Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (40 page)

No doubt it was wise of Mrs Thatcher not to dwell in later life on her experience as a teacher, though she did mention it if asked. Such a short stint at such a young age would never have stood comparison with the work of people who had given their life to the profession. But those few weeks were nevertheless of some importance to her. They gave her a certain respect for the hardships that teachers endure and reinforced her belief in the importance of making sure that children learn things properly. They also confirmed the feeling, which had earlier driven her to refuse the chance of the full bursary at Oxford that went with the promise to teach later, that she lacked the pedagogical vocation. To the observer of her reactions, her stint as a teacher provides evidence of (to put it kindly) her gift for leadership or (to put it unkindly) her bossiness. It is an early example of her belief, later so familiar to Cabinet colleagues, that people, particularly men, never did anything very well unless you stood over them while they did it. Mrs Thatcher always approached education with an odd mixture of feelings – a solemn conviction that it was overwhelmingly important for civilization and for the individual, combined with a certain impatience. Carol remembered that Mrs Thatcher, who was generally quite indulgent as a mother, did get ‘very upset if we had bad reports from school’. She would upbraid her children strongly if this happened: ‘I’d twigged before the Russians that she was the Iron Lady.’
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The Department of Education and Science did not stand high in the pecking order of Whitehall. First in Curzon Street, Mayfair, and then, in the
latter part of Mrs Thatcher’s term of office, south of the river in the astonishingly ugly new tower of Elizabeth House near Waterloo, it was geographically separated from the centre of power. Although Mrs Thatcher remembered the ‘splendid old quarters’ in Curzon Street with affection, the condition of their entrance was so squalid and the doormen so surly that officials used to arrange to meet visitors in the street outside and escort them quickly through, so they would not have to endure the horrors of the lobby for too long.
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Many of the DES officials, including the Permanent Secretary, Sir William Pile, who came from the Home Office to take over in the month that Mrs Thatcher arrived in the job, would have preferred to be in other government departments. In part, this reflected the cultural assumption that education was a ‘woman’s subject’, not worthy of the full attention of men whose job it was to rule.
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More, it arose from the fact that education was organized in such a way that the Department had very little power. Pile’s predecessor, Sir Herbert Andrew, described its work as ‘like steering a boat with a rubber tiller’. According to one official’s pardonable exaggeration, the Department ‘ran only the V&A, Apsley House [the London home of the 1st Duke of Wellington, now a museum] and the Science Museum directly’,
¹⁰
and even the arts and museums, for which Mrs Thatcher found herself nominally responsible, were handled by a separate minister, Lord Eccles, and on an ‘arm’s length principle’. Virtually everything in education was delegated, or mediated, universities receiving their money via the University Grants Committee and schools through local education authorities. These local authorities received an automatic central government grant worth 75 per cent of their spending.

In parliamentary answers to Education Questions throughout her time in office, Mrs Thatcher’s most common reply begins with the words: ‘I have no direct control …’ The idea that central government should intervene directly in the curriculum, or even to ensure the quality of teachers, was seen as an affront to local and professional autonomy. The only aspect of the content of teaching prescribed by law, and therefore the responsibility of the Secretary of State, was religious education, and even here the task was delegated to experts and churches. The Department produced money – for school building and for teachers’ salaries in particular – but not ideas. Mrs Thatcher was later to claim that she protested about this.
She remembered that she had said to Pile when she arrived: ‘I’m worried about the
content
in schools, rather than the structure.’
¹¹
It is true that there were a few occasions, especially towards the end of her time at the Department, when she mentioned this problem in speeches and interviews. In Cabinet, she sometimes complained of the automaticity of grants to local authorities. But there is no evidence that she made a serious attempt to change the balance of power. Indeed, her most immediately controversial policy – her scrapping of the Labour Circulars 10/65 and 10/66 which tried to force comprehensivization – took its stand on the principle of local independence. She never said that she was opposed to comprehensives in principle: instead she argued that good existing schools should be defended and that parents and local authorities should be able to make decisions for themselves, rather than be compelled to change.

