Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (15 page)

Apart from the Beveridge Report and other general briefing from the department, it was the case work – that is the investigation of particular people’s problems raised in letters – which taught me most about the Social Security system. I was not prepared to sign a reply if I did not feel that I properly understood the background. Consequently, a stream of officials came in and out of my office to give me the benefit of their matchless knowledge of each topic. I adopted a similar approach to parliamentary questions, which would be shared out between the ministers. I was not content to know the answer or the line to take. I wanted to know
why.

Having served as a junior minister to three different ministers in the same department I was interested to see that the advice tendered to the ministers by civil servants differed, even though it was on the same topic. So I complained when both Niall Macpherson and Richard Wood received policy submissions proposing approaches that I knew had not been put to their predecessor, John Boyd-Carpenter. I remember saying afterwards: ‘That’s not what you advised the previous minister.’ They replied that they had known that he would never accept it. I decided then and there that when I was in charge of a department I would insist on an absolutely frank assessment of all the options from any civil servants who would report to me. Arguments should be from first principles.

I also learned another lesson. There was a good deal of pressure to remove the earnings rule as regards widowed mothers. I sympathized with it strongly. Indeed, this was one of the issues upon which, as a new MP, I had publicly stated my position. I thought that if a woman who had lost her husband but still had children to support decided to try to earn a
little more through going out to work she should not lose pension for doing so. Perhaps as a woman I had a clearer idea of what problems widows faced. Perhaps it was my recollection of the heartbreaking sight of a recently widowed mother eking out her tiny income buying bruised fruit at my father’s shop. But I found it almost impossible to defend the Government line against Opposition attack. I raised the matter with officials and with my minister. On one occasion, I even raised it with Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister when he came to speak to a group of junior ministers. But although he seemed sympathetic, I never got anywhere.

The argument from officials in the department was always that ending the earnings rule for even this most deserving group would have ‘repercussions’ elsewhere. And, of course, they were logically correct. But how I came to hate that word ‘repercussions’.

Ministers were wrong to take such arguments at face value and not to apply political judgement to them. It was no surprise to me that one of the first acts of the incoming Labour Government in 1964 was to make the change for which I had been arguing, and to get the credit too. The moral was clear to me: bureaucratic logic is no substitute for ministerial judgement. Forget that as a politician, and the political ‘repercussions’ will be on you.

I retained my taste for the Chamber of the Commons, developed during my two years on the backbenches. We faced no mean opponents on the Labour benches. Dick Crossman had one of the finest minds in politics, if also one of the most wayward, and Douglas Houghton a formidable mastery of his brief. I liked both of them, but I was still determined to win any argument. I enjoyed the battle of facts and figures when our policies were under fire at Question Time and when I was speaking in debates – though sometimes I should have trod more warily. One day at the Dispatch Box I was handed a civil service note giving new statistics about a point raised in the debate. ‘Now,’ I said triumphantly, ‘I have the latest red hot figure.’ The House dissolved into laughter, and it took a moment for me to realize my
double entendre.

As luck would have it, at Pensions we were due to answer questions on the Monday immediately after the notorious Cabinet reshuffle in July 1962 which became known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. John Boyd-Carpenter departed to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Niall Macpherson had not yet replaced him at Pensions. Since most of the questions on the Order Paper related to my side of the department’s
activities, rather than War Pensions, I would have to answer in the place of the senior minister for nearly an hour. That meant another nerve-racking weekend for me and for the officials I had to pester. The Labour Party was in rumbustious mood, but I got through, saying when asked about future policy that I would refer the matter to my minister – ‘when I had one’.

But would the Government get through? As I was to experience myself many years later, every Cabinet reshuffle contains its own unforeseen dangers. But no difficulties I ever faced – even in 1989 – matched the appalling damage to the Government done by ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, in which one third of the Cabinet, including the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were dispatched and a new generation including Reggie Maudling, Keith Joseph and Edward Boyle found themselves in the front line of politics. One of the lessons I learned from the affair was that one should try to bring in some younger people to the Government at each reshuffle so as to avoid a log-jam. The handling of the changes was badly botched by Macmillan, whose standing never really recovered.

Above all, out in the country there had grown up a detectable feeling that the Conservatives had been in power too long and had lost their way. That most dangerous time for a government had arrived when most people feel, perhaps only in some vague way, that it is ‘time for a change’. Later in the autumn of 1962 the Government ran into squalls of a different kind. The Vassall spy case, the flight of Philby to the Soviet Union, confirming suspicions that he had been a KGB double-agent since the 1930s, and in the summer of 1963 the Profumo scandal – all served to enmesh the Government in rumours of sleaze and incompetence. These might have been shrugged off by a government in robust health. But the significance attached to these embarrassments was the greater because of the general malaise.

