Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (34 page)

The tough taskmaster’s first assignment for the MP from Finchley was a shift from pensions to a post as shadow spokesman on housing and land. This move was made on 15 October, two days after her fortieth birthday and on the same day as her first platform speech to the party conference. She used this occasion to deliver a competent but cautious speech on the domestic subject which was eventually to cause her more bother than anything else – the rates, as local government property taxes were then called.
‘It is very difficult’, she said, unringingly, ‘to find a method of reform which would result in less hardship than the system we already have.’ She opposed wholesale change, a version of which, many years later with the community charge (the so-called poll tax), she was to embrace. She sensed that the party conference wanted more than she had given them.
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In the six years of opposition, Mrs Thatcher held six shadow posts. The first three were as a junior spokesman – for pensions, then housing and land, then Treasury affairs – the second three in the Shadow Cabinet – dealing with fuel and power, transport and finally education. Some of these she liked more than others, being rather bored by transport and excited by economic policy, but common characteristics are visible in all her different guises. The first is that she could absorb almost any amount of detail and argue it through late-night sittings in the House of Commons. At a time, much more markedly so than today, when a politician’s reputation depended on performance in Parliament, Mrs Thatcher again and again impressed her fellow MPs with her combativeness and her industry. Even the mighty could be made to tremble. In a debate on the Rating Bill less than two months after she took up the housing portfolio, she pleased colleagues by exposing her clever and famous ministerial opponent Richard Crossman in his ignorance of what did and did not count as reckonable income.
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She was not witty like Iain Macleod, or intellectually original like Enoch Powell; she was not yet a star, but she was a worker and a fighter in a party which was slightly short of both. Nothing she did in those years brought her into the innermost circles of the Conservative Party, but virtually everything she did improved her reputation. She was given the opportunity to stretch out beyond the subjects traditionally handed to women MPs in both main parties, and she took it eagerly. Even earlier than her Labour opponent, Barbara Castle, Mrs Thatcher broke out of the parliamentary female ghetto. When, for example, she savaged the government’s Selective Employment Tax in parliamentary debate on 5 May 1966, an admittedly partial Iain Macleod declared that this was the only ‘triumph’ he could ever remember a woman scoring in the House of Commons.
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The second noticeable characteristic is that Mrs Thatcher took advantage of every brief she was given to pursue a common political theme. Strong though she was on the detail, most of the time she articulated a purpose beyond it. She could see the onrush of socialism and she set out to resist it without apology. It would not be true to say that she was developing a ‘Thatcherite’ ideology which consciously diverged from the policies of Edward Heath, but it is certainly the case that her temperamental aversion to retreat and compromise came to the fore. She thought that Britain had done very well for most of the years of Conservative government and
was now faring miserably under socialism. In Parliament and in the constituencies, year after year, she untiringly preached a gospel of economic freedom and opposition to the creeping power of the state. In 1965, one finds her deploying what was to become a favourite phrase, to Reading Conservative Women: ‘Every Labour government we have had has foundered on money and they have always succeeded in running out of other people’s money.’
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In her election address of 1966, she warned that a second Labour administration would ‘increase the power of the State at the expense of the subject’. In 1968, she told the readers of the
News of the World
that ‘When it comes to economising, housewives have to, because the Government won’t.’
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And in the following year she declared to the Motor Agents’ Association annual dinner: ‘I wish that we in this country were prepared to praise personal success and to make it worthwhile taxwise … It is not where a person comes from that counts, but where he can get to.’
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She said ‘he’, but by 1969 she had already got further than any Conservative woman in history.

