The Real Iron Lady

by Gillian Shephard

  Seven people lost their lives and some were horribly injured, particularly Norman and Margaret Tebbit, who still bear the scars today. We had no idea what would happen next, but Margaret, as ever, led from the front. At 9.30 a.m., the scheduled time for the conference to begin, she was on show, immaculately dressed and with an air of calm about her. Her actions steadied the atmosphere for the nation and the session proceeded as organised, even if the dress of the day was not always as planned. In the afternoon, with a speech hastily amended, she showed her true sense of leadership, her defiance of terrorism and her determination to have business as usual. After the conference, and with practically no sleep, she went to the Brighton Hospital where she spent many hours with those who had been injured. I found it immensely inspiring and comforting to have a Prime Minister with such strength, courage and compassion.

  Sir Anthony Garner was one of the most senior Central Office officials at the Conference that year.

  I had a remarkable escape. During the summer my wife and I had gone to the Conservative Women’s Ball with friends. One won the lucky programme prize – a week for two at Champneys – and she kindly invited my wife to join her. I suggested that they went during the Party Conference when I would be away from home. Because of this, instead of having a double room at the front of the hotel I had a single room, two rooms away from where I would normally have been.

  At 2 a.m. I went up in the lift with Eric Taylor, the North West Area Chairman and a dear friend of mine. We said goodnight on the third floor and he went on up to his room. That was the last I saw of him. When the bomb went off, his room and others, one of which I would have occupied, collapsed, and the occupants fell to the basement. He died there a few hours later. The Prime Minister and Denis, in their room near the centre of the explosion, also had a remarkable escape. It must have been a terrifying experience for them both and they were lucky to live through it. They were quickly taken by the police to a ‘safe house’ where they remained for the rest of the night.

  At about 5 a.m., I went with John Gummer, the Party Chairman, to a meeting with the Chief Constable at Police HQ. We discussed whether or not the final session of the conference should continue that morning. The police said that although a full search of the hall was being conducted, they could not guarantee that there was no further device. We ourselves had to consider whether or not sufficient members would, in the circumstances, attend. Both the chairman and I felt that we should continue if at all possible. John phoned Mrs Thatcher at the ‘safe house’. The conversation went something like this. ‘Margaret, we are here with the Chief Constable discussing whether or not we should continue with the conference in the morning.’ Immediately, she replied, ‘Yes, and we must start promptly at 9.30 a.m. I myself will be there at 9.15.’ There was no further comment on either side.

  We were not allowed back into the hotel and that morning I was still dressed in my very dusty dinner jacket and a tie I had borrowed from one of our stalls at the conference. When Mrs T. arrived at the hall promptly at 9.15 a.m., I took her into a small room at the back of the stage. I assured her that there was a full house and that everyone was very cheerful and looking forward to her speech. She was delighted. While I was talking to her, I was sitting on a table opposite to her. Suddenly she said, ‘Tony, do you realise that you have odd shoes on?’ In the darkness of my room I had picked up one black brogue and one Oxford shoe! That seemed to me a real example of her attention to detail. She was a remarkable woman who, despite her terrible experience, remained extremely cool and gave a great speech at the final session of the conference.

  Tom King was also at Brighton for the Party Conference.

  One particular memory of working with Margaret Thatcher was her courage and fortitude in dangerous times. There was no question that during that active period of IRA terrorism she was their prime target, and yet she faced it with great courage and resolution at all times.

  None of us who were in the Grand Hotel that night will ever forget the shock of that bomb attack, even though, thankfully, the robustness of the hotel prevented a far greater loss of life than would otherwise have been the case. The bomb went off at around 3 a.m. There was at the time great uncertainty as to whether that would be the only bomb or whether, a favourite tactic of the IRA, there would be a follow-up with a further ambush or other attack. Margaret Thatcher was fortunately uninjured even though her room was damaged. However, she was able to move and it was decided she should go immediately via the Brighton police station to Lewes. She can hardly have had two hours’ sleep before she awoke to hear of the sad deaths, including Roberta Wakeham and Tony Berry, and the injuries to John Wakeham and to Norman and Margaret Tebbit.

  She immediately determined that the conference would go on and of course it was the final day, at which she was due to give the concluding speech. I shall never forget the reception that the whole hall gave at 9.30 that morning, when Margaret Thatcher and the Cabinet and the National Union Officers marched on to the platform, on time, for the opening of the conference. Nor will I forget the courage of the speech that she then delivered, making clear that democracy would not be defeated by terrorism, that our conference was not going to be disrupted, and that that message of resolution stood out so clearly on that day.

  I was not an MP at the time of the Brighton bomb attack, but the enormity of the outrage, a terrorist attack designed to wipe out the whole of the democratically elected government of the country, took some time to sink in, at least partly because of the immediate horror of the deaths and injuries, and the inevitable appalled speculation of what might have been. Margaret Thatcher’s demeanour, outwardly totally calm, in control and resolute, hid the fear she must have been feeling, indeed was feeling according to Hugo Young.

