In January 1963 General de Gaulle unilaterally vetoed Britain’s application to join the Common Market. The collapse of his European policy holed Macmillan’s Government very near the waterline: by the summer of 1963 it was listing badly and beginning to sink. The restructuring of the Cabinet had failed to rejuvenate the Government, which now faced a dynamic new Leader of the Opposition, Harold Wilson, twenty-two years younger than the Prime Minister. Macmillan was made to look even more out of touch by the titillating revelations of the Profumo scandal, which threatened to engulf the administration in a slurry of sexual rumour and suspected sleaze. There were stirrings in the party that it was time for the old conjuror to retire. Privately Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her support for this view.
Macmillan considered stepping down; but then, as Prime Ministers do, determined to soldier on – until, three months later, on the eve of the party conference, ill health suddenly compelled him to retire after all, leading to an undignified scramble for the succession. Mrs Thatcher’s first preference was for ‘Rab’ Butler, but she was quite happy with the unexpected ‘emergence’ of Sir Alec Douglas Home. If she was pleased by the result, however, she was disappointed that the new Prime Minister did not undertake a wider reshuffle.When Richard Wood arrived at the MPNI to replace Niall Macpherson he found his Parliamentary Secretary in ‘some turmoil’, on tenterhooks to see what her own future might be.15 She evidently felt that two years of Pensions and National Insurance was enough. She could hardly have expected promotion, but she had hoped for a sideways move to another department to widen her experience. It is not surprising that Wood found her a difficult subordinate over the last year of the Government’s life.
Retaining Finchley
As the 1964 General Election, which seemed certain to end the Tories’ thirteen-year rule, approached, Mrs Thatcher could not be absolutely confident of retaining Finchley. But she was an exceptionally visible Member who, in five years, had won herself a strong personal vote. Despite her family and ministerial commitments, the Finchley Press reckoned on 18 September,‘there can be few Members who have spent more time among their constituents than Mrs Thatcher’. She herself, unusually, predicted a majority of 10,000 and she was nearly right.16
Her vote was down by 4,000, her majority nearly halved; the Liberals had succeeded in pushing Labour into third place. But Finchley was still a safe Tory seat. More significant was the impact of the Liberal advance on the national result. By nearly doubling their share of the vote largely at the Conservatives’ expense, they helped Labour back into government with a wafer-thin majority of four. After thirteen years of Tory rule and the shambles of 1963, Douglas-Home came astonishingly close to winning re-election. But he failed, narrowly, and his failure ended Mrs Thatcher’s first experience of government.
More seriously, she also suffered a personal reaction. Her daughter Carol suggests that she was exhausted after a particularly strenuous campaign in Finchley on top of her ministerial work, and driving back to Farnborough late every night. In one respect her family life was eased, since both Mark and Carol were now at boarding school so neither was at home in mid-October; but she was having problems with Denis, who seems to have undergone some sort of mid-life crisis in 1964. This was first disclosed in Carol’s biography of her father, published in 1996, and we only know what little she reveals. It appears that he was working too hard, partly because Atlas Preservatives was under-capitalised and struggling to survive, and he worried that not only his own family but the life savings of his mother, sister and two aunts depended on its continuing success. To someone as robust as Margaret, the idea of Denis having a nervous breakdown must have been alarming. She must have worried about the implications for herself and the twins if he were seriously ill. Not that he did not thoroughly support her ambition. On the contrary, the decision he took, after pondering the direction of his life on safari in southern Africa, to sell the family firm was not only intended to secure his family’s future but represented a deliberate subordination of his career to hers. He was nearly fifty; she was not yet forty. He had done as much as he could with Atlas; he had been warned that he needed to slow down if he was not to kill himself. She was well launched on a trajectory which, win or lose in 1964, might reasonably be expected to lead to the Cabinet within ten years. So he made his decision. But he did not discuss it with Margaret until it was a fait accompli.17
In fact, the sale of Atlas to Castrol turned out very well for Denis. According to Carol it realised £530,000, of which his personal share was just £10,000. But other accounts suggest that it was worth very much more than that. In practice the sale of his family firm made Denis a millionaire. Secondly, instead of narrowing his responsibilities it widened them. Denis had expected to carry on running Atlas for Castrol, but now as an employee without the stress of ultimate responsibility. To his surprise Castrol offered him a place on the board, with salary and car to match. (The car was a Daimler with a personalised number plate, DT3.) When, just a few years later, Castrol in turn merged with Burmah Oil, Denis did very well in terms of share options and once again was invited on to the board. From being the overworked chairman of an insecure paint and fertiliser business, Denis spent the last decade of his working life as a highly paid executive in the oil industry, which in turn left him well placed to pick up lucrative non-executive directorships after his retirement.
4
Opposition
Shadow boxing
FOR the next six years Margaret Thatcher was the Conservative Opposition’s maid of all work. Between 1964 and 1970 she held six different portfolios – three as a junior spokeswoman, successively on pensions, housing and economic policy, and three as a member of the Shadow Cabinet, shadowing Power, Transport and finally Education. When the Conservatives returned to power in 1970 she was confirmed in the last department. But in the meantime she had been given an unusually wide experience of shadow responsibilities which stood her in excellent stead as Prime Minister two decades later, going some way to compensate for her relatively narrow ministerial experience. Though her average tenure of each portfolio was less than a year she did nothing by halves, but always thoroughly mastered each one before moving on.
When in July 1965 Alec Douglas-Home announced his resignation of the Tory leadership, Mrs Thatcher was ‘stunned and upset’. It is a measure of her isolation from Westminster gossip that she claims to have had no inkling that Sir Alec was coming under pressure to step down, allegedly orchestrated by supporters of Ted Heath. ‘I never ventured into the Smoking Room so I was unaware of these mysterious cabals until it was too late.’1 Her exclusion was partly a function of her sex, but also reflected her compartmentalised life and her nose-to-the-grindstone view of politics. Harder to explain is why she was so upset. Much as she admired Sir Alec, he was clearly not cut out to be Leader of the Opposition; the party needed a more aggressive and modern style of leadership to wrest the political initiative back from Labour and rethink its policies. She had known Heath since their time as candidates in adjacent Kentish seats in 1949 – 51. They had spoken on one another’s platforms, but they had not become close and their acquaintance, as she later put it, ‘had never risked developing into friendship’.2 They were in truth very similar people – from similar social backgrounds, both humourless, single-minded and ambitious. But Mrs Thatcher disguised her ambition with a cloak of femininity: her manners were impeccable and she responded to a certain style of masculine gallantry. Heath had a curt manner and made no pretence at gallantry; long before he had any special cause to dislike Margaret Thatcher he was uncomfortable with her type of Tory lady, with her immaculate clothes, pearls, hats and gushing manner. So until she forced herself on his attention he barely noticed her. What attracted her to his standard – and kept her loyal for nine years, despite a personal relationship that never became warm – was respect for his seriousness of purpose, which matched her own. She evidently did not consider backing Enoch Powell, the leading advocate of free-market economics, who was then regarded as a fringe eccentric, but voted for Heath, who beat Maudling by 150 votes to 133, with Powell taking just 15.