change. Short’s Bill fell when Wilson called an early election. All it achieved was to expose Mrs Thatcher’s lack of sympathy with the policy she very soon found herself having to pursue in office.
Meanwhile, she was coming to terms with the rest of her new brief. The policy she had inherited was confidently expansionist. At a time when the Tories were promising to cut public expenditure overall, they were committed to higher spending on education.They were pledged to implement the raising of the school-leaving age to sixteen (which Labour had postponed in 1968), to maintain spending on secondary education while giving a higher priority to primary schools, and to double the number of students in higher education over ten years. Mrs Thatcher’s consistent theme as shadow Education Secretary was the need for more money and the promise that the Tories would find it. She was even sympathetic to the teachers’ claim for higher salaries.
For the first three or four months of 1970 the Conservatives were still confident of winning the next election, whenever it was held. Although Heath personally never established much rapport with the electorate, the party had enjoyed huge leads in the opinion polls for the past three years. Then, in the spring, the polls went suddenly into reverse. Wilson could not resist seizing the moment. With the polls temptingly favourable and the Tories commensurately rattled he called the election for 18 June.
Once Heath’s victory had made nonsense of the polls, many Conservatives claimed to have been confident all along that they would win. More honest, Lady Thatcher admits that she expected to lose.27 Not personally, of course: she was secure in Finchley, where the local Labour party did not even have a candidate in place when Wilson went to the Palace. But this was the first election in which she featured as a national figure, albeit in the second rank. Central Office arranged for her to speak in a number of constituencies beyond her own patch, all over the south and east of England; she did not detect the enthusiasm which others claimed to have felt.
She was also chosen to appear in one of the Tories’ election broadcasts. Despite a television training course she had taken in the 1950s and regular appearances on the radio, she was not a success; her planned contribution had to be cut. Characteristically, however, she realised that television was a skill that had to be mastered. ‘She was clever enough to ask for help,’ one media adviser acknowledged. ‘Margaret wanted to learn while most of the rest of the senior Tories wished television would just go away.’28 The man she turned to for coaching, who would eventually get the credit for transforming her image, was Gordon Reece.
In her memoirs Lady Thatcher described attending her own count in Hendon Town Hall, then going on to an election night party at the Savoy where it became clear that the Conservatives had won.29 In fact, Finchley did not count until the Friday morning. Carol’s memory is more accurate:
We were on our way to Lamberhurst[a] when the news of the early exit polls came over the car radio. ‘If that result is right, we’ve won,’ exclaimed Margaret, obviously surprised. Denis turned the car round and we went to the
That first exit poll, from Gravesend, was announced by the BBC at 10.30; the first results were declared soon after eleven. For both Labour, who had thought themselves to be cruising towards re-election, and for the Tories, resigned to defeat and just waiting to turn on their leader, the reversal of expectations was hard to grasp. For Mrs Thatcher the result meant the likelihood of Cabinet office. She returned to Finchley after an hour and a half’s sleep to learn that she had increased her own majority by nearly two thousand:
She was not in the first batch of Cabinet ministers named that day, but was summoned to Downing Street on Saturday morning to be offered, as expected, the Department of Education and Science. She was immediately asked if she would like to be the first woman Prime Minister. Her reply was categoric – but also barbed: ‘“No,” she answered emphatically, “there will never be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime – the male population is too prejudiced.”’31 She preferred to get on with the job in hand. She went home to read her first boxes, before turning up at the Department bright and early on Monday morning.
5
Education Secretary
The minister and her department
MARGARET Thatcher 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.
Heath 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.
It 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.
Politically 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.
The 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
