The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  In 1968 she was invited to give the annual Conservative Political Centre (CPC) lecture at the party conference in Blackpool. This was a considerable honour: previous lecturers had been recognised party thinkers. Mrs Thatcher, the Times diarist noted, was being offered ‘an opportunity much coveted by the party’s intellectuals through the years – and certainly the best chance a high-flying Tory politician ever gets to influence party thinking on a major theme’.11

  The Tory party was in a considerable ferment in the summer of 1968, as grass-roots loathing of the Government combined with mounting criticism of Heath’s leadership to fuel demand for a sharper, more distinctive Conservatism. Mrs Thatcher’s lecture did dimly reflect this rising tide. Instead of nailing her colours boldly to the mast, however, she offered an uncharacteristically woolly, largely conventional Tory critique of the growth of government. Concern about the size, complexity and facelessness of modern government was a commonplace right across the political spectrum in the sixties. The New Left warned of ‘alienation’ and demanded more ‘participation’. The right blamed socialism and talked vaguely of ‘getting government off people’s backs’ and ‘rolling back’ the state. Mrs Thatcher’s CPC lecture was just another Shadow Cabinet expression of this line – padded with some oddly naive banalities and altogether much less strikingly expressed than many of her Commons speeches. Such press coverage as the lecture received was typified by the Guardian’s headline: ‘Time to reassert right to privacy’.12

  The fact is that it would have been imprudent for an ambitious young frontbencher, only recently appointed to the Shadow Cabinet, to have come out openly as a Powellite in October 1968. Only six months earlier Enoch Powell had been sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for making his notorious ‘River Tiber’ speech calling for a halt to coloured immigration and the assisted repatriation of immigrants. This speech transformed him overnight from a cranky economic theorist into a national figure with a huge popular following, a hate figure to the left and a looming challenge to Heath’s leadership. Mrs Thatcher was never close to Powell in the few months they sat together in the Shadow Cabinet: Powell was an explicitly masculine politician who frankly deplored the intrusion of women into politics. But she was becoming increasingly interested in his economic ideas; she also ‘strongly sympathised’ with his argument about immigration. She regretted that Powell’s new notoriety henceforth overshadowed his economic agenda, allowing opponents to tar free-market thinking with the same brush as either right-wing extremism or crackpot nostalgia, or both at once.13

  That autumn, in the run-up to the party conference – just when she was writing her lecture – Heath had made a speech in Scotland firmly repudiating those Tories who were attracted by the seductive Powellite prescription of rolling back the state. ‘That’, he declared, ‘though a century out of date, would certainly be a distinctive, different policy.’

  But it would not be a Conservative policy and it would not provide a Conservative alternative. For better or worse the central Government is already responsible, in some way or another, for nearly half the activities of Britain. It is by far the biggest spender and the biggest employer.14

  That was precisely what Powell, the IEA and, in her heart, Mrs Thatcher, wanted to reverse. Most practical Conservatives, however, though they might pay lip service to the idea of some marginal denationalisation, took it for granted that a large public sector was a fact of life.

  It was in the context of this overwhelming orthodoxy that Mrs Thatcher spoke at Blackpool. The most significant section of her lecture was its ending, an unfashionable defence of party politics, rejecting the widespread hankering for ‘consensus’. ‘We have not yet appreciated or used fully’, she suggested, ‘the virtues of our party political system.’ The essential characteristic of the British system was the concept of the Opposition, which ensured not just an alternative leader but ‘an alternative policy and a whole alternative government ready to take office’. Consensus she dismissed as merely ‘an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything’. It was more important to have ‘a philosophy and policy which because they are good appeal to sufficient people to secure a majority’ – in other words, what she later called ‘conviction politics’. She concluded:

  No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do. It is not enough to have reluctant support. We want people’s enthusiasm as well.15

  More than anything else it was this crusading spirit which was Mrs Thatcher’s unique contribution to the anti-collectivist counter-revolution which ultimately bore her name. Others developed the ideas which she seized on and determinedly enacted. The force which transformed British politics over the next twenty years was Mrs Thatcher’s belief that politics was an arena of conflict between fundamentally opposed philosophies, her contempt for faint hearts and her ruthless view that a party with a clear philosophy needed only a ‘sufficient’ majority – not an inclusive ‘consensus’ – to drive through its programme. Few who heard the shadow Minister of Power set out this credo in Blackpool in October 1968 paid much attention at the time. Even when she grasped the party leadership seven years later few colleagues or commentators really believed she meant what she said. In fact the essence of Thatcherism was there in her words that day: not so much in the unremarkable policies as in her fierce belief in them.

