Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (14 page)

ELECTED

By the time the general election was called in September 1959, the Finchley Conservative Association was in much better and more united shape than it
was at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s selection fourteen months earlier. She campaigned as a loyal mainstream Conservative, supporting the government’s record over Suez, rent decontrol and accelerated independence for African colonies. ‘Life is better with the Conservatives, don’t let Labour ruin it’, was the slogan of the Tory manifesto and she backed it with fervour. Although she claimed in her memoirs to have felt ‘uneasy’
³⁶
over Harold Macmillan’s nonchalance about what he called ‘the little local difficulty’ of a £50 million increase in public expenditure, which caused his entire Treasury team of ministers to resign in January 1958, there is no evidence that such doubts were ever expressed during Margaret Thatcher’s campaign in Finchley. Her election address gave the clear impression that she was a wholehearted supporter of Macmillan’s expansionism.

She had an easy ride in her constituency. The tide was flowing the Tory way in 1959, and in Finchley the anti-Conservative vote was evenly divided between the Liberals and Labour, allowing neither party to mount a serious challenge.

The Labour candidate was Eric Deakins, who later became a junior minister in James Callaghan’s government. He found Margaret Thatcher a punctiliously correct opponent, full of strongly expressed convictions. However, at a personal level he assessed her as ‘one of the few people I’ve ever met in life who seemed to lack a single ounce of human warmth’.
³⁷

During the campaign, there were four well-attended public meetings at which all three candidates shared the platform. Eric Deakins remembers one of them for the lesson Margaret Thatcher taught him about political preparation. The Bishop of London chaired the meeting. An emotive and topical issue was the atrocities that had been committed at Hola camp in the British colony of Kenya. The Liberal and Labour candidates were critical of the colonial authorities.

In response, Margaret Thatcher produced from her handbag a copy of the committee of inquiry’s report. ‘My Lord Bishop, I seem to be the only one of the candidates who has read this document from cover to cover’,
³⁸
she began. Then she took the audience through carefully underlined passages from the two-inch thick report, reading aloud detailed extracts, which effectively neutralised her opponents’ broad-brush attacks. ‘It was game, set and match to Mrs Thatcher that night’, recalled Deakins.
³⁹

As a well-briefed debater, Margaret Thatcher was formidable. But she could also be overbearing. Eric Deakins remembers an incident at one of the meetings when a Tory lady in the front row made so many repetitive interjections that he
finally snapped at her: ‘Why don’t you shut up?’ This brought out the schoolmarm in the Conservative candidate. ‘Mr Deakins, that’s not the way to behave at a public meeting!’
⁴⁰
was how Margaret Thatcher loudly rebuked him. She seemed to have forgotten that it was the chair’s job to keep the candidates in order.

There were some frictions in the Conservative camp during the election. It was recorded in a Central Office report that the hard core of those who originally opposed Margaret Thatcher’s adoption maintained their hostile stance. It was also noted that the Conservative constituency agent had been ‘treated pretty roughly’ by the candidate. Whatever she said or did to him, the agent was magnanimous, for the report ended by saying that he had ‘nothing but praise for her campaign’.
⁴¹

The praise was justified by the figures declared at the Finchley count at 12.30 a.m. on Friday 9 October 1959. They were better than expected.
^**

This was an excellent result. She had increased the Finchley majority by almost 3,500 votes, riding high on the Tory tide which had re-elected Harold Macmillan’s government with an overall majority of 100 seats.

Margaret Thatcher, at the age of thirty-four, had arrived at Westminster as one of the youngest members of the new House of Commons.

REFLECTION

Margaret Thatcher was elected to her safe seat some two weeks before her thirty-fifth birthday. So she had followed the traditional advice, ‘Get into Parliament young’.
^††
This was no small achievement, especially for a woman.

After a successful debut as a candidate in Dartford, her path to Westminster did not run smoothly. Constituency selections of candidates are often a lottery, but why did she lose five of them in succession? It was surely not on grounds of ability, since the men who defeated her – Donald Sumner, John Baker White, Philip Goodhart, James Allason and John Wells (becoming respectively the MPs for Orpington, Canterbury, Beckenham, Hemel Hempstead and Maidstone)
– were all poor speakers who achieved little of distinction in their parliamentary careers.

