‘Someone had to stand’
As soon as the October election was out of the way, the struggle for the Tory leadership was unofficially on. Quite apart from the simmering revolt on the right, too many Tory MPs with no quarrel with Heath’s policies came back to Westminster convinced that the party could never win under his leadership. Several of his friends urged him to step down immediately, or at least submit himself for re-election. By refusing, however, he not only threw away his own best chance of survival, but he also made it practically impossible for Willie Whitelaw or any other candidate from the left of the Tory party to succeed him. By clinging on, he allowed time for a dark horse to emerge who would eventually consolidate all the various strands of party discontent against him.
Joseph was the obvious standard-bearer of the right – not because he possessed any of the qualities of political leadership but because by his speeches over the summer he alone had staked out a clear alternative to Heath’s discredited centrism. Mrs Thatcher quickly cast herself as his loyal supporter, explicitly discouraging speculation about her own chances. ‘You can cross my name off the list,’ she told the London Evening News the day after the General Election. ‘I just don’t think I am right for it.’7 But then, just two weeks after the election, Joseph made a speech in Birmingham which spectacularly confirmed the doubts of those who thought he lacked the judgement or the nerve for leadership. Exactly four weeks after this speech, he concluded that he was not the stuff of which leaders are made and decided that he would not be a candidate.
The first person he told – on 21 November – was Mrs Thatcher. We have only her account of the conversation, but if that can be believed she did not hesitate. ‘I heard myself saying: “Look, Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint has to stand.”’8 The telling is disingenuous: in practice she was a good deal more cautious than this suggests. Yet there is no reason to doubt that it accurately represents her instinctive reaction. In all her carefully phrased denials of the idea that she could ever aspire to the highest offices, there was always a qualification which suggests that she did not, in her heart, quite rule them out.
On 25 November Mrs Thatcher thought it right to tell Heath of her purpose in person, though it had already been heavily trailed in the weekend papers. She saw him in the Leader’s room at the House of Commons. It was reported at the time – and the story can only have come from her – that he neither stood up nor invited her to sit down, but merely grunted, ‘You’ll lose.’9 Lady Thatcher’s published version is that ‘He looked at me coldly, turned his back, shrugged his shoulders and said, “If you must.”’10 Either way the interview was evidently brief and chilly. But there is no suggestion that Heath was greatly worried by her candidature or thought it uniquely treacherous of her to stand. Having reluctantly agreed that new rules should be drawn up to allow a challenge to a sitting leader, he probably imagined that she would be the first of several hopefuls who might now throw their hats into the ring. This, she wrote in her memoirs, was her expectation, too. She thought it ‘most unlikely’ that she would win.11
Heath had inadvertently given his challenger another opportunity which she grasped with both hands. In reshuffling his front bench team at the beginning of November he moved Mrs Thatcher from Environment – which she had only shadowed for nine months – to become deputy Treasury spokesman under Robert Carr. It is not clear whether Heath intended this as a promotion or a snub. ‘There is an awful tendency in Britain’, she had once complained, ‘to think of women as making excellent Number Twos, but not to give them the top job.’12
Nevertheless, making her deputy to so bland a performer as Carr simply invited her to outshine her nominal superior. Unwittingly, Heath had given her the perfect opportunity to show her paces by taking on Labour’s powerful Treasury team, giving demoralised Tory MPs something to cheer for the first time in months. By her usual combination of hard work and calculated aggression Mrs Thatcher quickly assumed the leadership of the Tories’ opposition to Labour’s Finance Bill, leading a team of junior spokesmen almost all of whom became members of her own Cabinet a decade later.
It is often said that Tory MPs did not know what they were doing when they elected Mrs Thatcher leader. This is true only in that she did not set out a detailed agenda of specific policies – monetarism, tax cuts or privatisation. But it cannot be said that she disguised her beliefs to win the leadership. On the contrary, she declared her philosophy very clearly: if some who voted for her did so without fully realising where her ideas would lead, the fault was theirs for failing to believe that she meant what she said. In fact what the party responded to was not so much her beliefs themselves as the burning self-belief with which she expounded them: it was not her convictions that they voted for, but her conviction.
As important as her message, however, was the need to humanise her image, neutralise the gender question and persuade both the public and Tory MPs that she was a credible leader. Paradoxically she no longer needed to prove that she was tough enough for the job: it was becoming a cliché, as David Wood noted in The Times, to say that she was ‘the best man among them’.13 But that raised the alarming spectre of a feminist harridan – the worst sort of woman. What she now had to do was to make a virtue of her femininity.With Gordon Reece’s help, therefore, she presented herself to the press and television as an ordinary housewife, old-fashioned, home-loving and non-feminist, thus allaying both male fears and female disapproval. ‘What people don’t realise about me’, she told the Daily Mirror, ‘is that I am a very ordinary person who leads a very normal life. I enjoy it – seeing that the family have a good breakfast. And shopping keeps me in touch.’14 She played along with the pretence that she was ‘just’ a housewife and milked it for all it was worth. For the benefit of the Daily Mail she went shopping with her sister. On the morning of the ballot she was filmed cooking Denis’s breakfast and photographed putting out the milk bottles.
Heath’s supporters never really believed it possible for the former Prime Minister to be beaten by an inexperienced woman. He had the support of the whole Shadow Cabinet, except Keith Joseph. Elder statesmen like Alec Douglas-Home and Reggie Maudling were wheeled out to consolidate support for the status quo. The constituency chairmen came out overwhelmingly for Heath: a poll in the Daily Express found that 70 per cent of Tory voters still thought him the best leader.15 As a result, while Mrs Thatcher’s team were assiduously combing the lists of Tory MPs – as systematically and professionally as Peter Walker had done for Heath in 1965, finding the right colleague to influence each individual – Heath this time had no proper campaign at all. The Heath camp simply believed what they read in the newspapers and repeated to one another, that all sensible people were still for Ted and only a small fringe of right-wingers and diehard anti-Marketeers would vote for ‘that dreadful woman’.
They underestimated the extent of disillusion with Heath among a significant body of MPs who were neither particularly on the right nor anti-Europe. By his remoteness, insensitivity and sheer bad manners, Heath had exhausted the loyalty of a large number of backbenchers who had no reason to be grateful to him: this group simply wanted a change of leader. Most of them did not want Mrs Thatcher to become leader; they certainly did not want a lurch to right-wing policies; but they were persuaded to vote for Mrs Thatcher on the first ballot in the hope that they would then be able to vote for Whitelaw or some other more experienced candidate in the second round.