Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (52 page)

Where Reece was right was in his view that the ‘Knights of the Shires’ – the name traditionally given to the mainly rural, mainly gentry backbone of the Conservative parliamentary party – represented the key constituency Mrs Thatcher had to win. In later years, it was often written (particularly often by Julian Critchley,
*
who had voted for Mrs Thatcher but later became a full-time critic) that Mrs Thatcher’s supporters were ‘garagistes’ taking on the landed gentry in the party, and that she won because of a ‘peasants’ revolt’. This is not the case. There was not really a class war in the Tory Party at this time and, to the extent that there was, ‘Grocer’ Heath (as the satirical magazine
Private Eye
christened him) was just as likely to be the victim of it as the grocer’s daughter Margaret Thatcher. The Knights of the Shires were men who came mostly from public schools, very large numbers of whom had served in the Second World War. Some were aristocratic; some were ‘petty gentry’; some were from the professions and some from business. What they tended to share was a rather regimental, officers’-mess attitude to the party and a strong, though vague, patriotism much more powerful than any definite ideology which could be called left or right.

This was a group of men (more than 90 per cent of them were men) for whom the habits of politics were those of a club. By the autumn of 1974, large numbers of them were coming to the conclusion that Heath had let
down the regiment, weakened the spirit of the club and offended their patriotism. They felt cross that he had so often overlooked their own talents and, through sheer bad manners, snubbed them, and they were bewildered at the way his policies had failed to prevent socialism taking a grip of the country they loved. As Sara Morrison put it, ‘The men with double-barrelled names never really took to Ted.’
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Mrs Thatcher admired the values of this club – she had more or less married into it – but was not herself part of it: ‘I was conscious of being a woman and being of a different social background, although they never made me feel it … Airey had the contacts I didn’t have.’
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It would not have occurred to most of the Knights of the Shires, unprompted, that a woman could lead the Conservative Party, but when the proposition was brought to their attention they were surprisingly unworried by it. A significant minority of them were softened by Mrs Thatcher’s sex appeal,
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and a larger number rather took to her character. Her parliamentary performance and the manner of her challenge convinced them that she had the quality they admired above everything else – courage.

In the run-up to his own leadership bid in 1965, Ted Heath had distinguished himself in the role of debating the Finance Bill in committee. This had taken place as ‘a committee of the whole House’ (as opposed to a ‘select’ or ‘standing’ committee) and therefore gave MPs an opportunity to shine in the large forum of the Chamber, while deploying a mastery of detail. The same was true in 1974–5. Parliamentary proceedings were not televised at that time, or even broadcast on the radio: MPs felt they were addressing an intimate audience of their colleagues and performance on television was much less important than in the House of Commons, a view which, before the end of the twentieth century, was to be reversed. Taking the opportunity that Heath had inadvertently given her by making her the Treasury number two, Mrs Thatcher threw herself wholeheartedly into the assault on Denis Healey and his Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Joel Barnett (a man of whom, as so often with Jews, especially those with good economic brains, she was very fond). In the debate on the second reading, she railed against Healey’s inflation and delighted her troops with her attack on his proposals for capital taxes: ‘a capital transfer tax does not redistribute wealth, nor does a wealth tax. They concentrate wealth in the hands of the Government, which is the very opposite of distribution.’
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From 15 January to 11 February 1975, including the days of both of the leadership ballots, Mrs Thatcher spoke in twelve Finance Bill Committee debates, often very late at night, and almost always to good effect. She combined an astonishing mastery of the technical facts with a sure sense of the emotions aroused among voters by tax, inflation and economic mismanagement. She kept pushing the idea, for example, that
any policy of encouraging savings must welcome a vital motive to save – that of wanting to safeguard one’s posterity. ‘Fathers saved for them [their children] and then’, she said sarcastically, ‘did an awful thing – handing those savings to their children,’ for which they were now to be penalized.
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On 22 January, Mrs Thatcher reiterated her attacks on a grander scale. Healey responded to her criticisms by saying that her ‘whole speech was a defiant reassertion of birth and privilege’: ‘she emerged in this debate as La Pasionaria [a reference to the eloquent Communist orator and broadcaster in the Spanish Civil War] of privilege. She showed that she has decided … to see her party tagged as the party of the rich few.’ Mrs Thatcher was equal to this: ‘I wish I could say that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had done himself less than justice. Unfortunately, I can only say that I believe he has done himself justice. Some Chancellors are macro-economic. Other Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap.’ She emphasized that she was born ‘with no privilege at all’.
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Her combativeness, particularly against the able and aggressive Healey, won her much admiration.