Mrs Thatcher withdrew the Labour Circulars at once, telling her officials on her first working day (Monday 22 June 1970) that she would do so, and making the public announcement on 30 June. For this speed she was criticized. Wilma Hart, the Department’s deputy secretary and
éminence grise
, tried to dissuade her from introducing a ‘blanket policy’.
¹²
Unions and local authorities complained of the lack of consultation. Worse, from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view, 10 Downing Street indicated displeasure at her failure to discuss the matter in Cabinet first.
¹³
Her very readiness to act was taken as a danger signal by those around Ted Heath, an example of the ‘instant government’ which he deplored. In his introductory remarks at his very first Cabinet meeting on 23 June, Heath urged ministers, ‘Don’t be rushed into hasty decisions of policy’:
¹⁴
Mrs Thatcher had just rushed into one the day before. John Hedger, one of her private secretaries, remembered a conversation with a No. 10 counterpart at the time: ‘God, this woman is really right wing.’
¹⁵
The feeling was that she was getting above herself. In her own view, however, Mrs Thatcher was simply doing what she had promised. The withdrawal of the Circulars had been in the election manifesto, and she regarded the election, she told the Commons when introducing her Circular, as ‘the biggest consultation of all’. There was no need for legislation to effect their withdrawal. Therefore it should happen at once. In retrospect, she felt let down by the Department in the matter. No one told her, she complained, that to withdraw one Circular, you had to issue a replacement, so she hurriedly drafted one herself.
¹⁶

In reality, the issuing of Circular 10/70, as her new policy was called, was more the signal of a change of tone than a reform of huge importance. It was not able, and it was not even intended, to stop the flow of new comprehensives in its tracks. ‘We shall … expect plans to be based on educational considerations rather than on the comprehensive principle,’
she told the
Daily Telegraph
,
¹⁷
but, regardless of the principle, the comprehensive practice was so far advanced that not much could be done to stop it. On the day when Mrs Thatcher took office, there were 1,137 comprehensive schools in England and Wales, and hundreds of comprehensive schemes were pending. When she left it in March 1974, she had approved 3,286 comprehensive schemes and rejected only 326; she had saved ninety-four grammar schools. As she pursued her policy, Mrs Thatcher accepted the trend of the age, telling
The
Times
that non-selective education was coming ‘with increasing speed’.
¹⁸
She developed the argument that the Butler Act of 1944 had provided for a ‘comprehensive’ education service – the word appears in the Act – but that this did not necessarily mean that all schools had to take the same, comprehensive (that is, non-selective) form: comprehensiveness could be offered across an area, and was better if it included parental choice of types of school.
¹⁹
When she addressed her party’s conference that autumn, she did not take her stand on the virtues of grammar schools, let alone the vices of comprehensives. Instead she spoke about the value of a ‘variety of choice’ and she did not make the theme the centrepiece of her speech, preferring to emphasize the building of new primary schools. All that 10/70 ensured was that no local authority was compelled to go comprehensive. It did not give Mrs Thatcher new powers to shape education: indeed, she made much of repudiating the very idea. Her sole legal power over whether an old school closed or a new one opened derived from Section 13 of the Butler Act itself. Early in her time in office, she continued her predecessors’ habit of considering local education authority schemes for school reorganization as a whole, but from April 1971 she desisted. Always careful to follow a legally precise position, she decided to concentrate on the only thing which Section 13 provided for – the fate of individual schools. When her Labour shadow, Ted Short, complained that this way of proceeding could make ‘nonsense of the whole area scheme’,
²⁰
she did not disagree with him, but insisted that she must perform her statutory duties.

