWICK
So it was that what came to be known as the ‘Grunwick affair’ burst onto the political scene. This was a clear case of the outrageous abuse of trade union power. Paradoxically, it proved almost as politically damaging to us, whom the unions regarded with undisguised hostility, as to the Labour Party, who were their friends and sometime clients.
Grunwick was a medium-sized photographic processing and printing business in north-west London run by a dynamic Anglo-Indian entrepreneur, George Ward, with a largely immigrant workforce. A dispute in the summer of 1976 resulted in a walkout of a number of workers and their subsequent dismissal. This then escalated into a contest between the management and the APEX trade union, which had subsequently signed up the dismissed workers and demanded ‘recognition’. That would have given the union the right to negotiate on behalf of its members working for the company. APEX consequently demanded the reinstatement of those who had been dismissed.
For its part, Grunwick established in the courts that the dismissals had been perfectly legal — even under Labour’s new union legislation, which the unions had virtually written themselves. None of those who had been dismissed could be taken back under existing law unless all were taken back, and in a number of cases there was simply too much bad blood. Grunwick argued too that the behaviour of APEX in other firms suggested that it was out to impose a closed shop. Finally, secret ballots conducted by MORI and Gallup showed that the great majority of the Grunwick workforce — over 80 per cent — did not want to join APEX, or any other union.
A left-wing coalition emerged to support APEX and punish Grunwick. Every part of the socialist world was represented: the local Brent Trades Council, trade union leaders and ‘flying pickets’, the Socialist Workers Party, and leading members of the Labour Party itself, among them Cabinet ministers Shirley Williams and Fred Mulley, and the Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, who dusted off their donkey jackets and joined the Grunwick picket line for a short time, a couple of weeks before the picketing turned violent. Someone called it ‘the Ascot of the Left’.
The National Association for Freedom (NAFF), took up the case of George Ward as part of its campaign against abuses of individual freedom resulting from overweening trade union power. NAFF had been launched in December 1975, shortly after the IRA’s murder of someone who would have been one of its leading lights — Ross McWhirter, whom I had known (along with his twin brother Norris) from Orpington days.[49] NAFF’s Chairman was Bill De L’Isle and Dudley, the war hero and the MP who had spoken to us at Oxford attacking Yalta when I was an undergraduate.[50] The organization quickly become nationally known through its support for three British railwaymen, dismissed for refusing to join a union, who successfully took their case to the European Court of Human Rights. It fought (but eventually lost) an equally prominent action to prevent British Post Office unions boycotting mail to South Africa. I gave NAFF as much support as I could, though a number of my colleagues regarded it with deep distaste and made public criticisms of its activities. Without NAFF, Grunwick would almost certainly have gone under. When the postal union illegally blacked Grunwick’s outgoing mail, which contained the developed films on which the firm’s business depended, NAFF volunteers smuggled it through the pickets, distributed it around Britain, and discreetly posted it in thousands of pillarboxes.
The mass picketing began at the end of June 1977 and continued day after day with terrifying scenes of mob violence, injuries to police and pickets. At times thousands of demonstrators crowded the narrow suburban streets around the Grunwick factory in north-west London, to waylay the coaches laid on by the firm to bring their employees through. So I asked my PPS, Adam Butler, and Jim Prior’s number two, Barney Hayhoe, to join the employees on one of their morning coach journeys through the hail of missiles and abuse. Adam reported back to me on the fear — and the courage — of the people he had been with.
During this period a strange reticence gripped the Government. The Shadow Cabinet organized a number of Private Notice Questions to force ministers to declare their position on the violence. We issued a statement demanding that the Prime Minister state categorically that the police had the Government’s backing in carrying out their duties. But as I wrote to John Gouriet, one of NAFF’s directors, at the time: ‘we feel that the scenes of wild violence portrayed on television plus the wild charges and allegations being thrown about in certain quarters, are enough in themselves to put most of the public on the side of right and are doing more than hours of argument’.
Although the scenes outside the factory seemed to symbolize the consequences of giving trade unions virtually unlimited immunity in civil law, it was in fact the criminal law against violence and intimidation which was being breached. No matter how many new legal provisions might be desirable, the first duty of the authorities was to uphold the existing law. All the more so because the violence at Grunwick was part of a wider challenge posed by the far Left to the rule of law; and no one quite knew how far that challenge would ultimately go. The attitude of Sam Silkin, the Attorney-General, to law-breaking by trade unions had been revealed as at best ambiguous in the case raised by NAFF in January 1977, when two Post Office unions banned telephone calls, mail and telegrams to South Africa.[51] Later he would coin a memorable phrase which summed up the Labour Government’s shifty attitude to the law and individual rights, when he described certain sorts of picketing as ‘lawful intimidation’.[52]
It was also at this time that a new shamelessness on the part of the Left became apparent. Until the early 1970s, Transport House banned members of certain ‘proscribed organizations’ on the far Left from being members of the Labour Party. The lifting of this ban, long sought by the Left, was a very significant landmark in Labour’s drift to extremism. Hard-left Labour MPs saw less reason to conceal their links with communist organizations. The warmth of fraternal relations between trade union leaders and socialist politicians on the one hand and the Soviet bloc on the other was undisguised. High-ranking Soviet visitors were received by both the TUC and the Labour Party. Trotskyist organizations, such as the Militant Tendency, began to gain a grip on Labour Party constituencies. There was an almost tangible sense that, whatever the IMF or Prime Minister Jim Callaghan might think, it was the extreme Left whose programme represented Labour’s future, and that whether the tactics employed to achieve it were violent or peaceful was the only question at issue. In such an atmosphere, the scenes at Grunwick suggested — and not only to the Left itself — that perhaps the revolution had begun.
As well as the assault on the rule of law and the advance of the extreme Left, however, Grunwick also came to symbolize the closed shop. This was because NAFF, which defended Grunwick’s cause, was also vigorously campaigning against the closed shop. Also APEX clearly wished to coerce Grunwick’s employees, probably with a view ultimately to achieving a closed shop in the industry. More broadly, the closed shop represented a secure redoubt of trade union power from which further assaults on liberty could be mounted.
Yet, for all that, Grunwick was not limited to the closed shop; it was about the sheer power of the unions. Appalled as I was by what was happening at Grunwick, I did not believe that the time was yet ripe to depart from the cautious line about trade union reform (which I had agreed with Jim Prior) in order to mount a radical attack on the closed shop. We had to consider a much wider raft of questions, ranging from the unions’ immunity under civil law, to violence and intimidation which only escaped the criminal law because they came under the guise of lawful picketing. Until we had begun to solve some of these problems, we could not effectively outlaw the closed shop. The Prior line, which we had evolved when opposing elements of the Labour Government’s Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts, was to widen the safeguards and improve the compensation for workers who lost their jobs as a result of the closed shop, without trying to ban it as such. (It was widely argued that it would in practice continue to exist as a result of covert understandings between employers and trade unions, whatever we did; moreover, some groups of employers actually favoured the closed shop because it made their lives easier since they could rely on the trade union to discipline the workforce.) And this was the ground on which we uneasily stood.[53]
Jim Prior, himself, stood rather more easily than I did. For him, I suspect, it was a practical question rather than a moral one: the important thing was to be realistic and accept that the trade unions could not be tamed by law. Any reform would need their cooperation. By contrast, Keith Joseph was an unswerving opponent of what he saw as a breach of human rights resulting from collectivist bullying. Jim’s and Keith’s opposing views, expressed in public statements on the Scarman Report on the Grunwick dispute, brought all this out into the open. I have described earlier the problems this caused me on my American visit.[54] At the time, I thought that Keith’s criticisms of Lord Scarman were too sharp, though the Scarman Report itself was anything but a judicial document and had no legal force. Moreover Jim, not Keith, was the spokesman on these matters. Either I sacked Jim, or I moved him (neither of which I could afford to do), or I had to go along with his approach.
That was what I did. In retrospect, Jim and I were wrong and Keith was right. What the whole affair demonstrated was that our careful avoidance of any kind of commitment to changing the law on industrial relations, though it might make sense in normal times, would be weak and unsustainable in a crisis. But I took the decision to support Jim in part because, as yet, the climate was still not right to try to harden our policy. Within the Shadow Cabinet the great majority of my colleagues would not have gone along with me. But some time soon the nettle would have to be grasped.
In reflecting on all this, I came back to the idea of a referendum. On my return from America I knew that I would be pressed hard by Brian Walden, who was making his debut as interviewer on the television programme Weekend World, on what a Conservative Government would do if it were faced with an all-out confrontation with the trade unions. I had to have a convincing answer: and there was not much hope that any amount of discussion within Shadow Cabinet would arrive at one. So on the programme I argued that although such a confrontation was unlikely, yet if such an emergency was reached, then a referendum might be necessary. The suggestion was well received both in the press and — most significantly in the light of the stories of splits and conflicts — got public backing from both wings of the Party. (It helped perhaps that Jim was expecting a rough ride at the Conservative Party Conference over the closed shop.) I set up a Party Committee under Nick Edwards to report on referenda and their possible uses. But, of course, though the suggestion of a referendum bought us vital time, it was not in itself an answer to the problem of trade union power. Assuming that we won a referendum, so demonstrating that the general public backed the Government against the militants, it would still be necessary to frame the measures to reduce trade union power. And so far we had not seriously considered what those measures should be.
EDGING AWAY FROM INCOMES POLICY
The argument about trade union power remained linked to that about incomes policies. At this time the Government’s own incomes policy was looking increasingly fragile. No formal policy could be agreed with the unions after the end of the second year of ‘restraint’, though the TUC exhorted its members not to seek more than one increase in the next twelve months and the Chancellor of the Exchequer pleaded for settlements to be below 10 per cent (backed as before with the threat of sanctions against employers who paid more). But, of course, whatever difficulties the Labour Government had in agreeing incomes policy with the trade unions were likely to pale into insignificance by comparison with ours. Unfortunately, we were committed to produce a document on economic policy, including incomes policy, before the 1977 Party Conference. David Howell, an able journalist of monetarist persuasions and also a front-bench spokesman, was the principal draftsman. And Geoffrey Howe, remorselessly seeking some kind of consensus between the conflicting views in his Economic Reconstruction Group, had by now become thoroughly convinced of the merits of German-style ‘concerted action’ within some kind of economic forum.
I could see trouble coming down the track and I expressed my unease about all of this. Geoffrey tried to convince me of the system’s merits by sending me a paper on how the Germans did it, but I wrote back: ‘This paper frightens me to death even more. We really must avoid some of this terrible jargon. Also we should recognize that the German talking shop works because it consists of Germans.’
Work on the document continued, but among the front-bench economic spokesmen rather than the Shadow Cabinet. By contrast with the Grunwick/closed shop issue, Keith, who shared my misgivings about the ‘forum’, was prepared to compromise more than I would have done. And in the end, the document appeared under the signatures of Keith, Geoffrey, Jim Prior, David Howell and Angus Maude; it was not formally endorsed by the Shadow Cabinet.
I never felt much affection for The Right Approach to the Economy. Unlike The Right Approach of 1976, it made little impact either on the outside world or on the policy we would pursue as a Government. I was careful to ensure that ‘concerted action’ — apart from within the limited framework of the NEDC — never saw the light of day.
So it was that we more or less successfully papered over the policy cracks up to the 1977 Party Conference at Blackpool. The Conference itself taught me an important lesson which Party managers in general find it hard to accept. On the face of it, the Blackpool Conference was a success. Colleagues generally stuck to the agreed lines on controversial issues. Embarrassing splits were avoided. Somewhat in the same spirit was my own speech. It contained many good lines but, for all the spit and polish, it was essentially a rollicking attack on Labour that lacked positive substance. Although the immediate reception was good, it was soon clear that it left the large questions about our policies unanswered; and I was not satisfied with it. My instincts proved correct. Having entered the Conference season several points ahead of Labour in the opinion polls, we finished it running neck and neck. A ‘good’ Conference never avoids rows at the expense of issues.
In any case, January 1978 saw the spotlight turn back onto just those difficult, important issues which the Party managers considered best avoided. Geoffrey Howe, speaking in Swindon, delivered a sharp and comprehensive attack on the role of trade unions in Britain and was met by a barrage of abuse from the union leaders and scarcely concealed irritation from some colleagues. I agreed with Geoffrey and strongly defended him in public. But I was still basically sticking with the Prior line and so I dissuaded him from making a second such speech, noting on the draft: ‘Geoffrey: this is not your subject. Why go on with it? The press will crucify you for this.’
Oddly enough, just a few days later I found myself on the receiving end of almost equally sharp criticism. I had determined to use a speech to a conference of Scottish industrialists in Glasgow to break away from the qualification and obfuscation into which I felt we had been manoeuvred over incomes policy. I said:
The counterpart of the withdrawal of government from interference in prices and profits in the private sector which both we and you want to see, is inevitably the withdrawal of government from interference in wage bargaining. There can be no selective return to personal responsibility.
This was attacked by, among others, The Economist under the timid headline: ‘Mrs Thatcher Takes the Tories into Dangerous Water’.
A kind of torpid socialism had become the conventional wisdom of Britain in those years. But as the old order started to break up, it was increasingly difficult for anyone with the responsibility to think ahead to avoid challenging the prevailing orthodoxy. The succession of crises — economic, fiscal and industrial — under Labour constantly invited us to think thoughts and propose policies that deviated from both the conventional wisdom represented by Economist economists and the agreed line represented by Jim Prior — which as it happens usually amounted to the same thing.
IMMIGRATION
I was soon to offend against Party political wisdom still more fundamentally. Ever since Enoch Powell’s Birmingham speech in April 1968 it had been the mark of civilized high-mindedness among right-of-centre politicians to avoid speaking about immigration and race at all, and if that did not prove possible, then to do so in terms borrowed from the left of the political spectrum, relishing the ‘multi-cultural’, ‘multi-racial’ nature of modern British society. This whole approach glossed over the real problems that immigration sometimes caused and dismissed the anxieties of those who were directly affected as ‘racist’. I had never been prepared to go along with it. It seemed both dishonest and snobbish.
Nothing is more colour-blind than the capitalism in which I placed my faith for Britain’s revival. It was part of my credo that individuals were worthy of respect as individuals, not as members of classes or races; the whole purpose of the political and economic system I favoured was to liberate the talents of those individuals for the benefit of society. I felt no sympathy for rabble rousers, like the National Front, who sought to exploit race. I found it deeply significant that such groups, both now and in the past, were just as much socialist as they were nationalist. All collectivism is always conducive to oppression: it is only the victims who differ.
At the same time, large-scale New Commonwealth immigration over the years had transformed large areas of Britain in a way which the indigenous population found hard to accept. It is one thing for a well-heeled politician to preach the merits of tolerance on a public platform before returning to a comfortable home in a tranquil road in one of the more respectable suburbs, where house prices ensure him the exclusiveness of apartheid without the stigma. It is quite another for poorer people, who cannot afford to move, to watch their neighbourhoods changing and the value of their house falling. Those in such a situation need to be reassured rather than patronized. Nor, as I knew from talking to immigrants in my own constituency, was it just white families who were deeply worried. Those immigrants who had already come here and wanted to be accepted as full members of the community knew that continuing large-scale immigration would provoke a reaction of which they might be victims. The failure to articulate the sentiments of ordinary people like these had left the way open to the extremists. And, of course, the very success of those extremists was something which the Left in all its varieties could turn to its advantage. No matter how much the socialists mismanaged the economy, cut Britain’s defences or failed to uphold law and order, they were at least able to guarantee a sympathetic hearing by condemning their opponents as bigots. For the Left has never been slow to exploit the problems it creates.
Policy work on immigration had been proceeding under Willie Whitelaw’s direction for some time by January 1978. But it had not progressed very far — certainly not as far as many of our supporters, vocal at Party Conferences, wished. This was only partly because Willie himself was instinctively liberal-minded on Home Office matters. The problem was that it was very difficult to see what scope existed to cut down on present and potential future immigration.
Roy Jenkins had changed the immigration rules to allow in male fiances for the purpose of marriage to UK citizens, a provision which had been much abused. Illegal immigration, about whose size one could only speculate, had in effect been encouraged by amnesties. It had become normal practice for those who entered Britain after 1 January 1973 for a ‘temporary’ stay to be accepted later for settlement on removal of the time limit and their dependants also admitted. Work permits were not sufficiently tightly restricted. There was much uncertainty both about the accuracy of the immigration figures and, above all, about the number of potential immigrants and their dependants who had a right to come to Britain. There was, therefore, scope for action in these areas, but that scope was limited. For there were a number of commitments upon which we could not honourably or humanely renege — in particular, to UK passport holders in East Africa and (under the Conservative Government’s 1971 Immigration Act) to the dependants of those immigrants who were ordinarily resident in the UK on 1 January 1973.
Closing loopholes, tightening up administration and some new controls on primary and secondary immigration — all of these offered opportunities to reduce the inflow. But I knew that the single most important contribution we could make to good race relations was to reduce the uncertainties about the future. It was fear of the unknown rather than the awkwardnesses of the present which threatened danger. Willie Whitelaw shared that basic analysis, which is why he had pledged us at the 1976 Party Conference ‘to follow a policy which is clearly designed to work towards the end of immigration as we have seen it in these post-war years’.
Although I had not planned any specific announcement on immigration, I was not surprised when I was asked in an interview on World in Action about the subject. I had been giving it a good deal of thought, having indeed expressed myself strongly in other interviews. Nor, for the reasons that I have outlined, did I feel any inhibitions about doing so. I said:
People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture… So, if you want good race relations you have got to allay people’s fears on numbers… We do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration, except, of course, for compassionate cases. Therefore we have got to look at the numbers who have a right to come in… Everyone who is here must be treated equally under the law and that, I think, is why quite a lot of them too are fearful that their position might be put in jeopardy, or people might be hostile to them, unless we cut down the incoming numbers.
Even I was taken aback by the reaction to these extremely mild remarks. What it quickly showed was the degree to which politicians had become isolated from people’s real worries. I was denounced as ‘appallingly irresponsible’ by David Steel, the Liberal Party Leader, who later added for good measure that my remarks were ‘really quite wicked’. Denis Healey spoke of my ‘cold-blooded calculation in stirring up the muddy waters of racial prejudice… to spread fear and hatred among peaceful communities’. The Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, accused me of ‘making respectable racial hatred’. The bishops joined in. Fifteen years later, this reaction to ideas which were later embodied in legislation and are all but universally accepted seems hysterical.
