8
Thatcherism under Wraps
Cautious crusader
THE years of opposition were a peculiarly difficult and ambiguous time for Margaret Thatcher. She was a woman of strong convictions and a powerful sense of mission whose instinct, once she unexpectedly found herself leader, was to lead from the front.Yet at the same time, she was very conscious of the weakness of her political position, a little frightened of her own inexperience and the heavy responsibility which had suddenly been thrown upon her, and well aware of the formidable combination of habit, convention and vested interest that was ranged against her. She did not have the authority to impose a thoroughgoing free-market agenda on the Tory party, let alone project it unambiguously to the country. Moreover, even if she had been in a position to proclaim her long-term vision, there was a huge gap between knowing what was right in theory and translating that knowledge into practical policies that could be compressed into a manifesto.
Even after she achieved power, and a political dominance she could never have imagined in 1975, it still took her the best part of two terms, with the full resources of the Civil Service at her command, to begin to frame an explicitly ‘Thatcherite’ programme. So long as she was in opposition her overriding priority was to make sure she did not lose the General Election, whenever it came. She could not risk getting too far ahead of her party, so had to disclaim objectives which might alarm the voters or allow her opponents to label her ‘extreme’. She had to be prepared to fight on a vague prospectus that gave only the broadest hint of her true ambition. As a result, for the whole of this period in opposition, she was obliged to speak with two voices – one clear, didactic and evangelical, the other cautious, moderate and conventional – displaying a confusing mixture of confidence and caution. Right up to May 1979 no colleague or commentator could be sure which was the real Margaret Thatcher.
It is not even certain that she knew herself. Looking back from the perspective of the 1990s, Lady Thatcher in her memoirs naturally subscribed to the heroic legend of a leader who knew clearly from the outset what she wanted to achieve and was only constrained to dissemble her intentions by her dependence on colleagues less clear-sighted and resolute than herself. And, of course, there is plenty of evidence to support this view. ‘This is what we believe,’ she famously told a seminar at the Centre for Policy Studies, producing from her handbag a well-worn copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty and banging it down on the table.1 More than once she announced that her purpose was nothing less than to eliminate what she called socialism permanently from British public life. ‘Our aim is not just to remove a uniquely incompetent Government from office,’ she declared in May 1976. ‘It is to destroy the whole fallacy of socialism that the Labour party exists to spread.’2
Yet rarely if ever did Mrs Thatcher speak in public of abolishing exchange controls or serious denationalisation, still less of curbing local authorities or renewing the Tories’ battle with the miners. In an ideal world all this may have been among her long-term aspirations, but it is doubtful if she ever imagined that any of them would become practical politics. In the short term she thought more in terms of stopping things than of pursuing a radical agenda of her own. Her repeated refrain to colleagues and advisers from the think-tanks who told her what she should do in office was ‘Don’t tell me what. I know what. Tell me how.’ 3 It was by no means certain that the necessary public support would ever be attainable, even if she won the election. Even as Prime Minister, it is clear from the memoirs of Nigel Lawson, Geoffrey Howe and others that Mrs Thatcher was often the last to be persuaded that key ‘Thatcherite’ policies, from the scrapping of exchange controls to the reform of the National Health Service – however desirable in principle – were in fact practicable or politically prudent. She was still more hesitant in opposition.
The truth is that caution was just as integral a component of Margaret Thatcher’s character as faith. She was pretty sure she would only get one chance, and as an ambitious politician she did not intend to blow it. Nor was it simply that she dare not risk commitments that might split the party. She always had a superstitious fear of giving hostages to fortune or crossing bridges before she came to them. She hated the detailed pledges Heath had forced her to make on rates and mortgages in October 1974. Back in 1968 she had argued in her lecture to the Conservative Political Centre that elections should not be turned into competitive auctions. Now she seized on an essay by the political scientist S. E. Finer which lent academic authority to her distrust of the modern doctrine of the mandate, and quoted it triumphantly to her aides.4 She believed that politics should be a contest between opposed philosophies, not catchpenny bribes. Her purpose was to win the battle of ideas.
The battle of ideas
Thus it was because she had faith that she could afford to be cautious. She was confident that the correct policies would become clear in time so long as she got the direction right. In the meantime she could compromise, bide her time and go along with policies in which, in her heart, she fundamentally disbelieved – as she had been doing, after all, for most of her career – with no fear that she would thereby lose sight of her objective or be blown off course. She felt no contradiction, for example, in telling David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh that she was utterly opposed in principle to the trade union closed shop, but recognised that for the moment she had to live with it. She explained that politics was all about timing. You could kill a good idea by floating it five years ahead of its time, she told them; but two years ahead it could take off. Judging the right moment was the test of ‘real political leadership’.5
To win the battle of ideas Mrs Thatcher recognised that she had first to educate herself. Having come to the leadership so unexpectedly she knew she had an immense amount to learn, not merely to master the whole field of politics and government – where previously she had only had to cover one department at a time – but to equip herself intellectually to seize the opportunity which confronted her. With characteristic application, but remarkable humility, she set about learning what she needed to understand about the theory and practice of the free market and its place in Tory philosophy. She read the books that Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman told her to read, attended seminars at the Centre for Policy Studies and the IEA, and was not ashamed to sit humbly at the feet of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek when they came to London, absorbing their ideas but transmuting them skilfully into her own practical philosophy.