Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Although extremely conscious of her femininity, Mrs Thatcher had frequently to be reminded of the symbolic importance of her role as the leading elected representative of her sex. As part of her drive to reduce the number of quangos which received large sums of public money, Mrs Thatcher found herself confronted with the two such that were the direct responsibility of the Cabinet Office. John Hunt, assisted by John Ashworth, told her that she must choose between cutting the National Council for Women and a scientific body, the Advisory Council for Applied Research and Development (ACARD). Without hesitation, Mrs Thatcher, the scientist, said: ‘Can’t get rid of ACARD. Better get rid of the other one.’ Ashworth pointed out to her that she was the first woman Prime Minister and it might look bad to get rid of the National Council for Women. Mrs Thatcher reluctantly agreed and the result, which the two officials in this Yes, Prime Minister game had intended, was that both quangos survived.76

  Probably the most important member of Mrs Thatcher’s personal entourage was her parliamentary private secretary. Adam Butler and John Stanley, the latter having become known in the Thatcher team as ‘Flapper Jack’ because of his tendency to panic, had left for junior ministerial positions. Now that she was Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher chose as her PPS Ian Gow, the MP for Eastbourne. Because he had been a friend of his fellow Wykehamist Geoffrey Howe since working as an assistant in Aberavon during the 1959 election, Gow had supported Howe’s leadership bid in 1975 and was therefore not, at first, close to Mrs Thatcher. He was PPS to Airey Neave, however, until Neave’s assassination, and so his move to Mrs Thatcher herself in 1979 came naturally. After the election, Gow’s friendship with Howe became an advantage, since it helped good communication between No. 10 and the Treasury. Gow, bald, bespectacled, usually in a heavy three-piece suit, had the half-pompous, half-obsequious manner of a private doctor (his father’s profession) or solicitor (his own) between the wars. This was part of an elaborate self-parody. Gow was a keenly intelligent and intensely diligent man. He was completely, chivalrously committed to Mrs Thatcher, whom he was the first to describe as ‘The Lady’. ‘I shall love her’, he declared to the less enamoured Howe, ‘till the day I die,’77* and he saw his job, normally considered only a useful step on the ladder to higher things, as the great task of his life. He was at his desk at seven every morning, having often stayed up into the small hours doing his boss’s business in the House of Commons the night before.

  Gow’s commitment to Mrs Thatcher was ideological as well as personal. In the eyes of officials, who found his mode of operation ‘difficult’ because he would pretend that he had not seen official papers when he had, he was the closest upholder of her sense of purpose: ‘She drew from him the spirit of what she was trying to achieve.’78 For his part, Gow regarded bureaucrats collectively as ‘Martians’, and enjoyed battles with them. Self-consciously an old fogey, though only forty-two years old at the time of the 1979 election, he had an extreme reluctance to trust any official who had a beard, a prejudice shared by Mrs Thatcher who liked to declare that ‘Only men with weak chins have beards.’79 Gow was also a romantic who could quote entire speeches by General de Gaulle from memory. He was particularly attracted to the more High Tory aspects of Thatcherism, and was a strong supporter of the Union with Northern Ireland. It was through Ian Gow that Mrs Thatcher was to have many meetings with Enoch Powell in the first years of her premiership, Gow smuggling Powell into No. 10 by the back door.