Even at the time, the reaction in the country, undoubtedly sharpened by the exaggerated rhetoric of critics who imagined they had finally sunk me, was completely different. Before my interview, the opinion polls showed us level-pegging with Labour. Afterwards, they showed the Conservatives with an eleven-point lead. This unintended effect of a spontaneous reply to an interviewer’s question had important political conscquences. Whatever Willie in his heart of hearts and my other colleagues felt about it, it provided a large and welcome boost at an extremely difficult time. It also sharpened up the discussion within Shadow Cabinet of our proposals. Within weeks we had a comprehensive and agreed approach which satisfied all but the diehard advocates of repatriation and which would see us through the general election.[55]
The whole affair was a demonstration that I must trust my own judgement on crucial matters, rather than necessarily hope to persuade my colleagues in advance; for I could expect that somewhere out in the country there would be a following and perhaps a majority for me.
THE NON-ELECTION OF 1978
Quite apart from the immigration issue, 1978 had all the makings of a politically difficult year for the Opposition. As a result of the financial measures introduced under pressure from the IMF, the economic situation improved. In January 1978 inflation fell below 10 per cent for the first time since 1974 and it continued to fall. Unemployment was also falling gradually from its peak in August 1977; although there were sharp increases during the summer of 1978, 1.36 million were registered unemployed by that December, 120,000 fewer than the year before. We succeeded, with support from the Liberals, in forcing a cut of one penny in the basic rate of income tax: but that in itself would probably reduce the gloom about the economy which had played such an important part in Labour’s unpopularity and which had worked to our advantage.
Our assumption was that Jim Callaghan hoped to coast along on these gradual improvements towards an election in the autumn on a platform of ‘safety first’. One large obstacle in his way was that the Liberals now recognized that the Lib-Lab Pact had been politically disastrous for them. But their anxiety to bring it to an end was modified by their reluctance to face the electoral consequences of having sustained Labour in power at all. As for the opinion polls, Labour had drawn almost level with us by the summer and though we pulled away from them in August/September, during October and November (after a difficult Conservative Conference) they were around 5 per cent ahead, with the Liberals not even in double figures.
In these circumstances, I commissioned work on a draft manifesto. It was drawn together by Chris Patten and the Research Department on the basis of Shadow spokesmen’s drafts. When I read it in July I was unimpressed. The large, simple themes had become obscured by lists of costly promises designed to appeal to interest groups. I said that the next draft must put the main emphasis on a few central objectives, like tax cuts and strengthening the country’s internal and external defences. The fulfilment of all other spending pledges was conditional on meeting these pledges first. In truth, I was disagreeably reminded of what little real progress in analysis or policy we had made in Opposition over the last three years. If we continued thinking in these terms, how would we ever manage to turn the country round?
More encouraging, however, was the change which had come over the Party’s publicity. Gordon Reece had returned to become Director of Publicity at Central Office. It was through Gordon that Tim Bell and Saatchi & Saatchi were made responsible for the Party’s advertising. This was a significant departure in our political communications. But I needed no persuading that it was right to obtain the best professionals in their field to put across our message. There was no question of the advertising agency devising what that message was, of course. But politicians should resist the temptation to consider themselves experts in fields where they have no experience. I would frequently reject suggestions for advertising on grounds of taste or sense, but I left the creative work to them. From the first, I found Tim Bell, the Saatchi executive who handled our account, easy to work with: like Gordon, he had a feel for politics and a sense of fun. When I first met Tim I laid down the basis on which we would always cooperate, saying: ‘Politicians usually have a lot of toes and you must be frightfully careful not to tread on them. I, however, have no toes — and you will tell me the truth.’ Of course, I was not always so self-restrained in practice.
Saatchis put new life into the tired format of Party Political Broadcasts. There were the inevitable accusations of frivolity or over-simplification. But PPBs should not be judged on the basis of the comments of the Party faithful, but rather by whether the casual, unpolitical viewer actually chooses to watch them, rather than turning to another channel, and whether he gains a sympathetic impression. On this score, the change was a great improvement.
Most significant, however — and even more important than the work done for the 1979 general election campaign itself — was the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster campaign in the summer of 1978. Tim, Gordon and Ronnie Millar came down to Scotney on a Saturday in June 1978 to get my agreement for a campaign on this theme. Again, it would break new ground. Unemployment, which would be depicted both by the wording and by a picture of a dole queue, though it had risen to almost 1.5 million, was traditionally a ‘Labour issue’. That is to say, it was a topic which we would not normally make a campaign priority because, like the Welfare State, it was one where the Labour Party was generally regarded as stronger than us. The poster would also break with the notion that in party propaganda you should not mention your opponent directly. Saatchis, however, understood — and convinced me — that political advertising of the sort proposed could ignore such considerations. It was designed to undermine confidence in our political opponents, and so it should limit itself to a simple, negative message.
Generally, Governments do well during the summer recess because the political temperature drops. The planned campaign would keep it high and doubtless provoke strong reactions. So after much discussion I agreed that the campaign should go ahead.
As expected, it evoked a response. Denis Healey launched a bombardment. But the more it was condemned by the Labour Party, the greater publicity it got. Simply in order to explain what the controversy was about, the newspapers had to print pictures of the poster, thus multiplying the effect. So successful was it that a further series was developed on other topics, on each of which Labour was ‘not working’. Partly as a result of all this, we came through to the autumn of 1978 in better political shape than might have been expected — and in August-September we were strengthening. That in turn may have been of some significance, insofar as it affected the Prime Minister’s decision on whether to call an election.
Only Jim Callaghan can say precisely why he did not call a general election that autumn. Certainly, I expected that he would, particularly after his speech to the TUC Conference which ended improbably with him bursting into song: ‘There was I, waiting at the church…’ — a teasing refusal to tell them what he was going to do. Then, just two days later, on Thursday 7 September while I was on a visit to Birmingham, the news was telephoned through to me from Downing Street that in the Prime Ministerial broadcast that evening, which we knew was booked, Jim Callaghan would announce that there would not in fact be an election.
The advance warning was given in confidence, which I respected. In fact, we did not even inform the Central Office team. It was an odd feeling, knowing as I did that there would be no immediate campaign, yet receiving the excited good wishes of supporters unaware of this fact. At one factory, opposite a skill training centre I was visiting, the workforce turned out, waving and shouting ‘Good luck, Maggie.’ I had to complete my schedule as stoically and inscrutably as possible, while considering the right response.
I shared the general sense of anti-climax which the Prime Minister’s announcement caused. But I knew that others, who had been working night and day to place the Party on a war footing in what had every sign of being a closely contested struggle, would feel the let-down even more. Later that night I telephoned through to Tim Bell to see how he and Gordon Reece had taken it. In fact, the two of them had restored their spirits over champagne in a West End restaurant and I had clearly woken Tim from the sleep of the just. I was asking where I could find Gordon when suddenly he said, ‘My God, I’ve been burgled.’ And so he had. He had managed to get to bed without noticing.
I gave my reactions the following evening in the slot given to the Leader of the Opposition to reply to a Prime Ministerial broadcast. Ironically, in the light of what subsequently happened, the Prime Minister had sought to justify his refusal to seek a new mandate by arguing that a general election would do nothing to make the situation easier in the forthcoming winter. I replied:
Well, some of us look further ahead than this winter. We don’t believe that Britain has to grind on in bottom gear. The longer he puts things off, the worse they will become, and the worse they become the longer it will take to put them right. But I believe they can be put right, once we’ve a government that has confidence. The confidence of the people and confidence in the people. A government with authority at home, and with authority abroad.
Would we have won a general election in the autumn of 1978? I believe that we might have scraped in with a small overall majority. But it would only have needed one or two mistakes in our campaign to have lost. And even if we had just won, what would have happened next? The Labour Government’s pay policy was now clearly coming apart. The TUC had voted against a renewal of the Social Contract — and the following month’s Labour Party Conference would vote to reject all pay restraint — so even that fig leaf would be removed. A strike of Ford car workers already looked impossible to settle within the Government’s 5 per cent ‘pay norm’. The distortions and frustrations of several years of prices and incomes policy were unwinding, as they had under the Heath Government, amid bitterness and upheaval.
If we had been faced with that over the winter of 1978/79 it might have broken us, as it finally broke the Labour Government. First, I would have had to insist that all the talk about ‘norms’ and ‘limits’ should be dropped immediately. For reasons I shall explain, that would have been very unpopular and perhaps unacceptable to most of the Shadow Cabinet. Secondly, even had we tried to use cash limits in the public sector and market disciplines in the private sector, rather than some kind of pay policy, there would have been a high risk of damaging strikes. Rather than giving us a mandate to curb trade union power, as they would in the following year, these would probably only have confirmed in the public mind the impression left by the three-day week in 1974 that Conservative Governments meant provoking and losing confrontations with the trade unions. Appalling as the scenes of the winter of 1978/79 turned out to be, without them and without their exposure of the true nature of socialism, it would have been far more difficult to achieve what was done in the 1980s.
But in any case, we could afford to wait. Although I cannot claim to have foreseen what followed, I was convinced that the Labour Party’s basic approach was unsustainable. In exchange for agreement with the trade union leaders on pay limits, the Labour Government had pursued policies which extended state control of the economy, reduced the scope for individual enterprise and increased trade union power. At some point such a strategy would collapse. The trade union leaders and the left of the Labour Party would find their power so strengthened that they would no longer have an interest in delivering pay restraint. Nor would union members respond to calls for sacrifice in pursuit of policies that had plainly failed. The effects of socialist policies on the overall performance of the economy would be that Britain would lag further and further behind its competitors on productivity and living standards. Beyond a certain point this could no longer be concealed from the general public — nor from the foreign-exchange markets and foreign investors. Assuming that the basic structures of a free political and economic system were still operating, socialism must then break down. And that, of course, is exactly what happened that winter.
SPLITS AND REBELLIONS
The Conservative Party Conference at Brighton was always likely to be difficult. Most of those present had expected that it would never take place because of the supposedly imminent general election campaign and felt cheated of that victory. The opinion polls showed us falling behind Labour. Above all, the controversy over the Government’s rapidly disintegrating pay policy focused even more attention on our approach, and that was itself threatened with disintegration.
A couple of weeks before the Conference Jim Prior had unwisely made remarks in a radio interview which seemed to offer Conservative backing for the Government’s 5 per cent policy, and not only made clear his support for the principle of a statutory incomes policy but actually revealed that he thought a Conservative Government would be forced to introduce one: ‘I think that may well happen under certain circumstances.’ In my own interviews, I tried to shift the emphasis back towards the link between pay, profits and output and away from norms. Although I made it clear that I was not supporting the Ford strike, I equally blamed the Government’s 5 per cent pay norm for what was happening and said that a statutory policy was not a practical possibility. I was widely interpreted as having called for a return to free collective bargaining, an interpretation I did not seek to deny.
Ted Heath now intervened on the other side. Speaking in the Conference economic debate, while I watched from the platform, he warned of the risks of dogmatism and said of the Government’s 5 per cent policy: ‘It is not yet clear to what extent it has broken down. But if it has broken down, there is nothing here for gloating, nothing for joy. We should grieve for our country.’ Geoffrey Howe made a strong closing speech, handling Ted’s intervention with aplomb and saying that a future Conservative Government would return to ‘realistic, responsible collective bargaining, free from government interference’. But later that evening Ted appeared on television and went further. He warned that ‘free collective bargaining produces massive inflation’, and when asked if the Conservative Party should support the Government’s pay policy at a general election, he replied: ‘If the Prime Minister says he is going to the country and expresses the view that we cannot have another roaring inflation or another free-for-all, I would say I agree with that.’
This was a thinly veiled threat. An open split between the two of us during the general election would cause enormous damage. The question of Ted’s role during an election had long worried the Party, and Peter Thorneycroft had met him quietly to discuss his plans earlier in the year. Humphrey Atkins had also received messages from several MPs close to Ted who told him that he was proving amenable to an approach to help. Arrangements were made to liaise with his office during the campaign. Ted’s intervention had blown all that out of the water.
Moreover, in substance Ted’s view seemed to me entirely misconceived. There was no point in backing a policy which was beyond repair, even if it had been beneficial (which, in anything except the very short term, it was not). Moreover, although opposition to centrally imposed pay policies meant that we would find ourselves with strange bedfellows, including the more extreme trade union militants, the revolt against centralization and egalitarianism was basically healthy. As Conservatives, we should not frown on people being well rewarded for using sharp wits or strong arms to produce what the customer wanted. Of course, when such an approach was described, even by those allegedly on our own side, as being opportunist — and when it was accompanied by open disagreements as now between Shadow Ministers like Jim Prior and Keith Joseph — it was difficult to have the analysis taken seriously. But in fact it was an essential part of my political strategy to appeal directly to those who had not traditionally voted Conservative, but who now wanted more opportunities for themselves and their families. So I addressed much of my Conference speech directly to trade unionists.
You want higher wages, better pensions, shorter hours, more government spending, more investment, more — more — more — more. But where is this ‘more’ to come from? There is no more. There can be, but there will not be, unless we all produce it. You can no more separate pay from output than you can separate two blades of a pair of scissors and still have a sharp cutting edge. And here, let me say plainly to trade union leaders, you are often your own worst enemies. Why isn’t there more? Because too often restrictive practices rob you of the one thing you have to sell — your productivity.
Restrictive practices are encrusted like barnacles on our industrial life. They have been there for almost a century. They were designed to protect you from being exploited, but they have become the chief obstacle to your prosperity… I understand your fears. You’re afraid that producing more goods with fewer people will mean fewer jobs, and those fears are naturally stronger at a time of high unemployment. But you’re wrong. The right way to attack unemployment is to produce more goods more cheaply, and then more people can afford to buy them…
We shall do all that a government can to rebuild a free and prosperous Britain. We believe in realistic, responsible, collective bargaining, free from government interference. Labour does not. We believe in encouraging competition, free enterprise, and profits in firms large and small. Labour does not. We believe in making substantial cuts in the tax on your pay packet. Labour does not. We will create conditions in which the value of the money you earn and the money you save can be protected.
Over the next six months this strategy would be successful. But in the short term it was a liability, because the Party was not united on it and because opinion polls suggested that the public wanted us to support the Government against the unions. And not surprisingly we found ourselves at the end of the Conference season five and a half percentage points behind the Labour Party.
The removal of the prospect of an immediate election, after everyone’s nerves had been screwed up to fight one, led to a breakdown in the ordinary disciplines in both parties. In the Labour Party this focused on economics. With us, it boiled over on Rhodesia, first at the Party Conference and then in the House of Commons.
Within the Shadow Cabinet it was Peter Carrington who argued most strongly against accepting an amendment in the Rhodesian debate at the Party Conference which would commit us to lifting sanctions. Peter’s line was that although sanctions were largely futile, in the eyes of the Patriotic Front lifting them would constitute de facto recognition of the so-called ‘internal settlement’ earlier that year, by which Ian Smith had brought into the Rhodesian Government moderate black parties whose claim to represent the black majority was questioned. Peter argued that it would put us in an extremely weak position in trying to bring together the various parties to the Rhodesian dispute when we had already taken sides in this way. John Davies, who had to defend this contorted and unpopular line, did so in a rambling speech in which he was thrown by loud heckling. He looked exhausted and I could see when he sat down that he was in great distress, rubbing his head. I leaned across and asked him what was wrong: he told me that he had a splitting headache and had not slept for three days. I did not like the sound of this and told him that he must immediately go back to London to have a brain scan. He protested at first but finally agreed, being taken back in my car. There it was discovered that he had a malignant brain tumour, from which tragically he died a few months later.
Events at the debate at the Conference fuelled feeling within the Parliamentary Party. Reggie Maudling was one of a formidable team of backbenchers opposed to the Shadow Cabinet line of abstaining on the Commons order renewing sanctions. I did not like this line overmuch myself and, other things being equal, would have joined them in the ‘No’ lobby. But it was better to have a full-scale backbench revolt than to lose members of the Shadow Cabinet at this delicate juncture. In the end 114 Conservatives rebelled against the whip, including two junior spokesmen who accordingly left the front bench — the largest Conservative rebellion since 1945.
A few days later I reshuffled the Shadow Cabinet — moving in Francis Pym to replace John Davies, bringing back John Biffen to take responsibility for small businesses, and appointing Mark Carlisle to replace Norman St John-Stevas at Education, with Norman becoming Shadow Leader of the House. With an election so close at hand, I kept the various factions more or less in place.
I also did a little before the end of the year to still the embarrassing arguments about pay policy. When we failed to win the Berwick and East Lothian by-election in late October several backbench friends publicly blamed Ted Heath’s Blackpool intervention. I went on ITN and — with perhaps an excess of charity — exonerated him. And in the weeks following the Conference I temporarily bowed to the clamourings of a group of colleagues led by Peter Thorneycroft who urged me to reaffirm the line we had taken on pay policy in The Right Approach to the Economy. I spoke to this effect at Paddington in the week before Christmas.
So a difficult year approached its end. We were behind in the polls and seemed all too willing to behave like a permanent Opposition rather than a potential Government, a failing on which the actual Government readily capitalized. When we successfully defeated the Government’s attempts to impose sanctions on Ford for paying its workers more than the 5 per cent norm in the Commons, the Prime Minister was able to paint a picture of a responsible minority administration being prevented from defending the national interest by Conservative opportunism. And when the following day there was a debate on a Vote of Confidence the Government survived by ten votes — and I made a particularly poor speech.
It was true that we had made some progress towards converting the Party and public opinion in the direction I knew was required. Events too had contributed — the scenes at Grunwick and the failure of the ‘Social Contract’ deal with the unions, particularly. With Labour’s pay policy in ruins, the fact that we were keeping open the option of introducing a pay policy of our own troubled me less than it once had. What mattered far more was that our programme lacked the clear commitment to changes, particularly in trade union law, which I believed were necessary. In that respect, at least, we still had a long way to go.
LABOUR’S NEMESIS
But Labour’s time was running out. Jim Callaghan had been dealt a bad hand by history and Harold Wilson in 1976. Like a brilliant poker player, he had employed skill, gamesmanship and simple bluff to spin out his defeat as long as possible on the chance that an ace or two might suddenly appear from up his sleeve. As 1978 became 1979, however, a succession of deuces tumbled forth. On Tuesday 12 December trade unions representing National Health Service and local authority workers rejected the 5 per cent pay limit and announced that they would strike in the New Year. At the end of December the elements conspired to create more trouble, with heavy snow, gales and floods. On Wednesday 3 January the TGWU called the lorry drivers out on strike in pursuit of a 25 per cent pay rise. Some two million workers faced being laid off. Hospital patients, including terminally ill cancer patients, were denied treatment. Gravediggers went on strike in Liverpool. Refuse piled up in Leicester Square. With Government compliance, trade union shop stewards dispensed permits to allow lorry drivers to transport ‘essential’ goods across picket lines. In short, Britain ground to a halt. What was more damaging even than this to the Labour Government, however, was that it had handed over the running of the country to local committees of trade unionists.
