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IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1985 I was at home at Finings watching the death throes of the England – Australia Test at The Oval on television. I had hoped to be at the match, but the probability of a reshuffle, and whispers that I would be promoted, kept me by the phone. England’s pace bowler Richard Ellison was mopping up the Australians as I awaited events. Norma was out, and James and Elizabeth were at school, so I was alone. And I had a dilemma.

I was horrified that I might be offered the job of Minister of Sport. I loved sport and politics, but they were separate parts of my life, and I had no wish to mix them. This was the first of two occasions in my career when I was to wonder whether or not to accept a promotion. I paced the room, and decided that I wanted a job in the mainstream of politics, or no job at all. If the Prime Minister offered me Sport I would say no, and ask to stay in the Whips’ Office. I marshalled my arguments, knowing that she would not welcome such a response.

The telephone rang. It was Number 10. The Prime Minister wished to speak to me later – would I be around? ‘Yes,’ I said. And waited. And paced. England won the Test match. I continued to wait.

Finally the phone rang again. It was the Prime Minister. ‘I’d like you to leave the Whips’ Office and go to Social Security,’ she said. ‘It’s where I started. It’s a good place to be. Norman Fowler will be your Secretary of State – get in touch with him straight away. Good luck.’ And that was it. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was a minister, and with a mainstream brief.

I did not know Norman Fowler well, but he was very welcoming at the department; although much later, when we knew each other far better, he admitted that he had had reservations about my appointment. He feared I was a ‘Whips’ nark’ – put in place to keep tabs on the plans of the biggest-spending department of all. He had good grounds for this suspicion. I learned from officials that not long before I arrived, a garrulous junior minister had passed details of the ministry’s plans for social security reform to Nigel Lawson.

No reservations were evident in Norman’s welcome to me. From the start, he brought me into the core of the ministry’s work, and we came to be firm friends. I enjoyed the department from the moment I set foot in it. My work as Parliamentary Under Secretary for Social Security was detailed and gruelling, and often very boring, with masses of routine letter-signing. Six or seven red boxes accompanied me home every weekend, and sometimes it took me until Sunday night to get through them all. But it gave me an insight into an area of policy that few people ever master. There was nothing abstract about the portfolio – since it embraced pensions, housing and social security benefits, every policy decision we took directly affected the quality of life of many very vulnerable people.

Norman Fowler headed the social security side of the department, with Tony Newton immediately below him as the Minister of State, responsible in particular for disabled people. I was junior to Tony. Jean Trumpington, one of the redoubtable characters of Parliament, was our Minister in the House of Lords, covering all aspects of the department’s business.

I once asked Jean why she had chosen the title ‘Trumpington’. ‘Well, dear,’ she said, ‘as you know, people take a title from places they know well. I knew two villages very well: one was called Trumpington, and the other was Six Mile Bottom. Which one would you have chosen?’ Jean’s humour knew no bounds. The House of Lords loved her. So did we.

Norman Fowler had the great political gift of worrying away at a complex problem for days on end, to the total exclusion of all else, until the problem was solved. Making few mistakes, he was the epitome of ‘a safe pair of hands’ – although while he was avoiding one catastrophe, other decisions and problems piled up elsewhere that could have officials and junior ministers tearing their hair in frustration. But Norman proved his point. No other secretary of state successfully mastered this massive department – ultimately it was split in two – but he ran it with distinction for over five years. He was a far more formidable operator than many with higher public profiles, and he rarely lost an argument in Cabinet – or outside it.

Tony Newton, the Minister of State, was a fully-fledged human being with no sense of self at all; his thought was always for others. I once said that if a tramp stole his suit Tony would rush after him with a matching shirt. He saw every problem first from the human angle, although – if persuaded change was necessary – he would take through the most controversial legislation. He was the ultimate team player, trusted on all sides and a specialist in social security, whose knowledge matched that of many of the department’s officials. Tony was later to be one of the most reliable and trusted ministers in my government.

We all worked in Alexander Fleming House, an appalling concrete-and-plate-glass building, full of airless corridors. Since it was two miles south of the Thames, at the Elephant and Castle, it was something of an outpost of Margaret Thatcher’s empire. It was close by the London Electricity Board building where, more than twenty years earlier, I had been so pleased to find a job. That memory was a reminder to me of the hidden difficulties faced by the people affected by the department’s decisions.

