anything’. It was more important to have ‘a philosophy and policy which because they are good appeal to sufficient people to secure a majority’ – in other words, what she later called ‘conviction politics’. She concluded:
No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do. It is not enough to have reluctant support. We want people’s enthusiasm as well.15
More than anything else it was this crusading spirit which was Mrs Thatcher’s unique contribution to the anti-collectivist counter-revolution which ultimately bore her name. Others developed the ideas which she seized on and determinedly enacted. The force which transformed British politics over the next twenty years was Mrs Thatcher’s belief that politics was an arena of conflict between fundamentally opposed philosophies, her contempt for faint hearts and her ruthless view that a party with a clear philosophy needed only a ‘sufficient’ majority – not an inclusive ‘consensus’ – to drive through its programme. Few who heard the shadow Minister of Power set out this credo in Blackpool in October 1968 paid much attention at the time. Even when she grasped the party leadership seven years later few colleagues or commentators really believed she meant what she said. In fact the essence of Thatcherism was there in her words that day: not so much in the unremarkable policies as in her fierce belief in them.
That autumn she was switched again, to Transport. Interestingly, she did not see her job as simply championing the road lobby. Though famous later for her enthusiasm for ‘the great car economy’ and a corresponding detestation of the railways, she was at this time strikingly positive – in her first Commons speech on the subject – that the most urgent need was for more capital investment in British Railways. ‘If we build bigger and better roads’, she warned – thirty years before the argument was widely accepted – ‘they would soon be saturated with more vehicles and we would be no nearer solving the problem.’16
In the summer of 1969 she paid her first visit to the Soviet Union, the counterpart of her visit to the United States two years before. She was invited as Opposition Transport spokeswoman, principally to admire the Moscow metro and other Soviet achievements in the transport field, but she also found time to take in nuclear power stations as well as the usual tourist sights. Of course she had no illusions about the moral and material bankruptcy of the Soviet system: her instinctive hostility had been sharpened by her experience of campaigning for the past four years for the release of a British lecturer, one of her constituents, whom the Russians had charged with spying in the hope of swapping him for two of their own spies. (A swap was finally agreed just before her visit.) Her own self-congratulatory account of the trip tells of embarrassing her guides by asking awkward questions and correcting their propaganda; but while the drab streets and empty shops confirmed her preconceptions she also saw enough of the long-suffering victims of the system to convince her that they must sooner or later reject it. Believing passionately that Communism was contrary to human nature she was confident that it could not endure. She always thought that the Cold War was there to be won.17
That October she celebrated ten years in Parliament, marking the anniversary with a ball at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. In her speech she noted how the world had changed in those ten years: in 1959 South Africa had still been a member of the Commonwealth, Eisenhower was President of the United States, Britain had not yet applied to join the Common Market and the first man had not yet gone into space. There were no Beatles, no David Frost, no hippies and no ‘permissive society’. But some things, she asserted, did not change: ‘Right is still right and wrong is wrong.’18
In years to come Mrs Thatcher regularly blamed the decline in the moral standards of society on the liberalisation of the legal framework promoted by the Labour Government in the sixties – what she called in her memoirs the ‘almost complete separation between traditional Christian values and the authority of the State’.19 Yet at the time she supported much of this agenda. It is true that she opposed the 1968 liberalisation of divorce law. She also remained firm in her support for capital punishment. But she voted for the legalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults, and also for David Steel’s Abortion Bill. In both cases she was influenced by the individual suffering she had witnessed in her work at the Bar.
Shadow Education Secretary
With hindsight the appointment of Margaret Thatcher to replace Sir Edward Boyle as shadow Education Secretary is a symbolic moment in the transformation of the Tory party. A gentle, liberal, high-minded Old Etonian baronet who had already been Education Secretary in 1962 – 4, Boyle personified the educational consensus which had promoted comprehensive schools and ‘progressive’ teaching methods: as a result he was the principal target for the right-wing backlash. Angry Conservatives in the shires and suburbs fighting to preserve their grammar schools regarded Boyle as a traitor – a socialist in all but name. Mrs Thatcher – grammar school-educated, defiantly middle class and strenuously anti-socialist – was in every way his opposite.Yet Heath intended no change of policy by appointing her.
On the contrary the appointment was widely applauded as a shrewd piece of party management – for example by the
The choice of Mrs Thatcher shows that Mr Heath has resisted the pressure from the Right to appoint a dedicated opponent of the comprehensive system. Instead he has picked an uncommitted member of the ‘shadow’ Cabinet who has won a high reputation for her grasp of complex issues in the fields of finance, social security, power and transport.20
In fact, of course, she did have strong views on education. As Nora Beloff in the
Nationally, however, comprehensivisation was proceeding rapidly. Progressive opinion took it for granted that the momentum was unstoppable. There were still ‘pockets of resistance’, Boyle admitted just before he resigned. It was ‘a difficult subject for our Party’, and the next Conservative Government would have to take ‘a number of most uncomfortable decisions when we are returned to power’; but he was sure there were ‘absolutely no political dividends to be gained from any attempt to reverse the present trend in secondary education’.23 Even with Boyle gone, this remained the general view of the Shadow Cabinet. Whatever her own preference might have been, Mrs Thatcher inherited an agreed line which left her very little room for manoeuvre.
Looking back in her memoirs, Lady Thatcher wished she could have argued for preserving grammar schools on principle, not just case by case.24 In fact she did, from the first weeks of her responsibility for education, clearly assert the principle of diversity. She lost no time in lending her support to the nine LEAs which were refusing to go comprehensive. But at the same time she accepted that she could save only ‘a small top layer’ of the most famous grammar schools.25 She was not proposing to stake her career on fighting the march of comprehensivisation.
Mrs Thatcher may have hoped that such a pragmatic compromise would prevent her tenure of Education being dominated by the issue of comprehensivisation. But in practice her hand was forced by Labour’s Education Secretary, Edward Short – a former headmaster and a doctrinaire proponent of comprehensives – who blew her compromise apart by introducing a Bill in February 1970 to compel the handful of recalcitrant LEAs to comply. Even Boyle called this ‘highly dictatorial’;26 it was in fact unnecessary and counterproductive, since all it did was to provoke resistance to a process which was already proceeding very rapidly. Mrs Thatcher was bound to fight it, and in doing so she could not help revealing her gut instincts. But still Conservative policy did not materially
