Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (35 page)

Thatcher was unrepentant. “I left our partners in no doubt that my room for maneuver was limited, but I did not feel it right to refuse to make this further effort,” she later told parliamentarians. “We should get more, and it is worth while going on negotiating to get more, particularly as a number of countries in the Council of Ministers were trying very hard to help us achieve a better result.” Down the road European leaders ultimately granted Britain a rebate far beyond what the Foreign Office had considered possible. But it came at the cost of considerable damage to Britain’s reputation as a reliable player on the European stage—doubts that lingered for the rest of Thatcher’s term in office and beyond.

O
f the many pressing issues that Margaret Thatcher faced in her first year, however, there was one that she had to handle with particular care. This was the weighty question of trade-union power. The Winter of Discontent and the shift in public attitudes toward the unions that it helped to bring about had been a crucial factor in the Conservative electoral win. Yet Thatcher moved relatively cautiously on this front at first.

She had good reasons for opting to proceed with care. Tackling the unions was not among her immediate priorities. Cutting taxes, adopting new monetary targets, and abolishing exchange controls took precedence—partly because they were relatively easy to do. No one’s interests were directly threatened, and no legislation was immediately required.

As Thatcher understood perfectly well, moreover, her administration needed time to prepare the ground. The unions were formidable opponents, and they were deeply rooted in British political life. Here again her own experience as a minister under Heath proved a useful legacy. He had made no advance preparations to deal with the miners’ strike that finished off his government. This was a mistake she would not repeat. She made a conscious choice to refrain from confronting the unions all too directly at first. Instead, she moved ahead incrementally, starting with small reforms that chipped away at the rules that made it far too easy for union leaders to launch strikes (sometimes even absent a clear mandate from their members).

But there was also a narrower reason for her hesitation, and it had to do with the dynamics of her own political organization. Thatcher had won the 1979 election as the head of a deeply divided party. Despite her victory in the 1975 leadership fight, the rest of the Conservative Party elite had remained little changed from the days of Heath. Thatcher and her like-minded colleagues remained a minority in her shadow cabinet, whose membership largely overlapped with the ministerial team that had governed from 1970 to 1974. Many of these shadow ministers were Tory heavyweights, backed by powerful constituencies and decidedly loyal, if not to Heath himself, then to the brand of consensus politics that he had seemed to embody.

In public Thatcher spoke in ringing tones of the need for a “conviction cabinet” that mirrored her own evangelical political style:

            
If you’re going to do the things you want to do—and I’m only in politics to do things—you’ve got to have a togetherness and unity in your Cabinet. There are two ways of making a Cabinet. One way is to have in it people who represent all the different viewpoints within the party, within the broad philosophy. The other way is to have in it only the people who want to go in the direction in which every instinct tells me we have to go. Clearly, steadily, firmly, with resolution. We’ve got to go in an agreed and clear direction.
¹²

The reality was starkly different, and in private her tone reflected that. In a small gathering in Number Ten she once referred to herself dramatically as “the rebel
head of an establishment government.”
¹³
This was perhaps not quite as strange as it sounded; at least one observer of the British political system argues that prime ministers must behave like rebels within their cabinets while projecting unity to the outside.
¹⁴
But Thatcher, it turned out, had to work much harder than many prime ministers to have her way.

Journalist Hugo Young observes that Thatcher’s 1979 government team manifested less “togetherness” than any other postwar cabinet.
¹⁵
This had many reasons. One of them, at least partly, was the matter of her gender. (Conservative grandees were not the only ones guilty of lingering chauvinism, of course. On her first visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels, journalists considered it entirely legitimate to ask, “What are you going to do with your handbag?”)
¹⁶
Her team was dominated by pillars of the establishment, just the sort of people one might expect to find in a Conservative Party government—and this also meant that they were men. Six of her ministers were alumni of the Guards, the senior regiment of the British Army, and six were alumni of Eton. Universities other than Cambridge and Oxford barely figured in the mix. On this score, at least, the grocer’s daughter could claim a degree of commonality—but only up to a point. Although she was a natural politician, her social origins certainly did not predestine her to be a member of the ruling class. Politically, only six out of the twenty-two could be considered her allies. As later became known, only one of them had actually voted for her on the first secret ballot in the leadership contest in 1975.
¹⁷
She had beaten Heath because she marshaled the most credible challenge to his leadership—not because everyone agreed with her views.
¹⁸

