Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (36 page)

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On 10 October 1967, ten days before she spoke in this vein to the party conference, Edward Heath at last gave Mrs Thatcher the recognition he knew was due to her talent, and promoted her to the Shadow Cabinet, as shadow minister for fuel and power. She was up against a minister, Dick Marsh,
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whom she knew from Dartford days, and whose charm, good looks and relatively right-wing views endeared him to her. It indicates something of where she stood in the political firmament that, earlier in the year, a
Sunday Times
‘Spot the Prime Minister’ magazine feature about rising political talent had given Mrs Thatcher’s odds as 1,000–1, whereas Marsh was favourite at 5–1.
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Nevertheless, she was now well known, well respected, popular with the party rank and file, and sufficiently trusted by the leadership to be asked to tackle subjects that went beyond her shadow portfolio. This last point was particularly important to her, as she did not want to lose touch with the wider economic debate from which she had learnt so much. She entered the Shadow Cabinet without any access to the confidences of the leadership, nor any notable influence on its ideology, nor any clear independent power base. Yet it was also clear that she was formidable.

At fuel and power, Mrs Thatcher became more closely acquainted with the constraints under which the Conservative Party operated at this time. Although it found it easy to attack extensions of state ownership, it was much more uncertain about what should be done with those industries which were already state owned and run. Nationalization was not unambiguously unpopular with voters, and the Conservatives laboured under the belief that most of the industries involved would be unsellable, a view which reflected the overall weakness of the private sector at that time and an underlying lack of confidence in the future of free markets. In the same party conference speech, therefore, in which Mrs Thatcher was so robust about tax, she was more circumspect about nationalization. Positioning herself as someone with ‘deep philosophical reasons’ for opposing nationalization, she then added a caution: ‘we must accept that many people judge these things purely upon the practical results, so let us start adopting that approach.’ Privatization (as it was not then called) did not at present offer ready answers because ‘No one will buy a rotten enterprise.’

Already in the 1960s, coal was the most contentious of the matters in the fuel and power brief. It still employed the largest numbers of men – more than 300,000 – and great swathes of its production were uneconomic. It also held a special place in the aristocracy of labour, one which Tories respected and feared from what they hoped was a safe distance. Mrs Thatcher’s first encounter with it in her new post, however, was in a narrower but deeply emotional context. In October 1966, a coal-slag heap at Aberfan in Wales had slipped, engulfing a school and killing 116 children and 28 adults. A year later, the House of Commons debated the report of the investigating tribunal. Aberfan was an issue too painful for normal political argument, but Mrs Thatcher was struck by some of the lessons that emerged. She said she was shocked that the chairman of the National Coal Board, Lord Robens, had not gone to the scene of the disaster at once. She noted that the NCB’s director-general of production had been given a report about the state of the coal tips but had not read the material. ‘I despise any organisation or person’, she told the House, ‘who attempts to pass the buck further down the line,’ and she added that ‘It is a jolly sight easier to exercise control in private industry.’
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When she appeared on
Any Questions?
in Wales the following month, Mrs Thatcher described the report as ‘the most damning indictment of a management that I have ever read’, and she took the occasion, in answer to a question from an Aberfan bereaved mother, to give her view of the future of coal: ‘… I don’t think coal-mining as such is on the way out. I think it will be reduced in amount, the uneconomic pits will go’, and then it would revive.
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Later in the month, in the House of Commons, she
elaborated her views. She argued that the production target of 200 million tons was too high and that ‘The future policy is undoubtedly to plan for a contracting coal industry.’ The Central Electricity Generating Board’s preference for coal, enforced by government, was very expensive, she said, and would be made more so by the Coal Industry Bill. If public money was to be spent, it would be better used closing more pits and helping unemployed miners get new jobs. Although her main case was economic, she made a moral one as well. Three miners were killed each week at work and there was a high incidence of industrial disease: ‘if one were given a choice one would not send a son down a pit. I would not do so …’
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She renewed her criticisms of the NCB: ‘While the numbers of miners in the industry are being run down, the number of people on the Board is being put up. If a private enterprise did that, all hon. Members opposite would have a fine old time debating against me.’
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Always the housewife, Mrs Thatcher never forgot to consider the effect of government fuel and power policy on the consumer. Attacking Barbara Castle in Parliament about rising prices in general, she turned to the cost of electricity: ‘My bill is up. It came with a nice little apologetic note, but that does not alter the fact that it is up by 15 per cent, 3s. in the pound. This was another increase which was not referred to the Prices and Incomes Board.’
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Although she and Keith Joseph did fantazise in this period about splitting power-generating capacity into three as a prelude to privatization,
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Mrs Thatcher and her party did not come up with a plan for coal, and had no inkling of how the pits would eventually provide the political battleground on which Ted Heath would founder and she – much later – would triumph. All that is notable about her approach at this time is that she rejected the mystical approach to coal which was still so pervasive in British political culture.

