Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (24 page)

In early November, Edward du Cann and all seventeen members of the Executive of the 1922 Committee were re-elected. This was a blow to Heath, who had been trying to engineer their defeat. For the first of many great divides between the leader and the 1922 Executive was that Heath did not want any kind of vote on his position, whereas the 1922 were determined to have a leadership election as soon as possible.

Just how fraught this tension had become was clear at a meeting held in the leader of the opposition’s room on 12 November 1974. The Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, invited six of his senior colleagues to discuss the problem they knew would arise at the next full gathering of the 1922 Committee, on the following Thursday. These colleagues were Willie Whitelaw, Jim Prior, Francis Pym, John Peyton, Lord Hailsham and Lord Carrington.

Hailsham kept a note of the discussion, which survives in his papers. It shows that all present recognised that the 1922 was going to demand either a vote of confidence in the leader or a leadership election. Jim Prior, reflecting Ted Heath’s view, wanted neither of these options. But the others thought this was an untenable position.

‘Willie expressed fear lest Ducann [
sic
] cd win on (2)’,
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wrote Hailsham. His full stop after ‘(2)’ made it clear that they were talking about du Cann winning in a second ballot. This was a forecast also being made on the backbenches.

Although du Cann was clearly coming into the frame as a strong candidate, Carrington, Hailsham and Whitelaw said they could not work with him. Carrington reported on his lunchtime conversation with Harold Macmillan.
Apparently the former Prime Minister was dismissive of du Cann, saying, ‘Why not ask Tiny Rowland straight away?’ This was a reference to du Cann’s controversial business ties with Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland. The two were respectively Chairman and Chief Executive of Lonhro, a buccaneering trading company with extensive interests in Africa.

Hailsham’s note of this 12 November meeting is revealing. For a start, it makes no mention of Margaret Thatcher, who was not being even considered by this group. It shows that the key figures in the Tory hierarchy regarded du Cann as the number one threat to Heath. He was seen as both the likely winner of a leadership election and as the arbiter of whether or not there would be such an election.

As things turned out, du Cann quickly got his way on the election objective. He fought for and won a decision that there would be an early leadership contest. The date for the ballot was set for 4 February 1975, with nominations closing two weeks earlier.

But who, apart from the determinedly immovable Ted would be nominated?

Margaret Thatcher had declared her willingness to stand but was not yet certain to do so. Indeed, she was so uncertain about her prospects that in early December she offered to withdraw from the contest in order to let du Cann have a clear run. She made this offer of withdrawal to Nigel Fisher, the MP for Surbiton, and a member of the 1922 Committee. He was a mild, middle-of-the-road back-bencher who had developed a far from mild antipathy to Heath. This dated from an extraordinary display of rudeness to Fisher at a dinner party in 10 Downing Street when the Prime Minister told him he was ‘plain ignorant’ in front of other guests.
¹⁵
It had been Heath’s stock in trade to hand out gratuitous insults to colleagues with whom he disagreed. It was hardly surprising that the insulted became the activists in the campaign to defenestrate him.

In late November Nigel Fisher began gathering signatures among his colleagues to a letter urging Edward du Cann to stand for the leadership. After two days, twenty-five MPs including Airey Neave had signed it and another thirty indicated their willingness to do so. In the middle of this exercise, Fisher saw Margaret Thatcher. It is unlikely that she had anything over fifty potential supporters at this stage, and in any case she had no campaign manager to count her numbers. When she heard Nigel Fisher’s account of how well his canvassing for du Cann was going she said, ‘Please give Edward my firm assurance that I will withdraw my name if he decides to stand’.
¹⁶

Although it sounds out of character for Margaret Thatcher to back down from any sort of challenge, Edward du Cann was not surprised when Nigel Fisher brought him the news of her firm assurance. ‘I think it was a pure mathematical calculation on her part’, he has recalled. ‘I had the votes. She did not.’
¹⁷

Edward du Cann was a rare bird in the parliamentary aviary. But could he fly all the way to 10 Downing Street? He had some good credentials as a former Treasury minister and Party Chairman. He was a capable speaker and had formidable skills at chairing meetings. But he had enemies too, who engaged in a whispering campaign against him. They included Willie Whitelaw, who let it be known that he would never serve in a du Cann government; Peter Walker, a former business associate who murmured unhelpfully about du Cann’s City of London reputation; and above all Ted Heath, who had sacked him from the Party Chairmanship and excluded him from the 1970–1974 government.

