She tried to counter the image of bossiness by presenting a more collective style of leadership. She accepted John Wakeham’s advice that she should set up (and, most importantly, be seen to set up) a Strategy Group to take a grip on policy and presentation in the run-up to the election. In appearance this was a sort of inner cabinet of a sort she had never previously admitted since the ‘Thursday breakfasts’ attended by the inner core of monetarist economic ministers in 1979. Its members – immediately dubbed the ‘A-Team’, from a current television programme – were Willie Whitelaw, the holders of the three senior offices of state (Howe, Lawson and Hurd),Tebbit as party chairman and Wakeham as Chief Whip. In reality the A-Team was more for show than substance: it had less to do with sharing power than with shackling Tebbit, a means of retaining election planning in her own hands. Most of the groundwork for the reforms of the third term was done under her eye in the Downing Street Policy Unit rather than in the departments.
There was one very important exception. The policy initiative which turned out to be the most contentious after 1987 was agreed as far back as 1985, and originated not in the Policy Unit but in the Department of the Environment. After it blew up in her face, the poll tax was regularly cited as the epitome of Mrs Thatcher’s domineering style, the result of her personal obsession with abolishing the rates, pushed through a tame Cabinet purely by her insistence. In fact, no reform of the Thatcher years was more exhaustively debated through all the proper committees. As usual, the Prime Minister was one of the last to be persuaded that it was practicable. Once convinced, she was unswerving in her refusal to abandon it and in her memoirs she still defended it as right in principle. But it was successive Secretaries of State for the Environment and Scotland (and their juniors) who made all the running at the beginning.
Of course Mrs Thatcher’s desire to honour her 1974 commitment to abolish domestic rates was undiminished. She had always disliked the rates on principle as a tax on property which acted as a disincentive against making improvements; and she was keen to find a way to stop Labour councils piling heavy rate demands on Tory householders in order to spend the money on their own voters who were largely exempt from payment. But since Michael Heseltine’s abortive search for a workable alternative in 1979 – 83, her attention had been diverted into other ways of controlling local extravagance. It was Patrick Jenkin who unwisely revived the question by setting up yet another departmental inquiry in late 1984, delegating his juniors, Kenneth Baker and William Waldegrave, to find the holy grail. Waldegrave in turn consulted his old boss in Ted Heath’s think-tank, Victor Rothschild. Mrs Thatcher later credited Rothschild with ‘much of the radical thinking’ which produced the community charge;36 but many other bright sparks on the cerebral fringe of the Tory party, including the Adam Smith Institute, also had a hand in it.
The event which overcame her initial scepticism was the furious outcry against the revaluation of Scottish rates in February 1985, which threatened a steep hike in rateable values particularly in middle-class areas. Willie Whitelaw came back ‘severely shaken’ by the anger he encountered on a visit to the affluent Glasgow suburb of Bearsden in March.37 Whitelaw and George Younger convinced the Prime Minister that something must be done urgently: their alarm coincided neatly with Waldegrave’s review team coming up with an alternative which they believed would work. So she convened a conference at Chequers on 31 March at which Baker, Waldegrave and Rothschild gave a glossy presentation of their proposal, complete with colour slides and flip charts. Waldegrave ended his pitch with words allegedly suggested by Patrick Jenkin: ‘And so, Prime Minister, you will have fulfilled your promise to abolish the rates.’38 She was persuaded.
Five weeks later she paid her annual visit to the Scottish party conference and was able to tell the representatives that the Government had listened to their anger. ‘We have reached the stage where no amount of patching up of the existing system can overcome its inherent unfairness,’ she announced. The Government was now looking at a fundamental reform of local government finance. ‘The burden should fall, not heavily on the few, but fairly on the many.’39 The idea that everyone who used council services should pay equally towards the cost of them was, on paper, not a bad one. It was wrong in principle, and corrupting in practice, that only one-third of households paid full rates, yet everyone could vote for expenditure to which they did not contribute. ‘My father always said that everyone ought to pay something,’ she told Woodrow Wyatt, ‘even if it is only sixpence.’40 It was not envisaged that the charge would be more than £50 – 100 per head.
