Secretaryminister and her departmentThatcher was Secretary of State for Education and Science for three years and eight months. Her time at the DES formed a crucial period of her political development, if only because it constituted her only experience of heading a government department before she became Prime Minister, responsible for running the entire Whitehall machine, just five years later. Unfortunately it was an unhappy experience; or at least that was how she came to remember it.Yet there was an element of hindsight in her recollection. In truth, her time at the DES was a good deal less embattled – and a good deal more successful – than she later suggested.sent her to Education mainly because he had to send her somewhere, and after all her switches of the previous six years that was the portfolio she happened to be shadowing when the music stopped in June 1970. Education was not high on the Government’s agenda; no major policy initiatives were planned.When Iain Macleod died suddenly just four weeks after the Government took office, Mrs Thatcher’s name was canvassed in some quarters as a possible replacement Chancellor. Though inexperienced she had proven expertise. But it is most unlikely that Heath ever considered her before choosing the more amenable Tony Barber. In his view Education was about her ceiling.Yet it was in some ways the worst possible department for her.was a department with an entrenched culture and a settled agenda of its own which it pursued with little reference to ministers or the rest of Whitehall. The convention was that education was above politics: government’s job was to provide the money but otherwise leave the running of the education system to the professionals. Political control, such as it was, was exercised not by the DES but by the local educational authorities up and down the country; the real power lay with the professional community of teachers, administrators and educational academics, all of whom expected to be consulted – and listened to – before any change in the organisation or delivery of education was contemplated. Political interference in the content of education was taboo. The Secretary of State, in fact, had very few executive powers at all. One of Mrs Thatcher’s Labour successors complained that his only power seemed to be to order the demolition of an air raid shelter in a school playground. It was not a department for an ambitious minister keen to make her mark.as well as temperamentally, Mrs Thatcher was antipathetic to the DES. She instinctively disliked its central project, the spread of comprehensive schools, and the whole self-consciously ‘progressive’ ideology that lay behind it. She disliked the shared egalitarian and collectivist philosophy of the educational establishment, and resented the fact that they all knew each other extremely well. Attending her first teachers’ union dinner soon after coming into office she was disturbed to discover that her senior officials were ‘on the closest of terms’ with the NUT leaders.1 She particularly disliked the assumption that her views were immaterial and her only function, as the elected minister, was to get the money to carry out the predetermined policy. In addition she correctly sensed that the educational mafia frankly disliked her.DES traditionally looked for two qualities in its Secretary of State. On the one hand, the Department’s self-esteem required a leader of high intellectual calibre and broad liberal culture. Senior officials were sniffy about Mrs Thatcher’s science degree and her lack of cultural interests. At the same time, however, the DES wanted a minister who would fight its corner in competition with Cabinet colleagues and against the Treasury; and in that respect Mrs Thatcher quickly proved her mettle. She was not a heavyweight but she was a fighter. The stubbornness which exasperated her officials within the Department delighted them when it was deployed against the rest of Whitehall. She could be ‘brutal’ and ‘a bully’; but the obverse was that she was ‘strong, determined and bloody-minded enough to wear down the Treasury’. She was ‘absolutely maddening’, one of her most senior mandarins recalled. ‘We liked that.’2 Despite her intellectual limitations – perhaps because of them – she turned out to be highly effective at winning the resources to carry out the Department’s policies; so that in the end they came reluctantly to regard her as one of the best of recent Secretaries of State. In fact, once they had explained to her the constraints of her office, Mrs Thatcher was in some ways the civil servant’s ideal minister: hard-working and demanding, but a good advocate for the Department, with no educational agenda of her own.is not to say that she did not have strong views, only that she had no power to impose them. Her attitude to education was simple, prescriptive and defiantly old-fashioned: she saw it not as a process of awakening or intellectual stimulation but as a body of knowledge, skills and values to be imparted by the teacher to the taught. (‘Mrs Gradgrind Thatcher’, one profile not unfairly called her.)3 She deplored the new child-centred teaching which held that everything was relative and value-free.Secretary of State she took great pride in her own (very slight) experience of teaching. In her first Oxford summer vacation she had taught maths and science for six weeks at a Grantham boys’ school. She used to recall this brief exposure to the chalkface to