Everyone in the parliamentary party knew that Heath and du Cann were chalk and cheese. One was a rude man; the other was smooth man. Du Cann was master of the art of oleaginous compliments to colleagues. One of the many stories of a ‘du Canning’ was about his greeting a new member, Commander John Kerans RN,
^†
with the words, ‘I understand you served in submarines: how brave!’
¹⁸
Another, surely apocryphal, tale consisted of du Cann being asked the time, and replying, ‘And what time would you like it to be?’
¹⁹

Du Cann’s over-polished courtesy was seen by his colleagues as a stylistic quirk rather than as a serious fault. He might not have been everyone’s choice but his stature was thought to be higher than Margaret Thatcher’s. She was the only declared candidate, but even as an undeclared candidate he was believed to have a far better chance of beating Heath. Nigel Fisher was not the only experienced colleague to take this view. Airey Neave,
^‡
the Member for Abingdon,
had also offered his services to du Cann as his potential campaign manager. Among younger Members, Peter Tapsell was organising support for him. A key factor in this gathering momentum was that the Tory leadership was still regarded by many MPs as a male preserve. Edward du Cann seemed to be the most competent
man
available for the job, which was one reason why the odds on him were shortening.

Throughout the months of November and December, du Cann remained politely ambiguous towards all overtures. He had one good reason for his aloofness. As Chairman of the 1922 Committee he was the umpire of the leadership election. He did not wish to jeopardise this position. He feared he might be accused of having used his role improperly if he switched to becoming a challenger.

These arguments had less force after the machinery for the election on 4 February was agreed and in place. So when Nigel Fisher came down to du Cann’s home in Somerset at the beginning of the year, the hesitant candidate was still open to persuasion. However, there was a new problem. It was the attitude of his wife, Sally du Cann. The couple were in the middle of marital difficulties, which later ended in divorce. The future of their country house was one of the issues in dispute. As Nigel Fisher produced his round-robin letter, signed by supporters, it became clear that the candidate’s most important supporter was refusing to countenance a leadership bid. ‘Sally took Nigel out for a walk and told him she was utterly opposed to the idea,’ recalled Edward du Cann, ‘and once she said that, I accepted it completely. My wife’s objections were the chief reason why I told Nigel to drop it.’
²⁰

Before Nigel Fisher finally dropped it, he arranged a meeting between Margaret Thatcher and Edward du Cann. This clandestine rendezvous had the effect of extracting a new and quite different assurance – this time from him to her. She wanted to hear from his own lips that he definitely would not stand.

The meeting took place at du Cann’s house in Westminster, 14 Lord North Street. Denis Thatcher accompanied his wife. As Edward du Cann recalled it:

It was of course an entirely private meeting between the three of us. I remember it as rather tense at first. Margaret and Denis sat on the edge of the sofa in my drawing room almost as if they were a housekeeper and a butler applying for a job. After I assured
them that I was certainly not going to be a candidate they relaxed. It became quite clear that if my decision was final then she was going to run. No one else knew this. I took away the strong impression that Denis was her only confidant in on the secret and that the two of them were very excited.
²¹

Edward du Cann’s impressions were correct. Margaret Thatcher had taken quite a battering at the hands of Ted Heath’s camp since she had told him of her intention to stand against him. There had been several covert attempts to undermine her. Of these, the most damaging exercise in black propaganda had been Peter Walker’s use of a pre-election interview she gave to a somewhat obscure magazine,
Pre-Retirement Choice.
In this interview she had advised its readers to buy canned food, particularly tins of ‘the expensive proteins: ham, tongue, salmon, mackerel, sardines’, as a hedge against inflation.
²²

