On the other hand, there was an outpouring of public support for Keith in opinion polls and five bulging mail bags. One of these letters, a sample of which was analysed by Diana Spearman in the Spectator, summed up the feeling. In an unlettered hand, it read simply:
Dear Sir Joseph,
You are dead right.
For, with the exception of those few unfortunate phrases, the speech sent out powerful messages about the decline of the family, the subversion of moral values and the dangers of the permissive society, connecting all these things with socialism and egalitarianism, and proposing the ‘remoralization of Britain’ as a long-term aim. It was an attempt to provide a backbone for Conservative social policy, just as Keith had started to do for economic policy. The trouble was that the only short-term answer suggested by Keith for the social problems he outlined was making contraceptives more widely available — and that tended to drive away those who might have been attracted by his larger moral message.
The Edgbaston speech was bound to be dynamite, but it might at least have been a controlled explosion. Unfortunately, that is not how it happened. The speech was due to be given on Saturday night, and so the text was issued in advance with an embargo for media use. But the Evening Standard, for whatever reason, broke the embargo and launched a fierce attack on Keith, distorting what he said. I read its version on Waterloo Station and my heart sank. Afterwards Keith himself did not help his cause by constantly explaining, qualifying and apologizing. The Party establishment could barely contain their glee. Keith had been found guilty of that one mortal sin in the eyes of mediocrities — he had shown ‘lack of judgement’, i.e. willingness to think for himself. The press camped outside his house and refused to leave him or his family alone. He had probably never experienced anything quite like it. Having been vilified as the ‘milk snatcher’, I felt his hurt as if it were my own. But there was nothing to do except hope that it would all die down.
Doubtless as a result of all this, Ted felt a good deal more secure. He even told us in Shadow Cabinet the following Tuesday that the election campaign had been ‘quite a good containment exercise and that the mechanics had worked well’. A strange unreality pervaded our discussions. Everyone except Ted knew that the main political problem was the fact that he was still Leader. But he thought that we should now concentrate on Scotland, on how to improve our appeal to the young and on how to increase our support among working-class voters. Even on its own terms this analysis was flawed. As I was to point out two days later in an interview with Max Hastings in the Evening Standard, which appeared under the headline ‘Mrs Thatcher and the Twilight of the Middle Classes’, we should be trying to re-establish our middle-class support, for ‘[being middle class] has never been simply a matter of income, but a whole attitude to life, a will to take responsibility for oneself’. And I was surely not the only one present at Shadow Cabinet who felt that our recent election defeat was hardly a cause for even modest self-congratulation.
Ted was now locked in a bitter battle with the 1922 Executive. In reply to their demands for a leadership contest — and indeed for reform of the leadership election procedure — he disputed their legitimacy as representatives of the backbenches on the grounds that they had been elected during the previous Parliament and must themselves first face re-election by Tory MPs. Ted and his advisers hoped that they might be able to have his opponents thrown off the Executive and replaced by figures more amenable to him. As part of a somewhat belated attempt to win over backbenchers, Ted also proposed that extra front bench spokesmen should be appointed from among them and that officers of the Parliamentary Committees might speak from the front bench on some occasions. It was also widely rumoured that there would shortly be a reshuffle of the Shadow Cabinet.
Not for the first time, I found the press more optimistic about my prospects than I was. The Sunday Express and the Observer on 3 November ran stories that I was to be appointed Shadow Chancellor. This was a nice thought and I would have loved the job; but I regarded it as extremely unlikely that Ted would give it to me. That was more or less confirmed by stories in the Financial Times and the Daily Mirror on the Monday which said that I would get a top economic job, but not the Shadow Chancellorship. And so indeed it turned out. I was appointed Robert Carr’s deputy with special responsibility for the Finance Bill and also made a member of the Steering Committee. Some of my friends were annoyed that I had not received a more important portfolio. But I knew from the years when I worked under Iain Macleod on the Finance Bill that this was a position in which I could make the most of my talents. What neither Ted nor I knew was just how important that would be over the next three months. The reshuffle as a whole demonstrated something of the weakness of Ted’s political standing. Edward du Cann refused to join the Shadow Cabinet, which was therefore no more attractive to the right of the Party, some of whom at least Ted needed to win over. Tim Raison and Nicholas Scott who did come in were more or less on the left and, though able, not people who carried great political weight.
The re-election of all the members of the 1922 Executive, including Edward du Cann, on the day of the reshuffle — Thursday 7 November — was bad news for Ted. A leadership contest could no longer be avoided. He wrote to Edward saying that he was now willing to discuss changes to the procedure for electing the Party Leader. From now on it was probably in Ted’s interest to have the election over as soon as possible, before any alternative candidate could put together an effective campaign.
At this time I started to attend the Economic Dining Group which Nick Ridley had formed in 1972 and which largely consisted of sound money men like John Biffen, Jock Bruce-Gardyne, John Nott and others. Above all, I buried myself in the details of my new brief. It was a challenging time to take it up, for on Tuesday 12 November Denis Healey introduced one of his quarterly Budgets. It was a panic reaction to the rapidly growing problems of industry and consisted of cuts in business taxation to the tune of £775 million (£495 million of new business taxes having been imposed only six months before) and some curbs on subsidies to nationalized industries. Ted’s reply — in which, against the background of an audible gasp from Tory backbenchers, he criticized the Chancellor for allowing nationalized industry prices to rise towards market levels — did him no good at all.
My chance came the following Thursday when I spoke for the Opposition in the Budget Debate. I had done my homework and I set about contrasting the Labour Government’s past statements with its present actions. Some of the speech was quite technical and detailed, as it had to be. But it was my answers to the interruptions which had the backbenchers roaring support. I was directly answering Harold Lever (without whom Labour would have been still more economically inept) when he interrupted early in my speech to put me right on views I had attributed to him. Amid a good deal of merriment, not least from Harold Lever himself, a shrewd businessman from a wealthy family, I replied: ‘I always felt that I could never rival him [Lever] at the Treasury because there are four ways of acquiring money. To make it. To earn it. To marry it. And to borrow it. He seems to have experience of all four.’