Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  Apart from Mortimer, fiction was slower than other creative media to try to get to grips with the Thatcher era, although in The Satanic Verses (1988), Salman Rushdie* did make a passing reference to ‘Mrs Torture’. Most Thatcher-related novels appeared after her departure from office, and tended to use her as a straw woman to attack rather than a character to capture with the magic of fiction. What a Carve Up! (1994) by Jonathan Coe, for example, is a novel about a horrible Yorkshire family called the Winshaws, whose members embody perceived Thatcherite evils – the greedy banker, brutal farmer, unscrupulous art dealer, hypocritical tabloid journalist, arms dealer. GB84 (2004) by David Peace is a ferociously anti-Thatcher thriller, set against the backcloth of the 1984–5 miners’ strike and celebrating resistance to the ‘massed power of the British state’ at the Orgreave coking plant. Even novels with unpolitical subjects – Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), for example – tended to create Thatcher-era settings that were dystopian, brutal, materialistic and decayed. In her novel The Birds of the Air (1980), Alice Thomas Ellis made fun of the English propensity for seeing human beings as animals:

  Even the leaders of the political parties had come to resemble little animals. On the left an old teddy [Michael Foot] … On the right a mouse – a shop mouse, her head stuck in a yellowed meringue, a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutritionless, platitudinous parings of a grocer’s mind.34

  Sue Townsend’s great comic creation, the disaffected teenager Adrian Mole, even wrote a poem in his fictional diary, entitled ‘Mrs Thatcher’:

  Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?

  Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep?

  Do you weep like a sad willow?

  On your Marks and Spencer’s pillow?

  Are your tears molten steel?

  Do you weep?

  Do you wake with ‘Three Million’ on your brain?

  Are you sorry that they’ll never work again?

  When you’re dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue?

  Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?35

  Few authors tried to imagine sympathetically characters who were typical of the Thatcher era, such as ‘upwardly mobile’ members of the working class, people setting up their own business for the first time, or women who, because of Mrs Thatcher’s example, felt empowered to pursue more ambitious careers. There is no reason, of course, why novelists should have felt under any pressure to be pro-Thatcher, but it is interesting that they seem to have felt strong pressure to be anti-, and disappointing artistically that they made so little effort to address what underlay the changes in both British life and the wider world in her time. As the novelist and critic D. J. Taylor put it, ‘Scarcely a single contemporary novelist bothered him- or herself to try and comprehend the nature of Thatcher’s appeal.’36 Although seeing her from an extremely hostile point of view, David Hare, speaking for the theatre, agreed. The left had not seen Mrs Thatcher coming, he thought. They had predicted a left-wing revolution, and social breakdown, in the 1970s, but ‘Suddenly, the person who wants change is coming from the right. There was a massive feeling of being wrong-footed. History took a different turn. I had nothing to say.’37 It was only after about six years of Mrs Thatcher in office, Hare believed, that left-wing writers began to understand the full extent and (from her point of view) success of her project. He believed that she stood for selfishness, which he tried to capture in Pravda: ‘Murdoch was at the heart of her venture, opening up the press to the nihilists.’38

  One novelist actually interested in Mrs Thatcher’s appeal was Philip Hensher,* who drew on his experiences as a clerk of the House of Commons at the end of Mrs Thatcher’s period in office for his second novel Kitchen Venom (1996). It contains arresting vignettes of Mrs Thatcher’s dominance of Parliament and the sense that, as a character called Jane says when surveying the Cabinet, ‘It’s only her that’s at all remarkable.’39 The book, which never names Mrs Thatcher, notes her parliamentary technique – how she used the hubbub of Prime Minister’s Questions as ‘the ritornello to an aria’,40 for example. There are passages in the novel in which Mrs Thatcher’s inner thoughts are imagined, such as her rare experience of having ‘half an hour to spare’, and even some in which she is the narrator. Although Hensher was, by his own account, ‘a weak-willed lefty’41 at the time, he believed that the older generation of writers was much too obsessed with the question of Mrs Thatcher and social class and was inattentive to the way Britain had altered on such a large scale. So ‘Paradoxically, she was fresh material’:42 as a novelist, ‘You always want a clear voice. The Gloriana mode. It is a wonderful voice to carry a novel.’43 A homosexual, Hensher was also conscious of Mrs Thatcher as a ‘gay icon’. She had a ‘magnificent, diva-like presence’ and ‘the quality of transformation’44 about her appearance.

