The Real Iron Lady (6 page)
Read The Real Iron Lady Online
Authors: Gillian Shephard
Harvey Thomas was Director of Presentation at Conservative Central Office for thirteen years from the late 1970s onwards. He writes, âMy relationship with Mrs T. not only crossed between government and party,' as he puts it,
but as it happened, by the time Marlies and I were married in 1978, we were also Margaret's constituents in Finchley, and remained so throughout her time in power. This gave us, of course, yet another perspective. I doubt if her many friends in the constituency would claim it for themselves, but Mrs T. was enormously strengthened by the total loyalty and support from her constituency leaders, together of course with her constituency secretary, Joy Robilliard. The support from the constituency was superb, led in later years by her agent, Mike Love. I remember many times in Downing Street or some other official location in different parts of the world, when her eyes would relax and you could sense her pleasure as she referred to constituency friends and what, in many ways, she regarded as her âreal' foundations in Finchley.
Sir Donald Stringer, the senior Conservative agent responsible for the London area for much of the whole period Mrs Thatcher was a London MP, recalls how he would receive phone calls from her from all over the world, if word had reached her that something was not going well in Finchley.
Finchley played an important part in Margaret Thatcher's first election as Leader of the Conservative Party in 1979. Doreen Miller explains:
The first occasion I had any connection with her was when, as the new Leader of the Party, she was preparing for her first general election, in 1979. Mr Callaghan was deferring it for as long as he could. As an activist in the constituency adjoining hers, I was asked to secure contributions and to edit a pre-election (and pre-election expenses!) leaflet which was produced with the considerable assistance of a local journalist, Dennis Signey, in the form of a newspaper which we grandly called
The Finchley Leader.
Its first headline read âWe will be the next government.' Mrs Thatcher was able to make considerable use of this paper in the run-up to her historic victory in 1979.
She certainly did. The paper gave regular reports of her activities as opposition leader, of her speeches in the Commons and her policy announcements, and national journalists came to regard it as authoritative enough to repeat and quote in their newspapers on a regular basis.
Cynical political commentators almost invariably ignore the constituency element of a politician's life. But there is no truism more certain that you get back from a constituency what you put in, in terms of effort, presence and attention to detail. If Margaret Thatcher, at difficult moments, felt supported by Finchley, that is because Finchley knew that every detail of its collective and individual life mattered to her.
M
argaret Thatcher's ferocious attachment to hard work, her high standards and stamina, her insistence on getting things right, had a flip side. She could be impossible to work with, given to tantrums, tears and shouting matches and lightning changes of mood. She was indeed, as John Major says, âa woman of contrasts who could behave with great kindness, yet who was equally capable of great intimidation'.
Throughout her leadership, Margaret Thatcher was portrayed in the press as confident, battling, principled, unwavering, domineering, arguing, occasionally losing, more often winning. She was an extraordinarily divisive figure, and remains so to this day. Very few people are neutral
about her, and the mere mention of her name still arouses strong reactions, not only in Britain, but also abroad.
In opposition, and in her first parliamentary term as Prime Minister, however, there is plenty of evidence that she was privately much more hesitant than her manner indicated.
In
One of Us
, Hugo Young describes how
alongside the euphoria [of the success of the 1979 election] went anxiety⦠None of her colleagues had ever experienced a more assertive, more overbearing leader ⦠in part it was an act put on to convince herself and others that she really was the boss.
Those who were in a position to observe Margaret Thatcher at close quarters confirm this initial lack of confidence.
Matthew Parris, who worked in her private office in the early days of her leadership, and was later a Conservative MP and then a journalist, puts it thus:
History, having concluded that Margaret Thatcher was a tremendous, convinced, directed and unstoppable force, has all but forgotten the fragile self-confidence, the hurt, the panic, the changeability and the near despair that, I keep having to remind myself, I saw in the early days. (âA time, a place, Two entirely different stories',
The Times
, 26 May 2012.)
This hesitancy was also noted by Michael Jopling, her Chief Whip from 1979 to 1983.
