the Cabinet was precarious and she still remembered who it was that had made her leader, she was careful to keep her lines of communication open. On several contentious issues in the second term she backed down in the face of party anxiety. But inevitably, as all Prime Ministers do, she became increasingly remote from her backbench troops.
To compensate for the lack of serious opposition in the Commons, the House of Lords became increasingly assertive, to the extent that the Government suffered regular defeats in the Upper House – more than 200 between 1979 and 1987.Though the Tories always had a large nominal majority in the Lords, there was a substantial component of crossbenchers – in addition to Labour and Alliance peers – who did not take a party whip but considered issues on their merits. Mostly these defeats were reversed when the legislation came back to the Commons, but on some major issues the Lords’ will prevailed. Mrs Thatcher was not pleased by this show of independence by the peers, particularly since she had appointed so many of them. She considered reducing their powers, but concluded that it was not worth the effort.10
The House of Lords, despite its indefensible composition, was a useful counterweight to the Government’s unchecked hegemony in the Commons; but it could not redress the increasing irrelevance of Parliament in the political process. The ‘elective dictatorship’ of which Lord Hailsham had warned in 1975 – when he objected to a Labour Government elected by 39 per cent of the votes cast (and only 29 per cent of the electorate) ruling as though it commanded a majority mandate – was a far more pressing reality in the mid-1980s when Mrs Thatcher used her huge parliamentary majorities to push through her revolution on the basis of no more than 43 per cent support (or 31 per cent of the whole electorate). The size of her majorities, Labour’s impotence and her own functional view of Parliament as a legislative sausage factory meant that opposition to her policies found expression elsewhere: in local government, in parts of the press, occasionally on the streets, but above all on television and radio. Again, this shift of the political debate from Westminster to the airwaves had been under way for some time, but it was markedly accelerated in the Thatcher years, measured by the steep decline in serious press reporting of Parliament: insofar as debates were reported at all, it was in the form of satirical sketches. The journalists would say that the debates were no longer worth reporting, and they might be right; the process was self-fulfilling. But all that most of the public ever heard of Parliament was the crude knockabout of Prime Minister’s Questions.
The obvious response to the usurpation of Parliament by television was to televise Parliament. But Mrs Thatcher strongly opposed letting cameras into the chamber, partly because she believed that they would damage the reputation of the House by showing in full colour the rowdiness which was already offending radio listeners, and change its character by encouraging publicity seekers to play to the gallery; but partly also because she thought it would do her personally no good. Gordon Reece and Bernard Ingham both tried to persuade her that she would only gain from being seen trouncing Kinnock at the dispatch box twice a week; but she was afraid she would come over as strident (as well as being seen wearing glasses to read her brief) and feared that the BBC would edit the exchanges to her disadvantage. When the issue came to a vote in late 1985 – at the height of her vendetta with the BBC – she did not speak publicly against it, but Tory MPs waited to see which way she was voting before following her into the ‘No’ lobby. The proposal was defeated by twelve votes. Two years later, in February 1988, she spoke and lobbied openly against the cameras: a majority of Tories still followed her line, but this time a six- month experiment was agreed by a majority of fifty-four.11 The televising finally started in November 1989. Most observers thought the effect was, as Reece had anticipated, to underline the Prime Minister’s dominance. But the cameras caught their first moment of real parliamentary drama when they were able to broadcast Geoffrey Howe’s devastating resignation speech in November 1990. After that there was no going back – though still very little is ever shown on terrestrial channels apart from Question Time.
The power of patronage
For most of its life the Thatcher Government was not popular. Between General Elections it usually trailed in the polls – often in third place – and even its two landslide election victories were gained with well under half the votes cast. Yet except for a brief period in the spring of 1986, after the Westland crisis and the bombing of Libya, few commentators anticipated anything other than a third Tory victory in 1987 and probably a fourth after that. Labour under Neil Kinnock was slowly rowing back from the extremism of the early 1980s, becoming a better organised and credible opposition; yet such was Mrs Thatcher’s dominance that it took an extraordinary leap of faith to imagine anyone else forming the next government. There was a despairing fatalism on the left, and a corresponding complacency on the right, that the political pendulum had been halted and the Tories would be in power for ever. The restraints traditionally imposed by the expectation of a periodic alternation of power between the main parties consequently exerted a diminishing force.As a result, from the mid-1980s, the Government began to give off an unmistakable odour of corruption arising from overconfidence, constitutional corner-cutting and mounting hubris.
First, Mrs Thatcher had no scruples about using the Prime Minister’s power of patronage in a frankly partisan manner to reward her supporters. She revived the award of honours for political services – abandoned by Harold Wilson – and gave them in abundance: peerages to discarded ministers and an average of four or five knighthoods a year to long-serving MPs. She was even more blatant in honouring the proprietors and editors of loyal newspapers and other friendly journalists. And then there was a steady flow of honours to businessmen and industrialists in recognition of donations to Tory party funds, a well-documented correlation unequalled since the time of Lloyd George.
One of MrsThatcher’s most provocative announcements on taking office was to declare her intention of reviving hereditary honours, which had been in abeyance since Macmillan’s invention of life peerages in 1960. Having asserted the principle, however, she did nothing about it for four years, and then undercut the point by awarding them only to those – Willie Whitelaw and George Thomas – with no heir to inherit. She also wanted to give a hereditary title – the only sort he would accept – to Enoch Powell (who also had only daughters), but was dissuaded by Whitelaw. The following year Macmillan, at the age of ninety, belatedly accepted the earldom traditionally due to former Prime Ministers. But that was the extent of the revival until 1992 when John Major was persuaded, allegedly at Mrs Thatcher’s personal request, to award a baronetcy to Denis. Though she herself took only a life peerage in 1992, this bizarre resurrection ensured that on Denis’s death in June 2003 Mark inherited his title.
A second area where Mrs Thatcher was blatantly partisan was in making appointments to public bodies. From the chairmanship of nationalised industries to the dozens of obscure quangos, boards and advisory bodies of which British public life is made up, she took a close interest in getting into place men (and occasionally women) who were, in the phrase indelibly associated with her premiership, ‘one of us’ – that is, if not actually paid-up Conservatives, at least sympathetic to her purpose. She had equally little compunction about getting rid of people she found unhelpful, like the Governor of the Bank of England, following differences over monetary policy in 1980 – 81. His replacement was a former Tory leader of Kent County Council and chairman of the National Westminster Bank, with no central banking experience at all, but a sound monetarist.
Perhaps the Governor of the Bank needed to be a supporter of the Government’s central policy. But Mrs Thatcher’s interest in public appointments extended far beyond economic matters into the area of culture and the arts. Potential bishops and potential governors of the BBC were blackballed on frankly political grounds, and even nominations for trustees of national galleries were closely scrutinised and sometimes rejected on a hint from Downing Street. Right across the board Mrs Thatcher used the power of patronage systematically to assert her hegemony in every corner of national life.
A change of government in 1997 made very little difference. Tony Blair inherited the new conventions of Mrs Thatcher’s patronage state and simply exploited them more ruthlessly than even she had dared, for the benefit of New Labour. Thus Thatcherite hubris in the 1980s met the nemesis it deserved in the late 1990s. But the civilised tradition of bipartisanship – hitherto one of the unsung decencies of British life – had been destroyed for ever.