  Gow’s chief role as PPS was to keep open the links between the Prime Minister and her parliamentary party, links which had broken, with such disastrous results, in the days of Ted Heath. He did this by a huge amount of controlled but sustained drinking with Members of Parliament. ‘Cars run on petrol,’ he would say, ‘I run on alcohol,’ and he was particularly fond of White Ladies (two parts gin, one part Cointreau, one part lemon juice). When he arrived in No. 10, and found himself sharing a handsome ground-floor office next to the Cabinet Room with Richard Ryder, he immediately denounced the room as ‘appalling’ on the grounds that it did not have a fridge.80 One was soon installed, and filled with the produce of El Vino’s, the Fleet Street bar owned by David Mitchell, one of the new administration’s junior ministers. Gow devoted endless hours to listening to the complaints of Members of Parliament. Finding discontent, he would approach the diary secretary and say, ‘X is unhappy and needs to be loved. Please get him in to see Margaret.’81 With the large intake of new Conservative MPs in 1979, roughly a third of the parliamentary party was more or less unknown to the leader. Gow remedied this, taking her regularly to the tea-room, and ‘day by day getting her to connect’.82 Known half-affectionately as ‘Supergrass’, he would attend the meetings of Conservative backbench committees in Parliament and report to Mrs Thatcher who had said what. Building on her own remarkable tendency to criticize ‘the government’ as if she, as Prime Minister, had nothing to do with it, Gow was not above concerting parliamentary resistance to proposals from Cabinet colleagues which she did not like. In this respect, he could sometimes cause unnecessary trouble. But he was the most useful sort of aide for a leader – the one who knows his principal’s mind so completely that he does not need to ask her permission before he acts. Unfortunately for posterity, however, most of Ian Gow’s operations and thoughts were not committed to paper, and, when he was murdered by the IRA in 1990, he left few written records. The testimony of his contemporaries is that no one was more important in helping Mrs Thatcher survive the potential political crises of her first years, and that his role, after he left the post in 1983, was never so successfully replicated by his successors.

  This personal team, instantly loyal, cohesive and overworked, had to cope with the astonishing demands of their boss’s routine. Mrs Thatcher would rise at about six in the morning, listening first to the news on the BBC World Service and then to Radio 4’s Today programme. In the course of the night she would have demolished two or sometimes three of the red boxes that her private office had handed to her the previous evening. At about eight, Caroline Stephens would meet the private secretaries in the study below and then take up urgent requests to see Mrs Thatcher to the flat where, though she had always been up for hours, she was sometimes dressing in her bedroom. Denis, who also rose early, was invariably out of the bedroom by this time, and at his desk in his own study in the flat.83 After 8.30, the Prime Minister would descend from the flat to her study and begin a day of meetings, which would normally end up, during the parliamentary session, in the House of Commons. She took virtually no exercise, without any apparent ill effects, except for going up and down the stairs to the flat. These journeys were required, among other things, to use the lavatory, because there was none for her on the same floor as her study, though her staff noted her ability, like the Queen, never to seem to need to ‘go’.

  She allowed herself no leisure. She would work, or talk about work, until one or two in the morning, occasionally catnapping for fifteen minutes at about 11 p.m. In the evening, she would often take her shoes off, tuck her legs beneath her on the sofa, and chat – always shop – with a glass of weak whisky to help her. Sometimes, Denis would join her, with rather more to drink, but there were often occasions when she ignored him in the pressure of business. On one evening, her husband came in after dinner when she was engaged in composing a big speech about Rhodesia. He offered a few comments to which she paid no attention, and then went up to the flat. About half an hour later, the ceiling of the room in which Mrs Thatcher was sitting shook with a tremendous crash. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘That must be Denis. I think he must have fallen out of a broom cupboard.’ She made no attempt to find out what had happened.84 The hardest task for her entourage was to make her go to bed. Although she did, indeed, have immense stamina and a huge appetite for work, she was not as invincible as she believed. She got very tired, and when this happened, she talked more and achieved less.

