The Rest Is History - 662. Britain in the 70s: The Rise of Thatcher (Part 1)

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

How did Margaret Thatcher rise to become leader of the Conservative Party in Britain? Why were British politics so tumultuous in the 1970s? And, who was Thatcher up against? Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into the dramas, calamities, and triumphs of Thatcher’s rise to power, in 1970s Britain. _______ Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠restishistory.com⁠ _______ To read our new newsletter, sign up at: therestishistory.com/newsletters _______ Advertise with us: [e-mail] _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 thing. 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 recognised 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 I think I'm right, anti-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. Satchez's career. Do you know why, 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 at a level of nuance that I had not anticipated.

Thank you. And what makes that even better is actually I've got a really violent cold. So my my voice is naturally more deep 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 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. 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. 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. Yeah, and the funny thing is it's a sign of how much her shadow endures, that of the Tory's 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 leader, she actually dressed as Margaret Thatcher, put on a Thatcher costume, which is insane. And even today, Kemi Badock, people who are sort of trying to talk Kambi Badoop up will say,

Well, you know, Margaret Thatcher was poorly thought of when she was first leader to the opposition. Maybe she will change, you know, maybe it'll be the same story and all this kind of thing. I suppose, I mean, the comparison with Kemmy Bader Knaud is better than the previous two because Kemi Badernock has become leader as leader of the opposition, whereas May and trust became Prime Minister straight away. So that's kind of cheating. Yes. And in fact, you know, for people who are questioning the comparison, we're meeting

Thatcher today before she entered her imperial pomp. 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 who did in 2024, about the year in 1974. So we'll be meeting some old favourites, Harold Wilson, Marcy Williams. That really was bonkers. He mentioned Marcy Williams. So the plot to her by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's aides.

And that financial bloke who took all his clothes off and rolled around on the floor, screaming that we were all doomed. So William Armstrong, he was the head of the civil service. Is he popping up? No, he's not puffing 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 of what this. Listeners all have to. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Oh God, this is a taste of what listeners will have to endure. All 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. Which Britain won.

Which Britain did win. I think 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. Yeah. And actually gets worse and worse comparatively as the period goes on. So there's that. And then finally, there's a sort of 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 nationalised industries, this means that instead of pitting a private company against the trade unions, it's the government against the trade unions time after time. It's holding the British people to ransom. Yeah, I believe the technical term used at the time was trade union barons. They're always called trade union barons. And then there's Northern Ireland.

So we should do a series at some point on the troubles specifically. At this point, hundreds of people, 250, 300, are dying every year. So a real running sore. And all of that came to ahead, 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. Well, thank God, nothing like that's going to happen now. 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 modernising 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 mine. He called an election in February to try to get a new mandate from the people. And that ended in a deadlock in a 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 calls 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. The Britain is the sick man of Europe and it's heading for some sort of apocalyptic reckoning. Because you mentioned in our previous series on 1974 that there are all these kind of people who were plotting coups, weren't there? Yes, General, what's his name?

Sir Walter Walker or whatever's name is. Yeah, all of them. There's David Sterling, the guy who founded the SAS, all these people who are sort of offering themselves. as leaders of a national unity government. I'll give you one example of the 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 Severide 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 government 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 Ianda's chilly, 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 child. Charles the second was the pensioner of Louis the 14th. 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. 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. I do. 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. As 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. 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. There's nothing to see, presumably.

And also, Grantham is where the apple fell on Isaac Newton. Well, let's get back to Robert Thatcher. Well, of course, there is the little corner shop above which the young Margaret Roberts grew up and which was kept by her father, Alderman Roberts. 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's 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 recalled 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 apocryphly St. Francis of Assisi, she's asked, as she have any thoughts about her father, and she says to the cameras, I owe almost everything to my own father. I really do.

brought me up to believe all the things that I do believe, and they're just the values in which I've fought the election. Dominic, don't psychoanalysts make a great deal of the fact that she never mentions her mother. They do, yeah, not just psychoanalysts, but basically every biographer and interviewer. She almost never mentions her mother. Hard really to work out why. Is 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's as her father is. I mean, she's both slightly terrified of her father, I think, but admires him enormously. And I think, you know, 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? Yeah, she is. So 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, believing that religion is the great influence 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 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 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's in a fool, you know, she did. I went 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. Well, Edith Hall is very good at recognising top translations of her role. Is she? Is she good at like naming countries on maps? That's the question. I imagine that must be another of her skills.

I mean, presumably if your Prime Minister, the maps have labels. No, you don't need it. The Falkland Islands, ours. Yeah, that's all you need to know. What else is I don't know? Anyway, this is obviously rubbish. Well, she's a chemist, right? I mean, chemistry is really difficult.

And she 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.

I mean, I'm basically impressed by anyone who can do chemistry. Quite right, exactly. So at Oxford, she's not a fun-loving person. She's not a laugh. 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 aides 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. She does have an eye for a cad, though, doesn't she? She totally does. So kind of Cecil Parkinson or John Moore later on. A man who wears a pinstripe suit well. She loves a man in a pinstripe suit with brule-creamed hair who perhaps has a little glint in his

die. That's very much not 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. And she loves fashion, doesn't she? 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 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 dublo entres. So she went to 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 dry eye in the house. It's sometimes said of her that she's a Philistine. A lot of her critics said this in the 80s.

The writer Jonathan Rabin said she regarded books, art and ideas as just so much Black Forest Gatto. So 70s. I know, but I regard Black Forest Gato. is a good thing. I think that's a compliment. Anyway, she liked 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 Kimmy Bajnock is doing this.

She read Dostoevsk's demons. She had Curses, Darkness at noon. She had Le Carrey. She read Kipling, Salt Sinitsyn. She had Harold Bloom. Didn't she famously read The Day of the Jackal twice? Is that right? I mean, I've never heard that. I think she read it all the way through, and then she read it again to try and work out the plot. Wow. You know, so I kind of engineer perhaps, a kind of, you know,

scientists' perspective to see how it. Yeah, to see how it worked. To see the chemical composition of it. Yeah. I mean, just on the topic of music, you must know her favorite Beatles song. Money. It's a ex-man. Telstar.

Telstar. Which, of course, was not by the Beatles. Yeah, that's insane. But she probably likes it because she would like, she would say, I'd like popular music before the long hair. Yeah, she didn't like that. That probably the issue? Before the long hair and the singing, in fact.

Correct. 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 actually not to be ambitious and to be intimidated by people saying you should pull yourself up by your bootstraps or to be unlucky. Or to lose your job.

To lose your job, exactly. The thing that always, I think, captures her better than anything else. It's a passage in Matthew Paris'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 climb to them atop of a mountain and to say, here I am in a wild and dangerous place, miles from anywhere, look 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 it at a dinner party. Probably more fun than Theresa May. 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 Lions 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 an amazing young woman with experience and knowledge far beyond her years, outstanding inability, 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 Tory 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 county's 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. Her accent does occasionally broke through, doesn't it? So famously, she said of, was it Neil Kinnock that he was Fritt, which was a, a Granthamism. Yeah, but that's virtually the only time. Yeah. 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.

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. Isn't that a feminist perspective? 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. I don't see that as being an unfeminist perspective. 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 lives. live 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 grey suits. I mean, that is a huge

thing for you if you're a politician. Everyone immediately recognises you and you stand apart. Because she's a woman though, it means that people always talk about her hats, her outfits, you know, 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, his background is more humble.

He's the son of a Kentish builder. And his mother was a lady's maid, wasn't he? His mother was a lady's maid, exactly. Ladies' maids are always notorious as snobs. They're very snobbish, exactly. And he is very keen to play down his background and basically turn himself into a kind of bailiol-educated upper-crossed Tory, hence his mad voice that he has, that sort of strangulated voice.

Strangulated, yeah. That's the adjective that's always used, isn't it? His fun fun 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 shall I pick? And they said, what about Margaret Thatcher? She's the brightest. 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 White Law said she was governessy. 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 was 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, It's a bit gauche, a bit declassé. Because the vibe in the Tory party at this point is paternalist, is it? 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. Tipping your gamekeeper, making sure he's all right. Yes. At Christmas. Exactly. Exactly. And not sort of glorying in your achievements or your wealth or the fact that you have, you know, hold yourself up by your bootstraps, which is a bit common. Buying your own furniture.

Yes, it's buying your own furniture, exactly. And 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 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. Yeah. You know, education or health. The kind, caring jobs. The civil servants to 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, the excellent name was Sir William Pyle. Sir William Pyle. He said, she was narrow-minded, emotional, impossible to argue with.

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. Horrible. 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. Because Heath is notoriously rude. That's something that listeners have to keep and bear in mind. He's insanely rude. He is the rudest man ever. to have been Prime Minister. But actually the 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

Dubonnet and gin for breakfast. It's 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. And just to reiterate, she is the only woman in the cabinet. Yes, exactly. So you can imagine, basically, the cabinet break. takes up, they all go off to a gentleman's club and drink Jubonet 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. But I suppose she can console herself by slatching milk out from the hands of little children. So this is her one brush of fame as Education Secretary. She scrapped free school milk for children between the ages of seven and eleven. and everyone said she was the milk snatcher. And this is a totally mad and confected issue because the Wilson government, the Labor 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 school milk,

and I think it's bonkers anyway. Thatcher's Education Secretary, here's the thing that made 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, how terrible this was. So grammar schools, just to explain for people, are selective, selected on ability,

but inevitably because ability is honed by money. Yeah. The accusation is that it's a kind of a scam for middle class parents with sharp elbows. 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 a great shock to the sort of Tory press and whatnot. She persisted with this program and closed more grammar schools than any other minister in British history. And she didn't bring them back, did she, when she became prime minister, really?

I mean, the grammar schools are still an issue today, isn't it? Yeah, if you want to turn something out for the Daily Mail, bringing back grammar school, Oh, really? Yes. I don't think I've ever written a column about bringing back grammar schools. But it was always in the locker, waiting. 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. Is that because she feels that she's bound by collective responsibility of the cabinet?

Yeah, partly, partly, but also she's a politician. It's her job in a way to, you know, 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 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 when Heath loses in February 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 Torr is used her in the second election of the year in October more than any other minister except Heath. And she has a very unfatharite policy. She will cap your mortgage interest rate a 9.5% irrespective of wider interest rates or the state of the economy. And otherwise they will basically rig the interest rates, which is not something you would expect from a free market here 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 a 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 that 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. Ken, quite a feminist perspective. 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... No one can be less funny than Rachel Reeves. I mean, imagine you went to a stand-up night. And it was like, Rachel Reeves and Margaret Thatter 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 Tories 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 lieutenant. So the obvious person to succeed him would be his lieutenant Willie White Law, 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 Gino Powell, goes to Birmingham, which you should never do as a politician, and gives a speech that destroys himself. He says,

a 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. Sterilize them. Is this the implication? Well, it's not a good, it's not a good look, basically. This destroys him. Private Eye, the satirical magazine, referred to him henceforth as Sashith.

which I think is an excellent name. Anyway, on the 21st of November, Sir Sheath went to see his campaign manager and said, I've changed my mind. Obviously, 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, you'll lose. Huge drama and we will be finding out after the break.

You know, is he right? Or does Mrs. Satcher emerge as leader of the Conservative Party and ultimately prime minister? Any one way to find out? Join us after the break. This episode is brought to you by Tell us Online Security. Oh, tag season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what?

Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms. But I've got TELUS online security. It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply.

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, who must be out of your mind, woman. You haven't got a hope. Yes. Yeah, that's the encouragement you want. Thank you, darling.

And Dominic the press, are they rallying behind her or do they also think this is mad? They think it's mad as well, actually. So I mentioned Woodrow Wyatt at the Sunday Mirror. He said the tourists will never elect a limited, bossy, self-righteous and self-complaint woman. Because you're right, he does become a massive fan of hers and a kind of courtier. So it reflects well on Mrs. Satcher that she doesn't bear a grudge. Yeah, although she did hold grudges, actually, but clearly not towards, basically, if people bend the 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 seen as a bit of a forerunner of thatterism, but he said, they wouldn't put up with those hats and that accent, which is coming from him. Yeah.

Well, he didn't wear a hat, did he? 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, Erie Neve. So this is a tremendous character. So Erie Neve is an old Etonian who was captured by the Germans outside Calais in 1940s. The Germans advanced through France, and he was imprisoned at Colitz Castle.

He escaped brilliantly during a theatrical production, put on by the prisoners of war at Calditz Castle. They tunneled underneath the stage, I think, and he and another bloke, a Dutchman had, when they were making costumes of this play, some of the costumes they'd secretly made were German guards' uniforms. They tunneled under the stage. They escaped out of the stage, went 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 row. 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 New Yorkerberg trials who read the indictments to the Nazi war criminals. So that's a nice twist.

So then he became Tory MP, and everyone sort of said, well, an amazing bloat this is, escape from cold hits. And then in 1959, he had a heart attack. Heath was at that point the chief whip of the Tory party and when Aeryneve 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 Erie 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. And he does, 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 Heath'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 Naireney 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 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 White Law on the second ballot. Why don't you lend the Philly? Yeah, vote for the Philly. Give the Philly 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 Enn O'Neill, 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 nine months. Because presumably that brands his kind of conservatism as a conservatism for losers. People don't want it. 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. Do you think Mrs. That's image as a nanny who, of course, gives medicine? Yes. Do you think that helps? 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 More 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, 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's not doing well to basically say, I will sort it out, I will give you the medicine you need. That's quite a good card to play, I think. Well, people say that about British politics now, that someone needs to stand up and say, it's all a terrible mess. This is what we've got to do, harsh medicine. Of course, exactly. And there's a kind of massacist strain that people quite like that. Exactly. So, and there's 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 Eaton. 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 privatisation of nationalised industries, for colourisation. 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 the 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 will 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. And not worry about unemployment. Exactly, not worry about unemployment. The person who'd really made himself the champion of this with Sir Keith Joseph, but he's now out of the ring and it falls to Thatcher. And his supporters right to Thatcher, but she's very clever about how she's, 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. She is also, you know, you talked about the role she plays, she is presenting herself as the housewife who will sort out the national budget. Yes, exactly. Balance the books, not spend too much on the shopping or whatever. So it actually ticks two boxes. On the one hand, she says, 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. She knows the price of a pint of milk. Exactly. She actually gets the mirror, journalist and photographer, to come and watch her do the housework. Oh, she wears a kind of frilly pinny, doesn't she? 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 clean. 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 car to play 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. Well, they've changed their mind on that, but they?

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, 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 the 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 other's shoes. So he is fabulously posh, isn't he? He's eaten, foreign office, all of that. But in the long run, when Mr. Satcher resigns and he runs to succeed her, he feels obliged to court the votes of the Tory MPs by affecting to be a tenant farmer, which is a ludicrous pretension. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's a sign of how profoundly Mrs. Thatcher is going to upend the kind of social standards

of the Conservatives. Completely. And it never occurs to, I guess, people like Douglas Heard in 1975 or the other people around him in Ted Heath's court. You know, they think they are the Tory party. But actually, the Tory party, more broad. activists, voters are much more like Margaret Thatcher than they are like Douglas Hurd. Well, there are more middle class people than there are upper class people.

Exactly. Most people, even in the Tory party, didn't go to Eaton. 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 mail, explicitly supports Thatcher. There's a good omen for Heath as well.

The gods are with him. Because in that morning's times, Madame Tessauds, the waxworks, have published the result of their annual visitors survey. And in the list of political heroes of visitors to Madam Toswords, 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. I mean, Henry Kissinger, very dodgy behavior in, Southeast Asia. But Edward Heath, he abolished all the counties, traditional counties. So what's wrong with the British people voting for that? Yeah. Mad. Why is Heath so high? That's unbelievable. But I mean, his there. So when you filled in this survey when you went to to Madden to the 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 there have people. have got that wrong. Second, Adolf Hitler. I mean, he's a bad man. I don't think we can argue with his placing, though I think he should be first because of first place is Harold Wilson. Oh, really? Do you think Howard Wilson was a worse man than Hitler? Sure. No. No, because, well, I mean, the point of comparison, they both like wearing very tight shorts, didn't they? I knew that one come up. I absolutely need. Also, Hitler ran a tighter ship in his bunker than Wilson did in Downing Street.

There's none of the nonsense about lunch. Well, listen, Dominic, we're spiralling off. I think Wilson doesn't belong in that list. I agree with you. I think Hitler is worse than Wilson. 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 manager Tim Kitson goes off to get the final figures. The suspense mounts. They're all sitting there. 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 Philly, has won 130. They can't believe it. Heath's mate Lord Halesham burst into tears. But it's lucky that Edward Heath is going to take it well, isn't he? Yeah, well, 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 the Thatcher camp there's a mood of absolute amazement and jubilation so 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? 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 the woman was thank and applaud him for it

but she then says well I haven't won yet because there's got to be a second round when other tourists will pile him 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 patronising But he says The Conservative Party won't be willing to have her as leader And Willie White Law will win on the second ballot So the second ballot's a week later And now Willie White Law is in the ring

And Willie White Law is your absolute textbook Casting Agency supplied 1970s Tory politician, isn't he? It's got oyster eyes, hasn't he? Yeah, he's got massive bags under his eyes I mean the bags under his eyes are bigger than his eyes Great ruddy cheeks 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 all the way into Germany. Because this is something we talked about in our 1974 episode, that all these politicians, you know, 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. They combine an absolutely jaw-dropping resume between 1939 and 1945 with then a 20-year record of sort of shambling incompetence. Yeah. Whiskey. Ill-fitting suits.

Yeah. Useless legislation. Yeah. Exactly. And 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 handled the minor strike in 1974.

He's been 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, Blamange 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 didn't. Which is ironic, because of course he's not a coward at all. His record, exactly, given his record of bravery. As the Telegraph says, 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 just reward.

And so here we see how get taking on the image of Boeotasia, which will also be a crucial one. Exactly. Well, as one Tory MP said, the choice between Thatcher and White Law 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, the 11th of February, and the result comes through at 4 o'clock. Thatcher has won 146 votes. White Law has won 79. The others who've all thrown their hats

in the ring are 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. White law 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, Party is kind of rising stars at this point are Heath people. They're paternalists. They think 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 Channon, 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. And what's the reaction of labour to her victory. 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 her back and saying, well, the next elections, we're as good as won it. It's a foregone conclusion. This mad woman will never win. Wilson herself 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 and introduced, I think the seatbelt 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 a sign of the sort of 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 Home, Harold McMillan, Anthony Eden. And then, of course, the great Winston. It's like a dream, really. Wouldn't you think so? I almost webbed. when they told me. I did weep. Yeah, this is the style that basically her admirers adore and her critics

loathe. This sort of slightly syrupy. 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 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.

They're Essex men. Yes, they're on the right of the party. So like Norman Tebitt. Exactly. Who I think he is an MP at this point, is he? Yes. He's called the Skinhead, isn't he? They're Chingford Skinhead.

Chingford Skinhead. Exactly. They are more, they're self-made, their politics are more aggressive, their politics are more, They would say no doubt, we are true Tories, and these poshos are actually just weak. Yeah. So it's estate agents, not owners of estates. 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 the Depression. And her critics, sort of on the left of the Tory party, like Serian Gilmore, 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 that most hideous of things, a Gladstonean 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 in her own two feet, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I think it's actually the heathai period that's the aberration rather than the Thatcherite one. But the two things that I think are really distinctive about thatterism. 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 wanted 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 a world in action. She says, they say, where do your values come from? She says, well, 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 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 McMillan had said this, people would have laughed at him. Yeah, Winston Churchill. Yeah, he's not going to say that. But it's so influential that then you get Douglas Heard pretending to be a tenant farmer and, you know, Kemi Bates not going on about how she worked in McDonald's and things. I mean, it's absolutely what you have to do now. 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 you get some 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. Yeah, and the low church tone rather than the high church tone. Completely. 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 leader says before. So 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. 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 right as virtuous. And usually it's the other way around. Completely it is. I mean, you see this reflected in her archives, which are online at the Thatcher Foundation website, which is brilliant, by the way, this amazing digital archive. You can see all the notes that she would handwrite 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 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, 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. Yeah. 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 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. And talking of people taking it personally, what about Edward Heath, aka the incredible? the incredible sulk. 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 down. So he sat down, but she had to reign standing. It 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 Huronian monosyllables.

So he just said, no, yes, goodbye, whatever. And he then embarks on this unbelievably spectacular sulk. So at the end of the year, Willie Whitelaw tried to organise 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 in a quote, absolute amazement. And said, why on earth where 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 rest of his life. He's still sulking, even after she's kind of stopped being prime minister. Even after 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 Commons

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 stote,

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 Bajnock 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. Heath's 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.

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? The long hot summer of 1976? Yeah. 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 of history, club members of course, can hear the next three episodes right now. Our newsletters, they'll be thudding into your inboxes anytime soon.

loads of 70s content 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 rest of history.com and sign up there but in the meanwhile thank you dominic thanks everyone for listening bye bye goodbye goodbye