Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  Returning to No. 10, it was clear to her and other insiders that the momentum in the leadership election was moving heavily towards John Major. But she did make one or two last canvassing phone calls on his behalf, only to find that these alleged waverers had already become his supporters.

  Her only outside public engagement on Monday was to go and say a farewell thank you to the staff at Central Office. This caused the sole glitch in her post-resignation appearances, when she told them that she would be ‘a very good back seat driver’.

  The remark was immediately misinterpreted, not least in the Major campaign headquarters in Gayfere Street, where I heard an explosion of expletives in reaction to it. This was an error of judgement. For Margaret Thatcher was not signalling her intention of exercising influence on her successor.

  It was clear from the context that she was not referring to John Major, but to President George Bush. She told the Central Office staffers that she had been ‘very, very thrilled’ to receive a phone call from the President soon after her resignation announcement. She went on to say that they had discussed the military situation in the Gulf, where ‘He won’t falter, and I won’t falter. It’s just that I won’t be pulling the levers there. But I shall be a very good back seat driver.’42

  Two last outings as a front-seat driver took place at a party for the staff of 10 Downing Street and at her final appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions. The farewell staff party attended by cleaners, drivers, police officers and telephonists, as well as by her private office, was described by Ronnie Millar as a ‘triumphant’ occasion. She expressed her farewell thanks with great verve, standing on a chair to be cheered. Her last line, ‘Life begins at sixty-five’, brought the house down. She was presented with a first edition of Kipling’s poems and a high-frequency portable radio. Her Private Secretary, Andrew Turnbull, said that the gift had been chosen ‘So wherever you are in the world, you can continue to be cross with the BBC’.43

  On Tuesday 27 November, her last full day in office, she cast her own vote in the leadership election and then answered her 698th session of Prime Minister’s Questions. It was more of an occasion for congratulations than interrogation. But she did get in one Parthian shot when the Liberal MP, Rosie Barnes, asked her about electoral reform of the national voting system. ‘I am sure that the hon. Lady will understand that I am all for first past the post’, replied Margaret Thatcher.44 The laughter among Tory MPs included many pangs of regret that such a system had not been in place for her leadership election.

  Soon after 6 p.m., the results of the ballot were announced. John Major topped the poll with 185 votes to Heseltine’s 131 and Hurd’s 56. Although this left Major technically short of two votes for the absolute majority required under the rules, this was academic since Heseltine and Hurd immediately withdrew. So the crown went to John Major, although as Margaret Thatcher observed to her family, he was elected by nineteen fewer votes than she had received a week earlier.

  As soon as Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd had delivered their withdrawal statements, the outgoing Prime Minister went through the connecting door to No. 11 and congratulated her successor. ‘Well done, John, well done’, she said, shaking his hand.45 She was more effusive to Norma Major, giving her a hug and a kiss, saying, ‘It’s everything I’ve dreamt of for such a long time. The future is assured.’46

  With the media massing in Downing Street, it was time for John Major to emerge with a victory statement. Margaret Thatcher wanted to make it a joint appearance. ‘I’ll come out’, she said. But Norman Lamont, sensitive to the ‘back-seat driver’ controversy of the previous day, dissuaded her with the request, ‘Please let him have his moment’.47 She complied, and watched him from an upstairs window, peeping sadly from behind a curtain. It made a poignant photograph symbolising the passing of her era.

  Her last night at No. 10 consisted of more hard labour filling up the last of the packing cases, followed by a quiet supper with Denis, Mark and Carol.

  In the morning, she was down in the front hallway just after 9 a.m., where the entire No. 10 staff were lined up, some of them weeping. They burst into applause as she appeared. She shook hands with her private office team and many others. At first, she tried to suppress her own tears at these farewells, but soon was unable to stem the flow. By the time she had gone down the line of well-wishers her eyes were red and her mascara was smudged. Crawfie had to step in with a handkerchief to do some emergency make-up repairs.

  With composure recovered, the front door opened. She stepped out to a bank of microphones, and said:

  Ladies and Gentlemen. We’re leaving Downing Street for the last time after eleven and a half wonderful years, and we’re very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came eleven and a half years ago.

  After reiterating her gratitude to her staff and to the people who had sent her flowers and letters, she ended:

  Now it’s time for a new chapter to open, and I wish John Major all the luck in the world. He’ll be splendidly served and he has the makings of being a great Prime Minister, which I am sure he will be in a very short time. Thank you very much. Goodbye.48

  She and Denis got into the waiting car. As it moved away, she turned in her seat for a sideways look at the throng of media. The photographers caught an affecting picture of her face crumpling in sadness. It was a reminder of Enoch Powell’s adage, ‘All political careers end in tears’.49

  REFLECTION

  Politics is a rough trade, but the fall of Margaret Thatcher will go down as the most unpleasant and unattractive destruction of a prime minister in modern history. It brought out the worst aspects of the Tory Party – panic, disloyalty, deviousness, score settling and a cavalier disregard for the rights of the electorate.

