Profile of a Conviction Speaker: Margaret Thatcher (Part 2)

Mrs. Thatcher’s second term of office (1983 to 1987) If her first term was marked by problems with the economy, the Falklands War, and problems in Northern Ireland, her second term was marked by her conflict with the trade unions, the Irish problem once again, privatization, and the Westland affair. It was also a period of economic growth. But here, once again, Mrs. Thatcher’s tendency for confrontation and argumentation was the special feature of her tenure.

As many have remarked, she was a revolutionary rather than a conservative. In fact, it could be said that she ushered in the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” (Jenkins). An example of this middle class thrust was the government selling off some of the state concerns which it offered to the public. This was especially important for small investors, as it provided new opportunities for them. Also the government encouraged people to buy their own homes, particularly those who lived in Council owned homes.

However divided she was (ideologically speaking) from the opposition, it was within her scope to manage them to her advantage. But this was not the case with internal affairs within the Conservative Party. ‘One Nation’ Conservatives (albeit changed from the Macmillan time) had not disappeared from the political scene altogether, and they were still represented in her Cabinet. When Michael Heseltine, the Defence Minister, resigned in January 1986 over the Westland affair, this division came to the surface once again. The effects of this dispute were significant. But she survived the Heseltine resignation and accepted that Heseltine would become the figurehead of opposition within her own party. But Kinnock, the Labour Leader, was unable to take his golden opportunity to divide the Conservatives.

The Westland Affair

The Westland Affair concerned the business problems of the British helicopter manufacturer, Westland. Briefly, this company was in difficulties, and the Minister of Defence, Michael Heseltine, thought that the European alternative to the American bid to rescue this company had not been fairly examined by the cabinet.  Mrs. Thatcher, on the other hand, thought that Heseltine wasn’t playing by the rules of Cabinet collective responsibility. This internal dispute was a gift to the leader of the Opposition. The issue was brought to a head when the Labour opposition tabled a motion in Parliament. It now had to be debated in Parliament.

Kinnock had his opportunity to divide the Conservatives between Thatcherites and those who supported Heseltine. If he had been successful, the government would certainly have fallen. But instead of arguing the specific issue at hand, he once again went into generalities and attacked her government. Even when he tried to keep to facts, he spoke in general terms. Mrs. Thatcher said this about him,  “Neil Kinnock opened the debate that Monday afternoon with a long-winded and ill-considered speech which certainly did him more harm than it did me” (MT p.435).

When Thatcher rose to speak after the unfortunate Kinnock, she gave the exact details of the case, then analysed the situation, followed by her conclusion. Only after this did she go for the ill-fated Kinnock and annihilated him, figuratively speaking, of course. Mrs Thatcher tells us in her autobiography, “…the adrenalin flowed and I gave as good as I got”.

When we look at these speeches on paper, Kinnock’s speech looks the more motivating and Thatcher’s forensic type speech is unremarkable and somewhat boring. Yet she was victorious. Why is this, when the Thatcher speech does not even read well in terms of prose? What it all comes down to is a question of ethos, a question of her character against his, a question of professional and personal credibility. It was the force of her character supported by an artillery of detail (logos) that the unfortunate Kinnock with his generalities had coming down on him. He never stood a chance. “The facts? The facts? The facts? I have been elected to change the facts”, repeated Mrs. Thatcher. (PH, p.403)

This also introduces the question of non-verbal communication. Kinnock’s tonality was highly pitched, excitable, idealistic and offering little in a practical way to the ears of the listeners. Her tonality was forensic, controlled, specific and somewhat icy. In preparation for her Westland speech she asked Whitelaw and Howe to help her draft it. Ronald Millar, one of the Prime Minister’s friends, revised it.  The importance of the Westland speech cannot be underestimated. Her remark to Millar, before the debate, that, “She might cease to be Prime Minister by six o’clock that evening if things went bad”, shows how serious it was.

Alan Clark recorded in his diary that “For a few seconds Kinnock had her cornered…But then he had an attack of wind, gave her time to recover.”^[12] Heseltine was frustrated at Kinnock’s failure to exploit the moment, as it lost Heseltine the opportunity to challenge Thatcher’s leadership within the Conservatives.  As a result of the debate, Heseltine and his supporters had little option but to support the Government.

An example of the type of rhetoric Thatcher used at this point is interesting because she used ‘contrasting opposite viewpoints’ very effectively. A typical example is “Labour believes in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners.” More and more she converted the struggle into right and wrong, asking people to choose between prosperity and the policies of old Labour.

