MARGARET THATCHER
To Elizabeth
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Prologue
1 The early years
The birthplace
Family tensions
Fun (or lack of it)
First school
Fatherly inspiration
Reflection
2 The war, grammar school and fighting her headmistress
Grantham at war
KGGS
Getting her own way
Reflection
3 Oxford, boyfriends and political ambition
Early unhappiness at Oxford
Stirrings of romance
Success in OUCA politics
Reflection
4 First steps in politics
Young Conservative
Mentored by Alfred Bossom MP
Young candidate
Three men on a string
The general election of 1950
Frustration, consolidation and engagement
Reflection
5 Marriage, motherhood and Finchley
Marriage
Motherhood
The bumpy road to Finchley
Elected
Reflection
6 First years in Parliament 1959–1964
The lucky legislator
Making her way in the House
Junior minister
In the constituency
Family life
Reflection
7 Front-bench opposition
Entering opposition
Iain Macleod’s no. 2
Joining the shadow cabinet
Wooed by the Americans, dismayed by the Soviets
Preparing for government
Reflection
8 Secretary of State for Education
First moves
Milk snatcher
Saved by the Prime Minister
Wider than education
Reflection
9 Heath on the ropes
The twilight of a Tory leader
The phoney war in the party
The rise and fall of Sir Keith Joseph
Reflection
10 Winning the leadership
Deciding to run
Toffs for Thatcher and other surprises
A deal with Edward du Cann
Enter Airey Neave
A stunning result on the first ballot
Reflection
11 Leader of the Opposition: a fragile beginning
Winning the final round
An uncertain start
Personal glimpses
Reflection
12 Three frustrating years
Party conferences and foreign visits
Outmanoeuvred by James Callaghan
New policies and philosophies
Reflection
13 Last lap to the election
The importance of the laughing boys
The winter of discontent
The vote of no confidence
Reflection
14 The final ascent to No. 10
Waiting before the off
Soft-centre campaigning
On the eve of power
Victory
Reflection
15 First moves as Prime Minister
Making a start
Handling her cabinet
Challenging the civil service
Reflection
16 The learning curve
Inside No. 10
Bridge builders and voices
Old Stripey and stubbornness
A favour for Rupert Murdoch
Personality traits on and off duty
Dog days on Islay
Reflection
17 First steps in foreign affairs
Learning from Lord Carrington
Rhodesia
Europe
A slow start to the Special Relationship
Reflection
18 Storm clouds on the economy and in the cabinet
The gathering storm
Outflanking Jim Prior
The courage of the 1981 Budget
The vulnerable Prime Minister
Blockbustered into reshuffling the cabinet
Reflection
19 The Falklands War I: the prelude
Sabotaging the leaseback option
Parliament’s war
Seeing off Haig
Reflection
20 The Falklands War II: into the fighting
Military and political preparations
South Georgia, the Belgrano and the Sheffield
More diplomatic wobbles
Reflection
21 The Falklands War III: victory
The battle for the Falklands
Victory
Reflection
22 After the Falklands
The changing of the political landscape
The economy and the unions
The beginnings of privatisation
The suicide of the opposition
A landslide victory
Reflection
23 Stumbling into the second term
Cecil Parkinson and the Speaker
Other early glitches
Difficult problems
Her blue-eyed Chancellor
Reflection
24 Terrorism, Ireland and Hong Kong
Facing down terrorism
The Anglo-Irish Agreement
Accepting reality in Hong Kong
Reflection
25 Batting for Britain in Saudi Arabia
The deal of the century
Fighting the French
The Denis back channel
Difficult hurdles to overcome
The motivation of the Prime Minister
Reflection
26 Unions and miners
Stepping stones towards solving the problem
Arthur Scargill’s challenge
David Hart: her secret Blue Pimpernel
The NACODS crisis and the collapse of the strike
Losers but no victors
Reflection
27 Strengthening the Special Relationship with Ronald Reagan
The gold seam and the fault-line
The personal chemistry
Islands and tensions
The bombing of Libya
Reflection
28 Starting to win the Cold War
Why the Iron Lady was for turning
The Chequers overture to Mikhail Gorbachev
Bridge building between Moscow and Washington
Differences with Reagan over SDI and Reykjavik
Star performance in Moscow
Reflection
29 Rumblings of discontent
Tensions with ministers
Clashing with Heseltine
The Westland crisis explodes
That Bloody Woman
Reflection
30 Into the third term
Approaching the 1987 election
Winning for the third time
A bold but flawed beginning
Life without Whitelaw
Reflection
31 Trouble with Nigel Lawson
Flashpoints of personality
First clash over the ERM
Shadowing the Deutschmark
The boom or bust Budget
Howe stirs the ERM dispute
Reflection
