Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  † Iain Macleod (1913–70), educated Fettes and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Enfield West, 1950–70; Minister of Health, 1952–5; of Labour and National Service, 1955–9; Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1959–61; Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Leader of the House of Commons, 1961–3; Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1961–3; editor of the Spectator, 1963–5; Chancellor of the Exchequer, June–July 1970.

  * John Pardoe (1934–), educated Sherborne and C0rpus Christi College, Cambridge; Liberal MP for Cornwall North, 1966–79; unsuccessful candidate for Liberal leadership, 1976.

  † Bernard Donoughue (1934–), educated Northampton Grammar School, Lincoln College and Nuffield College, Oxford; senior policy adviser to Prime Minister, 1974–9; created Lord Donoughue, 1985; Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, 1997–9.

  * In later life she turned against red. ‘Red is too sharp,’ she told the present author. Hats, she added, ‘complete the picture’.

  * Mark was at Belmont, the prep school for Mill Hill, Denis’s old school. Carol was at Queenswood in Hatfield. Eventually she went to St Paul’s.

  * To the end of her days, she remembered her extravagance in paying £66 in the mid-1950s for a lacquered cabinet with mirrors. Long after her memory for the details of political events had faded, she remained minutely accurate about what she had collected, where she had bought it and what she had spent on it.

  † Mrs Thatcher’s taste in porcelain was always for what was bright and perfect. When she became secretary of state for education, the Victoria and Albert Museum (for which she was responsible) supplied her with an 1840s Spode dessert service in bright pink. She complained that the pieces looked very dirty and demanded that they be cleaned. In fact, the ‘dirt’ was black spotting from original firing difficulties which could not be removed. (Correspondence with Dame Rosalind Savill.)

  * Reginald Maudling (1917–79), educated Merchant Taylors’ and Merton College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Barnet, 1950–79; President of the Board of Trade, 1959–61; Colonial Secretary, 1961–2; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1962–4; Home Secretary, 1970–72; Shadow Foreign Secretary, 1975–6.

  * Mrs Thatcher, who generally eschewed what she called ‘personal remarks’, put it more gently, even in private: ‘Reggie had a first-class brain but he didn’t bestir himself as much as he should have done’ (The Thatcher Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge, THCR 4/4).

  † She later felt that Ted Heath had abandoned his father’s common sense in favour of a more pompous, clubby Tory milieu.

  * Eric Heffer (1922–91), educated Longmore Senior School, Hertford; joiner; Christian Socialist; Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, 1964–91; Shadow Cabinet, 1981; left-wing candidate for Labour leadership, 1983 (came third). Mrs Thatcher attended his memorial service.

  * She was wrong there. Jay was known to have a marked interest in short skirts.

  * James Prior (1927–), educated Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Lowestoft, 1959–83; for Waveney, 1983–7; Minister of Agriculture, 1970–72; Leader of the House of Commons, 1972–4; Shadow Employment Secretary, 1974–9; Secretary of State for Employment, 1979–81; for Northern Ireland, 1981–4; created Lord Prior, 1987.

  † Mervyn Pike was a woman.

  * Paul Johnson (1928–), editor of the New Statesman, 1965–70; author of innumerable works of history.

  * General de Gaulle rubbed salt in the wound by again refusing British entry to the EEC, nine days after devaluation.

  * Richard Marsh (1928–2011), educated Jennings School, Swindon, Woolwich Polytechnic and Ruskin College, Oxford; Labour MP for Greenwich, 1959–71; Minister of Power, 1966–8; of Transport, 1968–70; chairman, British Rail, 1971–6; created Lord Marsh, 1981.

  * Mrs Thatcher’s rhetoric was notable for the number of times she mentioned hopes or fears for her children, particularly her son. A poignant example from this period comes from her speech to the North Finchley and Whetstone British and Foreign Bible Society (see Finchley Times, 28 October 1966 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/101296)). In it, she spoke of the extreme horror of the death or serious illness of one’s child and mentioned Aberfan. She praised the beauty of the language of the Authorized Version of the Bible (‘the most beautiful piece of language that exists’) and said that one of her favourite passages in the Bible was David’s lament for his dead son, Absalom. It is clear from the way she speaks that the passage hit home because it led her to imagine her feelings if her own son were to die.

