Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (21 page)

By the middle of 1972, the Heath government was losing control of the national agenda. It reversed its previous policies of not bailing out ‘lame ducks’ such as the commercially doomed Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. The public spending spree of industrial subsidies was designed to halt unemployment, but it unleashed the forces of inflation and union militancy.

Another U-turn took place when the government backed down from its stand against prices and incomes policies. Looming over all other considerations was the threat and then the certainty of a strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The Industrial Relations Act, which had come into law in 1971, was being openly defied. It collapsed in a black pantomime of dock strikes, newspaper strikes, interventions by the Official Solicitor and confusing rulings by the new National Industrial Relations Court. The last straws were a ballot by the NUM showing an 81 per cent majority for a strike; the establishing of a three-day week to conserve fuel supplies; and the calling of a general election on 28 February 1974.

In later years, Margaret Thatcher did her best to distance herself from the mistakes of the Heath government, which preceded this chaos. At the time, not a squeak of protest emanated from her in cabinet or in discussions with her colleagues on economic policy. She was a loyal Heathite.

So subservient was she to the views of the Prime Minister that in December 1973 he considered promoting her to the post of Minister for Europe.
³⁷
Her only reported speeches on this issue, delivered in her constituency, never mentioned the arguments about loss of British sovereignty that were causing concern to Conservative opponents of entry such as Enoch Powell, Hugh Fraser, John Biffen
or Teddy Taylor. By contrast, the Margaret Thatcher of the 1970s displayed some insouciance about the consequences of joining the EEC. ‘I think we have a tendency in this country to be slightly isolationist’, she told a Finchley audience. ‘France is no less French or Holland less Dutch for joining. We have a great deal to contribute.’
³⁸

Even when the march of international and domestic events were giving the government a rough time, Margaret Thatcher was not a significant contributor to general policy discussions. In the autumn spending round of 1973, when all ministers were asked to cut their budgets in the prevailing economic crisis, she fought hard to preserve education spending. She could not negotiate a settlement with the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, so took her argument to the Chancellor, Anthony Barber, and then to the Prime Minister. She emerged from these battles with one of the smallest expenditure reductions of any spending minister – a trim of £157 million out of a total departmental budget of £3.5 billion.
³⁹
The later champion of cutting public spending was not keen to wield the axe in her own backyard in 1973.

When Ted Heath’s confrontation with the miners came to a head in 1974, Margaret Thatcher was more gung-ho than her Prime Minister. She defended the three-day week on the grounds that it would ‘conserve stocks and use them prudently like a frugal housewife’.
⁴⁰

More controversially, she argued that the three-day week was doing its job so well that the NUM feared a long stalemate. ‘In my opinion, the miners’ leaders are now trying to force their members to strike because our steps have succeeded and theirs have not’, she optimistically claimed.
⁴¹

In the same mindset, she wanted Heath to call an election several weeks earlier than the polling date he eventually chose, fighting it ‘unashamedly’, as she put it, ‘on the issue of “Who governs Britain?” ’
⁴²

Amidst mounting chaos, the date of the general election was announced for 28 February. While Parliament was going through the final stages of business before dissolution, an incident took place, which illustrated that Margaret Thatcher, whatever else she might have gained as a cabinet minister, had not acquired an ear for humour.

She was standing behind the Speaker’s Chair in the House of Commons with a group of Tory MPs, when they were joined by her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Fergus Montgomery. An elegant but somewhat effete figure, he had
just had his election photographs taken. He was was looking so well groomed that she complimented him. ‘You do look smart today, Fergus.’ Montgomery was gratified. Preening himself, he replied, ‘Well I’ve just been to the hairdresser.’ With a straight face, Margaret Thatcher responded, ‘I expect you’ve had a blow job’.
⁴³
The laughter was so loud that the Speaker turned round in his chair to find out the cause of the mirth. Margaret Thatcher had no idea why she had caused so much amusement.