Like most front-rank politicians, Mrs Thatcher wasted little emotional energy on ill feeling towards her political opponents. She liked Harold Wilson, for example, describing him as ‘very wily but very kind’.
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She was on good terms with the rabble-rousing left-wing MP Eric Heffer,
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whose Christian sincerity she respected, and she greatly admired most of those former coalminers who often sat in the House for mining seats, especially James Griffiths from Llanelly. She always liked Labour MPs who stood up for what she called the ‘underdog’. But her hatred for socialist doctrines was absolutely genuine, and it gave her the necessary energy to develop her views and advance them vigorously. Harold Wilson’s first two administrations, which ran from 1964 to 1970, accepted almost uncritically the idea that the state could control what the left liked to call the commanding heights of the economy. George Brown, Wilson’s defeated rival for the leadership, was put in charge of the Department of Economic Affairs, invented by Wilson to assail the traditional dominance of the Treasury. Brown duly produced a National Plan (‘a blueprint for inflation’ in Mrs Thatcher’s eyes), which purported to predict and direct all the main areas of the British economy. One of the means for this direction, and the one which it fell to Mrs Thatcher, as shadow housing and land spokesman, to oppose, was the proposed Land Commission which would control the price of development land. She quickly spotted that the minister responsible,
Fred Willey, ‘did not understand a thing’ about his own legislation, and harried him mercilessly. Her hatred for arbitrary state power, her interest in the rule of law and her tenderness towards property owners all came together. She told Willey that his Bill and its proposed levy overrode individual rights ‘to an extent which we never thought would be introduced by any government in peacetime’ and she protested at the chancy application of the tax: ‘It is impossible even for a valuer coupled with an accountant and coupled with a barrister to say what amount of levy would be chargeable.’
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In the middle of her campaign against the Land Commission, Mrs Thatcher was moved by Heath into the area which she had always most desired, economic affairs, though only as the deputy Treasury shadow. Her boss was Iain Macleod. She was not close to Macleod ideologically, but she admired his political and rhetorical skills and his readiness to close with the enemy: ‘Iain was the best
politician
I ever remember … he always understood that politics is a question of alternatives.’ ‘He chose me to do the hard work,’ she said, and she happily filled the gap left by his lack of interest in policy detail.
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Only two weeks after taking up her post on 19 April 1966, Mrs Thatcher found herself debating Labour’s proposed Selective Employment Tax in Parliament, up against Jack Diamond, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. As its name suggests, SET was a payroll tax; it sought to take money from some industries, mainly services, and redistribute some of it to others, mainly manufacturers. Its motive was both to raise more revenue, because economic growth predictions were proving over-optimistic, and to attempt industrial management. Its process was astonishingly complicated, collecting, as Mrs Thatcher later worked out, £1,130 million and then handing back £890 million of it within industry.
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‘What the Chancellor wants to do’, she explained in her first debate on the subject, ‘is to pay 7s. 6d. a week in respect of employees in manufacturing industry. Why cannot he just give the industries 7s. 6d. a week? … I really think that the right hon. Gentleman needs a woman at the Treasury. This is just sheer stupidity. If my chief had come to me and put up a cockeyed scheme like that, I should have asked him if he was feeling all right.’
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Mrs Thatcher then seized the moment to launch into a general denunciation of the thinking behind the Bill: ‘Personally, I dislike permanent subsidies and the premium paid back to industry will in fact be a permanent subsidy … Of course, the Chancellor will be very popular with inefficient industries, but I do not wish to be popular with inefficient industries. I would rather be popular with the efficient … The inefficient benefit from them [subsidies] because they keep them in business when they ought to go out of business.’
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This way of talking was notably bold, strongly against the grain of the times.

