A Tory Wind of Change

Savor the moment. For the first time in history, two women were the principals in the traditional "kissing hands upon appointment"--a ceremony in which the leader of the winning party is summoned to Buckingham Palace, there to be designated Prime Minister of Britain by the monarch and asked to form a government. The monarch, of course, was Queen Elizabeth II. The Prime Minister was Margaret Hilda Thatcher, 53, a grocer's daughter from the English Midlands, who last week led her Conservative Party to a decisive victory over James Callaghan's Labor Party. The Tories won a solid majority of 43 seats in the 635-member House of Commons,* and Thatcher thereby became not only the first woman to head a British government but the first to lead a major Western nation.

Even before the vote tally established that the Conservatives had an absolute majority of 318 seats, outgoing Prime Minister Callaghan drove to Buckingham Palace last Friday to hand in his resignation to the Queen. Minutes after he left the palace precincts, Thatcher was on her way to "kiss hands" and receive the royal commission to form a government. Denis Thatcher accompanied his wife to the palace; like Prime Ministers' spouses before him, he remained downstairs to chat with the Queen's aides.

Following an audience that lasted 45 minutes, the Thatchers drove in a black Rover limousine to No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of Prime Ministers. The Callaghans had already packed and left, not in haste but in keeping with a longstanding British tradition that the transfer of power in all its aspects should be quick and decorous.

Downing Street was packed with well-wishers and photographers when Thatcher arrived. Expressing delight and excitement over her victory, Britain's "Iron Lady" made a conciliatory statement clearly addressed to a nation poised uneasily for change: "I would like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi, which I think are particularly apt at the moment: 'Where there is discord, may we bring harmony; where there is doubt, may we bring faith; where there is despair, may we bring hope.' Now that the election is over, may we get together and strive to serve and strengthen the country."

At Labor Party headquarters a few blocks away, "Sunny Jim" Callaghan, 67, spoke of his defeat with the same reserve and gentle dignity that marked his campaign. He publicly congratulated his successor as Prime Minister. "It is a great office," he said, "a wonderful privilege, and for a woman to occupy that office is, I think, a tremendous moment in the country's history. Therefore, everybody must on behalf of all our people wish her well and wish her success."

Callaghan, who easily recaptured his home constituency in Wales, now becomes leader of the opposition. He will be less tormented by the Labor Party's left wing, many of whose zealous members went down to defeat in marginal districts. So did the most able woman in his Cabinet, former Education Secretary Shirley Williams, 48. Another loser, predictably, was onetime Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe, 50, who soon faces trial on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder a man who claimed to be his lover. A Tory easily bested eight other candidates to take Thorpe's North Devon seat.

Throughout the four-week campaign, which was brought about when Callaghan's government narrowly lost a vote of confidence in March, both major parties emphasized that Britain faced a clear choice. Callaghan offered a continuation of the moderate social democratic policies that have dominated British political and economic life since the end of World War II. Thatcher presented a clear break with the socialist past, advocating a return to the market economy and a retrenching of Britain's welfare state. As some commentators saw it, Labor, in a reversal of traditional roles, had become the party of established orthodoxy, while the Conservatives advocated radical reform.

The Tories entered the campaign with a lead of up to 21% in early polling. That was largely a result of public anger and frustration over a bitter winter of strikes and industrial strife that severely undermined Labor's claim to be the only party that could deal successfully with Britain's powerful trade unions. As the campaign continued, the Tory lead steadily dwindled; two days before the election one poll even showed a slight Labor edge. There seemed little doubt about the reason for the decline: the personality of Margaret Thatcher. To avoid a major gaffe by their outspoken leader, Tory strategists designed a media campaign to keep her on camera but away from confrontation. Nevertheless, Thatcher's sometimes hectoring, sometimes condescending manner irritated many voters. In one poll last week, she ranked behind both Callaghan and the Liberals' David Steel as a campaign performer. In the end, though, the desire for change proved overwhelming, and on election day Britons voted in near record numbers for the Tories and their fighting lady.

Thatcher thus takes her place alongside Israel's Golda Meir, India's Indira Gandhi and Sri Lanka's Sirimavo Bandaranaike as modern women politicians who have made it to the top. In keeping with British tradition, Thatcher will be addressed simply as "Prime Minister." Even before she paid her first visit to Downing Street, her campaign aides had arrived, their arms loaded with paper work. The government of a determined woman whose work ethic had been forged in the heartland of England was taking shape with no delay.

Grantham, a market town of 28,000 in Lincolnshire, has three claims to fame: the 281-ft. spire of St. Wulfram's Church is the third highest in England, Sir Isaac Newton went to school there, and Margaret Hilda Thatcher (nee Roberts) was born and raised in an apartment over her family's grocery store at the corner of North Parade and Broad streets.

A bootmaker's son, Alfred Roberts was a pillar of the Methodist Church and once served as the mayor of Grantham. He and his wife Beatrice, a seamstress before her marriage, kept a well-appointed shop that also served as the local post office. They lived upstairs in spotless quarters, although the bathroom was in the backyard. For Margaret and her elder sister Muriel, now 57, family life in Grantham was frugal but warm, with a vision of something better: work hard, pay cash, save and get ahead. Years later, Thatcher remembered that "my parents embedded in us very strongly that work and cleanliness were next to godliness. There was more than just having to work to live--there was work as a duty."

Margaret Roberts, who was never called "Maggie," is remembered in Grantham as a studious, determined little girl with the cherubic looks of a cupid on a Victorian valentine. At the age of nine, she won a poetry-reading prize at the annual town festival. Her headmistress at Hunting Town Road Elementary School offered congratulations, saying, "You were lucky!" To which Margaret replied: "I wasn't lucky. I deserved it."

There are no recollections in Grantham of Margaret with chums or boyfriends. She was an exceptionally pretty girl, but very earnest. As teen-agers she and Muriel would help out in the store. Thatcher remembers fondly: "We used to stand in the shop sometimes late on a Saturday evening. It was quite a big shop, with all the beautiful mahogany fitments that I now see in the antique shops. A lot of people came in, and with Father on the [town] council, and knowing we were all interested in what was going on in the world, we would talk quite late." In this grass-roots setting, her conservative political views came into focus. By the time she was in her late teens, she has said, "politics was in my bloodstream."

A career in either politics or law, her other main interest, seemed beyond the family's means. "There was no question of my thinking I had a political future," she once observed. "We could not have afforded it . . . Somehow, if people wanted to get on in the world, they went into the professions. It made a good deal of impression on me that we were in trade. I've always been trade all my life."

But Alfred Roberts was determined that his daughters would have a better life than the family shop. "Very few girls from Grantham went to any university, much less Oxford," says John Foster, a local businessman. "But Margaret and her father were set on Oxford." The university required Latin for all entering students, a course not offered to girls in Grantham at that time. Roberts solved the problem: he hired a tutor for his daughter, and in three months she was able to meet the university's Latin qualifications.

At Oxford's Somerville College, Margaret studied chemistry, not out of any basic interest, but because she knew it would guarantee a job. She became president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, but she was not allowed to participate in debates of the prestigious Oxford Union, long a training ground for British political leaders; not until 1963 were women admitted as members. She was graduated with a bachelor of science degree, an upper-class accent acquired by elocution lessons, and an unflagging determination to enter politics.

In 1947 she took a job as a research chemist with British Xylonite plastics in Essex and immediately began turning up at local Conservative Party affairs. Impressed Tory officials proposed her as their candidate for Dartford, then a safe Labor seat in Kent. Being chosen as a sacrificial lamb is the classic way to begin a career in British politics, and Margaret eagerly accepted. In the 1950 election Margaret, then 24, was the youngest woman running for Parliament. She lost, but Kingsley Wood, then leader of the Tories on the Dartford Council, recalls that "we all knew she was something different. She worked tirelessly and had the knack of remembering everyone's name."

It was also in 1950 that Margaret met tall, angular Denis Thatcher, a divorced businessman ten years her senior. They were married a year later. He then worked for a paint company that his family owned, and had run for Parliament himself, also unsuccessfully. More important, Denis Thatcher provided the emotional, financial and social security for her own career. He eventually became an executive director of the Burmah Oil Company before retiring in 1975.

In 1953 Margaret gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl--an instant family that her friends cite as the ultimate in efficiency. Mark went to Harrow and is now the representative of an Australia-based freight company. His sister Carol studied law at London University and has been working in Australia as a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald. She returned to London in time for the last weeks of the campaign.

Four months after the twins were born, Margaret qualified as a barrister specializing in tax and patent law. She also kept her political ties. In 1959, when the twins were six and in boarding school, she was adopted as the Conservative candidate for Finchley, a safe Tory seat in the London suburbs. Thatcher romped home with a majority of 16,260 in the Conservative landslide, and her political career was launched.

The meshing of her public and private lives placed near schizoid demands on Thatcher. She had, and still has, two faces that are startlingly different: prim and tart-tongued in public, she is also a homebody who delights in comparing prices with other housewives in grocery stores near her comfortable house on Flood Street in the fashionable London district of Chelsea. Thatcher herself has said that "I'm a romantic at heart," and admits that "there are times when I get home at night, and everything has got on top of me, when I shed a few tears silently, alone."

By all accounts the Thatcher family is a close-knit foursome, and Husband Denis is a cheery, supportive consort. Although the Thatchers last week began moving into the impersonal family quarters at No. 10 Downing Street, they will keep their Chelsea house. How much of their Chelsea routine can be kept is another matter. Normally, Thatcher is up at 6:30 a.m. to cook Denis' breakfast and do the shopping before heading off for Parliament. She likes sales and takes pride in being a bargain hunter. But time has become so precious that for the past few years she has bought her clothes--usually neatly tailored suits and blouses, often from Marks & Spencer--on twice-a-year bulk-buying sprees. Even the Queen sometimes appears slightly wind-blown in public, but Thatcher is invariably coifed and lacquered against the elements. She has already advised the staff at Downing Street that they "will have to understand that I must have an hour in my schedule once a week to have my hair done."

The family's life-style is comfortable, conventional, squarely middle class. Thatcher has few close friends and no real intellectual interests outside politics. She reads primarily "to keep up," as she puts it, much prefers Rudyard Kipling to T.S. Eliot, rarely dines out or sees a play. Her only hobby is collecting Royal Crown Derby china. At the end of a day, she and Denis like to relax over a drink: hers is Scotch, neat and usually just one.

When Thatcher first took her place on the back benches, there was no reason for anyone to mark her as a future Tory leader, much less Britain's first woman Prime Minister. She was not a member of any inner circle, not a protegee of any powerful party figure. Attractive in almost too meticulous a way, with a complexion as English as Devonshire cream and the instant smile of a doctor's receptionist, she looked rather like the chairman of a garden club in an affluent suburb. But in her first year as an M.P. she managed to get one of her own bills on the statute books--an early "sunshine law" that gave the press and the public the right to attend meetings of regional and urban councils.

After that, Thatcher's star began to rise rapidly. She became a junior minister for pensions in 1961, and three years later, when the Conservatives were in opposition, she was promoted to the front bench, which allowed her to shine in debate. In 1967 she joined the shadow cabinet and held a number of portfolios, including housing, transport and education. She also spoke up on treasury matters. Some Tory backbenchers remember vividly the verbal exchange that marked Thatcher as a fighting lady to be reckoned with. Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey, who is renowned for his brutal wit, had just dubbed her "La Pasionaria of Privilege." Thatcher ignored the pointed insult. "Some Chancellors are micro-economic," she answered coldly. "Some Chancellors are fiscal. This one is plain cheap." And she went on to document unerringly Healey's failure to deal with the facts.

Edward Heath became Prime Minister when Labor was upset in the 1970 election, and Thatcher was soon named Secretary of State for Education and Science, where she gained a reputation for toughness. While demanding more money for her department, she cut out free milk for elementary school children, thus earning the cruel sobriquet "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher." Heath had agreed to her appointment only because he felt it was good politics to have a woman in the Cabinet. "The chemistry between them was not good," recalls a Cabinet colleague.

After Labor twice defeated the Tories in the 1974 elections, Heath's leadership came under sharp attack, especially from his party's right wing. The two leading rightist candidates, Sir Keith Joseph and Edward Du Cann, declined to run for the leadership, while Heath could not make up his mind whether to fight or resign. Backed by Joseph, Norman St. John-Stevas, a Tory intellectual, and Airey Neave, who became her campaign manager and one of her closest advisers,--Thatcher stepped boldly into the arena. At a party caucus on Feb. 11, 1975, she defeated the acknowledged favorite, William Whitelaw, 146 to 79, thus becoming the first woman in history to lead a major British political party.

Thatcher immediately made it clear that there would be nothing demure or retiring about her leadership. In her words: "I am not a consensus politician. I am a conviction politician." Before Thatcher's victory last week, onetime rival Whitelaw declared: "She is a brilliant leader of the opposition, the best in a long, long time." Privately, however, some of her colleagues are more critical. Says one senior Tory: "She can be very petulant when up against criticism. When she gets into an argument she talks all the time. Talk. Talk. Talk. Because of this she is not a very good chairman." She can be scornful of those who are not tough in either performance or philosophy, reserving for them her ultimate pejorative, "wet," which in her lexicon is an accusation of gutlessness.

Unlike a U.S. President, a British Prime Minister is the first among supposed equals in the Cabinet. Cajolery is as vital a quality as conviction, and some Tories wonder whether Thatcher has the skills necessary to keep dissident ministers in line. Because of her authoritarian air, she sometimes appears to be rather like a headmistress dealing sternly with rowdy students. In discussions around the shadow cabinet table, says one associate, "she can be very sharp, steely in cutting somebody short if she has lost interest in what is being said."

Despite the rhetorical force of her convictions, some Tory colleagues accuse her of inconsistency. Says one prospective Cabinet appointee: "You cannot predict from one set of convictions what her views would be on another series of topics. Often her views do not add up to a single position. She tends to keep her opinions in separate compartments." And, he adds, "there is an element of impetuousness of judgment, which might result from being a woman."

Many of Thatcher's colleagues believe that the experience of being Prime Minister will temper her Iron Lady toughness. If nothing else, she will have to deal with several influential senior Tories who are determined to moderate her more radical views. "What will stop her behaving in a grandiose manner on the world stage is our economic situation," says one of them. But that is unlikely to prevent her from lecturing her counterparts in Western Europe. ("God help them," says one colleague.) Another potential Cabinet member sums her up: "She is a powerful lady, but manageable by her colleagues. They believe they can keep her from lurching too far right."

Britain's new Conservative government will not be an easy partner for the Carter Administration. Carter enjoyed a close, almost familial relationship with Callaghan, who was something of a "political uncle" to the President. For their first official meeting, Callaghan brought Carter a bolt of cloth for a suit in which pinstripes were made of tiny J.C.s, their common initials. It is not likely that Carter and Thatcher will develop an equally close relationship. "Margaret will start off despising Jimmy Carter," conceded one top Tory, "but responsibility will mellow her." There will be no lessening of Britain's commitment to friendship with the U.S., but the Tories will not supply the automatic support for Carter's foreign policy that was a special hallmark of the Callaghan government.

Thatcher shares a fear widespread among Tories that in pursuing SALT Carter has lost sight of the global Soviet threat. An early test for the Anglo-American alliance may come over Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Many Tories favor recognition of the new biracial government headed by Bishop Abel Muzorewa. It is unlikely, though, that the Thatcher government would move to recognize the new Zimbabwe-Rhodesian regime prior to the August meeting of the Commonwealth Conference in Zambia.

Although cuts in public spending will be a Tory hallmark, this will not apply to defense. Thatcher wants to improve Britain's nuclear deterrent force, which currently consists of four British-built submarines carrying Polaris A-3 missiles. The Conservatives want to expand the fleet to six, each carrying advanced Trident missiles bought from the U.S. Thatcher is so concerned over growing Soviet power that Tory strategists have considered the formation of a joint U.S.-European fleet based on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Committed to ties with both the U.S. and Europe, but without any special affection for either, Thatcher in effect is something of a "British Gaullist." She would like to move away from European economic and monetary union but toward a single foreign and defense policy for the European Community. Although Thatcher is personally a strong backer of Israel, Tory policy is likely to be more pro-Arab than under Callaghan. There are also strong indications that Thatcher will promptly authorize the sale of 250 or so Harrier jet fighters to China, a move that will both outrage the Soviets and disturb the U.S., by increasing Soviet fears of a possible Sino-Western military alliance.

It is in domestic policy, however, that Thatcher's government will differ most from its predecessor. In essence, her aim is to point Britain back toward a market economy by dismantling much of the apparatus of government controls and regulation built since the end of World War II. The means have already been made clear: curbing public expenditure, restoring personal incentives by cutting the income tax (a prohibitive 83% at the highest level of earned income), removing such restraints on private enterprise as wage and price guidelines and foreign exchange controls, redressing the balance of power between the unions and the rest of society by correcting the most flagrant abuses of organized labor.

Thatcher and her economic advisers are determined to reduce Britain's budget deficit by cutting public spending back by $9 billion. One area in which they hope to make substantial cuts is government support for industry. The Tories will not use the taxpayers' money to prop up ailing companies and industries--not even nationalized ones. Thatcher would like to return a number of nationalized industries to the private sector, but in light of their unprofitability, there would be few takers. Instead, she may try to introduce minority private shareholders into such government-owned enterprises as the British Steel Corp. and British Airways.

Just as it was for Labor, reducing inflation--currently around 10%--is a high-priority goal for the Tories. Thatcher is committed to free collective bargaining--meaning that there will be no attempt to impose a ceiling on pay rises sought by the unions. If heart conquered head, a Thatcher government would almost certainly welcome a showdown with the unions. But even the angriest Tories remember that Ted Heath's battle with the mine workers over his wage-restraints policy led to his defeat in the 1974 elections. Thus the new government's approach to industrial relations is likely to be more cautious than the campaign rhetoric. Instead of focusing on comprehensive legislation, the Tories will concentrate on outlawing specific abuses, like the picketing of businesses not directly involved in strikes, that irked many union moderates. The go-slow policy will appeal to middle-of-the-road Tories, who feel that an all-out attack on the unions will only make labor leaders and the rank and file more radical than they are today.

Even as the votes were being counted, Thatcher was given unmistakable warnings that her approach to the labor union issue might be the test of how long a honeymoon her new government would have. One of Britain's most respected business leaders, Sir Barrie Heath (no kin to Ted), advised the new Conservative government "not to rush in and try to bring in laws to restrict the unions. Such a course of action would be the death knell for British industry." The same day, Thatcher got a strong message from Terry Duffy, a moderate who heads the huge (1.2 million members) Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. Callaghan and the Trades Union Congress had worked out a "concordat" that laid down guidelines for wage claims and union self-discipline on wildcat strikes. That agreement, announced Duffy, was now a "dead document."

For the first time in five years, Britain has a majority government that appears capable of ruling the country for a full five-year term. That electoral stability allows Thatcher to confront the unions head on--if she so chooses. The big question facing Britain now is whether the determined Iron Lady, having gained the pinnacle of political success, will act according to the sharp words that sometimes marked her campaign rhetoric, or the conciliatory ones of St. Francis that she quoted so movingly on the doorstep of No. 10.

* Last Parliament: Labor 307, Conservatives 282, Liberals 14, others 29. New Parliament: Conservatives 339, Labor 268, Liberals 11, others 16.

* Neave, later shadow spokesman for Northern Ireland, was assassinated last March by an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army; a bomb planted in his car exploded as he drove out of the Parliament garage.

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