There were not many jokes for Tory politicians in the next four weeks. The election was blown badly off course. Instead of answering the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ the voters elected a hung Parliament. Margaret Thatcher was returned with a significantly reduced majority (down to a still-comfortable 5,978) but the Conservatives lost thirty-three constituencies. They held 297 seats in the House of Commons compared to Labour’s 301. Heath made abortive efforts to negotiate a coalition with the Liberal Party, but this attempt foundered because its leader, Jeremy Thorpe, failed to win the support of his colleagues. In her memoirs, Thatcher later wrote, ‘This horse-trading was making us look ridiculous’.
⁴⁴
Heath, also retrospectively, retorted, ‘She certainly did not say that at the time’.
⁴⁵

Heath was right on this one. Margaret Thatcher not only kept silent about any criticisms she may have had about the Prime Minister’s handling of his final months and days in office: at his last cabinet meeting on Monday 4 March she was fulsome in her praise for him.
⁴⁶
Alone of the ministers present, she spoke in glowing terms of the privilege it had been to serve under the Prime Minister in such a united and harmonious team. Was this hypocrisy? Or was she overcome by the valedictory emotions of the moment? Perhaps it merely showed that she could hit the wrong note at the wrong time.

REFLECTION

Wrong notes loomed large during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Secretary of State for Education. She was unfairly attacked, but she did herself few favours.

She had too many unnecessary personality clashes with her officials. She had an unsure touch when it came to the presentation of herself and her policies. Through inexperience, she allowed herself to become caricatured as a right-wing hate figure.

Not all of this was her fault, but she made bad mistakes. Within a month of her appointment, she allowed herself to be filmed in a cringe-making
Panorama
programme. It was hard to decide which sequence made her look more absurd. Maniacally pruning roses, while Denis no less maniacally roared up and down the two-acre lawn of their country house, stamped her with the image of suburban privilege. Rather more insensitive was her visit to a London comprehensive school. In a precocious voice, she advised science pupils on camera about what spoons they should use in their experiments with sulphur: ‘Breakfast spoons, you know, the spoons you use for boiled eggs. You dip in and, if they’re silver, they go brown and Mother has to clean them. So these days we tend to use stainless steel, don’t we.’
⁴⁷

‘Carry on Lady Bountiful’, Labour’s spin doctors might have said to the voters not born with silver spoons.

Even when she was doing well, she received limited plaudits because her style tended to alienate. Her forcefulness was her albatross. To many of her colleagues she was lacking in charm. She had much to learn from the Dale Carnegie school of
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
She could offend even those whose support she wanted to reciprocate. Norman St John-Stevas, a genuine fan of his Secretary of State, told a bizarre anecdote about the time he mentioned to her that his mother was Irish. ‘I thought most Irish people over here were descended from navvies’, responded Margaret Thatcher. St John-Stevas thought she must be making a joke. She was not.
⁴⁸

Despite her sharp elbows and wrong notes as a new cabinet minister, Margaret Thatcher was appreciated where it mattered most – inside 10 Downing Street. Ted Heath had many failings, but he was loyal to his colleagues. When she was in trouble, he gave her steadfast support. She forgot this episode too quickly. He remembered it too vividly. This was to be a cause of future tension between them as their relationship moved to centre stage in the passion play of Tory politics.

9

Heath on the ropes

THE TWILIGHT OF A TORY LEADER

The inconclusive result of the February 1974 general election left the Tory Party in disarray. Margaret Thatcher’s standing improved among her demoralised colleagues, but mainly because she was not Ted Heath. He was blamed for the hung Parliament, the minority Labour government and the return of Harold Wilson to 10 Downing Street. As the political world waited for a second election later in the year, the strongest force inside the Conservative Parliamentary Party was the surging tide of negativity against the incumbent leader. This was far more important than the tiny ripples of early support for Margaret Thatcher. She was not in consideration as a possible contender for the leadership until the autumn.

