More remarkable, however, was the fact that an unmarried, 23-year-old woman, only two years out of university, had even won the chance to fight. At the time of her birth, in 1925, women of
twenty-three did not even enjoy the right to vote. With no professional experience to speak of, it was
extraordinarily precocious of her to put herself forward. In the decade
that followed, as she went about trying to gain selection for a winnable constituency, she discovered that Conservative associations preferred men, often with the advantage of a distinguished war
record. Against the braid of military decorations and life experiences gained at the sharp end, she was hardly able to compete. And when, after her marriage to Denis Thatcher, she became a mother
of twins, selection committees asked her pointedly whether she really thought she ought to be at Westminster rather than attending to her motherly duties. A decade passed between her adoption at
Dartford and her selection in time for the 1959 general election. In being selected for the north London constituency of Finchley, she narrowly saw off rival prospective Tory candidates including
one man who had won the Military Cross and another who had served in the Special Operations Executive. Finchley’s retiring MP was so appalled that the nominees to succeed him included someone
called Peter Goldman and another called Margaret Thatcher that he grumbled: ‘We’ve got to choose between a bloody Jew and a bloody woman!’
43
The ‘bloody woman’ proceeded to win Finchley with an increased majority – of sixteen thousand – and to hold on to it in nine successive elections over
her thirty-three years in the House of Commons. During which time she showed that, as Alfred Sherman put it: ‘A woman from the provincial lower-middle class, without family connections,
oratorical skills, intellectual standing or factional backing of any sort, established herself as leader of a great party which had represented hierarchy, social stratification and male
dominance.’
44
But by then she was far less of a social outsider, thanks to the other man in her life besides her father. Unusually for many men of his class and generation, Denis Thatcher combined traditional
right-wing views and a successful business career with a recognition that his wife should not only be free to follow her career but that he should support and encourage her in her ambition. It was
his wealth that had allowed her to forsake the consistency of Lyons Maid ice cream, to employ a nanny for her two young children and to read for the bar, which was a profession far better suited in
its hours and challenges to someone with political ambitions. Between 1954 and her 1959 victory in Finchley, she honed her advocacy and attention to detail as a barrister specializing in taxation
law (an area useful to a politician but in which exceedingly few women specialized at that time). Her husband’s tolerance and material support were advantages she enjoyed over many women of
her generation for whom motherhood, social attitudes and financial constraints proved insurmountable hurdles. Yet, for all her staunch attachment to Denis, she rarely made due acknowledgement of
the head start his support gave her over most women. Despite her considerable personal experience of patronizing, sexist attitudes, she never developed an interest in any of the more
radical philosophies of feminism. Returning the cold shoulder, it was noticeable how few leading feminists took satisfaction from her success, even though she proved to be, in her
sphere, the most influential woman of her age, not just in Britain but anywhere in the world.
That she reached the top was seemingly not part of a long-worked-out plan. There is no contradictory evidence to suggest she was being falsely modest when in 1971 she told an interviewer:
‘I don’t think that in my lifetime there will be a woman prime minister. I am always a realist.’
45
It was not until 1975, the year
in which she became the Conservatives’ leader, that the equal pay act finally made it illegal to pay women less money for the same work as men; women had only been admitted to the London
Stock Exchange two years previously (when, in 1976, Geraldine Bridgewater became the first female trader on the floor of the London Metals Exchange she was met by a chorus of hisses, boos and
shouts of ‘Get out! Get out! No women allowed, get out! Get OUT!’ One trader even kicked her in the shins).
46
Few, indeed, who had
watched Thatcher’s development at Westminster during the 1960s and early 1970s either identified her as the woman who would be first to reach the top or foresaw that she would espouse a credo
that would set both her party and her country on a radically different course during the 1980s.
