Testing arguments, policies and ministers to destruction was a feature of Margaret Thatcher’s decision-making process. In 1990, the NHS reforms were to be approved. The legislation was due to be introduced in Parliament. Ken Clarke, the Secretary of State, Tony Newton, Minister of State, and Sir Duncan Nichol, our resilient and talented NHS Chief Executive, were summoned to Downing Street. I joined the team. The debate opened with the Prime Minister asking her adviser, at that time the successful businessman, David Wolfson, to comment on the plans. An intense, almost hostile, critique followed from him. But we survived, and the NHS reforms proceeded. If only more politicians thought through the implications of their initiatives with the same focus, preparation and attention to detail, we might achieve more.
Michael Brunson recounts in his book, A Ringside Seat, how Margaret Thatcher used her mastery of detail to devastating effect against political opponents – the same skill she had deployed against her first political opponent in Dartford, Norman Dodds.
During a terrible day in the House of Commons for Neil Kinnock, I watched as she destroyed him by simply picking away at the facts. Then having won the argument against him, she turned witheringly to tell the House, ‘I fear the Right Honourable Gentleman is not the master of his brief!’ As very many people, not just in the opposition parties, or the media, but in her own Cabinet, government and party, were to learn, it was always a good idea to master your brief, and to master it to the letter, before confronting Margaret Thatcher.
John Campbell in Margaret Thatcher explains this obsession with detail as one of the lessons she absorbed from her father.
She still prepared for parliamentary questions or international summits like a schoolgirl preparing for an exam. She was contemptuous of opponents, colleagues or fellow heads of government who had stinted their homework. But however much they had done, she always expected to do more.
As one of her Cabinet told me, ‘She always knew more about other people’s briefs than they did themselves.’
This inevitably led to a feeling across Whitehall, fully developed by the time I became a junior minister in 1989, that the spirit of the Prime Minister was somehow everywhere and in every department. Peter Hennessy, in his book The Prime Minister, describes it thus:
This was the period which established new expectations of prime ministership – what one might call the stretched premiership of late-twentieth-century Britain. In William Waldegrave’s judgement, we had ‘not had such all-pervasive personal government since Churchill as a war leader: perhaps since Lloyd George as a war leader, since there were large areas of policy on the home front about which even Churchill did not much concern himself. There were no such areas under Mrs Thatcher.’
Geoffrey Howe writes,
Her influence was deployed much more opportunistically and instinctively than we should have planned. But throughout Whitehall and Westminster her instinct, her thinking, her authority, was almost always present, making itself felt pervasively, tenaciously and effectively.
It came gradually to feel, as the months went by, as though the Prime Minister was present, unseen and unspeaking, at almost every meeting. The questions were always being asked, even if unspoken: how will this play at No. 10? What’s the best way of getting the Prime Minister on side for that? And so on.
This is certainly how things seemed to me in my first ministerial post at the Department of Social Security in 1989.
Nothing could have been more crushing to a brand new junior minister than to be told, frequently, ‘No, Minister, we cannot do that. It isn’t government policy.’ Eventually, I gained sufficient confidence to ask, from time to time, who made policy – ministers or civil servants. On the other hand, after eleven years of a government’s life, the weight of the government’s ‘line to take’ weighed heavy. What I should have realised at once was that the line to take was the No. 10 line.
While I was at the DSS, a furore arose on the level of war widows’ pensions. We were bombarded with thousands of letters from MPs and others, pointing out the need for a rise and the inequity of the existing arrangements. In fact this was a Ministry of Defence matter and any increase would have to be paid for out of their budget. In the end, when the sacks of letters we had received on the subject had filled the post rooms, Tony Newton, the Social Security Secretary, took us, his ministerial team, at the dead of night from our Regency surroundings at the DSS across the road to the Stalin-esque MoD buildings, to consult Tom King, then Defence Secretary, and his advisers. I will never forget how we crept through the department, past dozens of brightly lit offices, all absolutely empty apart from uniform jackets hanging from the backs of chairs. Tony Newton, a heavy smoker, was suffering from nicotine withdrawal, and an unhappy man.
When finally we arrived at Tom King’s sanctum, it was to be told by him, dismissively, and with an air of finality, that the MoD had received no correspondence on the issue – this seemed likely since we in the DSS had surely had all there could be. There would therefore be no change in policy. Mrs Thatcher’s shade hovered above us. Paralysis set in. The two Secretaries of State looked at each other, and almost together said, ‘No. 10 will never wear it, not to mention the Treasury.’ So we crept dejectedly back to the Department, where I caused the normally mild-mannered Tony Newton to explode with rage as he was able at last to light up a cigarette by asking, ‘Has anyone actually asked the Prime Minister? There is a genuine inequality in the current situation, which she would appreciate, surely, and we are going to get hammered by the tabloids. It is a perfect issue for them, and they will go on and on. And what shall we do when Vera Lynn gets involved, as she surely will?’
