The Iron Lady

sure there was no overt move against her, a powerful section of the party, including most of Heath’s senior colleagues whom she was obliged to retain in the Shadow Cabinet, remained conspicuously uncommitted to her.They were not greatly worried by her tendency to embrace simplistic panaceas like monetarism since they took it for granted, as experienced politicians, that no one could take such nonsense seriously for long. If she did become Prime Minister, the combination of Civil Service advice and the realities of office would quickly educate her.All parties, they assured themselves, tend to play to their extremes in opposition, but they return to the centre ground when back in government.

Mrs Thatcher was formally elected Leader of the Conservative party at a meeting of MPs, candidates, peers and party officials on 20 February, her nomination proposed by Lord Carrington and seconded by Lord Hailsham. Before that she had already been rapturously acclaimed by the 1922 Committee and presided rather awkwardly over a meeting of the existing Shadow Cabinet, minus only Heath himself. Owing to the circumstances of her election, however, her room for reshuffling the personnel she had inherited from Heath was very limited; just because they had almost all voted against her, paradoxically she was bound to keep most of his colleagues in post.

It was the backbenchers, not her front bench colleagues, who had made Mrs Thatcher leader; and for the first ten years of her leadership at least she never forgot it. She was determined not to repeat Heath’s mistake. Ironically in view of her ultimate fate, she welcomed the new rules requiring the leader to be re-elected every year, believing that the regular renewal of her mandate made her position stronger.^1,2 Her official channel for communicating with her backbenchers was the 1922 Committee, via its chairman Edward du Cann who had guaranteed access to her. In these early years du Cann found her very approachable and anxious to listen.

Awkward baptism

Moving out from Westminster to the country at large, Mrs Thatcher had next to sell herself to the party in the constituencies. She began well, with a tumultuous visit to Scotland ten days after her election. She was mobbed by a crowd of 3,000 in a shopping centre in Edinburgh and had to abandon a planned walkabout on police advice. That evening she spoke at a packed rally in Glasgow with overflow meetings in two additional halls near by. Yet somehow she never created the same excitement again. A similar walkabout in Cardiff drew only minimal crowds. John Moore, who accompanied her on a number of constituency visits, remembers the first two years as ‘an uphill struggle’, with a lot of ‘ghastly trips’ north of Watford, where the party was still demoralised and doubtful; there was no supportive network, poor response to her efforts to arouse enthusiasm, and little belief that she would be leader very long. In the first few weeks and months she addressed every sort of sectional and regional conference within the Tory party: Scottish Conservatives, Welsh Conservatives, Conservative women, Conservative trade unionists, the Federation of Conservative Students and the Conservative Central Council. She gave them all ringing patriotic statements of her determination to halt Britain’s decline by reawakening the virtues of freedom, enterprise, individual opportunity and self-reliance. For all her rousing rhetoric, however, she was careful to present her policies as simple common sense: moderation contrasted with Labour’s extremism. Wealth must be created before it could be distributed; the country could not consume more than it produced; taxes should be cut to increase incentives. These were the familiar axioms of Tory leaders, not the blueprint for a counter- revolution. As a result she was politely rather than rapturously received.

Mrs Thatcher faced a peculiarly awkward baptism just weeks after her election in the form of the imminent referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the Common Market. Suspected of being a good deal less keen on Europe than her predecessor, she nevertheless had no choice but to campaign for a vote to confirm the one unquestioned achievement of Heath’s Government – even though a ‘yes’ vote would also help to get Wilson off the hook on which the Labour party had been impaled for the past four years. It was a no-win situation for a new leader anxious to set her own agenda. Her difficulty was somewhat relieved by Heath declining her invitation to lead the Conservative campaign, preferring to conduct his own under the umbrella of the all-party organisation, Britain in Europe, chaired by Roy Jenkins. Then Wilson elected to take a back seat, placing the Government’s authority officially behind the ‘Yes’ campaign while playing little active part himself, which lent a sort of symmetry to Mrs Thatcher doing the same. Nevertheless, her low profile drew a good deal of criticism.

In her memoirs Lady Thatcher blamed herself for going along too tamely with the Establishment consensus in favour of continued membership, ducking the hard questions about Britain’s constitutional integrity and national identity which would come back to haunt her a decade and a half later.³ At the time, however, she was under pressure to dispel the persistent impression that she was privately cool about Europe. She did so emphatically on 8 April in the Commons debate approving the referendum with a characteristically practical but wholly positive case for staying in the Community. ‘Mrs Thatcher stills anti-Europe clamour’, The Times reported.⁴ She based her case on four arguments: security; guaranteed food supplies; access to the expanded European market; and the prospect of a wider world role. ‘The Community opens windows on the world for us which since the war have been closing.’⁵

All in all she did just enough. She was able to hail the decisive result as a ‘really thrilling’ vindication of the Tory party’s long-standing vision, compared with Labour’s record of unprincipled somersaults, while feeling privately relieved that the divisive issue was shelved for the foreseeable future.⁶ Right up to 1979 she continued to take a positive line on Europe, repeatedly berating the Government for failing to make the most of Britain’s membership by being too negative and adversarial.

Cold Warrior

But Europe was never a subject on which Mrs Thatcher was going to be able to speak with conviction. By contrast the Cold War, and the need for strong defence in the face of the ever-present threat of Soviet expansionism, was a cause close to her heart, and one she determined very early on to make her own. There was no inconsistency with her primary domestic mission, since she regarded the core problem of the British economy as too much socialism, which was merely a weaker local variant of Communism. Her immediate purpose might be freeing the British economy, but her ultimate ambition was to eradicate not just the symptoms of socialism, but the virus itself, whose source and breeding ground was the Soviet Union. Thus the struggle for the British economy was part of the global struggle against Communism. Moreover, it was a good deal easier for an opposition leader to define the battleground rhetorically in terms of the grand abstractions of Freedom against Tyranny than by getting bogged down in petty arguments about incomes policy and trade union law.

In particular she saw the forthcoming Helsinki conference, at which Western leaders were preparing to offer Russia all sorts of aid and recognition in exchange for promises of improved human rights, as a second Munich in the making; and could see a role for herself as the clear-sighted Churchill figure whose mission was to warn the West of impending disaster before it was too late.

Just before the Helsinki conference convened, therefore, she resolved to make a speech. The only Tory elder she consulted was Lord Home, whose unblinking view of Soviet intentions she had long respected. Replying to his congratulations on her election, she asked him for a meeting; and after Easter they began a series of informal conversations whenever he was in London. In June she specifically asked his help with her proposed speech: ‘It is time I made a comprehensive speech about “Britain’s Place in the World”,’ she wrote. ‘I wonder if you would give me some advice about it.’⁷ Afterwards she thanked him ‘first for providing the framework… and then for going through it so carefully. It gave me all the confidence I should otherwise have lacked.’⁸ Home in turn congratulated her. ‘One always hopes that the communists will change their spots but they have not done so yet, and until there is firm evidence of change people must be warned.’⁹

A second expert to whom she turned for help was the British historian Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror is still the most comprehensive expose of Stalin’s purges. Her third inspiration was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then at the height of his prestige in the West following his expulsion from