Читать книгу Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography - Margaret Thatcher - Страница 9

Backbencher and junior minister 1959–1964

BY NOW MY FAMILY AND I were comfortably installed in a large-ish detached house at Farnborough in Kent. We had decided to buy ‘Dormers’, which we saw advertised in Country Life, after rent decontrol threatened to make it a good deal more expensive to continue renting our flat in Swan Court. In any event, we felt the children needed a garden to play in.

The one and a half acres of garden were heavily overgrown but I enjoyed setting to work to improve things. When my parents finally moved to a house with a garden – very long but narrow – I was no longer living at home. So the garden at ‘Dormers’ was my first real opportunity to don thick gardening gloves and rip out brambles, trundle barrows of leaf-mould from the nearby wood to improve the soil, and plant out flowerbeds. Luckily, in Bertie Blatch I had a constituency chairman who doubled as horticulturist: but for all his tips my roses never quite resembled his.

For the twins, ‘Dormers’ was a seventh heaven. There was the new experience of their own garden, neighbours with children and all the excitement of a wood to walk in – though not alone. The house was part of an estate, so there was no through-traffic and it was safe for the children. I eliminated right at the beginning the dreadful possibility of their falling in the pond by having it filled with earth and turned into a rose bed.

Mark and Carol were six when I became an MP, old enough to get into plenty of trouble if not firmly handled. Nor was Denis at home as much as he would have liked, since his job took him abroad a good deal. Because my parliamentary duties meant that I was not always back before the twins went to bed, I insisted on full family attendance at breakfast. We also had the advantage of the long parliamentary recess and indeed the long parliamentary weekends. But I owe a debt of gratitude to Barbara, the children’s nanny until she married a local horticulturist who advised me on the garden – and to Abby who replaced her and who in due course became a close family friend. They kept the children in order and I always telephoned from the House shortly before six each evening to see that all was well and to give the children a chance to tell me that it wasn’t.

Although there were often constituency duties, the weekends provided the opportunity to sort out the house and usually to do a large bake, just as we had done at home in Grantham. In the summer months Denis and I and the children would work – or in their case play at working – in the garden. But on Saturdays in the rugby season Denis would probably be refereeing or watching a match – an arrangement which from the earliest days of our marriage had been solemnly set down in tablets of stone. Sometimes if he was refereeing an important game I would go along as well, though my concentration on the game was frequently disturbed by the less than complimentary remarks which English crowds are inclined to exchange about the conduct of referees. On Sundays we took the twins to the Family Service at the Farnborough parish church. Denis was an Anglican, and we both felt that it would be confusing for the children if we did not attend the same church. The fact that our local church was Low Church made it easier for the Methodist in me to make the transition. Anyway, John Wesley regarded himself as a member of the Church of England to his dying day. I did not feel that any great theological divide had been crossed.

Weekends, therefore, provided me with an invaluable and invigorating tonic. So did family holidays. I remembered what I had enjoyed – and not enjoyed – about my own holidays at Skegness. My conclusion was that for young children nothing beats buckets and spades and plenty of activity. So we used to take a house on the Sussex coast for a month right by the side of the beach, and there always seemed to be other families with small children nearby. Later we went regularly to a family hotel at Seaview on the Isle of Wight or rented a flat in the village. Crossing the Solent by ferry seemed a great adventure to the children who, like all twins, had a degree of (usually) playful rivalry. On the way down to the coast in the car we always passed through a place called ‘Four Marks’. I was never able to answer Mark’s question about who these four were. Nor could I think up a satisfactory response to Carol who thought that it was all unfair and that there should also be a ‘Four Carols’. Not to be outdone, Mark pointed out that it was no less unfair that Christmas carols had no male equivalent.

It is hard to know whether one worries more about one’s children when they are within reach or far away. I wanted the twins to be at home when they were young, but unfortunately, the nearby day school to which Mark went had to close in 1961, and Denis persuaded me that it was best that he should go to Belmont Preparatory School. At least Belmont was just on the edge of Finchley, so I could take him out to lunch. Also I knew he was not too far away in case of emergencies. But not to be left out, Carol decided that she wanted to go to boarding school as well. The house seemed empty without them.

