English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Partly, but only partly, this was because of her eccentric and overbearing manner of doing business. John Hoskyns, a businessman who had made a fortune in computers and who became the first head of her Policy Unit, despaired of her lack of any strategic sense. After a couple of years of working with her, he sent her one of the rudest memos a prime minister can ever have received from an understrapper:

  You break every rule of good man-management. You bully your weaker colleagues. You criticise colleagues in front of each other and in front of their officials. They can’t answer back without appearing disrespectful, in front of others, to a woman and to a Prime Minister. You abuse that situation. You give little praise or credit, and you are too ready to blame others when things go wrong.

  Even her most loyal of ghosts, Robin Harris, concedes that ‘in matters of man management, she was, by common consent, hopeless – alternately chaotic and domineering, timid and abrasive. She was a notoriously bad chairman’. He also accuses her of being a naive and hopeless picker of ministers. This is surely an unrealistic criticism. She was, after all, operating in a parliamentary democracy. Her cabinet had to be vaguely representative of the parliamentary Conservative Party, or there would have been even more hell to pay. All she could do – which she did – was to keep her most ham-fisted enemies as far from the levers of economic power as possible.

  But there is no getting away from the fact that her behaviour towards her colleagues was in the end to prove a fatal flaw. She could and did sweep out the old wets at regular intervals, only to find herself drenched with a shower of Blue Chips off the same block – Chris Patten, Kenneth Clarke and William Waldegrave instead of Christopher Soames, Ian Gilmour and Whitelaw. Much more serious was the attrition rate among her allies, who were less easy to replace. One by one, they limped off the pitch, bruised and affronted: Geoffrey Howe, Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit, John Biffen – consoled only by their CHs, a recurring suffix which an uninformed observer might have mistaken for some obscure religious order, the Confraternity of Humiliation.

  There is, however, a counter-argument which I think Moore glimpses but Harris doesn’t. If she had been a ‘good’ chairman, she would, time and again, have found herself summing up the sense of a meeting wholly against her inclinations. When she was so heavily outnumbered, disruption was the only answer. It was essential, as Stephen Potter would have said, to ‘break flow’. Interruption, Repetition, Digression – these were the only tools for getting her own way. When all these techniques failed, railroading decisions through smaller hand-picked committees and fixing the agenda were necessary resorts. It was the style of government that Michael Heseltine complained of when he stalked out of the cabinet in the Westland crisis. Harris finds plausible justification for Thatcher’s behaviour then, but over a wider field than the helicopter business, Heseltine was not without reason to complain. In fact, a prime minister who does not exploit her mastery of the cabinet agenda, which is one of her relatively few weapons, is probably not doing the job properly. In Thatcher’s case, her disruptive style sacrificed collegial harmony to getting things done. It is notable that, when she had confidence in the men in charge, as she did during the Falklands War, she was content to leave most things to the military, herself providing martial spirit on a heroic scale but not attempting to meddle in matters she knew she knew little or nothing about.

  Lord Renwick confirms this impression in his absorbing accounts of the negotiations he himself was involved in – the Lancaster House talks on Rhodesia, the stormy Budget negotiations in Brussels, and the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa – and of his colleague Sir Percy Cradock’s collaboration with her on the handover of Hong Kong. In each instance, he depicts a demanding but entirely rational boss, eager to test any argument to the limit but seeking a stable and realistic solution rather than being pushed to it when her ranting had run its course. The freshest part of his account is of the encouragement she gave F. W. de Klerk and the steady pressure she exerted for the release of Nelson Mandela. Of course, the sanctions on investment imposed by the US Congress and the change of heart within the Dutch Reformed Church were far more significant factors, but Renwick shows that, when she was not faced with sullen and obdurate opponents, she, too, was someone to do business with. Mrs Shephard’s accounts of Mrs Thatcher’s encounters with unfamous cogs in the political world supplement this picture on the domestic front, reminding us in particular that, uniquely among recent Conservative leaders, she came from the heart of the Conservative party and was at her happiest in the company of its members. She wrote of her first visit to a Conservative Party conference at Blackpool in 1946, that she was ‘entranced’. As Moore drily comments: ‘This is perhaps the only recorded occasion when anyone has used that word about a Conservative Party conference’.