32 Swinging towards Euroscepticism
Always a doubter
Diddled by the Single European Act (SEA)
Disillusionment with Geoffrey Howe
The Bruges speech
Reflecti
on
33 Boiling over on Europe
The fall-out from Bruges
High noon in Madrid
The dismissal of Geoffrey Howe
Reflection
34 Exit the Chancellor, enter the stalking horse
Trying to stabilise the government
The problem of Alan Walters
Lawson snaps
The stalking horse
Greater events
Reflection
35 Countdown to the coup
The invasion of Kuwait
The poison of the poll tax
Her last row on Europe
Howe prepares to strike
Reflection
36 End game
Howe goes for the jugular
Heseltine enters the ring
Peter Morrison’s complacency
A hard day’s night in Paris
Reflection
37 Exit
First soundings
The cabinet defects
A bravura farewell performance
The election of a new leader
Reflection
38 The agony after the fall
Trauma and tantrums
Travelling, speech-making and writing
Last months as a Member of Parliament
Sabotaging her successor
Reflection
39 Snapshots of her retirement years
Strategic ideas and personal conversations
Still batting for Britain
A break in the Highlands
Seventieth birthday
Finding her spiritual home
Epilogue
Decline
Fading out with dignity
Farewell
Bibliography
Principal sources
Notes describing sources
Index
List of illustrations
Between pages 204–205
The Roberts family (Getty Images)
All smiles at the Kent Conservative Dance (Express Newspapers)
Conservative Candidate for Dartford (Getty Images)
Margaret and Denis Thatcher on their wedding day (Getty Images)
Margaret watches her children Carol and Mark (Press Association)
New Member of Parliament for Finchley (Getty Images)
Victory in first ballot of Tory Leadership (Getty Images)
Leading the Conservative campaign for a Yes Vote in 1975 (Getty Images)
Margaret Thatcher waves to the crowd outside her home on Flood Street (Getty Images)
With Kenneth Kaunda (Press Association)
Political campaigning with Ian Gow (Courtesy of Dame Jane Whiteley)
Leaving Heathrow for European Summit meeting (Press Association)
With King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (Getty Images)
With François Mitterrand and Charles Powell (Getty Images)
Between pages 540–541
Visiting ‘Our Boys’ at Port Stanley (Getty Images)
Welcoming Mikhail Gorbachev to Chequers (Corbis Images)
Test driving Britain’s new Challenger tank (Press Association)
Visiting Moscow (Corbis Images)
Facing questions from the media alongside Bernard Ingham (Rex Features)
Reagan and Thatcher on the patio of the White House (Getty Images)
Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet (Getty Images)
Speaking at No. 10 Downing Street Dinner for President Reagan (White House official photograph/Thatcher papers/Churchill Archives Centre)
Leaving Downing Street for the last time (Getty Images)
Arriving with the Queen at Claridge’s (Getty Images)
Windswept on Rannoch Moor (Courtesy of Lord Pearson of Rannoch)
In front of a statue of Lenin (Courtesy of Bill Cash MP)
Arriving early for opening of Parliament (Getty Images)
Surrounded by Chelsea Pensioners (Getty Images)
Back cover
Margaret Thatcher leaves Westminster Abbey with Jonathan Aitken after attending the memorial service for the former Speaker Selwyn Lloyd, 5 July 1978 (Press Association)
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge all those who have helped me in the research, preparation and production of this biography of Margaret Thatcher.
There are two treasure troves of Thatcher papers to which I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude. One is the Thatcher Archive at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. I particularly thank Dr Allen Packwood the director of the Churchill Archives Centre and the Thatcher Archivist Andrew Riley. The other and closely linked main source of papers is the Margaret Thatcher Foundation and its website. Its editor Christopher Collins and its head Julian Seymour deserve the highest praise for their vision and their industry in making such huge resources of historical material on Margaret Thatcher so easily available to scholars, students, historians and biographers.
I have trawled through several other collections of source material and would like to thank the staff of the British Library, the British Library Newspapers, the Churchill Archives Centre, the Templeman Library at the Univeristy of Kent, the Boris Johnson newspaper cuttings archive and the Hans Tasiemka Archives.
The old agricultural saying ‘There’s no manure like the farmer’s foot’ applies to political biography. So I am immensely grateful to the many helpful guides and welcomers who showed me around places and institutions which were part of Margaret Thatcher’s life story.
