Though elected as a new broom, Heath initially felt obliged, with an election possible at any moment, to retain all his predecessor’s Shadow Cabinet. But in October he did reshuffle his front bench. Margaret Thatcher was delighted to be switched at last from Pensions and National Insurance (which she had been doing in and out of office for four years) to shadow Housing and Land.
Wilson was only biding his time before calling a second election in March 1966 which the Tories, even with a new leader, had no hope of winning. In Finchley, Mrs Thatcher did her best to project enthusiasm. But privately she was critical of Heath’s prosaic manifesto. Her own address led on the fundamental theme that every action of the Labour Government increased the power of the state over the citizen. Conservative philosophy was the opposite: ‘The State was made for Man, not Man for the State.’3
The result was never in doubt. Though her vote actually fell slightly, Mrs Thatcher was one of only three Tories to increase her majority, with Labour pushing the Liberals back into third place:
Nationally Labour won a landslide, with a majority of nearly a hundred. The Tories were condemned to another five years of opposition. With the certainty of a long haul ahead, Heath reshuffled his team, taking the chance to drop several of the older hands. There was some discussion of putting Mrs Thatcher in the Shadow Cabinet. Jim Prior, then Heath’s PPS, remembers suggesting her as the statutory woman. There was a long silence. ‘Yes,’ he said.‘Willie [Whitelaw, the Chief Whip] agrees she’s much the most able, but he says once she’s there we’ll never be able to get rid of her. So we both think it’s got to be Mervyn Pike.’4
Actually, the idea of a statutory woman was a new one. There had not been a woman in a Tory Cabinet since Florence Hors-burgh in 1954, nor in the Shadow Cabinet since the party went into opposition. But Wilson had included Barbara Castle in his first Cabinet in 1964 and promoted her the following year. If the Tories had to be seen to follow suit, Margaret Thatcher was a more obvious counterpart to Mrs Castle than the much gentler Mervyn Pike. Whitelaw’s preference for keeping Mrs Thatcher down for a little longer suggests that she was already seen as an uncomfortable colleague. Iain Macleod, however, had spotted her potential and specifically asked for her in his shadow Treasury team. Heath agreed. She became Treasury and Economic Affairs spokeswoman, outside the Shadow Cabinet but in some respects better placed to make a mark than she would have been inside it.
This was one of the very few periods in Mrs Thatcher’s career when she operated as a team player, contributing her own particular expertise as a tax lawyer to a delegated effort, opposing the Labour Government’s Selective Employment Tax. She clearly found it a liberating experience. When her own time came to lead she was not so good at delegating, yet she copied much of Macleod’s method of working.
At the party conference in Blackpool in October Mrs Thatcher had the opportunity of replying to a debate on taxation. She spent nine hours preparing her speech, and was rewarded with her ‘first real conference success’.5 ‘Thoroughly relaxed,’ the Daily Telegraph enthused, ‘she banged out sentences with the elusive rhythm some of her peers find it so hard to achieve.’6 The still pre-Murdoch Sun hailed a new star under the headline, ‘A Fiery Blonde Warns of the Road to Ruin’: ‘Mrs Margaret Thatcher, the pretty blonde MP for Finchley, got a standing ovation for one of those magnificent fire-in-the-belly speeches which are heard too seldom.’7
In 1967 she paid her first visit to the United States. It was a revelation to her. In her forty-two years she had scarcely been out of Britain before, apart from her honeymoon and, since 1962, her annual skiing holiday. Ever since the war she had been well disposed towards America as the arsenal of democracy and Britain’s great English-speaking ally in the cause of Freedom. But the potential love affair had not been consummated until now. In the spring of 1967 she went on an American government ‘leadership programme’ designed to show rising young British politicians the American way of life; for six weeks she was whisked all round the country. ‘The excitement which I felt’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘has never really subsided. At each stopover I was met and accommodated by friendly, open, generous people who took me into their homes and lives and showed me their cities and townships with evident pride.’ Her theoretical awareness of the ‘brain drain’ was brought into focus by meeting a former constituent from Finchley who had fled ‘overregulated, high-taxed Britain’ to become a space scientist with NASA.8 Two years later she went back for a four-week speaking tour under the auspices of the English Speaking Union. Henceforth America became for her the model of an enterprise economy and a free society: not only American business practice, but American private health care, American penal policy and American business sponsorship of the arts were the examples she encouraged her ministers to study in the eighties.
Shadow Cabinet
After eighteen months working with Macleod she got her reward in October 1967. By her performances in the House, Mrs Thatcher had certainly earned promotion to the Shadow Cabinet; but still she only gained it when she did because Mervyn Pike stepped down on grounds of health. She now had no rival as the statutory woman. Significantly, however, Heath did not simply give her Miss Pike’s social services portfolio – which would have been a traditionally feminine responsibility. Instead he set her to shadow the Ministry of Power, an unmistakably masculine brief comprising coal, nuclear energy, electricity and North Sea gas. More important than the portfolio, however, admission to the Shadow Cabinet marked Mrs Thatcher’s arrival at the top table, just eight years after entering Parliament. As Whitelaw had foreseen, she would not easily be got rid of now. In less than another eight years, in fact, she had toppled Heath and leapfrogged over Whitelaw to seize the leadership.
In her memoirs Lady Thatcher wrote that she felt marginalised as a member of Heath’s Shadow Cabinet. ‘For Ted and perhaps others I was principally there as the “statutory woman” whose main task was to explain what “women”… were likely to think and want on troublesome issues.’9 It is clear that she no longer felt – as she had done as Treasury spokesman – part of a team. If initially she talked too much she soon learned to keep quiet and bide her time.
Meanwhile, shadowing Power gave her the chance to master another important area of policy. Interviewed by the Sunday Telegraph just after her appointment she said it was ‘a great surprise’; she was now ‘busy genning up on the subject for all she was worth’.10 It was still the era of cheap imported oil. North Sea gas had recently been discovered, but not yet oil. The Labour Government was running down the coal industry, a policy the Conservatives broadly supported against a good deal of traditional Labour anguish. Altogether Power was another excellent portfolio for her, using her scientific training in handling technical questions of nuclear energy and mineral deposits, but also facing her directly for the first time with the political problem of the nationalised industries.