the Soviet Union the previous year. It was Solzhenitsyn’s dramatic assertion the year before that the West had been losing the Third World War ever since 1945, and had now ‘irrevocably lost it’, that gripped her imagination. Mrs Thatcher did not swallow the whole of this nightmare vision; but she was already repeating the essence of his warning before the end of 1975, and the Russian prophet quickly joined her gallery of heroes. She finally met him in 1983.
She delivered her speech to a hastily arranged meeting of the Chelsea Conservative Association on 26 July, two days before Wilson left for Helsinki. It was quite short but stunningly direct. She started from the premise that ‘Freedom has taken a major battering in the last few months’. The background to Helsinki, she asserted, was that the Soviet Union was spending 20 per cent more than the United States each year on military research and development; 25 per cent more on weapons and equipment; 60 per cent more on strategic nuclear forces; while the Soviet navy possessed more nuclear submarines than the rest of the world’s navies put together. ‘Can anyone truly describe this as a defensive weapon?’
She recalled the crushing of the Czechoslovak spring just seven years before, and the Soviet writers and scientists – Solzhenitsyn among them – jailed for voicing their belief in freedom. The Soviet leaders, she declared uncompromisingly, were ‘in principle arrayed against everything for which we stand’. The power of NATO was ‘already at its lowest safe limit’, she concluded. ‘Let us accept no proposals which would tip the balance of power still further against the West.’10
This was a speech of extraordinary simplicity and power. It expressed Mrs Thatcher’s own uncompromising but essentially optimistic view of the Cold War. She had no time for the static view that the best outcome to be hoped for was a managed stand-off between two equally balanced superpowers; still less did she accept any moral equivalence between the two sides. She always believed, instinctively and passionately, that the Cold War should and could be won by the unwavering assertion of Western values backed by military strength. She boldly declared her position as a newly elected opposition leader more than five years before Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States. She held to it unflinchingly as Prime Minister, in alliance with Reagan, throughout the 1980s, and saw it triumphantly vindicated just before she left office. She made other, more celebrated speeches over the next few years; but she never essentially departed from the position she took up at Chelsea in July 1975.
By contrast the new Leader of the Opposition failed to shine in the House of Commons, either at Prime Minister’s Questions or in debate. The fact was that the sort of simple certainties that went down well with party audiences cut no ice at Westminster. As a result she spoke less and less frequently in the House. Apart from certain fixed occasions in the parliamentary calendar which she could not avoid, she made no more than seven major speeches in the next two years and only one in 1977 – 8. She spoke slightly more over the winter of 1978 – 9 as the Labour Government began to crumble, but still much less than Heath had done when he was Leader of the Opposition. Her neglect of Parliament continued even after she became Prime Minister, when she had all the information and authority needed to command the House but still spoke as rarely as she could and never memorably.
‘Quite a dame’
If her voice was carrying little weight at home, however, Mrs Thatcher was nevertheless determined that it should be heard in the wider world. Against the advice of the experienced heads around her, she insisted on going to America at the earliest opportunity to announce herself as a robust new partner in the Western alliance. British opposition leaders have often been humiliated by the lack of attention paid to them in Washington. Not so Margaret Thatcher. Her public relations wizard, Gordon Reece, went ahead of her to stir up media interest. By the time Mrs Thatcher flew into New York in the middle of September – she made a point of flying by Freddie Laker’s free enterprise airline – the novelty of her sex and the unusual clarity of her message did the rest.
Her first speech, for the most part a perfectly standard lecture to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in New York on the evils of excessive taxation, was beefed up at the last minute by Adam Ridley in breach of the convention that opposition leaders do not criticise their own country when speaking abroad. Mrs Thatcher did not scruple to paint a grim picture of the British economy groaning under socialism, graphically endorsing the common American perception that Britain was going down the tube. Rebuked by James Callaghan for running Britain down, she retorted that she was ‘not knocking Britain: I’m knocking socialism’.11
By the time she moved on to Washington, she had captured the media’s attention. She met President Ford, had breakfast with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and had talks with both Treasury and Defense Secretaries. Her next speech, to the National Press Club, was broadcast live on CBS television. She seized the opportunity with both hands. First she put her own gloss on Solzhenitsyn’s warning that the West was losing the ideological struggle by default.
No, we did not lose the Cold War. But we are losing the Thaw in a subtle and disturbing way. We are losing confidence in ourselves and in our case. We are losing the Thaw politically.
Then she answered the critics of her earlier speech by emphasising her faith in Britain’s potential to surmount its problems, stressing the huge windfall of North Sea oil and her favourite measure of British genius, the proud tally of seventy-two scientific Nobel Prize winners. She claimed to see a new willingness to reject the easy options. ‘We may suffer from a British sickness now, but our constitution is sound and we have the heart and will to win through.’12
This combination of Churchill and Mrs Miniver went down a storm. Hard-nosed bankers were heard to declare that Britain’s alternative Prime Minister was ‘quite a dame’.13 This first American trip marked the beginning of a love affair between Margaret Thatcher and the American press and public which lasted with ever-increasing enthusiasm for the next twenty years. It also greatly boosted her self-confidence. To journalists on the flight home she boasted: ‘The very thing I was said to be weak in – international affairs – I’ve succeeded in.’14 She felt she had now proved herself on the international stage.
The one domestic forum where Mrs Thatcher could unfailingly project her faith and rouse a large audience to enthusiasm was the Tory party’s annual conference in October. Unlike any other Tory leader, Mrs Thatcher had always loved the Tories’ annual seaside jamboree, ever since she first attended it in 1946.The annual conference speech henceforth became the high point of her year, a shameless festival of orchestrated leader-worship for which she prepared with meticulous care. The latent actress in her responded instinctively to the cameras and the razzmatazz, the flagwaving and Elgar, and her speech was almost always intensely patriotic, associating Labour relentlessly with national decline and looking forward to the recovery of ‘greatness’ under the Conservatives.
‘Ronnified’
Her first conference speech as leader was a critical test. Over the summer she had made two poorly received economic speeches in the House of Commons, and one controversial outburst on defence. Blackpool in October was her first major opportunity to tell the party and, via television, the whole country what she was about. She was determined that she did not want to make ‘just an economic speech. So I sat down at home over the weekend and wrote out sixty pages of my large handwriting. I found no difficulty: it just flowed and flowed.’15 Then, on the Wednesday of conference, week she summoned Ronald Millar to Blackpool for the final rewrite.
