Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Kenneth Baker was one of the leading Conservative politicians, filling several ministerial posts before becoming home secretary in November 1990. He was closely associated with Margaret Thatcher’s drive to privatize publicly owned monopolies, such as British Telecom and the water industry, and with the controversial abolition of the Greater London Council and the Inner London Education Authority.
Background
Kenneth Wilfred Baker was born in Newport, Wales, in 1934, the son of Wilfred Michael Baker, a civil servant, and Amanda Baker (née Harries). His father moved to London in 1939 but moved back to work in Liverpool during World War II, living at nearby Southport.
Education
After the war the family moved to Twickenham, London, and the young Kenneth won a place at Hampton Grammar School; from there, he moved on to St. Paul’s, a school to which the rising middle classes had sent their sons since its foundation in 1509. After graduating, he did his national service in the army and then enrolled at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he obtained a second-class honors degree in history. He then became a trainee at the Shell Oil Company and from there moved on to sev¬eral other, smaller firms.
Career
He gained his first post in March 1972 in the Edward Heath government (1970— 1974), when he was made parliamentary undersecretary to the Civil Service Department, a department designed to improve the efficiency of public administration. This was a junior post that trained him in the internal workings of government administration. His experience there was relatively brief, as the Heath government was defeated in the general election of February 1974. It is clear that Baker was not fully in sympathy with Heath but was more in tune with Margaret Thatcher, the subsequent Conservative leader. When she became prime minister, in May 1979, his political career took off.
In January 1981 Baker was made minister of information technology in what became Thatcher’s first administrative reshuffle after her assumption of the office of prime minister, an occasion dubbed by journalists and political observers “the night of the long hatpin.”
Baker was elected to represent the Dorking constituency in the June 1983 general election, a move forced on him by the breakup of his old constituency, and retained his post as minister of information technology in Thatcher’s new administration. However, in September 1984 he was moved and became minister for local government.
In 1984 and 1985, Baker presided over a review group that suggested that council rates should not be based upon the size of property but upon a locally based charge levied on every person over the age of eighteen, thus ensuring that every citizen would contribute to local services and that councils would be responsive to the demands of their local community.
Baker became environment secretary in September 1985, which brought with it a seat in the cabinet. This was a brief, nine-month appointment, during which Baker focused on the concerns of the inner cities and, in February 1986, announced plans to privatize the water industry. By May 1986 he had been appointed education secretary, in charge of the Department of Education and Science.
Much to the relief of many educationists, Baker was asked to become the Conservative Party chairman on 25 July 1989, retaining his position within the cabinet as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a post that carried no ministerial responsibility. The party chairmanship was no easy brief; Baker had problems with some of the other leading political figures in the party—most notably with Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson, and Sir Geoffrey Howe—and encountered setbacks in the implementation of the Community Charge. Throughout the final days of the Thatcher administration, Baker remained one of the prime minister’s most faithful supporters. Reflecting on Thatcher’s decision in November 1990 to resign, Baker commented, “A great leader of our country, a very great Prime Minister, had been struck down by a collective loss of nerve among her colleagues” Thatcher supported John Major for the subsequent Conservative leadership, and Major was duly elected as Conservative leader and thus prime minister of the Conservative government. Baker loyally supported this action and was rewarded with an appointment to the office of home secretary on 29 November 1990, a post that he held until the general election of April 1992. During Baker’s tenure in this post, in late 1990, the Criminal Justice Bill put forward by his predecessor to ensure greater consistency in sentencing and punishment was successfully passed. Baker was deeply involved in his duties as home secretary and was particularly active in supporting the police, in initiating the privatization of prisons, and in promoting the National Lottery. His biggest embarrassment was the escape of two Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorists from Brixton Prison on 8 July 1991. An inquiry revealed security weaknesses at Brixton as well as a failure to take preventive measures despite prior knowledge that the two prisoners intended to escape. Given that these were flaws in operations rather than demonstrable indicators of policy weakness, Baker felt that there was no reason to resign. Nevertheless, he did resign following Major’s victory in the general election of April 1992; refusing the post of secretary of state for Wales—an appointment that must have seemed a demotion to a man who had long been a member of the inner cabinet circle— Baker returned to the back benches.
Achievements
Views
Reflecting recently on his actions as education secretary (in an interview with the Guardian, 16 September 1999), Baker candidly admitted: “I took away all the negotiating rights from the unions. It was quite brutal stuff. It was absolutely extreme stuff. ... I would have reduced LEAs to dealing with special educational needs and not much else. I put them on a course to wither in the vine. I have no regrets. My sins are of omission rather than commission.” He said that he had wished to challenge the comprehensive system of schooling: “I would have liked to bring back selection but I would have got into such controversy at an early stage that the other reforms would have been lost.” Thus, stealth was essential: “I was not going to take the comprehensive system head-on. I’d had the teachers’ strike, the national curriculum, you can’t take on yet another great fight. So I believed that if I set in train certain changes they would, er, have a cumulative beneficial effect.” He felt that offering parents a choice of schools would cause the poorer schools to close and other necessary changes to take place.
In the realms of higher and further education, Baker advocated rapid expansion; and indeed, whereas only one in eight children received higher education in 1980, the figure had risen to one in five by 1990. The problem was that even in improving these ratios, and in setting a target of one in three for 2000, he, like his predecessors Mark Carlisle (1979-1981) and Keith Joseph (1981-1986), aimed at the same time to reduce radically the funding that the government paid for each student. Universities found student numbers increasing on a vast scale, but had little money with which to deal with this flood. There were staff and student protests at these developments—particularly at Baker’s insistence that the cost of student education should be cut by replacing student grants with student loans, the first of which were made available for the academic year 1990-1991. Baker and his department were strongly opposed by what Baker called the “reactionary forces in education—the National Union of Students, the Labour Party, the Liberal Party, and the Tory Reform Group”.
Baker’s style in the education and other ministerial posts he held was clearly confrontational. He was as driven by his own ideological approach as were the extreme socialists whom he condemned. Consultation was not his habit, and the advice he sought was that which supported his own position. It is fair to describe him as a most unpopular education secretary, particularly among what he dubbed the “reactionary” forces—that is, the majority of the British electorate.
Membership
He eventually joined the Minster Trust, a City of London investment trust. From there he moved on to become managing director of a clothing company. In 1962 he met Mary Muir, whom he later married. It was at this point that Baker began to cultivate an interest in politics, serving on the ward committee of Twickenham Conservative Association and becoming a member of the Twickenham Borough Council in 1960.
From that base, Baker moved into national politics.
After unsuccessfully contesting the Poplar seat in London, he won election to Parliament representing the Acton constituency in a parliamentary by-election in March 1968. Although he lost his seat in the 1970 general election, he won the London seat of St. Marylebone in a parliamentary by-election later in 1970. Thereafter, he gradually began to rise in Conservative ranks.
Personality
Baker was at the center of British politics during the Thatcherite years when change was afoot. However, he will be remembered more for his confrontational style as education secretary and for the fact that he instigated several measures of privatization than for his more modest performance as home secretary.