Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (54 page)

On Tuesday 11 February 1975, the second ballot took place. The result was 146 votes for Mrs Thatcher, 79 for Whitelaw, 19 apiece for Prior and Howe, 11 for Peyton and two spoilt papers. She had therefore won outright, without needing a third ballot. Shelton’s count was again pretty accurate. He had underestimated Whitelaw’s support by one, and Mrs Thatcher’s by nine. She sat with Fergus Montgomery in Airey Neave’s small room in an attic corridor of the Commons. She remembered Neave opening the door softly and saying, ‘so quietly’, ‘I have to tell you you are the new Leader of the Opposition.’
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Meeting the press in the Grand Committee Room immediately after her victory, Mrs Thatcher said: ‘To me it is like a dream that the next name in the line
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after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, is Margaret Thatcher.’ There was a becoming modesty about her way of putting it, but the fact that her election did indeed seem like a dream was a large part of her problem.

It is hard to exaggerate the sheer strangeness, as it seemed at the time, of the event. Geoffrey Howe, whom Mrs Thatcher had just soundly beaten, described the scene when, two days after her election, she appeared in Committee Room 14 to address the regular meeting of the 1922 Committee: ‘The new leader, escorted by the chairman Edward Du Cann, entered the room through a door opening on to the platform. She was flanked only by the all-male officers of the Committee. Suddenly she looked very beautiful and very frail as the half-dozen knights of the shires towered over her. It was a moving, almost feudal, occasion. Tears came to my eyes.’
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The oldest, grandest, in many people’s eyes the stuffiest political party in the world had chosen a leader whose combination of class, inexperience and sex would previously have ruled her out. And it was not obvious that it had really meant to do so, or that it was confident of its choice. ‘As the Conservative Party now begins to take stock,’ reported an official at the US Embassy in London, ‘its mood is a curious mixture of relief, excitement, guilt, and misgivings.’
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Apart from anything else, the instant change in verbal and visual style produced by a woman leader was bewildering. What was the issue on which she had won, the press asked Mrs Thatcher in Conservative Central Office on the day of her triumph? ‘I like to think it was merit,’ she answered. ‘Could you expand on that?’ they asked. ‘No, it doesn’t need expansion. You chaps don’t like short answers, or direct
answers. Men like long, rambly, waffly answers.’ Interviewed by Michael Cockerell on the BBC’s
Midweek
, she described her reaction to the news of her victory. With an intense, almost sensual expression, she said, ‘I almost wept when they told me. I
did
weep.’ Such ways of speaking would have been unknown and unthought of in a Conservative leader twenty-four hours earlier. Would her ‘dream’ – which, for her establishment opponents, was a nightmare – turn out to be waking reality, or would it vanish in the cold light of normal politics?

Mrs Thatcher was at least as conscious of this problem as anyone else. On the day of her victory, she dined with the Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, in his room in the Commons, to discuss how to compose her Shadow Cabinet. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher says, ‘I told Humphrey that although there were some people, like Keith Joseph and Airey Neave, to whom I felt a special obligation, I did not want to make a clean sweep of the existing team.’
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But she also told Atkins that she was aware of Joseph’s shortcomings and of Neave’s unpopularity in some quarters. She toyed with the idea of keeping Neave running her office until such time as she could give him a peerage.
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The most urgent and delicate part of the discussions in the Chief Whip’s room concerned Ted Heath. In the course of her campaign, Mrs Thatcher had promised to offer Heath a place in her Shadow Cabinet, but she naturally hoped that this offer would be refused. Seeking to appear correct and polite, and to settle the matter without delay, she conveyed a message to Heath that she would like to call on him at once and talk about what he was going to do. Heath was advised by his friends – Willie Whitelaw, Lord Carrington (who was in Australia) and Francis Pym – that it would be better to let her settle down in the job and for him to join the team six months later, so a message came back from Heath’s people indicating that an offer at this stage was not a good idea.
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Mrs Thatcher was determined, however, to be seen to fulfil her promise, and so told Heath’s office that she would call on him in Wilton Street on the morning after her victory. Heath received her in his study off the hall, without getting up. ‘He was like a bird who’s broken its wing,’ Mrs Thatcher remembered. ‘He was hurt, and so would I have been. I offered him whichever post he wanted in the Shadow Cabinet. He just said “No.” ’
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Heath’s memory was different: ‘She offered me nothing.’
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Tim Kitson, who was present, and getting coffee, recalled: ‘Ted made it quite clear that he wouldn’t take a job, and therefore she didn’t actually offer him one.’
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The meeting was over so quickly that the coffee had not even arrived. Heath withdrew without ceremony. Mrs Thatcher felt she could not leave at once in case the press thought there had been a row: ‘I really couldn’t walk straight out, so I had a natter with
Tim in the kitchen. I’ve had no private conversation with Ted since then, which is sad.’
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She left the house and told Joan Hall, who was driving her: ‘Ted won’t come into my Shadow Cabinet. Well, that’s that.’
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Thus began Ted Heath’s self-exclusion from contact with his successor which became known as ‘the incredible sulk’, and which lasted, with one or two tiny deviations, until his death in 2005.

