God and Mrs Thatcher (17 page)

Anglican tensions too were exacerbated by the continual decline in religious worship and sacraments, which the liberalising trends clearly had not halted. Baptisms, for example, dropped by 15 per cent in the ten years between 1970 and 1980, in line with congregation figures as a whole.
32
Under such circumstances, the ecclesiastical leadership were forced to enact a systematic overhaul of its parishes. Between 1969 and 1984 some 1,086 churches were categorised as redundant and in 1976 alone it was estimated that one parish church was destroyed every nine days.
33

The decline of those entering the priesthood also prompted the closure of eleven of its twenty-six theological colleges between 1961 and 1977.
34
The priesthood was no longer the natural path for young Oxbridge graduates: by 1971 only 16 per cent of clergy came via this route compared with 38 per cent between 1920 and 1960; over half of new priests had no degree at all. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing; many believed that it would rid the Church of its endemic elitism, but there was little doubt that it altered the culture of Anglicanism in the process. Methodism fared even worse. Manchester, once a key stronghold, saw its congregations drop by 44 per cent between 1964 and 1984; a feat that even the most optimistic Moderators judged as
irreversible.
35
Roman Catholic congregations, which had reached a peak in the late 1960s, also fell by 17 per cent in just ten years.
36
In 1978, Liverpool Cathedral, the fifth largest of its kind in the world and only the third Anglican cathedral to have been built in Britain since the Reformation, was finally opened with a thanksgiving service attended by the Queen. At the point of its inception, Victoria had been on the throne, Liverpool was a thriving port and the Church of England had just established the diocese of Liverpool to cater for the city’s rapidly expanding population. By the time it was finally completed a century later, it seemed a clumsy and oversized monument to a muscular Christianity long gone. The fact that the central tower had a lift for tourists – the first of its kind for a cathedral – revealed much about the perceived intentions of its visitors.

The key growth area in the 1970s was amongst the conservative evangelicals, which accounted for nearly half of all new ordinands. These new recruits, who soon established their influence within middle-class suburban areas, tended to be individualistic in their faith and more willing than ever to challenge the liberal Anglicanism orthodoxy; they also tended to be Conservative voters. A political schism was emerging between reformers aligned with the progressive left and reactionaries associated with the right. This was a religio-political divide that would become all too clear in the 1980s.

Conservative evangelicals could feel some reassurance by the new man at the helm: the quiet, unassuming low-churchman Donald Coggan, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1974. Barely a year into office, Coggan launched a bold initiative, which he named his ‘Call to the Nation’. With union disruption, a stumbling economy and two elections in less than a year, the archbishop entreated Britons to write to him about their concerns and hopes for the future: ‘Part of our trouble is that we think the individual is powerless. That is a lie. He is not powerless. Your vote counts. Your voice counts. You count. Each man and woman is needed if the drift towards chaos is to stop. Your country needs YOU.’
37

If there was any doubt of the sense of national disillusionment and uncertainty that prevailed in Britain in the 1970s, then the 20,000 or so letters that filled the archbishop’s postbag certainly revealed it. Some predictably referred to the ‘pagan, permissive ruin’ and a desire for a biblical revival, but most referenced more temporal concerns, such the breakdown of communities (including the demise of the local shop), the self-interested culture of materialism and the values of thrift: ‘Gone are the days, it seems, when you saved up the money to buy what you needed,’ wrote one woman from Norfolk.
38
Others commented on the stifling culture of officialdom and the loss of community in the era of big business, unions and government. As one civil servant explained: ‘We may all be fanned by the same breeze, but the right to put on or take off sail is ours.’
39
There were brief references to the threat of collectivism and communism, but much more on the need for the revival of the Protestant work ethic. As one man from Thames Valley offered: ‘The majority who work hard and do their best are penalised, heavily taxed and vilified in order to support large numbers of idlers and scroungers. Now we all feel a kind of despair and tend to join the “take all, give the minimum” brigade.’
40
Another wondered whether salvation would come: ‘Perhaps the need of the hour will bring forward someone of vision and leadership to shock us from our lethargy.’
41
Margaret Thatcher studied the published letters from the archbishop’s call and in a speech in 1977 entitled ‘Dimensions of Conservatism’ made extensive reference to them before presenting her political philosophy of hard work, thrift, personal responsibility and moral integrity as the answer to their prayers.
42

AS IS WIDELY
recognised, it was Keith Joseph who first broke from the Heathite ranks and set the party on course for a radical change of direction. Joseph had been a proponent of the free market throughout
the 1960s, although, when in power, he had overseen two of the highest spending departments in Whitehall – Housing and Social Services. The man who ‘put a burr under Joseph’s saddle’ was his then on/off speechwriter Alfred Sherman who, in early 1974, wrote a series of articles in the
Telegraph
, which amounted to a thinly veiled personal attack on Joseph’s record in office.
43
It worked. Joseph and Sherman, with consent from Edward Heath, quickly established the Centre for Policy Studies and roped in Joseph’s closest Cabinet ally, Margaret Thatcher, as its deputy. CPS was not a run-of-the-mill research think-tank, rather its founders conceived it in missionary terms with a view to converting the party to neo-liberalism and translating theory into common sense to ensure mass appeal. Tone not policies was the priority.

