The Real Iron Lady (3 page)
Read The Real Iron Lady Online
Authors: Gillian Shephard
There could be no better illustration than this account of Margaret Thatcher's ferocious industriousness, her energy, her tenacity and her determination to get things right for a particular audience. The lecture was, after
all, not for a United Nations audience in New York, but for the Townswomen's Guild in London. Moreover, it was celebrating aspects of social policy with which most commentators would have assumed she was not in sympathy. It was appreciatively received by the audience. It is difficult to avoid a comparison with the totally disastrous and condescending misjudgement Tony Blair applied to a similar occasion, the Annual General Meeting of the National Federation of Women's Institutes in early June 2000. His slick and shallow approach earned him a derisive slow hand-clap from the 5,000 or so women assembled to hear him in the Royal Albert Hall, resulting in such unlikely headlines as âWI gives Blair hostile reception' (BBC News, 7 June 2000). It has gone down in political folklore.
Some of the content of the Thatcher speech for the Townswomen's Guild, though (as opposed to its composition), is perhaps more questionable. It contains the sentence âI hated those strident tones we hear from some Women's Libbers', a phrase not yet forgotten in feminist circles. The speech is included in full in the Appendix.
Margaret Thatcher believed strongly, and as a matter of principle, in keeping in touch with all sides of the parliamentary and voluntary Conservative Party. She therefore insisted that time was put aside in her prime ministerial diary for regular meetings with party officials and members, and for constituency matters. Anyone who has held ministerial office will know what a struggle it can be to continue to honour regular engagements with people
outside the purview of the civil service, but she continued the practice until the end of her career. Even from the small sample of those who have contributed to this book, it is amazing to note how many had, and indeed expected to have, regular meetings with her. Observation of her successors, with the exception of John Major, forces me to conclude that they did not and do not necessarily follow her meticulous example.
Hazel Byford, a Conservative Women's Area Chairman in the 1970s, met biannually with the Prime Minister at No. 10, and more frequently when she became a member of the Conservative Women's National Committee and a member of the National Union. Joan Seccombe, who became a Party Vice-Chairman for Women in 1987, was âfar more regularly involved with her, having one-to-one meetings, as well as taking others to see her'. John Taylor had regular meetings with the Prime Minister âas was customary for colleagues who were officers in the National Union, the voluntary side of the Conservative Party'.
As a new backbench MP, Janet Fookes had close contact with Margaret Thatcher.
When I entered the Commons in 1970, as a former teacher and Chairman of an Education Committee in local government I was much interested in education, and soon became an officer of the Party Education Group. I was truly surprised and pleased by the fact that Margaret, despite her many duties as Secretary of State for Education, thought it important to keep in touch with the officers of the group and
instituted regular meetings with us to discuss the issues of the day. So far as I am aware, this was unprecedented while in office. I thought it was a real mark of her willingness to engage with backbenchers.
Henry Plumb, a former Chairman of the National Farmers Union and, for a period, leader of the British delegation to the European Parliament, met Margaret Thatcher every two weeks to give her an update on European issues. John MacGregor as Chief Secretary to the Treasury met her each week to brief her on Treasury matters. Robert Armstrong, her Cabinet Secretary, had one-to-one meetings every Friday morning.
John Wakeham, as Chief Whip from 1983 to 1987, took the parliamentary business managers to have lunch with her at No. 10 every Monday when Parliament was sitting, and attended almost all the meetings she held with ministerial colleagues. He points out that âMrs Thatcher sometimes held four or five Cabinet Committees in a day, and I was usually present', yet another regular commitment which had to be fitted in.
Even the hairdresser came regularly, three times a week, arriving early in the morning at No. 10. Once the television cameras were allowed into Parliament, it was more important than ever to Margaret Thatcher that she should look well-groomed at all times, and so to the weekly hair appointments were added regular comb-outs. Some of her male colleagues used to say that she greatly valued her conversations with the hairdresser, welcoming them as a voice from the real world.
The people who have contributed to this book give only a small sample of the fixed and regular commitments she expected to honour, in addition to the enormous weight of prime ministerial obligations. To their examples have to be added the innumerable meetings, visits, travel and fixed parliamentary and media appearances that filled her life. Margaret Thatcher was well known for needing only four hours of sleep a night, as Hartley Booth points out. But she set a standard for stamina and hard-focused work not equalled by any of her predecessors or successors.
