Read Online Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography by Charles Moore - Free Book Online
Authors: Charles Moore
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struck with her charms. According to his colleague, Brian MacArthur, then education correspondent of
The Times
, Izbicki said: ‘Do you know, if I’d made a pass, I’m sure I would have been successful.’ Charming though John Izbicki was, it is hard to believe that he was right.
* Mrs Thatcher’s predecessor, Edward Boyle, summed up the status of the education secretary in an interview given in 1971, when she held the post: ‘You’re quite right if you think of the people since the war who have been most associated with Education. It isn’t a department which has enhanced one’s career in politics’ (
The Politics of Education: Edward Boyle and Anthony Crosland in Conversation with Maurice Kogan
, Penguin, 1971, p. 100.)
* Mrs Thatcher’s sympathy with Tory grass-root sentiment brought some rather snobbish criticism on her head. Christopher Price, a Labour MP with an interest in education, wrote in the
New Statesman
(6 July 1973) that these rank and file ‘are the bourgeois tradesmen like her father, who would not dream of touching a comprehensive with a bargepole. They use the local grammar school if their offspring are coachable into it, and turn to Miss Pringle’s Academy for Young Ladies if they’re not.’
* Mrs Thatcher herself believed that only her admirer John Izbicki, of the
Daily Telegraph
, would give her a fair hearing.
* The phrase ‘a new style of government’ was taken from a Conservative pamphlet of that name by David Howell, later Mrs Thatcher’s Energy Secretary, published shortly before the election with Heath’s blessing. It was a very free-market document. It is thought to be the first British publication to use the word ‘privatization’, a policy that it advocated. See David Howell,
The Edge of Now
, Pan, 2000, pp. 341 ff.
* Nigel Fisher (1913–96), father of Labour minister Mark Fisher; educated Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; MC, 1945; Conservative MP for Hitchin, 1950–55; for Surbiton, 1955–83. His book
The Tory Leaders
(1977) includes a good account of the 1974–5 leadership contest.
† Neave’s was not a partisan point of view. The sense of Britain on the verge of collapse was widespread. Bernard Donoughue spent August in France. On his return he wrote in his diary: ‘From abroad I could see England a little clearer. It looked in a terrible mess. Falling apart socially as well as economically. Seems very frail compared to France, which is becoming a giant again’ (
Downing Street Diary
, 2 vols, Jonathan Cape, 2005, 2008, vol. i:
With Harold Wilson in No. 10
, p. 174).
* The position of the
Daily Telegraph
at this time reflected that of the Conservative Party. Officially, the paper supported Ted Heath’s continuation in office, a line maintained by the proprietor, Lord Hartwell, and strongly pushed by his wife, Pamela. But the majority of the staff who concerned themselves with these matters – the deputy editor Colin Welch and leader writers such as T. E. Utley, Frank Johnson and John O’Sullivan, as well as Alfred Sherman, who worked part-time at the paper – were fierce critics of Heath and had led the way in attacking the U-turn when he was in office. W. F. Deedes, who left Parliament at the October 1974 election, was made editor immediately after it, but not with immediate effect. The day before his appointment was announced, Deedes dined with Heath, who enlisted him in his plan to try to cling on to the leadership. In a private memo he sent to his predecessor, Maurice Green, the next day, Deedes set out Heath’s reasoning, and his own view that ‘Labour would be swift to exploit the appearance of Heath being Shanghai’d by an ungrateful party … Therefore he owes it to his own party … to take his time’ (memo from W. F. Deedes to Maurice Green, 14 October 1974, unpublished). Deedes took up his position as editor at the beginning of 1975, shortly before the contest was held. He saw it as the paper’s role to hold the ring in the Tory Party.
The Times
, Izbicki said: ‘Do you know, if I’d made a pass, I’m sure I would have been successful.’ Charming though John Izbicki was, it is hard to believe that he was right.
* Mrs Thatcher’s predecessor, Edward Boyle, summed up the status of the education secretary in an interview given in 1971, when she held the post: ‘You’re quite right if you think of the people since the war who have been most associated with Education. It isn’t a department which has enhanced one’s career in politics’ (
The Politics of Education: Edward Boyle and Anthony Crosland in Conversation with Maurice Kogan
, Penguin, 1971, p. 100.)
* Mrs Thatcher’s sympathy with Tory grass-root sentiment brought some rather snobbish criticism on her head. Christopher Price, a Labour MP with an interest in education, wrote in the
New Statesman
(6 July 1973) that these rank and file ‘are the bourgeois tradesmen like her father, who would not dream of touching a comprehensive with a bargepole. They use the local grammar school if their offspring are coachable into it, and turn to Miss Pringle’s Academy for Young Ladies if they’re not.’
* Mrs Thatcher herself believed that only her admirer John Izbicki, of the
Daily Telegraph
, would give her a fair hearing.
* The phrase ‘a new style of government’ was taken from a Conservative pamphlet of that name by David Howell, later Mrs Thatcher’s Energy Secretary, published shortly before the election with Heath’s blessing. It was a very free-market document. It is thought to be the first British publication to use the word ‘privatization’, a policy that it advocated. See David Howell,
The Edge of Now
, Pan, 2000, pp. 341 ff.
* Nigel Fisher (1913–96), father of Labour minister Mark Fisher; educated Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; MC, 1945; Conservative MP for Hitchin, 1950–55; for Surbiton, 1955–83. His book
The Tory Leaders
(1977) includes a good account of the 1974–5 leadership contest.
† Neave’s was not a partisan point of view. The sense of Britain on the verge of collapse was widespread. Bernard Donoughue spent August in France. On his return he wrote in his diary: ‘From abroad I could see England a little clearer. It looked in a terrible mess. Falling apart socially as well as economically. Seems very frail compared to France, which is becoming a giant again’ (
Downing Street Diary
, 2 vols, Jonathan Cape, 2005, 2008, vol. i:
With Harold Wilson in No. 10
, p. 174).
* The position of the
Daily Telegraph
at this time reflected that of the Conservative Party. Officially, the paper supported Ted Heath’s continuation in office, a line maintained by the proprietor, Lord Hartwell, and strongly pushed by his wife, Pamela. But the majority of the staff who concerned themselves with these matters – the deputy editor Colin Welch and leader writers such as T. E. Utley, Frank Johnson and John O’Sullivan, as well as Alfred Sherman, who worked part-time at the paper – were fierce critics of Heath and had led the way in attacking the U-turn when he was in office. W. F. Deedes, who left Parliament at the October 1974 election, was made editor immediately after it, but not with immediate effect. The day before his appointment was announced, Deedes dined with Heath, who enlisted him in his plan to try to cling on to the leadership. In a private memo he sent to his predecessor, Maurice Green, the next day, Deedes set out Heath’s reasoning, and his own view that ‘Labour would be swift to exploit the appearance of Heath being Shanghai’d by an ungrateful party … Therefore he owes it to his own party … to take his time’ (memo from W. F. Deedes to Maurice Green, 14 October 1974, unpublished). Deedes took up his position as editor at the beginning of 1975, shortly before the contest was held. He saw it as the paper’s role to hold the ring in the Tory Party.
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