The Downing Street Years (5 page)

John Biffen I appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He had been a brilliant exponent in Opposition of the economic policies in which I believed and, before that, a courageous critic of the Heath Government’s U-turn. But he proved rather less effective than I had hoped in the gruelling task of trying to control public expenditure. His later performance as Leader of the House where the qualities required were acute political sensitivity, good humour and a certain style was far happier. John Nott became Secretary of State for Trade. He, too, had a clear understanding of and commitment to our policies of monetary control, low taxes and free enterprise. But John is a mixture of gold, dross and mercury. No one was better at analysing
a situation and prescribing a policy to deal with it. But he found it hard, or perhaps boring, to stick with the policy once it had been firmly decided. His vice was second thoughts.

With Geoffrey and Keith helping me to give a lead to the Cabinet, however, and with the loyalty I knew I could rely upon from Willie and some of the others, I believed we could see the economic strategy through.

Otherwise, it seemed prudent in the light of our effective performance in Opposition and the election campaign to maintain a high degree of continuity between Shadow Cabinet and Cabinet posts. Willie Whitelaw became Home Secretary, and in that capacity and later as Leader of the Lords he provided me personally and the Government as a whole with shrewd advice based on massive experience. People were often surprised that the two of us worked so well together, given our rivalry for the leadership and our different outlook on economics. But Willie is a big man in character as well as physically. He wanted the success of the Government which from the first he accepted would be guided by my general philosophy. Once he had pledged his loyalty, he never withdrew it. He supported me steadfastly when I was right and, more important, when I wasn’t. He was an irreplaceable deputy prime minister — an office which has no constitutional existence but is a clear sign of political precedence — and the ballast that helped keep the Government on course.

But I felt that some changes in portfolios were required. I brought in the formidable Christopher Soames to be Leader of the House of Lords. Christopher was his own man, indeed excessively so, and thus better suited to solo performances — whether as Ambassador in Paris or the last Governor of Rhodesia — than to working in harmony with others. Peter Carrington, who had led the Lords skilfully in Opposition, became Foreign Secretary. His unrivalled experience of foreign affairs more than qualified him for the job. Peter had great panache and the ability to identify immediately the main points in any argument; and he could express himself in pungent terms. We had disagreements, but there were never any hard feelings. We were an effective combination — not least because Peter could always tell some particularly intractable foreign minister that whatever he himself might feel about a particular proposition, there was no way in which his prime minister would accept it. This generally proved convincing. I was determined, however, that at least one Foreign Office minister should have a good grounding in — and sound views on — economic policy. I had Peter bring in Nick Ridley.

Two other appointments excited more comment. To his surprise,
I asked Peter Walker to be Minister of Agriculture. Peter had never made a secret of his hostility to my economic strategy. But he was both tough and persuasive, priceless assets in dealing with the plain absurdities of the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy. His membership of the Cabinet demonstrated that I was prepared to include every strand of Conservative opinion in the new Government, and his post that I was not prepared to put the central economic strategy at risk.

That was perhaps less clear in my decision to keep Jim Prior on at Employment. I shall describe elsewhere the divergences of opinion between Jim and the rest of us during Opposition. Running on from that time there was a lively argument about trade union reform. We all agreed that trade unions had acquired far too many powers and privileges. We also agreed that these must be dealt with one step at a time. But when it came down to specific measures, there was deep disagreement about how fast and how far to move. Yet there was no doubt in my mind that we needed Jim Prior. There was still the feeling in the country, and indeed in the Conservative Party, that Britain could not be governed without the tacit consent of the trades unions. It was to be some years before that changed. If we had signalled the wholesale reform of the unions over and against their opposition at the outset, it would have undermined confidence in the Government and perhaps even provoked a challenge we were not yet ready to face. Jim was the badge of our reasonableness. He had forged good relations with a number of trade union leaders whose practical value he perhaps overestimated. But he was an experienced politician and a strong personality — qualities he subsequently demonstrated to great effect in Northern Ireland.

The law prescribes that only twenty-two people may receive the salaries of Cabinet ministers. My decision to appoint a Foreign Secretary from the House of Lords meant that we had to have an additional Foreign minister in the Cabinet to answer in the Commons. Members of the House of Commons in any case dislike seeing too many Members of the Lords in the Cabinet. They accept, of course, that the Leader of the Lords and the Lord Chancellor (in this case the distinguished and effervescent Quintin Hailsham) and possibly a third peer of obvious suitability must be in the Cabinet. But they demand that there must be a second Cabinet minister in the Commons to answer for any departmental head who is a peer. In this post I appointed Ian Gilmour. (A similar arrangement would later be necessary when David Young joined the Cabinet, first at Employment and then at Trade and Industry.) Ian remained at the Foreign Office for two years. Subsequently,
he was to show me the same loyalty from the back-benches as he had in government.

I was anxious to have Angus Maude in the Cabinet to benefit from his years of political experience, his sound views, and his acid wit. He would handle government information. At the end of the day, we were short of one place. As a result, Norman Fowler, as Minister of State at Transport, was not able to be an official member of the Cabinet, although he attended all our meetings.

By about 11 p.m. the list of Cabinet was complete and had been approved by the Queen. I went upstairs to thank the No. 10 telephonists who had had a busy time arranging all the appointments for the following day. Then I was driven home.

On Saturday I saw the future Cabinet one by one. It all went smoothly enough. Those who were not already Privy Councillors were sworn in at Buckingham Palace.
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By Saturday afternoon the Cabinet was appointed and the names announced to the press. That gave every new minister the weekend to draft instructions to his department to put into effect the manifesto policies. In fact there was slightly more time than usual, since Monday was a Bank Holiday.