By now there was another emptiness in my life which could never be filled, and that was the loss of my mother, who died in 1960. She had been a great rock of family stability. She managed the household, stepped in to run the shop when necessary, entertained, supported my father in his public life and as Mayoress, did a great deal of voluntary social work for the church, displayed a series of practical domestic talents such as dressmaking and was never heard to complain. Like many people who live for others, she made possible all that her husband and daughters did. Her life had not been an easy one. Although in later years I would speak more readily of my father’s political influence on me, it was from my mother that I inherited the ability to organize and combine so many different duties of an active life. Her death was a great shock, even though it had not been entirely unexpected. Even young children have a keen sense of family grief. After my mother’s funeral, my father came back to stay with us for a while at ‘Dormers’. That evening when I turned back the coverlet of his bed, I found a little note from Mark on the pillow: ‘Dear Grandad I’m so sorry Granny died.’ It was heartbreaking.

I was very glad, however, that both my parents had seen their daughter enter the Palace of Westminster as a Member of Parliament – quite literally ‘seen’, because the press contained flattering photographs of me in my new hat on the way to the House. My first real contact with the Conservative Parliamentary Party was when on the day before Parliament opened I went along as a member of the 1922 Committee – the Party committee to which all Conservative backbench MPs belong – to discuss the question of the Speakership of the House. I knew only a relatively small number of the several hundred faces packed into that rumbustious, smoky committee room, but I immediately felt at home.

Everyone in those early days was immensely kind. The Chief Whip would give new Members a talk about the rules of the House and the whipping system. Old-stagers gave me useful hints about dealing with correspondence. They also told me that I should not just concentrate on the big issues like foreign affairs and finance, but also find one or two less popular topics on which I could make a mark. Another piece of good practical advice was to find myself a ‘pair’, which I promptly did in the form of Charlie Pannell, the Labour MP for Leeds West.* I had met him years earlier when he lived in Erith, in my old Dartford constituency. He was exactly the sort of good-humoured, decent Labour man I liked.

The Palace of Westminster seems a bewildering labyrinth of corridors to the uninitiated. It was some time before I could find my way with ease around it. There were modestly appointed rooms set apart for the twenty-five women Members – the ‘Lady Members’ Rooms’ – where I would find a desk to work at. Neither taste nor convention suggested my entering the Smoking Room. My formidably efficient secretary, Paddi Victor Smith, had a desk in a large office with a number of other secretaries where we worked on constituency correspondence. But the heart of the House of Commons was, even more than now, the Chamber itself. Early on, I was advised that there was no substitute for hours spent there. Finance and Foreign Affairs Committee meetings might be more informative. The weekly 1922 Committee meetings might be more lively, but it was only by absorbing the atmosphere of the House until its procedures became second nature and its style of debate instinctive that one could become that most respected kind of English politician, a ‘House of Commons man’ (or woman).

So I took my pre-arranged place in the fourth row back below the gangway – where thirty-one years later I chose to sit again after I resigned as Prime Minister. The House itself was – and still is – a very masculine place. This manifested itself above all, I found, in the sheer volume of noise. I was used to university debates and questions at the general election hustings, yet my brief previous visits to the Visitors’ Gallery of the House had never prepared me for this. But when I remarked on it to a colleague he just laughed and said, ‘You should have heard it during Suez!’ Masculinity, I soon found, however, did not degenerate into male prejudice. In different ways I had on occasion been made to feel small because I was a woman in industry, at the Bar and indeed in Tory constituency politics. But in the House of Commons we were all equals; and woe betide ministers who suggest by their demeanour or behaviour that they consider themselves more equal than the rest. I soon saw with appreciation that sincerity, logic and technical mastery of a subject could earn respect from both sides of the House. Shallowness and bluff were quickly exposed. Perhaps every generation of young men and women considers that those it once regarded as great figures had a stature lacked by their equivalents in later years. But I would certainly be hard put now to find on the backbenches the extraordinary range of experience and talents which characterized the House of Commons then. Almost whatever the subject, there would be some figure on either side of the House who would bring massive, specialized knowledge and obvious intuition to bear on it – and be listened to with respect by front and backbenches alike.

