Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Over at the Treasury, Bill Simon collected the same flattering impression of a soulmate cum disciple who was keen to learn. Writing to her later, the Secretary of the Treasury expressed himself with a warmth that went well beyond normal, official language: ‘Your dedication and knowledge made a deep impression … You face a very difficult task in restoring the equilibrium of your own economy. You are to be commended, Mrs Thatcher, for your courage in pursuing the policies necessary to bring inflation under control. I will follow with great interest and sympathy your progress in dealing with the problem.’85

  The following night, Mrs Thatcher achieved another mark of Washington acceptability, a dinner given for her by Mrs Kay Graham, proprietor of the Washington Post. One of those present remembered: ‘She spoke, largely off the cuff, and made a huge impression. She talked about free markets and liberty, using language that no previous British leader had done since the war. This speech was not false or designed to please. It came from the heart.’86 It went well enough, but Mrs Graham was never much of a friend to Mrs Thatcher.† Beside her at the dinner was Alan Greenspan:

  I knew little about her … I wasn’t quite sure what she knew. And the very first thing she said to me was ‘So, Dr Greenspan, why is it that we in Britain don’t have an M3?’ She was referring to a monetary aggregate that was not then used in Britain for technical reasons. This, of course, was not the first question I was expecting her to ask me. And when I attempted an explanation I could see she was following me closely … I found our conversation startling. She had a level of understanding of the way the world worked that most people in the political realm are unable to acquire. And it was a view that I would agree with. She believed in free-market discipline …87

  Every British politician visiting Washington makes a point of networking. The difference in Mrs Thatcher’s case was not just that she did so successfully, but that she was searching for allies who would help validate the ideological and political change she sought at home.

  During the rest of her trip, Mrs Thatcher made two more setpiece speeches. In the first, to the National Press Club in Washington the day after the dinner, she spoke darkly of Britain’s plight, and put it in the context of political and cultural struggles across the world. Her country was facing not so much technical economic problems as ‘one of the life and death of the human spirit’. Western allies should admit that ‘our ways’ were not winning: ‘We represent a diminishing band of brothers and sisters.’ If there was a thaw, producing détente, she worried that ‘we are losing the thaw in a subtle and disturbing way. We are losing confidence in ourselves and in our case.’ Marxism was ‘the negation of human dignity’, and it was the duty of the United States and Britain to ‘revive belief in freedom under the law’. Though acknowledging America’s current low spirits, she said, ‘But as I look at America, if this is failure, what in Heaven’s name is success?’ And she explicitly linked her own life and beliefs with the story of America: ‘I was not brought up to prosperity. Hard work was the only way … It is a moral struggle … the puritan morality of the founders of America.’ The joint task involved political, moral and economic reinvigoration – ‘The period of high spending and slack thinking is over’ – but she believed her country could do it: ‘We may suffer from a British sickness now, but we have a British constitution and it’s still sound, and we have British hearts and a British will to win through.’

  In Chicago, her last port of call before she flew to Canada for the final part of her trip, Mrs Thatcher gave a full-scale lecture88 on economic problems and the virtues of ‘political economy’. Linking Britain and America by pointing out that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence were of the same date (1776), she set out her case against government intervention in the economy, and her view of the scale of the threat posed by inflation. ‘Inflation’, she declared, ‘is a pernicious evil capable of destroying any society built on a value system where freedom is paramount. No democracy has survived a rate of inflation consistently higher than 20 per cent. When money can no longer be counted on to act as a store of value, savings and investment are undermined, the basis of contracts is distorted and the professional and middle-class citizen, the backbone of all societies, is disaffected.’ The free world needed to unite against inflation: there should be a ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ which would help ‘to produce a just and enforceable international economic order’.

