Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  I was too polite to say so at the time, but I thought this was one of the silliest statements I had ever heard from her lips. The notion that she should be sitting around in the House of Commons as an ex-Prime Minister looking for work to do was a certain recipe for increasing her frustration. This was indeed the pattern for her last eighteen months as a back-bencher. Far from simmering down in the slower pace of life after high office, she boiled over with increasingly venomous anger about the way she had been treated. She vented her spleen not just in private conversations but also in public interviews. She repeatedly referred to herself as ‘The only undefeated Prime Minister’.

  As she complained to Vanity Fair in March 1991: ‘I have never been defeated in an election. I have never been defeated in a vote of confidence in Parliament … I have never been defeated by the people.’ In the same interview she described with emotional imagery how ‘The pattern of my life was fractured … It’s like throwing a pane of glass with a complicated map upon it on the floor … You threw it on the floor and it shattered.’6

  The pain of her shattering resulted in many outbursts and tantrums. Denis bore the worst of these storms but not always stoically. He too could become angry. The unsuitability of the house in Dulwich was one bone of contention. This difficulty was solved by Kathleen Ford, the widow of Henry Ford, who lent the Thatchers her twelve-room duplex apartment in 93 Eaton Square for over a year in 1990–1991 until they acquired a lease on a five-storey house two minutes walk away at 73 Chester Square.

  Being comfortably housed was not the real problem. The root cause of Margaret Thatcher’s restlessness was that she retained a hunger and a capacity for power but had no field in which to exercise it. She found it impossible to fill this gap in her life since she had no interests beyond the arena of politics. As Charles Powell said after her death, ‘She never had a happy day after being ousted from office’.7

  TRAVELLING, SPEECH-MAKING AND WRITING

  The first break in the clouds that were causing her gloom came when she started to travel the world earning huge fees from speech-making. The first of these excursions was to Texas, where Mark’s contacts in Dallas clubbed together to provide a speaker’s honorarium of $250,000 for the ex-Prime Minister. ‘It gave my mother an enormous boost of confidence at a time when she was feeling very uncertain about her future’, said Mark.8

  The engagement opened the door to a relationship with the prestigious Washington Speakers Bureau who for several years arranged lectures for her at a fee of $50,000 a time. As always, she felt at home in the United States, having made ten visits there in 1991–1992. They included not only set-piece speeches to paying audiences but also public events at which she was honoured for her historic achievements. These included receiving the Congressional Medal of Freedom from George H.W. Bush at a lavish ceremony in the White House; and attending Ronald Reagan’s eightieth birthday party in California.

  Her travels soon became global. In August 1992 she set off to Taiwan and Hong Kong. The first of these assignments required a speech of careful diplomatic balance. The second was an even harder balancing act for she had to decide whether to oppose or support what were called the ‘Patten reforms’ for the colony in its last years before the handover. This was not an easy judgement. She had been ‘distinctly sniffy’9 about Chris Patten’s appointment as Governor. However, against the urgings of her former adviser, Sir Percy Cradock, she sided, not entirely successfully, with Patten’s attempts to introduce democratic freedom into the governance of Hong Kong. But, because of the immense respect accorded her by the leadership in Beijing, behind the scenes she was a helpful influence on various difficult issues in the run up to China’s absorption of the colony.

  From Hong Kong, she flew by a BP corporate jet to Baku, Azerbaijan, whose President Abulfaz Elchibey would not agree a major oil contract with the company unless Margaret Thatcher was present at the signing ceremony. Her presence was requested by the president to give a ‘free of corruption’ seal of approval to the deal. She was delighted to be ‘batting for Britain’ again in this way. She refused all offers of payment for her speeches and appearances in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Baku, even though she had prepared for them with a thoroughness almost as intense as for a prime ministerial tour.

  After she returned from this Far East–Central Asia series of engagements, the newly appointed head of her office, Julian Seymour, thought that the contribution she felt she had made to Britain’s national interests gave her a fresh sense of purpose. ‘From then on she was much more focused. She had found a way of exerting influence again.’10

  One other dimension of her speech-making after leaving office deserves to be highlighted. She enjoyed influencing the minds of the young. She accepted, always without taking a fee, many invitations from universities and colleges. She became Chancellor of William and Mary College in Virginia where she gave lectures and participated in Charter Day activities.

  In Britain she was more selective in speaking to academic audiences, but in different ways she was supportive of Buckingham University, Churchill College, Cambridge and the Saïd Business School at Oxford. She never quite got over the hostility of the Oxford dons who had voted against awarding her an honorary degree. But for old friends such as Wafic Saïd and Robin Butler she made an exception to her anti-Oxford bias.

  It was an invitation from her former private secretary, now Lord Butler of Brockwell and Master of University College, Oxford, which produced a rare example of Margaret Thatcher being outflanked by a sharp questioner. The scene of this uncomfortable exchange came when she addressed the students of University College at a private gathering organised by Robin Butler.

  In her brief opening remarks the former Prime Minister said she would like her listeners from the rising generation to reflect on just two points:

  ‘First, about the world; you should remember that during the 20th century, my century, more people died of tyranny than died in war. So you must always be ready to fight for freedom.