As it happens, I had very little opportunity during my first few months as an MP for the relaxed acquisition of experience of the House. With 310 other Members I had entered the Commons ballot for the introduction of Private Members’ Bills. Never previously having so much as won a raffle, I was greatly astonished to find myself drawn second. Only the first few Private Members’ Bills have any chance of becoming legislation, and even then the Government’s attitude towards them is crucial.

I had only given the most general consideration to the topic I would choose, but I now had just a week to make up my mind, for the Bill had to be tabled by 11 November.

As a result of an industrial dispute in the printing industry, which began in July 1958, a number of Labour-controlled councils in big cities had denied normal reporting facilities to journalists working on provincial newspapers involved in the dispute. This had highlighted a loophole in the law which many councils used to conceal information from the general public about their activities. The press had a statutory right of admission only to meetings of the full council, not to its committees. By the device of resolving to go into committee, councils could therefore exclude the press from their deliberations. And besides these ‘committees of the whole council’ there were many other committees which were closed. Large sums of ratepayers’ money could be spent – or mis-spent – without outside scrutiny. Nor did members of the public themselves have the right to attend any council or council committee meetings.

My own interest in the question stemmed partly from the fact that it had come to a head because of socialist connivance with trade union power, partly because I knew from Nottingham, not far from Grantham, what was going on, and partly because the present situation offended against my belief in accountability by government for the spending of people’s money. The 1959 Conservative manifesto had contained a promise ‘to make quite sure that the press have proper facilities for reporting the proceedings of local authorities’. Having read this, I imagined that a Bill to do just that would be welcome to the Government. I was swiftly disillusioned by the whips. Apparently, nothing more than a code of practice on the subject had been envisaged. This seemed to me extremely feeble, and so I decided to go ahead.

It quickly became clear that the objection to a measure with teeth came not from ministers at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government but rather from officials, who in turn were doubtless echoing the fierce opposition of the local authorities to any democratic check on their powers. Henry Brooke, the Cabinet minister in charge, was consistently sympathetic. Each Private Member’s Bill is placed under the supervision of a junior minister who either helps or hinders its progress. My Bill was given to Sir Keith Joseph, and it was in examination of the tedious technical intricacies of the measure that I first got to know Keith.

I learned a great deal in a very short time from the experience of devising, refashioning and negotiating for my Bill. Partly because the issue had been a live one for a number of years, but partly also because of senior Members’ kindness towards a new Member, I was able to rely on invaluable assistance from backbench colleagues. Sir Lionel Heald, a former Attorney-General, gave me the benefit of his great legal experience. I learned from him and others the techniques of legal draftsmanship, which were generally the preserve of the parliamentary draftsmen.

I also witnessed the power of pressure groups. The influence of the local authority lobby made itself felt in a hundred ways, and not only through the Labour Party. I therefore learned to play pressure group against pressure group and made the most of the help offered to me by the Newspaper Editors’ Guild and other press bodies.

In the end, however, there is no substitute for one’s own efforts. I wanted to get as many MPs as possible to the House on a Friday (when most MPs have returned to their constituency) for the Bill’s Second Reading – this was the great hurdle. I have always believed in the impact of a personal handwritten letter – even from someone you barely know. So just before Second Reading I wrote 250 letters to Government backbenchers asking them to attend and vote for my measure.

By the time I rose to deliver my speech on Friday 5 February 1960, I knew the arguments by heart. As a result, I could speak for almost half an hour without notes to hand – though not without nerves. The three women members of the Government – Pat Hornsby-Smith, Mervyn Pike and Edith Pitt – showed moral support from the front bench, and the House was very full for a Friday. I was delighted that nearly 200 Members voted, and we won handsomely. I was also genuinely moved by the comments that different MPs made to me personally – particularly Rab Butler, the Leader of the House and a master of ambiguous compliments, whose congratulations on this occasion, however, were straightforward, generous and very welcome to a new Member.

It was clear from the press next day that the speech had been a success and that I was – for the present at least – a celebrity. ‘A new star was born in Parliament’, thrilled the Daily Express. ‘Fame and Margaret Thatcher made friends yesterday’, shrieked the Sunday Dispatch. ‘A triumph’, observed the Daily Telegraph evenly. Feature articles appeared about me and my family. I was interviewed on television. The cameras came down to ‘Dormers’, and in an unguarded moment in answer to one of the more preposterous questions I told a journalist that ‘I couldn’t even consider a Cabinet post until my twins are older.’ But apart from this gaffe it was roses, roses all the way.

