by Chris Patten
Margaret Thatcher’s freedom from doubt helped give her rhetoric a self-confident drive that frequently belied what was really happening. At its outset her government had marched for a dismal year or two to the brass bands of monetarism, a funeral march for much of British industry. Over time she somehow managed to muffle the drums and trumpets, fudging the ideological commitment to this creed in its most dogmatic form. Her government slipped out of the straitjacket it imposed. Algebraic equations and the letter ‘M’ with a variety of numbers attached elided into a generalized call for honest money, low taxes and fiscal rectitude (a determination to some extent honoured in the breach).
But the party knew what she was on about. For many, what she regarded as the economics that she had learned from her father, Alderman Roberts, behind the grocer’s counter, were part of their DNA. Keynes was associated with fiscal irresponsibility, or, worse, socialist depravity. It was never difficult to write a speech for her which a party conference would cheer; this is a sentence which is accurate as it stands but would have failed a lie detector test if it had finished after the words ‘for her’. The trouble about these drafting sessions was they were often dominated by a spurious search for an intellectually coherent thesis with its roots in what she argued was Conservative philosophy.
Nevertheless, she did find a language which resonated abroad as well as at home. For example, the Technicolor dramas of her assertion of freedom in politics and economics made her an iconic figure as Russia’s empire crumbled away. This was principally a consequence of its own internal contradictions and failures, steady external pressure over four decades, the mistaken Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and the comparison which acceptance of the Helsinki Final Act allowed the citizens of communist tyrannies to make with pluralist values. But Thatcher’s heroic rhetoric and record certainly provided hope and inspiration to many in Central and Eastern Europe.
At home, her tone and her rhetoric defied the notion that in the 1980s running Britain was an exercise in managing decline. Her success in making Britain governable again was an enormous achievement, for which the majority of Britons, including Tony Blair, should be hugely grateful. It is the main reason, and no slight one, for asserting her claim on some great qualities as a leader. It is more difficult to regard Thatcher’s record as providing a template of Conservative government. She did not define the identity of Conservatism. Thatcherism – not a fully worked-out doctrine, but in effect simply the aggregate of what she did – was not always very Conservative, and in the end she came close not only to wrecking the Conservative Party but also, in the longer term, to corroding the middle-class values whose preservation was the objective of her furious activities.
As I argued earlier, Conservatives should run a mile at the suggestion that they have an ideology aimed at changing the culture of the nation. Yet this construct was nailed in 1979 to a prospectus of Friedmanite monetarism for which there was very little empirical evidence, and even less evidence after the early 1980s. Could you really control and even define the quantity of money in the economy? Was the demand for money stable and the speed of its circulation almost constant? Was a market economy self-regulating, so that a government should not bother itself with trying to manage demand for goods and services, but focus on its finances and the reduction of the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement? This was a faith-based project which, when combined with the impact of the global increase in the price of oil, applied a tourniquet to the prospects for industry in Britain. Interest rates and the pound rose; costs were increased because of oil and wage increases; demand fell at home and abroad. Profits fell; output fell; unemployment soared. Government policy cut a swathe through manufacturing industry; between a quarter and a fifth of manufacturing industry was wiped out. It was what Peter Walker (he is the presumed author of the remark) called ‘the economics of the mad house’.
The senior Conservatives who put these criticisms of monetarism most forcefully were Ian Gilmour and Jim Prior. Ian was a fine journalist and, that historically endangered species, an intellectual in British politics. There was a maddening gap between his aggressive and razor-sharp debating style around a dinner table and his rather drooping manner of public speaking; he was a tall man, but always seemed to be trying to hide behind the lectern. Every conversation with him was a delight, a really tough and witty give and take. I enjoyed his company as much as that of any older politician I have known. I think Margaret rather cared for him too, admiring his brain and his old-world charm. But eventually she obviously felt that she could no longer keep such a dissident member of the crew on board the ship. Being slipped over the side was rather a relief to him. Jim Prior was the other formidable critic of the economic policies of 1979–81, watching with bewilderment as clever people destroyed industries whose needs they could not apparently comprehend. Michael Foot made a brilliant speech about this in the Commons, comparing their surprise as large chunks of British industry disappeared before their eyes with his favourite comic magician who used to borrow a watch from a member of the audience, cover it with a cloth, smash it with a hammer, and then – the pieces in his hand – apologize to the owner for having forgotten the rest of the trick.
Fortunately, at about the same time that ‘the wets’ like Gilmour and Christopher Soames were expelled from the garden because of their (fairly muted) opposition to this ideological folly, the government relaxed its fiscal policy and set off a mini-boom in July 1982, abolishing hire purchase restrictions, dismantling other controls, and expanding consumer and business credits. Recovery began once the government slipped off its monetarist shackles. The Falklands War and a credit boom in 1983 helped to secure the government’s re-election. Maybe the freezing-cold bath in which industry had been immersed meant that the survivors of the shock emerged fitter and more efficient. Certainly they were helped by tax cuts, the relaxation of controls, reform of the unions and the changed climate about enterprise – though the firms that were sold off to the public had to operate within tight regulatory constraints. But it is easier with hindsight to see a real break between the policies of 1979–81 and what followed, rather than regard the first period as paving the way for later success, marked by the scarcely surprising popularity of a credit-consumption boom. In the ten years after Margaret’s first election, consumption rose by nearly seven points as a percentage of GDP while manufacturing investment fell. Nevertheless, inflation was sharply reduced and productivity rose, though it still lagged behind our competitors. While many benefited from the consumption boom and tax cuts, this did not include the poor. Moreover, even despite the huge benefit of North Sea oil, revenues from which accounted for about one tenth of the Chancellor’s budget by the mid-1980s, praise of Victorian values seemed to preclude the replacement of a large part of the infrastructure that the Victorians had bequeathed.