The built-in bias against women candidates was one explanation for this string of defeats. Another less obvious cause was that Margaret Thatcher failed to understand that a winning speech at a constituency selection contest could depend more on likeability than knowledgeability. The key factor is establishing a personal chemistry between the candidate and the selectors. A cricketing phrase more meaningful to Denis than to Margaret, ‘Knowing the pitch of the wicket’, is one way of summarising the art of wooing a local association.

It is easy to see why the young Margaret Thatcher might have lost support in a selection process by trying to hit every ball for six. She appeared more forthright than friendly, combative rather than charming, and better at generating political heat than human warmth. Even so, it is still hard to understand why such a first-rate woman should have been beaten by a series of second-division men.

Whatever the temporary disappointments, she achieved her goal. Yet there was a price to be paid for it, which she denied at the time: her family life suffered.

In several conversations with friends during her retirement years, Margaret Thatcher lamented that she had not devoted more of her time and energy to the upbringing of Mark and Carol. In 1995 she even went so far as to say to Sir Michael Spicer: ‘If I had my time again, I wouldn’t go into politics because of what it does to your family.’
⁴²
These misgivings, however sincerely expressed in her eighties, do not represent the true feelings she had in her thirties, forties and fifties. Her retrospective regrets should not be taken too seriously.

Margaret Thatcher was always driven by ambition. She put her career first, and her role as a wife and mother second. She put country before family: that was the way she was made. The public should not complain about it, particularly since Denis, Mark and Carol have never openly done so.

Although her shortcomings as a matriarchal figure were real and sometimes painful, she was far too intelligent not to have chosen her priorities with some deliberation. She gave the primacy of purpose to her life in politics. Her nearest and dearest may have suffered, but in 1959 Finchley gained an outstanding Member of Parliament, and in 1979 Britain began being governed by an extraordinary prime minister. From the outset, she knew the cost of a career in public life.

6

First years in Parliament 1959–1964

THE LUCKY LEGISLATOR

Margaret Thatcher’s early days as a Member of Parliament were shaped by a remarkable stroke of good luck. Within two weeks of arriving at Westminster she came second in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills. This was the equivalent of winning (at odds of approximately 300–1) the second prize in the annual House of Commons lottery that decides which back-benchers will be allocated time on the floor of the House to propose the bill of their choice with good prospects of it becoming law. She seized her chance with skill and bravado, although she had to swallow her pride and make several U-turns during the bill’s progress.

At the time of winning this ballot, Margaret Thatcher was completely unknown to most of her colleagues. She had not opened her mouth in the chamber. She was having more than her fair share of beginner’s difficulties in mastering the arcane procedures, obscure practices and labyrinthine geography of the House of Commons. This task, which has been compared to learning the ropes at a traditional boys’ school, was problematic for a new arrival who was manifestly not ‘one of the boys’.

The House of Commons in 1959 was a male-dominated and male chauvinistic place. Only twenty-five of its 630 MPs were women, twelve of them Conservatives. They tended to be marginalised, often rather badly treated in terms of facilities and fellowship. Most of them had to do their constituency work in the communal ‘Lady Members’ Room’. That was where Margaret Thatcher sorted out her daily post, dictating replies to her secretary, Paddi Victor Smith. If the Lady Members’ Room was crowded, as it often was, the alternative was to perch on a bench in the corridors.

The House of Commons in the 1950s took a cheeseparing attitude towards newly-elected back-benchers. They were allocated a locker, a space for their secretaries in the typing room, a filing cabinet – and that was it. Parliamentary expenses were minimal. The only perks were free parking and free calls, which had to be made from a semi-public line of telephone booths.

Margaret Thatcher made no complaint about these inadequate facilities. But she must have found the prevailing culture of condescension towards women MPs difficult to endure. Her parliamentary contemporary Pat Hornsby Smith once yelled at a male colleague for telling her that she should not ‘worry her pretty little head’ about the technical wording of a motion on the order paper.
¹
Although no comparable insult is remembered in the early career of Margaret Thatcher, as the youngest new woman back-bencher it is unlikely that she would never have encountered occasional slights, sexist remarks and suppressed misogyny.

In the era of her arrival at Westminster, there was an atmosphere of snobbish male supremacy on the Tory benches, heightened by the commonly shared experiences of war and National Service. This quasi-regimental attitude had many unattractive features such as heavy drinking in the smoking room, a Tory-dominated bar which the younger and older Margaret Thatcher generally avoided. But for all these enclaves and examples of bad behaviour, there was one parliamentary arena where equality ruled. This was the chamber of the House of Commons, in which every new member is judged by the quality of their speeches.