  The global impact of Margaret Thatcher was immediate and enormous, because she was, after Golda Meir
of Israel, the first elected woman leader in the Western world. Yet despite the criticism she had already attracted for being image-conscious in opposition, Mrs Thatcher gave extraordinarily little thought to media relations. Charles Anson,* who was a No. 10 press officer when she arrived, noticed an ‘absolutely instant’ change in the level of outside interest. The press mêlée outside No. 10 on the day of her victory had been so great that his colleagues had found it hard to get the tape recorder near enough to record her St Francis of Assisi remarks. Journalists from all over the world wanted to know things like whether there was a women’s lavatory near the Cabinet Room, and fashion editors seemed to telephone almost as much as members of the parliamentary press lobby. But it struck Anson that Mrs Thatcher showed ‘very little interest in how she was projected’.85 She was so irritated by questions about being a woman that the press office had to warn foreign journalists off the subject. She did not really read the newspapers herself, beyond a cursory glance at Denis’s Daily Telegraph, and it was hard to persuade her to pay much attention to what they were saying. Unlike Harold Wilson, who was obsessed with press coverage, and all prime ministers who were to succeed her, Mrs Thatcher needed reminding that the media mattered. It did not occur to her to alter the existing structure of the Downing Street press operation. All those running it were career civil servants, and the man she first put in charge of it was Henry James, a former head of the Central Office of Information who was then working at Vickers, whom she appointed as a temporary measure. It is notable that she did not take the opportunity to appoint a press secretary from a party or ideological background. Indeed, she consciously reverted to a less political approach to the press job because of what was seen as the excessively political one of Callaghan’s press secretary, Tom McCaffrey,86 choosing James precisely because he was unpolitical. Her relations with James were good, but she did not see his work as central to hers. At the beginning of her time in office, the Prime Minister received no daily press digest. There was no separate daily meeting about the media, and she did not automatically see her press secretary every morning, often dealing with these matters through her private secretaries alone.

  Although Thatcher supporters were adept at using sympathetic journalists to push their line, there was nothing like the modern, systematic management of coverage. The idea of planning an announcement round the hoped-for headline was unknown, and the word ‘spin’ had no currency in British politics. Mrs Thatcher was usually punctilious in observing the convention that announcements of new legislation, green papers and so on should be made first to Parliament, not on television, although there were occasions when she made important policy changes on the spur of the moment, under the heat of the television lights. Despite the intense interest in her, there was no twenty-four-hour news cycle such as exists today. Between her election in May 1979 and her first summer recess that August, Mrs Thatcher gave only four formal press conferences and no full-dress interviews. Once inside No. 10, she paid much less attention to people, such as Gordon Reece, who had handled her media appearances in opposition. She ignored Reece’s advice to give more television interviews, and crossly stamped on his request that her image be used for merchandising in aid of the party: ‘No permission to be given on any goods of any kind. Don’t mind a straight photograph.’87 Her main public communications were in the House of Commons and through setpiece speeches. In this, as in so much else, Mrs Thatcher conformed to existing rules.

  From 1 November 1979, however, James was recalled to Vickers, and Mrs Thatcher appointed Bernard Ingham* as her press secretary. A former Labour supporter who had once stood unsuccessfully for Leeds City Council and had later been an information officer at the Departments of Employment and Energy, Ingham was a naturally combative man. Perhaps excessively proud of his Yorkshire common sense, he was strongly in sympathy with the changes Mrs Thatcher was trying to make in British society. As his power grew in later years – he was to stay with her until the very end – Ingham would be criticized for intriguing on her behalf against ministers who were out of favour. He was always, however, rigorous about following the rules which prevented him having any contact with the party (never attending party conferences, for example, but going on holiday instead). However much he bruised individual feelings, he did not violate the Civil Service structure.

  After he had arrived at No. 10 in October, understudying James for a few weeks, Ingham took up his place in the bow window which surveys everyone who comes and goes in Downing Street. He soon decided that his most immediate problem was to make the Prime Minister pay any attention at all to how she was being reported. He therefore developed a daily press digest of about five foolscap pages and ‘sat down with her while we read it to make sure she did read it’ most mornings at 9 o’clock.88 This briefing became her window on the world. Mrs Thatcher did pay attention to what the Daily Telegraph said, since it was the main line to her natural supporters, and also to the Sun, whose importance in winning working-class voters over from Labour she readily acknowledged. In October 1979, the Sun asked her to send the paper a message of congratulation on its tenth anniversary. Ingham, who was still three days short of formally starting his job, recommended against, complaining of the ‘somewhat flimsy basis’. Mrs Thatcher, however, scribbled: ‘The Sun is a friend! Will do.’89 But in general she was distant from the media, and from the tastes of mass readerships. It is clear from the occasional notes she scribbled on these digests that she was thinking about particular issues – economic crises, for example, or the fate of servicemen killed in terrorist attacks – rather than about how she was herself being portrayed or what the current conversation in pub or coffee break might be. ‘The real problem’, Ingham remembered, ‘was that she was not in touch.’ She knew nothing about pop music or popular television programmes. She might, in her early days, read the first two columns of the Financial Times, but ‘they did not exactly keep her in touch with what Britain was thinking.’ Sometimes, when he and Mrs Thatcher were sitting on the tarmac waiting for an aeroplane to take off, Ingham would say to her, ‘You might usefully read the leader in X paper,’ and then notice that she did not know where the leader page was.90

