by Andy Beckett
During October and November, other possible contenders were talked up: confident liberal Tories like Jim Prior and Peter Walker; the soft-spoken but ambitious Geoffrey Howe, a more diplomatic spokesman than Joseph for the new right-wing economics; and the revered negotiator and coalition-builder Willie Whitelaw. Neave, an instinctive hedger of political bets, and increasingly desperate to get rid of Heath, offered Whitelaw his services. But Whitelaw, like Joseph and du Cann, decided not to run. Instead, in January 1975, Neave ended up as campaign manager for the contender long considered the cleverest but also the most doomed: Margaret Thatcher.
The deputy to the shadow chancellor was forty-nine. She had been an MP for sixteen years, a minister or shadow minister for fourteen, and a major public figure since the early seventies. She was a fast learner, a holder of fierce convictions and a highly distinctive speaker and political presence. She had made her way in a post-war Conservative Party – and a post-war Britain – largely unsympathetic to ambitious women and to politicians with her kind of right-wing opinions. She understood much better than Joseph and Powell the value of sometimes being patient or pragmatic. She had a growing number of admirers in Westminster and the media, and was not closely associated with Heath.
Yet all these assets seemed to be far outweighed by her liabilities. To many, Margaret Thatcher was little more than a curiosity or an under-performing, ageing political prodigy. Her record as a minister was modest. She had held only one Cabinet position, education secretary between 1970 and 1974. During that time, she had disappointed her right-wing allies by failing to slow the expansion of comprehensive education and education spending. She had also failed to oppose the panicky lurch to the left of Heath’s economic policy. An isolated and uninfluential figure in the Cabinet, her high profile outside it both at the time and since was in some ways closer to notoriety. In 1971, she had abolished free school milk for children aged seven to eleven and acquired an enduring nickname: ‘Margaret Thatcher Milk Snatcher’. That year, the Sun called her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.
There was often a crude misogyny behind how she was regarded, but in Britain in the seventies – and afterwards – for all the impetus of women’s lib, misogyny remained a potent political and electoral force. And besides, when newspapers and the public did express enthusiasm for the prospect of a female prime minister, they often preferred Shirley Williams, with her easy warmth and unstyled air, her seemingly modern informality, to the colder, more old-fashioned-looking Conservative with her buttoned-up suits and big fixed smile. Margaret Thatcher was, essentially, not easy to be around: ‘Thatcher was always tiresome,’ remembers the political journalist Michael White, who spent a lot of time with her in the seventies. ‘There was no romance, no self-analysis, no self-consciously epic quality like you would have got with Churchill.’ In character, Thatcher the brilliant, chilly loner was like Heath in some ways, and by the autumn of 1974 many Tories thought they had had enough of that sort of leader. And even more than Heath, she lacked the class background and manner of a traditional Conservative grandee. In September, The Times published a quote from Powell that was close to the consensus view on her chances of leading the party: ‘They would never put up with those hats or that accent.’
Contests for party leaderships, however, are rarely about ideal candidates. They are about who is bold enough to stand. On 21 November, Thatcher recalls in the first volume of her autobiography, The Path to Power,
… I was working in my room in the House, briefing myself on the Finance Bill, when the telephone rang. It was Keith [Joseph] … he had something he wanted to come along and tell me. As soon as he entered, I could see it was serious. He told me: ‘I am sorry, I just can’t run. Ever since I made that [Birmingham] speech the press have been outside my house …’ I was on the edge of despair. We just could not abandon the Party and the country to Ted [Heath]’s brand of politics. I heard myself saying: ‘Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will …’
Her campaign began slowly. Until the end of the year, she insisted that she would only formally stand against Heath – the vote was not until February – if no one else did. It was widely assumed that this seemingly tentative challenge would prompt a stronger candidate to declare himself. And when no such figure did, it was widely assumed that Heath, damaged as he was, would win by default. Polls showed that Conservative voters preferred him; so did most of the shadow cabinet; so did the Conservative Party in the Lords and in the constituencies.