  ‘Secondly, about Britain; the problems facing your generation will not be economic problems. They have been solved’, she announced, modestly refraining from saying who she thought had solved them.

  ‘But I think you will have to face a severe social problem which could better be described as a behavioural problem’, she continued. ‘When I was growing up, even during the war, five per cent of children were born illegitimate. Today thirty-two per cent of births are illegitimate, and the number is rising. I don’t know what the consequences of this will be, but it worries me.’

  During the Q & A session a student challenged her views on this issue: ‘Lady Thatcher, don’t you think it’s a little unfair to describe a child as illegitimate throughout its life when it has had no influence over the circumstances of its own birth?’

  ‘Well, what would you call it?’ she retorted. ‘I can think of another word to use. But I prefer not to use it in this company.’11

  There was a stunned silence. But after an uneasy pause, the questioning resumed on other topics. Then there was chapel, dinner at high table and a nightcap in the Master’s lodgings.

  Over a whisky with Denis and Robin Butler, Margaret Thatcher suddenly said: ‘Robin, that young man who asked the question about the word illegitimate – he had a point didn’t he?’12

  The episode highlighted three aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s personality. First, her sometimes insensitive forthrightness. Second, her reluctance to yield, let alone apologise for, a bad point. Third, her willingness to learn from a mistake.

  ‘I will wager she never used the word illegitimate again’, said Robin Butler.13

  The written word became a major preoccupation to Margaret Thatcher after she signed a £3.5 million deal with Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house, HarperCollins, for the world rights to her memoirs. The first volume, The Downing Street Years, took only eighteen months to write. Completing the gargantuan task of covering her entire premiership in such a short time meant that she had to rely too hea
vily on her team of ghost writers, who included Robin Harris, a former director of the Conservative Research Department; John O’Sullivan of the Daily Telegraph; and Christopher Collins, a young Oxford academic. But parts of this somewhat stilted autobiography bear the unmistakable stance of her personality and style. In particular, the Falklands chapters are such a vivid account of the conflict that they could only have been written by herself.

  Margaret Thatcher did not enjoy the literary process. She was at best a reluctant author. However, she well understood the importance of setting down her testament of history, and as a result her book shows many traces of self-serving revisionism – a common weakness among writers of political memoirs!

  By the time she got round to the second volume, The Path to Power, the failings of stiltedness and an excess of amanuenses were even more apparent. Charles Moore, her official biographer, perceptively noted that the two volumes of her memoirs ‘could never quite overcome the problem that they were the autobiography of someone who did not think autobiographically’.14

  Such a mind-set leaves all the more scope for her biographers. But she was not thinking of them either at the time when she was working on her memoirs. For she was a woman who infinitely preferred action to authorship. She wanted to stay in the arena where her passions and prejudices were focused. As a result, she stirred up a lot of action and argument on the stage of contemporary politics throughout the years 1990–1997, much to the chagrin of her party and her successor as prime minister.

  LAST MONTHS AS A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT

  Even when she was working on her memoirs, Margaret Thatcher was determined to fulfil her duties as an elected Member of the House of Commons. The readjustment process from the life of a prime minister to the life of a back-bencher was not easy.

  The problem of not having a Commons office was solved by Archie Hamilton vacating his far from spacious junior minister’s room. It was the first of his many acts of kindness towards her. Over the next few years, Ann and Archie Hamilton regularly invited Denis and Margaret to stay for long weekends, Easters and Christmases at Rhyll Manor, their country house in Devon. Their kindness was a major boon to both Thatchers, as was the similar hospitality they received from another parliamentary couple, Michael and Susan Forsyth.

  Peter Morrison was fading in health and diligence as a notional PPS. Margaret Thatcher let him down gently. She never criticised him publicly or privately for his disastrous handling of her leadership election campaign. He never reproached himself for it either. They were both in denial. Although the blame gaming of her betrayers became tedious, her loyalty to Morrison was exemplary. Fidelity to old friends was one of her most admirable qualities.

  New friends came into her parliamentary life. There were two identifiable Thatcher followings among Tory back-benchers. They were the Eurosceptics, particularly the Conservative European Reform Group run by Teddy Taylor, and the right-of-centre No Turning Back group run by Gerald Howarth.

  Margaret Thatcher seemed to be suffering not only from withdrawal symptoms over her loss of power but from guilt feelings about her failure not to have recognised early enough that the Delors vision of the EEC was posing a growing threat to Britain’s economic and political well-being. So, in her last months as an MP she spent much time in receiving briefings from two back-benchers whom many of their colleagues described as ‘completely mad’ about Europe – Teddy Taylor and Bill Cash. Both were obsessive masters of detail on the creeping federalism of EEC directives. Margaret Thatcher was their most willing pupil, sitting for hours with them (separately) in her small office as she immersed herself in their tutorials. Her absorption was amazing for its humility and its capacity to tolerate the boredom of the minutiae of EU documents.

