History of England 1-6

But surely it need not have come to this. Was there not North Sea oil, discovered in the late Sixties, to look forward to? The promise of it was to become a sticking point for the left wing of the Labour party. In the run-up to the IMF bailout they asked why the government needed to squeeze wages when North Sea oil was almost, as Tony Benn put it, ‘running up our shores’. It was in this context that the far Left held the IMF responsible for the meltdown of the late Seventies. However that may be, Callaghan found himself in parliament facing a noconfidence vote and lost by a tiny margin.

And so the parties went to the country. Callaghan had personal appeal, but nothing else to offer. Thatcher might be less likeable, but she had a plan. Perhaps no one in her position could have lost. In later years she would pay tribute to Callaghan, saying that in happier times ‘he would have been a very successful Prime Minister’. She even admitted that he often worsted her in the House of Commons. Still, the nation had had enough, and the Conservatives came to power, though with a surprisingly modest majority. On her way to Buckingham Palace, Margaret Thatcher addressed the nation in the words attributed to St Francis: ‘where there is discord, may we bring harmony’. In years to come it became apparent that it was the working class and not the bourgeoisie that had ignited the Thatcher revolution. There had been money in union membership; there was still more in becoming an entrepreneur.

50

Here she comes

The grocer’s daughter had worsted the carpenter’s son; more significantly, the shopkeeper had triumphed over the shop steward. There would be no more rule by union fiat. For all its seeming goodwill, Thatcher’s invoking of St Francis would have misled few who heard it. The nation knew well that it had elected a terrier with a burning torch gripped in her teeth. Not for Thatcher ‘the orderly management of decline’ that Sir William Armstrong had suggested was the real business of twentiethcentury governance.

She began as Methodist and became an Anglican, a change of emphasis that affected her political personality. Her accent, which in moments of anger or stress betrayed the cadences of her native Lincolnshire, first hardened and then softened into the genteel warble of a suburban nanny. Although her origins were theoretically lower-middle-class, she managed to obscure the fact by marrying a highly successful businessman, Denis Thatcher. She found her personality partly by identifying with others and partly by play-acting.

Thatcher had entered parliament in 1959, three years after the Suez crisis, but she had to live with that failure all the same. The English political class, according to one historian, ‘went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing’. If she ever contemplated such a thought, she quickly cast it aside. The journey from Grantham to Oxford was the first stage of her political maturity. She fought implacably to become the MP for Finchley, and once she had attained that position she solidified it with hard work and slowly made her ascent. She first became a parliamentary undersecretary, and in 1967 she joined Edward Heath’s shadow cabinet, as minister for fuel and power. In October 1969, she made another leap and became shadow education minister. After the Conservative victory in 1970, she became a minister in her own right, as secretary of state for education and science. Her liberal or free-market supporters, however, might not have been particularly enthusiastic about this term of her office, in which she sanctioned 3,286 comprehensive schools and rejected 328. It could be said that she was following her statutory duties, but she performed them with a vengeance.

There began in 1971 another series of struggles between the government and the public sector unions, with Heath beginning to give ground to Rolls-Royce and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. In turn came the National Union of Mineworkers. These were the conditions for the irresistible rise of Mrs Thatcher. During the campaign for the Conservative party leadership she maintained her composure, but there was a large element of ambition in her remorseless advance. None of her colleagues yet knew of what material she was made. Certain traits, however, were becoming clear. Defeatism was the plague against which she fought relentlessly. Pessimism was the second curse. And Ted Heath was, in her eyes, the embodiment of both.