Nigel Lawson had missed the Chequers seminar but later submitted a paper warning the Cabinet committee which considered it that the proposed flat-rate charge would prove ‘completely unworkable and politically catastrophic’.41 He correctly predicted that it would be hard to collect, while Labour councils would simply hike up their spending and blame the Government for the new tax. He proposed instead a banded tax on capital values (very similar to that with which Heseltine eventually replaced the poll tax in 1991). Having voiced his dissent, however, Lawson subsequently lay low: he neither exerted his authority as Chancellor, nor attempted to combine with Heseltine and Walker (both former Environment Secretaries) to coordinate opposition to the charge. In his memoirs Lawson sought to distance himself from the disaster that followed. But no new tax can be introduced against the opposition of the Treasury. Having identified the flaws in the poll tax so accurately, Lawson bears substantial responsibility for having failed to stop it.
It was Kenneth Baker (having succeeded Jenkin the previous autumn) who published in January 1986 a Green Paper, Paying for Local Government, setting out the detail of what was officially called the community charge. His presentation to the Commons was given a mixed welcome by Tory MPs. Four months later Baker departed to Education, leaving Nicholas Ridley holding his baby. Nevertheless, at that year’s Scottish conference Mrs Thatcher basked in the applause of the representatives for her promise of immediate legislation in Scotland, ahead of England and Wales.42 Contrary to subsequent claims, the Government did not use Scotland cynically as a test bed for an unpopular policy, but introduced it there first because the existing grievance was most urgent there. The following year, opening her General Election campaign in Perth as usual, Mrs Thatcher boasted that the Scottish legislation had passed its final stage the previous week. ‘They said we couldn’t do it. They said we wouldn’t do it. We did it.’43 She had no doubt that the change would be popular, at least with her own party.
At the same time other ministers were encouraged to develop a whole range of new policies on housing, health and education. The 1986 Conservative Party Conference was a brilliant public-relations exercise, choreographed by Saatchi & Saatchi under the slogan ‘The Next Moves Forward’ and designed to convey the message that the Government was not a one-woman band but a young and vigorous team full of energy and new, practical ideas for improving public services. Each day a succession of ministers trooped to the platform to set out their wares. On Tuesday Norman Lamont offered further privatisation, including water supply, the British Airports Authority and the return of Rolls-Royce to the private sector. On Wednesday Norman Fowler unveiled an ambitious hospital building programme, while Douglas Hurd announced longer sentences and new powers to seize criminals’ assets. Thursday brought Nigel Lawson holding out the prospect of zero inflation and income tax coming down to twenty-five pence. The coverage was everything Tebbit and Central Office could have hoped for, climaxing when Mrs Thatcher grabbed the spotlight back to herself on Friday morning.
The Government’s poll ratings picked up immediately, so that by December the Tories were back in a clear lead for the first time for nearly two years: 41 per cent against 32 per cent for Labour and 22 per cent for the Liberal/SDP Alliance, which had come badly unstuck over defence. Whereas in the early summer there had been growing belief in the likelihood of a Labour victory, by the end of the year the betting had swung overwhelmingly back towards the Tor
ies. Over the spring that lead was maintained and even extended.Though she had no need to go to the country again before 1988, Mrs Thatcher had much less hesitation than in 1983 about seizing this advantage while the going was good. Having won twice previously in May and June she had become convinced that the early summer was a lucky time for her, and she was keen to get the ordeal over as soon as possible so that she could get back to work.
Then, on 17 March, Nigel Lawson introduced the perfect pre-election budget in which he was able to cut the standard rate of income tax by another two pence while simultaneously finding money for increased spending on health and other services, without even raising duties on petrol, drink or cigarettes. Two weeks later the Tories’ resurgence was crowned by Mrs Thatcher’s triumphant visit to Moscow. She was indignant when reporters dared to suggest that her visit was designed with an eye on the upcoming election. ‘Enlarge your view,’ she told them scornfully.‘I’m here for Britain.’44 The impact was doubled by the contrast with Kinnock’s disastrous trip to Washington a few days earlier when he and Denis Healey were received by President Reagan with a barely disguised snub. They were accorded just a quarter of an hour of the President’s time, and the White House put out an uncompromising statement to the effect that Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy would be damaging to NATO. With the Tories making modest gains in the local elections on 7 May the omens could scarcely have been better, and it was no surprise that, having slept on it, Mrs Thatcher announced next day that the election would be on 11 June.
