Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (17 page)

Her over-keenness to be away on official engagements had an impact at home. Denis gradually found that he preferred to go sailing on a yacht named
Winnie
with his rugby-club friends at weekends. The alternative was to come back to an empty house or to a wife overwhelmed with ministerial papers from her red boxes.

Their children felt the weight of her workload too. She was often an absent mother. Even when she was with them at home, she could be completely obsessed by her job.

An example of her ability to cut herself off from the family life around her came one Saturday when
Top of the Pops
was blaring from the TV to the delight of Mark and Carol. When a particularly noisy number raised the decibel level, Carol asked her mother, sitting beside her on the sofa: ‘Is the television disturbing you, Mum?’

No reply. Carol repeated the question.

‘Pardon, dear? The TV?’ answered a surprised Margaret. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise it was on.’
⁴⁹

Carol was later to write: ‘When I look back, I have no doubt that my mother’s political ambitions – and the single-mindedness with which she pursued them – eclipsed our family and social life.’
⁵⁰

Denis was another side of the eclipse. He was away a great deal on overseas business trips and at weekend sporting events. The absences of their parents led to a certain dysfunctionality in the upbringing of the twins. But they were not the complaining types. Somehow the family stuck together, although a lot of the glue had to be provided by outsiders, particularly by a hardworking nanny called Abby.

In 1964, Denis nearly became unstuck when he went through a particularly bad patch of business worries. He had a form of nervous breakdown. In his account of this episode:

My doctor said that I was making myself ill working at that pace and if I carried on then I was endangering my health. And then he handed me an ultimatum. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you physically but if you don’t stop working so hard, you are going to be very ill indeed. You’ve simply got to take some time off.’ I got myself on a boat – it shook Margaret – and took myself off to South Africa.’
⁵¹

His sabbatical may well have shaken his wife, but it avoided the breakdown of his health and the break-up of their marriage. How close did he come to these disasters? According to an old friend, unnamed but quoted in Carol Thatcher’s biography of her father:

He was terribly depressed and decided to go to South Africa to sort himself out. I knew he was unhappy because he discussed it with me. He had his mother and Joy, who doted on him, and a wife who was totally absorbed in her political career.
⁵²

Denis enjoyed an idyllic few months off in a country he loved. He saw old friends and relatives, and became absorbed in learning the art of photography. He found the long sea voyages to and from the Cape particularly relaxing. Above all, he did a great deal of thinking about how to resolve the problems that had grown into his mid-life crisis.

The biggest strategic decision he took was to sell his business. The Atlas Preservative Company was profitable but under-capitalised. Denis decided to lift the load off his shareholders and make an approach to Castrol Oil. An agreed takeover was completed within six months. The deal put the equivalent of over a million pounds into his bank account. Denis went on running Atlas, but with the backing of a powerful parent company behind him. He also secured a seat on Castrol’s main board, with a package that included a company car, share options, plus a good salary and pension. From then on, the financial stability of the Thatcher family was assured.

Margaret steered her way through the rough passages that preceded this success with outward calm, although she must have had inner worries.

In the constituency, she was unsettled by the brash claims of her Liberal challenger John Pardoe who predicted victory for himself. This was hot air. The Finchley result in the general election of October 1964 was better than expected. Margaret Thatcher was re-elected with a majority of 8,802.

The national result was also better than expected for the Conservatives. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the most mocked and satirised Prime Minister in history, made a startling comeback in the campaign and was only just pipped at the winning post. The new Labour government, after cliffhanging recounts in a handful of marginals, particularly Meriden, eventually had a majority of just four in the new House of Commons. But a defeat is a defeat, and its consequences sent Margaret Thatcher’s spirits plummeting.

Denis, who missed the whole of the election campaign, remained in South Africa until late December. She could not turn to him when she lost her ministerial post and perks. Nor was he around when she suffered the disappointment of being kept in place as an opposition spokesman at the same level for the same department. She deserved better than being asked to soldier on as shadow junior minister for Pensions and National Insurance. Her career appeared to have hit a roadblock.

Compounding these reverses, and her concerns for Denis, were some unexpected health problems of her own. Margaret may have been depressed. She was certainly at a low ebb emotionally, politically and physically. As 1964 ended, a chest infection turned into a severe bout of pneumonia. She was too ill to rise from her sick bed to attend the lying in state at Westminster Hall of her hero Sir Winston Churchill, who died on 24 January 1965. The combination of
loss of office, an absent husband and pneumonia made this the winter of her discontent. It was the lowest moment in her life – until she was ousted from 10 Downing Street twenty-six years later.

