Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (31 page)

‘But on our side we are never extreme’, objected Margaret Thatcher. Professor Wade begged to differ, and was able to cite one or two examples of actions by previous Conservative governments that he thought fell into this category. This set off a vehement clash of opinions between the two of them. Their exchanges became so heated that Professor Michael Oakeshott mischievously started a diversion. Seeing on my mantelpiece a Victorian gilded birdcage containing two miniature linnets, he wound it up. As the clockwork songbirds chirruped away, several members of the group dissolved into laughter. But Margaret Thatcher was not to be distracted by these noises off. She kept firing her salvos until Bill Wade and the linnets subsided into silence.

Another lively evening, which found the Leader of the Opposition in full voice, began with a paper from Dr Edward Norman about the relations between church and state. Somehow this worked round to an argument about whether Christians had a duty to fight for the state even if its government became communist.

Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, an old adversary of Dr Norman, said he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He reminded us that when the Barbarians had sacked Rome, the Christians had promptly signed on for service in the Barbarian army.

‘You’re being deliberately provocative,’ declared Margaret Thatcher, ‘but do go on. This is fun.’

Enoch Powell intervened to say that he would fight for England even if it had a communist government.

‘But you would only fight to defend the right values?’ said the Leader of the Opposition in a tone of command rather than inquiry. ‘Values exist in a transcendental realm beyond space and time’, replied Powell. ‘They can neither be defended nor destroyed.’

Margaret Thatcher gazed at him as though this was the most extraordinary statement she’d ever heard. ‘Construct, Enoch dear, construct – don’t destruct’,
³²
she ordered.

More or less at this point the division bell pealed in my home at Lord North Street. We were on a two-line whip. Most of us, including the Leader of the Opposition, were paired and stayed on. But a handful of MPs, including Enoch Powell, who had become a member of the United Ulster Unionist Party, had to go and vote.

‘You shouldn’t have left us, Enoch dear’, was Margaret Thatcher’s parting shot. ‘You would have had a pair this evening.’
³³

As these vignettes show, her appearances at CPG evenings had their moments of amusement. She communicated some attractive sides of her personality in this private setting. Her warmth, her willingness to debate ideas and the radical strength of her political instincts manifested themselves in a form that was a refreshing contrast to the chilly caution of her Dresden china image. Among like-minded friends she relaxed more, and also looked a more interesting future prime minister.

Margaret Thatcher’s participation in the CPG was indicative of her enthusiasm for seeking out a framework of moral and intellectual values for her future policies. But it was not nearly as influential as the two think tanks that she listened to most – the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), chaired by Keith Joseph, and the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), chaired by Ralph Harris. She attended seminars and speaker events organised by both institutions, occasionally asking questions and frequently taking notes.

There is little doubt that the two most important thinkers who influenced Margaret Thatcher in her quest for fresh ideas were Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet she was never either a fully committed Hayekian or Friedmanite. The practicalities of British politics, coupled with her own instinctive caution, ensured that she did not fully embrace anyone’s academic theory or philosophy. Yet she owed much to both these gurus who were introduced or re-introduced to her in the late 1970s.

While an Oxford undergraduate, Margaret Thatcher read Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom
when it was first published in 1944. However, she had ignored the book’s fervent anti-socialism during her first fifteen years in Parliament, making many compromises with the leftist orthodoxy of the times when she served as Education Secretary in Ted Heath’s government. But Keith Joseph and the CPS reconverted her to Hayek’s political
credo.

There is a story of Margaret Thatcher visiting the consensus-leaning Conservative Research Department, where she cut short a researcher’s presentation by pulling out of her handbag a copy of Hayek’s
The Constitution of Liberty
. ‘This is what we believe’, she declared as she slammed the book down on the table.
³⁴

Many of her convictions were inspired by Hayek’s writings, particularly her zeal to roll back the frontiers of the socialist state in Britain. In their later
exchanges of correspondence, Margaret Thatcher paid tribute to her reliance on Hayekian thought. ‘We are indebted to your economic ideas and philosophy’, she wrote to her intellectual hero from 10 Downing Street twelve months after becoming Prime Minister. Four years later she made him a Companion of Honour in the 1984 Birthday Honours List.