  That autumn she was switched again, to Transport. Interestingly, she did not see her job as simply championing the road lobby. Though famous later for her enthusiasm for ‘the great car economy’ and a corresponding detestation of the railways, she was at this time strikingly positive – in her first Commons speech on the subject – that the most urgent need was for more capital investment in British Railways. ‘If we build bigger and better roads’, she warned – thirty years before the argument was widely accepted – ‘they would soon be saturated with more vehicles and we would be no nearer solving the problem.’16

  In the summer of 1969 she paid her first visit to the Soviet Union, the counterpart of her visit to the United States two years before. She was invited as Opposition Transport spokeswoman, principally to admire the Moscow metro and other Soviet achievements in the transport field, but she also found time to take in nuclear power stations as well as the usual tourist sights. Of course she had no illusions about the moral and material bankruptcy of the Soviet system: her instinctive hostility had been sharpened by her experience of campaigning for the past four years for the release of a British lecturer, one of her constituents, whom the Russians had charged with spying in the hope of swapping him for two of their own spies. (A swap was finally agreed just before her visit.) Her own self-congratulatory account of the trip tells of embarrassing her guides by asking awkward questions and correcting their propaganda; but while the drab streets and empty shops confirmed her preconceptions she also saw enough of the long-suffering victims of the system to convince her that they must sooner or later reject it. Believing passionately that Communism was contrary to human nature she was confident that it could not endure. She always thought that the Cold War was there to be won.17

  That October she celebrated ten years in Parliament, marking the anniversary with a ball at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. In her speech she noted how the world had changed in those ten years: in 1959 South Africa had still been a member of the Commonwealth, Eisenhower was President of the United States, Britain had not yet applied to join the Common Market and the first man had not yet gone into space. There were no Beatles, no David Frost, no hippies and no ‘permissive society’. But some things, she asserted, did not change: ‘Right is still right and wrong is wrong.’18

  In years to come Mrs Thatcher regularly blamed the decline in the moral standards of society on the liberalisation of the legal framework promoted by the Labour Government in the sixties – what she called in her memoirs the ‘almost complete separation between traditional Christian values and the authority of the State’.19 Yet at the time she supported much of this agenda. It is
true that she opposed the 1968 liberalisation of divorce law. She also remained firm in her support for capital punishment. But she voted for the legalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults, and also for David Steel’s Abortion Bill. In both cases she was influenced by the individual suffering she had witnessed in her work at the Bar.

  Shadow Education Secretary

  With hindsight the appointment of Margaret Thatcher to replace Sir Edward Boyle as shadow Education Secretary is a symbolic moment in the transformation of the Tory party. A gentle, liberal, high-minded Old Etonian baronet who had already been Education Secretary in 1962 – 4, Boyle personified the educational consensus which had promoted comprehensive schools and ‘progressive’ teaching methods: as a result he was the principal target for the right-wing backlash. Angry Conservatives in the shires and suburbs fighting to preserve their grammar schools regarded Boyle as a traitor – a socialist in all but name. Mrs Thatcher – grammar school-educated, defiantly middle class and strenuously anti-socialist – was in every way his opposite.Yet Heath intended no change of policy by appointing her.

  On the contrary the appointment was widely applauded as a shrewd piece of party management – for example by the Financial Times.

  The choice of Mrs Thatcher shows that Mr Heath has resisted the pressure from the Right to appoint a dedicated opponent of the comprehensive system. Instead he has picked an uncommitted member of the ‘shadow’ Cabinet who has won a high reputation for her grasp of complex issues in the fields of finance, social security, power and transport.20

  In fact, of course, she did have strong views on education. As Nora Beloff in the Observer was almost alone in pointing out, she ‘has made no secret of her desire to see the party campaign more aggressively in favour of freedom of choice and against regimentation’. 21 She had sent her own children to the most expensive private schools – Mark was now at Harrow, Carol at St Paul’s Girls’ School; but no one in 1969 considered this a disqualification for running the state system. Since 1965 the Labour Government had required Local Education Authorities to draw up schemes to convert their grammar and secondary modern schools to comprehensives. In Finchley at the 1966 election she promised that a Tory government would withdraw Labour’s circular requiring the preparation of plans; she always insisted that the party was not against comprehensivisation where appropriate but she deplored the disappearance of good grammar schools.22

  Nationally, however, comprehensivisation was proceeding rapidly. Progressive opinion took it for granted that the momentum was unstoppable. There were still ‘pockets of resistance’, Boyle admitted just before he resigned. It was ‘a difficult subject for our Party’, and the next Conservative Government would have to take ‘a number of most uncomfortable decisions when we are returned to power’; but he was sure there were ‘absolutely no political dividends to be gained from any attempt to reverse the present trend in secondary education’.23 Even with Boyle gone, this remained the general view of the Shadow Cabinet. Whatever her own preference might have been, Mrs Thatcher inherited an agreed line which left her very little room for manoeuvre.

  Looking back in her memoirs, Lady Thatcher wished she could have argued for preserving grammar schools on principle, not just case by case.24 In fact she did, from the first weeks of her responsibility for education, clearly assert the principle of diversity. She lost no time in lending her support to the nine LEAs which were refusing to go comprehensive. But at the same time she accepted that she could save only ‘a small top layer’ of the most famous grammar schools.25 She was not proposing to stake her career on fighting the march of comprehensivisation.

