Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (20 page)

One of her senior civil servants, Toby Weaver, recalled that the firestorm of anger ‘shook her to the core’ and ‘temporarily unhorsed her’.
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Norman St John-Stevas also noticed that she was ‘terribly upset, but at the same time terribly careful not to let her distress show. In those days she was not the Iron Lady but the Lady in the Iron Mask’.
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The most hurtful aspect of the furore was that it was directed against her feminine role as a wife and mother. To be caricatured as a wicked witch who snatched milk bottles from the lips of young, thirsty innocents was absurd. But by failing to spot the potential of the issue for personal denigration she had given her opponents a target.

Flailing out in the aftermath of the parliamentary rumpus she criticised her officials for not warning her of the backlash. This part of her blame-game was unfair. She was the decider of political risks. In any case, she was offered at least one piece of advice on the issue, which she chose to ignore. In an early meeting at the DES, her civil servants expressed concern that some children would not drink milk at all if they did not get it at school. ‘Gentlemen, none of you is a mother’, she replied. ‘No mother ever neglects her child.’
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But she did neglect the potential for negative campaigning that the school-milk issue offered her adversaries.

Some months later, when the ‘milk snatcher’ vilification seemed to be running out of steam, Margaret Thatcher needlessly opened up a second front of personal controversy. She had developed strong views about the tendency of student
unions to spend their funds on left-wing political causes. It was a problem but a small one. She proposed to curb the alleged excesses of political spending by creating a registrar of student unions with supervisory powers. When she presented her plan to the cabinet committee for Home and Social Affairs, it was rejected. Her colleagues felt that legislation to correct these comparatively minor abuses at a time when student militancy was at its zenith might be a hostage to fortune.

Against the advice of her officials, Margaret Thatcher came back to the cabinet committee with a second attempt at dealing with the problem. Instead of legislation, she proposed a new set of rules that would make student-union subscriptions voluntary. She published a confusing consultation document on the issue, which put her on a collision course with the National Union of Students (NUS). Its President in 1971 was Jack Straw.
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The NUS counter-argument was that the facilities it provided for its members such as travel concessions depended on compulsory subscriptions.

This difference of opinion erupted into widespread student demonstrations. Effigies of Margaret Thatcher were burned on campuses around the country. During visits to universities (Liverpool, Leeds and the London School of Economics) and polytechnics she was mobbed by noisy students and required police protection. The worst of these upheavals came when over 2,000 screaming NUS members tried to prevent her from presenting the designation document of the South Bank Polytechnic at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

These troubles caused her to worry about her teenage daughter Carol, who had just started to read Law at University College London. Carol was given a hard time, writing later: ‘To my student friends and contemporaries, the Minister of Education was public enemy number one, and I was her daughter … It meant that I never brought student friends home to the townhouse we’d bought in Flood Street Chelsea.’
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Family pressures were always the stresses Margaret Thatcher found hardest to bear. But although she was rattled by the degree of public hostility she faced, leaving the battlefield was never an option for her.

According to one of her earliest biographers, George Gardiner, there was a moment when on top of the student demonstrations and the ‘milk snatcher’ chants, a group of Tory MPs from the 1970 intake started a whispering campaign against her with the message, ‘Shift Thatcher’. Denis reacted to these mutterings by asking his wife, ‘To hell with all this, why not pack it up?’

‘Not likely’ came the immediate retort.
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Although this story may be apocryphal, it is clear that Margaret Thatcher was sufficiently upset by the turbulence to make her first U-turn as a cabinet minister. She dropped her proposals for changes in student-union funding. This retreat was forced on her when university vice-chancellors, including her old friend Edward Boyle, as Vice-Chancellor of Leeds, backed the case put forward by Jack Straw and the NUS.

Margaret Thatcher had no one but herself to blame for this fiasco. She had needlessly stirred up a hornet’s nest of student unrest on a minor issue. Taken in conjunction with the other avoidable rows she had been responsible for over school milk and her circular on comprehensives, she was beginning to look like a minister who was causing more trouble than she was worth.