Mrs. Thatcher’s ill-fated third term

Margaret Thatcher opened her third term of office with very ambitious plans: she wanted to reform the education system by introducing a national curriculum in education; to introduce more competition among those supplying services to the National Health system; and she wanted to introduce a new community tax system, the ‘poll’ tax.

The problem was that all three measures were very controversial. But with her usual conviction that she was right, she went ahead with her proposals and won two out of the three. But everything tended to come to a head with the ‘poll’ tax.

The ‘poll’ tax was a proposed tax of a uniform, fixed amount per adult resident in each household. The government wanted to replace the local ‘rating’ system of a person’s house with the new tax which was officially called the Community Charge. The idea was to charge each adult for local services. However, it was seen as very unfair by many people, as it shifted the tax burden from the rich to the poor, who generally speaking had more people living in their households. The bill had been introduced into Scotland one year earlier and it is commonly agreed that it ended any Conservative presence in Scotland. Protests took place all over the U.K. as groups refused to pay. Mrs. Thatcher was not prepared to give in and carried on with it, even though many of her MPs knew that what happened in Scotland could be repeated in parts of England.

Two divisive issues

If the ‘poll’ tax had turned many of the electorate against the government, two other issues were to divide the Cabinet and the parliamentary party. The first problem arose in 1988 over the management of the currency while the economy overheated. Her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, favored the policy of pegging the pound sterling to the Deutschmark through the ERM. Mrs. Thatcher opposed this. A confrontation resulted and Lawson resigned leaving behind a lot of bitterness between the supporters of the two sides.

Then came the fatal confrontation over the European Community. This time Mrs. Thatcher found herself at odds with Geoffrey Howe, her pro-European Foreign Secretary, on the question of European integration. In September 1988 she was invited to speak to the Bruges Group. Up till now the Conservative party was quite pro-European, but this speech signalled the shift to Euro-skepticism.

The shift was clear and a direct challenge to those in her Cabinet such as Geoffrey Howe, the Foreign Secretary. The extract below from Margaret Thatcher’s speech illustrates exactly what this shift was about and her logic behind it.

In a comment by one of her admirers, Martin Holmes, on the Bruges speech (Paper No. 34), we can see below how he saw Mrs. Thatcher’s style as ‘visionary’. However, what Thatcher was saying, in my view, was that we must maintain the status quo of the independent nations of Europe.

The Prime Minister’s speech was one of vision, clarity and foreboding. She outlined a positive vision of a wider, decentralized and democratic Europe. She attacked the Europe of Delors and in the process reinvented Euro-skepticism as an intellectually powerful and popular movement across the political spectrum.

With chilling accuracy she predicted the stark choice facing Britain with which we have wrestled since. Should Britain be part of a centralized, unaccountable federal Europe or should we use our influence to help create a Europe of independent, freely trading, cooperating nation states?

Margaret Thatcher opted for the latter choice and her vision was supported by the British people. They have never wanted to become part of a European Super state and did not vote “Yes” to the Common Market in 1975 in order to join one.

The Bruges speech fits well into a pattern over the years. For example, one of the most interesting arguments put forward by Margaret Thatcher was in her Press Conference, after the Dublin European Council. “We are not asking for a penny piece of Community money for Britain. We are asking for a very large amount of our own money back, over and above what we contribute to the Community, which is covered by our receipts from the Community. Broadly speaking for every 2 pounds we contribute we get I pound back.” The argument is about that 1 pound which is in reality a sum of 1,000 million pounds.  “Look! We, as one of the poorer member of the Community, cannot go on filling the coffers of the Community. We are giving you notice that we just cannot afford it!”  As history shows she was successful in this battle, but what about the war?

The last battle

After her famous Bruges’ speech, time passed, but for many the end was in sight. Geoffrey Howe resigned his post as Deputy Prime Minister over her shift on European policy. It was his speech in Parliament answering on why he resigned that eventually brought her down.  The extract from Howe’s speech below shows clearly where the two sides lay over Europe.

