Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (46 page)

Her campaigning style was combative. In her only national broadcast of the campaign, a BBC
Election Call
programme in which she shared a platform with Willie Whitelaw, Mrs Thatcher dismissed the idea of a nation-saving coalition of all the talents which was beginning to come up: ‘I think it’s a false assumption that if you get a government of all the best brains, the best brains will agree what to do.’
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And in her only full press interview of the campaign, in the
Daily Express
three days later, she presented herself as doughty: ‘ “I get
very
wild with people who don’t realise that underneath all this” – she taps a gold suit button – “there’s a bit of tough steel that’s me.” ’
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By mid-morning of polling day, Mrs Thatcher was worried. She didn’t like the way so many people on normally apathetic non-Tory council estates in Finchley were turning up to vote.
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Her fears were justified. Her own majority was almost halved.

The national result gave the Conservatives a larger share of the vote than Labour, but four fewer seats. The Liberals, with an astonishing 6 million votes (almost 20 per cent of the whole), pulled the Tories down, although their gain of seats was tiny. Labour won 301 seats, the Conservatives 297, the Liberals 14. No party had an overall majority in the House of Commons.

Heath tried to cling to power. By convention, he was entitled to do this, as the Queen, breaking her visit to Australia and returning home because of the crisis, was advised. She let him try to form a new administration. But, although the rules permitted him, public opinion was more impatient. He had gambled, was the feeling in the country and even in much of the party, and he had failed. ‘I thought from the start that E. Heath would have done better to resign,’ wrote Airey Neave in his diary for 2 March 1974. A sense of doom hung over the few frantic days that followed. If Heath had not broken with the Ulster Unionists, many of whom, until his suspension of Stormont, had taken the Tory whip, he could have struggled on. Overtures were made from that direction, but came to nothing.
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A more likely partner was the Liberal Party. On 1 March the Cabinet met to discuss the suggestion coming from Heath and those closest to him, such as Carrington and Prior (Willie Whitelaw was ill), that a deal should be sought. The idea was that ‘moderates’ should come together, and a coalition be mustered of
the ‘anti-socialist vote’. In words that suggest the weakness of the enthusiasm for this, Robert Armstrong, who was Heath’s principal private secretary at the time, recorded that the Cabinet gave ‘an indication of their inclination towards an attempt to come to an understanding with the Liberals’.
⁴⁷
But even this tepidity was too much for Mrs Thatcher. For the first time in three and a half years in Cabinet, she let rip. She protested at the suggestion that the Liberals were a force that had to be accommodated: ‘But 5 m. Lib. votes are non-Liberal. They are ours, and if we coalesce we lose them for ever. And don’t sell constitution for a mess of pottage.’
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Recorded by the Cabinet Secretary Sir John Hunt
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as one voice speaking together, she and Keith Joseph said: ‘We must keep our integrity.’ ‘What wd effect on parly party be of dabbling with electoral reform?’ asked Mrs Thatcher. ‘We must accept consequences of election and offer patriotic opposition to Labour,’ said Joseph.

The Cabinet overruled its two rebels, however, and the following day Heath saw Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader.
^†
The following night, Sunday 3 March, after attending a dinner given in No. 11 by Anthony Barber, which Mrs Thatcher also attended, Heath saw Thorpe again and on the morning of Monday 4 March reported the conversations to the Cabinet. Neither side could give enough ground to satisfy the other. The Cabinet approved Heath’s final letter to Thorpe, offering only a full coalition, rather than the loose arrangement he preferred, and no more than a Speaker’s Conference on proportional representation. Thorpe duly rejected it later that day, and the Cabinet met once more to hear this before agreeing that the matter was at an end. Armstrong recorded the last moments of Heath’s premiership: ‘At 6.25 p.m., the Prime Minister left 10 Downing Street for Buckingham Palace. I went with him; on the drive neither of us said a word. There was so much, or nothing, left to say.’
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The Queen asked Harold Wilson to form his third Labour administration.

