Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (36 page)

Margaret Thatcher was always a considerate boss. She could be short on apologies after she had gone over the top during a drama, but to her staff she was long on gentleness and kindness. Those two words are not naturally associated with the Iron Lady, but in her time as Leader of the Opposition they were true.

As for her feminine side, this was obvious in many ways starting with her good dress sense, her eye for colours and her interest in curtains, fabrics and furnishings. I remember when she came to a family lunch in my mother’s home, how she spent five minutes commenting with some expertise on a hand-painted Chinese wallpaper in the dining room, running her fingers delicately over the flow of the artist’s brush strokes.

As for other aspects of her femininity, it did not require much in the way of male imagination to see Margaret Thatcher as a woman of sensuality as well as strength. We were photographed walking away from Westminster Abbey after Selwyn Lloyd’s memorial service. Taken shortly before the general election of 1979, her hat is tilted at a jaunty angle; her confident eyes, her wide hips, her full yet trim figure and her elegant ankles all convey the impression of a fine-looking woman.

Being a woman political leader caused huge reactions in the political and media arena, but I could see that this almost unique status was of little interest to her. She was underwhelmed by the cause of feminism. She asked for and gave no quarter in arguments with her male colleagues. This put them at a disadvantage because they did not know how to answer her vigorous point scoring, let alone her diatribes.

She was at her most obnoxious when tearing a strip off a colleague, partly because she had no idea how to do this, except by going on and on with increasing unpleasantness.

Denis, who took his fair share of tongue-lashings, once said to me, ‘You just have to let her bollockings flow over you. Even the right royal ones don’t last that long.’
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On one occasion when I received a right royal bollocking from Margaret Thatcher while she was Leader of the Opposition, it was an alarming experience. Late one evening in the House of Commons, she called me into her office and in tones of fury erupted: ‘I hear you told Willie Whitelaw he was like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Well, let me tell you …’ Three minutes later, by which time the flow of molten lava had covered Willie’s war record, disloyalty to colleagues,
my arrogance, his hurt feelings, the importance of party unity and goodness knows what else, I finally got a word in edgeways.

I replied that I had not said what she thought I said. This seemed to infuriate her even more. Larger rockets were fired in my direction. But I stood my ground and insisted that my comment had merely been that the opposition had made ‘a Pavlovian response’ to a government announcement about the handling of complaints against the police. This was some way from attacking Willie Whitelaw personally.

Margaret Thatcher took no notice. She banged on as if I had compared her deputy to Adolf Hitler. ‘But it’s in
Hansard
’, I protested. ‘When you read it you’ll see that its mild stuff and not offensive. I’m sorry if Willie took it the wrong way.’ The realisation that my criticism of Whitelaw had not been a private
ad hominem
row but a public argument about policy on the floor of the House of Commons slowed her down – but not much. Mount Vesuvius went on rumbling but stopped erupting. The bollocking was over.

The following day the official record confirmed that my comment had indeed been a mild and impersonal one. Perhaps it was a misjudgement on my part, but nothing that remotely justified all that rage from Margaret Thatcher. Within a week she was going out of her way to be pleasant to me – which I sensed was her way of correcting her over-reaction. She hated to admit she had been in the wrong.

This minor incident was not uncharacteristic of Margaret Thatcher with her dander up. There were several colleagues who had been bruised by her voluble and personalised criticism. Ironically, one of them was Willie Whitelaw, who in 1976 moaned to friends, ‘I have never been spoken to that way in my life’, after she had lambasted him for not knowing his Home Office brief properly.
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There was a special skill in handling Margaret Thatcher which few of her political colleagues acquired in opposition, although one or two became adept at it in government. She had fewer people around her between 1975 and 1979 who knew how to cope with her volatility. They were Caroline Stephens, Richard Ryder, Ronnie Millar, Gordon Reece and Tim Bell. In their different ways they each brought out the best of her by understanding through the prism of her femininity not only her high peaks of achievement but also her low moments of vulnerability. And of course there was Denis. He put up with a lot but he was the rock of trust on which her ultimate confidences were reposed.