  It was a strength of hers that she did not bother her head with the petty intrigues and black arts of newspapers – ‘she didn’t have a dirty barrow-boy’s mind’ – but Ingham thought ‘she was unprofessional in not thinking about presentation enough.’ Much though she trusted him, she was so ‘naturally secretive’ about the distribution of paper that he fought a constant battle to keep up with what she was doing. In 1980, for instance, the report of the Top Salaries Review Body, with its controversial recommendations for generous increases, reached Ingham only half an hour before he was supposed to see the lobby about it. He did not know what the government line on it would be. ‘It’s madness,’ Ingham told her. What Ingham also noticed at once, however, was Mrs Thatcher’s gifts as a public performer. She was very concerned about her physical appearance and, when going on television, ‘indulged herself with the make-up girl’.91 Charles Anson observed that she considered her right profile better than her left, and was at pains to be photographed from that angle.92 As Ingham put it: ‘She was an actress who could turn on a tremendous performance when it had to be turned on.’93 She was not media-minded, but she was a media star.

  The first foreign politician to ring Mrs Thatcher to congratulate her on her victory on Friday 4 May 1979 was Ronald Reagan. But at that stage the ex-Governor of California was, in the official mind, little more than the unsuccessful challenger for the Republican nomination of 1976.* The Downing Street switchboard did not put him through. President Jimmy Carter was advised by aides to call, in addition to sending the usual congratulatory cable, to ‘help counter some of the distorted speculation we saw during the campaign (to the effect that we were hoping for a Labor win …)’.94 Carter made the call quite late in the day, and he and Mrs Thatcher spoke for only two minutes.

  Luckily for Mrs Thatcher, she and Reagan managed
to speak a few days later, and Reagan’s enthusiasm was not deflected by the snub from No. 10. He was confident in his relationship with Mrs Thatcher, having enjoyed a second meeting with her in London back in November 1978. This meeting had been arranged after Reagan, scheduled to visit Europe, ‘expressed a wish to call on Mrs Thatcher to renew their friendship’.95 ‘They sparked,’ said Richard Allen, who witnessed the encounter.96 Mrs Thatcher confided in Reagan her rather unfavourable evaluation of President Carter, before urging him to ‘keep working for his goals. She told him that while it might be too late to turn things around in her country, she hoped not and, in any case, would do everything she could to make a success of it.’97 In one of his regular weekly radio broadcasts, Reagan, who by May 1979 was campaigning once again for the Republican nomination, now cheered her on from the sidelines:

  I couldn’t be happier than I am over England’s new Prime Minister. It has been my privilege to meet and have two lengthy audiences with Margaret Thatcher and I’ve been rooting for her to become Prime Minister since our first meeting.

  If anyone can remind England of the greatness she knew during those dangerous days in WWII when alone and unafraid her people fought the Battle of Britain it will be the Prime Minister the English press has already nicknamed ‘Maggie’.

  I think she’ll do some moving and shaking of England’s once-proud industrial capacity which under the Labor Party has been running downhill for a long time. Productivity levels in some industrial fields are lower than they were 40 years ago. Output per man hour in many trades is only a third of what it was in the 1930s. Bricklayers for example laid 1000 bricks a day in 1937 – today they lay 300. I think ‘Maggie’ – bless her soul, will do something about that.98

  There was no comparable rapture in the chancelleries of Europe, but there was certainly keen interest. And the main European leaders, frustrated by having had to suffer the Labour Party’s internal divisions over the EEC, were quite pleased to have a return of the Tories, who were regarded at that time as definitely the more Europhile of the two parties. The attitude of officialdom, always pro-EEC, was to welcome the Conservatives because they seemed more united: ‘We all felt “Thank God we’ve got rid of that very weak government.” ’99