Excessive praise? I had no doubt myself that it was. And I was slightly nervous that it might excite the jealousy of colleagues. My speech had been a competent performance, but it was not an epic.

But was it, however, a portent? Some time before the general election I had read John Buchan’s The Gap in the Curtain. I had not thought more about it until I considered these somewhat overstated headlines. John Buchan’s tale concerns a group of men, including several politicians, who spend Whitsun at a friend’s house where they are enabled by another guest, a mysterious and fatally ill physicist of world renown, to glimpse the contents of a page of The Times one year later. Each sees something affecting his own future. One, a new Conservative MP, reads a brief obituary of himself which notes that he had delivered a brilliant maiden speech that had made him a national figure overnight. And so it turns out. The speech is outstanding, praised and admired on all sides; but after that, deprived of the self-confidence which knowledge of the future gave him, he fails totally and sinks into oblivion, waiting for the end. I shuddered slightly and reached for my lucky pearls.

But my Bill – with the significant addition that members of the general public should have the same rights as the press to attend council meetings, and with committees (apart from committees of the whole council) excluded from its provisions – duly passed into law; and, though my seven-day stardom faded somewhat, I had learned a lot and gained a good deal of confidence.

Life on the backbenches was always exciting – but so hectic that on one occasion, to the consternation of my male colleagues, I fainted in the Members’ Dining Room. I spent as much time as I could in the House and at backbench committees. I also regularly attended the dining club of new Tory Members to which the great figures of the Party – Harold Macmillan, Rab Butler, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell – and brilliant young Tory journalists like Peter Utley would come to speak.

The natural path to promotion and success at this time lay in the centre of politics and on the left of the Conservative Party. Above all, the up-and-coming Tory politician had to avoid being ‘reactionary’. Nothing was likely to be so socially and professionally damaging as to bear that label. Conservatism at this time lacked fire. Even though what are now widely seen as the damaging moral, social and economic developments of the sixties mainly belong to the period of Labour government after 1964, the first years of the decade also were ones of drift and cynicism, for which Conservatives must be held in large part responsible.

The odd thing is, looking back, that Conservatives in the sixties, though increasingly and obsessively worried about being out of touch with contemporary trends and fashions, were beginning to lose touch with the instincts and aspirations of ordinary conservative-minded people. This was true on issues as different as trade unions and immigration, law and order and aid to the Third World. But it was also and most directly important as regards management of the economy.

It was not so much inflation, which was zero throughout the winter of 1959–60 and did not reach 5 per cent until the summer of 1961, but rather the balance of payments that was seen as the main economic constraint on growth. And the means adopted to deal with the problems at this time – credit controls, interest rate rises, the search for international credit to sustain the pound, tax rises and, increasingly, prototype incomes policies – became all too familiar over the next fifteen years.

The rethinking that produced first ‘Selsdon Man’ and later Thatcherism was barely in evidence.

The more I learned about it, the less impressed I was by our management of the economy. I listened with great care to the speeches of the Tory backbencher Nigel Birch, which were highly critical of the Government’s failure to control public spending. The Government’s argument was that increases could be afforded as long as the economy continued to grow. But this in turn edged us towards policies of injecting too much demand and then pulling back sharply when this produced pressures on the balance of payments or sterling. This is precisely what happened in the summer of 1961 when the Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd introduced a deflationary budget and our first incomes policy, the ‘pay pause’. Another effect, of course, was to keep taxation higher than would otherwise be necessary. Chancellors of the Exchequer, wary of increases in basic income tax, laid particular importance on checking tax avoidance and evasion, repeatedly extending Inland Revenue powers to do so. Both as a tax lawyer and from my own instinctive dislike of handing more power to bureaucracies, I felt strongly on the matter and helped to write a critical report by the Inns of Court Conservative Society.