Under Sherman’s guidance, Keith Joseph delivered a series of mea culpa speeches, offering a summation of post-war Conservatism that actually had much in common with Edward Norman’s assessment of post-war Anglicanism: a tale of capitulation. According to Joseph, the Conservative Party had blindly followed the post-war order and drifted away from its fundamental principles. ‘It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism (I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that I was not really one at all),’ Joseph declared in 1975 in a phrase that economic liberals greeted with relief, paternalists with despair and the general public with understandable confusion.
44
By that time, however, Joseph’s momentum had already come to an abrupt halt. In a speech in Edgbaston the previous October, Joseph had attempted to broaden his analysis on the moral dimensions of economics, but had clumsily highlighted single mothers as the main social problem and eugenics as the solution. The media fury that followed convinced Joseph that he did not have the mental resilience for leadership and, when the contest was announced, he decided not to stand.

Up until the mid-1970s, nothing had distinguished Margaret Thatcher from the One-nation consensus within the party; in 1969 the
Financial Times
had her down as ‘an uncommitted member of
the shadow Cabinet’.
45
Her career was solid but unremarkable with the ‘Milk Snatcher’ episode earning her national notoriety for all the wrong reasons. Heath faced chants from Labour MPs in the Commons to ‘ditch the bitch’, but Thatcher had managed to weather the storm.
46
If the Edgbaston furore had forced Keith Joseph to concede that he had not the necessary mettle for leadership, then the Milk Snatcher controversy certainly convinced Margaret Thatcher that she could handle it.

In an interview with Granada TV, aired the night before the Conservative leadership ballot, Margaret Thatcher made an explicit appeal to wavering MPs. Heathite Conservatism may have alienated the middle classes, but Margaret Thatcher was determined to present herself as the candidate in harmony with the disaffected grassroots. This she did by returning to Grantham:

Her TV performance was believed to have convinced many floundering MPs, mindful of pressures at constituency level, to vote for her. Margaret Thatcher’s media persona up until that point had tended to focus on her balancing act as a working mother. From the moment that she bid for the leadership Margaret Thatcher self-consciously evoked her Nonconformist childhood – a tale of self-reliance, hard work and moral restraint – as the antidote for a nation suffering under the pressures of excessive bureaucracy, union militancy and permissiveness.

Whereas Keith Joseph’s conversion had been intellectual, Margaret Thatcher’s was instinctive. She had spent 1974 devouring the works of Milton Friedman, Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, but as
Alfred Sherman neatly put it: ‘She was a woman of beliefs, and not ideas.’
48
Margaret Thatcher found that the new evangelical fervour and principles and prejudices of the New Right conveniently chimed with her Nonconformist roots. The economic arguments against excessive state spending suited her inclination towards thrift; theoretical notions of state interference went hand in hand with her understanding on the foundations of individual liberty, while the desire for moral and economic restraint fed into her innate Puritanism. This was self-conscious but it was not entirely self-constructed. Her upbringing had instilled a class and religious identity that was to be reawakened in the mid-1970s. As Alfred Sherman later said: ‘The first eighteen years of her life in Puritan England shaped her forever. For her, God was a real presence … In part I might have helped her to recognise the significance of Grantham, but much of Grantham was embodied in her, waiting to emerge.’
49

Sherman perhaps overestimates, as he was prone to do, his own part in this. We need not delve too deeply into the psychology of Margaret Thatcher to appreciate that her father’s death may have also played a part. It is not uncommon for the death of one’s parents to trigger something in their offspring. Perhaps it is a desire to recreate their world or simply a romantic vision of one’s childhood that takes hold; either way it is telling and perhaps understandable that Margaret Thatcher began to evoke Grantham at a time when her ties with the place had been completely severed. Although few commentators recognised it at the time, the provincial girl with Nonconformist ancestry was in many ways the right woman for the time.

‘
TO BE A
Thatcherite is, in Margaret Thatcher’s own terms, to experience an epiphany, to undergo a religious transfiguration,’ wrote literary
critic Jonathan Raban in the late 1980s.
50
Indeed, one of the striking features of the New Right in the ’70s was the number of converts that it attracted, many of whom came from the extreme left and brought with them the same energy, zealousness and a yearning for ideas. Some reached this destination on their own initiative, while others attributed their conversion more personally to Margaret Thatcher. Alfred Sherman, for example, had been a former communist who had fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War; Alan Walters, Thatcher’s future economics adviser, was another who had made the leap from communist to economic liberal. Within Parliament, converts included former Labour Cabinet minister Reg Prentice (who would later serve in Thatcher’s first Cabinet as Minister for Social Security) and peers Lord Robens and Lord Chalfont. Another was Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt. Elected in the Labour landslide of 1945, Wyatt had been a junior minister under Attlee but would later become one of Thatcher’s closest confidantes.

It is not uncommon for new leaders to adopt an evangelical tone and moral fervour in their first years, especially those considered to have a weak hold over their party, which Thatcher undoubtedly did until 1979. And yet Margaret Thatcher adopted this style more fervently and blatantly than most, perhaps rediscovering the flair and skills of her younger days as a Methodist lay-preacher. In one of her first speeches as leader to the Conservative Central Council in March 1975, she issued the following rallying cry to her supporters:

Thatcher’s evangelical style certainly stood out against the dry managerial tones of Edward Heath and the soft consensual words of Jim
Callaghan. Here was Thatcher presenting herself as a prophet promising national renewal and a conviction approach:

According to these words, Thatcher saw politics as one of values not policies and the aim of leadership, like that of a preacher, as converting people to the cause. This was unique to Thatcher. One can hardly imagine her leadership rivals such as William Whitelaw or Edward Heath or even those on the Labour benches such as Michael Foot or Tony Benn putting it in quite these terms. Yet Margaret Thatcher did not simply market her politics as a religious cause, but more pointedly offered a Christian legitimation for her political philosophy.