Feat u r es
Although Whitelaw was a clever man, it came as a slight surprise that he went to university at all. He was completely untouched by any intellectual interest, preferring golf (in which he won a blue). He was awarded the Military Cross in the Scots Guards during the Second World War, and his attitude to Tory politics had a regimental character. He wanted to see that the men were well billeted and fought the enemy, not one another. Loyal to Ted Heath, who relied heavily on him, he stood against Mrs Thatcher in the leadership election of February 1975, after she had defeated Heath in the first ballot. He lost, and at once and ever afterwards maintained his loyalty to her. His only condition for becoming her deputy was that her mentor, Keith Joseph, should not be made shadow Chancellor. In her first administration of 1979 to 1983, Whitelaw was Home Secretary, dealing with the Brixton riots and trying to keep her dislike of the BBC at bay. After the 1983 election, slightly against his will, she gave him a (hereditary) peerage and made him Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords. In all his roles, the point of him was not to invent policies, but to bring about peace among colleagues. His task was to chair difficult Cabinet committees and to refresh those parts of the Conservative Party – mainly the more socially disdainful ones – which Mrs Thatcher could not reach. He did this by saying things like, ‘I’ve no idea why she wants it [whatever it might be], but she does. So there it is.’ This was surprisingly effective, and there can be no doubt that Whitelaw, an instinctive ‘Wet’, neutralised his fellow doubters and kept her position secure. It is often said that the crack-up of the Thatcher system dated from a carol service at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, in December 1987 during which Whitelaw suffered a stroke. When he left the Government early the following month, he was irreplaceable. When colleagues started to plot against Mrs Thatcher in the late Eighties, he was not there to warn her or to calm them down. With the partial exception of Nott, none of Mrs Thatcher’s Trinity-educated ministers had any effect on her ideas. Enoch Powell did. He was never personally close to her, first because he was a good deal older, second because he did not like having women in politics and was not easy in their company, and third because he had a certain donnish jealousy of the success of others. She, however, felt huge respect for him. Despite all her self-assertiveness, she did not overestimate her own intellectual powers: she always deferred to men (more than to women) whom she considered brilliant. Powell was brilliant.
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