Unusually for a secretary of state for education, the Department gave a farewell party for Mrs Thatcher: they had grown quite fond of her by the end. Her secretary, Alison Ward, noticed that, in accordance with her long-standing habit of taking nothing for granted, she was the only person on
the ministerial corridor in the House of Commons who had cleared her desk before the government had fallen.
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In a newspaper interview a few days after the defeat, Mrs Thatcher claimed that ‘It is easier for a woman than a man to give up power because you are not so lost. I can fill the time by spring-cleaning the house.’
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But her later memory of her reaction was almost the opposite: ‘I can’t tell you how lost I felt.’
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Tory disappointment at the election result was deep, and therefore discontent grew. Heath addressed the 1922 Committee the following day and Airey Neave spoke to him afterwards: ‘he is much deflated. He was also, one remembers, a bad Leader of the Opposition.’
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The plotting was pretty well instantaneous: ‘Hugh Fraser
*
said I should be on the front bench,’ said Neave. ‘He is beginning to campaign against Heath.’
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Even at the grandest level, there was feeling against Heath, or at least a sense that he could not just carry on regardless. On the night that Heath resigned as prime minister, Carrington gave him dinner at his house in Ovington Square, along with Tim Kitson,
^†
Douglas Hurd and Charlie Morrison.
^‡
These men agreed that Heath should offer himself for re-election as party leader and deputed Morrison, after dinner, to say this to him. Morrison did so, but Heath simply replied, ‘The rules don’t allow it,’ and that was that.
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About a week later, Harold Wilson told Bernard Donoughue of a conversation he had just had with Lord Home, whom Heath had replaced in 1965. Lord Home, said Wilson, ‘(and especially Lady Home) wants Heath out from Tory leadership. He is like me. He wants revenge.’
⁵⁶

Possible successors to Heath began to be touted, though none found very widespread favour. On 13 March, Neave joined a dinner attended by Whitelaw who, he noted, was ‘drinking a fair amount of whisky’. ‘Willie wants Ted Heath’s job but would not be my choice, though I thought so a few weeks ago.’
⁵⁷
Other names thrown up in conversation among leading
Tories at this time included Robert Carr,
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Mrs Thatcher, Du Cann and Geoffrey Howe, though there were anti-feminist anxieties that Howe’s wife Elspeth
^†
would be too busy to help him. But on the whole these names did not excite enthusiasm.
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The first test of the new Opposition was over the Labour government’s proposal to get rid of Stage 3 of the prices and incomes policy. The Conservative business managers put down an amendment opposing this. Tory backbenchers were furious. It was an issue on which the government might be defeated, provoking a second election in which the Tories could expect to do worse than before. Besides, more and more of them believed that prices and incomes policies had failed and should be ditched. Luckily for the Opposition front bench, the government indicated that it would stick to Stage 3 for the time being – while ending the miners’ dispute by giving them their rise on the basis of the recommendations of the Pay Board. The Tories were therefore able to withdraw their amendment. But the backbenchers poured out their anger. ‘His leadership is bad and he and his Cabinet have been wrong about everything for the last 3½ months,’ wrote Neave.
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Four days later he went on: ‘the knives are really out for Heath … I believe the whole Shadow Cabinet should resign and submit themselves for re-election by party each session.’
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The next day Neave noted, ‘Tonight Du Cann is seen as the alternative candidate,’ and recorded his own intention of standing for the Executive of the 1922 Committee.
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Heath was able to maintain his position through this perilous time, partly because of the disunity of his opponents, but more because of the electoral quandary. No one knew when the next general election would come, but all agreed that, because Labour lacked an overall majority, it could be at any moment. As Mrs Thatcher herself put it in a debate on the Housing Bill in Parliament: ‘In this Parliament it is difficult to know what to do: if one is not cooperative, one is in trouble; if one is cooperative, one is in trouble.’
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In the face of such uncertainty, Conservative backbenchers did not dare force a leadership contest, and indeed, under the rules, devised for the 1965 contest, there was no clear mechanism for doing so. Heath was not going to offer one. On 22 March Neave discovered that he, in common with many other malcontents, had been elected to the ’22 Executive. On 25 March some of the rebels, including Du Cann and Nicholas
Ridley, dined at Hugh Fraser’s house in Campden Hill Square. Airey Neave was present: they ‘decided’, he wrote, ‘that Heath would not go’.
⁶³

