In May 1970, Harold Wilson called a general election, apparently buoyed up by a sudden surge for Labour in the opinion polls. Most Tories, including Margaret Thatcher, were privately pessimistic about their chances of winning. But to his credit, Ted Heath never wavered in his self-belief, and delivered an impressive final party election broadcast. Mrs Thatcher thought his presentation ‘showed him as an honest patriot who cared deeply about his country and wanted to serve it’.39 This was a widely shared view at the time, and may well have been the factor that unexpectedly turned the tide towards the Conservatives on polling day.
On election night, there was a swing of between 3 and 6 per cent to the Tories. Listening to one of the early victories, announced on the car radio, a surprised Margaret Thatcher said to her husband, ‘If that result is right, we’ve won’.40 Denis turned the car round and they went to the Daily Telegraph party at the Savoy. By the end of the night it was clear that Ted Heath would form the next government with an overall majority of about thirty. When the seats that were counted the next day, among them Finchley, had all declared, the final result was indeed a Conservative overall majority of thirty, a lead over Labour of forty-three seats. Margaret Thatcher increased her majority to 11,185. She was not among the top tier of cabinet ministers whose appointments were announced on Friday 19 June. She waited, on tenterhooks, for the summons to 10 Downing Street. It came the following morning.
REFLECTION
The wait could not have been unduly tense for her place in the cabinet was a certainty. She had grown in stature during her six years in opposition, climbing from the anonymous shallows of junior front-benchers to the senior ranks of recognised party figures. As an attacker of Labour government policies in the debating chamber, she was second in effectiveness only to Iain Macleod. But her relationships with her colleagues were less assured. Life in the shadow cabinet and cabinet requires team players. She was a loner, strangely angular and intense in her non-collegiate approach.
Ted Heath was not so much hostile as indifferent towards her. His admiration for her competence was diminished by his irritation over her talkativeness. He was bored listening to her opinions on subjects about which he thought she knew nothing. He wanted to keep her firmly in her place as ‘the statutory woman’ of his administration, a concept that she found insufferably condescending.
She was wise enough to suffer in silence. She knew that his view of her reflected a widespread attitude amongst male members of the parliamentary club. It held that women MPs, even women in the cabinet, could only be Second XI players. This was pure prejudice, but it was a prejudice shared by the new prime minister.
Perhaps with more graciousness from him and less pushiness from her they might have built a better relationship. They were never likely to become kindred spirits, yet they shared obvious areas of kinship because they were fellow outsiders and pioneers. They had both broken new ground in the old hierarchical power structure of the Tory party by rising from their similar backgrounds of tradesmen fathers, strait-laced provincialism, grammar-school education and a socially uncertain start at Oxford.
One difference between them, which became much noticed by the time they contested the Tory leadership in 1975, was that Margaret Thatcher had good manners, whereas Ted Heath could be brusque to the point of rudeness. She had been well trained at home and in the shop to be polite. He brought to mind Talleyrand’s observation on Napoleon: ‘What a pity that such a great man should be so badly brought up.’41
This divergence between their styles of behaviour was displayed on the morning of Saturday 20 June 1970 at 10 Downing Street. At her first meeting with the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was all smiles and congratulations. Ted Heath was abrupt. As she described this contrast later, ‘not much time was spent on pleasantries. He was, as ever, brusque and businesslike’.42 His curt manner was surprising but nothing personal. Other cabinet appointees on the same day were astonished by his coldness on what is normally an occasion for warmth between colleagues.
Whatever the atmosphere, Margaret Thatcher got the job she had expected. She was appointed Secretary of State for Education and a Privy Councillor. Her career as a cabinet minister had begun.
________________
* The ring was bought for £220 from William Mullins, proprietor of J. McCarthy (established 1798), an antique jewellery shop in Artillery Row, Victoria. Both Thatchers were his regular customers for over forty-five years. Mr Mullins, a shopkeeper of considerable character, received an invitation to attend Lady Thatcher’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2013.
