Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (29 page)

12

Three frustrating years

PARTY CONFERENCES AND FOREIGN VISITS

In the world beyond the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher performed better as the new Leader of the Opposition. She was consistently effective with the faithful at constituency rallies and regional gatherings. Although this part of politics is the equivalent of preaching to the choir, she did it well. Indeed, the earliest sign that she might have star quality as a national leader came at her first party conference. In October 1975 at the Blackpool Winter Gardens, over four thousand delegates (the best crowd since 1963) came to inspect the leader they had not expected to be chosen. Even by the sceptical standards of the media commentators she was a hit.

She had vision and humour in her text. Its preparation was an agony but its reception was a triumph. The opening was endearingly humble as she recalled coming to her first conference in 1946 when Winston Churchill was leader. She moved briskly through tributes to all her predecessors including Ted Heath, ‘Who successfully led the party to victory in 1970 and brilliantly led the nation into Europe in 1973’.
¹
This was generous, considering Heath had refused to attend a reconciliation meeting organised by Willie Whitelaw two nights earlier in the Imperial Hotel. Her unreciprocated graciousness brought the audience to its feet, many expecting at least a handshake from the ex-leader sitting a few feet away from her on the platform. But Heath remained motionless and expressionless as a sphinx. The coldness of his snub increased the warmth for her as she developed her themes of economics and personal freedom.

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. They are the essence of a free economy. And on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.

Her knockabout moments went down well too with an amusing analogy likening the Labour Party to a pub which was running out of mild beer: ‘If someone doesn’t do something soon, all that’s left will be bitter. And all that’s bitter will be Left.’

After emphasising the importance of wealth creation in order to spend money on the sick and handicapped, and the primacy of law and order, she boldly upheld the right to be unequal in economic and personal development. Her peroration was the philosophy of her Grantham upbringing writ large:

I have tried to tell you something of my personal vision, my belief in the standards on which this nation was greatly built, on which it greatly thrived, and from which in recent years it has greatly fallen away. We are coming, I think, to yet another turning point in our long history. We can go on as we have been going and continue down. Or we can stop – and with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough!’
²

In those days a Tory conference always gave a rapturous ovation to the closing speech from the leader, but this acclaim was explosive in its enthusiasm. The reason for such excitement was partly down to her ability to express her own and the party’s frustrations over a failed socialist economy in which inflation had just reached the rate of 26.9 per cent. More importantly, Margaret Thatcher tapped into deep wells of instinctive Tory beliefs with her championship of self-reliance, a smaller state, and the economic right to be better rewarded for hard work and effort.

I recall the high emotions her speech produced in one of my constituency delegates from Thanet East. He was David Pettit, a greengrocer from Ramsgate. As we walked away from the Winter Gardens he hopped from one leg to the other and twisted himself around in dance-steps of delight, saying over and over again: ‘She spoke for me! She spoke for the man in the street! She spoke for my customers!’ Alfred Roberts would have been too restrained to do the dance, but he would surely have enthused over the speech for the same reasons as the greengrocer from Ramsgate. Middle England had found a voice. As the
Daily Mail
commented in its leader the following day: ‘If this is “lurching to the Right”, as her critics claim, 90 per cent of the population lurched that way long ago.’
³

The speech had been crafted by several wordsmiths but she was the only one who counted since she completely dominated the agonising process of its creation. The most exotic recruit to her speech-writing team was the playwright Ronald Millar.
^*
He was summoned to Blackpool at short notice by Gordon Reece with the brief to ‘make the whole text flow along’, as Margaret Thatcher put it.
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This was no mean task since she herself was constantly altering its flow.

In his amusing autobiography
A View from the Wings
, Millar recaptured the scene: a combination of the neurotic, the heroic and the comic, as he and his fellow writers Chris Patten and Adam Ridley wrote and rewrote into the small hours of the morning. The leader of the party attacked and changed their draft pages, which were spread out on tables, chairs and even over the carpet across the suite. An added complication was that since Margaret Thatcher did not do humour, the jokes that Millar wrote for her had to be explained and rehearsed in laborious detail. In this speech the line about mild and bitter beer took a lot of polishing, since she had never tasted either. The exhausting process went on until ten past five when Denis came in and ordered his wife to bed. It was the first illustration of a much-repeated saying among her inner circle: ‘No one ever writes a speech
for
Margaret Thatcher. They write it
with
her.’
⁵

Just before the speech started a highly nervous Margaret Thatcher said to Ronnie Millar, ‘I wish it was over’. He thought: ‘She looked young and vulnerable and pretty and scared. I felt suddenly protective.’
⁶

When it was finished she was at first uplifted by the acclamation. But two hours later she plunged herself into the depths of insecurity about whether she could repeat the performance at next year’s conference. ‘Brighton could be the most dreadful anti-climax’, she fretted.
⁷

According to Millar:

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 …’ I slipped away. So long as she had this man around she was going to be all right.
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Further away from home, Margaret Thatcher delivered speeches of quality in New York, Washington, Zurich and Hanover. These visits broadened her experience of foreign policy as she started to meet international leaders of the day including Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl, future Chancellor of West Germany. All of them seemed fascinated to meet this new phenomenon among Western democracies, a potential woman prime minister, but not all were impressed.

Jimmy Carter, who normally declined to meet opposition leaders, welcomed her for a forty-five minute discourse in the Oval Office, but was surprised when she used two-thirds of it to argue what a mistake he was making with his efforts to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty.

One early American visitor to London was won over by the Thatcher energy and vision. He was US Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger, who breakfasted with her at Claridge’s a week after she had won the leadership election. He had been trying to meet her since 1972, on the recommendation of his wife Nancy.