Yet in reality these groups were either marginal or irrelevant to the coming contest. Under the rules of Tory leadership races, which had recently, with the party in a restive phase, been subtly but significantly tilted against incumbents, Conservative MPs alone decided the fates of candidates. In February 1975, there were 277 Tory MPs. Being chosen as leader required the support of a majority – a minimum of 139 votes – and also a victory margin over your nearest rival of 15 per cent of the parliamentary party, or forty-two votes. If this demanding electoral arithmetic produced no clear winner, further rounds of voting would be held until one emerged. In effect, any significant degree of support for an alternative to Heath, plus a reasonable number of abstentions, would prevent him winning a clear victory and leave the wounded Tory leader at the mercy of a second ballot.
Heath’s position was further weakened by the ineptness of his campaign. At times, it was gratingly overconfident, with his lieutenants boasting publicly that he had the support of more than enough MPs to win comfortably on the first ballot; at others, it seemed clumsily, vulnerably eager to please, with the usually aloof Heath suddenly buying drinks in the Commons and holding awkward dinner parties for Tory MPs. By contrast, Thatcher’s campaign quietly acquired momentum. Neave and Thatcher had known each other since the early fifties, when they had both been parliamentary candidates. Unlike her, he had spent the intervening decades carefully building Commons alliances and gathering information about fellow MPs. He knew who might be persuaded to support her, and who might be the best person to do the persuading. Sometimes it was himself; sometimes it was an MP already friendly with the intended convert; and sometimes it was Thatcher herself, low-voiced and ready to listen, more patient and less abrasive in private than she usually was in public.
While this discreet lobbying went on, Neave slyly played down her rising levels of support. He told potential backers that she was performing respectably but not strongly enough to defeat Heath. The implication was that MPs could use her candidacy either to teach Heath a lesson and make him behave better as leader in future, or simply to force a second ballot, at which point the rules still permitted other candidates to enter the race.
Thatcher also gathered votes by more straightforward means. In a Commons debate on inheritance tax in mid-January, she made a calculated and effective attack on one of Labour’s most formidable public speakers, the chancellor Denis Healey: ‘Some Chancellors are macro-economic. Other Chancellors are fiscal. This one is just plain cheap.’ And she gave a glimpse of the new thinking she intended to bring to the Conservative Party. ‘The future of freedom’, she declared ambitiously, ‘is inseparable from a wide distribution of private property among the people, not concentrating it in the hands of politicians.’ In an article for the Daily Telegraph nine days later, she was more expansive:
I was attacked [as education secretary] for fighting a rear-guard action in defence of ‘middle-class interests’. The same accusation is levelled at me now … Well, if ‘middle-class values’ include the encouragement of variety andindividual choice, the provision of fair incentives and rewards for skill and hard work, the maintenance of effective barriers against the excessive power of the state … then they are certainly what I am trying to defend … If a Tory does not believe that private property is one of the main bulwarks of individual freedom, then he had better become a socialist and have done with it. Indeed one of the reasons for our electoral failure is that people believe too many Conservatives have become socialists already �
�� Why should anyone support a party that seems to have the courage of no convictions?
This kind of confidence and aggression, of clarity and ideological frankness, had not been displayed in combination by a senior Tory for decades. Five days later, on 4 February, the first ballot for the party leadership took place. Heath got 119 votes and Thatcher 130. Heath resigned immediately, and it was announced that a second ballot would take place a week later, and that Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe and Jim Prior would also be standing.
