Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (60 page)

Studying her parliamentary performances in her first year as leader, one cannot find any occasion on which she won control of the House. Always well prepared and always sharp in argument, she nevertheless failed to tip the parliamentary scales in her favour. She lacked, at this stage, the confident spontaneity required. This was bad for the morale of her parliamentary colleagues, particularly as Heath remained an effective and baleful presence in the Chamber. By the turn of the year, Mrs Thatcher had made serious attempts to improve her links with all shades of parliamentary opinion. William Shelton had gone in October, to be replaced as her PPS by Adam Butler,
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son of RAB and therefore well connected. An attempt was made to appoint Peter Morrison as her other PPS, but this was rejected on the grounds that it would look bad if both men were ‘Honourable’ (that is, sons of peers) Old Etonians.
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After Christmas, poor Fergus Montgomery was replaced by the more able, though not more popular, John Stanley.
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Her parliamentary position was improving incrementally, but she had no palpable hits in the Chamber of which she could boast.

Mrs Thatcher was much more successful in the public preaching role which she had designed for herself, with its accompanying projection of her combative personality. Her speeches, mainly those to Conservative audiences, continued to attack the global Communist threat and to link it, to use the phrase which would become famous in the 1980s, with ‘the enemy within’. She exposed left-wing subversion of local government, deploying one of her most famous phrases about the spending of ‘other
people’s money’,
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and she proclaimed her vision of ‘Every man, every woman a capitalist’.
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In addition to the power of her general arguments on this subject, there was a specific one which guaranteed Mrs Thatcher the sympathetic attention of most of the press. This was the growing and disruptive power of trade unions within the newspaper industry. The print unions, entirely unreformed in their restrictive and often corrupt practices, were becoming more militant, stopping the production of the papers more frequently. Under the Trade Union and Labour Relations Bill proposed by the left-wing Employment Secretary, Michael Foot, the closed shop was to become easier to impose than ever before. Mrs Thatcher pointed out that this could mean that the National Union of Journalists would gain a monopoly in newspapers. This enabled her to draw comparisons with Communist China and the Soviet Union where ‘the press is in chains’.
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This had happened because one body had taken control of the entire press. ‘Are we so sure’, she asked, in a letter to the
Finchley Times
, ‘our liberties are safe when extremists are so active on all sides?’
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Newspapers feared that their freedom of expression and their right to manage themselves would be taken away: they naturally gravitated towards the woman who expressed their fears.

