The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  Britain had, of course, been closely involved in the development of the bomb, though because of the breakdown of Anglo-American nuclear co-operation after the war it was not till 1952 that we ourselves were able to explode one. Churchill and Truman, as we now know, were duped by Stalin at Potsdam when the American President ‘broke the news’ of the bomb to the Soviet leader, who knew about it already and promptly returned to Moscow to urge his own scientists to speed up their atomic programme. But the fact remains, as I used to remind the Soviets when I became Prime Minister, that the most persuasive proof of the essential benevolence of the United States was that in those few crucial years when it alone possessed the military means to enforce its will upon the world, it refrained from doing so.

  If the atomic bomb raised one set of questions about Britain’s role in the post-war world, the situation in India raised another. The subject retained its fascination for me. I knew that Churchill, for whom my admiration by now knew no bounds, had fought ferociously against the moves to appease nationalist opinion in India, which had been implemented in the Government of India Act of 1935. The situation in India had deteriorated sharply in the war years and it seemed highly unlikely that even the earlier prospect of Dominion status would seriously lessen the pressure for independence. This was, moreover, against the background, which we did not yet all fully understand, of a much less significant world role for Britain after the war. The two material circumstances which had allowed us to fight Hitler all but alone — the existence of huge accumulated overseas investments and the most successful and extensive empire the world had seen — had been lost or greatly diminished as the price of victory in that great struggle.

  For all that, people of my age — even those committed to the links with Empire developing into a Commonwealth — took a more positive view of what was happening in India than did many of our elders. I myself read at about this time two books which emphasized the role of Britain, not just as guarantor of sound administration and humane justice in our Imperial territories, but rather as a kind of midwife for their birth, growth and maturity as responsible members of the international community. Leo Amery’s Thoughts on the Constitution (lectures delivered at Oxford) emphasized the crucial need to ensure Imperial ‘unity of thought and purpose’ through free co-operation: such thinking also, for a time at least, attracted me towards ideas of Imperial Preference as a means of sustaining our community of interest. I also read Lord Elton’s Imperial Commonwealth which saw our evolving Empire as an example of unity and co-operation:

  To have spread organized political freedom across the world; three times to have saved Europe, and twice the world as well, from a tyrant; to have ended slavery, and taught other nations to end it too; to have been so reluctant to acquire territory, and so often to have acquired it in the interests of others; to have learned wisdom from adversity and to have held a giant’s power without using it like a giant… all this has richly earned the Empire survival hitherto, and has given it abundant titles to the gratitude of mankind… And it may well be that the island from which the world learned the art of freedom will yet teach it the art of unity. It may well be that her present sufferings have finally fitted Britain for that role.

  In retrospect, much of this was self-deception. We could not both give independence to the colonies and continue to determine their future afterwards. At that time, however, such ideas seemed to promise a continued world role for Britain, without either the burden or the guilt of empire.

  Between the spring 1946 mission of Stafford Cripps to India to seek agreement among Indians on the future of their country and the summer of 1947, when the Government finally endorsed a settlement based on partition, I followed events closely. I felt that there was much to criticize in the means, but that the ends of our policy were right and in the direction of progress for Britain, India and the wider Commonwealth. But the Labour Government and Mountbatten as Viceroy undoubtedly tried to move too fast. In a tragic sense the civil war which now broke out, in which a million people died, showed the degree to which British rule had been the guarantee of Indian unity and peace.

  These thoughts, however, seemed out of place in a post-war world in which the new global institutions were the UN, the IMF and the World Bank, and in which the European colonial empires had a very limited future. Indeed, we have still not achieved a full and successful transition from a stable colonial to a stable post-colonial world. As crises like Somalia demonstrate, there are parts of Africa and Asia where order cannot be provided locally, but for which the international institutions have no remedy — certainly no remedy as effective as colonial rule was a century ago.

  But the greatest transformation affecting Britain at the time — and the one which would have a great impact on my political life — was the change of the Soviet Union from comrade in arms to deadly enemy. It is important to stress how little understanding most people in the West had at this time of conditions within the USSR. True, many of the facts were available if anyone had cared to investigate and report them. But by and large and for a variety of reasons they did not. As I have described, I was never tempted to sympathize with communism. But my opposition to it was at this time more visceral than intellectual. It was much later that I thought and read more deeply about the communist system and saw precisely where its weaknesses and wickednesses lay. And it is interesting to note that when Hayek came to write a new preface to The Road to Serfdom in 1976 he too felt that he had ‘under-stressed the significance of the experience of communism in Russia’.