The gradual emergence of a Heath–Thatcher power struggle was all about him and hardly anything to do with her. This inconvenient truth could only be grasped by understanding the intensity of the discontent that was simmering within the narrow leadership electorate – the 297 Tory MPs elected to the House of Commons in February 1974.

As one of those MPs, arriving at Westminster for the first time, I was astonished by the strength of hostility against Ted Heath personally. As his hometown of Broadstairs was in the heart of my new constituency of Thanet East, I had come to know his father and stepmother quite well. I had met Ted Heath on many occasions in their home on Dumpton Park Drive. Although my respect for the visiting Prime Minister was great, I had detected in his wooden aloofness a curious dissonance between his character and his circle of friends.

A revealing incident one Sunday morning in Broadstairs highlighted the problem. Sitting in Will and Mary Heath’s garden, Ted was reading the
Sunday
Times
when he suddenly flew into a rage. What had caused his anger was one particular sentence in a serialised extract from a biography of him by Margaret Laing. The sentence read, ‘Ted Heath has no close friends’.
¹

Expostulating over what he kept calling ‘this bloody lie’, Heath turned to a Broadstairs neighbour, Edward ‘Teddy’ Denman. He was an insurance broker with Lloyds who had known the family for some years. Ted Heath thrust the offending copy of the
Sunday Times
under the nose of Mr Denman.

‘Look at this, Teddy! No close friends! How can they print this lie? They don’t know about you and me, do they?’ Soon after this outburst Teddy Denman murmured
sotto voce
to me: ‘You heard what Ted just said? Well, until this moment I didn’t have the faintest idea he considered me as a close friend.’
²

On 5 March 1974, the day I entered the House of Commons as an elected MP, I remembered this Broadstairs conversation all too well for I was having my first ever drink in the smoking room with several of Ted Heath’s ‘friends’. We had just come from a meeting of the back-benchers’ 1922 Committee. The public expressions of support and sympathy for the defeated Prime Minister from his colleagues sounded sincere. Robin Maxwell-Hyslop, the Member for Tiverton, alone raised the question of whether Heath should remain our leader. But this appeared to be a maverick viewpoint which elicited chilly murmurs of disagreement, in sharp contrast to the warm thumping of desks and ‘hear, hears’ which greeted Heath.

Yet, as the Scotch flowed in the smoking room, it was clear that the applause at the 1922 Committee had in many cases been as phoney as Margaret Thatcher’s encomium of Ted Heath at his final cabinet meeting. The resentments that emerged in the conversation ran deep. They were more about the leader’s behaviour than his judgement. Apparently he had inflicted all manner of slights on his back-benchers in recent years, from refusing to listen to their views to snubbing their wives. I was amazed, having experienced nothing but courtesy from Ted Heath as a young candidate from 1966 to 1974. But the personal criticism of him by these colleagues was so bitter that I immediately sensed that his hold on the leadership was far less secure than it looked from the outside. The smoking-room conversation broke up with someone saying, ‘But we’re stuck with him for the time being’. To which another voice retorted, ‘Until he’s lost the next election – which must come within six months’. It was an accurate prediction.
³

Margaret Thatcher would have been aware of the strong currents of anti-Heath opinion on the back benches, but she did nothing to exploit them. She remained a hard working member of the shadow cabinet. She was pleased to be given the Environment portfolio, which included the responsibility for working out new policies on mortgages, housing and rates. Since there was a general expectation that Harold Wilson would call an autumn general election, the opposition had to race against time to produce a manifesto that would contain novel ideas without repudiating the record of the Conservative government. Squaring this circle was difficult.