Now that she was in the Shadow Cabinet, Mrs Thatcher began to show the first signs of developing an overall, publicly argued political position of her own. Her first big opportunity to present this came with the invitation to deliver the Conservative Political Centre Lecture at the party conference in Blackpool in October 1968. The CPC Lecture was the most
prestigious fringe meeting of the conference. The person asked to give it was thus marked out as a coming man, so this was Heath’s way of saying that Mrs Thatcher was a coming woman. Indeed, it was on the subject of women’s rights that he invited her to speak, but she rejected this with something approaching scorn. ‘Ted said would I do “women in politics”,’ she remembered. ‘I thought that was much too dull.’
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She boldly told the
Daily Mirror
at the time that she had refused the subject of women – ‘They’ve been around since Eve, you know.’
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She chose instead the all-embracing title ‘What’s wrong with politics?’

To understand Mrs Thatcher’s resolute unfashionableness throughout her career it is worth noting what she was doing at any particular time and compare it with what was happening elsewhere. Thus, on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, she was opening a charity bazaar in her constituency and attending a Rotary Club dinner. In the summer of 1968, when the Western world was turning on, tuning in and dropping out, and the Soviet Union was invading Czechoslovakia, she was sitting at The Mount, Lamberhurst, studying the thirty or so works of Conservative political philosophy, including the writings of Karl Popper on the open society, which she had got out of the library in preparation for her lecture. This was her first effort at organized philosophizing, and, unlike her later productions, it was her own entirely unaided work.

Some have criticized Mrs Thatcher’s CPC Lecture for being rather naive, even plodding. Certainly its use of extensive quotation has a clumsily autodidactic feel, and her enumeration, point by point, of the seven reasons why the public now distrusted politicians was an uncomfortable survival of her barristerial training. But the lecture is interesting all the same for setting out many of the main beliefs that animated her, most of which were to matter more and more as the years passed. She herself recognized the lecture’s importance, both intellectually and politically. She delivered it in a gold brocade coat-dress which she had deliberately chosen to attract the greatest possible amount of attention.
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The lecture attributed the growing distrust of politicians to a mixture of factors as various as the disappearance of independent Members of Parliament, more instant news on television and an increasingly disrespectful society. Her remedies were more coherent. ‘I believe’, she said, ‘that the great mistake of the last few years has been for the government to provide or to legislate for almost everything.’ The Tories themselves had not been guiltless. In the early 1960s, ‘the emphasis in politics shifted.’ At about that time ‘growth’ became the key political word and the contest between the parties became too much about economics, not enough about people. Those who promised the most through governmental agency seemed the
most attractive, and so Britain entered into the era of national plans and then prices and incomes policy to control inflation. Now, she went on, there were calls for more ‘participation’ by the voter, but this was no good if it meant participation in more government decisions, rather than ‘making more of his own decisions’. The trend was so bad that on incomes policy Conservatives and Labour sounded ‘almost indistinguishable’. Governments could not run prices or incomes: ‘we have too little regard for the essential role of government which is control of the money supply and the management of demand.’ Governments had been paying for expenditure by ‘printing the money’. Enter, for the first time, Thatcher the monetarist. The whole idea of ‘keeping down incomes’ made little sense to her, she continued: ‘There is nothing wrong with people wanting larger incomes,’ but the ‘condition precedent’ was ‘hard work’. If people could keep more of what they earned they could contribute more to the general good, Mrs Thatcher said, and she used an image of which she and her supporters in later years would never tire: ‘The point is that the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass by on the other side.’