The eighties was a decade that gloried in thrusting self-reliance. Success was envied and aped. This stand-on-your-own-two-feet mentality drove Britain towards better things. It helped the nation regain its respect. But self-reliance can be taken too far, and a proper balance must be kept. Some people simply do not have the capacity to succeed, and others are trapped by circumstances. Many of these people were our clients in Social Security, and our policy was to target help to those most in need, and to enable as many as possible to cope on their own.

The department, when I arrived, was on the threshold of complex and (in the end) effective reforms to pension and social security benefits. The aim was to simplify the system and to ensure that benefits went to the people who actually needed them. A Bill had already been drafted before my promotion, but when Tony and I began to take the legislation through the Commons we very quickly realised that its later clauses, which dealt with social security, were deficient, and would not achieve their objectives. They could not be passed as they stood.

We hit on a solution. I would take the first twenty clauses, on pensions, through Commons committee stage on my own, while Tony and Norman rewrote the latter half of the Bill. The pension clauses were ferociously complex, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the committee met, I was up by five in the morning to brief myself properly. The Bill undertook the liberalisation of the private pension market. This would make it easier for people to take their pension with them from one job to another without being penalised, and it also offered help to people to build up a personal pension plan of their own. Millions of individuals were to benefit, with the help of government support and generous tax relief. Over six million people were to take out personal pensions, with well over £200 billion held in them. The Bill was a tough baptism for a junior minister, but it enabled me to form an excellent working relationship with Tony and Norman, and speedily settled me into the department.

On social security, the Conservative government was viewed with suspicion by a Labour Party confident in its attacks on us. This confidence was not always matched by the ability of the party’s front bench team, but nonetheless, the political battleground gave me a lot of experience at the dispatch box.

After late-night votes Tony Newton and I would often linger to chat over a drink. Like me, he was a politics addict who had learned his trade in the Whips’ Office, and from the outset our relationship was easy. Tony was a habitual smoker – something of an embarrassment when he became Health Minister – and was forever harassed, because he took on more commitments than any mortal could easily handle. He offered help to others, but rarely asked for it himself, even when his need was evident. Once he lost two front teeth in an accident shortly before he was due to appear both in committee and on television. I offered to do the television interview for him. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Are you sure? I could do it.’ But his gap-toothed grin suggested he knew it would not be wise.

Norman Fowler believed in giving his junior ministers every opportunity to improve their profile in the media, especially if the interviews were very early in the morning or very late at night, and he was unfailingly supportive if things went wrong. Each Monday all the department’s ministers were expected to join him for lunch at a nearby pizza restaurant where, free of the office and officials, we could discuss the pure politics of what we were about. Since I saw a good deal of Norman and Tony I knew how their conversations would go, and since I loathe pizza I usually found a reason to miss the meal. It was some weeks before Norman realised why I was a permanent absentee, and the pizzas were replaced by salad lunches in the office. The lack of ministerial garlic in the afternoon was much welcomed by civil servants.

I was well served by my officials, in particular by my Private Secretary Norman Cockett. Norman was bespectacled, with a full beard and a gentle good humour that took the sting out of every difficulty. He was never ruffled, the first of the many civil servants with whom I worked who were dedicated to public service. He put in the same killing hours as me. At his desk to brief me when I came into the office before breakfast, he was often still on hand when the House voted at 10 p.m., and sometimes did not leave for home until 2 a.m.

It was Norman Cockett who showed me the effects of our decisions at the sharp end. Our first visit was to a benefits office in my constituency, a gentle introduction. Our next trip was shocking. We arrived at an inner-London social security centre just before midday, and did not leave until 3.30. For all of that time there were never fewer than a hundred unhappy people queuing to see the handful of stressed clerks dealing with their enquiries, and there were only thirty seats in the room. The office, I learned, had a staff turnover of more than 100 per cent a year. It was a grim place.

The experience sowed some of the seeds in my mind of what would become the Citizen’s Charter. I saw no reason why people should suffer such scandalously poor service, and the following afternoon I sat down with Norman Cockett and produced a note on my visit for Norman Fowler, proposing that we sorted out the London benefits system. It led to a scheme which greatly improved the distribution of benefits in the capital.

