Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (54 page)

Even with that understanding, it took immense courage on the part of the British Prime Minister to keep saying ‘No’ forcefully to the well-meaning if muddled peace seekers; particularly Haig, Pym and assorted intermediaries.

If her diplomatic steadfastness was remarkable, it was matched by her unflinching willingness to accept the military risks. If a British aircraft carrier had been lost, the whole operation might have been regarded as a failure, and her resolution would have been condemned as recklessness.

Did her determination show a courage that could only have been displayed by a woman? Her Defence Secretary, John Nott, thinks so.

This was undoubtedly a woman’s war. Margaret Thatcher did not have any traces of men’s hesitancy. She had made up her mind to get the Falkland Islands back, to avenge our national dishonour. I cannot think of any recent male Prime Minister – Macmillan, Heath, Callaghan – who would not have sought a settlement. Margaret only pretended to do this. She went along with the diplomatic games played by Haig and company because to win she had to be seen to be trying diplomacy. But once faced with the crisis, she shut her mind to the risks of conducting such an operation 8,000 miles away. Her refusal to compromise was instinctive and un-masculine.
²⁸

The instincts of the Prime Minister were not without a maternal dimension. During the battle she revealed a tearful softness over casualties. Before the hostilities began, she ‘was hugely concerned over the individual deaths of servicemen, that she knew would happen’, recalled Cecil Parkinson. ‘Her abiding preoccupation was that losses must be kept to the minimum.’
²⁹
But once that preoccupation had been made clear to the military, she never wavered.

In the end, it was her courage that counted. It is academic whether it was the heart of a lion or a lioness that produced it. As Willie Whitelaw said on the night of victory, only she could have done it. By succeeding, she changed the mood of the country, the landscape of politics and her legacy to history.

The Falklands War was the turning point in Margaret Thatcher’s story.

22

After the Falklands

THE CHANGING OF THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE

The political rewards for Margaret Thatcher from the Falklands were enormous, but she was too cautious to exploit them quickly. With two years to go before the 1979 Parliament ran its full term, she dismissed the speculation that she might make an early dash to the polls in a ‘khaki election’.
¹
Instead, she engaged in a more subtle form of political opportunism. She exploited to the full the growing perception of her strong personality.

The Iron Lady and the Lady Not for Turning had been two uncertain stereotypes when they first made their appearances. After the Falklands they were not only accepted; they merged into two sides of the same re-valued coin.

Enoch Powell was the first to articulate this. Using the metaphor of metallurgy he had deployed in the epic parliamentary debate at the start of the war, he rose at Prime Minister’s Questions on 17 June to remind the House how he had predicted that the Falklands crisis should determine what metal the Iron Lady was made of. With theatrical solemnity Professor Powell announced the results of his experiment: ‘It shows that the substance under test consists of ferrous metal of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes.’
^*
Margaret Thatcher glowed at Powell’s tribute. ‘I am very grateful indeed to the right hon. Gentleman. I agree with every word he said’, she replied.
²

It took her no time to develop a link between the resolution she had demonstrated in the South Atlantic and the resolution that would be required to solve the most pressing economic, industrial and political issues at home.

The summer of 1982 was a festival of Falklands jubilation. One by one, the big ships of the task force came home – HMS
Illustrious
,
Hermes
,
Fearless
,
Intrepid
and the
Canberra
– amid scenes of high emotion at Portsmouth and Plymouth. One image that I vividly recall from the television news was that of a burly Marine coming ashore from HMS
Fearless
to embrace his wife with tears streaming down his face as he repeated ‘Best bloody country in the world, this!’
³

Margaret Thatcher tapped into these manifestations of national pride. In one of her first speeches after the war, at Cheltenham Racecourse, she alluded to the connection between conflicts to come at home and the war that had just been fought:

We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away … We rejoice that Britain has rekindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.
⁴

Outwardly she seemed hyped up during the weeks of post-Falklands euphoria. Inwardly she was tired, perhaps suffering from a temporary burn-out after some seventy-two days of intense pressure and sleepless nights. She admitted as much to friends and family.

She became tetchy about post-Falklands pinpricks. She was incandescent with the BBC for its ‘unpatriotic’ (they said ‘even-handed’) reporting; insulted by the suggestions from Tam Dalyell MP that she had ordered the sinking of the
General Belgrano
to thwart the Peruvian peace initiative; and irritated with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, for including prayers for the Argentine dead in the Falklands Memorial Service at St Paul’s Cathedral.

