FIGHT INFLATION

“She actually gets the Mirror journalist and photographer to come and watch her do the housework. The piece says, you know, she did this, she did the shopping, she did the laundry, and after that, she had to tidy up the Tory party, polish off Ted Heath and give Britain a good spring cleaning. With Margaret Thatcher, it's sometimes a bit hard to tell whether she wants to be Prime Minister or Housewife of the Year.”

“On the 5th of March, that's a week before Wilson is planning to make his announcement, the Bank of England decides to cut interest rates to try and give the economy a little bit of a boost. And the markets don't like this at all. And people start rushing to sell sterling. And quite soon the rush turns into a stampede. So by the evening of the following day, the 6th, the pound has now fallen to $1.98. Remember it was $2.23 a few minutes ago. It's now $1.98, the lowest level in its history.”

“At the end of the year, Willie Whitelaw tried to organize a reconciliation. He said, why don't you get together, have a meeting and come together for the good of the party in the country? Heath said no. And he said to him, Thatcher and her supporters are traitors. They will destroy the party and destroy Britain. He then embarks on this unbelievably spectacular sulk and he lives this for the rest of his life.”

“Because Healy is actually a very clever man and he's intellectually self-confident, he's self-confident enough to listen to them and to say, OK, fair enough, I will change. And it's very rare that Chancellor does that, actually. It's one of the signal examples in modern British history of a Chancellor starting off as one thing and then turning into something else. So he then reinvents himself as something of a monetarist, as somebody who is basically going to use monetary targets to bring inflation down.”

“Margaret Roberts as a girl had to say grace for every meal. Her father as a lay preacher went on and on and on about hard work, individualism, thrift, clean living, all of this. There is a moralism to it, a low church moralism that is totally unlike anything that any other Tory leader says before her. She said in 1984, I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end, good will triumph.”

“In very simple terms, monetarism is basically the government should stop messing around in the economy, stop taxing and spending, stop worrying about unemployment, just concentrate on one thing, your one priority, which is regulating the money supply to keep inflation down because inflation is the real evil. And this is the brainchild of the Chicago economist Milton Friedman.”

“In April 1976, he was telling a press conference that Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. Then in May 1976, so the following month, came the most notorious incident of all, when he turned up at Victoria Station in I think an open top Mercedes and greeted fans with what was alleged at the time to be a Nazi salute and which Bowie, Elon Musk style subsequently said had just been a wave. Then a few weeks later, he gives the interview that I've just cited.”

“By his last act of patronage, Harold Wilson has succeeded in reducing himself and not only himself, he has demeaned the office of Prime Minister. And actually, Labour MPs were appalled by this. That he should pick inadequate, buccaneering, sharp seisters for his honours was disgusting. It was unsavoury, disreputable and it just told the whole Wilson story in a single episode. And Haynes and Donahue go around everywhere and they say to everybody, this is Marcia's list, she wrote it on a lavender note paper.”

“The oil shock of late 1973 basically blew up the British economy. It sent inflation through the roof... inflation reached a record 26% in the summer of 1975. The result of all this is that especially on the right and indeed abroad, there is a profound sense by the beginning of 1975, that something has gone very, very badly wrong. The Briton is the sick man of Europe, and it's heading for some sort of apocalyptic reckoning.”

“He said the British security services were out to get me for years. They spread rumours that I was running a communist cell in Downing Street. And these BBC blokes can't believe this. I mean, this guy was prime minister just a few weeks ago. And then he's very calm, he's still puffing on his cigar. He says, they were saying that I was tied up with the communists. The link was Marcia. She was supposed to be a dedicated communist. And he goes on to say, he says, Norman Scott, this stable bloke, is a South African agent.”

“And Bernard Donoghue followed him out and found him in the toilet with kind of with his head in his hands, absolutely crushed. And Wilson just said very weakly, I'm so exhausted. I'm so tired. And he just he basically allowed himself to be insulted in this way by his own Chancellor in front of everybody. He did nothing at all about it. And he is, as Donoghue writes a month later, privately, we know he's blown. He's no more interest, no more ideas, no appetite for power.”

“On his second day as Prime Minister, another Labour MP, a disgraced Labour MP, this is very hard to explain in one sentence, but basically a disgraced Labour MP called John Stonehouse, who had faked his own death on a beach in Miami and then turned up in Melbourne and was arrested as a fraudster. He returned to British politics, he quits the party and he says there should be an immediate general election. So now Callaghan has no majority at all after just a couple of days. He's got 314 seats.”

“Alfred Roberts is your absolute textbook, early 20th century public spirited, worthy. He runs this grocer shop and he brings his two daughters up with the values of hard work and thrift and entrepreneurship and all this kind of thing. When she becomes Prime Minister in 1979, when she's outside number 10, she says to the cameras, I owe almost everything to my own father. He brought me up to believe all the things that I do believe and they're just the values on which I fought the election.”

“Whenever people ask him how she's doing, he says, oh, she's doing terribly. She'll never win. But if you could lend her your vote, that would be very helpful, especially if you would like a really big heavyweight like Willie Whitelaw on the second ballot. Why don't you lend the filly? Give the filly your vote. And actually loads of people say, oh, go on then. Yeah, fair enough.”