Political Commentary

Thatcher Mark Two

John Grigg 'rile general verdict on Mrs Thatcher's reshuffle is that it marks a swing to the right. NOW that her leadership is firmly established—so the argument goes—and now that the Tory Party is doing so well in byelections and in the opinion polls, she is free to have a shadow cabinet more truly concordant with her own views. There is a limited amount of truth in this interpretation, though far less than is commonly suPposed.

.„ For a start, we must be clear about Mrs hatcher's political character. Though she ,became party leader with the support of right_wing• (actually neo-Gladstonian) Lideologues, there is very little evidence in !ler career of any devout attachment to !cleology. She has, to be sure, some of the instincts and prejudices that belong to the ',libel, from which she sprang—specifically a dislike of trade unions and an oversimplified faith in private enterprise—but above alI she is a practical politician who wishes

lead the country, and to lead it success

'Y. She is not the one to allow dogmas to °bstruct her march to Downing Street or to cramp her style when she is there. Meanwhile she knows the value of c)taggeration for sustaining the morale of a arty in opposition, and she is naturally iceen to do as much as prudence permits to !fleourage her friends. But her chief concern tS0 show that the Tory Party is united and ut to govern. What she did last week was a calculated balancing operation. Those who see it as a pronounced swing i° the right are reading too much into the anges that have been made, and taking 00 little account of the changes that have Of been made. Mr Prior is still handling relations with the unions, Mr Whitelaw is still shadow home secretary, Mr Gilmour is sp_till shadow defence secretary (though with

Winston Churchill under him) and Mr John-Stevas is still shadow education "nister (though with Dr Rhodes Boyson silnder him). Prior, Whitelaw, Gilmour and

John-Stevas are all good Tories, but of _lie sort that naïve Thatcherites are apt to ipard as insufficiently militant and robust. t°"unately Mrs Thatcher herself has had ue sense to keep them in their key positions. Another who has not been moved is Sir Ae"freY Howe, the shadow chancellor. i..ccording to one report (by Simon Hoggart the Guardian) Mrs Thatcher intended to ti113130int Sir Keith Joseph in his place, but lac aPpointment was vetoed by Mr White is I believe to be a canard. Sir Keith lasI .'Llict have been the right man to succeed si n Macleod as chancellor in 1970, but h,rtce 1974 he has gratuitously typecast

self as a nineteenth-century Liberal of the Manchester school, with the result that to appoint him shadow chancellor would be asking for trouble. Mrs Thatcher owes Sir Keith a considerable debt, but there are some debts that serious political leaders know they cannot afford to pay.

Who or what, then, inspired the Guardian story? It is possible that Mr Whitelaw, a

far from reticent man, may have said some thing that was misunderstood. Another possibility is that the word went out from Mrs Thatcher's entourage, not necessarily

with her connivance. It suited Gladstone not only to deny office to Henry Labouchere,

but also to put it around that Queen Victoria would not have him as one of her ministers. Similarly Baldwin found it convenient to say that Neville Chamberlain would not tolerate Lloyd Geroge's admission to the cabinet. By accident or design,

the Guardian story gives Mrs Thatcher the credit for wanting to appoint Sir Keith without the embarrassment of appointing him.

The removal of Mr Maudling may have been partly due to his anti-monetarist

views, though a more telling reason must have been his distaste for Mrs Thatcher's 'iron lady' speeches. To that extent it is a right-wing gesture to have got rid of him, and on the Russian issue it seems to me that Mrs Thatcher's attitude is more realistic than his. But would it not have been wise to retain him in the shadow cabinet, like Lord Hailsham, as a senior counsellor without

specific duties? Whatever his faults, he is a very able and experienced man, whose friendship was worth having and whose inevitable resentment she may have cause to regret.

Switching Mr Heseltine from industry to environment is not, in itself, an ideologically

significant act. Cynics may be tempted to

surmise that Mr Heseltine did himself no good by somewhat upstaging his leader at Brighton, where in 1957 Lord Hailsham

upstaged Mr Macmillan with his famous bell-ringing speech, only to find himself in

due course dismissed from the chairmanship of the party and relegated to the ministry of science and technology. But a duller explanation is that industry would have provided less scope for Mr Heseltine's gladiatorial talents in the new session than it did in the last, and that Mrs Thatcher feels more could be made of DoE issues, particularly housing.

Mr Heseltine's successor as shadow spokesman on industry, John Biffen, is reputed to be a right-winger pure and undefiled. But it is fairly easy to have that sort of reputation when one has never held office. Better liked than Mr Heseltine, Mr

Biffen is also less abrasive, and readers of his article in last week's Spectator must have

been struck by his lack of pugnacity on one issue within his former shadow sphere. Like Teddy Taylor, who has been brought into the shadow cabinet as spokesman on trade, Mr Biffen is a Powellite with the symbolic merit of being detached from Mr Powell.

Beyond question the main legislative business of the new session will be devolution, and it is therefore specially noteworthy that Mrs Thatcher has chosen Francis Pym to be the chief opposition spokesman on that subject. Though he has not hitherto advertised his views on it, it is fair to assume that they are as balanced and sensible as his known views on other matters, and that Mr Whitelaw has been relieved of the responsibility only because he was overburdened. Mr Pym's appointment, perhaps the most important in the reshuffle—though one of the least discussed—in no way supports the theory of a drastic swing away from centrist moderation.

Equally false is the view that Mr Heath's remarks last week to the Greater London Young Conservatives amounted to an attack on Mrs Thatcher and have destroyed the fragile unity established at Brighton. Where Mr Heath is concerned, there seems to be an unholy alliance between mediamen in search of sensation and the rearguard of malevolent Heath-bashers at Westminster. ln fact, there was no more implied criticism of the leadership in what he said last week than in his speech at Brighton, which was hailed as a gesture of reconciliation, and certainly no more than he is fully entitled to make as an eminent back-bench Tory MP.

In deprecating a smear campaign against Labour left-wingers in Parliament he was not criticising the Tory leadership at all, and his comments on the undesirability of a campaign against scroungers seemed quite fair and innocuous to Mrs Chalker—the new junior opposition spokesman on social services—who was present at the meeting and heard them. Mr Heath's message to the Tory Party, that it should concentrate on the big issues and 'not delve into things which are beneath us,' is one to which Mrs Thatcher has no reason to object. Indeed, for some months past she has been acting increasingly in that spirit herself.

Mr Heath is one of the Tory Party's greatest assets in the country. When he speaks for a candidate there is sure .to be a full house, and at the next election he will be worth many votes to the party. His value consists in being himself, and in not pretending to be anything else. If he were to go beyond loyalty to the party, to the extent of kissing the boots of the colleague who ousted him from the leadership, he would be guilty of gross hypocrisy. He would also destroy his own power. At this stage it is right that he should accept Mrs Thatcher as leader, but not that he should grovel to her, as some people would have him do.