The Iron Lady

constituency chairmen came out overwhelmingly for Heath: a poll in the Daily Express found that 70 per cent of Tory voters still thought him the best leader.¹⁵ As a result, while Mrs Thatcher’s team were assiduously combing the lists of Tory MPs – as systematically and professionally as Peter Walker had done for Heath in 1965, finding the right colleague to influence each individual – Heath this time had no proper campaign at all. The Heath camp simply believed what they read in the newspapers and repeated to one another, that all sensible people were still for Ted and only a small fringe of right-wingers and diehard anti- Marketeers would vote for ‘that dreadful woman’.

They underestimated the extent of disillusion with Heath among a significant body of MPs who were neither particularly on the right nor anti-Europe. By his remoteness, insensitivity and sheer bad manners, Heath had exhausted the loyalty of a large number of backbenchers who had no reason to be grateful to him: this group simply wanted a change of leader. Most of them did not want Mrs Thatcher to become leader; they certainly did not want a lurch to right-wing policies; but they were persuaded to vote for Mrs Thatcher on the first ballot in the hope that they would then be able to vote for Whitelaw or some other more experienced candidate in the second round.

The result of all this second-guessing was that the unfancied filly not only gained enough votes to open up a second ballot, but actually topped the poll. Heath mustered only 119 supporters: Mrs Thatcher – for whatever mixture of motives – attracted 130, while sixteen voted for Hugh Fraser and another eleven abstained. ‘The word sensational’, the Daily Mail reported, ‘was barely adequate to describe the shock wave that hit Westminster’ when the figures were declared.¹⁶ From the Establishment’s point of view the figures were not only bad enough to oblige Heath to step down immediately. (‘We got it all wrong,’ he told his stunned team.)¹⁷ They also made it very difficult for anyone to pick up his banner with any prospect of success.

By the normal British understanding of elections, Mrs Thatcher had won already. She had defeated the incumbent and therefore asserted an unanswerable moral claim on the prize. Willie Whitelaw was bound to announce that he would now come forward as the unity candidate who could bind the party’s wounds; but it was too late – Mrs Thatcher’s stature was hugely increased by her unexpected victory. The fact that three more contenders threw their hats into the ring as well merely underlined that none of them had any chance of catching her. They were simply putting down markers: had they been serious about trying to stop her they should all have backed Whitelaw. Saluting her achievement, the Daily Telegraph suggested that it was almost bad form to force a second ballot at all after she had done the dirty work of getting rid of Heath.¹⁸

In the week between the two ballots the novelty and kudos of being the first major political party in the Western world to elect a woman leader overcame the previous doubts of many who had intended to switch their votes, and of a good many more who had voted for Heath. ‘Electing Margaret Thatcher would be the most imaginative thing the party has done for years’, one supporter told the Daily Mail; ‘The time has come for a change’, said another, ‘and it would be absolutely right for the Tories to come up with a woman leader, who may even be a woman Prime Minister.’¹⁹

Though she gained only another sixteen votes overall – just seven more than the simple majority required to win on the second ballot – Whitelaw’s poor showing and the fragmentation of the vote among the rest made her margin of victory look more decisive than it really was. The figures were:

The new leader’s first engagement on receiving the result was a press conference in the Grand Committee Room, off Westminster Hall. She began by being suitably gushing and humble, carefully paying tribute to all her predecessors:

To me it is like a dream that the next name in the lists after Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath is Margaret Thatcher. Each has brought his own style of leadership and stamp of greatness to the task. I shall take on the work with humility and dedication.

The only surprise was that she did not go back as far as Churchill – the Tory leader she was really proud to be succeeding – but she made good the omission with a tearful tribute to ‘the great Winston’ on television that evening.²⁰ Having got the pieties out of the way, she ‘took complete charge’ of the press conference in a manner that would become very familiar.

The new Tory leader stunned her audience into silence with her rapid, almost brusque replies to questions. She kept calling ‘Next question, next question’, as she outpaced the flustered press gang. At one time she called out confidently: ‘You chaps don’t like short, direct answers. Men like long, rambling, waffling answers.’

Asked if she had won because she was a woman, she replied crisply: ‘I like to think I won on merit.’ She even had the confidence to risk a joke. Asked about foreign affairs, she replied: ‘I am all for them.’ She then acknowledged, with ‘disarming feminine charm’, ‘I am the first to understand that I am not expert in every subject.’²¹ Swivelling this way and that to give all the photographers a good picture, she announced pointedly, ‘I am now going to take a turn to the right, which is very appropriate.’²² It was an astonishing performance: already she had the press eating out of her hand.

7 Leader of the Opposition

On trial

MARGARET Thatcher said that it was ‘like a dream’ to follow in the footsteps of Macmillan, Home and Heath. But none of these predecessors had faced such a daunting prospect on becoming leader. She was the first Conservative leader since 1921 to lack the prestige of having already been Prime Minister. She had seized the leadership as a result of a backbench revolt against the party establishment, opposed by practically the whole of her predecessor’s Shadow Cabinet. Even those who had campaigned for her were not sure what they had persuaded the party to elect, and the party in the country did not know her at all. For all these reasons, in addition to the startlingly novel factor of her femininity, she was even more on trial than most new leaders, facing a mixture of scepticism, curiosity and snobbish condescension, shading into latent or outright hostility.

Nevertheless, not everything was against her. First, she was protected by the Tory party’s traditional instinct to rally round a new leader – reinforced in her case by an old-fashioned sense of chivalry. Second, party elders such as Alec Home, Quintin Hailsham and Peter Carrington – all loyal friends of Heath who could easily have made her life impossible had they so wished – determined that the new leader must be supported and set a strong example to that effect. Above all Willie Whitelaw, the principal rival whom she had defeated in the leadership contest, determined to be both a good loser and a loyal deputy. This was by no means easy for him, since he and Mrs Thatcher had little in common, either personally or politically.Though she immediately named him deputy leader and consulted him about other appointments, Mrs Thatcher was not at first quite sure that she could trust him. Having stood against her and lost, however, Whitelaw felt an almost military sense of duty to subordinate his views to hers. With his deep knowledge of the party he would sometimes warn her what the backbenchers or the constituencies would not wear; but he would not oppose her. In opposition and later in government, Whitelaw steadfastly refused to lend himself to any appearance of factionalism. His unwavering support over the next thirteen years was indispensable to her survival and her success.

Yet her position remained insecure for the whole period 1975 – 9. Though Whitelaw and Carrington made