This dull story was spun into a scandal by well-orchestrated accusations that Margaret Thatcher was a ‘food hoarder’ – a term with unpleasant associations from the days of rationing in the Second World War. The claims had echoes of the ‘milk snatcher’ uproar with the added ingredient of snobbery. The implication was that the Grantham grocer’s daughter was selfishly stocking up her own larder, ‘acting against the public interest’. This accusation was solemnly made on television by the former Conservative Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne, who had become the Deputy Chairman of Harrods.
²³

In rebuttal, Margaret Thatcher no less solemnly invited a posse of Fleet Street journalists to report on the modest contents of her food cupboard at her Flood Street home. The episode says volumes about the febrile atmosphere of fear and feuding that her leadership challenge had triggered at the highest levels of the Tory Party.

After a week or two of media hysteria, the synthetic indignation evaporated. It is unlikely to have changed a single vote in the election, but it rattled Margaret Thatcher at the time. ‘I was bitterly upset by it’, she recalled. ‘Sometimes I was near to tears. Sometimes I was shaking with anger.’
²⁴

The bruises from the food-hoarder affair meant that the Thatcher family had a downcast Christmas. Denis was having business worries because of boardroom troubles at Burmah Oil. But there were hopeful signs too. A small but gathering band of supporters following in Peter Morrison’s footsteps came to see Mrs Thatcher to assure her of their votes. These early declarers included
Geoffrey Finsberg, Robin Cooke, Bill Shelton, John Gorst, David Crouch, Hugh Rossi and William Rees-Davies. None of them carried great weight in the party, and no one was organising or counting them. But their arrival as the outriders of a support movement was a further sign that a spontaneous Thatcher bandwagon was beginning to roll.

Although the Heath camp had shown itself capable of malevolence over the food-hoarder row, it was proving incapable of picking up fresh support. Among the new intakes of younger MPs elected in February and October 1974, dissatisfaction with the status quo was growing. Heath was looking like goods too damaged to be re-elected. Yet he held pole position partly because his potential challengers had too many weaknesses, and partly because he still controlled the levers of power within the party. This gave him the only team of colleagues who seemed capable of running an effective election campaign. This changed the moment Airey Neave became Margaret Thatcher’s campaign manager. Why he got there and how he carried out the job for her is an intriguing story, which greatly enhanced his House of Commons reputation as a man of mystery.

ENTER AIREY NEAVE

Many of his fellow-Conservative MPs were baffled by Airey Neave. He was variously described as ‘a sound man’, ‘a shadowy figure’ and ‘a good operator’.
²⁵
His soundness derived from his war record, whose highlights were to have been decorated with the MC, DSO and Croix de Guerre. He was the first British officer to have escaped and made a ‘home run’ from Colditz.

The shadowy side of Neave came from the widespread belief that he had worked in the post-war years for MI5, and still maintained close links with the intelligence community. This may have been an impression he himself liked to cultivate. He would have fitted in well as a character from the ‘Circus’ in John Le Carré’s novels. Even Neave’s way of walking and talking had an air of invisibility. He moved along the corridors of the House of Commons like a crab scuttling towards crevices in the walls. He murmured rather than spoke in elliptical half sentences. Extracting a point of view from him was like fishing for a moonbeam.

Was he on the left or right of the party? For or against the EEC? Supporting which contender in the leadership election? The answers were in the evasive.

One fact that did become known about Airey Neave was his intense dislike of Ted Heath. This was hardly a singular distinction, but the story of their falling out (later denied by Heath) formed part of the apocrypha of leader vilification. According to the smoking-room stories (encouraged by discreet nods and winks from the injured party), Neave had suffered a heart attack in 1959 and went to explain to Chief Whip Heath that for medical reasons he could not continue to serve as a junior minister in Macmillan’s government. ‘You’re finished then’, was Heath’s cold response.
²⁶

Whatever words were actually used on that occasion, there was a lasting resentment between the two men. A further cause of enmity was that Neave felt he had been unfairly denied a knighthood. This was a grievance shared by several other non-‘Knights of the Shires’. The impression was given that Airey Neave was energised into hyperactive plotting against Heath for reasons that were more personal than political.