  Her critics accused her of the illusion of omniscience, that as Hoskyns put it, ‘she didn’t know what she didn’t know’. Hoskyns, while paying full tribute to her guts, determination and lack of pomposity, complained that ‘she is quite limited intellectually. The problem is that she is unaware of the fact that other people’s intelligence may be superior to her own’. I’m not sure that this is correct. Rather, she was inclined to hero-worship those intellectuals whose views coincided with her own. Out of her notorious handbag at one time or another, she would pull Lord Radcliffe’s Reith Lectures, Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, Beveridge’s report on social insurance and that speech wrongly attributed to Abraham Lincoln which declares that ‘you cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong’. She would read anything that was recommended to her: Popper, Burke, Schumpeter, Adam Smith, Dostoevsky, Koestler. It is quite true, though, that she was not an intellectual in the sense of relishing the free play of thought. Every excursion had to be subordinate to her driving purposes.

  But where did these driving purposes come from? Caroline Stephens, her redoubtable social secretary for almost all her time in power, used to tell new secretaries, only half-joking, that ‘The first thing you have to bear in mind is that Mrs Thatcher is a very ordinary woman’. If so, the first mystery that any biographer has to address is how did such an ordinary woman become Britain’s first woman prime minister, and hold power for eleven years and leave such a lasting mark on the nation, rather than more brilliant and idolized characters such as Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams. If the answer lies in the will, we have to track down the ultimate origins of that will.

  Mrs Thatcher herself was quite clear on the subject. ‘All my ideas about Britain were formed before I was seventeen or eighteen.’ The answer lay in Grantham, and the grocer’s premises at No. 1, North Parade, above which Margaret Roberts was born and lived her life until she went from Kesteven Girls Grammar School to Oxford. When she came to write her memoirs, it was, as with many people, her earliest memories of home and school that flooded back. The later stuff had to be extracted with some pain by her two ghosts, Harris and John O’Sullivan, the former Daily Telegraph journalist, who added a refreshing allegrezza to the end product, which is now reissued in a single volume compressed and edited by Harris.

  Yet there is a strange reluctance on Harris’s part to accept Grantham as the clue. He dismisses the place as ‘a somewhat dreary town in the East Midlands, itself one of the more dreary regions of England’. Well, one could quarrel with that description: the town has ancient coaching inns and a glorious parish church with, according to Simon Jenkins, ‘the finest steeple in England’ (Ruskin swooned when he saw it), and it lies in gentle country between Belvoir Castle and Belton Hall. Pevsner rightly says that there is even a touch of Vanbrugh about the Wesleyan chapel in Finkin Street where Margaret Roberts worshipped and her father Alfred preached every alternate Sunday when he was not carrying the gospel to the surrounding country. It is true that she herself said that ‘it was a great thrill to come to London. In Grantham it was like swimming in a very small pool: you keep bumping into the sides’ – and in later life she did not go
back there much. But then this is true of many ambitious young people in a hurry. It does not mean that her upbringing did not leave an indelible mark upon her; still less, as Harris claims, that at the deeper level of her being, she may have reacted against her upbringing more than she reflected it.

  He deduces ‘the lack of impact which Methodism had had on her religious outlook’ from the fact that she did not seem to know her Bible very well and had little interest in theology. This is, I think, a dubious linkage. Methodism was never about theological learning. It thrived, in David Hempton’s phrase, ‘on the raw edge of religious excitement’. For the Methodist, the ideal Christian life was one of ceaseless cheerful activism. Margaret Thatcher’s obsession with self-improvement and her hatred of wasting time were signs that her Methodist roots were still very much alive in her; ditto her unquenchable hopefulness and the strange sense of exaltation that she radiated. If she was not much good at forgiving, nor was John Wesley.

