Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Changes took place at this time in the Thatcher family life. Denis, who had reached the age of sixty, retired from Burmah Oil in May 1975. At the moment of retirement, he remembered, he was earning £12,000 per annum, plus a £1,500 bonus in that final year.102 This he considered good money. (At that time, his wife’s salary was £9,000.) Although he remained busy with non-executive directorships, Denis no longer had the daily reverse commute to Swindon. He therefore became more important than in the past in the counsel he gave his wife in political matters and was often present at the more informal meetings which took place in their house. Having sold The Mount in Lamberhurst, as too big and too little used, and later rented a flat in Court Lodge, the ‘big house’ of the village, the Thatchers moved into the old dower flat in Scotney Castle, also in Lamberhurst, that October. Over the dining-room table, they hung a large Arabic inscription presented to Mrs Thatcher by the Syrian Ambassador. Jonathan Aitken,* then a young MP who became Carol’s boyfriend at about this time, used to visit Scotney and was surprised to see the inscription hanging there because, unknown to the Thatchers, it declared: ‘There is one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet.’103 Margaret and Denis enjoyed Scotney, but they had no domestic help there and the demands of the job meant that Margaret had even less time than before for country weekends. Besides, the twins did not want to spend much time in Lamberhurst. So most of life was lived in Flood Street, Chelsea, and it was not altogether easy. The twins, aged twenty-two, were based at home. Carol, dutifully but without enthusiasm, was completing her training as a solicitor. Mark, who had greatly upset his parents four years earlier by refusing a place at Keble College, Oxford,104 in favour of having fun in South Africa, was failing to obtain his qualifications as an accountant. Short of time and always inclined to look indulgently on her son, Mrs Thatcher was considered by some who worked with her to be ‘the ultimate chequebook mum’.105† In Carol’s view, after her Grantham upbringing, ‘which had control as its middle name’, her mother erred on the side of not ordering her children about.106 But Sue Mastriforte, whose back door in Flood Street abutted that of the Thatchers, was impressed by the efforts she made to preserve a proper home life.

  Ms Mastriforte, whom Carol described as ‘a very good neighbour’,107 had been deserted by her husband in the mid-1970s and left to bring up her children with very little money. Mrs Thatcher was, in turn, a good neighbour to her. Shocked that she could be left in this plight, she was kind and tactful in giving her food and other objects (often presented to her on her travels as leader), and sometimes slipped her small sums of money. She also arranged to pay her to do some of her shopping and look after her house. It was Sue Mastriforte, for example, who bought material in a Harrods sale out of which Mrs Thatcher had a dress made for her visit to America. Mrs Thatcher always arranged jaunts for the Mastriforte children in their holidays too. Under the strain of her marriage break-up, Ms Mastriforte had a heart attack in her flat one night and rang Carol, whom she had babysat when she was a teenager and who had become a close friend, to ask her to help. Carol’s mother raced across with her daughter, and rang 999. Sue Mastriforte was struck by Mrs Thatcher’s consideration as she spoke on the telephone to the ambulancemen: ‘When you arrive, please don’t ring the doorbell, because there are children asleep upstairs.’108 There was no doubt in her mind that Carol did not enjoy her mother’s eminence: ‘I think Carol would have liked a suburban mother with a pinny … baking cakes all day.’109 Carol sometimes felt neglected, becoming overweight and suffering Mrs Thatcher’s criticism for dressing frumpily (she particularly disliked a garment which Carol called her ‘fireman’s coat’).110 But, in Ms Mastriforte’s view, ‘Margaret was fairer than Carol gave her credit’ and certainly cared for her welfare. She ‘always knew what was happening with Carol’111 and tried rather vainly to find better ways of communicating with her. For her part, Carol liked Flood Street less than their previous homes: it was too small for all the traffic which started to flow through the door once her mother had become leader of the Opposition, and ‘not brilliant for four adults’.112 Family life, in these conditions, was not ideal, but, to Sue Mastriforte, Denis and Margaret seemed ‘a very close couple’; the fact that she was Conservative leader made him ‘ten feet tall with pride’.113