  A paperback edition of Kitchen Venom shows a picture of the prime ministerial feet in high-heeled shoes treading on a cigarette. This is drawn from Hensher’s description of how Mrs Thatcher walked: ‘When she walked, she seemed to extinguish a cigarette beneath every pace; in her walk, it could be seen that she was in the right.’45 He was not the only novelist to observe her gait. Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Line of Beauty (2004), perhaps the best-known fiction set in the Thatcher era so far published, tells the story of a young gay man, Nick Guest, experiencing a world that is grander and more glamorous than his own. The setting is the mid-Thatcher period of 1983 to 1987, the height of her power, and Nick, as lodger in the elegant house of a rising Tory politician called Gerald Fedden, witnesses some of it. The high point for Fedden is when he finally persuades Mrs Thatcher to come to a party held at his house, and she ends up (improbably) dancing – ‘getting down rather sexily with Nick’. Describing Mrs Thatcher’s entry to the party, Hollinghurst writes, ‘She came in at her gracious scuttle, with its hint of a long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power.’46 This observant if superior way of describing Mrs Thatcher suggests how fruitful might have been fiction which imagined the circumstances and feelings of her and those like her as they fought to rise in the world.

  Mrs Thatcher herself was not interested in how she was portrayed in fiction or on stage. This was not because she lacked egotism and pride, but because she had long learnt from hard knocks going back to the days of ‘milksnatcher’ not to waste emotional energy on thinking about how others saw her, particularly if those others were not important in winning votes. A rather sad result of this was that the drama she most disliked – Anyone for Denis? – was by no means the least friendly. This was simply because she saw it, and did not see the others. The play, which opened in May 1981 and closed, on grounds of taste, during the Falklands War, was the stage version of the Private Eye ‘Dear Bill’ letters. These, composed by John Wells* and Richard Ingrams,† purported to be written by Denis to an old chum, Bill, who was widely taken to be W. F. (Bill) Deedes,‡ at that time the editor of the Daily Telegraph, describing the slings and arrows of life under ‘the Boss’ or ‘the old girl’. Mrs Thatcher was persuaded against her will by Tim Bell and others that it would look sporting for the couple to attend. They went to a special charity performance, in which press and audience watched intently for the Thatchers’ reaction. The detectives, frightened of being photographed laughing at jokes against their principal, insisted on sitting inconspicuously behind her and made Bernard Ingham sit beside her.47 Mrs Thatcher was, in Carol’s words, ‘acutely offended’48 by the show, though she dutifully kept up the pretence of enjoyment, saying ‘Marvellous farce’ to the press through gritted teeth as she left. In her dislike of it, she took her cue from Denis, who was irritated to be portrayed as a drunken halfwit (though the adjective did not always lack foundation). The spoof letters themselves, however, did much to humanize the Thatcher marriage in people’s minds. They also performed the useful service of convincing people that Denis was not the sort of person who could possibly have any political influence over his wi
fe, although this was not the case. As Bill Deedes put it, ‘Private Eye made people think he could not be a serious figure: that put everyone off the scent.’49

  Generally, however, Mrs Thatcher stuck to her line of paying little attention to her cultural depictions. This was almost certainly the psychologically correct thing to do. In her old age, the novelist Sebastian Faulks met her at a lunch party. Faulks told her she should read The Line of Beauty, since she appeared in it. She had not heard of the book, but listened attentively. As they parted, she said to Faulks, ‘The Line of Duty: I shall remember that.’50 It was a characteristic mishearing, illustrating the gap between her way of thinking about the world and that of British metropolitan literary culture.

