Having served as a junior minister to three different ministers in the same department I was interested to see that the advice tendered to the ministers by civil servants differed, even though it was on the same topic. So I complained when both Niall Mac-pherson and Richard Wood received policy submissions proposing approaches that I knew had not been put to their predecessor, John Boyd-Carpenter. I remember saying afterwards: ‘That’s not what you advised the previous minister.’ They replied that they had known that he would never accept it. I decided then and there that when I was in charge of a department I would insist on an absolutely frank assessment of all the options from any civil servants who would report to me. Arguments should be from first principles.
I also learned another lesson. There was a good deal of pressure to remove the earnings rule as regards widowed mothers. I sympathized with it strongly. Indeed, this was one of the issues upon which, as a new MP, I had publicly stated my position. I thought that if a woman who had lost her husband but still had children to support decided to try to earn a little more through going out to work she should not lose pension for doing so. Perhaps as a woman I had a clearer idea of what problems widows faced. Perhaps it was my recollection of the heartbreaking sight of a recently widowed mother eking out her tiny income buying bruised fruit at my father’s shop in Grantham. But I found it almost impossible to defend the Government line against Opposition attack. I raised the matter with officials and with my minister. On one occasion, I even raised it with Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister when he came to speak to a group of junior ministers. But although he seemed sympathetic, I never got anywhere.
The argument from officials in the department was always that ending the earnings rule for even this most deserving group would have ‘repercussions’ elsewhere. And, of course, they were logically correct. But how I came to hate that word ‘repercussions’. Ministers were wrong to take such arguments at face value and not to apply political judgement to them. It was no surprise to me that one of the first acts of the incoming Labour Government in 1964 was to make the change for which I had been arguing, and to get the credit too. The moral was clear to me: bureaucratic logic is no substitute for ministerial judgement. Forget that as a politician, and the political ‘repercussions’ will be on you.
My days at Pensions were full. Although I shared a ministerial car with my colleague, the junior minister who dealt with war pensions, I generally drove myself in from Farnborough in the mornings. At the Ministry the day might begin with the two junior ministers meeting John Boyd-Carpenter to discuss the larger policy issues or the current political situation. Then there would be batches of letters for me to sign or on which I would seek advice. I might have a meeting about particular areas of responsibility which my minister had given me, such as working out reciprocal arrangements on pensions with other countries. I would have meetings with officials in preparation for papers on forward planning in Social Security — a task which was as necessary as it was difficult. In the afternoon a deputation from the pressure groups, which even in those days abounded in the social services field, might arrive to put its case to me for the correction of some alleged anomaly or the increase of some benefit. I sometimes visited regional Social Security offices, talking to the staff about the problems they faced and listening to suggestions. I would dine at the House or perhaps with political friends — an invitation to dinner with Ernest Marples, the ebullient and original politician who made a name for himself as Transport Minister, and his wife was always a guarantee of superb food and fine wine, as well as jovial company. If there was a division, I would often be in the House to vote at 10 o’clock, before driving back home with two or three red boxes full of draft letters and policy papers to read into the early hours.
I retained my taste for the Chamber of the Commons, developed during my two years on the backbenches. We faced no mean opponents on the Labour benches. Dick Crossman had one of the finest minds in politics, if also one of the most wayward, and Douglas Houghton a formidable mastery of his brief. I liked both of them, but I was still determined to win any argument. I enjoyed the battle of facts and figures when our policies were under fire at Question Time and when I was speaking in debates — though sometimes I should have trod more warily. One day at the Despatch Box I was handed a civil service note giving new statistics about a point raised in the debate. ‘Now,’ I said triumphantly, ‘I have the latest red hot figure.’ The House dissolved into laughter, and it took a moment for me to realize my double entendre.
As luck would have it, at Pensions we were due to answer questions on the Monday immediately after the notorious Cabinet reshuffle in July 1962 which became known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. John Boyd-Carpenter departed to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Niall Macpherson had not yet replaced him at Pensions. Since most of the questions on the Order Paper related to my side of the department’s activities, rather than War Pensions, I would have to answer in the place of the senior minister for nearly an hour. That meant another nerve-racking weekend for me and for the officials I had to pester. The Labour Party was in rumbustious mood and Iain Macleod was the only Cabinet minister in the Chamber. But I got through, saying when asked about future policy that I would refer the matter to my minister — ‘when I had one’.
…AND OUT AGAIN
But would the Government get through? As I was to experience myself many years later, every Cabinet reshuffle contains its own unforeseen dangers. But no difficulties I ever faced — even in 1989 — matched the appalling damage to the Government done by ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, in which one third of the Cabinet, including the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were despatched and a new generation including Reggie Maudling, Keith Joseph and Edward Boyle found themselves in the front line of politics. One of the lessons I learned from the affair was that one should try to bring in some younger people to the Government at each reshuffle so as to avoid a log-jam. But in any case the handling of the changes was badly botched by Macmillan, whose standing never really recovered.
