looked forward to serving in this capacity. The formalities thus indicated a kind of armed truce between the competing views and personalities.
The following evening, I made my first appearance as Leader at the 1922 Committee meeting. My relations with the wider Parliamentary Party were much easier than with the Shadow Cabinet. As I entered, everyone rose to their feet. Edward du Cann presented me with an unsigned Valentine card (a day early) which would join the other Valentines and roses that accumulated at Flood Street. In addressing the 1922 Committee it is the Leader’s mood and bearing rather than the content of a speech which matter most. But they seemed to like the message as well — namely, the need to distinguish the Conservative approach clearly from that of the socialists, to return to traditional values of independence and self-help and to challenge the assumption that the onward march of the Left was irreversible. I sat down amid much clapping, banging of desks and that curious deep braying with which the Parliamentary Conservative Party expresses its approval.
In the next few days my time was taken up in meeting journalists, discussing arrangements for my office and fulfilling long-standing constituency engagements. There were few opportunities to sit down with Humphrey and Willie to discuss Shadow Cabinet membership. In any case, I wanted the weekend to make my final decisions. But the delay encouraged speculation. According to the press a battle was under way to prevent Keith Joseph becoming Shadow Chancellor. In fact, he did not ask for the position nor did I offer it.
My Shadow Cabinet-making was smoothed by the fact that Peter Thomas and Geoffrey Rippon made it clear that they did not want to continue. That meant two more vacancies to play with. I spent Saturday and Sunday at Flood Street making and remaking the list, consulting Humphrey or Willie on particular points. On Monday I made the appointments in a series of meetings with colleagues at my room in the Commons.
Willie was the first to come in. I gave him a roving brief which included the issue of devolution — which already spelt political difficulties he, as both a former Chief Whip and a Scot representing an English seat, might be able to tackle. Then I saw Keith Joseph, whom I asked to continue with his Shadow Cabinet responsibility for policy and research. In a sense, Willie and Keith were the two key figures, one providing the political brawn and the other the policy-making brains of the team. I also felt that Keith must continue his intellectual crusade from the Centre for Policy Studies for wider understanding and acceptance of free-enterprise economics. I was under no illusion that my victory in the leadership election represented a wholesale conversion. Our ability to change Party policy, as the first step towards making changes in government, depended upon using our positions to change minds. Unfortunately, on his forays into the universities Keith was to find a readier hearing from the Militant Tendency in his avowedly left-wing audiences than he would from the cynical tendency among his colleagues.
My next visitor was Reggie Maudling. I suspect that, although he had made it clear publicly that he was willing to serve, he was as surprised as the press when I made him Shadow Foreign Secretary. Though widely praised at the time, this was not a good appointment. I had always admired Reggie’s intellect and regretted that he had had to resign over the Poulson affair in 1972. Also bringing Reggie back to deal with foreign affairs appeared a convincing answer to those who had contrasted Ted’s experience with my own lack of it. But it soon became clear that Reggie was not prepared to modify his own views, a problem compounded by the fact that, more broadly, he had an only thinly disguised contempt for the monetarist approach which Keith and I wanted to pursue. I would have done better to appoint someone who shared my instincts on defence and foreign policy.
Still less of a soulmate was Ian Gilmour. I suspect that when he learned that I wanted to see him he expected the worst. He had been a strong partisan of Ted, and he lacked the support or standing which might have made him politically costly to dispense with. But I valued his intelligence. I felt that he could make a useful contribution as long as he was kept out of an economic post, to which in spite of his later reputation as one of the foremost advocates of ‘reflation’ neither his training nor his aptitudes suited him. I asked him to be Shadow Home Secretary.
