Political Commentary
The lady and her luck
Patrick Cosgrave
Now that the euphoria has died down somewhat and she is actually installed in the hot seat, there are a few more observations to be made about Mrs Margaret Thatcher and the extraordinary series of problems which currently face her. Some of them, if placed properly in context, may even help prevent her being entrapped within an image, or an imagined range of characteristics, which could eventually be very damaging or, more unlikely, very helpful to her over the next six months or so.
The first context in which to regard any politician who has come to the top of the heap is that of luck. This may seem an ungracious remark to make about Mrs Thatcher, when she has fought so courageously and skilfully for the great prize. But every political career has a huge luck factor, and every serious politician knows it. If the Dardanelles operation had succeeded — and it came very close once or twice — it might have been Winston Churchill rather than Andrew Sonar Law who succeeded Lloyd George, with consequences difficult to imagine. If Mr Macmillan had been better disposed towards Lord Butler, Mr Heath might never have been Prime Minister, and Mr Powell might nOW be, at least, Chancellor of the Exchequer. And so it goes on. The circumstances surrounding an incoming leader can, likewise, be very lucky. Mr Macmillan was lucky to succeed in times difficult for his party, because he had command of the right restorative thetoric; and Mrs Thatcher is likewise lucky now.
She is lucky because her party is in extreme difficulties about its own appeal and identity, and because she has no doubt at all about where the identity is to be found and where the appeal lies: no rival for the leadership had remotely as much certainty and definition. Further, her enemies as well as her rivals denied, throughout the campaign for the leadership, the possibility of her having appeal north of the Wash. They denied it so vehemently that she has nowhere to go but up, in the estimation of northern voters, who may justly feel themselves as well as their new leader, to have been rashly condemned as barbarians by many of the commentators and politicians. She has been lucky — now that she is victorious — also in the vehement denunciations (all wholly untrue) of her as some kind of right wing termagant for, in the minds of reasonably fair-minded people (she will never convert, not need she seek to convert, the many socialists who hate her with an unbridled hatred, of the kind the Tories once reserved for Mr Harold Wilson), anything she does now is likely to seem mild compared with what was threatened from her.
She is lucky, finally, in being a woman. She has never, like many successful women, pretended or implied that she was the same as a man; and frequently during her campaign, humorously stressed her sex. But, as Mr Bernard Levin observed in the article which announced the beginnings of his uneasy conversion to her cause, great ideas and great happenings in politics often have a curious way of preparing themselves below the surface of events for a long time, before springing up fully fledged, only to be accepted as the most natural things in the world very shortly after their emergence. Mrs Thatcher will, just because of her sex, remain uniquely fascinating for some months, and during that time she will create an enormous series of displacements in British politics. What they will be nobody can be wholly sure but they will happen as, in detail after detail, the psychology of her politics, and the tactics of her friends and foes alike, become altered. The effect of Mrs Thatcher on British politics and its character will be greater than that of any leader since Churchill's retirement: it does not follow that she will be successful — though I believe she will — but her effect will be extraordinary.
The next question, of course, is what she will do with her luck. Bismarck, in one of his more reflective moments, suggested that his tactics were based on listening for the hoofbeats of the horse of God and grabbing the rider's tails as he went by. That is not a bad saw for Mrs Thatcher to remember for the moment, for her luck, and the circumstances of her accession, have won for her a freedom of manoeuvre that Mr Whitelaw would never have had (no disrespect to him, merely that his luck would have been different) had he been the victor. Mr Whitelaw would have been expected more or less to potter along in Mr Heath's way, different style, perhaps, but not many other differences: Mrs Thatcher is expected to be exciting, but because of her limited experience she is still rather an unknown quantity, and can be expected to attract attention in everything she does for quite some time to come.
