Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (42 page)

The attacks produced an uncharacteristic self-pity. In an interview in the
Guardian
, she burst out, ‘Why, why? Why are you doing it?’,
⁵⁸
and she earned a rebuke from the
Daily Mail
columnist Jean Rook – ‘Show some spunk, Margaret. Remember flaming Barbara Castle when she came back at critics like a blow-lamp’
⁵⁹
– advice which she took to heart. In some interviews about this difficult time, Mrs Thatcher liked to say how it had been worse for Denis, who had to bear all the attacks without being able to answer back. But really it was she, not he, who found the whole thing almost unbearable. It was Denis, forcing her to decide whether she was tough enough for this sort of thing, who brought her through it.
⁶⁰
What also drove her on was the conviction that the policy was, in essence, right: ‘The idea that most people couldn’t pay a small amount for their children’s milk was to me utterly ridiculous … And it showed up those who were using it not really about school milk, but to try to get me out of Education.’
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In later years, Mrs Thatcher gained a reputation for physical and psychological stamina, but though her determination was always present, the toughness had to be acquired by bitter experience. People who knew her in the 1970s often remarked how tired she seemed, and how upset by attack. ‘Milk’ was her first really big test, and she did not pass it easily. Indeed, once the milksnatcher row was all over, Ted Heath, unbeknownst to her, even raised the idea with colleagues that he should sack her. The chief whip, Francis Pym, told him that he could not dismiss the only woman in his Cabinet. Health dropped the notion.

The last straw came just before Christmas 1971. A DES official caught up with the fact that the Department had put out its milk Circular incorrectly, suggesting that local authorities could remit the charge ‘in suitable
circumstances’. If this had been true, the whole purpose of the Bill could have been nullified. Pile wrote almost abjectly to Mrs Thatcher on 23 December, informing her of the error: ‘I want to apologise unreservedly for this mistake which should never have happened. It adds a further embarrassment in an area which is already causing you much trouble.’ Mrs Thatcher agreed to issue a correction at once and added that ‘No. 10 ought to be informed.’
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She was so angry with Pile that at the office Christmas party to which she had brought him a present she turned and whispered to an official: ‘Put that Christmas present away. I cannot give it to him now.’
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Perhaps because of the Christmas break, however, the correction of the Circular went out without publicity, and at this point the defiance of the milk edict rather mysteriously melted away. By 9 January 1972 Britain was embroiled in the first of the Heath government’s miners’ strikes and the media had lost interest in milk.

It was at this point that Ted Heath, showing a concern for which Mrs Thatcher always remained grateful, took matters in hand. Given that she had attracted so much bad publicity over milk for so small a financial saving, and that her public image was poor, she was in a vulnerable position. Heath could have decided to sack her, and there had been rumours that he was thinking of doing so. Instead he backed her. On 12 January he had her, Pile and other senior officials to
Chequers to effect a reconciliation between them – Heath later recalled that she had been agitating to get Pile moved to another department
⁶⁴
– and to plan a new direction for her tenure of the post. Heath had been impressed by Mrs Thatcher’s tenacity, culminating in her victory in Cabinet over funds for school building in June 1971, in getting more money for her department. The deal, in essence, was to take the heat out of education, and to put money into it. The milk row had shown that the educational establishment was lining up against Mrs Thatcher. So had a smaller, but also bitter and eventually humiliating, dispute in which she had urged reform of the system by which subscriptions to the National Union of Students were automatically made from students’ grants regardless of their wishes. Left-wing students had barracked her all over the country about the matter, led by the future Labour Foreign Secretary and Lord Chancellor Jack Straw, who was then president of the National Union of Students; and, in a period when confrontation was dreaded, she had received no backing from vice-chancellors for her attempt to abolish this government-funded closed shop. With the exception of Keith Joseph, Cabinet ministers had been lukewarm in her support when they discussed it in Cabinet in August 1971, fearing a needlessly bloody political battle. On 10 January 1972 she announced postponement of the question for a year. As for the question of comprehensives, the minutes of the Chequers meeting show agreement that ‘If the procedure for local objections was allowed to influence policy … the Government might get the worst of both worlds.’
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From now on, she would concentrate instead on those areas on which people could agree – more primary schools (on which she had already made a good start), further education, more polytechnics, raising the school leaving age, an expansion of nursery education and a White Paper to set out the bright future.
⁶⁶

Following the Chequers meeting, Heath praised Mrs Thatcher in the House of Commons. She used this, and her private knowledge of his support, for what is nowadays called a relaunch. A spate of press interviews in January and February presented her as someone who had learnt from her ordeal and bounced back. She emphasized her ordinariness: ‘Whenever I go over a school the teachers always say to me, “You’re not at all how we expected.” ’
⁶⁷
To the journalist Lynda Lee Potter, with a touching glimmering of self-awareness, she said, ‘The strange thing is, people
do
resent it when you know the answers.’
⁶⁸
‘I’m afraid I’ll be remembered for milk,’ she told the
Liverpool Daily Post.
‘But I’d like to be remembered as the Minister who actually, actually did raise the school leaving age instead of just talking about it,’ and she added, ‘I must confess the record really is pretty impressive. I think the Prime Minister thinks so too.’
⁶⁹
The school leaving age was raised from fifteen to sixteen with effect from September 1973. By May 1972 she was dropping hints about the expansion of nursery schools. She was effective in her fight with the Treasury – officials remembered that ‘it was almost literally true that Tony Barber [the Chancellor of the Exchequer] walked backwards when he saw her coming’
⁷⁰
– and at the party conference at Blackpool in October she was able to trail her coming ‘programme for the systematic expansion of nursery education’.

