Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (55 page)

In her speech on 20 February 1975 formally accepting the leadership from the wider party, Mrs Thatcher appealed to the nation’s past. With a slight nod in the direction of Queen Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury, she declared that the country would never have embarked on the Elizabethan expeditions, or enunciated great legal principles, or founded parliamentary democracy, or made sure that ‘liberty did not perish’, if it had lived only for the moment. There was a need for more forthright and visionary leadership, ‘more emphasis on principle’. There was urgency too, because Britain now had the unpleasant experience of being treated ‘as a poor nation whose only greatness lies in the past’.
*
If Labour won the next election, Britain would be ‘irretrievably on the path to a socialist state’. It is notable that, from the start, Mrs Thatcher used party meetings as the occasions for enunciating her convictions, preferring a less missionary tone in Parliament. On 15 March she told the Conservative Central Council to resist ‘those [the trade unions] who use their weight to push others around’ and declared that ‘the individual is the sun and the state is the moon which shines with borrowed light’. On 25 March, she enthused the Federation
of Conservative Students by telling them that ‘This Party of ours has been on the defensive for too long.’ ‘If we can win the battle of ideas, then the war will already be half won.’ To her Heathite critics in the party, it was this language that proved her dangerous. Jim Prior privately opined that it was ‘wrong to speak of winning an intellectual argument because that implied you had a body of doctrine’.
²⁶
But it was her readiness for the battle of ideas which sustained her, directed her, won her support from outside her party and riveted public attention upon her.

Strictly speaking, Mrs Thatcher was ill equipped for intellectual battle. Despite the brisk efficiency for which she was renowned, she did not have an intellectually orderly mind; nor did she have an original one. Rather than developing ideas of her own, she was a sort of ‘stage-door Johnny’ for the ideas of others – admiring, overexcited. But this was not, in fact, a handicap. Alfred Sherman, who, at this period, supplied so much of the material, developed his theory about Mrs Thatcher’s intellectual character. ‘She wasn’t a woman of ideas,’ he said, ‘she was a woman of beliefs, and beliefs are better than ideas.’
²⁷
David Wolfson,
*
who was to become her chief of staff, described her as ‘a prophet not a king. History remembers prophets long after kings are forgotten.’
²⁸
John Hoskyns,
^†
an independent businessman desperately casting around for ways of rescuing Britain from economic collapse, first met her in August 1976. She was so excited by their meeting that she cancelled her lunch so that they could go on talking. Hoskyns was struck by her belief that ‘something simply had to be done’. ‘I don’t think she had any idea what to do, but she had a patriotic impulse and a sense of shame about what had happened to our country.’ He was struck by her combination of ‘insecurity, sense of destiny and reckless courage’.
²⁹

From the first, these qualities constituted a form and style of leadership, and they created the space for ideas to come forward. Keith Joseph and his Centre for Policy Studies were the means of production, distribution and exchange. As Alfred Sherman put it, characteristically: ‘Early Thatcherism was pure Keith, which meant pure Sherman. She lacked coherence.’
³⁰
And it was ‘pure Keith’ that the new Shadow Cabinet soon had to consider when Joseph submitted to them a document entitled (echoing T. S. Eliot) ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Policy’.
³¹
It was thoroughgoing,
self-lacerating and explosive. Joseph sought to attack the post-war Conservative approach of which he had, he admitted frankly, been a keen supporter: ‘We made things worse when, after the war, we chose the path of consensus. It seems to me that on a number of subjects we have reached the end of that road.’ They had promised too much and been guilty of ‘subordinating the rule of law to the avoidance of conflict’. ‘In short, by ignoring history, instincts, human nature and common-sense, we have intensified the very evils which we believed, with the best of intentions, that we could wipe away.’ There was a need for a strategy to put things right, one which fought shy of any national coalition and of efforts to solve the crisis with a siege economy (‘there is no case for a siege economy when the enemy is within the gates’). This strategy should consider economic problems not in technical isolation but in the light of the threat to the nation which came from economic weakness, the threat of the Soviet Union from without and from Communist subversion within. ‘If we lose independence, we lose all,’ said Joseph, and ‘already we are being disarmed by inflation.’ If we want patriotism, he continued, ‘we must define the
patria
’, introducing better immigration controls. Both the money supply and public spending must be controlled and price increases must be permitted. Benefits should be removed from strikers’ families and there should be ‘sharply lower direct taxes on earnings and investment’. In a climate of such economic weakness and trade union power, ‘Presumably we do not think that denationalisation is practicable,’ but he did argue that a legal framework for trade union activity ‘will come one day’. The Tories should get rid of regional subsidies, try to arrest the decline of the family because ‘the family … is the sole reliable transmitter of attitudes and culture’, consider education and health vouchers, and perhaps decriminalize drugs (a revolutionary suggestion for a Conservative at that time) and introduce a Bill of Rights.

With the exception of the last two suggestions and the eventual but at that time unimaginable triumph of privatization, this startling paper furnished the main elements of what came to be called Thatcherism, both in specific policy and in general psychological terms. Building on an atmosphere of crisis and doom, and appealing to a sense of national greatness that had been lost, it set out a straight and narrow path to recovery, deliberately at odds with prevailing views. There was one important respect, however, in which it reflected the difference of character between Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Joseph’s tone was gloomy and dark. Her natural tone, though just as severe about what had gone wrong, was much more optimistic and energetic about how it could be put right. She knew
how to inspire hope as well as fear. It was one of the qualities which made her a much better natural leader than Joseph.