Mrs Thatcher had more success, on the same day, with Willie Whitelaw. In accordance with his regimental attitude to his role, he had made clear his readiness to serve her as soon as his defeat had been announced, and she duly offered him the post of deputy leader. He accepted, reportedly on the condition that Keith Joseph not be made shadow Chancellor.
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On 17 February 1975, however, Joseph told her that he wanted the shadow Chancellorship or nothing
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– the same position, oddly enough, in which he had found himself with Ted Heath – but she dissuaded him skilfully and he was satisfied with being made her number three, in charge of policy and research. Geoffrey Howe became shadow Chancellor, though she had first dangled the post before Edward Du Cann, who preferred to remain chairman of the ’22 and continue to earn money in the City. The prominent Heathites Robert Carr and Peter Walker were removed, but there was no general purge of the left of the party. Jim Prior took on employment. Francis Pym accepted agriculture, though he was to give up the post, following a nervous breakdown, a few weeks later. Ian Gilmour was promoted to shadow home secretary, and Mrs Thatcher brought back Reggie Maudling to the front bench as shadow foreign secretary. Airey Neave, at his request, was made shadow secretary for Northern Ireland. Keen to have the backing of the elder statesmen of the party, she kept Lord Hailsham and Lord Carrington in the team, the first without portfolio, and the second as leader of the Lords, and accepted Willie Whitelaw’s suggestion that his cousin, Lord Thorneycroft, should become party chairman. Mrs Thatcher chose her Shadow Cabinet for their variety of opinion. Of the twenty-four who met round the table, perhaps four – Neave, Joseph, Angus Maude and Sally Oppenheim – had voted for her, and only two of these – Neave and Joseph – had been her leading supporters. In a memo to Joseph in April, the founder-director of the Centre for Policy Studies, Nigel Vinson,
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questioned the need for the CPS’s continued existence ‘now that the Tory Party is in the hands of true believers’.
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But it wasn’t, and
Mrs Thatcher did not feel nearly strong enough yet to make sure that it would be.

