FADING OUT WITH DIGNITY
Her final years were more contented than they looked from the outside. The public, when they glimpsed her, saw the Iron Lady reduced to a frail shipwreck, tottering in and out of Gordon Brown’s No. 10 Downing Street, snapped on a bench in the gardens of Chester Square, or attending with emptiness in her eyes a drinks party organised by Liam Fox MP.
Such excursions did not seem to bring her much joy. But thanks to the medication she was generally calm and peaceful. She did become upset when Carol spoke publicly about the medical details of her dementia. A far worse blow came when Mark got into trouble after being embroiled in an alleged plot to organise a coup in Equatorial New Guinea. Although his mother was not well enough to understand the details she grasped the size of the problem when she had to put up the £100,000 of bail money to get him released from police custody in South Africa and help with the payment of his £265,000 fine.
Although she loved her son through thick and thin, this and other episodes caused some disillusionment with him in old age. The only outward sign of this was her decision not to appoint him as an executor of her will, and giving the final rights of decision-making about her funeral arrangements to Julian Seymour.
One blessing of her decline was that she stayed comfortable and well looked after. She had no money worries so could afford excellent carers supervised by an outstanding team of doctors headed by Dr Christopher Powell-Brett of the Basil Street practice and Dr Michael Pelly of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Her afflictions included a succession of transient ischemic attacks (mini-strokes); polymyalgia rheumatica (muscle pains); continuing episodes of dementia; growing deafness; and a malignant tumour of the bladder which required surgery at Christmas 2012.
After this operation she could no longer manage the stairs at her home in Chester Square, a house without a lift. So she convalesced at the Ritz Hotel whose owners, the Barclay brothers, allocated a suite of rooms to her at a generously low rate.
Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay were part of a network of friends, former colleagues and admirers who in their different ways wanted to pay continuing homage to the former Prime Minister. It would be invidious to name them or describe their attentiveness. But Mark Worthington played an exceptionally kind and caring role as her last private secretary well aided by Conor Burns MP. Julian Seymour, who had become head of her private office in 1991 and later handled all her legal, financial and administrative arrangements, deserves the palm for faithful and efficient stewardship of her affairs. She showed her absolute trust in him by appointing him as the principal executor of her will, a simple testament which divided her estate into three equal parts – one to Mark, one to Carol and one to her grandchildren.
Heading a regiment of supportive friends, Charles Powell was extraordinary in his devotion to her. Throughout the twenty-two years that elapsed between her departure from Downing Street and her death, he saw her two or three times each month, often taking her out to meals and always being available for telephone calls and wise counsel, even from the furthest corners of his peripatetic world. ‘Charles was unquestionably the greatest hero of her declining years’, was the judgement of Julian Seymour.
It was consistent with Charles Powell’s loyalty that he should have been her last visitor at the Ritz. On the evening of Sunday 7 April, the day before she died, he made one of his regular calls. He was with her for over an hour. He thought that his former boss was weary, but her spirits seemed good. Her heart was strong and she had come through the bladder-cancer operation and its general anaesthetic with amazing resilience. There was no reason why she should not have lived on into her nineties. But it was not to be.
On the morning of Monday 8 April, sitting in an armchair in her suite while reading a picture book, Margaret Thatcher suffered another stroke. This one ended her life. Within fifteen minutes of the attack her heartbeat stopped. It was an easeful and mercifully sudden death.
FAREWELL
The public arrangements for her funeral had been meticulously planned – largely by Margaret Thatcher herself. As early as 2006, discussions began with the Cabinet Office during Tony Blair’s premiership. Before Gordon Brown left Downing Street in 2010 the detailed preparations for what was fairly called ‘a state funeral in all but name’4 had been approved in the format used on the day in 2013.
The key figure in this process was Sir Malcolm Ross, a former royal courtier who had organised the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Queen Mother. The Thatcher family paid him fees and costs in excess of £100,000 for these well-rehearsed arrangements, which were made in coordination with the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Ministry of Defence and the Metropolitan Police.
The announcement of Margaret Thatcher’s death was accompanied by an avalanche of tributes, obituaries and assessments across the world. Internationally the surprise was the enormous scale of the appreciation. Domestically the coverage was even larger but with a more astringent mixture of praise and criticism.
On the critical side of the balance sheet the most overworked adjective to describe Margaret Thatcher was ‘divisive’. It appeared to be used mainly by commentators who had forgotten how deeply divided Britain had been during the ‘winter of discontent’ before she was elected Prime Minister.