Connecting for the first time on 18 February 1975, Kissinger was impressed by Margaret Thatcher’s ardent support for the ‘special relationship’ and her staunch anti-communism. She asked him what he thought was the major problem facing the world now that the Vietnam War was over. He mentioned the Latin American debt crisis. ‘Why is that a problem?’ she asked. ‘You borrow money. You have to pay it back.’
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She may have seemed simplistic in some of her opinions, but Kissinger saw the point of her, ahead of any other world statesman.

He sat down to breakfast with her expecting to be underwhelmed, since the night before one or two of his Tory grandee friends had filled him up with their views on Margaret Thatcher which were ‘distinctly jaundiced’.
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But the US Secretary of State was impressed by her forthright personality. Even so he retained doubts, planted by his UK establishment friends, about her electability. Three months after the Claridge’s meeting Kissinger advised President Gerald Ford, ‘I don’t think Margaret Thatcher will last’.
¹¹
This view of the Leader of the Opposition’s prospects evidently improved for during the years 1976–1978 Kissinger organised dinner parties in honour of Margaret Thatcher every time
she came to Washington. His guests were luminaries of the foreign-policy establishment, such as Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar; senior White House aides; editors from
Time, Newsweek
and the
New York Times
; Kay Graham, the owner of the
Washington Post
; and the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Warren Earl Burger.

One of the reasons why Henry and Nancy Kissinger went out of their way to be so hospitable was that they were irritated on her behalf by the lack of hospitality extended to her by the British Ambassador to Washington, Peter Jay. This criticism may have been misplaced. Jay seems to have done his best to be helpful on Margaret Thatcher’s visits to Washington. But if there was a certain coolness between the Ambassador and the Leader of the Opposition, it was understandable. For Peter Jay was a political appointee with unusually close connections to the Labour government. His father-in-law, James Callaghan, was the new Prime Minister. He presented a formidable obstacle to Margaret Thatcher’s progress.

OUTMANOEUVRED BY JAMES CALLAGHAN

It might have been predicted that the unexpected retirement of Harold Wilson in March 1976 would have helped Margaret Thatcher. Far from it. Her performances from the despatch box became noticeably worse as she went head to head with James Callaghan.

She got off to a bad start on the day Wilson announced his departure. It was an occasion when the traditions of the House expected the Leader of the Opposition to join graciously in the tributes to the retiring Prime Minister. Instead, she completely misread the mood and slipped into partisan jibes demanding an immediate election. It was a mistake that brought frowns from her own side and protests from Labour. The word in the tea room afterwards was that she had showed no feel for Parliament.

This word increased as she lost clash after clash with Callaghan. His technique was to don the mantle of a wise elder statesman brushing aside the clamourings of an over-eager challenger. His condescension infuriated her. ‘I am sure that one day the right hon. Lady will understand these things a little better’, was his patronising put-down when she tried to interrogate him about government borrowing.
¹²

As Callaghan’s authority in the House increased, she had greater difficulty in penetrating his armour. On one occasion she attacked him for his ‘avuncular flannel’, but he genially brushed her aside: ‘I have often thought of the right hon. Lady in many ways, but never as my niece.’
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Although Callaghan’s flannelling was surprisingly successful, the Labour government hit a dangerous rock in March 1977. The devolution issue turned sour when it lost the support of Welsh and Scottish Nationalist MPs. This caused parliamentary chaos for a while. Margaret Thatcher tabled a motion of no confidence. But Callaghan was able to cobble up a deal with the Liberals. Some Conservative back-benchers thought their leader should have done the same. She was adamantly opposed to the thought, saying privately, ‘never, but never, would I consider a coalition from which could only come irresolute and debilitating government’.
¹⁴

Callaghan’s deal, later called the Lib–Lab pact, saved his government and enabled him to defeat the opposition’s motion with some ease. He was helped by Margaret Thatcher’s opening speech in the debate, which by her own admission was one of the worst she ever made. It produced many negative reactions. I remember the grimaces and cringes on our back benches as she faltered through her mediocre script.

‘They’ll be passing a no confidence motion on
us
after this’, muttered the MP for Canterbury, David Crouch, amidst the half-hearted ‘hear, hears’ when Mrs Thatcher resumed her seat.
¹⁵

In the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery an eminent Washington columnist Joseph Alsop was listening to the debate. I had tea with him afterwards in the Pugin Room. ‘I came because I heard she was the great white hope’, drawled Alsop. ‘I’m going away thinking she’s not up to it.’
¹⁶

Joe Alsop’s opinion was becoming the received wisdom in sceptical Tory circles. Edward du Cann, keeping his ear to the ground among Conservative MPs, recalled ‘continuous and considerable sniping against Margaret by a wide spectrum of the colleagues … a recurring theme among several of them was “we’ve made a mistake: how can we undo it?”’
¹⁷

One way of undoing it, which received a surprising amount of support, was the notion of a government of national unity. This had been floated first by Ted Heath when he was sinking towards defeat in October 1974. In the 1976–1978 period it was revived by various eminent business leaders, by
The Times
and
even by Harold Macmillan, who broke thirteen years of ex-prime ministerial silence. Margaret Thatcher went to see him a few days later ‘to see what he really thought’.
¹⁸
Their meeting was not a great success. She called it ‘pleasantly inconclusive’. He returned from it to Chatsworth, where his hostess the Duchess of Devonshire asked him, ‘Did you talk?’ ‘No, she did’, was Macmillan’s tart response.
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