† The collapse of the colliery spoil tip at the village of Aberfan on the 21 October 1966 killing 116 children and twenty-eight adults. The National Coal Board was heavily criticised for their failings in the aftermath of the disaster.
8
Secretary of State for Education
FIRST MOVES
The flaw in Margaret as Education Secretary was the same flaw that became apparent in her as Prime Minister. Everything had to begin, continue and end with a vigorous argument. It is not always the best way of getting things done.1
This comment of Norman St John-Stevas, Junior Minister at the Department of Education and Science (DES) under Margaret Thatcher, would have been agreed with by her departmental officials.
Arriving as the new Secretary of State at her department’s Curzon Street office on Monday 22 June 1970, she presented her Permanent Secretary with a page torn from a school exercise book listing eighteen actions she wanted taken that day. William Pile* was also a newcomer, having just been promoted to the top rung of the Whitehall ladder at the young age of fifty. From day one they were at loggerheads on many issues.
Top of Margaret Thatcher’s action list was an instruction to local education authorities telling them that they could disregard the previous Labour government’s directives on the compulsory comprehensivisation of secondary schools. This was not unexpected since it had been promised in the Conservative manifesto. Pile put the draft circular on her desk by the end of the day. It led to the first of many clashes between them.
What Margaret Thatcher wanted was the swift and simple withdrawal of Labour’s directives on comprehensives. She was advised that to remove one circular she had to issue a replacement. The draft replacement circular was a long and circumlocutory paper setting out the department’s view on the future shape of secondary education across the country. It was not to the taste of the new Secretary of State. She rejected it and produced a much shorter draft in her own handwriting, which became known as Circular 10/70. It withdrew the existing Labour directives making comprehensivisation compulsory and contained the sentence, ‘The Secretary of State will expect educational considerations in general, local needs and wishes in particular and the wise use of resources to be the main principles determining the local pattern.’2
Although the new circular produced a noisy debate in Parliament, it was hardly a counter-revolutionary call to arms. The power to decide the future of local schools remained firmly with the LEAs, of which 70 per cent had already gone comprehensive. So, despite being accused of ‘sheer high-handed ideological arrogance’,3 and described as ‘the feminine version of Selsdon Man operating in education’,4 Margaret Thatcher was right to retort that she was not stopping anyone from doing anything, nor was she changing the law. She was merely removing the compulsion from Labour’s policy and restoring the right of LEAs to make their own decisions. When existing schemes were working well there would be no change. ‘I fail to see what is reactionary or extreme about that’, she told the House.5 She won the argument but she made some enemies.
The charge of arrogance against Margaret Thatcher in her early days as a Secretary of State had justification both politically and personally. She took no notice of the Prime Minister’s warning to all his colleagues at the first meeting of his cabinet on 23 June: ‘Don’t be rushed into hasty decisions of policy.’6 Against official advice, she ploughed her own policy furrows with more haste t
han speed.
On the personal front, there was a revealing incident at her father’s memorial service on 18 October 1970, at the Finkin Street Church in Grantham. Margaret Thatcher complained to her elder sister, ‘They don’t know how to treat a Cabinet Minister, do they?’ Muriel’s tart response was, ‘This service isn’t for you’.7
Her self-importance and self-certainty could be assets in confronting senior colleagues. One of her boldest challenges was mounted against the Treasury, which had decided to cut £300 million from the DES budget. Margaret Thatcher, after some vigorous arguments with the diffident Chief Secretary Maurice Macmillan, fought and won her corner. Her budget remained virtually unscathed and she managed to avoid the Treasury’s axe falling on its two priority targets: Raising of the School Leaving Age (ROSLA) and the Open University (OU).
Raising of the school leaving age to sixteen had been delayed by the Labour government, and the Treasury made the case for a further postponement. But Margaret Thatcher firmly reminded her colleagues that ROSLA had been a manifesto promise. The Prime Minister supported her. So this big spending policy commitment was given the green light.