All through the summer of 1966, Mrs Thatcher attacked. She used the voice of the plain-speaking housewife: ‘So once more the married woman who goes to the butcher, grocer and dry cleaner and then, when she is finished and wishes for a little pleasure, to the hairdressers, will find that prices are going up.’
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This was not mere populism. Mrs Thatcher was working to what would now be called an agenda, and it was a feminist one. She noted that the tax system discriminated against married women because it simply added their income to that of their husbands rather than taxing them separately, and the problems would be compounded by SET because it punished the service industries, in which women were disproportionately employed, and created the same tax liability for a part-time woman worker working nine hours per week as one working the full forty-two hours.
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She also assaulted the system, since abolished, by which estate duty was charged to widows, and she supported an amendment to give tax relief on maintenance payments to divorced or deserted mothers: ‘I do not know how any man can stand at that Dispatch Box and recognise that family allowances on a man attract earned income relief yet say in the same breath that a woman who looks after her children does not deserve earned income relief on maintenance payments. He must be a very curious creature indeed.’
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In one debate, Mrs Thatcher launched into another housewife analogy: ‘It is as absurd to use the Standard Industrial Classification for the purpose of selective employment payments as it would be to use a clothes washing machine for washing up crockery,’ she said. At which point, Jack Diamond rose to intervene. Mrs Thatcher: ‘The right hon. Gentleman is not so good on clothes washing and dish washing machines as I am, so he had better sit down. But I will give way to him if he wants me to.’ Poor Diamond stuttered: ‘I am terrified. I was only about to make a simple point …’
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Later in the year, she used a similar technique to ridicule the government’s growing attempt to regulate the growth of prices and incomes. She took the example of prices for women’s fashions: ‘One cannot control the price of a garment which has a mini-skirt in July, but a skirt four inches below the knee in January. I doubt very much that the President of the Board of Trade [Douglas Jay] would even notice the difference.’
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Such aggressive, if almost flirtatious, rhetoric was deployed to drive forward an essentially radical approach to taxation, more radical than most commentators have noticed. Mrs Thatcher was saying not only that tax was too high (income tax had now reached a top rate of 19 shillings and 3 pence, there being 20 shillings in the pound – that is 96.25 per cent). She was also questioning
the entire wisdom of those who tried to run the British economy. They were wrong, she argued, and people who had nothing to do with government were much more likely to be right. More radical still, she was saying that women, through work, motherhood and marriage, understood more about the effects of taxation and inflation than the men who inflicted both. By implication, she was challenging not only the Labour government but the established order of things in both parties.

It was part of her skill in charming her party that her male colleagues in Parliament mostly enjoyed her approach rather than being frightened of it. At the highest levels of the party, however, suspicions were aroused that the rise of Margaret Thatcher might represent some sort of threat to male peace and tranquillity. Jim Prior,
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later to become her dissident secretary of state for employment, has recorded that Heath considered the question of promoting her to his Shadow Cabinet after Labour’s landslide at the general election of March 1966. In a meeting between Heath and William Whitelaw, the Chief Whip, Prior, who was Heath’s PPS at the time, recommended Mrs Thatcher for what, by his own account, they all regarded as the ‘statutory woman’ slot: ‘There was a long silence. “Yes,” he [Heath] said, “Willie agrees she’s much the most able, but he says that once she’s there we’ll never be able to get rid of her. So we both think it’s got to be Mervyn Pike.” ’
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From their own point of view, Heath and Whitelaw were right. In 1975, Mrs Thatcher would beat first one and then the other in the contest for the party leadership.

Although Mrs Thatcher, kept out of the Shadow Cabinet for the time being, naturally chafed at the ‘statutory woman’ role, she also understood how to take advantage of it. Press and public interest in a woman in politics was high; and BBC Radio’s
Any Questions?
, then the most influential current affairs discussion programme, was always in search of a woman to enliven the panel, and could rely on Mrs Thatcher to do so. Through this and other media appearances, she began to establish a marked public persona, appearing on
Any Questions?
ten times between 1966 and 1970. In these appearances, she never missed an opportunity to speak up for her sex, often to the disparagement of the male. To a questioner who complained about the 1966 World Cup taking up too much attention, she answered that those thus distracted were mainly men and so ‘the women can get on
and do the job in their absence.’
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Asked whether judging a woman’s intelligence by her legs could be applied to a man (a typical question of the programme in that period), she replied: ‘I really only ever look at a man’s head to see whether he’s intelligent, and so often the answer is that he’s not, that one doesn’t to look any farther.’
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She knew exactly how far to go in referring questions about women and their advancement to herself. To a question about equal pay for the sexes, she said that she wondered whether equal opportunity would still be withheld: ‘there is an awful tendency in Britain to think of women as making excellent Number Twos, but not to give them the top job.’ Another panellist, the broadcaster Kenneth Allsop, cut in to suggest the possibility of a woman prime minister. Mrs Thatcher: ‘Well, I wasn’t quite thinking at that level.’
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