establish her credentials. At the same time she recognised that teaching was ‘a vocation which most people just do not have’.4 Teachers, of course, regarded such pieties as simply an excuse for underpaying them. In principle she did value good teachers – it was the teaching unions she blamed for protecting bad teachers while imposing a left-wing political orthodoxy of underachievement. But in 1970 the Secretary of State had very little power to affect either the quality or the content of education., it was her very success as a departmental minister, winning resources for policies she did not in her heart approve, which retrospectively poisoned her memory of the DES. From the perspective of the 1980s her record as a high-spending minister with the reputation of having ‘gone native’, who had tamely followed the departmental line and failed to halt the spread of comprehensivisation, was an embarrassment to her which never ceased to rankle. Stuart Sexton, a special adviser to successive Education Secretaries in the 1980s, felt that the Prime Minister ‘hated the Department of Education, because I think she realised they had taken her for a ride’.5 The fact is, however, that she did not hate them all at the time; nor did all of them hate her.certainly had her difficulties, beginning with the Permanent Secretary, Sir William Pile. Newly appointed in June 1970, Pile was an old DES hand who had spent most of his career in the Department, now coming back as its head after a spell in the Home Office as Director of Prisons. Described by the Whitehall historian Peter Hennessy as ‘a genial, quiet, pipe-smoking official who… liked to look on the bright side’,6 he was at the same time ‘a doughty defender’ of the DES line who ‘liked to stick to his guns’.7 So did Mrs Thatcher. Generally, however, Mrs Thatcher and Pile got along. Other senior officials in the Department saw nothing wrong with their relationship, and feel that reports of their hostility were greatly overdone.Thatcher arrived at the DES on Monday morning 22 June determined to show that she was the boss. She marched in, with no conversational preliminaries, and presented Pile with a list of points for immediate action written on a page torn out of an exercise book. Number one was the immediate withdrawal of Short’s circular requiring local authorities to prepare schemes for comprehensivisation. But she had no positive agenda. She was committed by the Tory manifesto to a number of broad objectives all of which, apart from the slowing down of comprehensivisation and more Government support for direct grant schools, were uncontroversial, even consensual. Her main priority was switching more resources into primary education, with an ambitious new school building programme. ‘This’, she told the party conference revealingly in October, ‘is the thing the Government controls.’8 The Government was committed to raising the school-leaving age to sixteen – a long-planned change postponed by Labour in 1966 – and to continuing the expansion of higher education. The manifesto also promised an inquiry into teacher training. All this she carried out.practice – to her subsequent chagrin – comprehensivisation proceeded faster than ever during Mrs Thatcher’s time at the DES. Under Section 13 of the 1944 Education Act final approval of every local scheme still lay with the Secretary of State; and Mrs Thatcher took this responsibility very seriously. She was meticulous in examining every scheme personally, burdening herself with a ‘massive workload’9 and giving rise to allegations of deliberate delay; in November 1971 she told the Commons that she currently had 350 schemes under consideration.10 Where she could discover valid grounds for refusing approval she did so; but in practice she found few schemes that she could reasonably stop. In many cases schools had to merge, on purely practical grounds, to create Sixth Forms to cope with the raised school-leaving age. The result was that over the four years of Mrs Thatcher’s tenure of the DES she rejected only 326 out of 3,612 schemes which were submitted to her; that is about 9 per cent. But it was this small minority which made the headlines. Wherever she withheld approval from a scheme she laid herself open to the charge that she was making nonsense of the Government’s professed policy of leaving local decisions to local option.her budgetfirst serious challenge on coming into office in June 1970 was to defend the education budget. Just like her own Government nine years later, the Heath Government took office promising immediate economies in public spending to pay for tax cuts. Macleod’s first act as Chancellor – virtually his only one before his sudden death – was to demand a series of savings from the departments. Having established in opposition that the Tories were committed to increasing education spending, Mrs Thatcher was in a better position than most of her colleagues to resist. Even so, she was required to find some short-term economies. She did so by raising the price of school meals and stopping the supply of free milk to children over the age of seven. These were from her point of view unimportant cuts, falling only on the welfare benefits which had got loaded on to education while protecting the essential business of education itself – in particular the expensive commitment to proceed with the raising of the school-leaving age, and her promise to improve the standard of primary school buildings. In 1971 she