The preservation of the Open University (OU) was a more remarkable feat, although the way it was saved raised hackles among senior colleagues. In his quest for savings, Iain Macleod was determined to abolish the OU, which he saw as a dubious conjuring trick of Harold Wilson’s. The outgoing Labour Prime Minister loved telling the story of how the idea of a university of the airwaves, open to all, had floated into his mind when walking round St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly. Macleod, who described Harold Wilson as ‘an illusionist without ideals’,8 took the cynical view that the project should follow its originator into oblivion.9
Margaret Thatcher was convinced of the Open University’s potential to offer graduation opportunities to mature students at low cost. She outflanked the Prime Minister and the Chancellor by boldly announcing her support for the Open University at a press conference two days after taking office. Macleod, from his hospital bed, was upset, and Heath was furious.10 The Open University’s future might have been brought back to full cabinet for further review had not Iain Macleod† suddenly died of a heart attack, aged only fifty-six, at the end of July 1970.
At the DES, Margaret Thatcher’s highest priority, after defending her department’s budget, was fighting a rearguard action to save good grammar schools. There was a power, under Section 13 of the 1944 Education Act, for the Secretary of State to give or withhold approval for reorganisation schemes – but the grounds for withholding were strictly limited. Unlike her Conservative and Labour predecessors, who had regarded Section 13 as giving only ‘reserve powers’ to the minister, Margaret Thatcher personally examined nearly 3,500 school reorganisation schemes. This required a massive increase in her workload. To her chagrin, she found that over 90 per cent of the schemes submitted by LEAs were correct and locally approved reorganisations. Even in her hometown of Grantham she had to accept that her alma mater KGGS had to merge on the practical grounds of needing to create larger sixth forms to cope with the raised school-leaving age.
Margaret Thatcher did however intervene in 326, or in 9 per cent of the comprehensivisation schemes submitted to her. She claimed in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in June 1972 that she had saved ninety-four ‘famous grammar schools with supreme reputations’.11 Some of those reprieves were only temporary. Even in her constituency’s local authority of Barnet, where she preserved Christ’s College and Woodhouse Grammar, both of them were merged with comprehensives or sixth-form colleges three years later.
The outcome of her largely unsuccessful efforts to preserve selective education was that while she was Secretary of State, comprehensivisation advanced on a wider and faster scale than ever before. She preserved only a handful of grammar schools in Conservative controlled areas such as Surrey, Harrow, Walsall and Birmingham. But her rearguard action was not a complete failure. She kept alive the flame of choice in education. It was to burn more brightly again under subsequent governments, including her own.
The warfare over comprehensivisation brought Margaret Thatcher into a feeling of growing animosity towards her Permanent Secretary, Bill Pile. He was a smart and stubborn Sir Humphrey when it came to confrontations. Sparks flew between him and Margaret Thatcher, particularly when he advised her that she had no powers to dismiss officials whom she felt had let her down, or to intervene in disputes which were beyond her legal powers.
In the middle of one of her rows with Pile she went to see the Minister for the Civil Service, Lord Jellicoe, and made a tearful appeal for her Permanent Secretary to be transferred to another department. She did not help her case by suggesting that Pile’s Russian wife made him a security risk. Ted Heath, on the advice of the Head of the Civil Service, Sir William Armstrong, rejected Margaret Thatcher’s request. Pile stayed in his post.12
Norman St John-Stevas recalled:
Margaret’s rows with Bill Pile could be dreadful. They would go at each other hammer and tongs, neither of them would concede anything and the meetings ended with them both stalking out of the room at opposite exits. But for all the explosions, most of the time they both got on with the department’s agenda with icy co-operation. The main thing they fell out about was her fierce criticism of individual officials who she wanted sacked and Pile wouldn’t have it.13
The Secretary of State could be equally abrasive with her junior ministers. One she disliked for his ‘wetness’14 (an early use of a term she made famous as Prime Minister) was Lord Sandford. He was a well-off Anglican clergyman who had inherited a peerage and assimilated a liberal viewpoint on comprehensives. ‘She kept bashing him up one day, and then sending him to Siberia the next’, was how Norman St John-Stevas remembered their relationship.
