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By Root 2673 0

in the Governments of Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home and Ted Heath. I enjoyed my early ministerial career: it was an absorbing education both in the ways of Whitehall and in the technicalities of pensions policy. But I could not help noticing a curious discrepancy in the behaviour of my colleagues. What they said and what they did seemed to exist in two separate compartments. It was not that they consciously deceived anyone; they were in fact conspicuously honourable. But the language of free enterprise, anti-socialism and the national interest sprang readily to their lips, while they conducted government business on very different assumptions about the role of the state at home and of the nation-state abroad. Their rhetoric was prompted by general ideas they thought desirable, such as freedom; their actions were confined by general ideas they thought inevitable, such as equality.

At the start, as an inexperienced young minister, I had to live with this. When we went into Opposition after the 1964 and 1966 defeats, I joined with Ted Heath in a rethinking of party policy which seemed to foreshadow much of what we later came to call Thatcherism. ‘Selsdon Man’ won the 1970 election on a radical Conservative manifesto.* But the Party’s conversion to its own philosophy proved skin-deep. After two years of struggling to put it into effect, the Heath Government changed course equally radically and adopted a programme of corporatism, intervention and reflation. I had my doubts, but as a first-time Cabinet minister I devoted myself principally to the major controversies of my own department (Education), and left more senior colleagues to get on with their own responsibilities. Yet all my instincts chafed against this. Perhaps because of my very unease, I noticed earlier than most that the very policies adopted as concessions to reality were also the least successful. Incomes policy, in addition to restricting people’s freedom, was invariably the prelude to a wages explosion. And that was one among many. Almost all the policies hawked about by ‘practical’ men on ‘pragmatic’ grounds turned out in the end to be highly impractical. Yet this fact never seemed to dent their enthusiasm. Indeed, Ted Heath responded to the defeat of his Government on the issue of incomes policy in the first 1974 election by proposing a still more ambitious scheme of interventionist government in the second.

While I was pondering on this mystery, Keith Joseph made a remark which reverberated powerfully in my mind. ‘I have only recently become a Conservative,’ he said, meaning that for his first twenty years in politics, many of them at the top, he had been a sort of moderate Fabian. I recognized both the truth of Keith’s remark and also that my own case was subtly different: I had always been an instinctive Conservative, but I had failed to develop these instincts either into a coherent framework of ideas or into a set of practical policies for government. And the faster the illusions of practical men crumbled before the onrush of reality, the more necessary it was to set about developing such a framework. Keith and I established the Centre for Policy Studies to do just that.

With Keith, I had come to see ever more clearly that what appeared to be technical arguments about the relationship between the stock of money and the level of prices went right to the heart of the question of what the role of government in a free society should be. It was the job of government to establish a framework of stability — whether constitutional stability, the rule of law, or the economic stability provided by sound money — within which individual families and businesses were free to pursue their own dreams and ambitions. We had to get out of the business of telling people what their ambitions should be and how exactly to realize them. That was up to them. The conclusions I reached fitted precisely those which my own instincts and experience themselves suggested. But I was aware that all too few of my colleagues in the Shadow Cabinet and in the House of Commons