was able to announce ‘a huge building drive’ to replace old primary schools, spending £132 million over three years from the savings on school meals and milk.11 She also reprieved the Open University, which Macleod had earmarked for the axe before it had enrolled its first students. ‘With all our difficulties’, she boasted, ‘the cuts have not fallen on education.’12Tony Barber announced his package in October, she was generally thought to have done well: the row over school milk did not blow up until the following year. As Prime Minister a decade later she insisted that her ministers owed their first duty to the Government’s collective strategy, not to their departments; but in 1970, like every other departmental minister, her priority was to fight her own corner. She made a point of telling journalists that she had taken on the Treasury and won.most remarkable feat was saving the Open University. The Tories in opposition had sneered at the projected ‘university of the air’ as a typical Wilson gimmick. But Mrs Thatcher took a different view. She was persuaded that it was a worthwhile enterprise which would genuinely extend opportunity. It was also good value for money, an economical way to produce more graduates. So even though the Department itself was not strongly committed to it, she had already determined to defy the Treasury death sentence and allow it to go ahead. She indicated her intention at a press conference two days after taking office. Contrary to the impression he gives in his memoirs, Heath was furious at this exercise of ‘instant government’: she had unilaterally reversed the party’s policy before he had even appointed the junior minister who would be responsible for the universities. Within days of appointing her he was already talking ‘quite openly’ of getting rid of his Education Secretary ‘if he could’.13 Thirty-nine years later, when the Open University is established as a great success, the credit for its conception is usually given to Harold Wilson and Jennie Lee; but Margaret Thatcher deserves equal credit for single-handedly allowing it to be born when her senior colleagues were intent on aborting it. It is one of her more surprising and unsung achievements.
‘Milk snatcher’blamed her officials for failing to foresee the hornets’ nest she would stir up by cutting free school milk. To the Department it seemed an obviously sensible and uncontentious economy. The Government was currently spending more on providing free milk than on books for schools; much of the milk was never drunk – partly because the crates of little bottles were not refrigerated, partly because children’s taste had simply moved on since Attlee’s day. Labour had already stopped the supply to secondary schools, with no public outcry and no ill effect on children. By ending the provision to children aged seven to eleven, Mrs Thatcher was merely continuing a process which Labour had begun: as she pointed out, milk would still be provided free to those children who were prescribed it on medical grounds, and schools could still sell milk.14 Insofar as she was withdrawing a previously universal benefit in accordance with the Tory belief that those who could afford to pay should do so, it could be presented as an ideological measure; but in truth it was a minor administrative rationalisation, ending a wasteful anachronism.was unprepared for the furore it aroused. It was the personal nature of the attacks which shook her. The Sun asked ‘Is Mrs Thatcher human?’15 and dubbed her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.16 For the first time in her political career her sex was being used against her. The fact of a woman, a mother, taking milk from children was portrayed as far more shocking – unnatural even – than a man doing the same thing; and the cruel nickname ‘Thatcher – Milk Snatcher’ (coined by a speaker at the 1971 Labour Party Conference) struck a deep and lasting chord in the public mind. For better or worse it made her name: image recognition was never a problem for her again.the beginning of 1972 there was speculation that Heath might sack his Education Secretary. In fact, he stood by her in her darkest hour. At the end of the month he invited her, with Pile and other of her officials, to Chequers to discuss her future plans. This was a clear signal that she was not about to be removed. She ‘emerged radiant’, the Daily Mail reported. ‘The comeback has begun.’17this low point her fortunes sharply improved: the second half of her time at the DES was, at least in terms of public perception, dramatically more successful than the first. This was partly due to the fact that from late 1971 she had a new press officer with whom she got on exceptionally well. Terry Perks had a lot to do with Mrs Thatcher’s more professional presentation of herself from 1972 onwards. The first sign that she had turned the corner actually came before the end of January when she won an unexpectedly good reception from an NUT dinner. She was able to reap the credit for having finally given the go-ahead to raising the school-leaving age. She made ‘a splendid speech’, The Times reported, ‘full of warmth, wit and friendly reproach to her critics. Seasoned Thatcher-watchers reckoned it her best public appearance yet.’18Thatcher sealed her rehabilitation in the eyes of the educational establishment with the publication, towards the end of 1972, of her White Paper, A Framework for Expansion. This represented the culmination of