Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (50 page)

Joseph might, perhaps, have survived the original mauling if he had been ready to rebut attack. His speech was, in fact, a thoughtful one which inaugurated an era of public agonizing about morality and the ‘underclass’ which has been with us ever since. But he had no back-up, and little inclination for a fight. Characteristically, he began to apologize for what he had said. He publicly admitted that he had damaged the cause he was trying to advance. Bernard Donoughue, head of Harold Wilson’s No. 10 Policy Unit, sat opposite Joseph at an evening meeting four days after Edgbaston: ‘we talked at length about various social problems … He was pleasant and interesting but obviously very jumpy about his recent speeches and current bid for the leadership. Later in the meeting he just sat with his head in his hands.’
¹⁹
If Joseph wouldn’t defend his words, nor, fully, could anyone else. In an
Evening Standard
interview with Max Hastings, the bulk of which was conducted before Joseph’s speech, Mrs Thatcher answered, to a question which Hastings must have inserted after Joseph’s speech, that
‘Keith is perfectly right. This is the twilight of the middle class,’ but she also admitted that his Edgbaston speech had done harm to the mission.
²⁰
She was aware, however, that it did no harm to her. In an interview in the
Scottish Sunday Post
of 3 November, she acknowledged that she was receiving many letters from the public urging her to stand for the leadership. Joseph himself appears to have understood the way things were going. Shortly after the Edgbaston speech, he shared a cab with Cecil Parkinson. ‘I think Margaret could become the standard-bearer,’ he said.
²¹

But a period of uncertainty ensued for almost a month. As Heath argued with the 1922 Committee about changes in the rules, opinion surveys of constituency chairmen showed that he still had their support. Even among Tory voters in general, just over half backed him to continue. The race had not quite started and Joseph, though wounded, had not yet withdrawn from it. The weakening of Joseph seemed to favour Willie Whitelaw. Airey Neave met Whitelaw at the Wessex Area Council. Whitelaw was confidential: ‘He was afraid it could not go on much longer. I said Heath must go by Christmas and he (Whitelaw) must take the initiative. There were 40 or 50 hardliners who would bring Heath down. Willie said he might have to give up the Chairmanship [in which he had succeeded Lord Carrington after the election] as he would be in a strong position. Evidently he feels Keith Joseph has put himself out of the running.’ Despite urging him on, however, Neave was not impressed: ‘No one really trusts him and I suspect he is rather weak in character.’
²²

At this time the atmosphere was altered by what was happening in the House of Commons. In his reply to the Queen’s Speech on 29 October 1974, Heath was heard in what Bernard Donoughue described as ‘almost total silence from his own backbenchers … Each party privately thinks that it is time for a change of leadership.’
²³
Then, on 7 November, timed to weaken his opponents in the 1922 Executive elections, Heath announced changes to his Shadow Cabinet. The press had spoken of Mrs Thatcher as a possible shadow Chancellor, but in fact she was offered the almost humiliating post of number two Treasury spokesman (though with a seat in the Shadow Cabinet) under Robert Carr. Rather than grumbling, however, she set to work with a will. On 12 November, the Chancellor, Denis Healey,
*
introduced a full-scale Budget, which invented Capital Gains Tax and Capital Transfer Tax and imposed a new tax on North Sea oil. On 14
November, Mrs Thatcher debated the Budget in the Commons. She teased Healey for ‘trying not to reveal that if he was right now he was wrong in his March Budget’. The Public Sector Borrowing Requirement was up by £6 billion since then, though he had said at the time that he would try to get it down. Now he was opting for ‘sacrifice by instalments’ when the people would have accepted the full thing there and then: ‘The people were ready. The Chancellor was not. He and they will regret it.’
²⁴
She pointed out that the government had imposed no penalties on the trade unions for breaching the Social Contract. Airey Neave was delighted by her performance: ‘I heard part of a brilliant speech by Margaret Thatcher on the Budget. She dealt very well with … the Social Contract, was amusing and increased her reputation.’
²⁵
Geoffrey Finsberg MP,
*
in the neighbouring constituency of Hampstead, urged her to stand, as, earlier, did Fergus Montgomery,
^†
her PPS. But she told the latter: ‘The party isn’t ready for a woman and the press would crucify me.’
²⁶