Friedrich Hayek was important as a philosopher-king to the Thatcherite movement, but he was never a monetarist. This part of the opposition’s new thinking on economic policy came largely from Milton Friedman. He preached his gospel of public expenditure cuts and tight control of the money supply. Margaret Thatcher listened to him at both the CPG and the IEA in 1978. Ralph Harris has recalled from the latter occasion how ‘Mrs Thatcher hung on his words like a schoolgirl, carefully writing down everything he said and asking intelligent but elementary questions, as though it was all quite new to her’.
³⁵

For all her keen studies of Hayek and Friedman, Margaret Thatcher did not use either of them as direct sources for policy-making. As she well realised, the specific application of their ideas would be a dangerous hostage to fortune in electoral politics. Nevertheless, their influences made themselves felt in her self presentations of the kind of national leader she would turn out to be.

The values she proclaimed were a mixture of economic freedom and social conservatism. She advocated free choice, free enterprise and a throwing off of the shackles of socialist governance. Common-sense economics and sound rule of law disciplines were the key points on her compass. But rarely did these themes translate into specific proposals. Instead, she expressed her beliefs through the image of her personality.

Her most important tool in wooing the electorate was her self-projection. Many voters did not warm to her personality, but an increasing number were won over by the strength of it. What you saw was what you got – an immensely hard-working, determined and professional political leader. Away from the bear-pit of the House of Commons, where she faltered too often, she was beginning to sound like a capable Prime Minister-in-waiting. This improving perception of her owed much to her growing trust in a trio of image-makers – Tim Bell, Gordon Reece and Ronnie Millar. The results of their labours were a long time coming, and might not have come at all had it not been for the extraordinary events that became known as the ‘winter of discontent’.

That winter was some eight months away in the spring of 1978. It was a time when Margaret Thatcher did not look like a sure-fire winner for the next general election. The opinion polls were narrowing. Jim Callaghan was maintaining his ascendency in the Commons, and the economy was starting to recover. This last factor was the wild card. Two years of IMF-imposed discipline on the public finances had given Denis Healey enough leeway to make some modest tax cuts in his April Budget. All of a sudden, the sinking ship of government by Lib–Lab pact appeared more seaworthy.

Astonishingly, considering its failures of policy and governance in the previous four years, Labour began to look electable. The party even showed a small lead in the polls later in the summer, while the Prime Minister’s personal approval ratings climbed ten or twelve points above those of the Leader of the Opposition.

These signs and portents unnerved many Conservatives. Instead of concentrating their fire on the most unsuccessful government in living memory, they began a renewed round of grumbling about matters such as Margaret Thatcher’s hats and vocal chords. It was the summer of Tory discontent and the lowest point of her leadership.

REFLECTION

As Parliament went into recess in July 1978, the discontent over Margaret Thatcher was reaching new levels of turbulence among Conservative MPs. Three years after she had been elected Leader of the Opposition she was looking alarmingly close to being a failure at the job. Why did she do so badly, particularly in a period when the Labour government of the day was in such dire straits?

The answer to this question may have more to do with the plight of the country than the political abilities of Margaret Thatcher. The mid-1970s found Britain in a demoralised, chaotic and confused state. We were rightly called ‘The sick man of Europe’, but no one in the front line of politics knew how to cure the sickness. Successive Conservative and Labour governments had failed at this task. The endemic problems of soaring inflation, union militancy, low productivity and unsustainable levels of public expenditure remained in place. Worse than any of this was the shattering loss of national self-confidence.

Although as Leader of the Opposition Margaret Thatcher tried to articulate solutions to the crisis, her voice and her views were not nearly as coherent as they became once she was established as Prime Minister. She had three major difficulties. Her party was not united behind her. Her skills at presentation, particularly in the House of Commons, were often unconvincing. And, she herself had not worked out what the right policies were for halting Britain’s decline.

One last obstacle to her progress towards No. 10 was the considerable figure of James Callaghan. All polling data suggested that the electorate trusted him far more than they trusted her to pull Britain back from the abyss. He was often called ‘The best Conservative Prime Minister we never had’. Considering the poor cards he held in terms of a fractious party, explosive wage demands, anarchic unions and no parliamentary majority, he was astonishingly successful in playing his hand as a respected national leader. Had he called a general election in either the summer or early autumn of 1978 he would probably have won it, thereby relegating Margaret Thatcher to a footnote in political history. She always said she would only get one chance from the electorate as Leader of the Opposition. In the period May–October 1978 she looked as though she was going to blow it.

