The Iron Lady Read online

  In July 1962, when Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet in an ill-judged effort to revive his faltering Government, Boyd-Carpenter was finally promoted. His successor at the MPNI was Niall Macpherson, who in turn was replaced the following year by Richard Wood. Both were much milder personalities than Boyd-Carpenter. The result was that Mrs Thatcher, though still only joint Parliamentary Secretary in charge of National Insurance and National Assistance, was allowed to assume a much more dominant role within the Department than is usual for a junior minister.

  Her finest moment in the 1959 Parliament came on the day following Macmillan’s culling of his Cabinet. The House met in a state of shock. By chance the first business was questions to the Minister of Pensions; but Boyd-Carpenter had been promoted to the Cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and his successor at the MPNI had not yet been named. Into the breach stepped the two joint Parliamentary Secretaries. Of fifteen questions tabled, Mrs Thatcher answered fourteen. It was not simply the fact that she answered, but the way she did it, that made an impact. ‘Amid the gloom and depression of the Government benches’, one observer wrote, ‘she alone radiated confidence, cheerfulness and charm.’14 It was a performance of exceptional composure under pressure.

  In January 1963 General de Gaulle unilaterally vetoed Britain’s application to join the Common Market. The collapse of his European policy holed Macmillan’s Government very near the waterline: by the summer of 1963 it was listing badly and beginning to sink. The restructuring of the Cabinet had failed to rejuvenate the Government, which now faced a dynamic new Leader of the Opposition, Harold Wilson, twenty-two years younger than the Prime Minister. Macmillan was made to look even more out of touch by the titillating revelations of the Profumo scandal, which threatened to engulf the administration in a slurry of sexual rumour and suspected sleaze. There were stirrings in the party that it was time for the old conjuror to retire. Privately Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her support for this view.

  Macmillan considered stepping down; but then, as Prime Ministers do, determined to soldier on – until, three months later, on the eve of the party conference, ill health suddenly compelled him to retire after all, leading to an undignified scramble for the succession. Mrs Thatcher’s first preference was for ‘Rab’ Butler, but she was quite happy with the unexpected ‘emergence’ of Sir Alec Douglas Home. If she was pleased by the result, however, she was disappointed that the new Prime Minister did not undertake a wider reshuffle.When Richard Wood arrived at the MPNI to replace Niall Macpherson he found his Parliamentary Secretary in ‘some turmoil’, on tenterhooks to see what her own future might be.15 She evidently felt that two years of Pensions and National Insurance was enough. She could hardly have expected promotion, but she had hoped for a sideways move to another department to widen her experience. It is not surprising that Wood found her a difficult subordinate over the last year of the Government’s life.

  Retaining Finchley

  As the 1964 General Election, which seemed certain to end the Tories’ thirteen-year rule, approached, Mrs Thatcher could not be absolutely confident of retaining Finchley. But she was an exceptionally visible Member who, in five years, had won herself a strong personal vote. Despite her family and ministerial commitments, the Finchley Press reckoned on 18 September,‘there can be few Members who have spent more time among their constituents than Mrs Thatcher’. She herself, unusually, predicted a majority of 10,000 and she was nearly right.16

  Her vote was down by 4,000, her majority nearly halved; the Liberals had succeeded in pushing Labour into third place. But Finchley was still a safe Tory seat. More significant was the impact of the Liberal advance on the national result. By nearly doubling their share of the vote largely at the Conservatives’ expense, they helped Labour back into government with a wafer-thin majority of four. After thirteen years of Tory rule and the shambles of 1963, Douglas-Home came astonishingly close to winning re-election. But he failed, narrowly, and his failure ended Mrs Thatcher’s first experience of government.

  More seriously, she also suffered a personal reaction. Her daughter Carol suggests that she was exhausted after a particularly strenuous campaign in Finchley on top of her ministerial work, and driving back to Farnborough late every night. In one respect her family life was eased, since both Mark and Carol were now at boarding school so neither was at home in mid-October; but she was having problems with Denis, who seems to have undergone some sort of mid-life crisis in 1964. This was first disclosed in Carol’s biography of her father, published in 1996, and we only know what little she reveals. It appears that he was working too hard, partly because Atlas Preservatives was under-capitalised and struggling to survive, and he worried that not only his own family but the life savings of his mother, sister and two aunts depended on its continuing success. To someone as robust as Margaret, the idea of Denis having a nervous breakdown must have been alarming. She must have worried about the implications for herself and the twins if he were seriously ill. Not that he did not thoroughly support her ambition. On the contrary, the decision he took, after pondering the direction of his life on safari in southern Africa, to sell the family firm was not only intended to secure his family’s future but represented a deliberate subordination of his career to hers. He was nearly fifty; she was not yet forty. He had done as much as he could with Atlas; he had been warned that he needed to slow down if he was not to kill himself. She was well launched on a trajectory which, win or lose in 1964, might reasonably be expected to lead to the Cabinet within ten years. So he made his decision. But he did not discuss it with Margaret until it was a fait accompli.17

