Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (37 page)

REFLECTION

Although Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 election, the main force that drove her to victory was neither her policies nor her leadership nor her image; it was the ‘winter of discontent’.

The voters most affected by this national melodrama were the group known to pollsters as C2s. They were the skilled working class, fast becoming disillusioned with Labour for giving in to union militants who stopped them earning higher pay for longer hours of work. Many of these C2s were readers of the
Sun
, which was why the paper’s editor, Larry Lamb, worked so closely with Tim Bell and Gordon Reece before and during the election.
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Lamb’s view of his readers was that many of them saw in Margaret Thatcher the values that they themselves aspired to. They liked her because she was self-made, hard working, ambitious, determined, patriotic and hating Britain’s slide into anarchic decline. The big hurdle these readers and voters had to overcome was that they and their families were traditionally Labour voters. The big push in Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, broadcasts and newspaper coverage was persuading them ‘to cross the Rubicon’,
⁵⁰
as she put it, and vote Conservative for the first time.

Post-election analysis of the voting figures showed that this strategy succeeded. Amongst C2 or skilled working-class voters, the Tories achieved a swing of 11 per cent. With the C3, or unskilled working class, the swing to the Conservatives was 9 per cent. This was twice as big as swing as the rest of the electorate gave Margaret Thatcher.
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She broke new ground by capturing votes that had never before been won from Labour by the Conservative Party. This blue-collar support stayed solidly behind her for most of the 1980s. It was the bedrock on which she built her revolution. It gave her a mandate for breaking with the middle-way consensus that had governed Britain since 1945.

No one would have guessed this if they had tuned in to the prayer of St Francis of Assisi that the new Prime Minister read out on the threshold of 10 Downing Street. It was an ill-judged lurch into uncharacteristic hypocrisy. For the saint’s apocryphal words did not represent the true thoughts or the real instincts of Margaret Thatcher – as the world would soon discover.

15

First moves as Prime Minister

MAKING A START

‘Well, Ken, what do I do now?’ were almost the first words spoken by Margaret Thatcher after she crossed the threshold of No. 10 Downing Street.
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They were addressed to her Principal Private Secretary, Kenneth Stowe, whom she had come to know and trust from her occasional dealings with him as Leader of the Opposition.

He was waiting for her on the other side of the famous front door, while she delivered her Francis of Assisi message to the media. Crammed into the entrance hall with him was the entire hundred-strong prime ministerial staff, from tea ladies to top civil servants. As they applauded the arrival of their new boss, Margaret Thatcher seemed touched by the warmth and size of her reception committee. After exchanging pleasantries with them, Stowe led her to the Cabinet Room where a number of briefing papers were laid out for her, starting with the procedures for nuclear weapons and urgent security issues. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, took her through these briefs. Her work as Prime Minister had begun.

‘Well prepared, brisk, thoroughly business-like and knowing exactly what she wanted’, was Kenneth Stowe’s characterisation of Margaret Thatcher’s first hours in No. 10. Her immediate priority was forming the government. The great offices of state went to William Whitelaw (Home Secretary), Lord Carrington (Foreign Secretary) and Sir Geoffrey Howe (Chancellor of the Exchequer). There had been speculation in the press that she might invite Ted Heath to be Foreign Secretary, but this was not a thought she entertained seriously. She did mention it to Kenneth Stowe at the outset of her cabinet making, but only in the context of how she should tell Heath that he was
not
going to be offered the Foreign Office. She sent a handwritten letter to his home by despatch rider, explaining
that after thinking ‘long and deeply about the post of Foreign Secretary’ she had ‘decided to offer it to Peter Carrington who – as I am sure you will agree – will do the job superbly’.
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As she told her Private Secretary before writing to Heath: ‘I can’t have him in the cabinet because he will be patronising me all the time.’
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Margaret Thatcher hated to be patronised. That was why she excluded from her first cabinet one other senior figure who she thought, on past form, was likely to offend her in this way. He was John Peyton, the Shadow Leader of the House, whose pedantic style of elaborate sarcasm she disliked. She gave the Leadership of the House to the more colourful Norman St John-Stevas, whose jokes about ‘The Leaderene’ and ‘The Blessed Margaret’ were thought, at least in his own opinion, to provide him with a special niche in her affections as a licensed court jester.

The surprise of her first cabinet appointments lay in their caution. Most of the new ministers were given the posts they had been shadowing in opposition. There was no tilt to the right. Some ardent Thatcherites, such as Nicholas Ridley and Jock Bruce-Gardyne, were disappointed. They were predicting that she would pick a team containing many whole-hearted supporters of her reforming agenda.