I felt even more strongly that the fashionable liberal tendencies in penal policy should be sharply reversed. So I spoke – and voted – in support of a new clause which a group of us wanted to add on to that year’s Criminal Justice Bill which would have introduced birching or caning for young violent offenders. In the prevailing climate of opinion, this was a line which I knew would expose me to ridicule from the selfconsciously high-minded commentators. But my constituents did not see it that way, and nor did a substantial number of us on the right. Although the new clause was defeated, sixty-nine Tory backbenchers voted against the Government and in support of it. It was the biggest Party revolt since we came to power in 1951, and the Whips’ Office were none too pleased. It was also the only occasion in my entire time in the House of Commons when I voted against the Party line.

The summer of 1961 was a more than usually interesting time in politics. I retained my close interest in foreign affairs, which were dominated by the uneasy developing relationship between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the building by the Soviets of the Berlin Wall and, closer to home, by the beginning of negotiations for Britain to join the Common Market. There was also speculation about a reshuffle. In spite of my slightly blotted copybook, I had some reason to think that I might be a beneficiary of it. I had remained to a modest degree in the public eye, and not just with my speech on corporal punishment. I gave a press conference with Eirene White, the Labour MP for East Flint, on the lack of provision being made for the needs of pre-school children in high-rise flats, a topic of growing concern at this time when so many of these badly designed monstrosities were being erected. But the main reason why I had hopes of benefiting from the reshuffle was very simple. Pat Hornsby-Smith had decided to resign to pursue her business interests, and it was thought politically desirable to keep up the number of women in the Government.

That said, I did not try to conceal my delight when the telephone rang and I was summoned to see the Prime Minister. Harold Macmillan was camping out in some style at Admiralty House while 10 Downing Street was undergoing extensive refurbishment. I had already developed my own strong impressions of him, not just from speeches in the House and to the 1922 Committee, but also when he came to speak to our New Members’ Dining Club – on which occasion he had strongly recommended Disraeli’s Sybil and Coningsby as political reading. But Disraeli’s style was too ornate for my taste, though I can see why it may have appealed to Harold Macmillan. It is now clear to me that Macmillan was a more complex and sensitive figure than he appeared; but appearance did seem to count for a great deal. Certainly, whether it was striking a bargain and cementing a friendship with President Kennedy, or delivering a deliciously humorous put-down to a ranting Khrushchev, Harold Macmillan was a superb representative of Britain abroad.

I sorted out my best outfit, this time sapphire blue, to go and see the Prime Minister. The interview was short. Harold Macmillan charmingly greeted me and offered the expected appointment. I enthusiastically accepted. I wanted to begin as soon as possible and asked him how I should arrange things with the department. Characteristically, he said: ‘Oh well, ring the Permanent Secretary and turn up at about 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, look around and come away. I shouldn’t stay too long.’

So it was the following morning – rather before eleven – that I arrived at the pleasant Georgian house in John Adam Street, just off the Strand, which was at that time the headquarters of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. In a gesture which I much appreciated – and which I myself as a Cabinet minister always emulated – John Boyd-Carpenter, my minister, was there at the front door to meet me and take me up to my new office. John was someone it was easy to like and admire for his personal kindness, grasp of detail and capacity for lucid exposition of a complex case. And he was an excellent speaker and debater. All in all, a good model for a novice Parliamentary Secretary to follow.

The first step was to re-read the original Beveridge Report in which the philosophy of the post-war system of pensions and benefits was clearly set out. I was already quite well acquainted with its main aspects and I strongly approved of them. At the centre was the concept of a comprehensive ‘social insurance scheme’, which was intended to cover loss of earning power caused by unemployment, sickness or retirement. This would be done by a single system of benefits at subsistence level financed by flat-rate individual contributions. By the side of this there would be a system of National Assistance, financed out of general taxation, to help those who were unable to sustain themselves on National Insurance benefits, either because they had been unable to contribute, or had run out of cover. National Assistance was means tested and had been envisaged as in large part a transitional system, whose scope would diminish as pensions or personal savings rose.