  Even after her leadership victory, Mrs Thatcher remained a careful and proud housewife. ‘She always remembered that people had to eat.’114 She ‘made a big thing’ of Sunday lunch at Flood Street or Scotney, producing large, unimaginative meals of Coronation chicken and tinned mandarin oranges in the style she had learnt in the 1950s.115 She took a keen interest in her soft furnishings (‘She never stopped saying, “When I first got married, I had to make my own curtains” ’),116 always knew how much was in her bank account, but never what was in Denis’s, and amassed in the kitchen the Green Shield stamps (the equivalent of modern reward cards) that in those days many shops issued with purchases. She paid for all her clothes, and she and Denis split the household bills. Sue Mastriforte’s impression was that the Thatchers were comfortably off, but not rich. The children’s private education and subsequent training took their toll and Denis also helped support his divorced sister Joy. Theirs was the unostentatious life of the hard-working upper bourgeoisie in the age of inflation, never seriously feeling the pinch, but never luxurious.

  In November 1975 the IRA murdered Ross McWhirter, a Thatcher supporter and a leading light in founding the National Association for Freedom, publicly launched very soon after his death, which tried to combat trade union power. His killing meant that, for the first time, Mrs Thatcher was given police protection, which was to remain with her for the rest of her life. This separated her more than before from anything that could be described as normality. But Bob Kingston, the Special Branch officer who came to guard her and stayed until the mid-1990s, was struck at once by how ‘remarkably easy’ Mrs Thatcher was and how friendly. She took a particular interest in Kingston’s handicapped son and never, in his view, gave herself airs. ‘She had difficulty with people who weren’t correct,’ he remembered, but to people who were presentable and efficient, she behaved impeccably: ‘In twenty years, she never once raised her voice to me.’117

  In the autumn of 1975, Mrs Thatcher tried to capitalize on her success at Blackpool. In the House of Commons, this was hard to do. Although disillusioned, often drunk, and in declining health after having fought five elections as Labour leader, Harold Wilson remained a cunning and attractive parliamentary performer. In their twice-weekly duels at Prime Minister’s Questions, he found Mrs Thatcher ‘more pointed and less ideological’ than Heath had been, and decided that the best way not to build her up was not to attack her.118 To the eyes of his senior policy adviser, Bernard Donoughue, Mrs Thatcher seemed ‘petrified’ when she had to face the Prime Minister in the Chamber, ‘like a rabbit in front of a stoat’.119 Her voice counted against her too.120 To improve matters, Mrs Thatcher built up a group of young MPs, Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit,* Geoffrey Pattie† and George Gardiner, soon known, in echo of the Maoist clique in China at the time, as the ‘Gang of Four’, who would help her prepare for the Questions. She learnt fast, Tebbit remembered, and improved her technique with the help of Gordon Reece, but ‘she hadn’t really focused on a lot of issues’ and she felt inhibited from using some forms of expression because she was a woman.121 In those pre-broadcast days, male MPs also felt no such inhibition in trying to mock Mrs Thatcher on the grounds of her sex. When she rose to speak, Labour backbenchers would often emit ‘female-type whoops’122 to try to make her look silly. Tebbit felt frustrated by her reaction to these difficulties, which was to be ultra-correct, concentrating on the issue rather than the man. For her part, Mrs Thatcher regarded Wilson as clever, nice, courteous and ‘subtle’,123 which was, in part, her way of saying that she did not want to engage with him too closely.

  Studying her parliamentary performances in her first year as leader, one cannot find any occasion on which she won control of the House. Always well
prepared and always sharp in argument, she nevertheless failed to tip the parliamentary scales in her favour. She lacked, at this stage, the confident spontaneity required. This was bad for the morale of her parliamentary colleagues, particularly as Heath remained an effective and baleful presence in the Chamber. By the turn of the year, Mrs Thatcher had made serious attempts to improve her links with all shades of parliamentary opinion. William Shelton had gone in October, to be replaced as her PPS by Adam Butler,* son of RAB and therefore well connected. An attempt was made to appoint Peter Morrison as her other PPS, but this was rejected on the grounds that it would look bad if both men were ‘Honourable’ (that is, sons of peers) Old Etonians.124† After Christmas, poor Fergus Montgomery was replaced by the more able, though not more popular, John Stanley.‡ Her parliamentary position was improving incrementally, but she had no palpable hits in the Chamber of which she could boast.