As a political tactic, Mrs Thatcher’s readiness to shut up and spend worked well. Ted Heath, increasingly beleaguered with economic and industrial problems, was happy to have quiet on the schools front. The educational interest groups were placated, and it became known that Mrs Thatcher was persistent in arguing the case for better pay for teachers in Cabinet. Max Morris, a Communist who became vice-president of the NUT in 1972, and a pioneer thinker in the comprehensivist movement in the 1930s, remembered Mrs Thatcher as ‘very expeditious and businesslike’ and, despite her dislike of comprehensives, ‘very pragmatic’. He was pleased that she avoided confrontation with the union over the report into teacher training which she had commissioned from Lord James of Rusholme, the former high master of Manchester Grammar School, who delivered it in January 1972. In later years, she expressed dissatisfaction with the report’s emphasis on structures rather than content of education, but at the time
she was extremely cautious, and did not press ahead with its plan to have ‘licensed’ student teachers in the classroom, an idea hated by the union because it would undermine their sense of their own professionalism if students were permitted to teach alone without being fully qualified.
⁷¹

The Department began to feel at ease once more. The White Paper, provisionally entitled
Education – A Framework for Expansion
by Michael James (no relation of Lord James), the young official who drafted it, and preserving that name almost to the end of the process because ‘No one gave a stuff what it was called,’
⁷²
was really a Sir Humphrey’s dream, creating new work for officials for years to come, and projecting not far short of a 50 per cent rise in expenditure over the coming decade (£2,162 million in 1971–2 to £3,120 million in 1981–2). In fact, because of the priority of nursery education, the plans included some economies about teacher numbers and restraining admission to universities in favour of polytechnics, which were cheaper, and, in her eyes, crucial to the expansion of higher education. But when the Cabinet considered the proposals on 30 November 1972 – virtually the only Cabinet discussion of education policy in Heath’s entire administration – it was agreed to play economies down and, for propaganda reasons, to restore the title,
A Framework for Expansion
, which had been dropped in favour of ‘A Framework for Advance’. Edward Heath declared to his Cabinet colleagues that it was ‘the most important White Paper [on the subject] since 1944’, but he also told them that the government should ‘Make clear that the White Paper is concerned with the structure, not with the content of education’.
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So Mrs Thatcher’s urgings about content had got precisely nowhere. When it was published in December 1972, the White Paper identified five areas – nursery education, school building, staffing standards in schools, teacher training and higher education – where expenditure ‘will continue to increase substantially in real terms over the coming decade’ – and devoted most of the rest of the document to setting out the various projections. Although always following matters with her customary thoroughness, Mrs Thatcher did not inject many of her own ideas into the White Paper.
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There was nothing about parental choice, little about standards, little that represented an ideology. The document was essentially a bureaucratic product, arising from a cross-government exercise invented by Heath called Programme Analysis and Review (PAR). It stated an official view of matters – quantitive, not qualitative, but one which, for political reasons, Mrs Thatcher was happy to endorse. Officials, by now appreciative of her energy and communicative talents,
*
were very pleased with the way she presented the
Framework
to the world, but what she presented was not discernibly different from what any other secretary of state for education in those years would have offered. As she said at the press conference to launch the White Paper on 6 December, ‘there is little that can be accomplished in education without money,’ and really money was all that it was about. She won a great deal of it for education. At the press conference, Mrs Thatcher also said, ‘Most of you … must have felt that over the last year or so I … have had very little hard news to put before you.’ This quietism had been intentional, and it had succeeded, but it is doubtful if Mrs Thatcher enjoyed it very much. She found herself almost bored, and would have liked to move jobs.
⁷⁵
Her emollient tactic had ensured her political survival, but the price – the loss of her distinctive voice – was high. Interviews and speeches of the period show her adopting a banal, goody-goody tone which does not suit her character. The
Guardian
was now praising her for being ‘more than half-way towards a respectable socialist education policy’, and she told the
Illustrated London News
how pleased she was that the atmosphere in primary schools was ‘much better … much more progressive’,
⁷⁶
whereas in private she complained to inspectors that such education was ‘all rag dolls and rolling on the floor’.
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Floor speakers at the Conservative Party conference in October 1972 complained vociferously that not enough was being done to protect grammar schools and permit parental choice.

For the first and almost the only time in her political career, Mrs Thatcher started to face more attacks from the right than from the left. From time to time, she gave interviews and made speeches designed to show that her Tory heart remained in the right place over education. She expressed concerns about standards of reading, and commissioned a report from the historian and moderately left-wing Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, Sir Alan Bullock, on the subject. She worried that ‘We are feeding doubts into our children not beliefs,’
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she attacked ‘levelling down’,
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and she maintained rhetorical, though not practical, support for parental choice. Privately, she felt that the school curriculum was ‘going off the rails’.
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But in public she became bland. Her period at Education after 1972 is the only time in her career when her contributions in the House of Commons largely lose their combative tone. She became the loyal, careful and on the whole strictly departmental spokesman of a government that found itself in more and
more trouble. As the economic prospect darkened, all spending plans came under closer scrutiny and in the course of 1973 it became clear the
Framework
ideas were a wish-list which could not be met. On 12 November the National Union of Mineworkers announced an overtime ban in pursuit of a pay claim, and the following day, worried about power supply, the government proclaimed a state of emergency. One of the consequent cuts planned was of heating in schools. Mrs Thatcher was not told about this, and the first she heard about it was on the BBC’s
Today
programme. She went straight round in person to the Department of Trade and Industry to complain, and within twelve hours the order was stopped. Mrs Thatcher was at pains to reveal this decisive intervention to the world.
⁸¹
If the equivalent to the milk row was looming, she wanted this time to be on the right side of the fence.

The coming struggle that was to engulf the country and the Conservative Party made school milk seem a very small matter indeed.