Missing: one Tory Leader. Answers to the name of Margaret Thatcher. Mysteriously disappeared from the Market Referendum Campaign eleven days ago. Has not been seen since. Will finder kindly wake her up and remind her she is failing the nation in her duty as Leader of the Opposition?
Some of this was undoubtedly being fed to the press by people who had other axes to grind at my expense. But Alistair McAlpine, a supporter soon to become a friend, was sufficiently concerned to tell Willie Whitelaw that I should take a more active role. Unfortunately, on the prearranged day for me to hold a press conference at Central Office as part of the campaign, Edward du Cann, the 1922 Committee Chairman, came out with a call for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum. I learned about this shortly before I had to face the press. Caught between Edward Scylla and Edward Charybdis, I had to weave and tack rather than steer directly towards Brussels.
The referendum result itself was no surprise, with 67 per cent voting ‘Yes’ and 33 per cent ‘No’. Less predictable were the effects on the political scene as a whole. The result was a blow to the left of the Labour Party; and Harold Wilson, whose cunning tactical ploy the whole exercise had been, used it to move Tony Benn from Industry, where he had proved a political liability, to Energy where his scope for mischief was more limited. For the Conservatives, it was naturally Ted and his friends who won most of the plaudits. I myself paid tribute to him in the House. He made no response. That came later.
Soon the press was full of accounts of Ted’s earlier meeting with me at Wilton Street, but given in such a way as to suggest that I had not made a serious offer to him to join the Shadow Cabinet. These stories were accompanied by suggestions that he now intended to use the position gained through the referendum campaign to make his way back — presumably at my expense — to power. Ted’s ambitions were his own affair. But at least the real facts about the Wilton Street meeting should be known. Consequently, I told them to George Hutchinson of The Times — not a supporter of mine, but a journalist of great integrity — and the account duly appeared.
No doubt Ted’s hopes were buoyed up by two other things. First, I could not fail to be aware that all sorts of well-informed commentators were predicting that my tenure of the leadership would not last; indeed, that I would be gone by Christmas. Secondly, the deepening economic crisis into which a combination of the Heath Government’s earlier financial irresponsibility and the Wilson Government’s present anti-enterprise policies were plunging Britain might conceivably lead to that National Government on which Ted’s prospects were deemed to ride. And perhaps too, the introduction of proportional representation might keep a centrist coalition in power — and people like me out of it — permanently.
In fact, the chances of any of this happening were less than the commentators imagined. It was not just that I had no intention of relinquishing the leadership, nor even that Tory backbenchers were unprepared to tolerate Ted’s return. Neither was there any prospect of a shrewd, self-assured politician like Harold Wilson stepping aside gracefully to allow the sort of self-important figures he despised a free hand to sort Britain’s problems out. If he went he would do so on his terms and at his timing: this of course is what subsequently occurred.[44] A further aspect not widely grasped at the time was that, for all the criticism levelled at me for my alleged failure to beat the European drum with sufficient vigour, I emerged from the campaign as a unifying figure for the Party. The anti-Market Tory MPs felt no bitterness towards me. The majority of backbenchers also felt very much as I did about Europe, viewing it as a framework within which Britain could prosper rather than a crusade. The issue of whether Britain should or should not be a member of the European Community had been settled for the foreseeable future. But the real question now was what sort of Community should that be? On this issue a rather different coalition of opinions within the Conservative Party would emerge.
Two short foreign visits which I made in the course of the European referendum campaign provided me with food for thought. At the end of April I visited Luxembourg and attended the European Assembly, which was already demanding to be termed a ‘Parliament’. A lacklustre debate on some trivial issue was in progress, after which the best I could say to an eager press corps was that the institution was obviously ‘very valuable’ and that its members worked ‘very hard’. At this time the members of the Assembly were still nominated MPs from the constituent countries. We all ought probably to have thought more carefully about whether it was right to end this system in favour of direct elections. At least under the old system there was close contact between the members of the national Parliament and members of the European Assembly; they were, indeed, the same people. The Assembly had a limited role for which full-time MEPs were unnecessary. When the latter appeared on the scene they demanded a wider role, in part in order to justify their salaries, generous expenses and existence, and this was to cause no end of problems. My main conclusion from the visit to Luxembourg, however, was that such an Assembly in which people did not speak the same language or share the same traditions illustrated the shortcomings of attempts to create artificial Europe-wide institutions. Peter Kirk, the Conservative Leader in the Assembly, who organized a reception for me in Luxembourg, was doing his best to import British parliamentary attitudes and impose some financial discipline. But it would take more than this to create a real European Parliament.
The following month I was invited to Paris as the guest of the Gaullist Party — then called the UDR, later the RPR. It was on this visit that I first met Jacques Chirac, the Prime Minister, with whom I had lunch at the Hôtel Matignon (his office and official residence), and President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whom I saw later at the Elysée Palace. In spite of the marked differences of character between the two — the Prime Minister’s charismatic exuberance was the complete opposite of the President’s chilly precision — both the Matignon and the Elysée made the same statement of the historic grandeur and national pride of France. French identity and interests would always come first in the Community or any other forum. Some people might have felt aggrieved at this, but I found it oddly reassuring: you knew where you stood.
Three different but connected developments from now on commanded my attention in Europe. First, there was the matter of the speed and extent of European integration: in particular, we had to consider the arrangements for direct elections to the European Assembly and our policy towards the European Monetary System. Secondly, there was the feeling, which I shared, that the right-of-centre parties in Europe ought to cooperate more closely, providing a kind of answer to the Socialist International. Thirdly, it was necessary to establish what Western Europe’s role should be in East-West relations, particularly in the light of the Helsinki process — something which is best examined later.[45]
At the beginning of July Leo Tindemans, the Belgian Prime Minister, came to Britain, having been asked by the heads of Government at the Paris Summit of December 1974 to draw up a report on ‘European Union’. I met him with Reggie Maudling and others in a room at the House of Commons. I had set up a committee under Reggie on which Sir Anthony Royle, a former diplomat, and others sat, to look at such matters. But I emphasized to M. Tindemans that it would be best if the Community developed organically rather than according to some pre-ordained structure. This was intended as a warning that, although I envisaged that Britain under a Conservative Government would adopt a more positive attitude to the Community than had been the case under Labour, our partners should not imagine that we were keen on grand plans imposed from the centre.