Hat-trick: June 1987
Yet June 1987 was by no means such a walkover as June 1983 had been. Despite the polls there was a nervousness in the Tory camp that perhaps the Government had been in office too long, that Mrs Thatcher’s style of leadership had become a liability and that the oldest cry in democratic politics – ‘Time for a Change’ – might exert a potent effect. By contrast with the shambles of 1983, Labour mounted a very slick and professional campaign while there was always the possibility of a late surge by the Alliance. In fact, the outcome almost exactly mirrored the polls at the beginning and victory was almost certainly in the bag all along. But it was, as Lady Thatcher wrote with some understatement in her memoirs, ‘not… a happy campaign’.45
It was vitiated by intense rivalry between Norman Tebbit, the party chairman, and David Young whom she had appointed unofficially to second-guess him. This tension boiled over on 4 June – ‘Wobbly Thursday’ – when a rogue poll almost persuaded some in both camps that the party might actually lose. Mrs Thatcher herself made a number of slips – notably in suggesting that she hoped to go ‘on and on’ – and was irritable throughout, suffering from a painful tooth and missing the soothing presence of Cecil Parkinson who had masterminded her previous re-election so smoothly in 1983.
Thus, at the very height of her electoral success, in securing her unprecedented third election victory, Mrs Thatcher did not dare to seek and certainly did not secure any sort of mandate for ‘Social Thatcherism’. She won easily again, essentially because the voters did not trust Labour on the economy or defence, while the Alliance remained popular enough to split the opposition but too divided to make its dreamed-of breakthrough. ‘Mr Kinnock had in his favour’, The Times commented, ‘eight years of the most vilified Prime Minister of modern times; three million unemployed and a country apparently enraged by the condition of its health service. Yet he could not win.’46 By keeping the Government on the defensive on health, employment and the state of the inner cities, Labour was widely judged to have ‘won’ the campaign. Yet Kinnock managed to recover only about half of the three million votes Foot had lost in 1983, and that ground was almost all regained from the Alliance. This gave Mrs Thatcher 376 seats (a loss of twenty-three), Labour 229 (up just twenty) and the Alliance a mere twenty-two, with the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists at three each, trimming the Government’s overall majority from the swollen 144 it had won in 1983 to a still more than comfortable 102. In raw parliamentary terms it was another landslide.[n]
In the hour of victory it seemed that Mrs Thatcher could be Prime Minister for life if she wanted. Speaking to the crowds in Downing Street on Friday morning she was openly delighted with her achievement. ‘I think the real thing now is we have done it three times… With a universal franchise the third time is terrific, is it not?’47 Pressed again about how long she intended to go on, she made no bones about her intention to complete the third term, dismissed the idea of grooming a successor (‘Good heavens, no’) and did not demur when Robin Day suggested that she might still be Prime Minister in the year 2000, when she would be only seventy-five. ‘You never know,’ she replied, ‘I might be here, I might be twanging a harp. Let us just see how things go.’48 She had no doubt that she had won a huge personal mandate.
Denis was more realistic. Watching with Carol from an upstairs window as Margaret acknowledged the cheering crowd below, he ‘turned to get himself a refill and said, “In a year she’ll be so unpopular you won’t believe it”.’49 In fact, it took a bit longer than that. But it was prescient all the same.
