Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (78 page)

The global impact of Margaret Thatcher was immediate and enormous, because she was, after Golda Meir of Israel, the first elected woman leader in the Western world. Yet despite the criticism she had already attracted for being image-conscious in opposition, Mrs Thatcher gave extraordinarily little thought to media relations. Charles Anson,
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who was a No. 10
press officer when she arrived, noticed an ‘absolutely instant’ change in the level of outside interest. The press mêlée outside No. 10 on the day of her victory had been so great that his colleagues had found it hard to get the tape recorder near enough to record her St Francis of Assisi remarks. Journalists from all over the world wanted to know things like whether there was a women’s lavatory near the Cabinet Room, and fashion editors seemed to telephone almost as much as members of the parliamentary press lobby. But it struck Anson that Mrs Thatcher showed ‘very little interest in how she was projected’.
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She was so irritated by questions about being a woman that the press office had to warn foreign journalists off the subject. She did not really read the newspapers herself, beyond a cursory glance at Denis’s
Daily Telegraph
, and it was hard to persuade her to pay much attention to what they were saying. Unlike Harold Wilson, who was obsessed with press coverage, and all prime ministers who were to succeed her, Mrs Thatcher needed reminding that the media mattered. It did not occur to her to alter the existing structure of the Downing Street press operation. All those running it were career civil servants, and the man she first put in charge of it was Henry James, a former head of the Central Office of Information who was then working at Vickers, whom she appointed as a temporary measure. It is notable that she did not take the opportunity to appoint a press secretary from a party or ideological background. Indeed, she consciously reverted to a less political approach to the press job because of what was seen as the excessively political one of Callaghan’s press secretary, Tom McCaffrey,
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choosing James precisely because he was unpolitical. Her relations with James were good, but she did not see his work as central to hers. At the beginning of her time in office, the Prime Minister received no daily press digest. There was no separate daily meeting about the media, and she did not automatically see her press secretary every morning, often dealing with these matters through her private secretaries alone.

Although Thatcher supporters were adept at using sympathetic journalists to push their line, there was nothing like the modern, systematic management of coverage. The idea of planning an announcement round the hoped-for headline was unknown, and the word ‘spin’ had no currency in British politics. Mrs Thatcher was usually punctilious in observing the convention that announcements of new legislation, green papers and so on should be made first to Parliament, not on television, although there were occasions when she made important policy changes on the spur of the moment, under the heat of the television lights. Despite the intense
interest in her, there was no twenty-four-hour news cycle such as exists today. Between her election in May 1979 and her first summer recess that August, Mrs Thatcher gave only four formal press conferences and no full-dress interviews. Once inside No. 10, she paid much less attention to people, such as Gordon Reece, who had handled her media appearances in opposition. She ignored Reece’s advice to give more television interviews, and crossly stamped on his request that her image be used for merchandising in aid of the party: ‘
No
permission to be given on any goods of any kind. Don’t mind a straight photograph.’
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Her main public communications were in the House of Commons and through setpiece speeches. In this, as in so much else, Mrs Thatcher conformed to existing rules.

From 1 November 1979, however, James was recalled to Vickers, and Mrs Thatcher appointed Bernard Ingham
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as her press secretary. A former Labour supporter who had once stood unsuccessfully for Leeds City Council and had later been an information officer at the Departments of Employment and Energy, Ingham was a naturally combative man. Perhaps excessively proud of his Yorkshire common sense, he was strongly in sympathy with the changes Mrs Thatcher was trying to make in British society. As his power grew in later years – he was to stay with her until the very end – Ingham would be criticized for intriguing on her behalf against ministers who were out of favour. He was always, however, rigorous about following the rules which prevented him having any contact with the party (never attending party conferences, for example, but going on holiday instead). However much he bruised individual feelings, he did not violate the Civil Service structure.

