4 - Thatcher's Management and Domination of the Parliamentary Conservative Party

Summary

Throughout her premiership, Margaret Thatcher led a party in which, according to Philip Norton (1990), only 19 per cent of Conservative MPs and ministers fully shared and supported her political views and vision, yet she and her eponymous ideology enjoyed considerable dominance, both intellectually and in terms of policy objectives (the parliamentary rejection of the 1986 Shops Bill to legalize Sunday trading was Thatcher’s only parliamentary defeat in the 1980s). Seven factors underpinned this dominance, and thereby the entrenchment of Thatcherism until it had established intellectual hegemony and a path-dependency, namely: (1) her allocation of cabinet posts and ministerial portfolios; (2) her combative style in chairing cabinet meetings, ministerial committees or conducting bilateral meetings with individual ministers to determine policy; (3) the recruitment of ideologically-aligned special advisers (SPADS) to the Downing Street Policy Unit and, sometimes, elsewhere in Whitehall; (4) the successful manner in which she responded to specific major events or crises which might have undermined other prime ministers; (5) the loyalty of most Conservative MPs whose support was extensively based on her electoral success rather than wholehearted or fervent ideological agreement; (6) the extent to which her critics and opponents in the parliamentary Conservative Party both underestimated her sheer determination and tenacity, and were unable to articulate a coherent or convincing alternative; and (7) the weakness of the non-Conservative opposition generally, not only ideologically and in terms of (lack of) leadership credibility, but due also to the vicissitudes of Britain's simple plurality or first-past-the-post electoral system which fragments, and thus effectively weakens the impact of, public support enjoyed by the other political parties among British voters.

Thatcher's allocation of cabinet posts and ministerial portfolios

It has become common wisdom that during her premiership, Thatcher appointed a cabinet of “Yes Men”, a perspective ostensibly lent credence by the well-publicized dismissals of prominent critics, usually from the left or One Nation wing of the parliamentary Conservative Party, whose more general ideological weakness is discussed below. During her first term (1979‒83), Thatcher dismissed non-believers such as Mark Carlisle, Ian Gilmour, Lord (Christopher) Soames and Norman St John Stevas, while the Conservatives’ emphatic victory in the 1983 election heralded the sacking of Francis Pym.