The grumbling continued. In the following month Neave bumped into a fellow backbencher, Dr Gerard Vaughan,
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who told him that the party was ‘rudderless’: ‘He said new MPs liked Margaret Thatcher and thought the rest of the Front Bench technocrats.’
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George Gardiner,
^†
a new and, at that time, pro-European MP, in later years confirmed this unhappiness among the new boys, saying they all felt ignored by Heath.
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Even the Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins,
^‡
had by this time developed a low opinion of Heath himself.
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Yet more irritation was created when it became clear that Heath was determined to carry over from his time as prime minister his unusually personal grip on economic policy. On 9 May the new, anti-Heath 1922 Executive met and discussed policy-making. ‘It is said E. Heath is in charge of the important area of counter-inflation …’ wrote Neave. ‘The Executive is very opposed to this arrangement and will protest. I get the impression he is still an autocrat. The grumbling about him is still serious. He has to be made to understand that he will lose another election if he does not alter his curt attitude but how can he do it? He seems as afraid of everyone as they are of him.’
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By late May the unhappiness had almost reached breaking point, and the 1922 Executive seriously discussed a planned campaign of revolt. The problem was how to manage the succession. At a dinner given by David Renton, Hugh Fraser, Nicholas Ridley, Edward Du Cann, Neave and others discussed the matter: ‘We agreed we might have to take action if things blew up. Edward would have to tell Heath the Party would not support him. People do not think we have yet reached this point but I think we soon shall. The difficulty is that Heath will fight.’
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Faced with that difficulty, Heath’s opponents stood back. A few days later, Neave saw Heath about nuclear reactors, on whose behalf he was a paid lobbyist: ‘He was in a v. poor state, red faced, far too fat
^§
and depressed. I think he should stand down in favour of Whitelaw but he will need a lot of persuading.’
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Neave did not dare attempt such persuasion in person. Faced with Heath’s intransigence, the 1922 Executive ‘decided to keep the leadership question “on ice” ’.
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In a tragi-comic attempt to create better relations with backbenchers, Heath’s PPS, Kenneth Baker,
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who had got wind of a small party the Neaves were giving for new Conservative MPs, asked Neave why the leader had not been asked. Taken aback, Neave pretended that he had been planning a second party to which Heath would be invited. This went ahead. Neave had thirty-eight acceptances and one and a half dozen bottles of champagne from Oddbins. His brief description of the occasion conveys the atmosphere: ‘E. Heath arrived with many others at 7 p.m. and was very frosty for the first 10 mins. I had a job to get him to talk to anyone. I started with George Gardiner and his wife, Ivan Lawrence,
^†
Patrick Mayhew …’
^‡
Winston Churchill,
^§
grandson of the late Prime Minister, was one of the few guests who was not of the new intake, so Heath asked him what he was doing there. In return, Churchill asked him the same question: ‘Whereupon Heath replied, “I am the chief fornicator.”
^¶
This’, said Neave, ‘sounds a strange joke.’
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It was also typical of Heath’s bewildering conversational style. Neave felt he got nothing out of the party. His wife had received no flowers or card from the leader, he complained to his diary, and Heath ‘gets fatter every day which gives a poor impression on TV’.
⁷²
A week later, he recorded again: ‘Heath has never thanked Diana for the party. I wonder very much whether it was worth it. I certainly have no hopes of patronage in his direction. My advice has never been sought on those policy areas in which I might have been useful.’
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In later years, when asked why he had lost the leadership of his party, Heath used to say that it was simply because
he had not handed out enough honours.
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There were other, bigger reasons, but he was not completely wrong.
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