22
No Such Thing as Society
‘Society – that’s no one’
IN June 1987 Thatcherism moved into a new phase. Having sorted out the economy, as she believed, Mrs Thatcher now wanted to take on British society and specifically the culture of dependency which had grown out of forty years of socialised welfare. But this ambition quickly brought the contradictions of her philosophy into sharp focus. With the exception of curbing the unions, which had required legislation, and privatisation (which only involved undoing what had been done in the past), most of what she had achieved so far had been achieved by not doing things – not intervening as previous governments had done to settle strikes or to save jobs. So far she, Howe and Lawson, with their advisers, had been following a clear programme which had worked more or less as intended. The hands-off, free-market approach had undoubtedly had a stimulating effect on those parts of the economy that survived its rigours. Now she proposed to tackle something much more difficult and amorphous, where there were not the same clear doctrinal guidelines. According to the pure milk of free-market economics, the state should not be in the business of providing education, housing or medical care at all. But in practice abolishing public provision was not an option: too many voters were indeed dependent on it. She could trim a little at the margins; but fundamentally she could only try to improve the delivery and quality of services. And she could only do this by intervening directly to reform the way they were run. Partly from this inexorable logic, therefore, partly from her own restlessly interfering temperament, she was driven into an activist, centralising frenzy at odds with the professed philosophy of rolling back the state. This was to cause all sorts of trouble in the next three years.
Usually Mrs Thatcher denied any conflict, insisting that all her reforms were simply aimed at giving power back to schools, parents, tenants and patients. But an article she wrote for the Sunday Express a week after the election reveals a rare awareness of this contradiction. (No doubt it was largely written for her; but nothing was ever published in Mrs Thatcher’s name without her correcting every word.) Conscious of the criticism that her government since 1979 had served only the interests of the better-off, she set four goals for ‘a Government which seeks to serve all the people all the time’. The first three were quite conventional: to ensure liberty and security, to preserve the value of the currency and (more vaguely) to ensure ‘fairness’ for all. But the fourth recognised the tension between the philosophy of minimum government and her instinct to tell people what to do:
Fourth, in full recognition of human frailty, and together with all the other great institutions, it must seek to set standards by which people lead their lives. A society which knows what is expected of it has a sure base for progress.
Immediately she entered all sorts of disclaimers:
We do not seek to lead people’s lives for them, nor to boss them around, nor to regu
late them into apathy… A government for all the people must have the humility to recognise its limitations and the strength to resist the temptation to meddle in the citizens’ lives.1
Nevertheless the ambition had been declared in the first sentence: the Government ‘must seek to set standards by which people live their lives’. That is unmistakably the voice of nanny.
It was during an interview for the magazine Woman’s Own that autumn that Mrs Thatcher delivered the statement which seemed to define her philosophy more perfectly than anything else she ever said. Arguing that people should not look to ‘society’ to solve their problems, she asserted:
There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no Government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look after our neighbour.2
As is usually the case with famous sayings, she had made the same point several times before, for instance in a 1985 television interview. She said it again in 1988: ‘Don’t blame society – that’s no one’, going on to explain that the streets would not be dirty if only people did not drop litter.3 So her words were not a misquotation or taken out of context. But this time they created enormous outrage.
In her memoirs Lady Thatcher protested that she had been deliberately misunderstood. All she had meant was that society was not an abstraction, ‘but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations… Society for me is not an excuse, but an obligation.’4 In a purely literal sense it is obviously true that society is made up of individuals, grouped into families and other associations. But because it is composed of small platoons does not mean that society, as an aggregate of those components, does not exist. On the contrary, society has a collective existence on at least two levels. First there is the emotional sense of a national community, a concept traditionally important to Conservatives of all stripes, whether One Nation paternalists or gung-ho imperialists. Mrs Thatcher more than most professed a semi-mystical view of Britain as a family united by common values, an ideal to which she frequently appealed when it suited her. But more concrete than that, modern society has also a statutory existence as a network of legal and financial arrangements built up to discharge collective responsibilities beyond the capacity of the immediate neighbourhood. It was a perfectly legitimate Conservative position to argue that society in this sense had taken on too many responsibilities, which should be reduced. It was not meaningful for the head of a government charged with administering those responsibilities to maintain that it did not exist.
The Iron Lady Page 51