  * Surtax was the high rate of income tax on the top earners.

  * In a later draft, Galloway also reported that Mrs Thatcher would like to meet John Kenneth Galbraith, the guru of liberal economics, who had just delivered the BBC’s Reith Lectures. This desire was not to be fulfilled.

  * Campbell notes his source for this story as ‘private information’, but since the only British Treasury official present at the lunch with Schweitzer was Douglas Wass, it seems reasonable to assume that the ‘information’ was his. Wass was permanent secretary at the Treasury when Mrs Thatcher first came into office in 1979, and was believed to have taken an equally dim view of her economic policy. When the present author interviewed him, he was less critical of her handling of Schweitzer. She had only a ‘superficial knowledge’ of the procedures of the IMF, but this was neither surprising nor discreditable. The cynical, worldly-wise Frenchman was simply ‘the antithesis of her’. (Interview with Sir Douglas Wass.)

  * The mayor, Ivan Allen Jr, was echoing Atlanta’s self-adopted mantra as the city ‘too busy to hate’.

  * Paul Channon (1935–2007), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; son of Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, MP and political diarist; Conservative MP for Southend West, 1959–97; Minister for the Arts, 1981–3; Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, 1986–7; for Transport, 1987–9; created Lord Kelvedon, 1997.

  * This story is told slightly differently in Lady Thatcher’s memoirs, though the variations are not important. She was often imprecise in her memories of incidents, long before she suffered a loss of memory, due to small strokes, in the late 1990s.

  † Shirley Williams (1930–), educated at eight schools in UK and USA and Somerville College, Oxford; Labour MP for Hitchin, 1964–74; for Hertford and Stevenage, February 1974–9; Secretary of State for Prices, 1974–6; for Education, 1976–9. Member of ‘Gang of Four’ which founded SDP; elected SDP MP for Crosby in by-election, 1981; lost seat, 1983; created Baroness Williams of Crosby, 1983.

  * As so often in Tory politics, there was a class issue lurking in all this. Old Etonians, like Boyle, tended to feel rather guilty about the question and therefore to side with the progressives. Mrs Thatcher, though she retained her liking for Boyle, observed this sharply: ‘The trouble with Edward is that he has never got over coming from a good home and having a good education’ (Correspondence with Professor David Dilks). Grammar school pupils were more robust. It is interesting to find the left-wing Peter Walker, Heath’s blue-eyed boy and later an opponent of Mrs Thatcher, criticizing ‘the degree of acceptance … of the comprehensive formula’ in the Shadow Cabinet (Conservative Party Archive, LCC 1/2/13, 15 July 1968). Walker was a grammar school boy.

  † Circulars were important, because they were the Secretary of State’s only method of urging a national policy upon all the local authorities.

  * The title says much about attitudes of the time.

  * On 18 October 1970 Mrs Thatcher attended a memorial service at Finkin Street Church in Grantham at which a lectern was dedicated in memory of Alfred Roberts, half the cost being subscribed by the congregation and half by the Rotary Club. At the ceremony, according to Muriel Cullen, her sister complained to her: ‘They don’t know how to treat a Cabinet minister, do they?’ Muriel replied, ‘This service isn’t for you.’

  * John Izbicki, then education correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, found Mrs Thatcher almost tearful in her ballgown
after the press assault on her for nearly depriving them of their story. He danced with her at the NAHT Ball, and then took her out along the promenade by the Grand Hotel to admire the sea lit by the moonlight. He was struck with her charms. According to his colleague, Brian MacArthur, then education correspondent of The Times, Izbicki said: ‘Do you know, if I’d made a pass, I’m sure I would have been successful.’ Charming though John Izbicki was, it is hard to believe that he was right.