But as often happens in politics, the game was changed by unexpected developments. These were the events of the ‘winter of discontent’ and the wave of reaction they unleashed among the electorate. Because Margaret Thatcher kept her nerve during the troughs of opposition, she was ready to ride on the crest of this wave. Its turbulence seemed to vindicate much of what she had been saying and standing for during her most difficult years as leader of her party.

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Last lap to the election

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LAUGHING BOYS

Before the tide turned in Margaret Thatcher’s favour during the ‘winter of discontent’, there were another six months of choppy political waters to be navigated. It was a time when she needed friends. She found three of her best ones in the world of advertising, PR and the theatre. They were Tim Bell, Gordon Reece and Ronnie Millar. She called the first two ‘my laughing boys’, a label which might just have well been extended to all three of them, since it was Millar who provided the best of the humour. As a triumvirate, they were deadly serious about delivering the missing weapon in the Leader of the Opposition’s arsenal – the presentational skills which could deliver victory at the coming election.

In the summer of 1978, Margaret Thatcher was doing badly in the House of Commons. In late July she had come off noticeably worse in a joust with Jim Callaghan, which was designed to draw the battle lines for the expected autumn election. Opening the debate, Callaghan launched an attack on the Leader of the Opposition’s ability to govern. He accused her of being ‘All over the shop on this issue of pay’, ‘insulting the intelligence of the British people with her one-sentence solutions to deep-seated problems’ and setting out a foreign policy based on ‘prejudice and dislike’.
¹
His peroration was designed to portray the Leader of the Opposition as a divisive figure who would split the country.

He concluded:

The right hon. Lady has led the Conservative Party for three years and under her leadership people still do not know what the Conservatives stand for. They do not know because she does not know … The Tory Party once aspired to lead one nation and to speak for one nation. Now the Tory Party, many of its members reluctant and
sullen, has to listen to the language of division the whole time. The British people have come to know that they achieve most when they work together in unison, in social justice and in fair play.
²

Margaret Thatcher missed her chance to make a vigorous rebuttal of the Prime Minister’s attack. Instead of a debating speech from a fighter, the House was given an analysis of government statistics by a lecturer. Callaghan had instructed his back-benchers not to interrupt her. The result was that she spoke in an eerie silence that made her tone sound ‘nervous and faltering’.
³
According to one discomfited member of her shadow cabinet, Norman St John-Stevas, ‘The speech showed that she had no feel whatever for the mood of the House’.
⁴
It was a disaster.

As she ran through a tedious recital of the comparative economic figures from the Conservative record of 1961–1964 (pointedly omitting the Heath government period of 1970–1974), the restive back-benchers behind her were the visible proof of Callaghan’s claim that her own party was ‘reluctant and sullen’.
⁵

It was an unhappy parliamentary occasion for the Tories, made unhappier by the wind-up speech for the government by the Chancellor, Denis Healey. Posing as a prophet of doom, he condemned Margaret Thatcher for her ‘deep psychological obsession with conflict and confrontation’, and funereally proclaimed the debate as ‘a historical occasion’ because it was her last speech as Leader of the Conservative Party. ‘The axes and knives are already been sharpened.’ She and her party were ‘in the last stages of decay … riding to certain defeat’.
⁶

Although the fever of what he evidently thought was an imminent election made Healey’s forecasts look silly in hindsight, at the time both he and Callaghan touched many a Tory nerve with their attacks on the Leader of the Opposition. I well remember the negative reactions among colleagues to her speech, which even her strongest supporters were describing as ‘off form’ or ‘dull’. Most of us thought she had confirmed her increasingly poor reputation for failing to rise to the occasion in these big set-piece debates. ‘But we’re stuck with her now, until she loses’,
⁷
said Nicholas Fairbairn, the colourful Scottish Member for Kinross and Perthshire. It was exactly the sort of gloomy judgement passed on Ted Heath in early 1974.

