Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (22 page)

This stubbornness by Heath and his immediate circle turned the rumblings of discontent within the parliamentary party into the beginnings of a rebellion. But there were no obvious organisers of the ‘Heath must go’ movement. Still less was there any consensus about who could replace him as leader. So what descended on the Conservative Party was a twilight phoney war of pretending, plotting, muttering and muddle. Heath’s cabal of loyalists pretended they could maintain the status quo. The plotters were determined to get rid of Heath, but could not begin to unite behind a candidate who might replace him. The mutterers, probably the largest group among the Tory MPs who remained in Parliament, went round in circles as ideas, rumours, people and votes were endlessly discussed but with no conclusions being reached. We were a tribe that had lost its head.

Having a ringside seat at this spectacle of chaotic events made me, and most other backbenchers, less rather than more knowledgeable about what the outcome would be. Yet gradually, out of these mists of confusion, a challenger emerged. How Margaret Thatcher moved into this role is a fascinating saga. If one was looking for a catchy headline to describe how she did it, the battle-cry of the US Marine Corps would do:

Hey diddle diddle,

Straight up the middle!

There was no movement for Margaret Thatcher as a leading candidate during the weeks after the second 1974 election. On 31 October, most of the 276 surviving Tory MPs crammed into Committee Room 14 for the first full 192 Committee meeting of the new Parliament. Margaret Thatcher was present, sitting a few feet away from me. She frowned at many of the interventions, perhaps more to conceal her feelings than to indicate disagreement at what was being said.

The early contributions reminded me of a much-quoted line from David Walder MP: ‘The first three speakers at the “22” are usually mad.’ Sir John Rodgers, the Member for Sevenoaks, opened the discussion by saying with heavy pomposity that we should all be steady on parade and stay loyal to the leader. ‘All right, John, he’s already given you your K’, someone heckled. Next on his feet was the venerable but obscure Member for Rutland, Kenneth Lewis, who after a cloud of platitudes coined a telling phrase. He said that the leadership of our party was ‘a leasehold not a freehold’. There were murmurs of suppressed assent. Hugh Fraser was then called. ‘I could not agree more with Mr Harris’, he began, misnaming the previous speaker. ‘Get your islands right, Hugh’, cried out Marcus Kimball. His sally produced laughter, more frowning from Margaret Thatcher and a sudden loss of temper by Hugh Fraser. ‘This is serious!’ he shouted. ‘This is the most important meeting in the history of this committee. We have to make a change.’

His anger altered the mood. Twenty more speakers were called. Eighteen of them were critical of Ted Heath. Only one followed the line of Sir John Rodgers. By the time the meeting ended an hour later, the leader’s fate appeared to be sealed. But nothing happened. The word was put out: ‘Ted’s not budging. He regards the 1922 as just an expression of opinion.’
¹⁶

Many plots and cabals took place over the next few weeks with the objective of budging Ted Heath. One of them stands out in my memory. It was a dinner party hosted by Hugh Fraser at his home in Campden Hill Square. Airey Neave, Nicholas Ridley, Nicholas Fairbairn, Winston Churchill and myself were among the dozen or so guests – all of us Tory MPs. The discussion went round and round in ever decreasing and depressing circles. The general tone was that we could not carry on any longer with Heath at the helm. But from then on, there was total disagreement. One potential candidate after another was named but rejected. ‘Keith Joseph – mad as a hatter’; ‘Edward du Cann – not quite
a hundred annas to the rupee’; ‘Robert Carr – so wet, you could shoot snipe off him’; ‘Richard Wood – decent but not clever enough’. Eventually, someone said, ‘You’ll have to do it, Hugh’. ‘I am ready to unsheathe my sword’, declared Fraser, reaching for his imaginary scabbard. We all laughed, but our host was semi-serious.
¹⁷
Nobody mentioned the name of Margaret Thatcher.