As polling day loomed, there was a growing sense that Britain was facing a watershed election. Whatever their political allegiances, most people knew that we could not go on with the economic and political failure that had characterised the locust years of the 1970s. One key figure who understood that the tectonic plates of political Britain were shifting was James Callaghan. In the closing phase of the campaign he made one or two comments to his staff that revealed his understanding of what was happening in the mood of the electorate. When his speech-writer served him up a draft that included a personal attack on his opponent, he rejected it, saying, ‘I’m not going to go for Mrs Thatcher like that. In a week or so she may be Prime Minister of Britain.’
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Bernard Donoghue, the Prime Minister’s closest political aide, detected a growing respect in Callaghan’s mind for what Margaret Thatcher was saying in her election speeches and broadcasts. Even when the polls suggested the gap between the parties was narrowing Callaghan remained privately sceptical about his own prospects. Driving back from a Labour Party rally in the last week before polling day, Donoghue offered the view that victory could yet be theirs if the momentum continued. As the car rounded Parliament Square, the Prime Minister disagreed:

Every thirty years or so there comes a sea change in politics … Then it does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves. I suspect there is now such a sea change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.
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That sea change was the final ingredient in Margaret Thatcher on the eve of the election. She was riding to power on the crest of a wave. The force was with her, and it was exciting to watch. She generated her own electricity which both attracted and repelled. If you were anywhere near her field you felt the current. You sensed that she was going to give the nation a shock – but would it energise the body politic or make it fall apart? She was sure of the answer, but most members of her party in Parliament, whatever they might hope or fear, were much less certain.

VICTORY

There was no lack of certainty about the result in Margaret Thatcher’s mind as polling day dawned, although she professed to be nervous. After casting her vote
at nine in the morning in Chelsea Town Hall for the Conservative Candidate Nicholas Scott, she tried a laboured jest: ‘We never count our chickens before they are hatched, and we don’t count No. 10 Downing Street before it is thatched.’
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She wrote the line herself. Jokes were still uncertain instruments in her hands.

The polls and the papers were good. Her most ardent new supporter in the media, the
Sun
, for the first time urged its largely Labour readership, ‘Vote Tory This Time – It’s the Only Way to Stop the Rot’.
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Rupert Murdoch had initially been anti-Thatcher in her early days as opposition leader, but scenting her success, he had come round. So had the swing voters. All the final opinion polls put her in the lead by margins of between 2 and 10.5 per cent. But she was careful to suppress her optimism as she spent the afternoon doing the usual tour of committee rooms in her Finchley constituency. Then she returned to Flood Street for the unusual luxury of a nap.

By the time she arrived, shortly after midnight, at Barnet Town Hall for the Finchley count, the trend of the early results was encouraging. It seemed clear that the Tories would form the next government. The predictions of the majority were rising. But Margaret Thatcher made no premature comment. She sat in a side room watching the television coverage, making notes of the returns in the briefing book Conservative Central Office had prepared for her. She could now count her chickens as they hatched, and long before her own result was announced she was certain she would be the next prime minister.

Because of a temporarily mislaid ballot box, Finchley declared late at 2.25 a.m. Margaret Thatcher more than doubled her majority, winning by 7,878 votes.
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She said she was ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the national result, which she revised to ‘optimistic’ when she arrived to cheering crowds at Central Office just before 4.00 a.m.

Amidst the scenes of triumph, a BBC radio reporter caught her saying it was ‘all very exciting … but somehow one is calm about it because you have to be’.
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Calmness in the eye of the storm of rejoicing was her trademark on that blissful dawn. She made a point of formally thanking every available Central Office staffer and party volunteer. Only once did she let her emotions show. She drew Ronnie Millar aside and asked him what he had prepared as a draft statement for her to deliver on the steps of No. 10 Downing Street.