• The point was perhaps more sharply put by a British businessman, trading in Brussels and elsewhere, who wrote to me last week, stating :
• “People throughout Europe see our Prime Minister’s finger-wagging and hear her passionate, No, No, No’, much more clearly than the content of the carefully worded formal texts.”
• He went on: “It is too easy for them to believe that we all share her attitudes ; for why else has she been our Prime Minister for so long?”
• My correspondent concluded: “This is a desperately serious situation for our country.” And sadly, I have to agree.
• The tragedy is–and it is for me personally, for my party, for our whole people and for my right hon. Friend herself, a very real tragedy–that the Prime Minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation. It risks minimising our influence and maximising our chances of being once again shut out. We have paid heavily in the past for late starts and squandered opportunities in Europe. We dare not let that happen again. If we detach ourselves completely, as a party or a nation, from the middle ground of Europe, the effects will be incalculable and very hard ever to correct.
• In my letter of resignation, which I tendered with the utmost sadness and dismay, I said : “Cabinet Government is all about trying to persuade one another from within”.
• That was my commitment to Government by persuasion–persuading colleagues and the nation. I have tried to do that as Foreign Secretary and since, but I realise now that the task has become futile : trying to stretch the meaning of words beyond what was credible, and trying to pretend that there was a common policy when every step forward risked being subverted by some casual comment or impulsive answer.

The odd thing for most commentators was that this speech was probably the most spirited speech Howe ever made. For many listeners it certainly was his best. Mrs. Thatcher had this to say about her former colleague’s speech.

 “It was cool, forensic, light at points, and poisonous….He persuasively caricatured my arguments of principle against Europe’s drift to federalism as mere tics of temperamental obstinacy.” (p.839 MT)

Especially in an earlier part of his speech, Howe, the lawyer, had turned the tables on her by using exactly the same style which she had used constantly over the years to whip erring colleagues and those who opposed her, like the unfortunate Neil Kinnock.

Howe built his arguments well. For example, Mrs Thatcher greatly admired Winston Churchill, and Howe used this very cleverly against her.

• The European enterprise is not and should not be seen like that–as some kind of zero sum game. Sir Winston Churchill put it much more positively 40 years ago, when he said :
• “It is also possible and not less agreeable to regard this sacrifice or merger of national sovereignty as the gradual assumption by all the nations concerned of that larger sovereignty which can alone protect their diverse and distinctive customs and characteristics and their national traditions.”
• I have to say that I find Winston Churchill’s perception a good deal more convincing, and more encouraging for the interests of our nation, than the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill- intentioned people, scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy”, to “dissolve our national identities” and to lead us “through the back-door into a federal Europe”.

He went on to say:

• “What kind of vision is that for our business people, who trade there each day, for our financiers, who seek to make London the money capital of Europe or for all the young people of today?”

The end approaches

She had been Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. Indeed she was the longest serving prime minister this century. She lost office in 1990 without losing an election. She lost the support of the cabinet and many of the parliamentary party who knew very well that they could lose their seats in the next election if she were to continue.

In the country at large (especially in the North) there was fierce opposition to the Thatcher government. M.Ps worried about their futures. People complained about the local government taxation system, the high interest rates (15%) which were crippling both small businesses and home owners with higher mortgages, and the division in the Conservative party over Europe.

Realizing that her time might be up, she began to appear frequently in the Commons’ Tea Room canvassing support for her policies from the backbenchers. But others were also visiting the Tea Room to speak to backbenchers, and nothing any longer was certain. Finally, she decided to call each member of the Cabinet to her office to ascertain her support among her colleagues. To her dismay, she heard the same story repeated time and time again.

“Of course Prime Minister we will support you if a vote is called; but I don’t think you will win the vote of the whole parliamentary party”. ‘I was sick at heart’, she wrote bitterly; … ‘what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words whereby they transmitted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.’

She was right about her colleague’s “weasel words” and her biggest area of weakness, as it turned out, was her among her very colleagues in the Cabinet. (p.847 MT).

When asked about the role of the Opposition Leader in her resignation, Thatcher responded:

• “Mr. Kinnock, in all his years as Opposition leader, never let me down. Right to the end, he struck every wrong note. On this occasion he delivered a speech that might have served if I had announced my intention to stand for the second ballot. It was a standard partisan rant.” (p.858 MT)

The end of a legend

The story of Mrs. Thatcher’s resignation is amply told elsewhere. It is suffice here to comment that the harsh words she spoke about her colleagues were in keeping with her style.

As she felt betrayed, some bitter things were said about her former colleagues.  However, one could argue that her failure to leave office with dignity was in keeping with the way she had behaved as prime minister. But some compassion must be shown when we read the account of her as she walked down from the PM’s flat in Downing Street on her last day to make one last check to see that she had left nothing in her study.  She found that the key to the room had already been removed from her key-ring. It takes, according to Jeremy Paxman, an inner strength to survive a very public humiliation like that sort of sacking (p.281, Paxman).

