Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (49 page)

Besides, there was a fundamental incoherence about the ‘government of national unity’ idea. Who was going to lead it? Heath naturally thought
that he would, but polls showed that it was he, more than any other leading politician, whom the public regarded as divisive. Many of those close to Heath tried to persuade him to offer the ‘supreme sacrifice’, in which he would publicly suggest that he would be prepared to step down in the interests of unity. They argued that he had nothing to lose since, if he won, he would be in a strong position to lead any coalition he chose and, if he lost, he had no chance anyway. But Heath was made thoroughly suspicious by the idea, and rejected it. The Tory campaign therefore ended in incoherence. Wilson was able to present the ‘national unity’ idea as a ‘Con trick’. The Labour Party increased its majority to forty-two over the Conservatives, though its overall majority in the Commons was only three. The final state of the parties was Labour 319, Conservatives 277, Liberals 13, SNP 11, Plaid Cymru 3, Ulster Unionists and others 12. In Finchley, Mrs Thatcher’s majority fell by 2,000:

‘I was now in no doubt’, Mrs Thatcher recalled, ‘that Ted should go.’
¹¹¹

After the October defeat, it was not only the right of the Conservative Party that wanted Heath to go. Indeed, plans had been laid, or rather inconclusively debated, beforehand. On 7 August 1974, Sara Morrison, as loyal as anyone to Heath, had spoken privately to Airey Neave: ‘She agreed that E. Heath has to go if we lose. She favours Ian Gilmour but accepts W. Whitelaw interim. She rules out Margaret. Robert Carr can’t decide “whether he wants a boiled or a fried egg”. Keith Joseph is played out.’
¹
On the day of the result, Sara Morrison tried to get Heath to resign.
²
So did Lord Carrington and Jim Prior. Some complained that Heath’s close friend Lord Aldington was a bad influence in helping him shield himself from the reality of defeat,
³
but really there was only one big reason why Heath still stayed, one object that proved immoveable. This was, as Lord Carrington put it succinctly, ‘Ted’.
⁴
Despite a weight of opinion to the contrary, Heath continued to believe that he alone was fit to be national leader when, as he expected, the economic crisis would demand some sort of coalition government. He sat still therefore, and his unhappy close supporters stayed loyal, but the Tory Party began to move against him.

On Monday 14 October 1974 the Executive of the 1922 Committee met in Edward Du Cann’s house in Lord North Street. Du Cann asked each in turn for his views. As Neave recorded it, ‘All thought Heath should go, but varied when … The only dissident was Du Cann himself who thought Heath should stay two years perhaps because he has thoughts of the job.’
⁵
The Executive agreed that Du Cann should go at once to Heath and tell him what they thought. They arranged to meet the next morning so that Du Cann could report the result of the conversation, and chose the offices of his bank, Keyser Ullmann in Milk Street, to avoid the scrutiny of the press. At the Milk Street gathering, a meeting of the full 1922 Committee (that is, all Tory backbenchers) was set for 31 October. ‘A letter was then dictated’, wrote Neave, ‘… saying it was in the best interests of the party that he [Heath] should state his intention. It was to be delivered by
hand. I hope it has more success than the Du Cann interview yesterday evening with Heath when the latter made no comment as he told him our opinion that he should resign!! We are being snubbed as usual. It is Heath’s attitude to Parliament of which I most disapprove. Du Cann said he was the only one at the meeting who “liked” Heath which is the most palpable nonsense.’ Despite the precautions, the press were lurking outside. The Executive took evasive action: ‘Du Cann led us to the back door and a key was found, with many jokes about Colditz.’ Photographers popped up, though, and snapped Du Cann, Neave and others as they tried to sneak out. The pro-Heath
Evening Standard
ran the picture with the headline ‘The Milk Street Mafia’. Heath gave a television broadcast that night in which he was more effective than usual. ‘We have lost the first round,’ wrote Neave.
⁶
Indeed, the Heath camp counterattacked. The Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, told the left-wing but anti-Heath MP Nigel Fisher
*
that the Executive of the ’22 would be rejected
en bloc
in the coming elections. Heath said that he would not meet the Executive until after these elections on 7 November. He was taking his stand on the principle that until there was a new House of Commons in session, and therefore new elections to the Executive, he would not deal with the ’22. For Neave, a period of anxiety and gloom ensued. Travelling on the Brighton train to stay with friends, he noted: ‘I was rather disgusted by the vulgar, sleek, first-class passengers. I wonder if they realised that the country is on the verge of revolution.’
^7
†