At Grantham I would like to thank Michael and Diana Honeybone, former teacher at KGGS, who escorted me around the locations in the town, the schools and the churches which the young Margaret and the Roberts family attended. In particular I am grateful to local historian Malcolm G. Knapp and Denys Lambley of the Finkin Street Methodist Church. My thanks also go to Ian Todd, Assistant Head Teacher of Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, Mrs Janet Thompson, the Archivist, and Diane Barrett, Office Manager at the school; also to Mark Anderson, Head Teacher of Huntingtower Community Primary Academy, Grantham, and Margaret Lockwood, Office Manager. Sandra Good, the proprietor of Living Health on North Parade, kindly showed me around what used to be Roberts Food Stores on the ground floor and the flat above where the family lived, including the room where Margaret Thatcher was born.
At the University of Oxford I appreciated visiting Margaret Thatcher’s old room at Somerville and touring the college with the distinguished historian Dr Franklyn Prochaska, husband of the Principal Dr Alice Prochaska.
At the Royal Hospital Chelsea I was most grateful to be shown around and briefed by the Lieutenant Governor, Major General Peter Currie, and the Chaplain the Revd Dick Whittington.
The most enjoyable sources were the living witnesses to Margaret Thatcher’s career in public life, some ninety of whom gave me interviews. Their names are listed, with gratitude, at the end of the book.
Lastly, I must thank the many previous authors who have written books on Margaret Thatcher. Most biographers assimilate fragments, large or small, from their predecessors’ writings. I am no exception to this practice and I would particularly like to thank the earliest Thatcher biographers, Patricia Murray, Ernle Money, George Gardiner, Russell Lewis and Penny Junor. I also much appreciated Hugo Young’s portrait One of Us, the two-volume biography by John Campbell and the first volume of the official biography by Charles Moore published earlier this year.
Finally, the greatest thanks of all go to my own home team of researchers and secretarial helpers.
The chief researcher on my two-year biographer’s journey was Jacqueline Williams, whose diligence and dedication in unearthing the raw material of history was magnificent. She was ably assisted by two talented interns from Oxford University, Mark Holmes and Tom Perrin, whose enthusiasm was infectious as we read through the first draft of the manuscript and made many changes. I am also grateful to my daughter Victoria Aitken for her encouragement and occasional research.
The brunt of the typing of the manuscript was borne by
the excellent Prue Fox. She was supported by Helen Kirkpatrick and Rosemary Gooding, while the onerous task of scheduling interviews and collating the draft chapters was superbly executed by Susanna Jennens.
I would also like to thank everyone concerned with this book at my publishers Bloomsbury, particularly my editor, Robin Baird-Smith, and his assistant editor, Joel Simons.
The last but really the first helper, encourager and sharer of my workload has been my beloved wife Elizabeth. She walked every step of the road of my author’s journey, and the book is lovingly dedicated to her.
Jonathan Aitken
July 2013
Prologue
After the applause comes the appraisal.
The applause created the most moving moment at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. As her coffin was carried out of St Paul’s Cathedral on the shoulders of military pallbearers while the choir sang Nunc Dimittis to the hauntingly beautiful setting of Stanford in G, the first sight of her cortège by the crowds spontaneously produced a swelling wave of sound.
It was so unexpected that those of us still seated beneath the great dome of Christopher Wren’s ecclesiastical masterpiece were startled. For days the London media had been predicting hostile protests. So at this fleeting instant I and many others in the congregation wondered whether we were hearing the ultimate anti-Thatcher demonstration.
Far from it. For it quickly became clear that the great roar rolling up from Ludgate Hill and other streets near St Paul’s bore the unmistakable resonance of massive cheering.
What were those crowds cheering her for? Some were too young to have known the age of Thatcher. Many more were likely to have disagreed with the values and the policies she championed. But on the day of her obsequies the overwhelming majority seemed ready to salute her life’s journey for its achievements, breakthroughs and for its footprints on the sands of time.
Applause is usually thought inappropriate at a funeral, but Margaret Thatcher broke so many conventions and ceilings in her life that the shattering of one more establishment custom in death seemed right. She would have enjoyed those cheers. Not only did they symbolise the affection of her fans; they also marked one last victory over her foes.
Because she was such a political polariser, it was anticipated that her adversaries from the militant left would turn out to give their old enemy a farewell booing. I encountered some of them on my walk towards St Paul’s. These would-be troublemakers were hostile enough to give me and others attired in our tailcoats a few jeers. But a friendly apple-cheeked woman in the same part of the crowd had a different message. ‘Don’t you worry about them lot,’ she said in her West Country burr. ‘We’ll drown them out.’ And they did.
The subtleties that were important elements in the make-up of Margaret Thatcher were often drowned out. She herself concealed many of them. She could be politically cautious while preferring to sound proudly radical. She had an overdeveloped sense of privacy. Throughout her life she suppressed personal information, insecurities, emotions and inconvenient truths behind a façade of carefully projected self-certainty. She became the most famous woman in the world on account of her highly visible political directness. Yet on the less visible sides of her character she could be more difficult and complicated than most people guessed.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 1
