From her time at the DES, however, she had learned a number of lessons which she would carry back with her into government in 1979. First, as she reflected on her experience, she became convinced of the malign power of officials to block, frustrate and manipulate all but the most determined ministers. Secondly, she learned from the failure of the Government as a whole to maintain its sense of direction and purpose in the face of mounting political pressure. At its simplest this expressed itself as a determination not to duplicate Heath’s notorious U-turns. But this was not so much an ideological point as a political one.
Heath lost the ability to control events, paradoxically, because he tried to control too much: all the complex machinery of prices and incomes control – the Pay Board, the Price Commission and the rest – left the Government still helpless in the face of soaring imported food and commodity prices on the one hand, and the industrial muscle of the miners on the other. The lesson Mrs Thatcher took from the Heath Government was not so much monetarism, which she grasped later as a useful technical explanation, but rather a compelling affirmation of an old Tory article of faith – the self-defeating folly of overambitious government. Government – she instinctively believed – must be strong, clear, decisive; but the experience of the Heath Government taught that it could only appear strong by holding itself above the economic fray, not taking responsibility upon itself for every rise in unemployment or inflation. It was that lesson, more than any other, which enabled her Government to rise above the economic devastation of the early 1980s.
6
The Peasants’ Revolt
The roulette wheel
LESS than a year after losing office in March 1974 Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative party. This was a stunning transformation which no one would have predicted twelve months earlier: one of those totally unexpected events – which in retrospect appear predestined – that constitute the fascination of politics. One of the most extraordinary things about Mrs Thatcher’s seizure of the Tory leadership is that scarcely anyone – colleague or commentator – saw her coming. Even after the event her victory was widely disparaged as a freak of fortune of which she was merely the lucky beneficiary. As Enoch Powell put it, with a mixture of envy and grudging admiration: ‘She didn’t rise to power. She was opposite the spot on the roulette wheel at the right time, and she didn’t funk it.’1
But the fact that she did not funk it was crucial, and not at all an accident. It should have been foreseen by anyone who had worked closely with her over the previous twenty-five years, for she had been quietly preparing for the opportunity all her life. When it came she was ready. It takes extraordinary single-mindedness and stamina to reach the topmost rung of British politics, an obsessive dedication to the job to the exclusion of other concerns like money, family, friendship and the pursuit of leisure. Like Harold Wilson, like Ted Heath, but more than any of her Conservative contemporaries, Margaret Thatcher possessed that quality of single-minded dedication to her career. She never made any secret of her ambition: it was only because she was a woman that the possibility that she might go right to the top was not taken seriously. No one who had known her at Oxford, at Colchester or Dartford should have been surprised that when the chance offered she left her male rivals at the post.
Yet it was still an unpredictable combination of other factors which created her opportunity. First, she benefited from an intellectual revolution – or counter-revolution – in Tory thinking which had been building over the previous ten years but which was suddenly brought to a head by the shock of electoral defeat, creating the opening for a radical change of direction. This was a development in which she played very little part, yet one which reflected her most deeply held convictions, so that she had no difficulty taking advantage of it. At the same time a fortuitous pattern of personal circumstances ruled out of contention virtually all the other candidates who might, a year earlier, have hoped to harness this opportunity to their own careers.
The revolution in Tory thinking had two strands – economic and political. On the one hand there was a sudden revival of interest in the free-market economic ideas quietly propagated for years on the margins of serious politics by the Institute of Economic Affairs but largely derided by the conventional wisdom in both Whitehall and the universities. Throughout the 1960s the fact that the only prominent politician to preach the beauty of the unfettered market was Enoch Powell was enough to tar the message with the taint of crazed fanaticism.
From the middle of 1972 onwards, however, the Government’s U-turns in economic policy had begun to make converts for the Powellite critique. Treasury mandarins attached little importance to the money supply. But in Fleet Street an influential group of economic journalists led by Samuel Brittan on the Financial Times and Peter Jay and William Rees-Mogg on The Times took up the cause and began to expound it in their columns. When the Heath Government fell, therefore, there was quite suddenly a fully-fledged monetarist explanation of its failure available for disillusioned Tories – including ex-ministers – to draw upon.
At the same time there was among ordinary Tories in the country a more generalised mood of mounting frustration at the failure of successive Conservative Governments to halt or reverse what seemed a relentless one-way slide to socialism. Not only in the management of the economy but in almost every sphere of domestic and foreign policy – immigration, comprehensive schools, trade unions, Northern Ireland, Rhodesia – Heath had appeared almost deliberately to affront the party’s traditional supporters while appeasing their tribal enemies. Strikes, crime, revolting students, pornography, terrorism, inflation eating away at their savings – all stoked a rising anger that the country was going to the dogs while the Tory Government was not resisting but rather speeding the process. By the time Heath lost the February 1974 election an ugly mood had built up in the Tory party which lacked only heavyweight leadership to weld together the two elements – the political backlash and the economic analysis – to form a potent combination which ultimately became known as Thatcherism.
The unlikely catalyst was Keith Joseph – hitherto no one’s idea of a rebel or a populist, but a former Cabinet Minister of long experience and unimpeachable integrity who was almost uniquely qualified to lend intellectual rigour to political revolt. He subsequently described how he had thought he had been a Conservative for the past thirty years, but now realised that he had been a ‘statist’ all along, bewitched by the delusive power of government.2 Having seen the light, he set out with a religious fervour rare in high-level politics to atone for his past sins by bringing the Tory party – and ultimately the country – to a realisation of the true faith.
Mrs Thatcher by contrast never pretended to be a thinker. She was a politician, and – unlike Joseph – an intensely practical and ambitious one. It is not the job of politicians to have original ideas, or even necessarily to understand them. Professional economists like Peter Jay used to sneer that Mrs Thatcher never really understood monetarism. But she did not need to. It was enough that she saw its importance; she possessed – as Joseph did not – the much more important and rare ability to simplify complex ideas and mobilise support for them. No intellectual herself, she was nevertheless unusual among politicians in acknowledging the importance of ideas. She had always believed that politics should be a battle between fundamentally opposed philosophies; it was a characteristic of her leadership that she systematically used intellectuals and academics – those whom she thought were on her side – to underpin her policies and furnish her with arguments and intellectual ammunition. As Prime Minister she developed an informal think-tank of her favourite academics to advise her.