She ended with a call to Conservatives. She said that it was a distinctive and admirable feature of the British parliamentary system that there was no automatic consensus. An ‘alternative policy’ was always on offer, rather than a futile ‘attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything’. She ended by sounding the trumpet for conviction politics while blowing her own at the same time. At a recent university meeting, she said, ‘a young undergraduate came to me and said, “I had no idea there was such a clear alternative.” He found the idea challenging and infinitely more effective than one in which everyone virtually expects their MP or the Government to solve their problems. The Conservative creed has never offered a life of ease without effort.’ Here the voice of Alderman Roberts in the pulpit was coming through. ‘Democracy is not for such people. Self-government is for those men and women who have learned to govern themselves’. ‘No great party’, Mrs Thatcher concluded, ‘can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do.’

While there was certainly nothing disloyal in anything Mrs Thatcher told her Blackpool audience, it was nevertheless quite an artful performance politically. Her speech tapped into a growing unease about Heath’s approach, a questioning of the merely technocratic leadership which tried to minimize all ideological differences and failed to offer an alternative account of economics or, indeed, of the purpose of government itself. It marked the speaker out as a person of principle, and of combative conviction. It also positioned her carefully in the rows within the party over its most controversial figure, Enoch Powell.

Earlier in the year, Powell had finally broken with Heath. Always stiff-necked and solitary, always far more intellectually original than his colleagues, Powell had carved out an increasingly distinctive place in the Conservative Party. When the leadership had leant towards centrism and corporatism, Powell had produced eloquent attacks on the idea that industry and government could successfully improve the British economy by working hand in hand. He had developed, too, the doctrines of what came to be called monetarism and heaped scorn on the idea that prices and incomes policies could control inflation. A heretic on defence, on which he was the party’s shadow minister, he had raised questions about the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence and had suggested that Britain should withdraw its military presence east of Suez. There had been rows between him and his fellow frontbenchers, and Powell felt that he was being sidelined in the Shadow Cabinet, but it was on none of these subjects that the great break came.

In Birmingham, on 20 April 1968, Powell spoke to the city’s CPC in a speech that he chose not to clear with Heath in advance, and which appeared to break a Shadow Cabinet consensus on the subject reached ten days earlier. That subject was immigration. Powell quoted a constituent of his who had told him that he wanted to leave Britain because ‘in this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’ Using the Registrar-General’s projections for the growth of the immigrant population and its descendants, he declared: ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants … It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’ He attacked the Labour government’s coming Race Relations Bill as the means by which the immigrant community would be able to ‘agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens’, and he ended with his vision of the apocalypse: ‘As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”.’

Margaret had always been an admirer of Enoch Powell, ever since first meeting him in Essex in the late 1940s. The two were not personally close, partly because Powell was awkward in the company of women, and did not approve of women in politics, but they were on friendly terms, the two couples dining together occasionally. Always an admirer of intellectual attainment, and surprisingly humble about what she considered her own lack of it, Mrs Thatcher was in awe of Powell’s brain (‘His intellect was second to none’) and drawn to his arguments. In later years she said, ‘Enoch got us on to the right argument about inflation.’
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She had never been deeply interested in questions of immigration, although such views as she had expressed in public were in favour of tight control of numbers. She
considered it an ‘irony’ that Powell himself had admitted many immigrants, when he had been minister of health, to work in British hospitals.
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On the Sunday morning when Powell’s speech was reported in the newspapers, Ted Heath rang round Shadow Cabinet colleagues to tell them that he proposed to sack Powell. By her account, Heath said to Mrs Thatcher: ‘Enoch must go.’ She replied, ‘Ted, I wouldn’t heighten what he said too much,’ recommending that he leave time for things to cool down. But Heath replied: ‘No, no. Most people think he must go.’
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Go he did, never to return to the front bench.