  Privately she was as terrified, according to friends, as any human being would expect to be. How could anyone shake off the knowledge that she, she in particular, and above all was the target? The event moved her far more deeply than her somewhat routine public expressions of bravado might have indicated.

  Three years later, she was required to summon up further reserves of courage on the occasion of the IRA atrocity on Remembrance Day at Enniskillen. Tom King, by that time Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, describes what happened.

  I remembered Brighton so well again three years later, November 1987, when the IRA detonated a bomb at the Remembrance Day Parade in Enniskillen. I got to Enniskillen that afternoon, and saw the terrible destruction and loss of life that that outrage had caused. I expressed my conviction at the time that such outrages would not deter the people of Northern Ireland from their determination to live their lives in the future in peace and not be dictated to by terrorism. This was echoed quite soon afterwards by a statement from the British Legion, saying that they were not going to allow their parade to be prevented in this way, and that they would hold another parade two weeks later. This was widely supported across the whole of the United Kingdom by other Legion branches who were determined to send their support. A huge number of standard bearers proposed to attend the re-enactment of the Remembrance Day parade in the square at Enniskillen. As Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, I certainly wished to attend the parade, but I then realised that it would be even better if Margaret Thatcher, as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was able to attend as well. I discussed it with Charles Powell, her Private Secretary, and asked if it would be possible for her to come to Enniskillen, and what engagements she had on that day. It then turned out that she had committed to a meeting with President Mitterand in Paris. I asked what time that meeting was, and it turned out that she was due to be there in the afternoon. That meant, with the help of the RAF, that it would be possible for her to come to Enniskillen in the morning, by flying direct to Aldergrove, travel by helicopter to St Angelo base close to Enniskillen and to drive in to the parade. When this was put to her, there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation and she agreed, indeed, wished, to attend.

  Of course the fact of her be
ing committed to go to France for her meeting with President Mitterand was the perfect cover when some press queries arose in the two weeks before the next parade, as to whether she might be attending, when we could say she was going to France. There is no doubt that the security did work and I shall never forget, as we got out of the car in the square in Enniskillen, the collective gasp of recognition from the huge crowd as she stepped out and took her place in the line beside the war memorial.

  Her action in attending the parade had a huge impact right across Northern Ireland. There had been great distress at the outrage, particularly among the Unionist community, that it should have occurred on Remembrance Day, such an important day for so many in the Province. That act of leadership by her in being present, and showing her resolution and support for the Province, showed great courage and had a particularly valuable impact on attitudes in the Province. The parade itself was given blanket coverage on television throughout the morning by BBC and ITV, and further enhanced the virtually universal condemnation of the outrage from both Unionist and Nationalist communities, and was a major setback for the IRA and Sinn Féin. There is no question that Margaret Thatcher’s presence gave a real focus to the coming together of the whole community, and strong leadership just when it was needed.

  Sometimes that courage was misplaced, certainly in the view of party colleagues and the press. This was the position when she was required to reply to an emergency Commons debate called by Labour on the Westland affair on 27 January 1986. Briefly, the Westland affair started in 1985 with a dispute between Leon Brittan at the Department of Trade and Industry and Michael Heseltine at the Ministry of Defence, about a possible rescue package for Westland Helicopters based in Somerset. Leon Brittan favoured a merger with the US helicopter giant Sikorsky; Heseltine, a European consortium of helicopter manufacturers. This escalated into a full-blown row, with accusations of unconstitutional behaviour on the part of Margaret Thatcher, leaks, secret press briefings, all of which culminated in Michael Heseltine’s dramatic resignation from the Cabinet. I will not rehearse the rights and wrongs of the convoluted issue here. Suffice it to say that the role of the government, Margaret Thatcher’s government, in the matter seemed not entirely above suspicion. The debate, as the opposition well knew, would provide a dramatic parliamentary opportunity to expose that role once and for all. The Prime Minister said on a number of occasions that as she left Downing Street for the debate, she did not know if she would be Prime Minister when she returned. As is frequently the case, what was billed as a knockout parliamentary occasion failed to live up to expectations, not least because Neil Kinnock as opposition leader simply did not manage to deliver a killer blow. Margaret Thatcher herself admitted having made mistakes: ‘With hindsight, it is clear that this was one, and doubtless there were others, of a number of matters which could have been handled better, and that too, I regret.’

  But the occasion left her washed out and exhausted. Peter Riddell, at that time Political Editor of the Financial Times, paints a haunting picture of the Prime Minister.

  Only once did I see the mask fall, in January 1986, after the end of the great Westland debate in the House of Commons. After weeks of infighting, disclosures, and resignation of two Cabinet ministers, her hold on power appeared to be under threat. The case against her and her advisers in Downing Street was strong. That morning, as she left for the Commons, she said that might be her last day as Prime Minister. In the event, Neil Kinnock made a mess of his attack on her, she delivered a competent reply, and Michael Heseltine, her great challenger, drew a line under the affair in what Michael Foot called his re-ratting speech. And despite everything, the Tory Party did not want all the upheaval and divisions of changing their leader. When the dramas of the afternoon had been played out, I bumped into her with Archie Hamilton, her faithful PPS, in one of the small corridors by the terrace. I made some no doubt inane remark about the debate and she replied, for once incoherently, looking utterly drained and exhausted. The curtain had fallen, the exam was over, the final lap had been run, and the victor had nothing left.

