Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The introductions completed, Ken Stowe led Mrs Thatcher to the Cabinet Room, where all the briefs, which he had compiled in his adjacent office, awaited. At the door, she turned to Stowe and asked him: ‘Ken, what do I do now?’ ‘You might want to speak to John Hunt [the Cabinet Secretary], Prime Minister,’ said Stowe. ‘You’ve got to form an administration.’7

  This little exchange was heartening for Stowe and his colleagues in the private office, and appeared to confirm Dobbs’s fears. The officials were relieved to find her turning to them for help. Mrs Thatcher had a temperamental and ideological suspicion of the Civil Service; her time at Education had made her angry about how officialdom could frustrate what she believed needed doing. In opposition, she had complained of the difficulty in ‘finding enough colleagues with the character and ability to stand up to the Civil Service’, and claimed that she had met with success only ‘by nearly killing herself to get on top of 3,000 [officials] at DES’.8 Many expected that she would make radical changes in the machinery of government. Besides, the plots and dramas of the Lib–Lab Pact, involving a good deal of monkeying with the business of the House of Commons, had made bad blood between government and Opposition. Stowe, as the official charged with operating the pact, half expected to be punished by Mrs Thatcher when she arrived. In his first meeting with her the previous year, to brief her on the Civil List (the system of parliamentary payments to support the cost of the monarchy), he thought that he had ‘never encountered someone before who was such a bad listener’, and yet when he sat in on the Opposition front-bench speech on the subject shortly afterwards in the House of Commons, ‘My jaw dropped as I heard my briefing coming back … She’d taken it all in.’9 He knew she was formidable, and he did not expect her to be sympathetic.

  The most junior private secretary, Michael Pattison,* had joined No. 10 in late March and immediately found himself sitting in the officials’ box in the Commons watching the no-confidence debate. ‘I wasn’t at all sure about the lady in the blue rinse,’ he remembered.10 Bryan Cartledge,† who was the private secretary assigned to foreign affairs, recalled that an atmosphere of ‘Lib–Labbery’ prevailed among No. 10 officials, and a fear of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘general stridency’.11 At lunchtime on the day of the handover of power, Jim Callaghan had collected all his closest Downing Street assistants, including the private secretaries, for a modest and melancholy farewell meal of cottage pie before going to take leave of the Queen. The civil servants present had fully expected to be the victims of the fierce new broom which would begin sweeping that afternoon. That night, however, they found themselves sitting at a scratch supper in the State Dining Room with the new Prime Minister, huddled at the end of the table by the fireplace eating cottage pie for the second time in a day.‡ Mrs Thatcher had no plans to get rid of anyone.

  In fact, in this area, she had almost no plans at all. To the constant surprise and frustration of many advisers and supporters who were on what Denis called the ‘Long March’ with her, Mrs Thatcher never showed much interest in how to organize matters and control appointments to achieve the results she sought. No one in her office was in charge of co-ordinating the work of government. She did not believe that the bureaucracy should be reshaped from top to bottom, but rather that it should be regalvanized. ‘It was not’, according to Richard Ryder, ‘the Maoists arriving at No. 10.’12 She was very correct about the non-political structure of the Civil Service and considered it a sign of inadequacy for all but the most senior ministers to have political advisers. Before the election, she had asked Richard Ryder to be her political secretary in No. 10, and told him that only her personal secretaries, including his future wife Caroline Stephens, should come with her. For other appointments, she ‘wished to keep her options open’.13 She was obsessed by the need to keep entourages as small as possible. Although she disliked officials as a class, she loved individual examples of the breed and depended very heavily on them. The private office she inherited was touched and ‘astonished that she accepted us without any question’.14* Nick Sanders,† another private secretary inherited from the Labour administration, recalled that Callaghan, though always courteous, had seemed to hold back from his officials what he was really thinking. Mrs Thatcher, on the other hand, ‘told us exactly what she thought’.15 John Hoskyns, who was the first head of her Policy Unit and therefore her leading non-career civil servant, remarked on ‘a strange contradiction: her instinct when she’s scared is to fight. But she was quite in awe of Whitehall mandarins.’16 But it may not have been a contradiction at all: she understood the importance of the men who made the machine work, and would always support them so long as they made it work for her. After a few months of governing, she looked up from her desk at Clive Whitmore,‡ who had replaced Ken Stowe as her principal private secretary in June, and said: ‘Clive, I’d be able to run this Government much better if I didn’t have ministers, only permanent secretaries.’17

