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- [00:01]
Tom Holland
I sold my car in Carvana last night.
- [00:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, that's cool.
- [00:03]
Tom Holland
No, you don't understand.
- [00:04]
Dominic Sandbrook
It went perfectly.
- [00:06]
Tom Holland
Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow.
- [00:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
You need to relax.
- [00:20]
Tom Holland
I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
- [00:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana.
- [00:29]
Tom Holland
Pick up fees.
- [00:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
May apply. Chronic migraine is 15 or more head
- [00:32]
Tom Holland
headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
- [00:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
Botox Onobotulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start.
- [00:40]
Tom Holland
It's not for those with 14 or
- [00:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions including als, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome and medications including botulinum toxins as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.
- [01:24]
Tom Holland
Why wait?
- [01:25]
Dominic Sandbrook
Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. It's the Paradise Podcast. I am your host, Ryan Michelle Bathe with my husband0. What's up? Join us here on Hulu and Hulu on Disney where we'll discuss each episode with the cast and crew of Paradise. I'll be getting all the secrets from Dan Fogelman, James Marsden, Shailene Woodley, Julianne Nicholson and Sterling Kelby Brown. Paradise. The official podcast is now streaming and stream. Paradise on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.
- [02:12]
Tom Holland
The first Conservative Party conference I attended was in 1946. You will understand. I know the humility I feel at following in the footsteps of great men like our leader that year, Winston Churchill. Oh, a man called by Destiny who raised the name of Britain to supreme heights in the history of the free world. We are coming, I think, to yet another turning point in our long history. We can go on as we have been going and continue down, or we can stop. And with a decisive act of will, we can say, enough. Let us, all of us here today and others far beyond this hall, who believe in our cause, make that act of will. Let us proclaim our faith in a new and better future for our party and our people. Let us resolve to heal the wounds of a divided nation. And let that act of healing be the prelude to a lasting victory. So that was Margaret Thatcher, and it was her first speech to the Conservative Party conference as leader, and she delivered it on the 10th of October, 1975. And astute listeners will have recognized that Mrs. Thatcher there did not sound like she did later, with her deep, masculine voice and her slow, steady elocution, because at this point, she hadn't actually had the elocution lessons that gave her that voice at this point. And I think I'm right, aren't I, Dominic, in saying this, she had a much shriller, faster, less controlled voice. And so through the medium of vocal impression, I have conveyed the transformation that was to come later in Mrs. Thatcher's career.
- [03:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
Do you know what? I really take my hat off to you there, because I had anticipated you would do it in the husky voice. It had never occurred to me that you wouldn't. And you brought to it a level of nuance that I had not anticipated.
- [04:06]
Tom Holland
Thank you. And what makes that even better is, actually, I've got a really violent cold. So my, my, My voice is naturally more deeper than it is. And it's a great speech, isn't it? Because you've got complete Thatcher bingo there. You've got the invocation of Winston. You've got the patriotism, you've got the. The apocalyptic sense of national decline, you've got the talk of faith, you've got the talk of healing, of victory. And that's what she is, this kind of colossal figure in whose shadow all of us who grew up through the late 70s and 80s spent our childhood and our youth.
- [04:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, you're not wrong. I mean, she became Tory leader when I was not yet one, and she left as Tory leader and Prime Minister when I was 16. So she was there for a ridiculously long time. She was, as anybody knows who grew up in Britain in those years, she was this sort of transcendent figure. Everybody had heard of her, everybody knew what they thought of her. They either Loved her, by and large, or they absolutely hated her. The Marmite Prime Minister, more than Marmite. I mean, all the political and social changes of the 80s and 90s somehow came to be embodied in her or attributed to her, weren't they? So whatever happened, it was assumed that she had a finger in it in one way or another.
- [05:22]
Tom Holland
Even if people hated her, they thought that she was doing things, that she was pulling levers and changes were being affected. And I suppose that is a massive contrast with the leaders that we have now. You're not wrong where it doesn't matter who they are, they just come in, they're completely useless and nothing changes.
- [05:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. And the funny thing is, it's a sign of how much shadow endures that of the Tories recent leaders. You know, Theresa May basically tried to turn herself into a Thatcher tribute act. Liz Truss, you may remember, when she was debating Rishi Sunak to try and become Tory Lee, she actually dressed as Margaret Thatcher, put on a Thatcher costume, which is insane. And even today, Kemi Badenok, people who are sort of trying to talk Camber Badenoch up will say, well, you know, Margaret Thatcher was poorly thought of when she was first leader of the drop position. Maybe she will change, you know, maybe it'll be the same story and all this kind of thing, I suppose.
- [06:14]
Tom Holland
I mean, the comparison with Kemi Badenok is better than the previous two because Kemi Badenok has become leader as leader of the Opposition, whereas May and Truss became Prime Minister straight away. So that's kind of cheating.
- [06:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. And in fact, you know, for people who are questioning the. The comparison, we're meeting Thatcher today before she entered her imperial pomp, when a lot of people were writing her off too. And so this is the story in today's episode of how in February 1975, she becomes the first woman to lead the British political party. And it's also the first episode in the series on the politics of mid-70s Britain. So an absolutely bonkers period in kind of British modern history. And it's following on from a series we did in 2024 about the year 1974. So we'll be meeting some old favorites. Harold Wilson, Marcia Williams.
- [07:02]
Tom Holland
That really was bonkers. You mentioned Marcy Williams. So the plot to kill her by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's aides and that. That financial bloke who took all his clothes off and rolled around on the floor screaming that we were all doomed.
- [07:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
So William Armstrong, he was the head of the Civil Service.
- [07:17]
Tom Holland
Is he popping up?
- [07:18]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, he's not popping up. Sadly, but there's some other. There's loads of mad people popping up. So we've got David Bowie and of course, the Sex Pistols. So that's going to be very exciting. That's a little taste listeners will have to. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh, God. This is a taste of what listeners will have to endure. Right, so let's set the scene before we get to Thatcher herself. So we are 25 years on from the end of the Second World War.
- [07:46]
Tom Holland
Which Britain won.
- [07:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
Which Britain did win. I think. What the technical. If you want to get it right, she says, we stood alone when everyone else surrendered. We rescued half Europe when Europe was in chains. That, I think, is the direct quote, anyway. So Britain is a country transformed. Britain's lost its empire. By the beginning of the 1970s, almost all the former colonists have become independent. It's struggling to find a new role for itself. Britain has joined the European Community under the Tory leader ted heath in 1973. Britain has enjoyed two decades of economic growth, like most Western countries, but there's a sense that the wheels are coming off. It's struggling. British businesses are struggling compared with their West German, French or Japanese counterparts. And there's a growing sense that Britain's heavy industries, kind of coal, steel, shipbuilding, car making, are on borrowed time competitively. Britain's market share is dropping all the time. And if you plot it on a graph, compared with that West Germany, say, which is a reasonable comparison, then Britain looks. British productivity, for example, is absolutely terrible and actually gets worse and worse comparatively as the period goes on. So there's that, and then finally there's a sort of great crisis of confidence. So this is a sense among the political elite of weariness and exhaustion. They're ground down by constant battles with Britain's trade unions. Britain has this very, very fragmented trade union system, lots of different unions competing for members. And because it has so many nationalized industries, this means that instead of pitting a private company against the trade unions, it's the government against the trade unions.
- [09:26]
Tom Holland
Time after time, it's holding the British people to ransom.
- [09:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, I believe the technical term used at the time was trade union barons. They were always called trade union barons. And. And then there's Northern Ireland. So we should do a series at some point on the trouble. Specifically at this point, hundreds of people, 250 to 300, are dying every year. So a real running sore. And all of that came to a head, as we described in our previous series, in the tumultuous year of 1974, the oil shock of late 1973 basically blew up the British economy.
- [10:00]
Tom Holland
Well, thank God nothing like that's going to happen now.
- [10:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
It sent inflation through the roof. And this will be a constant theme of this series. So inflation reached a record 26% in the summer of 1975. The modernizing Tory MP Ted Heath, who was Prime Minister at the beginning of the 70s, he lost control of the economy. He tried to impose a kind of pay policy, but that provoked a strike by the coal miners. He called an election in February to try to get a new mandate from the people. And that ended in a deadlock and hung parliament. So stalemate. And he was replaced by the very shop soiled figure, the former Prime Minister, Labour's Harold Wilson. And Wilson paid off the unions. He brought industrial peace, but inflation got worse. The upside for Wilson, he caused another election in October and he eked out a very narrow majority of just three seats. And the result of all this is that especially on the right and indeed abroad, there is a profound sense by the beginning of 1975 that something has gone very, very badly wrong, that Britain is the sick man of Europe and it's heading for some sort of apocalyptic reckoning.
