Yet Mrs Thatcher determinedly played down the feminist aspect of her victory. She always insisted that she did not think of herself as a woman, but simply as a politician with a job to do, the standard-bearer of certain principles, who happened to be female. Though in her thirty-year progress from Grantham via Oxford to Westminster and now Downing Street she had skilfully exploited her femininity for whatever advantages it could bring her, she had rarely presented herself as a pathfinder for her sex and did not intend to start now. It was symptomatic of her uniqueness that the 1979 election saw fewer women returned than at any election since 1951 – just nineteen compared with twenty-seven in the previous Parliament. ‘It never occurred to me that I was a woman Prime Minister,’ she claimed in her televised memoirs.3 She preferred to boast of being the first scientist to reach the office.
More important than the novelty of her gender was the widespread sense that she represented a political new dawn and a decisive break with the recent past. Of course no one in 1979 imagined that she would remain Prime Minister for eleven years, stamping her personality and even her name indelibly on the whole of the next decade. But she was unquestionably different. Her admirers – who included, crucially, many former Labour voters – saw her election as the last chance for a failing country to pull itself out of the spiral of terminal decline. Others – including many in her own party – feared that on the contrary she was a narrow-minded dogmatist whose simple-minded remedies would prove disastrous if she was not restrained by wiser counsel. In between, of course, there were plenty of cynics who were confident that she would in practice turn out no different from any of her recent predecessors whose lofty rhetoric had quickly turned to dust. With all her brave talk of restoring Britain’s ‘greatness’ – whatever that meant – by reviving the spirit of enterprise, Mrs Thatcher had been remarkably unspecific in opposition about how she was going to do it. Why then should she be expected to succeed where they had failed?
Mrs Thatcher herself was fiercely determined that her government would indeed be different. She was driven by a burning sense of patriotic mission and historic destiny. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she insisted during the election.4 ‘I know that I can save this country and that no one else can’, the Earl of Chatham is supposed to have declared on taking office in the middle of the Seven Years War in 1757. ‘It would have been presumptuous of me to have compared myself with Chatham,’ Lady Thatcher wrote in her memoirs. ‘But if I am honest I must admit that my exhilaration came from a similar inner conviction.’5
Of course this was written many years later. But from the moment she walked through the door of Number Ten her officials felt the force of this passionate self-belief. Kenneth Stowe, her first principal private secretary, recalls that from the first moment she was ‘absolutely focused, absolutely committed’ and ‘very hands-on’: she wanted to be briefed about everything and to take charge of everything immediately, even before she sat down to pick her Cabinet. The contrast with the relaxed style of her predecessor could not have been more marked.6 Mrs Thatcher appeared to need no sleep, nor did she expect anyone else to need it. All her life, and specifically for the past four years, she had been training herself for this moment. ‘I have always had an onerous timetable, but I like it,’ she told an interviewer on the first anniversary of her taking office. ‘I have a tremendous amount of energy and for the first time in my life it is fully used.’7
Yet her missionary impatience was, as always, overlaid with caution. She knew in broad terms what she wanted to achieve. She knew there was a tide to seize, a powerful movement of economic thinking in favour of the New Right free-market agenda that she and Keith Joseph had been preaching for the past four years. But at the same time she knew that the opposition of established interests and entrenched assumptions – in Whitehall, in the country and not least in the Tory party – was still very strong, so that she would have to proceed carefully in order to carry the party and the country with her. The election had delivered her an adequate parliamentary majority of forty-three. But the outstanding feature of the result, emphasised by all the press, was the imbalance between the prosperous Tory south of England and the struggling old industrial areas of the north of England, Wales and Scotland, which had still predominantly voted Labour.
She frequently remarked that she would be given only one chance to get it right and she did not intend to blow it. In making her first pronouncements, therefore, in choosing her Cabinet, in taking over the machinery of government and in setting out her initial agenda, she was a great deal more cautious than her rhetoric in opposition had suggested, disappointing her keenest supporters while reassuring those who had feared she might be dangerously headstrong. The heroic picture painted in her memoirs of a radical reformer determined to shake the country from its socialistic torpor is not untrue; but her radicalism was in practice tempered by a shrewd awareness of political reality and a streak of genuine humility. She had no illusions about the scale of the task before her.