A reasonable verdict might be that the most transformative thing that the Thatcher government did on the economic front was to redress the balance between the unions, other economic actors and the national democratic interest. But this was no small thing. The unions and an unreformed public sector had defeated Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Jim Callaghan had simply tried to manage the slide downhill with a rueful suggestion that there was nothing much anyone could do about it. But there was, and she did it, cannily and bravely riding her luck, doing a bit at a time, falling back when she was not going to win, digging in when she absolutely had to win. Was she fortunate, making the most of her luck from time to time? Of course she was. Arthur Scargill was the gift that went on giving; so too a divided Labour Party led from the left and abandoned by the Social Democrats. So Thatcher drained a sea of fudge, brought the unions to heel, reasserted the case for markets and enterprise, opened the chance of home ownership to tens of thousands of council tenants, and re-established the governability of the country. For the rest, a damaging ideological experiment was succeeded by pretty traditional market-oriented policies which favoured consumption and pre-election booms.
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p; In 1990, Margaret Thatcher argued, ‘Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!’ Well, actually, no. There were for example two departures from traditional Conservative philosophy that had shelf-lives which were in the first case passing and in the second balefully long-lived – surviving at least until today. Any regard for the importance of intermediary institutions in society – for example, universities, the BBC, local government – was thought a denial of the government’s democratic authority. Margaret Thatcher’s government was a ruthless centralizer. No one should stand in the way – from Ken Livingstone to the professions to university Vice-Chancellors. The way in which opposition to these government policies was sometimes conducted demeaned those who understandably took up the cudgels against them: denying Margaret an honorary degree from her own university discredited it; rioting against the poll tax was inexcusable. But both actions reflected real, sustained and understandable opposition to bad policies.
The poll tax was a crazy policy devised by a group of very clever men. Quite how it ever survived from the scientists’ laboratory to the light of day tells much about the servility which had become by the late 1980s a dominant characteristic of the way the government did business. Certainly no new tax should survive without the agreement of the Treasury, and Nigel Lawson was one of the few ministers who opposed it. Having done so vigorously but unsuccessfully, he retired in a grumpy huff to his tent from which he only occasionally reappeared, for example to dress me down for trying to get the Prime Minister to understand the horrendous political consequences of what the poll tax would do to Conservative fortunes. I wanted her to intervene either to abate the financial consequences for ordinary families by capping individual losses, or by introducing the tax bit by bit. Nothing happened: a politician usually hypersensitive about the impact of tax or interest changes on people’s pocket books, she was then distracted by rows over Europe. My main meeting with her about this, shortly after my appointment in 1989, was the only one at No. 10 of which there appeared to be no minutes. The poll tax came in and Margaret went out: it was a much more important reason for her downfall than rows about Europe, although it was more than self-indulgent to lose both Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe to resignations over European policy. No one close to her had the gumption to tell her that what she was doing was reckless.
It was partly because she had gone out on a limb before, risked pretty much everything, and been proved right. It was during the Falklands campaign that Thatcher’s qualities as a leader who could blow a trumpet and bring the walls of Jericho (or Port Stanley) down were best demonstrated. She was exactly the sort of brave leader that generals and admirals, and those they commanded perhaps, admired and even loved. She was clever, decisive, supportive, courageous, unsqueamish and a doubt-free zone. Unfortunately, one of the triggers for the campaign may have been inadequately considered public spending cuts (especially on the navy), and she had some difficulty in displaying any magnanimity in the wake of victory. Good soldiers are often excellent at this since they have witnessed the horrors of war, the large and small acts of decency and courage, close up. (Remember The Surrender at Breda.) Nevertheless, the Falklands campaign was her finest hour.
Margaret Thatcher’s courage had been honed over the years. At every rung in her clamber up the political ladder, the grocer’s daughter must have felt the weight of people – mostly, but not exclusively, men – patronizing her. At Oxford, it probably felt worse than it was. She had only just scraped into Somerville to read Chemistry, and even her college head (a woman) was subsequently witheringly condescending about her intellectual abilities. Her north London constituency (for which she was chosen as Conservative candidate by a stroke of more than luck) enabled critics to associate her opinions with a suburban world view, as though there was something intellectually diminishing about living in Finchley with a privet hedge. I doubt whether many of the Conservative MPs who voted for her as leader thought she could win an election: for them the important thing was that she was not Ted Heath. Even after that victory, her gender and her self-confident – sometimes overbearing – advocacy of positions that often challenged conventional wisdom (not always itself wise) created patronizing resentment. She responded by developing a battling Boadicea personality, and a brittle carapace of opinions on everything under the sun. In practice, she was mostly more cautious and politically smart than her language and attitude suggested she would be, at least until her retirement meant that there were fewer practical consequences to what she said. She was undoubtedly a luckier politician than either Heath or Major. But she was brilliant at spotting when the currents were running in her favour, and brave in taking them in full flood.
