Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (13 page)

‘Wets’ and ‘Dries’

What Keynes might have done thirty-five years after his death was anyone’s guess. Yet he was not the only posthumous figure expected to animate the debate. Indeed, much of
the tussle over the Thatcher government’s first years was conducted through the prism – or at least the labels – of Victorian politics. Thatcher’s Conservative opponents
repeatedly saluted the memory of Benjamin Disraeli. A reference from Disraeli’s 1846 novel
Sybil
to the rich and the poor comprising two nations was invoked by Thatcher’s critics
in the Tory Reform Group who proclaimed themselves ‘One Nation Conservatives’. The clear implication was that Thatcher and her monetarist ideologues were divisive splitters, destroying
the fabric of national unity. Disraelian ‘Tory paternalism’ may have been a somewhat romantic notion, but it provided a convenient bridge between a Merrie England of kind-hearted
squires doling out charity to contented, toothless tenants and support for the fundamentals of the post-war welfare state. Appropriating the long-dead Disraeli to their cause was also a means of
escaping the ‘Heathite’ label, with all the connotations of recent failure that it involved. At a deeper level, it fitted better with what really rankled Tory paternalists about
Thatcherism.

Sir Ian Gilmour and Christopher Soames struggled to conceal a
de haut en bas
disdain for the
arriviste
Thatcherites who, they believed, were upsetting a settled social order and
ruling without recognizing the duty of
noblesse oblige
towards those they stepped over. The critique was perfectly expressed in Gilmour’s book
Inside Right
, when he wrote:
‘If people are not to be seduced by other attractions, they must at least feel loyalty to the state. Their loyalty will not be deep unless they gain from the state protection and other
benefits . . . If the state is not interested in them, why should they be interested in the state? . . . Economic liberalism, because of its starkness and its failure to create a sense of
community, is likely to repel people from the rest of liberalism.’
¹⁵
By this yardstick, was the prime minister even a Tory? It was not just
the neo-Disraelians who thought her worldview far closer to the Victorian liberalism of William Ewart Gladstone. Her favourite American monetarist economist, Milton Friedman, agreed, concluding:
‘The thing people do not recognize is that Margaret Thatcher is not in terms of belief a Tory. She is a nineteenth-century Liberal.’
¹⁶

It was, perhaps, an authentically Conservative approach to contemporary
problems to turn them into a reflection of the past. Nevertheless, the attempt to fight once again
the divisions of the 1880s – or even the 1840s – in the Tory cabinet of the 1980s was historically questionable. So many former Whigs and classical Liberals had defected to the
Conservatives between the 1880s and the 1930s, bringing aspects of their beliefs with them, that the modern party had long been a blend of Victorian Toryism and Liberalism in which identifying the
separate strands was a specious science. Was not Thatcher’s hero, Winston Churchill, the embodiment of how the two traditions had ended up in the same entity? While Thatcher’s economic
views undoubtedly owed more to the free-trade ‘Manchester Liberalism’ of John Bright and Richard Cobden, many of her emotional attachments were far removed from their peace-seeking
internationalism. Her reverence for the monarchy, the armed forces and the projection of British power, her unease about mass immigration and support for strong punishment for criminal offenders,
could scarcely have been more deep-seatedly Tory. In 1981, she stated: ‘My politics are based not on some economic theory, but on things I and millions like me were brought up with: an honest
day’s work for an honest day’s pay; live within your means; put by a nest-egg for a rainy day; pay your bills on time; support the police.’
¹⁷
Any attempt to deduce whether this made her closer to Asquith or to Bonar Law would have been highly pedantic.

Where she departed from any attempt to wrap herself in traditional Tory sentiment was in her refusal to talk the language of moderation and the imperative of social cohesion. In an unguarded
aside to the British ambassador to Iran during a trip to Tehran in 1978, she revealed the extent of her animosity towards those back home who believed searching for consensus was the aim of
politics: ‘I regard them as Quislings, as traitors.’
¹⁸
Yet a year later she put several of the cheerleaders for the line of least
resistance in her Cabinet. With the exceptions of Sir Keith Joseph and (surprisingly) Norman St John Stevas, probably no other member of her first Cabinet had voted for her in the deciding ballot
for the party leadership in 1975. That she found herself entrusting with major government departments men who had preferred Heath to her was a sign less of her magnanimity than of her weakness.
There simply were not enough Conservatives with sufficient experience or standing in the party who shared her outlook.