Until her decision to challenge Edward Heath for the party leadership, she had been a party loyalist, reluctant to depart far from the ideological – or, rather, non-ideological –
mainstream. In all her years in Parliament prior to becoming leader, she had only rebelled against the party line once. That was back in 1961, when she forlornly supported the reintroduction of
birching for young offenders. It was not until Heath appointed her as his education secretary in 1970 that she started to show more of an independent spirit. Her decision to find minor economies by
scrapping free school milk for the oversevens made her infamous: ‘Is Mrs Thatcher human?’ asked
The Sun
, before declaring her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’;
the nickname ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’, coined at the 1971 Labour Party conference, stuck. Yet she had fought off attempts to cut the education budget overall. She even boasted of
the spending increases she secured. While she mostly failed, despite her wishes, to prevent local education authorities closing their grammar schools, she succeeded in saving the Open University,
which her Cabinet colleagues were adamant should be scrapped. What particularly surprised those same colleagues was when she suddenly aligned herself with Sir Keith Joseph, another high-spending
minister who, having overseen social services, underwent a conversion towards budget tightening when the Conservatives fell from power in 1974.
Joseph responded to being freed from the responsibility of government by thinking aloud. In a series of speeches, he began to sketch an alternative
philosophy of a smaller
state, before blowing his chances in October 1974 by articulating what he regarded as the need for better contraception for badly educated young people ‘in social classes 4 and 5’,
whose permissive behaviour otherwise risked undermining the ‘human stock’.
47
In the ensuing uproar, Joseph accepted he was out of the
running to succeed Heath, who, having lost three out of four general elections as Tory leader, was facing renewed pressure to justify himself. Thatcher duly turned to Joseph and said: ‘Look,
Keith, if you’re not going to stand, I will, because someone who represents our viewpoint
has
to stand.’
48
With its customary
Whiggish distain,
The Economist
dryly observed that she was ‘precisely the sort of candidate who ought to be able to stand, and lose, harmlessly’.
49
Indeed, her prospects would almost certainly have been eclipsed if the establishment figure of Sir Edward du Cann, who as chairman of the 1922 Committee led back-bench
hostility to Heath, had chosen to risk his City directorships at a moment when his personal finances were tight. Had du Cann thrown his hat into the ring, Thatcher would almost certainly have
withdrawn.
50
It is therefore hard to disagree with the assessment of the historian Richard Vinen: ‘Thatcher had been almost no one’s
first choice for the leadership, probably not even her own.’
51
Heath’s campaign organizers assumed the best line of attack was to belittle the woman. They tried to turn her grocer’s daughter image against her. At a time when sugar shortages were
thought to be imminent, a fictitious claim was spread that she had been spotted in a shop on the Finchley High Road making a bulk purchase of sugar. Journalists were encouraged to ask if she was a
secret food hoarder and, humiliatingly, she was forced to invite the cameras into her home so they could inspect her sparse larder. It was all rather pathetic and, denied any front-bench
endorsement, Thatcher, almost by default, picked up the support of backbenchers exasperated by Heath’s political and personal failings. Beating him by 130 to 119 in the first round of voting,
she then had momentum behind her, winning through in a more crowded field of candidates in the second and decisive round. That she pitched her political tent to the right of Heath was clear, but
she was still not widely perceived to be advocating an entirely new philosophy. After all, she had sat through Heath’s Cabinets without much complaint. She was even lauding Harold Macmillan
as her political hero, assuring a television interviewer in February 1975 that the ‘marvellous politician’ Macmillan ‘was working towards the things which I believe
in’.
52
But the second half of the seventies (like, for that matter, the first half) was an excellent time to be in opposition. The Keynesian conventions that accompanied low unemployment and rising
living standards came under intense pressure. In place of orderly improvement, corporatist government struggled to cope with rampant inflation and the destruction of savings, the
humiliating circumstances of the IMF bail-out, trade union militancy and the massive dissatisfaction and unrest expressed across the public sector. Levels of taxation far exceeded the
European average, while comparative competitiveness deteriorated alarmingly. Against these developments, Thatcher resolved to fight.
How much of the Britain created in the thirty years before the seventies she also wanted to sweep away was less clear. Some aspects of the wartime and post-war consensus Thatcher claimed to
share. She admired the 1944 Education Act and, having mostly failed to rescue them in the early 1970s, she was now pledged to retain the few remaining grammar schools that were the Butler
act’s legacy. She even accepted such cornerstones of the post-war welfare state as the Beveridge Report and the 1944 employment white paper – while claiming that their proposals had
been perverted by subsequent administrations.
