Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (27 page)

For reasons with which I need not bother you, the Jewish faith have allied themselves to Liberalism and at the last local election won five seats from the Conservatives on our council. We are now finding great difficulty in making headway in these areas, particularly in Hampstead Garden Suburb.
As Finchley has had a Liberal MP in the past we are naturally apprehensive and are now making great efforts to further the Conservative cause. I fear the division [that is, the constituency] as a whole has not been very dynamic in the past.
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Although the Jewish population was probably not the 25 per cent of the Finchley vote which Mrs Thatcher mentioned in the same letter, being in fact a fifth or less, it was nevertheless highly significant, indeed essential, for any candidate requiring the support of the middle classes. Through her Finchley experience, Mrs Thatcher conceived a strong admiration for Jewish values. Jews, she later declared, are ‘one of the most scholarly races’, and ‘They also are the people of the Old Testament: how can you believe in the New unless you believe in the Old?’
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She was attracted, too, by their very active sense of community – ‘My, they were good citizens’ – which expressed itself in ‘not just talking, but doing and giving’. And she liked their entrepreneurial virtues, seeing Jews as ‘natural traders’ who managed ‘positively to get on by their own efforts’.
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During her premiership, she was often closer to Jewish religious leaders, notably the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, whom she ennobled, than to Christian ones. But in her early days in Finchley she looked on Jewish matters in a more matter-of-fact way: she needed Jewish votes and she thought the Tories were sacrificing them unnecessarily. As we shall see, although her relationship with the Jewish community was fundamentally harmonious and productive, Mrs Thatcher did sometimes find Finchley Jews irritating. What is clear, however, is that she approached them without the prejudices which existed in some sections of her party, and they responded warmly. Helped, as she records in her memoirs,
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by Ted Heath, who was then Chief Whip, Mrs Thatcher drafted in senior Conservative MPs to speak on her behalf. Notable among these was Sir Keith Joseph,
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later her greatest political ally, MP for Leeds North East, and the most important Jewish Conservative of his generation. He came to speak for Mrs Thatcher in Finchley in February 1959.

Anyone can see, in retrospect, that Mrs Thatcher was certain to hold Finchley for the Conservatives at the next election, whenever it came. This moderately prosperous, petit-bourgeois, owner-occupied, suburban constituency was a safe Tory seat, and ideally suited for its chosen candidate.
Although the phrase was not used at the time, Mrs Thatcher was upwardly mobile, and so was Finchley. Besides, the political wind had been blowing in the party’s favour. Harold Macmillan had replaced Eden as prime minister in January 1957 and set his course on expansionary policies. The era of post-war austerity was well and truly over, replaced by what, when it returned in the 1980s, was sometimes disparaged as ‘bourgeois triumphalism’. David Kynaston, the social historian of post-war Britain, cites an advertisement for New Zealand butter which appeared in
Woman
magazine in the first week of 1957, as capturing the spirit of the age. ‘Good food and plenty of it, full employment, well furnished homes – today’s generation knows what Good Living really means!’ ran the text, before praising the ‘natural golden colour’ of the butter.
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Although Macmillan himself, born in the nineteenth century, seemed a rather old-fashioned, Edwardian figure, and even played up to this image, he was adroit at managing the politics of prosperity. It was he who, as housing minister, had made and fulfilled his party’s pledge before the 1951 election, to build 300,000 council houses a year. It was Macmillan who, on 20 July 1957, made a famous speech in which he declared: ‘Indeed let us be frank about it – most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime – nor, indeed, in the history of this country.’ It was true. The average real pay for industrial workers had risen by 20 per cent since the Tory victory in 1951. Earlier in the same year, Macmillan had written to an official at Central Office: ‘I am always hearing about the Middle Classes. What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of notepaper, and I will see whether we can give it to them.’
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As the general election of 1959 approached, he seemed to have found the answer.

In the very same ‘never had it so good’ speech, Macmillan himself had raised the question, ‘Is it too good to last? … can prices be steadied while at the same time we maintain full employment in an expanding economy?’ In the next decade, this question would come to dominate politics, but, in the late 1950s, people tended to think that it could be postponed. In January 1958, Macmillan’s Treasury team, led by the Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft,
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and including Enoch Powell, had resigned in protest at the government’s reluctance to hold back public spending adequately (the disputed sum was a mere £50 million), saying that profligacy would lead
to inflation. Macmillan dismissed the resignations as ‘little local difficulties’, and more or less got away with it. The resignations much later came to be seen as harbingers of monetarism, and were much admired by Thatcherites, but at the time they did not achieve their purpose. As the 1959 election drew near, the headline rate of inflation remained below 3 per cent. Macmillan’s political approach to public spending seemed to be vindicated.

In the budget of 1959, the Chancellor cut the standard rate of income tax from 8s 6d (42.5 pence) to 7s 9d (38.5 pence) and reduced purchase tax and the duty on beer. In September of that year, Macmillan called an early and quick election, for 8 October. The manifesto asked, ‘Do you want to go ahead on the lines which have brought prosperity at home?’ and ‘Do you want your present leaders to represent you?’, questions which represented confidence or complacency, according to taste. ‘Life’s Better Under the Conservatives’, was the slogan, and so, in an immediate and directly material sense, it was. In later years, Mrs Thatcher looked back critically. In 1979, she told Macmillan’s official biographer, Alistair Horne, that ‘I think part of our post-1959 problems arose from an extremely over-generous Budget in 1959.’
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But at the time she was mainly content to go with the political flow.

