Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (59 page)

Before long, Mrs Thatcher would use the word ‘Ronniefied’ to describe a speech improved by Millar’s hand, but as she approached her party conference speech for October 1975 she had not yet developed a pattern of speech composition. As a result, the chaos and tension were frightful. Always extremely nervous before any setpiece speech, Mrs Thatcher was triply so before her performance at the party conference. Her first as leader, she well knew, would be the most important single speech of her career so far. Under the electoral system then obtaining, the rank-and-file members of the Conservative Party had played no direct part in choosing her as leader. They were known, in the majority, to have supported Heath. Would they accept her now that she had overthrown him? If they did not, her support was certainly not so secure in Parliament, press or party hierarchy
that her leadership could easily survive. By her own account, she was dissatisfied with the early drafts of her speech from Patten and others in the Research Department, and spent the weekend at home writing her own.
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Throughout her time in Blackpool that week, Mrs Thatcher remained unhappy with the drafts, and numerous hands, including Angus Maude, as well as Ridley and Patten, and Richard Ryder to keep control of the material, slaved away. Alison Ward and Caroline Stephens retyped fifty-page drafts again and again on a manual typewriter, using six carbons and collating the copies on their hands and knees.
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After many laborious hours of laying out endlessly retyped texts on the floor in front of her, however, Mrs Thatcher still did not believe that she had a proper speech, and at last agreed to Gordon Reece’s suggestion that Ronnie Millar be called up to Blackpool (a painfully long train journey from London) to sort it out. It was not until 4.30 on the morning of Friday 10 October, the day of delivery, that her speech was ready and she went to bed.

Mrs Thatcher’s nerves in Blackpool had not been improved by the conduct of Ted Heath. The Conservative National Union, the body responsible, among other things, for organizing the party conference, was known to be sympathetic to Heath. When one of her staff took her to the room of the chairman of the National Union in the Imperial Hotel, they could hear Heath’s voice from inside, and rude remarks about her issuing through the closed door, so they hurried away. As they did so, Mrs Thatcher remarked: ‘Some men are bitches.’
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On the night before the speech, Willie Whitelaw telephoned to tell her that he thought he had effected reconciliation between her and Heath and that the two of them should meet in his room that night for a drink. She should await his call, he said. She did, for two hours, but no call came, so she telephoned Whitelaw who told her, crestfallen, ‘It won’t work.’ She was upset both by Whitelaw’s carelessness or weakness in not ringing her as promised and by Heath’s snub. ‘Tears came regardless,’ she remembered.
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Despite these tribulations, Mrs Thatcher looked well when she mounted the platform that Friday afternoon, three days before her fiftieth birthday. She wore a peacock-blue dress, tie collar and a slim-fitting turquoise coat. On the top of her script, she had written, as she often did with speeches at this time: ‘Relax. Low Speaking Voice. Not too slow.’ She addressed head-on the complaint that in the United States she had criticized Britain. She had criticized socialism, she said – ‘Britain and Socialism are not the same thing.’ She painted a gloomy picture of the economic situation – ‘We’ve really got a three-day week now, only it takes five days to do it’ – but, as so often, she gave it a moral rather than a technocratic context. There was a ‘moral challenge’ to the nations of the West, especially to Britain. ‘What
kind of people are we?’ Mrs Thatcher asked. The British had invented or discovered ‘the computer, refrigerator, electric motor, stethoscope, rayon, steam turbine, stainless steel, the tank, television, penicillin, radar, jet engine, hovercraft, float glass and carbon fibres. Oh, and the best half of Concorde.’
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She advocated a freer economy, though not pure laissez-faire (‘We Conservatives hate unemployment’), and she developed her defence of inequality that she had begun in America. ‘We are all unequal,’ she said, ‘… but to us every human being is equally important.’ In appealing for a great change, she cast her eyes back to the traditions of her country:

Let me give you my vision: a man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master – these are the British inheritance … We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery, not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped … We are coming, I think, to yet another turning point in our long history. We can go on as we have been going and continue down. Or we can stop and – with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough’.
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The ensuing standing ovation was much more than customary: it was genuine, the reaction of long-disheartened troops hearing their own innermost beliefs expressed with vigour and optimism. The idea that there was now a clear difference between one party and the other, and that a decision could and must be made about the country’s destiny, was exhilarating. And the enthusiasm from the hall was echoed in the press and in the country. A Marplan poll after Mrs Thatcher’s speech gave the Conservatives 54 per cent support, compared to 31 per cent for Labour. Speaking to the German
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magazine, and therefore, in those pre-internet days, slightly less cautious than she would have been in the British press, Mrs Thatcher attributed the huge cheers at Blackpool to the fact that she had broken with Heath’s tactics of staying close to Labour.
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Certainly she had secured a grass-root loyalty which was to prove unparalleled – ‘She cheered up the troops more than any party leader since Churchill,’ remembered Chris Patten with reluctant admiration
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– and was to last pretty much to the end. For the first time since winning, she felt secure in her leadership.

Changes took place at this time in the Thatcher family life. Denis, who had reached the age of sixty, retired from Burmah Oil in May 1975. At the moment of retirement, he remembered, he was earning £12,000 per annum, plus a £1,500 bonus in that final year.
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This he considered good money.
(At that time, his wife’s salary was £9,000.) Although he remained busy with non-executive directorships, Denis no longer had the daily reverse commute to Swindon. He therefore became more important than in the past in the counsel he gave his wife in political matters and was often present at the more informal meetings which took place in their house. Having sold The Mount in Lamberhurst, as too big and too little used, and later rented a flat in Court Lodge, the ‘big house’ of the village, the Thatchers moved into the old dower flat in Scotney Castle, also in Lamberhurst, that October. Over the dining-room table, they hung a large Arabic inscription presented to Mrs Thatcher by the Syrian Ambassador. Jonathan Aitken,
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then a young MP who became Carol’s boyfriend at about this time, used to visit Scotney and was surprised to see the inscription hanging there because, unknown to the Thatchers, it declared: ‘There is one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet.’
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Margaret and Denis enjoyed Scotney, but they had no domestic help there and the demands of the job meant that Margaret had even less time than before for country weekends. Besides, the twins did not want to spend much time in Lamberhurst. So most of life was lived in Flood Street, Chelsea, and it was not altogether easy. The twins, aged twenty-two, were based at home. Carol, dutifully but without enthusiasm, was completing her training as a solicitor. Mark, who had greatly upset his parents four years earlier by refusing a place at Keble College, Oxford,
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in favour of having fun in South Africa, was failing to obtain his qualifications as an accountant. Short of time and always inclined to look indulgently on her son, Mrs Thatcher was considered by some who worked with her to be ‘the ultimate chequebook mum’.
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In Carol’s view, after her Grantham upbringing, ‘which had control as its middle name’, her mother erred on the side of not ordering her children about.
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But Sue Mastriforte, whose back door in Flood Street abutted that of the Thatchers, was impressed by the efforts she made to preserve a proper home life.