  Mrs Thatcher was much more successful in the public preaching role which she had designed for herself, with its accompanying projection of her combative personality. Her speeches, mainly those to Conservative audiences, continued to attack the global Communist threat and to link it, to use the phrase which would become famous in the 1980s, with ‘the enemy within’. She exposed left-wing subversion of local government, deploying one of her most famous phrases about the spending of ‘other people’s money’,125 and she proclaimed her vision of ‘Every man, every woman a capitalist’.126 In addition to the power of her general arguments on this subject, there was a specific one which guaranteed Mrs Thatcher the sympathetic attention of most of the press. This was the growing and disruptive power of trade unions within the newspaper industry. The print unions, entirely unreformed in their restrictive and often corrupt practices, were becoming more militant, stopping the production of the papers more frequently. Under the Trade Union and Labour Relations Bill proposed by the left-wing Employment Secretary, Michael Foot, the closed shop was to become easier to impose than ever before. Mrs Thatcher pointed out that this could mean that the National Union of Journalists would gain a monopoly in newspapers. This enabled her to draw comparisons with Communist China and the Soviet Union where ‘the press is in chains’.127 This had happened because one body had taken control of the entire press. ‘Are we so sure’, she asked, in a letter to the Finchley Times, ‘our liberties are safe when extremists are so active on all sides?’128 Newspapers feared that their freedom of expression and their right to manage themselves would be taken away: they naturally gravitated towards the woman who expressed their fears.

  But it was to the subject which she had raised in Chelsea the previous July to which Mrs Thatcher returned with the most incendiary effect. In January 1976, following an investigation in the Daily Mail of the Soviet military build-up, and in the absence of Robert Conquest, who had returned to America, Richard Ryder contacted Robert Moss, a young expert on terrorism and subversion then working for the Economist. Moss was asked to write her a speech about the Soviet menace, and was given a pretty free hand. On this occasion, however, to avoid the previous criticism of failing to consult, Mrs Thatcher brought Reggie Maudling along to Flood Street late at night to study the draft with her. He did not like what he saw, complaining that it was wrong to describe Soviet society as ‘sterile’: ‘Think of Tchaikovsky!’129* Maudling’s objections were largely overruled, however. As in her Chelsea speech, Mrs Thatcher was entirely resistant to the idea that her major speeches on world affairs should go in a neat box marked ‘foreign policy’, still less ‘diplomacy’. Her views on the state of the world were part of her account of life, the universe and everything. Moss understood that Mrs Thatcher was consciously harking back to Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, when he famously spoke of ‘an iron curtain’ descending on Europe. She sought just such a ‘clarion effect’, and he drafted accordingly.130

  Speaking in Kensington town hall on 19 January 1976 after a visit to British armed forces in West Germany, she declared that ‘The first duty of any Government is to safeguard its people against external aggression.’ She then applied this test to the Labour government and found that it was ‘dismantling our defences at a moment when the strategic threat to Britain and her allies from an expansionist power is graver than at any moment since the end of the last war’ – ‘Perhaps some people in the Labour Party think we are on the same side as the Russians!’ The Russians, she said, were ‘bent on world dominance’, and, having no success of which to boast but their military might, were pursuing it through arms; the Politburo ‘put guns before butter, while we put just about everything before guns’. In Central Europe, the Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered those of NATO by ‘150,000 men, nearly 10,000 tanks and 2,600 aircraft’. The Soviet Union produced one new nuclear submarine per month, threatening our sea routes. She had been right, she insisted, to warn about the illusions of Helsinki, and she called upon her audience to listen to Solzhenitsyn’s claim that the West had been fighting the Third World War since 1945, and – as Vietnam, and now Portugal and Angola (in which, following Portuguese colonial collapse in 1975, Marxists struggled for supremacy), showed – losing ground. The remedy, said Mrs Thatcher, lay not only in rearming, but also, and here she quoted the American Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in ‘a reasoned and vigorous defence of the Western concept of rights and liberties’. She asserted her Atlanticism: ‘we believe that our foreign policy should continue to be based on a close understanding with our traditional ally, America. This is part of our Anglo-Saxon tradition as well as part of our NATO commitment.’ She was more cautious about closer links within the EEC, saying that ‘Any steps towards closer European union must be carefully considered.’ Much of Britain’s decline had been brought about by socialism – ‘the Conservative Party has the vital task of shaking the British public out of a long sleep.’ This, said Mrs Thatcher, was ‘a moment when our choice will determine the life or death of our kind of society’: ‘Let’s ensure that our children will have cause to rejoice that we did not forsake their freedom.’131