Ted Heath heard these complaints, many of them from Tory MPs, and briefly considered sacking his accident-prone Secretary of State for Education. In his later years of acrid hostility towards her, he grumbled: ‘She was no good. Should have got rid of her when she was causing us all that trouble.’
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This was the revisionism of personal resentment. At the time, Prime Minister Heath had more protective instincts. He disliked being told what to do by back-benchers and newspapers. He thought the ‘milk snatcher’ label unfair. So he battened down the hatches and helped Margaret Thatcher steer her way out of the storms.

SAVED BY THE PRIME MINISTER

On 12 January 1972 Margaret Thatcher and her senior officials at DES were invited to Chequers to discuss education strategy with the Prime Minister. It was a turning point in her career. She went to the meeting as a beleaguered minister. She returned from it as a cabinet colleague who knew she had the full confidence of her leader.

This transformation took place because Ted Heath decided she needed his support. She might have made herself unpopular but she was an asset to his
government. Although he often found her annoying, he also saw qualities in her that appealed to his managerial instincts. Unlike several other members of his cabinet, she was a team player; she did not leak stories to journalists; and she loyally accepted her collective responsibility for bearing a share of the Treasury’s expenditure cuts. This was the reason she had come under such hard pounding. As Heath knew, it was Treasury policy not Thatcher policy that had caused most of the hysteria against her.

There may have been other factors working for her survival. The government needed a woman in the cabinet and there was no credible alternative. More importantly, the Prime Minister liked the future educational plans she rolled out before him at Chequers. He was willing to support her vision for expanding nursery education, teacher recruitment and a larger number of higher education places. He also appreciated the thoroughness of her briefing on the school-milk, student-union and grammar-school controversies. With better political skill than she had displayed in these areas, Heath spotted some new presentational angles, which could be used in the House of Commons to defend the government’s record on education.

On 3 February, three weeks after the Chequers briefing, Ted Heath faced a Prime Minister’s Questions that were focused mainly on educational issues. Like a batsman on top form, he hit ball after ball to the boundary. It was a splendid innings by the Prime Minister but the real match winner was Margaret Thatcher.

The opposition bowling was opened by Gerald Kaufman. He wanted Margaret Thatcher dismissed for her ‘petty-minded and vindictive interference with Manchester Corporation’, because she would not provide free hot drinks (instead of milk) to children who received school dinners. Harold Wilson followed up by asking that if the Secretary of State for Education could introduce a bill to stop free milk, ‘one of the filthiest Bills we have ever had in this House’, she could easily introduce legislation to allow LEAs to provide free hot drinks. Having been warned of a concerted Labour attack on the most unpopular member of his cabinet, Heath was ready to defend her. He dismissed the opposition leader’s call for a new law on free school drinks, reminding him that Labour had cut free milk in all secondary schools without any exemptions. When Ted Short, the former Education Secretary, condemned Margaret Thatcher for her ‘constant, monotonous decisions … to reject local authority reorganisation schemes’ for comprehensivisation, the Prime Minister retorted that it was
her statutory duty to judge every scheme on its merits, and added, ‘At least she has not tried to bully local authorities to accept one scheme’.
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After this knockabout, some slow bowlers came on from the Tory benches. Invited by a well-primed Conservative to congratulate Mrs Thatcher on her achievements, Heath scored a flurry of runs on her behalf. He thanked her for increasing the primary-school building programme, expanding the polytechnics, raising the school-leaving age, saving the grammar schools of Surrey and recruiting more teachers. As he left the chamber to cheers from his own back-benchers, it was clear that Ted Heath had changed the game for Margaret Thatcher.

The government’s most derided minister had escaped the brickbats and been festooned with bouquets. From the Labour front bench to the press gallery to the Tory MPs who had been encouraging the ‘sack Thatcher’ rumours, it was apparent that there was no longer any mileage in attacking an Education Secretary so strongly supported by the Prime Minister.

