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collectivism during his time in Heath’s Cabinet, and had been roundly criticised for it. Most of the members of the re-appointed Shadow Cabinet had supported the collectivist policies of the Heath government, and mistrusted both Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Very few of the new appointments were convinced by monetarist ideas. Indeed, very few of the party as a whole were monetarists – links between traditional right-wing Conservative individualism and Friedman’s economics were neither tried, tested nor accepted. Throughout the following years, this limited the pool from which new Shadow Cabinet members could be selected.
    Margaret Thatcher set out to win hearts and minds. The Tory conference was in October, which gave her seven months to establish a hold, though maybe a tenuous one, on her leadership. These were momentous times in the country. The battle for the European Union was raging – February 1975 saw the country vote to remain in the union in a referendum. In July the government brought forward a pay policy. Margaret Thatcher did not shine in debate against Wilson, and was hampered because by no means all the Tory Party or Shadow Cabinet would accept her speaking her true beliefs on this – that pay policies were fundamentally wrong, and helped cause rather than cure rising inflation. In September, she left for a two-week visit to the USA and Canada, but she was back in time for her first Tory conference as leader.
    Her conference speech was a critical test. She did not want to make a speech just about economic policy, she wanted to set the foundations of a real philosophical and practical alternative to collectivist thinking. This was absolutely new ground in a mainstream political forum. Monetarist forerunners like Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell had been cast as mavericks, and the message had been lost in reaction to them personally or to other parts of their speeches.
    The process of writing this speech was typical of Margaret Thatcher’s style. The first draft came from the Tory party research department. She re-wrote this herself, in her own handwriting. Then it went to Woodrow Wyatt to look at from a journalist’s perspective, and had some more material added by the research department. During the week before conference, it passed through many hands, but by the Wednesday it was, according to Margaret Thatcher, clear to me that none of those working away in my suite was what in the jargon is known as ‘wordsmith’. We had the structure, the ideas and even the foundations for some good jokes, but we needed someone with a feel for the words themselves who could make the whole text flow along . 2
    Who could do that effectively? A playwright of course. Ronnie Millar was a successful playwright, with a new play in rehearsal. He endeared himself immediately to Margaret Thatcher – he included some lines from Abraham Lincoln
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    â€˜You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong
    You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
    You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.’ 3
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    Lines that she had already found and kept on a scrap of paper in her handbag. For the next 15 years no major speech was complete until it had been ‘Ronnified’ – until Ronnie Millar had used his playwright’s ability to speak in her voice, and make that voice audible.
    This speech was finished at 4.30 in the morning on Friday, and delivered on Saturday. It contained a passage that Margaret Thatcher describes as her ‘credo’ and quotes in full in her memoirs: Let me give you my vision: A man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master – these are the British inheritance... We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery – not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old