Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography. Margaret Thatcher
lobby made itself felt in a hundred ways, and not only through the Labour Party. I therefore learned to play pressure group against pressure group and made the most of the help offered to me by the Newspaper Editors’ Guild and other press bodies.
In the end, however, there is no substitute for one’s own efforts. I wanted to get as many MPs as possible to the House on a Friday (when most MPs have returned to their constituency) for the Bill’s Second Reading – this was the great hurdle. I have always believed in the impact of a personal handwritten letter – even from someone you barely know. So just before Second Reading I wrote 250 letters to Government backbenchers asking them to attend and vote for my measure.
By the time I rose to deliver my speech on Friday 5 February 1960, I knew the arguments by heart. As a result, I could speak for almost half an hour without notes to hand – though not without nerves. The three women members of the Government – Pat Hornsby-Smith, Mervyn Pike and Edith Pitt – showed moral support from the front bench, and the House was very full for a Friday. I was delighted that nearly 200 Members voted, and we won handsomely. I was also genuinely moved by the comments that different MPs made to me personally – particularly Rab Butler, the Leader of the House and a master of ambiguous compliments, whose congratulations on this occasion, however, were straightforward, generous and very welcome to a new Member.
It was clear from the press next day that the speech had been a success and that I was – for the present at least – a celebrity. ‘A new star was born in Parliament’, thrilled the Daily Express. ‘Fame and Margaret Thatcher made friends yesterday’, shrieked the Sunday Dispatch. ‘A triumph’, observed the Daily Telegraph evenly. Feature articles appeared about me and my family. I was interviewed on television. The cameras came down to ‘Dormers’, and in an unguarded moment in answer to one of the more preposterous questions I told a journalist that ‘I couldn’t even consider a Cabinet post until my twins are older.’ But apart from this gaffe it was roses, roses all the way.
Excessive praise? I had no doubt myself that it was. And I was slightly nervous that it might excite the jealousy of colleagues. My speech had been a competent performance, but it was not an epic.
But was it, however, a portent? Some time before the general election I had read John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain. I had not thought more about it until I considered these somewhat overstated headlines. John Buchan’s tale concerns a group of men, including several politicians, who spend Whitsun at a friend’s house where they are enabled by another guest, a mysterious and fatally ill physicist of world renown, to glimpse the contents of a page of The Times one year later. Each sees something affecting his own future. One, a new Conservative MP, reads a brief obituary of himself which notes that he had delivered a brilliant maiden speech that had made him a national figure overnight. And so it turns out. The speech is outstanding, praised and admired on all sides; but after that, deprived of the self-confidence which knowledge of the future gave him, he fails totally and sinks into oblivion, waiting for the end. I shuddered slightly and reached for my lucky pearls.
But my Bill – with the significant addition that members of the general public should have the same rights as the press to attend council meetings, and with committees (apart from committees of the whole council) excluded from its provisions – duly passed into law; and, though my seven-day stardom faded somewhat, I had learned a lot and gained a good deal of confidence.
Life on the backbenches was always exciting – but so hectic that on one occasion, to the consternation of my male colleagues, I fainted in the Members’ Dining Room. I spent as much time as I could in the House and at backbench committees. I also regularly attended the dining club of new Tory Members to which the great figures of the Party – Harold Macmillan, Rab Butler, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell – and brilliant young Tory journalists like Peter Utley would come to speak.
The natural path to promotion and success at this time lay in the centre of politics and on the left of the Conservative Party. Above all, the up-and-coming Tory politician had to avoid being ‘reactionary’. Nothing was likely to be so socially and professionally damaging as to bear that label. Conservatism at this time lacked fire. Even though what are now widely seen as the damaging moral, social and economic developments of the sixties mainly belong to the period of Labour government after 1964, the first years of the decade also were ones of drift and cynicism, for which Conservatives must be held in large part responsible.
The odd thing is, looking back, that Conservatives in the sixties, though increasingly and obsessively worried about being out of touch with contemporary trends and fashions, were beginning to lose touch with the instincts and aspirations of ordinary conservative-minded people. This was true on issues as different as trade unions and immigration, law and order and aid to the Third World. But it was also and most directly important as regards management of the economy.
It was not so much inflation, which was zero throughout the winter of 1959–60 and did not reach 5 per cent until the summer of 1961, but rather the balance of payments that was seen as the main economic constraint on growth. And the means adopted to deal with the problems at this time – credit controls, interest rate rises, the search for international credit to sustain the pound, tax rises and, increasingly, prototype incomes policies – became all too familiar over the next fifteen years.
The rethinking that produced first ‘Selsdon Man’ and later Thatcherism was barely in evidence.
The more I learned about it, the less impressed I was by our management of the economy. I listened with great care to the speeches of the Tory backbencher Nigel Birch, which were highly critical of the Government’s failure to control public spending. The Government’s argument was that increases could be afforded as long as the economy continued to grow. But this in turn edged us towards policies of injecting too much demand and then pulling back sharply when this produced pressures on the balance of payments or sterling. This is precisely what happened in the summer of 1961 when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd introduced a deflationary budget and our first incomes policy, the ‘pay pause’. Another effect, of course, was to keep taxation higher than would otherwise be necessary. Chancellors of the Exchequer, wary of increases in basic income tax, laid particular importance on checking tax avoidance and evasion, repeatedly extending Inland Revenue powers to do so. Both as a tax lawyer and from my own instinctive dislike of handing more power to bureaucracies, I felt strongly on the matter and helped to write a critical report by the Inns of Court Conservative Society.
I felt even more strongly that the fashionable liberal tendencies in penal policy should be sharply reversed. So I spoke – and voted – in support of a new clause which a group of us wanted to add on to that year’s Criminal Justice Bill which would have introduced birching or caning for young violent offenders. In the prevailing climate of opinion, this was a line which I knew would expose me to ridicule from the selfconsciously high-minded commentators. But my constituents did not see it that way, and nor did a substantial number of us on the right. Although the new clause was defeated, sixty-nine Tory backbenchers voted against the Government and in support of it. It was the biggest Party revolt since we came to power in 1951, and the Whips’ Office were none too pleased. It was also the only occasion in my entire time in the House of Commons when I voted against the Party line.
The summer of 1961 was a more than usually interesting time in politics. I retained my close interest in foreign affairs, which were dominated by the uneasy developing relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the building by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall and, closer to home, by the beginning of negotiations for Britain to join the Common Market. There was also speculation about a reshuffle. In spite of my slightly blotted copybook, I had some reason to think that I might be a beneficiary of it. I had remained to a modest degree in the public eye, and not just with my speech on corporal punishment. I gave a press conference with Eirene White, the Labour MP for East Flint, on the lack of provision being made for the needs of pre-school children in high-rise flats, a topic of growing concern at this time when so many of these badly designed monstrosities were being erected. But the main reason why I had hopes of benefiting from the reshuffle was very simple. Pat Hornsby-Smith had decided to resign to pursue her business interests, and it was thought politically desirable to keep up the number of women in the Government.
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