It was Airey Neave who knew how to turn all this to good electoral effect among his colleagues, not least because his own mindset was similar to that of the men he was trying to win over. Though much more intelligent than most of them, he shared the career disappointments, the grumpy solidarity of the cash-poor upper-middle class, the experience of war and the dismay at the country’s steep decline. He also, despite his hesitancy in backing her candidacy, had always liked Margaret Thatcher. He had known her since they had been young candidates together and also at the Bar. In the 1970 Parliament, Neave had found her an ally, sharing an interest in science (which came within her departmental responsibilities) and in nuclear power. In 1972, Mrs Thatcher helped persuade him to stay on as chairman of the Select Committee on Science and Technology ‘since the establishment would be only too keen to get rid of a “strong man” ’.
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In the course of that year, the Thatchers twice went to stay with the Neaves in the country, once to visit the nuclear power station at Harwell (‘Margaret made a hit with the scientists’).
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Neave found her physically attractive, provoking, according to their daughter, a small gleam of jealousy from his wife Diana.
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He was less charmed by Denis – ‘an awkward, complaining character very jealous of his wife – who is really beautiful and brilliant’.
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Once he was her campaign manager, Neave saw it as his task to keep Mrs Thatcher out of the fray of intrigue. She should stick to her parliamentary guns, avoiding media interviews until the very late stages, seeing all MPs who wanted to see her, but not ingratiating herself with anyone or acting out of character. With Shelton as the keeper of what turned out to be highly accurate lists, Neave, who loved skulduggery and backstairs work, sidled up to people in the corridors and the Smoking Room, and told broken-down backbenchers that Mrs Thatcher admired them. One trick he used on John Farr,
*
a fairly typical example of the genre, was to say, ‘Margaret assumes you must have turned down a job offer from Ted.’ Farr: ‘Why?’ Neave: ‘Oh, because you so obviously should have one if you want it.’
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Since Mrs Thatcher had a reputation for naivety, it did her no harm that her campaign manager had a reputation for the opposite which was linked with rumours that he had worked, or even worked still, for the security services. According to Joan Hall,
^†
who had been MP for Keighley until losing her seat in February 1974, and was roped in by Neave to help organize Mrs Thatcher’s campaign, ‘Airey would always clutch to the wall, never walk down the corridor straight,’ whereas Mrs Thatcher was ‘very practical and straightforward’.
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Although Mrs Thatcher gained much of her impetus and her nucleus of support from Keith Joseph and members of the Economic Dining Club such as Nicholas Ridley and John Nott, Neave did not much concern himself with these. He concentrated on the men who sat in the Smoking Room and grumbled – men like Robin Cooke,
^‡
little known then and forgotten now, but men whose votes needed to be won. He also made the most of his acquaintance with Humphrey Atkins, the Chief Whip, supposedly neutral in the contest, but actually inclined towards Mrs Thatcher.
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Atkins resisted pressure from Francis Pym
^§
to support Heath and almost campaign for him. Atkins privately believed that Heath should withdraw.
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The Thatcher campaign was greatly assisted by the tactics of the Heath camp. Heath himself was a hopeless campaigner, resenting the very idea
and, even more than in the past, extremely bad at affecting an interest in other people. The Tory Party, he told Bernard Weatherill, consists of ‘shits, bloody shits and fucking shits’,
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and he was not successful at concealing this belief from the colleagues whose votes he wanted. According to Tim Kitson, Heath would be persuaded by his team to go into the Smoking Room, but would then pick up the
Evening Standard
, drink some whisky and not talk to anyone.
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His campaign managers made him give lunches and dinners to backbenchers, but these proved to be sepulchral occasions, only provoking those invited to ask themselves, ‘Why haven’t we been asked over the last five years?’
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Those close to Heath believed that his natural awkwardness in situations of this kind was added to by his resentment of his opponent on grounds of her sex. ‘It was all tied up with Ted’s psychology about women,’ according to his other PPS, Kenneth Baker.
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Heath seldom seemed to enjoy the company of women. He was so surprised at the idea of being challenged by a woman, and found it so distasteful and disloyal, that he could not quite face it or work out how to deal with it. ‘It’s a matter of opinion’, he told Sara Morrison, ‘whether you think she’s a woman or not,’
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but if Mrs Thatcher had not been, he would have found it much easier.

