The Iron Lady Read online

  Here too she was pressured to go further than she wanted. A meeting of party heavyweights – Heath flanked by most of his senior colleagues – ‘bludgeoned’ her into promising abolition of the rates before they had decided what to put in their place. Her August package eventually spoke of replacing the rates with ‘taxes more broadly-based and related to people’s ability to pay’, meanwhile transferring to the Treasury the cost not only of teachers’ pay but of parts of the police and fire services. ‘I felt bruised and resentful’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘to be bounced again into policies which had not been properly thought out.’ Yet she was still too loyal, or too junior, to refuse. Heath was still the leader, backed by almost the whole of his former Cabinet. In the last resort she was still willing to conform to protect her career. ‘I thought that if I combined caution on the details with as much presentational bravura as I could muster I could make our rates and housing policies into vote-winners for the Party.’5

  Mrs Thatcher’s performance over the summer and autumn of 1974 – arguing in private against policies which she would then defend equally passionately in public – demonstrated the maturing of a formidable political skill. By her championing of subsidised mortgages she showed that she possessed not only the good lawyer’s ability to argue a weak case; any self-respecting politician can do that. She also had a preacher’s ability to invest even a poor case with moralistic force: this more than anything else was the secret of her success over the next fifteen years. In the years of her success she boasted of being a ‘conviction politician’, but it should not be forgotten that both words carried equal weight. She had powerful convictions, certainly; but she could be brilliantly insincere too, when the situation required it, and such was her reputation for burning integrity that few could spot the difference. At a number of critical points in her later career it was only this which enabled her to skate on some very thin ice and get away with it.

  She was the Tories’ star performer in the October 1974 campaign. She still made only two trips out of London; but largely because her policies were their only new ones, she appeared more than ever before on television and radio, featuring in three of the party’s election broadcasts and three of the morning press conferences, including the final one with Heath. She was coached for her television appearances by Gordon Reece, who began for the first time to get her to relax in front of the camera. With Reece’s help she was judged to have done so well in the Tories’ first broadcast that she was promoted to introduce the second.

  Labour was seriously alarmed, but could not make up its mind how to respond. In the event polls soon showed that the public did not believe the Tories’ promises.6 Despite this, however, the high-profile exposure did Mrs Thatcher much more good than harm. It temporarily damaged her credentials with the right, who were dismayed to see her once again betraying her professed beliefs, using public money to distort the market in pursuit of votes. But the sheer feistiness of her performance, and indeed her pragmatism, stood her in good stead when she came to appeal to the whole body of middle-of-the-road MPs just three months later. She had valuably shown herself not as a naive right-winger but as a vigorous vote-getter and a seasoned pro.

  In the event, with just 39.2 per cent of the vote (against 35.8 per cent), Labour gained only eighteen seats for an overall majority of four. Mrs Thatcher’s personal majority was cut by another 2,000 (on a lower turnout), but it was still sufficient:

  In fact, as events turned out, the national result was probably the best possible for her. An unexpectedly successful rearguard action was creditable enough to enable Heath to dismiss calls that it was time for him to stand down; yet at the same time it was still a defeat, the party’s third in four elections under his leadership, so it only fuelled the gathering consensus that he could not survive much longer. Meanwhile, such a tiny majority was unlikely to sustain Labour in office for a full term – thus offering an unusually fruitful prospect of opposition for whoever succeeded in replacing him.

  ‘Someone had to stand’

  As soon as the October election was out of the way, the struggle for the Tory leadership was unofficially on. Quite apart from the simmering revolt on the right, too many Tory MPs with no quarrel with Heath’s policies came back to Westminster convinced that the party could never win under his leadership. Several of his friends urged him to step down immediately, or at least submit himself for re-election. By refusing, however, he not only threw away his own best chance of survival, but he also made it practically impossible for Willie Whitelaw or any other candidate from the left of the Tory party to succeed him. By clinging on, he allowed time for a dark horse to emerge who would eventually consolidate all the various strands of party discontent against him.

  Joseph was the obvious standard-bearer of the right – not because he possessed any of the qualities of political leadership but because by his speeches over the summer he alone had staked out a clear alternative to Heath’s discredited centrism. Mrs Thatcher quickly cast herself as his loyal supporter, explicitly discouraging speculation about her own chances. ‘You can cross my name off the list,’ she told the London Evening News the day after the General Election. ‘I just don’t think I am right for it.’7 But then, just two weeks after the election, Joseph made a speech in Birmingham which spectacularly confirmed the doubts of those who thought he lacked the judgement or the nerve for leadership. Exactly four weeks after this speech, he concluded that he was not the stuff of which leaders are made and decided that he would not be a candidate.

  The first person he told – on 21 November – was Mrs Thatcher. We have only her account of the conversation, but if that can be believed she did not hesitate. ‘I heard myself saying: “Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.”’8 The telling is disingenuous: in practice she was a good deal more cautious than this suggests. Yet there is no reason to doubt that it accurately represents her instinctive reaction. In all her carefully phrased denials of the idea that she could ever aspire to the highest offices, there was always a qualification which suggests that she did not, in her heart, quite rule them out.

