Although Mrs Thatcher was no intellectual, she was ‘passionately attracted by ideas’. This was why she fought shy of the government machine, although she often admired and trusted individual members of it. She liked to see ideas ‘in their original form, uncluttered by bureaucratic processing. She seized on what to her was a new idea with all the avidity and enthusiasm of a parched traveller, emerging thirsty from the desert to be presented with a goblet of ice-cold water.’ For this reason, she was no respecter of persons and, though she could be most alarming in her dignity of office, ‘she was probably the least pompous of all British Prime Ministers,’ welcoming ideas whether they came from a Cabinet minister, an academic, an entrepreneur, ‘or indeed the doorkeeper’.
Coles asked himself what motivated her. First, he concluded that it was her upbringing, especially what she had learnt from her father, and her consequent commitment to work, even when it entailed sacrifice of herself and others: ‘She always had a stricken conscience that if she had spent more time with her children, their lives would have been easier.’106 He added, rather tentatively, the idea that ‘had the emotional side of her character been fully satisfied, she would never have developed the prodigious energy and determination that are two of her strongest qualities.’ He was implying that never, in her marriage or in any other relationship, had she known the full force of sexual passion or unguarded love.
David Goodall, another senior civil servant who wrote a private account of Mrs Thatcher – in his case, after she had left office – had less natural rapport with her. As a strong sympathizer with Irish nationalism very concerned to solve the problem which he considered had been caused by the partition of Ireland, he disliked Mrs Thatcher’s strong, if somewhat confused prejudices in the other direction. He worked closely with her in the Cabinet Office from 1982 to 1984 and quite closely from 1984 to 1987, when he was Deputy Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office and dealt with everything pertaining to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. ‘Like so many of those who served under her, I liked, admired, and was repelled and exasperated by her in about equal measure. In retrospect, however, and on the whole, the admiration predominates.’107
He liked, for example, the fact that she could be teased. On one occasion, fed up with objections by officials to what she wanted to do, she exclaimed, ‘ “Don’t keep saying ‘No, no, Prime Minister.’ ” We substituted “But, Prime Minister”. “But, but, but; too many buts,” she complained. “If we can’t say no and we can’t say but, how are we to disagree with you?” I asked. She had the grace to laugh.’
Her interest in small matters or seemingly unimportant people was notable. When Goodall was appointed high commissioner in India in 1987, Mrs Thatcher saw him to wish him well. After a tour d’horizon of India, including her proclamation that its large middle class ‘can pull all the rest up: that’s what middle classes do’, she turned to the subject of the servants’ quarters in the Delhi High Commission. ‘As the former colonial power, our servants shouldn’t be less well looked after than the Germans’ or the Americans’. And you have such a nice head bearer there – such a nice head bearer. So if you want my help bashing the Foreign Office over the head to improve the servants’ quarters, don’t hesitate.’108 The head bearer, Kacheru, remained a preoccupation of hers. Some years after her resignation, she expressed outrage that he had not been given an adequately high honour; and she sent him a present.