a whole raft of policies the DES had been working on for twenty years. In truth she had remarkably little to do with its conception: she was merely the midwife. It projected a 50 per cent rise in education spending (in real terms) over the next ten years, pushing education’s share from 13 to 14 per cent of total government expenditure (overtaking defence for the first time). Within this overall growth there was to be a vast expansion of nursery education, designed to provide free part-time nursery places for 50 per cent of three-year-olds and 90 per cent of four-year-olds by 1981 (concentrated at first in areas of greatest need); a 40 per cent increase in the number of teachers – from 360,000 in 1971 to a projected 510,000 in 1981, which would cut the average teacher – pupil ratio from one to 22.6 to one to 18.5; and the continued expansion of higher education, evenly divided between the universities and polytechnics, to a target of 750,000 students by 1981 (an increase from 15 to 22 per cent of eighteen-year-olds).19was a hugely ambitious plan, and a triumph for the DES. Pile was afraid that Mrs Thatcher would not swallow it: in fact she took it all on board without demur. At a time when Government spending was expanding on all fronts she was determined to get her share of it. Having had to fight the Treasury hard over her first two years to get the money she wanted for school building and improving teachers’ pay, she was taken aback by the ease with which the Cabinet accepted her proposed White Paper. She had expected another battle. Very soon she came to repudiate her own enthusiasm for it. Looking back, she wrote in her memoirs, it was ‘all too typical of those over-ambitious, high-spending years… In retrospect the White Paper marks the high point of the attempts by Government to overcome the problems inherent in Britain’s education system by throwing money at them.’20 At the time, however, she basked in the almost universal praise her plans attracted. Every minister likes to put his or her name to something big; and she was happy to be seen as less of a reactionary than had been thought., her optimism was blown away within a year by the quadrupling of oil prices following the Yom Kippur war and the consequent recession which forced cutbacks in Government spending for the next decade. Mrs Thatcher’s bold plans were under threat before she had even left office. They were not pursued by her Labour successors after February 1974; and by the time she returned to Downing Street as Prime Minister in 1979 her interest in using the state to extend educational opportunity had passed. Not until 1995 did the aspiration to offer nursery places to all pre-school children creep back on to the political agenda. A generous vision which might have been the most far-reaching legacy from Mrs Thatcher’s time as Education Secretary was sadly destined to go down as one of the great might-have-beens of recent history.the end, however, even she could not protect her department from the heavy cuts Barber was forced to impose at the end of 1973. Excluding Scotland, science and the arts, the DES share of the cuts amounted to £157 million out of a total departmental budget of £3.5 billion. This she described as ‘serious but not disastrous’: she gave the impression that the cuts would only slow the projected building programme and procurement by LEAs, insisting that the department’s priorities – including the nursery programme – had been substantially preserved.21 But this was her last speech as Education Secretary. Just over a week later the miners – whose overtime ban had already reduced the country to a three-day week – voted for a full-scale strike. Confronted with this challenge, Heath finally gave in to the hawks in his Cabinet and called the General Election which removed him from office.turnsThatcher’s wider role as a member of the Heath Government subsequently came to embarrass her. Not only did she pursue policies in her own department which she later repudiated, and fail to promote others which in retrospect she wished she had embraced more vigorously; she also conspicuously failed to dissent from economic policies which she soon came to regard as disastrously flawed and which, she now implied, she had instinctively known to be wrong all along. For someone who would later make so much of being a ‘conviction politician’ this was a singularly unheroic performance, which she and her biographers had to expend much effort trying to explain or deny.Government notoriously made two major U-turns in economic policy, both in 1972. First, in response to rising unemployment – which in January 1972 passed the symbolic and at that time politically intolerable figure of one million – Heath reversed the policy of not bailing out ‘lame ducks’ on which he had fought the 1970 election and started to throw money indiscriminately at industry in a successful (but inflationary) effort to stimulate the economy into rapid growth. Second, when inflation rocketed – as a result partly of sharp increases in the price of imported commodities (copper, rubber, zinc and other raw materials) even before the 1973 oil price shock, but also, it was almost universally believed, of excessive domestic wage increases – the Government abandoned its apparently principled rejection of incomes policy and introduced, from November 1972, an increasingly complex system of statutory wage and price control. Both policies commanded wide support on the