But it was to the subject which she had raised in Chelsea the previous July to which Mrs Thatcher returned with the most incendiary effect. In January 1976, following an investigation in the
Daily Mail
of the Soviet military build-up, and in the absence of Robert Conquest, who had returned to America, Richard Ryder contacted Robert Moss, a young expert on terrorism and subversion then working for the
Economist
. Moss was asked to write her a speech about the Soviet menace, and was given a pretty free hand. On this occasion, however, to avoid the previous criticism of failing to consult, Mrs Thatcher brought Reggie Maudling along to Flood Street late at night to study the draft with her. He did not like what he saw, complaining that it was wrong to describe Soviet society as ‘sterile’: ‘Think of Tchaikovsky!’
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Maudling’s objections were largely overruled, however. As in her Chelsea speech, Mrs Thatcher was entirely resistant to the idea that her major speeches on world affairs should go in a neat box marked ‘foreign policy’, still less ‘diplomacy’. Her views on the state of the world were part of her account of life, the universe and everything. Moss understood that Mrs Thatcher was consciously harking back to Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, when he famously spoke of ‘an iron curtain’ descending on Europe. She sought just such a ‘clarion effect’, and he drafted accordingly.
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Speaking in Kensington town hall on 19 January 1976 after a visit to British armed forces in West Germany, she declared that ‘The first duty of any Government is to safeguard its people against external aggression.’ She then applied this test to the Labour government and found that it was ‘dismantling our defences at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’ – ‘Perhaps some people in the Labour Party think we are on the same side as the Russians!’ The Russians, she said, were ‘bent on world dominance’, and, having no success of which to boast but their military might, were pursuing it through arms; the Politburo ‘put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns’. In Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered those of NATO by ‘150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft’. The Soviet Union produced one new nuclear submarine per month, threatening our sea routes. She had been right, she insisted, to warn about the illusions of Helsinki, and she called upon her audience to listen to Solzhenitsyn’s claim that the West had been fighting the Third World War since 1945, and – as Vietnam, and now Portugal and Angola (in which, following Portuguese colonial collapse in 1975, Marxists struggled for supremacy), showed – losing ground. The remedy, said Mrs Thatcher, lay not only in rearming, but also, and here she quoted the American Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in ‘a reasoned and vigorous defence of the Western concept of rights and liberties’. She asserted her Atlanticism: ‘we believe that our foreign policy should continue to be based on a close understanding with our traditional ally, America. This is part of our Anglo-Saxon tradition as well as part of our NATO commitment.’ She was more cautious about closer links within the EEC, saying that ‘Any steps towards closer European union must be carefully considered.’ Much of Britain’s decline had been brought about by socialism – ‘the Conservative Party has the vital task of shaking the British public out of a long sleep.’ This, said Mrs Thatcher, was ‘a moment when our choice will determine the life or death of our kind of society’: ‘Let’s ensure that our children will have cause to rejoice that we did not forsake their freedom.’
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This was a powerful speech, combining a strong line of fresh arguments and facts with plenty of passion. But Mrs Thatcher could not have known how lucky she would be in the reaction to it. The excited, sometimes angry response at home was fanned by that of the Russians. The Red Army’s newspaper
Red Star
, amplified by being reported on Moscow Radio, described Mrs Thatcher, intending an insulting comparison with Bismarck, the nineteenth-century ‘Iron Chancellor’ of Germany, as ‘the Iron Lady’.
She seized the opportunity. Speaking to her own Conservative Association in Finchley, she reintroduced herself to her admiring audience:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western world. A Cold War warrior … Yes, I
am
an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke; yes, if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.
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It is hard to think of a neater way of placing herself where she wanted to be – a wholly feminine but strong woman, a figure respected by her enemies, a patriotic leader in the tradition of the Duke of Wellington (‘the Iron Duke’), a defender of the nation and its values. Thanks to her opponents, she had graduated to being a global figure with a sobriquet that marked her out – the Iron Lady.

On 16 March 1976, Mrs Thatcher delivered a substantial speech to the Bow Group, the home of more liberal-minded and intellectual Conservatives, for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Taking its inspiration from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s recent broadcast on the BBC, the address linked the fight against socialism to the need for the cultivation of excellence: ‘For the greatest advances of the ordinary person are the products of the achievements of the extraordinary person.’
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No one outside her immediate audience in the Café Royal paid the slightest attention, however, because Harold Wilson had chosen that morning to resign as prime minister.

To this day, no one knows for certain why Wilson resigned. There were rumours about approaching scandal and about illness. Given that he had led for so long, it was not surprising that he wanted to go, but the exact timing was a complete surprise. Mrs Thatcher’s handling of the occasion won her little praise on either side of the House. Watching Prime Minister’s Questions that afternoon, in which tributes to Wilson were paid, Bernard Donoughue recorded: ‘Heath was superb. But Thatcher got it wrong again, graceless, with some snide petty points and a call for a general election, which clearly embarrassed many people on her own side.’
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Barbara Castle watched her from the government front bench: ‘He [Wilson] just played with Margaret Thatcher, who sat, as she usually does before a parliamentary effort, head down and with lips pursed, as if summoning up some superior wisdom of which we ordinary mortals do not know. Her intervention, when it came, was not … exactly masterly.’
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Mrs Thatcher seems to have been perfectly sincere in her ill-grounded belief that a general election was what constitutional propriety required. But the Labour Party had no such ideas, and proceeded to choose Wilson’s successor. The government was, in fact, in deep trouble, having lost parliamentary votes the previous months on the first of its cuts to public expenditure plans for future years, and faced an ensuing crisis in the money markets when sterling fell below $2 on 2 March. But attention now
transferred to the contest, and left Mrs Thatcher looking irrelevant and somehow uninteresting. It is a curious fact that although the Labour government of 1974–9 was largely unsuccessful, it contained an extraordinary abundance of talent. Those who stood to replace Wilson were Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey, all eloquent, experienced and charismatic figures, and all more substantial, at that time, than Mrs Thatcher. On 5 April 1976 the third ballot produced a victory for Jim Callaghan. Labour MPs had preferred the only candidate without an Oxford degree over Michael Foot, the main choice of the left.

