Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  The paradoxes in Margaret Thatcher have long intrigued me. Ever since I first met her nearly fifty years ago, it was clear that her most important feature was the strength of her personality. This was the force that drove her forward, conquered the obstacles in her path, shaped her vision for Britain and won three successive general elections. Her successes in domestic and international politics never softened her argumentative nature or smoothed her sharp edges. She irritated many of her colleagues, infuriated most of her opponents and challenged the comfortable consensus of the status quo at every opportunity. She was much easier to admire from afar than to work with at close quarters. She could be personally kind to her staff but impersonally unpleasant towards those whose views or misfortunes lay outside her field of empathy. She was never an easy person.

  Because of these and many other complexities, I hope that a biographical portrait of Margaret Thatcher that focuses on her personality may make a contribution to her historical appraisal. But it would amount to pointless psychobabble if the portrait was not grounded in the narrative of how she sought, won, wielded and lost power. For this was the context in which she lived her life.

  As her journey progressed her personality changed. There was a metamorphosis from Grantham to grandeur; from humility to hubris; from a realistic courageousness in fighting her corner to a reckless Ride of the Valkyries.

  The Shakespearean nemesis of the coup against her was an agony, as were her outpourings of bitterness that followed it. The personality shifts that accompanied these dramas deserve interpretation, sometimes critically, sometimes sympathetically.

  In the latter category, it needs to be said that some of the grandeur and the hubris were not of her own making. It was twentieth-century history that cast her as a figure on the world stage. She became an icon of freedom to the peoples of Eastern Europe. Women across global and political boundaries admired her for breaking the highest barriers of male-dominated leadership. She liberated millions of her aspiring fellow countrymen in areas such as home ownership, class barriers and economic opportunity. She was ahead of her time, but right, in challenging the pressures from the UK’s foreign-policy and financial establishments towards joining the single currency and the Eurozone. She restored national pride and economic strength to Britain. These were such momentous achievements that she would have been inhuman not to have been tempted towards some feelings of vaulting self-aggrandisement.

  The changes in her personality carried a price tag. It was paid in the currency of hurt feelings by those damaged in her personal and political battles. They included bullied colleagues, derided officials, ignored communities and neglected family members. Ultimately she herself joined the ranks of the wounded, for her ousting from power was calculated, craven and cruel. She never recovered her equilibrium after her fall.

  I had a ringside seat at many private and public spectacles in the Margaret Thatcher saga. Before I met her she was a name to conjure with in our home. My father was present in the House of Commons to hear her maiden speech. He repeatedly told my mother how impressed he had been by the young Member for Finchley. After a conversation with her in the tea room three days later he was so taken with her intensity and beauty that he frequently compared her to the film star Virginia McKenna.*

  When I first met Margaret Thatcher during the 1966 general election, she was the junior opposition spokesman for housing and land and I was the youngest Conservative parliamentary candidate in the country. She reminded me that she had been in the same position as candidate for Dartford in 1950. On that occasion and on some subsequent encounters when I was a candidate,† I did not share my father’s enthusiasm for her. The feeling was mutual. ‘That young man needs his wings clipped,’ I heard her say in a piercing voice at a Young Conservative conference we had both been addressing in 1972.

  Entering the House of Commons in February 1974, I started out as a Ted Heath admirer, unsurprisingly since his home town of Broadstairs was in my constituency and I was a frequent guest at the home of his father. But Ted’s weaknesses grew all too apparent at first-hand observation.‡ Also at first hand I witnessed the earliest stirrings of the Thatcher bandwagon in the form of Peter Morrison’s manoeuvres with the upper-class splinter group called ‘toffs for Thatcher’.# I also followed the more solid support she received from members of the Economic Dining Club and a group of Treasury Committee specialists headed by my friends Peter Rees and Norman Lamont. Amidst the extraordinary turbulence of the 1975 Tory leadership election I reckoned, after numerous conversations with players like Hugh Fraser, Airey Neave, Edward du Cann and Ted Heath himself, that I had a well-informed insider’s view** of how Margaret Thatcher won the crown, even though I was not a cheering member of her coronation party.

  Her opposition years were the most fragile period of her career. It was the time when I came to know her well. She was a warmer and more interesting character than I had expected. Although she was struggling in the House of Commons at the gladiatorial battles of Prime Minister’s Questions (which she usually lost), she came across as a strong and attractive leader to many back-benchers and to the party in the country. I saw her interest in new ideas at meetings of the Conservative Philosophy Group†† in my home, and in House of Commons discussions on Home Office policy after being made a junior front-bench spokesman on police matters.