After he had arrived at No. 10 in October, understudying James for a few weeks, Ingham took up his place in the bow window which surveys everyone who comes and goes in Downing Street. He soon decided that his most immediate problem was to make the Prime Minister pay any attention at all to how she was being reported. He therefore developed a daily press digest of about five foolscap pages and ‘sat down with her while we read it to make sure she
did
read it’ most mornings at 9 o’clock.
⁸⁸
This briefing became her window on the world. Mrs Thatcher did pay attention to what the
Daily Telegraph
said, since it was the main line to her natural supporters, and also to the
Sun
, whose importance in winning working-class voters over from Labour she readily acknowledged. In October 1979,
the
Sun
asked her to send the paper a message of congratulation on its tenth anniversary. Ingham, who was still three days short of formally starting his job, recommended against, complaining of the ‘somewhat flimsy basis’. Mrs Thatcher, however, scribbled: ‘The
Sun
is a friend! Will do.’
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But in general she was distant from the media, and from the tastes of mass readerships. It is clear from the occasional notes she scribbled on these digests that she was thinking about particular issues – economic crises, for example, or the fate of servicemen killed in terrorist attacks – rather than about how she was herself being portrayed or what the current conversation in pub or coffee break might be. ‘The real problem’, Ingham remembered, ‘was that she was not in touch.’ She knew nothing about pop music or popular television programmes. She might, in her early days, read the first two columns of the
Financial Times
, but ‘they did not exactly keep her in touch with what Britain was thinking.’ Sometimes, when he and Mrs Thatcher were sitting on the tarmac waiting for an aeroplane to take off, Ingham would say to her, ‘You might usefully read the leader in X paper,’ and then notice that she did not know where the leader page was.
⁹⁰

It was a strength of hers that she did not bother her head with the petty intrigues and black arts of newspapers – ‘she didn’t have a dirty barrow-boy’s mind’ – but Ingham thought ‘she was unprofessional in not thinking about presentation enough.’ Much though she trusted him, she was so ‘naturally secretive’ about the distribution of paper that he fought a constant battle to keep up with what she was doing. In 1980, for instance, the report of the Top Salaries Review Body, with its controversial recommendations for generous increases, reached Ingham only half an hour before he was supposed to see the lobby about it. He did not know what the government line on it would be. ‘It’s madness,’ Ingham told her. What Ingham also noticed at once, however, was Mrs Thatcher’s gifts as a public performer. She was very concerned about her physical appearance and, when going on television, ‘indulged herself with the make-up girl’.
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Charles Anson observed that she considered her right profile better than her left, and was at pains to be photographed from that angle.
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As Ingham put it: ‘She was an actress who could turn on a tremendous performance when it had to be turned on.’
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She was not media-minded, but she was a media star.

The first foreign politician to ring Mrs Thatcher to congratulate her on her victory on Friday 4 May 1979 was Ronald Reagan. But at that stage the ex-Governor of California was, in the official mind, little more than the unsuccessful challenger for the Republican nomination of 1976.
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The
Downing Street switchboard did not put him through. President Jimmy Carter was advised by aides to call, in addition to sending the usual congratulatory cable, to ‘help counter some of the distorted speculation we saw during the campaign (to the effect that we were hoping for a Labor win …)’.
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Carter made the call quite late in the day, and he and Mrs Thatcher spoke for only two minutes.

Luckily for Mrs Thatcher, she and Reagan managed to speak a few days later, and Reagan’s enthusiasm was not deflected by the snub from No. 10. He was confident in his relationship with Mrs Thatcher, having enjoyed a second meeting with her in London back in November 1978. This meeting had been arranged after Reagan, scheduled to visit Europe, ‘expressed a wish to call on Mrs Thatcher to renew their friendship’.
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‘They sparked,’ said Richard Allen, who witnessed the encounter.
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Mrs Thatcher confided in Reagan her rather unfavourable evaluation of President Carter, before urging him to ‘keep working for his goals. She told him that while it might be too late to turn things around in her country, she hoped not and, in any case, would do everything she could to make a success of it.’
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In one of his regular weekly radio broadcasts, Reagan, who by May 1979 was campaigning once again for the Republican nomination, now cheered her on from the sidelines:

I couldn’t be happier than I am over England’s new Prime Minister. It has been my privilege to meet and have two lengthy audiences with Margaret Thatcher and I’ve been rooting for her to become Prime Minister since our first meeting.