It is easy in retrospect to poke fun at many of Beveridge’s assumptions and predictions. But Beveridge had sought to guard against the very problems which later governments more or less ignored and which have now returned to plague us, in particular the debilitating effects of welfare dependency and the loss of private and voluntary effort. Whatever the effects in practice, the Beveridge Report’s rhetoric has what would later be considered a Thatcherite ring to it:

… The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organizing security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family. [Paragraph 9]

… The insured persons should not feel that income for idleness, however caused, can come from a bottomless purse. [Paragraph 22]

Much of our time at the Ministry was taken up both with coping with the effects of and finding remedies to the difficulties which flowed from the gap between Beveridge’s original conception and the way in which the system – and with it public expectations – had developed. So, for example, in those days before inflation took hold and benefits were annually up-rated to cope with it, there were cries of disapproval when National Insurance pensions were increased and National Assistance, which made up your income to a certain level, was not. People also increasingly came to expect something better than a subsistence-level pension to retire upon, but the contribution levels or financing from general taxation which this would require seemed prohibitive. This lay behind John Boyd-Carpenter’s idea of the ‘graduated pensions’ scheme, whereby the payment of higher contributions could secure a somewhat higher pension, and provision was made for the encouragement of private occupational pension schemes. Another constant source of difficulty for which we found no ultimate (affordable) answer was the ‘earnings rule’ whereby pensioners who worked would at a certain level of income lose part or all of their pension payments. It was the impact of this on pensioner widows which caused me most difficulty and not a little heart-searching.

Apart from the Beveridge Report and other general briefing from the department, it was the case work – that is the investigation of particular people’s problems raised in letters – which taught me most about the Social Security system. I was not prepared to sign a reply if I did not feel that I properly understood the background. Consequently, a stream of officials came in and out of my office to give me the benefit of their matchless knowledge of each topic. I adopted a similar approach to parliamentary questions, which would be shared out between the ministers. I was not content to know the answer or the line to take. I wanted to know why.

Having served as a junior minister to three different ministers in the same department I was interested to see that the advice tendered to the ministers by civil servants differed, even though it was on the same topic. So I complained when both Niall Macpherson and Richard Wood received policy submissions proposing approaches that I knew had not been put to their predecessor, John Boyd-Carpenter. I remember saying afterwards: ‘That’s not what you advised the previous minister.’ They replied that they had known that he would never accept it. I decided then and there that when I was in charge of a department I would insist on an absolutely frank assessment of all the options from any civil servants who would report to me. Arguments should be from first principles.

I also learned another lesson. There was a good deal of pressure to remove the earnings rule as regards widowed mothers. I sympathized with it strongly. Indeed, this was one of the issues upon which, as a new MP, I had publicly stated my position. I thought that if a woman who had lost her husband but still had children to support decided to try to earn a little more through going out to work she should not lose pension for doing so. Perhaps as a woman I had a clearer idea of what problems widows faced. Perhaps it was my recollection of the heartbreaking sight of a recently widowed mother eking out her tiny income buying bruised fruit at my father’s shop. But I found it almost impossible to defend the Government line against Opposition attack. I raised the matter with officials and with my minister. On one occasion, I even raised it with Alec Douglas-Home as Prime Minister when he came to speak to a group of junior ministers. But although he seemed sympathetic, I never got anywhere.

The argument from officials in the department was always that ending the earnings rule for even this most deserving group would have ‘repercussions’ elsewhere. And, of course, they were logically correct. But how I came to hate that word ‘repercussions’.

Ministers were wrong to take such arguments at face value and not to apply political judgement to them. It was no surprise to me that one of the first acts of the incoming Labour Government in 1964 was to make the change for which I had been arguing, and to get the credit too. The moral was clear to me: bureaucratic logic is no substitute for ministerial judgement. Forget that as a politician, and the political ‘repercussions’ will be on you.

I retained my taste for the Chamber of the Commons, developed during my two years on the backbenches. We faced no mean opponents on the Labour benches. Dick Crossman had one of the finest minds in politics, if also one of the most wayward, and Douglas Houghton a formidable mastery of his brief. I liked both of them, but I was still determined to win any argument. I enjoyed the battle of facts and figures when our policies were under fire at Question Time and when I was speaking in debates – though sometimes I should have trod more warily. One day at the Dispatch Box I was handed a civil service note giving new statistics about a point raised in the debate. ‘Now,’ I said triumphantly, ‘I have the latest red hot figure.’ The House dissolved into laughter, and it took a moment for me to realize my double entendre.

