The Path to Power

Chambers. He was, indeed, one of the most brilliant criminal lawyers I ever knew. He was witty, with no illusions about human nature or his own profession, extraordinarily lucid in exposition, and a kind guide to me.

In fact, I was to go through no fewer than four sets of Chambers, partly because I had to gain a grounding in several fields before I was competent to specialize in tax. So I witnessed the rhetorical fireworks of the Criminal Bar, admired the precise draftsmanship of the Chancery Bar and then delved into the details of company law. But I became increasingly confident that tax law could be my forte. It was a meeting point with my interest in politics; it offered the right mixture of theory and practical substance; and of one thing we could all be sure — there would never be a shortage of clients desperate to cut their way out of the jungle of over-complex and constantly changing tax law.

Studying, observing, discussing and eventually practising law had a profound effect on my political outlook. In this I was probably unusual. Familiarity with the law usually breeds if not contempt, at least a large measure of cynicism. For me, however, it gave a richer significance to that expression ‘the rule of law’ which so easily tripped off the Conservative tongue.

From my reading at university and earlier I had gained a clear idea that what distinguished free from un- free regimes was that law ruled in the first and force in the second. But what was the essence of this ‘law’? By what process had it evolved? And why did it have such deep roots in Britain and, as recent history showed, such shallow ones elsewhere? The legal textbooks that I now studied were not by and large intended to provide answers to such points. But the principles of law which they expounded continually raised in my mind these questions. Similarly, as I read about the great judges of the formative periods of English law, I was increasingly fascinated by the mysterious and cumulative process by which the courts of England had laid the foundations for English freedom.

But it was A.V. Dicey whose writing — above all his classic textbook The Law of the Constitution — had most impact on me. It had long been fashionable to attack Dicey for his doctrinaire opposition to the new administrative state, and there are plenty of learned commentators still inclined to do so. But I found myself immediately at home with what he said — it is not perhaps without significance that though Dicey’s was a great legal mind, he was at heart a classical liberal. The ‘law of the constitution’ was, in Dicey’s words, the result of two ‘guiding principles, which had been gradually worked out by the more or less conscious efforts of generations of English statesmen and lawyers’. The first of these principles was the sovereignty of Parliament. The second was the rule of law, which I will summarize briefly and inadequately as the principle that no authority is above the law of the land.[6] For Dicey, writing in 1885, and for me reading him some seventy years later, the rule of law still had a very English, or at least Anglo- Saxon, feel to it. It was later, through reading Hayek’s masterpieces The Constitution of Liberty and Law, Legislation and Liberty that I really came to think of this principle as having wider application.

When politics is in your blood, every circumstance seems to lead you back to it. Whether pondering Dicey, poring over the intricacies of tax law or discussing current issues with other members of the Inns of Court Conservative Society, political questions insisted on taking centre stage in my imagination. So when in December 1954 I heard that there was a vacancy for the Conservative candidature in Orpington — which of course, being next to my old constituency of Dartford, I knew, and which was not too far from London — I telephoned Central Office and asked to have my name put forward. I was interviewed and placed on the short-list. Sitting just outside the selection meeting with Denis, I heard Donald Sumner, the local candidate (and Association Chairman), advancing in his speech the decisive argument that in Orpington what they really needed was ‘a Member who really knows what is going on in the constituency — who knows the state of the roads in Locksbottom’. Denis and I roared with laughter. But Donald Sumner got the seat.

I was naturally disappointed by the decision, because Orpington would have been an ideal constituency for me. It seemed extremely unlikely now that a similarly suitable seat would become available before what looked liked an increasingly imminent general election. So I wrote to John Hare to say that I would now ‘continue at the Bar with no further thought of a parliamentary career for many years’. Knowing me better than I knew myself perhaps, he wrote back urging me at least to reconsider if a winnable seat in Kent became available. But I was adamant, though I made it clear that I would always be available to speak in constituencies and would of course be active in the general election campaign.

Although I was in general a loyal Conservative, I had felt for some time that the Government could have moved further and faster in dismantling socialism and installing free-enterprise policies. But it had not been easy for them to persuade popular opinion — or indeed themselves — that a somewhat stronger brew would be palatable. In fact, by 1955 a good deal of modest progress had been made as regards the removal of controls and, even more modestly, returning nationalized industries to the private sector. The rationing of food had finally been brought to an end. Large steps had been taken towards restoring the convertibility of the currency. Iron and steel nationalization had been halted and a start made in selling road haulage. Above all, the proportion of GNP taken by the state had been reduced steadily in the years from 1951. And there was one development of great importance for the future: the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting and the beginning of commercial television.

SUEZ AND AFTER

Conservative thinking about policy matters was also becoming more self-confident and more radical. This can be illustrated by a comparison between the two most influential publications produced by the Party over these years — One Nation (October 1950) and Change is our Ally (May 1954). Both were written by an overlapping group of remarkably gifted young Members of Parliament, including Enoch Powell, Angus Maude, Robert Carr and (One Nation only) Ted Heath and Iain Macleod. Admittedly, One Nation dealt with social policy which, particularly at a time when it was clear that a Conservative government would have to rein back on public expenditure, was a tricky topic. But still the relative blandness of that document — which emphasized (soundly enough, of course) Conservative commitment to a ‘safety net’ of benefits securing a living standard below which none must fall, and to Anthony Eden’s notion of the strengthening of the weak rather than the weakening of the strong — suggested a defensive exercise and indeed a defensive mentality.

Change is our Ally is a far more exciting document which, when I re-read it in the late 1980s, I found to contain very much the same analysis as that we had adopted since I became Party Leader. It began by tracing the growth of collectivism in the British economy between the wars. It then boldly attacked the notion that the planning of the Second World War economy could appropriately be extended into peacetime. It even pointed out — what everyone knew to be true, but what for years after the war went largely unsaid — that the wartime system of planning had been inefficient, wasteful and bureaucratic, however necessary in the emergency the nation faced at the time. The follies and absurdities of the economic plan, with its detailed predictions and quantified targets, were further exposed by retrospective comparisons between the assumptions made in Lord Beveridge’s unofficial study Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944, and the situation a decade later. It was all admirably commonsensical. What the authors of Change is our Ally, and indeed those of the following year’s Conservative manifesto, did not do — and I certainly claim no credit for thinking at the time that they should have done — was to propose the root and branch dismantling of collectivism in industry or fundamental reform in the Welfare State. But in the mid–1950s the Conservative Party was at least playing with a consistent free market analysis which would, in due course and given the opportunities of government, have led to free market policies. This, however, was not how matters were to develop.

In April 1955 Churchill resigned as Prime Minister to be succeeded by Anthony Eden, and there was in quick succession a snap general election, a new Conservative Government, the debacle of Suez and the arrival at No. 10 of Harold Macmillan, the wizard of change.

During the general election campaign of May 1955 I spoke in a number of constituencies. But for me it was generally a dull affair. Once you have been a candidate everything else palls. Moreover, there was very little doubt of the outcome on this occasion. Sure enough, the Conservatives won an overall majority of fifty-eight. But the