  So too, by and large, did the newspapers. For example, the Daily Telegraph gave little prominence to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, and even after the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in August 1939 oddly interpreted the Russian invasion of eastern Poland as a sign of ‘tension’ with Hitler. In wartime, Anglo-Soviet friendship societies bloomed. Smiling, soft-hearted Uncle Joe, the creation as much of Western wishful thinking as of Soviet propaganda, concealed the reality of the paranoid tyrant. Douglas Hyde’s I Believed (which appeared in 1950, and which I read) reveals the extent to which British communists infiltrated, manipulated and distorted so as subtly to shape political debate. Hyde’s account shows too how the war of disinformation in Britain was as ruthlessly and directly controlled from Moscow as were the communist movements which worked in Eastern Europe alongside the advancing Red Army to impose Stalin’s grip on countries whose liberties we had fought the war against Hitler to defend.

  A strong case can be made to mitigate Churchill’s and Britain’s role in the abandonment of Central and Eastern Europe. The famous half sheet of paper on which Churchill scribbled his proposals for shared spheres of influence in the Balkans when he met Stalin in Moscow in October 1944 does indeed have a whiff of cynical realpolitik about it, as Churchill himself accepted when he described it as a ‘naughty document’. It clearly flies in the face of the proclaimed principles of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. But it recognized the reality that the Red Army had occupied a large part of Eastern Europe — and it may have helped to preserve Greek independence. Churchill at least saw, as the Americans did not, that the precipitate withdrawal of our troops in the face of the Red Army would leave the central zone of Germany in Soviet hands and effectively remove any chance at all of our being able to influence the fate of Eastern Europe.

  That said, there is a difference between recognizing reality and legitimizing it. For legitimacy tends to set injustice in concrete. So the Conservatives who abstained or voted against the Government on the issue of the Yalta Agreement of February 1945 — among them Alec Douglas-Home — were right. My own unease was transformed into opposition on hearing a powerful speech by Lord De L’Isle and Dudley to OUCA in the Taylorian. It would certainly have been difficult, and perhaps impossible, to force the Soviets to respect democracy and the right of national self-determination in the countries which they now occupied. It was understandable that weary and wounded American and British forces wanted to put the horrors of war behind them and not to
risk some new conflict with their former ally. But to set a seal of approval on agreements which we knew in our hearts would not be honoured — let alone to try to force the exiled non-communist government of Poland to accept them — was wrong.

  Yalta made me begin to think hard about the military aspect of the communist threat. Little by little, I was also piecing together in my own mind other features of the reality of communism. For example, I read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon with its poignant account of a communist show trial. Unlike Valtin’s description of Gestapo brutality, Koestler’s book allowed me for the first time to get inside, as it were, the mentality of the communist. Even more subtly, it showed that through the eyes of the communist himself the communist system makes no sense. Koestler’s character, Rubashov, reflects:

  The Party denied the free will of the individual — and at the same time it exacted his willing self-sacrifice. It denied his capacity to choose between two alternatives — and at the same time it demanded that he should constantly choose the right one. It denied his power to distinguish good and evil — and at the same time it spoke pathetically of guilt and treachery. The individual stood under the sign of economic fatality, a wheel in a clockwork which had been wound up for all eternity and could not be stopped or influenced — and the Party demanded that the wheel should revolt against the clockwork and change its course. There was somewhere an error in the calculation; the equation did not work out.

  Years later, when as Leader of the Opposition I met Koestler, I said how powerful I had found his book. I asked him how he had been able to imagine Rubashov and his tormentors. He told me no imagination was required. They were real.

  As with the whole question of the atomic bomb, so with the (alleged) theoretical basis of Marxism: the fact that I was a scientist gave me a somewhat different insight into some of the arguments. It was in fact after I left university that I read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper, whose analysis in many ways complemented that of Hayek, approached Marxism from the point of view of the philosopher of the natural sciences. This meant that he was ideally equipped to expose the fraudulent claim of Marxists to have discovered immutable laws of history, social development or ‘progress’ — laws which were comparable to the laws of natural science. It was not just that the ‘inevitable’ course of events which Marx had prophesied had not occurred and showed no signs of occurring. Marx and Marxists had not even understood the scientific method, let alone practised it in their analysis. Unlike the Marxists — whether historians, economists or social scientists — who tried to ‘prove’ their theories by accumulating more and more facts to sustain them, ‘the method of science is rather to look out for facts which may refute the theory… and the fact that all tests of the theory are attempted falsifications of predictions derived with its help furnishes the clue to scientific method’. The political consequences of this basic error — perhaps more properly described as basic fraud — were summed up by Popper in the dedication of his later book The Poverty of Historicism: ‘In memory of the countless men, women and children of all creeds or nations or races who fell victims to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.’