Would we be able to grasp the opportunities this provided? That might depend in part on an operation which had been proceeding in fits and starts, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, since the summer of 1977 and which went under the umbrella title of ‘Stepping Stones’. It was the brainchild of John Hoskyns, an able ex-soldier who had set up one of the first computer software companies, which he had built up and then sold to concentrate on public affairs. John had been in contact with Keith Joseph at the Centre for Policy Studies for some time before we were introduced. Together with his colleague Norman Strauss, he had a refreshingly if sometimes irritatingly undisguised scorn for the ad hoc nature of political decision-making in general and the decision-making of the Shadow Cabinet in particular. The two of them argued that we could never succeed unless we fitted all our policies into a single strategy in which we worked out in advance the order in which actions had to be taken — hence the title. The first time I heard all this I was not very impressed. We met over Sunday lunch at Flood Street and the session ended by my remarking on the fact that they had eaten a whole joint of roast beef and I wasn’t sure what I had gained from it all. Alfred Sherman, who was with us, quipped that next time they would bring sandwiches.
But under different circumstances, when long-term thinking was concerned, I came to appreciate the depth and quality of John Hoskyns’ analysis. Ironically, in the light of events, the paper which he and Norman Strauss prepared in the autumn of 1977, whose title ‘Stepping Stones’ came to apply to the framework of discussions which followed, was about persuasion as much as about policy. Its theme was that union reform was at the centre of what we wanted to do; without it the rest of our programme for national recovery would be blocked. But that programme could only be implemented by a Conservative Government that had won the argument. Winning the next election, even by a large majority, would not be enough if the only basis for it was dissatisfaction with Labour’s performance in office since 1974. Therefore, far from avoiding the union issue — as so many of my colleagues wanted — we should seek to open up debate. Moreover, this debate was not something to fear: the unions were an increasing liability to Labour and correspondingly a political asset to us. With intelligence and courage we could turn on its head the inhibiting and often defeatist talk about ‘confrontation’.
I was warming to this analysis and said as much when (along with Keith Joseph, Angus Maude and Willie Whitelaw) I met its authors over drinks and supper at the House of Commons at the end of November 1977. To follow up the report I set up a Stepping Stones Steering Group which met in January 1978, and proposed that small groups of Shadow Ministers and outsiders with relevant knowledge should plan ways to advance the strategy through speeches, pamphlets, articles and so on. There would also be a ‘Policy Search’ group of some of the more solid Shadows, Keith Joseph, David Howell, Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont, working alongside John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, to seek new policy initiatives in line with the overall Stepping Stones theme.
But before this work could begin, sceptical and hostile colleagues had to be faced. I held a meeting of the Leader’s Steering Committee at the end of January at which we argued ourselves to a standstill. Colleagues vied with each other in praising the Stepping Stones paper, but then warning against doing anything to follow it up — a well-known technique of evasion. We should avoid being ‘too insensitive or controversial’ (Francis Pym). We were ‘against appeasement and confrontation but there had to be a third way’ (John Peyton). Peter Thorneycroft, Ian Gilmour and Jim Prior all expressed degrees of doubt. John Davies said frankly that ‘if we told the truth about the unions we should certainly lose the election’.
Chris Patten had submitted a paper to the meeting showing deep suspicion of Stepping Stones. Essentially, Chris favoured what he would doubtless consider a pragmatic rather than an ideological approach to Opposition. But I supported the view of the authors of Stepping Stones that it would take more than tactics to transform Britain. The majority at the meeting grasped at the straw provided by Chris’s paper and expressed a nonsensical desire to unify the Patten-Hoskyns approach, to which I had to bow. Effectively they wanted to kill Stepping Stones, but that I would not allow.
It took a month to get Stepping Stones back on track and even then Chris Patten’s work was to go on ‘in parallel’ and opponents of the whole approach, notably Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour, were in control of several of the most important ‘Theme Teams’. John Hoskyns had hoped to persuade Jim Prior to break new ground on the union question but Jim’s promised Stepping Stones speech, when it finally came, was no advance. Though some useful ideas (and some not so good) emerged from the Policy Search group, the crucial question of pay policy was excluded from its remit and by the end of summer 1978 the whole Stepping Stones initiative seemed to have come to a halt. Nor had it had any impact on manifesto work: had we fought an October general election the manifesto would have included no significant measures on union reform.[56]
What rejuvenated the Stepping Stones initiative was the collapse of the Government’s 5 per cent pay policy that autumn. Immediately after the Labour Conference rejected the policy, Keith Joseph came to see Willie Whitelaw and me, expressing his disappointment that we had not got on further. At various times people had suggested that the only way forward was to shift Jim Prior, but now there was obviously an opportunity to move on without taking such a strong step. Accordingly, I arranged another meeting of the Stepping Stones Steering Group for mid-November.
At this and at a later meeting, however, Jim was still able to block proposals for a vigorous campaign on the union question that winter. Peter Thorneycroft gave him strong support. Peter had never been a friend of Stepping Stones: at one point he actually suggested that every copy of the Stepping Stones report should be recalled to Central Office and burned. Even though Party opinion had begun to shift in my direction, no amount of discussion between Shadow ministers, advisers and MPs would have sufficed to persuade the Shadow Cabinet of the need to think seriously about trade union reform, had it not been for the industrial chaos of the ‘Winter of Discontent’.
Even then they would require a lead. This was an area in which we had made little or no advance since 1975. As Shadow Employment spokesman, Jim Prior had been well placed to veto the development of new policy on union reform. Although just before Christmas 1978 we managed to persuade him to accept an extension of our policy of providing state funds for unions voluntarily holding secret ballots — we would offer cash to cover the cost of pre-strike ballots as well as union elections — this really amounted to very little. Indeed, to the average voter our policy on secret ballots would have been hard to distinguish from Labour’s: in November 1978 the Prime Minister was offering to legislate on secret ballots if the unions wanted it.
In December Keith Joseph had tried to reopen the question of benefits paid to strikers’ families. I had agreed to the summoning of a new Policy Group to consider this question, but when it met Jim Prior’s opposition had prevented any progress.
I spent Christmas and New Year anxiously and reflectively at Scotney, watching the crisis build up. As it had at Christmas 1974, the bad weather discouraged us from our usual walks, and besides I had plenty to do. I read through the various Policy Group papers on union questions and I had brought down a bulging file of briefing from the press and interested outsiders. I spent many hours studying a textbook on industrial relations law and went back to the original Acts of Parliament, reading through the most important legislation since 1906. Every time I turned on the radio or the television the news was worse. I came back to London determined on one thing: the time had come to toughen our policy on union reform.
There was no difficulty in finding a platform. I had agreed before Christmas to be interviewed on Sunday 14 January by Brian Walden on Weekend World; the date was brought forward a week to 7 January. When I came back to London in the New Year, I saw Alfred Sherman, Gordon Reece and a few other close advisers to continue my briefing. The industrial situation was changing so fast that it was becoming more and more difficult to keep up to date, but over the next few weeks having the very latest facts to hand gave me vital advantages.
On Wednesday 3 January Jim Prior intervened to prevent a change in policy. Interviewed by Robin Day on radio, he firmly rejected compulsory strike ballots (‘not something that you can make compulsory in any way’), rejected legislation on strikers’ benefits, and commented on the closed shop: ‘we want to take this quite quietly… it is better in these matters to play a quiet game rather than to shout too much’. Asked what he thought of recent criticism of the trade union leadership by David Howell and Michael Heseltine, he said: ‘I don’t think they are being fair to trade union leaders who at the moment are trying to give good advice to the rank and file, and the rank and file is quite often rejecting it.’
On Weekend World I struck rather a different note. ‘Every power implies responsibility, every liberty a duty. The unions have [had] tremendous power over the years… [And] this is what the debate has got to be about — how unions use their power. I’m a parliamentarian, I am not in Parliament to enable them to have a licence to inflict harm, damage and injury on others and be immune from the law, and if I see it happening, then I’ve got to take action.’
Although I was careful not to commit us firmly to individual measures before they had received proper consideration, I ran through with Brian Walden a shopping list of possible changes, which naturally moved them higher on the agenda than some of my colleagues really wanted. I reaffirmed Jim Prior’s announcement that we would make funds available for secret ballots before strikes as well as for union elections. But I hinted at compulsion if needed, holding out the possibility of legislation to refuse Social Security benefits unless there had been a strike ballot. I also mentioned the possibility of restricting strikes in essential services, announced that we would subject short-term Social Security benefits to taxation and made the case for a right of appeal to the courts for people excluded from a union, who faced losing their jobs where there was a closed shop.
On television the following day Jim Prior replied to my interview. He said that nothing had been agreed between us on Social Security benefits for strikers and that he was against compulsory secret ballots. Thankfully, others reacted more positively. I had broken ranks. People could see that I was going to fight. Offers of support, information and new ideas began to flow into my office.
Most significantly, I received a request for a meeting from a former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Lord George-Brown, who came to my office at the Commons on Wednesday 10 January and who on the following Saturday drove down to Scotney for a further conversation with me. George Brown had more knowledge and experience of the labour movement — that is, the unions as well as the party — than almost any of its current leadership. He had resigned from the party in 1976 (sitting as an independent in the Lords) and had become an increasingly hostile critic of the power of the unions, writing effectively in the press. He told me how the hard Left had risen to positions of influence and power within some of Britain’s most important unions. He showed me that the immunities conferred by legislation since 1906 were being used with a new ruthlessness, and made an unanswerable case for a fundamental change in the law.
The strong support that I received for what I said in my Weekend World interview was in marked contrast to the reaction to Jim Callaghan’s remarks on his arrival back three days later from the Guadeloupe summit. His absence from the country at such a critical time had itself been politically damaging, helping to strengthen the impression that the Government was paralysed in the face of the strikes. The press coverage of the summit itself had not helped him; the sight of the Prime Minister sitting with the other leaders in the Caribbean sun, all casually dressed, was a dangerous contrast to events at home. But the final disaster was the impression he left with the press when he flew into Heathrow. Although he never did use those precise words — ‘Crisis? What Crisis?’ — the myth faithfully represented his attempt to play down the scale of the problem. His image of unflappability and competence was never restored.
I reflected later on why Jim Callaghan, the most canny of politicians, stumbled into such an error. Partly, no doubt, it was tiredness as a result of the transatlantic flight. That taught me a lesson I never forgot: do not make public statements on arriving back in the country after any lengthy absence or long journey. Yet the misjudgement also had deeper roots. Indeed, I always considered it a kind of nemesis. Jim Callaghan had based his whole political career on alliance with the trade union leaders. For him, if not for the country, it had been a winning formula. Now that the unions could no longer be appeased, he had no other policy in his locker. This alone can explain his helpless reaction to the crisis which overwhelmed him. The Government could not even decide whether to declare a State of Emergency. Although I had seen when a member of Ted Heath’s Cabinet that this was likely to be of limited effectiveness, the Government’s alternative of trying to reach voluntary agreement with the trade unions to limit the effects of the picketing was obviously futile.
What should be our next move? Parliament was due to return on Monday 15 January. I wrote to the Prime Minister demanding a full statement and a debate on the industrial situation. We had a slot already arranged for a PPB on Wednesday 17 January and work began on a script.
The preparations I made for my speech in the debate were perhaps the most thorough I had ever made for an appearance in the Commons. I had allowed others to prepare a text for my speech in the last Confidence debate, a few months before: it had not been a success and I had resolved afterwards that on occasions of such importance I would not do this again. I did not want a written text in any case — I always spoke better from notes. I worked on this speech as if it were a tax brief, amassing my sources, marking them up with coloured pens, and drafting carefully a few pages of handwritten notes which would show me instantly the structure of my speech when I glanced down at them on the despatch box. Front- and backbench colleagues came in to help, some with information about their constituencies, others-particularly Ian Percival and Leon Brittan — to assist on points of law. Sympathetic firms affected by the strikes sent telexes giving their latest news; the CBI was producing a daily briefing; Denis passed on a good deal that he heard; and we all scanned the press.
My original idea had been to make a hard-hitting but essentially conventional speech from the Opposition benches — hammering the Government and demanding that they change course. But at Scotney over the weekend of 13–14 January and on Monday back in London several people urged a different approach. Peter Utley and Peter Thorneycroft sent me suggestions for a speech offering support for the Government if it was prepared to introduce the kind of legislative changes necessary to break the union stranglehold. Ronnie Millar and Chris Patten — working on the PPB script — were urging the same idea.
My own immediate inclination was to avoid offers of cooperation, for several reasons. First, unlike the more coalition-minded of my colleagues, I believed that the job of Oppositions is generally to oppose. We had a fundamentally different approach from that of the Government and our main duty was to explain it and persuade the country of its merits. Secondly, it was dangerous to make an offer of cooperation without having thought through clearly in advance whether we actually wanted it accepted or not. Probably nothing which went to the heart of the problem would — or indeed could — be accepted by Jim Callaghan’s Government. There was, therefore, a risk that in order to make a credible offer of support, we would have to set our sights too low as regards measures of reform. And if the Government then did accept the offer, we would have thrown away, for the time being at least, the opportunity of forcing it out of office. Moreover, reforms in trade union law alone would not suffice to deal with Britain’s underlying economic problems: that would need a much more comprehensive strategy to which the socialists could never agree.
That evening — Monday 15 January — I called a Steering Committee meeting. Most of my senior colleagues favoured the idea of a conditional offer and by this stage I had come round to the idea myself. Reforms were essential; and if the Government were prepared to introduce the necessary measures, how could we oppose them? By offering help we enhanced our moral authority. I believed — as did most of the supporters of the idea — that the offer should be set at a level which, though abundantly justified by events, would be unlikely to be accepted by the Government. This was a difficult matter to judge in detail: the Labour Party might just be persuaded to agree to the negotiation of no-strike agreements in essential services, the payment by the taxpayer of the cost of secret ballots in trade unions and even a code of practice to end secondary picketing — though the last was doubtful. Equally, I was clear that if the Government did accept, we were honour-bound to keep our side of the bargain. For me, however, there was an additional and very important consideration. By agreeing to offer cooperation with the Government on selected measures, Jim Prior and his supporters would find it impossible to refuse support to those same measures if and when a Conservative Government introduced them.
The upshot was that the Steering Committee agreed that the Government could rely on Conservative support if it took firmer action on picketing (to get essential supplies moving), legislated to outlaw secondary picketing and to encourage secret ballots for union elections, and if it made efforts to negotiate non-strike agreements in essential industries. Events are a powerful advocate.
I opened the debate the following day. I began by describing the crisis. Transport of goods by road was widely disrupted, in many cases due to secondary picketing of firms and operators not involved in the actual disputes. British Rail had issued a brief statement: ‘There are no trains today.’ The CBI had reported that many firms were being strangled, due to shortage of materials and inability to move finished goods. There was trouble at the ports, adding to the problems of exporters. At least 125,000 people had been laid off already and the figure was expected to reach a million by the end of the week. The food industry, in particular, was in a shambolic state, with growing shortages of basic supplies like edible oils, yeast, salt and sugar. And all this on top of a winter of strikes — strikes by tanker drivers, bakers, staff at old people’s homes and hospitals; strikes in the press and broadcasting, airports and car plants; a strike of gravediggers.
I pulled no punches in the speech. I made the point put to me by George Brown that the unions had been falling more and more under the control of left-wing militancy. I reminded the archmoderate Shirley Williams that she had joined the Grunwick picket line. I made the conditional offer of support agreed in the Steering Committee, and I also made it a condition of cooperation that the Government should act on the closed shop; I felt too strongly on this subject not to include it.
The Prime Minister spoke next. He began his reply in a surprising way:
I congratulate the Right Honourable lady on a most effective parliamentary performance. It was in the best manner of our debates and the style in which it was delivered was one of which the Right Honourable lady can be proud.
It was a good start. But all that the Prime Minister then had to offer in the body of his speech were further concessions to the unions — exemptions from the 5 per cent pay limit, tighter price controls and extension of the principle of ‘comparability’, under which public sector workers could expect more money. All these were intended as inducements to the unions to sign up to a new pay policy. But he signally failed to address what everyone except the far Left considered the main problem, excessive trade union power.
To my offer the Prime Minister made no direct reply. He had clearly been wrong-footed. The question now was whether I should repeat the offer the following evening in our Party Political Broadcast — or limit myself to attacking the Government’s paralysis and pledging that a Conservative Government would reform trade union law.
I was still uneasy, and toughened the script when I saw it the following day. But after all, the offer had already been made, and the higher the profile we gave it, the more tightly it would bind reluctant colleagues and the more public support we would gain. So we went ahead, filming it in my room at the House of Commons. Again, the Government made no direct reply.
In any case, by now the whole political atmosphere had been transformed. From trailing the Labour Party by several percentage points in the opinion polls before my interview with Brian Walden, we had now opened up a twenty-point lead. From being a liability, our perceived willingness to take on the trade union militants had become an advantage. Within the Shadow Cabinet, the opposition from people like Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour to the approach which Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe and I wanted was effectively silenced — for the time being at least. Personally, I was conscious that in some strange way I was instinctively speaking and feeling in harmony with the great majority of the population. Such moments are as unforgettable as they are rare. They must be seized to change history.
THE FALL OF THE GOVERNMENT
But now Banquo’s ghost came back to haunt the Labour Government. Devolution, which they had embraced solely as a means of staying in power with support from the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists, returned to grimace and gibber at Jim Callaghan at his lowest point. Following the defeat of the Scotland and Wales Bill in early 1977 Labour had reintroduced devolution legislation in the form of separate Bills for Scotland and Wales, with provision for referenda in each country before they came into effect. Backbench dissent on their own side led to the passage of a number of amendments, including the crucial additional requirement that a minimum of 40 per cent of those eligible to vote had to support devolution in each case. Although I had not publicly campaigned for a ‘No’ vote in the referenda in Scotland and Wales, that was the result I wanted. When the vote took place on 1 March 1979 in Scotland a bare majority of those voting was in favour — well below the required 40 per cent of the total electorate — and in Wales a large majority of those who voted rejected the proposal. For the moment, devolution was dead: I did not mourn it.
From this point on it seemed likely, though not certain, that the Government would be unable to continue in office; but the circumstances under which a general election would occur were far from predictable. The Prime Minister sought desperately to spin out discussion about devolution rather than go ahead immediately with the repeal of the Devolution Acts. But his potential allies were preparing to desert. The SNP now had no reason to keep Labour in office and wanted an early confidence motion. The Liberals were keen on an early election, even though their standing in the opinion polls was weak; this was principally in order to avoid the embarrassment of the forthcoming trial of their former Leader, Jeremy Thorpe, on a charge of conspiracy to murder, of which he was later acquitted. Admittedly, the Welsh Nationalists, who were more of a socialist party than their Scottish equivalents, might still be persuadable.