53
With the Attlee government’s major act of foreign policy – subscription to NATO and the
maintenance of the transatlantic alliance – she was in wholehearted agreement. That she went into the 1979 general election promising a smaller state and tax cuts was not, of itself,
distinctively ‘Thatcherite’. Successive Conservative leaders had tempted every post-war electorate with these aspirations and inducements. Her proposed assault on trade union power was
still quite cautious, her privatization programme extremely limited. On 4 May 1979, as Britain awoke to its first day of the new Conservative government, it seemed Mrs Thatcher was aiming to ensure
that the eighties would not be shaped by what she considered as the worst excesses of the seventies. She had won power not with an imaginative and visionary outlook but with a manifesto remarkably
similar to Edward Heath’s statement of intent in 1970. The difference was her determination to deliver on her promises.
The Joy of Monetarism
The British economy was to be subjected to the shock therapy of monetarism. But what was monetarism? Simplified explanations portrayed it as a needlessly technical term for the
easily understood and long-established tenets of classical liberalism and minimal state interference – the economic doctrine of
laissez-faire
, without the carefree associations cast by
a French expression. In public discussion, monetarism came to embody these values as well as the broader ones rebranded for the new decade as ‘Thatcherism’, for which Nigel Lawson
provided the succinct definition: ‘a mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian values” (of the Samuel
Smiles self-help variety), privatisation and a dash of populism’.
1
A consequence of equating monetarism with Thatcherism was that Margaret
Thatcher continued to be attacked for being in hock to the theory long after its ideologues were mourning the fact that her government had wandered off the monetarist path.
Reducing the size of the state was a product of monetarism but was not the theory itself. Essentially, monetarism gave primacy in economic policy to the control of inflation, believing that if
it was kept in check, economic equilibrium would naturally follow. Inflation, it maintained, resulted when too much money chased too few goods. Yet this was hardly a revolutionary observation. The
dangers of the cavalier printing of money were well known, both in theory and from the calamitous experience of Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s, where it resulted in hyperinflation and
the destruction of a whole generation’s personal savings, and led to the widespread assumption that the dismal experience was a contributory factor to the rise of Nazism. It did not need a
new generation of economists to spring this unsurprising revelation. So, when Sir Geoffrey Howe, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed her Chancellor of the Exchequer, claimed that ‘monetarism
means curbing the excessive expansion of money and credit’, he was
not arguing for something that would have astounded his Treasury predecessors.
2
What was different was the single-minded devotion to regarding the quantity of money in the economy as determining the extent of inflation, and, in particular, the belief
that it was within the government’s grasp to manage the growth of the money supply.
That monetarist theory rested upon this simple belief was a convenience that suited the Thatcher government’s wider agenda. The interventionist social and economic policies pursued by
successive post-war British governments – rather imprecisely labelled Keynesian, after the economist John Maynard Keynes, whose death in 1946 had denied him the opportunity of commenting on
the policies carried out in his name – made the control of demand rather than of the money supply the central task. If the economy looked like entering an inflationary boom, the squeeze was
applied by raising taxes and cutting the budget deficit. In tougher times, tax, spending and borrowing disciplines could be relaxed. At its crudest, this led to a jolting
‘stop–go’ economy, but until the late 1960s it had succeeded in keeping both unemployment and inflation relatively low. By the mid-seventies, however, both were soaring. In this
environment, demand-fixing measures to reduce unemployment fuelled inflation, which in turn harmed the economy, creating further job losses and a vicious circle of stagflation (diminishing output
and soaring inflation). While the Callaghan government had tried to rein in public spending and prevent the money supply spiralling out of control, it had also attempted to bring down inflation
(which had peaked at 27 per cent in 1975) by intervention, giving more subsidies to nationalized industries so that they would not increase prices to customers, and organizing an incomes policy in
partnership with the leaders of the TUC. So complicated was the effort to fine-tune economic performance from Whitehall that in the space of the five years between 1974 and 1979 Labour’s
Chancellor, Denis Healey, had introduced fifteen budgets and mini-budgets. The
idée fixe
of Keynesianism had degenerated into an excuse for Treasury micromanagement and the belief
that this still offered the best hope of playing an instrument as diverse and complicated as the British economy. Keynes had anticipated his theories operating in a world of fixed international
exchange rates, stable energy costs, modest inflation, containable budget deficits and trade union compliance in ensuring increasing output. None of these preconditions existed during
Healey’s tenure at the Treasury. Theory and reality had parted company.