- [11:07]
Tom Holland
Because you mentioned in our previous series on 1974 that there are all these kind of people who were plotting coups, weren't there?
- [11:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, General, what's his name? Sir Walter Walker or whatever his name is.
- [11:16]
Tom Holland
Yeah, all of them.
- [11:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
There's David Sterling, the guy who founded the sas, all these people who sort of offering themselves as leaders of a national unity government. I'll give you one example of an international perception. At the beginning of 1975, there was a report on the CBS Evening News in the United States by the veteran American correspondent Eric Severide. And Sevride said to the viewers, Britain's problem is not just that her military strength is ebbing and her economic strength weakening. Britain is at the stage of Allende's Chilean, when a minority tried to force a profound transformation of society upon the majority. It's drifting slowly toward a condition of ungovernability and sleepwalking into a social revolution. And this was enough of a story that Harold Wilson issued a statement saying this was completely untrue and whatnot. And the Times published a long editorial about it and it said, you know, actually we're not as bad as Allende's Chile, but we are pretty bad. We're borrowing far too much money, we're porpoise on the world stage. And the Times ended up by saying these facts are well known to the world, where British prestige has not stood so low since Charles II was the pensioner of Louis xiv.
- [12:28]
Tom Holland
I mean, again, Dominic, there is a kind of echo of present circumstance, isn't there? Because there are so many articles in the British newspapers at the moment about how our military standing is kind of in a 17th century state.
- [12:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, completely. I mean, this is all the stuff. This American abuse of Britain is very common. It's kind of perennial theme. There's a particular kind of American correspondent that loves nothing better than putting the boot into the former master. I think that's what it is anyway. So this is the setting in which Margaret Thatcher emerges. She became Tory leader in the year she turned 50. So before we get into how she became Tory leader, we'll look at the previous 50 years. She was born. Tom, you know, of course, where she was born. She was born in Grantham in Lincolnshire.
- [13:08]
Tom Holland
I do.
- [13:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
In October 1925. And Grantham, for people who are not familiar with Grantham, it is the quintessential boring English market town, isn't it? No, it is. No, it's very boring. It's former town clerk, listen to its town clerk. Its town clerk said to Hugo Young, it was a narrow town built on a narrow street inhabited by narrow people. The sun in the early 1980s called it the most boring town in Britain.
- [13:35]
Tom Holland
The sun is wrong. Okay. There's a hotel on the main street of Grantham that was originally a coaching inn where Edward III and Queen Philippa stayed. And I stayed there. And you go and have breakfast. And in that room is the place where Richard III signed the death warrant of the Duke of Buckingham. That's not boring.
- [13:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
There's nothing to see, presumably.
- [13:55]
Tom Holland
And also Grantham is where the apple fell on Isaac Newton.
- [13:58]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, let's get back to. Let's get back to Margaret Thatcher.
- [14:02]
Tom Holland
Well, of course there is. There is, there is. There is the little corner shop above which the young Margaret Roberts grew up and which was kept by her father, Alderman Roberts.
- [14:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
You've got us very neatly to back to the shop. Very well done. So her father is the key influence on it. He's called Alfred Roberts. He runs this grocer shop and he brings his two daughters up with the values of sort of hard work and thrift and entrepreneurship and all this kind of thing. Alfred Roberts is your absolute textbook, early 20th century public spirited. Worthy. I think he's a worthy. He is an independent local councillor. He's the chairman of the finance committee. He's an alderman. He's briefly the mayor. He's the chairman of the Rotary Club. He does all this kind of thing. Now, Alderman Roberts sees himself as an old fashioned liberal. He's very interested in politics, he loves John Stuart Mill, but he thinks that modern liberals, led by rogues and rascals like Asquith and Lloyd George, have taken the party down the road of socialism. And so he now supports the Tory party of Baldwin and Chamberlain. And Margaret Roberts, she is an absolute awe of her father. In fact, later on, when she was Prime Minister in the middle of the 80s, Miriam Stoppard did an interview with her and asked about her father. And Margaret Thatcher recalls the day that he was voted out as alderman, had to give up his robes and she started crying in the interview, you know, a very unusual thing for her to do. And actually when she becomes prime minister in 1979, when she's outside number 10 in the very famous moment, you know, when she quotes or apocryphally Saint Francis of Assisi, she's asked as you have any thoughts about her father? And she says to the cameras, I owe almost everything to my own father, I really do. He brought me up to believe all the things that I do believe and they're just the values on which I fought the election.
- [15:54]
Tom Holland
Dominic, don't psychoanalysts make a great deal of the fact that she never mentions her mother?
- [16:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
They do, yeah. Not just psychoanalysts, but basically every biographer and interviewer. She, she almost never mentions her mother. Hard really to, to work out why. I think she very boring. I think she's possibly just a little bit, she's quiet and not as. She's clearly not as big an intellectual influence on Margaret as her father is. I mean she's, she's both slightly terrified of her father, I think, but admires him enormously. And I think, you know, he, he just looms so large. I mean Thatcher, all her life is defined by her relationships with men rather than with women, isn't she?
- [16:35]
Tom Holland
Yeah, she is.
- [16:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
So this is, this is part of the course. The other big thing he gives her is his Methodism. So there are several different Methodist chapels. This will please you, Tom, for believing that religion is the, is the great influence on, on, on national life. There are several different Methodist chapels in Grantham and they worship at the most respectable, which is the Wesleyan Church in the town centre. So they have to go past other chapels which are near the shop to get to this respectable one. And the, the vibe of the Wesleyan Church is still pretty austere. You know, clean living, self improvement, don't have too much fun. And Alfred Roberts takes it Very, very seriously. He's a lay preacher. His daughters have to go multiple times to church on a Sunday. So Sunday school and then, you know, the main service and then maybe a prayer meeting or something. And although Margaret, when she's an adult, leaves it behind and joins the Church of England, which is more respectable, still, it leaves a massive imprint on her. And we'll actually come back to this because I think it's a huge, huge part of her identity. So she's a clever girl, hardworking, she wins a place at Oxford later on when she became Prime Minister. Sort of high minded. Intellectual critics could not abide the fact that she had gone to Oxford and that she might be quite clever. And they would say, oh, she isn't a fool, you know. Once was on a radio program and I remember Edith hall saying with absolute fury that Margaret Thatcher was not an intelligent woman and couldn't identify Cambodia on a map.
- [18:07]
Tom Holland
Well, Edith hall is very good at recognising top translations of Herodotus.
- [18:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
Is she?
- [18:12]
Tom Holland
Yeah, she is.
- [18:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
Is she good at, like, naming countries on maps? That's the question.
- [18:14]
Tom Holland
I imagine that must be another of her skills.
- [18:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, presumably if you're Prime Minister, the maps have, have labels. No, you don't need the Falkland Islands.
- [18:23]
Tom Holland
Ours.
- [18:23]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. That's all you need to know.
- [18:25]
Tom Holland
What else is there to know?
- [18:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Anyway, this, this is obviously rubbish.
- [18:29]
Tom Holland
Well, she's a chemist, right? I mean, chemistry's really difficult and she
- [18:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
was good at it. So her tutor at Oxford was Dorothy Hodgkin, who was the first and only British woman scientist ever to win the Nobel Prize. And Dorothy Hodgkin, who didn't agree with her on politics at all, recalled her, as I quote, a good student. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well read essay. You know, she's not brilliant, but she's still very good at chemistry. She's at Oxford.
- [18:57]
Tom Holland
I mean, I'm basically impressed by anyone who could do chemistry.
- [19:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Quite right, exactly. So at Oxford, she, she's not a fun loving person, she's not a laugh. She joins the Wesleyan Church and the Wesleyan Society, she does some preaching, she joins the Conservative association and becomes its president. But she's not hanging out in the college bar, you know, necking ciders. She is a workaholic. And in fact, all through her life, you know, the idea of having fun for its own sake or doing nothing just strikes her as completely insane. Why would you do that when there's more work to be done? And actually, even as Prime Minister, after work, when she stops work and she's hanging around with her aides and whatnot. She just talks about the evils of socialism. I mean, they're very funny about this. A lot of her AIDS in the 80s, they say, you know, she would just give us these massive lectures, as though we didn't already agree with her, but we were like the last people that she needed to convince.
- [19:49]
Tom Holland
She does have an eye for a cad, though, doesn't she?