That meant that the Northern Irish MPs — ten Ulster Unionists, one member of the Social Democratic and Liberal Party (SDLP) and one Independent Republican — were likely to be decisive. Gerry Fitt, the SDLP Member, had been alienated from the Government by their attempts to court the Ulster Unionists with additional seats for the Province. Frank Maguire, the Independent Republican, was entirely unpredictable. A majority of the Ulster Unionists had been prepared to keep the Government in office until the legislation increasing the representation of Northern Ireland had passed through Parliament: but this it had done by 15 March. There was now much public talk of Unionist demands for a gas pipeline to link the Province to the natural gas network on the mainland and the strengthening of local government powers in Northern Ireland as the price of their support for either of the two parties. Airey Neave, who had by now established close personal links with a number of the Unionists, was responsible for the discussions on our side.
Many of our backbenchers wanted an early confidence motion, but initially the Shadow Cabinet held its fire. One reason was that we would need the support of anti-devolution Labour MPs to make absolutely sure that the order repealing the Devolution Acts went through; we did not quite trust the Government on this question. Moreover, unlike previous occasions when there had seemed a possibility of bringing down the Government in a vote in the House of Commons, we were extremely reluctant to put down a Motion of No Confidence until we were assured of its likely success. A Government victory would strengthen it at a bad time. When we considered the matter at Shadow Cabinet on Wednesday 21 March we decided, indeed, that we would not move such a motion unless the SNP, the Liberals and, if possible, the Welsh Nationalists gave firm assurances of support. But there was still no question, as far as I was concerned, of doing deals which would tie my hands in government.
On Thursday 22 March the Prime Minister made a last effort to keep devolution alive and win over the SNP, making a parliamentary statement offering yet more talks and following it with a Prime Ministerial broadcast that evening. He never had any real chance of success, and when assurances of SNP and Liberal support for our motion seemed to be forthcoming — though there was none from the Welsh Nationalists — I agreed that it should be tabled, which was done a little before 7 p.m. The Conservative Whips now went all out to persuade the minority parties to see that their less reliable members actually joined us in the lobbies. Equally important, of course, was ensuring that there was a full turn-out of Conservative MPs. Luckily, none was seriously ill — though one Member’s car overturned on the motorway as he was driving down and another insisted on voting for us though he had been shattered by the death of his wife the previous day.
Oddly enough, the most intractable problem that evening was caused by the strike of catering staff at the Palace of Westminster. Not even the most blood-curdling threats by the Whips could prevent Tory MPs drifting off to their clubs or to the Savoy for something to eat. Willie Whitelaw and I dined in the Chief Whip’s office with Humphrey Atkins and his colleagues off the contents of two large hampers brought back by Spencer Le Marchant and Tony Berry from Fortnums. But I could not summon up much appetite. The opening speeches of the debate itself had gone, I felt, more or less as expected — neither was a triumph of oratory. But sitting around our improvised supper table, Willie, Humphrey and I knew that the result, on which so much hung, was too close to call. Perhaps because they really felt that way, or perhaps because they did not want to raise my spirits to have them dashed by the narrowest of defeats, I had the impression that they thought the Government would somehow manage once again to survive. In my heart of hearts, I thought so too.
Then we returned to the Chamber to hear the closing speeches. Michael Foot’s for the Government was one of the outstanding performances of a gifted House of Commons orator. But it would take more than rhetoric to persuade the unpredictable Members upon whose decisions the outcome depended.
Amid clamour and confusion we began to file into the lobbies. Having voted, I returned to my place by the side of Willie, Francis and Humphrey and waited to learn our fate. Humphrey had sought to ensure that I had some advance notice of the result. He asked John Stradling Thomas, one of the senior Whips, to go through our lobby very quickly and then stand at the exit of the other one. For some reason, not just when they are in a minority, Conservative MPs go through the lobby more quickly than the Labour Party. As soon as we were all through, the message as to what our numbers were would be given to John Stradling Thomas, who meanwhile was listening to the other (Government) lobby being counted out. As soon as they had finished, he would know whether we had won or not. If we had not won he would come back, and just stand next to the Speaker’s chair. If we had won, he would put up a finger so that Humphrey could tell me. Only later was I let into the secret code. I just saw John Stradling Thomas return — and then Humphrey leaned across to me and with a stage whisper said: ‘We’ve won!’
The announced figures bore it out. ‘Ayes, 311. Noes, 310.’ So at last I had my chance, my only chance. I must seize it with both hands.[57]
AIREY
Two days later I was attending a function in my constituency — a fund-raising event organized by Motability, which provided disabled people with special cars at a modest price. I was to make the presentation. My mind was at least half on the Party Election Broadcast I was due to make that evening, when Derek Howe approached me to say: ‘I think you ought to know that a bomb has gone off in the precincts of the House of Commons, in the garage they think. At least one person has been very seriously injured, but we don’t know who.’
A hundred possibilities — though not the correct one — went through my mind as we drove down to the BBC studios in Portland Place. When I got there, and before I went in to be made up, one of the producers took me aside into a private room and told me who it was. It was Airey Neave. He was critically injured. The Irish National Liberation Army — a breakaway faction from the IRA — had placed a bomb under his car and it had exploded when he drove up the ramp from the House of Commons car park. It was very unlikely that he would survive — indeed, by the time I heard the news he may well have been dead. There was no way I could bring myself to broadcast after that. I telephoned the Prime Minister and explained. I felt only stunned. The full grief would come later. With it came also anger that this man — my friend — who had shrugged off so much danger in his life should be murdered by someone worse than a common criminal.
CHAPTER XII
Just One Chance…
The 1979 general election campaign
DEFINING THE THEME
As I have already described, I was far from enthusiastic about the first manifesto draft of 1978: it was too long, diffuse and chock-full of costly (but uncosted) spending commitments. The revised draft in August was better. But it was still not adequate. This was no reflection on Chris Patten and Angus Maude who drafted it, but rather on the rest of us who had not been able to agree clear and coherent policies in some crucial areas, particularly the trade unions.
I have also described how I decided to seize the initiative in January 1979. Between the summer of 1978 and the dissolution of Parliament in March 1979 outside events, above all that winter’s strikes, allowed me to shift our policies in the direction I wanted. The balance of opinion in the Shadow Cabinet, following rather than leading opinion in the country, was now that we could and should obtain a mandate to clip the wings of the trade union militants. Similarly — though I was to be less successful in dispensing with this unwelcome aspect of my political inheritance — the collapse of Labour’s pay policy made it easier to argue that the whole approach of prices and incomes controls, both ‘voluntary’ and statutory, should be abandoned. Above all, I was sure that there had been over the winter a sea-change and that our manifesto had to catch that tide.
Before Angus and Chris got to work I sent them a note.
I think the existing [autumn 1978] draft will have to be radically changed consequent upon recent events and our much more robust union policy. But the general approach of the limited objective first (i.e. tax cuts etc. to encourage wealth creation) remains. In my view the average person and a lot of non-average as well wants ‘tax cuts and order’.
A comparison between the manifesto draft of August 1978 and the final text published in April 1979 illustrates both the extent and the limits of the changes which — in varying combinations — Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, my advisers and I secured. The passage on trade unions, of course, was the real test. In 1978 I was prepared to go along with almost everything that Jim Prior suggested, including the promise that we would be ‘even-handed in our approach to industrial problems’, that we would ‘not undertake any sweeping changes in the law of industrial relations’ and that instead we would ‘seek to promote an era of continuity and constructive reform’. The 1979 text was significantly different. Now we promised to strike ‘a fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement’. Furthermore, we challenged directly the idea that the law had no useful role to play in this area: ‘Labour claim that industrial relations in Britain cannot be improved by changing the law. We disagree. If the law can be used to confer privileges it can and should also be used to establish obligations.’
I had disliked both the tone and the intellectual confusion which characterized Jim Prior’s suggested manifesto passages on the general role of trade unions in the spring of 1978. But I objected still more strongly to Jim’s suggestions on the closed shop. Although Jim wanted us to say that we were ‘opposed to the closed shop in principle’, he wanted to add that ‘experience has shown that a number of managements and unions consider it a convenient method of conducting their negotiations’. The contrast in the same sentence between the requirements of ‘principle’ and ‘convenience’ struck me as particularly distasteful. There are, of course, many freedoms which it would be ‘convenient’ for powerful groups to suppress: but most of us reckon that ‘principle’ requires that those freedoms should be defended. Jim also wanted us to promise a ‘code of practice’ which would regulate the closed shop. If the code of practice was not honoured ‘it could result (as at present) in workers losing their livelihood without compensation or redress from either employer or union. In this event we would be prepared to legislate to protect their rights’.
Even in 1978 I had felt that we could do better than this. I had insisted that there must be a right of appeal to the courts if someone was unfairly excluded or expelled from their union. But in 1979 we went significantly further by dropping the formula about the closed shop being objectionable but inevitable and making a clear commitment to change the law. Existing employees and ‘those with personal conviction’ (a weasel phrase but still unavoidable in the circumstances) ‘must be adequately protected, and if they lose their jobs as a result of the closed shop they must be entitled to adequate compensation’. The manifesto also promised an enquiry into the coercive recruitment practices of the SLADE printing union.[58] Additionally we made it clear that the code of practice would have statutory force.
But the main change of substance related to picketing. In 1978 I had gone along with what Jim Prior wanted, which was not very much: ‘In consultation with all parties, we must find acceptable means to regulate the conduct of picketing. The strict arrangements adopted by the NUM in February 1974 could provide a sensible basis for this.’
There was no mention even of a code of practice, let alone legislation. It was also, in retrospect, not particularly wise to remind voters directly of the occasion when the previous Conservative Government had been broken by the miners’ strike. Thankfully, the shocking scenes of the Winter of Discontent ensured that this feeble approach was now out of touch with reality and people’s expectations. We now promised to make secondary picketing unlawful and to review trade union immunities. Moreover, there was the clear suggestion that we would be prepared to take further legislative steps if these proved necessary: ‘We shall also make any further changes that are necessary so that a citizen’s right to work and to go about his or her lawful business free from intimidation or obstruction is guaranteed.’
Two other new provisions were inserted between the 1978 and 1979 texts: one was the promise to ‘seek to conclude no-strike agreements in a few essential services’ (which in fact came to nothing), and the other to ‘ensure that unions bear their fair share of the cost of supporting those of their members who are on strike’, which we later implemented. Together with the limited proposals to ease the effects of the closed shop and equally modest proposals to finance postal ballots for union elections and other important issues, these constituted our package of trade union reform. I was very happy with it: indeed, it would turn out that I was far more confident not just in its practicality but also its popularity than some of my colleagues.
By contrast with my victory over the position on trade unions, I scored no better than a draw on incomes policy. On this question, of course, I could not place my usual reliance on Geoffrey Howe who had developed a fatal attraction for the so-called ‘forum’.
In 1978 I had argued that we should be clearer about our intention to break away from incomes policies, suggesting that instead of asserting (as proposed) that ‘the return to flexibility will take time, but it cannot be postponed for ever’, the last phrase should be replaced by ‘but it must start without delay’. And I did not even win this small point.
In 1979 the manifesto contained, indeed, a somewhat more explicit allusion to the ‘forum’, even mentioning the German model. But this I could live with. Of more practical importance, there was a strongly worded promise to avoid incomes policies in the private sector: ‘Pay bargaining in the private sector should be left to the companies and workers concerned. At the end of the day, no one should or can protect them from the results of the agreements they make.’
That left one particularly thorny aspect of incomes policy to be grasped in the public sector. The Prime Minister’s offer in January 1979 of new machinery to establish ‘comparability’ between the public and private sectors led to the setting up of a commission under Professor Hugh Clegg to take evidence and make recommendations which, of course, the Government committed itself to honour — after the election. Inevitably, when the election campaign began we were pressed to define our attitude. The question, in effect, was whether we would agree to pick up the bill (size unknown) for Labour’s efforts to buy off the public sector unions.
Our policy for public sector pay had always been based on the strict application of cash limits. Geoffrey Howe and I did our best to stick to that, but there was intense pressure from colleagues and the Party, frankly concerned not to lose vital votes. And so finally we yielded and pledged ourselves to implement Professor Clegg’s recommendations. It was an expensive but unavoidable commitment.[59]
In general, however, I was happy with the manifesto, both as regards contents and style. It contained a coherent philosophy and a limited number of clearly defined pledges. And it passed the most important final test, namely that at no stage in the campaign did we have to modify or retreat from it.
I was to fight three general elections as Leader of the Conservative Party; and each one was different. The 1983 campaign was perhaps the easiest; the 1987 campaign was certainly the most emotionally fraught; but the general election of 1979 was the most challenging both for me and the Party. I never had any illusion that if we lost or even if we failed to win an overall majority I would be given another chance. I accepted this fact and was even prepared to speak about it openly. Personally, I had little doubt that it was also a watershed for the Conservative Party and for Britain.
Unlike some Conservatives, I did not believe that the taming of the Left of the Labour Party would prove anything other than temporary if Labour won an overall majority. The Left knew what it wanted and was prepared to bide its time so as to obtain it. I never put any faith in the resolve or abilities of the ‘centre’. I agreed with Keith Joseph that the ‘centre’ ground of politics had moved steadily leftwards, and I attributed this principally to the lack of moral courage of those who prided themselves upon being ‘moderates’. Time and again these people had been prepared to compromise and adjust their positions; and, as a result, socialism had continued its onward march through our institutions. This march, I believed, had more or less reached its point of no return. So many people and so many vested interests were by now significantly dependent on the state — for employment in the public sector, for Social Security benefits, for health care, education and housing — that economic freedom had begun to pose an almost unacceptable risk to their living standards. And, when that finally happened, political freedom — for example the freedom to join or not to join a union or the freedom to have controversial views and still be entitled to teach in a state school or work in a government department — would be the next victim. Moreover, the advance of communism abroad and the retreat of the West before it was helping to sap the morale of those who wished to oppose collectivism at home.
The 1979 campaign was also different in a number of other ways. It was the first time that the Conservative Party had ever fought so clearly on the theme that it was ‘time for a change’. Implicit in this approach was that Britain had been in retreat for much more than the years since 1974; the 1970–74 Conservative Government, however bravely it had started out, had been part of that retreat. I therefore believed that we should be bold in explaining precisely what had gone wrong and why radical action was required to put it right. I was soon to be aware, however, that this was not how Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office in general saw things. Their belief was that we should at all costs avoid ‘gaffes’, which meant in practice almost anything controversial — in particular, attacks on trade union power — in the belief that the Labour Party was already sufficiently discredited to lose the election. In fact, with a few concessions, I insisted on doing it my way. But this led to tensions.
It also led to an odd reversal of roles between Government and Opposition. From the very beginning of their campaign, Labour more or less ignored their own manifesto — with the exception of vote-buying promises like free television licences for pensioners — and offered only limited excuses for their record. Instead, they concentrated on attacking real and alleged Conservative policies. Jim Callaghan largely discarded his image of avuncular bonhomie and led an extremely effective but wholly negative campaign. This was carried on at three levels. First, the media were fed with a daily diet of scare stories — ranging from the doubling of Value Added Tax to large cuts in the National Health Service — which would allegedly occur if we were elected. Secondly, doubt was cast on the credibility of our promises, particularly the pledge to cut income tax. Thirdly, there was an attempt to portray me as a dangerous right-wing ideologue, unsuited to the complex and demanding tasks of the premiership. Labour’s strategy presented us with a fundamental dilemma. Should we reply to their attacks? Or should we stick to our own message and our own ground? We only ever partly solved this dilemma.
ORGANIZING THE CAMPAIGN
The fact that we had been expecting an election for so long before it was actually called had given us plenty of time to make preparations. For the first time, the Party hired a campaign bus which was fitted up as a mobile office in which we would travel from one campaign stop to another. In overall charge on the bus was David Wolfson — who stood in for John Stanley after John fell down the steps in Bristol on our first day out, slipped a disc and was rushed off to hospital where he spent the whole campaign. Derek Howe was my Press Officer on the ‘battle bus’, while David Boddy was the second Press Officer travelling with the press in a second bus. Roger Boaden was responsible for ensuring that we knew where we were going and what to do when we got there — a taxing task on occasions. My old friend and now Deputy Chairman of the Party, Janet (Lady) Young, travelled with us to keep in touch with the Chairman’s office. Michael Dobbs, the future author of lurid tales of political skulduggery, was given the role of travelling librarian, accompanied by a bulging collection of sources for facts and figures I might need in answer to questions at my whistle-stops. Harvey Thomas travelled ahead of us, making the arrangements for my speeches and preparing the rallies. And three long-suffering secretaries — Tessa Jardine Paterson, Caroline Stephens and Sally James — coped with the almost impossible task of typing my speech drafts as the bus wound and bumped its way over country roads.
The lack of word processors, faxes or photocopiers made life much more complicated than it would be in later elections. We did have a radio telephone, but it was not really satisfactory; for example, on one occasion the driver reversed the bus and knocked the aerial off. So whenever we arrived at a Conservative office there would be a mad rush to telephone through changes to speech texts to Conservative Central Office, while someone else on another line would receive an account of the day’s events in London.
To allow me to cover more ground, I spent several nights away from London on tour. But I found this unsatisfactory and did not repeat it in future campaigns. It is easy to get — or at least feel — out of touch in an election campaign when you are away from London; it is also possible for other people to substitute their judgement for yours on crucial matters. Neither is acceptable in a life or death election. Usually, however, I would return late in the evening to Flood Street where secretaries would come in to serve up hot meals for me and my speech-writing team — John Hoskyns, Peter Utley, Hugh Thomas, Alfred Sherman and sometimes Ronnie Millar. Frozen cooked foods were our staple diet on weekdays. At the weekends we sampled the modestly exotic flavours of Duck à l’Orange and Sole Véronique. While we were speech-writing, Denis would be upstairs glued to the television, listening to reports on the campaign. I knew that Labour politicians were implanting some particularly hostile barb when I heard Denis yelling ‘Rubbish!’ — or worse.
It is always difficult to coordinate the different aspects of an election campaign. The best-laid plans unravel and in no time at all the morning press conferences are concentrating on one message, the Party Leader’s speeches a second, Shadow ministers a third, and briefing for candidates something else again. In spite of the serious difference I had with Peter Thorneycroft over tactics, Peter and the team which worked with him were extremely capable: moreover their abilities complemented one another. Peter himself stayed in London throughout the campaign, chairing a tactical committee at Central Office which at times seemed to be in almost permanent session. He was always shrewd and massively authoritative. Alistair McAlpine’s extraordinary abilities as a fund raiser ensured that the Party was never prevented from taking the initiatives we wanted by lack of cash. Significantly, there had been a large increase in the smaller subscriptions from business. This reflected the fact that businessmen understood that the Conservative Party was again the party of free enterprise: it also meant that we were not dependent on just a few large donors. Tony Garner, always cheerful, optimistic and dapper, was the Chief Agent in charge of the campaign organization in the country. Gordon Reece, now back at Central Office as Director of Publicity, had made us all face up to the rigorous demands of the media — emphasizing the importance of the tabloid newspapers and of having our best film coverage and press releases available in good time for the early evening news. By now, I had learned a lot from Gordon about what to do (and not to do) to come over properly on the television screen. At least there was not much reason to worry about possible colour clashes. Conservative campaigning has its own version of Henry Ford’s dictum: you can wear any colour you like as long as it’s blue. And for most of the time in my case it was navy blue.
