Millar was a popular West End playwright who had written occasional material for Ted Heath. He responded reluctantly, but he was instantly captivated. He read her some material which he had hastily prepared, ending with some lines of Abraham Lincoln:
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer…
When he had finished Mrs Thatcher said nothing, but produced from her handbag a piece of yellowing newsprint containing the same lines. ‘It goes wherever I go,’ she told him.16 In that moment they clicked. For the next fifteen years no major speech of hers was complete until it had been ‘Ronnified’.
With his experience of the theatre, Millar also coached her in how to deliver her lines, writing in the pauses and emphases she should observe. ‘I’m not a performer, dear,’ she told him once;17 but she was, and much of his success with her was due to the fact that he handled her like a highly-strung actress. As she delivered this first conference speech, Millar stood in the wings, feeling like Henry Higgins watching Eliza Doolittle at Ascot. But the speech was a triumph.
She began with nicely judged humility, recalling her first conference in the same hall in 1946, when Churchill was leader and she never dreamed that she might one day speak from the same platform, paying tribute in turn to Eden, Macmillan, Home and Heath (‘who successfully led the party to victory in 1970 and brilliantly led the nation into Europe in 1973’). Getting into her stride, however, she repeated her defence of her speeches in America. She damned the Labour Government not just for high unemployment, high taxation, low productivity and record borrowing but, more fundamentally, for threatening the British way of life itself. ‘Let me give you my vision’, she went on – with characteristic disregard for feminism:
A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the State as servant and not as master – these are the British inheritance. They are the essence of a free country and on that freedom all our other freedoms depend.
‘We want a free economy,’ she conceded, ‘not only because it guarantees our liberties but also because it is the best way of creating wealth.’ There followed a fairly standard recital of the need to stimulate private enterprise, cut the share of the economy taken by public spending and rebuild profits and incentives. The purpose of increasing prosperity, she proclaimed, was ‘not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped’. Yet she ended with another explicit endorsement of inequality: ‘We are all unequal,’ she declared boldly.
No one, thank heavens, is quite like anyone else, however much the Socialists may like to pretend otherwise. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal. But to us, every human being is equally important… Everyone must be allowed to develop the abilities he knows he has within him – and she knows she has within her – in the way he chooses.
Finally, after a strong assertion of the primacy of law and order, and a pledge to uphold the Union with Northern Ireland, she returned to her intensely patriotic personal faith.
I believe we are coming to yet another turning point in our long history. We can go on as we have been going and continue down, or we can stop and with a decisive act of will say ‘Enough’.18
The representatives in the hall loved it. The press loved it. ‘Now I
Back at Westminster for the autumn session, however, Wilson continued effortlessly to dominate her at Prime Minister’s Questions every Tuesday and Thursday, alternately taunting her with her shared responsibility for 1970 – 74 and chiding her if she disowned it. He patronised her inexperience: ‘It is a pity she never served on the Public Accounts Committee or she would have known these things.’20 He mocked her reluctance to intervene more often, and once caught her out quoting newspaper reports of a White Paper instead of the paper itself.21
Emergence of the ‘Iron Lady’
Mrs Thatcher maintained her attack on the Helsinki process with several more speeches during 1976. It was the first, delivered at Kensington Town Hall in January, which succeeded in striking a most satisfactory response from the Soviets. Russia, she bluntly asserted, was ‘ruled by a dictatorship of patient, far-sighted men who are rapidly making their country the foremost naval and military power in the world’.They were not doing this for self-defence: ‘A huge, largely landlocked country like Russia does not need to build the most powerful navy in the world just to guard its own frontiers.’
No. The Russians are bent on world dominance, and they are rapidly acquiring the means to become the most powerful imperial nation the world has seen. The men in the Soviet Politburo do not have to worry about the ebb and flow of public opinion. They put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns. They know that they are a superpower in only one sense – the military sense. They are a failure in human and economic terms.22
This was breathtakingly undiplomatic. She was immediately attacked for warmongering. Such bluntness was simply not the language of serious statesmanship. Old hands like Callaghan and Wilson prided themselves on their ability to do business with the enduring Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, and his hard-faced colleagues. Calling the Soviet leaders dictators bent on world domination was in this view merely childish and counterproductive. It certainly annoyed them. A few days after the Kensington speech the Soviet army newspaper
The next month her personal rating shot up by seven points. Realising that she was on to a winner, she kept up the attack. She undertook an extensive programme of globetrotting over the next three years – partly to spread her message and polish her credentials as a world leader in waiting, partly to educate herself and meet the other leaders with whom she hoped to deal once she had attained office. In all she visited twenty-three countries, including all Britain’s major European partners at least once, and one or two outside the EC like Switzerland and Finland. She visited the two Iron Curtain countries least controlled by the Soviet Union – Ceausescu’s Romania and Tito’s Yugoslavia; but was – unsurprisingly – not invited to Moscow. Her strong anti-Soviet stance did, however, earn her an invitation to China in April 1977. She visited Egypt, Syria and Israel in early 1976, and later the same year made an extended tour of India, Pakistan and Singapore, going on to Australia and New Zealand. She did not set foot, however, in sub-Saharan Africa, South America or the Gulf. For the most part she did not lecture her hosts about free markets – where she tried it, in Australia, it went down badly. But she did project herself successfully as a staunch defender of Freedom with a capital F, capitalising skilfully on the curiosity which attended a forceful woman politician. In Israel she visited a kibbutz and predictably did not like it. She then infuriated the Israelis by inspecting a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria; but she was even-handed in her condemnation of terrorism and refused to recognise the PLO.
On her main battleground of Helsinki and the Cold War, however, she made an undoubted impact, at least while the Republican administration of Ford and Kissinger was still in the White House. Jimmy Carter, elected in November 1976, was a different kind of President, genuinely but naively determined to work for disarmament and human rights. Mrs Thatcher met him on her second visit to the States in September 1977 – a mark of some