- [19:52]
Dominic Sandbrook
She totally does.
- [19:53]
Tom Holland
So kind of Cecil Parkinson or John Moore, later on, a man who wears a pinstripe suit with.
- [20:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, she loves a man in a pinstripe suit with brill creamed hair who perhaps has a little glint in his eye. That's very much what she likes. So she did have a boyfriend at Oxford called Tony Bray. She loved dancing, so when she was prime minister, one of her great passions was to dance with Ronald Reagan.
- [20:18]
Tom Holland
And she loves fashion, doesn't she?
- [20:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, she really likes fashion. So there's letters in Charles Moore's biography, letters that she's writing to her sister, saying, I'd really like to get these new shoes, these. These glamorous new shoes, but I know that our father would not approve. So there is a little bit of tension there with her father. The one thing she doesn't. I mean, what she doesn't have, she doesn't have any sense of irony or the absurd, a fun aspect of her life and career. She's completely oblivious to double entendres. Yeah. So she was campaigning once in Putney, and she saw a man carrying a big wrench, and she said to the press corps, goodness, I've never seen a tool as big as that. So they all start laughing, and she just doesn't understand why they're laughing. And then the best one is she went to the Falklands in 1983, when victory had been secured, and there was a big sort of field gun. And they said, would you like to sit on this field gun and fire some rounds, like just, you know, in the very direction of Argentina or whatever? And she said she was tempted. And then she said to them, but mightn't it jerk me off? And again, everybody's sort of not a
- [21:21]
Tom Holland
dry eye in the house.
- [21:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's sometimes said of her that she's a philistine. A lot of her critics said this in the 80s. The writer Jonathan Raybon said she regarded books, art and ideas as just so much Black Forest gateau, so 70s, I know, but I regard Black Forest ghetto as a good thing. I think that's a compliment. Anyway, she likes classical music she liked Chopin, she liked Beethoven, she liked Bach. We know from letters in the archives that in the 70s, as leader of the opposition, I don't think Kimi Badenoch is doing this. She read Dostoevsk as demons. She read Kirsta's Darkness at Noon. She read Le Carre. She read Kipling, Solzhenitsyn. She wrote Harold Bloom.
- [21:57]
Tom Holland
Didn't she famously read the Day of the Jackal twice?
- [22:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Is that right? I mean, I've never heard that.
- [22:03]
Tom Holland
I think she read it all the way through, and then she wanted to. She read it again to try and work out the plot.
- [22:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
Wow.
- [22:08]
Tom Holland
You know, so a kind of engineer, perhaps a kind of, you know, scientist's perspective, to see.
- [22:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, to see how it worked, to see the chemical composition of it.
- [22:15]
Tom Holland
Yeah. I mean, just on the topic of music, you must know her favorite Beatles,
- [22:19]
Dominic Sandbrook
Soul Money Tax Man, Telstar.
- [22:24]
Tom Holland
Telstar, which, of course, was not by the Beatles.
- [22:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. That's insane. But she probably liked it because she would like. She would say, I'd like popular music before the long hair. Yeah, she's. That probably the issue before the long hair and the singing, in fact.
- [22:37]
Tom Holland
Correct.
- [22:38]
Dominic Sandbrook
So I've sort of shot down a couple of the criticisms that she's a philistine or whatever, or that, you know, she's not very clever. What is absolutely true, however, is that she doesn't have any real sense of imagination or empathy. Almost all her biographers, everybody who worked with her, said this was the massive weak point, that basically, Margaret Thatcher did not really understand, certainly not on an emotional level, what it was like to be different from her. What it was like to be poor, to be insecure. What it was like, naturally, not to be ambitious and to be intimidated by people saying you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps and ought to be
- [23:14]
Tom Holland
unlucky, or to lose your job.
- [23:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
To lose your job. Exactly. The thing that always, I think, captures her better than anything else. It's a passage in Matthew Parris's memoir. Matthew Paris, the Times columnist, worked for her in the 1970s. And there's a point when he says to her, they meet at some party, and he says, I'm going off to the Desolation Islands. I think Aubrey and Maturin go to the Desolation Islands, don't they? In Master and Commander stories, he says, I'm going to the Desolation Islands on a trip. And she said to him, I know why you want to go. You want to go thousands of miles to some remote and dangerous place and. And climb to the top of a mountain. And to say, here I am in a wild and dangerous place, miles from anywhere, looking at the moon and the stars. That's exactly why he wants to go. And she said, take my advice, dear, don't bother. You can see the moon and the stars from Spalding. And that, I think, completely captures. There's a sort of a limit, a narrowness to her. You know, for all her strengths, there's a lack of imagination. She would not be a terribly fun person, I think, to sit next to at a dinner party.
- [24:16]
Tom Holland
Probably more fun than Theresa May.
- [24:17]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. I mean, she's read Dostoevsky. You could talk to her about Dostoevsky. So let's get back to the story. She leaves Oxford, becomes a research chemist, actually, for the Lyons Ice Cream Company. At one point, she tries to find a safe seat in the House of Commons. She's highly thought of the local agent in Dartford, where she stood in 1950 and 1951, said she was amazing young woman with experience and knowledge far beyond her years, outstanding in ability and has in addition, a most attractive personality and appearance. And one of the people who agrees with this is a businessman who meets her in Dartford, who is called Dennis Thatcher. And he's divorced, he's much older, he's 10 years older. But they get married and they have twins, Mark and Carol. She retrains as a barrister. She becomes the 28 candidate for Finchley in 1959. She transforms herself in the course of the 50s from the sort of Methodist grammar school girl to a more of a Home Counties, Tory, sort of mother, wife and mother. So she's got her kids at private school, she goes to the Church of England, she has this new accent, kind of cut glass accent, and she has these very extravagant hats. In fact, it's her hats that people associate with, though this period more than anything else.
- [25:28]
Tom Holland
Her accent does occasionally break through, doesn't it? So famously she said of. Was it Neil Kinnick that he was frit, which was a. A Granthamism.
- [25:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. But that's the virtually the only time.
- [25:39]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [25:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
She never. There's never a hint that she's actually not from the south of England, really. The one thing obviously that's holding her back is the issue of her being a woman. And I think actually during her premiership, people almost underrated how important this was to her political identity. She's obviously not a feminist. You know, she disdains feminism and feminists, by and large, hated her. But she's very unusual in being a working wife and mother. She always stuck up for working women. So in the 1950s, she wrote in for the Young Conservative Journal and she said, you know, if a woman has ambition, she should be able to use her talent to the full.
- [26:18]
Tom Holland
Isn't that a feminist perspective?
- [26:20]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, you might say that it was, yeah. I mean, she said at one point, men who disdain working women should remember their daughters would almost certainly have to go out to work. You know, this is the world we are moving into.
- [26:31]
Tom Holland
I don't see that as being an unfeminist perspective.
- [26:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, of course, I don't see it as unfeminist either. I think in lots of ways she's the embodiment of the social and cultural changes that are massively expanding the horizons of British women between the 1950s and the 1980s. The thing is, of course, she doesn't like activists of any kind, really, and she doesn't like progressive Do Gooders. So she doesn't sit well with the kind of women's lib movement of the 1970s. Her being a woman is both a strength and a weakness. First of all, it means that she stands out from all the boring men in gray suits. I mean, that is a huge thing for you. If you're a politician, everyone immediately recognizes you and you stand apart. Because she's a woman, though, it means that people always talk about her hats, her outfits, you know, what she's, how she's getting on as a mother, all of this kind of thing, rather than her political opinions. And because she's a woman, her Tory colleagues take her much less seriously and dismiss her ideas. And the paradigmatic example of this is the person who is the leader in the late 1960s and 1970s, which is Ted Heath. And the funny thing about this is that Heath and Thatcher are pretty similar in some ways. They're both from modest, provincial backgrounds. They both went to grammar school, they both went to Oxford. They're both slightly humorless, ambitious, impatient kind of self. Made the difference, I think, is that Heath, who's a bit older, is. His background is more humble. He's the son of a Kentish builder
- [28:00]
Tom Holland
and his mother was a lady's maid, wasn't he?
- [28:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
His mother was a lady's maid. Exactly.
- [28:04]
Tom Holland
Ladies maids are always notorious as snobs.
- [28:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
They're very snobbish. Exactly. And he is very keen to play down his background and basically to turn himself into a kind of Balliol educated, upper crust Tory. Hence his mad voice that he has that sort of strangulated voice.
