Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (96 page)

The anger unleashed in her by Bosnia was exceeded by the passion with which she opposed the Maastricht Treaty. To widespread surprise, John Major achieved a considerable success in securing an opt-out for Britain from joining the single currency, and an exemption from signing up to the Social Chapter. Had Margaret Thatcher still been at the helm, the probability is that she would have been delighted at these results, which saved the pound sterling and guaranteed its independence from the euro. But by this time, nothing that Major did was right in her eyes. So she worked overtime to undermine him. She came perilously close to succeeding.

The votes on Maastricht in the House of Commons were a cliff-hanger. Margaret Thatcher, who had kept silent about the proposed treaty during the 1992 general election, became an outright opponent of its ratification. Elevated to the House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, she worked vigorously to corral her coterie of Eurosceptic Tory MPs into opposing the enabling legislation of Maastricht. From her new base in the upper house, she ran a campaign of persuading potential rebels from the Commons to vote against or at least abstain in the most crucial division of all – on the so-called ‘paving’ amendment. She was at her most manipulative: charming some waverers, flattering others and giving one or two of them brutal handbaggings. Her former political secretary, John Whittingdale, the newly elected MP for Colchester, broke down in tears after she told him: ‘The trouble with you, John, is that your spine does not reach your brain.’
²¹
He abstained.

It was without precedent to have a former Conservative Prime Minister fighting at one end of the corridors of the Palace of Westminster to incite Conservative back-benchers into rebellion against her successor’s most important legislation. Her campaigning, aided and abetted by her fellow new peer Lord Tebbit, came within a hair’s breath of blocking the treaty. For the tightest division on the ‘paving’ amendment was carried by the government by only three votes. Right up to the last minute, Margaret Thatcher had been doing her utmost to get the government defeated. Had she succeeded, the consequences for John Major would have been catastrophic.

Although Margaret Thatcher’s opposition to the Maastricht Treaty marked her most determined efforts to derail the new Conservative government, she continued her sabotage activities in numerous other ways. Because of her enduring agony at losing office, she could not control her tongue or her emotions. She
began to half-believe in extraordinary conspiracy theories, of which the silliest was the notion that John Major had feigned his wisdom-tooth operation in order to be absent from the campaign for her re-election as Conservative leader in November 1990.

This was nonsense, and her rational mind knew it. But her irrational, wounded side could spread poison, or at least pejorative propaganda, among the many acquaintances she saw privately. As her new circle included many journalists, from press barons to political reporters, her hostility towards the Prime Minister did not stay private for long. Instead of the loyalty he had hoped to receive from his predecessor, John Major was constantly having to handle a barrage of negativity from her, which steadily made his life impossible.

As he recalled:

Leading the Conservative Party at this time was like sitting on a volcano about to erupt. I don’t think I lived through a single day without worrying whether the party was going to split into two. If I had chosen to be as fierce in my own views as she was in hers, I think that fear might have become a reality. But I was forever trying to knit things together, and prepared to do a great deal to stop it splitting. As a result, I had to keep silent in the face of a great deal of provocation.
²²

The silence was one sided. Margaret Thatcher could not find the self-discipline to stop her complaining and carping. Because her wounds had not healed, they festered. She encouraged denigration of the Prime Minister, and legitimised the internal opposition towards him. She openly mocked several of his Cabinet Ministers. One amusing example of this occurred when she came to a drinks party at the home of Alan Duncan MP in 1997. There she saw Michael Portillo, the new Defence Secretary who told her that he had put out many invitations to tender since he assumed his office.

‘Invitations to tender!’ snorted the former Prime Minister in tones of ringing scorn. ‘You’ll never win a war Michael with invitations to tender! I know about these things. You’ll have to do far better than talking about invitations to tender.’

As she stalked off to another part of Alan Duncan’s drawing room she muttered to her host ‘I know I mustn’t! I know I mustn’t’!
²³

The fierceness and the frequency of her grumblings against the Major government took their toll. They had a huge knock on effect in spreading discontent, particularly on Europe. Although the Conservative Party did not actually split,
it looked and behaved as though it was a house bitterly divided against itself. This was the darkest side of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy.

REFLECTION

In the 1970s, it was said that no Conservative Party leader had ever behaved as badly towards their successor as Ted Heath did with his sulks, snubs and unhelpful behaviour towards Margaret Thatcher.