  At this same time I began to understand the private side of her personality because for three years I dated her daughter Carol. She was one of the great loves of my life, but I handled our romance badly. Nevertheless, while the relationship was in full swing I caught many glimpses of a little-known Margaret Thatcher. She was hospitable, feminine, confiding, dysfunctional within her family, direct with her daughter’s boyfriend and much more vulnerable than I had realised. One night I found her in tears in her Flood Street home because some back-bench critic had told her she was ‘wrecking the party’. I told her to ignore it but she left the room in emotional distress saying: ‘I hurt too, you know.’‡‡

  The ‘winter of discontent’ was the turning point for Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition and she seized her opportunities brilliantly. I think I was the second person (ironically the first was Jim Callaghan) to tell her, in Westminster Abbey after a memorial service, that her party political broadcast of 17 January 1979 had started a sea change in public opinion.##

  Soon after Margaret Thatcher won the general election and became Prime Minister, my romance with Carol ended. ‘You have brought great personal distress to the Queen’s First Minister,’ said her Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) Ian Gow. I understood his message. It was conveyed in other ways, not least in leaks to journalists. Although this was painful, I thought it was reasonable that I should have been sent to Siberia. What mother does not feel angry if she thinks her daughter’s happiness has been destroyed by a young man? Margaret Thatcher’s human instincts were entirely understandable.

  Siberia was not outer darkness. I continued to stay in touch with the Prime Minister vicariously. Ian Gow was one of my best friends and late-night drinking companions. So was his successor as her PPS, Michael Alison (but with less drinking!). So were numerous senior and junior ministers and whips. The parliamentary club is a small one and a good vantage point for watching a new prime minister.

  Like many others I grew into becoming a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher because of her courage. The Falklands War, the 1981 Budget and the victory over Arthur Scargill in the 1984 miners’ strike were shining examples of this cardinal virtue. The stories of her personality during these epic battles soon filtered through from insiders of whom the most indiscreet was Willie Whitelaw and the most extraordinary David Hart.***

  In addition to the wealth of material available in archives and collections of papers, I kept my own diaries and other records throughout my twenty-three years in Parliament alongside Margaret Thatcher. From these and from many contemporary sources I hope it has been possible to portray her with some fresh brush strokes on my biographer�
�s canvas.

  It has to be said that I occasionally saw her, and have painted parts of her personality, in unattractive colours. For example, I remember growing angry at her outrageous behaviour towards my friend Bernard ‘Jack’ Weatherill††† before and after he became Speaker of the House of Commons. Her constant bullying of Geoffrey Howe‡‡‡ was worse. She could be nastily unpleasant to a minister or an official against whom she had formed an instant, and sometimes inexplicable, dislike. She was cruel in her constant disparagement of her chosen successor as Prime Minister, John Major.### She had little empathy or sympathy for those members of society who were too different or too disadvantaged to appreciate her self-help philosophy.

  On the other side of the coin her virtues far outweighed her occasional streaks of viciousness. Great men and women often have their Achilles heels. Margaret Thatcher’s failures of behaviour were painful to those on the receiving end of them. But on the big picture of politics it was the strength of her personality that made it possible to achieve what was thought almost impossible.

  While her second and third terms as Prime Minister continued, I was no longer exiled to Siberia. As a back-bencher I saw her quite often, occasionally in one-to-one conversations whose subjects ranged from problems with an RAF base in my constituency, to the obduracy of the Kent miners,**** to conversations about the King of Saudi Arabia and former US President Richard Nixon.†††† At one point she sent me a message through her PPS Michael Alison saying that I would not have to wait long before being brought into the government. This never happened, not I think because of lingering feelings about Carol but because I came to be regarded by the whips as an intolerable nuisance over Europe.

  This was ironic because the Prime Minister was becoming far from unsympathetic to the rebellions against European legislation organised by the Conservative European Reform Group (CERG)‡‡‡‡ of which I was chairman. Indeed, when she got into trouble over her own galloping Euroscepticism it was CERG’s supporters in the House of Commons who became her most vociferous backers.

  The fall of Margaret Thatcher had three ingredients. Her personality went off the rails because of an excess of hubris and a want of listening. Her party went off the rails because of a surfeit of fear and a shortage of loyalty. A pincer movement of two plotters and the collapse of her support in cabinet dealt her the killer blows.

  Watching this tragedy unfold was the saddest spectacle I ever witnessed in politics. My blood still boils when I watch, in television replays, my grimaces of anger immediately behind Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement in which I was ‘doughnutted’ by the cameras.####

  In the parliamentary arena spectators are often participants, never more so than in the public execution of Margaret Thatcher. I have made no attempt to tell this part of the story even-handedly. For all their good years of service to the state, Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine will always to me be the villains of the piece for the parts they played in the downfall of a prime minister whose term of office should only have been ended by the votes of the electorate.

  My angles of observation on Margaret Thatcher grew closer again during her unhappy years of enforced retirement and decline. In the immediate aftermath of her overthrow her agony was unbearable. I often saw this and felt for her at close quarters.

  Although the pain dulled, it always troubled her. My penultimate chapters ‘The agony after the fall’ and ‘Snapshots of her retirement years’ are full of poignant glimpses of the wounded lioness caged into inactivity.

