Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [93]
Perhaps the most important change was the promotion of Norman Tebbit to replace Jim Prior at Employment. Norman had had experience of dealing with industrial relations as a trade unionist himself. He had been an official of the British Airline Pilots’ Association and had no illusions about the vicious world of hard-left trade unionism, nor, by contrast, any doubt about the fundamental decency of most trade union members. As a true believer in the kind of approach Keith Joseph and I stood for, Norman understood how trade union reform fitted into our overall strategy. Norman was also one of the Party’s most effective performers in Parliament and on a public platform. The fact that the Left howled disapproval confirmed that he was just the right man for the job. He was someone they feared.
I had already agreed with Peter Thorneycroft that he should cease to be Party Chairman. I had been unhappy about some of Peter’s actions in recent months. But I would never forget how much he did to help win the 1979 election. He was one of an older school of political leaders — a man of force and character — and remained a friend. I appointed Cecil Parkinson to succeed him — dynamic, full of common sense, a good accountant, an excellent presenter and, no less important, on my wing of the Party.
The whole nature of the Cabinet changed as a result of these changes. After the new Cabinet’s first meeting I remarked to David Wolfson and John Hoskyns what a difference it made to have most of the people in it on my side. This did not mean that we would always agree, or that there would not be the regular arguments about public spending. There would always be some dissent and Jim Prior at his own request remained a member of ‘E’ committee, the economic committee of the Cabinet. But it would be a number of years before there arose an issue which fundamentally divided me from the majority of my Cabinet, and by then Britain’s economic recovery, so much a matter of controversy in 1981, had been accepted — perhaps all too easily accepted — as a fact of life.
The day after the reshuffle, The Times leader entitled Prima Inter Pares, summed up reaction to the changes I had made:
the final impression … left by this reshuffle is the indelible stamp and style of the Prime Minister herself. She has reasserted her political dominance and restated her faith in her own policies. She has rewarded those who do, and punished some of those who do not share that faith. If she succeeds — and by success we mean regenerating the British economy and winning the next election for the Conservative Party — it will be a remarkable personal triumph. If she fails, the fault will be laid at her door, though the damage and the casualties will spread wide through the political and economic landscape.
I could accept that.
THE 1981 CONSERVATIVE PARTY
CONFERENCE
The ‘wets’ had been defeated, but they did not yet fully realize it, and decided to make a last assault at the 1981 Party Conference in Blackpool that October.
The circumstances on the eve of the conference were grim. Inflation, which had fallen sharply since 1980, remained stubbornly at between 11 and 12 per cent. Largely as a result of the US budget deficit, interest rates had been increased by 2 per cent in mid-September, temporarily wiping out the reduction made possible at such cost by the budget in March. Then, shortly after I arrived at Melbourne for the Commonwealth Conference on 30 September, I received a telephone call to say that we would have to make a second increase of 2 per cent. So interest rates