A maiden speech is the first hurdle of a parliamentary career, and long- established conventions apply to it. By tradition, a maiden should be non- controversial, contain a brief description of the new member’s constituency (often boring, but occasionally amusing) and a complimentary reference to the previous MP. It may not be interrupted, although the maiden speaker’s
quid pro quo
for this calm passage is to ensure that the content is uncontroversial.

Margaret Thatcher broke all these rules in her first speech. Her reason for ignoring the conventions was that she decided to make her parliamentary debut a combination of delivering a maiden speech and moving the Private Member’s Bill she had won in the ballot. This was a bold and unprecedented start to her career.

Before tabling her bill she had to engage in a week of frantic activity to choose its subject, negotiate its passage with government whips, ministers and civil
servants, and to prepare its detailed clauses with the help of a parliamentary draftsman. All this was new territory. How she handled it revealed several interesting dimensions of her personality and character.

Any winner or runner-up in the Private Members’ ballot is immediately inundated with suggestions. Margaret Thatcher decided to follow her instincts and to introduce a bill to weaken the power of the closed shop. She had developed an interest in this subject as a result of following the case of
Rookes
v.
Barnard
, which centred on the dismissal of an airline employee for refusing to join a trade union. She had also been influenced by an Inns of Court Conservative Society pamphlet on the same subject,
A Giant’s Strength
, which had been largely written by an unknown young barrister, Geoffrey Howe.
²

Restricting the power of the trade unions was becoming a popular cause with some sections of the Tory Party. But it was too controversial a step for the ‘middle way’ approach of Harold Macmillan’s government. Margaret Thatcher was firmly told by the whips’ office that a Private Member’s Bill on the closed shop would not get government backing. This would have killed her chances of getting the bill through the House, so she made her first U-turn and abandoned it.

Her next proposal was a bill to tidy up certain aspects of the law of contempt of court, which had caused clashes between the press and the government’s law officers over the reporting of a prominent murder case. Margaret Thatcher was on the side of making life easier for the press, but the law officers were not on the side of her bill. The Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller,
^*
whose nickname in the House was ‘Bullying Manner’, took a condescending approach to the proposals of the Member for Finchley. His line was that changing the contempt of court law was ‘too complicated a task for a back-bench member who was not even a Silk’.
^†

The task of breaking this bad news to Margaret Thatcher fell to the Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne. They had a vigorous argument at which neither of
them minced words.
³
She failed to persuade the Chief Whip, so a second U-turn was necessary.

Her third attempt at producing a bill did find favour with the government. Showing a good eye for catching the attention of the press gallery, she took up a cause that was being championed by the Guild of Newspaper Editors. This was the right of admission for journalists and other members of the public to attend meetings and committee meetings of the local councils.

It was a topical subject because a year earlier a number of Labour-controlled councils in big cities denied normal reporting facilities to journalists working for a chain of provincial newspapers involved in an industrial dispute with the printing unions. This apparent abuse of union power caused so much national concern that the Conservative Party in its 1959 election manifesto had promised ‘to make quite sure that the Press have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities’.
⁴

However, when Margaret Thatcher made her next visit to the whips’ office, she was disappointed to discover that the manifesto promise was not quite what it seemed to be. She was told that the government’s remedy for the problem was a code of practice rather than an Act of Parliament. Describing this attitude as ‘extremely feeble’,
⁵
she went to see the cabinet minister responsible for local government, Henry Brooke.

He was sympathetic but ambivalent. Mindful of the manifesto commitment, he offered her what in effect was half a loaf. To slice her down to size, he delegated the reduction in her expectations to his officials. These negotiations almost came to a stalemate because of what Mrs Thatcher later described as ‘peppery exchanges’
⁶
with civil servants.

Most of the pepper seems to have been provided not by the Member for Finchley but by another formidable lady, Dame Evelyn Sharp,
^‡
the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. The Dame, as she was labelled in the diaries of Richard Crossman,
^#
wanted
a minimalist bill that imposed only limited restrictions on councils’ rights to exclude reporters from some local authority meetings. Margaret Thatcher proposed a far wider and tougher measure. There was a headlong collision of views, apparent even in the officialese of the civil service minutes of their meetings.

