Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (53 page)

Reece remained worried that Mrs Thatcher might be trapped into over-exposure and too much public argument. He arranged for her to be filmed for Granada Television’s
World in Action
because the programme was to be more personal. He had a row with Neave (Neave refers to him in his diary as ‘one Rees’) because he thought she should not appear on
Midweek
as well – a row which he lost.
World in Action
, though filmed the week before, did not appear until the eve of the first ballot. It showed Mrs Thatcher with her family discussing the Sunday papers, working in her constituency, meeting a council cleaner, chatting to colleagues and speaking at a public meeting. She spoke, as she had done so often before, about managing a home as well as a career. She said that her experience of the October election had led her to feel that she could cope with the leadership ‘every bit as well as my colleagues’ (thus accidentally confirming that she had entertained thoughts of the job when still backing Keith Joseph), and she once again dismissed the notion of herself as a defender of privilege. She emphasized her Grantham background and declared: ‘All my ideas about [Britain] were formed before I was seventeen or eighteen.’ She promised to offer Heath a post in her Shadow Cabinet, but not, ‘for the present’, Enoch Powell (now back in Parliament as an Ulster Unionist), since he had ‘deserted his own people’.

The reason that Mrs Thatcher put herself more in the front line in the last week, and expressed her views more strongly, was a growing confidence within her team. Neave and Shelton kept poring over the figures on Shelton’s sheet. As early as 21 January 1975, Neave noted: ‘It became evident during the day that Margaret was in the lead and I told her so. She distinguished herself by a brilliant attack on the capital transfer tax late tonight.’
¹⁰²
The next day, Neave decided to release the news that Mrs Thatcher was ahead on the first ballot by their count. On 23 January the BBC
Today
programme led with this story. ‘This has caused a sensation,’ wrote Neave, ‘and sent the establishment into a flat spin. My birthday aged 59 today. I went to see Margaret. She does not want too much TV exposure.’
¹⁰³
On Sunday 26 January, Neave spoke to George Clark of
The Times
: ‘I said Margaret was in a “strong position” on the first ballot. I had agreed this line with Bill Shelton who went with me and Keith Joseph to see Margaret at 19 Flood Street at 6 p.m… . She has 112 pledges and Heath less than 80 but this must be too optimistic. It is essential to give out no figures.’
¹⁰⁴
In the Labour government, these developments were observed with interest, and provoked disagreement. In his diary for 24 January, Bernard Donoughue records a conversation between Harold Wilson and his press secretary, Joe Haines: ‘Before he left Joe suggested to him [Wilson] that we should give a police escort to Mrs Thatcher – to help her subtly in the leadership contest with Heath because Joe said he wanted Heath beaten: “He is still the most dangerous.” HW agreed at first and then wavered – he said he feared Thatcher as well, especially as a woman.’
¹⁰⁵

As the campaign entered its closing phase, the ‘establishment’ which Mrs Thatcher had decided to take on pulled out all the stops. Lord Home announced his support for Heath. The constituency chairmen, generally more supportive of the central power than the rank and file beneath them, declared heavily for Heath too. And even the battered rank and file, according to a poll in the
Daily Express
published on 3 February, backed Heath: 70 per cent of Conservative voters said they preferred him to any rival. Heath’s campaign managers, believing their own counts of pledges, put it about that Ted was winning, hoping that this momentum would carry him through and frighten off opposition which would fear the repercussions that would follow a Heath victory. This in turn caused Neave to alter tactics. His earlier assertion that Mrs Thatcher was ahead had increased her support. In his last diary entry before he became too busy to keep it going – 28 January – he wrote: ‘There are allegedly signs that Heath support is growing … but our canvass does not support this.’ But he saw that many of those inclining to Mrs Thatcher did so not because they actually wanted her to be leader, but because they sought a second ballot in which other candidates could stand. Neave wanted to make such people feel that a vote for Mrs Thatcher in the first ballot would make it easy for Willie Whitelaw or Jim Prior or another to enter the race, whereas a Heath victory would obviously kill everything dead.