As luck would have it, at Pensions we were due to answer questions on the Monday immediately after the notorious Cabinet reshuffle in July 1962 which became known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. John Boyd-Carpenter departed to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Niall Macpherson had not yet replaced him at Pensions. Since most of the questions on the Order Paper related to my side of the department’s activities, rather than War Pensions, I would have to answer in the place of the senior minister for nearly an hour. That meant another nerve-racking weekend for me and for the officials I had to pester. The Labour Party was in rumbustious mood, but I got through, saying when asked about future policy that I would refer the matter to my minister – ‘when I had one’.

But would the Government get through? As I was to experience myself many years later, every Cabinet reshuffle contains its own unforeseen dangers. But no difficulties I ever faced – even in 1989 – matched the appalling damage to the Government done by ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, in which one third of the Cabinet, including the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were dispatched and a new generation including Reggie Maudling, Keith Joseph and Edward Boyle found themselves in the front line of politics. One of the lessons I learned from the affair was that one should try to bring in some younger people to the Government at each reshuffle so as to avoid a log-jam. The handling of the changes was badly botched by Macmillan, whose standing never really recovered.

Above all, out in the country there had grown up a detectable feeling that the Conservatives had been in power too long and had lost their way. That most dangerous time for a government had arrived when most people feel, perhaps only in some vague way, that it is ‘time for a change’. Later in the autumn of 1962 the Government ran into squalls of a different kind. The Vassall spy case, the flight of Philby to the Soviet Union, confirming suspicions that he had been a KGB double-agent since the 1930s, and in the summer of 1963 the Profumo scandal – all served to enmesh the Government in rumours of sleaze and incompetence. These might have been shrugged off by a government in robust health. But the significance attached to these embarrassments was the greater because of the general malaise.

Europe was one of the main reasons for that malaise. In October 1961 Ted Heath had been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the difficult negotiations for British membership of the European Economic Community. Not least because of Ted’s tenacity and dedication, most of the problems, such as what to do about Britain’s agriculture and about trade links with the Commonwealth, seemed eminently soluble. Then in January 1963 General de Gaulle vetoed our entry. No great popular passions about Europe were aroused at this time in Britain. There was a general sense, which I shared, that in the past we had underrated the potential advantage to Britain of access to the Common Market, that neither the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) nor our links with the Commonwealth and the United States offered us the trading future we needed, and that the time was right for us to join the EEC. I was an active member of the European Union of Women – an organization founded in Austria in 1953 to promote European integration – and sat on its ‘Judicial Panel’ which debated issues relating to law and the family. But I saw the EEC as essentially a trading framework – a Common Market – and neither shared nor took very seriously the idealistic rhetoric with which ‘Europe’ was already being dressed in some quarters. In fact, it is now clear to me that General de Gaulle was much more perceptive than we were at this time when, to our great chagrin, he noted:

England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones … In short, the nature, the structure, the very situation that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the Continentals …

But he also said:

If the Brussels negotiations were shortly not to succeed, nothing would prevent the conclusion between the Common Market and Great Britain of an accord of association designed to safeguard exchanges, and nothing would prevent close relations between England and France from being maintained, nor the pursuit and development of their direct cooperation in all kinds of fields …

If this is what de Gaulle was indeed offering, it would have been a better reflection of British interests than the terms of British membership that were eventually agreed a decade later. We may have missed the best European bus that ever came along. At the time, however, so much political capital had been invested by Harold Macmillan in the European venture that its undignified collapse contributed to the impression that the Government had lost its sense of direction.

The Labour Party had suffered a tragedy when Hugh Gaitskell died young in January 1963. Harold Wilson was elected as Leader. Though lacking the respect which Gaitskell had won, Wilson was a new and deadly threat to the Government. He was a formidable parliamentary debater with a rapier wit. He knew how to flatter the press to excellent effect. He could coin the kind of ambiguous phrase to keep Labour united (e.g. ‘planned growth of incomes’ rather than ‘incomes policy’), and he could get under Harold Macmillan’s skin in a way Hugh Gaitskell never could. While Gaitskell was more of a statesman than Wilson, Wilson was an infinitely more accomplished politician.