The Joseph paper caused consternation in the Shadow Cabinet, though Mrs Thatcher supported it. The official minutes express the disagreements gently. There was ‘some anxiety’, they say, about Joseph’s rejection of consensus, and ‘it was generally felt that the Conservative Government of 1970–4 had, on the whole, tried to do the right things, but had failed to explain its intentions adequately.’
³²
But Lord Hailsham kept his own private, less discreet record of some of the dialogue:

Hailsham concluded, dead-pan, ‘There was hardly a dull moment.’
³³

Joseph raised the spectre of ‘Finlandization’, as the West’s quietism towards Soviet Communism was then known, and Mrs Thatcher presciently warned that ‘a serious crisis could well occur were the Government forced to borrow from abroad on terms which were unacceptable to the Left.’
³⁴
But there was, to use the word she so disapproved of, no consensus within the senior ranks of the Conservatives about the analysis of the basic problems, and therefore no agreement about most of the possible solutions. In the coming few weeks, the Shadow Cabinet split, along similar lines, on the question of proportional representation (Mrs Thatcher adamantly opposed) and on that of a wages freeze (Jim Prior in favour). These splits persisted, and the latter was a very important one.

Part of Mrs Thatcher’s difficulty was that the current political situation did not present obvious, immediate opportunities. The precariousness of the Labour majority meant that yet another election could be precipitated at any time, but this would be unlikely to work to the advantage of the Tories. The sense of crisis made party politics a hard game to play. At a time when wages and prices were shooting up (the retail price index for June 1975 recorded an annual inflation rate of 26 per cent), it could be made to seem unpatriotic and irresponsible to oppose a policy to keep them down. The urgent language of emergency weighed more heavily with the public than the seemingly abstract ideas of monetary control and free collective bargaining. Mrs Thatcher therefore showed an untypical desire to remain silent, and tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid making a speech in the big economic debate in the House of Commons on 22 May. By her own account, the speech she did make was ‘not … able to provide a coherent alternative to the Government’s policy’.
³⁵
Public opinion strongly backed a prices and incomes policy, and so did her most outspoken opponents in her own party, Peter Walker and Ted Heath. When the Labour government came up with a proposal in July for maximum wage increases of £6 per week, backed by the threat of statute if necessary, Mrs Thatcher felt able to criticize the Chancellor, Denis Healey, for having only half a package,
³⁶
but she agreed that her party should abstain rather than be tarred with opposing wage restraint. She could not get a purchase on events.

The first big political campaign of her leadership also offered her no very useful opportunities. This was the referendum on continuing Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community, an idea of Harold Wilson’s born out of his need to balance the divided factions on the subject within his own party. Like almost all senior Conservatives (Edward Du Cann turned out to be a last-minute exception), Mrs Thatcher supported a ‘yes’ vote, but she did not pretend to any great expertise in the subject and she therefore asked Ted Heath to lead the Conservative contribution to the ‘yes’ campaign for the referendum to be held on 5 June. From a party point of view, this was both a sensible and a generous thing for her to do, and although Heath technically refused her invitation, preferring an
informal role, it was he who made the most prominent Tory speeches on the subject. At the campaign launch on 16 April 1975, Mrs Thatcher sat next to Heath on the platform and said that ‘Naturally, it’s with some temerity that the pupil speaks before the master.’
³⁷
Heath did not respond with similar generosity.

In her speech that day Mrs Thatcher repeated rather uninterestingly the standard pro-European lines – ‘Are the French any less French?’ and so on – and it has been suggested by some supporters of her subsequent Euroscepticism that her heart was not in it. It is true that she never manifested great excitement in the European arguments of the period, and was mildly criticized for this at the time. Harold Wilson called her ‘the reluctant debutante’. Those close to her remembered her sitting watching the rather amateurish ‘no’ campaign broadcast and saying ‘Gosh, that was good,’
³⁸
and when polling day came she told a member of her staff she wished she didn’t have to vote at all.
³⁹
It is also true that she never bought the more visionary version of Europeanism. In a television interview three days before the poll, she rejected the notion of a federal Europe, saying that ‘The United States of America is a different thing from the United States of Europe’ and that all she favoured was ‘closer co-operation’;
⁴⁰
but she defended membership on the grounds that British loss of sovereignty was largely ‘technical’ and that the nation was ‘getting far more than you’re giving up’.
⁴¹
She strongly subscribed to the prevailing Tory view of the time that the EEC could be made to work as a bulwark against Communism and that a victory for the ‘no’ campaign would be, as she told the audience at the campaign launch, ‘a victory for the tribunes of the Left’. The convincing endorsement of continuing membership by nearly two-thirds of those voting did her no harm politically, and no good. But the campaign helped to restore Ted Heath’s reputation, reminded people that he was more of a statesman than she and rekindled in some minds the idea that he might yet return, or at least that she might go. Because the ‘yes’ campaign had been a cross-party coalition, secretly supported by the BBC and backed by most of the establishment, it provided a possible model for the way the country could be run if there were to be a coalition of national unity to deal with the economic crisis. Such a coalition would have been the end of Margaret Thatcher.