REFLECTION

During her first five years in Parliament, Margaret Thatcher’s career in public life advanced, but her family relationships deteriorated. She did not seem to be unduly bothered by this imbalance. Perhaps it left scars on Mark, Carol and Denis, but at the time they took it as a
fait accompli
. Collectively, they kept their heads down and got on with their somewhat dysfunctional lives.

By the end of 1964, Margaret Thatcher’s career seemed to be stalling. She had proved herself a most capable parliamentary junior secretary at MPNI, far outshining the two senior ministers in her department who followed John Boyd-Carpenter – Niall Macpherson and Richard Wood. Yet she could not climb her way out of the salt mines. She missed two good opportunities for promotion. The first came in October 1963, when Harold Macmillan resigned for health reasons. His unexpected successor was Sir Alec Douglas-Home. She backed him in the ‘customary processes of consultation’, which was the mysterious and undemocratic procedure by which the Tories chose their new leader. Unfortunately, Sir Alec did not return the favour. So Margaret Thatcher remained marooned as a junior pensions minister. The same fate befell her after the Conservatives lost the 1964 election. The opposition front bench was reshuffled, but she stayed where she was. Rumour had it that she was out of favour with the whips’ office. She must have felt frustrated by her lack of upward mobility at a time of opportunity within the party.

It’s easy to be a starter,

But are you a sticker, too?

The lines she had learned in her Grantham childhood had a negative resonance after five years at Westminster. She had made a promising start. But now she was stuck.

7

Front-bench opposition

ENTERING OPPOSITION

The health and husband worries that were making Margaret Thatcher so miserable at the turn of the year soon lifted. She recovered from her pneumonia. Denis recovered his equilibrium. The marriage and the family finances regained strength. Soon she was fighting fit to do battle in a surprisingly wide spread of portfolios as an opposition front-bencher.

There is an old parliamentary saying: ‘Opposition creates opportunities.’ Margaret Thatcher seized hers with gusto mingled with good luck. In the six years while the Conservatives were out of office between 1964 and 1970 she was appointed to be an opposition front-bencher, covering six separate portfolios – pensions, housing, economic policy, power, transport and education. The last three posts brought her into the shadow cabinet, and in 1970 she was appointed Secretary of State for Education in the new government. She had a good run. Her major benefactor, despite a relationship of mutual uneasiness, was Ted Heath.

Alec Douglas-Home never looked likely to stay long as leader of the opposition. He resigned, after some none-too-gentle pushing by Heath supporters, in July 1965. Margaret Thatcher was ‘stunned and upset’ by her leader’s departure, rightly blaming ‘mysterious cabals’ which had clearly not tried to recruit her support.
¹

A new system of election for the leadership of the Conservative Party had been established. The leading contenders were Edward Heath and Reginald Maudling. Margaret Thatcher was initially inclined to support Maudling but Keith Joseph persuaded her to change her mind. She was not close to either candidate. If Maudling had reached out to her he would probably have secured
her vote, for she preferred both his personality and his policies. But Maudling was too complacent to canvass his supporters.

By contrast the Heath campaign, well organised by Peter Walker, had a sophisticated system of approaching every MP through a close colleague, most likely to influence his or her vote. Walker won over Joseph, who in turn won over Thatcher. What seems to have swung her round was less a dissection of Maudling’s weaknesses by Keith Joseph, but more his advocacy of Heath’s strengths. ‘Ted has a passion to get Britain right’ was the line that finally convinced her.
²
She always put passionate professionalism well ahead of laid-back detachment when making her choices.

Ted Heath, even though she had never warmed to him, received her backing. He won the election with 150 votes to Maudling’s 133. Enoch Powell, regarded as a maverick candidate, received fifteen votes.

As the new leader of the opposition, Heath reshuffled his pack of front- benchers, making Margaret Thatcher the subordinate Shadow Minister for Housing and Land under her former boss John Boyd-Carpenter. She had a juicy target to attack in the Labour government’s proposal for a Land Commission, an ill-conceived quango designed to control the price of housing development. She did an effective demolition job on the legislation and its hapless minister Fred Willey in several speeches and articles, but long before the Commission could be established Harold Wilson called an early election in March 1966.

The contest was a lacklustre event for the Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher, like many others, was privately critical of its manifesto,
Action not Words
,
³
which seemed arid and unconvincing. The same adjectives could also be applied to the new leader, Ted Heath. In the polls he trailed badly behind Harold Wilson, who had shown some deft foreign-policy skills in his handling of the Rhodesia crisis, and was far more effective as a television performer.