  On 25 November Mrs Thatcher thought it right to tell Heath of her purpose in person, though it had already been heavily trailed in the weekend papers. She saw him in the Leader’s room at the House of Commons. It was reported at the time – and the story can only have come from her – that he neither stood up nor invited her to sit down, but merely grunted, ‘You’ll lose.’9 Lady Thatcher’s published version is that ‘He looked at me coldly, turned his back, shrugged his shoulders and said, “If you must.”’10 Either way the interview was evidently brief and chilly. But there is no suggestion that Heath was greatly worried by her candidature or thought it uniquely treacherous of her to stand. Having reluctantly agreed that new rules should be drawn up to allow a challenge to a sitting leader, he probably imagined that she would be the first of several hopefuls who might now throw their hats into the ring. This, she wrote in her memoirs, was her expectation, too. She thought it ‘most unlikely’ that she would win.11

  Heath had inadvertently given his challenger another opportunity which she grasped with both hands. In reshuffling his front bench team at the beginning of November he moved Mrs Thatcher from Environment – which she had only shadowed for nine months – to become deputy Treasury spokesman under Robert Carr. It is not clear whether Heath intended this as a promotion or a snub. ‘There is an awful tendency in Britain’, she had once complained, ‘to think of women as making excellent Number Twos, but not to give them the top job.’12

  Nevertheless, making her deputy to so bland a performer as Carr simply invited her to outshine her nominal superior. Unwittingly, Heath had given her the perfect opportunity to show her paces by taking on Labour’s powerful Treasury team, giving demoralised Tory MPs something to cheer for the first time in months. By her usual combination of hard work and calculated aggression Mrs Thatcher quickly assumed the leadership of th
e Tories’ opposition to Labour’s Finance Bill, leading a team of junior spokesmen almost all of whom became members of her own Cabinet a decade later.

  It is often said that Tory MPs did not know what they were doing when they elected Mrs Thatcher leader. This is true only in that she did not set out a detailed agenda of specific policies – monetarism, tax cuts or privatisation. But it cannot be said that she disguised her beliefs to win the leadership. On the contrary, she declared her philosophy very clearly: if some who voted for her did so without fully realising where her ideas would lead, the fault was theirs for failing to believe that she meant what she said. In fact what the party responded to was not so much her beliefs themselves as the burning self-belief with which she expounded them: it was not her convictions that they voted for, but her conviction.

  As important as her message, however, was the need to humanise her image, neutralise the gender question and persuade both the public and Tory MPs that she was a credible leader. Paradoxically she no longer needed to prove that she was tough enough for the job: it was becoming a cliché, as David Wood noted in The Times, to say that she was ‘the best man among them’.13 But that raised the alarming spectre of a feminist harridan – the worst sort of woman. What she now had to do was to make a virtue of her femininity.With Gordon Reece’s help, therefore, she presented herself to the press and television as an ordinary housewife, old-fashioned, home-loving and non-feminist, thus allaying both male fears and female disapproval. ‘What people don’t realise about me’, she told the Daily Mirror, ‘is that I am a very ordinary person who leads a very normal life. I enjoy it – seeing that the family have a good breakfast. And shopping keeps me in touch.’14 She played along with the pretence that she was ‘just’ a housewife and milked it for all it was worth. For the benefit of the Daily Mail she went shopping with her sister. On the morning of the ballot she was filmed cooking Denis’s breakfast and photographed putting out the milk bottles.

  Heath’s supporters never really believed it possible for the former Prime Minister to be beaten by an inexperienced woman. He had the support of the whole Shadow Cabinet, except Keith Joseph. Elder statesmen like Alec Douglas-Home and Reggie Maudling were wheeled out to consolidate support for the status quo. The constituency chairmen came out overwhelmingly for Heath: a poll in the Daily Express found that 70 per cent of Tory voters still thought him the best leader.15 As a result, while Mrs Thatcher’s team were assiduously combing the lists of Tory MPs – as systematically and professionally as Peter Walker had done for Heath in 1965, finding the right colleague to influence each individual – Heath this time had no proper campaign at all. The Heath camp simply believed what they read in the newspapers and repeated to one another, that all sensible people were still for Ted and only a small fringe of right-wingers and diehard anti-Marketeers would vote for ‘that dreadful woman’.

  They underestimated the extent of disillusion with Heath among a significant body of MPs who were neither particularly on the right nor anti-Europe. By his remoteness, insensitivity and sheer bad manners, Heath had exhausted the loyalty of a large number of backbenchers who had no reason to be grateful to him: this group simply wanted a change of leader. Most of them did not want Mrs Thatcher to become leader; they certainly did not want a lurch to right-wing policies; but they were persuaded to vote for Mrs Thatcher on the first ballot in the hope that they would then be able to vote for Whitelaw or some other more experienced candidate in the second round.