Conservative benches and in the press. A handful of eccentric monetarists warned that the Government was itself fuelling the very inflation it was attempting to cure; while a rather larger number of more traditional right-wingers were disturbed by the socialistic overtones of the Government’s increasing interference in the economy. But in the short term both policies appeared to be working: the economy boomed, unemployment fell and inflation was contained. Until the double blow of the oil crisis and the miners’ strike at the end of 1973 the Government seemed to be surmounting its problems with a good chance of re-election in the autumn of 1974 or spring of 1975.is little evidence that Mrs Thatcher offered any serious objection to either U-turn. Indeed, she positively supported what many regarded as the forerunner of the later reversals, the nationalisation of the aircraft division of Rolls-Royce in 1971. It is true that a report in The Times in 1972 named her as one of a number of Cabinet Ministers who ‘frankly confess their uneasiness about the socialist implications’ of the Government’s new industrial strategy; but that was all.22 She stoutly defended prices and income control as ‘absolutely necessary’.23 Cabinets did not leak so freely in those days, nor did ministers brief the press with their private views. Mrs Thatcher uttered no public indication of dissent, unless there was a coded message in her speech to the party conference in October, when she declared pointedly that ‘I believe it is right for any Government to honour the terms of its manifesto. That is precisely what we are doing in education.’24third major issue of the Heath Government on which Mrs Thatcher expressed no contrary view at the time was Britain’s entry into the European Community. Heath’s achievement in persuading President Pompidou to lift de Gaulle’s veto, negotiating acceptable terms, winning a substantial bipartisan majority in the House of Commons and forcing the enabling legislation through against the determined opposition of a section of his own party, finally joining the Community on 1 January 1973, was the one unquestioned success of his ill-fated Government. Despite her later change of heart, Mrs Thatcher was firmly and conventionally supportive of the European project throughout, as she had been since Macmillan first launched it in 1961.had no reservations, either, about supporting the Government in its stand against the miners. While she condemned the miners’ leaders and attacked Communist influence in the NUM, she insisted that the Government’s offer to the miners – in the range of 13 – 16 per cent – was ‘generous’ and argued that the Government had ‘kept faith with the miners’ when it could have switched to other energy sources. She appealed to the miners in turn to vote against a strike. At the same time she pointed out that North Sea gas and oil would soon give the Government alternatives to both coal and imported oil. ‘The prospects are enormous.’25 In the prevailing mood of almost apocalyptic gloom, this was an unusually optimistic message.4 February 1974, however, the miners voted overwhelmingly to step up their action, and Heath finally bowed to the clamour for an election, though still seeking a settlement of the dispute by referring the miners’ claim to the Pay Board while the election was in progress. He was honourably determined not to fight a confrontational campaign against the miners, even though that would almost certainly have given him his best chance of winning. Mrs Thatcher in all her published and reported statements loyally followed her leader’s line.changes meant that she could no longer take her seat for granted. Moreover, she had a potential problem with the Jewish vote as a result of Heath’s even-handed policy of refusing to supply Israel with military parts, or even allow American planes to supply Israel from British airfields, during the Yom Kippur war. This issue allied Mrs Thatcher with Keith Joseph, the only Jewish member of the Cabinet. Together they protested, but Heath and Alec Douglas-Home were determined to avert an Arab oil embargo by maintaining strict neutrality. She met the Finchley branch of the Anglo-Israel Friendship League to assure them that she opposed the Government’s policy.26 This was the most difficult period in her long and close relationship with her Jewish constituents; but her position was not seriously threatened.was an election the Tories confidently expected to win. Indeed, one reason Heath fought such a poor campaign was that he was afraid of winning too heavily. In the event he failed to polarise the country sufficiently. By referring the miners’ dispute to the Pay Board the Government seemed to call into question the point of having an election at all. Labour was still in disarray over Europe and beginning to be torn apart by the new hard left: Wilson did not expect to win any more than Heath expected to lose. In these circumstances the electorate called a plague on both their houses and turned in unprecedented numbers to the Liberals.of officeThatcher was still perfectly safe in Finchley. As usual the Liberal hype could achieve only so much. On a reduced poll (and revised boundaries) her vote was 7,000 down, the Liberals nearly 4,000 votes up, but Labour still held on to second place. Her majority was nearly halved but the two opposition parties cancelled each other out.it was a different story. The Liberals won an unprecedented six million votes, nearly 