  With such a background of reading, it is therefore easy to imagine how I reacted to Churchill’s speech of 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri. It is, of course, rightly famous for its powerful warning that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’, and that in these Russian-dominated states ‘police governments’ were prevailing. But no less significant in my eyes was Churchill’s evocation of the special relationship between Britain and the United States, and of the idealistic ‘message of the British and American peoples to mankind’ which lay behind it. The ideas of liberty found their fullest development in the political traditions and institutions of our two countries. The speech is now rightly seen as extraordinarily prescient. But at the time it was bitterly criticized as warmongering hyperbole by commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. It would not be long, however, before their tone started to change, as Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe and Greece became unmistakably clear.

  By the time I left Oxford with a second-class degree in Chemistry under my belt, I knew a great deal more about the world and particularly about the world of politics. My character had not changed; nor had my beliefs. But I had a clearer idea of where I stood in relation to other people, their ambitions and opinions. I had, in short, grown up. And, by that mysterious process which leads people to every kind of prominent or obscure vocation, I had discovered what I really wanted to do with my life.

  Shortly before my university days came to an end I went back to Corby Glen, a village some ten miles from Grantham, to a dance. Afterwards a few of us gathered for coffee and a sandwich in the kitchen of the house where I was staying. Not unusually, I was talking about politics. Something I said, or perhaps the way I said it, prompted one of the men to remark: ‘What you really want to do is to be an MP, isn’t it?’ Almost without thinking I said: ‘Yes: that really is what I want to do.’ I had never said it before — not even to myself. When I went to bed that night I found that I had a lot on my mind.

  CHAPTER III

  House Bound

  Marriage, Family, Law and Politics 1947–1959

  MY POLITICAL APPRENTICESHIP

  If going up to Oxford is one sort of shock, coming down is quite another. I had made many like-minded friends at Oxford, I had enjoyed my adventures in chemistry and I was passionately interested in university politics. It was a wrench to leave all that behind.

  The newly created Oxford University Appointments Committee, which helped new graduates to find suitable jobs, arranged several interviews for me, including one at a Northern ICI plant, I think at Billingham. We hopefuls were interviewed by several managers whose written comments were passed on to the general manager, who gave us our final interview. The remarks on me were lying on the table at the interview, and I could not resist using my faculty for reading upside down. They were both encouraging and discouraging; one manager had written: ‘This young woman has much too strong a personality to work here.’ In fact, I had three or four interviews with other companies and, though I was unsuccessful, I enjoyed them all. Not only was I given entry to a new world of industry, but the interviewers in those days were invariably courteous and interested in one’s own hopes and ambitions. Eventually I was taken on by BX Plastics at Manningtree just outside Colchester to work in their research and development section. BX produced a full range of plastics both for industrial use and consumer use, including for films.

  Very few people greatly enjoy the early stages of a new job, and in this I was no exception. It had been understood when we originally discussed the position that it would involve my being in effect Personal Assistant to the Research and Development Director. I had been looking forward to this because I thought it would allow me to get to know more of how the company as a whole operated and also to use the talents I had, over and above my knowledge of chemistry. But on my arrival it was decided that there was not enough to do in that capacity and so I found myself donning my white coat again and immersing myself in the wonderful world of plastics. The Research and Development Section had only just been created as a separate unit and its teething troubles compounded mine. But by the time Christmas 1947 was approaching I had made one or two friends and things became easier. My supervisor helped me along. The Section moved into a separate and rather pleasant house in nearby Lawford. Like many others at the company, I lived in Colchester — a town which I increasingly came to like and where I had found comfortable lodgings. A bus took us all out to Lawford every day.

  And, as always with me, there was politics. I immediately joined the Conservative Association and threw myself into the usual round of Party activities. In particular, I thoroughly enjoyed what was called the “39–’45’ discussion group, where Conservatives of the war generation met to exchange views and argue ab
out the political topics of the day. I also kept in touch, in so far as I could, with friends like Edward Boyle, who was later adopted for a Birmingham seat in the 1950 election. It was as a representative of the Oxford University Graduate Conservative Association (OUGCA) that I went to the Llandudno Conservative Party Conference in October 1948.

  It had originally been intended that I should speak at the Conference, seconding an OUGCA motion deploring the abolition of university seats. At that time universities had separate representation in Parliament, and graduates had the right to vote in their universities as well as in the constituency where they lived. (I supported separate university representation, but not the principle that graduates should have more than one vote; my view was that graduates should be able to choose to vote in one or the other constituency.) It would have been my first Conference speech, but in the end the seconder chosen was a City man, because the City seats were also to be abolished.

  My disappointment at this was, however, very quickly overcome and in a most unexpected way. After one of the debates, I found myself engaged in one of those speculative conversations which young people have about their future prospects. An Oxford friend, John Grant, said he supposed that one day I would like to be a Member of Parliament. ‘Well, yes,’ I replied, ‘but there’s not much hope of that. The chances of my being selected are just nil at the moment.’ I might have added that with no private income of my own there was no way I could have afforded to be an MP on the salary then available. I had not even tried to get on the Party’s list of approved candidates.