If anyone can remind England of the greatness she knew during those dangerous days in WWII when alone and unafraid her people fought the Battle of Britain it will be the Prime Minister the English press has already nicknamed ‘Maggie’.

I think she’ll do some moving and shaking of England’s once-proud industrial capacity which under the Labor Party has been running downhill for a long time. Productivity levels in some industrial fields are lower than they were 40 years ago. Output per man hour in many trades is only a third of what it was in the 1930s. Bricklayers for example laid 1000 bricks a day in 1937 – today they lay 300. I think ‘Maggie’ – bless her soul, will do something about that.
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There was no comparable rapture in the chancelleries of Europe, but there was certainly keen interest. And the main European leaders, frustrated by having had to suffer the Labour Party’s internal divisions over the EEC, were quite pleased to have a return of the Tories, who were regarded at that time as definitely the more Europhile of the two parties. The attitude of officialdom, always pro-EEC, was to welcome the Conservatives because they seemed more united: ‘We all felt “Thank God we’ve got rid of that very weak government.” ’
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It chanced that, by arrangement with the previous government, the first foreign leader scheduled for a visit to No. 10 was Helmut Schmidt, the Chancellor of West Germany.
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This did not please Mrs Thatcher, though she knew about it and had provisionally accepted it before coming into office. ‘Why’s he coming?’ she complained to John Hunt. ‘I didn’t ask for it.’ But the visit, which took place only a week after her victory, was a success. Schmidt was staggered by Mrs Thatcher’s mastery of her brief.
¹⁰⁰
For her part, Mrs Thatcher never expressed, even in private, the anti-German feeling that would appear in later years.
¹⁰¹
In public, she was admiring of German achievements, noting in her speech at the dinner that Germany’s ‘enviable example’ of economic success had been mentioned in both the main parties’ election manifestos. She then launched into a statement of Britain’s attitude to the EEC which, while warm – ‘Ours is not a grudging acquiescence in Community membership’ – was also realistic rather than visionary. She complained that Britain paid the ‘lion’s share’ of the bill for wasteful agricultural surpluses, and emphasized the ‘variety of our distinct nation states’. The strongest link between Germany and Britain, she said, was not the EEC but that ‘First and foremost, we are both members of the North Atlantic Alliance.’
¹⁰²
At the joint press conference the next day, Mrs Thatcher was asked, for the first of scores of occasions in her administration, when Britain would join the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System (EMS), which was something which Germany strongly urged. Also for the first of scores of occasions, she played for time. The government would look at the matter, she promised, when the system was reviewed in September.
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Her remarks on EEC subjects at this time were conditioned by the fact that, eleven days after winning one election, she had to start fighting another. For the first time, direct elections were held for the European Parliament, or Assembly as it was still properly called and as Mrs Thatcher, wary of its pretensions, preferred to call it. The Conservative manifesto,
launched on 15 May, declared a vague aim of joining the ERM at an unspecified point. Apart from launching the manifesto, Mrs Thatcher made only one campaign speech, to a ‘Youth for Europe’ rally on 2 June. Here she maintained the party’s pro-European orthodoxy, but expressed it in a way that fitted with her other preoccupations. The EEC, she argued, should promote freedom, both in economic terms and against Soviet tyranny: ‘the Treaty of Rome says little about the ideal of freedom, but defines at length the economic structures necessary to sustain it.’ European values would never be secure so long as there was a Berlin wall. And without beating an anti-Brussels drum, she signalled her strong dissatisfaction with the European budget: Britain’s contribution was ‘manifestly unjust’.
¹⁰⁴
In the poll on 7 June 1979, the Conservatives won sixty seats against the Labour Party’s seventeen.