Although the only electorate in the contest was parliamentary, the attitudes of MPs would obviously be affected by public opinion and the media. Gordon Reece attended to this aspect of the campaign. Since the aim was to pick up the widest range of the disaffected, he wanted a negative campaign in the first stage and ‘nothing on policy at all’.
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Mrs Thatcher needed to look like a winner and ‘This was quite a tall order, particularly as she was not at this stage good at either communicating with people, or on television.’
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There was no question, in the first ballot, of candidates debating with one another on television, because of the doctrine that ‘Conservative must not appear against Conservative.’ For two months Mrs Thatcher gave no press or broadcast interviews whatever, breaking her silence only a week before the first ballot. As the nominations closed, her managers felt it was time for her to go public. Speaking to ITN, she stayed off policy, saying merely that it was time for a contest, and noting that she was the same age as Heath had been when he became leader and that he, like herself now, had been distinguishing himself in the Finance Bill at that time. She compared herself to Mrs Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India (‘a delightful person’).
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Two days later, she appeared in an interview by
Michael Cockerell on BBC’s
Midweek
, and was filmed having her hair done. Antonia Fraser recorded, ‘Margaret Thatcher awful – physically she is not good. Flutters her eyelashes in an unattractive way which is terrible!’
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But these were the words, of course, of a rival’s wife. Most thought that Mrs Thatcher seemed fresh compared with Heath, who was not interviewed, but was shown attacking the new leadership election rules.

On the same day, in the
Daily Telegraph
,
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Mrs Thatcher offered the nearest thing to a manifesto in her campaign. Under the headline ‘My Kind of Tory Party’, the piece, which had been drafted chiefly by Angus Maude,
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began with the premise that the Conservatives had ‘failed the people’.
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There were two lessons of this failure – that inflation was ‘the worst enemy’ and that the preoccupation with macro-economics should not ‘blind us to the day-to-day problems of ordinary people’. ‘International interest rates’, she wrote, ‘must be thought of in terms of the young couple’s mortgage as well as of the balance of payments.’ There was nothing wrong with defending what people called ‘middle-class values’: ‘This is not a fight for “privilege”; it is a fight for freedom – freedom for
every
citizen.’ She continued her attack on Capital Transfer Tax, and said that those who did not respect private property should ‘become a socialist and have done with it’. She added, ‘people believe too many Conservatives
have
become socialists already.’ She argued that ‘industrial democracy’ and ‘co-partnership’, as currently promoted, were means of increasing union power, and she took the part of those workers who resented ‘State subsidies to shirkers’. The
message was reinforced in a speech to her constituents in Finchley the next day:

In the desperate situation of Britain today, our party needs the support of all who value the traditional ideals of Toryism: compassion, and concern for the individual and his freedom; opposition to excessive State power; the right of the enterprising, the hard-working and the thrifty to succeed and to reap the rewards of success and pass some of them on to their children; encouragement of that infinite diversity of choice that is an essential of freedom; the defence of widely distributed private property against the Socialist State; the right of a man to work without oppression by either employer or trade union boss.

There is a widespread feeling in the country that the Conservative Party has not defended these ideals explicitly and toughly enough, so that Britain is set on a course towards inevitable Socialist mediocrity.
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