A huge amount of information flows in and out of Conservative Central Office at election time: what comes in has to be analysed for significance and what goes out has to be checked for accuracy. Those responsible are some of the unsung heroes of the political battle. Keith Britto, Central Office’s number-cruncher and opinion poll expert, would struggle manfully with the contradictory psephological material with which we were deluged during the campaign. While Chris Patten was fighting a seat in Bath, Adam Ridley kept the Research Department working at fever pitch. Michael Portillo, from CRD, briefed me for my morning press conferences — a task in which he demonstrated not just his grasp of facts, figures and arguments, but also an instinctive shrewdness in suggesting their deployment. One of my impressions of the campaign was that Michael was a young man who would — and deserved to — go far.
Two important tactical questions had to be addressed before the campaign got under way. The first was whether I should agree to take part in televised debates with Jim Callaghan. Discussions had been going on with the broadcasters since the summer of 1978 when the BBC (on behalf of both networks) had approached my office and the Prime Minister’s simultaneously. Attempts to arrange such debates in previous elections had broken down because of the difficulty of involving the minor parties, which insisted on a presence. Neither Labour nor we would accept that. But this time — July 1978 — the broadcasters were prepared to go ahead with a two-party format regardless of what the minor parties thought. Accordingly we gave the proposal serious consideration, though at the time we did not know the Prime Minister’s position. No final decision was taken because the election expected that autumn did not materialize, but influenced by Peter Thorneycroft and Gordon Reece — who were both strongly opposed — I was inclined to say no.
Shortly before the actual campaign began, ITV revived the idea, proposing two debates on successive Sundays at the end of the campaign with Brian Walden as chairman. This time I was inclined to accept. It was not just that I had always been a natural debater; I believed that Jim Callaghan was greatly overrated and I wanted the chance to expose that fact. He had built his career on giving the trade unions whatever they wanted. So I felt that he was to blame, in a uniquely personal way, for the scenes of the winter of 1978/79. Chris Patten also favoured my taking on the Prime Minister. Moreover, there was a new factor in the situation: the Prime Minister publicly accepted the ITV proposal. And I did not like the idea of beginning an election campaign on a defensive note by refusing to debate.
There were, however, still powerful arguments on the other side which persuaded Gordon Reece, Peter Thorneycroft and Willie Whitelaw to argue against. When the possibility had first been mooted, we were neck-and-neck with the Labour Party in the opinion polls. But by the time the decision had to be made we had a substantial lead of probably 10 per cent. This meant that we might hope to win without the risks of a televised confrontation. And those risks were certainly large. I might make a mistake which it would be hard to obliterate. Jim Callaghan was usually a polished performer on television and he would certainly have no hesitation in using his authority and experience to patronize me. The fact that in the early tentative discussions we learned that he would wish to have the first debate on foreign affairs, where he would be able to deploy all those strengths, caused me to reconsider my earlier enthusiasm.
Moreover, the Liberals were to be offered a quid pro quo: a long interview with David Steel on the Friday before polling day. My advisers and I were in full agreement that the most serious danger to us would be a last-minute upsurge of Liberal support — all the easier to imagine since they had just taken the Liverpool Edgehill seat from Labour at a by-election and were busily seeking, as Liberals always do, to exaggerate the ‘momentum’ this had given them. I had no wish to give the Liberal Leader any more political exposure than necessary.
So I was persuaded to turn down the invitation to debate. It was not worth the risks. In any case, as I wrote in my published reply to ITV’s invitation: ‘Personally, I believe that issues and policies decide elections, not personalities. We should stick to that approach. We are not electing a president, we are choosing a government.’ It was the right decision and the criticism it provoked in some quarters quickly dissipated.
The other tactical question concerned the morning press conferences. Gordon Reece would have liked to dispense with these altogether. In terms of media impact, he was right. Very rarely did anything which happened at the press conference — other perhaps than egregious slip-ups, which were thankfully absent during this campaign — make its way into the day’s main news. But the morning press conference does provide the press with opportunities to ask awkward questions, and this in turn provides an opportunity for politicians to show what they are made of. The morning press conferences are therefore an opportunity to win the respect of seasoned journalists whose judgement will influence the coverage they give throughout the campaign.
A further complication on this occasion was that neither we nor the Labour Party were prepared to surrender the convenient 9.30 a.m. slot to the other. Consequently, our press conference in Central Office was held at the same time as Labour’s in Transport House across the square. A posse of journalists would arrive in the already overcrowded and overheated Central Office conference room to ask questions on the basis of allegations and attacks made by Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey or Shirley Williams at the beginning of the Labour press conference. A final element of chaos was contributed by the new ‘ENG’ (‘electronic news-gathering’) cameras. Though ridiculously unwieldy by present-day standards, they greatly increased the flexibility and extent of television coverage. But the number of cameramen also increased. And the shoulder-held television cameras with their trailing cables both at Central Office and at locations along the route of my tour were a constant threat to life and limb.
For some reason, the Conservative Party always starts campaigning later and builds up more slowly than the Labour Party. Labour on this occasion, however, had an even freer run than usual between the Dissolution and the launch of our manifesto on Wednesday 11 April — largely because the political colleagues to whom I left the public appearances and statements were not very effective. This was, indeed, a difficulty throughout the campaign. With the exception of Michael Heseltine, always relishing a headline, they seemed to behave more like ministers-in-waiting than politicians — which meant, of course, that they risked waiting a good deal longer than they expected. It also ensured that even more of the focus was on me, which even I felt was a mixed blessing. In all campaigns there should ideally be a balance of tones and personalities.
Labour used this period to some effect in order to begin attacking policies which we had not yet published. But the trade union leaders managed, before they were muzzled by Labour Party managers, to play into our hands by adopting tones reminiscent of the Winter of Discontent. Sid Weighell, leader of the National Union of Railwaymen, threatened that with free collective bargaining and a Conservative Government, he would ‘say to the lads, come on, get your snouts into the trough’. Bill Keays, leader of the print union SOGAT, promised ‘confrontation’ if the country was ‘foolish enough to elect the Tory Party’. David Basnett, leader of the General and Municipal Workers, also predicted industrial conflict. It was the same old tune which had played well for Labour in the past, but which was out of harmony with what voters were now prepared to tolerate.
Nor had I been entirely silent. On Thursday 5 April I had addressed the candidates (including Conservative MPs standing for re-election) at a meeting at Central Hall, Westminster. This was not my — or probably anyone else’s — favourite place for a public meeting, since it was then rather drab and characterless. There was a special difficulty this year because the candidates expected to hear from me the main themes of a manifesto which was still unpublished. I had to give them some idea of what was coming without revealing the details. So I concentrated heavily on income tax cuts to give greater incentives for wealth-creation and on the need for trade union reform. An audience composed entirely of speakers is not the easiest to address. But their enthusiasm confirmed my instinct that we had chosen the right battleground.
THE FIRST WEEK — D–21 to D–14
On Wednesday 11 April the manifesto itself was launched at the first Conservative press conference which I chaired, joined by Willie Whitelaw, Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, Peter Carrington, Jim Prior, Humphrey Atkins, Peter Thorneycroft and Angus Maude. The manifesto’s tone was modest and practical and Chris Patten and Angus Maude had dressed our ideas in language which was simple and jargon-free.[60]
It went down well in the following day’s press. But the heat at the hugely overcrowded press conference itself was almost unbearable. And my perspiring male colleagues clad in their thick worsted suits suffered worse than I did.
The following day was Maundy Thursday. Because Easter fell during the campaign, four days of electioneering were lost. So my first day of serious campaigning was on Monday 16 April — what in the election agents’ jargon was D–17. (‘D-day’ of course was polling day itself.) We had decided to begin in Wales. Having flown down from Gatwick, I met the election battle bus at Swansea Airport, visited an NHS hospital and went on to the local Conservative Club, where I was to give regional television and radio interviews. I was aware of a fair amount of background noise at the club. But I only learned afterwards that a huge row, which finished up with fisticuffs, had arisen when the club authorities had tried to keep women reporters out of those rooms reserved for male members only.
Then I went on to Cardiff for the first of the major rallies of the campaign. It was an appropriate place to start. This was very much the heart of enemy territory since Mr Callaghan’s constituency was Cardiff South East. So it was a good thing that Cardiff City Hall had a pleasant feel, the right acoustics and an enthusiastic audience. I also had an extremely powerful speech to deliver. It was an uncompromising statement of how socialism had debilitated Britain and of the need for a fundamental change of direction — though not towards some experiment with Utopia but rather back to principles from which we had mistakenly departed.
…In politics, I’ve learned something you in Wales are born knowing: if you’ve got a message, preach it. I am a conviction politician. The Old Testament prophets didn’t merely say: ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said: ‘This is my faith and vision. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it too, then come with me.’ Tonight I say to you just that. Away with the recent bleak and dismal past. Away with defeatism. Under the twin banners, choice and freedom, a new and exciting future beckons the British people.
The audience loved it and so did I. But my cunning adversary, Jim Callaghan, successfully used it to awaken all of the old fears in the Tory Party establishment about the unnerving figure leading them in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar direction. The Prime Minister subsequently claimed that in my speech I had moved the Conservative Party to the right and that this opened the centre ground for him. Appropriately enough, the main speaker at the Conservative press conference that morning was Reg Prentice, former Labour Cabinet minister and now Conservative Party candidate, who with other ‘converts’ from socialism was living proof that it was Labour which had shifted leftwards. But in any case I agreed with Keith Joseph that it was the ‘common ground’, not the ‘middle ground’, on which we must stake our case. From now on a gap opened up between the way in which Central Office wished to campaign and the direction I insisted on taking.
Such problems were not, however, immediately evident to me. Tuesday morning’s newspapers carried a report of an NOP poll suggesting that our lead was just 6 per cent, but compared with earlier NOP polls it did not suggest any narrowing of the gap. (Throughout the campaign the opinion polls were to give very different pictures of the balance of party support, ranging from the most exiguous of Tory leads — in one case a slight Labour lead — to an improbably overwhelming Tory landslide.) I felt it was an effective day’s campaigning, beginning in Bristol where I visited the Kleeneze brush factory to use every possible photo-opportunity to demonstrate my intention of ‘sweeping away the cobwebs’, ‘applying a new broom’ etc.
Also in Bristol I was on the receiving end of the Election Gall programme hosted by Robin Day. There is always an element of risk on these occasions. A well-briefed caller can expose gaps in a politician’s understanding which most political opponents never could. Moreover, judging the correct reaction is always more difficult when you cannot see the person to whom you are talking over the telephone. But I felt that this Election Call went particularly well, because the points raised with me were on the precise questions to which we had the most convincing answers — the need for tax cuts, controlling inflation, cutting back on government borrowing and encouraging small businesses. Of course, there were critical points too. I always felt that the key to dealing with these was to admit what had gone wrong and say clearly why a future Conservative Government would put it right. So on this occasion I agreed that the previous Conservative Government was indeed responsible for an increase in bureaucracy in the health service, and said how we were going to reverse it.
On the way back from Bristol, taking the new Intercity 125 high-speed train, I stopped off in West Country constituencies and had my photo taken with the candidates, including Chris Patten on the station platform at Bath. The day finished with my addressing a meeting at Gravesend. Since Central Office was telling me that our support among pensioners was shaky I wrote out a press release reminding voters of the record of Conservative Governments on this point.
The following day (Wednesday 18 April), after the morning press conference, I set off to campaign in East Anglia and the East Midlands. First stop was my bid for the agricultural vote. This consisted of a discussion of cattle feed with a friendly farmer, carefully navigating my way across a field full of cows (I had forgotten my boots) and then cradling a calf in my arms for the benefit of the cameras and, I hoped, the wider public. I had no experience with calves and I was not certain of the right technique. With cameramen from five continents present, Denis, ever realistic, warned that ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll have a dead calf on our hands.’ But it survived my attentions and those of the photographers. Fortunately, perhaps, the calf was not able to give an interview.
THE SECOND WEEK — D–14 to D–7
By now (Thursday 19 April) much agonizing had taken place back in London about the implications of my Cardiff speech for the ‘positioning’ of the Party and our campaign. Peter Thorneycroft had persuaded himself that we had made a strategic error which should not be repeated. And since nothing that Central Office or my colleagues did seemed to get much publicity, he decided to involve himself in the drafting of my speeches. Oblivious to all this, I spent that Thursday morning visiting a Leicester textile factory, where I put my childhood training to good effect by stitching overall pockets amid a chaotic crowd of journalists and an astonished workforce.
It was, however, just before the bus arrived at the Cadbury factory in Bournville that I learned that Peter Thorneycroft was insisting that a strong passage on trade unions, drafted by Paul Johnson, one of Britain’s leading journalists, an historian and a convert from socialism, should be removed from that evening’s speech in Birmingham — the second major rally of the campaign. Peter thought it too provocative. He had also apparently intervened to stop Keith Joseph speaking on the same subject. I did not agree with Peter’s assessment. But being away from London I felt insufficiently sure of my judgement to substitute it for his. So I angrily tore out the relevant pages of my draft speech and inserted some more innocuous passages. I contented myself with the knowledge that the last section of the speech, with which I had been helped by Peter Carrington, contained some extremely strong stuff on defence and foreign affairs, deliberately adopting the tone and some of the language of my earlier Kensington Town Hall speech.
But I was not in the best of humour as our coach drew up in front of the factory. I had specifically said that I did not want a formal reception committee, but rather to go straight in and talk to individual managers and workers. Now I saw two long lines of people in white hats and coats. I could not for the moment see the camera crews but I had no doubt that they were waiting somewhere to take suitable shots of this ludicrous scene. I stayed on the bus for a minute or two to regain my cool. It was only then that I realized that I knew the faces of what I had assumed to be the factory staff. It was the pressmen who, doubtless informed of my earlier instructions, had dressed up in white overalls as a joke. As I left the bus they held up their cameras as a kind of arch beneath which I entered the factory. They were so carried away with their joke that they forgot to take any photographs; but they helped me see the funny side of campaigning, for which I suspect we were all grateful.
Having sewn pockets in the morning, I suppose it was only natural that I should find myself sorting chocolates in the afternoon. It was a tricky, demanding task — the sort which gives the lie to the loosely-used expression ‘unskilled work’. It was many years since I myself had worked in a factory, but I saw that some traditions do not change. One girl who was shortly getting married had all her wedding presents laid out on a table close to the production line for her friends to see. After my chocolate-packing was over, we all discussed them at rather greater length than my programme allowed. In the end I was bustled away, for we had to get to the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. As a chocolate addict, I never thought I would lose my appetite for them. But somehow that clinging smell of vanilla put me off them for the rest of the campaign.
The Birmingham speech, for all the trouble its preparation had caused, was a great success — not just the passages on East-West relations and the communist threat, but also those on law and order, on which I pledged to ‘place a barrier of steel’ against the socialist path to lawlessness. Afterwards we drove back to London where the following day’s (Friday 20 April) constituency visits would take place.
Saturday 21 April was a day of regular campaigning which began at a factory producing highly sophisticated electrical components in Milton Keynes. I was excited by the technology, about which I had been thoroughly briefed, and soon found myself giving a detailed exposition of it to a group of slightly bemused pressmen. I was then wired up and tested on a heart monitoring machine. With all the dials pointing in the right direction I was shown to be in good working order: ‘Solid as a rock,’ as I remarked — something which also reflected my judgement about how our campaign as a whole was going. For one of the oddest characteristics of the 1979 general election campaign was the wide and growing difference of perceptions between those of us who were out in the field and those who were back at the centre. Of course, politicians, like everyone else, are susceptible to self-delusion. But, far more than in 1983 and 1987 when security considerations loomed so large, I was confident that I did have a real sense of what the electorate felt and that their hearts were with us. I was also convinced that this change had come about largely because of the events of the winter of 1978/79 and that therefore undue caution on the issue of trade union power was bad tactics.
But it was clear from discussion at the strategy meeting I held in Flood Street on Sunday 22 April that not everyone saw matters this way. Although the opinion polls were still varied — one showing a 20 per cent and another a 5.5 per cent Conservative lead — there had not been much movement during the campaign. Peter Thorneycroft’s view was that we should more or less carry on as we were. As he put it in a paper for that Sunday’s meeting: ‘We should not embark on any high-risk initiatives. We are in the lead.’ This seemed to me fair enough as far as it went. But it begged two questions. First, had we not gained our lead in the first place by taking some quite high-risk initiatives, such as my interventions in the Winter of Discontent? Secondly, what now constituted a ‘high risk’? Measures to curb union power? Or the absence of them? In any case, one of the greatest dangers in a campaign where you have started out with a significant lead is complacency. Exciting the voters, as long as it is not on some issue on which they disagree with you, is an indispensable part of winning elections.
My campaigning that week would take me to the North of England, before going on to Scotland. After the Monday morning press conference, I flew to Newcastle where the photo-opportunity was at a tea factory. Tasting the sludgy concoctions, undiluted and unmasked by milk and sugar, had something of the same effect on my tea drinking as did the Bournville factory on my consumption of chocolates.
Outside the factory a crowd had gathered, among which was a large, formidable woman who was pouring out a torrent of abuse in my direction. The police advised me to stay away. But I felt that if she had something to say she had better do so to my face rather than my back, and so I walked over to talk to her. I took her arm and told her quietly just to say what was wrong. Her manner changed completely. She had the usual grumbles and worries. But the real cause of her anger was a conviction that politicians were just not people who listened. I tried to answer as best I could and we parted amicably. As I walked away I heard her unmistakable tones telling a friend: ‘I told you she wasn’t half so bad.’ My experience of campaigning over the years is that there are very few irredeemably hostile electors. It is one of the tragedies of the terrorist threat that politicians nowadays have so few opportunities to convince themselves of that fact.
Tuesday, too, was very much a traditional-style campaigning day, with four walkabouts, including a visit to the Sowerby candidate, Donald Thompson’s butcher’s shop, and to a supermarket — after which the usual piles of purchases were taken back on the battle bus. On the steps of the Conservative Party offices in Halifax I was photographed in the drizzle holding up two shopping bags — a blue bag which contained the food which could have been bought for £1 in 1974 and a half-filled red bag which contained all that £1 would buy in Labour Britain in 1979. And if this was better politics than economics it was no worse for that. Among the no-nonsense Yorkshire people it went down well.