In the 1990s, this view had to be revised. For Margaret Thatcher’s political behaviour towards John Major was infinitely worse and far more destructive.

There were both human and political explanations for Margaret Thatcher’s malevolence. On the human side, she had every justification for fury at the internal coup that had brought about her fall. Her anger and her sickness of heart were so profound that she could not overcome them. This was her personal tragedy.

On the political front, she was entitled to hold passionate views about both Bosnia and Europe. Freed from the constraints of office, she could use wilder words and take up more extreme stances. Since she was broadly right about both issues, her principled beliefs deserve respect.

Unfortunately for her reputation, the human bitterness began to damage the political respect. She abandoned some of the qualities that had stood her in good stead in her early years as Prime Minister, such as self-discipline, caution and an acceptance of the norms of political conduct. She no longer listened enough to objective, let along critical, advice. Instead, she was misled towards further furies by voices who pandered to her worst fears and prejudices. Her denigration of John Major was a bad blot on her record.

Internationally, the picture was much more positive. On her global travels she did the state some service, built up her finances, and enhanced her reputation as an icon of historic achievements. Yet, even so, this chapter of her life was a sad one. Her agony after the fall did not enable her to go gently into the twilight of retirement.

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Snapshots of her retirement years

STRATEGIC IDEAS AND PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS

The newly ennobled Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven did not settle comfortably into the House of Lords. Her early speeches on Maastricht were listened to politely but voted against by overwhelming majorities. She tended to misjudge the mood of the upper house, particularly on 14 July 1993 when she launched an emotional attack against further erosions of sovereignty to Brussels unless sanctioned by a national referendum.
¹
The motion she supported was defeated by 445 votes to 146. Such speeches, aggravated by her continuing snipings against John Major, began to irritate not only the Tory establishment but also the party rank and file, who gave her noticeably shorter ovations when she appeared at party conferences.

None of these fluctuations in her domestic popularity worried her in the slightest. The contrast between the acclaim she was receiving on her international speaking tours and the anxiety she caused by her interventions in domestic politics could have been an echo of the biblical line ‘a prophet is without honour in his own country’.
²

On the world stage some of her speeches deserved the adjective prophetic. In March 1996 at Fulton, Missouri (where Winston Churchill had given his great ‘Iron Curtain’ address in 1945), she coined another memorable phrase by warning of the threat posed by ‘rogue states’. She specified in this category ‘Syria, Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya’ and highlighted ‘the danger from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’.
³

Despite Margaret Thatcher’s vast experience of geopolitical issues, her hostility towards John Major meant that he and his government had ceased to consult her on foreign policy. However, there was no ban on ministers taking
advice from the former Prime Minister. So a few weeks after my appointment as Minister of State for Defence I went to see her. Despite some handwringing from my officials (‘Are you sure it would be wise, minister?’) I felt I would benefit from her advice over the biggest decisions on my desk involving potential orders for missiles, torpedoes and aircraft. The rationale for them ultimately centred on a strategic question: Was there or was there not likely to be a future military threat to the UK from Russia now that the Soviet Union had collapsed?

I asked Margaret Thatcher if I could come and talk to her on this issue. She had unrivalled experience of making geopolitical judgements and an unequalled range of contacts in both Washington and Moscow. So for over an hour we had a deep and detailed discussion about the various factors that might cause a Russian resurgence as an aggressive military power.

She was still at the top of her game, well understanding why a new Defence minister might want to ask her advice on questions that could decide whether certain kinds of procurement orders should be confirmed or cancelled. After a conversation that ranged across both strategic and specific considerations, it emerged that she was a cautious optimist about Russian intentions. ‘The Bear may get hungry and angry towards its neighbours, but not for a generation or two.’
⁴
I agreed, and told her that as a result of her advice I would shortly be cancelling the £1 billion Spearfish torpedo programme.
^*

At the end of this talk I said I would like to mention something rather personal. Taking a deep breath I began:

We were last on our own together nearly thirteen years ago, and I have often thought that if we ever found ourselves in a one-on-one situation again then I would like to apologise to you. You see, I think I handled the break-up with Carol terribly badly. I am on good terms with her again, but I know I made such a mess of things that I upset you too as her mother. So I just wanted you to know that I am very sorry for that.
⁵

Margaret Thatcher looked totally stunned. There was an awkward silence in which she seemed to be choking up. I understood this, knowing how difficult
she found any kind of personal or family matters. So I took my leave quickly, wondering whether I had made a mistake in reopening a painful memory.