Ms Mastriforte, whom Carol described as ‘a very good neighbour’,
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had been deserted by her husband in the mid-1970s and left to bring up her children with very little money. Mrs Thatcher was, in turn, a good neighbour to her. Shocked that she could be left in this plight, she was kind and tactful in giving her food and other objects (often presented to her on
her travels as leader), and sometimes slipped her small sums of money. She also arranged to pay her to do some of her shopping and look after her house. It was Sue Mastriforte, for example, who bought material in a Harrods sale out of which Mrs Thatcher had a dress made for her visit to America. Mrs Thatcher always arranged jaunts for the Mastriforte children in their holidays too. Under the strain of her marriage break-up, Ms Mastriforte had a heart attack in her flat one night and rang Carol, whom she had babysat when she was a teenager and who had become a close friend, to ask her to help. Carol’s mother raced across with her daughter, and rang 999. Sue Mastriforte was struck by Mrs Thatcher’s consideration as she spoke on the telephone to the ambulancemen: ‘When you arrive, please don’t ring the doorbell, because there are children asleep upstairs.’
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There was no doubt in her mind that Carol did not enjoy her mother’s eminence: ‘I think Carol would have liked a suburban mother with a pinny … baking cakes all day.’
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Carol sometimes felt neglected, becoming overweight and suffering Mrs Thatcher’s criticism for dressing frumpily (she particularly disliked a garment which Carol called her ‘fireman’s coat’).
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But, in Ms Mastriforte’s view, ‘Margaret was fairer than Carol gave her credit’ and certainly cared for her welfare. She ‘always knew what was happening with Carol’
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and tried rather vainly to find better ways of communicating with her. For her part, Carol liked Flood Street less than their previous homes: it was too small for all the traffic which started to flow through the door once her mother had become leader of the Opposition, and ‘not brilliant for four adults’.
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Family life, in these conditions, was not ideal, but, to Sue Mastriforte, Denis and Margaret seemed ‘a very close couple’; the fact that she was Conservative leader made him ‘ten feet tall with pride’.
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Even after her leadership victory, Mrs Thatcher remained a careful and proud housewife. ‘She always remembered that people had to eat.’
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She ‘made a big thing’ of Sunday lunch at Flood Street or Scotney, producing large, unimaginative meals of Coronation chicken and tinned mandarin oranges in the style she had learnt in the 1950s.
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She took a keen interest in her soft furnishings (‘She never stopped saying, “When I first got married, I had to make my own curtains” ’),
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always knew how much was in her bank account, but never what was in Denis’s, and amassed in the kitchen the Green Shield stamps (the equivalent of modern reward cards) that in those days many shops issued with purchases. She paid for all her clothes, and she and Denis split the household bills. Sue Mastriforte’s impression was that the Thatchers were comfortably off, but not rich. The children’s private education and subsequent training took their toll and Denis also helped support his divorced sister Joy. Theirs was the unosten
tatious life of the hard-working upper bourgeoisie in the age of inflation, never seriously feeling the pinch, but never luxurious.

In November 1975 the IRA murdered Ross McWhirter, a Thatcher supporter and a leading light in founding the National Association for Freedom, publicly launched very soon after his death, which tried to combat trade union power. His killing meant that, for the first time, Mrs Thatcher was given police protection, which was to remain with her for the rest of her life. This separated her more than before from anything that could be described as normality. But Bob Kingston, the Special Branch officer who came to guard her and stayed until the mid-1990s, was struck at once by how ‘remarkably easy’ Mrs Thatcher was and how friendly. She took a particular interest in Kingston’s handicapped son and never, in his view, gave herself airs. ‘She had difficulty with people who weren’t correct,’ he remembered, but to people who were presentable and efficient, she behaved impeccably: ‘In twenty years, she never once raised her voice to me.’
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In the autumn of 1975, Mrs Thatcher tried to capitalize on her success at Blackpool. In the House of Commons, this was hard to do. Although disillusioned, often drunk, and in declining health after having fought five elections as Labour leader, Harold Wilson remained a cunning and attractive parliamentary performer. In their twice-weekly duels at Prime Minister’s Questions, he found Mrs Thatcher ‘more pointed and less ideological’ than Heath had been, and decided that the best way not to build her up was not to attack her.
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To the eyes of his senior policy adviser, Bernard Donoughue, Mrs Thatcher seemed ‘petrified’ when she had to face the Prime Minister in the Chamber, ‘like a rabbit in front of a stoat’.
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Her voice counted against her too.
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To improve matters, Mrs Thatcher built up a group of young MPs, Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit,
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Geoffrey Pattie
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and George Gardiner, soon known, in echo of the Maoist clique in China at the time, as the ‘Gang of Four’, who would help her prepare for the Questions. She learnt fast, Tebbit remembered, and improved her technique with the help of Gordon Reece, but ‘she hadn’t really focused on a lot of
issues’ and she felt inhibited from using some forms of expression because she was a woman.
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In those pre-broadcast days, male MPs also felt no such inhibition in trying to mock Mrs Thatcher on the grounds of her sex. When she rose to speak, Labour backbenchers would often emit ‘female-type whoops’
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to try to make her look silly. Tebbit felt frustrated by her reaction to these difficulties, which was to be ultra-correct, concentrating on the issue rather than the man. For her part, Mrs Thatcher regarded Wilson as clever, nice, courteous and ‘subtle’,
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which was, in part, her way of saying that she did not want to engage with him too closely.