One of Mrs Thatcher’s best political gifts, born of a rather surprising lack of self-confidence and a female conscientiousness, was never to take anything for granted. If her party risked complacency, she did not. She campaigned ferociously hard. At the annual general meeting of the Finchley Conservatives on 23 March 1959, the chairman, Bertie Blatch, praised her for the fact that she had fulfilled 130 requests to speak since her adoption less than eight months earlier.
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Compared with her first campaign at Dartford, Mrs Thatcher was more circumspect in advancing her personal views, and she was happy enough to join in her party’s boasting about its ever-growing spending, but she nevertheless put down a few markers for what would later be called Thatcherism. Speaking at a public meeting in Friern Barnet on 3 April 1959, she addressed herself to the anxiety that, despite the increase in material prosperity, there seemed to be little moral advance. ‘If one desires above all to build a responsible society of responsible citizens,’ she asked, ‘how can Parliament bring it about?’ To the small extent that it could, firm standards and the pursuit of excellence were the keys. She told her audience that she supported the use of the birch for those crimes of violence committed ‘for the sheer love of brutality’. She was also tackled on the emerging question of comprehensive schools. While saying that some comprehensives might turn out to be very good, Mrs Thatcher made it clear where her sympathies lay: ‘We never believe in throwing out what tradition and experience have proved to be very good indeed, and
replacing this by something as yet in the experimental stage.’
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At her election adoption meeting on 21 September, she emphasized the simple verity which was so often to stand her in such good stead: ‘The whole of our future at home and abroad depends on our having a solvent society,’
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a doctrine to which Macmillan paid only formal obeisance. There is nothing, however, to suggest anything dangerously unorthodox in the views of the thirty-three-year-old parliamentary candidate. Although to the right of her party’s leader, she endorsed the middle-way, unideological expansionism of the ‘never had it so good’ era. Her election address for the poll which Macmillan had called for 8 October categorized the main issues as ‘Your Home … Your Job … Your Children … Your Defence … Your Vote’, and offered a conventional mixture of security, prosperity and high spending. The respect in which the candidate for Finchley stood out was not ideological: it was because she was already a bit of a star – through her sex, her looks, her dynamism and her air of being, true blue though she was, something new for the Tory Party, a persuasive meritocrat. ‘The business of the working class is on its way out,’ she told an interviewer in the
Evening News
during the campaign. ‘After all, aren’t I working class? I work jolly hard, I can tell you.’
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And somehow she induced the (female) interviewer to declare, ‘she is, without question, an absolute honey.’
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At the count, rigid with nerves, Mrs Thatcher heard that she had increased the Conservative majority from 12,825 to 16,260, winning well over half of the votes cast. The result was:

The national result – a Conservative majority of 107 – was the party’s best since the war. Margaret Thatcher reached Parliament at a peak in her party’s fortunes from which it could only decline.

The new Member of Parliament who walked up the steps of the House of Commons with her characteristically short, brisk stride gave every air of outward confidence. The first person to greet her was her secretary, Paddi Victor Smith. The two had not met before. Miss Victor Smith was already the secretary for another Conservative MP, Frederic Bennett, and had applied for the additional work with Mrs Thatcher in order to earn extra money. She had gained the job without an interview. When she met Mrs Thatcher at the Members’ entrance, she thought at once that she was ‘very pretty, well groomed’; she felt ‘surprised right from the start at how together she was’.
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This impression of neatness and competence never went away. When, later, she visited Margaret at Dormers, Paddi Victor Smith noted that ‘all her clothes were beautifully hung in plastic bags’ and that she seemed to possess early prototypes of the freezer bags that are common today.
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Yet Mrs Thatcher probably felt less poised than she looked. Despite her electoral success and the security provided by her marriage, she remained an outsider. Although loyal to her family, she also found her lower-middle-class roots a little embarrassing. A few days after the 1959 election, she wrote to Muriel, thanking her for the congratulatory talcum powder that her sister had sent her, and complaining that she had 350 letters and 75 telegrams to answer. She was so busy, she said, that her lack of a housekeeper was becoming ‘a major worry’. On election night, she added, her father’s brother, Harold Roberts, had suddenly appeared: ‘Would you believe it Uncle Harold turned up on election day. Visited two committee rooms, got himself into the count and then, as he hadn’t arranged any transport back, I had to take him on to a party with me before driving him back to town.’
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Writing to Muriel three days later, the girls’ father explained what had happened more fully, after remarking, rather sadly: ‘We, so far, have only received a short letter from Margaret, but she says she is completely inundated with correspondence. We realise that so exercise patience.’ Uncle
Harold, apparently, had decided, ‘without previous indication to anyone, to go up to Finchley for the day’. There he found his niece, and ‘attached himself to her for the rest of the night’, going to the count and celebration party and then ‘needing to be taken to St Pancras station at 4.30 am’. ‘It has upset me very much,’ Alfred went on, ‘for much as I cling to Harold for he is a good man, obviously in every way he would be out of his element and become a responsibility to Margaret and Denis to look after which to their credit they certainly did.’ Alfred Roberts had taken the matter in hand, he said: ‘as kindly and reasonably as possible I have told him he mustn’t obtrude.’ He had also had cause to write to his sister, Frances Garland, whose husband Charlie had presented himself at the Thatchers’ house without warning on a recent occasion: ‘Frances has written a nasty letter in reply, but I will put up with that if it saves Margaret and Denis future trouble. Why do they want to cash in on Margaret’s success in this pushing way.’
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