Europe was one of the main reasons for that malaise. In October 1961 Ted Heath had been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the difficult negotiations for British membership of the European Economic Community. Not least because of Ted’s tenacity and dedication, most of the problems, such as what to do about Britain’s agriculture and about trade links with the Commonwealth, seemed eminently soluble. Then in January 1963 General de Gaulle vetoed our entry. No great popular passions about Europe were aroused at this time in Britain. There was a general sense, which I shared, that in the past we had underrated the
potential advantage to Britain of access to the Common Market, that neither the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) nor our links with the Commonwealth and the United States offered us the trading future we needed, and that the time was right for us to join the EEC. I was an active member of the European Union of Women – an organization founded in Austria in 1953 to promote European integration – and sat on its ‘Judicial Panel’ which debated issues relating to law and the family. But I saw the EEC as essentially a trading framework – a Common Market – and neither shared nor took very seriously the idealistic rhetoric with which ‘Europe’ was already being dressed in some quarters. In fact, it is now clear to me that General de Gaulle was much more perceptive than we were at this time when, to our great chagrin, he noted:

But he also said:

If this is what de Gaulle was indeed offering, it would have been a better reflection of British interests than the terms of British membership that were eventually agreed a decade later. We may have missed the best European bus that ever came along. At the time, however, so much political capital had been invested by Harold Macmillan in the European venture that its undignified collapse contributed to the impression that the Government had lost its sense of direction.

The Labour Party had suffered a tragedy when Hugh Gaitskell died young in January 1963. Harold Wilson was elected as Leader. Though lacking the respect which Gaitskell had won, Wilson was a new and
deadly threat to the Government. He was a formidable parliamentary debater with a rapier wit. He knew how to flatter the press to excellent effect. He could coin the kind of ambiguous phrase to keep Labour united (e.g. ‘planned growth of incomes’ rather than ‘incomes policy’), and he could get under Harold Macmillan’s skin in a way Hugh Gaitskell never could. While Gaitskell was more of a statesman than Wilson, Wilson was an infinitely more accomplished politician.

As a result of all these factors, the Conservatives’ standing in the polls fell alarmingly. In July 1963, Labour were some 20 per cent ahead. In early October at the Labour Party Conference Harold Wilson’s brilliant but shallow speech about the ‘white heat’ of scientific revolution caught the imagination of the commentators. And then just a few days later – a bombshell – a resignation statement from Harold Macmillan’s hospital bed was read out by Alec Douglas-Home to the Party Conference at Blackpool, which was immediately transformed into a kind of gladiatorial combat by the leadership candidates.

But the real battle for the Conservative leadership was taking place elsewhere. The subtlest process of all was the way in which Harold Macmillan let it be known that he favoured Quintin Hogg over Rab Butler, thus stopping any bandwagon for the latter and preparing the ground for the ‘emergence’ of Alec Douglas-Home.

The Monday following the Conference I received a phone call from the Whips’ Office to gauge my views on the leadership. I first told them that I would support Rab over Quintin, because he was simply the more qualified of the two. I was then asked my view of Alec. This opened up a possibility I had not envisaged. ‘Is it constitutionally possible?’ I asked. Assured that it was, I did not hesitate. I replied: ‘Then I am strongly in favour of Alec.’

When Alec Douglas-Home became Foreign Secretary in June 1960 I had expressed doubts to Betty Harvie Anderson (MP for Renfrewshire East). I thought that there surely ought to be a suitable candidate for the post among the ministers in the Commons. Anthony Eden had, I recalled, ostensibly refused to give the Foreign Secretaryship to Lord Salisbury on these grounds. But Betty told me that Alec was quite outstanding and deserved the job. So I decided to read the new Foreign Secretary’s first speech in Hansard. It was a masterly survey of East-West relations, which emphasized the need for deterrence as well as negotiation with the Soviets and stressed the importance of our relationship with the United States. Alec now and later managed, most unusually, to combine skill in
diplomacy with clarity of vision and he had the charm, polish and eye for detail of the perfect negotiator.

Moreover, Alec Douglas-Home was a manifestly good man – and goodness is not to be underrated as a qualification for those considered for powerful positions. He was also, in the best possible way, ‘classless’. You always felt that he treated you not as a category but as a person. And he actually listened – as I found when I took up with him the vexed question of the widowed mothers’ allowance.

But the press were cruelly and almost unanimously against him. He was easy to caricature as an out-of-touch aristocrat, a throwback to the worst sort of reactionary Toryism. Inverted snobbery was always to my mind even more distasteful than the straightforward self-important kind. By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class. And how they laughed when Alec said self-deprecatingly that he used matchsticks to work out economic concepts. What a contrast with the economic models with which the technically brilliant mind of Harold Wilson was familiar. No one stopped to question whether the weaknesses of the British economy were fundamentally simple and only superficially complex. In fact, if politicians had been compelled to use more honest language and simple illustrations to ensure that people understood their policies, we might well have avoided Britain’s slither into relative decline.

For all that – in spite of the media criticism, in spite of the chaotic end of the Macmillan Government, in spite of the correct but appallingly timed abolition of Retail Price Maintenance which so offended small-business support for the Conservatives – we very nearly won the 1964 general election. This recovery was not because of any economic improvement, for inflation worsened and the balance of payments deficit yawned. In part it was because the closer one looked at the Labour Party’s programme and its Leader, the less substantial they seemed. But mainly the credit for our political recovery should go to Alec.

There had been some press speculation that I might not hold Finchley. The Liberals began predicting another Orpington. They had secured a tight grip on the old Finchley council, though in May 1964 they had done rather less well in the elections for the new Barnet borough council. The Liberals’ new, energetic candidate, John Pardoe, campaigned principally on local issues while I mainly stuck to national ones – above all, how to secure prosperity without inflation.

I am always anxious on election day; but in 1964 my anxieties were, in spite of the predictions of my defeat at the start of the campaign, much greater for the Party nationally than for me in Finchley.