- [28:18]
Tom Holland
Voice strangulated? Yeah, that's what the adjective that's always
- [28:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
used, isn't it, his fondness for yachting, for classical music. These are all kind of upper class tastes that he affects. And he never, ever talks about his background. Thatcher is not embarrassed by her background, perhaps because it was a little bit more respectable. She glories in the middle class identity. She hates the sort of what she calls the establishment, the tweedy country gents who despise her. And so she is much more obviously a sort of bourgeois champion than Heath is. Now. Heath has known her since 1949. He doesn't like women and he doesn't really like her. But he is told when he becomes Tory leader, you need a statutory woman. That was the expression. And he asked his friends, who should I pick? And they said, what about Margaret Thatcher? She's the brightest. If he said, okay, fair enough. And Willie Whitelaw, his friend, said to him, once she's there, we will never get rid of her. And he was, of course, quite right. Now that tells you something about the way in which she's viewed generally. So part of this is her class. So Whitelaw said she was governessi. Francis Pym, another Heathite, she was a corporal, not a cavalry officer. Christopher Soames, what was he, Churchill's grandson or something, called her a jumped up housemaid. This is a very, very common in the sort of the Heath inner circle, people sneering at her because of her class, her politics. Part of this, being right wing at this point, the late 60s, early 70s is seen as a bit gauche, a bit declassee, because the vibe in the
- [29:51]
Tom Holland
Tory party at this point is paternalist. Is it?
- [29:53]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. It's more paternalist. It's more, you know, this is the modern world, having multiple phones in your office with which you can ring trade union leaders and agree a mutually beneficial deal.
- [30:03]
Tom Holland
Tipping your gamekeeper, making sure he's all right.
- [30:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. At Christmas. Exactly, exactly. And not. And not sort of glorying in your. In your achievements or your wealth or your. The fact that you have, you know, hauled yourself up by your bootstraps, which is a bit common.
- [30:19]
Tom Holland
Buying your own furniture.
- [30:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, it's buying your own furniture. Exactly. It's also her style. A lot of men just don't like her style, which is quite abrasive and sharp. So Woodrow Wyatt in the Sunday Mirror in 1969, he ended up being a big fan of her, but this stage he was not anti feminists may feel she is the sort of thing that happens if you allow women to go into politics. Her air of bossiness, her aptitude for Interfering can be very tiresome and irritating to easygoing men who do not always want to be kept up to scratch, particularly by a female. That, I mean, that last bit absolutely captures the sort of golf club vibe of the, the late 60s and 70s, doesn't it? Anyway, Heath becomes prime minister in 1970. She becomes his Education Secretary. Education was traditionally seen as. That's what you get the little ladies to do.
- [31:06]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [31:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
You know, education or health, the kind, caring jobs. The civil servants of the Department of Education by and large hated her. They were Oxford educated public school men themselves. One of them said she was like a very well spoken nanny, which tells you where he was coming from. She had a totally unoriginal mind. She was really quite narrow. Her Permanent Secretary was called Sir. Her exit name is. Sir William Pyle. Sir William Pyle. He said she was narrow minded, emotional, impossible to argue with. She lives in a world apart, unaware of how most of the population lived. The knowledge of history was nil. So these are obviously former public schoolboys. They don't want some Midlands, you know, grammar school girl who did chemistry to come and tell them what to do.
- [31:57]
Tom Holland
Horrible.
- [31:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
And this was widespread even in the Cabinet. So whenever she was speaking in the Cabinet, Heath would. People would say. Heath would drum impatiently on his blotter
- [32:06]
Tom Holland
because Heath is notoriously rude. That's something that listeners have to keep and bear in mind.
- [32:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
He's insanely rude.
- [32:12]
Tom Holland
He is the rudest man ever to have been Prime Minister but actually the
- [32:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
rudeness is quite common. So Reginald Maudling, who was his Home Secretary, who was like a man who, what did he. He used to drink a pint of Dubonne and gin for breakfast. Very, very 70s Britain, he called it, and I quote, that bloody woman who never listens, that bitch. And that's basically, that's the conversational tenor of Ted Heath's Tory Party.
- [32:38]
Tom Holland
And just to reiterate, she is the only woman in the Cabinet.
- [32:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, exactly. So you can imagine, basically the Cabinet breaks up, they all go off to a gentleman's club and drink jubonnet and gin and get absolutely wrecked and talk about the Second World War and, you know, being kind to the trade unions and she's on her own, she has to go back home to the twins and whatnot, knowing that they're all talking about her and saying, that bloody woman, she never listens.
- [33:01]
Tom Holland
But I suppose she can console herself by snatching milk out from the hands of little children.
- [33:08]
Dominic Sandbrook
So this is her one brush of fame as Education Secretary. She scrapped free school milk for children between the ages of 7 and 11 and everyone said she was the milk snatcher. And this is a totally mad and confected issue because the Wilson government, the Labour government of the 60s, had already scrapped free school milk for 11 to 18 year olds. This was basically the next step. Most kids hated this free school milk anyway and it was a hangover from the 40s meant to deal with the Depression. I mean, the idea that they were giving out all this free skill milk, I think is bonkers. Anyway, Thatcher's Education Secretary. Here's the thing that may surprise listeners. She is much more mainstream and indeed in some ways much more progressive than you might expect. She closed more grammar schools and turned them into comprehensive schools later. You know, a great kind of Tory issue that. How terrible this was.
- [33:57]
Tom Holland
So grammar schools, just to explain for people, are selective, selected on. On ability, but inevitably because ability is honed by money.
- [34:07]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [34:08]
Tom Holland
The accusation is that it's a kind of a scam for middle class parents with sharp elbows.
- [34:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And so in the 60s and 70s, a lot of these selective schools were turned into comprehensive schools in which everybody went. And this was great shock to the sort of Tory press and whatnot. She persisted with this, this program and closed more grammar schools than any other minister in British history.
- [34:32]
Tom Holland
And she didn't bring them back, did she, when she became Prime Minister, really?
- [34:35]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean, she. The grammar schools are still an issue today, isn't it? Yeah. If you want to turn something out for the Daily Mail, bring you back grammar schools.
- [34:43]
Tom Holland
Oh, really?
- [34:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. I don't think I've ever written a column about bringing back grammar schools, but
- [34:47]
Tom Holland
it was always in the locker waiting.
- [34:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Anyway, I think this is an example of something that people get massively wrong about Thatcher. They see her as this red blooded ideologue, you know, fighting tooth and claw for what she believes to be right. Never giving up, never giving ground. This is total rubbish. She is a pragmatic career politician. She sits in Ted Heath's cabinet while he's throwing money around, pumping money into the economy, doing deals with the unions, all of this going into Europe and she never says a word against it, not a squeak of protest, she just basically goes along with it.
- [35:25]
Tom Holland
Is that because she, she feels that she's bound by collective responsibility of the cabinet or.
- [35:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, partly, partly. But also she's a politician. It's her, it's her job in a way to, to, you know, she's, she, she wants to thrive in the party, she wants to get on, she wants to. Lots of politicians do this. You accommodate yourself a little bit to the mood of the moment. I mean when she's having a drink, when you with in private, she probably says, I wonder if we're, you know, going a little bit too far down the corporatist road. But she's not one to rock the boat, basically. She's actually, amazingly enough, given how she later runs the government, she's a team player at this stage. And. And when Heath loses in 2-2-74, so he loses that first election of the year, he promotes her, he gives her a really big job, Environment Secretary, which covers planning and housing and things like that. The Tories use her in the second election of the year in October, more than any other minister except Heath. And she has a very unthatcherite policy. She will cap your mortgage interest rate at 9.5% irrespective of wider interest rates or the state of the economy in otherwise they will basically rig the interest rates, which is not something you would expect from a free marketeer at all. Anyway, the Tories lose that election in October and the verdict is generally that she's done very well and she's been their big star. And actually some papers say, you know, if Ted Heath were ever to go, she could be a dark horse candidate. I mean she's never realistically going to win, but she could have her hat in the ring and do quite well. Who knows? And I quote Sunday Times, she's a real contender, despite the apparent handicap that she is a woman. And at this point it is seen as very unlikely that a woman could lead. She has said so herself. So there's a children's program she went on in 1973, Val meets the VIPs. That's it. And they meet celebrities and she's the celebrity. And a child says, would you like to be Prime Minister? And she says, I would not wish to be Prime Minister, dear. I have not enough experience for that job. And this is only two years before she becomes party leader. And before that she told the local newspaper in Finchley where she's an mp, There will never be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime. The male population is too prejudiced.
- [37:45]
Tom Holland
Ken. Quite a feminist perspective.
