God and Mrs Thatcher (19 page)

It became an iconic moment as soon as she said it. Prompted by journalists to reflect on her historic win, Margaret Thatcher chose not to
ponder on the fact that she was the first female to occupy No. 10, but rather on the man whose influence had got her there:

As she uttered these words and entered through the black door, so the era of conviction politics was born.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1981, Margaret Thatcher was invited to reopen the newly restored John Wesley’s House, situated next door to Wesley’s Chapel in the City of London. It was no great surprise she had been asked; she had been married in the chapel and at that point was the most prominent person of Methodist heritage in Britain. The house, where John Wesley had lived until his death, was to be reopened to coincide with Wesley Day, with the BBC broadcasting a special celebration service to mark the occasion.

Margaret Thatcher always made sure that she was suitably well briefed, but her level of preparation on this occasion suggests that she did not simply want to turn up and declare Wesley’s house open. She read up on his early life, as well as his sermons, preaching tours and letters. Her jottings reveal a side of Thatcher rarely seen: in private study without the aid of speechwriters, unconcerned with public opinion, policy or even politics. ‘The inward willingness my son, that is the proof, the strongest proof of Christianity’ she had copied down from a letter from Rev. Samuel Wesley to his son John. She also made a record of the Wesley brothers’ tireless work and their achievements; of the 40,000 sermons, the 400 books and the miles they had covered in their years of preaching. Speaking in the courtyard of Wesley’s Chapel, Margaret Thatcher declared:

On the service sheet Margaret Thatcher had jotted: ‘world full of global
dilemmas; personal dilemmas’. At the time, she herself was no doubt feeling such burdens. The controversial 1981 Budget delivered that March had turned the entire academic economic community against the government; riots in Brixton had broken out that April while the Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands had died in early May. ‘You are carrying heavy burdens, Margaret,’ wrote Speaker of the Commons and Methodist George Thomas in sycophantic tones soon after her visit: ‘I am convinced that the country realises that your strength of character is rooted in deep Christian convictions.’
5
They did not. In fact, her unwillingness to yield to the hunger strikers’ demands – as well as a personal plea from Pope John Paul II – gave rise to the public perception of Thatcher as harsh and uncaring. The
Methodist Recorder,
which had covered the visit, also hinted at other priorities. Alongside a picture of Margaret Thatcher opening Wesley’s House was a call for a march against unemployment, a proposed disarmament vigil outside Parliament and a campaign by War on Want to fight global poverty.

MORE THAN ANY
other politician of her generation, Thatcher used her speeches as a means of asserting her personal authority and values. As is well documented, Margaret Thatcher devoted a considerable amount of time and effort into getting her public statements right. As she explained to her speechwriter on foreign affairs, George Urban: ‘It’s most important that the words on your lips are
your
words, that they express
your
feelings from the pit of your guts, that they mirror the stuff of which you are made.’
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There is little doubt that Margaret Thatcher, as the daughter of a preacher, believed in the power of the spoken word. She was heavily reliant on an army of speechwriters, but as her chief wordsmith Ronald Millar later confirmed: ‘Her views, her opinions, her kind of language and her guidance were behind
every syllable.’
7
Alfred Sherman described the process in blunter terms: ‘We proposed, she disposed’, hinting at the fact that it was often an agonising process for all involved.
8
The original text would be heavily marked with Thatcher’s blue pen and she would often demand changes even after the final copy had been typed up. Edward Heath, in contrast, delegated the responsibility of his big speeches entirely to his staff, as did Tony Blair, who reportedly used to spend more time on fine-tuning the delivery rather than on the words themselves. For the most part, what Margaret Thatcher said, she believed, and in a language she felt comfortable with. Thatcher’s rhetoric was characterised by its straightforwardness and bluntness, which in the words of Jonathan Raban, hit like the ‘raw freshness of Hemingway … after an overdose of George Eliot’.
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In early 1981, Margaret Thatcher was once again invited to give a sermon at St Lawrence Jewry from the same pulpit she had delivered her ‘I believe’ speech three years earlier. Her aides were unsure, given pressures on her time, but T. E. Utley advised in favour, judging that such an occasion ‘does the PM good’.
10
Utley, though, had misgivings about the vicar at St Lawrence’s, Rev. Basil Watson, whom he felt enjoyed the limelight a bit too much and whose blatantly Tory leanings Utley thought might render the association publicly disadvantageous. Rev. Watson, however, wrote to No. 10 pressuring the Prime Minister to consent: ‘There are still too many in my firm who think that socialists have the undoubted monopoly of the Christian religion!’
11

The drafting process, however, was not an easy one. Margaret Thatcher was not happy with Utley’s and Webley’s initial efforts. The speech was full of wishy-washy platitudes nor did it sound very Thatcherite: the Prime Minister had marked a resounding ‘NO’, for example, on their contention that nations were mere accidents of history. The Prime Minister clearly wanted a speech much more in tune with Edward Norman’s views, whose lecture on ‘Religion, Ethics and Politics in the 1980s’ she had recently heard him give at a meeting of the Conservative
Philosophy Group and whose text she had marked with approving annotations. If there is any doubt that Margaret Thatcher was ever at the mercy of her speechwriters one need only contrast Webley’s and Utley’s first draft with the final speech she actually delivered.