  E. P. Thompson’s blistering attack on Methodism in The Making of the English Working Class contained an internal contradiction. If Methodism was such a miserable creed, why did it produce such active, cheerful souls and come to generate the British Labour movement? But Thompson’s scorching rhetoric did succeed in obscuring the virtues of Methodism at its best, so that even today it seems difficult to persuade people that such a queer creed could have had much to do with the nurturing of a Margaret Thatcher.

  Moore sets out to rescue her, as did Bishop Richard Chartres in his brilliant oration at her funeral, from the misunderstanding of her notorious remark in the interview she gave to Woman’s Own that ‘there is no such thing as society’. He points out that in her 1977 Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture, she argues that self-interest was not the antithesis of care for others, because ‘man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence’. Similar messages can be derived from the semi-sermons she gave at St Lawrence Jewry, the City church, and to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. But these were texts largely prepared for her by others, notably Alfred Sherman, the capo of what she called her ‘awkward squad’. Her actions show less of a Burkean enthusiast for the little platoons. She steadfastly opposed the efforts of Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson to retain some support for marriage when independent taxation of husband and wife was introduced. And she remorselessly squashed the independence of local government through rate-capping, nationalization of the business rates and, ultimately and fatally, the poll tax. She believed in strong but limited government and a strong individual, with nothing much in between. One’s duty towards one’s neighbour entailed compassion and kindness to others, and her efforts to bring succour to widows, wounded soldiers and anyone who might be lonely or depressed were unremitting. But ultimately she believed in personal salvation unaided by sacrament or intermediate institutions. And in this, too, she was Methodist to her bones.

  Harris paints her childhood as a grim one and advises us not to take at face value the recollection in her memoirs and in earlier interviews of the douceur de vivre she experienced at the cinema or the odd musical, for such events were rare in her Spartan adolescence. This picture is undercut by a lucky discovery that Charles Moore made of more than 150 letters that Margaret had written to her elder sister Muriel between the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1960s. The letters, which had been lying unsorted in bags in Muriel’s attic, not only cast doubt on Harris’s assertion that, being four years apart in age, ‘the sisters were never close’. They also refute the assumption that she never had much fun. The young Margaret wishes she could have danced like Ginger Rogers, loves the Laurence Olivier–Joan Fontaine film of Rebecca, thinks the latest Deanna Durbin flick ‘rotten’, but says that Quiet Wedding, starring Margaret Lockwood, with screenplay by Terence Rattigan, was ‘an absolute scream. I laughed more than I have for months’. Even when she gets to Somerville, most of her letters are not about politics but about the underwear she has just bought.

  The letters also disprove the line taken by previous biographers and followed by Harris that, until Denis came along, she had had no romantic friendships with men. This was never likely with such an undeniably pretty girl at Oxford where the sex-starved men were knee-deep and just back from the war. In Somerville Hall, she might be belittled as a humourless Midlands chemist, but she was not short of admirers. One of them, Tony Bray, wept when he was reminded of their walk-out sixty years later.

  These letters are important not just because of their Brief Encounter-style charm but because they dispel the illusions that Margaret Roberts was some kind of freak. They do not, I hasten to add, transform our picture of her into a sweet, easy-going type. Her comments on her boyfriends are as tart as were to be her comments on her cabinet colleagues.

  When she agrees to see Tony Bray a couple of years later, ‘more to let him see how I’ve changed rather than to see him!’, she remarks afterwards that ‘I quite enjoyed seeing him again for a short time – it satisfied my curiosity – but he’s a weird-looking chap to cart around the place!’ When Denis Thatcher hove in view, he fared no better, being described as ‘not a very attractive creature’. Nor did he improve for her on nearer acquaintance: ‘I can’t say I really ever enjoy going out for the evening with him. He has not got a very prepossessing personality’. (They were to be happily married for sixty years and she was irremediably shattered by his death.)