We were already in trouble for a number of obvious — and some less obvious — reasons. Inflation had started to rise quite sharply. Incomes policy in the form of the ‘pay pause’ and then the ‘guiding light’ had been employed in an attempt to control it. Industrial disputes, especially the engineering and shipbuilding strikes, led to more days being lost due to strikes in 1962 than in any year since the General Strike of 1926. Rather than deal with the roots of the problem, which lay in trade union power, the Government moved towards corporatist deals with organized labour by setting up the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) — shortly to be supplemented by a National Incomes Commission (NIC) — so accepting a fundamentally collectivist analysis of what was wrong with Britain.
Above all, out in the country there had grown up a detectable feeling that the Conservatives had been in power too long and had lost their way. That most dangerous time for a government had arrived when most people feel, perhaps only in some vague way, that it is ‘time for a change’. Later in the autumn of 1962 the Government ran into squalls of a different kind. The Vassall spy case, the flight of Philby to the Soviet Union, confirming suspicions that he had been a KGB double-agent since the 1930s, and in the summer of 1963 the Profumo scandal — all served to enmesh the Government in rumours of sleaze and incompetence. These might have been shrugged off by a government in robust health. But the significance attached to these embarrassments was the greater because of the general malaise.
Europe was one of the main reasons for that malaise. In October 1961 Ted Heath had been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the difficult negotiations for British membership of the European Economic Community. Not least because of Ted’s tenacity and dedication, most of the problems, such as what to do about Britain’s agriculture and about trade links with the Commonwealth, seemed eminently soluble. Then in January 1963 General de Gaulle vetoed our entry. No great popular passions about Europe were ar
oused at this time in Britain. There was a general sense, which I shared, that in the past we had underrated the potential advantage to Britain of access to the Common Market, that neither the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) nor our links with the Common wealth and the United States offered us the trading future we needed, and that the time was right for us to join the EEC. I was an active member of the European Union of Women — an organization founded in Austria in 1953 to promote European integration — and sat on its ‘Judicial Panel’ which debated issues relating to law and the family. But I saw the EEC as essentially a trading framework — a Common Market — and neither shared nor took very seriously the idealistic rhetoric with which ‘Europe’ was already being dressed in some quarters. In fact, it is now clear to me that General de Gaulle was much more perceptive than we were at this time when, to our great chagrin and near universal condemnation, he noted:
England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones… In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the Continentals…
But he also said:
If the Brussels negotiations were shortly not to succeed, nothing would prevent the conclusion between the Common Market and Great Britain of an accord of association designed to safeguard exchanges, and nothing would prevent close relations between England and France from being maintained, nor the pursuit and development of their direct cooperation in all kinds of fields…
It is evident that if this is what de Gaulle was indeed offering, it would have been a better reflection of British interests than the terms of British membership that were eventually agreed a decade later. We may have missed the best European bus that ever came along. At the time, however, so much political capital had been invested by Harold Macmillan in the European venture that its undignified collapse deprived our foreign policy of its main current objective and contributed to the impression that the Government had lost its sense of direction.
The Labour Party had suffered a tragedy when Hugh Gaitskell died young in January 1963. Harold Wilson was elected as Leader. Though lacking the respect which Gaitskell had won, Wilson was in himself a new and deadly threat to the Government. He was a formidable parliamentary debater with a rapier wit. He knew how to flatter the press to excellent effect. He could coin the kind of ambiguous phrase to keep Labour united (e.g. ‘planned growth of incomes’ rather than ‘incomes policy’), and he could get under Harold Macmillan’s skin in a way Hugh Gaitskell never could. While Gaitskell was more of a statesman than Wilson, Wilson was an infinitely more accomplished politician.
As a result of all these factors, the Conservatives’ standing in the polls fell alarmingly as the dismal course of 1963 unfolded. In July Labour were some 20 per cent ahead. In early October at the Labour Party Conference Harold Wilson’s brilliant but shallow speech about the ‘white heat’ of scientific revolution caught the imagination of the country, or at least of the commentators. And then just a few days later — a bombshell — a resignation statement from Harold Macmillan’s hospital bed was read out by Alec Douglas-Home to the Party Conference at Blackpool, which was immediately transformed into a kind of gladiatorial combat by the leadership candidates.
This made Blackpool the most exciting Tory Conference anyone has ever witnessed. There was an atmosphere of ‘buzz, buzz, buzz’ as the contenders — at first Rab Butler and Quintin Hogg — and their supporters manoeuvred for advantage. As a junior minister, I was very much on the outside of even the outer ring of the magic circle. But I felt that the victory was Rab’s for the taking. He was a statesman of vast experience and some vision who had missed the leadership by a whisker six years before. Quintin Hogg, or as he still was and later became Lord Hailsham, had more flair and great powers of oratory, but also a reputation at that time for erratic judgement. In brief, Rab failed to grasp the opportunity which was there, making a pedestrian speech at the final rally; while Quintin grabbed and ran off with an opportunity that had never existed in the first place. So when the politicians entrained for London that Saturday, the contest was still undecided.