However, a week or two later Denis Thatcher came over to me at a large cocktail party and said, as we shook hands: ‘Thank you for what you said to Margaret the other day. She appreciated it a lot and so did I.’
⁶

From that moment onwards, my communications with Margaret Thatcher got better and better. I was a regular guest at her drinks and dinner parties, and she came to some of mine. She particularly enjoyed arguing over a meal with visiting foreign statesmen such as Henry Kissinger, Ghazi al Gosaibi of Saudi Arabia and HM the Sultan of Oman.

On one occasion her arguing went completely over the top. Margaret and Denis came down to Sandwich Bay to stay the weekend with Julian and Diana Seymour. As their near neighbour I invited the Thatchers and the Seymours over for lunch. It was a disaster.

Margaret had read a story in the Sunday papers about the deteriorating situation in Bosnia. So she arrived with her dander up to press the argument for immediate British military intervention. By this time I was in the cabinet as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. So I parroted the Treasury line that such a commitment could lead to an unpredictably high cost to public expenditure. I might just as well have lit the blue touch paper to a barrel of gunpowder.

In the explosions that followed, the table of Sunday lunch guests fell into cowed silence as Margaret denounced the ‘cowardice and the shame’ of our policy of non-intervention. One of her milder rhetorical questions was: ‘Are you ministers so weak that you are going to twiddle your thumbs while the Serbs inflict genocide?’ It did not help the temperature of the discussion when my Serbian-born wife, Lolicia, observed that most Serbs did not agree with genocide. More gunpowder exploded.

Although I had caught glimpses of Margaret Thatcher in this kind of a mood back in her Leader of the Opposition days, I was startled by the ferocity of her anger. It was eventually curtailed by Denis taking advantage of a pause in the explosions to issue the quiet command, ‘Cut it out girl!’ Amazingly she did, making on abrupt and barely polite exit a few minutes later. ‘It’s not cricket to behave like that’, observed one of our guests, E.W. ‘Jim’ Swanton, whose opinion carried some authority since he had been the chief cricket correspondent of the
Daily Telegraph
for many years.
⁷

The outburst had an unexpected sequel. Perhaps realising that she had over-reacted, Margaret asked to see me in the House of Lords a few days later. Apologies were not her style but she went out of her way to be gracious and charming on a most unexpected subject – the choice of her official biographer. She said that she was considering the possibilities. Julian Seymour had recommended me for the job.

She stressed that she would not be making up her mind quickly, but was I interested? Naturally I was. So I sent her an inscribed copy of my 670-page biography of Richard Nixon and hoped for the best.

Meanwhile, I learned that the field of authors under consideration had narrowed down to four runners – Simon Heffer, Antony Beevor, Charles Moore and myself. Some months went by. Then Margaret said to me, ‘I’m afraid I have decided not to ask you to be my official biographer because’ – and nothing could possibly have prepared me for the next four words – ‘you’re too old’.

For a moment I thought I must be mishearing her. But in the next few sentences she explained she was going to make it a pre-condition that her official biography should not be published until after her death. I was left to draw the conclusion that she expected to outlive me. This seemed an optimistic assumption on her part since at the time (1996) I was fifty-four to her seventy. Perhaps she had other reasons. Whatever they may have been, she made a wise choice in appointing the excellent Charles Moore to be her official biographer.

One of the oddities of conversations with Margaret Thatcher in her retirement was that they sometimes contained an ambush of eccentric unpredictability. Two subjects on which she showed this side of her personality concerned the dangers (as she saw them) of a reunited Germany and the opportunities created by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On the first subject she often lurched into embarrassing tirades against Helmut Kohl and his German reunification policies. On one occasion in 1997 she was giving a drink to a group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs who included Iain Duncan Smith, Bernard Jenkin, Bill Cash and Richard Shepherd. They were gathered in the Chesham Place offices of the Thatcher Foundation which overlooked the German Embassy in the same street. As the former Prime Minister’s denunciations of the Bundestag and the Berlin government became particularly vehement, Richard Shepherd gestured towards the Embassy and joked, ‘Careful
Margaret, they’ll hear you!’ Raising her voice and shaking her fist at the gates of the German Embassy she shouted across to the other side of Chesham Place, ‘Oh I do hope so!’
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A more endearing example of her spontaneous reaction to a foreign-policy issue occurred later the same year when she went to visit Sir James Goldsmith at Montjeu, his country house in France. Escorted by her host and accompanied by her fellow house guests, Bill and Biddy Cash, she and Denis went for a walk on the estate. To her surprise they came across, in a woodland grove, a huge bronze statue of Lenin. Margaret Thatcher insisted on posing for a photograph in front of this monument to the founding father of communism saying, ‘I just want to show him we won!’
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Winning battles remained on her agenda in the late 1990s. On the whole they were not political. She made occasional speeches in the constituencies of MPs she wanted to help, including a fiery one for me in South Thanet in which she all but called for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. But because she was so alienated from the official Conservative policy towards Europe she was a major contributor to the rift in the party which intensified the size of the government’s defeat in the 1997 election.

