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.’24
The third 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.
She 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.
On 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.
Boundary 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.
This 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.
Out of office
Mrs Thatcher 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.
Nationally 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’.27
From her 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.
Heath 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.
6
The Peasants’ Revolt
The roulette wheel
LESS than 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.’1
But the 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