  Mrs Thatcher’s chief method of exerting her will over the machine was not institutional but personal. She used every remark, every memo, every meeting as an opportunity to challenge existing habits, criticize any sign of ignorance, confusion or waste and preach incessantly the main aims of her administration. Just five days after her election victory, for example, Mrs Thatcher directed her private secretary to inform the Foreign Office of her dissatisfaction with the briefing documents produced for her so far. ‘She hopes that in future Departments will avoid wordy generalisations and the re-statement of facts or conclusions which are, or should be, well known to all those for whom the briefs are designed. The Prime Minister, who is a quick reader, is fully prepared to tackle long briefs when necessary: but she would like their content to be pithy and concisely expressed.’18 Determined to work harder and know more than any other minister, she used the ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament every Tuesday and Thursday that the House was sitting as the means of familiarizing herself with the work of all departments. She would be briefed early in the morning about what was likely to be asked (though the device of the ‘open question’ meant that she could never know exactly), and then, over a light lunch which everyone ate holding plates on their knees, would rehearse possible answers with Nick Sanders, the relevant private secretary, Ian Gow, her parliamentary private secretary, and others.19 Gow would tell her which questions he had been able to ‘plant’ with whichever loyal Tory MPs had been drawn in the ballot. She would then go over to the Commons, armed with a book of about forty ‘subject notes’ per question time, and take her place on the bench at 3.10 for the fifteen-minute contest. ‘She had a virtually photographic memory and always knew more than the Opposition,’ recalled William Rickett,* who served after Sanders as her private secretary for Questions.20 She hardly ever made a factual error. On one occasion during the Falklands War, her civil servants told her immediately afterwards that she had given an incorrect answer to a question about the Labour government’s sale of warships to Argentina. ‘She went ballistic’ at having been wrongly briefed, according to Rickett, but ‘it then turned out she’d been right after all.’21 From time to time, reforms attempting to make Prime Minister’s Questions more rational would be suggested to her, but Mrs Thatcher always opposed them, saying, ‘It would be seen as a sign of weakness if I proposed changes.’22 She did very well out of the combination of the parliamentary political joust and the twice-weekly cramming of facts. Her strongest form of self-criticism, she herself recalled in old age, was provoked ‘whenever I had not prepared thoroughly enough for something’.23

  Her other method of control, used much more rarely, was to make visitations to different departments to see for herself what they were up to. These were memorably demanding occasions. In the case of the Department of Employment, with which, as the department closest to the trade unions, she was naturally out of sympathy, the outing was particularly painful for her hosts. Due to some confusion at the front desk, Mrs Thatcher went upstairs without being greeted by Jim Prior and his junior ministe
rs, who came down in one lift just after she had gone up in another. Prior, red-faced at the best of times, went purple in his race to catch up with her. When his panting party arrived, he found the Prime Minister already in full flood.24 At this meeting, Mrs Thatcher got into an argument with an able official called Donald Derx, who was so nettled by her hectoring that he said, ‘Prime Minister, do you want to know the facts or not?’ Derx had been lined up by the Civil Service for the highest posts. As a result of this incident, it was said, his career stalled.25 Such scenes were unpleasant, and sometimes resulted in unfair judgments being made, but they were also useful in helping her search for talent and energy. At a better-starred visit to the Ministry of Defence, she marked out an official called Clive Whitmore (see above), whom the mandarins, hoping she would notice him, had pushed to the fore. She promptly made him her principal private secretary in succession to Ken Stowe. The visits also had a very important general effect. They meant that Mrs Thatcher was feared. From first to last, for eleven and a half years, she sent tremors through the whole of Whitehall.