The easy part had proved to be making sure she did not have to share the Cabinet Room with the great lost leader. Having refused to sit in her shadow Cabinet, Edward Heath had perked up at the
prospect of power and wanted to be her Foreign Secretary. He was duly put in his place with the offer of ambassador to Washington – one of the very last places the Grand European wished to
end up. He turned it down and resumed his public sulk. But his former supporters (many of them not even former) remained a Cabinet majority: the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, and the Home
Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, were Tories of the old, paternalistic school. The same was true of Francis Pym (defence), Jim Prior (employment), Mark Carlisle (education),
Michael Heseltine (environment), Peter Walker (agriculture), Sir Ian Gilmour (Lord Privy Seal), Lord Hailsham (Lord Chancellor) and Lord Soames (Leader of the House of Lords). Those who had come
round to Thatcher’s view were a minority. Critically, however, she ensured they held the portfolios that determined economic policy. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe was
assisted by John Biffen, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Thatcher’s liberalizing instincts were also shared by her secretary of state for industry, Sir Keith Joseph by John Nott at
trade; Patrick Jenkin, who ran social services; David Howell at energy and by Angus Maude, who was Postmaster General. Nigel Lawson, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, was a significant
reinforcement to those who believed in sound finance even though he was not a member of the Cabinet. Thus Jim Prior, as employment secretary, was the only opponent of monetarism with a portfolio
intimately involved with economics, and consequently he was the only Heathite on the ‘E’ committee (the Cabinet committee dealing with economic policy). This, it seems, was not
sufficient to entitle him to an invitation to the private Thursday morning confabs that Thatcher scheduled with her monetarist ministers in the first months of her premiership. If this group was to
succeed in its objectives, it was necessary to ensure that when the full Cabinet discussed economic policy it was prevented from blocking the fundamentals upon which that policy was being
pursued.

Surrounded by her all-male Cabinet, the prime minister stood out in more ways than her sex and her monetarism. Of the twenty-two members of Thatcher’s first Cabinet, only three –
Thatcher, John Biffen and Peter Walker – had not been educated at public schools.
^EN8
Peter Walker was the only graduate who had not gone to Oxford
or Cambridge. The prime minister’s belief in social meritocracy was not the most striking aspect of her Cabinet appointments. Her team included seven Old Etonians, which was one more than had
sat in Harold Macmillan’s Cabinet. Six were former Guards officers. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, was a hereditary peer who had served in Harold Macmillan’s government, spoke
with an exceptionally plummy drawl, and had spent much of the last few years engaged less by front-line politics than by his work for Rio Tinto Zinc. Like eight members of the Cabinet, Lord
Carrington had fought in the Second World War, winning the Military Cross for his part in holding the bridge at Nijmegen during the
Arnhem campaign. Lord Hailsham, who would
serve as Lord Chancellor until 1987, sat on the same Woolsack once occupied by his father. Hailsham was born in 1907 and had been in Parliament since winning a bitter by-election in 1938, fought on
the issue of Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. While Hailsham was the most venerable figure in a government allegedly committed to disconnecting Britain from its immediate past,
even the other leading front-bench ministers enjoyed, on average, a seniority of five to six years over their prime minister. To those who queried her suitability, she seemed handicapped not just
by her relative youth but by her supposed inexperience both of life (not having fought in the war) and of government (just three years as education secretary). While she perceived the advantages of
not being a natural member of the establishment, her lack of the social links that bound her front bench together – public school, regiment, City firm or gentlemen’s club – placed
her outside of the
esprit de corps
of her colleagues who could, with sufficient backbone, determine her fate. What helped save her was that widely respected old boys like Hailsham and
Whitelaw placed their loyalty to her as prime minister above their doubts about whether she was in the right. Indeed, next to enjoying broad agreement with her Chancellor over the economy, having
Willie Whitelaw to smooth over differences with malcontents whose outlook and pastimes he shared proved the most invaluable shield for Thatcher’s back.

