Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (94 page)

Three members of the cabinet (Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind and Chris Patten) told her to her face that they would not vote for her. Most of the rest genuinely believed that her support among the back-benchers was collapsing. But they made no concerted attempt to claw back the votes that were slipping away from the Prime Minister. Instead, they became paralysed at the prospect of Heseltine arriving at No. 10, a fear that turned into a stampede of cabinet ministers running with the herd of alarmed Tory back-benchers.

As a back-bencher with a ringside seat at this debacle, I was amazed and ashamed by it. I thought Margaret Thatcher’s achievements and virtues far outweighed her misjudgements and failings. Overthrowing her because of the poll tax on the eve of the Gulf War and in the middle of a strategic struggle over the future direction of Europe seemed a myopic and tragic mistake.

Sadly, the Conservative parliamentary party had changed its nature too much to recognise its mistake. Long-term loyalty to the nationally elected leader was at a discount. Short-term fixes to the problems of the Community Charge were at a premium. The Prime Minister worked on longer horizons and bigger visions. Saving our seats was to her a mere parochial imperative compared to saving our country, which had been her mission since the day she came to power in 1979. Winning the Gulf War, defeating inflation and preventing Britain from sliding into the single currency and European federalism were her priorities in the autumn of 1990. Because she took her stand on them so forcefully to the exclusion of most other considerations, she fell – but over much smaller issues and at the hands of much lesser men.

Perhaps the British public would have supported her view of the bigger issues when asked to back her or sack her at a mid-1992 general election, which I and many others believe she would have won. But if it had been the latter decision, at least her rejection would have been at the hands of the national electorate rather than by a party faction. That would have been a better departure for her. Instead, she left in a mind-set of emotionally charged bitterness that was to make life difficult for herself, her successor and her party for many years to come.

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The agony after the fall

TRAUMA AND TANTRUMS

The first weeks after the fall were traumatic. Margaret Thatcher was in a black mood that combined shocked emotions of bereavement, betrayal and blind fury.

Immediately after leaving No. 10, she and Denis were driven to their new home in Dulwich. So troubled were her feelings that she did not speak a single word to her husband on her fifty-minute journey, according to her driver.
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Soon she was facing some uncomfortable domestic realities. After eleven years at the apex of power, she was unable to cope with many of life’s simplest practicalities. She did not know how to dial a telephone number,
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how to send a fax or how to operate the washing and drying machines in her basement. Her Special Branch protection team, who had installed themselves in the garage, helped her over these hurdles. One of the first outside calls she made, on a police line, was to Crawfie. ‘This is Margaret. From the garage’,
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was her poignant opening to the conversation.

Seven hours after leaving Whitehall she returned to it in order to attend a party in the Cabinet Office organised in her honour by Sir Robin Butler. Proposing her health to the carefully chosen gathering of her favourite Permanent Secretaries and senior officials, he said, ‘When we are old the one thing our children and grandchildren will be most interested in is that we worked for Margaret Thatcher’.
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The guest of honour liked this prediction. But she visibly disliked Butler’s maladroit presentation to her of a Cabinet Office pass giving her full access as
an ex-Prime Minister to government buildings. Even more did she dislike his next move of Whitehall housekeeping. This consisted of sending her the standard Cabinet Secretary’s letter to former Prime Ministers asking for the return of all government documents in her possession. She refused in a tirade that was extreme even by her standards.

Her parliamentary colleagues also had to get used to her lashings out and eruptions in this dark period. The whips were berated for not immediately finding her an office within the Palace of Westminster. Alastair McAlpine, the Conservative Party Treasurer, came to the rescue by lending her his house in Great College Street. She used it as a base for her secretariat and for receiving visitors in a poky first-floor sitting room.

One cold January evening in 1991 I was walking along Great College Street towards my home in Lord North Street when Peter Morrison popped his head out of the door and said, ‘Can you spare a moment, old boy? Margaret could do with some company’.

In the hallway he explained that the recently deposed Prime Minister was ‘like a bear with a sore head. She can’t stand the sight of the swine who had stabbed her in the back. But she knows you were a last ditcher. So do her a favour and come in and have a nightcap’.
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He made the invitation sound like an SOS message. In a way it was, for I soon discovered that Margaret Thatcher’s state of aggression was elephantine as well as ursine on the Richter scale of rampages.