On 20 November, the committee on the leadership election rules, agreed by Heath six days earlier, was set up. ‘Talk of Margaret Thatcher standing and Du Cann more likely,’ noted Neave. The following day, in the early evening, Keith Joseph telephoned Mrs Thatcher and asked if he could come and see her in her office in the Commons. She quoted her memory of the conversation in her memoirs: Joseph said, ‘I am sorry, I just can’t run. Ever since I made that speech the press have been outside the house. They have been merciless. Helen [his wife] can’t take it and I have decided that I just can’t stand.’ ‘His mind was quite made up,’ Mrs Thatcher went on. ‘I was on the edge of despair. We just could not abandon the Party and the country to Ted’s brand of politics. I heard myself saying: “Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint
has
to stand.” ’
²⁷
Joseph then said, ‘I will give you all my support.’
²⁸
Remembering the occasion, Mrs Thatcher used to say that she had been ‘really rather shocked … he [Joseph] really was the leader.’ Characteristically, she shifted blame for Joseph’s failure to grasp his opportunity on to his wife: ‘I
was
surprised. I thought Helen would be 100 per cent behind him.’
²⁹

It may be doubted, however, whether Mrs Thatcher was either surprised or upset. What she ‘heard myself saying’ was what she had been ready to
say before the meeting began. On 19 November the Chief Whip had been told by the MP David Mitchell
*
that Joseph would not stand, but that he would propose and support Mrs Thatcher.
³⁰
The following day Humphrey Atkins had a conversation with Mrs Thatcher on other matters, at the end of which she told him of Joseph’s decision not to stand and of her decision that she should, indeed must.
^†
Atkins, of course, preserved impartiality, but those close to him believed that he personally tended to support Mrs Thatcher.
³¹
There is no reason to doubt that Mrs Thatcher’s meeting with Joseph took place as she records, and it was obviously important because it was face to face, rather than through intermediaries, but it was a formality: she had already decided to stand. She knew that she was better suited for the task than he. She genuinely loved and admired Joseph, both for his kindness to her and for the intellectual power he brought to the attack on socialism.
^‡
‘Socialism was like having a sheet of graph paper and putting a regulation on every square,’ she said, whereas Joseph’s conservatism was ‘like building a house’. But she understood his character quite well enough to know that he was unsuitable for the highest command. Although she said it was ‘a tragedy that he never became prime minister’, she added, in the same breath, that he ‘would have agonized over every decision’.
³²
Besides, even without the embarrassment of Edgbaston, those who shared Joseph’s and Mrs Thatcher’s political views had never been wholly convinced that Joseph had what it took. As a result, there was no real Joseph campaign team.

One person who saw what was happening was Gordon Reece,
^§
the public relations guru who advised the Conservatives on their party political broadcasts. He had noticed, watching clips of unused party political broadcasts from the 1970 election, how Mrs Thatcher ‘dominated the screen when she was on it’.
³³
He came to know her better, and by December 1973
had decided that she was the answer for the Tories – ‘It was the clearness with which she saw things.’ After the October 1974 defeat, Reece told Mrs Thatcher that there was a ‘unique opportunity for a woman leader’. She told him, however, that she was backing Joseph, and urged him to offer him his televisual skills. Reece went to interview Joseph the following day and asked the sort of penetrating personal questions (for example, the extent of family support for his candidacy) which he thought television interviewers might wish to pursue. Joseph displayed ‘visible unease’ with cameras, he thought. Reece told him that he could win the party leadership contest, but not a general election. Joseph said: ‘I think I agree with you.’ The essence of this conversation was known to Mrs Thatcher. There was never a definite Joseph campaign which was then aborted by his agonies over the reaction to Edgbaston. Rather, a Joseph candidacy had been a sort of working hypothesis for those, including Mrs Thatcher, who thought as he did. When that hypothesis collapsed, there was more relief than dismay.