  In fact, the sale of Atlas to Castrol turned out very well for Denis. According to Carol it realised £530,000, of which his personal share was just £10,000. But other accounts suggest that it was worth very much more than that. In practice the sale of his family firm made Denis a millionaire. Secondly, instead of narrowing his responsibilities it widened them. Denis had expected to carry on running Atlas for Castrol, but now as an employee without the stress of ultimate responsibility. To his surprise Castrol offered him a place on the board, with salary and car to match. (The car was a Daimler with a personalised number plate, DT3.) When, just a few years later, Castrol in turn merged with Burmah Oil, Denis did very well in terms of share options and once again was invited on to the board. From being the overworked chairman of an insecure paint and fertiliser business, Denis spent the last decade of his working life as a highly paid executive in the oil industry, which in turn left him well placed to pick up lucrative non-executive directorships after his retirement.

  4

  Opposition

  Shadow boxing

  FOR the next six years Margaret Thatcher was the Conservative Opposition’s maid of all work. Between 1964 and 1970 she held six different portfolios – three as a junior spokeswoman, successively on pensions, housing and economic policy, and three as a member of the Shadow Cabinet, shadowing Power, Transport and finally Education. When the Conservatives returned to power in 1970 she was confirmed in the last department. But in the meantime she had been given an unusually wide experience of shadow responsibilities which stood her in excellent stead as Prime Minister two decades later, going some way to compensate for her relatively narrow ministerial experience. Though her average tenure of each portfolio was less than a year she did nothing by halves, but always thoroughly mastered each one before moving on.

  When in July 1965 Alec Douglas-Home announced his resignation of the Tory leadership, Mrs Thatcher was ‘stunned and upset’. It is a measure of her isolation from Westminster gossip that she claims to have had no inkling that Sir Alec was coming under pressure to step down, allegedly orchestrated by supporters of Ted Heath. ‘I never ventured into the Smoking Room so I was unaware of these mysterious cabals until it was too late.’1 Her exclusion was partly a function of her sex, but also reflected her compartmentalised life and her nose-to-the-grindstone view of politics. Harder to explain is why she was so upse
t. Much as she admired Sir Alec, he was clearly not cut out to be Leader of the Opposition; the party needed a more aggressive and modern style of leadership to wrest the political initiative back from Labour and rethink its policies. She had known Heath since their time as candidates in adjacent Kentish seats in 1949 – 51. They had spoken on one another’s platforms, but they had not become close and their acquaintance, as she later put it, ‘had never risked developing into friendship’.2 They were in truth very similar people – from similar social backgrounds, both humourless, single-minded and ambitious. But Mrs Thatcher disguised her ambition with a cloak of femininity: her manners were impeccable and she responded to a certain style of masculine gallantry. Heath had a curt manner and made no pretence at gallantry; long before he had any special cause to dislike Margaret Thatcher he was uncomfortable with her type of Tory lady, with her immaculate clothes, pearls, hats and gushing manner. So until she forced herself on his attention he barely noticed her. What attracted her to his standard – and kept her loyal for nine years, despite a personal relationship that never became warm – was respect for his seriousness of purpose, which matched her own. She evidently did not consider backing Enoch Powell, the leading advocate of free-market economics, who was then regarded as a fringe eccentric, but voted for Heath, who beat Maudling by 150 votes to 133, with Powell taking just 15.

  Though elected as a new broom, Heath initially felt obliged, with an election possible at any moment, to retain all his predecessor’s Shadow Cabinet. But in October he did reshuffle his front bench. Margaret Thatcher was delighted to be switched at last from Pensions and National Insurance (which she had been doing in and out of office for four years) to shadow Housing and Land.

  Wilson was only biding his time before calling a second election in March 1966 which the Tories, even with a new leader, had no hope of winning. In Finchley, Mrs Thatcher did her best to project enthusiasm. But privately she was critical of Heath’s prosaic manifesto. Her own address led on the fundamental theme that every action of the Labour Government increased the power of the state over the citizen. Conservative philosophy was the opposite: ‘The State was made for Man, not Man for the State.’3

  The result was never in doubt. Though her vote actually fell slightly, Mrs Thatcher was one of only three Tories to increase her majority, with Labour pushing the Liberals back into third place:

  Nationally Labour won a landslide, with a majority of nearly a hundred. The Tories were condemned to another five years of opposition. With the certainty of a long haul ahead, Heath reshuffled his team, taking the chance to drop several of the older hands. There was some discussion of putting Mrs Thatcher in the Shadow Cabinet. Jim Prior, then Heath’s PPS, remembers suggesting her as the statutory woman. There was a long silence. ‘Yes,’ he said.‘Willie [Whitelaw, the Chief Whip] agrees she’s much the most able, but he says once she’s there we’ll never be able to get rid of her. So we both think it’s got to be Mervyn Pike.’4

  Actually, the idea of a statutory woman was a new one. There had not been a woman in a Tory Cabinet since Florence Hors-burgh in 1954, nor in the Shadow Cabinet since the party went into opposition. But Wilson had included Barbara Castle in his first Cabinet in 1964 and promoted her the following year. If the Tories had to be seen to follow suit, Margaret Thatcher was a more obvious counterpart to Mrs Castle than the much gentler Mervyn Pike. Whitelaw’s preference for keeping Mrs Thatcher down for a little longer suggests that she was already seen as an uncomfortable colleague. Iain Macleod, however, had spotted her potential and specifically asked for her in his shadow Treasury team. Heath agreed. She became Treasury and Economic Affairs spokeswoman, outside the Shadow Cabinet but in some respects better placed to make a mark than she would have been inside it.