As leader of the opposition she had succeeded, to a considerable degree, in papering over some of the resulting divisions. Policy toward the unions was a case in point. In late 1977 two of Thatcher’s stalwarts, John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, presented the party leaders with a memorandum titled “Stepping Stones.” In their paper the authors made a passionate case that confronting the unions had to be the centerpiece of any serious strategy to reverse Britain’s economic decline. Rather than sticking to the consensus view that dictated compromise with the unions, Hoskyns and Strauss insisted that it was time for the Conservatives to pursue a long-term strategy of identifying organized labor as an obstacle to prosperity. This was too much for the Heathites. Thatcher had chosen one of them, party grandee James Prior, to serve as the shadow cabinet’s point man on industrial relations precisely because his reputation as a compromiser would mollify labor leaders. While Prior agreed in principle that union powers needed to be reduced, in practice he favored a characteristically Heathite course of accommodation. He pronounced “Stepping
Stones” a provocation that could sabotage the party’s prospects of winning the next election if its contents became known. He prevailed upon Thatcher to keep it out of the public eye. (Party chairman Peter Thorneycroft, who later proved himself a devoted monetarist, actually demanded that every existing copy be burned.) But “Stepping Stones” remained enormously influential within her administration—especially after the Winter of Discontent shifted the boundaries of public tolerance for union behavior. This divide returned when the Conservatives began drawing up their manifesto for the 1979 election. Thatcher, confident that voters were ready for a change, proposed several specific reforms (including a law against secondary picketing and a ban on strikes by public-sector workers). But she met with stiff resistance from the moderates, and the language of the manifesto was watered down accordingly.
¹⁹

During Thatcher’s first term in office, indeed, it was above all the split within her own party that most vividly expressed the challenge she faced. The aim of the Thatcherite counterrevolution was to dismantle the postwar consensus, and no one embodied this better than the Heathites within her own cabinet. A nineteenth-century term was revived to express the distinction: the Thatcherites were the “dries,” like the arch-conservatives of the Victorian era, while the centrists came to be known as the “wets,” evoking a political pedigree that went back to the One-Nation Tories of Disraeli, who insisted that Conservatives should pursue policies that addressed national interests rather than sectional ones. Prior, in this scheme, functioned as the “chief wet” of Thatcher’s first cabinet. As her secretary for employment, he was the only one of the moderates to hold an economic office. His centrist stalwarts included the eloquent Ian Gilmour, whose later book,
Dancing with Dogma
, provides perhaps the best elucidation of the moderates’ views. Another, the aristocrat Peter Carrington, served as her foreign minister, while Willie Whitelaw, popular among the party rank-and-file, became her home secretary and deputy prime minister.

The wets revolted against both the style and the substance of Thatcher’s new order. There was, to begin with, her habit of browbeating her colleagues—an approach that applied to her allies as well as her enemies. Though she was famously kind to her personal staff, her attitude toward the members of her cabinet was relentless. She harangued them like schoolboys. Even her longtime friend Keith Joseph came to dread his sessions with her; before heading off to meet her, he would tell his staff “to send two ambulances at 3 o’clock.” Whitelaw told a confidant that, for the first time in his life, politics had ceased to be “fun.”
²⁰
“Fun,” of course, was a very poor description of what Thatcher was about. Her domineering manner grated
on her middle-aged male colleagues who, thanks to their traditionalist upbringings, were accustomed to deference from the women in their lives. James Prior was writing only partly in jest when he confessed in his memoir that “I found [Thatcher’s bossiness] very difficult to stomach and this form of male chauvinism was obviously one of my failings.”
²¹