As a result of all these factors, the Conservatives’ standing in the polls fell alarmingly. In July 1963, Labour were some 20 per cent ahead. In early October at the Labour Party Conference Harold Wilson’s brilliant but shallow speech about the ‘white heat’ of scientific revolution caught the imagination of the commentators. And then just a few days later – a bombshell – a resignation statement from Harold Macmillan’s hospital bed was read out by Alec Douglas-Home to the Party Conference at Blackpool, which was immediately transformed into a kind of gladiatorial combat by the leadership candidates.

But the real battle for the Conservative leadership was taking place elsewhere. The subtlest process of all was the way in which Harold Macmillan let it be known that he favoured Quintin Hogg over Rab Butler, thus stopping any bandwagon for the latter and preparing the ground for the ‘emergence’ of Alec Douglas-Home.

The Monday following the Conference I received a phone call from the Whips’ Office to gauge my views on the leadership. I first told them that I would support Rab over Quintin, because he was simply the more qualified of the two. I was then asked my view of Alec. This opened up a possibility I had not envisaged. ‘Is it constitutionally possible?’ I asked. Assured that it was, I did not hesitate. I replied: ‘Then I am strongly in favour of Alec.’

When Alec Douglas-Home became Foreign Secretary in June 1960 I had expressed doubts to Betty Harvie Anderson (MP for Renfrewshire East). I thought that there surely ought to be a suitable candidate for the post among the ministers in the Commons. Anthony Eden had, I recalled, ostensibly refused to give the Foreign Secretaryship to Lord Salisbury on these grounds. But Betty told me that Alec was quite outstanding and deserved the job. So I decided to read the new Foreign Secretary’s first speech in Hansard. It was a masterly survey of East-West relations, which emphasized the need for deterrence as well as negotiation with the Soviets and stressed the importance of our relationship with the United States. Alec now and later managed, most unusually, to combine skill in diplomacy with clarity of vision and he had the charm, polish and eye for detail of the perfect negotiator.

Moreover, Alec Douglas-Home was a manifestly good man – and goodness is not to be underrated as a qualification for those considered for powerful positions. He was also, in the best possible way, ‘classless’. You always felt that he treated you not as a category but as a person. And he actually listened – as I found when I took up with him the vexed question of the widowed mothers’ allowance.

But the press were cruelly and almost unanimously against him. He was easy to caricature as an out-of-touch aristocrat, a throwback to the worst sort of reactionary Toryism. Inverted snobbery was always to my mind even more distasteful than the straightforward self-important kind. By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class. And how they laughed when Alec said self-deprecatingly that he used matchsticks to work out economic concepts. What a contrast with the economic models with which the technically brilliant mind of Harold Wilson was familiar. No one stopped to question whether the weaknesses of the British economy were fundamentally simple and only superficially complex. In fact, if politicians had been compelled to use more honest language and simple illustrations to ensure that people understood their policies, we might well have avoided Britain’s slither into relative decline.

For all that – in spite of the media criticism, in spite of the chaotic end of the Macmillan Government, in spite of the correct but appallingly timed abolition of Retail Price Maintenance which so offended small-business support for the Conservatives – we very nearly won the 1964 general election. This recovery was not because of any economic improvement, for inflation worsened and the balance of payments deficit yawned. In part it was because the closer one looked at the Labour Party’s programme and its Leader, the less substantial they seemed. But mainly the credit for our political recovery should go to Alec.

There had been some press speculation that I might not hold Finchley. The Liberals began predicting another Orpington. They had secured a tight grip on the old Finchley council, though in May 1964 they had done rather less well in the elections for the new Barnet borough council. The Liberals’ new, energetic candidate, John Pardoe, campaigned principally on local issues while I mainly stuck to national ones – above all, how to secure prosperity without inflation.

I am always anxious on election day; but in 1964 my anxieties were, in spite of the predictions of my defeat at the start of the campaign, much greater for the Party nationally than for me in Finchley.

The results bore this out. I found myself with a majority over John Pardoe of almost 9,000. But I had seen the last of the Ministry at John Adam Street, for Labour had secured an overall majority of four seats. Thirteen years of Conservative government were over and a period of fundamental rethinking of Conservative philosophy was about to begin – alas, not for the last time.

* ‘Pairing’ is an informal arrangement by which pairs of MPs from opposing parties agree to abstain in parliamentary votes when one or other of them wishes to be absent from the House of Commons. The arrangement does not usually apply to crucial votes.