Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (26 page)

REFLECTION

’Tis not in mortals to command success;

But we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.

(Joseph Addison,
Cato, A Tragedy
, Act I, Scene 2)

Addison’s lines are the true explanation of why Margaret Thatcher was catapulted into an unassailable position in the leadership race. For some years afterwards, particularly during the troughs of her time as Leader of the Opposition, it was fashionable to say that she was just lucky. Not true. By her courage, her early declaration and her professionalism in the debates on the Finance Bill, she earned her emergence as the winner of the first ballot.

Whatever role luck played, it was a small one. Her greatest piece of good fortune was that Enoch Powell had quixotically ruled himself out of the running by giving up his Wolverhampton seat in January 1974, and advising the electorate to vote Labour. Had he still been a Conservative MP, he would have won the contest hands down. She was helped by the decisions of Whitelaw and
du Cann not to enter the first round of the race. Her greatest bonus was the curmudgeonly character of Ted Heath, who accumulated such a large anti-vote. But other people’s mistakes did not turn her into a champion. As the race came down to the wire, she galloped ahead because of the very qualities her earliest supporters among those toffs and Treasury specialists for Thatcher had identified in her. In spite of the prejudice against women in the Tory Party of the 1970s, she was the bravest, the brightest and the best of the candidates.

She deserved her victory.

11

Leader of the Opposition

A fragile beginning

WINNING THE FINAL ROUND

The second ballot for the leadership of the Conservative Party was almost a non-event. From the outside, the media did its best to make the contest look as though it would be a close race. Inside the House of Commons, most Tory MPs knew it was all over bar the shouting. The only betting was on the size of Margaret Thatcher’s majority.

Predictably, Willie Whitelaw threw his hat into the ring as the unity candidate, but he was too late. At least half the Conservative Party was uniting behind the victor of the first ballot. The other half was splitting to candidates besides Whitelaw. This lack of solidarity behind a single ‘stop Thatcher’ candidate was largely due to further Machiavellian manoeuvres by Airey Neave. He despatched closet Thatcherites, notably the far from neutral Chief Whip Humphrey Atkins, to encourage other shadow cabinet ministers to stand in the second ballot. The line taken with these not-so-reluctant
débutantes
was that they should put down a marker in this election so as to be well positioned for the next leadership contest if Thatcher were to implode. This appeal to political vanity brought three more hats into the ring from Jim Prior, Geoffrey Howe and John Peyton. The anti-Margaret forces were now well and truly divided. The trio of new contenders guaranteed that Whitelaw could not muster enough votes to mount a serious challenge to the front-runner.

By contrast, Margaret Thatcher was on a roll. She was the only candidate with momentum and charisma. Once it was realised by the wider public that Britain might be about to have the first-ever woman political leader of a major Western democracy, astonishment turned to excitement.

During the week between the first and second ballots, I decided to take soundings among the executive committee of my constituency Conservative
Association. About thirty Thanet East Tory activists turned up. They had on the whole been staunch supporters of local boy Ted Heath, whom some of them had known since childhood. Now two-thirds of them were gung-ho for Margaret Thatcher, who they variously described as ‘gutsy’, ‘rather beautiful’, ‘strong enough to give Wilson hell’, ‘an imaginative choice’ and ‘a winner’.
¹
After this test of grass-roots opinion, I returned to Westminster and cast my vote for the lady.

Other colleagues had similar experiences. The establishment wanted decent old Whitelaw, but exciting innovative Thatcher was the people’s candidate. She romped home with 146 votes to Willie Whitelaw’s seventy-nine votes. Geoffrey Howe, nineteen votes, Jim Prior, nineteen votes, and John Peyton, eleven votes, trailed far behind her. Britain had a new Leader of the Opposition.

There were some interesting surprises during her first few hours in her new role. Her soft style to MPs during the campaign was replaced by a bossy manner at her first press conference. She gave brisk one-liners as replies to questions. Asked about foreign affairs, she coquettishly answered, ‘I am all for them’. Her staccato responses kept the event moving too fast for most of the press corps, who she chivvied along with commands, ‘Come along now, next question, next question’. She also pronounced: ‘You chaps don’t like short, direct answers. Men like long, rambling, waffling answers.’
²

After the press conference she attended a celebration party at the Pimlico home of her deputy campaign manager, Bill Shelton, followed by a working dinner with Chief Whip Humphrey Atkins. Denis seemed to have been dumped in the middle of the new leader’s progress. He was found wandering by himself in a House of Commons corridor by Norman Tebbit, who took him to dinner.