  But she did not necessarily show clarity about lines of command. Mrs Thatcher’s rather unworldly vagueness, even weakness, about who should do which job caused immediate confusion. Adam Ridley, who had been giving her the main economic advice from the Conservative Research Department, fully expected to take charge in office, running the Policy Unit, perhaps with John Hoskyns in tow. Ten days before the election, Mrs Thatcher had, he had every reason to believe, offered him the job.26 Without receiving her final confirmation, he arrived at No. 10 before she did, having recruited Michael Portillo, George Cardona* and Michael Dobbs as the team which she had initially agreed. Richard Ryder, who knew that she had wanted to avoid appointing people to jobs in advance, reported Ridley’s precipitate arrival to Mrs Thatcher. She was not pleased.27 She told Ridley that the officials were ‘so marvellous’ that his team was not needed after all. He and Hoskyns, she suggested, should share the Policy Unit between them with, in effect, no support from anyone other than Norman Strauss.28 Piqued, Ridley refused, saying that such a unit would be too small. A place was found for him instead as special adviser to Geoffrey Howe, whom Mrs Thatcher had made Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his three juniors trickled down to other posts. John Hoskyns was put in charge of the Policy Unit. He was allowed to bring Norman Strauss with him on the condition that Mrs Thatcher, who found Strauss’ eccentric manner and informal style of dressing alarming, never had to see him.29 According to Hoskyns, she had already decided before the election that he, not Ridley, should advise her. One evening, at dinner with the Wolfsons in early March, Denis had taken Hoskyns aside and told him that he would get the appointment. ‘You spark her,’ he told Hoskyns, while Adam Ridley ‘cannot see the wood for the trees’.30 There was, in addition, an ideological question involved. Though not an out-and-out Heathite, Ridley was not a monetarist either. Despite Chris Patten’s ‘litmus test’ approach to the appointment of Ridley,31 Mrs Thatcher decided to defy the centrists and prefer the more radical Hoskyns. What she failed to do, however, was to sort this out directly with the people involved. In his diary for Tuesday 8 May, Hoskyns noted: ‘I had to bring to a head a problem she would not face.’ Even more surprising, she did not have much idea about what the Policy Unit should do, and never, in all Hoskyns’s time there, tasked it with any particular job. It always had to generate its own momentum. Tim Lankester,* who was her first economic private secretary, noted that ‘she wasn’t very interested in strategy.’32 From the other side of the official fence, Hoskyns thought exactly the same. The most missionary of all modern prime ministers never sat down to define her mission or to plan its implementation.

  In such a hurry to get on with her task, as she saw it, of rebuilding the British economy, Mrs Thatcher tended to grab whatever tools lay to hand, rather than try to forge new ones. One such body was the Central Policy Review Staff, known as the Think Tank, which had been founded by Ted Heath. Under the Cabinet Office rather than directly answerable to the Prime Minister, its job was not political. Its purpose was to think, as people did not then put it, ‘outside the box’, and investigate policy issues too long term for the ordinary run of Civil Service life. Its head could attend any Cabinet committees on whose subject the Think Tank was working, and would produce useful briefing notes for these. But, because of its structure, floating free of any chain of departmental or prime ministerial command, the CPRS tended, despite its high intellectual calibre, to be ineffective. Its reports were both too controversial for comfort and too unimmediate to demand action. In 1979, for instance, it was working on a report on the future of the motor industry and another on alcohol abuse. Mrs Thatcher could not at first see the point of it. She called in the Think Tank’s head, Sir Kenneth Berrill,* and said, ‘If I want to know about industry, I ask Keith Joseph. Why should I ask you?’ Berrill’s reply was ‘You’ll get independent input.’33

  Dr John Ashworth,† the Chief Scientist, who worked within the CPRS, asked to see Mrs Thatcher shortly after she had arrived at No. 10. As he entered, the Prime Minister said: ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am your Chief Scientist,’ Ashworth replied. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Thatcher, ‘do I want one of those?’ He explained his work, mentioning that he was completing a report about the then almost unstudied subject of climate change. Mrs Thatcher stared at him: ‘Are you standing there and seriously telling me that my government should worry about the weather?’‡ She told Ashworth that she was not going to have a minister for science at all: ‘I’m a scientist. I shall be my own Minister for Science.’34 But, despite this typically, frighteningly challenging way of approaching the matter, Mrs Thatcher quickly realized that, her Policy Unit being so small and staffed by people without experience of the workings of government, she needed experts who could help with progress-chasing. After a bit, the two organizations found they could make common cause, as both, regardless of their precise political views, shared a desire to rescue Britain from the collapse of the Winter of Discontent. Both enjoyed working for Mrs Thatcher because, as Berrill remembered it: ‘She’s active, highly critical: you’re on your toes. I didn’t have to say what she’d like to hear … I never found a subject on which you were wasting your time analysing something as deeply as you wanted.’35 She communicated her passion for reform and for new ideas. But, at the Policy Unit, in the CPRS and in the regular Civil Service, officials quickly came to recognize that Mrs Thatcher was not, in the normal managerial sense, much good at running things, despite her appetite for official paper. As John Ashworth put it: ‘She hated muddle, but she also caused it, because she did not really appreciate how bureaucracies need sharp lines.’36 She did not know how the machine worked and, as Hoskyns put it, ‘My worry was that she didn’t know what she didn’t know.’37

