The issue on which I finally alighted was also essentially one of civil liberties under threat from collectivism. As a result of an industrial dispute in the printing industry which began in July 1958, a number of Labour-controlled councils in big cities had denied normal reporting facilities to journalists working on provincial newspapers involved in the dispute. This had highlighted a loophole in the law which many councils used to conceal information from the general public about their activities. The press had a statutory right of admission only to meetings of the full council, not to its committees. By the device of resolving to go into committee, councils could therefore exclude the press from their deliberations. And besides these ‘committees of the whole council’ there were many other committees which were closed. Large sums of ratepayers’ money could be spent — or mis-spent — without outside scrutiny. Nor did members of the public themselves have the right to attend any council or council committee meetings.
My own interest in the question stemmed partly from the fact that it had come to a head because of socialist connivance with trade union power, partly because I knew from Nottingham, not far from Grantham, what was going on, and partly because the present situation offended against my belief in accountability by government for the spending of people’s money. The 1959 Conservative manifesto had contained a promise ‘to make quite sure that the press have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities’. Having read this, I imagined that a Bill to do just that would be welcome to the Government. I was again swiftly disillusioned by the Whips. Apparently, nothing more than a code of practice on the subject had been envisaged. This seemed to me extremely feeble, and so I decided to go ahead.
It quickly became clear that the objection to a measure with teeth came not from ministers at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government but rather from officials, who in turn were doubtless echoing the fierce opposition of the local authorities to any democratic check on their powers. Henry Brooke, the Cabinet minister in charge, was consistently sympathetic. Each Private Member’s Bill is placed under the supervision of a junior minister who either helps or hinders its progress. My Bill was given to Sir Keith Joseph, and it was in examination of the tedious technical intricacies of the measure that I first got to know Keith.
I learned a great deal in a very short time from the experience of devising, refashioning and negotiating for my Bill. Partly because the issue had been a live one for a number of years, but partly also because of senior Members’ kindness towards a new Member, I was able to rely on invaluable assistance from backbench colleagues. Sir Lionel Heald, a former Attorney General, gave me the benefit of his great legal experience. I learned from him and others the techniques of legal draftsmanship which were generally the preserve of the parliamentary draftsmen.
I also witnessed the power of pressure groups. The influence of the local authority lobby made itself felt in a hundred ways, and not only through the Labour Party. I therefore learned to play pressure group against pressure group and made the most of the help offered to me by the Newspaper Editors’ Guild and other press bodies.
In the end, however, there is no substitute for one’s own efforts. I wanted to get as many MPs as possible to the House on a Friday (when most MPs have returned to their constituency) for the Bill’s Second Reading — this was the great hurdle. I have always believed in the impact of a personal handwritten letter — even from someone you barely know. So just before Second Reading I wrote 250 letters to Government backbenchers asking them to attend and vote for my measure.
There were other complications. I had originally envisaged waiting several months to make my maiden speech, because I had been advised first to get the feel of the House. I had had it in mind to speak on Lord Radcliffe’s Report on the Working of the Monetary System which had appeared in the late summer — I was fascinated by the techniques of monetary policy which it outlined. But I did not have the time to prepare such a speech as well as the speech to introduce the Second Reading of my new Bill, so I decided to concentrate on the latter. That in turn faced a further obstacle. Convention dictated that a maiden speech should be a modest, uncontroversial affair, larded with appreciative references to my predecessor and my constituency. This was now impossible, because a maiden speech on the Second Reading of a Bill like mine could not have avoided controversy.
At least, though, I was not short of content. By the time I rose to deliver my speech on Friday 5 February 1960, I knew the arguments by heart. As a result, I could speak for almost half an hour without notes to hand — though not without nerves. The three women members of the Government — Pat Hornsby-Smith, Mervyn Pike and Edith Pitt — showed moral support from the front bench, and the House was very full for a Friday. I was delighted that nearly 200 Members voted, and we won handsomely. I was also genuinely moved by the comments that different MPs made to me personally — particularly Rab Butler, the Leader of the House and a master of ambiguous compliments, whose congratulations on this occasion, however, were straightforward, generous and very welcome to a new Member.
It was clear from the press next day that the speech had been a success and that I was — for the present at least — a celebrity. ‘A new star was born in Parliament’, thrilled the Daily Express. ‘Fame and Margaret Thatcher made friends yesterday’, shrieked the Sunday Dispatch. ‘A triumph’, observed the Daily Telegraph evenly. Feature articles appeared about me and my family. I was interviewed on television. The cameras came down to ‘Dormers’, and in an unguarded moment in answer to one of the more preposterous questions I told a journalist that ‘I couldn’t even consider a Cabinet post until my twins are older.’ But apart from this gaffe it was roses, roses all the way.
Excessive praise? I had no doubt myself that it was. And I was slightly nervous that it might excite the jealousy of colleagues. My speech had been a competent performance, but it was not an epic.
But was it, however, a portent? Some time before the general election I had read John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain. I had not thought more about it until I considered these somewhat overstated headlines. John Buchan’s tale concerns a group of men, including several politicians, who spend Whitsun at a friend’s house where they are enabled by another guest, a mysterious and fatally ill physicist of world renown, to glimpse the contents of a page of The Times one year later. Each sees something affecting his own future. One, a new Conservative MP, reads a brief obituary of himself which notes that he had delivered a brilliant maiden speech that had made him a national figure overnight. And so it turns out. The speech is outstanding, praised and admired on all sides; but after that, deprived of the self-confidence which knowledge of the future gave him, he fails totally and sinks into oblivion, waiting for the end. I shuddered slightly and reached for my lucky pearls.
But my Bill — with the significant addition that members of the general public should have the same rights as the press to attend council meetings, and with committees (apart from committees of the whole council) excluded from its provisions — duly passed into law; and, though my seven-day stardom faded somewhat, I had learned a lot and gained a good deal of confidence.
THE RIGHT LEFT PEOPLE
Life on the backbenches was always exciting — but so hectic that on one occasion, to the consternation of my male colleagues, I fainted in the Members’ Dining Room. I spent as much time as I could in the House and at backbench committees. I also regularly attended the dining club of new Tory Members to which the great figures of the Party — Harold Macmillan, Rab Butler, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell — and brilliant young Tory journalists like Peter Utley would come to speak.