Thatcher (7 page)

The ideological argument against collectivism was first put forward by Keith Joseph. He spoke about the ‘socialist danger' of previous governments, including Conservative ones. These ideas were far more in tune with Margaret Thatcher's instincts, where individual equality and freedom depended not on the actions of the government but in the hard work and enterprise of the individual; where full employment was not a goal but an evil, because it took away the incentive to work hard; where rights to education and housing took away a man's basic duty to care for himself and his own family; and where the taxation and government spending needed to support welfare arrangements was money the individual should have the right to spend themselves. This alternative drew on the economic ideas of Milton Friedman, and became known as ‘monetarism'. Here, inflation is seen as happening because the government allows the supply of money in the economy to grow by providing subsidies for industry and wage rises. A government's sole responsibility is to reduce the amount of money in the economy by reducing spending. This action, coupled with valuing individual enterprise and avoiding any form of collectivism, is the foundation of the philosophy that Keith Joseph was speaking about, Margaret Thatcher implemented and which became known as ‘Thatcherism'.

On that morning in 1975, these ideas were new and unpopular. Keith Joseph had begun to move away from collectivism during his time in Heath's Cabinet, and had been roundly criticised for it. Most of the members of the re-appointed Shadow Cabinet had supported the collectivist policies of the Heath government, and mistrusted both Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Very few of the new appointments were convinced by monetarist ideas. Indeed, very few of the party as a whole were monetarists – links between traditional right-wing Conservative individualism and Friedman's economics were neither tried, tested nor accepted. Throughout the following years, this limited the pool from which new Shadow Cabinet members could be selected.

Margaret Thatcher set out to win hearts and minds. The Tory conference was in October, which gave her seven months to establish a hold, though maybe a tenuous one, on her leadership. These were momentous times in the country. The battle for the European Union was raging – February 1975 saw the country vote to remain in the union in a referendum. In July the government brought forward a pay policy. Margaret Thatcher did not shine in debate against Wilson, and was hampered because by no means all the Tory Party or Shadow Cabinet would accept her speaking her true beliefs on this – that pay policies were fundamentally wrong, and helped cause rather than cure rising inflation. In September, she left for a two-week visit to the USA and Canada, but she was back in time for her first Tory conference as leader.

Her conference speech was a critical test. She did not want to make a speech just about economic policy, she wanted to set the foundations of a real philosophical and practical alternative to collectivist thinking. This was absolutely new ground in a mainstream political forum. Monetarist forerunners like Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell had been cast as mavericks, and the message had been lost in reaction to them personally or to other parts of their speeches.

The process of writing this speech was typical of Margaret Thatcher's style. The first draft came from the Tory party research department. She re-wrote this herself, in her own handwriting. Then it went to Woodrow Wyatt to look at from a journalist's perspective, and had some more material added by the research department. During the week before conference, it passed through many hands, but by the Wednesday it was, according to Margaret Thatcher,
clear to me that none of those working away in my suite was what in the jargon is known as ‘wordsmith'. We had the structure, the ideas and even the foundations for some good jokes, but we needed someone with a feel for the words
themselves
who could make the whole text flow along
.
²

Who could do that effectively? A playwright of course. Ronnie Millar was a successful playwright, with a new play in rehearsal. He endeared himself immediately to Margaret Thatcher – he included some lines from Abraham Lincoln

 

‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.

You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.'
³

 

Lines that she had already found and kept on a scrap of paper in her handbag. For the next 15 years no major speech was complete until it had been ‘Ronnified' – until Ronnie Millar had used his playwright's ability to speak in her voice, and make that voice audible.

This speech was finished at 4.30 in the morning on Friday, and delivered on Saturday. It contained a passage that Margaret Thatcher describes as her ‘credo' and quotes in full in her memoirs:
Let me give you my vision: A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master – these are the British inheritance... We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery – not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped... I believe that, just as each of us has an obligation to make the best of his talents, so governments have an obligation to create the framework within which we can do so... We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stand up and with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough'
.
⁴

It went down very well indeed. The audience loved it. The press reported it joyfully.
Now I
am
Leader
, she told her immediate supporters.
⁵
Millar saw another side of her, though. He found her looking tired and drawn. This speech had been alright, but what about the next one? Was this going to be the best she could do? This was too much for Denis. ‘My God woman, you've just had a bloody great triumph and here you are worrying yourself sick about next year! I'll get the others, shall I? Then you can settle down for another all night session. I mean, obviously there's no time to be lost...'
⁶

This was the year that Denis Thatcher retired from the management of Burmah Oil, the company that had bought the family firm and where he had become director, at great profit to himself. While he did not retire from all his business interests – his active directorship of other companies topped up the family's by now considerable fortune – he was available to support Mrs. Thatcher throughout the trying years in opposition and in government. The children were grown up. The Thatchers spent the week at their flat in Flood Street, and the weekends in the Dower Flat at Scotney Castle at Lambourne that had replaced the large and underused house. Like most working women, Margaret Thatcher still had domestic responsibilities, but as the partner of a rich man, these were light. Denis Thatcher was possibly even more of an individualist Tory than she was herself, with extensive business interests, knowledge and contacts, who had reached a stage where his time could be used flexibly to support his wife. His support was both public and private. If he felt a speech was going badly, he would sit at the back of the hall and clap and shout his agreement. Usually others would follow suit and the tone of the meeting would be changed. He would collect his wife from meetings or conferences that were continuing late, tapping his watch and saying ‘Margaret, time for Bedfordshire'.
⁷
He was the closest advisor Margaret Thatcher ever had, or who she would listen to – constantly beside her in the years to come.

