Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography. Margaret Thatcher
and rates proposals were just about the only attractive ones in our manifesto, and consequently they set out to rubbish them as soon as possible. On Tuesday 24 September Tony Crosland described them as ‘a pack of lies’. (This was the same press conference at which Denis Healey made his notorious claim that inflation was running at 8.4 per cent, calculating the figure on a three-month basis when the annual rate was in fact 17 per cent.) I immediately issued a statement rebutting the accusation, and in order to keep the argument going, for it would highlight our policies, I said at Finchley that evening that the cut in mortgage rates would be among the first actions of a new Conservative Government. Then, in pursuit of the same goal, and having consulted Ted and Robert Carr, the Shadow Chancellor, I announced at the morning press conference at Central Office on Friday that the mortgage rate reduction would occur ‘by Christmas’ if we won. The main morning papers led with the story the following day – ‘Santa Thatcher’ – and it was generally said that we had taken the initiative for the first time during the campaign. On the following Monday I described this on a Party Election Broadcast as a ‘firm, unshakeable promise’. And the brute political fact was that, despite my reservations about the wisdom of the pledge, we would have had to honour it at almost any cost.
It was at this point that the way in which I was presenting our housing and rates policies first began to run up against the general approach Ted wanted to take in the campaign. At his insistence I had made the policies I was offering as hard and specific as possible. But the manifesto, particularly in the opening section, deliberately conveyed the impression that the Conservatives might consider some kind of National Government and would therefore be flexible on the policies we were putting forward.
At the Conservative press conference on Friday 2 October Ted stressed his willingness as Prime Minister to bring non-Conservatives into a government of ‘all the talents’. This tension between firm pledges and implied flexibilities was in danger of making nonsense of our campaign and dividing Shadow ministers.
On Thursday I continued when campaigning in the London areas with the vigorous defence of our housing policies and combined this with attacks on ‘creeping socialism’ through municipalization. In the evening I was asked to come and see Ted at Wilton Street. His advisers had apparently been urging him to actually start talking about the possibility of a Coalition Government. Because I was known to be firmly against this for both strategic and tactical reasons, and because I was due to appear on the radio programme Any Questions in Southampton the following evening, I had been called in to have the new line spelt out to me. Ted said that he was now prepared to call for a Government of National Unity which, apparently, ‘the people’ wanted. I was extremely angry. He had himself, after all, insisted on making the housing and rates policies I had been advocating as specific as possible: now, at almost the end of the campaign, he was effectively discarding the pledges in the manifesto because that seemed to offer a better chance of his returning to Downing Street.
Why he imagined that he himself would be a Coalition Government’s likely Leader quite escaped me. Ted at this time was a divisive figure, and although he had somehow convinced himself that he represented the ‘consensus’, this accorded with neither his record, nor his temperament, nor indeed other people’s estimation. For myself, I was not going to retreat from the policies which at his insistence I had been advocating. I went away highly disgruntled.
The last few days of the campaign were dominated by all the awkward questions which talk of coalitions brings. But I stuck to my own brief, repeating the manifesto pledges sitting alongside Ted Heath at the last Conservative press conference on Tuesday 7 October. The general election result two days later suggested that in spite of the natural desire of electors to give the minority Labour Government a chance to govern effectively, there was still a good deal of distrust of them. Labour finished up with an overall majority of three, which was unlikely to see them through a full term. But the Conservative result – 277 seats compared with Labour’s 319 – though it might have been worse, was hardly any kind of endorsement for our approach.
Though my majority fell a little in Finchley, I was thought to have had a good campaign. Talk of my even possibly becoming Leader of the Party, a subject which had already excited some journalists a great deal more than it convinced me, started to grow. I felt sorry for Ted Heath personally. He had his music and a small circle of friends, but politics was his life. That year, moreover, he had suffered a series of personal blows. His yacht, Morning Cloud, had sunk and his godson had been among those lost. The election defeat was a further blow.
Nonetheless, I had no doubt that Ted now ought to go. He had lost three elections out of four. He himself could not change and he was too defensive of his own past record to see that a fundamental change of policies was needed. So my reluctance to confirm suggestions that I might myself become Leader had little to do with keeping Ted in his present position. It had everything to do with seeing Keith take over from him. Indeed, by the weekend I had virtually become Keith’s informal campaign manager. Accordingly I discouraged speculation about my own prospects.
Then, on Saturday 19 October, Keith spoke at Edgbaston in Birmingham. It was not intended as part of the series of major speeches designed to alter the thinking of the Conservative Party, and perhaps for this reason had not been widely circulated among Keith’s friends and advisers: certainly, I had no inkling of the text. The Edgbaston speech is generally reckoned to have destroyed Keith’s leadership chances. It was the section containing the assertion that ‘the balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened’, and going on to lament the high and rising proportion of children being born to mothers ‘least fitted to bring children into the world’, having been ‘pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5’, which did the damage. Ironically, the most incendiary phrases came not from Keith’s own mouth, but from passages taken from an article by two left-wing sociologists published by the Child Poverty Action Group. This distinction, however, was lost upon the bishops, novelists, academics, socialist politicians and commentators who rushed to denounce Keith as a mad eugenicist.
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 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.
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.
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 that 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