Instead, she appointed a traditional Tory cabinet most of whom had built their careers in the Macmillan, Douglas-Home and Heath administrations. The political commentators, as always obsessively interested in the class backgrounds of ministers, gleefully pointed out that the new twenty-two-member cabinet contained twenty Oxbridge graduates; six Old Etonians; three Wykehamists; six former Guards officers; five barristers; three baronets; two hereditary peers; and seven substantial landowners. Just two ministers, aside from Margaret Thatcher, had been educated at state schools – John Biffen and Peter Walker.
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She was the only woman. Feminism, radicalism and monetarism did not seem well represented in the Prime Minister’s brave new world.

These appearances were somewhat deceptive. Superficially, she appeared to have picked a cabinet with a built-in majority of the laid back and the lukewarm in their attitudes to Thatcherism. James Prior (Employment); Francis Pym (Defence); Sir Ian Gilmour (Lord Privy Seal and Lord Carrington’s deputy in the House of Commons); Mark Carlisle (Education); David Howell (Energy); Peter Walker (Agriculture); George Younger (Scotland); Lord Hailsham (Lord Chancellor); and Lord Soames (Leader of the House of Lords) were a mixture
of sceptics and consensualists of the old school. They seemed unlikely to be ardent followers of the Prime Minister down the roads of confronting the unions or replacing Keynesian economics with the doctrines of Milton Friedman.

There were, however, other counter-balancing factors in the early architecture of Thatcherism. She handpicked an inner group of Treasury and spending department ministers whom she treated as her praetorian guard. They held most of the positions on the vital E (for Economic) Committee of the Cabinet. She had weekly breakfast meetings with them to discuss both the tactics and the strategy of adherence to the monetarist faith. These insiders included Sir Geoffrey Howe (Chancellor of the Exchequer); John Biffen (Chief Secretary to the Treasury); Sir Keith Joseph (Industry); Patrick Jenkin (Health and Social Security); and John Nott (Trade). Outside the cabinet two influential keepers of the monetarist flame were Nigel Lawson (Financial Secretary to the Treasury) and Ian Gow (Parliamentary Private Secretary).

By far the most important torchbearer for change in the government was the Prime Minister herself. She was the personification of Edmund Burke’s dictum ‘One man with conviction makes a majority’.
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If there were any doubts that the pressures of power might dilute Margaret Thatcher’s zeal as a reformer, they were dispelled by her first parliamentary appearance eleven days after winning the election. Opening the traditional debate on the Queen’s Speech, she outlined the government’s legislative programme for the year ahead with an extraordinary display of political passion.

Listening to this firecracker of a performance from the back benches, I was one of several MPs present on whom it dawned that Margaret Thatcher was determined to upset the apple-cart of the old consensus politics. Watching Tory grandees like Francis Pym and Ian Gilmour shift uneasily in their seats on the front bench as their leader crushed interruptions and powered ahead with her agenda of economic priorities, I wondered how well some of them supported the tone in which she was moving ‘The Gracious Speech’.

After reminding the House that she had won this ‘watershed election … with a difference of about 2 million votes between the two parties, which was the largest difference since 1935’, Margaret Thatcher unveiled the agenda of reform that she had been careful not to spell out with specific details during the election. Public expenditure would be cut. Income tax would be reduced by the Budget in one month’s time. Every council tenant would have the right to buy their
home at a substantial discount with 100 per cent mortgage. Grammar schools would be preserved. Trade-union powers would be curbed. The public sector would be reduced. The Price Commission and the Community Land Act would be abolished. State holdings in industry would be sold. The government’s strategy was to restore the balance between the individual and the state.
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The fervour with which she delivered her speech (which she had written herself) left the House stunned – with admiration if you were on her side, or with amazement if you were not. These categories were not necessarily defined by political loyalties. I recall going to the tea room soon after the Prime Minister sat down. A Scottish Labour MP, Dr J. Dickson ‘Dick’ Mabon, said, ‘What courage! She’s exactly what the voters are crying out for.’
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Several Tories were more hesitant. ‘She needs hosing down with the waters of reality’, said William van Straubenzee, the Conservative Member for Wokingham, whose penchant for Episcopalian platitudes earned him the nickname ‘The Bishop’.
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Tony Benn captured the mood on the Left when in his diary he described her oration as ‘the most rumbustious, rampaging right-wing speech I’ve heard from the Government Front Bench in the whole of my life’.
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The Budget on 12 June was also bolder and more right wing than most observers had imagined possible. Although the economic weather was becoming increasingly stormy, with inflation at 10 per cent and rising, the unity of purpose between the Prime Minister and her Chancellor was steadfast. The relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe was eventually to turn sour and to bring about her downfall. But in the 1979–1981 period they worked hand in glove together, even if it was her hand pushing into his glove.