The problem, which this and a hundred other conversations diagnosed, was that in October 1974 the Conservative Parliamentary Party was desperately short of talent at the top. It had no leaders in waiting who were obviously
papabile
. The strongest runner in the field should have been William Whitelaw. He was a likeable Wykehamist of shrewd political judgement, supported by a clever mind, which he did his best to conceal by genial bluster. He had the experience for the leadership, having served well in various crises as Chief Whip, Northern Ireland Secretary and Minister of Labour. But there were three obstacles in his path. The first was Ted Heath, to whom Whitelaw was impeccably, perhaps excessively loyal. As long as the leader wanted to stay, his number two stayed quiet.

Second, Whitelaw was endearingly modest about his ability to be a future prime minister. He was not hungry with ambition for the top job. Deep down, he instinctively felt that he lacked the toughness and the talent to be
capax imperii.
This self-doubt was his greatest disqualification and it immobilised him at the time of his greatest opportunity.

The third obstacle was that Whitelaw had the wrong image to be leader of the Conservative Party in the last quarter of the twentieth century. He was a throwback to a different era of country squires, grouse shooting, gentlemen’s clubs, vintage port and over-ripe pheasant. To these symbols of his lifestyle he added a
bonhomme
of manner which was all too easy to caricature. As Bernard Levin put it in
The Times,
‘Mr Whitelaw … only needs a sprig of holly in his hair to be mistaken for a Christmas pudding’.
¹⁸

The same article contained a more positive assessment of Margaret Thatcher’s prospects, but concluded that she could not win because in a nation of male chauvinists her sex was too great a handicap. Another disadvantage was that she was even colder than Ted Heath. In the opinion of Levin, ‘There is no point in the party jumping out of the igloo and onto the glacier.’
¹⁹

Although she would not have been amused by these objections, Margaret Thatcher accepted that her hour had not yet come. She said as much on
Any
Questions
, with an answer that sounded forthright but left an intriguing sliver of wriggle room:

I wouldn’t be overjoyed at the prospect of being the Leader of the Party at the moment … Nor do I think somehow that the country is ready to have a woman leader … unless there clearly is no alternative man available. Now, I just don’t see that there will therefore be a woman Prime Minister in the next ten years. Now let’s not think beyond that.
²⁰

Having stated her position with becoming, if qualified, modesty, Margaret Thatcher concentrated her energies on supporting the best alternative man available. In her view, this was her intellectual mentor, Sir Keith Joseph. With her encouragement, he now moved into the spotlight as the leading contender for Heath’s crown.

THE RISE AND FALL OF SIR KEITH JOSEPH

Seen from a distance, Keith Joseph looked a strong right of centre candidate to lead the Conservative Party. He had served in the cabinets of Macmillan and Heath as Minister for Housing, and as Secretary of State for Social Services. He was a second-generation baronet with inherited wealth. He had a successful track record in business as Chairman of Bovis, the family building company. Although Harold Macmillan condescendingly described him as ‘the only dull Jew I know’,
²¹
Joseph had a brilliant intellect. His academic distinctions included a First in Law, and a fellowship at All Souls, Oxford.

Yet these glittering prizes had not given him the self-confidence that is an essential part of the armour for political battle. He was a troubled and at times tormented soul. His intellectual wrestling with ideas left him plagued with self-doubt and political guilt. These drawbacks, already known to some of his colleagues, became increasingly apparent as he set off on a one-man voyage of political exploration in search of new policy ideas for a different Conservative Party.

Companions on this voyage were few and far between at first. In the aftermath of the February 1974 election defeat, Margaret Thatcher was more of a sympathiser than a fellow traveller. She was loyal to him personally, but she kept her distance politically. She was not among the small group of MPs who overtly
supported what was becoming known as the monetarist approach to the public finances. Those pioneers included Nicholas Ridley, Jock Bruce-Gardyne, Ian Gow and, below the radar, Geoffrey Howe. The last two urged Joseph to stand against Heath, in the spring of 1974. But Sir Keith was far more interested in political ideas then self-promotion. He turned down their approaches, at least for the time being. Instead, he concentrated on loading up the good ship Joseph, and set sail under the flag of the CPS, with intellectual fire-power.

He recruited as his master gunner, officially called Director of Studies at the CPS, a mercurial hard-pounder turned speech-writer, Alfred Sherman. A former communist, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, Sherman had undergone a spectacular ideological conversion from extreme left to radical right. By 1974, his passion for free markets, monetarist economies and the ideas of Friedrich Hayek were equalled only by his contempt for the policies of Edward Heath.