  On the day of Mrs Thatcher’s Chicago lecture, a woman called Sara Moore tried but failed to shoot President Ford in San Francisco. The attack naturally limited American coverage of Mrs Thatcher’s words, but in Britain they were noticed. The Guardian pulled together everything she had said in the United States to conclude: ‘Mrs Thatcher’s speeches … show that she has broken decisively with the Disraelian Tory tradition of pragmatism … the Conservative Party is now launched on a crusade in the cause of reaction; the Tories have been taken over by the extremists.’89 Mrs Thatcher would not, of course, have agreed about the extremism, but she was not sorry to have stirred up attention to her message. Her last setpiece speech in North America, at the Empire Club in Toronto, Canada, took to task the phrase, commonly associated with R. A. Butler, that was most emblematic of post-war Tory centrism: ‘It is often said that politics is the art of the possible. The danger of such a phrase is that we may deem impossible things which would be possible, indeed desirable, if only we had more courage, more insight.’ She was beginning to develop her unique contribution to British politics – the art of the impossible.

  In his private analysis of the US visit sent to a Foreign Office colleague, Derek Thomas on the North America desk summed up favourably:

  Mrs Thatcher certainly seemed to get what she wanted out of her visit. But it seems to me that it also served a useful non-partisan purpose in giving her American audiences a less pessimistic view of Britain than the one which they have been getting from their media in recent months. It was inevitable that Mrs Thatcher should … make no bones about her political beliefs, but it does seem that what was more important for her American audiences was her manifest confidence in Britain’s future.90

  It was part of her achievement to link in American minds that confidence in Britain with her own prospects of success.* Those close to her at the time also noticed that her American trip helped to solidify her position before her party’s conference in the following month, ‘and how much it did for her confidence’.91

  Between her election in February 1975 and her first party conference as leader in early October, Mrs Thatcher had gradually built up the sort of entourage she needed. To the rage of Jim Prior, she had quickly got rid of the Heathite director-general of Central Office, Michael Wolff, and abolished the post. She had also brought back Gordon Reece. In June, she chose Alistair McAlpine* as party treasurer, with the instruction, born of her wariness of the party machine: ‘You work for me. You’re my appointment.’ She also told him to get rid of his Mercedes and get a British car.92 McAlpine came through Airey Neave’s contacts. His father, Edwin, ran the family building firm, Sir Robert McAlpine and Sons, and, as deputy chairman of British Nuclear Associates, was in charge of a lobby organization called the Nuclear Power Group which had hired Neave during the Heath government, as its parliamentary spokesman.† When he ran Mrs Thatcher’s office, Neave continued to be paid, in part, by Edwin McAlpine. Alistair, who also worked for Robert McAlpine, had been born in the Dorchester Hotel, which his father owned, in 1942, and from this auspicious beginning had learnt how to acquire and enjoy the good things of life, being an expert on food, drink, clothes, restaurants, birds, gardens, art and many species of collecting. At that time an enthusiastic pro-European, McAlpine had been deputy treasurer for the ‘yes’ campaign in the referendum and had noted with alarm how the Heathites used it to push Mrs Thatcher to the margins. From the first, he was devoted to her personally and much less concerned for the Conservative Party. Young, hospitable, short, tubby and eccentric, McAlpine was extremel
y well connected, both with traditional sources of Tory funding and with more raffish and arty worlds of which Mrs Thatcher knew almost nothing. He saw it as his job to spread the right buzz about Mrs Thatcher while at the same time keeping her away from having to ingratiate herself with potential donors. With his guidance, she began to build up a group of powerful businessmen who were ready to help, including Sir Frank McFadzean of Beechams, Michael Richardson,‡ at that time at the stockbrokers Cazenove’s* and later to be important to her at Rothschild’s, and Sir Marcus Sieff and Sir Derek Rayner† of Marks and Spencer. McAlpine immediately took to Gordon Reece, sharing his love of champagne and gossip, and when Reece’s marriage broke down took him into his flat in London, provoking false rumours, on which McAlpine longed to sue, that the two were lovers. This odd couple were crucial in maintaining Mrs Thatcher’s morale.