  * Mrs Thatcher’s predecessor, Edward Boyle, summed up the status of the education secretary in an interview given in 1971, when she held the post: ‘You’re quite right if you think of the people since the war who have been most associated with Education. It isn’t a department which has enhanced one’s career in politics’ (The Politics of Education: Edward Boyle and Anthony Crosland in Conversation with Maurice Kogan, Penguin, 1971, p. 100.)

  * Mrs Thatcher’s sympathy with Tory grass-root sentiment brought some rather snobbish criticism on her head. Christopher Price, a Labour MP with an interest in education, wrote in the New Statesman (6 July 1973) that these rank and file ‘are the bourgeois tradesmen like her father, who would not dream of touching a comprehensive with a bargepole. They use the local grammar school if their offspring are coachable into it, and turn to Miss Pringle’s Academy for Young Ladies if they’re not.’

  * Oddly enough, Mrs Thatcher was quite a frequent customer of a left-wing bookshop at this time. Collett’s, the avowedly Communist bookstore, also sold Chinese pottery, which she collected. The Education Secretary could therefore be seen inspecting the top floor where the pots were displayed (THCR 4/4).

  * At this time, a series of education ‘Black Papers’, published by academics, teachers and writers, including Kingsley Amis, who were worried about the trends in progressive education, caused a great stir. Mrs Thatcher was sympathetic to the Black Papers, and always gave their authors a friendly hearing, but there is little evidence that she tried to apply much of their thought to her action in government. The prevailing orthodoxy was strong in the opposite direction, and she did not feel ready to defy it.

  † Lord Belstead (1932–2005), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; born John Ganzoni, succeeded father as Lord Belstead, 1958; Leader of the House of Lords, 1988–90.

  * Perhaps the only people who, for the most part, did not share the outrage were the children themselves. The bottles of milk supplied at elevenses were unpopular with pupils partly because few schools had the necessary refrigeration in those days and the milk, delivered early and often sitting for hours in crates beside radiators, was warm and semi-separated. The present author’s generation felt liberated from the age of compulsory milk.

  * Mrs Thatcher herself believed that only her admirer John Izbicki, of the Daily Telegraph, would give her a fair hearing.

  * One of the threats made to Mrs Thatcher was nastier still. A man approached her at a meeting and said that he was from the Angry Brigade, a minor terrorist grouping of the period, and she would be blown up in twenty minutes. He was lying, but she had to start thinking about the threat of terrorism for the first time. From the period of the milk dispute, and for the rest of her life, she was subject to the attention of extremists and mobs of protesters. This probably did her more political good than harm, but it was a heavy personal burden for her and her family to have to bear. In February 1972, she raised the matter in Cabinet, asking if government ministers were insured against terrorist attack (Cabinet Secretary’s notebooks).

  * Mrs Thatcher was always a ‘quick study’, and amazed people by how rapidly she made up for her pre-existing ignorance of a subject like state education. Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw, chairman of the Manchester Education Committee when Mrs Thatcher came into office, expounded the history and development of further education to her, and noticed how fast she picked it up: ‘If she’d had to learn Hebrew from scratch by the end of the week to save the nation, she’d have done it and been word perfect’ (letter from Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw).

  * The phrase ‘a new style of government’ was taken from a Conservative pamphlet of that name by David Howell, later Mrs Thatcher’s Energy Secretary, published shortly before the election with Heath’s blessing. It was a very free-market document. It is thought to be the first British publication to use the word ‘privatization’, a policy that it advocated. See David Howell, The Edge of Now, Pan, 2000, pp. 341 ff.

  * Robert Armstrong (1927–), educated Eton and Christ Church, Oxford; joined Treasury, 1950; private secretary to R. A. Butler (Chancellor of the Exchequer), 1954–5; joint principal private secretary to Roy Jenkins (Chancellor), 1968; principal private secretary to the Prime Minister, 1970–75; Permanent Under-Secretary, Home Office, 1977–9; Cabinet Secretary, 1979–87; created Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, 1988. The two Armstrongs were not related.