For well over an hour I listened to what could only be called a hysterical rant. If the former Prime Minister had been equipped with tusks she would have tossed and gored half the Conservative parliamentary party. Her angriest thrusts were directed against her most recently promoted ministers, who she now vilified as ‘spineless, gutless Judases’. She set off down what she called ‘My list of turncoats and traitors’. The intensity of her rage was increased by the liberal glasses of Famous Grouse Whisky being dispensed by the understandably tired Peter Morrison. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling once or twice as to indicate that he had heard this litany of denunciation many times before. It was a painful, embarrassing and apparently recurring scene. At the time I felt heartbroken for Margaret Thatcher as this dreadful session wore on. Nearly a quarter of a century later, I know it is fairer to draw a veil over these depths of her agony.

The evening ended, however, with a contrastingly brisk decision on her part. Making one effort to distract her from her hymns of hate against her assassins,
I tried to turn the conversation, or to be more accurate her monologue, towards the subject of writing her memoirs. My attempt failed at first instance. Her only response was to fulminate with longer diatribes about betrayals. Making a second try to divert the flow, I talked about the White House aides who had betrayed Richard Nixon. ‘How do you know all that?’ she asked.

‘Originally, because I was staying at San Clemente when Nixon was writing the Watergate chapter of his memoirs. I talked a lot to him and to the researchers who worked on the draft. I think you were once interviewed by one of them – Diane Sawyer of CBS.’

‘Diane Sawyer – are you sure?’

‘Absolutely certain’, I replied, going on to describe how my American friends Frank Gannon and Diane Sawyer had borne the brunt of the research work on the massive Nixon memoirs.

‘Well, that’s interesting’, said Margaret Thatcher. ‘Let’s have another discussion about how exactly President Nixon wrote his book – but not now. It’s time to get back to Dulwich.’
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About ten days later I did have a well-focused discussion with Margaret Thatcher about how the memoirs of the 43rd President of the United States had been researched and written. By this time I had done my homework and knew exactly which sections, on issues as diverse as the vice presidency, the opening to China and Watergate, had been worked on by which researcher.

Margaret Thatcher was intrigued. At one point I told her that Nixon had grilled Diane Sawyer for hours at a stretch of intense questioning about her draft pages on Watergate. ‘The longest of these lasted six and a half hours without even a bathroom break’, I said. This detail got a human reaction from the former Prime Minister.

‘Without even a bathroom break!’ she exclaimed. ‘Poor girl! How inconsiderate of Mr Nixon. One must be considerate to one’s staff.’

The final consideration that was discussed in our talk about Nixon’s memoirs was time. She asked how long she would need to write her memoirs. The subject must have been on her mind, since the press were reporting that there was a bidding war between Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch for the worldwide rights to her autobiography.

‘President Nixon took two and a half years to write his book’, I said.

The Iron Lady became the impatient Lady.

‘Two and a half years!’ she said, her voice rising. That’s half the time it took to win the Second World War! And this Parliament may last another two and a half years. There’s work for me to do in the House!’

I was too polite to say so at the time, but I thought this was one of the silliest statements I had ever heard from her lips. The notion that she should be sitting around in the House of Commons as an ex-Prime Minister looking for work to do was a certain recipe for increasing her frustration. This was indeed the pattern for her last eighteen months as a back-bencher. Far from simmering down in the slower pace of life after high office, she boiled over with increasingly venomous anger about the way she had been treated. She vented her spleen not just in private conversations but also in public interviews. She repeatedly referred to herself as ‘The only undefeated Prime Minister’.

As she complained to
Vanity Fair
in March 1991: ‘I have never been defeated in an election. I have never been defeated in a vote of confidence in Parliament … I have never been defeated by the people.’ In the same interview she described with emotional imagery how ‘The pattern of my life was fractured … It’s like throwing a pane of glass with a complicated map upon it on the floor … You threw it on the floor and it shattered.’
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The pain of her shattering resulted in many outbursts and tantrums. Denis bore the worst of these storms but not always stoically. He too could become angry. The unsuitability of the house in Dulwich was one bone of contention. This difficulty was solved by Kathleen Ford, the widow of Henry Ford, who lent the Thatchers her twelve-room duplex apartment in 93 Eaton Square for over a year in 1990–1991 until they acquired a lease on a five-storey house two minutes walk away at 73 Chester Square.