There were successes. Mrs Thatcher prevented the compulsory comprehensivization of Birmingham which was already in train when she arrived in office, and after Labour took control of Birmingham Council in 1972 she was able to back the strong feeling in favour of many of the grammar schools in the city, saving nearly half of them. In general, however, the policy did not really please enough people enough. Particularly awkward were those areas controlled by Conservatives which wanted to go comprehensive. ‘Look at who fought me,’ she would lament in later years.
²¹
One of these was true-blue Surrey where, according to Short, she had organized an unsuccessful ‘tennis court plot’ at a ‘secret’ meeting with
grammar school supporters in a tennis club to prevent comprehensives, which her own party had foiled. When she addressed the National Union of Teachers conference in Blackpool in April 1972, Mrs Thatcher found herself in the piquant situation of facing a boycott led by Surrey teachers, followed by a walk-out of about a hundred militant teachers during her speech. The left-wing union executive, resenting the discourtesy, led a standing ovation to her from the platform.
²²

Worse still was the problem in her own constituency, caused because Barnet Council wished to go comprehensive. In June 1971, Mrs Thatcher vetoed the part of Barnet’s ‘Plan C’ which linked Woodhouse Grammar with Friern Barnet County School, and also forbade Whitefield School, Cricklewood, to go comprehensive, on the grounds of a split site and, in the latter case, the unsuitability of accommodation. Earlier in the year, she had already stopped other Barnet ‘Plan C’ schemes, although a consultation organized by the council had produced 86 per cent support for ‘Plan C’ from 28,000 replies. The normally loyal
Finchley Press
reported the local teachers as ‘staggered’ and quoted attacks on Mrs Thatcher by a prominent and usually friendly Conservative councillor, Vic Usher, who was chairman of the council’s education committee. Usher expressed his ‘tremendous disappointment’
²³
and complained that an unrepresentative group had won the battle for ‘Mrs Thatcher’s ear’. There tended, in Conservative areas, to be a split between the education committees of councils, whose members saw things more from an overall organizational point of view and therefore wanted the tidiness of wholesale comprehensivization, and the Tory rank and file, many of whom worried greatly about educational standards and felt strongly about particular schools.
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Perhaps the least satisfied customer of the policy was Mrs Thatcher herself. Even she found the details of so many plans exhausting to deal with and, through overconscientiousness and anxiety about political consequences, lingered too long over many of them.
²⁴
And although she genuinely believed that it was a bad idea that central government should decree the nature of every school in the country, she had little practical faith in the capacity of the only other source of power available at the time, the local authorities, to make the right decisions. ‘She really hated it,’ one senior official remembered. ‘She chafed against her own policy that local
authorities were free.’
²⁵
This was noticed.
The
Times Educational Supplement
, which was the voice of the educational establishment and Mrs Thatcher’s opponent throughout, complained that she continued ‘to hide behind the autonomy of the local authorities … when it suits her, but as soon as they use their autonomy in a way she does not like, out comes the big stick.’
²⁶
As for other policy solutions, she lacked the official support, the intellectual preparation and the political clout to produce any of her own. She rejected voucher schemes providing for real parental choice, on the grounds that their effects would be unmanageable. She warmly supported the existing direct grant schools, which mixed central government bursaries with fee-paying, but she did not dare to extend their number beyond the 176 schools already operating. In essence, she found herself presiding over a vast change of educational structure whose underlying egalitarian principles she did not support, but which she was powerless to reverse.

This sense of frustration was fed by a sense of isolation. At the DES, she did not feel among friends. In her memoirs, she describes the prevailing atmosphere there as ‘self-righteously socialist’.
²⁷
One of her first complaints on arriving at the Department was that she had seen lots of Marxist books for sale in Dillons, the London University bookshop. The officials’ puzzlement at how to react to a matter which had nothing to do with them was interpreted by Mrs Thatcher as a sort of complicity in the act.
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*
After she had had Bill Pile and his wife to lunch at her home in Lamberhurst, she was irritated not to receive a thank-you letter from Pile’s left-wing wife. Irritated, but not surprised: ‘What do you expect,’ she complained to an official. ‘She’s Communist Party. She’s CP.’
²⁹
On 12 September 1970, Ted Heath was called away at the last minute by the Palestinian hijacking crisis involving Leila Khaled, and Mrs Thatcher had to substitute for him as the speaker for the centenary dinner of the National Union of Teachers at Guildhall. She professed herself shocked by what she saw that night of the crony relationship between her officials and the NUT. ‘It’s a closed world,’ she remembered thinking. ‘I saw how closely some of our top civil servants were in with the NUT.’
³⁰
This particularly worried her because of Communist influence in the NUT, a subject which she later raised in the Cabinet.