Margaret Thatcher was the first Oxford-educated Prime Minister for quite a time to be denied an honorary degree by the University. Over a thousand academics voted and she was denied her prize by a two to one majority. It was ostensibly a protest vote against her government’s cuts in higher education. Whatever the real reason, it was a snub and it was bitterly felt.

Sir Percy Cradock, her foreign affairs advisor, gives us another perspective, “She was different. It was partly that she carried with her into No.10 a greater baggage of ideology than her predecessors. It was partly that she was a scientist by training, not, for once, a product of literae humaniores.” (PH, p.397).

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References

Hennessy, Peter. The Prime Minister: the office and its holders since 1945, Penguin Press, 2000

Thatcher, Margaret. Margaret Thatcher: The Downing Street Years, HarperCollins, 1995

Young, Hugo. One of us: a biography of Margaret Thatcher, Pan, 1993

Paxman, Jeremy. The Political Animal, Penguin Books, 2002

Margaret Thatcher Foundation,    http://www.margaretthatcher.org/essential/biography.asp

 

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Appendix 1

Selected points from her biography

 Hugo Young opens his remarkable biography of Margaret Thatcher by telling us she had been born to be a politician.  Indeed, if we look at her background, we can understand Hugo Young’s remark.

Margaret Roberts, the second daughter of Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, was born in Grantham in 1925. Like Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan, the story of the future Prime Minister of the U.K began in her home. Her father, Alfred Roberts was self-made. He had left school at 13 when his family moved from Ringstead (Midlands) to Grantham in the east of England. He went to work in a grocery shop, but by the age of 28 when he married Beatrice Stephenson he had already bought his first grocery shop.  The Roberts lived over their shop in Grantham. Four years later, in 1923, he bought his second shop on the smarter side of town.  Indeed his business prospered. He also entered local politics where he served as a member of the local council as an Independent and later as Lord Mayor in 1945.  The Independents in Grantham, although greatly influenced by the old Liberals, usually voted with the Conservatives.

Alfred, although not formally educated, spent most of his spare time reading or attending classes. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher was later to say that her father was the best read man she had ever known. He greatly admired John Stuart Mill, for example. He had a passion for self improvement which he passed on to his younger daughter who showed some academic promise at school. For example, there were the piano lessons, the Latin grinds (tutorials), the weekly compulsory library visits, and, of course, the primary school on the smart side of town. But probably most important of all, Alfred taught his daughter to ask questions. She learned at home to question everything, which laid the basis for her well acclaimed argumentative skills.

Alfred and Beatrice Roberts were Methodists, and Alfred strongly believed in the self-help movement which was popular both in England and the United States. His religion and the ideas of ‘self help’ seemed to go together. This can be seen in the high value that Alfred Roberts placed on education, truthfulness, individual responsibility, hard work, and sound finance. He was an active lay preacher in his local Methodist church. Margaret and her sister found themselves attending chapel twice on Sundays.

Margaret Roberts attended the local grammar school where she performed well. During her last two years at school, through her own and her father’s assertiveness, she finally, in 1943, found a place at Somerville College, Oxford to study science. Although she eventually left Oxford with a second class honours degree, she certainly made her mark on the University Conservative Association which opened up a whole new network for her within the Conservative Party in London.

Her early political career

The 1945 election in Britain is famous for its idiosyncratic voting patterns. The Conservatives under Winston Churchill fought it by harking back to the past without offering any remedies for peoples’ current needs. Indeed, Churchill badly mistook the mood of the country. The result was inevitable, and the country rejected the Churchill government.

In the Oxford constituency, Margaret Thatcher canvassed for Quintin Hogg, the Conservative candidate, against the Labour candidate, Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford). This was her baptism into the political world of door-to-door canvassing and meeting the electorate face-to-face. It was a time when she began to formulate her idea that concrete particulars are a better base to form a policy than general ideas. Margaret Roberts, who was now chairperson of the Oxford University Conservative Party, tended now and from then onwards to think that only a policy built on reason and logic would give the practical answers needed for society’s ills.

Hard Work and a clear ideology

Whether one feel kindly or not towards Margaret Thatcher, there are aspects of her that nobody can dispute. Two of these were her hard work and her clear ideology. Margaret Thatcher may not have shown a great intellect in academia, but whatever she lacked was made up for with hard work. While at Oxford she was an unusual specimen because she was a Conservative, while most other young women at the time were liberal in their thinking.