Thatcher and Neave’s successful ambush of Heath sent a tremor across Westminster, but only a mild one. In Downing Street, Harold Wilson was with Ronald McIntosh, discussing how best to manage the investment programmes of the nationalized industries. ‘While we were talking the news came in,’ wrote McIntosh. ‘Wilson said that like me he was surprised that Margaret Thatcher had got more votes than Ted. He said that the Conservative Party would not be willing to have her as leader and that Whitelaw would win in the second ballot.’ The following day, McIntosh had lunch with the chancellor. ‘Healey told me he had expected Heath to get more votes than Thatcher; and like the PM he expects Whitelaw to be the next leader.’
On 11 February, Thatcher beat Whitelaw in the second ballot by seventy-seven votes and became the first female leader of a major British political party. ‘I rapidly scribbled some thoughts in the back of my diary,’ she wrote later, ‘because I knew I would now have to go and give my first press conference as Party Leader.’ In the Grand Committee Room next to Westminster Hall, she faced a crush of slightly stunned male journalists. Her suit was severe and dark, her hair like a blonde battle helmet, and her answers were disconcertingly direct and short. She was asked, absurdly, if she had won because she was a woman. ‘I like to think I won on merit,’ she replied. Then she held poses for the photographers. ‘I am now going to take a turn to the right,’ she advised them half-jokingly, ‘which is very appropriate.’
The next morning, the Daily Telegraph acknowledged that something momentous might have happened: ‘Her accession to the leadership could mark a sea-change.’ But as striking as the excitement of the most deeply Tory paper was its use of the word ‘could’. For all her fame or notoriety, for all her campaign’s public engagements, for all its statements about her personal beliefs, Thatcher was still a somewhat mysterious political figure. She had few well-known allies; she had a distinct tone but not many defined policies; and her suitability for the political environment of the British seventies, outside the peculiar hothouse of a Conservative leadership contest, was far from established. Another area of uncertainty concerned her social position and background. ‘Since getting into Parliament in 1959 she had been happy to present herself as the archetypal Tory lady … quintessentially southern and suburban,’ writes her biographer John Campbell. ‘She had a rich businessman husband, sent her children to the most expensive public schools, lived in Chelsea and represented Finchley.’ Yet this version of herself, while true up to a point, was far from the whole story. The real Margaret Thatcher was both much less polished and much more interesting.
She came from the East Midlands town of Grantham in Lincolnshire. It was a low-lying, ordinary place – part market town, part road and railway hub, part engineering works – and her father Alfred Roberts was a grocer. She was born in 1925 in a flat above his shop. Fifty years later, as the new Tory leader, she would begin emphasizing these biographical details for the first time: after Heath and Wilson, she realized a modest provincial upbringing was close to obligatory for a major British political figure.
Yet her childhood was more comfortable than theirs in small but significant ways. Her father had started out as a shop assistant, and her mother Beatrice as a dressmaker, but by the time Margaret was born – the younger of two daughters – her father had saved and worked his way to owning three shops, two of which had been knocked together, and he employed staff. ‘My father was a specialist grocer,’ she wrote later, ‘… the best-quality produce … three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers with sparkling brass handles …’ In the larger shop there was also a post-office franchise. Alfred Roberts was a contractor for the state as well as the dedicated small businessman his daughter would come to canonize.
He was also on the town council from 1927 to 1952, first as a councillor, then as an alderman, then as mayor. Officially, he was an Independent – there was a fading tradition in local government of not having party affiliations – but his politics were clear. ‘The Independent group on the council was an anti-socialist coalition,’ writes Campbell, and Roberts’s ‘overriding purpose in local politics was keeping the rates down. He very quickly became chairman of the Finance and Rating Committee, and retained that position for more than twenty years … He established a formidable reputation for guarding the ratepayers’ pennies as carefully as his own.’ After Labour took over the council for the first time, in 1950, as part of the post-war national surge of support for state spending and socialism, Roberts’s political career was gradually terminated.