  In forming her first Cabinet, as in her dealings with the Civil Service, Mrs Thatcher displayed a similar, slightly surprising tendency not to want to upset the institutional applecart. Her appointments sought political balance more than ideological affinity. She turned first to Willie Whitelaw, whom she immediately made Home Secretary and, in effect, though not in formal title, deputy prime minister. He had never disappointed her in the loyalty he had promised after she beat him for the leadership in 1975, and he possessed qualities and connections which she knew she lacked. Her friend Hector Laing* once praised Whitelaw to her for his ‘low cunning and lovable dimness’. Mrs Thatcher laughed and said: ‘I’m not very good at either.’38 Cunning, lovability and at least the appearance of dimness were essential characteristics in the Tory tribe, so Whitelaw was indispensable. He did not arrive in London from his seat in the Borders until the Friday afternoon. When he had done so, he joined Mrs Thatcher and the Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, in No. 10 for the rest of the evening to advise her. Filling the hole left by the death of Neave, she offered Atkins the post of Northern Ireland secretary. When he had reluctantly accepted it, she rang Michael Jopling,† also in the fastness of his northern constituency, to ask him to succeed At
kins. Jopling drove to London through the Friday night to help handle the process of appointments the following day.

  When he accepted the post of deputy leader in 1975, Whitelaw had told Mrs Thatcher: ‘I shall give you my 100-per-cent loyalty on one condition: that you never make Keith Joseph Chancellor.’39 For this reason, she had never made Joseph shadow Chancellor, and now she kept her promise. Mrs Thatcher had to stick with the man whom the past four years had made the only logical choice for the Chancellorship, Geoffrey Howe. Her relations with Howe were not very easy, and she tended to say, ‘The trouble with people like Geoffrey – lawyers – is that they are too timid,’40 conveniently forgetting she was a lawyer herself. But although in her heart she would have preferred Keith Joseph, she was not seriously reluctant to give Howe the job for which, she could not deny, he was now well qualified. Her love for Joseph, which was the strongest of all her affections for her senior colleagues, did not blind her to the fact that he would have been unable to bear the heat and burden of the Treasury. She made him Secretary of State for Industry.

  It was only in those portfolios which dealt with economic matters that Mrs Thatcher sought out men who were ideologically sympathetic to her. As well as Howe and Joseph, she appointed John Nott, who had been one of the most original free-market economists in opposition, making him Trade Secretary. To assist Howe, she made John Biffen Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in charge of the control of public spending. This appointment was based on a misunderstanding. Mrs Thatcher had a great respect for Biffen’s intellect and what she called his ‘ability to think laterally’41 and believed, because of his opposition to the Heath U-turn, that he was at one with her. She also felt motherly towards him because he had suffered from depression and had to step down from the Shadow Cabinet for a year as a result. Biffen was grateful for her kindness over this episode. But he was a Powellite rather than a Thatcherite by belief, and a quietist by temperament. He was a lifelong Eurosceptic and he believed in balanced budgets and the control of inflation by monetary means, but he was not averse to high public spending in itself. Besides, he was not combative – ‘I don’t like the sound of breaking crockery’42 – and he disliked policy detail. He was not as much ‘on board’ as Mrs Thatcher thought. In an attempt to co-ordinate the advancement of economic policy and steer it through the rest of the Cabinet as things grew gradually rougher, these ministers – Howe, Joseph, Nott and Biffen – eventually established a secret breakfast with Mrs Thatcher every Thursday morning. Its existence was unknown to colleagues until revealed in the press in November 1980.