‘I warned her flatly’, recorded Dame Evelyn Sharp, ‘that if she did go ahead with her Bill in its present form, I thought the Government would be bound to advise the House to vote against it’.
⁷

The Dame also reported an ‘extremely unsatisfactory discussion’ at which Mrs Thatcher seemed to be reneging ‘on the clear understanding which I thought I had reached with her, and on the undertaking which she gave to the Minister in response to his letter’.
⁸

In the end there was another U-turn. Faced with the reality that only with the department’s full support would her bill have a chance of reaching the statute book, Margaret Thatcher backed down and accepted the minimalist version. It was progress, but watered down progress.

Margaret Thatcher introduced the second reading of her diluted Public Bodies (Admission of the Press to Meetings) Bill on Friday 5 February 1960. In that era, Fridays were known as ‘dead days’ in the House of Commons, often attracting only single-figure attendances in the chamber for non-contentious business such as Adjournment Debates or Private Members’ Motions. The danger of such doldrums was that some ill-wisher of the subject under discussion might call for ‘a count’. If the number of MPs fell below the required quorum of forty, the motion was automatically postponed – a delay usually disastrous to a bill’s chances of becoming law.

To avoid such a fate for her bill, Margaret Thatcher sent handwritten letters to 250 Conservative back-benchers, requesting their presence and support. It was quite a favour to ask, for most MPs were committed to constituency engagements on a Friday. But her assiduous correspondence achieved a good turnout of over a hundred Tory MPs.

Margaret Thatcher was understandably nervous, but she did not look or sound it as she rose to introduce her bill. Wearing a coat dress of bronze and black brocade buttoned down the front with a black velvet collar, she opened with a brisk self-dispensation from the conventional maiden speech tributes to her constituency and her predecessor.

The Official Report of Parliamentary Debates in
Hansard
can be a cold leveller and deceiver. Read half a century after the event, Margaret Thatcher’s maiden speech seems a rather clinical if competent performance, with little sparkle. But at the time it was seen as a brilliant debut that immediately established her as a parliamentarian to watch. What dazzled her colleagues in the House and the reporters in the press gallery was that she spoke without referring to notes. She was master of her subject, with a delivery that was both impassioned and
ex tempore
. A combination of these abilities is a sure-fire winner when it comes to building a parliamentary reputation, as was apparent on the day. Even allowing for the convention that compliments to a maiden speaker are expected to be gracious, the tributes to Mrs Thatcher from all parts of the House were exceptionally fulsome.

From the Labour benches Barbara Castle
^**
recognised ‘her outstanding maiden speech’. The future Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart praised ‘a most striking, impressive and skilful performance’.

Charles Pannell, who had admired Margaret Roberts from his then position as Labour leader of Erith Council when she was adopted to fight Dartford in 1949, offered flowery congratulations on ‘rather a beautiful maiden speech’, describing it as ‘almost a model to the occupants of the Government Front Bench on how to deliver a speech in favour of a Bill, instead of having a dreary essay read to us in a turgid monotone’.

From the government front bench, the minister winding up the second reading debate, Henry Brooke, was almost equally flowery in his congratulations:

No words of mine can be too high praise for the brilliance with which my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley opened the debate. She spoke with charm, as we all expected, she spoke with a fluency which most of us would envy, and she achieved the rare feat of making a Parliamentary reputation on a Friday.
⁹

It might have been expected after these felicitous tributes that the bill would get an easy passage. Not so. Henry Brooke was only at the last minute persuaded (by the size of the 152 to thirty-nine majority at the second reading vote) to
allow the long title to be extended to include members of the public as well as journalists. This could only be done on a government motion, and was a vital step in order to avoid a procedural quagmire at the committee stage.

Steering a bill through a standing committee is a challenge to a well-briefed minister. For an inexperienced back-bencher it is a mountain to climb. It was hardly surprising that Margaret Thatcher lost her footing several times during its passage. Away from the committee debates, she managed to give offence to the departmental officials whose help she most needed – the parliamentary draftsmen. One of them advised against arranging a meeting between the appropriate clerks of the House of Commons and Mrs Thatcher, and wrote a minute warning about her abrasiveness: ‘If she treats them as she has treated us, she may well put their backs up.’
¹⁰

She also lost supporters within the standing committee by being aggressive rather than conciliatory in debate. She annoyed some Tory MPs so much that they voted against a crucial clause to give public access to all local authority committees, which exercised delegated functions. After this defeat she had to settle for access to be granted only to committees of the full council. A leader in
The Times
reported that this reduced the bill to a ‘half measure’.
¹¹