  This was a powerful speech, combining a strong line of fresh arguments and facts with plenty of passion. But Mrs Thatcher could not have known how lucky she would be in the reaction to it. The excited, sometimes angry response at home was fanned by that of the Russians. The Red Army’s newspaper Red Star, amplified by being reported on Moscow Radio, described Mrs Thatcher, intending an insulting comparison with Bismarck, the nineteenth-century ‘Iron Chancellor’ of Germany, as ‘the Iron Lady’. She seized the opportunity. Speaking to her own Conservative Association in Finchley, she reintroduced herself to her admiring audience:

  I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western world. A Cold War warrior … Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke; yes, if that’s how they wish to interpret my defence of values and freedoms fundamental to our way of life.132

  It is hard to think of a neater way of placing herself where she wanted to be – a wholly feminine but strong woman, a figure respected by her enemies, a patriotic leader in the tradition of the Duke of Wellington (‘the Iron Duke’), a defender of the nation and its values. Thanks to her opponents, she had graduated to being a global figure with a sobriquet that marked her out – the Iron Lady.

  13

  Trapped in moderation

  ‘She does not lead and manage her Shadow Cabinet’

  On 16 March 1976, Mrs Thatcher delivered a substantial speech to the Bow Group, the home of more liberal-minded and intellectual Conservatives, for its twenty-fifth anniversary. Taking its inspiration from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s recent broadcast on the BBC, the address linked the fight against socialism to the need for the cultivation of excellence: ‘For the greatest advances of the ordinary person are the products of the achievements of the extraordinary person.’1 No one outside her immediate audience in the Café Royal paid the slightest attention, however, because Harold W
ilson had chosen that morning to resign as prime minister.

  To this day, no one knows for certain why Wilson resigned. There were rumours about approaching scandal and about illness. Given that he had led for so long, it was not surprising that he wanted to go, but the exact timing was a complete surprise. Mrs Thatcher’s handling of the occasion won her little praise on either side of the House. Watching Prime Minister’s Questions that afternoon, in which tributes to Wilson were paid, Bernard Donoughue recorded: ‘Heath was superb. But Thatcher got it wrong again, graceless, with some snide petty points and a call for a general election, which clearly embarrassed many people on her own side.’2 Barbara Castle watched her from the government front bench: ‘He [Wilson] just played with Margaret Thatcher, who sat, as she usually does before a parliamentary effort, head down and with lips pursed, as if summoning up some superior wisdom of which we ordinary mortals do not know. Her intervention, when it came, was not … exactly masterly.’3

  Mrs Thatcher seems to have been perfectly sincere in her ill-grounded belief that a general election was what constitutional propriety required. But the Labour Party had no such ideas, and proceeded to choose Wilson’s successor. The government was, in fact, in deep trouble, having lost parliamentary votes the previous months on the first of its cuts to public expenditure plans for future years, and faced an ensuing crisis in the money markets when sterling fell below $2 on 2 March. But attention now transferred to the contest, and left Mrs Thatcher looking irrelevant and somehow uninteresting. It is a curious fact that although the Labour government of 1974–9 was largely unsuccessful, it contained an extraordinary abundance of talent. Those who stood to replace Wilson were Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey, all eloquent, experienced and charismatic figures, and all more substantial, at that time, than Mrs Thatcher. On 5 April 1976 the third ballot produced a victory for Jim Callaghan. Labour MPs had preferred the only candidate without an Oxford degree over Michael Foot, the main choice of the left.