But the real battle for the Conservative leadership — if a military metaphor can be applied to the subtle processes by which Tory leaders at that time ‘emerged’ — was taking place elsewhere. The subtlest process of all was the way in which Harold Macmillan let it be known that he favoured Hogg over Butler, thus stopping any bandwagon for the latter and preparing the ground for the ‘emergence’ of Alec Douglas-Home. Iain Macleod was to write devastatingly in the Spectator about the way in which the magic circle of the Party ignored Butler and at Macmillan’s behest engineered this. I admired Iain Macleod, as I did Enoch Powell, both of whom subsequently refused to serve in the new Prime Minister’s Cabinet. But I did not agree with their criticisms either of the process or of the choice. I thought at the time there was something to be said for avoiding the public divisions in the Party which open elections would necessitate. I am not in general a believer in changing customs and conventions simply because rationalizing critics demand it. The way in which a Party Leader is chosen seemed to me of much less importance than whether the right person came out on top — and I thought that the right person had come out on top.
The Monday following the Conference I received a phone call from the Whips’ Office to gauge my views on the leadership. I first told them that I would support Rab over Quintin, because he was simply the more qualified of the two. I was then asked my view of Alec. This opened up a possibility I had not envisaged. ‘Is it constitutionally possible?’ I asked. Assured that it was, I did not hesitate. I replied: ‘Then I am strongly in favour of Alec.’
My only reservation, which I expressed at the time, was that there was something dubious about assuming the result of an election — Alec would have to disclaim his peerage and fight a by-election — when asking the monarch to choose a Prime Minister. But I also said that I left that question for others better qualified to consider. In retrospect, though, I would have to add one other qualification. Events in fact showed that the magic circle no longer provided the legitimacy for the men who emerged. It was a handicap to Alec as Prime Minister. By the time a new system was announced I too had come to see the need for it.
My admiration for Alec Douglas-Home was not the result of a recent conversion. When he became Foreign Secretary in June i960 I had expressed doubts to Bettie Harvie-Anderson (MP for Renfrewshire East). I thought that there surely ought to be a suitable candidate for the post among the ministers in the Commons. Moreover, Anthony Eden had, I recalled, ostensibly refused to give the Foreign Secretaryship to Lord Salisbury on these grounds. But Betty told me that Alec was quite outstanding and deserved the job. So I decided to read the new Foreign Secretary’s first speech in Hansard. It was a masterly survey of East-West relations, which emphasized the need for deterrence as well as negotiation with the Soviets and stressed the importance of our relationship with the United States. Alec now and later managed, most unusually, to combine skill in diplomacy with clarity of vision. He exhibited none of those tendencies, so characteristic of those who aspire to be Foreign Secretary, towards regarding the processes of negotiation as an end in themselves. Yet he had the charm, polish and eye for detail of the perfect negotiator.
Moreover, Alec Douglas-Home was a manifestly good man — and goodness is not to be underrated as a qualification for those considered for powerful positions. He was also in the best possible way ‘classless’. You always felt that he treated you not as a category but as a person. And he actually listened — as I found when I took up with him the vexed question of the widowed mothers’ allowance.
But the press were cruelly, ruthlessly and almost unanimously against him. He was easy to caricature as an out-of-touch aristocrat, a throwback to the worst sort of reactionar
y Toryism. Inverted snobbery was always to my mind even more distasteful than the straightforward self-important kind. By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class. And how they laughed when Alec said self-deprecatingly that he used matchsticks to work out economic concepts. What a contrast with the economic models with which the technically brilliant mind of Harold Wilson was familiar. No one stopped to question whether the weaknesses of the British economy were fundamentally simple and only superficially complex. In fact, if politicians had been compelled to use more honest language and simple illustrations to ensure that people understood their policies, we might well have avoided Britain’s slither into relative decline.
For all that — in spite of the media criticism, in spite of the chaotic end of the Macmillan Government, in spite of the correct but appallingly timed abolition of Retail Price Maintenance which so offended small-business support for the Conservatives — we very nearly won the 1964 general election. This recovery was not because of any economic improvement, for inflation worsened and the balance of payments deficit yawned. Nor was it because of our 1964 manifesto, with its heavy emphasis on corporatism as the way out of the country’s economic problems — territory on which the socialists were bound to be more convincing. In part it was because the closer one looked at the Labour Party’s programme and its Leader, the less substantial they seemed. But mainly the credit for our political recovery should go to Alec. It is ironic that he had already been cast in the role of scapegoat for the defeat many thought inevitable.
There had been some press speculation that I might not hold Finchley. The Liberals, never reticent in talking up their chances, began predicting another Orpington. They had secured a tight grip on the old Finchley council, though in May 1964 they had done rather less well in the elections for the new Barnet borough council. The Golf Club scandal kept rumbling on. The Liberals’ new, energetic candidate, John Pardoe, campaigned principally on local issues while I mainly stuck to national ones — above all, how to secure prosperity without inflation. The Party asked me to speak in a number of constituencies in and around London. I answered attacks on the Government’s record on pensions and benefits at a noisy, hostile meeting of women at Bethnal Green. I wrote in an article in the Evening Standard on ‘good housekeeping’ as the test for sound policies.
The Path to Power m-2 Page 15