Member for Finchley
WITH the Conservatives winning a three-figure majority, Margaret Thatcher was one of sixty-four new Tory Members elected in 1959. Among such a large new intake being a woman was simultaneously an advantage and a handicap. As one of only twelve women Members on the Conservative side of the House (Labour had thirteen) she was immediately conspicuous – the more so since she was younger, prettier and better dressed than any of the others – but for this very reason she was also patronised and disregarded. ‘She appeared rather over-bright and shiny’, one contemporary recalled. ‘She rarely smiled and never laughed… We all smiled benignly as we looked into those blue eyes and the tilt of that golden head. We, and all the world, had no idea what we were in for.’1
She was always combative, another remembered, but in those early days she would generally back down gracefully when she had made her point. The alternative was to be written off as strident and bossy. She had to be careful to keep this side of her character out of sight for the next twenty years while she climbed the ladder: not until she was Prime Minister did Tory MPs come to enjoy being hectored by a strong-minded woman. To a remarkable extent she succeeded, while extracting the maximum advantage from her femininity.
Mrs Thatcher’s parliamentary career received a fortunate boost within a few weeks of arriving at Westminster when she came third in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills. This threw her in at the deep end, but also gave her the opportunity to make a conspicuous splash: instead of the usual uncontroversial debut delivered in the dinner hour to empty benches, she made her maiden speech introducing a controversial Bill. Inevitably she seized her chance and made certain of a triumph. She brought herself emphatically to the attention of the whips, demonstrated her competence and duly saw her Bill on to the Statute Book with the Government’s blessing. Behind the scenes, however, neither the origin nor the passage of the Bill were as straightforward as they appeared. The newly elected thirty-four-year-old endured some bruising battles, both in the House of Commons and in Whitehall; and the measure that emerged was neither the one she originally intended nor the one she introduced. It was a tough baptism.
An MP who wins a high place in the Private Members’ ballot is swamped with proposals for Bills which he or she might like to introduce. The issue Mrs Thatcher eventually chose was the right of the press to cover local government. This was thought to have been enshrined in an Act of 1908. Recently, however, some councils had been getting round the requirement of open meetings by barring the press from committees and going into a committee of the whole council when they wanted to exclude reporters. The 1959 Tory manifesto contained a pledge to ‘make quite sure that the press have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities’.2 But the Government proposed to achieve this by a new code of conduct rather than by legislation. Mrs Thatcher considered this ‘extremely feeble’ and found enough support to risk defying the expressed preference of the Minister of Housing and Local Government, Henry Brooke, and his officials.
Her problem was that she needed the Department’s help to draft her Bill; but the Department would only countenance a minimal Bill falling well short of her objective. Eventually she settled for half a loaf. Her Bill published on 24 January 1960 was judged by The Times ‘to have kept nicely in line with Conservative thinking’.3 In fact, it was a fairly toothless measure which increased the number of bodies – water boards and police committees as well as local authorities – whose meetings should normally be open to the press; required that agendas and relevant papers be made available to the press in advance; and defined more tightly the circumstances in which reporters might be excluded – but still left loopholes. It was still open to a majority to declare any meeting closed on grounds of confidentiality.
Maiden speech
The Second Reading was set down for 5 February. To ensure a good attendance on a Friday morning, Mrs Thatcher sent 250 handwritten letters to Tory backbenchers requesting their support. She was rewarded with a turnout of about a hundred. She immediately ignored the convention by which maiden speakers begin with some modest expression of humility, a tribute to their predecessor and a guidebook tour of their constituency. Margaret Thatcher wasted no time on such courtesies:
This is a maiden speech, but I know that the constituency of Finchley which I have the honour to represent would not wish me to do other than come straight to the point and address myself to the matter before the House. I cannot do better than begin by stating the object of the Bill…
She spoke for twenty-seven minutes with fluency and perfect clarity, expounding the history of the issue and emphasising – significantly – not the freedom of the press but rather the need to limit local government expenditure. Only at the very end did she remember to thank the House for its traditional indulgence to a new Member.4
Her seconder, Frederick Corfield, immediately congratulated her on ‘an outstanding maiden speech… delivered with very considerable clarity and charm’. She had introduced her Bill ‘in a manner that would do credit to the Front Benches on either side of the Chamber’.5 Later speakers reiterated the same compliments. It was practically compulsory in 1960 to praise a lady speaker’s ‘charm’; but the tributes to the Member for Finchley’s front bench quality were more significant and probably more sincere.
In any case, the Bill passed its Second Reading – on a free vote, with many Labour Members supporting and some Tories opposing – by 152 votes to 39. Eventually it went into committee in mid-March. Over the next few weeks Mrs Thatcher had to battle hard for her Bill. She suffered a serious defeat when she failed to carry a clause giving public access to all committees exercising delegated functions; she had to settle for committees of the full council only. The Times regretted that this reduced the Bill to a ‘half-measure’.6
Back on the floor of the House the emasculated Bill carried its Third Reading on 13 May, without a vote. For the Government Keith Joseph paid another compliment to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘most cogent, charming, lucid and composed manner’, which had contributed to the passage of ‘a delicate and contentious measure perhaps not ideally suited for a first venture into legislation’.7 In the Lords the Bill earned another historical footnote when Baroness Elliot of Harwood became the first peeress to move a Bill in the Upper House, before it finally received the Royal Assent in October. After exactly a year it was an achievement of sorts, but rather more of an education. As a piece of legislation it was ineffective. Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher had learned in a few months more about the ways of Whitehall – and specifically about the ability of officials and the Tory establishment together to stifle reform – than most backbenchers learn in a lifetime.
Mrs Thatcher’s conduct of the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Bill, as a novice backbencher taking on a senior Cabinet Minister of her own party, his Permanent Secretary and the parliamentary draftsmen, in the belief that they were all being either feeble or obstructive, displayed a degree of political aggression to which Whitehall was unaccustomed. Officials did not know how to handle a forceful woman who did not play by bureaucratic rules or accept their departmental wisdom. Their successors were to have the same problem twenty years later, multiplied tenfold by her authority as Prime Minister. No one in 1960 imagined that a woman could ever become Prime Minister. But her luck in winning a high place in the Private Members’ ballot, and her plucky exploitation of the opportunity, had certainly put her in line for early promotion.