Being comfortably housed was not the real problem. The root cause of Margaret Thatcher’s restlessness was that she retained a hunger and a capacity for power but had no field in which to exercise it. She found it impossible to fill this gap in her life since she had no interests beyond the arena of politics. As Charles Powell said after her death, ‘She never had a happy day after being ousted from office’.
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TRAVELLING, SPEECH-MAKING AND WRITING

The first break in the clouds that were causing her gloom came when she started to travel the world earning huge fees from speech-making. The first of
these excursions was to Texas, where Mark’s contacts in Dallas clubbed together to provide a speaker’s honorarium of $250,000 for the ex-Prime Minister. ‘It gave my mother an enormous boost of confidence at a time when she was feeling very uncertain about her future’, said Mark.
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The engagement opened the door to a relationship with the prestigious Washington Speakers Bureau who for several years arranged lectures for her at a fee of $50,000 a time. As always, she felt at home in the United States, having made ten visits there in 1991–1992. They included not only set-piece speeches to paying audiences but also public events at which she was honoured for her historic achievements. These included receiving the Congressional Medal of Freedom from George H.W. Bush at a lavish ceremony in the White House; and attending Ronald Reagan’s eightieth birthday party in California.

Her travels soon became global. In August 1992 she set off to Taiwan and Hong Kong. The first of these assignments required a speech of careful diplomatic balance. The second was an even harder balancing act for she had to decide whether to oppose or support what were called the ‘Patten reforms’ for the colony in its last years before the handover. This was not an easy judgement. She had been ‘distinctly sniffy’
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about Chris Patten’s appointment as Governor. However, against the urgings of her former adviser, Sir Percy Cradock, she sided, not entirely successfully, with Patten’s attempts to introduce democratic freedom into the governance of Hong Kong. But, because of the immense respect accorded her by the leadership in Beijing, behind the scenes she was a helpful influence on various difficult issues in the run up to China’s absorption of the colony.

From Hong Kong, she flew by a BP corporate jet to Baku, Azerbaijan, whose President Abulfaz Elchibey would not agree a major oil contract with the company unless Margaret Thatcher was present at the signing ceremony. Her presence was requested by the president to give a ‘free of corruption’ seal of approval to the deal. She was delighted to be ‘batting for Britain’ again in this way. She refused all offers of payment for her speeches and appearances in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Baku, even though she had prepared for them with a thoroughness almost as intense as for a prime ministerial tour.

After she returned from this Far East–Central Asia series of engagements, the newly appointed head of her office, Julian Seymour, thought that the contribution she felt she had made to Britain’s national interests gave her a fresh sense of purpose. ‘From then on she was much more focused. She had found a way of exerting influence again.’
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One other dimension of her speech-making after leaving office deserves to be highlighted. She enjoyed influencing the minds of the young. She accepted, always without taking a fee, many invitations from universities and colleges. She became Chancellor of William and Mary College in Virginia where she gave lectures and participated in Charter Day activities.

In Britain she was more selective in speaking to academic audiences, but in different ways she was supportive of Buckingham University, Churchill College, Cambridge and the Saïd Business School at Oxford. She never quite got over the hostility of the Oxford dons who had voted against awarding her an honorary degree. But for old friends such as Wafic Saïd and Robin Butler she made an exception to her anti-Oxford bias.

It was an invitation from her former private secretary, now Lord Butler of Brockwell and Master of University College, Oxford, which produced a rare example of Margaret Thatcher being outflanked by a sharp questioner. The scene of this uncomfortable exchange came when she addressed the students of University College at a private gathering organised by Robin Butler.

In her brief opening remarks the former Prime Minister said she would like her listeners from the rising generation to reflect on just two points:

‘First, about the world; you should remember that during the 20th century, my century, more people died of tyranny than died in war. So you must always be ready to fight for freedom.

‘Secondly, about Britain; the problems facing your generation will not be economic problems. They have been solved’, she announced, modestly refraining from saying who she thought had solved them.

‘But I think you will have to face a severe social problem which could better be described as a behavioural problem’, she continued. ‘When I was growing up, even during the war, five per cent of children were born illegitimate. Today thirty-two per cent of births are illegitimate, and the number is rising. I don’t know what the consequences of this will be, but it worries me.’

During the Q & A session a student challenged her views on this issue: ‘Lady Thatcher, don’t you think it’s a little unfair to describe a child as illegitimate throughout its life when it has had no influence over the circumstances of its own birth?’

‘Well, what would you call it?’ she retorted. ‘I can think of another word to use. But I prefer not to use it in this company.’
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There was a stunned silence. But after an uneasy pause, the questioning resumed on other topics. Then there was chapel, dinner at high table and a nightcap in the Master’s lodgings.