Although this extreme pessimism was a minority view within the party, as we dispersed for the long summer recess the mood was more of foreboding
than anticipation. Most Tory MPs thought an election was coming in the autumn, and many felt that the chances of winning it were at best fifty–fifty. These anxieties were heightened by opinion polls in early August showing that Labour was ahead with a four-point lead.

August is a month that is usually helpful to the government of the day. But 1978 was an exception because the ‘laughing boys’, led by Tim Bell, took the initiative of introducing into British politics the first example of negative campaigning. Their initial poster was so effective that it derailed Callaghan’s plans for an early election.

The name the ‘laughing boys’ derived from a lunch party at the Thatcher’s country flat in Scotney Castle in July 1978. Its main objective was for election photographs to be taken of the leader looking relaxed
en famille
. However, the image of a happy family was difficult to portray on this particular morning because all four Thatchers were in a vile temper. Denis was irate because he had been ordered to cancel his Sunday game of golf. Margaret was furious because Denis had spontaneously invited the barrister Tricia Murray, wife of the DJ Pete Murray, to stay on for lunch after doing an interview for a book she was writing on Margaret Thatcher. The presence of this unexpected guest thwarted the leader’s plan to discuss election tactics with her key media advisers. As for Mark and Carol, they were having a quarrel of their own which put both of them in bolshie moods. However, their bad temper was offset by the arrival of Messrs Bell, Reece and Millar in the sunniest of moods. They had turned up early in the vicinity of Scotney, and to kill time had polished off a couple of bottles of champagne in a local pub.

While downing the champagne, Ronnie Millar regaled his friends with an anecdote from his naval days about a commander whose invariable wardroom order was ‘I’ll have a piece of gin, please’. On arrival in the drawing room of Scotney, when Margaret Thatcher asked Millar what he would like to drink, he again imitated the commander’s punch-line. This sent Reece and Bell into paroxysms of merriment. Unaware of the champagne, and oblivious to the point of the joke, the lady was bemused but pretended to be amused. She promptly christened the jesters ‘my laughing boys’, and the name stuck. On the day, it relieved the tension, which was a task they all became good at during the next twelve years.

Margaret Thatcher already trusted Ronnie Millar, a playwright friend of Noël Coward, who had been sculpting the best lines in her conference speeches
since 1975. She had also come to depend on Gordon Reece, a television producer who softened her image, deepened her voice, advised her on clothes and accompanied her on media interviews. She had appointed him Director of Publicity at Central Office in early 1978. For his part, Reece venerated Margaret Thatcher with devotion not far short of idolatry. This spirit of adoration soon spread to Tim Bell, who was the toughest and savviest of the ‘laughing boys’. He had entered the advertising industry straight from his North London grammar school, and climbed the ladder fast by his creative originality on big campaigns. In the summer of 1978 he was Managing Director of Saatchi and Saatchi,
^*
8
which Reece chose to handle the Conservative Party account.

Tim Bell, who was the only Conservative voter in the hierarchy of Saatchi and Saatchi, soon hit it off with Margaret Thatcher, who found him a kindred spirit. They shared similar grammar school backgrounds, an aversion to consensus politics and a preference for blunt speaking. At their first meeting, in her room at the House of Commons, she told him: ‘You will find that politicians have very large fingers and very large toes. You must be frightfully careful not to tread on them by accident.’

Bell respectfully agreed to watch his step among the political classes. Then she startled him with more personal advice: ‘I, however, have no fingers and no toes, and I insist you tell me the truth at all times, however painful you think it might be for me.’

Her final warning was: ‘If you paint a picture of me that isn’t true, and I get elected, then I won’t be able to do what I want because people will expect me to do something else.’ As Bell was leaving after this unusual interview, Margaret Thatcher asked him: ‘What’s your favourite poem?’

‘ “If”, by Rudyard Kipling’.

‘Mine, too’, she replied.

From day one, she and Bell bonded.
⁹

It was still unusual in the 1970s for political parties to rely on advertising men, although the Tories had used Colman Prentis and Varley in the 1959 election. But Margaret Thatcher took an intuitive decision to use the industry’s most innovative tactics and to trust Tim Bell. He suggested a strategy that consisted of appealing to voters’ instincts with emotional messages and hitting Labour hard by going on the attack. Both themes were present in the poster he unveiled to the Leader of the Opposition that Sunday afternoon at Scotney.

