Shadowing Power, in fact, was all about the nationalised industries. Every speech that Mrs Thatcher made during the year that she held this portfolio – and the following year when she was switched to Transport – shows her developing ever more clearly the conviction that public ownership was economically, politically and morally wrong. Though she never cited him, all the signs are that she had been reading – or rereading – Hayek, whose two-volume elaboration of The Road to Serfdom,The Constitution of Liberty, was published in 1960. She was certainly beginning to come under the influence of the independent free-market think-tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), run by Arthur Seldon and Ralph Harris. But already she had the gift of putting their arguments into clear unacademic language of her own. On one hand she delighted in demonstrating that public ownership was inefficient, on the other that it was destructive of individual freedom.
In 1968 she was invited to give the annual Conservative Political Centre (CPC) lecture at the party conference in Blackpool. This was a considerable honour: previous lecturers had been recognised party thinkers. Mrs Thatcher, the Times diarist noted, was being offered ‘an opportunity much coveted by the party’s intellectuals through the years – and certainly the best chance a high-flying Tory politician ever gets to influence party thinking on a major theme’.11
The Tory party was in a considerable ferment in the summer of 1968, as grass-roots loathing of the Government combined with mounting criticism of Heath’s leadership to fuel demand for a sharper, more distinctive Conservatism. Mrs Thatcher’s lecture did dimly reflect this rising tide. Instead of nailing her colours boldly to the mast, however, she offered an uncharacteristically woolly, largely conventional Tory critique of the growth of government. Concern about the size, complexity and facelessness of modern government was a commonplace right across the political spectrum in the sixties. The New Left warned of ‘alienation’ and demanded more ‘participation’. The right blamed socialism and talked vaguely of ‘getting government off people’s backs’ and ‘rolling back’ the state. Mrs Thatcher’s CPC lecture was just another Shadow Cabinet expression of this line – padded with some oddly naive banalities and altogether much less strikingly expressed than many of her Commons speeches. Such press coverage as the lecture received was typified by the Guardian’s headline: ‘Time to reassert right to privacy’.12
The fact is that it would have been imprudent for an ambitious young frontbencher, only recently appointed to the Shadow Cabinet, to have come out openly as a Powellite in October 1968. Only six months earlier Enoch Powell had been sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for making his notorious ‘River Tiber’ speech calling for a halt to coloured immigration and the assisted repatriation of immigrants. This speech transformed him overnight from a cranky economic theorist into a national figure with a huge popular following, a hate figure to the left and a looming challenge to Heath’s leadership. Mrs Thatcher was never close to Powell in the few months they sat together in the Shadow Cabinet: Powell was an explicitly masculine politician who frankly deplored the intrusion of women into politics. But she was becoming increasingly interested in his economic ideas; she also ‘strongly sympathised’ with his argument about immigration. She regretted that Powell’s new notoriety henceforth overshadowed his economic agenda, allowing opponents to tar free-market thinking with the same brush as either right-wing extremism or crackpot nostalgia, or both at once.13
That autumn, in the run-up to the party conference – just when she was writing her lecture – Heath had made a speech in Scotland firmly repudiating those Tories who were attracted by the seductive Powellite prescription of rolling back the state. ‘That’, he declared, ‘though a century out of date, would certainly be a distinctive, different policy.’
But it would not be a Conservative policy and it would not provide a Conservative alternative. For better or worse the central Government is already responsible, in some way or another, for nearly half the activities of Britain. It is by far the biggest spender and the biggest employer.14
That was precisely what Powell, the IEA and, in her heart, Mrs Thatcher, wanted to reverse. Most practical Conservatives, however, though they might pay lip service to the idea of some marginal denationalisation, took it for granted that a large public sector was a fact of life.
It was in the context of this overwhelming orthodoxy that Mrs Thatcher spoke at Blackpool. The most significant section of her lecture was its ending, an unfashionable defence of party politics, rejecting the widespread hankering for ‘consensus’. ‘We have not yet appreciated or used fully’, she suggested, ‘the virtues of our party political system.’ The essential characteristic of the British system was the concept of the Opposition, which ensured not just an alternative leader but ‘an alternative policy and a whole alternative government ready to take office’. Consensus she dismissed as merely ‘an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything’. It was more important to have ‘a philosophy and policy which because they are good appeal to sufficient people to secure a majority’ – in other words, what she later called ‘conviction politics’. She concluded:
No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do. It is not enough to have reluctant support. We want people’s enthusiasm as well.15
More than anything else it was this crusading spirit which was Mrs Thatcher’s unique contribution to the anti-collectivist counter-revolution which ultimately bore her name. Others developed the ideas which she seized on and determinedly enacted. The force which transformed British politics over the next twenty years was Mrs Thatcher’s belief that politics was an arena of conflict between fundamentally opposed philosophies, her contempt for faint hearts and her ruthless view that a party with a clear philosophy needed only a ‘sufficient’ majority – not an inclusive ‘consensus’ – to drive through its programme. Few who heard the shadow Minister of Power set out this credo in Blackpool in October 1968 paid much attention at the time. Even when she grasped the party leadership seven years later few colleagues or commentators really believed she meant what she said. In fact the essence of Thatcherism was there in her words that day: not so much in the unremarkable policies as in her fierce belief in them.
That autumn she was switched again, to Transport. Interestingly, she did not see her job as simply championing the road lobby. Though famous later for her enthusiasm for ‘the great car economy’ and a corresponding detestation of the railways, she was at this time strikingly positive – in her first Commons speech on the subject – that the most urgent need was for more capital investment in British Railways. ‘If we build bigger and better roads’, she warned – thirty years before the argument was widely accepted – ‘they would soon be saturated with more vehicles and we would be no nearer solving the problem.’16