Margaret inherited his work ethic and much of his politics. She helped in the shop – ‘there was, of course, no question of closing down for long family holidays’, she wrote in her autobiography – and she helped the Conservative Party from the age of ten, delivering messages for them during the 1935 general election. The reined-in, conscientious quality of her childhood – ‘nothing in our house was wasted, and we always lived within our means’ – would furnish her with a whole political lifetime of morality tales. Yet she got out of Grantham as fast as she reasonably could. Quiet but self-assured, she studied hard at school, precociously read politics books and the Daily Telegraph, and won a place to study chemistry at Oxford. She arrived there in 1943, graduating in 1947. After several unsuccessful job interviews – in her autobiography Thatcher proudly quotes the notes from one: ‘This woman has much too strong a personality to work here’ – she obtained a job as a research chemist in one of the new British industries emerging away from the East Midlands. ‘I was taken on by BX Plastics at Manningtree just outside Colchester.’
What was missing from this relatively smooth passage through the thirties and forties, compared to the experiences of Wilson, Heath and their generation of British politicians, was the decisive influence of the Depression and the Second World War. Bombs fell on Grantham, the unemployed queued outside the Labour Exchange – with Thatcher passing them on her way to school – but her life and outlook were not transformed. She was too young, her family slightly too comfortably-off, and she was the wrong gender to wear a combat uniform. She was not left with the same reverence as the likes of Heath for the state-led, essentially social-democratic way of doing things that had been the British response to the recession of the thirties and the threat of fascism, and which would be the basis for the post-war consensus.
Instead, from her time at Oxford onwards, she began to read and re-read a book that felt the opposite of reverence for the welfare state, Keynesian economics and other such left-of-centre notions: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. von Hayek. Hayek’s book was published in 1944, and Thatcher first encountered it soon afterwards. ‘I cannot claim that I fully grasped the implications of Hayek’s little masterpiece at this time,’ she writes,
[but] at this stage it was the … unanswerable criticisms of socialism in The Road to Serfdom which had an impact. Hayek saw that Nazism – national socialism – had its roots in nineteenth-century German social planning. He showed that intervention by the state in one area of the economy or society gave rise to almost irresistible pressures to extend planning further … Nor did Hayek mince his words about the monopolistic tendencies of the planned society which professional groups and trade unions would inevitably seek to exploit. Each demand for security, whether of employment, income or social position, implied the exclusion … of those outside the particular privileged group – and would generate demands for countervailing privileges from the excluded groups. Eventually, in such a situation everyone will lose. Perhaps
because he did not come from a British Conservative background … Hayek had none of the inhibitions which characterized the agonized social conscience of the English upper classes when it came to speaking bluntly about such things.
The Road to Serfdom and its heretical notions caused a sensation. With wartime paper rationing, print runs were unable to keep up with demand. Hostile volumes were published in response. During the 1945 general-election campaign, Winston Churchill crudely distilled Hayek’s already pungent thesis into his claim that the Labour Party, if elected, would require ‘some form of Gestapo’. But what most of the book’s early readers, including the chemistry student and president of the Oxford University Conservative Association Margaret Roberts, did not fully realize was that Hayek was much less of a voice in the wilderness than he liked to make out. He was part of an intellectual movement, radically right-wing in orientation and international in scope, that had been working towards a breakthrough for over half a century.
In politics, with all its competitiveness and restlessness, a set of ideas does not have to have reached its peak of influence for a counterrevolution to already be under way. Left-wing ideologies that threaten or seem to threaten powerful vested interests may be particularly prone to being usurped in this way. So it was in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Just as trade unions were beginning to become properly established, and just as government intervention to lessen the brutalities of the Victorian economy and society was beginning to be broadly accepted, so the first campaigns were launched for a return to a more robust national order. The Liberty and Property Defence League was typical. Founded by landowners and industrialists in 1882, its purpose, said one of its members, Lord Brabourne, was to oppose ‘undue interference by the State, and to encourage self-help vs. State help’. As a brusque summary of what would become the modern right-wing mindset, it was almost worthy of Margaret Thatcher.