This was not a good result for Mrs Thatcher. If Foot had won (he had amazed everyone by coming top in the first ballot), her excoriations of socialism would immediately have resonated with the voters. With Jim Callaghan, the Red wolf wore more effective sheep’s clothing than ever before. Callaghan was thirteen years older than Mrs Thatcher, and had been an MP since 1945. He was an unquestionably patriotic product of the respectable working class and he embodied the idea, still persuasive to many voters, that only Labour could get on with the trade unions. A tall man, who deployed what Mrs Thatcher well described as ‘avuncular flannel’,
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Callaghan treated her at the despatch box with a condescension which usually worked in the heavily male House of Commons. In one of their early exchanges at Prime Minister’s Questions, Mrs Thatcher claimed that ‘his only policy is to put Britain deeper in the red, to keep the red flag flying here.’ Callaghan replied: ‘I still have hopes that one day Question Time will be a serious period, without Members just thinking up clever phrases in advance and then shouting them across the Dispatch Box … I am sure that one day the right honourable Lady will understand these things a little better.’
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On another occasion, when Mrs Thatcher was trying to press Callaghan on the revolutionary opinions of one of his colleagues, he put her down: ‘I could, of course, give the right honourable Lady my views on these matters, but unfortunately I do not seem able to endow her with a sense of humour.’
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Mrs Thatcher remembered Callaghan as a more ‘dominating’ political figure than Wilson.
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Throughout his time as leader, Callaghan had a higher personal popularity rating with the public than she did.

Two days after Callaghan became leader, Labour lost its overall majority in the Commons through the death of one of its Members and the resignation of the whip by the fraudster John Stonehouse.
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This loss of
control was not the blessing for the Tories which many of their supporters took it to be. Many now expected the Labour government to fall, but the Liberals and the minor parties could and did ensure that it stayed in office. Mrs Thatcher therefore found herself in the difficult position of having to keep her troops in permanent readiness for a war which might still be as much as three years away – the end of the legal life of the Parliament. With most Commons votes so finely balanced, parliamentary chaos became more frequent. At the end of May 1976, Labour’s Bill to nationalize the shipbuilding and aircraft industry was pushed to the vote even though the Speaker had declared it ‘hybrid’ (that is, a Bill which, because it mixed general provisions with ones applying to specific businesses, was contrary to House of Commons procedure), and then was carried only, the Tories alleged, when the government whips induced one of their MPs to break his pair. Left-wing Labour MPs started to sing ‘The Red Flag’ in the Chamber of the House of Commons. Then Michael Heseltine, the Conservative industry spokesman, grabbed the Mace, which symbolizes the delegated authority of the Crown, and waved it aloft. Jim Prior and Willie Whitelaw restrained him, but not before everyone saw what had happened. Heseltine claimed ever afterwards that he was satirically offering the Mace to the Labour left, not brandishing it,
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but that is not how the matter was viewed. Mrs Thatcher seems quite to have enjoyed the kerfuffle, and did not reprimand Heseltine. The result of these dramas was that she suspended all parliamentary co-operation with the government until Callaghan agreed to hold the vote on the Shipbuilding Bill once more. This he did, four weeks later, but by that time he had made sure of the votes he needed.