In person she was a strange mixture of kindness and occasional bullying. I was fortunate, despite sometimes disagreeing with her publicly as well as privately, to be the beneficiary mostly of the former and very seldom of the latter. She was particularly graceful and courteous towards waitresses, drivers, lift attendants and the like. She remembered partners’ and children’s names. When I was director of the Conservative Research Department and writing conference speeches and pamphlets for her, one of my daughters had an accident. Margaret was particularly solicitous, especially when she discovered that she and Laura almost shared a birthday. She used to send me home after party conferences bearing one of the cakes that her well-wishers had baked for her.
Later, when I was in Hong Kong, she visited quite often. She was always impeccably mannered, was pretty well the only house guest we ever had who made her own bed, and relentlessly spoiled our greedy terriers, Whisky and Soda, feeding the little buggers smoked-salmon sandwiches and chocolate bourbon biscuits in her sitting room, where they invariably spent most of the time when she was staying. She was always supportive of my work in Hong Kong despite the efforts of some to squeeze a few words of criticism out of her, and even when provoked by the identity of some of my other visitors. For example, she came to stay one summer on the way back from a conference she had been addressing in Hawaii. She arrived late in the evening, exhausted from the long flight, while we were finishing my birthday dinner with a group of friends. Kindly, she said she would come down and join us for a celebratory drink after she had ‘powdered her nose’. Nose powdered she joined us in the drawing room, was poured a whisky, and fell fast asleep on a sofa, her feet tucked up characteristically under her. The rest of us were chatting away, and one of my friends asked me how a visit earlier that week to Hong Kong by Helmut Kohl had gone. (Answer: Mr Kohl’s consumption of Chinese food did not let Germany down.) At the mention of Chancellor Kohl’s name, Margaret awoke with a start as though an electric charge had been passed through her. Without drawing breath, she went straight into a not-so-short lecture on the history of Europe out of which neither France nor Germany emerged with much credit. ‘And,’ she said at the end, turning to my wife as though denouncing a crime against humanity, ‘I believe that you have just bought a house in France.’ Her charming private secretary came gallantly to Lavender’s rescue. ‘Well, Margaret, you can’t hold that against the Pattens. Peter Lilley [an intellectual ally of Mrs T] has bought a chateau in France.’ She paused for a nano-second and then continued her advance, guns blazing. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it’s in northern France.’ Oh, for the days before Calais had to be inscribed on Queen Mary’s heart.
This was one example out of many of Thatcher’s truncated sense of humour, on which in retrospect I look more kindly than I do on Heath’s. She occasionally got, or even came close to making, what my mother would have called a ‘broad joke’, mildly lavatorial or related to the reproductive organs. But subtlety was a very rare visitor, and she had no self-knowledge of how absurd she could seem; hence I suppose ‘We are a grandmother’, her breathy announcement to the press in Downing Street of the birth of a grandchild. One illustration of this incapacity came when in 1977 Ronnie Millar and I were doing duty again on the speech-writing front, passed down like baubles of office from
Ted to Margaret. At party conferences these were dire occasions. We would work in a hotel room – I remember with particular horror the Arthur Askey Suite at the Imperial Hotel, Blackpool, complete with a green shagpile carpet rather like an unmown lawn. Each day we would write most of a new speech, which would be torn to pieces late into each night by our diva, while we made desperate efforts to save a few bits for the next day’s offering. Worst of all were the occasions when she would arrive late at night clutching a draft that some aspirant for her favour had pressed on her, full of the sort of stuff that her instincts would have liked her to utter but which her political intelligence would usually eventually reject. One year we were writing the speech not long after Jim Callaghan had become Prime Minister and announced his conversion to monetarism. This was greeted by his son-in-law, the economic journalist Peter Jay, who was about to go off to Washington as British ambassador, as a spectacular example of leadership, tantamount to Moses leading his people into the Promised Land. Ronnie and I wrote a passage for the speech welcoming this conversion and concluding, ‘So my message to Moses is this: keep taking the tablets.’
Night after night – and these drafting sessions would go on until near dawn – Margaret stopped at this line, her red pen poised to strike, and said she thought it made no sense. Night after night we fought successfully to retain it. On the last night, we seemed to have completed the speech to her approval right down to the R. C. Sheriff type peroration in which Ronnie specialized (these passages usually brought stout Tory ladies close to tears). Then she suddenly struck. Putting down her whisky she said, ‘Can we go back to that Moses line? Wouldn’t it be better not to say ‘keep taking the tablets’, but ‘keep taking the pill’.’ Grimacing in horror at one another, we managed to convince her that this would not be a good idea. The following day she delivered the line as we had drafted it. There was a roar of laughter. I do not think she ever knew why.