By contrast, Willie Whitelaw definitely had. He had demonstrated his popularity in the leadership election. He was immensely experienced and his presence would be a reassuring guarantee to many on the backbenches that evolution rather than revolution was the order of the day. Perhaps both of us already sensed that we could form a strong political partnership, our strengths and weaknesses complementing one another’s. Although I could not as yet offer him a particular portfolio, I asked Willie to be Deputy Leader of the Party, and he accepted. But his loyalty was not contingent on that; he was loyal from the first.
There was much male chauvinist hilarity — ‘Give us a kiss, Maggie,’ etc. — when I came into the Chamber to hear the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, make a statement. I took my place on the front bench between Willie and Robert Carr. Jim Prior, Geoffrey Howe and John Peyton — the other defeated leadership candidates — were also there, though Ted was not. I received the wittily barbed congratulations of the Prime Minister and replied somewhat less wittily to them. Harold Wilson was at his still incomparable best in the House. As I listened, I reflected that as a new Leader of a shaken and still badly split party, and as a woman striving for dominance in this noisy, boisterous, masculine world, I could expect difficulties ahead. And so it proved.
That evening I chaired the Shadow Cabinet for the first time. The meeting had a slightly unreal atmosphere since none of those present had yet been formally reappointed, and some would not be. Quintin Hailsham congratulated me on the Shadow Cabinet’s behalf and pledged their loyalty and cooperation. I felt that he at least probably meant it. I said that Willie had agreed to be Deputy Leader and that Ted had turned down my offer of a place in the Shadow Cabinet. Willie then said that he had accepted the Deputy Leadership at once and looked forward to serving in this capacity. The formalities thus indicated a kind of armed truce between the competing views and personalities.
The following evening, I made my first appearance as Leader at the 1922 Committee meeting. My relations with the wider Parliamentary Party were much easier than with the Shadow Cabinet. As I entered, everyone rose to their feet. Edward du Cann presented me with an unsigned Valentine card (a day early) which would join the other Valentines and roses that accumulated at Flood Street. In addressing the 1922 Committee it is the Leader’s mood and bearing rather than the content of a speech which matter most. But they seemed to like the message as well — namely, the need to distinguish the Conservative approach clearly from that of the socialists, to return to traditional values of independence and self-help and to challenge the assumption that the onward march of the Left was irreversible. I sat down amid much clapping, banging of desks and that curious deep braying with which the Parliamentary Conservative Party expresses its approval.
In the next few days my time was taken up in meeting journalists, discussing arrangements for my office and fulfilling long-standing constituency engagements. There were few opportunities to sit down with Humphrey and Willie to discuss Shadow Cabinet membership. In any case, I wanted the weekend to make my final decisions. But the delay encouraged speculation. According to the press a battle was under way to prevent Keith Joseph becoming Shadow Chancellor. In fact, he did not ask for the position nor did I offer it.
My Shadow Cabinet-making was smoothed by the fact that Peter Thomas and Geoffrey Rippon made it clear that they did not want to continue. That meant two more vacancies to play with. I spent Saturday and Sunday at Flood Street making and remaking the list, consulting Humphrey or Willie on particular points. On Monday I made the appointments in a series of meetings with colleagues at my room in the Commons.
Willie was the first to come in. I gave him a roving brief which included the issue of devolution — which already spelt political difficulties he, as both a former Chief Whip and a Scot representing an English seat, might be able to tackle. Then I saw Keith Joseph, whom I asked to continue with his Shadow Cabinet responsibility for policy and research. In a sense, Willie and Keith were the two key figures, one providing the political brawn and the other the policy-making brains of the team. I also felt that Keith must continue his intellectual crusade from the Centre for Policy Studies for wider understanding and acceptance of free-enterprise economics. I was under no illusion that my victory in the leadership election represented a wholesale conversion. Our ability to change Party policy, as the first step towards making changes in government, depended upon using our positions to change minds. Unfortunately, on his forays into the universities Keith was to find a readier hearing from the Militant Tendency in his avowedly left-wing audiences than he would from the cynical tendency among his colleagues.
My next visitor was Reggie Maudling. I suspect that, although he had made it clear publicly that he was willing to serve, he was as surprised as the press when I made him Shadow Foreign Secretary. Though widely praised at the time, this was not a good appointment. I had always admired Reggie’s intellect and regretted that he had had to resign over the Poulson affair in 1972. Also bringing Reggie back to deal with foreign affairs appeared a convincing answer to those who had contrasted Ted’s experience with my own lack of it. But it soon became clear that Reggie was not prepared to modify his own views, a problem compounded by the fact that, more broadly, he had an only thinly disguised contempt for the monetarist approach which Keith and I wanted to pursue. I would have done better to appoint someone who shared my instincts on defence and foreign policy.
Still less of a soulmate was Ian Gilmour. I suspect that when he learned that I wanted to see him he expected the worst. He had been a strong partisan of Ted, and he lacked the support or standing which might have made him politically costly to dispense with. But I valued his intelligence. I felt that he could make a useful contribution as long as he was kept out of an economic post, to which in spite of his later reputation as one of the foremost advocates of ‘reflation’ neither his training nor his aptitudes suited him. I asked him to be Shadow Home Secretary.
Michael Heseltine, who now came in to see me, had a much more flamboyant personality than Ian’s, although they shared many of the same views. He too had long been a Heath supporter, but it had always been assumed that the cause he most strongly advocated was his own. My campaign team believed him to have been an abstainer in the first round of the leadership contest. To do Michael credit, he was always refreshingly open about his ambitions. I asked him to stay on as Shadow Industry Secretary. It was a portfolio which fascinated him and which gave full scope to his talent for Opposition, since it fell to him to fight the Labour Government’s main nationalization proposals. What I did not fully grasp at this time was how ideologically committed he was to an interventionist approach in industry which I could not accept.
After a lunchtime meeting of small businessmen at the National Chamber of Trade, where I made my first public speech as Leader, I returned to my room at the House for more Shadow Cabinet carpentry. I asked Peter Carrington to stay on as Leader of the House of Lords. Again, I had no illusions about Peter’s position in the Tory Party’s political spectrum: he was not of my way of thinking. He had, of course, been in Ted’s inner circle making the political decisions about the miners’ strike and the February 1974 election. But since we lost office he had proved an extremely effective Opposition Leader in the Upper House, and as a former Defence Minister and an international businessman he had wide experience of foreign affairs. Admittedly, he was likely in Shadow Cabinet to be on the opposite side to me on economic policy. But he never allowed economic disagreements to get in the way of his more general responsibilities. He brought style, experience, wit and — politically incorrect as the thought may be — a touch of class.