Margaret Thatcher spoke on ‘The Spirit of the Nation’ to a packed-out congregation, although Denis was not present. He had been asked whether he would like to hear his wife give a ‘major philosophical speech’ but his reply was somewhat telling of what he thought of such occasions and of Downing Street life altogether: ‘There are moments when all I want is to “go home” and I have blanked out 4–8 March to do just that’ he informed the Prime Minister’s diary secretary.
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Thatcher’s address at St Lawrence’s hinged on the central contention that ‘the virtue of the nation is only as great as the virtue of the individuals who compose it’. She went on to elaborate:

This was in essence Margaret Thatcher’s theology: the individual positioned at the centre of the spiritual and the temporal world. Her
central claim was that as the Christian faith was a call to individuals, so it should follow that the relationship between the citizen and the state should operate along the same lines. Just as there seemed to be little room for intermediaries (such as the priest) in Margaret Thatcher’s theology, nor was there any room for intermediary institutions (e.g. trade unions, local government) in her politics. As Jonathan Raban put it: ‘Man shall stand as nakedly before his Government as he does before his Maker.’
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Even more contentious was Thatcher’s assumption that because Conservative philosophy was rooted in individualism (in contrast to socialists that prioritised society), Conservatism was therefore closer to the Christian faith. One-nation Conservatives would no doubt have challenged her on this point, particularly her lack of reference to the social order, but her prioritisation of the individual was precisely where Thatcherism diverged from One-nation Toryism. Thatcher’s main target, though, was what she labelled the socialist ‘heresy’: the idea that societal salvation could come through the state.

The individual may have been at the centre of Thatcher’s theological and political values, but for it to mean anything, it needed to have one word attached to it: freedom. To reinforce this point, Thatcher always stressed that free will was after all at the heart of the Christian revelation: ‘We are all responsible moral beings with a choice between good and evil, beings who are infinitely precious in the eyes of their Creator,’ she had said in her first address at St Lawrence Jewry in 1978.

A decade later, in an interview with David Frost, Thatcher referenced the notion of free will as the essence of biblical teaching: ‘If he [man] did not have the fundamental choice, well he would not be Man made in the image of God.’
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Frost was also the offspring of a Methodist minister but he chose not to challenge her on this point. That same year, in her infamous address to the General Assembly, Thatcher even seemed to interpret the Crucifixion story as a tale of
choice rather than sacrifice: ‘When faced with His terrible choice and lonely vigil [He]
chose
to lay down His life that our sins may be forgiven. I remember very well a sermon on an Armistice Sunday when our Preacher said, “No one took away the life of Jesus, He chose to lay it down”.’
16

The changing of the Conservative Party’s logo from the Unionist symbol of the thistle, daffodil, clover leaf and rose to the torch of liberty in 1983 signified the new ideological focus under Thatcher. The doctrine of liberty, though, was always exalted beyond party politics and elevated to the saintly realm; it was ‘not state-given’ according to Thatcher, but ‘God-given’. This was, of course, a distinctly Thatcherite notion of political and economic freedom. Thatcher never entertained the idea that the state could be an instrument of liberty, rather it was always characterised (either in Britain or the Communist Eastern bloc) as an instrument of oppression. Above all, liberty was only achieved through individual choice and certainly not through collective struggle. In her contention on the biblical foundations of liberty, Thatcher was prepared to confront history. When in Paris during the 200th anniversary celebrations of the French Revolution in 1989, Thatcher made the rather undiplomatic point that all hope of
liberté, egalité, fraternité
had only resulted in ‘a lot of headless bodies and a tyrant’. Thatcher’s history was often as subtle as her theology.

‘Individual liberty’ and ‘choice’ became the buzzwords of Thatcherism, the linguistic legitimation for government initiatives be it the extension of home ownership, the deregulation of the market or the lowering of direct taxation. Citizens would be ‘free’ to buy their own council houses, send their children to private schools or switch to private healthcare. Synod member and Cabinet minister John Gummer echoed his leader when, in an explicit appeal to Christian voters in 1987, he wrote: ‘Choice lies at the heart of the Christian revelation … there is something wrong in believing a man is fit to choose his
eternal destiny but not to decide on the education of his children.’
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Drawing on the revelation as a justification for private education was one that few ecclesiastical leaders could stomach and yet it did find some sympathy amongst the laity. ‘Haven’t we all been given free will?’ wrote one parishioner responding to the Bishop of Manchester’s public hostility to private healthcare. ‘Our way to God is free for us, we choose what prayers suit us best, we also choose the Churches that we wish to worship in […] we then have the choice as to whom we can go to for care.’
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The notion of free will, which had historically been used against an overbearing Church was being appropriated by Thatcher to challenge an overbearing state. Indeed, what was once the scriptural justification for Nonconformity was now being articulated as the political justification for neo-liberalism.

Margaret Thatcher always maintained that unchecked and unguided liberty brought with it its own dilemmas. As she warned the congregation of St Lawrence Jewry in 1978: ‘There are many difficult things about freedom: it does not give you safety; it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the destiny of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.’ The curtailment of liberty therefore rested not with society or the state but with the individual: freedom
with
responsibility was Margaret Thatcher’s key phrase. She was, however, decidedly vague in setting out how the Church should curtail individual freedom.