Although I did not actually hear her say it, I know that when she took over as Leader of the Opposition she did say that one problem was that all the brains were among the right wing of the Conservative Party. She also described Keith Joseph as her muse. It has surprised me that if that was her view then, she must have changed it before 1979, when she appointed a Cabinet with a strong left-of-centre flavour. As a result she failed to get Cabinet support in 1980 for the economic policy proposed by her and Chancellor Geoffrey Howe. So, in two shuffles in 1981 to restore the balance, she dropped Christopher Soames, Ian Gilmour, Norman St John Stevas and Mark Carlisle. But what surprised me was that her muse Keith Joseph never held any of the great offices of state, Treasury, Home Office or Foreign Office.
She almost fell into the same trap again in 1982 when she had another shuffle. At a very late stage when all was agreed, we pointed out to her that she was again poised to appoint a Cabinet which had a similar slant to the earlier one. As a result of this, changes were made to redress the balance. Among other changes, she brought in Lord Cockfield as Trade Secretary at the last minute.
Given that of all the members of a probable Cabinet after the 1979 election, only two, Keith Joseph and Norman St Stevas, had voted for her in the leadership election, it is hardly surprising that she was at first hesitant of making wholesale changes to her Cabinet. The fact was that the Conservatives were divided after the 1979 election. In a
way, she was there on sufferance, not least because she was a woman. There was a great deal of male muttering and covert joking. She must have been aware of it, and it cannot have been conducive to confidence in her own leadership. Jim Prior was not the only one of her colleagues who found it irritating to be led by a woman. âI found it very difficult to stomach,' he later wrote.
There is no suggestion that Patrick Cormack, at the time MP for Cannock, shared Jim Prior's distaste for a woman Prime Minister. On the other hand, he reflects the ambivalence towards Margaret Thatcher, on policy grounds, within the parliamentary party. Not only was she a woman, but she was taking the party into policy areas to which it was not accustomed, and to priorities not necessarily shared by colleagues.
I was of course aware of Margaret Thatcher as a rising star in the Tory ranks, when, as a very young schoolmaster, I fought the impregnable Labour stronghold of Bolsover in 1964, and even more so when I contested my home town of Grimsby eighteen months later. I had heard her speak at Party Conferences and candidates' gatherings, and there was much talk of her being in the next Conservative Cabinet. The first time I was really conscious of her as a force to be reckoned with was when she was in charge of Education in Ted Heath's government of 1970, when my victory in Cannock, against another formidable woman politician, Jennie Lee, helped put the Conservatives back in power. Margaret quickly made her mark at Education, and not just as âMargaret Thatcher, milk snatcher'. From my point of
view, as someone who had been educated at a grammar school, and taught at one, it was a disappointing mark, for there was no attempt to roll back the engulfing tide of comprehensive education, no clarion call for the virtues and values of the sort of school from which both she and I had benefited.
I did not find it easy to be a fervent backbench supporter of the first or indeed the subsequent Thatcher governments. It was partly because she herself never seemed to be fully in sympathy with the needs and aspirations of manufacturing in the Midlands, where the first three years of the Thatcher administration did not go down well. There is certainly little doubt that hers, like Ted Heath's, would have been a one-term government had it not been for the extraordinary events of April 1982, the invasion of the Falkland Islands.
My biggest falling-out with her came during her second and third terms, over her decision to abolish, rather than reform, the GLC. There was no sustainable case for depriving London of a directly elected local government, and I said so, and voted accordingly. And then, of course, there was the Community Charge, the âpoll tax', where I was one of only two Tories who refused to support its experimental introduction in Scotland and who consistently voted against it thereafter. So my relations with the woman I had helped to elect to leadership of our party were sometimes a little difficult.
While Patrick Cormack expresses no personal antipathy towards the new Prime Minister, and certainly no objection to her on grounds of gender, these views, many of which were shared by parliamentary colleagues, illustrate just how precarious was Margaret Thatcher's position
in the early days of her first government. Her reaction was emphatically not to betray any insecurity she may have felt, but rather to become, on occasion, overbearing and difficult.
