Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (63 page)

In a speech, drafted by T. E. Utley and Simon Webley, from the pulpit of St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London the following year, Mrs Thatcher was more explicit about religion. She recalled her upbringing: ‘What mattered fundamentally was Man’s relationship to God, and in the last resort this depended on the response of the individual soul to God’s Grace.’ She went on, ‘I never thought that Christianity equipped me with a political philosophy, but I thought it did equip me with standards to which political actions must, in the end, be referred.’ She said that Christian teaching and worship should not be taken out of schools because ‘To most ordinary people, heaven and hell, right and wrong, good and bad, matter.’ The relief of poverty and suffering was a religious duty, but not one necessarily best performed by the state, she declared, taking her favourite example: ‘I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him?’ The worst political doctrines, notably Marxism (‘utterly inconsistent with the Gospel’), proclaimed the perfectibility of man through politics. She did not, but ‘There is a well-known prayer which refers to God’s service as “perfect freedom”. My wish for the people of this country is that we shall be “free to serve”.’ There was an apparent contradiction, she said, between the idea of interdependence and individual responsibility, but not a real one: ‘the whole of political wisdom consists in getting these two ideas in the right relationship to each other.’
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The reaction of the intellectuals to all of this was interesting to behold. Some of them fell in love with Mrs Thatcher. John Vaizey,
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an educationalist who had moved from the left during her time at the Department of Education, wrote to her to tell her how interesting her voice was to listen to.
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Most were flattered by her enthusiasm and, of course, by her praise for their writing. ‘You just put things so marvellously: I wish I had your gift for words,’ was one of her corny but effective lines. The historian David Dilks,
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who met her through Leon Brittan, was struck by her ‘directness, quickness on the point, anxiety to listen to a wide range of views, conscious exploitation of feminine charm, and a certain motherly quality.’
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He was also impressed by her desire to recapture ‘intellectual capital’ from universities to rebuild Conservative ideas. Some, however, thought her naive. Edward Norman, though an admirer, recalled that she ‘had all that ven
eration for intellectual life which real intellectuals don’t share’.
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She had ‘no real sense of intellectual inquiry’ and ‘an extraordinarily intelligent, but unformed mind’. Some simply doubted whether she was up to the task. After meeting her for the first time in 1978 – an occasion on which he told her to abolish exchange controls – Milton Friedman wrote to thank his host Ralph Harris: ‘Rose and I both enjoyed our dinner with Margaret Thatcher … very much indeed. She is a very attractive and interesting lady. Whether she really has the capacities that Britain so badly needs at this time, I must confess, seems to me a very open question …’
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But all shared a certain wonderment at the phenomenon of a party leader in search of ideas. Almost all responded to her demands, and it quite quickly became noticed that no equivalent mental activity was forthcoming either from the left of the Conservative Party or from the social democratic elements of Labour. Mrs Thatcher was the most clamorous customer in the ideological market-place. As a result, she was able to stimulate a good supply, and buy up more than any rivals. Her energy in this area made her critics look dingy and negative. Chris Patten’s memory of his own reaction can stand for many others:

The most fundamental aspect of her leadership … was that she believed she was engaged in a battle of ideas. And that unless the Conservative Party won it, she wouldn’t have the Opposition in office … Now that came as a particularly rude shock to many of us. Even though I was running the Conservative Party’s Research Department, interested in ideas, I was much more used to an approach to politics that saw things in a less intellectually confrontational way. I happen to think she was right. But I remember the first time she said to me, ‘We have to win the battle of ideas in British politics,’ I thought, ‘This is a bit rum.’
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Against all this intellectual firepower, some Heathite arguments began to crumble. ‘Monetarism’, by which was really only meant the control of inflation by attacking what Keith Joseph called ‘monetary incontinence’, was able to advance more or less unimpeded, so long as it was not too loudly proclaimed. It was to guard against this danger that Joseph entitled his Stockton Lecture of 1976 ‘Monetarism is Not Enough’: he emphasized how an over-large public sector could play havoc with the best-designed monetary policy. Mrs Thatcher could still be slowed down by appeals to the political danger of what she was trying to do, but nothing could stand in the way of the general direction of travel.