Michael Heseltine, who now came in to see me, had a much more flamboyant personality than Ian’s, although they shared many of the same views. He too had long been a Heath supporter, but it had always been assumed that the cause he most strongly advocated was his own. My campaign team believed him to have been an abstainer in the first round of the leadership contest. To do Michael credit, he was always refreshingly open about his ambitions. I asked him to stay on as Shadow Industry Secretary. It was a portfolio which fascinated him and which gave full scope to his talent for Opposition, since it fell to him to fight the Labour Government’s main nationalization proposals. What I did not fully grasp at this time was how ideologically committed he was to an interventionist approach in industry which I could not accept.
After a lunchtime meeting of small businessmen at the National Chamber of Trade, where I made my first public speech as Leader, I returned to my room at the House for more Shadow Cabinet carpentry. I asked Peter Carrington to stay on as Leader of the House of Lords. Again, I had no illusions about Peter’s position in the Tory Party’s political spectrum: he was not of my way of thinking. He had, of course, been in Ted’s inner circle making the political decisions about the miners’ strike and the February 1974 election. But since we lost office he had proved an extremely effective Opposition Leader in the Upper House, and as a former Defence Minister and an international businessman he had wide experience of foreign affairs. Admittedly, he was likely in Shadow Cabinet to be on the opposite side to me on economic policy. But he never allowed economic disagreements to get in the way of his more general responsibilities. He brought style, experience, wit and — politically incorrect as the thought may be — a touch of class.
Geoffrey Howe had his own droll wit. But in most other ways he was a very different politician from my other appointments that day. I would in any case have felt obliged to give Geoffrey a Shadow Cabinet post, simply because he was a candidate against me and I wished to unify the Party as much as possible. But it was a calculated gamble to make him Shadow Chancellor. I knew that as an immensely hard-working lawyer he would make the effort required to master his brief. I also knew that, in spite of his role in implementing the Heath Government’s prices and incomes policy as Minister for Trade and Consumer Affairs, he had a well-deserved reputation as a believer in free-market economics. As such, he was very much a rarity in the upper ranks of the Conservative Party. Once I had decided that Keith would be better employed overseeing policy rethinking, Geoffrey seemed the best candidate. Very few who come new to such a demanding portfolio find it trouble-free. Geoffrey was to have a difficult time both trying to resolve our divisions on economic policy and in defending our case in the House. I would be put under a good deal of pressure to remove him and find someone better able to take on the Chancellor, Denis Healey. But I knew that Geoffrey’s difficulties, like mine, were more the result of circumstances than lack of native talent. By the time our period in Opposition was approaching its end he had become indispensable.
After careful thought I decided to keep Jim Prior as Shadow Employment Secretary. This was rightly taken as a signal that I had no immediate plans for a fundamental reform of trade union law. Jim’s suitability for the job is only understandable in the light of the Heath Government’s poisoned legacy. In the 1972 Industrial Relations Act Ted had attempted the most far-reaching reforms of trade union law since 1906: its failure made Conservatives right across the Party very wary of pursuing the same course again. Moreover, after Ted had taken on the militants and lost in February 1974, the main question in the public’s mind was whether
Such an approach made more sense at the beginning of the period in Opposition than at the end of it. But in any case it left two important questions unanswered. First, how would we react if events demonstrated that the theoretical shortcomings of the present law, as amended by the socialists, were having malign practical effects? (The circumstances of the Grunwick dispute[36] and of the strikes of the winter of 1978/79 would demonstrate precisely that.) Secondly, since the trade union leaders were at least as much socialist politicians as they were workers’ representatives, why should they cooperate willingly with Conservatives? There was a basic incompatibility between their economic approach and ours, and indeed between their political allegiance and ours. So how valuable would any amount of personal diplomacy between Jim and the TUC turn out to be? Probably not very. For the present, though, he was the right man in the right position.
Airey Neave had already privately told me that the only portfolio he wanted was that of Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. His intelligence contacts, proven physical courage and shrewdness amply qualified him for this testing and largely thankless task.
The other appointments were less strategically crucial. Quintin Hailsham had no portfolio, but was in effect