This gives her enormous opportunities to develop the particular lines of policy she wants to develop in her own way, and to be sure of the maximum amount of coverage whenever she wants it. When one considers all these things together it can be seen that she has, within her own party, a total freedom of action and certainly a freedom greater than any succeeding leader since Eden; she has no substantial debts to pay, no inherited machine she need keep, and a firm certainty that she can, by her unaided efforts, seize as much favourable public attention as she wants. Perhaps the most important word she has used since she succeeded was the word 'enthusiasm', when she stressed to the 1922 committee that her first job was to restore enthusiasm to the party. Enthusiasm is inseparable from excitement and that, for some time, Mrs Thatcher will be able to generate almost without trying.
Of course, I am writing of the next few months, perhaps up until the end of the year, if she is lucky. Lord Home in 1963 and Mr Heath in 1965 had, because of their styles and the circumstances of their victories, to labour hard with their public relations as they struggled with emerging policies. Mrs Thatcher can work quite slowly at both her policies and the identities of the people she wants around her. She also has the great human virtue (it is rare in a leader) of knowing what she does not know, and can spend some time making up the gaps in her knowledge. Those who watched her at all sympathetically from the moment she replaced Sir Keith Joseph as Mr Heath's principal rival saw, I believe, how rapidly her mind broadened to the great responsibility of being out in front — a most uncomfortable position — as a challenger for the highest honour her party had to give. Clearly, her friends will hope that that broadening will continue.
It does not follow that I am suggesting that Mrs Thatcher should become the kind of leader Mr Whitelaw would have become. I once quoted before in this column Sir Herbert Butterfield's dictum that a Prime Minister must be the presiding mind of his Cabinet: it is as true of a leader and a Shadow Cabinet. The definite, if as yet imperfectly understood, difference between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Heath was what caused her to stand; and it was a philpsophical, political and tactical difference far mare than it was a personal one. It has to be reflected, and sharply reflected, in what she does from now on, and she is in a position where she need make very few concessions indeed to those who want her to move towards being something like what Mr Whitelaw would have been.
It does not follow that she should not be unifier and a reconciler, as she clearly saw when she made Mr Whitelaw her deputy. It does follow, however, that adjustments should be made by other members of the Tory Party towards her, rather than by her: that is her right as Leader. It would be a very mean spirit indeed which tried to force Mrs Thatcher, after so solid a victory, Coming at the end of a campaign which began to the tune of laughter by those who did not wish her to succeed, to concede anything she believed in to those who did not believe in it. But — and I do not want to refer again after this occasion to the many criticisms advanced here and elsewhere about Mr Heath's leadership — it would likewise be a great mistake for Mrs Thatcher ever to create the kind of exclusivist bureaucracy, which shut out criticism and fresh ideas, with which her predecessor surrounded himself. The greatest difference in democratic politics is the difference between being not leader and being leader: it is the same as the difference between being not Prime Minister and being Prime Minister. As Churchill wrote:
In any sphere of action there can be no comparison between the position of number one and number Wm, three or four. The duties and problems of all persons other than number one are quite different and in many ways more difficult. It is always a misfortune when number two or three has to initiate a dominating policy.
But
At the top there are great simplifications. An accepted leader has only to be sure of what is best to do, or at least to have made up his mind about it. The loyalties which centre upon number one are enormous. If he trips he must be sustained. If he makes mistakes they must be covered. If he sleeps he must not be wantonly disturbed. If he is no good he must be pole-axed. But this last extreme process cannot be carried out every day; and certainly not in the days just after he has been chosen.
This is one of Churchill's most profOund passages, for it indicates the mature fruit of his long judgment. He would never have been the success he was once he came to the top had he not been sure in his own mind of what it was best to do, though, as we now know, he made up his mind not in haste (though definitely) but after the most exhaustive consideration; and he made up his mind in the spirit of the direction he had set himself before he came into power' and saw that that spirit should prevail. JLISt after her election Mrs Thatcher referred, modestly, to the thrill she felt at being now, where Ted Heath and Alec Home and Harold Macmillan once were. She is also now where Winston Churchill once was.
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