Joseph and Sherman were an odd couple, and at the newly established CPS they mixed a heady brew of new ideas. Margaret Thatcher joined in as the CPS Deputy Chairman. This was partly out of affection for her old friend Joseph, partly out of infatuation for Sherman, who she briefly described as ‘a genius’,
²²
and partly because she was setting out on her own intellectual quest for a new philosophical framework for her political position. She had never shown interest in such searchings before. Alfred Sherman rightly described her as a politician ‘of beliefs not of ideas’.
²³
But she was changing. Encouraged first by Ralph Harris at the Institute of Economic Affairs and then by the two founding fathers of the CPS, Margaret Thatcher was moving from old certainty to new questioning. She was on a mission to understand the free-market philosophy that Keith Joseph was staring to proclaim in his public speeches.

In one of his first proclamations he announced a shattering discovery. ‘It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism’, he wrote. ‘I had thought I was a Conservative, but now I see I was not really one at all.’
²⁴

Margaret Thatcher, much though she admired Joseph, had no time for such theoretical musings. She was an intensely practical Conservative, secure in her certainties even when they turned out to be wrong. The theology of repentance, applied to contemporary politics, was
terra incognita
for her. So, although she encouraged Joseph privately, she stayed detached from him publicly until the October 1974 election ended in the expected defeat. Then she came out of the
closet and became a supporter of the leadership bid that Joseph was expected to make. However, her role was neither as prominent nor as active as she later claimed. In her memoirs she wrote that by the weekend after the election ‘I had virtually become Keith’s informal campaign manager’.
²⁵

This virtual appointment was largely in her own mind. The job of being campaign manager for a leadership candidate requires visibility, organisational know-how and energetic activity at a number of menial but essential tasks such as intelligence gathering, canvassing, keeping reliable lists and horse trading for votes. There is no evidence that Margaret Thatcher began doing any of this work. The new Parliament did not assemble for several days, and then only briefly for the election of a Speaker and the swearing in of new members. Before even these introductory formalities were completed, Keith Joseph’s hopes of becoming leader imploded. He pressed the self-destruct button with a speech in Edgbaston, Birmingham, on Saturday 19 October.

Margaret Thatcher played no part in this fateful speech. She was not even aware of its subject matter. It was not part of the series of addresses Joseph had been delivering in the months before the election designed to redirect Conservative philosophy. Usually she was sent first drafts of Keith Joseph’s speeches. But this time she was not in the loop.

The first she knew of Joseph’s speech was when she picked up a copy of the
Evening Standard
at Waterloo Station on Friday 18 October. The paper had broken the embargo and splashed the text on its front page. ‘My heart sank’,
²⁶
was her immediate reaction as she read the lurid headline: ‘ “STOP BABIES FOR LOWER CLASSES” – SIR KEITH.’
²⁷

As the first blasts of media notoriety suggested, Joseph had strayed from economics to eugenics. He unwisely opined that ‘Our human stock’ was threatened by the birth of too many children from teenage mothers ‘in social classes four and five’.
²⁸

The hysteria these remarks created was worse than anything Margaret Thatcher had to endure at the height of her ‘milk snatcher’ notoriety. She was strong enough to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous vilification, but Keith Joseph was far more sensitive. He crumbled under the weight of condemnation and caricature. One nickname, ‘Sir Sheath’, exposed him to national ridicule. Another, ‘Mad Monk’, struck a deeper chord at Westminster, causing a sharp decline in the number of his parliamentary supporters.

The real trouble was that his own writhing, convoluted explanations about what he had meant to say made him look all the more like a doubting and tormented novice from some closed monastic order. He was unlucky, particularly as his original words were much distorted. Politics is a rough trade. Heath’s supporters made it rougher. With the paparazzi camped on his doorstep and the parliamentary party chanting like a Greek chorus that he showed ‘lack of judgement’,
²⁹
Sir Keith Joseph decided to throw in the towel. There now seemed to be no potential challenger to Heath in sight. But Margaret Thatcher was watching and waiting.