On 1 February,
The Times
, edited by Mrs Thatcher’s Oxford
contemporary William Rees-Mogg,
*
endorsed Whitelaw, even though he was not yet a candidate. Neave decided to exploit all this and therefore put it about, though his numbers told him otherwise, that ‘Margaret is doing well, but not quite well enough.’ On the night before the ballot, Neave spoke to Robert Carvel, the political correspondent of the
Evening Standard
, and told him that Heath’s figures were higher than he really thought they were. The paper’s first edition duly ran with the story and Bill Shelton was instructed to buy extra copies for the Commons smoking and tea rooms for the supporters of alternative successors to Heath, such as Whitelaw or Prior, to peruse.
¹⁰⁶
The tactic worked. Faced with the prospect of yet more Heath, several men with no time for Mrs Thatcher voted for her. Outside the Thatcher camp, information about support for Heath was tainted. On the day before the poll, Bernard Weatherill, worried that his chief, Atkins, was leaning too much to Mrs Thatcher, showed Tim Kitson the whips’ office’s own figures.
¹⁰⁷
They reported twenty-five more votes than there were MPs. People were lying, and naturally they were lying more to the incumbent than to the challenger. For his part, Atkins told Heath that he ought to be confident of 129 votes.
¹⁰⁸
At the heart of all this, the challenger herself remained calm, almost detached. Mrs Thatcher did as Neave told her and got on with the Finance Bill. Although always in a terrible state before making a public speech, she was much less nervous about a behind-the-scenes campaign. Those close to her at that time were impressed. Joan Hall thought that Mrs Thatcher understood that she was riding a tide: ‘She was above all ordinary mortals,’ waiting quietly for whatever fate held in store.
¹⁰⁹

On the day of the first ballot, Mrs Thatcher kept a lunch appointment at Rothschild’s Bank to which she was taken by the young MP Norman Lamont,
^†
who worked for them. On the way there, noticing an
Evening Standard
placard saying, ‘Constituencies rally to Heath’, Mrs Thatcher remarked: ‘CCO [Conservative Central Office] has been working hard.’
¹¹⁰
Sir Evelyn de Rothschild was the only senior member of the family to attend the lunch. Lord (Victor) Rothschild, who had run Heath’s Think Tank, refused to attend, as did his son Jacob. All through the lunch,
Mrs Thatcher found herself attacked on all sides. On the way back, she said to Lamont: ‘Never take me to that red bank again.’
¹¹¹
*
Lamont found himself drafting insincere thank-you letters from both the guest and the host.

The poll closed at 3.30, and the result did not take long in coming. Shelton’s final canvass had suggested 124 votes for Mrs Thatcher and 122 for Heath. Standing as a ‘teller’ of the votes outside Committee Room 14, which had been set aside for the ballot, he publicly bet Kitson a pound that his candidate would win. In fact, the figures were better for Shelton’s candidate than he himself had predicted. Among votes cast on the spot, the two leading candidates were neck and neck, but the postal votes pulled Mrs Thatcher ahead: she got 130 votes, Heath 119, Fraser 16. There were six abstentions and five spoiled ballot papers. Canvass records suggest, though he has never confirmed this, that one of these abstentions was Michael Heseltine.
^†
Another was certainly Jim Prior, a Heath supporter, whose train arrived too late for him to vote.

It has often been reported that when Ted Heath heard the news of his defeat he said, ‘We got it all wrong,’
¹¹²
implying a mismanaged campaign. William Waldegrave, who was present, remembered it differently. Heath said, ‘So it’s all gone wrong then,’ by which he meant that something had fundamentally changed, and that the politics which Heath stood for had lost. ‘He thought he’d lost the Apostolic Succession.’
¹¹³

The Thatcher camp, which had retained discipline throughout, now suffered a lapse of taste. On the night of the result, Neave gave a party with champagne in his flat, and the television cameras were allowed in – a mistake since there was, as yet, no final winner. It looked as though they were rubbing Heath’s nose in his defeat. Denis was filmed grinning toothily, and making one of his very few public utterances. Asked for his reaction, he said, ‘Delighted! Terribly proud, naturally. Wouldn’t you be?’
¹¹⁴
Due to the astonishing demands of her parliamentary timetable, Mrs Thatcher then returned, after dinner with the Neaves, to the Commons for further debate of the committee stage of the Finance Bill. She was not able to go home until 2.30 in the morning. When she tried to leave with Joan Hall, who
had been driving her all through the campaign, they found the gates of the House of Commons closed and Hall’s car locked in.
¹¹⁵
The staff had to be found to unlock them and allow the two women to drive away in Miss Hall’s MGB GT harvest-gold two-seater.