  The vital, painful matter of speech-writing also needed attention. Mrs Thatcher was, in fact, well served by the party machine in the quality of drafting available. And she had the good grace to recognize that Chris Patten, and his assistant director at the Research Department, Adam Ridley, were skilled at this, even though neither, particularly Patten, was her ideological soulmate. Patten was noted for his turn of phrase, and Ridley was her main economic adviser from within the party (officially, to the whole Shadow Cabinet), providing much of the material for her Chicago speech that summer. She could also call on outsiders such as Alfred Sherman for more original and ideologically based contributions, but Mrs Thatcher understood from the first that she needed to be supplied with material in her own tone of voice for setpiece speeches – something of which she could say ‘Yes, that’s me.’ Being by nature a scholarship girl, hating to say anything which was not carefully grounded in fact and tending to produce arguments in regimented, point-by-point form, she needed a speech-writer who could capture her essence and yet at the same time loosen her up. He should be someone without ideological or party baggage of his own. She told everyone that what she wanted was a ‘wordsmith’. Enter Ronald Millar.‡ Ronnie Millar, one of the many homosexuals who worked for and loved Mrs Thatcher without her having the least idea of their propensity, was a playwright and screenwriter. His stage adaptations of C. P. Snow’s novels, his musical Robert and Elizabeth and his play Abelard and Heloise had been West End successes. He had helped Ted Heath with some of his speeches and so expected to be persona non grata with Mrs Thatcher. He was therefore surprised to be ordered by her to contribute a script for her first television party political broadcast as leader, which was to go out on 5 March 1975. For it, Millar chose some words which he, like most others, attributed wrongly to Abraham Lincoln (the true author was one William Boetcker, writing some seventy-five years later): ‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift …’ When he came to see Mrs Thatcher with the draft, she asked him to read it aloud to her. After he had done so, there was a silence which Millar attributed to her dissatisfaction. Then she reached slowly and dramatically for her handbag and produced from it a piece of yellowing paper containing the same ‘Lincoln’ lines. ‘It goes wherever I go,’ she told him.93 The lines were duly delivered in the broadcast, and forever afterwards Mrs Thatcher had faith in Millar. Like many of her most trusted associates, Millar was an unlikely companion for her. Humorous, camp, silk-dressing-gowned, slightly seedy, he was from the world of Noël Coward, not of Westminster. His stated recreations in Who’s Who were ‘all kinds of music, all kinds of people’. He was not highly political, although he certainly believed in Mrs Thatcher’s call for the revival of Britain. He lightened any gathering which he attended. It says a good deal for the surprising broadmindedness of her taste that Mrs Thatcher got on so well with people like Reece, McAlpine and Millar. It was part of the sense in which, though extremely correct, she was never stuffy.* Richard Ryder recalled: ‘She was exceptional with every member of her staff, however junior. It was the happiest office in which I have ever worked.’94

  Before long, Mrs Thatcher would use the word ‘Ronniefied’ to describe a speech improved by Millar’s hand, but as she approached her party conference speech for October 1975 she had not yet developed a pattern of speech composition. As a result, the chaos and tension were frightful. Always extremely nervous before any setpiece speech, Mrs Thatcher was triply so before her performance at the party conference. Her first as leader, she well knew, would be the most important single speech of her career so far. Under the electoral system then obtaining, the rank-and-file members of the Conservative Party had played no direct part in choosing her as leader. They were known, in the majority, to have supported Heath. Would they accept her now that she had overthrown him? If they did not, her support was certainly not so secure in Parliament, press or party hierarchy that her leadership could easily survive. By her own account, she was dissatisfied with the early drafts of her speech from Patten and others in the Research Department, and spent the weekend at home writing her own.95 Throughout her time in Blackpool that week, Mrs Thatcher remained unhappy with the drafts, and numerous hands, including Angus Maude, as well as Ridley and Patten, and Richard Ryder to keep control of the material, slaved away. Alison Ward and Caroline Stephens retyped fifty-page drafts again and again on a manual typewriter, using six carbons and collating the copies on their hands and knees.96 After many laborious hours of laying out endlessly retyped texts on the floor in front of her, however, Mrs Thatcher still did not believe that she had a proper speech, and at last agreed to Gordon Reece’s suggestion that Ronnie Millar be called up to Blackpool (a painfully long train journey from London) to sort it out. It was not until 4.30 on the morning of Friday 10 October, the day of delivery, that her speech was ready and she went to bed.