Back in London that evening I was interviewed by Denis Tuohy for TV Eye. This was the most hostile interview of the campaign. But it allowed me to give a vigorous defence of our proposals for trade union reform. And on this, whatever Central Office might think, I was not going to backtrack. I reaffirmed my determination to deal with the trade union militants. I also pointed out just what was implied by the suggestion that a Conservative Government would be faced with an all-out battle with the trade unions.
Let’s come to the nub of the matter. What you are saying is that the trade union leaders are saying that the whole of this general election is a hollow mockery and a sham. If you are right, and that is what they are saying, then I am going to ask for the biggest majority any country has ever given any government, and I am going to ask for the biggest majority from the twelve million members of trade unions. I don’t think you are right.
I was especially severe with the Labour Party’s suggestion that discussion with the trade unions, the so-called ‘Concordat’, was a better way of dealing with union power than were changes in the law.
You know, it would have been very, very strange if Lord Shaftesbury, the great Tory reformer, looking at conditions which he saw in the mills and the factories decades ago, had said: I’ll do it by a voluntary concordat with the mill owners. Do you think he would have got it? Of course he wouldn’t. He said: There are some things which we must do by law.
After the Wednesday 25 April morning press conference and radio interviews I had lunch at Central Office before flying to Edinburgh in the afternoon. I was beginning to become tired of the standard speech I made to audiences around the country, which drew heavily on the texts prepared for Cardiff and Birmingham with extra pieces slotted in that would go out as press releases. As a result, I performed inadvisably radical surgery on the material I took with me to Scotland. Just minutes before I was due to speak, I was on my knees in the Caledonian Hotel applying scissors and Sellotape to a speech which spread from one wall to the other and back again. Tessa Jardine Paterson frantically typed up each page of the speech, which was handed out, more or less as I delivered it, at Leith Town Hall. At least it was fresh — even to me. At the end I inserted one of my favourite quotations from Kipling:
So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,
Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And everyone smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own![61]
It was a marvellous audience, and from the first few cheers my spirits lifted and I gave of my best.
We went on to the hotel at Glasgow Airport to have a late supper and then turn in before another day of Scottish campaigning. I was buoyed up with that special excitement which comes of knowing you have given a good speech. Although the opinion polls suggested that Labour might be closing on us, the gap was still a healthy one and my instincts were that we were winning the argument. Labour’s campaign had a distinctly tired feel about it. They reiterated so frequently the theme that Tory policies could not work, or would work only at the cost of draconian cuts in public services, that they slipped imperceptibly into arguing that nothing could work, and that Britain’s problems were in essence insoluble. This put Labour in conflict with the people’s basic instinct that improvement is possible and ought to be pursued. We represented that instinct — indeed Labour was giving us a monopoly on it. I felt that things were going well.
Denis, Carol and Ronnie Millar were with me at the hotel and we exchanged gossip and jokes. Janet Young was also travelling with us and had slipped out during the meal. She now returned with a serious expression to tell me that Peter Thorneycroft — or ‘the Chairman’ as she insisted on calling him — felt that things were not too good politically and that Ted Heath should appear on the next Party Election Broadcast.
I exploded. It was about as clear a demonstration of lack of confidence in me as could be imagined. If Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office had not yet understood that what we were fighting for was a reversal not just of the Wilson-Callaghan approach but of the Heath Government’s approach they had understood nothing. I told Janet Young that if she and Peter thought that then I might as well pack up. Ted had lost three elections out of four and had nothing to say about an election fought on this kind of manifesto. To invite him to deliver a Party Political for us was tantamount to accepting defeat for the kind of policies I was advancing.
It was perhaps unfair of me to blame Janet in part for conveying Peter’s message. But this was the closest I came in the campaign to being really upset. I told her that I would not even hear of it. She conveyed a doubtless censored version of my response to ‘the Chairman’ and, still seething, I went to bed.
THE THIRD WEEK — D-7 to D-Day
Thursday morning’s Glasgow press conference was an unremarkable affair. The journalists did not seem to have much to say for themselves and I still felt out of sorts. Later in the morning I had a rather difficult interview with a Scottish television interviewer who was believed to be a Conservative supporter and, as sometimes happens, wished to prove the opposite by being particularly hostile. But from then on the day looked up. We visited a creamery in Aberdeen where I sampled some of the finest butter I have ever tasted — and was astonished to learn that it was all being produced not for consumption but to go into EEC intervention storage. It was my first meeting with the butter mountain.
Then it was on to the harbour at Buckie and a fish factory, where the irrepressibly high spirits and good humour of the people worked wonders on me. I addressed an early-evening meeting at Elgin Town Hall and then the coach drove us on to Lossiemouth to board the plane which would take us back to London. All along the way to Lossiemouth Airport the road was lined with people waving and we had to keep stopping to receive flowers and presents. Here was more proof that we were among friends.
It can well be imagined that there was some unseasonal frost in the April air when I came for my briefing at Central Office before the Friday morning press conference. I was also rather too sharp with a journalist at it on the subject of the impact of technology on employment. Then a television interviewer, whom I had been told would be sympathetic, turned out to be very much the opposite. It was that point in an election campaign when everybody’s nerves have become frayed with tiredness. And the pressure was still building. I knew I had further important media interviews, the last PEB to record and big speeches at Bolton and the final Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Moreover, the opinion polls now seemed to suggest that our lead was being eroded. The Central Office view was that it had fallen from about 10 per cent to about 6 per cent. Unfortunately, there was no reason to give any more credence to the internal Party opinion polling — which was on the optimistic side of the median — than to other polls. I had to cancel my visit to the Fulham constituency that afternoon in order to work on the PEB text and the CTU speech. But someone told the press that the real cause was that my voice was failing, which was used to paint an exaggerated picture of a ‘battle-worn Maggie’ trying to stop the election slipping away. In fact, my voice was in remarkably good order — but I now had to risk real strain by raising it so as to convince interviewers and audiences that my larynx was alive and well.
Saturday morning’s Daily Express carried a MORI poll showing our lead down to just 3 per cent. There was evidence of a mild case of the jitters affecting Conservative Central Office. Peter Thorneycroft wrote to candidates saying: ‘Whatever happens, I ask for no complacency and no despair.’ It was not a very encouraging message and perhaps indicated all too accurately the feeling of its author and his advisers that the way to win elections was by doing nothing wrong rather than by doing something right. For myself, I publicly shrugged off the polls, noting that: ‘Always as you get up to an election the lead narrows.’ In fact, I had decided that by far the best course now was to shut the opinion polls out of my mind and put every ounce of remaining energy into the decisive final days of the campaign. I had a good morning of campaigning in London, including my own Finchley constituency, returning home to Flood Street in the afternoon for discussion of the Election Broadcast.
Sunday 29 April would be crucial. The opinion polls were all over the place. I ignored them. I had my hair done in the morning and then after lunch was driven to the Wembley Conference Centre for the Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Harvey Thomas, drawing on his experience of Billy Graham’s evangelical rallies, had pulled out every stop. A galaxy of actors and comedians livened up the proceedings. Ignoring previous instructions from perhaps over-serious Party officials concerned about the dignity of ‘the next Prime Minister’, Harvey played the campaign song ‘Hello Maggie’ when I entered. And dignity certainly went by the board as everyone joined in. I had never known anything quite like it — though compared with Harvey’s extravaganzas of future years this came to seem quite tame.
The speech itself was short and sharp. And the reception was terrific. Then I went on to Saatchi & Saatchi to record the final Election Broadcast. From four o’clock in the afternoon Gordon, Ronnie, Tim and I worked and reworked the text. Then there was an apparently endless succession of ‘takes’, each of which — until the final one — seemed not quite right to at least one of us. At last, well after midnight, we were satisfied.
The main event of my campaign on Monday was the Granada 500 programme, when each of the three party leaders was questioned by an audience from what was deemed to be the most representative seat in the country, Bolton East. (For many years Bolton East had been won by the party which formed the next government, but in 1979, dazzled perhaps by national attention, the electors got it wrong.) I enjoyed these occasions, feeling more at ease than when interviewed on a one-to-one basis. Somehow the fact that these were ‘real’ people with real worries helped me to relax. Judging by the ‘clapometer’ reading I won the contest.
But the following (Tuesday) morning there was a further opinion poll by NOP which showed Labour 0.7 per cent ahead. There was only one real question on people’s lips at that morning’s press conference: how would I react to the poll? I just brushed it aside, saying that I hoped it would stir Conservative Party supporters to go out and vote on the day. Not only did this line serve me at a difficult moment: I suspect it was a correct judgement. For if anything really threatened our victory it was complacency, and from this moment there was no chance of that. I went on to campaign in the North-West, finishing up, of course, by addressing a rally in Bolton, where the comedian Ken Dodd appeared on stage with a blue feather-duster to greet me. After Ken Dodd’s message from Knotty Ash — which he made sound a pretty true blue constituency — any speech would have seemed over-serious. But there was only one real message for this stage of the campaign, which was that those who wished to throw the Labour Party out of government must not fritter their votes away on minor parties, but rather vote Conservative.
Moreover, the same message had to be repeated insistently until polling day. It was my theme at the final press conference on Wednesday (2 May). I returned to it as I went around the London constituencies, finishing up at the Woodhouse School in Finchley — where I had to push my way through protesting feminists chanting: ‘We want women’s rights not a right-wing woman.’ As I drove back to Flood Street I felt the tiredness flow over me. I had had my chance and had taken it. It was oddly satisfying to know that whatever happened now was out of my hands. For the first time in many nights Denis and I had a full six hours’ sleep.
I woke on election day to learn from the radio news that all of that morning’s opinion polls showed the Conservatives with a lead ranging from 2 per cent to 8 per cent. Denis and I went out to vote at 9 o’clock in Chelsea before driving on to Finchley, where, as was my wont, I toured the committee rooms followed by photographers. I went back to Flood Street for a light supper and to try to have some rest before what I knew would be a long evening. At the Finchley count in Barnet Town Hall, where I arrived shortly after midnight, I kept out of the way in a side room, equipped with a television and supplied with coffee and sandwiches, where I could listen to the results as they came in. Roger Boaden was with me, supplementing the television reports with early information telephoned through from Central Office. I kept a running tally, referring to the detailed briefing which Keith Britto had prepared for me. The first few results suggested that we had won, though among them was the upsetting news that Teddy Taylor had lost Glasgow Cathcart. The projections of our majority steadily began to mount. Local councillors, my Constituency Chairman and his wife, my agent and others came in and out looking more and more cheerful. But I deliberately suppressed any inclinations to premature euphoria: calculation, superstition and above all the knowledge that it is easiest to cope with bad news when you are not expecting good entered into this. In the end, however, not even I could remain non-committal. It was clear to everyone by the time I went out to hear the results of my own count that we would form the next Government.
The events of the early hours of Friday — the welcoming clamour of supporters at the count, the visit to Central Office, the warmth and relief of brief relaxation with my family — are no more than blurred recollections. That afternoon’s visit to Buckingham Palace to receive authority to form a government and my subsequent arrival at Downing Street I have described elsewhere.[62]
The scale of the victory took everyone — or almost everyone — by surprise. It was not just that we had won an election: we had also won a new kind of mandate for change. As the psephologists and commentators mulled over the detailed results, the pattern of our success bore this out. We had won a majority of forty-three seats over all other parties. The 5.6 per cent national swing from Labour to the Conservatives was the largest achieved by either — and our 7 per cent lead over Labour was also the largest — since 1945.
Equally significant, the biggest swing to us was among the skilled workers; and over a third of that lead had apparently built up during the campaign. These were precisely the people we had to win over from their often lifelong socialist allegiances. They were confronted in a particularly acute form by the fundamental dilemma which faced Britain as a whole: whether to accept an ever greater role for government in the life of the nation, or to break free in a new direction. For these people, above all, it was a severely practical matter of choosing whether to rely on the comforting security of state provision or to make the sacrifices required to win a better life for themselves and their families. They had now decided to take the risk (for it was a risk) of voting for what I offered — for what in a certain sense I knew that I now personified. I would always try to keep faith with them.
DEFINING THE THEME
As I have already described, I was far from enthusiastic about the first manifesto draft of 1978: it was too long, diffuse and chock-full of costly (but uncosted) spending commitments. The revised draft in August was better. But it was still not adequate. This was no reflection on Chris Patten and Angus Maude who drafted it, but rather on the rest of us who had not been able to agree clear and coherent policies in some crucial areas, particularly the trade unions.
I have also described how I decided to seize the initiative in January 1979. Between the summer of 1978 and the dissolution of Parliament in March 1979 outside events, above all that winter’s strikes, allowed me to shift our policies in the direction I wanted. The balance of opinion in the Shadow Cabinet, following rather than leading opinion in the country, was now that we could and should obtain a mandate to clip the wings of the trade union militants. Similarly — though I was to be less successful in dispensing with this unwelcome aspect of my political inheritance — the collapse of Labour’s pay policy made it easier to argue that the whole approach of prices and incomes controls, both ‘voluntary’ and statutory, should be abandoned. Above all, I was sure that there had been over the winter a sea-change and that our manifesto had to catch that tide.
Before Angus and Chris got to work I sent them a note.
I think the existing [autumn 1978] draft will have to be radically changed consequent upon recent events and our much more robust union policy. But the general approach of the limited objective first (i.e. tax cuts etc. to encourage wealth creation) remains. In my view the average person and a lot of non-average as well wants ‘tax cuts and order’.
A comparison between the manifesto draft of August 1978 and the final text published in April 1979 illustrates both the extent and the limits of the changes which — in varying combinations — Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, my advisers and I secured. The passage on trade unions, of course, was the real test. In 1978 I was prepared to go along with almost everything that Jim Prior suggested, including the promise that we would be ‘even-handed in our approach to industrial problems’, that we would ‘not undertake any sweeping changes in the law of industrial relations’ and that instead we would ‘seek to promote an era of continuity and constructive reform’. The 1979 text was significantly different. Now we promised to strike ‘a fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement’. Furthermore, we challenged directly the idea that the law had no useful role to play in this area: ‘Labour claim that industrial relations in Britain cannot be improved by changing the law. We disagree. If the law can be used to confer privileges it can and should also be used to establish obligations.’
I had disliked both the tone and the intellectual confusion which characterized Jim Prior’s suggested manifesto passages on the general role of trade unions in the spring of 1978. But I objected still more strongly to Jim’s suggestions on the closed shop. Although Jim wanted us to say that we were ‘opposed to the closed shop in principle’, he wanted to add that ‘experience has shown that a number of managements and unions consider it a convenient method of conducting their negotiations’. The contrast in the same sentence between the requirements of ‘principle’ and ‘convenience’ struck me as particularly distasteful. There are, of course, many freedoms which it would be ‘convenient’ for powerful groups to suppress: but most of us reckon that ‘principle’ requires that those freedoms should be defended. Jim also wanted us to promise a ‘code of practice’ which would regulate the closed shop. If the code of practice was not honoured ‘it could result (as at present) in workers losing their livelihood without compensation or redress from either employer or union. In this event we would be prepared to legislate to protect their rights’.
Even in 1978 I had felt that we could do better than this. I had insisted that there must be a right of appeal to the courts if someone was unfairly excluded or expelled from their union. But in 1979 we went significantly further by dropping the formula about the closed shop being objectionable but inevitable and making a clear commitment to change the law. Existing employees and ‘those with personal conviction’ (a weasel phrase but still unavoidable in the circumstances) ‘must be adequately protected, and if they lose their jobs as a result of the closed shop they must be entitled to adequate compensation’. The manifesto also promised an enquiry into the coercive recruitment practices of the SLADE printing union.[58] Additionally we made it clear that the code of practice would have statutory force.
But the main change of substance related to picketing. In 1978 I had gone along with what Jim Prior wanted, which was not very much: ‘In consultation with all parties, we must find acceptable means to regulate the conduct of picketing. The strict arrangements adopted by the NUM in February 1974 could provide a sensible basis for this.’
There was no mention even of a code of practice, let alone legislation. It was also, in retrospect, not particularly wise to remind voters directly of the occasion when the previous Conservative Government had been broken by the miners’ strike. Thankfully, the shocking scenes of the Winter of Discontent ensured that this feeble approach was now out of touch with reality and people’s expectations. We now promised to make secondary picketing unlawful and to review trade union immunities. Moreover, there was the clear suggestion that we would be prepared to take further legislative steps if these proved necessary: ‘We shall also make any further changes that are necessary so that a citizen’s right to work and to go about his or her lawful business free from intimidation or obstruction is guaranteed.’
Two other new provisions were inserted between the 1978 and 1979 texts: one was the promise to ‘seek to conclude no-strike agreements in a few essential services’ (which in fact came to nothing), and the other to ‘ensure that unions bear their fair share of the cost of supporting those of their members who are on strike’, which we later implemented. Together with the limited proposals to ease the effects of the closed shop and equally modest proposals to finance postal ballots for union elections and other important issues, these constituted our package of trade union reform. I was very happy with it: indeed, it would turn out that I was far more confident not just in its practicality but also its popularity than some of my colleagues.
By contrast with my victory over the position on trade unions, I scored no better than a draw on incomes policy. On this question, of course, I could not place my usual reliance on Geoffrey Howe who had developed a fatal attraction for the so-called ‘forum’.
In 1978 I had argued that we should be clearer about our intention to break away from incomes policies, suggesting that instead of asserting (as proposed) that ‘the return to flexibility will take time, but it cannot be postponed for ever’, the last phrase should be replaced by ‘but it must start without delay’. And I did not even win this small point.
In 1979 the manifesto contained, indeed, a somewhat more explicit allusion to the ‘forum’, even mentioning the German model. But this I could live with. Of more practical importance, there was a strongly worded promise to avoid incomes policies in the private sector: ‘Pay bargaining in the private sector should be left to the companies and workers concerned. At the end of the day, no one should or can protect them from the results of the agreements they make.’
That left one particularly thorny aspect of incomes policy to be grasped in the public sector. The Prime Minister’s offer in January 1979 of new machinery to establish ‘comparability’ between the public and private sectors led to the setting up of a commission under Professor Hugh Clegg to take evidence and make recommendations which, of course, the Government committed itself to honour — after the election. Inevitably, when the election campaign began we were pressed to define our attitude. The question, in effect, was whether we would agree to pick up the bill (size unknown) for Labour’s efforts to buy off the public sector unions.
Our policy for public sector pay had always been based on the strict application of cash limits. Geoffrey Howe and I did our best to stick to that, but there was intense pressure from colleagues and the Party, frankly concerned not to lose vital votes. And so finally we yielded and pledged ourselves to implement Professor Clegg’s recommendations. It was an expensive but unavoidable commitment.[59]
In general, however, I was happy with the manifesto, both as regards contents and style. It contained a coherent philosophy and a limited number of clearly defined pledges. And it passed the most important final test, namely that at no stage in the campaign did we have to modify or retreat from it.