John Major, as a former Chancellor and Foreign Secretary in a Thatcher government and eventually her successor as Prime Minister, was very well placed to observe some of the personality issues.
In the years since she left office, Margaret Thatcher has been buried under myth. The real Margaret â the one I knew, and for whom and with whom I worked â was more studied, more pragmatic and far more interesting than the stereotype celebrated in a thousand half-truths and exaggerations. I hope history records the reality and not the caricature. She was a woman of contrasts who could behave with great kindness, yet who was equally capable of great intimidation. I experienced both these character traits first-hand in the mid-1980s when I was appointed a Treasury Whip.
At a Whips' dinner in June 1985, Margaret, accompanied by Denis, was becoming increasingly bored by the pre-dinner chat. John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, accurately reading Margaret's impatience,
silenced the room, saying, âLet's begin', and went on to state that, given Treasury policy was crucial to all our plans, the Treasury Whip should brief the Prime Minister on the current concerns of the parliamentary party.
I obliged, but perhaps too vividly. I told the Prime Minister that the party was not enamoured of our policy. In fact, many of our members disliked it intensely, and were openly saying so in the tea rooms. Only loyalty was holding back their discontent and that was already being stretched to breaking point. We were close to facing a rebellion.
âWhat
exactly
are they concerned about?' came an icy voice from across the table, as her soup went cold. Unperturbed, I set out a detailed list, most notably that colleagues believed that worthwhile capital expenditure (which they favoured) was being sacrificed to sustain current expenditure â especially on social security (which they did not favour). Every Whip present had heard the same complaints on a daily basis, but they seemed entirely novel to the Prime Minister, and entirely unwelcome.
Margaret was livid and began attacking me as though the views I had reported from the party were my own. Her reaction was so wildly over the top that my fellow Whips studied their empty soup bowls and shuffled uneasily in their seats. Infuriated by the injustice of her behaviour, I reiterated that it was the job of a Whip to report the party view whether the Prime Minister liked it or not. Unsurprisingly, this did not calm her mood.
Carol Mather â ADC to Montgomery â intervened to support me. So did Bob Boscawen, blown up in a tank and terribly scarred. These were two of the bravest men I have ever known. Margaret slapped down Carol and glared at Bob. The temperature continued to rise. Jean Trumpington, a Lords Whip, attempted to diffuse the situation but had her head snapped off. It was an extraordinary scene, which significantly delayed the main course until we eventually, and uncomfortably, moved on to other issues.
At the end of the evening, the Deputy Chief Whip, John Cope, whispered in my ear that I âmight care to make peace with the Prime Minister'. I did not. I was still seething at the injustice of her attack on me and others.
Yet the very next day, this extraordinary woman of contrasts came to sit beside me on the front bench, where I was the Whip on duty. All warmth and smiles, she suggested we continue our discussion in the Whips' Office. I talked. She listened. All was sweetness and light. Three weeks later, she appointed me Junior Minister at the Department of Health and Social Security. âIt's a good job,' said Margaret, âIt's where I started.' And so it was. This was not the only disagreement I had with Margaret, but it was certainly the most memorable.
In the furore of that Whips' dinner in 1985, I learned something crucial about Margaret's
modus operandi:
she did not like people who were pliant. She liked a good row and thrived on it. Indeed, going into battle often helped her reach a decision.
Working with Margaret was always challenging, but equally stimulating. When she was in agreement with you, she was as forceful in support as she could be in opposition. Moreover, if she felt comfortable with you, a great deal of latitude was offered before your opinion was challenged. This was one of the reasons why she attracted such strong support from almost all those with whom she worked.
Like all iconic figures, Margaret Thatcher attracts stories which are an absurd travesty of the truth to those who know her and wish her to be fairly and accurately represented. And those of us who know her owe her no less than she expected from us: the unvarnished truth â not least for the sake of historical record.
Harvey Thomas provides an interesting explanation of Margaret Thatcher's behaviour:
Margaret has a clear and simple approach to friendship. She has said many times, âFriends are there to be taken advantage of â and I expect them to take advantage of me.' This was both a strength and a weakness, because sometimes her unwavering belief that you could say anything and do anything to âtrusted friends' could have negative consequences. I think her approach comes from an openness that for the most part is straightforward, but could occasionally leave the wrong impression.
