Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (30 page)

The general populace, however, did appear ready to listen to Margaret Thatcher’s message. She continued her practice of campaigning alongside the Conservative candidate in by-elections, and enjoyed a string of successes as large Labour majorities were overturned in seats as diverse as Walsall North, Workington, Stetchford and Ashfield. Her arguments for reining back public spending were gaining ground, apparently even within the Labour government. For the Chancellor, Denis Healey, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had to implement a stringent programme of expenditure cuts, while Jim Callaghan bravely told his party conference that governments could no longer spend their way out of a recession.

The feeling that the Conservatives were winning the debate, in the country if not in the House of Commons, was confirmed by a succession of encouraging opinion polls. The most favourable of these, which showed a leap in the Tory lead over Labour to a margin of 48–39 per cent, came after Margaret Thatcher made a calculated intervention on the taboo subject of immigration.

Ever since the furore created by Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, the rising level of voter concern about immigration numbers had become the ‘elephant in the room’ of British politics. For nearly ten years there was an uneasy silence from the Tory front bench on race and immigration issues. The Shadow Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw spoke, if at all, on the subject in woolly bromides.

On 27 January 1978, without any consultation with her colleagues, Margaret Thatcher answered a question about immigration on
World in Action
with unusual clarity:

People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture … So, if you want good race relations, you have got to allay people’s fears on numbers … So, we do have to hold out the prospect of an end to immigration, except of course, for compassionate cases. Therefore we have to look at the numbers who have a right to come in.
²⁰

Coming two days after an episode of racial violence in Wolverhampton, the emotive word ‘swamped’ caused excitable reaction. The Chancellor, Denis Healey, accused Margaret Thatcher of ‘stirring up the muddy waters of racial prejudice’. The Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, claimed she was ‘making respectable racial hatred’. The Liberal Party leader, David Steel, said that her remarks were ‘really quite wicked’.
²¹
Willie Whitelaw was furious and briefly considered resignation.

But whatever the political elite was saying, the public reacted favourably. The 11 per cent surge to the Tories in the opinion polls, an unexpected win for the Conservative candidate in the Ilford North by-election and other evidence from market research organisations all confirmed that Margaret Thatcher had struck a populist chord. Even though the Conservative Party’s policy on immigration hardly changed, it sounded as though its leader wanted a new approach. She had followed her instincts, defied her colleagues and successfully made her point. This was to be a pattern she repeated many more times both in opposition and in government. The element of surprise in Margaret Thatcher’s personality was beginning to be appreciated.

NEW POLICIES AND PHILOSOPHIES

During her four years as Leader of the Opposition there was a constant tug of war between two perceptions of Margaret Thatcher. The positive perception was that of a conviction politician who was gradually winning support from the electorate by her courageous openness to new ideas about how to tackle Britain’s decline. The negative image of her, ardently promoted by her opponents, portrayed her as the stereotype of a narrow, shrill, suburban right-winger who could never win an election.

This tug of war was not resolved until the ‘winter of discontent’ in early 1979. In the meantime, the debate about her raged on with peaks and troughs on both sides of the argument.

One of the first peaks, which led to a short-term surge in her support, was her attack on the Soviet Union. This was delivered in two speeches on home Tory territory, to an audience of the faithful in Kensington and Chelsea. Until these broadsides, she had been noticeably cautious in foreign-policy matters. She had dutifully supported NATO and the Anglo-American alliance, while
rather less dutifully campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1975 referendum on Britain’s membership of the EEC. But when she came out as a critic of Soviet expansion and portrayed herself as a passionate opponent of détente, she ruffled many feathers, not least in her own shadow cabinet.

Margaret Thatcher had a long history, going back to her Grantham days, of attacking communism. In her Chelsea speech, inspired by the writings of Herbert Agar, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, she championed the predicament of dissidents in the Soviet Union. She warned that on this subject the Helsinki Agreement consisted of vague words rather than clear action.

In her Kensington speech six months later, she went much further, attacking the Soviet military build-up around the world:

She’s [Russia’s] ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted determined men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world. They are not doing this solely for the sake of self-defence. A huge land-locked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers. No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen… . The men in the Soviet politburo don’t have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one sense – the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms.
²²

The men in the Soviet politburo were not amused by this unexpected onslaught from a Western political leader. They disliked being described as ‘a dictatorship’ and resented the challenge to their détente and defence strategy. Affronted by Margaret Thatcher, they decided to counter-attack with ridicule. A few days after her speech, the Soviet army newspaper
Red Star
came up with the worst insult they could think of. They dubbed her the ‘Iron Lady’.
²³

The epithet made headlines around the world. Margaret Thatcher revelled in it. ‘They never did me a greater favour’, she commented.
²⁴
In the polls, her leadership rating climbed by seven points. She was hailed as a heroine of anti-Sovietism around the world from the dissidents of Eastern Europe to the leaders of China. But the speech played unfavourably inside her shadow cabinet.

Reggie Maudling, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, had already had one private row with her about making anti-Moscow speeches without consulting him. Now
he protested even more vehemently against her ‘violent and sustained attack on the Soviet Government’.
²⁵
It is likely that several other members of the shadow cabinet agreed with him, for it was the general view of the foreign-policy establishment that détente with the Soviet Union should be supported.

Maudling was out of sympathy with his leader on incomes policy, trade-union reform and now on her policy towards the Soviet Union. To make matters worse, he made a joke – apparently at her expense – at a shadow cabinet meeting in November 1976. She reported to her colleagues that she had been unimpressed by the President-elect of the United States, Jimmy Carter, at their first meeting, ‘but sometimes the job can make the man’.