An unattractive surprise was the venom of some of those who had voted against her. Ian Gilmour was, and remained, vitriolic in his condemnation of the party’s choice, saying that night in his cups, ‘We’ve gone mad. She won’t last … she can’t last.’
³
There seemed to be an uncomfortable number of heads nodding in agreement at his table in the smoking room.

Labour, in general, was cock-a-hoop about the Tory choice. My election night featured a drink in the ‘Kremlin’ bar with my Labour pair, Alec Woodall, the Member for Hemsworth, and a group of his fellow mining MPs from Yorkshire. They repeated over and over again the line that the new Tory Leader would prove ‘bloody unelectable’.
⁴
This was the received wisdom on the government benches for many more months.

On the night of 11 February, the House was busy voting in numerous divisions. One of them was in the Finance Bill Committee of which Margaret Thatcher was still a member. So she took part in a 10.20 p.m. vote on an amendment. After it, the Labour Chairman, Richard Crawshaw, congratulated her. She replied with a few leave-taking words that combined charm and asperity. ‘I think that, due to circumstances beyond my control, I have been called to higher things and, therefore, may not be with the Committee very much longer’, she began, going on to say that progress on the bill seemed to get slower when she was absent because ‘women are always very economical in their speeches’.
⁵

At around midnight, she came home to Flood Street and popped in to see Carol, who was in bed in a neighbour’s spare room. ‘I was half-asleep when she knocked on the door and I can’t remember exactly what we said to each other. But I do recall that she instantly looked the part: the aura of power about her was almost like a halo.’
⁶

Her daughter’s beatification was premature. As the congratulations and celebrations faded away, the reality soon dawned that the victory had brought Margaret Thatcher a difficult and divided inheritance.

AN UNCERTAIN START

Margaret Thatcher got off to a shaky start as Leader of the Opposition. The parliamentary party did not unite behind her. The shadow cabinet, which she altered only slightly, simmered uneasily with divisions and discontent. She made maladroit changes at the top of Conservative Central Office. Airey Neave, who she appointed head of her private office, was conspicuously less successful in this role than he had been as her campaign manager. The greatest disappointment was that she failed to establish a leader’s ascendancy in the House of Commons.

Although these weaknesses were considerable they were mitigated by other factors. Ted Heath helped her by his volcanic sulking. The emollient Willie Whitelaw, her deputy, was a paragon of public loyalty tinged with occasional private disparagements. The constituency associations were more enthusiastic about her than the parliamentarians. On the wider stage, the media were favourable to her novelty and sympathetic to her problems. Yet even taking account of these positive factors, her position remained fragile.

The morning after she was elected, Margaret Thatcher called on Ted Heath at his home in Wilton Street. It was never going to be an easy encounter. She offered him a place in her shadow cabinet, hoping he would turn it down. He did. Her second olive branch was an invitation for him to lead the Conservative campaign in the referendum on Europe. He rejected that too. Then she asked him for advice on how to handle the press. He refused to comment. The meeting was over in less than five minutes.

Heath behaved rudely as well as abruptly. Just before the appointment he was seen by his PPS, Tim Kitson, piling up books on two out of the three chairs in his study to make it impossible for his visitor to take a seat. He did not rise from behind his desk when Margaret Thatcher entered the room. She had to move the books in order to find somewhere to sit down. According to one account, he replied to both her offers in the monosyllables of a petulant child: ‘Shan’t’ and ‘Won’t’. ‘What can I say?’ she then asked him. ‘There is nothing to say’, he replied.
⁷

With the dialogue at an end, Margaret Thatcher left the room. She hung around downstairs talking inconsequentially to Tim Kitson for another quarter of an hour in order to diminish the risk of bad publicity from the reporters waiting outside. Her first attempt at rapprochement had failed completely, as did other peace moves towards Ted Heath in the next few months. The problem was that the deposed leader remained in such high dudgeon that he declined to speak not just to his successor, but to all his old friends who agreed to serve in her shadow cabinet. Even Willie Whitelaw, Jim Prior and Peter Carrington found that they were ‘sent to Coventry’ by their old boss for several months.

Margaret Thatcher did not take her chance to reshape the shadow cabinet. Caution ruled her. She neither rocked the boat nor brought fresh faces into it. This was partly because there was no pool of outstanding talent on the Tory back benches from which a new leader could easily pick replacement shadow cabinet ministers. The net result was that the reshuffle was minimal. Only Peter Walker was sacked, although two other front-benchers retired. The most interesting appointments were Reggie Maudling as Shadow Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe as Shadow Chancellor, and Airey Neave as spokesman for Northern Ireland, which he combined with being head of her private office.