She made things worse with her habit of filling the key economic posts in her cabinet with like-minded allies while reserving the less important positions for the moderates. Her tendency to rely on ad hoc groups of advisers and loyalists also alienated the wets. Though it was not widely known at the time, for the first years of her administration she breakfasted regularly with a small group of trusted political aides who shared her views. These unofficial meetings played a major role in shaping policy.

There was little time left over for the objections of dissenters like Prior, who cast himself as the lonely voice of reason amid the clamor of right-wing fanatics. “I was telling her all the time that we should take things steadily, and not believe that we could solve all the problems by draconian legislation,” wrote Prior.
²²
The announcement of Howe’s budget dispelled any illusions that the views of Prior and other wets would receive a fair hearing. The night before the budget was announced, Prior was having dinner with a leading union official, who asked about the rumors of an impending hike in VAT. Prior reassured him that no one was considering such madness.
²³
All the greater, then, his embarrassment the next morning:

            
It was really an enormous shock to me that the budget which Geoffrey produced the month after the election of 1979 was so extreme. It was then that I realized that Margaret, Geoffrey and Keith really had got the bit between their teeth and were not going to pay attention to the rest of us at all if they could possibly help it. That first budget also brought it home to me that I was really on a hiding to nothing from the very beginning, as the only economic Minister who was not of the monetarist right.
²⁴

Monetarism, for the wets, amounted to a doctrinaire rejection of “pragmatic” economic policy. Gilmour later published an eloquent denunciation of the “
sans culottes
of the monetarist revolution” embodied by Thatcher and her ilk. “British Conservatism is not an ‘-ism,’” he sneered. “It is . . . not a system of ideas. It is not an ideology or a doctrine.” The wets derided the monetarists’ obsession with precise money-supply targets. Prior and his colleagues also pointed out that the combination of the high pound and the new government’s policies of austerity would have
devastating effects on British industry, which was, certainly at first, the case. Prior sneered at treasury monetarists in his memoir as impractical ideologues whose ideas about economics came from books and lecture rooms rather than contact with business realities: “None of them had any experience of running a whelk stall, let alone a decent-sized company. Their attitude to manufacturing industry bordered on the contemptuous.”
²⁵

None of this had much effect on Thatcher’s determination to push ahead with her change of economic course. Still, Prior was somewhat more successful when it came to the government’s policies on organized labor. Prior did agree to outlaw secondary picketing, but Thatcher wanted to make good on her promises in the election manifesto by cutting welfare benefits for strikers and banning secondary strikes as well. Howe proclaimed that Prior’s bill was just the beginning of a longer process to bring the unions back under control, provoking equally public disagreement from Prior. This marked the beginning of what one observer described as “open war” between the two sides.
²⁶
And that was essentially the way it remained until Thatcher began to purge them from her cabinet two years later. But she had, at least, started down the path that ultimately led to her successful challenge to union power in the miners’ strike of 1984–1985.

The wets fought their corner as best they could. They scored many valid points but never quite won the argument. In their own defense, much later they pointed to the self-destructive behavior of the unions, the ineptitude of the Labour opposition, and a rightward shift in public opinion abetted by Rupert Murdoch’s conservative press as factors that undermined their chances.
²⁷
There is truth to this. There is a sense in which the wets simply found themselves on the wrong side of history. For the present-day student of politics, reading the memoirs of Prior and his like-minded colleagues is to breathe the air of a vanished age—a bit like perusing the memoirs of the aristocrats who fled revolutionary France or the liberal democrats exiled from Russia by the Bolsheviks. For better or worse, the Conservative opponents of Margaret Thatcher palpably belong to a vanished world.