None of this ferment of ideas would have been much use, however, without anyone to try to relate it to actual policies. Here the most important person
was not Keith Joseph, who was more ‘the licensed thinker scouting ahead in Indian country’,
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but Geoffrey Howe. According to Richard Ryder, Howe was the ‘tapestry master of Thatcherism’.
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He was slightly unusual in being to the left of the party and yet having a record of supporting free-market economics which went right back to the 1950s. It was he, much more than Mrs Thatcher, who had close and long-standing links with the Institute of Economic Affairs, and he had learnt bitter lessons from his close involvement in piloting Ted Heath’s trade union reforms through the House of Commons and in implementing his incomes policies. Always a glutton for paperwork and one of the few senior politicians to be what is nowadays called a policy wonk, Howe spawned a vast amount of detailed policy rethinking. His informal group, meeting at his house in Fentiman Road, and including Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson and the tax expert Arthur Cockfield,
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tried to plot a free-market path for a future Conservative government. Naturally civil-servantish and emollient, Howe was better than any other leading party figure in establishing links between freelance advice from bodies like the Centre for Policy Studies and the policy work produced within the party and serviced by the Conservative Research Department. The policy group on taxation, for example, presided over by Cockfield, and assisted by Peter Cropper,
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one of the few free-market men in the CRD, did detailed work on subjects like the reform of capital taxation in a way which prepared for government and gave Mrs Thatcher confidence. This was chiefly thanks to Howe. His approach was cautious, but also dogged. It was Howe who formulated the idea, embodied in
The Right Approach
, that the need for freedom was best expressed in the language of common sense rather than anything more ecstatic. Although he shared most of the aims of Keith Joseph, he was concerned about what he called ‘too breakneck a pace’: ‘You know my own preference for not-so-benign neglect of harmful institutions rather than theatrical reform.’
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Unfortunately, from the very beginning of her leadership, Mrs Thatcher had certain reservations about Geoffrey Howe. She had been surprised and slightly unnerved when he stood against her in the second ballot, and she harboured a suspicion, which grew with time, that he was ambitious for her job.
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She had uneasy relations with Howe’s wife, Elspeth, who was too much of the bluestocking, too much on the left and perhaps, being of grander class origin, too socially confident a woman to appeal to Mrs Thatcher. Many years later, Denis Thatcher would refer to Elspeth Howe as ‘that bitch of a wife’.
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Things were nothing like so bad in the early days, but late in 1975 a problem arose which helped to sour relations ever after. Under the sex equality legislation of which Mrs Thatcher anyway disapproved, the Equal Opportunities Commission was established. According to Lady Howe, Mrs Thatcher was ‘positively not interested’ in women’s issues and suffered from ‘Queen Bee Syndrome – “I made it. Others can jolly well do the same” ’.
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Lady Howe was invited to serve as the deputy chairman of the EOC, and Mrs Thatcher learnt of this with displeasure, feeling it might compromise Conservative positions on the subject. Using the MP Peter Rees
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as an intermediary, she raised the matter with Geoffrey Howe, who sent Rees a rather characteristically hangdog reply (‘I understand your anxiety’) which nevertheless defended his wife’s appointment.
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The matter was to rumble on into Mrs Thatcher’s time in office, and it gave her the ineradicable impression that Howe was rather unmanly in the way he veered between two powerful women – his wife and her. Lady Howe had something of the same feeling, later suggesting that her husband was at fault in not complaining about his ill treatment. She liked to quote John Biffen’s image, also from the insect world, that she and Mrs Thatcher were ‘like two wasps in a jam-jar’.
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Mrs Thatcher was always irritated by Geoffrey Howe’s quiet, almost inaudible voice, his tendency to be long-winded and his slightly pudgy, soft, bespectacled demeanour. He was never dashing, and she liked dash. Howe saw his own role as the patient antidote to her ‘reluctance to think ahead’, and it was partly his very patience which made her cross. She was intelligent, he believed, but there was ‘an intellectual void which others had to fill’.
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In Chris Patten’s view, he was ‘like a country solicitor with an increasingly demanding client’.
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Howe acidly recalled that ‘Unlike most men, she hadn’t appeared to learn that you don’t rebuke officers in front of other ranks.’
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These temperamental differences led Mrs Thatcher to suspect, falsely, that Howe was not to be relied on in the fight for the economic change she wanted. He had not been her first choice as shadow Chancellor, and most of the period in opposition was punctuated by her half-hearted attempts to move him. In November 1975, she told Humphrey Atkins that she wanted
Howe to have the Home Office portfolio and Keith Joseph as shadow Chancellor,
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though in the end she was dissuaded and relieved her frustration by sacking Reggie Maudling instead. Sixteen months later, when an election seemed imminent and Mrs Thatcher was wondering who should be her Chancellor of the Exchequer if she won, she again expressed anxiety about Howe, questioning his competence. But party managers, worried that she was bad at communicating with the left of the party, saw Howe as one of that wing. She was not good with him or with Jim Prior, they agreed, but she needed to make it clear that both men would keep their jobs if the Tories won.
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Howe stuck it out, and did more than any other politician to prepare the Conservatives to rescue the British economy. Norman Strauss,
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one of the most radical of those involved in the Thatcher project, remembered Howe with admiration: ‘We all thought Geoffrey Howe was great. He seemed to have the greatest understanding of what we were about.’
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All the tensions, personal and ideological, tactical and strategic, which beset Mrs Thatcher’s period in opposition were at their tautest on the question of incomes policy and of what to do about trade unions. The subject involved both high principle and low tactics, and it evoked bitter dispute about the recent history of the Conservatives and why the 1974 elections had been lost. No believer in a free economy could seriously suggest that the government should make itself permanently responsible for the level of wages employers paid their workers. On the other hand, the coming of inflation had thrown workers into fierce competition for wage increases and no government, many believed, could afford to stand aside from this. This was most obviously the case in the public sector, where the government produced the money. At a time when many of the ‘commanding heights’ of British industry were in the hands of the government, a pay policy, in fact if not in name, seemed inevitable. The idea that it was the government’s job to control the supply of money in the economy and the employers’ job to settle wages with employees at whatever both parties could agree seemed simultaneously too radical to understand and too old-fashioned to countenance.

