the whole of this period in opposition, she was obliged to speak with two voices – one clear, didactic and evangelical, the other cautious, moderate and conventional – displaying a confusing mixture of confidence and caution. Right up to May 1979 no colleague or commentator could be sure which was the real Margaret Thatcher.
It is not even certain that she knew herself. Looking back from the perspective of the 1990s, Lady Thatcher in her memoirs naturally subscribed to the heroic legend of a leader who knew clearly from the outset what she wanted to achieve and was only constrained to dissemble her intentions by her dependence on colleagues less clear-sighted and resolute than herself. And, of course, there is plenty of evidence to support this view. ‘
Yet rarely if ever did Mrs Thatcher speak in public of abolishing exchange controls or serious denationalisation, still less of curbing local authorities or renewing the Tories’ battle with the miners. In an ideal world all this may have been among her long-term aspirations, but it is doubtful if she ever imagined that any of them would become practical politics. In the short term she thought more in terms of stopping things than of pursuing a radical agenda of her own. Her repeated refrain to colleagues and advisers from the think-tanks who told her what she should do in office was ‘Don’t tell me
The truth is that caution was just as integral a component of Margaret Thatcher’s character as faith. She was pretty sure she would only get one chance, and as an ambitious politician she did not intend to blow it. Nor was it simply that she dare not risk commitments that might split the party. She always had a superstitious fear of giving hostages to fortune or crossing bridges before she came to them. She hated the detailed pledges Heath had forced her to make on rates and mortgages in October 1974. Back in 1968 she had argued in her lecture to the Conservative Political Centre that elections should not be turned into competitive auctions. Now she seized on an essay by the political scientist S. E. Finer which lent academic authority to her distrust of the modern doctrine of the mandate, and quoted it triumphantly to her aides.4 She believed that politics should be a contest between opposed philosophies, not catchpenny bribes. Her purpose was to win the battle of ideas.
The battle of ideas
Thus it was because she had faith that she could afford to be cautious. She was confident that the correct policies would become clear in time so long as she got the direction right. In the meantime she could compromise, bide her time and go along with policies in which, in her heart, she fundamentally disbelieved – as she had been doing, after all, for most of her career – with no fear that she would thereby lose sight of her objective or be blown off course. She felt no contradiction, for example, in telling David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh that she was utterly opposed in principle to the trade union closed shop, but recognised that for the moment she had to live with it. She explained that politics was all about timing. You could kill a good idea by floating it five years ahead of its time, she told them; but two years ahead it could take off. Judging the right moment was the test of ‘real political leadership’.5
To win the battle of ideas Mrs Thatcher recognised that she had first to educate herself. Having come to the leadership so unexpectedly she knew she had an immense amount to learn, not merely to master the whole field of politics and government – where previously she had only had to cover one department at a time – but to equip herself intellectually to seize the opportunity which confronted her. With characteristic application, but remarkable humility, she set about learning what she needed to understand about the theory and practice of the free market and its place in Tory philosophy. She read the books that Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman told her to read, attended seminars at the Centre for Policy Studies and the IEA, and was not ashamed to sit humbly at the feet of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek when they came to London, absorbing their ideas but transmuting them skilfully into her own practical philosophy.
The main theme of all her speeches in these years was simple. One day very soon – ‘and it will be a day just like any other Thursday’ – the British electorate would face a simple choice between opposed governing philosophies: on the one hand what she loosely labelled socialism, and others would call social democracy, corporatism, Keynesianism or the mixed economy; on the other ‘what socialists call capitalism and I prefer to call the free economy’.6 When a Labour MP interrupted her in the Commons to ask her what she meant by socialism she was at a loss to reply.7 What in fact she meant was Government support for inefficient industries, punitive taxation, regulation of the labour market, price controls – everything that interfered with the functioning of the free economy. She accepted that many of these evils were in practice unavoidable. Even so, there were in principle, as she put it in a speech to the West German Christian Democrats, ‘only two political philosophies, only two ways of governing a country’, however many party labels might be invented to obscure the fact: the Marxist-socialist way, which put the interest of the state first, and the way of freedom, which put people first.8
Moderate Western forms of democratic socialism as practised by the German Social Democrats or the British Labour party she regarded contemptuously as merely watered down versions of Marxism without the courage of Moscow’s convictions. It fitted her political model perfectly that the Labour Party – under the influence of its increasingly dominant left wing – was becoming ever more openly Marxist.True to Hayek, she believed that socialism was a slippery slope – literally the road to serfdom – which would lead inexorably to Communism if the slide was not halted and reversed. Hence she did not, like other Tory leaders in the past, attribute the failures of the Labour Government merely to incompetence or inefficiency, but to fundamental error, which in her more generous moments she could recognise as well-intentioned. Labour Governments, she believed – and Tory ones when they fell into socialist fallacies – inevitably caused inflation, unemployment and stagnation because socialism was by its very nature simply wrong. It was wrong in practice, since self-evidently it did not work: and the reason it did not work was because it was morally wrong. It was essentially immoral and contrary to everything that she believed was best in human nature.
The Right Approach
Meanwhile, despite her determination not to saddle herself with specific commitments, the opposition had to have some policies. In keeping with the strategy of presenting a moderate face to the electorate, and the necessity of keeping the party outwardly united, Mrs Thatcher was content to leave the official process of policy- making in the hands of the Conservative Research Department fed by a network of backbench committees. Some were more active than others, and the process was nothing like so thorough as Heath’s comprehensive policy exercise in 1965 – 70; but Mrs Thatcher was happy to encourage it as a harmless way of keeping her MPs out of mischief.
Meanwhile, the important policy work was being done on a freelance basis by shadow ministers, particularly Geoffrey Howe and his shadow Treasury team. Some of this Mrs Thatcher followed closely; other ideas appear to have been worked up without her direct knowledge. In between there was a lot of thinking, planning and discussion which she was more or less aware of; but very little of this work found its way into her public pronouncements. Though she was evidently persuaded, for instance, that exchange controls should be