The tendency to see intra-Tory differences on policy as dictated by background could be overstated, as could the extent of Thatcher’s social iconoclasm. She was, after all, happily married
to a man whose social milieu was distinctly old school. Of the five parliamentary private secretaries she selected to serve her directly during the course of her tenure in Downing Street, four were
Old Etonians and one (Ian Gow) was a Wykehamist. Nor did an expensive education confer intellectual conformity. Sir Ian Gilmour, Carrington’s ultra-Heathite deputy at the Foreign Office, may
have been the son of a baronet and a product of Eton and Balliol, but this was exactly the same education as another junior Foreign Office minister, the ultra-Thatcherite Nicholas Ridley, had
received. And loftier still, Ridley’s father was a peer. Not all the Tory paternalists were quite as grand as they seemed. Peter Walker had made his fortune in the 1970s through the City firm
of Slater Walker, whose asset-stripping approach to companies it bought smacked of the very spivvy City activities that Tory paternalism supposedly abhorred. Even in the eyes of many fellow Tory
Reform Group members, Michael Heseltine was considered a bit of a social climber (public school – Shrewsbury),
^EN9
who had started out accumulating
his fortune by buying and selling property.

For all these subtle gradations, the neo-Disraelians certainly carried an air of social superiority – a posture that succeeded only in provoking the Thatcherites into
believing they were up against a tired and effete
ancien régime
from which Britain was in as much need of rescue as from the trade union movement. That Thatcher was more interested in
attitude than background was perfectly encapsulated by her estimation of her distinctly Heathite employment secretary. Jim Prior was a successful farmer, with the demeanour of a genial squire. It
was a countenance to reassure many Tories. But not the prime minister. He was, she summed up in her memoirs, one of her party’s ‘false squires’, who ‘have all the outward
show of a John Bull – ruddy face, white hair, bluff manner – but inwardly they are political calculators who see the task of Conservatives as one of retreating gracefully before the
left’s inevitable advance’.
¹⁹
Nothing did more to puncture the Tory paternalists’ pretensions to power than the coining of the
dismissive public school-speak description of them as ‘wets’. The Thatcherites gained the epithet ‘dries’. This connoted, by no means inappropriately, a certain humourless
asceticism. There was, it may be assumed, nobody drier in manner than the Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe. But in a time of acute challenge, it seemed less dismissive to be marked down as
‘dry’ than as ‘wet’. Both terms stuck and remained the standard appellations for the dividing line in Conservative politics for the rest of the decade. Tellingly, they fell
out of use within weeks of Thatcher’s political demise.

Thatcher once announced at a Downing Street reception that she was ‘the rebel head of an establishment government’.
²⁰
Others close to
her described her as ‘the only prime minister who moonlit as leader of the opposition’.
²¹
It was not paranoia but a firm grasp of
reality that made her aware that her battle was as much with her own Cabinet as with the Labour Party. Real differences of outlook were sharpened by her naturally combative style for,
unfortunately, not all her colleagues enjoyed her love of argument, particularly when conducted in front of other ministers across the Cabinet table. In her argumentative stride, all sense of
old-fashioned courtesy disappeared. What she may have thought was knockabout, the recipients thought of as brazen rudeness. Many were not of a generation used to being publicly spoken to by a woman
in this way and did not know how to retaliate.
²²
For them, the worst part was her schoolgirl-swot approach to argument, trumping their generalities
with a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of highly technical details and statistics. She would ask them a specific question, cutting into their vague response by telling them the answer. By such
means, she was able to imply that she was more on top of their department’s work than they were. The impression that she was some kind of superwoman shouldering the work of a score of Cabinet
ministers was fortified by her ability to cope on a mere four to five hours sleep per night, with
just an apple and a vitamin pill for breakfast. This gave her an immense
advantage over more elderly men who spent in a state of rejuvenating slumber the time she was sitting bolt upright in bed mastering her ministerial boxes.