The post of parliamentary under secretary is really an apprenticeship: more senior positions beckon if the test is not flunked. Parliamentary under secretaries have the influence of access to more senior ministers, and take day-to-day decisions on how things are done, but policy is the prerogative of their more elevated colleagues. I was lucky at Social Security because very early on I appeared a lot in the Commons and helped to take through a significant piece of legislation. This gave me a profile I would not otherwise have received so early on, and is perhaps one reason my political career accelerated.

I began to receive invitations to political events all over the country. One in particular sticks in my mind. In spring 1986 Robert Cranborne, a fellow Blue Chip and the Member for Dorset South, asked me to join a handful of other MPs on a panel of speakers at a Conservative Party event in a small village in his constituency. With me were Tristan Garel-Jones, still in the Whips’ Office; Virginia Bottomley, recently elected to the Commons and already Chris Patten’s Parliamentary Private Secretary; and Matthew Parris, who at an impending by-election would leave politics for journalism. We drove down to Dorset, and to pass the journey talked about the issues that might come up that night. Our conversation became light-hearted, and someone – I don’t remember which of us – suggested that we each write down a ‘frivolous fact’, and attempt to introduce it in our replies later that evening. The idea began as a joke, but by the time we arrived at the village hall we had dared each other to go ahead.

Matthew spoke first, and crisply dropped his point – that Upper Volta had recently been renamed Burkina Faso, ‘the country of wise men’, into his reply to a question on women’s rights. Virginia was convincing in bringing out the fact that ‘frogs swallow with their eyes shut’ into her answer. My turn came next – and, suppressing my mirth, I succeeded in including the point that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand in my piece. But Tristan failed dismally. Almost in stitches, he just about managed to keep a straight face, but dared not bring in his silly fact – I think it was that 18 per cent of the British population regularly share a bath. The following morning at breakfast, we put a white feather on his plate.

Peter Bottomley, Virginia’s husband, also an MP, and a Transport minister, joined us for dinner at Cranborne Lodge. We told him what we had been up to, and he was sorry to have missed the fun. He made up for it when answering Transport questions in the Commons a few days later. One MP raised the matter of traffic congestion in Mayfair. ‘I have been down Park Lane on a bus,’ Peter informed the House. ‘I took a sandwich with me, and it was unfinished when I reached the other end. Unlike frogs, which eat with their eyes closed, I had mine open. Neither the bus nor the traffic was held up.’

He was asked another question. ‘Like the first inhabitants of Burkina Faso,’ he began his reply, ‘the land of the wise men, otherwise known as Upper Volta, I might wonder whether it is right to take all those powers into my department’s hands.’

His answer to a third question completed the set. ‘We can do many things with statistics. We can say that Anne Boleyn had six fingers or that 18 per cent of people share their baths. However, it is more important to consider each bus lane to see whether it is worthwhile.’

Impressed by Peter’s bravura performance, when I bumped into Tristan I teased him, ‘Go and tell the Prime Minister.’ He did, though he was concerned that she might not see the joke. We need not have worried. ‘It’s the only good thing I’ve ever heard about Peter,’ she replied.

As the summer of 1986 advanced, rumour hinted that I might be promoted again in the forthcoming reshuffle. I realised this was a possibility, but thought it unlikely, given my slender experience and the usual prime ministerial practice of leaving beginners in their jobs a little longer than a year. Although I was ambitious, I did not wish to leave Social Security until I had learned all I could in my role there.

The fates, however, were generous. When the reshuffle came in September, Tony Newton was moved sideways within the department, becoming Minister of State for Health, and at Norman Fowler’s request I was promoted to Tony’s place as Minister of State for Social Security.

Responsibility for the disabled now fell to me. Since the late 1970s, Norma had been involved with the charity Mencap, and for my part I vividly remembered the difficulties my father had faced when he lost his sight. So this was a job I relished on both these counts, and in addition because it has engendered its own fraternity. My predecessors in the role, on both sides of the House, treated me as one of their own. I was fortunate too that my new deputy as parliamentary secretary was an old friend, Nick Lyell, who as a lawyer had a gift for detail, and with whom I worked very easily. My new Private Secretary, Colin Phillips, soon introduced me to the delights of a steak lunch at the nearby Horse and Groom pub, where we spent many a jolly hour and took quite a few decisions. I was not to know that such pleasures would soon be curtailed as my anonymity fell away.