  There were, of course, writers, intellectuals and people from the world of the arts who did admire Mrs Thatcher. In an interview for Graham Turner’s article, Kingsley Amis,* who, like many refugees from earlier leftism, was particularly attracted to Mrs Thatcher, praised her for one of the things which most enraged her cultural critics: ‘the less the Government was involved with the arts, the better it was for the arts.’51 He detected a certain jealousy of her on the left: ‘Another thing – she’s a woman and the Labour Party were supposed to have the first woman prime minister – the Tories have nipped in and stolen that.’52 Barry Humphries,† writer, comedian and inventor of Dame Edna Everage, made a similar point when commenting after her death: ‘Whenever feminists have complained in my presence about neglect of female high achievers … I always like to mention brilliant Margaret Thatcher. It always makes them furious.’53 The novelist Peter Ackroyd‡ complained of the ‘patronising snobbery’ of those who despised Mrs Thatcher,54 while Noël Annan,§ the leading academic and historian of British intellectual life, said that it ‘was not true that there was no place for intellectuals in her scheme of things’:55 it was merely that she had changed who those intellectuals were. She also, said Annan, had ‘a contempt for intellectuals as managers, and with justice’.56

  Even the novelist John le Carré,¶ very far from Mrs Thatcher politically, found himself thinking well of her after the Falklands War: ‘I never thought I would find her admirable, but I do somehow. Even though the immediate consequences, at least, are so wretched.’57 She flatteringly encouraged le Carré to consider accepting an honour, which he turned down. Although himself instinctively on the left, he did not like the way left-wing writers ‘cast her as the nanny, the tyrant’.58 To him, she seemed ‘a totally democratic person. Naturally adversarial. Entirely, in her own way, fair.’ He also found her very attractive, sensing that she ‘gave a cry for protection which made me feel like one of her courtiers’.*

  Intellectuals with direct experience of real tyranny thought of Mrs Thatcher very differently from her left-wing critics in Britain. She was greatly admired, for example, by Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident (see Chapters 8 and 18), and by Vladimir Bukovsky,† the science student and writer who was released from a Soviet prison in 1977 and granted asylum in the West. ‘She loved arguing,’ Bukovsky recalled, ‘Russians love arguing. People from Eton and Oxford were too polite to argue with a lady. Sometimes it would come to shouts and bangs on the table. I could see she enjoyed it.’59 He felt he could trust her: ‘She was an intensely loyal person, which always amazed me. We’d have a great quarrel [usually about her closeness to Gorbachev, of which Bukovsky vehemently disapproved], and then she’d go round introducing me in most flattering terms.’ In Bukovsky’s view, ‘She was very cerebral. Zero intuition. One hundred per cent intellect. Reagan was the opposite.’60 And yet she did not understand ideology, he thought: she simply had the correct perception that Communism was terrible. ‘She was more man than all the others,’ he judged, regarding this as a high compliment.

  Mrs Thatcher was indeed well capable of using her powers of flattery upon intellectuals, which were made stronger by the fact that her admiration was usually genuine. She liked what she called ‘wordsmiths’, who could express things better than she believed she could, and also ‘big minds’. When, for example, in 1986, the present author argued with her that she should not build the proposed new British Library but should revamp the old Reading Room of the British Museum, she replied that ‘David Eccles‡ wants it. He is a big mind. When a big mind wants something, I do not stand in his way.’61 This admiration for mental greatness was particularly apparent in her attitude to leading scientists, of whom she felt in awe. ‘The only time I can remember seeing Mrs Thatcher in a flap, behaving just like a schoolgirl, meek and mild,’ recalled Charles Powell, ‘was when her former Oxford tutor, the Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin,* came to tea at No. 10.’62 She was interested in leading intellectuals from all disciplines. When Allan Bloom’s† book The Closing of the American Mind appeared, to great éclat, in 1987, George Walden,‡ then her universities minister, suggested that she should meet him. He was keen to get her to share Bloom’s enthusiasm for non-utilitarian studies. Mrs Thatcher was receptive to Bloom’s thesis that relativism in American education, far from opening new horizons for students, had disabled their ability to learn the canon of great thought. She invited Bloom to Chequers (with Walden) for lunch. When they arrived, Denis took Walden aside and asked him, ‘ “What the hell have you given Margaret to read that kept her up till 2.30?” At the lunch she asked detailed questions of Bloom, and listened carefully to the answers … I was impressed. Bloom was dazzled.’63 Walden believed it was an example of Mrs Thatcher’s genuine interest in such matters: ‘She had had no reason to see this man – there was no press release – it was politically useless, but she was interested.’64