- [37:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, yeah, I guess so. And I think she absolutely believes that. Everyone knows her dream is to be Chancellor. She basically is Rachel Reeves only slightly funnier. Is she funnier? I mean she's. I mean you.
- [37:58]
Tom Holland
No one can be less funny than Rachel Reeves.
- [38:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
I mean imagine you went to a stand up night and it was like Rachel Reeves and Margaret Thatcher on the bill. Your heart would sink. So oh my God. Anyway, so what changes? So in October 74, Heath has lost two elections in nine months and the tourists are down to 36%. Everybody thinks that Heath is going to resign. He kind of has to resign now. He's lost loads of elections. But Heath is the world's most stubborn man and he has no intention of resigning. He thinks, well, I was right, the British people were wrong. I shouldn't be given another chance in which they can redeem themselves. And Heath, weirdly, given his rudeness, he inspires tremendous loyalty from his lieutenants. So the obvious person to succeed him would be his lieutenant, Willie Whitelaw, who we'll talk about in the second half. But none of them have the sort of have the ruthlessness to challenge him. So Heath does make one concession. He says, I'll put myself up for re election in January and a challenger will only need two nominations. So any Tory MP could plausibly challenge him. Now, there is one Tory MP who everyone thinks will challenge him, and this is his former secretary at the Department of Health and Social Security, who is Sir Keith Joseph. Keith Joseph had been a sort of conventional minister, but then in 74, he had a massive conversion experience. He said, I was wrong about everything. We've been wrong as a party. We haven't been properly Conservative. We should embrace free market liberalism and I will stand against Ted Heath. But then Keith Joseph, a little bit like Enoch Powell, goes to Birmingham, which you should never do as a politician, and gives a speech that destroys himself. He says, our human stock is threatened by working class mothers who are unfit to have children, so they are giving birth to the delinquents of the future and we should give these classes of people loads of birth control so that they will stop having children.
- [39:53]
Tom Holland
Sterilize them. Is this the implication?
- [39:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
Well, it's. I mean, it's not a good. It's not a good look. Basically, this destroys him. Private, Private Eye, the satirical magazine, referred to him henceforth as Sasheeth, which I think is an excellent name. Anyway, on 21st November, Sasheeth went to see his campaign manager and said, I've changed my mind, obviously, I've just. I've disgraced myself. I'm not going to stand after all. And his campaign manager said, keith, if you're not going to stand, I will, because somebody who represents our viewpoint has to stand. And this, of course, is Margaret Thatcher. And four days later, she goes to see Ted Heath in the House of Commons and she says to him, ted, I'm going to stand against you in the leadership election. And Heath being Heath, he doesn't even bother to get out of his chair. He just shrugs and he says your
- [40:43]
Tom Holland
lose huge drama and we will be finding out after the break. You know, is he right or does Mrs. Sacher emerge as leader of the Conservative party and ultimately prime minister? Any one way to find out. Join us after the break.
- [40:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
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- [41:12]
Tom Holland
give everyone the best seat in the
- [41:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
yard with the Hampton bay Mayfield park four piece conversation set for only $399. Save on grills and patio sets with low prices guaranteed during spring Black Friday only at the Home Depot now through April 22nd while supplies last exclusion supplies to homedepot.com Pricematch for details. K Pop Demon hunters Haja boys breakfast meal and hunt tricks meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take
- [41:39]
Tom Holland
breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share.
- [41:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, it's our honor.
- [41:45]
Tom Holland
It is our larger honor.
- [41:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, really stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Ba da ba ba ba and participate
- [41:56]
Tom Holland
in McDonald's while supplies last. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink?
- [42:03]
Dominic Sandbrook
Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.
- [42:18]
Tom Holland
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Rest is History. The excitement is wild because Margaret Thatcher, despite being a woman and despite not having gone to an expensive public school, has announced her intention to stand for leadership of the world's oldest political party. And clearly everyone thinks this is mad, including her own husband, Dennis. You must be out of your mind, woman. You haven't got a hope.
- [42:45]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. Yeah. That's the encouragement you want.
- [42:48]
Tom Holland
Thank you, darling. And Dominic, the press, are they rallying behind her or do they also think this is mad?
- [42:55]
Dominic Sandbrook
They think it's mad as well, actually. So I mentioned Woodrow Wyatt of the Sunday Mirror. He said the Tories will never elect a limited, bossy, self righteous and self complacent woman.
- [43:04]
Tom Holland
Because you're right, he does become a massive fan of hers and a kind of courtier. So it reflects well on Mrs. Thatcher that she doesn't bear a grudge.
- [43:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah. Although she did hold grudges, actually, but clearly not towards. Basically if people bent their knee, she's like Trumpian in that way. If you bend the knee, she's delighted. So even the right wing press, the Daily Express, Derek Marks, she is totally out of touch with anybody, but carefully corseted, middle class, middle aged ladies. Enoch Powell. So Enoch Powell, who at this point has basically left the Conservative Party, he is, you know, seen as a bit of a forerunner of that tourism. But he said they wouldn't put up with those hats and that accent, which coming from him.
- [43:45]
Tom Holland
Yeah. Well, he did wear a hat. Did he?
- [43:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, he didn't. But he did have an entertaining accent. But she has a few things going for her. Number one, she has a very, very smart campaign manager. Oh, yeah.
- [43:56]
Tom Holland
Erie Neeve.
- [43:57]
Dominic Sandbrook
So this is a tremendous character. So Airy Neave is an old Etonian who was captured by the Germans outside Calais in 1940, as the Germans advanced through France and he was imprisoned at Colditz Castle. He escaped brilliantly during a theatrical production put on by the prisoners of war at Colditz Castle. They tunneled underneath the stage, I think, and he and another bloke, a Dutchman, had, when they were making costumes, this play that some of the costumes they'd secretly made were German guards uniforms. They tunneled under the stage, they escaped out of the stage, went under, went through, back into the sort of castle grounds. They put on these uniforms, homemade. Then they walked through the lodge of the castle, kind of saluting the guards, kept walking, walked all the way to a railway station, got various trains and basically ended up walking across the Swiss border. It's an incredible, incredible story. You know, he was a massive, massive war hero because he spoke German. He was the person at the Nuremberg trials who read the indictments to the Nazi war criminals. So that's, that's a nice twist. So then he became Tory MP and everyone sort of said, what an amazing bloke this is, Escape from Colditz. And then in 1959, he had a heart attack. Heath was at that point the Chief Whip of the Tory party. And when Airy Neve came back to work after his heart attack, Heath said to him, you'd better get out of politics, you're finished. I mean, he literally said, you're finished. So rude, Incredibly rude. And Airy Neve was very offended by this he never forgave Heath. And he basically said to himself, one day I will get my revenge on that absolute shit of a man. Which he does.
- [45:39]
Tom Holland
And he does.
- [45:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, because he takes over Margaret Thatcher's campaign. He says, look, I'll run your campaign for you. The way he does it. He organizes little groups of Tory MPs to have tea with her. Now, Heath would never do this because he's so rude and so sort of haughty, but she has tea with these people and, you know, nods and smiles at them and whatnot. And the other thing that net. Ariane Eve always does, that people say is a masterstroke, as though it had never occurred to anyone to do this before. I mean, I don't think it's that, but obviously it is a considered a great masterstroke. Whenever people ask him how she's doing, he says, oh, she's doing terribly, she'll never win. But if you could lend her your vote, that would be very helpful, especially if you would like a really big heavyweight like Willie Whitelaw on the second ballot. Why don't you lend the filly? Yeah, vote for the filly. Give the filly your vote. Go on. She's doing very badly. Margaret would love your vote. And actually loads of people say, oh, go on then. Yeah, fair enough. So that's part of it. But she's also, I think, profiting from something deeper, which is a more profound shift on the right of British politics. So people like Sir Keith Joseph and indeed Margaret Thatcher and indeed Enoch Powell speak for a lot of Tory MPs and Tory activists and Tory voters and also intellectuals and people sort of right wing adjacent who have been very disappointed with Ted Heath's government. These are familiar accusations to us today. They say he's been too weak, he's been too soft, he's been too moderate, he's part of a socialist consensus. He's sucked up to Europe, he's sucked up to the trade unions, he's spent too much money, he hasn't been a real conservative. And you can get away with this sort of thing if you win. But Heath has lost two elections in
- [47:21]
Tom Holland
nine months because presumably that brands his kind of conservatism as a conservatism for losers. People don't want it.
- [47:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, completely. If you're not red blooded and then you don't win, what's the point? You might as well just fight and lose for what you believe in. That's what they say.