The jump from parliamentary under secretary to full minister of state is a big one; it means you have entered the pool of ministers from which the Cabinet is chosen. I now attended far more of the Cabinet sub-committees that are the machinery of policy-making, and began to see government and its characters from the inside: who carried weight, who knew his or her brief, who was politically astute, and who had an overblown reputation. It soon became clear to me why rumours of reshuffle casualties were often so accurate – the Cabinet committees mercilessly exposed ministers who were not on top of their jobs or were out of sympathy with policy. Broad-brush answers or flip comments might suffice in the debating atmosphere of the Commons, but you had to be master of the detail to win your way in the committees.

Within days of my appointment I realised that I would be responsible for replying to a debate at the Conservative Party Conference the following month. Despite years of attendance, and many attempts to speak from the floor, I had never been called to do so. Now, though unknown nationally, I was to speak from the platform. In retrospect I can see now that the Social Security debate that year was not of great importance, and in any event, the only speeches that really mattered were those of Cabinet ministers. But it did not feel that way at the time, and I was extremely nervous.

I sat in my garden in the September sun composing a speech. Never had I found one so hard to write. I had little experience of big rallies, and social security does not readily lend itself to conference oratory. Soon the ground at my feet was littered with discarded texts. The speech passed off well enough on the day, however, and I earned a crouching ovation from the audience, many of whom were wondering who was on next, and whether the subject to follow would be more politically exciting. No conference speech ever gave me so much trouble as my debut, and I was mightily relieved when it was over without disaster.

When Parliament reassembled in November I began to get to know the many disabled lobby groups who worked with such dedication for their special interests. In most cases they were not the left-wing warriors I had expected to find, and although not many were obvious Tories, I enjoyed the relationships that were soon built up. I would have liked to have become closer to them, but their institutional role of lobbying the government made that more difficult than I had imagined.

Soon after I had been appointed the McColl Report landed on my desk. Ian McColl, a distinguished professor of surgery, had chaired a Committee of Inquiry into the service provided by the artificial limb and appliance centres. It was a high-powered committee including Brian Griffiths, soon to be appointed head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit at Number 10, and Marmaduke (‘Duke’) Hussey, who had lost a leg at the Anzio beach-head in 1943 but had gone on to a distinguished career and was a former Chief Executive and Managing Director of Times Newspapers.

The report was fiercely critical of the services available to disabled people: wheelchair design was out of date; artificial limbs were poorly fitted; and the contract arrangements between the department and the near-monopoly suppliers were inadequate. As I had nearly lost a leg myself in Nigeria I was instinctively sympathetic to the disabled. I knew I was fortunate not to be in need of an artificial limb myself.

The department was disenchanted with the McColl Report, but I decided to implement it in full, and called in Professor McColl to discuss the way forward. I had not previously met the author of this rip-roaring critique of current policy, but he turned out to be a slender, sandy-haired individual of gentle disposition who was courteously but firmly determined to ensure his report was not shelved – as, he told me, he had been threatened it would be by an angry civil servant. His good nature soon overcame any residual resentment among the department’s officials, and a Special Health Authority was set up with a wide-ranging brief to improve services for disabled people. I invited Lord Holderness – formerly Richard Wood, a Conservative MP and government minister who had lost both his legs to a bomb in Libya in 1943 – to chair the new authority, and he and his colleagues worked to such effect that services greatly improved.

Ian McColl, however, was not to drift out of my life. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher sent him to the House of Lords, and in the 1990s he became my Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Lords. He spent his early mornings operating at Guy’s or St Thomas’s Hospitals and then came on to Number 10, where he had become the doctor-in-residence as well as a political adviser, and one of the most popular figures in Downing Street.

My higher profile as a minister of state made me a bigger target for criticism, and on one issue, although for a few days only, I became Public Enemy Number One. January 1987 was bitterly cold. Heavy falls of snow covered the whole country, and there was genuine concern about how vulnerable people would keep warm. The previous summer the department had prepared a new scheme of cold weather payments to help the vulnerable when the temperature fell below a certain level, but with Arctic blizzards sweeping Britain, the system looked hopelessly bureaucratic. I was even accused of having personally devised a scheme that would never be triggered (although why anyone would have done that the critics never explained).