Talking to Ted Heath in March 1977, the journalist Hugo Young recorded, ‘The note of contempt for Thatcher and her team remains unabated. If they get in, Ted says, “They wouldn’t know what to do” about the unions and economic policy. But they would be driven, he says, to a
form of incomes policy. “But they would have wasted all this time … Why won’t people learn the lessons of the past?” ’
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The feeling of the time is conveyed by an interview given to the
Observer
in the summer of 1975 by the Canadian-born guru of the economic left J. K. Galbraith. ‘America’s celebrated economist explains … why pay and price curbs will be a permanent feature, both in Britain and in every other industrial nation,’ said the paper, by way of introduction, ‘and argues that the monetarists who oppose this view are romantics who should be “cherished only for their irrelevance”.’
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The Labour government’s counter-inflation policy will ‘last forever’, said Galbraith, and monetarists ‘should be treated as museum pieces’.
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This was the orthodoxy of the age, and it required some intellectual self-confidence to resist it. By the end of the twentieth century, no Western country had price and pay curbs.

In moral though not in intellectual terms, the subject of incomes policy was even harder for Conservatives to handle than for Labour. The history of the 1930s had taught the Tories to fear unemployment above all things, and had linked them with high unemployment in the public mind. To people like Heath and Jim Prior, a pay policy was an earnest that government would not stand aside and let chill economic winds blow where they would. Drawing on the instincts of wartime solidarity that dominated peacetime rhetoric for more than thirty years after 1945, they promoted the idea of everyone pulling together, tightening their belts and making necessary sacrifices for the common good. Rather like the RAF commander in the
Beyond the Fringe
sketch sending a pilot up with the instruction not to return, they believed that ‘We need a futile gesture at this stage.’ For many voters, this had a strong emotional appeal, and there was constant indecision in the public mind, exemplified in both the general election results of 1974, about which party could better deal with these problems. Ted Heath somehow got the worst of both worlds, linked to a pay policy yet regarded as ‘confrontational’. He had won a lot of support from people who wanted to ‘take on the miners’. But a fairly marginal majority seemed to think that Labour was a better bet because it could ‘get on with the unions’. To someone like Prior, it followed that the Conservatives risked permanent exclusion from power unless they could convince voters that they had a friendly working relationship with trade union bosses. To do this, agreement about pay and prices to ‘control’ inflation would have to be reached.