  This was one of the very few periods in Mrs Thatcher’s career when she operated as a team player, contributing her own particular expertise as a tax lawyer to a delegated effort, opposing the Labour Government’s Selective Employment Tax. She clearly found it a liberating experience. When her own time came to lead she was not so good at delegating, yet she copied much of Macleod’s method of working.

  At the party conference in Blackpool in October Mrs Thatcher had the opportunity of replying to a debate on taxation. She spent nine hours preparing her speech, and was rewarded with her ‘first real conference success’.5 ‘Thoroughly relaxed,’ the Daily Telegraph enthused, ‘she banged out sentences with the elusive rhythm some of her peers find it so hard to achieve.’6 The still pre-Murdoch Sun hailed a new star under the headline, ‘A Fiery Blonde Warns of the Road to Ruin’: ‘Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the pretty blonde MP for Finchley, got a standing ovation for one of those magnificent fire-in-the-belly speeches which are heard too seldom.’7

  In 1967 she paid her first visit to the United States. It was a revelation to her. In her forty-two years she had scarcely been out of Britain before, apart from her honeymoon and, since 1962, her annual skiing holiday. Ever since the war she had been well disposed towards America as the arsenal of democracy and Britain’s great English-speaking ally in the cause of Freedom. But the potential love affair had not been consummated until now. In the spring of 1967 she went on an American government ‘leadership programme’ designed to show rising young British politicians the American way of life; for six weeks she was whisked all round the country. ‘The excitement which I felt’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘has never really subsided. At each stopover I was met and accommodated by friendly, open, generous people who took me into their homes and lives and showed me their cities and townships with evident pride.’ Her theoretical awareness of the ‘brain drain’ was brought into focus by meeting a former constituent from Finchley who had fled ‘overregulated, high-taxed Britain’ to become a space scientist with NASA.8 Two years later she went back for a four-week speaking tour under the auspices of the English Speaking Union. Henceforth America became for her the model of an enterprise economy and a free society: not only American business practice, but American private health care, American penal policy and American business sponsorship of the arts were the examples she encouraged her ministers to study in the eighties.

  Shadow Cabinet

  After eighteen months working with Macleod she got her reward in October 1967. By her performances in the House, Mrs Thatcher had certainly earned promotion to the Shadow Cabinet; but still she only gained it when she did because Mervyn Pike stepped down on grounds of health. She now had no rival as the statutory woman. Significantly, however, Heath did not simply give her Miss Pike’s social services portfolio – which would have been a traditionally feminine responsibility. Instead he set her to shadow the Ministry of Power, an unmistakably masculine brief comprising coal, nuclear energy, electricity and North Sea gas. More important than the portfolio, however, admission to the Shadow Cabinet marked Mrs Thatcher’s arrival at the top table, just eight years after entering Parliament. As Whitelaw had foreseen, she would not easily be got rid of now. In less than another eight years, in fact, she had toppled Heath and leapfrogged over Whitelaw to seize the leadership.

  In her memoirs Lady Thatcher wrote that she felt marginalised as a member of Heath’s Shadow Cabinet. ‘For Ted and perhaps others I was principally there as the “statutory woman” whose main task was to explain what “women”… were likely to think and want on troublesome issues.’9 It is clear that she no longer felt – as she had done as Treasury spokesman – part of a team. If initially she talked too much she soon learned to keep quiet and bide her time.

  Meanwhile, shadowing Power gave her the chance to master another important area of policy. Interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph just after her appointment she said it was ‘a great surprise’; she was now ‘busy genning up on the subject for all she was worth’.10 It was still the era of cheap imported oil. North Sea gas had recently been discovered, but not yet oil. The Labour Government was running down the coal industry, a policy the Conservatives broadly supported against a good deal of traditional Labour anguish. Altoge
ther Power was another excellent portfolio for her, using her scientific training in handling technical questions of nuclear energy and mineral deposits, but also facing her directly for the first time with the political problem of the nationalised industries.

  Shadowing Power, in fact, was all about the nationalised industries. Every speech that Mrs Thatcher made during the year that she held this portfolio – and the following year when she was switched to Transport – shows her developing ever more clearly the conviction that public ownership was economically, politically and morally wrong. Though she never cited him, all the signs are that she had been reading – or rereading – Hayek, whose two-volume elaboration of The Road to Serfdom,The Constitution of Liberty, was published in 1960. She was certainly beginning to come under the influence of the independent free-market think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), run by Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris. But already she had the gift of putting their arguments into clear unacademic language of her own. On one hand she delighted in demonstrating that public ownership was inefficient, on the other that it was destructive of individual freedom.