As I drove from Huntingdon to the Commons on icy roads and in grim weather, the radio news made it clear that the cold weather payments were the issue of the moment, and that the opposition’s attack on what it called our ‘heartless system’ would be fierce. I had not realised, until I listened to Labour spokesmen, that by introducing a new scheme to help the old pay for their heating in cold weather we had been deliberately trying to freeze them to death. Labour, however, assured everyone that that was our intention. And they pinned the blame on me.

I had no authority to change the scheme and make early payments under it without both Treasury approval and extra funding – neither of which was forthcoming. The Treasury refused to yield, and an alarmed Margaret Thatcher – no doubt with an eye to Prime Minister’s Questions, where uproar was guaranteed – summoned John MacGregor, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and myself to see her at Number 10 and thrash out our solution to this winter crisis. I pleaded for money, and John resisted. We were in the first-floor study, in which Margaret liked to work, and I looked through the window at the deep snow covering Horse Guards Parade. ‘It must be very cold in a two-up, two-down semi with no heating,’ I said. Mrs Thatcher turned to me sharply, then looked out, and I knew I had won.

The Treasury approved the expenditure, and I announced that one and a half million vulnerable people would receive a £5 payment towards their heating bills. The vulnerable were reassured, the Labour fox was shot, the Tories were delighted, and I ended my brief stint as a hate figure.

It was a timely introduction to the sort of political flash-fire that can so often cause trouble. The Treasury was not always all-powerful, and Margaret Thatcher was a good deal more alert to popular concerns than her detractors liked to suggest. I moved from villain to hero in a matter of hours, and within a short time revised the system of cold weather payments to make it a good deal more effective. That done, the weather improved, and the new system remained untested.

I enjoyed my two years at Social Security, and did not anticipate that they would soon come to an end. In early 1987, however, the Conservatives returned to the lead in the opinion polls, and all parties began to prepare themselves for a general election. After two successive election defeats Labour still looked unelectable, and we were generally confident of another win. As the election approached speculation grew, and I was tipped for all manner of jobs in the new Parliament.

I had a modest role in the preparations for the June election by helping the Treasury to ‘cost’ Labour’s social security policies. The bulk of this work was done by Andrew Tyrie, then Nigel Lawson’s special adviser, and after 1997 the Tory Member for Chichester. It was a brilliant success in undermining Labour’s claim to be able to afford their programme without massive tax increases.

When the election was called, Peter Brown, my constituency agent in Huntingdon, had prepared yet again for me to fight the seat as though it was a marginal. I was committed to a busy programme, including three speeches each evening at different villages, as well as a string of question-and-answer sessions with special-interest groups. This was our normal practice. We expected to win the election in Huntingdon, but we never took it for granted and left nothing to chance, working hard for the biggest possible majority.

Our plans were complicated when I was invited to join a number of Central Office press conferences during the campaign. As these took place early in the morning, I would drive to London after my evening speeches and return to the constituency mid-morning. It was exhausting, and sleep was at a premium. But it was exhilarating to see the campaign from the centre. I was at the morning conference a week before polling day on 4 June, ‘wobbly Thursday’, when Margaret – tired and in pain from a tooth infection – was snappy and irritable, and everyone walked on eggshells to avoid provoking an explosion.

It was evident from the underlying atmosphere at Central Office that morning that the relationship between Norman Tebbit, as Party Chairman, and David Young, the Secretary of State for Employment and a leading figure in planning the campaign, was one of mutual distrust. But our private rolling daily opinion poll never blinked, and the election was won comfortably. Division of the anti-Conservative forces gave Mrs Thatcher a reduced, but still substantial majority of 102, although she received only 42 per cent of the poll. It was a stunning third election victory for her.

At Huntingdon I won with a record majority of over twenty-seven thousand, and more than two-thirds of the vote. It was now one of the safest Tory seats in the country. Norma and I returned to Finings to celebrate and ponder the next five years. Neither of us would then have believed that when the party was to defend its majority at the next general election, it would be doing so with me as prime minister.