At the ripe old age of twenty-three, I was fighting my first election in 1966 as the Conservative Parliamentary Candidate for Meriden, one of the most marginal seats in the country. The campaign brought about my first meeting with Margaret Thatcher – fleeting but interesting.

The background was that although the national polls were predicting a Labour landslide, some regional polls suggested that because of a special ‘West Midlands Factor’ the trend might be reversed in the Birmingham area, with the Tories picking up some marginal seats. One of the constituencies forecast to produce
an upset was Meriden, where I was battling to overturn a slender Labour majority of 364.

Once the ‘West Midlands Factor’ became a talking point in the general election, Conservative Central Office sent its biggest guns down to Meriden. In ten days, nine front-bench spokesmen passed though my patch on their whistle-stop tours of the area. These eminent visitors included the three past, present and future Tory leaders – Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher – although no one in those days entertained the remotest thought that the junior opposition spokeswoman for Housing and Land might be a future prime minister.

Central Office gave her a walk-on part in Meriden. I met her at a shopping centre in Coleshill, where her minders said she could spend just fifteen minutes. We used it in accosting pedestrians, handing out leaflets and asking the shadow minister to say a few words into a battery-powered megaphone.

My first impressions of Margaret Thatcher were positive. She went out of her way to be agreeable to a neophyte politician. She mentioned that she too had once been the youngest Conservative Parliamentary Candidate in the country when fighting Dartford in 1950. ‘You learn a lot quickly, don’t you?’ she said. I was pleased to be bracketed together with her in this way.
⁴
Given the frantic pace of her visitation, I thought she would barely know my name. But she was gracious. ‘I’ve seen you listening to debates in the House from the gallery’, she said. I explained that this was part of my job as a part-time private secretary to Selwyn Lloyd. ‘Doing your homework – quite right!’ she commented.
⁵

Unfortunately, the Meriden megaphone went quite wrong and sounded dreadfully screechy. My agent, Gill Rogers, apparently offended by the peremptory way her hand had been shaken, or rather yanked, by our latest visitor offered the unhelpful view, ‘It’s her voice that’s the trouble’. I did not pass on this observation. Margaret Thatcher was rather shrill, but the erratic amplification made things worse. Unfazed by the technical malfunctions, she pressed on with a vigorous denunciation of ‘this socialist land grab, which will take away our basic individual freedom’.

Her words did not make as much impression on the passers-by as her millinery did on the gaggle of Tory women in the greeting party. Her hat was a creation shaped like a tea cosy, topped with a flamboyant blue bow. ‘Very
stylish, but not right for Coleshill’, was the verdict of Alderman Mrs Marjorie Leech MBE, the Chair of the Meriden Women’s Advisory Committee.
⁶

Before either fashion or politics could be discussed further, Margaret Thatcher declared, ‘Time’s up! I have to be on my way to Coventry!’
⁷
So she bustled away from the shopping centre in a high-speed, jerky walk, which could have been a parody of the wound-up clockwork dolls of that era. Apart from some mild amusement caused by the briskly rolling gait of her receding rear view, her visit to Meriden in 1966 was not a memorable one.

Even less memorable, from a Tory point of view, was the final result of the general election. In Meriden, and almost everywhere else, Conservative candidates were crushed by swings to Labour of between 4 and 7 per cent. Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street with a handsome majority of ninety-seven seats. A rare exception to this trend was in Finchley. Thanks to a fall in the Liberal vote, Margaret Thatcher increased her majority to 9,464. She was one of only three Conservatives in the country to achieve an improved result.

There was press speculation after the election that Margaret Thatcher would be promoted into the shadow cabinet. She disbelieved the reports, knowing that her leader had no great liking for her. ‘My acquaintanceship with Ted’, as she archly put it, ‘had never risked developing into friendship.’
⁸
However, he did briefly consider her elevation as ‘the statutory woman’ in his front-line team. Equally briefly, he rejected the idea, which came from Jim Prior, his Parliamentary Private Secretary.

As Prior described the scene in the Leader of the Opposition’s office after putting Mrs Thatcher’s name forward, ‘There was a long silence. “Yes,” Ted Heath said, “Willie [Whitelaw, the Chief Whip] agrees she’s much the most able, but he says once she’s there we’ll never be able to get rid of her. So we both think it’s got to be Mervyn Pike.” ’
⁹

Being passed over for the mild-mannered Mervyn Pike was only a temporary disappointment to Margaret Thatcher. She had two consolation prizes. Denis gave her a beautiful eternity ring.
^*
Iain Macleod, the Shadow Chancellor of the
Exchequer, asked to have her in a key role for his opposition Treasury team. Heath consented, appointing her as the no. 2 Opposition Treasury and Economic Affairs spokeswoman. She shone far more in this understudy position than she would have done if she had been appointed to the shadow cabinet with her own portfolio.