I was to fight three general elections as Leader of the Conservative Party; and each one was different. The 1983 campaign was perhaps the easiest; the 1987 campaign was certainly the most emotionally fraught; but the general election of 1979 was the most challenging both for me and the Party. I never had any illusion that if we lost or even if we failed to win an overall majority I would be given another chance. I accepted this fact and was even prepared to speak about it openly. Personally, I had little doubt that it was also a watershed for the Conservative Party and for Britain.
Unlike some Conservatives, I did not believe that the taming of the Left of the Labour Party would prove anything other than temporary if Labour won an overall majority. The Left knew what it wanted and was prepared to bide its time so as to obtain it. I never put any faith in the resolve or abilities of the ‘centre’. I agreed with Keith Joseph that the ‘centre’ ground of politics had moved steadily leftwards, and I attributed this principally to the lack of moral courage of those who prided themselves upon being ‘moderates’. Time and again these people had been prepared to compromise and adjust their positions; and, as a result, socialism had continued its onward march through our institutions. This march, I believed, had more or less reached its point of no return. So many people and so many vested interests were by now significantly dependent on the state — for employment in the public sector, for Social Security benefits, for health care, education and housing — that economic freedom had begun to pose an almost unacceptable risk to their living standards. And, when that finally happened, political freedom — for example the freedom to join or not to join a union or the freedom to have controversial views and still be entitled to teach in a state school or work in a government department — would be the next victim. Moreover, the advance of communism abroad and the retreat of the West before it was helping to sap the morale of those who wished to oppose collectivism at home.
The 1979 campaign was also different in a number of other ways. It was the first time that the Conservative Party had ever fought so clearly on the theme that it was ‘time for a change’. Implicit in this approach was that Britain had been in retreat for much more than the years since 1974; the 1970–74 Conservative Government, however bravely it had started out, had been part of that retreat. I therefore believed that we should be bold in explaining precisely what had gone wrong and why radical action was required to put it right. I was soon to be aware, however, that this was not how Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office in general saw things. Their belief was that we should at all costs avoid ‘gaffes’, which meant in practice almost anything controversial — in particular, attacks on trade union power — in the belief that the Labour Party was already sufficiently discredited to lose the election. In fact, with a few concessions, I insisted on doing it my way. But this led to tensions.
It also led to an odd reversal of roles between Government and Opposition. From the very beginning of their campaign, Labour more or less ignored their own manifesto — with the exception of vote-buying promises like free television licences for pensioners — and offered only limited excuses for their record. Instead, they concentrated on attacking real and alleged Conservative policies. Jim Callaghan largely discarded his image of avuncular bonhomie and led an extremely effective but wholly negative campaign. This was carried on at three levels. First, the media were fed with a daily diet of scare stories — ranging from the doubling of Value Added Tax to large cuts in the National Health Service — which would allegedly occur if we were elected. Secondly, doubt was cast on the credibility of our promises, particularly the pledge to cut income tax. Thirdly, there was an attempt to portray me as a dangerous right-wing ideologue, unsuited to the complex and demanding tasks of the premiership. Labour’s strategy presented us with a fundamental dilemma. Should we reply to their attacks? Or should we stick to our own message and our own ground? We only ever partly solved this dilemma.
ORGANIZING THE CAMPAIGN
The fact that we had been expecting an election for so long before it was actually called had given us plenty of time to make preparations. For the first time, the Party hired a campaign bus which was fitted up as a mobile office in which we would travel from one campaign stop to another. In overall charge on the bus was David Wolfson — who stood in for John Stanley after John fell down the steps in Bristol on our first day out, slipped a disc and was rushed off to hospital where he spent the whole campaign. Derek Howe was my Press Officer on the ‘battle bus’, while David Boddy was the second Press Officer travelling with the press in a second bus. Roger Boaden was responsible for ensuring that we knew where we were going and what to do when we got there — a taxing task on occasions. My old friend and now Deputy Chairman of the Party, Janet (Lady) Young, travelled with us to keep in touch with the Chairman’s office. Michael Dobbs, the future author of lurid tales of political skulduggery, was given the role of travelling librarian, accompanied by a bulging collection of sources for facts and figures I might need in answer to questions at my whistle-stops. Harvey Thomas travelled ahead of us, making the arrangements for my speeches and preparing the rallies. And three long-suffering secretaries — Tessa Jardine Paterson, Caroline Stephens and Sally James — coped with the almost impossible task of typing my speech drafts as the bus wound and bumped its way over country roads.
The lack of word processors, faxes or photocopiers made life much more complicated than it would be in later elections. We did have a radio telephone, but it was not really satisfactory; for example, on one occasion the driver reversed the bus and knocked the aerial off. So whenever we arrived at a Conservative office there would be a mad rush to telephone through changes to speech texts to Conservative Central Office, while someone else on another line would receive an account of the day’s events in London.
To allow me to cover more ground, I spent several nights away from London on tour. But I found this unsatisfactory and did not repeat it in future campaigns. It is easy to get — or at least feel — out of touch in an election campaign when you are away from London; it is also possible for other people to substitute their judgement for yours on crucial matters. Neither is acceptable in a life or death election. Usually, however, I would return late in the evening to Flood Street where secretaries would come in to serve up hot meals for me and my speech-writing team — John Hoskyns, Peter Utley, Hugh Thomas, Alfred Sherman and sometimes Ronnie Millar. Frozen cooked foods were our staple diet on weekdays. At the weekends we sampled the modestly exotic flavours of Duck à l’Orange and Sole Véronique. While we were speech-writing, Denis would be upstairs glued to the television, listening to reports on the campaign. I knew that Labour politicians were implanting some particularly hostile barb when I heard Denis yelling ‘Rubbish!’ — or worse.
It is always difficult to coordinate the different aspects of an election campaign. The best-laid plans unravel and in no time at all the morning press conferences are concentrating on one message, the Party Leader’s speeches a second, Shadow ministers a third, and briefing for candidates something else again. In spite of the serious difference I had with Peter Thorneycroft over tactics, Peter and the team which worked with him were extremely capable: moreover their abilities complemented one another. Peter himself stayed in London throughout the campaign, chairing a tactical committee at Central Office which at times seemed to be in almost permanent session. He was always shrewd and massively authoritative. Alistair McAlpine’s extraordinary abilities as a fund raiser ensured that the Party was never prevented from taking the initiatives we wanted by lack of cash. Significantly, there had been a large increase in the smaller subscriptions from business. This reflected the fact that businessmen understood that the Conservative Party was again the party of free enterprise: it also meant that we were not dependent on just a few large donors. Tony Garner, always cheerful, optimistic and dapper, was the Chief Agent in charge of the campaign organization in the country. Gordon Reece, now back at Central Office as Director of Publicity, had made us all face up to the rigorous demands of the media — emphasizing the importance of the tabloid newspapers and of having our best film coverage and press releases available in good time for the early evening news. By now, I had learned a lot from Gordon about what to do (and not to do) to come over properly on the television screen. At least there was not much reason to worry about possible colour clashes. Conservative campaigning has its own version of Henry Ford’s dictum: you can wear any colour you like as long as it’s blue. And for most of the time in my case it was navy blue.
A huge amount of information flows in and out of Conservative Central Office at election time: what comes in has to be analysed for significance and what goes out has to be checked for accuracy. Those responsible are some of the unsung heroes of the political battle. Keith Britto, Central Office’s number-cruncher and opinion poll expert, would struggle manfully with the contradictory psephological material with which we were deluged during the campaign. While Chris Patten was fighting a seat in Bath, Adam Ridley kept the Research Department working at fever pitch. Michael Portillo, from CRD, briefed me for my morning press conferences — a task in which he demonstrated not just his grasp of facts, figures and arguments, but also an instinctive shrewdness in suggesting their deployment. One of my impressions of the campaign was that Michael was a young man who would — and deserved to — go far.
Two important tactical questions had to be addressed before the campaign got under way. The first was whether I should agree to take part in televised debates with Jim Callaghan. Discussions had been going on with the broadcasters since the summer of 1978 when the BBC (on behalf of both networks) had approached my office and the Prime Minister’s simultaneously. Attempts to arrange such debates in previous elections had broken down because of the difficulty of involving the minor parties, which insisted on a presence. Neither Labour nor we would accept that. But this time — July 1978 — the broadcasters were prepared to go ahead with a two-party format regardless of what the minor parties thought. Accordingly we gave the proposal serious consideration, though at the time we did not know the Prime Minister’s position. No final decision was taken because the election expected that autumn did not materialize, but influenced by Peter Thorneycroft and Gordon Reece — who were both strongly opposed — I was inclined to say no.
Shortly before the actual campaign began, ITV revived the idea, proposing two debates on successive Sundays at the end of the campaign with Brian Walden as chairman. This time I was inclined to accept. It was not just that I had always been a natural debater; I believed that Jim Callaghan was greatly overrated and I wanted the chance to expose that fact. He had built his career on giving the trade unions whatever they wanted. So I felt that he was to blame, in a uniquely personal way, for the scenes of the winter of 1978/79. Chris Patten also favoured my taking on the Prime Minister. Moreover, there was a new factor in the situation: the Prime Minister publicly accepted the ITV proposal. And I did not like the idea of beginning an election campaign on a defensive note by refusing to debate.
There were, however, still powerful arguments on the other side which persuaded Gordon Reece, Peter Thorneycroft and Willie Whitelaw to argue against. When the possibility had first been mooted, we were neck-and-neck with the Labour Party in the opinion polls. But by the time the decision had to be made we had a substantial lead of probably 10 per cent. This meant that we might hope to win without the risks of a televised confrontation. And those risks were certainly large. I might make a mistake which it would be hard to obliterate. Jim Callaghan was usually a polished performer on television and he would certainly have no hesitation in using his authority and experience to patronize me. The fact that in the early tentative discussions we learned that he would wish to have the first debate on foreign affairs, where he would be able to deploy all those strengths, caused me to reconsider my earlier enthusiasm.
Moreover, the Liberals were to be offered a quid pro quo: a long interview with David Steel on the Friday before polling day. My advisers and I were in full agreement that the most serious danger to us would be a last-minute upsurge of Liberal support — all the easier to imagine since they had just taken the Liverpool Edgehill seat from Labour at a by-election and were busily seeking, as Liberals always do, to exaggerate the ‘momentum’ this had given them. I had no wish to give the Liberal Leader any more political exposure than necessary.
So I was persuaded to turn down the invitation to debate. It was not worth the risks. In any case, as I wrote in my published reply to ITV’s invitation: ‘Personally, I believe that issues and policies decide elections, not personalities. We should stick to that approach. We are not electing a president, we are choosing a government.’ It was the right decision and the criticism it provoked in some quarters quickly dissipated.
The other tactical question concerned the morning press conferences. Gordon Reece would have liked to dispense with these altogether. In terms of media impact, he was right. Very rarely did anything which happened at the press conference — other perhaps than egregious slip-ups, which were thankfully absent during this campaign — make its way into the day’s main news. But the morning press conference does provide the press with opportunities to ask awkward questions, and this in turn provides an opportunity for politicians to show what they are made of. The morning press conferences are therefore an opportunity to win the respect of seasoned journalists whose judgement will influence the coverage they give throughout the campaign.
A further complication on this occasion was that neither we nor the Labour Party were prepared to surrender the convenient 9.30 a.m. slot to the other. Consequently, our press conference in Central Office was held at the same time as Labour’s in Transport House across the square. A posse of journalists would arrive in the already overcrowded and overheated Central Office conference room to ask questions on the basis of allegations and attacks made by Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey or Shirley Williams at the beginning of the Labour press conference. A final element of chaos was contributed by the new ‘ENG’ (‘electronic news-gathering’) cameras. Though ridiculously unwieldy by present-day standards, they greatly increased the flexibility and extent of television coverage. But the number of cameramen also increased. And the shoulder-held television cameras with their trailing cables both at Central Office and at locations along the route of my tour were a constant threat to life and limb.
For some reason, the Conservative Party always starts campaigning later and builds up more slowly than the Labour Party. Labour on this occasion, however, had an even freer run than usual between the Dissolution and the launch of our manifesto on Wednesday 11 April — largely because the political colleagues to whom I left the public appearances and statements were not very effective. This was, indeed, a difficulty throughout the campaign. With the exception of Michael Heseltine, always relishing a headline, they seemed to behave more like ministers-in-waiting than politicians — which meant, of course, that they risked waiting a good deal longer than they expected. It also ensured that even more of the focus was on me, which even I felt was a mixed blessing. In all campaigns there should ideally be a balance of tones and personalities.
Labour used this period to some effect in order to begin attacking policies which we had not yet published. But the trade union leaders managed, before they were muzzled by Labour Party managers, to play into our hands by adopting tones reminiscent of the Winter of Discontent. Sid Weighell, leader of the National Union of Railwaymen, threatened that with free collective bargaining and a Conservative Government, he would ‘say to the lads, come on, get your snouts into the trough’. Bill Keays, leader of the print union SOGAT, promised ‘confrontation’ if the country was ‘foolish enough to elect the Tory Party’. David Basnett, leader of the General and Municipal Workers, also predicted industrial conflict. It was the same old tune which had played well for Labour in the past, but which was out of harmony with what voters were now prepared to tolerate.
Nor had I been entirely silent. On Thursday 5 April I had addressed the candidates (including Conservative MPs standing for re-election) at a meeting at Central Hall, Westminster. This was not my — or probably anyone else’s — favourite place for a public meeting, since it was then rather drab and characterless. There was a special difficulty this year because the candidates expected to hear from me the main themes of a manifesto which was still unpublished. I had to give them some idea of what was coming without revealing the details. So I concentrated heavily on income tax cuts to give greater incentives for wealth-creation and on the need for trade union reform. An audience composed entirely of speakers is not the easiest to address. But their enthusiasm confirmed my instinct that we had chosen the right battleground.
THE FIRST WEEK — D–21 to D–14
On Wednesday 11 April the manifesto itself was launched at the first Conservative press conference which I chaired, joined by Willie Whitelaw, Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, Peter Carrington, Jim Prior, Humphrey Atkins, Peter Thorneycroft and Angus Maude. The manifesto’s tone was modest and practical and Chris Patten and Angus Maude had dressed our ideas in language which was simple and jargon-free.[60]
It went down well in the following day’s press. But the heat at the hugely overcrowded press conference itself was almost unbearable. And my perspiring male colleagues clad in their thick worsted suits suffered worse than I did.
The following day was Maundy Thursday. Because Easter fell during the campaign, four days of electioneering were lost. So my first day of serious campaigning was on Monday 16 April — what in the election agents’ jargon was D–17. (‘D-day’ of course was polling day itself.) We had decided to begin in Wales. Having flown down from Gatwick, I met the election battle bus at Swansea Airport, visited an NHS hospital and went on to the local Conservative Club, where I was to give regional television and radio interviews. I was aware of a fair amount of background noise at the club. But I only learned afterwards that a huge row, which finished up with fisticuffs, had arisen when the club authorities had tried to keep women reporters out of those rooms reserved for male members only.
Then I went on to Cardiff for the first of the major rallies of the campaign. It was an appropriate place to start. This was very much the heart of enemy territory since Mr Callaghan’s constituency was Cardiff South East. So it was a good thing that Cardiff City Hall had a pleasant feel, the right acoustics and an enthusiastic audience. I also had an extremely powerful speech to deliver. It was an uncompromising statement of how socialism had debilitated Britain and of the need for a fundamental change of direction — though not towards some experiment with Utopia but rather back to principles from which we had mistakenly departed.
…In politics, I’ve learned something you in Wales are born knowing: if you’ve got a message, preach it. I am a conviction politician. The Old Testament prophets didn’t merely say: ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said: ‘This is my faith and vision. This is what I passionately believe. If you believe it too, then come with me.’ Tonight I say to you just that. Away with the recent bleak and dismal past. Away with defeatism. Under the twin banners, choice and freedom, a new and exciting future beckons the British people.
The audience loved it and so did I. But my cunning adversary, Jim Callaghan, successfully used it to awaken all of the old fears in the Tory Party establishment about the unnerving figure leading them in an uncomfortable, unfamiliar direction. The Prime Minister subsequently claimed that in my speech I had moved the Conservative Party to the right and that this opened the centre ground for him. Appropriately enough, the main speaker at the Conservative press conference that morning was Reg Prentice, former Labour Cabinet minister and now Conservative Party candidate, who with other ‘converts’ from socialism was living proof that it was Labour which had shifted leftwards. But in any case I agreed with Keith Joseph that it was the ‘common ground’, not the ‘middle ground’, on which we must stake our case. From now on a gap opened up between the way in which Central Office wished to campaign and the direction I insisted on taking.
Such problems were not, however, immediately evident to me. Tuesday morning’s newspapers carried a report of an NOP poll suggesting that our lead was just 6 per cent, but compared with earlier NOP polls it did not suggest any narrowing of the gap. (Throughout the campaign the opinion polls were to give very different pictures of the balance of party support, ranging from the most exiguous of Tory leads — in one case a slight Labour lead — to an improbably overwhelming Tory landslide.) I felt it was an effective day’s campaigning, beginning in Bristol where I visited the Kleeneze brush factory to use every possible photo-opportunity to demonstrate my intention of ‘sweeping away the cobwebs’, ‘applying a new broom’ etc.
Also in Bristol I was on the receiving end of the Election Gall programme hosted by Robin Day. There is always an element of risk on these occasions. A well-briefed caller can expose gaps in a politician’s understanding which most political opponents never could. Moreover, judging the correct reaction is always more difficult when you cannot see the person to whom you are talking over the telephone. But I felt that this Election Call went particularly well, because the points raised with me were on the precise questions to which we had the most convincing answers — the need for tax cuts, controlling inflation, cutting back on government borrowing and encouraging small businesses. Of course, there were critical points too. I always felt that the key to dealing with these was to admit what had gone wrong and say clearly why a future Conservative Government would put it right. So on this occasion I agreed that the previous Conservative Government was indeed responsible for an increase in bureaucracy in the health service, and said how we were going to reverse it.
On the way back from Bristol, taking the new Intercity 125 high-speed train, I stopped off in West Country constituencies and had my photo taken with the candidates, including Chris Patten on the station platform at Bath. The day finished with my addressing a meeting at Gravesend. Since Central Office was telling me that our support among pensioners was shaky I wrote out a press release reminding voters of the record of Conservative Governments on this point.
The following day (Wednesday 18 April), after the morning press conference, I set off to campaign in East Anglia and the East Midlands. First stop was my bid for the agricultural vote. This consisted of a discussion of cattle feed with a friendly farmer, carefully navigating my way across a field full of cows (I had forgotten my boots) and then cradling a calf in my arms for the benefit of the cameras and, I hoped, the wider public. I had no experience with calves and I was not certain of the right technique. With cameramen from five continents present, Denis, ever realistic, warned that ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll have a dead calf on our hands.’ But it survived my attentions and those of the photographers. Fortunately, perhaps, the calf was not able to give an interview.