20 per cent of the poll. They were rewarded with just fourteen seats, but their advance fatally damaged the Tories, helping Labour to scrape a narrow majority – 301 seats to 297 – despite winning a slightly lower share of the poll – 37.1 per cent against 37.9 per cent. Heath held a last Cabinet before being driven to the Palace to resign. It was by all accounts a bleak occasion: he was determined that it was not the end of his Government, merely a temporary interruption, so there were no thanks, tributes or recriminations. Only one minister felt she could not let the moment pass without a word of valediction. It was Margaret Thatcher who insisted on speaking ‘in emotional terms of the wonderful experience of team loyalty that she felt she had shared since 1970’.27her time at the DES, however, she had learned a number of lessons which she would carry back with her into government in 1979. First, as she reflected on her experience, she became convinced of the malign power of officials to block, frustrate and manipulate all but the most determined ministers. Secondly, she learned from the failure of the Government as a whole to maintain its sense of direction and purpose in the face of mounting political pressure. At its simplest this expressed itself as a determination not to duplicate Heath’s notorious U-turns. But this was not so much an ideological point as a political one.lost the ability to control events, paradoxically, because he tried to control too much: all the complex machinery of prices and incomes control – the Pay Board, the Price Commission and the rest – left the Government still helpless in the face of soaring imported food and commodity prices on the one hand, and the industrial muscle of the miners on the other. The lesson Mrs Thatcher took from the Heath Government was not so much monetarism, which she grasped later as a useful technical explanation, but rather a compelling affirmation of an old Tory article of faith – the self-defeating folly of overambitious government. Government – she instinctively believed – must be strong, clear, decisive; but the experience of the Heath Government taught that it could only appear strong by holding itself above the economic fray, not taking responsibility upon itself for every rise in unemployment or inflation. It was that lesson, more than any other, which enabled her Government to rise above the economic devastation of the early 1980s.
Peasants’ Revoltroulette wheelthan a year after losing office in March 1974 Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative party. This was a stunning transformation which no one would have predicted twelve months earlier: one of those totally unexpected events – which in retrospect appear predestined – that constitute the fascination of politics. One of the most extraordinary things about Mrs Thatcher’s seizure of the Tory leadership is that scarcely anyone – colleague or commentator – saw her coming. Even after the event her victory was widely disparaged as a freak of fortune of which she was merely the lucky beneficiary. As Enoch Powell put it, with a mixture of envy and grudging admiration: ‘She didn’t rise to power. She was opposite the spot on the roulette wheel at the right time, and she didn’t funk it.’1the fact that she did not funk it was crucial, and not at all an accident. It should have been foreseen by anyone who had worked closely with her over the previous twenty-five years, for she had been quietly preparing for the opportunity all her life. When it came she was ready. It takes extraordinary single-mindedness and stamina to reach the topmost rung of British politics, an obsessive dedication to the job to the exclusion of other concerns like money, family, friendship and the pursuit of leisure. Like Harold Wilson, like Ted Heath, but more than any of her Conservative contemporaries, Margaret Thatcher possessed that quality of single-minded dedication to her career. She never made any secret of her ambition: it was only because she was a woman that the possibility that she might go right to the top was not taken seriously. No one who had known her at Oxford, at Colchester or Dartford should have been surprised that when the chance offered she left her male rivals at the post.it was still an unpredictable combination of other factors which created her opportunity. First, she benefited from an intellectual revolution – or counter-revolution – in Tory thinking which had been building over the previous ten years but which was suddenly brought to a head by the shock of electoral defeat, creating the opening for a radical change of direction. This was a development in which she played very little part, yet one which reflected her most deeply held convictions, so that she had no difficulty taking advantage of it. At the same time a fortuitous pattern of personal circumstances ruled out of contention virtually all the other candidates who might, a year earlier, have hoped to harness this opportunity to their own careers.revolution in Tory thinking had two strands – economic and political. On the one hand there was a sudden revival of interest in the free-market economic ideas quietly propagated for years on the margins of serious politics by the Institute of Economic Affairs but largely derided by the conventional wisdom in both Whitehall and the universities. Throughout the 1960s the fact that the only prominent politician to preach the beauty of the unfettered market was Enoch