When the full 1922 Committee met on 31 October, however, Edward Du Cann was cheered, and only two speakers supported Heath: nineteen opposed him. One backbencher, Kenneth Lewis, struck home with his deadly phrase that the leadership was ‘a leasehold, not a freehold’. ‘Anyone but he [Heath] would resign after this meeting,’ wrote Neave.
⁸
But when the Chief Whip telephoned Heath, who was in Wales, to report the mood of the meeting, Heath refused to give up. Willie Whitelaw told friends that Heath was being unbelievably arrogant,
⁹
but he and the other Tory grandees continued to shield him. On 7 November the entire, anti-Heath 1922
Executive was re-elected, despite the whips. Emboldened, its members drafted a letter to Heath calling for an early contest. Part of the difficulty surrounding all of this was that the 1965 rules for the election of the leader – the first balloted election in the party’s history – made no provision for a challenge to a sitting leader. New rules were therefore needed and the 1922 Executive were intensely suspicious that Heath would find a way of spinning out – or suddenly rushing forward – rule changes, or of constructing all changes in his favour. They knew they could, eventually, force a contest, but they did not know when, or under what rules. On 14 November, however, Heath came to the ’22 (‘He was coldly but politely received,’ wrote Neave in his diary of that day) and agreed to set up a review of the system for electing the leader. The man in charge of the changes was Lord Home, the leader whom Heath, though not by direct challenge, had displaced. It was now expected that there would be a leadership election in February 1975. Much less certain, though, was who, apart from Heath, would be a candidate. Neave, and most of the 1922 Executive, including Nigel Fisher, Charlie Morrison and Philip Goodhart,
*
wanted Heath out, but cast rather desperately around for an alternative. Neave’s diary reveals his perplexity. In the course of 1974 he looked with favour often on Du Cann, quite often on Margaret Thatcher, sometimes on Whitelaw, sometimes on Joseph, occasionally on Gilmour. Like most Conservative MPs at the time, he was following no very strong ideological line. He was simply searching for a credible replacement for Heath, a response to what he saw as national and party failure. Just after the October defeat he noted that there was not much support for Whitelaw: ‘This makes K. Joseph the favourite, though Jack Weatherill deputy chief whip
^†
says he is liable to nervous breakdowns!’
¹⁰
At a dinner party the following evening, ‘We could find nothing but objections to possible candidates e.g. Whitelaw, K. Joseph, Carr, Margaret Thatcher. K. Joseph most likely.’ On the day before Heath finally agreed to review the leadership election rules, Nigel Fisher organized a meeting of MPs to consider the candidacy of Du Cann. Neave was interested in the idea, and attended the meeting, but recorded: ‘It appears that he [Du Cann] is not yet willing to stand partly owing to his wife’s dislike
of politics. We discussed how rumours about his reputation in the City can be countered as inquiries show nothing against him although Keyser Ullmann has a doubtful reputation … It is premature to start a campaign.’
¹¹

If Mrs Thatcher’s own account is to be believed, she had no thought, in the wake of the October election, of challenging for the party leadership herself. She has recorded that she gave her wholehearted backing to Keith Joseph. While she is undoubtedly accurate, in her memoirs, about her loyalty towards Joseph, she is over-innocent about her attitude to her own fortunes at this time. In the course of 1974 more and more people had begun to notice her abilities, and some had told her so. One omen, auspicious at a time when the Morrison family was credited with preternatural powers of understanding the Tory psyche, was a visit paid her by Peter Morrison, brother of Charlie, and at that time a new MP, in August 1974.
*
He reported to her and endorsed the view of his father, Lord Margadale, who, as John Morrison, had been chairman of the 1922 Committee in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘Mark my words, Mrs Thatcher is going to be the next Leader of the Conservative party.’
^12
†