  The big question remains: should a serving prime minister ever be removed by a faction of MPs within their own party? In Margaret Thatcher’s case, the issue was particularly acute because she was a leader of such outstanding stature, who had been confirmed as Prime Minister by three substantial election victories. If she was going to be overthrown, it should have been done by the voters, in a general election.

  It is true that Margaret Thatcher brought many of her troubles on herself. She stopped listening to her party, and even to the most loyal of her colleagues. Her man-management became deplorable. Hubris and arrogance grew within her. The way she handled her leadership election challenge from Michael Heseltine was downright sloppy – an adjective which could not be applied to any other episode in her political career. These were grave mistakes, but did they amount to a charge sheet that justified her political execution? ‘No! No! No!’, to echo the words she memorably used in an earlier context.

  She was ousted because a section of the Conservative Party in Parliament, and particularly about half the members of the cabinet, worked themselves up into a mid-term panic. The woes of the poll tax and a clutch of bad by-election results meant that a swathe of MPs, particularly in the North West, were convinced that they were going to lose their seats. Experience suggests that by the time a general election came round in 1992 these fears would have significantly abated. The poll tax was in the process of being amended and alleviated. Other issues such as the improvement in the economy and success in the Gulf War would have had more impact in an election.

  A Kinnock versus Thatcher head-to-head contest at the polls would have broken all precedents if the result had been a knockout victory for the challenger. If these probabilities of political life had been explained by reassuring voices from the cabinet, the chances are that the back-bench hysteria would have been contained.

  Unfortunately, several cabinet ministers were themselves in a state of panic. All of them liked and respected Geoffrey Howe. They were aghast at the harshness of his treatment by the Prime Minister and at the havoc unleashed by his resignation statement.

  Michael Heseltine would never have challenged Margaret Thatcher as a sitting Prime Minister had it not been
for the invitation to do so issued at the end of Howe’s resignation statement. The collusion between these two enemies of their leader, whether plotted or telepathic, caused chaos. Most of the cabinet were not expecting it. They reacted with irrational fear. Had they closed ranks and strongly supported the Prime Minister, the chances of her defeating him by a simple majority (as the second-ballot rules required) would have risen to at least 50–50. But instead of giving her that steadfast support, the cabinet’s loyalty disintegrated.

  The charge of treachery by the cabinet, which Margaret Thatcher herself made in her post-resignation years, is difficult to sustain, at least in the extreme form that involves plotting and backstabbing. What happened was that the cabinet took its lead from the back-benchers. Usually in politics it is the other way round. But this cabinet lacked ministers willing to go into battle for their leader. They were feeble turncoats rather than resolute traitors. In retrospect, they look like weak politicians who lost their bearings in a crisis. Some may have been treacherous, but most of them defected because they had no stomach for the fight.

  Three members of the cabinet (Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind and Chris Patten) told her to her face that they would not vote for her. Most of the rest genuinely believed that her support among the back-benchers was collapsing. But they made no concerted attempt to claw back the votes that were slipping away from the Prime Minister. Instead, they became paralysed at the prospect of Heseltine arriving at No. 10, a fear that turned into a stampede of cabinet ministers running with the herd of alarmed Tory back-benchers.

  As a back-bencher with a ringside seat at this debacle, I was amazed and ashamed by it. I thought Margaret Thatcher’s achievements and virtues far outweighed her misjudgements and failings. Overthrowing her because of the poll tax on the eve of the Gulf War and in the middle of a strategic struggle over the future direction of Europe seemed a myopic and tragic mistake.

  Sadly, the Conservative parliamentary party had changed its nature too much to recognise its mistake. Long-term loyalty to the nationally elected leader was at a discount. Short-term fixes to the problems of the Community Charge were at a premium. The Prime Minister worked on longer horizons and bigger visions. Saving our seats was to her a mere parochial imperative compared to saving our country, which had been her mission since the day she came to power in 1979. Winning the Gulf War, defeating inflation and preventing Britain from sliding into the single currency and European federalism were her priorities in the autumn of 1990. Because she took her stand on them so forcefully to the exclusion of most other considerations, she fell – but over much smaller issues and at the hands of much lesser men.

  Perhaps the British public would have supported her view of the bigger issues when asked to back her or sack her at a mid-1992 general election, which I and many others believe she would have won. But if it had been the latter decision, at least her rejection would have been at the hands of the national electorate rather than by a party faction. That would have been a better departure for her. Instead, she left in a mind-set of emotionally charged bitterness that was to make life difficult for herself, her successor and her party for many years to come.

  ________________

  * The 92 Group was so called because members used to meet at 92 Cheyne Walk, the home of their first Chairman, Patrick Wall MP.

  † Lady Home (1909–1990), wife of Lord Home of the Hirsel who as Sir Alec Douglas-Home was Conservative Prime Minister, 1963–1964.

  38

  The agony after the fall

  TRAUMA AND TANTRUMS

  The first weeks after the fall were traumatic. Margaret Thatcher was in a black mood that combined shocked emotions of bereavement, betrayal and blind fury.