Powell was enough to tar the message with the taint of crazed fanaticism.the middle of 1972 onwards, however, the Government’s U-turns in economic policy had begun to make converts for the Powellite critique. Treasury mandarins attached little importance to the money supply. But in Fleet Street an influential group of economic journalists led by Samuel Brittan on the Financial Times and Peter Jay and William Rees-Mogg on The Times took up the cause and began to expound it in their columns. When the Heath Government fell, therefore, there was quite suddenly a fully-fledged monetarist explanation of its failure available for disillusioned Tories – including ex-ministers – to draw upon.the same time there was among ordinary Tories in the country a more generalised mood of mounting frustration at the failure of successive Conservative Governments to halt or reverse what seemed a relentless one-way slide to socialism. Not only in the management of the economy but in almost every sphere of domestic and foreign policy – immigration, comprehensive schools, trade unions, Northern Ireland, Rhodesia – Heath had appeared almost deliberately to affront the party’s traditional supporters while appeasing their tribal enemies. Strikes, crime, revolting students, pornography, terrorism, inflation eating away at their savings – all stoked a rising anger that the country was going to the dogs while the Tory Government was not resisting but rather speeding the process. By the time Heath lost the February 1974 election an ugly mood had built up in the Tory party which lacked only heavyweight leadership to weld together the two elements – the political backlash and the economic analysis – to form a potent combination which ultimately became known as Thatcherism.unlikely catalyst was Keith Joseph – hitherto no one’s idea of a rebel or a populist, but a former Cabinet Minister of long experience and unimpeachable integrity who was almost uniquely qualified to lend intellectual rigour to political revolt. He subsequently described how he had thought he had been a Conservative for the past thirty years, but now realised that he had been a ‘statist’ all along, bewitched by the delusive power of government.2 Having seen the light, he set out with a religious fervour rare in high-level politics to atone for his past sins by bringing the Tory party – and ultimately the country – to a realisation of the true faith.Thatcher by contrast never pretended to be a thinker. She was a politician, and – unlike Joseph – an intensely practical and ambitious one. It is not the job of politicians to have original ideas, or even necessarily to understand them. Professional economists like Peter Jay used to sneer that Mrs Thatcher never really understood monetarism. But she did not need to. It was enough that she saw its importance; she possessed – as Joseph did not – the much more important and rare ability to simplify complex ideas and mobilise support for them. No intellectual herself, she was nevertheless unusual among politicians in acknowledging the importance of ideas. She had always believed that politics should be a battle between fundamentally opposed philosophies; it was a characteristic of her leadership that she systematically used intellectuals and academics – those whom she thought were on her side – to underpin her policies and furnish her with arguments and intellectual ammunition. As Prime Minister she developed an informal think-tank of her favourite academics to advise her.result of the February election had left the Tory party in a sort of limbo. With another election certain within a few months – as soon as Wilson saw an opportunity to increase his precarious majority – there was no early possibility of challenging Heath’s leadership, even if there had been an obvious challenger in waiting. The lesson he drew from the debacle of confrontation with the miners was that the Conservatives must try harder than ever to show themselves moderate and consensual in order to unite the country and win back the votes lost to the Liberals. This was the opposite of what his party critics wanted.one area in which Heath saw a need for new policies was housing. He told the Shadow Cabinet that the voters he met wanted ‘some radical and drastic changes in policy aimed particularly at the problems of ordinary people’ – specifically the cost of mortgages and the burden of the rates – ‘which should take priority over rather more abstract principles’.3 The key job of developing and selling these shiny new policies which would form the centrepiece of the party’s appeal at the next election he entrusted to Margaret Thatcher: an indication that he still saw her as an efficient and amenable agent of his will, not as a potential troublemaker.Environment Secretaryfact, up to October 1974 he was not wrong. The job of shadow Environment Secretary was a high-profile opportunity in an area of policy she had always been interested in but had not previously covered. It took her all her time to get on top of it. An Oxford contemporary who had known her in the Department of Education ran into her soon after she had taken it over and found her uncharacteristically harassed, complaining that the wide-ranging DoE empire – taking in transport as well as housing and local government – was too big to master in her usual detail.4 Parliamentary opposition, however, was just a matter of going through the motions – more than ever this summer when the Conservatives had