‘You are the most junior minister in this Department,’ he almost shouted. ‘Don’t think you can just make policy on the hoof because with Margaret Thatcher you can’t.’ He was obviously in an impossible position: he himself was convinced of the case; he was attracting all the flak, and was unsupported by colleagues. Meanwhile Armistice Day was approaching. Vera Lynn did get involved, and a media frenzy ensued. The Prime Minister was finally consulted. She agreed. Tony Newton said afterwards, ‘We did at least avoid the involvement of the Queen Mother.’ But I learned a lot from the episode, not least that with the Prime Minister, it was always worth making a case – provided of course that you had done your homework!
Hartley Booth describes what it was like to work for someone so ferociously hard-working and tenacious.
There was never a case of any note going to her that used three words where one was enough. I was expected to warn her of impending trouble, propose improvements to policy and to comment on briefings coming from my three Departments: Home Office, Environment and the Lord Chancellor. Other ministers and senior officials sent in material to No. 10. I was the cog that commented on everything relevant in my area if I felt it was necessary. How did Margaret receive her briefings from me and the Policy Unit members? Cartoon characterisation would have you believe it would be a brutal regime in No. 10 in which we all lived in constant fear of ‘handbagging’. This was not the case. Until Margaret Thatcher’s mind was made up, she was not just open to new ideas and proposals, she welcomed them. She listened intently and read with great focus.
Life was made easier by two things: there was an atmosphere of encouragement and we knew Margaret’s policy principles. I, and indeed the civil service, responded best because we knew the goals and the framework or targets with which to work. Consequently policy had to be tested, for example, by applying the questions such as: ‘Does the proposal produce value for money?’; ‘Is it in line with the manifesto?’ (I had the manifesto on my desk all the time.); ‘Does it increase government control or reduce it?’; ‘Could the proposal be regarded as nannying?’
Policy briefings and other reports would frequently enter the red boxes and in-trays of Ministers and stay there for far too long. With Margaret, you were always sure that papers put to her would be read speedily and marked assiduously. Her custom was to underline comments, and
put ticks and crosses in the margin. There might be the occasional ‘NO’ beside a comment. Happy were the moments when a tick and an ‘MT’ inscription was put beside it. Things would then happen and sometimes very fast indeed. One proposal for example, that gained one of her ‘yes, do it’ ticks became legislation in just three months. (It resulted in the Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc.) Act of 1985.) This was at a time when the whole country had become appalled by the bad behaviour displayed at football matches. Margaret, with the proposal in front of her, and with strong support from Denis, saw to it that the legislative process was fast-tracked. When I told her a year later, ‘Prime Minister, this season there are a third fewer reported football crowd crimes thanks, it seems, to the introduction of CCTV and control of alcohol on the terraces,’ I received another comment in the margin: ‘Excellent.’
One of the fascinating points about Hartley Booth’s account above is his listing of the four criteria which had to be applied to policy proposals under Margaret Thatcher. With such a firm framework to work to, there is no wonder that the spirit of Thatcher seemed to float above every desk.
Ian Beesley, between 1981 and 1986, served in the Rayner/Efficiency Unit at No. 10. He describes first how he was appointed to the Unit and then, rather like Hartley Booth, how he found successful ways of working with the Prime Minister, despite the fact that he was a civil servant.
I was not long back from the cash limits division in Denis Healey’s Treasury when the Thatcher government came to power. The Winter of Discontent had ended, but the civil service had goose bumps at the prospect of the threatened cold winds. Cash limits had been central to the control of expenditure following the 25 per cent per annum inflation of 1975, and during the IMF crisis of 1976. But the appointment of Sir Derek Rayner of Marks and Spencer as Mrs Thatcher’s part-time unpaid adviser on eliminating waste was widely seen as a last chance for the civil service. If Rayner failed, said my Permanent Secretary, Sir John Boreham, expect the next appointment to be a Genghis Khan.
Thatcher was determined, it was put to me, to tame the jungle of official statistics, and I was to be the lead statistician member of the team to do so. Twice I said ‘no’ to the career-limiting appointment, finally to be drafted on the authority of the Head of the Home Civil Service, Sir Ian Bancroft. Other promising young civil servants were similarly chosen to carry out the Rayner ‘test drillings’ of the value for money from typical departmental activities (known as scrutinies). They reported directly to their Secretaries of State with recommendations which, largely unheard of previously, carried the names of those responsible, which were produced to a tight timescale and which were not to be amended by the departmental hierarchy. This was ‘close up and personal’ on a new scale.
It was during that first assignment that I realised that though Mrs Thatcher disliked the civil service, she appreciated individual civil servants and especially those whom she perceived were trying to change things for the better.
At the end of 1980, Rayner rescued my career by appointing me general manager of the scrutiny programme. I learned how to make submissions that would stand a fair chance of gaining Mrs Thatcher’s agreement. All but the most trivial would be read personally, and phrases that made an impact on her, for good or bad, would be underlined in felt pen. Short notes, in an unmistakeable, slightly elaborate handwriting, would instruct the relevant Private Secretary what was to be conveyed on her behalf. The skill, I soon discovered, was to keep things brief, to deploy evidence in support of the arguments and above all to use language which would resonate with her – stick to concrete examples and avoid the woolly abstractions so often encountered in ‘management speak’. There was another reason. All those who lead units for a Prime Minister must speak from time to time with the voice of their master, and the recipient must not be able to tell whether the words come directly out of his or her mouth, or are interpretations of what he or she would have said in the circumstances.