After coming down from Oxford, Margaret Roberts held a research position in two jobs which could not have been described as out of the ordinary for a chemistry graduate. These jobs didn’t last long. As at University, she spent most of her free time networking within local Conservative parties. She eventually found a constituency at Dartford in South East London which had a large Labour majority. She stood for the General Elections of 1950 and 1951, but lost both times. However, this experience brought her into the public eye as the youngest woman candidate in the country. She also met her future husband, a well-heeled local businessman, Denis Thatcher, who was later to sell his family business and join the board of an oil company in the City. Between the Dartford experience and her eventual election to Parliament for Finchley in 1959, her twins were born, she studied for the Bar examinations, and worked as a pupil in the tax chambers of Ian McLeod. Margaret Thatcher took to tax law like a fish to water, most likely because it was very particular and without any great philosophical generalities.

One-nation Conservatism / consensus politics

Our story begins with the end of the Macmillan period in Britain and Thatcher’s entry into politics. Harold Macmillan, one of the leading Conservatives of the postwar years, and later a Prime Minister (1957-1963), came to believe that the Conservatives had to accept the need for both full employment and the welfare state, even if this meant accepting forms of central planning. His position, which came to be called one nation conservatism, was somewhere between what today we would describe as social democracy and old liberalism. This one nation approach to the economy, he hoped, would not only keep the country united after the War years, but would lead to full employment, as well. Others called it consensus politics. In many ways, it fitted the needs of the time.

This, of course, contrasted with the monetarist approach held by some of the newcomers to parliament, such as Keith Joseph, the new member for Leeds. He had argued that to get the economy moving again, there was a need for strict controls over money, even if this led to higher unemployment and social conflict.

Macmillan, on the other hand, believed in consensus politics, and under his leadership the party had had a landslide victory in 1959, the year Margaret Thatcher entered parliament. This was the year of Macmillan’s famous remark, “Let’s be frank about it, most of our people have never had it so good” which was an outward sign of his confidence in his policies.

But as the dialectic shows, where we have a solid thesis, the antithesis is not far away. So, by 1961, just two years later, the antithesis of ‘Old Mac’s’ argument had become a reality. Britain had run up a balance of payments problem. Macmillan reacted by asking for a wage freeze, which had its consequences among the working classes in general and with those working in large organizations where the wage freeze was imposed to the letter. This, quite naturally, began his slow fall in popularity. The final nail which was probably driven into the Macmillan administration’s coffin had been the John Profumo scandal which broke in 1963.

As Macmillan’s health had been deteriorating, he finally left office later that year and was replaced by Douglas Hume, who served as prime minister till the general election in October 1964.  After this election defeat, Hume had been replaced by Edward Heath as leader of the Opposition.

Labour had won the election with a very narrow majority. Harold Wilson, who became the new prime minister, had called a snap election within a year and increased his majority to a workable 96 seats.

Meantime Margaret Thatcher had entered Parliament as a Member for Finchley, a North London constituency, in 1959. She sat as a backbencher for her first two years and was then given a junior office in the administration of Harold Macmillan. After this, Thatcher served in various capacities in the shadow cabinet under Edward Heath. So, when the Conservatives returned to power in 1970, she was in line for a cabinet position.

Heath gave her the post of Secretary for Education, which included the most difficult periods of her political life, due to the conflictive relationship she had with parts of the general public. But she mastered the job, and was toughened by the conflictive experience. It was an extraordinary time for her, where she gained a reputation for hard work, preparation, and for her argumentative style. This argumentative style was built on knowing the facts, analyzing them, and then using this analysis to support her contention. Of course, not everyone agreed with this approach, as the premise of any argument had to fit her ideology. She was forceful and usually won out in arguments with her colleagues and the Opposition, simply because most of them hadn’t done their homework.

The failure of the Heath government

Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister (1970-’74) was essentially a ‘Macmillan’ Tory with reforming plans. In other words, he was a ‘One-Nation’ conservative who wanted to introduce more free market economic reforms. He believed in consensus politics, but was unable to tame the trade unions in their demands. He had entered office with a promise of dealing with the unions and of economic revival. But his period in power ended with his negotiating with the unions and introducing a wage freeze and control of prices and dividends. The country was in turmoil, with strikes paralysing the public sector. Margaret Thatcher put herself forward as an alternative candidate for the party’s leadership.

 

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