The press began to take notice. Everyone agreed that Mrs Thatcher had had a good campaign in October 1974, and on polling day the
Sun
singled her out as the only Tory to have done so. The next day, in reply to leadership speculation from the
Evening News
, she said, ‘You can cross my name off the list.’ The journalist John Clare, who met Mrs Thatcher for a piece he was writing about her in the
Observer
for 13 October, remembered that she was seeking press attention at the time, letting it be known that she would be at a particular place at a particular moment: ‘She was testing the water.’
¹³
The following Sunday, in an artful interview in the
Sunday Express
, Mrs Thatcher insisted that ‘my only wish is to further the Conservative Party and the philosophy upon which it is founded.’ (References to Tory ‘philosophy’ were coded attacks on Heath, because he was thought to have abandoned it.) But she added that ‘the prejudice against women is dropping faster than I expected,’ and phrased her sympathy for Heath in a way that
contrasted him unfavourably with herself: ‘All this is so wretched for him … And unlike me he hasn’t a family around him from whom to draw strength.’
*
She then answered, quite specifically, the question of whether she would stand: ‘If that time comes and people thought I was that woman, I would accept the challenge and do the job – as I have tried to do everything in my life – to the utmost of my ability.’
¹⁴
Her family would support her, she said. These were not the remarks of a person who had not given the leadership a moment’s thought.

In private, indeed, Mrs Thatcher was explicit on the point. On 15 October Fred Silvester, a disillusioned Heathite MP,
^†
wrote to her asking her to allow herself to go forward for the party leadership. In her (undated) reply, she was frank: ‘If the contest were to come immediately, I wouldn’t stand a chance. If later, I may … At present the country contains too much prejudice to accept a woman but with the sort of discussion that is now taking place through the media, it may change.’
¹⁵

Nevertheless, Mrs Thatcher’s working assumption remained that Joseph would challenge Heath and that she would back him. She was spoken of, informally, as his campaign manager. But between her giving her
Sunday Express
interview on 17 October and its publication on 20 October, the scene changed. On 19 October, Keith Joseph made a speech at Edgbaston which stirred up a hornets’ nest. Most of the speech was a thoughtful development of his earlier setpieces. He was trying to move the debate beyond the purely economic to ‘the tone of national life’, arguing, to adapt a phrase from a later row about Thatcherism, that there
is
such a thing as society. He called for a ‘battle of ideas to be fought in every school, university, publication, committee, TV studio’ to counter collectivism. And he developed his idea of the ‘cycle of deprivation’, deriving from work done by the left-wing Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) which showed demographic trends that he found dismaying. ‘The balance of our population,’ Joseph said, ‘our human stock, is threatened … A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world … Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational
attainment … They are producing problem children … Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes four and five, are now producing a third of all births …’ Joseph appeared to argue that such young women should be much more vigorously encouraged to use contraceptives.

In after years, there was some dispute about how this passage of argument came about. Alfred Sherman suggested that he had warned Joseph against using the CPAG’s material, because it was left wing, but said that he had indeed argued that we ‘needed a sexually structured society [that is, stable marriage] for free enterprise to work’.
¹⁶
Most of the phrases that Joseph used, including his numerical classification of social classes, had a Shermanic ring to them. What is certain, however, is that Joseph had not followed his usual practice of running drafts past Mrs Thatcher and other colleagues. The first that Mrs Thatcher knew of the speech was when she picked up a copy of the
Evening Standard
(which then published on a Saturday) at Waterloo station on her return from an engagement in Bournemouth.
¹⁷
‘SIR KEITH IN “STOP BABIES” SENSATION’ said the headline. She knew at once that this was trouble. Airey Neave’s reaction was fairly typical. ‘Keith Joseph made a speech in favour of the family yesterday,’
*
he wrote, ‘and deplored the decline in morals. Unfortunately he recommended that family planning be particularly applied to one-parent families. He was very tactless and this has raised a storm and will affect his chances of replacing Heath. The latter seems to have recovered his position and I suppose we have to accept the worst.’
¹⁸