  Mrs Thatcher’s nerves in Blackpool had not been improved by the conduct of Ted Heath. The Conservative National Union, the body responsible, among other things, for organizing the party conference, was known to be sympathetic to Heath. When one of her staff took her to the room of the chairman of the National Union in the Imperial Hotel, they could hear Heath’s voice from inside, and rude remarks about her issuing through the closed door, so they hurried away. As they did so, Mrs Thatcher remarked: ‘Some men are bitches.’97 On the night before the speech, Willie Whitelaw telephoned to tell her that he thought he had effected reconciliation between her and Heath and that the two of them should meet in his room that night for a drink. She should await his call, he said. She did, for two hours, but no call came, so she telephoned Whitelaw who told her, crestfallen, ‘It won’t work.’ She was upset both by Whitelaw’s carelessness or weakness in not ringing her as promised and by Heath’s snub. ‘Tears came regardless,’ she remembered.98

  Despite these tribulations, Mrs Thatcher looked well when she mounted the platform that Friday afternoon, three days before her fiftieth birthday. She wore a peacock-blue dress, tie collar and a slim-fitting turquoise coat. On the top of her script, she had written, as she often did with speeches at this time: ‘Relax. Low Speaking Voice. Not too slow.’ She addressed head-on the complaint that in the United States she had criticized Britain. She had criticized socialism, she said – ‘Britain and Socialism are not the same thing.’ She painted a gloomy picture of the economic situation – ‘We’ve really got a three-day week now, only it takes five days to do it’ – but, as so often, she gave it a moral rather than a technocratic context. There was a ‘moral challenge’ to the nations of the West, especially to Britain. ‘What kind of people are we?’ Mrs Thatcher asked. The British had invented or discovered ‘the computer, refrigerator, electric motor, stethoscope, rayon, steam turbine, stainless steel, the tank, television, penicillin, radar, jet engine, hovercraft, float glass and carbon fibres. Oh, and the best half of Concorde.’* She advocated a freer economy, though not pure laissez-faire (‘We Conservatives hate unemployment’), and she developed her defence of inequality that she had begun in America. ‘We are all unequal,’ she said, ‘… but to us every human being is equ
ally important.’ In appealing for a great change, she cast her eyes back to the traditions of her country:

  Let me give you my vision: a man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master – these are the British inheritance … We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery, not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped … We are coming, I think, to yet another turning point in our long history. We can go on as we have been going and continue down. Or we can stop and – with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough’.99

  The ensuing standing ovation was much more than customary: it was genuine, the reaction of long-disheartened troops hearing their own innermost beliefs expressed with vigour and optimism. The idea that there was now a clear difference between one party and the other, and that a decision could and must be made about the country’s destiny, was exhilarating. And the enthusiasm from the hall was echoed in the press and in the country. A Marplan poll after Mrs Thatcher’s speech gave the Conservatives 54 per cent support, compared to 31 per cent for Labour. Speaking to the German Stern magazine, and therefore, in those pre-internet days, slightly less cautious than she would have been in the British press, Mrs Thatcher attributed the huge cheers at Blackpool to the fact that she had broken with Heath’s tactics of staying close to Labour.100 Certainly she had secured a grass-root loyalty which was to prove unparalleled – ‘She cheered up the troops more than any party leader since Churchill,’ remembered Chris Patten with reluctant admiration101 – and was to last pretty much to the end. For the first time since winning, she felt secure in her leadership.