‘Yes,’ observed Reggie Maudling, ‘I remember Winston’s remark – if you feed a grub on royal jelly, it will grow into a Queen Bee.’

His jibe produced an icy stare from Margaret Thatcher and suppressed mirth among several colleagues. ‘I did not fancy Reggie’s chances in the next reshuffle’, commented Jim Prior.
²⁶

This prediction came true a few weeks later when Maudling was sacked from the front bench after an angry encounter in which she told him, ‘You’re getting in my way’.
²⁷

The same thought was in her mind when she moved Michael Heseltine from his portfolio at Industry where his interventionist views were at odds with hers. He reluctantly accepted a less palatable role as Shadow Environment Secretary but only after extracting a pledge that he would not be appointed to this post in government.

Two weeks later, the Shadow Scottish Secretary Alick Buchanan-Smith resigned in disagreement with Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to Scottish devolution. His right-wing replacement, Teddy Taylor, was on the opposite side of the issue to Willie Whitelaw and Francis Pym who were supporters of devolution. Other discordant voices, particularly Ian Gilmour (Shadow Defence Secretary) and Jim Prior (Shadow Employment Secretary), were critical of the opposition’s far from clear policies on the economy and the trade unions. One way and another the shadow cabinet was not a happy ship.

To a small group of insiders it was clear that Margaret Thatcher was passionate about reversing Britain’s decline with radical new policies on the unions and the economy. But she was too cautious to allow her real thinking on these issues to surface in the shape of policy commitments.

On the unions, she encouraged two informal advisers, John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, to produce a paper titled
Stepping Stones
, which advocated a confrontational strategy. Its main policy suggestions were legislation to outlaw the closed shop, secondary picketing and legal immunities for the trade unions. Even when presented in the mildest of forms, this agenda sharply divided the shadow cabinet. Peter Thorneycroft, Jim Prior, Ian Gilmour, Lord Carrington and Francis Pym did their best to block
Stepping Stones
, even though it had the backing of Keith Joseph, Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe and the leader herself.

John Hoskyns recalled:

Margaret’s heart was entirely in the right place in supporting our radical reforms, but she never allowed
Stepping Stones
to be published, nor did she accept its ideas publicly until the Winter of Discontent had completely changed the climate of public opinion. So until late 1978 we were just going round in impotent circles on union reform, even though she knew all too well what had to be done.
²⁸

This same mixture of private radicalism and public caution prevailed in Margaret Thatcher’s mixed messages on the economy. Off the record, when speaking to small gatherings of colleagues, she communicated her support for free markets, free wage bargaining, lower taxes, the abolition of exchange controls, big reductions in public expenditure and tight control of the money supply. But the specifics of these virtues were not openly spelt out by her. The only policy document the Conservative Party produced while she was Leader of the Opposition was
The Right Approach
(1977). She herself called it ‘a fudge – but temporarily palatable’.
²⁹

On the crucial question of whether a Thatcher government would adopt an incomes policy, there was a vague public impression that she would go along with it in the interests of national unity. However, in many private conversations she said exactly the opposite.

This was not a dishonest approach. It was the different expression of Margaret Thatcher’s short-term political head and her long-term philosophical heart. One perceptive observer of this phenomenon was Enoch Powell, who saw the contradictions as the product of a feminine mind:

The consonance between thoughts and words is something in which she is basically not interested. This – as well as being a woman – enables her year after year to live with
something, with a cross on a paper at the back of her mind saying, ‘I don’t agree with that, I don’t like it … but I can’t do anything about it at the moment.’ … It’s more the mood of a person who says, ‘I don’t like that. When I can settle accounts with that, I will settle account with it.’
³⁰

It is possible that Enoch Powell’s perception of this ambivalence in Margaret Thatcher came from listening to her at private gatherings of an organisation to which they both belonged in the 1976–1979 period – the Conservative Philosophy Group (CPG). Although her attendance at its meetings was intermittent, she revealed more of herself than was on display to the general public by her interest in the philosophical ideas and values championed by the group.

Margaret Thatcher began coming to the CPG because Airey Neave suspected its meetings were being used for plotting against her. This paranoia on his part surfaced in May 1975, when he asked me to come and see him. ‘Are you running some sort of subversive right-wing operation against the leader?’ he asked. ‘What’s this I hear about you starting up a splinter group to keep on supporting Hugh Fraser?’
³¹

This was one of many wires that were getting crossed in the fragile aftermath of her election as Tory leader. Hugh Fraser, the least successful of first-round contestants, had started chairing the new CPG, whose principal organisers were the philosopher Roger Scruton, the Cambridge don Dr John Casey and myself. As we had lined up speakers of the calibre of Robert Blake, Friedrich Hayek, Michael Oakeshott, Milton Friedman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hugh Thomas, Peregrine Worsthorne, Anthony Quinton, Richard Nixon and Paul Johnson, it was not difficult to persuade the head of the leader’s office that the purpose of the CPG was to generate new ideas for the party, not to open old wounds. Margaret Thatcher was evidently so persuaded, because a few days later a slightly sheepish Airey Neave asked me, ‘Do you think the leader could be invited to join your group?’ The answer was of course yes, so I sent her an invitation to our next supper, which she promptly accepted.

Her participation in CPG meetings revealed some interesting angles on her then unknown personality. It became clear that she loved to argue, often with a vigour that could startle the assembled company. One evening Professor H.W.R. Wade, Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, delivered a paper favouring a British Bill of Human Rights, which he said was necessary ‘to protect us from political extremes’.