On Saturday night we completed the list of junior ministers, and I saw or telephoned them on the Sunday. Many of these would later enter Cabinet, including Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit, Nick Ridley and John Wakeham. The best junior ministers were always in great demand by their seniors: a really good ministerial team is of enormous importance in keeping effective political control over the work of a government department. There were some sixty posts to be filled. But the whole Government had been appointed and announced within 48 hours of my entering Downing Street.

My last and best appointment was of Ian Gow as my Parliamentary Private Secretary (or PPS). Ian’s combination of loyalty, shrewdness
and an irrepressible sense of fun was to see us all through many difficult moments. He was an instinctive parliamentarian who loved every aspect of the House of Commons. In private conversation he had the ability to draw everyone into the political circle and make them feel theirs was the vital contribution. In public his speeches were marked by a deadpan humour which could reduce both sides of the House to tears of laughter. We remained close friends after Ian’s principled resignation over the Anglo-Irish agreement which he opposed from a standpoint of undiluted Unionism. His murder by IRA terrorists in 1990 was an irreplaceable loss.

Monday was, as I have noted, a Bank Holiday. I came into No. 10 and took the opportunity to complete a number of nonministerial appointments. John Hoskyns arrived in the afternoon to become head of my Policy Unit.
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John’s background was in business and computers; but over and above that experience, he had strong powers of analysis and had helped formulate our economic strategy in Opposition. He propagated the theory that a ‘culture of decline’ was the ultimate cause of many of Britain’s economic problems. In government he repeatedly compelled ministers to relate each problem to our overall strategy of reversing that decline. He kept our eye on the ball.

That same day I saw Kenneth Berrill, the head of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) or ‘Think-Tank’. The CPRS had originally been set up by Ted Heath as a source of long-term policy advice for the Government, at a time when there were fewer private think-tanks, fewer special advisers in government and a widespread belief that the great questions of the day could be resolved by specialized technical analysis. But a government with a firm philosophical direction was inevitably a less comfortable environment for a body with a technocratic outlook. And the Think-Tank’s detached speculations, when leaked to the press and attributed to ministers, had the capacity to embarrass. The world had changed, and the CPRS could not change with it. For these and other reasons, I believe that my later decision to abolish the CPRS was right and probably inevitable. And I have to say that I never missed it.

I also asked Sir Derek Rayner to set up an Efficiency Unit that would tackle the waste and ineffectiveness of government. Derek was another successful businessman, from what everyone used to describe
as my favourite company, Marks & Spencer. The two of us used to say that in politics you judge the value of a service by the amount you put in, but in business you judge it by the amount you get out. We were both convinced of the need to bring some of the attitudes of business into government. We neither of us conceived just how difficult this would prove.

On the same day I saw Sir Richard O’Brien on a matter which illustrates the extraordinary range of topics which crossed my desk in these first days. Sir Richard was not only chairman of the Manpower Services Commission, the QUANGO which supervised the nation’s training schemes,
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but also chairman of the committee to advise the prime minister on the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury. (Donald Coggan had announced his intention to retire; his successor had to be found by the end of the year.) He informed me about the committee’s work and gave me an idea of when it would be ready to make its recommendations. In view of my later relations with the hierarchy, I could wish that Sir Richard had combined his two jobs and established a decent training scheme for bishops.

It was the nation’s financial and economic affairs, however, which required immediate attention. Sir John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, gave a reassuring impression of quiet efficiency which turned out to be entirely accurate. He had prepared a short brief on the most urgent questions, such as public sector pay and the size of the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR), and compiled a list of imminent meetings with other heads of government. Each of these required early decisions to be made. My last appointment that Monday afternoon was with Geoffrey Howe to discuss his forthcoming budget. That night — most unusually — I managed to get back to Flood Street for dinner with the family. But there was no let-up in activity. I had a stack of papers to read on every conceivable subject.

Or so it seemed. The ceaseless flow of red despatch boxes had begun — anything up to three each evening and four at weekends. But I set to with a will. There is never another opportunity like that given to a new government with a fresh electoral mandate to place its stamp firmly on public affairs, and I was determined to take advantage of it.

On Tuesday at 2.30 p.m. we held our first Cabinet meeting. It was ‘informal’: no agenda had been prepared by the Cabinet Secretariat and no minutes were taken. (Its conclusions were later recorded in the first ‘formal’ Cabinet which met on the customary Thursday morning.) Ministers reported on their departments and the preparations they had made for forthcoming legislation. We gave immediate effect to the pledges in our manifesto to see that both the police and the armed forces were properly paid. As a result of the crisis of morale in the police service, the fall in recruitment and talk of a possible police strike, the Labour Government had set up a committee on police pay under Lord Justice Edmund Davies. The committee had devised a formula to keep police pay in line with other earnings. We decided that the recommendations for pay increases due for implementation on 1 November should be brought forward. This was duly announced the following day, Wednesday. We similarly decided that the full military salary recommended by the latest Report of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body should be paid in full, as from 1 April.

At that first informal Cabinet we began the painful but necessary process of shrinking down the public sector after years in which it was assumed that it should grow at the expense of the private sector. So we imposed an immediate freeze on all civil service recruitment, though this would later be modified and specific targets for reduction set. We started a review of the controls imposed by central on local government, though here, too, we would in due course be forced down the path of applying still tougher, financial controls, as the inability or refusal of local councils to run services efficiently became increasingly apparent.

Pay and prices were an immediate concern, as they continued to be throughout those economically troubled early years. Professor Hugh Clegg’s Commission on Pay Comparability had been appointed by the Labour Government as a respectable means of bribing public sector workers not to strike with postdated cheques due to be presented after the election. The Clegg Commission was a major headache, and the pain became steadily more acute as the cheques fell due.
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