Under the rules, Mrs Thatcher had not won outright. There would be a second ballot, and her team expected that there would be a third. Heath at last faced the inevitable, and resigned, making Robert Carr interim leader until the ultimate result. With hindsight, it is easy to see that Mrs Thatcher’s victory on the second ballot was almost assured. She had the momentum, the press excitement and the prestige which came from having had the courage to challenge. She had set the agenda, and proved that she could triumph over the establishment. But that was not how she saw things at the time. It seemed perfectly possible that the party, having screwed itself up to get rid of Heath, would turn ungratefully upon its chosen assassin.
*
Many agreed with Reggie Maudling, who bumped into Kenneth Baker in the hours after the result of the first ballot and told him: ‘This is the darkest day in the history of the Tory Party: they’ve all gone absolutely mad.’
¹¹⁶
Willie Whitelaw declared his candidacy on the night of Heath’s defeat and Mrs Thatcher always maintained in later years that she thought he would beat her.
^117
†
There was also talk of Julian Amery
^‡
and Maurice Macmillan, brothers-in-law, standing too. In fact, it was John Peyton,
^§
Jim Prior and Geoffrey Howe who entered the fray. The first was not a serious candidate, the second, more serious, would never have been an ally of Mrs Thatcher, but the third, Howe, perturbed her. She had told Neave
^¶
that Howe would be almost the only member of the Shadow Cabinet apart from Joseph to support her. In fact, he had voted for Heath in the first ballot. Supported by his old friend Ian Gow,
^**
who was later to play such an important part
in Mrs Thatcher’s life, Howe put himself forward quite strongly. ‘I didn’t have the wit to realize it at the time,’ Mrs Thatcher remembered, ‘but he had far more naked ambition than I’d thought.’
¹¹⁸
Even at this stage, Howe was not as close to her as their shared economic views might have suggested.

Whitelaw quickly couched his appeal as one of unity and moderation, particularly reaching what the
Guardian
called ‘the northern and working-class folks’.
¹¹⁹
Mrs Thatcher’s campaign therefore moved towards the centre, denying that she was a monetarist or necessarily opposed to incomes policy. She spoke up, too, to quash rumours that she was anti-European: ‘This torch [of pro-Europeanism] must be picked up … by whoever is chosen … Experience shows that our presence in the Community has helped ensure that it is outward-looking.’
¹²⁰
To attract centrist votes, an approach was made to Prior, hinting that, if he dropped his candidacy, he could become Mrs Thatcher’s deputy leader. He turned this down.
¹²¹

Despite a fierce row, Gordon Reece managed to persuade Mrs Thatcher not to go on
Panorama
for a debate with the other four candidates. She had wanted to do so to prove that she was not frightened just because she was a woman, but, after much acrimony, Reece’s argument that ‘The dragon in shallow water is the sport of shrimps’ prevailed.
¹²²
The only setpiece public appearance before the second ballot was therefore the chance provided by the Young Conservatives conference in Eastbourne that weekend. Mrs Thatcher and Whitelaw paraded together on the seafront for the cameras, and he offered her a public kiss with the unintentionally hilarious justification to the press that they had done it often before ‘and it is perfectly genuine and normal and right to do so’.
¹²³
Whitelaw’s opportunity at the conference was confined to a question-and-answer session with the delegates on party organization and devolution at which his performance was considered lacklustre. Mrs Thatcher, by contrast, risked wrath by campaigning more obviously. In her platform speech, she told the delegates: ‘I believe we should judge people on merit and not on background. I believe the person who is prepared to work hardest should get the greatest rewards and keep them after tax; that we should back the workers not the shirkers … You would not have political liberty for long if all power and property went to the State.’
¹²⁴
She
received sixty-seven seconds of applause. In the next morning’s
Sunday Express
, Mrs Thatcher spoke of the nation’s ‘thousand years of history’ and the ‘challenge to [the] survival’ of the British people. She spoke of a ‘turning-point for Britain’. ‘We may not have a Churchill now [subtly hinting that they might soon be getting one] – but the instincts and traditions on which Churchill founded his appeal to the nation to fight and to survive are very far from dead.’ ‘The party will unite itself,’ she said. ‘What
I
want to do is to unite the country.’
¹²⁵
Against all this, Whitelaw’s television stunt, in which he was filmed drying the dishes at home in his cardigan, was not powerful.