to hold back for fear of precipitating another election before they were ready for it. Mrs Thatcher’s real brief was to come up with the bright new housing policies which Heath wanted to put in the forefront of the party’s next manifesto to win back the middle-class voters who had cost the Tories the February election by defecting to the Liberals. Frankly, what he was seeking was a short-term electoral bribe, but one which could be presented as consistent with the long-standing Conservative philosophy of encouraging home-ownership.her doubts, Mrs Thatcher loyally complied. The package she eventually announced at the end of August comprised three different forms of housing subsidy. First she promised to hold mortgages to a maximum interest rate of 9.5 per cent, to be achieved by varying the tax rate on building societies. Second, council tenants were to be helped to buy their houses at a 33 per cent discount. Third, first-time buyers would be encouraged to save by a direct Government bribe of £1 for every £2 saved. Most significant for the long term, however, was her fourth commitment: a promise to abolish domestic rates.too she was pressured to go further than she wanted. A meeting of party heavyweights – Heath flanked by most of his senior colleagues – ‘bludgeoned’ her into promising abolition of the rates before they had decided what to put in their place. Her August package eventually spoke of replacing the rates with ‘taxes more broadly-based and related to people’s ability to pay’, meanwhile transferring to the Treasury the cost not only of teachers’ pay but of parts of the police and fire services. ‘I felt bruised and resentful’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘to be bounced again into policies which had not been properly thought out.’ Yet she was still too loyal, or too junior, to refuse. Heath was still the leader, backed by almost the whole of his former Cabinet. In the last resort she was still willing to conform to protect her career. ‘I thought that if I combined caution on the details with as much presentational bravura as I could muster I could make our rates and housing policies into vote-winners for the Party.’5Thatcher’s performance over the summer and autumn of 1974 – arguing in private against policies which she would then defend equally passionately in public – demonstrated the maturing of a formidable political skill. By her championing of subsidised mortgages she showed that she possessed not only the good lawyer’s ability to argue a weak case; any self-respecting politician can do that. She also had a preacher’s ability to invest even a poor case with moralistic force: this more than anything else was the secret of her success over the next fifteen years. In the years of her success she boasted of being a ‘conviction politician’, but it should not be forgotten that both words carried equal weight. She had powerful convictions, certainly; but she could be brilliantly insincere too, when the situation required it, and such was her reputation for burning integrity that few could spot the difference. At a number of critical points in her later career it was only this which enabled her to skate on some very thin ice and get away with it.was the Tories’ star performer in the October 1974 campaign. She still made only two trips out of London; but largely because her policies were their only new ones, she appeared more than ever before on television and radio, featuring in three of the party’s election broadcasts and three of the morning press conferences, including the final one with Heath. She was coached for her television appearances by Gordon Reece, who began for the first time to get her to relax in front of the camera. With Reece’s help she was judged to have done so well in the Tories’ first broadcast that she was promoted to introduce the second.was seriously alarmed, but could not make up its mind how to respond. In the event polls soon showed that the public did not believe the Tories’ promises.6 Despite this, however, the high-profile exposure did Mrs Thatcher much more good than harm. It temporarily damaged her credentials with the right, who were dismayed to see her once again betraying her professed beliefs, using public money to distort the market in pursuit of votes. But the sheer feistiness of her performance, and indeed her pragmatism, stood her in good stead when she came to appeal to the whole body of middle-of-the-road MPs just three months later. She had valuably shown herself not as a naive right-winger but as a vigorous vote-getter and a seasoned pro.the event, with just 39.2 per cent of the vote (against 35.8 per cent), Labour gained only eighteen seats for an overall majority of four. Mrs Thatcher’s personal majority was cut by another 2,000 (on a lower turnout), but it was still sufficient:fact, as events turned out, the national result was probably the best possible for her. An unexpectedly successful rearguard action was creditable enough to enable Heath to dismiss calls that it was time for him to stand down; yet at the same time it was still a defeat, the party’s third in four elections under his leadership, so it only fuelled the gathering consensus that he could not survive much longer. Meanwhile, such a tiny majority was unlikely to sustain Labour in office for a full term – thus offering an unusually fruitful prospect of opposition for whoever succeeded in replacing him.
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