dismissed as a pacifist wimp.
However, she was hurt by the allegation that her social policies showed a lack of compassion, and worried by the widespread impression that Christians could no longer be Conservatives. She believed absolutely the contrary. Her politics and her religion were based alike on the primacy of individual choice and individual responsibility. ‘The heart of the Christian message,’ she told Laurens van der Post in a 1983 television interview with her favourite mystic, ‘is that each person has the right to choose.’25 She did not believe in collective morality or collective compassion, via taxation, but in individual charity – which depended on a degree of individual wealth. ‘No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions,’ she told Brian Walden in another interview. The important point was that ‘he had money as well’.26
Unless provoked, she was generally careful not to bring religion into her political speeches.27 She recognised that many sincere Christians were not Tories, and knew that it would cause an outcry if she suggested that they should be. But at the same time she was keen to demonstrate that good Christians could be – and in her view, should be – Conservatives; so she was not afraid to preach her own distinctive political theology whenever she was given the chance in an appropriate setting. In March 1981 she revisited the City church of St Lawrence Jewry, where she had preached once before when she was Leader of the Opposition, to expound her favourite parable of the talents: ‘Creating wealth,’ she told her lunchtime audience of bankers and stockbrokers, ‘must be seen as a Christian obligation if we are to fulfil our role as stewards of the resources and talents the Creator has provided for us.’28 And in 1988 she outraged the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland with her gospel of unfettered individualism.
Though the Prime Minister’s initiative in the appointment of bishops had been greatly curtailed by a new system introduced in 1976 whereby she was given only two names to choose from, Mrs Thatcher took her diminished responsibility very seriously and made a point of trying to appoint the more conservative of the options put up to her.‘They only give me two choices,’ she once complained, ‘both from the left.’ Another time, when Woodrow Wyatt asked her why she had appointed so-and-so, she said, ‘You should have seen the other one.’29 In fact, she could ask for more names and at least once did so. Right at the end of her time she had the chance to replace Runcie at Canterbury. With no obvious front-runner, she made a bold choice by picking a complete outsider, the very non-Establishment, state school-educated evangelical George Carey – a moral and theological conservative who nevertheless supported the ordination of women – in preference to any of the Establishment candidates. ‘In choosing him,’
She found a much more effective champion of her religious views in the person of the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, whose robust preaching of clear Old Testament values reminded her of her father. She frequently stated her admiration of the way the Jews in her constituency looked after their own community, without relying on the state. ‘In the thirty-three years that I represented it’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘I never had a Jew come in poverty and desperation to one of my constituency surgeries… I often wished that… Christians… would take closer note of the Jewish emphasis on self-help and acceptance of personal responsibility.’31 The number of ministers of Jewish extraction in her Cabinets – Keith Joseph, Nigel Lawson, Leon Brittan, David Young, Malcolm Rifkind and later Michael Howard – and also among her private advisers, attracted some notice and even suggestions of favouritism; but it was largely accidental. She certainly liked clever, classless outsiders, which many of these people were; but the description also covered plenty of others not Jewish. There is no suggestion that she showed undue favour towards Jews, only that she was, as Nigel Lawson wrote, unusually free of ‘the faintest trace of anti-Semitism’.32 She was very far from being uncritically supportive of the State of Israel. But she did find it politically useful to hold up Jakobovits as a model by which implicitly to criticise Runcie. She knighted him – rather incongruously – in 1981; and wanted to send him to the House of Lords to balance the Anglican bishops there, but with curious deference to protocol was not sure she could, until she finally took the plunge – to general applause – in 1988.
‘Academic poison’
The Prime Minister might grumble about the bishops, but she could not do very much about them: and perhaps they did not greatly matter anyway. The case of the universities was different. If the nation’s institutions of higher education were obstructing the realisation of the Government’s vision, it was within the Government’s power to bring them to heel. And that was precisely what she set out to do.
Mrs Thatcher’s relations with the academic community were paradoxical. Though not herself an intellectual, she used intellectuals to advise her more systematically and effectively than any previous Prime Minister. She used the deliberately homely language of housewife economics to lead the most ideologically driven government of the century. And Thatcherism prevailed: she won the ideological argument and shifted the political agenda decisively in her direction for a generation. Ideas that had been derided when she and Keith Joseph first began to argue them in 1975 were taken for granted by a Labour Government twenty-five years later. Yet the intellectuals never forgave her. Of course, she had her academic supporters. But Thatcherite academics were always a minority – if, by the end of the decade, a highly visible and vocal one. The great majority of university teachers loathed her, and she equally despised them.
Her experience as Education Secretary in the early 1970s, visiting universities at the height of student radicalism and being shouted down by left-wing demonstrators who mindlessly denounced all Tory ministers as ‘Fascists’, confirmed both her dim view of the quality of education being taught and her contempt for the trendy professors and craven vice chancellors who permitted this sort of intolerance to go on. Remembering her own student days of hard work and plain living, she regarded modern students and most of their lecturers as idle parasites who lived off the taxpayer while abusing the hand that fed them. But she blamed the students less than their tutors. ‘Revolutionary doctrines like communism,’ she told Brian Walden in 1988, ‘usually came from intellectuals and academics… Some academics and intellectuals… are putting out what I call poison. Some young people, who were thrilled to bits to get to university, had every decent value pounded out of them.’33
She resented the universities’ claims to intellectual autonomy while expecting to be funded by the state, and complained of their anti-capitalist culture. Only two institutions were exempt from this blanket condemnation. The Open University, which she had saved from being strangled at birth in 1970, gave good value for the Government’s money by turning out graduates more cheaply than conventional residential universities; she worried about left- wing bias in some of its correspondence material, but at least its students were highly motivated adults who did not waste their time on drink, sex and campus politics. Better still, the independent University College of Buckingham, founded in 1974, was a private university on the American model which got no funding from the Government at all.
Keith Joseph had tried to convert the universities to the beauty of the free market by his brave campaign around the campuses between 1975 and 1979, during which he was regularly abused, spat at and shouted down. Once in power Mrs Thatcher adopted more direct methods, first by simply cutting their budgets, later by taking them under direct political control, forcing them on the one hand to seek alternative sources of income and on the other to process more students with fewer staff and resources.
Curiously some of the heaviest cuts fell on science. Part of the problem was that the increasing emphasis on profitable development diverted money away from pure research. The result was that over the five years 1981 – 6 the proportion of national GDP devoted to research and development together fell from 0.72 per cent – which already compared poorly with other European countries – to 0.62 per cent.34 Now Mrs Thatcher realised that if she was going to be her own Minister of Science she must be seen to do something. So she set up a Cabinet committee, with herself in the chair, to try to redirect resources to pure science. But the damage was done. The squeeze on the universities in general and science in particular had already driven many of the country’s best scientists to move to the United States.
It was this more than anything else which provoked Oxford to the unprecedented snub of refusing the Prime Minister an honorary degree. All her recent Oxford-educated predecessors, from Attlee to Heath, had received this honour within a year of taking office. But the university had missed the moment in 1979 because it was already