Before that debacle took place she was always keen to do her bit for some cause in Britain’s interest where she felt she could make a difference. British exports generally and defence exports in particular received considerable help from her as she travelled across the world, well briefed by the Foreign Office to put right words into the ears of the heads of state or government she was visiting. As the following story shows, she could be at her best in the Gulf.

STILL BATTING FOR BRITAIN

Margaret Thatcher has remained a heroine in the Gulf for the part she played in the war to liberate Kuwait. Because of this, she seemed the best person to help with a different sort of rescue operation in that country. This was a crisis over a vital Kuwaiti export order for armoured cars made by GKN in Birmingham.

As the Minister for Defence exports, I had been supporting GKN’s efforts to secure this contract. The company’s bid succeeded. The government of Kuwait publicly announced that it would be ordering £1 billion worth of GKN’s Warrior armoured cars as part of its armed forces re-equipment programme.

But just before the contract was due to be signed, a US defence manufacturer put in a counter-bid. Under the conventions among NATO countries and under normal business practices in Kuwait, such an opportunistic move would never normally have been considered. But this particular American counter-bid broke all the rules. It was accompanied by an extraordinary level of political lobbying from Washington, which climaxed in a telephone call to the Crown Prince from the US Vice President Al Gore and a personal letter to the Emir from President Bill Clinton.

Faced with the prospect of a British export triumph turning into a last-minute defeat, I did my ministerial best to organise some high-level counter-lobbying from London. Knowing that Margaret Thatcher, like the British government, had been personally assured by the Kuwait ruling family that this contract was coming to Britain, I went round to her house in Chester Square to see if she could help.

The action of the next forty minutes was a marvellous demonstration of Thatcher power at its fiercest, funniest and most effective. As I recounted the sequence of events in the contract battle so far, my narrative was punctuated by a succession of explosive epithets from Margaret Thatcher: ‘Outrageous!’ ‘Appalling!’ ‘Disgraceful!’ and finally, ‘I will not allow this!’ Having started the adrenalin flowing at warlike levels in the former Prime Minister, my next challenge was to persuade her to charge at the right target. No such persuasion was required. The lady was for phoning. ‘Do you have the Crown Prince of Kuwait’s home telephone number?’ she demanded. Fortunately I had, and dialled it. Amazingly, Sheikh Jabr Al Sabah answered the line himself. ‘Your Highness, I am in Margaret Thatcher’s house. She is right beside me, and would like to speak to you about an urgent matter’, I began. ‘Jonathan, you must be joking’, the bemused heir apparent said. Before I could explain that jokes were not on the evening’s agenda, Margaret Thatcher seized the receiver. In tones of rising passion she reminded the Crown Prince of the part Britain had played in the liberation of Kuwait and of his pledge that Britain would get its fair share of the armed forces re-equipment programme. She also reminded him that debts of honour were debts of honour, and that only a month or so ago he had personally assured her that Britain had won the armoured vehicle competition.

‘Now what I want to know is: do Kuwaitis keep their promises?’

The answer was apparently less than satisfactory. ‘Your Highness, I do not like what I am hearing. Let me ask you again. Do Kuwaitis keep their promises? Are you going to keep your word or break your word?’

‘I’m beginning to feel a bit sorry for this chappie’, observed Sir Denis
sotto voce
as he sipped his gin and tonic. His sympathy was evidently not shared by his spouse. Her decibels rose as she enlarged on her strong feelings to the Crown Prince. ‘So what exactly are you going to do at your cabinet meeting tomorrow?’ she crescendoed. ‘You are not going to run away from your responsibilities, are you?’