The poster, destined to become a political legend, showed a dole queue tailing off into the distance. The slogan above it read ‘Labour isn’t working’
.
Bell told her it was a
double entendre
. ‘What’s this
double entendre
that’s too subtle for me to get?’ she demanded. It was patiently explained to her that neither the Labour government nor the unemployed were working. Then she found a different objection. ‘Surely, it’s all wrong that the biggest thing on this poster is the name of the opposition? Why are we promoting them?’ Tim Bell argued back: ‘We’re not promoting the opposition. We are demolishing Labour.’
¹⁰
Eventually she saw the point, and gave the go-ahead. Although the poster went up on only twenty sites around the country, it caused a sensation.

Small news often becomes big news in sleepy August. With election jitters in the air, Labour launched a frenzy of protests against the poster, which only served to heighten its impact. The images were reproduced so often on television and in the press that Tim Bell later boasted that the Tories received £5 million of free publicity at a cash cost of only £50,000. Even the disclosure that the poster dole queue consisted of Hendon Young Conservatives posing for Saatchi and Saatchi cameras did not dilute its message. For the campaign reminded millions that the fear of rising unemployment was an issue on which the Labour government was electorally vulnerable.

No one took this reminder more seriously than Jim Callaghan. Having raised expectations that he would call an election, even to the point of singing the old music-hall song ‘There was I, waiting at the church …’ to the TUC conference on 5 September, he changed his mind. Two days later, he announced he would address the nation on television. ‘I don’t imagine that he’s making a ministerial broadcast to say he’s
not
going to hold an election’, said Margaret Thatcher, who was on a tour of marginal seats in the West Midlands.
¹¹
Minutes later she took a call from No. 10 Downing Street giving her advance notice that this was precisely what was going to happen. The Prime Minister had blinked.
That evening he solemnly announced to the nation that there would be no autumn election.

It is one of the mysteries of twentieth-century politics why Jim Callaghan backed away from going to the country. One explanation was that the Saatchi and Saatchi poster unnerved him. A second was that he felt less sure than the pollsters and most other observers that he would win the electorate’s support. A third was that he thought he could gamble on an improvement in the economy over the winter months, winning the co-operation of the unions for a policy of pay restraint. But the most private, and perhaps most telling, explanation was the one he gave to his Downing Street aide, Tom McNally. ‘In the history books, having been Prime Minister for three years rather than two looks a lot better.’ When this unguarded Callaghan aside was passed on to Bernard Donoughue, the head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at No. 10, he observed: ‘That’s the ring of the true Jim.’ Callaghan’s desire to record against his name ‘Prime Minister 1976–1979’ was the decisive factor in postponing the date of polling day.
¹²

When she received the news of the delay, Margaret Thatcher initially felt frustrated. She rang up Tim Bell to grumble about her sense of anti-climax, but soon shifted gear to discussing how the extra time could best be used. ‘We were all on the go button,’ he recalled, ‘but once she began saying in a matter of fact way that we would just have to start all over again, we knuckled down and began preparing a completely new set of party political broadcasts for the New Year.’
¹³

PPBs, as they were known, were considered to be a major force in shifting the allegiances of voters in the 1970s. The Tories were allocated five of them, each ten minutes long, during the election campaign itself, and two more in the weeks before polling day was announced. The ‘laughing boys’ seized these opportunities with relish. But their first priority was to extract the best possible performances from the leader.

Tim Bell recalled:

We treated her like a film star from the word go. She could have been Sophia Loren in terms of flowers, hairdos and compliments. Mind you, she saw through it. One day we were filming a PPB that was designed to reassure people that it would be all right to have a woman’s finger on the nuclear trigger. As she couldn’t understand what the
fuss was about, it wasn’t easy to get her into the right mood for the filming. But Ronnie Millar had written a script which contained the line, ‘Whether we like it or not, we are the parents and the children of the nuclear generation’. He rehearsed her over and over again to get her intonation right. Eventually she said rather crossly, ‘The trouble with you lot is that you think I’m Anna Neagle’.
^†
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