  † Douglas Hurd (1930–), educated Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; joined FCO, 1952; political secretary to the Prime Minister, 1970–74; Conservative MP for Mid Oxon, February 1974–83; for Witney, 1983–97; Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1984–5; Home Secretary, 1985–9; Foreign Secretary, 1989–97; contested Conservative leadership unsuccessfully, 1990; created Lord Hurd of Westwell, 1997.

  * Working to rule is a union tactic of minutely following the office or factory rulebook so that normal service is disrupted.

  † John Davies (1916–79), educated St Edward’s School, Oxford; Conservative MP for Knutsford, 1970–78; director-general, CBI, 1965–9; Minister of Technology, July–Oct. 1970; Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, 1970–72; Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1972–4; Shadow Foreign Secretary, 1976–8.

  * Arthur Scargill (1938–), educated White Cross Secondary School and Leeds University; President, Yorkshire National Union of Mineworkers, 1973; President, NUM, 1981–2002; Honorary President from 2002.

  † This was not the ‘three-day week’, a formal arrangement imposed by the government from 1 January 1974.

  * Edward Du Cann (1924–), educated Woodbridge School and St John’s College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Taunton, 1956–87; Chairman, Conservative Party, 1965–7; Chairman, 1922 Committee, 1972–84. A leading figure in the City, he was ultimately discredited by his controversial financial record.

  † The 1922 Committee consists of all Conservative Members of Parliament. Its executive is drawn from the back benches. Its private meetings provide a forum for backbenchers and the chance to discuss matters with frontbenchers.

  ‡ It is true, however, that The Times reported that Mrs Thatcher was among those ministers who objected to the Industry Bill when it was published in May (The Times, 17 May 1972). The report is likely to have been correct, since David Wood, the paper’s political correspondent, was one of Mrs Thatcher’s few journalistic contacts at that time. He had known her father in Grantham.

  * Nicholas Ridley (1929–93), educated Eton and Balliol College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Cirencester and Tewkesbury, 1959–92; Minister of State, FCO, 1979–81; Economic Secretary to the Treasury, 1981–3; Secretary of State for Transport, 1983–7; for the Environment, 1987–9; for Trade and Industry, 1989–90; forced to resign after a frank interview criticizing Germany and the EEC in the Spectator, July 1990; created Lord Ridley of Liddesdale, 1992.

  † John Biffen (1930–2007), educated Dr Morgan’s School, Bridgwater and Jesus College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Oswestry, 1961–83; for Shropshire North, 1983–97; Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 1979–81; Secretary of State for Trade, 1981–2; Lord President of the Council, 1982–3; Leader of the House of Commons, 1982–7; Lord Privy Seal, 1983–7; created Lord Biffen, 1997.

  ‡ Jock Bruce-Gardyne (1930–90), educated Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford; Conservative MP for South Angus, 1964–74; for Knutsford, 1979–83; Minister of State, Treasury, 1981; Economic Secretary to the Treasury, 1981–3; created Lord Bruce-Gardyne, 1983.

  § John Nott (1932–), educated Bradfield and Trinity College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Cornwall St Ives, 1
966–83; Secretary of State for Trade, 1979–81; for Defence, 1981–3; knighted, 1983.

  ¶ Cecil Parkinson (1931–), Royal Lancaster Grammar School, Lancaster and Emmanuel College, Cambridge; Conservative MP for Enfield West, 1970–74; for Hertfordshire South, February 1974–83; for Hertsmere, 1983–92; Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, June–Oct. 1983; for Energy, 1987–9; for Transport, 1989–90; Chairman, Conservative Party, 1981–3 and 1997–8; created Lord Parkinson, 1992.

  * Walter Annenberg (1908–2002), businessman and philanthropist; US Ambassador to Britain, 1969–74.

  * Robin Butler (1938–), educated Harrow and University College, Oxford; principal private secretary to the Prime Minister, 1982–5; Second Permanent Secretary, Public Expenditure, Treasury, 1985–7; Cabinet Secretary, 1988–98; created Lord Butler of Brockwell, 1998.