Her long-term ambition, as set out in opposition, was nothing less than the elimination of what she called ‘socialism’ from British politics, the reversal of the whole collectivising trend of the post-war era and thereby, she believed, the moral reinvigoration of the nation. ‘Economics is the method’, she declared in 1981. ‘The object is to change the soul.’8 In the short term, however, she was determined to keep her attention firmly on the method. She would not be distracted by foreign affairs; she had no interest in flashy constitutional reform; nor did she have any immediate plans for tackling the welfare state. Even the reform of trade-union law – for which she had an undoubted popular mandate – was not to be rushed. Hence for the leader of a determinedly radical government she had a remarkably thin agenda of specific reforms in May 1979. In opposition since 1975 she had deliberately stuck to general principles and avoided precise commitments. Her fundamental philosophy of anti- socialist economics prescribed a number of broad objectives: the Government should cut public spending, cut taxes, keep tight control of the money supply, refrain from detailed intervention in the economy and generally trust the operation of the free market. But very little of this required legislation. Most of it simply involved not doing things which previous governments of both parties had believed it their function to do.
She had three important factors working in her favour. First, she gained a huge advantage from the timing of the election which had brought her to power. Had the Labour Government fallen at any time in the previous four years, Mrs Thatcher would have been obliged to launch her free-market experiment in far less propitious conditions. But the trade-union-orchestrated chaos of the previous winter had played into her hands. In the ten years since 1969, the unions had destroyed the Wilson, Heath and now the Callaghan Governments. Public tolerance of the assumption that the country could only be governed with the consent of the unions – the conventional wisdom of the past four decades – had finally snapped. There was a powerful mood that it was time for someone to make a stand and face them down; and that someone was Margaret Thatcher.
At an official level, too, a significant shift had already occurred. Though monetarism – the theory that there was a direct causal relationship between the amount of money in the economy and rising inflation – was still deeply controversial, disputed by many economists and used by politicians as sloppy shorthand for all manner of right-wing extremism, it had in practice been largely accepted and quietly applied by the Labour Government, under the instruction of the International Monetary Fund, for the past two years. Callaghan and his Chancellor, Denis Healey, had kept a tight squeeze on monetary growth on pragmatic, not dogmatic, grounds; the new Conservative Government – or at least the inner group of ministers who would direct its economic policy – believed in controlling the money supply as a matter of principle, even of faith. But the soil had already been prepared for them, and the change of policy within the Treasury was more cosmetic – a matter of presentation – than real. The incoming Government was actually a good deal less innovative in this respect than either the Tories pretended or Labour ex-ministers liked to acknowledge.
The third enormous benefit the new Government enjoyed, which cushioned to some extent the impact of the policies it intended to pursue, was the coming on flow of North Sea oil. It was in June 1980 that Britain became for the first time a net oil exporter. The effect of this fortunate windfall was disguised by the fact that the Government’s coming to power coincided with the onset of a major world recession, so that for the first two or three years the economic news appeared to be all bad as unemployment and inflation soared. But the impact of the recession would have been a great deal worse, and maybe politically unsustainable, had it not been for the fortuitous subsidy that Britain’s independent oil supply gave to both government revenue and the balance of payments.
Unlike all her recent predecessors, Mrs Thatcher’s purpose was not to run the economy from Whitehall, but to teach British industry to survive by its own competitiveness instead of looking to the Government for its salvation. Her immediate priority, therefore, was to take three or four big, bold decisions and then have the courage to stick to them. As it happened, this turned out to be more difficult than anticipated as the recession bit, provoking a concerted demand from every shade of the political spectrum that the Government must set aside its ideological preconceptions and act in the national interest in exactly the ways Mrs Thatcher was determined to