On the positive side, in 1981, the late playwright, Ronnie Millar, John O'Sullivan and I, and Mrs T., were sitting in No. 10 working on a speech. On one section, I made the comment, âI don't really like this bit.' âDon't you, Harvey? What would you put in its place?' I hadn't thought through any further than an initial negative reaction to the section, and I stuttered, âEr, er, er, well I, erâ¦'
âFor goodness' sake, Harvey,' she exploded, âI've got a country to run, and we've got to finish this speech. If you don't have anything better to suggest, let's get on with it.'
Of course I was chastened, to say the least, and tucked my head down to let Ronnie Millar do most of the talking for the next few minutes. But it was not even five minutes later when she turned and said, âWhat do you think about this, Harvey?' as though there had never been a cross word.
As we left the room, Ronnie Millar turned to me and said, âWell, Harvey, welcome to the family.' I asked him what he meant, and he said, âWell, you do realise she would never have raised her voice to you unless she regarded you as a trusted friend.'
I had only been working with her for two or three years, and those words were spoken privately in a small group, but they still ring proudly in my ears more than thirty years later.
Robert Armstrong was Secretary of the Cabinet from 1979 to 1987. Margaret Thatcher appointed him in a typically decisive manner, on 9 July 1979.
I was of course no stranger to her. I had come to know her and see something of her when she was Secretary of State for Education in Edward Heath's administration and I was his Principal Private Secretary, and I had had occasional meetings with her on security-related matters when she was Leader of the Opposition. So I went to 10 Downing Street with a cautious hopefulness when I received a summons to go and see the Prime Minister.
I was disconcerted when the first thing the Prime Minister said when I went into her study was, âRobert, you're looking very tired.' It was a worrying opening to a meeting at which I hoped that I was going to be invited to take on one of the most onerous positions in the civil service. I mumbled something about having been up rather late the night before, and then the Prime Minister said, âRobert, I want you to succeed John Hunt as Cabinet Secretary when he retires in October. I should like you to know that I have not thought of asking anyone else.'
How could I have done otherwise than gratefully to accept an offer so generously expressed? So I went downstairs and told the Principal Private Secretary that the Prime Minister had offered me the job but that it had been a little disconcerting when she started by remarking
that I was looking very tired. He laughed, and said, âOh, you don't need to worry about that, she's saying that to everybody this morning.'
That was the introduction to eight fascinating and action-packed years of working for and with Margaret Thatcher, whom I invariably addressed as âPrime Minister'.
Every Friday morning at 10 a.m., I would go for my weekly meeting with her to discuss and plan the business for Cabinet and for Cabinet Committees of which she was chairman, for the ensuing three or four weeks. If she had other engagements that morning, our meeting would be short and business-like. If she did not, our meeting could go on far into the morning, and we would talk about many other things.
On one such occasion the Prime Minister wanted to discuss a memorandum I had recently submitted to her. She was clearly not persuaded by the recommendation I was making, and she argued quite fiercely, like an advocate (she had been a barrister), testing and contesting my case. After a time, I heard myself say, âNo, Prime Minister, you're wrong.' I wondered if I had gone too far and whether that was not how one should address a Prime Minister. I remembered what Queen Elizabeth I said to Robert Cecil. âMust? Is “must” a word to be addressed to princes? Little man, little man! Thy father, if he had been alive, durst not have used that word.' But the Prime Minister paused, and said, âWhy do you say that I am wrong, Robert?' I had burned my boats, and so I said why I thought she was wrong, chapter and verse, facts and figures. She did not interrupt me, and when I had finished, she said, âThank you, Robert, you're quite right. I was wrong.'
This incident did wonders for our mutual respect. I knew that she would listen and could be convinced. She knew that I would not put something to her which was not properly thought through. But those
discussions were to be had only
unter vier augen
. I thought that it was not my business to argue with her in that way at meetings when her colleagues were present.
