The natural path to promotion and success at this time lay in the centre of politics and on the left of the Conservative Party. Above all, the up-and-coming Tory politician had to avoid being ‘reactionary’. Nothing was likely to be so socially and professionally damaging as to bear that label. Conservatism at this time lacked fire. Even though what are now widely seen as the damaging moral, social and economic developments of the sixties mainly belong to the period of Labour Government after 1964, the first years of the decade also were ones of drift and cynicism, for which Conservatives must be held in large part responsible.
Indeed, Conservatives in the early sixties were living through one of their occasional phases of complacency. Macmillan’s 1959 landslide and the continuous rise in affluence combined to persuade even non-partisan commentators that the Tories were now the party of ‘modernization’ and that Labour, with its ‘cloth cap image’, was in danger of being relegated to permanent opposition. Rab Butler told us at the New Members’ Dining Club one evening that if the Party played its cards well, we would be in power for the next twenty-five years. In these circumstances there was little incentive for either serious forward thinking on policy or philosophical reflection. The main dispute within the Tory Party was over Iain Macleod’s ‘Scramble from Africa’, with the old right complaining that Britain was abandoning its responsibility both to white settlers and to the African majorities of tribal farmers by giving power to rootless urban African politicians who would become dictators in short order. Time has made these fears seem prescient; in the early sixties they looked like a nostalgic hankering for an Empire that had almost passed into history. A passionate minority of Tory MPs embraced these criticisms; most of us, though, thought that Iain Macleod was applying Tory ‘modernization’ to colonial policy and backed him.
The odd thing is, looking back, that Conservatives in the sixties, though increasingly and obsessively worried about being out of touch with contemporary trends and fashions, were beginning to lose touch with the instincts and aspirations of ordinary conservative-minded people. This was true on issues as different as trade unions and immigration, law and order and aid to the Third World. But it was also and most directly important as regards management of the economy.
It was not so much inflation, which was zero throughout the winter of 1959–60 and did not reach 5 per cent until the summer of 1961, but rather the balance of payments that was seen as the main economic constraint on growth. And the means adopted to deal with the problems at this time — credit controls, interest rate rises, the search for international credit to sustain the pound, tax rises and, increasingly, prototype incomes policies — became all too familiar over the next fifteen years.
The rethinking that produced first ‘Selsdon Man’ and later Thatcherism was barely in evidence. Enoch Powell at this time was pushing through his ten-year hospital building programme — one of the largest programmes of public spending presided over by Macmillan. Only a handful of backbenchers — including the recently arrived John Biffen — were prepared to argue the case against incomes policy and for monetary control of inflation. Indeed, an unhealthy concern with inflation (as opposed to unemployment) was seen by the powers-that-be as reflecting the interests of declining sectors of British society, such as fixed-income pensioners, rather than the new and exciting ‘young managers’ of Conservative Central Office’s imagination — at least until the fixed-income pensioners handed us a series of by-election defeats like Orpington and Middlesbrough West in the Tory heartland. These, together with the series of scandals from 1962 onwards, marked the end of the complacent period of Macmillanite Conservatism. Ahead of us lay years of defeat, opposition and (eventually) serious rethinking as Conservatives felt their way instinctively out of paternalism and into a new style of Toryism.
Although no really serious trouble in my relations with the Government and with the prevailing orthodoxy in the Conservative Party ever threatened when I was on the backbenches, I was conscious that, for all the plaudits I had received, I was not one of those young Tories who could expect to rise without trace. I had my own beliefs. I was uneasy about the general direction in which we seemed to be going. It would be wrong to suggest anything stronger than that. But for someone who believed in sound finance, the creative potential of free enterprise and social discipline, there was much to be concerned about.
The more I learned about it, the less impressed I was by our management of the economy. I listened with great care to the speeches of the Tory backbencher Nigel Birch, which were highly critical of the Government’s failure to control public spending. The Government’s argument was that increases could be afforded as long as the economy continued to grow. But this in turn edged us towards policies of injecting too much demand and then pulling back sharply when this produced pressures on the balance of payments or sterling. This is precisely what happened in the summer of 1961 when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd introduced a deflationary Budget and our first incomes policy, the ‘pay pause’. Another effect, of course, was to keep taxation higher than would otherwise be necessary. Chancellors of the Exchequer, wary of increases in basic income tax, laid particular importance on checking tax avoidance and evasion, repeatedly extending Inland Revenue powers to do so. Both as a tax lawyer and from my own instinctive dislike of handing more power to bureaucracies, I felt strongly on the matter and helped to write a critical report by the Inns of Court Conservative Society.
I felt even more strongly that the fashionable liberal tendencies in penal policy should be sharply reversed. So I spoke — and voted — in support of a new clause which a group of us wanted to add on to that year’s Criminal Justice Bill which would have introduced birching or caning for young violent offenders. In the prevailing climate of opinion, this was a line which I knew would expose me to ridicule from the self-consciously high-minded and soft-hearted commentators. But my constituents did not see it that way, and nor did a substantial number of us on the right. Although the new clause was entirely predictably defeated, sixty-nine Tory backbenchers voted against the Government and in support of it. It was the biggest Party revolt since we came to power in 1951, and the Whips’ Office were none too pleased. It was also the only occasion in my entire time in the House of Commons when I voted against the Party line.
The summer of 1961 was a more than usually interesting time in politics. I retained my close interest in foreign affairs, which were dominated by the uneasy developing relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the building by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall (which the House was recalled to discuss) and, closer to home, by the beginning of negotiations for Britain to join the Common Market. There was also speculation about a reshuffle. In spite of my slightly blotted copybook, I had some reason to think that I might be a beneficiary of it. I had remained to a modest degree in the public eye, and not just with my speech on corporal punishment. I gave a press conference with Eirene White, the Labour MP for East Flint, on the lack of provision being made for the needs of pre-school children in high-rise flats, a topic of growing concern at this time when so many of these badly designed monstrosities were being erected. But the main reason why I had hopes of benefiting from the reshuffle was very simple. Pat Hornsby-Smith had decided to resign to pursue her business interests, and it was thought politically desirable to keep up the number of women in the Government. I even had more than an inkling of what my future post might be. It leaked out that there were two jobs available — one at Aviation and the other at Pensions. Much as I would have liked it, I could not see them giving Aviation in those days to a young woman.