It was at this point that the way in which I was presenting our housing and rates policies first began to run up against the general approach Ted wanted to take in the campaign. At his insistence I had made the policies I was offering as hard and specific as possible. But the manifesto, particularly in the opening section, deliberately conveyed the impression that the Conservatives might consider some kind of National Government and would therefore be flexible on the policies we were putting forward. The passage read:
The Conservative Party, free from dogma and free from dependence upon any single interest, is broadly based throughout the nation. It is our objective to win a clear majority in the House of Commons in this election. But we will use that majority above all to unite the nation. We will not govern in a narrow partisan spirit. After the election we will consult and confer with the leaders of other parties and with the leaders of the great interests in the nation, in order to secure for the Government’s policies the consent and support of all men and women of goodwill. We will invite people from outside the ranks of our party to join with us in overcoming Britain’s difficulties. [Emphasis added.]
These undefined people who would join the Conservatives in government might include, one presumed, some members of the right wing of the Labour Party and perhaps the Liberals. The latter had all along been openly campaigning for a coalition government. This kind of rhetoric made me deeply uneasy. It was not just that, like Disraeli’s England, I did not like coalitions. In practical terms, such talk reduced the credibility of the pledges I was making in my own area. For who could tell what inter-party horse-trading might do to them?
At the Conservative press conference on Friday 2 October Ted stressed his willingness as Prime Minister to bring non-Conservatives into a government of ‘all the talents’ (party and talent being in this context considered synonyms). This tension between firm pledges and implied flexibilities was in danger of making nonsense of our campaign and dividing Shadow ministers.
We were now entering the last week. I still did not believe we were likely to win. The opinion polls had shown us well behind since the beginning of the campaign. But I felt that in spite of criticism in the heavyweight press my housing and rates policies had proved a political success. I also thought that we might manage to get by with the present somewhat ambiguous attitude to National Governments for the few days remaining.
On Thursday I continued when campaigning in the London areas with the vigorous defence of our housing policies and combined this with attacks on ‘creeping socialism’ through municipalization. In the evening I was asked to come and see Ted at Wilton Street. His advisers had apparently been urging him to go further and actually start talking about the possibility of a Coalition Government. Because I was known to be firmly against this for both strategic and tactical reasons, and because I was due to appear on the radio programme Any Questions in Southampton the following evening, I had been called in to have the new line spelt out to me. Ted said that he was now prepared to call for a Government of National Unity which, apparently, ‘the people’ wanted. I was extremely angry. He had himself, after all, insisted on making the housing and rates policies I had been advocating as specific as possible: now at almost the end of the campaign he was effectively discarding the pledges in the manifesto because that seemed to offer a better chance of his returning to Downing Street.
Why, in any case, he imagined that he himself would be a Coalition Government’s likely Leader quite escaped me. Ted at this time was a divisive figure, and although he had somehow convinced himself that he represented the ‘consensus’, this accorded with neither his record, nor his temperament, nor indeed other people’s estimation. For myself, I was not going to retreat from the policies which at his insistence I had been advocating. I went away highly disgruntled.
On Any Questions I conceded that if there were no clear majority, a coalition would probably be necessary. But I qualified this by saying that I myself could never sit in a government with left wingers like Michael Foot or Tony Benn. I might have added that the likelihood of Keith Joseph and my being included in a coalition of the great and the good was tiny — hardly greater in fact than Ted himself leading it.
The last few days of the campaign were dominated by all the awkward questions which talk of coalitions brings. But I stuck to my own brief, repeating the manifesto pledges sitting alongside Ted Heath at the last Conservative press conference on Tuesday 7 October. The general election result two days later suggested that in spite of the natural desire of electors to give the minority Labour Government a chance to govern effectively, there was still a good deal of distrust of them. Labour finished up with an overall majority of three, which was unlikely to see them through a full term. But the Conservative result — 277 seats compared with Labour’s 319 — though it might have been worse, was hardly any kind of endorsement for our approach.
KEITH BOWS OUT
I myself had fared quite well, though my majority fell a little in Finchley. I was thought to have had a good campaign. Talk of my even possibly becoming Leader of the Party, a subject which had already excited some journalists a great deal more than it convinced me, started to grow. I felt sorry for Ted Heath personally. He had his music and a small circle of friends, but politics was his life. That year, moreover, he had suffered a series of personal blows. His yacht, Morning Cloud, had sunk and his godson had been among those lost. The election defeat was a further blow.
Nonetheless, I had no doubt that Ted now ought to go. He had lost three elections out of four. He himself could not change and he was too defensive of his own past record to see that a fundamental change of policies was needed. So my reluctance to confirm suggestions that I might myself become Leader had little to do with keeping Ted in his present position. It had everything to do with seeing Keith take over from him. Indeed, by the weekend I had virtually become Keith’s informal campaign manager. Accordingly I discouraged speculation about my own prospects. For example, I told the London Evening News on Friday 11 October: ‘You can cross my name off the list.’
Similarly I told the Evening Standard on Tuesday 15 October: ‘I think it would be extremely difficult for a woman to make it to the top… I have always taken the view that to get to the very top one has to have experience in one of the three important posts…[32] they give you confidence in yourself and give others confidence in you.’
Then on Saturday 19 October Keith spoke at Edgbaston in Birmingham. It was not intended as part of the series of major speeches designed to alter the thinking of the Conservative Party, and perhaps for this reason had not been widely circulated among Keith’s friends and advisers: certainly, I had no inkling of the text. The Edgbaston speech is generally reckoned to have destroyed Keith’s leadership chances. It was the section containing the assertion that ‘the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened’, and going on to lament the high and rising proportion of children being born to mothers ‘least fitted to bring children into the world’, having been ‘pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5’, which did the damage. Ironically, the most incendiary phrases came not from Keith’s own mouth, but from passages taken from an article by two left-wing sociologists published by the Child Poverty Action Group. This distinction, however, was lost upon the bishops, novelists, academics, socialist politicians and commentators who rushed to denounce Keith as a mad eugenicist.