- [47:37]
Tom Holland
Do you think Mrs. Thatcher's image as a nanny who of course gives medicine?
- [47:42]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes.
- [47:42]
Tom Holland
Do you think that helps?
- [47:44]
Dominic Sandbrook
Totally. I completely. I think it's a very astute point. I think this is one of the roles that she plays. There are several good biographies of Margaret Thatcher. The most famous ones are the Charles Moore ones, but the one before that was John Campbell, and he had a passage there where he talked about the different roles that she would play. You know, Nurse Thatcher, Nanny Thatcher, all the housewife, all these different things. And Nanny Thatcher is one of the most common and the most appealing. I think there's a particular kind of man, frankly, who quite likes it. But also I think it's when the country is not doing well to basically say, I will sort it out, I will give you the medicine you need. That. That's quite a. A good card to play, I think.
- [48:23]
Tom Holland
Well, people say that about British politics now, that. That someone needs to stand up and say, it's all a terrible mess. This is what we've got to do.
- [48:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
Harsh medicine, of course. Exactly.
- [48:31]
Tom Holland
And there's a kind of masochist strain that people quite like that.
- [48:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly so. And there's a. Definitely an appetite on the right for more kind of red meat. So it's a lovely letter, I think, to the Times by Sir Alec Douglas Hume, the former Prime Minister's brother William. And he said, it's time for a Tory who's not ashamed, who will let you buy your Rolls Royce and cigars if that's what you want, and send your boys to Eton, and if any man attempts to say you nay, salute him with two fingers in the shape of an inverted V sign. So there's this. There's this sort of instinctive emotional thirst for more robust, more obviously conservative politics. But there's also an intellectual, more ideological side to it. So since 1955, a think tank called the Institute for Economic affairs has been arguing that Britain has gone much too far down the road to socialism. And it's been calling like a voice in the wilderness, for privatization of nationalized industries, for cutting the welfare state, for bringing back free market economics, kind of laissez faire economics that you would have found in the 19th century under the sort of Gladstone administration and whatnot. And part of this is the adoption of a new creed, which in some ways is quite an old creed, which is monetarism. In very simple terms, monetarism is basically the government should stop messing around in the economy, stop taxing and spending, stop worrying about unemployment. Just concentrate on one thing, your one priority, which is regulating the money supply to keep inflation down, because inflation is the real evil and this is the brainchild of the Chicago economist Milton Friedman. He comes to Britain, he gives a lecture about it in 1970. The audience has loads of Tory MPs, also loads of Labour MPs. So Jim Callahan, who we'll be meeting later in the series, is very interested in this kind of stuff. And by 1974, this message resonates with lots of Tories. They are saying, you know what, we've gone completely wrong. We've been taxing and spending far too much. We've been trying to intervene in the economy and save lame duck industries and stuff. We should just leave the economy alone, stop spending so much money, just worry about inflation.
- [50:41]
Tom Holland
And not worry about unemployment.
- [50:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. And not worry about unemployment. The person who'd really made himself the champion of this was Sir Keith Joseph. But he's now out of the ring and it falls to Thatcher and his supporters rally to Thatcher. But she's very clever about how she packages this, because her campaign is as much about what we would now call vibes as it is about ideas. So, first of all, the fact that she's a woman is really important. She basically markets herself as the champion of the middle class housewife, who's basically the person who does the shopping and has to worry about the family budget.
- [51:18]
Tom Holland
She is also present. You know, you talked about the role she plays. She is presenting herself as the housewife who will sort out the national budget.
- [51:26]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, exactly.
- [51:27]
Tom Holland
Balance the books, not spend too much on the shopping or whatever.
- [51:31]
Dominic Sandbrook
So it, it actually ticks two boxes. On the one hand, she says, I'm like. I'm like voters, I'm normal, I'm ordinary, I'm not a, you know, I am a career politician, but I'm kind of not, because I'm also a wife and mother. And on the other hand, as you say, means that she can talk about complicated economic issues in very domestic terms. It gives her the kind of tools to do it. So an interview with the Mirror before the first ballot. I'm a very ordinary person who leads a very normal life. I enjoy it. Seeing that the family have a good breakfast and shopping keeps me in touch.
- [52:03]
Tom Holland
She knows the price of a pint of milk.
- [52:05]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. She actually gets the Mirror journalist and photographer to come and watch her do the housework.
- [52:10]
Tom Holland
Oh, she wears a kind of frilly penny, doesn't she?
- [52:12]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes, she literally does the housework. And the piece says, you know, she did this, she did the shopping, she did the laundry, and after that she had to tidy up the Tory Party, polish off Ted Heath and give Britain a good spring cleaning. With Margaret Thatcher, it's sometimes a bit hard to tell whether she wants to be Prime Minister or housewife of the year. And that of course is a very useful card to play if you're, you know, if you're pitching yourself as the outsider who's going to clean things up. Now ironically, the Guardian of all newspapers said that she was all image and no substance.
- [52:44]
Tom Holland
Well, they've changed their mind on that.
- [52:46]
Dominic Sandbrook
They did change their mind on that, but actually that's not right. There is clearly substance there. All her interviews and all her articles and stuff, she says she stands for traditional middle class Tory politics. Individual freedom, individual prosperity, law and order, private property, all of this kind of thing. Now Heath and his, Whenever Heath and his camp read this, they kind of wince and laugh. They say she's selfish, she'd make us narrow minded, she'd make us too middle class. So one of Heath's aides was a young MP called Douglas Hurd, who goes on to be one of Mrs. Thatcher's most reliable ministers. And he said at the time to a journalist, Hugo Young, he said, she can never win. She's limited by her narrow horizons, no vision, no broad sweep and inability to put herself in others shoes.
- [53:37]
Tom Holland
So he is fabulously posh, isn't he? He's eaten Foreign Office, all of that. But in the long run, when Mrs. Thatcher resigns and he runs to succeed her, he feels obliged to court the, the, the votes of the Tory mps by affecting to be a tenant farmer. Which is a, which is a ludicrous pretension.
- [54:00]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [54:02]
Tom Holland
So it's a sign of how profoundly Mrs. Thatcher is going to upend the kind of social standards of the Conservatives completely.
- [54:09]
Dominic Sandbrook
And it never occurs to, I guess, people like Douglas Hurd in 1975 or the other people around him in Ted Heath's court, they think they are the Tory Party, but actually the Tory party more broadly, activists voters are much more like Margaret Thatcher than they are like Douglas Hurd.
- [54:30]
Tom Holland
Well, there are more middle class people than there are upper class people.
- [54:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Most people even in the Tory party didn't go to Eton. So this is going to be a problem. So anyway, we come to the first ballot, which is Tuesday the 4th of February 1975. Of course everybody knows that Heath will win. Every Tory paper predicts that Heath will win and only one Tory paper, the male, explicitly supports Thatcher. There's a good omen for Heath as well. The, the gods are with him. Because in that morning's Times, Madame to swords the waxworks have published the result of their annual visitors survey. And in the list of political heroes, of visitors to Madame to Swords, Heath has come second and he's been beaten. Only one man has the power to beat Ted Heath and that man is Henry Kissinger.
- [55:20]
Tom Holland
I mean, Henry Kissinger, very dodgy behavior in Southeast Asia. But Heath, he abolished all the counties, traditional counties. So what's wrong with the British people voting for that? Yeah, Mad.
- [55:32]
Dominic Sandbrook
Why is he so high? That's unbelievable. But I mean, here's the. So when you filled in the survey, when you went to Madam to Swords, you had to say who your hero was, but also you had to name people who inspire hate and fear. I love this. So in third place, Richard Nixon. Weird that Kissinger is in one list and Nixon the other. I think people have got that wrong. Second, Adolf Hitler. I mean, he's. He's a bad man. I don't think we can argue with this. His placing, though. I think he should be first because in first place is Harold Wilson.
- [56:06]
Tom Holland
Oh, really?
- [56:06]
Dominic Sandbrook
Do you think Howard Wilson was a worse man than Hitler? Sure.
- [56:10]
Tom Holland
No, because, well, I mean, to point to comparison, they both like wearing very tight shorts, didn't they?
- [56:16]
Dominic Sandbrook
I knew that would come up. I absolutely need it. Also, Hitler ran a tighter ship in his bunker than Wilson did in Downing Street. There's none of the nonsense about lunch.
- [56:27]
Tom Holland
Well, listen, Dominic, we're spiraling off.
- [56:29]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think Wilson doesn't belong in that list.