There was something likeable and comic about her unpompous, immediate expression of what was on her mind to anyone who happened to be present. Early in her time as prime minister, Goodall was invited to brief her before a meeting with the Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Schmidt. He entered 10 Downing Street with Michael Palliser, the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office. Mrs Thatcher greeted them in the hall:
‘What do you think of my new carpet? Much better than that dirty old coconut matting. By the way [to Palliser], have you got any lamps? I need some new lamps for the Pillared Room.’ We stood reverentially on the edge of the carpet, contemplating it, when the front door opened and Lord Carrington [at that time Foreign Secretary] came in, looking rather cross and carrying a bundle of papers. ‘Peter, you’ve just walked across a new and expensive carpet.’ Carrington looked baffled. ‘Carpet? What carpet?’ ‘And Peter, have you got any lamps?’ ‘Lamps? Lamps? Prime Minister, you’re turning into an absolute magpie.’109
‘What I liked’, said Goodall,
was her downrightness, her clarity of mind, her ability to cut to the heart of a problem … and the courage and resolution with which she stuck to her guns. She was stimulating, capable of kindness and could be fun. What was less attractive was her narrowness of vision and above all what seemed to me a certain ungenerosity of spirit: she bridled at the word ‘magnanimity’ and the idea itself seemed alien to her.110
Robin Butler, one of her closest aides, was in many ways an admirer who came to believe that the only thing that history would remember about him and many of his colleagues was that they had worked for Mrs Thatcher. But he shared some uncomfortable feelings about her. ‘My heart always fell when I had to sit next to her,’ he recalled. She had no small talk, and he felt ‘at risk’. Dealing with her face to face was ‘like feeding a fierce animal’.111
Although almost no women had formal power during Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, several were important in what might be called her court. They testified to aspects of her character which men tended to understand less well. In the opinion of Carla Powell, Charles’s vivacious Italian wife, who frequently gave Mrs Thatcher informal assistance with clothes and home decoration, ‘Everything about her was totally, totally feminine. She adored the details of clothes. I called her La Bionda [The Blonde] because she loved the boys [her private secretaries].’112 Mrs Thatcher liked the way they prepared her for interviews and public appearances, and ‘the boys’ seemed to understand this. Robin Butler used an equestrian metaphor about getting her ready for Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament: ‘It was important that there was the right amount of sweat on the flanks.’113 With Mrs Thatcher, Carla Powell continued, ‘everything was a woman thing’.114 It was important not to upstage the Prime Minister. She recalled being lectured by Robin Butler: ‘Remember that Mrs Thatcher is a woman, so don’t overdress as you usually do.’115 Because of her own attention to dress, Mrs Thatcher used to fret about her daughter Carol’s more casual attitude: ‘She wanted Carol to be better dressed. She looked as if she wanted to put her in a washing machine.’116 This was connected in Mrs Thatcher’s own mind, thought Carla, with her longing for her daughter to marry someone.* The subject of Carol, about whom Mrs Thatcher felt guilty, would bring tears to her eyes.† Her own marriage was undoubtedly strong and even, according to Carla Powell’s testimony, which differs in this from the consensus, flirtatious. She recalled a scrap of dialogue: ‘Denis: “You know I don’t like you dressed in black.” Mrs Thatcher: “I have to. I’m the Prime Minister.” Then Denis made a “Go on with you!” gesture.’117 According to Cynthia Crawford, however, the marriage was ‘not a huge love affair though they were great soulmates’ and Mrs Thatcher always felt uneasy about Denis’s first marriage, whose break-up had hurt him greatly. ‘Crawfie,’ she once said, ‘I shall always be only the second Mrs Thatcher’ (see Volume I, p. 110). For all her determination and success, she always suffered from insecurity.
Mrs Thatcher was ready to ‘use her femininity’.118 She could be ‘totally, utterly ruthless’, and part of this was to do with her idea of the role of her sex. Once she came across Carla Powell upset and crying over some argument. She tried to comfort her in her trouble and then said, ‘Carla, if a woman takes on a battle, she has to win.’ This was one of her strongest beliefs, and it may explain why she was not instinctively magnanimous. She believed men would close ranks against a woman: every inch had to be fought for. And yet this unyielding combativeness did not usually make her unpleasant to work for. She bestowed and received loyalty and ‘She gave everyone love.’119
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bsp; Even her demanding nature had its appeal. She had a surprising cosiness about her. On foreign trips in particular, she liked to have some of her secretaries – her ‘girls’ – about her.* Caroline Ryder, who went on several, recalled: ‘She wanted us around early morning, late at night, late afternoon, to talk to. We were her daughters.’120 Mrs Thatcher was always trying to find husbands for these younger women, often fastening on ‘suitable’ men who were, unbeknown to her, homosexual. She enjoyed gossip about such matters, especially about the absurdities of men in pursuit of women. Early in her leadership, for example, when Alison Ward told her how a young bachelor MP had made a ‘massive lunge’ at her in a taxi, scattering the contents of her handbag all over the floor, Mrs Thatcher ‘cried with laughter’.121 In such matters, her staff believed, she had learnt from early experiences of her own ