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THE FIRST STEPS IN GOVERNMENT

1 As a backbencher she took an early interest in tax.Two themes which could be taken almost word for word from numerous speeches she later made as prime minister began to make a trenchant appearance. Her greatest worry, she told her local party after eighteen months in the House, was the control of public spending. «It is in fact very much more difficult than I ever thought it would be in theory», she said. «We are chasing after the hundreds and the thousands,but tending to let the millions go by.Some time we must alter the system of public accountabilityand the nation must present its accounts to Parliamentas a company does to its shareholders.» Only in this way could tax be reduced. But secondly,the tax system should have a bias in favour of productive industry and against the entirely unmeritorious playing of the stock market. «It is the speculators in shares that we want to get at»,she told the Commons during the debate on the 1961 budget, «the person who is making a business of buying and selling shares,not to hold them for their income producing properties, but to live on the profit which he makes from the transactions».Although, as aconsequence of her financial policiesas prime minister, many thousands of people were to get very rich indeed by precisely such methods,it was a feature of budgets during the 1980s that they did the talksand other money-changers few favours.The puritanical moralist of the1960s did her best to survive into the later era.

2 The main significance of this period, however, was that it saw thequiet launching of Margaret Thatcher into government. The smooth management of her Bill had proved her qualities as a speakerand willing compromiser in the party interest.She showed she could playthe game. To elevate her above the jostling crowd of ambitious new MPs she also had, once again, the advantage of being a woman.

In her own estimation she owed her first job,in October 1961, tothis fact not least. She was offered the post of parliamentary secretary at the Ministryof Pensions, she told George Gardiner, becausethe vacancy had been created by the departure ofanother woman,Pat Hornsby-Smith. Even in those days, convention required a certain proportion of women to be admitted tothe male preserve of government, and there were not many in theMacmillan Tory Party to choose from. The minister whose junior she became, John Boyd-Carpenter,began by being somewhat scornful. «I thought quite frankly», it recalled later, «when Harold Macmillan appointed her that it was a little bit of a gimmick on his part. Here was a good-looking womanand he was obviously, I thought, trying to brighten up image of his government.» As it happened, this particular woman, her tax background and her relish for the fiddling details of a pensions minister's work, was admirably qualified for the job.But being a woman was nonetheless a special help. It set her early on S career, which gave her a front-bench seat for the rest of her political life.

3 Her occupation of the post was of only modest interest. She didnothing memorable in it. How could it be otherwise? In any listing of the least glamorous positions in government, parliamentary secretary to the Ministryof Pensions would be near the top. Mrs. Thatcher livedon a daily diet of individual complaints and inquiriesabout nationalinsurance and national assistance, hundred upon hundred of them to be considered by civil servants and adjudicated by the junior minister. At this class of workshe proved to be thoroughly adept, and Boyd-Carpenter soon revised his early judgment.«I couldn't have been more wrong, because once she got there she very quickly showed a grip on the highly technical matters of social security — and it's an extraordinarily technical, complex subject — and a capacity for hard work which she's shown ever since, and which quite startled the civil servants and certainly startled me.»



A somewhat sourer memory was offered a little earlier than this to other biographers. The permanent secretary at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance in 1961 was Sir Eric Bowyer. He evidently disapproved of her appointment to the job. He asked whether as a young mother she would work hard enough. Twenty years on, he also pulled out of the past a recollection that had surely by then become a misleading cliché. «'She would turn up looking as if she had spent the whole morning with the coiffeur and the whole afternoon with the couturier.' However in the end the civil service had got at least as much work from her as anyone else and probably a bit more'.»

In these condescending words may lie a clue to the one enduring impact Mrs. Thatcher's first government job made on her political life. It offered few opportunities to shine in Parliament, though what she had to do she did capably enough.

 

TASKS


Date: 2016-04-22; view: 751


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