T
hese were the words used by the Prime Minister when appointing me to my first ministerial post, that of Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department of Social Security, at a Downing Street reception in July 1989. She added, âThis is the post I started in, as you know, and it is a very important one.'
I was overwhelmed to the point of speechlessness. I then realised that I was meant to say something in response, so I asked what I should do next. âI would get round to the department very early tomorrow morning, and make a good start,' was the reply. Naturally, I obeyed this to the letter, arriving at the DSS just after 8 a.m., to find cleaners in possession of the building and no sign of other ministers or officials. I returned to my office, wondering if it had all been some kind of mistake, and that I had possibly had
the shortest ministerial career on record, to find messages on my phone from No. 10, my husband, my agent and my constituency office, all asking, âWhere are you?' It turned out that the Prime Minister had phoned again that morning (as part of the official reshuffle procedure obviously), as she put it, âjust to make quite sure', and I, equally obviously, could not be found as I was loitering outside the DSS. Not the best of starts, but an example of how the Prime Minister found the time to dot the i's and cross the t's, even with the most junior of ministerial appointments.
This attention to detail was a characteristic of her working method not shared by all her male counterparts, then or subsequently; one for which she was frequently ridiculed by political colleagues, but one which nevertheless stood her in good stead throughout her career. This sense that it was âthe
detail
which was important', coupled with her astonishing memory, served her well as Prime Minister, within the Conservative Party and with the public, and of course in her constituency of Finchley.
It was something she had learned, and demonstrated, very early in her political career, to devastating effect. She was selected as Conservative candidate in the constituency of Dartford in January 1949. The seat was a hopeless one for a Conservative: the incumbent Labour MP, Norman Dodds, had an enormous majority of 20,000, and was both popular and charming. He was chivalrous and pleasant to his young challenger in their quite frequent encounters on public platforms. However, Mr Dodds soon learned to his
cost, and in full public gaze, that on matters of fact his young Conservative opponent was on all occasions formidably briefed and prepared. Stories about her dazzling performances as parliamentary candidate in Dartford were still remembered and being retold by the late Bob Dunn, MP for Dartford from 1979 to 1997, and other parliamentary colleagues, when I arrived in Parliament in 1987. Apparently at one election meeting, she criticised an answer Mr Dodds had given to a question and he challenged her to do better. To his amazement she had brought to the meeting a large number of copies of
The Economist
, one of which she consulted there and then, to produce the correct answer. This must have been devastating for Norman Dodds. It certainly impressed the Dartford audience. It also impressed Members of Parliament who heard the story. Without exception, we felt that to take a supply of copies of
The Economist
to an election hustings, and then to have the sheer nerve to consult them, actually during the meeting, just to prove one's opponent wrong, represented a determination not to be bested and a thoroughness of preparation none of us could begin to match.
Unsurprisingly, this approach, and the contrast it afforded between her and her predecessors, terrified Whitehall when she became Prime Minister, although civil servants in the Department of Education had had to accustom themselves to the technique when she was Secretary of State for Education. Her Cabinet colleagues, and even those much lower in the pecking order like me, became
accustomed to seeing her handwritten comments in the margins of ministerial papers from every department. In this she was a complete contrast to her predecessor, James Callaghan, who, while a good chairman, preferred to distance himself from the detail. She, on the other hand, frequently gave the impression that she thought nothing would be done correctly unless she personally saw to it.
Frank Field, who as Labour MP has held the seat of Birkenhead since 1979, further illustrates the point.
One aspect of her premiership never ceased to fascinate me. It was her exercise of power in part through a command of detail. On one occasion I saw her in the early evening of the same day on which she had returned from, as she so eloquently put it, putting some backbone into President Bush (Sr.). We met in her study in Downing Street. She was like a cat on a hot tin roof. I had never seen her so excited. She marched around her study, explaining how she had had to put backbone into the President (the time of her famous comment, âThis is no time to go wobbly.'). âPrime Minister, please come and sit down so that I can talk to you,' I pleaded. However, the marching continued, as did the declamations. When she had exhausted herself, she stopped, and asked me what I wanted. I went through my small agenda, much of it concerning Cammell Laird [a major shipbuilding firm based on the Mersey], whose fate greatly affected my constituency. âIs that all?' she asked. I replied that it was. The marching recommenced, and I left.