THE SECOND WEEK — D–14 to D–7
By now (Thursday 19 April) much agonizing had taken place back in London about the implications of my Cardiff speech for the ‘positioning’ of the Party and our campaign. Peter Thorneycroft had persuaded himself that we had made a strategic error which should not be repeated. And since nothing that Central Office or my colleagues did seemed to get much publicity, he decided to involve himself in the drafting of my speeches. Oblivious to all this, I spent that Thursday morning visiting a Leicester textile factory, where I put my childhood training to good effect by stitching overall pockets amid a chaotic crowd of journalists and an astonished workforce.
It was, however, just before the bus arrived at the Cadbury factory in Bournville that I learned that Peter Thorneycroft was insisting that a strong passage on trade unions, drafted by Paul Johnson, one of Britain’s leading journalists, an historian and a convert from socialism, should be removed from that evening’s speech in Birmingham — the second major rally of the campaign. Peter thought it too provocative. He had also apparently intervened to stop Keith Joseph speaking on the same subject. I did not agree with Peter’s assessment. But being away from London I felt insufficiently sure of my judgement to substitute it for his. So I angrily tore out the relevant pages of my draft speech and inserted some more innocuous passages. I contented myself with the knowledge that the last section of the speech, with which I had been helped by Peter Carrington, contained some extremely strong stuff on defence and foreign affairs, deliberately adopting the tone and some of the language of my earlier Kensington Town Hall speech.
But I was not in the best of humour as our coach drew up in front of the factory. I had specifically said that I did not want a formal reception committee, but rather to go straight in and talk to individual managers and workers. Now I saw two long lines of people in white hats and coats. I could not for the moment see the camera crews but I had no doubt that they were waiting somewhere to take suitable shots of this ludicrous scene. I stayed on the bus for a minute or two to regain my cool. It was only then that I realized that I knew the faces of what I had assumed to be the factory staff. It was the pressmen who, doubtless informed of my earlier instructions, had dressed up in white overalls as a joke. As I left the bus they held up their cameras as a kind of arch beneath which I entered the factory. They were so carried away with their joke that they forgot to take any photographs; but they helped me see the funny side of campaigning, for which I suspect we were all grateful.
Having sewn pockets in the morning, I suppose it was only natural that I should find myself sorting chocolates in the afternoon. It was a tricky, demanding task — the sort which gives the lie to the loosely-used expression ‘unskilled work’. It was many years since I myself had worked in a factory, but I saw that some traditions do not change. One girl who was shortly getting married had all her wedding presents laid out on a table close to the production line for her friends to see. After my chocolate-packing was over, we all discussed them at rather greater length than my programme allowed. In the end I was bustled away, for we had to get to the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. As a chocolate addict, I never thought I would lose my appetite for them. But somehow that clinging smell of vanilla put me off them for the rest of the campaign.
The Birmingham speech, for all the trouble its preparation had caused, was a great success — not just the passages on East-West relations and the communist threat, but also those on law and order, on which I pledged to ‘place a barrier of steel’ against the socialist path to lawlessness. Afterwards we drove back to London where the following day’s (Friday 20 April) constituency visits would take place.
Saturday 21 April was a day of regular campaigning which began at a factory producing highly sophisticated electrical components in Milton Keynes. I was excited by the technology, about which I had been thoroughly briefed, and soon found myself giving a detailed exposition of it to a group of slightly bemused pressmen. I was then wired up and tested on a heart monitoring machine. With all the dials pointing in the right direction I was shown to be in good working order: ‘Solid as a rock,’ as I remarked — something which also reflected my judgement about how our campaign as a whole was going. For one of the oddest characteristics of the 1979 general election campaign was the wide and growing difference of perceptions between those of us who were out in the field and those who were back at the centre. Of course, politicians, like everyone else, are susceptible to self-delusion. But, far more than in 1983 and 1987 when security considerations loomed so large, I was confident that I did have a real sense of what the electorate felt and that their hearts were with us. I was also convinced that this change had come about largely because of the events of the winter of 1978/79 and that therefore undue caution on the issue of trade union power was bad tactics.
But it was clear from discussion at the strategy meeting I held in Flood Street on Sunday 22 April that not everyone saw matters this way. Although the opinion polls were still varied — one showing a 20 per cent and another a 5.5 per cent Conservative lead — there had not been much movement during the campaign. Peter Thorneycroft’s view was that we should more or less carry on as we were. As he put it in a paper for that Sunday’s meeting: ‘We should not embark on any high-risk initiatives. We are in the lead.’ This seemed to me fair enough as far as it went. But it begged two questions. First, had we not gained our lead in the first place by taking some quite high-risk initiatives, such as my interventions in the Winter of Discontent? Secondly, what now constituted a ‘high risk’? Measures to curb union power? Or the absence of them? In any case, one of the greatest dangers in a campaign where you have started out with a significant lead is complacency. Exciting the voters, as long as it is not on some issue on which they disagree with you, is an indispensable part of winning elections.
My campaigning that week would take me to the North of England, before going on to Scotland. After the Monday morning press conference, I flew to Newcastle where the photo-opportunity was at a tea factory. Tasting the sludgy concoctions, undiluted and unmasked by milk and sugar, had something of the same effect on my tea drinking as did the Bournville factory on my consumption of chocolates.
Outside the factory a crowd had gathered, among which was a large, formidable woman who was pouring out a torrent of abuse in my direction. The police advised me to stay away. But I felt that if she had something to say she had better do so to my face rather than my back, and so I walked over to talk to her. I took her arm and told her quietly just to say what was wrong. Her manner changed completely. She had the usual grumbles and worries. But the real cause of her anger was a conviction that politicians were just not people who listened. I tried to answer as best I could and we parted amicably. As I walked away I heard her unmistakable tones telling a friend: ‘I told you she wasn’t half so bad.’ My experience of campaigning over the years is that there are very few irredeemably hostile electors. It is one of the tragedies of the terrorist threat that politicians nowadays have so few opportunities to convince themselves of that fact.
Tuesday, too, was very much a traditional-style campaigning day, with four walkabouts, including a visit to the Sowerby candidate, Donald Thompson’s butcher’s shop, and to a supermarket — after which the usual piles of purchases were taken back on the battle bus. On the steps of the Conservative Party offices in Halifax I was photographed in the drizzle holding up two shopping bags — a blue bag which contained the food which could have been bought for £1 in 1974 and a half-filled red bag which contained all that £1 would buy in Labour Britain in 1979. And if this was better politics than economics it was no worse for that. Among the no-nonsense Yorkshire people it went down well.
Back in London that evening I was interviewed by Denis Tuohy for TV Eye. This was the most hostile interview of the campaign. But it allowed me to give a vigorous defence of our proposals for trade union reform. And on this, whatever Central Office might think, I was not going to backtrack. I reaffirmed my determination to deal with the trade union militants. I also pointed out just what was implied by the suggestion that a Conservative Government would be faced with an all-out battle with the trade unions.
Let’s come to the nub of the matter. What you are saying is that the trade union leaders are saying that the whole of this general election is a hollow mockery and a sham. If you are right, and that is what they are saying, then I am going to ask for the biggest majority any country has ever given any government, and I am going to ask for the biggest majority from the twelve million members of trade unions. I don’t think you are right.
I was especially severe with the Labour Party’s suggestion that discussion with the trade unions, the so-called ‘Concordat’, was a better way of dealing with union power than were changes in the law.
You know, it would have been very, very strange if Lord Shaftesbury, the great Tory reformer, looking at conditions which he saw in the mills and the factories decades ago, had said: I’ll do it by a voluntary concordat with the mill owners. Do you think he would have got it? Of course he wouldn’t. He said: There are some things which we must do by law.
After the Wednesday 25 April morning press conference and radio interviews I had lunch at Central Office before flying to Edinburgh in the afternoon. I was beginning to become tired of the standard speech I made to audiences around the country, which drew heavily on the texts prepared for Cardiff and Birmingham with extra pieces slotted in that would go out as press releases. As a result, I performed inadvisably radical surgery on the material I took with me to Scotland. Just minutes before I was due to speak, I was on my knees in the Caledonian Hotel applying scissors and Sellotape to a speech which spread from one wall to the other and back again. Tessa Jardine Paterson frantically typed up each page of the speech, which was handed out, more or less as I delivered it, at Leith Town Hall. At least it was fresh — even to me. At the end I inserted one of my favourite quotations from Kipling:
So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,
Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And everyone smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own![61]
It was a marvellous audience, and from the first few cheers my spirits lifted and I gave of my best.
We went on to the hotel at Glasgow Airport to have a late supper and then turn in before another day of Scottish campaigning. I was buoyed up with that special excitement which comes of knowing you have given a good speech. Although the opinion polls suggested that Labour might be closing on us, the gap was still a healthy one and my instincts were that we were winning the argument. Labour’s campaign had a distinctly tired feel about it. They reiterated so frequently the theme that Tory policies could not work, or would work only at the cost of draconian cuts in public services, that they slipped imperceptibly into arguing that nothing could work, and that Britain’s problems were in essence insoluble. This put Labour in conflict with the people’s basic instinct that improvement is possible and ought to be pursued. We represented that instinct — indeed Labour was giving us a monopoly on it. I felt that things were going well.
Denis, Carol and Ronnie Millar were with me at the hotel and we exchanged gossip and jokes. Janet Young was also travelling with us and had slipped out during the meal. She now returned with a serious expression to tell me that Peter Thorneycroft — or ‘the Chairman’ as she insisted on calling him — felt that things were not too good politically and that Ted Heath should appear on the next Party Election Broadcast.
I exploded. It was about as clear a demonstration of lack of confidence in me as could be imagined. If Peter Thorneycroft and Central Office had not yet understood that what we were fighting for was a reversal not just of the Wilson-Callaghan approach but of the Heath Government’s approach they had understood nothing. I told Janet Young that if she and Peter thought that then I might as well pack up. Ted had lost three elections out of four and had nothing to say about an election fought on this kind of manifesto. To invite him to deliver a Party Political for us was tantamount to accepting defeat for the kind of policies I was advancing.
It was perhaps unfair of me to blame Janet in part for conveying Peter’s message. But this was the closest I came in the campaign to being really upset. I told her that I would not even hear of it. She conveyed a doubtless censored version of my response to ‘the Chairman’ and, still seething, I went to bed.
THE THIRD WEEK — D-7 to D-Day
Thursday morning’s Glasgow press conference was an unremarkable affair. The journalists did not seem to have much to say for themselves and I still felt out of sorts. Later in the morning I had a rather difficult interview with a Scottish television interviewer who was believed to be a Conservative supporter and, as sometimes happens, wished to prove the opposite by being particularly hostile. But from then on the day looked up. We visited a creamery in Aberdeen where I sampled some of the finest butter I have ever tasted — and was astonished to learn that it was all being produced not for consumption but to go into EEC intervention storage. It was my first meeting with the butter mountain.
Then it was on to the harbour at Buckie and a fish factory, where the irrepressibly high spirits and good humour of the people worked wonders on me. I addressed an early-evening meeting at Elgin Town Hall and then the coach drove us on to Lossiemouth to board the plane which would take us back to London. All along the way to Lossiemouth Airport the road was lined with people waving and we had to keep stopping to receive flowers and presents. Here was more proof that we were among friends.
It can well be imagined that there was some unseasonal frost in the April air when I came for my briefing at Central Office before the Friday morning press conference. I was also rather too sharp with a journalist at it on the subject of the impact of technology on employment. Then a television interviewer, whom I had been told would be sympathetic, turned out to be very much the opposite. It was that point in an election campaign when everybody’s nerves have become frayed with tiredness. And the pressure was still building. I knew I had further important media interviews, the last PEB to record and big speeches at Bolton and the final Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Moreover, the opinion polls now seemed to suggest that our lead was being eroded. The Central Office view was that it had fallen from about 10 per cent to about 6 per cent. Unfortunately, there was no reason to give any more credence to the internal Party opinion polling — which was on the optimistic side of the median — than to other polls. I had to cancel my visit to the Fulham constituency that afternoon in order to work on the PEB text and the CTU speech. But someone told the press that the real cause was that my voice was failing, which was used to paint an exaggerated picture of a ‘battle-worn Maggie’ trying to stop the election slipping away. In fact, my voice was in remarkably good order — but I now had to risk real strain by raising it so as to convince interviewers and audiences that my larynx was alive and well.
Saturday morning’s Daily Express carried a MORI poll showing our lead down to just 3 per cent. There was evidence of a mild case of the jitters affecting Conservative Central Office. Peter Thorneycroft wrote to candidates saying: ‘Whatever happens, I ask for no complacency and no despair.’ It was not a very encouraging message and perhaps indicated all too accurately the feeling of its author and his advisers that the way to win elections was by doing nothing wrong rather than by doing something right. For myself, I publicly shrugged off the polls, noting that: ‘Always as you get up to an election the lead narrows.’ In fact, I had decided that by far the best course now was to shut the opinion polls out of my mind and put every ounce of remaining energy into the decisive final days of the campaign. I had a good morning of campaigning in London, including my own Finchley constituency, returning home to Flood Street in the afternoon for discussion of the Election Broadcast.
Sunday 29 April would be crucial. The opinion polls were all over the place. I ignored them. I had my hair done in the morning and then after lunch was driven to the Wembley Conference Centre for the Conservative Trade Unionists’ rally. Harvey Thomas, drawing on his experience of Billy Graham’s evangelical rallies, had pulled out every stop. A galaxy of actors and comedians livened up the proceedings. Ignoring previous instructions from perhaps over-serious Party officials concerned about the dignity of ‘the next Prime Minister’, Harvey played the campaign song ‘Hello Maggie’ when I entered. And dignity certainly went by the board as everyone joined in. I had never known anything quite like it — though compared with Harvey’s extravaganzas of future years this came to seem quite tame.
The speech itself was short and sharp. And the reception was terrific. Then I went on to Saatchi & Saatchi to record the final Election Broadcast. From four o’clock in the afternoon Gordon, Ronnie, Tim and I worked and reworked the text. Then there was an apparently endless succession of ‘takes’, each of which — until the final one — seemed not quite right to at least one of us. At last, well after midnight, we were satisfied.
The main event of my campaign on Monday was the Granada 500 programme, when each of the three party leaders was questioned by an audience from what was deemed to be the most representative seat in the country, Bolton East. (For many years Bolton East had been won by the party which formed the next government, but in 1979, dazzled perhaps by national attention, the electors got it wrong.) I enjoyed these occasions, feeling more at ease than when interviewed on a one-to-one basis. Somehow the fact that these were ‘real’ people with real worries helped me to relax. Judging by the ‘clapometer’ reading I won the contest.
But the following (Tuesday) morning there was a further opinion poll by NOP which showed Labour 0.7 per cent ahead. There was only one real question on people’s lips at that morning’s press conference: how would I react to the poll? I just brushed it aside, saying that I hoped it would stir Conservative Party supporters to go out and vote on the day. Not only did this line serve me at a difficult moment: I suspect it was a correct judgement. For if anything really threatened our victory it was complacency, and from this moment there was no chance of that. I went on to campaign in the North-West, finishing up, of course, by addressing a rally in Bolton, where the comedian Ken Dodd appeared on stage with a blue feather-duster to greet me. After Ken Dodd’s message from Knotty Ash — which he made sound a pretty true blue constituency — any speech would have seemed over-serious. But there was only one real message for this stage of the campaign, which was that those who wished to throw the Labour Party out of government must not fritter their votes away on minor parties, but rather vote Conservative.
Moreover, the same message had to be repeated insistently until polling day. It was my theme at the final press conference on Wednesday (2 May). I returned to it as I went around the London constituencies, finishing up at the Woodhouse School in Finchley — where I had to push my way through protesting feminists chanting: ‘We want women’s rights not a right-wing woman.’ As I drove back to Flood Street I felt the tiredness flow over me. I had had my chance and had taken it. It was oddly satisfying to know that whatever happened now was out of my hands. For the first time in many nights Denis and I had a full six hours’ sleep.
I woke on election day to learn from the radio news that all of that morning’s opinion polls showed the Conservatives with a lead ranging from 2 per cent to 8 per cent. Denis and I went out to vote at 9 o’clock in Chelsea before driving on to Finchley, where, as was my wont, I toured the committee rooms followed by photographers. I went back to Flood Street for a light supper and to try to have some rest before what I knew would be a long evening. At the Finchley count in Barnet Town Hall, where I arrived shortly after midnight, I kept out of the way in a side room, equipped with a television and supplied with coffee and sandwiches, where I could listen to the results as they came in. Roger Boaden was with me, supplementing the television reports with early information telephoned through from Central Office. I kept a running tally, referring to the detailed briefing which Keith Britto had prepared for me. The first few results suggested that we had won, though among them was the upsetting news that Teddy Taylor had lost Glasgow Cathcart. The projections of our majority steadily began to mount. Local councillors, my Constituency Chairman and his wife, my agent and others came in and out looking more and more cheerful. But I deliberately suppressed any inclinations to premature euphoria: calculation, superstition and above all the knowledge that it is easiest to cope with bad news when you are not expecting good entered into this. In the end, however, not even I could remain non-committal. It was clear to everyone by the time I went out to hear the results of my own count that we would form the next Government.
The events of the early hours of Friday — the welcoming clamour of supporters at the count, the visit to Central Office, the warmth and relief of brief relaxation with my family — are no more than blurred recollections. That afternoon’s visit to Buckingham Palace to receive authority to form a government and my subsequent arrival at Downing Street I have described elsewhere.[62]
The scale of the victory took everyone — or almost everyone — by surprise. It was not just that we had won an election: we had also won a new kind of mandate for change. As the psephologists and commentators mulled over the detailed results, the pattern of our success bore this out. We had won a majority of forty-three seats over all other parties. The 5.6 per cent national swing from Labour to the Conservatives was the largest achieved by either — and our 7 per cent lead over Labour was also the largest — since 1945.
Equally significant, the biggest swing to us was among the skilled workers; and over a third of that lead had apparently built up during the campaign. These were precisely the people we had to win over from their often lifelong socialist allegiances. They were confronted in a particularly acute form by the fundamental dilemma which faced Britain as a whole: whether to accept an ever greater role for government in the life of the nation, or to break free in a new direction. For these people, above all, it was a severely practical matter of choosing whether to rely on the comforting security of state provision or to make the sacrifices required to win a better life for themselves and their families. They had now decided to take the risk (for it was a risk) of voting for what I offered — for what in a certain sense I knew that I now personified. I would always try to keep faith with them.
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