  A glimpse of her commitment to the Eurosceptic cause and its rebel leaders came in 1991 when Teddy Taylor was awarded a knighthood after thirty-three years of parliamentary service. I hosted a drinks party in my home to celebrate this event. Margaret Thatcher accepted the invitation and inevitably became the star guest of the evening. She made a ringing speech lauding Teddy to the skies ‘for keeping the torch of freedom aloft for so many years’.15 She was also charming to the Taylors’ two teenage sons, George and John, singing their father’s praises to them. To one or two cynical observers it seemed remarkable that the former Prime Minister had taken so long to recognise the virtues of a colleague who had been in her shadow cabinet as early as 1976 but who she had passed over for any kind of promotion or recognition in the intervening years.

  The MP who did her the greatest service in the period after the fall was Gerald Howarth, the Member for Cannock and Burntwood. He worshipped Margaret Thatcher. One of his first moves, immediately after her overthrow, was to organise the delivery to Dulwich of a gargantuan bouquet of flowers from the No Turning Back group of Thatcherites. On the day when she was feeling catastrophically unloved, being bunched by a group of admiring young back-benchers counted with her.

  Gerald Howarth was a shrewd operator. He knew how to handle both the political instincts and the feminine instincts of Margaret Thatcher. As her appointed PPS, he used both skills to bring her into contact with younger MPs she barely knew.

  Politically, she was like a great ship without an anchor as she navigated the unfamiliar waters of the back benches in 1991–1992. She knew the course she wanted to steer – as far as possible away from Brussels without demanding withdrawal from the EEC – but she had little or no idea of how to impose discipline on herself or on her new crew. The result was unhappy chaos, as almost any discontented Tory MP was welcomed on board as a ‘Thatcherite’. This label, which had once meant a principled belief in free markets, strict control of public expenditure, upholding the rule of law and firm moral values, began to look like the skull and crossbones flag of rebellious right-wing malcontents. As individuals, they proclaimed fealty to their wounded queen over the water. However, as Tory MPs, it was far from clear how much distance they and she wanted to keep from the government headed by her chosen successor.

  Her speeches in the House of Commons as a back-bencher were rare but high-voltage events. She declared outward support for John Major, describing him as ‘a leader of vision’,16 but created the impression that she would be much more robust than he was likely to be in keeping Britain out of the single currency and preserving national sovereignty. These confusing signals narrowly managed to keep within the boundaries of political propriety and loyalty.

  With a general election looming in the spring of 1992, the potential Thatcherite splinter group of the Conservative parliamentary party closed ranks with the Major government. The only issue where the splintering continued to hurt concerned the question of whether or not to hold a referendum before the forthcoming Maastricht Treaty was approved.

  In the spring of 1992, making an unprecedented move for an ex-prime minister, Margaret Thatcher actively encouraged and supported the Private Member’s Bill of Richard Shepherd, designed to require certain treaties to be ratified by a national referendum.

  Richard Shepherd was one of the Eurosceptic back-benchers who found themselves admired by Margaret Thatcher after her fall, even though they had been ignored by her while she was in power. So he approached her to see if she would be willing to support his bill. He was trying to make it compulsory for the government to hold a national referendum before future international treaties involving changes to the British constitution could be ratified. This was a thinly veiled pre-emptive strike against the impending Maastricht Treaty.

  Thirteen months after her defenestration from Downing Street, the former Prime Minister was feeling guilty about not having done enough to halt the momentum towards full European union. So she asked to be sent an advance copy of Richard Shepherd’s bill and invited him to come and discuss it with her. He recalled:

  I went to see her in the room she had been allocated in the House. I was shocked to discover how badly a former Prime Minister was being treated. Her office was on the lower ministerial corridor.
It was smaller than a small bathroom, cramped and uncomfortable. The sole sign that she had been head of the government for eleven years was a policeman perched on a chair outside the door. When I went in, the only space to sit down was on a small sofa that I shared with her. She was holding a copy of my bill which she had annotated in detail.

  Huddled together on the sofa with the lucky winner of the Private Member’s ballot, the former Prime Minister said she very much approved of his bill but had detailed questions about the drafting of certain sections. ‘I remember her saying about one particular clause that it was far too open’, recalled Richard Shepherd. ‘She urged me to get it tightened up saying, “You can’t trust anybody”.’17

  The bill had no chance of reaching the statute book because it was too controversial and had arrived too late in the truncated session shortly before Parliament was to be prorogued for the impending general election. Nevertheless it was debated for five hours. Margaret Thatcher sat in her new place below the gangway listening to the entire proceedings which ended in a vote. Because the bill could not proceed further, the division was a purely symbolic rebellion, attended on a quiet Friday afternoon only by friends of Richard Shepherd and fans of the referendum he was championing.

  As I fell into both categories, I was in the rebel lobby, along with a mere forty-three colleagues. Margaret Thatcher was the most prominent supporter of this bill, whose purposes were the opposite of the government’s. It was the last vote she ever cast in the House of Commons. This made it, in a small way, an historic occasion. More ominously, it was a warning sign that she might be about to become an outright saboteur of John Major’s government and its policies.

  SABOTAGING HER SUCCESSOR

  The referendum question was the first of many issues on which Margaret Thatcher became a thorn in the flesh of her successor, John Major.