The meeting had excited me, affording for a brief moment a small ringside seat into what was quickly unfolding as the First Gulf War.
Its timing had been fortuitous, and the drama of Mrs T. marching to and fro before me, and up and down the sides of the room where I was sitting, remained vivid in my consciousness throughout the following day. Indeed, it so mesmerised me that I forgot to report back to my three colleagues in the Wirral, who were also active in promoting the interests of Cammell Laird within the government.
Two days later I saw David Hunt, MP for a Wirral seat and a minister in the government. âOh dear,' I thought, âI haven't reported back to the other three on what Mrs T. had promised to do two evenings earlier.' I went to apologise. My opening words were cut short. âI see you saw the Prime Minister,' was his opening remark. I began my apology again. Again it was interrupted. Each relevant minister had received a copy of the prime ministerial minute, and it had been copied to their Permanent Secretaries.
There had been no one else in the Prime Minister's study that night when I met her. She was high on octane following her meeting with the President. Yet, at some stage that evening, a minute had been dictated on what was said and agreed during our meeting, and had been sent out to colleagues and departments for action.
Frank Field had lobbied Mrs Thatcher before. On that occasion, he said he had expressed his annoyance to her political office, which was preventing him from seeing her.
My retaliation, I told them, would be to kidnap the Prime Minister, tell her that her office was a menace and were not only preventing me from seeing her but, much more importantly, many of her own political party.
I arrived back at the Commons after a dinner where I had
been bored to the point where my bones ached, but where the pain and boredom had been somewhat anaesthetised by a generous supply of drink. A note awaited me on the message board, announcing that the Prime Minister would see me that evening after the ten o'clock vote. Panic set in. I could not remember the agenda I intended to cover with her. Slowly my mind cleared. I voted quickly and went over to stand at the exit from the No Lobby. Mrs T. as usual was the last one out. She timed her exit so that colleagues wishing to lobby her could do so. âShall I follow you, Prime Minister?' I asked. âPeople usually do,' was the reply.
As she swept out of the Lobby, I longed to be able to see her face. Despite all the reports depicting her as totally lacking in any humour whatsoever, she must, surely, have been smiling as I inevitably did what others did, and followed her, to the office the Prime Minister has behind the Speaker's chair.
As we sat down, Mrs T. asked what I wanted to drink, and I was offered a single option. I therefore asked for a very, very weak whisky. She, looking at Mark Lennox Boyd, her Parliamentary Private Secretary at that time, replied that she too wanted a very, very weak whisky, emphasising to the point of mimicry the stress I had put on âvery'. Two whiskies quickly appeared. One looked like almost clear water, the other as though it was neat whisky. Mrs T.'s hand, as the tray was lowered, thankfully grasped the far from transparent glass.
âWhat do you want?' was, as always, the opening gambit. We discussed Cammell Laird and a vacant deanery that she would shortly fill. The business was over before she had finished her drink. The Cammell Laird request would be followed up, but we remained divided over the deanery.
Michael Brunson, Chief Political Editor for ITN during the Thatcher premiership, describes an early encounter with Mrs Thatcher in January 1978.
There were, I believe, three words which anyone who worked with Mrs T. needed to learn, and learn fast â âDo your homework!' It was a lesson I learned the hard way.
In January 1978, the then Leader of the Opposition decided, somewhat unusually in those days, to go out and campaign for a candidate in the Ilford North by-election. I had not long returned from a spell as the ITN correspondent in Washington, and had already been told that, when the general election came, I would be the reporter assigned to cover Mrs T.'s campaign. Having learned all too little about her during my spell in America, what better opportunity to get to know her better than to watch her in action on the campaign trail?
As it happened, the morning on which I chose to do so followed her appearance on ITV the previous evening, when she had been asked about immigration. She had spoken about the British character and said, âIf there is any fear that it might be swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.' Overnight it had become a huge story, with, for some, uncomfortable echoes of Enoch Powell's ârivers of blood' speech ten years earlier. Labour's Denis Healey accused her of âstirring up the muddy waters of racial prejudice' and the Liberal Leader, David Steel, called her remarks âreally quite wicked'.