Margaret Thatcher did her best to make the manifesto pledges politically attractive and fiscally responsible. She was more cautious than Heath, reluctantly agreeing only after heavy pressure from him to announce two major promises. One was to abolish the rating system. The other was to peg mortgages at a maximum interest rate of 9.5 per cent. A third pledge was to offer council-house tenants who had lived in their homes for over three years the right to buy them at one-third below market value. However, this ‘right to buy’ (an idea which had originated from Peter Walker) was hedged around by so many qualifications and caveats that Margaret Thatcher herself later came to see her own restrictions as ‘narrow and unimaginative’.
⁴
She would not make the same mistake again as Prime Minister.

Her contribution to the draft election manifesto was well received by the press at the time of its announcement in late August. ‘It went down with hardened reporters almost as well as the sherry’, said the
Evening Standard
.
⁵
However, at the highest levels of the party Margaret Thatcher was more noted for her caution than for her creative thinking. Retrospectively, she claimed that during this period she was busy re-examining the party’s values. ‘After the defeat of 1974 Keith Joseph, and I asked how did it happen? We went back over the fundamental philosophy’, she told an interviewer in 1990.
⁶

This was an exaggeration. Sir Keith Joseph was starting to re-examine his own and his party’s principles in a series of intellectually challenging speeches. But Margaret Thatcher was either too busy or too careful to give him public support. The Editor of the
Sunday Express
, John Junor, tried to persuade her in the summer of 1974 to emulate Joseph and make a speech on Conservative philosophy. Her reaction was to ask which Oxford dons might help her with
such a project, mentioning Robert Blake
^*
and Hugh Trevor-Roper.
^†
7
A stirring of interest perhaps, but a long way from putting her head above the parapet as a Tory champion of new philosophical thinking.

Another sign of both her caution and her interest in reappraising the Conservative record came when she accepted Keith Joseph’s invitation to become Deputy Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS). This was a think- tank set up under Joseph’s chairmanship (with Heath’s reluctant approval), supposedly to study what Britain could learn from the social market economies of EEC countries. In reality, the CPS soon emerged as a powerhouse of fresh ideas, most of them opposed to the inflationary interventionism of the previous Conservative government.

At first Margaret Thatcher kept her distance from the controversial work of the CPS. When Keith Joseph presented its paper on inflation to the shadow cabinet in May 1974, she remained uncharacteristically quiet. As Peter Walker recalled, ‘Margaret did not side openly with Keith except to say that we should pay careful attention to what he was saying’.
⁸

By August, as Deputy Chairman of the CPS, she was becoming more involved in its work, privately helping Keith Joseph to prepare his speeches. Yet publicly she remained loyal to Heath even when she resented the pressure he was putting on her to devise policies on rates and mortgages, which she thought would increase public spending and inflation.

Ted Heath was having an unhappy summer. Because he had no home of his own apart from a Pimlico flat borrowed from his Parliamentary Private Secretary, Timothy Kitson, he often stayed at his father’s house in Broadstairs. The polls and the press gave him a difficult time. To help him through the August doldrums, my constituents in the Thanet East Conservative Association organised a series of somewhat artificial events, at which his speeches could be filmed by television cameras.

A typically downbeat occasion was the renaming of our constituency office in Ramsgate as Heath House. As guest of honour, Ted Heath gave a defensive address, mainly in praise of his government’s record. He seemed to be put off his stride by the mild booing he received in the street by a group of Kent miners. Inside Heath House, some of my leading supporters had been his contemporaries at the local grammar school, Chatham House, so they were ready for their old school chum with lines like, ‘Hello Ted, do you remember the time when we were in the choir together?’ Astonishingly, despite some advance prompting from the Member of Parliament at his elbow, Ted did not remember. He blanked the men who said they had grown up with him. In an attempt to soothe their umbrage after the event, I fell back on the suggestion that the former Prime Minister could have been feeling unwell. This excuse may have been more accurate than I could have guessed, for a year later he was diagnosed as suffering from a thyroid illness that had been sapping his energies for months.
⁹

In early September, with election fever rampant, Keith Joseph was preparing to deliver his major CPS address on economic policy. Fearing that this would be a rethinking exercise that could only give rise to headlines about Tory rifts and splits, Ted Heath attempted to use Margaret Thatcher as an intermediary who might persuade Joseph not to deliver his speech. This was mission impossible. She had already seen the text, describing it as, ‘one of the most powerful and persuasive analyses I have ever read’.
¹⁰
However, she responded to Heath via Jim Prior by saying that she did not have much influence over Keith Joseph. This was an economy with the truth.

