But would it play outside the Empress Ballroom? I hoped, and in my heart believed, that the Daily Mail’s leader comment on the contents of the speech was correct: ‘If this is “lurching to the right”, as her critics claim, 90 per cent of the population lurched that way long ago.’
By the end of that first year as Leader of the Opposition I felt that I had found my feet. I still had difficulties adjusting to my new role in the House of Commons. But I had established a good rapport with the Party in Parliament and in the country. I was pleased with the way my little team in the office were working together. I only wished the Shadow Cabinet could be persuaded to do likewise.
I had also settled into a new domestic routine. Denis had officially retired from Burmah, though his other business interests kept him fully occupied. The twins, now aged twenty-two, were living very much their own lives: Carol was finishing her training as a solicitor and would take a job as a journalist in Australia in 1977; Mark was continuing his accountancy training. Flood Street remained our London home. I would entertain there or, during the week when the House was sitting, in my room at the House of Commons.
A fortnight after the Party Conference we moved into the old dower flat in Scotney Castle at Lamberhurst (we had stayed in the village after selling ‘The Mount’, renting a flat at Court Lodge in the interim). Our friend Thelma Cazalet-Keir, a former MP who also had a flat there, often gave lunch parties and seemed to know everyone for miles around. My old friend Edward Boyle had a house not far away. Other neighbours were the Longfords, Edward Crankshaw (the historian of the Habsburgs) and Malcolm Muggeridge. But it was around Thelma Cazalet-Keir’s table that the most stimulating discussions occurred. It was a break from the intense, hothouse atmosphere of Westminster party politics. I would often come away determined to find out more about some topic or widen my reading. For example, in the course of a discussion of communism, Malcolm Muggeridge said that its whole mentality was spelt out in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. ‘Read it,’ he told me. I did, found he was right, and went on to delve more deeply into Russian thought and literature.
Our first Christmas at Scotney passed pleasantly enough. But I had no doubt that 1976 would be a testing year. Britain was in the grip of a serious economic crisis that in due course would draw the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into a direct role in running the British economy. The Labour Government was ill-equipped to deal with this, not least because it was on the verge of losing its already slim parliamentary majority. But we on the Conservative benches had difficulties in turning this situation to our advantage, notably because the trade unions were seen by people as all-powerful. So we were constantly put at a disadvantage by the question: How would you deal with the unions? Or more ominously: How would the unions deal with you?
On top of this there had been widespread criticism of the performance of the Shadow Cabinet, including of course my own, and I decided that some changes were necessary. I reshuffled the pack on 15 January 1976. Reshuffles in Opposition had strong elements of farce. The layout of the Leader of the Opposition’s suite of rooms in the Commons was such that it was almost impossible to manage the entrances and exits of fortunate and unfortunate colleagues with suitable delicacy. Embarrassing encounters were inevitable. But on this occasion there was not too much blood on the carpet.
I was delighted that John Biffen was now prepared to join the Shadow Cabinet as Energy spokesman. He had been perhaps the most eloquent and effective critic on the backbenches at the time of the Heath Government U-turn and I welcomed his presence. If the promotion of John Biffen demonstrated that we were serious about correcting the corporatist mistakes of the past, so the promotion of Douglas Hurd, one of Ted’s closest aides, to be Party spokesman on Europe, showed that whatever Ted himself might feel I had no grudges against those who had served him. I made Willie Shadow Home Secretary in place of Ian Gilmour, whom I moved to Defence where he proved an extremely robust and effective Shadow spokesman; if he had limited himself to that, life would have been easier for all concerned. The rest was musical chairs. Patrick Jenkin I moved sideways to Social Services, replacing Norman Fowler who became Transport spokesman outside the Shadow Cabinet. Francis Pym returned after his illness to Agriculture.
In the remodelled Shadow Cabinet we faced three major strategic problems. The first, already mentioned, was the question, repeated mantra-like by the commentators, ‘How will you get on with the trade unions if you form a government?’ We urgently had to come up with a convincing answer because, as 1976 wore on, there seemed an increasing possibility of the Labour Government collapsing.
Our problem was made worse because we could not rely on many of the large industrialists prominent in the CBI, whose nerve had been badly shaken by the three-day week and the Heath Government’s fall. Keith, Geoffrey, Jim and I met the CBI leaders in January 1976. We heard an extraordinary tale. CBI members would apparently be ‘horrified’ if we did not support the Government’s incomes policy. They themselves were committed to supporting a second and possibly a third year of it. They did not like dividend controls and they were desperate to break free of price controls. This was all well and good. But it was obvious that they were not being entirely candid either with me or with themselves. Not only were their nerves shaken; in their demoralized state, they were positively attracted to wage controls — and indeed to the entire corporatist paraphernalia of the ‘little neddys’ (the NEDC sector working parties). These men were managers who had lost all hope of the possibility of ever really managing their companies again.
I could not go along with such defeatism. Still, I was convinced by Jim Prior’s arguments that we had to show that we could, if we formed the government, achieve some sort of working relationship with the unions. I took up the theme in a speech in early February to the Young Conservatives in Scarborough, noting that ‘the bigger majority we have, the more it would be obvious that many members of trade unions have voted Conservative’. It would therefore ‘not be difficult to work with responsible trade union leadership’. Admittedly, this did not get us very far.
The following Friday, 13 February, we held an all-day Shadow Cabinet discussion, much of which was based on a paper by Jim Prior. This urged us both to show the electorate that the TUC was being consulted in the formation of our policies, and to show the TUC that those policies would bring prosperity and jobs. But could this be achieved without sacrificing necessary reforms? I had my doubts, but I kept stressing that we were both willing and able to get on with the trade unions, using interviews and speeches in February to do so. This caused some rumbles of discontent among my supporters on the right. But it was not their opposition which finally scuttled this approach, but the failure of the TUC to respond in any meaningful way. A year after Jim’s paper, in 1977, I met the leaders of the TUC privately for informal talks. The meeting itself was amicable enough, but not surprisingly there was no real meeting of minds. In any case, the Grunwick dispute and the controversy over the closed shop had by then begun to cast clouds over our relations.[39] Whatever the tactical benefits of the ‘opening’ to the trade unions in which Jim believed, it bore no worthwhile fruit. And when the Winter of Discontent came along in 1978/79, our bad relations with the TUC were a positive advantage.