Evidence mattered, and we soon learned to deploy it effectively. ‘Give me an example’, was a frequent response to a statement or suggestion. If satisfied, Mrs Thatcher would let the conversation move on, and then when least expected would return to probe again. ‘What you said about X was very interesting,’ she would say. ‘Have you another example?’ Success in her cross-examination depended upon having evidence in depth, and being able to deploy it as the discussion zigzagged forward. Thus, she ensured that she controlled the flow of argument and that you stayed focused.
This fascinating account demonstrates Margaret Thatcher’s revolutionary role in introducing, through the Rayner Efficiency Unit, a complete change in civil service working methods, in that those responsible for producing papers were also held accountable for them. This does not seem so revolutionary now, but the absence of such a principle before does go some way to explain Mrs Thatcher’s exasperation with the civil service practices she had encountered on her arrival in Whitehall. Ian Beesley also illustrates Mrs Thatcher’s own approach to accountability. Her insistence on detail, and on fully understanding the practical detail of a proposal, meant that she knew that she herself would have to explain and be responsible for it at the despatch box, and, thereafter, to the public.
At other times, such as opening the October 1985 seminar on management responsibilities for junior ministers, her deep belief that management in government mattered shone out, perhaps, in hindsight, at the risk of appearing patronising. ‘You have been appointed to get results, not just to hold office’ and ‘Getting results out of the department is the mark of a minister in the driving seat’ were part of her opening remarks. Few would have been persuaded but all would have registered the rules, and for those of us working to give effect to good management as a policy in its own right, to hear her say so unequivocally that our efforts were important and valued was inspirational. However, when she addressed a question to me, in front of everyone, to check if what a Permanent Secretary had just said was accurate, for me was somewhat fraught with danger!
It was through this combination of looking for the evidence first-hand, seeking the underlying causes and having a plan for practical action that working for Mrs Thatcher brought home to me the opportunities I had and the enduring loyalty I owed to her. It was a five-year rollercoaster ride, at once exhilarating and frightening and never to be forgotten.
Margaret Thatcher’s approach to politics was that of one who sought solutions to particular problems rather than the discussion of abstract principles. As Ian Beesley says, she regarded a successful minister as one who got results. She would always ask how a policy would work. So much the better, surely, since government’s policies affect everyone’s lives. It is curious that this practical approach to politics, the constant question ‘how will it work’, which characterised much of her domestic policy, somehow failed when it came to the poll tax, where despite the model process of consultation, Green Papers and White Papers, and a full process through the relevant Cabinet Committees, the wrong decision in the end was taken.
Margaret Thatcher’s tireless attention to detail paid great dividends in her contacts with the public, who were invariably impressed by the trouble she had taken to inform herself about them as individuals. Janet Fookes recalls that
on one occasion I had a visitor to the Commons from Australia who expressed a great wish to meet her. Margaret explained that she would not be able to meet him until after the ten o’clock vote. The division having duly taken place, Margaret kept her word, and chatted with the visitor, taking a lot of time to talk to him and showing an amazing knowledge of the construction of the roof of the Sydney Opera House. The guest was astonished (and so was I) that late in the evening she showed such kindness and knowledge to someone simply passing through.
Hazel Byford writes,
Her clarity of thought combined with her ability to work long hours made her a remarkable adversary and a good friend. As Prime Minister, she set the standard and would expect from others the same commitment. The Conserva
tive Women’s Area chairmen used to meet the Prime Minister once a year, when we would be asked to give a short resumé of the issues affecting our particular area. The best piece of advice I was given for these occasions was to think of the supplementary questions that might be raised from my contribution. Her single-mindedness, the ability to listen and seek clarification are skills I have always remembered, and they have remained through my parliamentary life. I did not consider her approach overpowering, but one was certainly on one’s mettle on these occasions.
Mrs Thatcher was an inspiration whether talking within a small group or giving her end-of-conference speech – she was totally engaged. Many who neither shared Conservative policies nor were admirers of our leader would openly admit that even so, she was an amazing lady. But there was much more to Mrs Thatcher than was publicly recorded, and that was her detailed concern for others on a personal level. I share but one such example.
In 1985, Val Pulford became Chairman of the East Midlands Area Women’s Committee, but she was also a member of the Leicestershire County Council and the North West Leicestershire District Council, both of which were ‘hung’. This workload proved too great for her, and she stood down after her first term as East Midlands Chairman, although she continued to work tirelessly for the party for over thirty years. She never received any public recognition for this work. In 2002, I had the chance to raise this with Margaret Thatcher, who responded with a personal handwritten letter to Val. Val said that in retrospect she often thought that she was more a Thatcherite than she was a Conservative. Mrs Thatcher’s influence is well known, but many of her detailed and individual kindnesses are not so well documented.
The Real Iron Lady Page 4