Joseph’s speech at Preston on 5 September did indeed rock the boat. It was an appeal for the defeat of inflation by tight control of the money supply. It was the opposite of Heath’s policy in government of increasing public spending in order to save jobs. Labour seized on the speech as evidence that a future Tory government would deliberately increase unemployment by monetarism. The press gave the controversy huge coverage. The ideological split within the Conservative leadership was headline news.
¹¹
Ted Heath was incandescent.

Like Brer Rabbit, Margaret Thatcher ‘lay low and said nothing’. As the election got under way, she avoided the furore over economic policy and stuck rigidly to her shadow-cabinet responsibilities. As she was the only member of
Heath’s team with something new to announce, she played a prominent part in the campaign. Despite her reluctance a few weeks earlier to give firm public-spending commitments on housing and rates, she did exactly that during a morning press conference on 27 September. She made a clear pledge that mortgages would be cut to 9.5 per cent by Christmas.
¹²
‘Santa Thatcher’, the press dubbed her.
¹³

It was a popular policy, which gave the Tories a temporary lift in the polls. It also lifted Margaret Thatcher’s profile. She appeared on television in three of the party’s political broadcasts allocated to the Conservatives. She performed so well in the first of these that she was promoted to introduce the second. She was coached for her appearances by a young television producer, Gordon Reece, with whom she established a rapport. He was to become a key player in the remodelling of her television image over the next few years.

The presentations by ‘Santa Thatcher’ of the giveaway mortgages and rates abolition policies caused qualms among the economic purists of the Conservative right, who feared the consequences for inflation. Margaret Thatcher shared their anxieties, but consoled herself with her private opinion that the pledges would never have to be delivered anyway. She did not believe that the Conservatives were going to win the election. This was the loud and clear message from the polls and from the canvassers in the constituencies. Heath was fighting such a lacklustre campaign with muddled promises about forming a government of national unity that he looked a beaten man by the last week.

Morale was far higher in the Labour camp with optimistic talk of a landslide. There were even signs that Finchley might be one of their surprise gains. Harold Wilson took the trouble to visit the constituency, boosting the Labour candidate’s hopes by telling him, ‘I gather you have dear Margaret on the run’.
¹⁴

At the count on 10 October, ‘dear Margaret’ did appear to be highly nervous, with a voice that was ‘cracked and strained’.
¹⁵
But she got back safely, although for the first time her majority fell below 4,000, to 3,911. This was her lowest margin of victory in thirty-three years as a Member of Parliament. Her result was in line with the drift away from the Tories all over the country. Yet it was a reverse not a rout.

The Conservatives lost twenty constituencies, leaving them with 276 seats in the Commons. Labour scraped home with an overall majority of three, but had forty-three more seats than the Tories. This parliamentary arithmetic gave the
Conservative Party a strong base from which to recover. The same could not be said of its leader, who was now encumbered with the dismal record of having lost three out of the last four elections.

THE PHONEY WAR IN THE PARTY

The most obvious and most honourable course of action for Heath to take in the aftermath of the election would have been to resign, or at least to offer himself immediately for re-election. But it was not in the nature of the man to listen to his friends who were giving him such advice. Instead he wanted to tough it out, calling on his immediate circle of loyalists to back him in this endeavour. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, the centrists in the cabinet closed ranks around their leader. At his insistence they made determined efforts to block both a vote of confidence and a leadership election.