At a small and surprisingly poorly attended press conference in Ilford, I decided to question Mrs T. on the matter. Did she now regret having raised the immigration issue during the interview? Suddenly, what President Mitterand of France once described as the eyes of
Caligula swivelled sharply in my direction. Too late I realised that, like many a soldier before her, she regarded attack as the best form of defence. What on earth was I talking about? She had not
raised
the matter. She had simply answered a question on the issue. How on earth could I be talking about her having
raised
it? Was it really too much to expect journalists to do their homework properly, as she always did?
It was typical Thatcher. In some considerable political trouble, she had seized the opportunity which my loose use of language had given her to fight her way out of it. Over the ensuing thirteen years, I saw her use that tactic many times. Woe betide the sloppy journalist, or politician for that matter, who was ill prepared or badly briefed. They could expect a mauling or worse. I think I only slipped up on one other occasion, when, during an end-of-summit press conference in Bonn, I put to the then German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt a spectacularly ill-advised enquiry. Sitting beside the Chancellor, Mrs T. turned in the opposite direction towards her Press Secretary, Bernard Ingham, and in the biggest stage whisper you ever heard, declared, âWhat a very silly question.'
In the year 2000, Mrs T. was kind enough to record a message for a farewell video my colleagues put together when I left ITN. There were good reasons, notably the abolition at the time of
News at Ten,
why I decided to go, though she could not resist referring to my leaving âat the early age of sixty'. She then added that I always seemed to know exactly what questions to put to her. She would, of course, have long forgotten our first encounter in Ilford twenty-two years earlier, at which she had delivered her stern admonitions about homework, but believe me, I never did.
Virginia Bottomley was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of the Environment by Margaret Thatcher in July 1987, with the words âNever turn down the opportunity to explain the government's case; no one else will.'
After I settled in at the Department for the Environment, the Prime Minister developed an obsession with the evils of litter dropping. It was a wonderful example of her ability to take a relatively trivial subject as seriously as matters of international importance. I was summoned to Downing Street with my boss, Nicholas Ridley. Douglas Hurd, as Home Secretary, was also present. Lengthy discussions took place about whether penalties for litter dropping should be raised. I was despatched to Paris to study the operation of officials on motor bikes, freezing or squirting dog mess off the pavement.
Virginia does not recall if she ever reported back after this trip, but many will remember press photos of the Prime Minister armed with a large black bag and a spiked stick clearing up rubbish in one of the London parks. âWe were afraid she wouldn't stop until she'd cleared the whole park,' one official said afterwards. Virginia continues,
Withstanding the challenges of the miners and the economy, Margaret Thatcher turned to broader environmental issues. As a junior Environment Minister, I was the lowest form of ministerial life at the âSaving the Ozone Layer' Conference in 1989. I was the great lady's bag carrier. Hearing her interrogate officials in the green room
before going on stage was a lesson. No detail, however awkward, was missed. That way she was confident she knew the answers and the questions. It was an example I followed.
Events, rather than career structures and formal appraisal, alter the course of political lives; do not expect measured career planning and development. As part of the ministerial fall-out following Nigel Lawson's resignation in October 1989, David Mellor was moved to the Foreign Office and I was summoned to Health. The Prime Minister's call was arranged at the Waverley District Council Office as I was about to start my surgery. âYou have done well at Environment, Virginia, we would like you to move to Health. You know all about that, don't you?' Ten minutes later, the reshuffle was on the news.
Testing arguments, policies and ministers to destruction was a feature of Margaret Thatcher's decision-making process. In 1990, the NHS reforms were to be approved. The legislation was due to be introduced in Parliament. Ken Clarke, the Secretary of State, Tony Newton, Minister of State, and Sir Duncan Nichol, our resilient and talented NHS Chief Executive, were summoned to Downing Street. I joined the team. The debate opened with the Prime Minister asking her adviser, at that time the successful businessman, David Wolfson, to comment on the plans. An intense, almost hostile, critique followed from him. But we survived, and the NHS reforms proceeded. If only more politicians thought through the implications of their initiatives with the same focus, preparation and attention to detail, we might achieve more.