- [56:30]
Tom Holland
I. I agree with you. I. I think Hitler is worse than Wilson.
- [56:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, right. Well, anyway, this is the omen for Heath. He's done well in this poll, so it's looking good. The vote is held in Committee Room 14 in the House of Commons. Heath votes at 3 o' clock and then he goes back to his office to wait with his cronies and his campaign manage. Tim Kitson goes off to get the final figures. The suspense mounts. They're all sitting there, Heath kind of glacial and brooding as he always is. Then the door opens and Kitson comes back in and it's terrible news. Heath has won 119 votes and Thatcher, the filly, has won 130. They can't believe it. Heath's mate, Lord Hailsham, bursts into tears.
- [57:10]
Tom Holland
But it's lucky that Edward Heath is going to take it well, isn't he?
- [57:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, well, he doesn't. He doesn't give anything away. He's totally impassive. I mean, he's always impassive. He just pours himself a massive glass of whiskey and just sort of sits there like an Easter Island. Statue. Now in, in the Thatcher camp there's a mood of absolute amazement and jubilation. So they, they're in airy Neves flat in Westminster. You can see the footage online on YouTube. There's an ITV reporter interviewing Dennis Thatcher saying, how do you feel about it? She says, delighted, terribly proud. Wouldn't you? You know, Dennis can't believe it. Thatcher's very gracious actually. She says she's very sad for Ted Heath. He's had an enormous achievement to be Tory leader so long. One must thank and applaud him for it. But she then says, well I'm not, I haven't won yet because there's got to be a second, second round when other Tories will pile in. Interestingly, the assumption, particularly in Downing street, we haven't mentioned the Labour government at all. They think she won't win. So Harold Wilson says to his aides he fears Thatcher especially as a woman because it'll be hard to know how to argue with her. You don't want to look like you're being patronizing, but he says the Conservative Party won't be willing to have her as leader and Willy Whitelaw will win on the second ballot. So the second ballot's a week later and now Willy Whitelaw is in the ring and Willy Whitelaw is your absolute textbook casting agency supplied 1970s Tory politician, isn't he?
- [58:39]
Tom Holland
He's got kind of oyster eyes, hasn't he?
- [58:41]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, he's got massive bags under his eyes. I mean the bags under his eyes are bigger than his eyes.
- [58:45]
Tom Holland
Great ruddy cheeks.
- [58:47]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, he's a big man. He's from the Scottish landed gentry. He went to Winchester, he went to Trinity College Cambridge. He was a tank commander in Normandy. He led his battalion on all the way into Germany.
- [59:01]
Tom Holland
Because this is something we talked about in our 1974 episode that all these politicians, you know, they could, they can be very fat, they can be very spindly, they all wear thick kind of glasses. But they had all been insanely brave in the war and taken out kind of panzer divisions with single handedly and things storm beaches.
- [59:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
They combine an absolutely jaw dropping resume between 1939 and 1945 with then a 20 year record of sort of shambling incompetence.
- [59:32]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [59:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
Whiskey, ill fitting suits.
- [59:35]
Tom Holland
Yeah. Useless legislation.
- [59:37]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, exactly. And he, he's been leader of the House of Commons for Heath. He was the first ever Northern Ireland secretary basically. He was Britain's pro consul in Belfast and then he was, he handled the miners strike in 1974. He's been the basically the go to man for Heath's Tory government. And he's very shrewd, he's very experienced, he's very kind of affable, but he has this shambling and sort of woolly consensus man blancmange image. For years, everyone had thought he would be Tory leader. He'd been the future England captain of Tories. But because he's been so loyal to Heath for so long, he now enters with a massive handicap because he looks like a coward compared to Thatcher. Thatcher dared to challenge Heath and he
- [60:18]
Tom Holland
didn't, which is ironic because of course he's not a coward at all.
- [60:22]
Dominic Sandbrook
His record. Exactly. Given his record of bravery, as the Telegraph says it, it looks as though a herd of faint hearts left it to a courageous and able woman to topple a formidable leader and then ganged up to deny her her just reward.
- [60:36]
Tom Holland
And so here we see her get taking on the image of Boadicea, which will also be a crucial one.
- [60:40]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Well, as one Tory MP said, the choice between Thatcher and Whitelaw is a choice between a woman and an old woman. And I will vote for the woman, you know, because he's seen as bumbling and all of this kind of thing. So the vote is held on Tuesday 11th February, and the result comes through at 4o'. Clock. Thatcher has won 146 votes, Whitelaw has won 79. The others, who've all thrown their hats in the ring on dribs and drabs and unbelievably something that no one expected even, you know, a couple of weeks ago. Margaret Thatcher is the leader of the Conservative Party. Whitelaw is dumbstruck by this. He burst into tears when he heard the news and he said later, the worst thing was that his elderly mother could never forgive him for losing to a woman. Which tells its own story. Most of the sort of grandees in the Tory party were absolutely appalled. As one party vice chairman put it, my God, the bitch has won. And a lot of young MPs, because a lot of people who join the Tory party as kind of rising stars at this point are Heath people. They're paternalists. They think them that to be modern is to be, you know, more on the left of the party. I guess a lot of these people who end up becoming her ministers in the 1980s are really shocked when she wins in 75. People like Kenneth Clark or Norman Fowler or Paul Channen, who was the Transport secretary in the 80s, he said at the time, she's a right wing fanatic who could never win over the middle ground.
- [62:12]
Tom Holland
And what's the reaction of Labour to her victory?
- [62:15]
Dominic Sandbrook
They think it's a tremendous laugh. So, Marcia Williams, great to have her back on the show. Harold Wilson's tyrannical secretary. She later remembered seeing all the ministers laughing and slapping each other on the back and saying, well, well, the next elections we've as good as one. It's a foregone conclusion. This mad woman will never win. Wilson himself was very miserable. He said, oh, I have to learn new tricks to beat a woman. And then, characteristically, he poured himself a stiff brandy, which he will be doing a lot in this series. But actually the most interesting one is the one prominent labor woman was a politician called Barbara Castle, who had been in charge of the relations with the trade unions in the late 60s and had also been Transport Secretary introduced. I think the seat belt is Barbara Castle's great innovation. And a lot of people had said of Barbara Castle, maybe she will be the first woman Prime Minister because she's a sort of real socialist firebrand and her politics are completely different from Thatcher's. But she writes in her diary, I've had a growing conviction that this would happen. She's so clearly the best man among them. I can't help feeling a thrill, even though I believe her election will make things much more difficult for us. I've been saying for a long time that this country is ready, even more than ready, for a woman prime minister. And of course, she's right. Actually, to me, the most surprising thing is Thatcher's reaction, because if you go online, you can see her interview with Michael Cockrell of the BBC and he says, how do you feel? So she's just one. She's in the flush of victory and she says it's. It's a sign of the sort of the. The human being behind the sort of iconic image. She says to think that one is the next name after a long line of very, very distinguished names, because, my goodness, Edward Heath, Alec Douglas Holme, Harold Macmillan, Anthony Eden and then, of course, the great Winston. It's like a dream, really, wouldn't you think so? I almost wept when they told me. I did weep. Yeah. This is the style that basically her admirers adore and her critics loathe the sort of slightly syrupy. You know, she's very good at this. This sort of stuff. So she's another Tory leader, just as we. I know this has been a very long episode, but just a couple of things about what it actually means. Afterwards, a lot of people said it was a fluke. That basically history could have worked out in lots of different ways. You know, Ted Heath could have resigned earlier, somebody else could have stood against him. Keith Joseph might not have made that mad speech and then, you know, she'd never have stood. Which is sort of true. You know, there are ways in which history could turn out differently, but there are definitely deeper factors. So just to whiz through some of the deeper factors, it's interesting when you look at the vote. The Tory MPs who voted for Heath tend to be public schoolboys, landed gentry MPs from Scotland and Wales. Do you know who they're like? They are. They're. Rory Stewart. Yes, that's his constituency. And her supporters are more likely to come from the south of England to have gone to grammar schools, not public schools. So they're more middle class, less posh.
- [65:20]
Tom Holland
They're Essex men.
- [65:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes. They're on the right of the party.
- [65:23]
Tom Holland
So like Norman Tebbett.
- [65:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly.
- [65:25]
Tom Holland
Who? I think he is an MP at this point. Is he?
- [65:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yes.
- [65:29]
Tom Holland
He's called the skinhead, isn't he?
- [65:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
The Chingford Skinhead. Chingford Skinhead, exactly. They are more. They're self made, their politics are more aggressive, their politics are more. They would, they would say, no doubt, we are true Tories and these poshos are actually just weak.