She was also dismayed at having to allow the setting up of a committee of senior Privy Councillors under the Chairmanship of Lord Franks, inquiring into the way the government handled the crisis in the period leading up to the conflict. Six months later, Franks came to the conclusion that the invasion could not have been anticipated or prevented by Britain since the Argentines themselves only decided to seize the Islands at a very late date. This exoneration was
diplomatically generous but politically wise, even if a few critics called it a whitewash. For the Franks Committee deliberated against a background of national gratitude for a job well done. Although there clearly had been errors of judgement in political and intelligence areas before the war, none of the blame for them was apportioned to the Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands’ luck held.

Her popularity was at its zenith when Parliament went into recess at the end of July. But she needed a rest so unusually for her she took a proper holiday, staying for ten days at a chateau in the Swiss Alps owned by Lady Glover.
^†
On return, the Prime Minister was admitted to the Fitzroy Nuffield Hospital in Bryanston Square for surgery on her varicose veins. She discharged herself the same day as the operation, wearing trousers for the only time in her years at No. 10. Her general practitioner, Dr John Henderson, told reporters that he was ‘completely overwhelmed … by the way Mrs Thatcher has recovered. She is really behaving as if nothing had happened … she simply won’t allow herself to be ill’.
⁵

What she was allowing herself to do was to rise above the political fray. For the next few months she soared to an extraordinary status somewhere between ‘she who must be obeyed’ and ‘she who should not be criticised’. This was not achieved by wrapping herself in the Union Jack. She was circumspect about her triumph as a war leader, confining the Falklands to no more than a few sentences at the end of her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in October. Instead she entered the artificial world of soft imaging.

This was a strategic move suggested by Tim Bell to counter-balance her reputation as a Warrior Queen. Suddenly the women’s magazines and the women’s pages of the tabloids were full of prime ministerial interviews accentuating her feminine side – her hair, her favourite recipes, her clothes, her feelings as a mother, her taste in novels and her enjoyment of TV serials. The readers of
Vogue
,
Woman
,
Woman’s Own
, the
Sun
, the
Sunday People
and the
News of the World
may have lapped this up. Those who knew the real
Margaret Thatcher had a double take or two when she professed to watch television drama series, read many novels, and to like nothing more than to just potter in the kitchen or the garden.

This charm offensive extended to the broadcast media. She appeared on both ITV and BBC children’s programmes, achieving one of the highest-ever viewing audiences for her starring role on
Jim’ll Fix It
with Jimmy Savile. Her memories of the Falklands campaign often featured in these broadcasts, particularly on the Remembrance Sunday edition of
Songs of Praise
, when she talked about the lives lost at Goose Green, and chose as her favourite memorial hymn:

O valiant hearts who to your glory came

Through dust of conflict and through battle flame
⁶

She also relived the Falklands War in front of the television cameras when she made her first visit to the Islands in January 1983. It was an emotional tour of battlefields and war graves combined with meeting servicemen and enjoying parties hosted by grateful Falklanders. There were touches of comedy too, such as her insistence at rising at 5 a.m. on the morning of her departure with the demand, ‘I haven’t seen a penguin. I must see a penguin before I leave.’
⁷
Her energy levels exhausted everyone, not least Denis, who at one point had to restrain her from inspecting some discarded boxes of ammunition. ‘For God’s sake, woman, don’t get out and count them.’
⁸

If her non-political image needed any further polishing, it got it from a BBC documentary,
The Woman at No. 10
, shown in March 1983. This was soft journalism extended to soft furnishings. It drew comparisons with Jackie Kennedy’s televised presentation of the White House a generation earlier. The complaisant interviewer on this prime ministerial guided tour of No. 10 was one of her favourite spiritual gurus, the anthropologist Sir Laurens van der Post, who had been a Chelsea neighbour in her Flood Street days. He gave her
carte blanche
to talk about her favourite paintings, porcelain and predecessors.

She seized her opportunities. ‘I thought of Wellington very much because I was very upset at the people who lost their lives in the Falklands’, she said, pointing to one portrait of the victor of Waterloo. ‘The great Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister for thirteen years’, was her comment on another picture on the walls of No. 10. Sitting in a chair in the Cabinet Room, she gestured towards
a painting of Sir Robert Walpole: ‘It is a great comfort to many of us that he stayed here for twenty-one years.’
⁹

The not so subliminal message was that Margaret Thatcher had woven herself into the tapestry of Britain’s military and political history. Like Walpole, Wellington, Salisbury and Churchill, she would be around for a long time.

