Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography. Margaret Thatcher
to the editors. But he also persuaded me that the person they really wanted to see and hear from was me. So, whatever the other demands on my diary, when Gordon said that we must have lunch with such-and-such an editor, that was the priority.
Gordon also performed another invaluable service. Every politician has to decide how much he or she is prepared to change manner and appearance for the sake of the media. It may sound grittily honourable to refuse to make any concessions, but such an attitude in a public figure is most likely to betray a lack of seriousness about winning power or even, paradoxically, the pride that apes humility. When Gordon suggested some changes in my style of hair and clothes in order to make a better impression, he was calling upon his experience in television. ‘Avoid lots of jewellery near the face. Edges look good on television. Watch out for background colours which clash with your outfit.’ It was quite an education.
There was also the matter of my voice. In the House of Commons one has to speak over the din to get a hearing. This is more difficult the higher the pitch of one’s voice, because in increasing its volume one automatically goes up the register. This poses an obvious problem for most women. Somehow one has to learn to project the voice without shrieking.
Even outside the House, when addressing an audience my voice was naturally high-pitched, which can easily become grating and I had deliberately tried to lower its tone. The result, unfortunately, was to give me a sore throat – an even greater problem for a regular public speaker. Gordon found me an expert who knew that the first thing to do was to get your breathing right, and then to speak not from the back of the throat but from the front of the mouth. She was a genius. Her sympathetic understanding for my difficulties was only matched by that for her ailing cat. Unfortunately, the cat would sometimes fall sick just before my lesson and force its cancellation. Fortunately, I too like cats. And so we finished the course.
On one occasion Gordon took me to meet Sir Laurence Olivier to see whether he had any tips. He was quite complimentary, telling me that I had a good gaze out to the audience, which was important, and that my voice was perfectly all right, which – no thanks to the cat – it now probably was.
Getting all these things right took me several months. But all in all the general system never let me down. The real political tests of Opposition leadership, however, still lay ahead.
My first real experience of the public aspects of being Leader of the Opposition came when I visited Scotland on Friday 21 February. From the time that I stepped off the aircraft at Edinburgh Airport, where a waggish piper played ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’, I received an enthusiastic Scottish welcome.
I could always be sure of a friendly reception from grassroots Scottish Tories, whose embattled position seems to sharpen their zeal. More generally, however, the honeymoon did not last long and ordinary political life resumed with a vengeance. The opinion polls, which in February had given the Conservatives a 4 percentage point lead over Labour, showed a 2 per cent Labour lead just a month later – not statistically significant perhaps, but a check on any premature tendency to euphoria. It also soon became clear that powerful elements in the Party were out to make trouble for me. In early April Harold Macmillan and Ted Heath made speeches to a conference of Young Conservatives, warning against shifting the Conservative Party to the right. The European referendum campaign placed the focus on European issues, and this in turn gave a fillip to advocates of coalition government. All this created more difficulties for me.
My first major parliamentary performance, in which I crossed swords with Harold Wilson, in a debate on the economy on Thursday 22 May, was heavily and justly criticized for not spelling out convincingly the Conservative alternative. The difficulty was that at this point we had no credible alternative to offer. Imprisoned by the requirement of defending the indefensible record of the Heath Government, we were unable as yet to break through to a proper free market alternative.
Even so, on this and several other occasions I did not make a good speech. Leading for the Opposition in set-piece debates, one is not able to make a wide-ranging speech on the basis of a few notes, something which I was good at. The root of all our problems, however, lay in the unresolved contradictions of policy.
In March 1975 we discussed a paper from Keith and Angus on policy-making. They proposed involving both backbench committees and sympathetic outside experts; and this was accepted. The number of policy groups continued to multiply. They were generally chaired by the relevant front-bench spokesmen. Geoffrey Howe’s Economic Reconstruction Group was the main forum for hashing over economic policy. From time to time, there would be whole-day Shadow Cabinet policy discussions, which I myself would chair. The full Shadow Cabinet approved, rather than devised, policy on the basis of papers put to it by the chief Shadow spokesmen and their policy groups.
The Centre for Policy Studies and a range of outside advisers, particularly on economic matters, fed in ideas and suggestions to Keith and me (Keith also had a number of lunchtime meetings with other Shadow Cabinet colleagues on policy). And on top of all that I would sometimes advance a new policy in a speech or interview – not always to the applause of my colleagues.
As a system of decision-taking the structure had a somewhat ramshackle feel to it. But then, no amount of institutional neatness could resolve the fundamental questions we had to decide. The fact that by the time we took office in May 1979 so many of the big issues had been satisfactorily resolved, and Shadow ministers had as clear an idea of their priorities as any incoming post-war British Government, shows that in the most important sense this policy-making system ‘worked’.
The foremost policy issue was how to deal with inflation, which soared to 26.9 per cent in August 1975 before beginning to fall, going below 10 per cent in January 1978. Discussion of how inflation was caused and cured also necessarily involved making a judgement about the Heath Government. If inflation was the result of an increase in the money supply, which takes approximately eighteen months to work through in the form of higher prices, then the prime responsibility for the high inflation during the first eighteen months or so of the Labour Government should be laid at the door of the Conservatives. If, however, the cause of high inflation was excessive wage awards after the collapse of the previous Conservative Government’s incomes policy and Labour’s abdication of authority to the trade unions, then political life in Opposition would be easier. We might not have any credible solutions to offer, but we could at least blame everything on the Government. This approach was likely to be favoured by those of my colleagues who prided themselves on being sceptics about all kinds of economic theory. In fact, the case that the Heath Government’s monetary incontinence was to blame for inflation seemed to me convincingly argued by Alan Walters, whose devastating indictment and predictions were circulated by Keith as background for a discussion with Shadow Cabinet colleagues in March 1975. But if I had publicly accepted this it would have provoked even more trouble from Ted Heath and his supporters.
Our failure to be explicit about the overriding importance of monetary policy did, however, open up our flank to attack on incomes policy. For if wage rises were the cause of inflation, then how would we in government be able to contain such rises?
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