I used to think she was so silly with him and some of the top civil servants. If only she’d occasionally let them win a point or two! But no, she just had to crush them into the ground and grind them into little pieces.15
This style of aggressive arguing and personal bullying was reserved for just a handful of ministers and decision-making officials at DES. Below this level, most of the middle-ranking and junior civil servants who engaged with their Secretary of State liked her. She was courteous, solicitous and at times rather motherly towards them. When they worked late with her she would rustle up snacks, pour them out mugs of coffee laced with a splash of whisky and thank them warmly for their extra effort.
Her flashes of bad temper were reserved for the high fliers. She saw many of them as ideologically obstructive. They saw her as a confrontational Home Counties lady who wanted to impose Tory radicalism on an area of national life that they thought was already well run by the prevailing educational consensus. Both perspectives had rights and wrongs in them. If the two camps had managed to find a better working relationship as a team, they might have avoided the nastiest and most artificial row during her three years and eight months as Secretary of State, when she was labelled ‘Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher’.16
MILK SNATCHER
The row about free milk and schoolchildren was artificial in its political substance but it had a devastating impact on Margaret Thatcher’s reputation at the time. To this day, the phrase, which originated from a floor speaker at the Labour Party Conference of 1971, is remembered as the most pejorative and personalised negative campaigning slogan of the early 1970s.
The row did not surface when the Secretary of State for Education conceded the £8 million cut in free school milk during her public expenditure round of negotiations with the Treasury in the autumn of 1970. The press commented favourably on her defence of her department’s programme. The Guardian, mentioning the milk cut, praised Margaret Thatcher for her victories over the Treasury, and thought she had done well to escape with ‘a remarkably light raid on the education budget’.17
The Guardian, the rest of the press and the Labour Party changed their tune by the time Margaret Thatcher came to introduce the leg
islation ending free school milk. The Sun voted her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’, and asked its readers, ‘Is Mrs Thatcher human?’18 The Guardian described the Education (Milk) Bill as ‘a vindictive measure that should never have been laid before Parliament’.19 During debates in the House of Commons she was variously described by Labour MPs as ‘the most mean and vicious member of a thoroughly discredited Government’,20 ‘Mrs Scrooge with the painted face’ and as ‘a reactionary cavewoman’,21 while Gerald Kaufman opined that she was to British education ‘what Attila the Hun was to Western Civilisation’.22
These over the top exaggerations were mild compared to some of the unrecorded taunts shouted from a sedentary position during the later stages of the debate. I was listening in the gallery to the wind-up speeches, having been tipped off by the Speaker (my godfather) that it would be a noisy occasion. It certainly was. Hansard edited out the epithets of uproar, mentioning them only by the neutral word ‘Interruption’. In fact, the decibel levels were stratospheric on the opposition benches, where the tauntings of the Secretary of State ranged from the offensive to the obscene. ‘Ditch the bitch!’ was one of many insults. The repetition of the chant ‘Thatcher, milk snatcher’ was the main noise of the night. Some ministers feel exhilarated when at the receiving end of alcohol-fuelled rowdy scenes during the wind-up speeches in a House of Commons debate of that era. Margaret Thatcher, at this moment in her career, was unnerved, particularly as the abusive taunts continued at public events for some months.
It was the personalised tone of the attacks that got to her. Logically she considered the arguments unfair. Labour had withdrawn free milk from secondary schools two years earlier with no fuss and no ill effects on the health of the nation’s children. Many of the archaic one third-of-a-pint glass milk bottles went unopened by primary school pupils in the 1970s, often because their tastes had changed since the scheme was introduced in the 1940s. Free milk was no longer a priority or a need – although Margaret Thatcher had preserved the concession for children who were medically prescribed it. She saw the campaign as a synthetic row. Nevertheless, she was severely thrown by the obloquy that poured down on her.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 17