Another manifestation of the divisiveness was a handful of demonstrations supported mainly by students. Most of them had not been born by the time Margaret Thatcher left office, so their explanations to the media on why they were demonstrating seemed as thin as their limited numbers of fellow protesters.
The most exotic yet idiotic protest took the form of organising a downloading campaign to ensure that the BBC were required to play on their Top 40 chart show ‘Ding Dong! the Witch is Dead’. This seventy-year-old number from the film The Wizard of Oz was temporarily manoeuvred into number two in the charts. The embarrassed BBC gave it seven seconds’ airtime on Radio 1. In the middle of the tabloid headlines about this incident I found myself on the breakfast TV programme Daybreak sharing the sofa with the downloader-in-chief of ‘Ding Dong’. He was so inarticulate and ineffective that I felt more like saying ‘Please do continue’ instead of attacking his protest.
By the day of the funeral the national mood had changed. Student japes and ‘Ding Dongs’ evaporated. Even among the millions who disagreed with Margaret Thatcher’s politics there was an atmosphere of respect for her personal achievements. This was reflected by the attitudes in the crowds lining the streets on the processional route. Expressions of hostility were minimal. Not a single arrest was made all day. Immediately around St Paul’s the popular reactions to the sight of her cortège were positive and surprising.*
Inside the cathedral, the quintessential Englishness of the order of service produced a near perfect mixture of history and holiness, high ceremonial and human touches. What made it so special was that Margaret Thatcher had chosen all the key ingredients herself. She blended resounding hymns from Denis’s service ten years earlier with the 1662 Book of Common Prayer liturgy used at Sir Winston Churchill’s state funeral at St Paul’s in 1965.
Few concessions were made to the temporal world. Faith, hope and the message of the Resurrection were the spiritual signals. In her youth Margaret Thatcher had been a devout Methodist. As an Oxford student she preached sermons before she delivered her first speeches. She knew her King James Bible, Charles Wesley’s hymns and Cardinal Newman’s prayers. All were included, ringing out to the 3,000 strong congregation just as she had wanted, with the most powerful reading (Ephesians 6:10–18) coming from her nineteen-year-old Dallas-born granddaughter, Amanda Thatcher.
There were highlights in the panoply of beauty at St Paul’s that morning which moved me and perhaps many others to tears. One was the finest funeral address I have ever heard. It was delivered by Margaret Thatcher’s favourite prelate, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, clad in a magnificent black cope designed for and last used at Churchill’s funeral. He began in his epis
copal basso profundo:
After the storm of a life lived in the heat of political controversy there is a great calm. The storm of conflicting opinions centres on the Mrs Thatcher who became a symbolic figure, even an ‘ism’. Today the remains of the real Margaret Hilda Thatcher are here at her funeral service. Lying here she is one of us, subject to the common destiny of all human beings.
The Bishop had cleverly incorporated the phrase Margaret Thatcher used to describe her praetorian guard of true believers – ‘one of us’ – into what was ostensibly a non-political address. Stirring passages in it were as politically effective as Mark Antony’s oration over the grave of Julius Caesar.
Perhaps the unfairest calumny ever used by the left to attack the political philosophy of Margaret Thatcher was the wrenching out of context of her words ‘There is no such thing as society’. The Bishop skilfully set this part of her record straight by quoting from a sermon she had preached at St Lawrence Jewry before becoming Prime Minister. In it she referred to the Christian doctrine
that we are all members of one another, expressed in the concept of the Church on earth as the Body of Christ. From this we learn our interdependence and the great truth that we do not achieve happiness or salvation in isolation from each other but as members of society.
British society, revolutionised and restored to confidence by Margaret Thatcher, will continue to argue over her for generations to come. Already there have been a plethora of books, movies, plays, TV series and even an opera about her, but this is just the beginning. She is one of those seminal personalities whose charisma in her lifetime will continue to generate curiosity into the far horizons of history.
Although she was endearingly disinterested in books and biographies about herself during her life time, it is possible that she had a presentiment of her legacy’s longevity when she was selecting the readings for her funeral. For the first words printed on its service sheet were from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning
The end is where we start from.
As Margaret Thatcher’s funeral came to an end with the choir singing Nunc Dimittis as the military pallbearers carried her coffin out of St Paul’s, there was a completely unexpected new beginning marked by the crowd erupting into applause.
This book began and now concludes at this same moment. After the applause comes the appraisal: ‘The end is where we start from.’
________________
* See Prologue.
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Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 87