IAIN MACLEOD’S NO. 2

A lucky break combined with prodigious hard work was the formula that propelled Margaret Thatcher’s career forward during her eighteen-month stint as a member of Iain Macleod’s Treasury team in opposition.

The luck came in the form of a new tax proposal from the Labour government, called Selective Employment Tax (SET). Introduced in the 1966 Budget of Chancellor James Callaghan, it was perhaps the silliest, most complicated and least successful tax innovation of any post-war government. The hard work lay in the diligence with which Margaret Thatcher prepared and executed her attack on SET.

SET had been prepared in great haste to raise essential tax revenue without appearing to break Labour’s election pledge that there would be no severe increase in taxation. It was meant to shift resources from service industries into manufacturing by making employers pay SET of 25s (£1.25) a week on all male employees. Employers in manufacturing industries could reclaim the SET six months later and receive a bonus of 7s 6d (£0.37) per employee on top. Service industries got nothing back. There was a whole range of variables for women employees, part timers and different classifications of industry. The scheme was riddled with anomalies. It proved to be a political goldmine for the new opposition spokeswoman for Treasury and Economic Affairs.

Making her debut in this role in the third day of the Budget debate on 5 May 1966, Margaret Thatcher was on devastating form. She turned the SET proposals and Jack Diamond, the hapless Chief Secretary of the Treasury who had to defend them, into a laughing stock. She compared the administrative absurdities of the tax to a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, lampooning the concept of the Chancellor taking 25s a week off manufacturing employers and then repaying them 32s 6d six months later. Why not, she demanded, just pay them the 7s 6d and have done with it.

This is absolute nonsense … I really think the right hon. Gentleman needs a woman at the Treasury … If my chief had come to me and put up a cock-eyed scheme like that, I should have asked him if he was feeling all right.
¹⁰

Jack Diamond must have felt even worse when she crushed one of his interventions. She had been lambasting him for failing to understand the impact on working women who paid for childcare. ‘The hon. Lady has overlooked’, he complained, ‘that this is a tax on employers.’

‘Precisely’, she retorted. ‘I do not think the right hon. Gentleman has been listening. In this case the married woman and the widow is the employer.’
¹¹

Margaret Thatcher sat down to resounding Tory cheers and even some admiration from her opponents.

Her boss, Iain Macleod was fulsome in his congratulations. Over a drink in the smoking room after the debate he confided to Angus Maude, ‘After listening to Margaret’s speech tonight, it no longer seems absurd to think that there might one day be a woman Prime Minister’.
¹²

A few days later, Macleod poured public praise over his No. 2. ‘I have heard many excellent speeches from women Ministers and Members from the front and back benches’, he wrote in the
Daily Mail
, ‘but cannot recall another in a major debate that was described as a triumph.’
¹³

Iain Macleod took over where John Boyd-Carpenter left off as a mentor in parliamentary debating to Margaret Thatcher. She sat beside her new boss on the front bench for hundreds of hours of late-night sittings. They were a fine partnership. She had the stamina and the application to detail. Macleod was weak in both. But he had a master’s touch at high scorn and trumpet-blasting invective when it came to attacking his opponents. It became clear later in the year that his pupil had absorbed several of the same oratorical techniques of the Shadow Chancellor.

In October, Margaret Thatcher wound up a debate on taxation at the Tory Conference in Blackpool. For the second time in six months, she achieved a triumphant
tour de force
with her fiery denunciations of SET.

Having been a parliamentary candidate in the March 1966 general election, I was a West Midlands delegate sitting in the conference hall and retained three memories of her speech, which won a standing ovation – a rarity in those days.

My first memory was that she teetered on the brink of over-the-top crowd pleasing. Some winced, though the ultra-faithful applauded when she declared that SET was ‘a step not merely towards Socialism but towards Communism’.
¹⁴
This synthetic start was replaced by real substance.

My second memory was of listening with close and increasingly admiring concentration to her detailed dissection of the technical flaws and anomalies of SET. She concluded with a firework display of rocket attacks on Callaghan’s record of tax increases, culminating in the final salvo, ‘This chap Callaghan must go!’
¹⁵

The words look mundane, but in the fevered atmosphere of the hall they brought the cheering delegates to their feet. Seen in retrospect, this speech was one of the early turning points in her career, for it established her as a new and rising star with the party faithful.