Between them they constructed a budget that cut public expenditure by £3.5 billion; brought the top rate of tax down from 83 per cent to 60 per cent, and the standard rate from 33 to 30 per cent; lifted pay and dividend restraints; and abolished exchange controls.
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This last move, which was completed in three stages by October, was a radical affirmation of faith in free markets. Lifting all restrictions on the movement of capital could have caused the collapse of sterling. In fact the international markets sent the pound rising, but the move had been a close call with Margaret Thatcher temporarily becoming more hesitant than Geoffrey Howe on the eve of the final announcement.

There were prices to be paid for these displays of boldness. In order to afford the cuts in direct taxation, VAT was massively increased as the existing rates of
8 and 12.5 per cent were unified at 15 per cent.
¹¹
Inflation, boosted by soaring oil prices, more than doubled, from 10.3 per cent to 21.9 per cent in the first year after the Budget. Interest rates soared to 17 per cent.
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Unemployment began climbing towards what was thought to be a frightening forecast of two million. Also starting to rise were the number of doubters in the cabinet.

HANDLING HER CABINET

Handling her cabinet was not one of Margaret Thatcher’s strengths. Eventually it became one of the main causes of her downfall. But in her early weeks of power she was a good practitioner of collegiate government. The old hands compared her favourably with Ted Heath, who had been far more restrictive in suppressing wide-ranging debate on policy issues.

By contrast, the new Prime Minister enjoyed a good argument around the cabinet table. She liked to open the discussion on a particular topic herself, usually rather forcefully. She was not backward in interrupting the voices that disagreed with the line she had taken. Later in her premiership this style was regarded as somewhat intimidating by newcomers to the cabinet. But at the beginning she was surrounded by older and more experienced colleagues who could not easily be intimidated. So the shared decision-making process was rather effective, owing much to the skills of Willie Whitelaw. He was a past master at summing up cabinet deliberations in a way that kept the dissenters mollified while guiding the decision in the direction the Prime Minister wanted. When reaching this goal proved particularly tricky, Willie had a habit of tugging his eyebrow with his right hand as if to pull himself and his audience to the desired conclusion. It was an engaging quirk that seemed to achieve the right result.

It was sometimes said that Margaret Thatcher never quite understood the concept of cabinet government, and lost the art of it when Whitelaw retired, following a minor stroke, in 1988. Her weakness was spotted early by one leading political figure who had never served with her. Enoch Powell joked over dinner one evening in my home:

The problem is that cabinet government is the ultimate men’s team game. All those public schoolboys were trained from childhood to play in football teams, cricket teams,
regimental teams and at the top of politics in the cabinet team. But she’s a woman. She thinks quite differently. Women fight for their men, their children, their homes, but they don’t play in teams. So it’s hardly surprising she doesn’t know how to be captain of a team. She has no concept of
primus inter pares
. She’s what Hollywood calls a Lone Ranger.
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Some members of her cabinet were unable to dodge the Lone Ranger’s bullets. To a minister she felt was ineffective, she could be insufferably rude, even in the presence of his departmental officials. This was below the belt by all previous standards of prime ministerial behaviour. But Margaret Thatcher did not play by the Queensberry or any other set of rules when she was in a fighting mood.

Among the earliest targets for the rough edge of her tongue were the Department of Energy and its Secretary of State, David Howell. He was a cerebral and courteous Old Etonian, with useful ministerial experience as Willie Whitelaw’s no. 2 in Northern Ireland during the Heath government. Thatcherite in his economic thinking, Howell had headed Margaret Thatcher’s speech-writing team in opposition to her considerable satisfaction. Yet in government, he found he could do nothing right in the eyes of the Prime Minister. He recalled:

She was instantly hostile to everything and everyone in my department. It was almost as if she had declared UDI
^*
from us. She saw Energy as a gigantic temple of inefficient, high-spending nationalised industries, particularly coal, electricity and nuclear power. She thought North Sea oil was a bureaucratic mess. She disliked the Permanent Secretary and the Deputy Permanent Secretary. She was unpleasant and rude to me. It just got more and more rough.
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This was not just the bruised reaction of a beleaguered cabinet minister. David Howell’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary was Norman Lamont. He was so upset by the Prime Minister’s belligerence at her meetings with Energy ministers that he went to see Sir Keith Joseph to make a private complaint about it. ‘Oh, I’ve felt the lash too’, said Joseph with amused insouciance. ‘You see, she deals in creative destruction to make her point.’
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At this early stage in the life of the government, the personality flaws of Margaret Thatcher as an occasional bully were hidden from the world, although they later became notorious because of her treatment of Sir Geoffrey Howe. But within the inner circle, her rudeness to her senior colleagues, even in cabinet, could seem shocking. ‘It’s not just an error,’ she snapped at Lord Carrington when he apologised for some minor failing by the Foreign Office, ‘it’s incompetence, and it comes from the top.’
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