  Immediately after leaving No. 10, she and Denis were driven to their new home in Dulwich. So troubled were her feelings that she did not speak a single word to her husband on her fifty-minute journey, according to her driver.1 Soon she was facing some uncomfortable domestic realities. After eleven years at the apex of power, she was unable to cope with many of life’s simplest practicalities. She did not know how to dial a telephone number,* how to send a fax or how to operate the washing and drying machines in her basement. Her Special Branch protection team, who had installed themselves in the garage, helped her over these hurdles. One of the first outside calls she made, on a police line, was to Crawfie. ‘This is Margaret. From the garage’,2 was her poignant opening to the conversation.

  Seven hours after leaving Whitehall she returned to it in order to attend a party in the Cabinet Office organised in her honour by Sir Robin Butler. Proposing her health to the carefully chosen gathering of her favourite Permanent Secretaries and senior officials, he said, ‘When we are old the one thing our children and grandchildren will be most interested in is that we worked for Margaret Thatcher’.3

  The guest of honour liked this prediction. But she visibly disliked Butler’s maladroit presentation to her of a Cabinet Office pass giving her full access as an ex-Prime Minister to government buildings. Even more did she dislike his next move of Whitehall housekeeping. This consisted of sending her the standard Cabinet Secretary’s letter to former Prime Ministers asking for the return of all government documents in her possession. She refused in a tirade that was extreme even by her standards.

  Her parliamentary colleagues also had to get used to her lashings out and eruptions in this dark period. The whips were berated for not immediately finding her an office within the Palace of Westminster. Alastair McAlpine, the Conservative Party Treasurer, came to the rescue by lending her his house in Great College Street. She used it as a base for her secretariat and for receiving visitors in a poky first-floor sitting room.

  One cold January evening in 1991 I was walking along Great College Street towards my home in Lord North Street when Peter Morrison popped his head out of the door and said, ‘Can you spare a moment, old boy? Margaret could do with some company’.

  In the hallway he explained that the recently deposed Prime Minister was ‘like a bear with a sore head. She can’t stand the sight of the swine who had stabbed her in the back. But she knows you were a last ditcher. So do her a favour and come in and have a nightcap’.4 He made the invitation sound like an SOS message. In a way it was, for I soon discovered that Margaret Thatcher’s state of aggression was elephantine as well as ursine on the Richter scale of rampages.

  For well over an hour I listened to what could only be called a hysterical rant. If the former Prime Minister had been equipped with tusks she would have tossed and gored half the Conservative parliamentary party. Her angriest thrusts were directed against her most recently promoted ministers, who she now vilified as ‘spineless, gutless Judases’. She set off down what she called ‘My list of turncoats and traitors’. The intensity of her rage was increased by the liberal glasses of Famous Grouse Whisky being dispensed by the understandably tired Peter Morrison. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling once or twice as to indicate that he had heard this litany of denunciation many times before. It was a painful, embarrassing and apparently recurring scene. At the time I felt heartbroken for Margaret Thatcher as this dreadful session wore on. Nearly a quarter of a century later, I know it is fairer to draw a veil over these depths of her agony.

  The evening ended, however, with a contrastingly brisk decision on her part. Making one effort to distract her from her hymns of hate against her assassins, I tried to turn the conversation, or to be more accurate her monologue, towards the subject of writing her memoirs. My attempt failed at first instance. Her only response was to fulminate with longer diatribes about betrayals. Making a second try to divert the flow, I talked about the White House aides who had betrayed Richard Nixon. ‘How do you know all that?’ she asked.

  ‘Originally, because I was staying at San Clemente when Nixon was writing the Watergate chapter of his memoirs. I talked a lot to him and to the researchers who worked on the draft. I think you were once interviewed by one of them – Diane Sawyer of CBS.’

  ‘
Diane Sawyer – are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely certain’, I replied, going on to describe how my American friends Frank Gannon and Diane Sawyer had borne the brunt of the research work on the massive Nixon memoirs.

  ‘Well, that’s interesting’, said Margaret Thatcher. ‘Let’s have another discussion about how exactly President Nixon wrote his book – but not now. It’s time to get back to Dulwich.’5

  About ten days later I did have a well-focused discussion with Margaret Thatcher about how the memoirs of the 43rd President of the United States had been researched and written. By this time I had done my homework and knew exactly which sections, on issues as diverse as the vice presidency, the opening to China and Watergate, had been worked on by which researcher.

  Margaret Thatcher was intrigued. At one point I told her that Nixon had grilled Diane Sawyer for hours at a stretch of intense questioning about her draft pages on Watergate. ‘The longest of these lasted six and a half hours without even a bathroom break’, I said. This detail got a human reaction from the former Prime Minister.

  ‘Without even a bathroom break!’ she exclaimed. ‘Poor girl! How inconsiderate of Mr Nixon. One must be considerate to one’s staff.’

  The final consideration that was discussed in our talk about Nixon’s memoirs was time. She asked how long she would need to write her memoirs. The subject must have been on her mind, since the press were reporting that there was a bidding war between Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch for the worldwide rights to her autobiography.

  ‘President Nixon took two and a half years to write his book’, I said.

  The Iron Lady became the impatient Lady.

  ‘Two and a half years!’ she said, her voice rising. That’s half the time it took to win the Second World War! And this Parliament may last another two and a half years. There’s work for me to do in the House!’