Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (35 page)

Mrs Thatcher was always careful not to let the ‘woman’ persona degenerate into the mere character-acting that has ruined many a career in British public life. Money and economics, about which women were traditionally held to be ignorant, were her strong suits. Always well briefed, she talked seriously and intelligently, if not always originally, on serious subjects. The frequent accusation of humourlessness does not do justice to her readiness of repartee, her flirtatiousness and her ability to act up, but seriousness, in one of her background, was something of which to be proud. In one edition of
Any Questions?
she found herself up against her country neighbour Malcolm Muggeridge, then at the height of his powers as a public contrarian. A questioner asked what the panel felt about being imitated. Muggeridge, who, by the way, was highly imitable, replied that all people were ‘intrinsically ridiculous’. Mrs Thatcher: ‘This is a ridiculous answer.’ Muggeridge: ‘Why?’ Mrs Thatcher: ‘You don’t regard yourself as an intrinsically ridiculous person.’ Muggeridge: ‘I do. Why are you contradicting me?’ Mrs Thatcher: ‘Because over dinner you took yourself extremely seriously.’ Muggeridge: ‘You don’t imagine you’re a serious person.’ Mrs Thatcher: ‘Well, I do. You may not.’
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And when it came to the moral and social questions which were so hotly argued through the 1960s Mrs Thatcher found her sex an advantage, giving her stronger, more practical ground, in any dispute. In all her views, she liked to refer, both in private and in public, to the individual example or experience which she found persuasive. Her support for the legalization of abortion, for example, came from the suffering she had observed of a severely handicapped child of Bertie Blatch, her constituency chairman in Finchley. The boy, she remembered, had often asked his parents ‘Why me?’,
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and this led her to believe that abortion of those with severe genetic defects was the kindest course. Her backing of the liberalization of the laws against homosexual acts derived from her observation of cases which
she had seen as a barrister, which she considered a humiliating intrusion into privacy and a waste of court time.
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On the other hand, her experience as a mother made her instinctively hostile to the permissive society presided over by the Home Secretary from 1964 to 1967, Roy Jenkins, whom she privately referred to as ‘shaky jowls’. She supported Mary Whitehouse’s condemnation of pornography, and said that the ‘average woman’ feared sexual licence and drugs for her children. In a radio argument with Paul Johnson,
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then the left-wing editor of the
New Statesman
and later one of the most enthusiastic converts to the right, she declared that ‘I … fail to see anything civilised about allowing … the sexual act to be shown on the stage in a theatre,’ and she countered Johnson’s exhortation to relax, let everything happen and then life would settle down: ‘I think as a legislator you have to legislate to try to retain the good standards and the best things in your society.’ If all people were religious and good, you wouldn’t have to, she said, but they weren’t.
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It was a similarly dark view about the persistence of human wickedness which inclined her to maintain her support for the death penalty. As for divorce, she opposed the additional liberalization of the 1960s which allowed automatic divorce after five years’ separation, on the grounds that it would make it too easy to desert a woman.

Only once in this period, at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton on 10 October 1969, did Mrs Thatcher agree to take a prominent party platform to put forward her views on women’s questions. The subject was nothing to do with her Shadow Cabinet portfolio, which was transport, but the organizers wanted a leading woman to promote the new policy document
A Fair Share for the Fair Sex
, an embarrassing title about which she publicly complained. Her opening was typical: ‘I think it was Socrates who said long, long ago that when woman is made equal to man she becomes his superior, and I would not dissent from anyone as wise as Socrates.’ Then she teased a councillor who had spoken from the floor against female emancipation: ‘He said that women get married and have children, but men do not. This must upset the statisticians somewhere.’ She then attacked the idea that housewives should be paid for the work that they do, joking that ‘The husband would very soon be bankrupt’ and arguing that nothing should be done to disturb the wife’s right to support. In a sentence which summed up so much of her attitude to life, she declared, ‘Equity is a very much better principle than equality.’
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Harold Wilson called a second election for 31 March 1966 in order to improve his slender majority. He won a second term as Labour prime minister easily. His new majority was ninety-eight. Since there was a strong public mood to give Labour more time and a bigger mandate, little blame attached to Edward Heath, who had been leader for only eight months, although this was the worst defeat for his party for more than twenty years. At his party’s conference that autumn, Heath put new heart into the troops. ‘Ted Heath went over really big,’ wrote Margaret to Muriel, ‘and has quite suddenly turned out to be human again. I was at a cocktail party in his suite when he overheard someone wish me a happy birthday. To my amazement he stopped the party and made everyone drink a toast to me! Maybe the champagne had an effect on him too.’
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This is the only recorded instance of personal warmth between the two in parallel political careers lasting half a century. Margaret’s tone shows that, even then, it surprised her.

Mrs Thatcher’s own election campaign in Finchley had gone well. She warned in her election address that Labour ‘would increase the power of the State at the expense of the subject’ and she made much of the unchecked power of the trade unions, saying that ‘we could delay no longer’ the review of trade union law which had not taken place for sixty years.
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‘A dislike of being dictated to is one of the more fundamental British characteristics,’ she wrote in the
Finchley Press
.
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She tapped into the economic anxieties of her constituents: ‘Inflation means cheating the thrifty out of part of their savings.’
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And she did not forget to emphasize her housewife side, telling the feminist Jill Tweedie (of all people): ‘I’ve got a housekeeper but I still do the cooking myself … rush in, peel the vegetables, put the roast in … all before I take off my hat.’
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The question of British entry into the European Economic Community was revived, both because it reflected Heath’s genuine enthusiasm for the project and because he hoped to exploit Labour divisions on the subject. Mrs Thatcher spoke up too, thinking in the terms of making ‘Europe’ a world power which she was later to deride. ‘Europe has become a cornerstone of our campaign,’ she told an election meeting. ‘You will be aware of Mr Heath’s [earlier] efforts to get us into the Common Market. Many of the difficulties facing us then [1963] no longer exist … I believe together we could form a block with as much power as the USA or Russia.’
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But even in this campaign there was a hint of suspicion underlying her Europeanism: ‘I don’t like the idea of a Europe without us there, directing and guiding its powers.’
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The Liberal vote, nationally and in Finchley, fell sharply, so that Mrs
Thatcher, though winning fewer votes than on the previous occasion, increased her majority by 662. The results were:

Although the Labour victory was huge, economic problems closed in upon Harold Wilson’s government. Inflation, wage rises, high government spending, low government revenues and an unfavourable balance of payments bore down upon the administration, resulting, eventually, in the devaluation of the pound from its fixed rate of $2.80 to one of $2.40, on 18 November 1967.
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Mrs Thatcher was moved from her shadow Treasury brief in the month before the final collapse, but from the 1966 election until then she had a ringside seat, and she used it effectively to heap obloquy on Labour’s head. Three things particularly struck her about what she witnessed. The first was the way that economic and financial difficulty diminished the personal credit of political leaders. Harold Wilson, she believed, was exposed as a trickster: ‘The Prime Minister’s problem is that Britain’s creditors now understand him perfectly,’ she told the House of Commons on 26 July 1966. The lack of trust meant that no specific remedy could work its effect: ‘They are not judging the measures themselves; they are judging the set of men, headed by the Prime Minister, who brought them into operation.’
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Her deputy villain in this set was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan. If, to Mrs Thatcher, Wilson was devious, Callaghan was incompetent. SET was brought in, she asserted, because the Chancellor got his forecasts wrong.
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‘You can’t say he has lost command of the situation – he never had it.’
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Invited to give a platform speech at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool that October, she hinted criticism of past Tory governments, saying that the tax burden under them had been ‘high enough in all honesty’. She then announced the results of her careful study of all post-war Budgets to show that three of the four highest-taxing Budgets ever had been introduced by Jim Callaghan. ‘This chap Callaghan’, she told the cheering audience, ‘must go.’

Her second lesson was to find her anxiety for the rule of law, and for clarity and due form in law-making, confirmed. Alert to the drafting of Bills, she always noticed when a clause was obscure, or gave the authorities
arbitrary power, or covertly changed the purposes of a tax. She quickly spotted, for example, that SET would break the rule which as a minister she had overseen, that National Insurance should perform the purpose for which it was named; SET showed ‘the unwisdom of using the National Insurance system as a means of raising general revenue’.
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It also gave arbitrary powers to the Ministry of Labour to decide who would get a rebate and who a penalty. The introduction of wage freezes, she believed, was also unfair. It meant that employers could not keep faith with promises they had already made to employees, and so undermined the sanctity of contracts. Bargains freely made were nullified: ‘It is the first step on the journey to coercion.’
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As individual ‘prices and incomes orders’ were laid before Parliament, Mrs Thatcher could fasten on the absurdity of individual situations to illustrate her point. In January 1967, the Rockware Glass Company wanted to pay a promised increase to its thirty-four maintenance engineers in their extra payment for keeping the furnaces going continuously. Mrs Thatcher angrily scorned the bureaucratic idea that to permit such a case would have ‘repercussions’: where was the rule of law if workers and bosses could not make and stick by their own agreements?
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Again and again, she criticized prices and incomes policy for its inequity: ‘It used to be a civil offence to break a contract, now it can be a criminal offence to keep a bargain.’
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Her third and most important lesson from her period as Treasury shadow, but also from her entire experience of the six years of opposition, was about the state’s role in the economy. She had always believed that nationalization, high taxes and government interference were bad. Now she saw the car-crash she had predicted happening before her eyes. The government, she felt, was little better than a robber: ‘the Government dislike[s] the fruits of investment going to those who supply the money to invest.’
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It did not see that profits were good, representing the successful common interest of labour and capital. She said that Callaghan’s ‘message to all who work is “If you make it, I’ll take it” ’.
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And she was not frightened of standing on moral high ground about taxation: ‘Members of the Government have talked about social justice. There are many ways in which one can be socially unjust. One of them is to take away too high a proportion of anyone’s income.’
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She argued that tax avoidance (as opposed to evasion) was perfectly justified, indeed essential when rates were high. Clashing with Eric Heffer, who accused her of complaining about the top rate of tax although it affected only a very few people, she was unabashed: ‘The honourable Gentleman is quite right. We are concerned with a comparatively small group of people, I do not deny that, but I say that the future of people in industry depends tremendously on the small group of people who can create more wealth, and they are far more
valuable to the ordinary working person than those of us who work here, including the honourable Gentleman, who cannot.’
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Her dislike of tax led her to develop the idea, later so important in her attitude to housing, that tax relief was a far, far better thing than cash subsidy. Subsidy, she wrote in the
Building Societies Gazette
, ‘implies that all income is ultimately vested in the State’, whereas relief ‘rightly enables people to keep
more of their own money
with which to discharge their own responsibilities’.
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She went further, arguing that, because tax was where the shoe pinched each citizen, revolts against it were the main engine for British liberty. She told the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in October 1967 that:

freedom has been gained in this country – not by great abstract campaigns, but through the objections of ordinary men and women to having their money taken from them by the State. In the early days, people banded together and said to the then Government, ‘You shall not take our money before you have redressed our grievances.’ It was their money, their wealth, which was the source of their independence against the Government. This is crucial.
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