  The result of all this second-guessing was that the unfancied filly not only gained enough votes to open up a second ballot, but actually topped the poll. Heath mustered only 119 supporters: Mrs Thatcher – for whatever mixture of motives – attracted 130, while sixteen voted for Hugh Fraser and another eleven abstained. ‘The word sensational’, the Daily Mail reported, ‘was barely adequate to describe the shock wave that hit Westminster’ when the figures were declared.16 From the Establishment’s point of view the figures were not only bad enough to oblige Heath to step down immediately. (‘We got it all wrong,’ he told his stunned team.)17 They also made it very difficult for anyone to pick up his banner with any prospect of success.

  By the normal British understanding of elections, Mrs Thatcher had won already. She had defeated the incumbent and therefore asserted an unanswerable moral claim on the prize. Willie Whitelaw was bound to announce that he would now come forward as the unity candidate who could bind the party’s wounds; but it was too late – Mrs Thatcher’s stature was hugely increased by her unexpected victory. The fact that three more contenders threw their hats into the ring as well merely underlined that none of them had any chance of catching her. They were simply putting down markers: had they been serious about trying to stop her they should all have backed Whitelaw. Saluting her achievement, the Daily Telegraph suggested that it was almost bad form to force a second ballot at all after she had done the dirty work of getting rid of Heath.18

  In the week between the two ballots the novelty and kudos of being the first major political party in the Western world to elect a woman leader overcame the previous doubts of many who had intended to switch their votes, and of a good many more who had voted for Heath. ‘Electing Margaret Thatcher would be the most imaginative thing the party has done for years’, one supporter told the Daily Mail; ‘The time has come for a change’, said another, ‘and it would be absolutely right for the Tories to come up with a woman leader, who may even be a woman Prime Minister.’19

  Though she gained only another sixteen votes overall – just seven more than the simple majority required to win on the second ballot – Whitelaw’s poor showing and the fragmentation of the vote among the rest made her margin of victory look more decisive than it really was. The figures were:

  The new leader’s first engagement on receiving the result was a press conference in the Grand Committee Room, off Westminster Hall. She began by being suitably gushing and humble, carefully paying tribute to all her predecessors:

  To me it is like a dream that the next name in the lists after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath is Margaret Thatcher. Each has brought his own style of leadership and stamp of greatness to the task. I shall take on the work with humility and dedication.

  The only surprise was that she did not go back as far as Churchill – the Tory leader she was really proud to be succeeding – but she made good the omission with a tearful tribute to ‘the great Winston’ on television that evening.20 Having got the pieties out of the way, she ‘took complete charge’ of the press conference in a manner that would become very familiar.

  The new Tory leader stunned her audience into silence with her rapid, almost brusque replies to questions. She kept calling ‘Next question, next question’, as she outpaced the flustered press gang. At one time she called out confidently: ‘You chaps don’t like short, direct answers. Men like long, rambling, waffling answers.’

  Asked if she had won because she was a woman, she replied crisply: ‘I like to think I won on merit.’ She even had the confidence to risk a joke. Asked about foreign affairs, she replied: ‘I am all for them.’ She then acknowledged, with ‘disarming feminine charm’, ‘I am the first to understand that I am not expert in every subject.’21 Swivelling this way and that to give all the photographers a good picture, she announced pointedly, ‘I am now going to take a turn to the right, which is very appropriate.’22 It was an astonishing performance: already she had the press eating out of her hand.

  7

  Leader of the Opposition

  On trial

  MARGARET Thatcher said that it was ‘like a dream’ to follow in the footsteps of Macmillan, Home and Heath. But none of these predecessors had faced such a daunting prospect on becoming leader. She was the first Conservative leader since 1921 to lack the prestige of having already been Prime Minister. She had seized the leadership as a result of a backbench revolt against the party establishment, opposed by practically the whole of her predecessor’s Shadow Cabinet. Even those
who had campaigned for her were not sure what they had persuaded the party to elect, and the party in the country did not know her at all. For all these reasons, in addition to the startlingly novel factor of her femininity, she was even more on trial than most new leaders, facing a mixture of scepticism, curiosity and snobbish condescension, shading into latent or outright hostility.

  Nevertheless, not everything was against her. First, she was protected by the Tory party’s traditional instinct to rally round a new leader – reinforced in her case by an old-fashioned sense of chivalry. Second, party elders such as Alec Home, Quintin Hailsham and Peter Carrington – all loyal friends of Heath who could easily have made her life impossible had they so wished – determined that the new leader must be supported and set a strong example to that effect. Above all Willie Whitelaw, the principal rival whom she had defeated in the leadership contest, determined to be both a good loser and a loyal deputy. This was by no means easy for him, since he and Mrs Thatcher had little in common, either personally or politically.Though she immediately named him deputy leader and consulted him about other appointments, Mrs Thatcher was not at first quite sure that she could trust him. Having stood against her and lost, however, Whitelaw felt an almost military sense of duty to subordinate his views to hers. With his deep knowledge of the party he would sometimes warn her what the backbenchers or the constituencies would not wear; but he would not oppose her. In opposition and later in government, Whitelaw steadfastly refused to lend himself to any appearance of factionalism. His unwavering support over the next thirteen years was indispensable to her survival and her success.