Nor was her own entourage, at the beginning, a source of strength. Following his defeat, Willie Whitelaw replied to a message of commiseration from Robert Carr, saying, ‘Of course it is now becoming clear that her cohorts have a. little talent and b. have no idea at all about running a party.’
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Although she would not have phrased it thus, Mrs Thatcher did not really dissent. Thanking her old friend Edward Boyle for his letter of congratulation, she wrote that she had ‘too few people of high calibre to spot what is important and to alert me in time’.
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Few thought much of her PPSs William Shelton and Fergus Montgomery, and it quickly, though privately, became rumoured that Montgomery had been involved in the homosexual scandal involving the Soviet spy John Vassall in the early 1960s. His exposure was feared. Within a fortnight of the leadership election, Neave, whom Mrs Thatcher made titular head of her private office, had recruited Richard Ryder,
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a journalist on the
Daily Telegraph
, to run the operation day to day. Ryder was highly intelligent and competent, but he was also only twenty-five years old and not, at first, vested with much authority by his new boss. In theory, Airey Neave ran the office, but in practice he attended to his Shadow Cabinet portfolio of Northern Ireland, and Ryder did all the work. Mrs Thatcher also recruited the ‘very attractive, bright and sexy’
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Caroline Stephens,
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who had previously worked for Heath, as her private papers secretary. The only important member of her staff who had worked for her before her promotion was her secretary, Alison Ward. Among the existing staffs at Conservative Central Office in Smith Square and the Conservative Research Department, which at that time existed more or less independently in Old Queen Street, she had few friends. Ian Gilmour she quickly replaced as chairman of the CRD with Angus Maude, but Chris Patten stayed on as director.
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In reshaping all these arrangements, Mrs Thatcher was cautious – partly because of the weakness of her political position, partly because of her lack of organizational experience, and partly because, for all her courage at critical moments, caution was always an important part of her character.
There was yet another reason, too – a sense of social inferiority. Although she was to acquire a reputation as the scourge of the Tory grandees, and she certainly hated to be patronized by anyone, she was by nature deferential to social systems and respected the way that the Conservative Party had been run. In many ways, her
beau idéal
of a Tory leader was Alec Douglas-Home – ‘Alec would still be there if he had learnt how to communicate his message,’ she declared extravagantly in the late 1990s. ‘He was a marvellous man.’
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Her romantic sense of history and her dislike of dreary mediocrity drew her instinctively to aristocratic patterns of behaviour, though she had too much integrity and earnestness to try to imitate them. She wanted to observe the proprieties, and had no desire to turn everything upside down. Those who worked for her noticed how worried she always was by all matters of dress and protocol. Not long after becoming leader, for example, she was invited to dinner with the Carringtons at their house in Ovington Square. Since the dinner was formal, Mrs Thatcher became filled with anxiety about whether or not she should wear gloves for it, and would not rest until her office had telephoned Lady Carrington for guidance.
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Writing to the Queen for the first time as leader, she got in a tizz about how to end the letter. Caroline Stephens advised her simply to write ‘yours sincerely’, an error which prompted Sir Martin Charteris, the Queen’s private secretary, to tell Caroline (‘very sweetly’) the proper form, and ask her to convey it to her boss.
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The party grandees were carefully watched by Mrs Thatcher’s team for how well they treated her. Lord Carrington did pretty well. Willie Whitelaw ‘behaved beautifully to her face though he would make snide comments behind her back’.
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Ian Gilmour was favoured at first, but increasingly seen – he was very tall – as ‘lofty’. Christopher Soames, at that time a European commissioner, but actively looking for a return to British politics, was considered ‘top of the list of snobs’.
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For their part, the old establishment watched the new Leader with a mixture of fascination, admiration, repugnance and bemusement. Some doubted whether she would last; others genuinely wanted to help her and to break down what they saw as her isolation, as they had once embraced the equally lower-middle-class Heath. Humphrey Atkins and other party managers well disposed to her sought ways to furnish her with a group of friends she could trust – people like Carrington, Whitelaw and Thorneycroft – but there was always the problem, compounded by her sex, class and personality, that she found it hard to relax in such company. They were struck by her extreme privacy, which went right down, they thought, to a reluctance
to have others assist her with matters like her clothes and domestic help.
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There was a cultural gulf. Chris Patten, though himself of what the grandees would have considered humble birth, sided culturally and politically with them. He and his colleagues in the Conservative Research Department used to express their humorous exasperation with their Leader by referring to her by her starchy Victorian second name, ‘Hilda’,
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or sometimes ‘Milksnatcher’.
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But before the impression is collected that Margaret Thatcher as the new Leader was some little girl lost, it should be pointed out that she had something that compensated for all these disadvantages. In her speech to the 1922 Committee after her election, she had turned her weakness into a strength by telling her MPs that she was a frail little woman who needed the help of strong men such as they.
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She was not as vulnerable as she wished to seem, however. She had a burning sense of mission. On the day of her election, she had told ITN News that ‘You don’t exist as a party unless you have a clear philosophy and a clear message.’ She was confident from the first that she could supply both. The propagation of ideas was one of her greatest strengths.