  But her most remarkable dalliance was with Willie Cullen, one of a group of energetic Scots farmers who had come down to Essex to escape the agricultural depression in Scotland – not unlike Donald Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Margaret is boundlessly patronizing about him: ‘He has a kind of naïveté that only Scotsmen can have – the funniest part is that although I have been introduced to him twice, I can never catch his name and still don’t know it! . . . He speaks with a frightfully Scotch accent. I’m afraid he’s going to be an awful nuisance’. Then she has a brainwave: ‘I showed him the snapshot of you and I [grammar, Miss Roberts!] together – and he said he could scarcely tell the difference so I should think we could easily substitute me for you’ (she meant ‘you for me’ – Kesteven Girls Grammar School has a lot to answer for). Clearly, the bucolic if canny Willie will not do for her, but he might do for Muriel who has just broken up with her current boyfriend. Margaret urges Muriel to come and stay with her to meet Willie. ‘By the way, he will never become your brother-in-law though I have big hopes that he may be mine one day!’ Which he does. It is a plot out of a Hardy novel, except that it ends happily. But there is no greater testimony to Margaret Roberts’s ability to get her own way than her effortless marrying-off of her elder sister (herself a fairly strong-willed character) to get rid of the incomprehensible Willie. The handover was delayed only because he gave her a very nice black-calf handbag and out of decency she had to go out with him a while longer.

  Moore’s touch is as sure in retailing these enchanting early days as in recounting her grim struggles to replace Ted Heath and to stamp her principles on the crucial budgets of 1979 and 1981 which were to set the country on its fresh path. Mrs Thatcher’s capacity for cunning and caution is well displayed as much in her readiness to succumb without fuss to the first miners’ strike, which the government was unprepared to withstand, as to fight with ruthless tenacity Arthur Scargill’s decision to call out a national strike without a national ballot in the spring of 1984, by which time her previous energy secretary, Nigel Lawson, had coal stocks piled high. Both Moore and Renwick tell the story of the Falklands in brilliantly nuanced detail, demonstrating Mrs Thatcher’s willingness to go to the tolerable edge (and probably beyond) in diplomatic negotiations and her agony at the thought of all the young lives that would be lost. Nobody who reads these pages could ever again think of Margaret Thatcher as heartless.

  Moore’s is, quite simply, a marvellous biography, and when the succeeding two (or possibly three volumes) are published, it will take its place alongside the monumental multivolume
Lives of earlier great prime ministers – Moneypenny and Buckle’s Disraeli, Morley’s Gladstone and John Grigg’s Lloyd George – while being more entertaining than any of these. It is hard to find anything much to quibble with: it was Clement Attlee, not Enoch Powell, who first popularized the phrase ‘the enemy within’, and surprisingly in relation to communist infiltration into the trade unions, much as Mrs Thatcher was to use the phrase. Harold Macmillan rose to stardom after building 300,000 houses a year, not 300,000 council houses, although in the early years of that Tory government the vast majority of houses built were indeed council houses – a strange thought in the light of subsequent history. Nor would I go along with Moore’s proposition that ‘she generally eschewed what she would call “personal remarks”’. Only seven pages later, he has her referring to Roy Jenkins as ‘Shaky Jowls’. And her descriptions of her cabinet enemies are memorable: Jim Prior ‘the false squire’; Michael Heseltine – ‘every talent except brains’. But in general, Moore’s estimate of her character, actions and achievements is unfailingly just and thoughtful but never uncritical, and his book can safely be recommended to readers who have no smidgen of sympathy for the Iron Lady as well as to her unswerving fans.

  Look here upon this picture and on this. Talk about Hyperion to a satyr. While Moore is always keen to be fair to every side in the argument, Robin Harris has Old Vitriolic as his permanent font setting. Yet nobody could be better qualified for the task. As well as writing a history of the Conservative Party, Harris worked for Thatcher in one way or another ever since 1985, writing many of her speeches, intimately engaged in advising her on policy, and, most importantly, coaxing a full set of memoirs out of someone who was constitutionally averse to writing so much as a memo, preferring to scrawl straight lines (Good) or wiggly lines (Bad) under or beside other people’s words, interspersed with the occasional ‘No!’ Indeed, the wayward lollop of her handwriting seems better suited to her gossipy letters to Muriel than to affairs of state. Those two volumes of recollection are an indispensable resource, gracefully written, self-serving, of course, but with the arguments for and against her views fairly and accurately reported. They are as well worth reading as the biographical works under review and much better history than the previous biographies published.