Mrs Thatcher wrote that she went home to Flood Street that night and told Denis of her decision to stand. ‘You must be out of your mind,’ she says he said. ‘You haven’t got a hope.’
³⁴
His own version of the moment is more coloured, but to the same effect: ‘I did suck my teeth a bit. “Heath will murder you,” I told her.’
³⁵

It did not at all follow from her brave decision to stand that Mrs Thatcher’s way now lay clear. Many regarded her candidacy as nothing more than a chance to prepare the ground for a challenge by someone more serious, or merely for malcontents to let off steam. The
Economist
, jaunty in its erroneous confidence, described her as ‘precisely the sort of candidate who ought to be able to stand, and lose, harmlessly’.
³⁶
Paying one of his state visits to the Conservative Research Department which he had once run to such effect, R. A. Butler paused at the lift and said to Chris Patten, the director: ‘We don’t need to take this Thatcher business seriously, do we?’
³⁷
Many Tory MPs looked on the contest almost with ribaldry. At the 1922 Committee on 28 November, one Member said that it was a two-horse race:

A MEMBER
: You mean one filly.

ANOTHER MEMBER:
And a gelding.
³⁸

Mrs Thatcher herself was extremely worried about her chances, by the exile she feared would follow if she failed, and also, of course, by the reaction of Heath himself. When Peter Morrison told her, before she had announced her candidacy, that he would support her, she said, ‘You must understand, I have no chance.’ She added that she welcomed his support,
‘but I implore you not to announce it for your own sake [that is, for the sake of his career]’.
³⁹

Events moved quite fast. On 21 November 1974, the day of her conversation with Keith Joseph – a dramatic date because of the Birmingham IRA pub bombings in which twenty-eight people died
*
– Geoffrey Finsberg informed the Executive of the 1922 Committee that Mrs Thatcher would definitely stand.
⁴⁰
On the following day, Airey Neave noted, ‘I have arranged to have a private meeting with Margaret Thatcher on Tuesday at 7.30 to find out what she intends.’
⁴¹
Mrs Thatcher spent the weekend at Lamberhurst, but returned to Flood Street a little early, from what her interviewer, Gordon Greig, called ‘the wilds of Kent’, to speak to the
Daily Mail
. In doing so, she made clear that she had had strong support all along, before she had offered herself as a candidate: ‘When I knew that Keith wasn’t standing I knew I had to consider all the people who had been asking me day in and day out to put myself forward … The party has got to be given a choice.’

The
Mail
presented her as ‘Thoroughly Modern Maggie’, the ‘candidate of change’, and praised her ‘guts and honesty’ instead of the ‘grotesque hypocrisy that [has] so far marked the fight to get rid of Edward Heath’. On the next day, Monday, taking the advice of Fergus Montgomery that she must speak to Heath in person, rather than write him a letter, to tell him formally that she was to challenge him, she called on her leader in his room in the Commons. Accounts vary as to what was said, but, whatever it was, the meeting was short. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher recounts that he told her, ‘If you must,’
⁴²
but on other occasions she remembered him saying, ‘You’ll lose,’ to which she added, ‘That remark gave a certain zest to my competitive spirit.’
⁴³
In his own memoirs, Heath says, ‘I thanked her.’
⁴⁴
The atmosphere was not warm.

The day before this interview, Airey Neave had spent a good deal of time on the telephone to Edward Du Cann, ‘who has still not decided whether to stand. I think he thinks he has much to lose by giving up the City. I told him I would see Margaret,’ but, Neave added cautiously, ‘… it is going to be fairly hard to “sell” Margaret Thatcher.’
⁴⁵
Two days later, Neave saw her in her room in the House:

She said she was definitely a candidate to run in the Leadership stakes. She seemed rather apprehensive about the effect on her Shadow Cabinet
colleagues. She had told E. Heath she would stand against him and he said, ‘If that’s what you want to do, go ahead.’ I told her I would see her again in a week. She has a good chance.
⁴⁶

Neave was becoming irritated by Du Cann’s hesitation, and the worries about his chiaroscuro business career were growing. A day after seeing Mrs Thatcher, Neave recorded a conversation which gives the flavour of the intrigue, rumour and complication of the time: ‘Cecil Parkinson told me that the Whips had heard via J. Selwyn Gummer
*
that Shirley Williams (of all people) had said the Labour Party had a “dossier” on Edward Du Cann and his City connections. They hoped he was going to stand so they could make use of it.’
⁴⁷
The Heath camp rather hoped that Du Cann would be a challenger because they ‘all knew that he had such a dubious financial record as to make him an easy target.’
⁴⁸
The whips had heard a rumour that a forthcoming book about the fraudster Bernie Cornfeld would implicate Du Cann.
⁴⁹