The electorate had already taken this message on board. Before the Falklands she was rated as the country’s most unpopular prime minister since polling was invented. With both Labour and the SDP well ahead of her, winning by-elections in Tory strongholds up to March 1982, her chances of remaining at No. 10 looked slender. One year later she bestrode the political landscape like a colossus. The polls proclaimed it and the public knew it. This success was not all down to the Falklands factor. She appeared to be winning on two other battlefields that the voters cared about – the economy and the trade unions.

THE ECONOMY AND THE UNIONS

The economy was on the move before the Falklands War started. Sir Geoffrey Howe’s bold budget of 1981 had begun to produce its medicinal results. The most worrying symptom of the British disease, rising inflation, was being cured. By the end of 1982, the headline rate of inflation had fallen to below 5 per cent. After the price rise panics of the 1970s, when the Retail Price Index had fluctuated between 8 and 24 per cent, this stability was reassuring. With interest rates also coming down and living standards on the rise for those in work, Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy was beginning to be credited with delivering at least some of what she had promised.

What was not being delivered was a reduction in unemployment. In August 1982 it soared to 3.3 million. Such a figure would have previously been a harbinger of electoral disaster for any government. Old hands still worried on this score. In the middle of the post-Falklands festivities, when the earliest voices began predicting a second term for Margaret Thatcher, her loyal deputy Willie Whitelaw was heard to warn: ‘Nobody has ever won an election before with three million on the dole.’
¹⁰
But Norman Tebbit, who had joined the cabinet as Employment Secretary in September 1981, took a more sanguine view, persuading the Prime Minister that the jobless figure had reached a plateau, and that in any case the public were coming round to a different view of the causes of unemployment. Tebbit was right on both counts.

The sea change in the public’s perception of unemployment was one of the most remarkable consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s style of leadership. In the politics of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, governments had always been blamed for putting people out of work. In her didactic way of telling home truths, the Prime Minister had been sending out the message that jobs were lost by lack of international competitiveness, by over-manning, by the follies of mismanagement and, above all, by trade-union militancy. Gradually it became clear that the public was starting to believe her. From their own experiences of daily life, the majority of the electorate grudgingly accepted that she was correct. Unemployment became the dog that did not bark in the night.

The domestic arena where Margaret Thatcher scored her most convincing victories was in confronting the power of the unions. The unions helped her by inflicting some of the worse damage on themselves. She accelerated the twilight of their authority by changing the law.

In January 1982, Norman Tebbit produced the government’s second instalment of trade-union reform. He only just managed to have his Employment Bill accepted by the cabinet after Margaret Thatcher had crushed the doubting voices by summing up vigorously in support of her abrasive new Employment Secretary. In fact the ‘Chingford skin-head’, as his detractors called him, produced a more subtle package than the Tory right were hoping for. The bill removed the immunity of trade-union funds from actions for damages resulting from secondary or sympathetic strike actions. It also tightened the restrictions on closed shops and made it easier for employers to dismiss persistent trouble-makers. Norman Tebbit wanted to make union ballots compulsory before strike action could be called. But Margaret Thatcher’s political caution caused her to take a gradualist approach. She postponed such radical changes until 1984. Her moderation ensured a comparatively easy passage for the bill through Parliament.

Her first test of strength with the unions came over the 1980 steel strike. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) was faced with a demand for a 20 per cent wage increase, which could not possibly be paid on any economic basis. The steel unions, who called a strike in support of their pay claim, came to No. 10 to ask the government to help BSC settle the dispute with ‘new money’.
¹¹
Margaret Thatcher firmly pointed out that there was no such thing.

In the first three months of the strike, steel stocks diminished and officials at the Department of Industry pressed their Secretary of State, Sir Keith Joseph,
to settle the dispute by finding extra pockets of pubic money. For all his strict monetarist principles, Sir Keith was inclined to see all sides of the question too easily, so he returned at least three times to No. 10 to try and get the Prime Minister’s agreement to a strike settling formula. She would have none of it. ‘Don’t wobble, Keith’,
¹²
she instructed. Her determination won the day.