Airey Neave, so conspiratorially adroit at planning the election that made Margaret Thatcher leader, became conspiratorially paranoiac about plots to undermine her. His brooding mistrust created an unnecessarily tense atmosphere.

I myself ran into trouble with Neave about a month after his appointment when he called me into his office to ask why I was being ‘disloyal to the boss’. As evidence for this crime he produced a copy of
Private Eye.
It reported my attendance at a dinner party in Beirut at which various Middle Easterners, while discussing the 1975 Sinai Accord between Israel and Egypt, wanted to know which sections or subsections of the draft agreement were supported by Margaret Thatcher.

At a late hour in this convivial evening I was reported, alas accurately, as saying, ‘She knows so little about the Middle East, she probably thinks that Sinai is the plural of Sinus’.
⁸
Although I explained that this rather feeble quip was intended only as a light-hearted aside for private hearing, Neave insisted that I should formally apologise to my leader. He suggested I should do this in the Aye lobby at the 10 p.m. division, superfluously adding, ‘She’ll be wearing a green dress’. When I duly made my rendezvous with the lady in green and ate my humble pie, Margaret Thatcher was charmingly insouciant about the episode. ‘Oh don’t worry at all. Keith and I say the most frightful things about each other at dinner parties’, was her response.
⁹

As this story shows, Margaret Thatcher went out of her way to be agreeable to her back-benchers including those who had voted or even joked against her. Acutely aware of Heath’s mistakes, she made concerted efforts to be congenial where he had seemed curmudgeonly. She worked hard at remembering the names of even her obscurest colleagues, often asking after their wives and children.

This was not natural territory to her, but her solicitousness was appreciated. Several MPs, when they were having family or health problems, were touched to be sent handwritten notes from her. I received two such letters when I was in hospital with a typhoid infection for eight weeks. These personal kindnesses helped her to keep the party steady during those early months when she was not making much headway as Leader of the Opposition across the floor of the House of Commons.

In the gladiatorial combat of Prime Minister’s Questions, quick repartee, a ready wit and a feel for the mood of the House are vital skills for dominating the frequently boisterous atmosphere. Despite her earlier successes in parliamentary debates, Margaret Thatcher often lacked those skills while Leader of the Opposition. Time and again her troops left the chamber after PMQs feeling deflated. I recall one such down moment in the tea room when Cranley Onslow,
later to become Chairman of the 1922 Committee, observed, ‘Hasn’t quite got the pitch of the wicket yet, has she?’ To which Nicholas Budgen replied, ‘It’s the pitch of her voice that’s more worrying’.
¹⁰

Her shrill voice was a problem. She overcame it by taking lessons from a speech therapist recommended by Gordon Reece who taught her breathing techniques. These and the repeated chanting of the mysterious word ‘Ingakokka’ deepened her tones. Reece also tutored her for television appearances with visual recommendations such as, ‘Avoid lots of jewellery near the face … Watch out for background colours which clash with your outfit.’
¹¹

But while her style in the media improved, the substance of her speeches in the House of Commons did not. Some of her earliest parliamentary performances in her new role were a near disaster.

On 22 May 1975 she moved an opposition motion condemning the government’s failure to curb the accelerating rate of inflation. As this was 21.7 per cent and rising, her target should have been easy to hit. Instead, she delivered a turgid recital of statistics, which bored the House and offered no alternative policies. Harold Wilson had no trouble running rings round her. She had a bad press for the speech. The
Sunday Times
described it as ‘a disappointing flop … it lacked fizz and originality and her voice had its usual garden-party quality’.
¹²

The combination of disappointing parliamentary performances and a divided shadow cabinet meant that Margaret Thatcher’s base of support in Westminster looked insecure. Willie Whitelaw loyally deflected the rumblings of criticism, but even he became affronted from time to time by her confrontational methods of man-management. One such flashpoint in the early weeks of her leadership was the sudden dismissal of the Director General of Central Office, Michael Wolff.

This row was pointless and easily avoidable. Michael Wolff was a decent and thoughtful Conservative Party administrator who had previously been a
Telegraph
leader writer and chief researcher to Randolph Churchill for the first two volumes of his mammoth filial biography of Sir Winston. The only fault in Wolff was that he had been appointed to the top job at Central Office by Ted Heath. For this reason alone Margaret Thatcher sacked him.