  Mrs Thatcher may have hoped that such a pragmatic compromise would prevent her tenure of Education being dominated by the issue of comprehensivisation. But in practice her hand was forced by Labour’s Education Secretary, Edward Short – a former headmaster and a doctrinaire proponent of comprehensives – who blew her compromise apart by introducing a Bill in February 1970 to compel the handful of recalcitrant LEAs to comply. Even Boyle called this ‘highly dictatorial’;26 it was in fact unnecessary and counterproductive, since all it did was to provoke resistance to a process which was already proceeding very rapidly. Mrs Thatcher was bound to fight it, and in doing so she could not help revealing her gut instincts. But still Conservative policy did not materially change. Short’s Bill fell when Wilson called an early election. All it achieved was to expose Mrs Thatcher’s lack of sympathy with the policy she very soon found herself having to pursue in office.

  Meanwhile, she was coming to terms with the rest of her new brief. The policy she had inherited was confidently expansionist. At a time when the Tories were promising to cut public expenditure overall, they were committed to higher spending on education.They were pledged to implement the raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen (which Labour had postponed in 1968), to maintain spending on secondary education while giving a higher priority to primary schools, and to double the number of students in higher education over ten years. Mrs Thatcher’s consistent theme as shadow Education Secretary was the need for more money and the promise that the Tories would find it. She was even sympathetic to the teachers’ claim for higher salaries.

  For the first three or four months of 1970 the Conservatives were still confident of winning the next election, whenever it was held. Although Heath personally never established much rapport with the electorate, the party had enjoyed huge leads in the opinion polls for the past three years. Then, in the spring, the polls went suddenly into reverse. Wilson could not resist seizing the moment. With the polls temptingly favourable and the Tories commensurately rattled he called the election for 18 June.

  Once Heath’s victory had made nonsense of the polls, many Conservatives claimed to have been confident all along that they would win. More honest, Lady Thatcher admits that she expected to lose.27 Not personally, of course: she was secure in Finchley, where the local Labour party did not even have a candidate in place when Wilson went to the Palace. But this was the first election in which she featured as a national figure, albeit in the second rank. Central Office arranged for her to speak in a number of constituencies beyond her own patch, all over the south and east of England; she did not detect the enthusiasm which others claimed to have felt.

  She was also chosen to appear in one of the Tories’ election broadcasts. Despite a television training course she had taken in the 1950s and regular appearances on the radio, she was not a success; her planned contribution had to be cut. Characteristically, however, she realised that television was a skill that had to be mastered. ‘She was clever enough to ask for help,’ one media adviser acknowledged. ‘Margaret wanted to learn while most of the rest of the senior Tories wished television would just go away.’28 The man she turned to for coaching, who would eventually get the credit for transforming her image, was Gordon Reece.

  In her memoirs Lady Thatcher described attending her own count in Hendon Town Hall, then going on to an election night party at the Savoy where it became clear that the Conservatives had won.29 In fact, Finchley did not count until the Friday morning. Carol’s memory is more accurate:

  We were on our way to Lamberhurst[a] when the news of the early exit polls came over the car radio. ‘If that result is right, we’ve won,’ exclaimed Margaret, obviously surprised. Denis turned the car round and we went to the Daily Telegraph party at the Savoy.30

  That first exit poll, from Gravesend, was announced by the BBC at 10.30; the first results were declared soon after eleven. For both Labour, who had thought themselves to be cruising towards re-election, and for the Tories, resigned to defeat and just waiting to turn on their leader, the reversal of expectations was hard to grasp. For Mrs Thatcher the result meant the likelihood of Cabinet office. She returned to Finchley after an hour and a half’s sleep to learn that she had increased her own majority by nearly two thousand:

  She was not in the first batch of Cabinet ministers named that day, but was summoned to Downing Street on Saturda
y morning to be offered, as expected, the Department of Education and Science. She was immediately asked if she would like to be the first woman Prime Minister. Her reply was categoric – but also barbed: ‘“No,” she answered emphatically, “there will never be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime – the male population is too prejudiced.”’31 She preferred to get on with the job in hand. She went home to read her first boxes, before turning up at the Department bright and early on Monday morning.

  5

  Education Secretary

  The minister and her department

  MARGARET Thatcher was Secretary of State for Education and Science for three years and eight months. Her time at the DES formed a crucial period of her political development, if only because it constituted her only experience of heading a government department before she became Prime Minister, responsible for running the entire Whitehall machine, just five years later. Unfortunately it was an unhappy experience; or at least that was how she came to remember it.Yet there was an element of hindsight in her recollection. In truth, her time at the DES was a good deal less embattled – and a good deal more successful – than she later suggested.

  Heath sent her to Education mainly because he had to send her somewhere, and after all her switches of the previous six years that was the portfolio she happened to be shadowing when the music stopped in June 1970. Education was not high on the Government’s agenda; no major policy initiatives were planned.When Iain Macleod died suddenly just four weeks after the Government took office, Mrs Thatcher’s name was canvassed in some quarters as a possible replacement Chancellor. Though inexperienced she had proven expertise. But it is most unlikely that Heath ever considered her before choosing the more amenable Tony Barber. In his view Education was about her ceiling.Yet it was in some ways the worst possible department for her.