The tide was turning for her in other ways too. She won an unexpected ovation at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers in April 1972. Although the hard-left section of her audience walked out before she started, the moderate majority of teachers who had the courtesy to stay and listen began to like her for raising the school-leaving age, expanding their profession and for championing the cause of smaller comprehensive schools.

One newspaper reported her NUT speech as ‘The Making of Margaret Thatcher’.
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The newspaper that had created the headline in January, ‘The Lady Nobody Loves’, was by May writing about ‘the Mellowing of Margaret’.
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In June,
The Times
published a profile praising her ‘remarkable political rebirth’.
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These positive articles may have owed something to the arrival at the DES of a new press secretary, Terry Perks. He got on well with his Secretary of State, who seven years later brought him into 10 Downing Street as deputy to her Press Secretary, Bernard Ingham.

The high peak of favourable media coverage was reached in December 1972 when she published a White Paper,
Education: A Framework for Expansion
. This confirmed Margaret Thatcher’s journey on the high spending path she had agreed with Ted Heath at Chequers. School building, teacher staff levels and higher education institutions were all increased. The most important announcement was a major expansion of nursery education, which she said would be provided
for 90 per cent of four-year-olds and 50 per cent of three-year-olds. It was a first attempt at early interventionism, which is now being championed by Iain Duncan Smith in David Cameron’s cabinet.

The White Paper received what Margaret Thatcher later called ‘a disconcertingly rapturous reception’.
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Improbable enthusiasts for her handiwork included the Labour back-bencher Renee Short – hitherto an implacable adversary – and the
Guardian,
which praised her ‘progressive programme’ and added the backhanded compliment, ‘Mrs Thatcher is more than half way towards a respectably socialist education policy’.
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Margaret Thatcher’s political fame in the 1970s could be compared to a tennis match in which the play becomes exciting because the ball is being struck so hard on both sides of the net. She achieved her stardom by going from wicked witch to heroine of the education world in less than eighteen months. She did not deserve either status. When she was riding high, her success was more apparent than real. Many of the expansionary plans she announced, particularly in nursery education, were never delivered due to a sudden deterioration in the public finances. But the combination of negative and positive media coverage made her one of the most recognisable politicians in Britain. In a monochrome Tory cabinet she stood out as one of its most colourful characters. In terms of public awareness she ranked fourth in the government behind Heath, Maudling and Douglas-Home. But few, if any, saw her as a dark horse moving up on the rails in a future leadership race.

WIDER THAN EDUCATION

One outsider who took an interest in Margaret Thatcher’s future potential was Dr Henry Kissinger. He did this vicariously through his wife, Nancy. She had been involved in an Anglo-American educational project that brought her into contact with Britain’s Education Minister. ‘Nancy was so impressed by her meetings with Margaret Thatcher that she kept telling me I needed to see her’,
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recalled Kissinger. He tried to arrange this on two of his visits to the United Kingdom as National Security Advisor to President Nixon. But the Cabinet Office in London was unhelpful and did not facilitate the appointment. Their encounter was delayed until 18 February 1975, when Kissinger became the first international statesman to meet Britain’s new opposition Leader.

The US Embassy, whose officials had continued to monitor Margaret Thatcher’s progress since sponsoring her first tour of America in 1969, kept in touch with her. Over lunch with First Secretary Dirk Gleysteen at the Connaught Hotel on 25 June 1973, she made a number of indiscreet comments on her ministerial colleagues. ‘Michael Heseltine’, she said, ‘had everything it took in politics except brains.’ ‘Peter Walker’, she observed, ‘doesn’t have the kind of first-class mind needed at the top.’ She thought Geoffrey Howe ‘too willing to compromise’, and wondered if he would ‘get over this weakness’.
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Her own weakness at this time was that she was a marginalised member of the cabinet, exercising little or no influence on national issues outside her own education brief.