During the next years, she needed his support. She had not only to convince the world and her party that a woman could lead a major Western democracy, she also had to develop and make convincing a whole new ideological perspective on practical policy-making. As she was no match for Harold Wilson in parliamentary debate, she had to look for other ways to make her presence known. She approached the task with typical Thatcher decision and precision. She began with herself. Margaret Roberts had been a successful middle-class girl, earning her place through hard work. Margaret Thatcher must appear to have her place by right and ability. She started with her voice – like many women she had to talk loudly in order to make herself heard in male-dominated political debate, and simply raising the volume had made her sound shrill. This, and the last remnants of her Lincolnshire accent, were taken to a voice coach, and even to the actor Laurence Olivier for advice. The result was a slower, more enunciated and more resonant delivery, reminiscent of the kind of dignified pre-war woman teachers she would remember well. Her hair changed, not only because she had little time and soft, thick hair but also because she had a personal assistant available at all times with heated rollers. Her dress sense began to take account of camera angles and the need to make a strong personal statement. She was fully conscious of the effect of her appearance. Christened the ‘Iron Lady' by the official Soviet news agency Tass, after her attacks on defence cuts she said:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you tonight in my green chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up, my fair hair gently waved... The Iron Lady of the Western World
.
⁸
She used the sobriquet often in the future – the contrast between the image and her toughness was useful.

Care of her image went hand in hand with selling the message to the country, through personal appearances and newspaper articles. She was guided by Gordon Reece, part of her full-time staff and an ex-television producer. He could jolly her along to accept things she would otherwise have rejected. He thought that the message should be put to all the electorate, not just readers of heavyweight papers. He even argued that traditionally Labour newspapers like the
Sun
and the
News of the World
would report new ideas, if only to argue against them. This was revolutionary thinking – no leader of either party had set out to woo the press to get a political philosophy in front of all voters. And this was a personal wooing:
he
[Reece]
also persuaded me that the person they really wanted to see and hear from was me. So, whatever the other demands on my diary, when Gordon said that we must have lunch with such-and-such an editor, that was the priority
.
⁹

It is unlikely that she needed much persuasion. To her, changing political course was a mission bordering on a religion. It was not only a practical answer to Britain's problems, it was also a way to defend people from the harm that socialism did to their lives, their prospects and their characters. To Margaret Thatcher, the trade unions were quickly becoming the best possible example of the damage socialism could do. How the unions would deal with the Conservatives after Edward Heath's defeat at their hands was at the centre of party policy-making over the next years. In 1976, Margaret Thatcher reshuffled her Shadow Cabinet. John Biffen joined – a strong critic of Heath's corporatist approach. Douglas Hurd, one of Heath's closest aides, became party spokesman on Europe. Willie Whitelaw became Shadow Home Secretary, and Ian Gilmour moved to defence. This was still not a purely monetarist and individualist group, but it did allow Keith Joseph, still head of research and policy, Geoffrey Howe, Jim Prior and Margaret Thatcher to approach the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to discuss possible futures. The result horrified her:
These men were managers who had lost all hope of ever really managing their companies again
.
¹⁰
While she could not accept such defeatism, the experience did convince her that she must show herself able to work with trade unions. Accordingly, she told the Young Conservatives in early February that
it would not be difficult to work with responsible trade union leadership. She did not specify what she might see as responsible leadership
.

She was less circumspect in discussion of defence policy. She saw Soviet communism as an ideological and a practical threat. In Kensington in January, she made this crystal-clear:
No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has ever seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a super power in only one sense – the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms
.
¹¹
This open criticism of another power and of government defence policy was breathtakingly undiplomatic, but popular in the country: her personal popularity rating shot up by seven points. Her call for strong defence and her scepticism of government foreign policy was finally too much for Reginald Maudling, the Shadow Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary. He complained that Margaret Thatcher had unilaterally committed the Shadow Cabinet to massive re-armament. He lost his post a few weeks later. But in truth Margaret Thatcher was not taking her personal policies from the Shadow Cabinet. As she saw it, she was still a trailblazer slowly establishing a following rather than a spokesperson for a united front. The real debate in the Shadow Cabinet was leading to the publication of
The Right Approach
in October 1976, the first Conservative publication to begin to lay down the practical alternatives to socialism.