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.
She 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.
Labour 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.
In 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:
In 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.
‘Someone had to stand’
As soon as the October election was out of the way, the struggle for the Tory leadership was unofficially on. Quite apart from the simmering revolt on the right, too many Tory MPs with no quarrel with Heath’s policies came back to Westminster convinced that the party could never win under his leadership. Several of his friends urged him to step down immediately, or at least submit himself for re-election. By refusing, however, he not only threw away his own best chance of survival, but he also made it practically impossible for Willie Whitelaw or any other candidate from the left of the Tory party to succeed him. By clinging on, he allowed time for a dark horse to emerge who would eventually consolidate all the various strands of party discontent against him.
Joseph was the obvious standard-bearer of the right – not because he possessed any of the qualities of political leadership but because by his speeches over the summer he alone had staked out a clear alternative to Heath’s discredited centrism. Mrs Thatcher quickly cast herself as his loyal supporter, explicitly discouraging speculation about her own chances. ‘You can cross my name off the list,’ she told the London
The first person he told – on 21 November – was Mrs Thatcher. We have only her account of the conversation, but if that can be believed she did not hesitate. ‘I heard myself saying: “Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint
On 25 November Mrs Thatcher thought it right to tell Heath of her purpose in person, though it had already been heavily trailed in the weekend papers. She saw him in the Leader’s room at the House of Commons. It was reported at the time – and the story can only have come from her – that he neither stood up nor invited her to sit down, but merely grunted, ‘You’ll lose.’9 Lady Thatcher’s published version is that ‘He looked at me coldly, turned his back, shrugged his shoulders and said, “If you must.”’10 Either way the interview was evidently brief and chilly. But there is no suggestion that Heath was greatly worried by her candidature or thought it uniquely treacherous of her to stand. Having reluctantly agreed that new rules should be drawn up to allow a challenge to a sitting leader, he probably imagined that she would be the first of several hopefuls who might now throw their hats into the ring. This, she wrote in her memoirs, was her expectation, too. She thought it ‘most unlikely’ that she would win.11
Heath had inadvertently given his challenger another opportunity which she grasped with both hands. In reshuffling his front bench team at the beginning of November he moved Mrs Thatcher from Environment – which she had only shadowed for nine months – to become deputy Treasury spokesman under Robert Carr. It is not clear whether Heath intended this as a promotion or a snub. ‘There is an awful tendency in Britain’, she had once complained, ‘to think of women as making excellent Number Twos, but not to give them the top job.’12
Nevertheless, making her deputy to so bland a performer as Carr simply invited her to outshine her nominal superior. Unwittingly, Heath had given her the perfect opportunity to show her paces by taking on Labour’s powerful Treasury team, giving demoralised Tory MPs something to cheer for the first time in months. By her usual combination of hard work and calculated aggression Mrs Thatcher quickly assumed the leadership of the Tories’ opposition to Labour’s Finance Bill, leading a team of junior spokesmen almost all of whom became members of her own Cabinet a decade later.
It is often said that Tory MPs did not know what they were doing when they elected Mrs Thatcher leader. This is true only in that she did not set out a detailed agenda of specific policies – monetarism, tax cuts or privatisation. But it cannot be said that she disguised her beliefs to win the leadership. On the contrary, she declared her philosophy very clearly: if some who voted for her did so without fully realising where her ideas would lead, the fault was theirs for failing to believe that she meant what she said. In fact what the party responded to was not so much her beliefs themselves as the burning self-belief with which she expounded them: it was not her convictions that they voted for, but her conviction.
As important as her message, however, was the need to humanise her image, neutralise the gender question and persuade both the public and Tory MPs that she was a credible leader. Paradoxically she no longer needed to prove that she was tough enough for the job: it was becoming a cliche, as David Wood noted in
Heath’s supporters never really believed it possible for the former Prime Minister to be beaten by an inexperienced woman. He had the support of the whole Shadow Cabinet, except Keith Joseph. Elder statesmen like Alec Douglas-Home and Reggie Maudling were wheeled out to consolidate support for the status quo. The