He suggested she should quote the words of a prayer attributed to St Francis of Assisi:

Where there is discord, may we bring harmony, where there is error, may we bring truth, where there is doubt, may we bring faith, and where there is despair, may we bring hope.
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According to Ronnie Millar, ‘The lady rarely shows her deep feelings but this, on a night of high tension and the constant switchback of emotion, proved too much. Her eyes swam. She blew her nose.’
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As she sat down with her constituency secretary, Alison Ward, to get the lines typed, Alison began crying too. After these private tears, it was back to Flood Street for public cheers at 5 a.m. There, she snatched a couple of hours of sleep.

When the final results were analysed, the Conservatives were home and dry with a comfortable overall majority of forty-three seats. The national swing was 5.1 per cent – regionally higher in the South (7.7. per cent) than in the North (4.2. per cent).
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The worst blow of the night was that the Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Teddy Taylor, lost his seat to Labour in Glasgow Cathcart. But with that exception, the electoral sea change predicted by Jim Callaghan had taken place.

At 11.30 a.m. on Friday 4 May Margaret Thatcher returned to Central Office, where Tim Bell and Gordon Reece advised her that she should not use the prayer of St Francis because it sounded ‘far too pious’.
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She consulted Ronnie Millar, who told her to ignore them, invoking the name of Winston Churchill, which seemed to persuade her.

‘What shall I tell the boys?’ she asked.

‘Tell them it’s too soon to get cold feet until you’ve kissed hands.’
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She decided to stay with the St Francis script.

On television it was reported that Jim Callaghan had gone to Buckingham Palace to surrender his seals of office. Half an hour later, the phone rang. It was Ted Heath, wanting to offer his congratulations. Margaret Thatcher decided not to take the call. ‘Thank him very much’, was her instruction. The phone rang again. Everyone stiffened. ‘You’re not going to believe this’, said Caroline Stephens. ‘Wrong number.’
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With the tension rising, Margaret Thatcher kicked off her shoes and flexed her toes. Denis asked whether she had confused Buckingham Palace with a Hindu temple. She glared at him but put her shoes back on. Just after three o’clock the call came from the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Philip Moore.

‘Right. We’re off’, she said as she replaced the receiver.

‘Prime Minister …’ began Mark.

‘Not yet, dear’, reproved his mother.

‘No’, chipped in Denis. ‘The car might break down.’

‘In that case, I shall walk’, said the Prime Minister-elect, with theatrical firmness.
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As she was driven out of Smith Square, she had the idea of using the car telephone to reach out to the defeated Teddy Taylor. He was amazed to be told she was calling while en route for the Palace. Her words of commiseration and kindness at such a moment moved him to tears.
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After a forty-five minute audience with the Queen, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher arrived at Downing Street. She paused amidst a
melée
of cameras to deliver the apocryphal prayer of St Francis. Her tone was the opposite of triumphalism. It was also the opposite of what she planned to do in government. As she must have known, ‘Where there is discord, may we bring harmony’ was the antithesis of her conviction politics.

Just before she crossed the threshold of No. 10, a reporter shouted, ‘Have you any thoughts, Mrs Thatcher, at this moment about Mrs Pankhurst
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and your own mentor in political life – your own father?’

Despite the oddity of this pairing, the last two words evidently struck a chord. Ignoring Mrs Pankhurst, the new Prime Minister seized her chance to pay tribute to Alfred Roberts. She responded:

Well, of course, I just owe almost everything to my own father. I really do. He brought me up to believe all the things that I do believe and they’re just the values on which I’ve fought the election. And it’s passionately interesting for me that the things I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.
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Invoking her humble roots was a good public relations touch. But the tasks that awaited her on the other side of No. 10’s front door would soon show different dimensions of her personality than the humility and the prayer of St Francis.