  Any minister who has faced a hostile House of Commons, with no way of knowing how the day will end, will recognise the courage with which Margaret Thatcher faced her destiny in that fateful debate.

  The final word is given to Douglas Hurd, who records Margaret Thatcher’s heroic stoicism at the end of her prime ministerial career.

  I have a vivid memory of Margaret Thatcher at President Mitterand’s banquet at Versailles after the signing of the CSCE Treaty [Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Treaty] in the last week of her premiership. She carried herself magnificently that evening, even though she had in her handbag the results of the first ballot in which she failed to achieve a knockout blow against Michael Heseltine.

  She must have known it was the beginning of the end. Not for a moment did her demeanour betray that to those watching her on the international stage. That is courage.

  SIX

  ‘ONCE YOU HAVE BEEN A CANDIDATE, EVERYTHING ELSE PALLS.’

  To read the comments of people who knew her at Oxford, one would never have thought that Margaret Roberts would have become the dazzling premier who fascinated the British press, an American, a French and a Russian President, and whose sobriquet, the Iron Lady, became known across the world.

  Pamela Mason, a contemporary of Margaret Thatcher’s at Somerville, remembers ‘a plump bonny girl, quite well covered. She had brown hair and brown eyes – she gave a brown impression, more like a woman of forty than a girl of eighteen.’ Another Somervillian, Hazel Bishop, described Margaret Roberts in Brenda Maddox’s Maggie as ‘brown haired, plumpish, with a voice that she had worked on and used with great care. She never seemed young.’

  A fellow undergraduate, also at Somerville, was Sheila Browne. She went on to become a distinguished fellow at St Hilda’s College in Oxford, where she taught me medieval French and was also my moral tutor. Sheila Browne eventually became the Senior Chief Inspector of Schools and was in that post at the same time as Margaret Thatcher was Education Secretary. It was also the time when I was a schools inspector in Norfolk, and had professional as well as personal contact with Miss Browne. I was intrigued by the fact that she and Margaret Thatcher, who had known each other at Somerville, were now both working in the Department for Education. Miss Browne told me that she and Margaret Thatcher had, when they were undergraduates, shared a bedroom after a dance, but that at that time, Margaret Roberts was not particularly memorable. Miss Browne, as told in John Campbell’s book Margaret Thatcher, formed the later impression that Margaret Roberts was a ‘deeply insecure young woman, concerned above all to do the right thing’. And Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville from 1945, explains to John Campbell why she did not invite Margaret Roberts to social occasions at weekends. ‘She wasn’t interesting, except as a Conservative. If I had interesting or amusing people staying with me, I would never have thought of asking Margaret Roberts – except as a Conservative.’ In other words, a not very interesting specimen of an alien and unacceptable breed. Leaving aside this dreadful example of a peculiarly Oxford type of narrow-mindedness, later to flower into the university’s decision not to award an honorary doctorate to Britain’s first, and so far only, woman Prime Minister, one is forced to conclude that her time at Oxford was not Margaret Thatcher’s finest, or happiest, hour.

  Even within the embrace of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), where she was eventually elected president in 1946, a great achievement for a woman, she was not remembered as a brilliant performer, but rather as a very ambitious but conventional political thinker.

  What made the difference was her first experience of live politics, as an OUCA representative at the 1946 Conservative Party Conference. She was entranced. For the first time in her adult life, she felt surrounded by people who thought as she did. There was a place for her. She could see her way forward.

  By the time she was selected to fight her first seat, D
artford, at the tender age of twenty-three, she was completely transformed. Comments from Dartford voters recalled by the late Bob Dunn included glowing tributes to her looks, her ability, her quickness to answer and her extraordinary capacity for hard work. Others remarked on her capacity for leadership in preparing for her first election campaign, and the sheer energy she devoted to it. Although she, and everyone else, must have known that she could not win such a safe Labour seat, she inspired members of the Association with her own enthusiasm for the fight. During the campaign itself she was absolutely tireless in her preparation for the election, campaigning, canvassing, speaking at meetings, sustained by excitement and her own ambition. She had found her niche. During the election campaign, which in those days featured many public meetings, she drew huge crowds; everyone wanted to see her.

  Janet Fookes first encountered the name of Margaret Roberts when she was

  going out with a young man whose father was one of the leading Conservative agents in the country. Having seen her soundly defeated in a selection procedure, he observed to his son that ‘women don’t make it in politics’. The next time she hove into my sight it was the early 1960s, and I was at a Conservative lunch in the Queen’s Hotel, Hastings. Margaret was the guest speaker, now a thrusting young MP who made a confident speech on the theme of ‘Politics is the Art of the Possible’. I reckon this pragmatic approach was to be the distinguishing hallmark of her entire parliamentary career. It was simply that what others thought was impossible, Margaret considered possible.