  Philip Larkin admired Mrs Thatcher because ‘Her great virtue is saying that two and two make four, which is as unpopular nowadays as it has always been.’65 He liked the toughness of her politics, but he, too, enjoyed her admiration. He was very pleased when she offered him the poet-laureateship, although he turned it down. Writing to Robert Conquest in her praise for being so understanding about this, Larkin extolled her beauty, but added: ‘The country will let her down, too idle and selfish.’66 To the diarist James Lees-Milne, she was ‘the greatest prime minister of the century’.67

  Views differed strongly about Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the arts. The artists Gilbert and George* expressed themselves succinctly: ‘We admire Margaret Thatcher greatly. She did a lot for art. Socialism wants everyone to be equal. We want to be different.’68 Some praised her enthusiasm, and even, in the area of music, her serious interest. Claus Moser,† the chairman of the Royal Opera House, recalled receiving her on one occasion in the royal box at Covent Garden for Il trovatore: ‘She arrived looking marvellous – as though she didn’t have a care in the world, unlike the rest of us who were all tired after a day’s work. Il trovatore, as it happens, has one of the most complex plots in all opera. I certainly can’t fathom it. Just before we took our seats, Mrs Thatcher said to me: “There’s a little scene in the second act which I don’t quite understand.” Of course I couldn’t explain it to her.’69

  Mrs Thatcher was always anxious to acquire more cultural knowledge. In August 1984, while staying with Lady Glover in Switzerland, she went to the town of Anif in Austria to have lunch with the celebrated German conductor Herbert von Karajan‡ at his house there. Karajan, who disliked small talk, was delighted by the way she immediately started interrogating him: ‘How, she asked, does a conductor create a sense of ensemble when the players are in different relationships with one another and at different distances? How do you best control an orchestra: is it by force of will or by persuasion? Is a conductor necessary?’70 He so enjoyed this line of questioning that, having answered, he adopted a similar technique on her: ‘Now it is my turn to ask you about your profession.’71 He asked her comparable questions about the exercise of power and the nature of authority, making the lunch continue much longer than expected.

  In Whitehall, Mrs Thatcher was notorious for noticing interesting works of art and furniture in the government
collection and hijacking them for display at Downing Street. On one occasion, contrary to Whitehall rules that only specialist handlers could move a pair of valuable vases, she happily picked up one and ordered Robert Armstrong to carry the other.72 She formed a friendly relationship with the director of the Government Art Collection, Wendy Baron, and asked her to provide works of art which ‘displayed the greatness of Britain’.73 Dr Baron provided her with portraits of scientists, like Sir Humphry Davy, and Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, who invented the first algorithm intended to be carried out by machine, and a bust of Grantham’s other most famous citizen, Sir Isaac Newton; also portraits of Wellington and Nelson, which she had demanded. Under the influence of Lord Gowrie, she was persuaded to display more modern work as well, including a sculpture by Henry Moore. She had idiosyncratic doctrines of her own about paintings, for example that they should have what she called ‘focal points’, by which she really meant little scenes of particular interest (hence an admiration for L. S. Lowry). Once, looking at a painting of the Camden School that Dr Baron had produced, she said, ‘That’s not a very good picture. I was taught at school one must never have more than two bright colours in one painting.’74 The only picture that Mrs Thatcher specifically herself discovered and persuaded the government fund to buy for Downing Street was a (bad) painting of a sunset over water by Winston Churchill. She believed that Churchill had hung it in his study at Chartwell. She loved her surroundings. One August, thinking that Mrs Thatcher would be away, Dr Baron visited No. 10 to check up on the collection. She was surprised to come upon the Prime Minister busily dusting her cabinet full of porcelain on loan from the V&A. ‘You know, Dr Baron,’ she said, ‘one of the things I shall most miss when I leave here is having all these beautiful pictures.’75 She thought pictures were too expensive to buy herself, but she collected some things privately – Chinese scrolls, for instance, and Crown Derby – and was always eager to learn more, asking to be taken round museums by their directors incognita to be instructed about their collections.76 John Pope-Hennessy, however, who, as director of the V&A when she was Education Secretary, had escorted Mrs Thatcher round the collection, recalled that she ‘left me with the unambiguous impression that she was blind’.77