- [65:46]
Tom Holland
Yeah. So it's estate agents, not owners of estates.
- [65:50]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Estate agents have taken over from the estate owners. They're aspirational, they've worked for their success and they don't feel guilty about it. So there's a class element, there's an ideological element which is the resurgence of this free market liberal tradition that has been underplayed since 1945 because the post war Tory leaders have been so keen to banish memories of. Of the Depression. And her critics, sort of on the left of the Tory party, like Serene Gilmour, who wrote a book about it in the 80s, said, she's actually not really a conservative, she's not a proper Conservative. She's the. That most hideous of things, a Gladstonian liberal who believes in free markets and all of this. And I think this is actually. I think this is rubbish. I think free market liberalism had always been part of the Tory brand. And, you know, everything that she's saying, Baldwin and Chamberlain and Disraeli, I mean, I don't think they'd have really argued with all this stuff about, you know, low taxes, you know, standing on your own two feet, blah, blah, blah. I think it's actually the Heathi period that's the aberration rather than the Thatcherite one. But the two things that I think are really distinctive about Thatcherism, first of all, I think it has a big populist element to it. And that housewife thing that we mentioned is a big part of it. Grantham is a big part of it. The grocer's shop, the grammar school, a lot of things that she had once tried to leave behind because they're not really. She wants to be more respectable, but now she glories in them. They're very useful to her. So she boasts. I mean, here's an interview she gives with World In Action. She says, they say, where do your values come from? She says they will. They come from my life experience, from going to an ordinary state school, having no privileges at all, except perhaps the ones that count most. A good home background with parents who are very interested in their children and in them getting on and all of this thing. She says it again and again. I'm a plain, straightforward provincial. I've got no hang ups about my background. I know what it's like running a house. I know what it's like having to live within a budget. I know what it's like having to cope. No Tory leader before her could have said this. If Harold Macmillan had said this, people would have laughed at him. Yeah, Winston Churchill.
- [68:02]
Tom Holland
Yeah, he's not going to say that, but. But it's so influential that then you get Douglas heard pretending to be a tenant farmer and, you know, Kemi Bate not going on about how she worked in McDonald's and things. I mean, it's absolutely what you have to do now.
- [68:14]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's a political star that had long been very popular in America, but not in Britain. I would say the other thing is something else she gets from Grantham and that's the Methodism. And actually this, to me, I think this is one of the absolute defining things of Thatcherism. It's the tone, the moralistic evangelical tone.
- [68:32]
Tom Holland
Yeah, and the low church tone, rather than the high church tone completely.
- [68:36]
Dominic Sandbrook
Margaret Roberts as a girl had to say grace before every meal. She had to go to chapel three or four times on Sundays. Her father, as a lay preacher, went on and on and on about hard work, individualism, thrift, clean living, all of this. And this is what I think makes her politics different. There is a moralism to it, a low church moralism that is totally unlike anything that any other Tory leaders says before her. So in the. In 1984, an interview with the Times. I am in politics because of the conflict between good and Evil. And I believe that in the end good will triumph. I mean, Ted Heath could have lived to the age of 10,000 and he would never have said anything like that. It's unthinkable.
- [69:16]
Tom Holland
Also, I mean, what's interesting is that it's giving to the left what the left often give to the right. It's casting the left as evil and the writers virtuous. And usually it's the other way around completely.
- [69:30]
Dominic Sandbrook
It is. If you, I mean, you see this reflected in her archives, which are online at Thatcher foundation website, which is brilliant, by the way, this amazing digital archive. You can see all the notes that she would hand write for her conference speeches and they'd be full of all the stuff about, you know, the evils of socialism, good versus evil, what the great religions of the past teach us, what life, you know, life is struggle. Her speechwriters would cut all this, they'd say, God, this is bonkers. But it would find its way in one way or another. And I think you're absolutely right. She thinks socialism is not just wrong, she thinks it's. She thinks it's morally, it's evil, it's corrupting. And people in 70s Britain, you know, they're used to thinking socialists are well meaning and idealistic. Maybe they're a bit deluded, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, she doesn't think that. She doesn't think they are well meaning, idealistic. She thinks that they're doing the devil's work.
- [70:26]
Tom Holland
Yeah.
- [70:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
And that's what makes for her admirers, it's so invigorating. And for her critics, I mean, if you're on the left, right, and you're used to thinking yourself of yourself as the goodies to be told, actually you're not, you're the bad people. It's insulting and it's why, I think, one reason why people take it so personally when she sort of wades into battle.
- [70:49]
Tom Holland
And talking of people taking it personally, what about Edward Heath, AKA the Incredible Sulk?
- [70:56]
Dominic Sandbrook
So the day after she won, she went to see Heath in Belgravia at his house. And she said, you know, it's a courtesy call, Ted, would you serve in a senior position under me? And her aides told the press afterwards that Heath had deliberately stacked books on all the chairs and made it impossible for her to sit. Sit down. So he sat down, but she had to remain standing. Which says it all about Ted Heath. I mean, if it was anyone else, you wouldn't believe it, but with him it sounds absolutely plausible. And he spoke to her own in monosyllables. Sacha said, no. Yes, goodbye, whatever. And he then embarks on this unbelievably spectacular sulk. So at the end of the year, Willy Whitelaw tried to organize a reconciliation. He said, you know, why don't you get together, have a meeting and come together for the good of the party in the country? He said, no. And he said to him, thatcher and her supporters are traitors. They will destroy the party and destroy Britain. Two years after that, another of their friends, Peter Carrington, said to him, I think you should try harder to be a good loser. And I think you should make a real effort now to rehabilitate yourself and go around telling everybody how great you think Margaret Thatcher is. And the wonderful account, he stared at him and in a quote, absolute amazement, and said, why on earth would I do that? I don't think she's any good. I'm much better. I should be there still. And basically, he lives this for the next.
- [72:24]
Tom Holland
For the rest of his life, he's still sulking. Even after she's kind of stopped being
- [72:28]
Dominic Sandbrook
Prime Minister, even after, you know, she's an elderly woman. Heath is still nursing his hatred and he will never, ever, ever give it up. Which makes. Which is very amusing, I have to say. But the thing is, a lot of people agreed with Ted heath in the 70s. They agreed that he was better and that he should still be there. You know, you did that introduction. I mean, that really did capture how she spoke in the comments. When she made her debut as Tory leader, she was. Everyone said she was very pale and nervous. She was hesitant or gabbled, and then was shrill and just. And Wilson. So the very first PMQs, Wilson drank three glasses of brandy to steady his nerves, then went in and absolutely wiped the floor with her. She was no good at all. And there's a lovely description two months later by Wilson's aide, Bernard Donahue, who wrote a fantastic diary. And we'll be quoting from him a lot in the next few episodes, he said of Prime Minister's questions. The only interest is to see Margaret Thatcher sitting there, petrified like a rabbit in front of a stoat, and Ted Heath sitting waiting stonily in the corner with no sign of life until Harold puts the boot into Mrs. Thatcher when a wintry smile crosses his face. So this sets the tone, really, for the next six months. I mean, we talked about Kemi Badenoch and her rocky start as leader of the Opposition. Thatcher's start is very, very rocky. In the first six months, her approval rating fell by half, from 64% to 35%. And by the summer of 1975, a lot of people are saying, she's obviously a mistake, she's a dud. His friend Lord Carrington says to his pals, she, you know, mark my words, she will be gone by Christmas. But will she? Because everything is about to change. The economy is heading towards the rocks. Britain is about to hold its first ever referendum on whether to leave the European Community. And the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, is planning to walk out of British politics at a point when the international money markets are about to lose confidence in Britain as a going concern and to leave Britain teetering on the brink of financial oblivion.
- [74:42]
Tom Holland
God, unbelievable excitements. And on top of that, Dominic, am I not right in saying that you have the Sex Pistols lurking in the wings? Yeah, the long, hot summer of 1976.
- [74:54]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah.
- [74:54]
Tom Holland
And I imagine that there'll be all kinds of insane, shambolic goings on in Downing Street. So all of that to look forward to. The rest is History Club members, of course, can hear the next three episodes right now. Our newsletters. They'll be thudding into your inboxes anytime soon.
- [75:13]
Dominic Sandbrook
Loads of 70s content.
- [75:15]
Tom Holland
And if you would like to join the rest of History Club and you're not already a member, then of course you can go to the restofhistory.com and sign up there. But in the meanwhile, thank you, Dominic. Thanks everyone for listening. Bye bye.
- [75:27]
Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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Dominic Sandbrook
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Tom Holland
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