  In spite of having had some unique insights on Margaret Thatcher, it will be clear from my narrative that politically I was an unimportant spear carrier on her back benches – although I hope an observant one. Many of my Westminster and Whitehall friends were much closer and more important figures in her world. Over ninety of them have been generous with the time they gave me in their interviews for this book. So have many other witnesses to her years in power including some who have never talked about her to an author before. Heading this latter category I am particularly grateful to Mikhail Gorbachev for giving me his first ever account of his Chequers talks with Margaret Thatcher in 1984.*****

  Although this book covers virtually all the important milestones and episodes in Margaret Thatcher’s career, I end this prologue with two caveats.

  First, I have written a biographical portrait rather than a definitive biography. I tell her story, but with the freedom to capture its light and shade with reflective criticisms at the end of every chapter.

  Finally, I should say that at the end of my biographer’s journey, even more so than when I started it, I admired Margaret Thatcher enormously.

  This is a portrait that attempts to combine both the applause and the appraisal.

  ________________

  * See Chapter 6

  † See Chapter 7

  ‡ See Chapter 9

  # See Chapter 10

  ** See Chapter 10

  †† See Chapter 11

  ‡‡ See Chapter 11

  ## See Chapter 12

  *** See Chapter 26

  ††† See Chapter 23

  ‡‡‡ See Chapter 33

  ### See Chapter 38

  **** See Chapter 26

  †††† See Chapters 25, 27, 29 and 37

  ‡‡‡‡ See Chapters 32 and 36

  #### See Chapter 36

  ***** See Chapter 28

  1

  The early years

  THE BIRTHPLACE

  In the beginning was the discipline: one of six characteristics ingrained in the life of Margaret Roberts the child that shaped the career of Margaret Thatcher the Prime Minister. The other five were a mixture of positives and negatives.

  In the first category came her determination of character, forthrightness of expression and certainty of belief. The two negatives were less visible because she tried to cover them up. They were her personal insecurity and her lack of empathy towards those, particularly her mother, with whom she had sharp disagreements.

  If this looks a strange and narrow list, lacking in the more natural features of childhood such as enjoyment, laughter, relaxation, family tactility and parental love, it is because Margaret’s upbringing was an unnaturally restricted one, shaped by straitened circumstances and strait-laced parents.

  She was born on 13 October 1925, in an upstairs room above her father’s corner shop at No. 1 North Parade, Grantham in Lincolnshire. From the outside it looked a substantial three-storey building but the living accommodation was cramped and the facilities basic.

  The shop took up most of the property. The family sitting room was on the first floor, and could only be accessed by a staircase behind the counter, which led to it through the main bedroom. Margaret and her older sister, Muriel, born 24 May 1921, each had their own small room at the top of the house. There was no running water or central heating. The most awkward missing amenity was the lack of a bathroom. The family took their baths in an unplumbed iron tub. It was in the same ground-floor room as the outside lavatory, located across the backyard of the shop. There was no garden or indoor toilet.

  Even by the standards of the 1920s, the house in which Margaret grew up was Spartan. Yet the austerity was not caused by poverty. Her father, Alfred Roberts, owned two grocery stores in Grantham, and could easily have afforded to install what estate agents of the time called, ‘modern conveniences’. But for reasons of principle, he decided that his family should live frugally. He believed in saving, not spending, money. He told his daughter that he had kept this rule ever since his first job as a shop assistant. In those days, he earned fourteen shillings a week, of which twelve shillings paid for his board and lodging. After that, ‘For every one shilling saved there was one shilling to spend’.1 Her father’s financial priorities resulted in the purse strings being held so tight that he would not even pay for running water in the family home.

  ‘Alderman Roberts would become prosperous because he wouldn’t worry about things
like plumbing,’ explained Marjorie Lee, one of Margaret’s classmates.2

  Margaret herself did worry about them. In a revealing interview given after she had been Prime Minister for six years, she told Miriam Stoppard: ‘Home was really very small, and we had no mod cons, and I remember having a dream that the one thing I really wanted was to live in a nice house, you know, a house with more things than we had.’3

  Uncertainty was another cause of Alfred Roberts’ reluctance to find the money for basic home improvements. ‘Grantham people were having a hard time in Margaret’s childhood,’ recalled her contemporary Malcolm Knapp, a local historian still living in the town. ‘We had 40 per cent unemployment here in 1930 and soup kitchens, visited by the Duke of Kent, no less, in 1933. Mr Roberts must often have worried whether his customers had the money in their pockets to pay for their groceries.’4

  The austerity of the Depression years required a regime of relentless hard work for the family living above the shop.

  ‘You are always on duty,’5 recalled Margaret in a phrase that applies to politicians as well as shopkeepers. For even though Alfred Roberts employed three assistants at his two grocery stores, it was still very much a family business. He was the hands-on proprietor, usually behind the counter operating the bacon slicer. His wife and mother-in-law served the customers. His daughters were also expected to help out, particularly in the school holidays. Margaret’s earliest memories included weighing the sugar, which had been delivered in large wholesale sacks, into 1lb and 2lb bags.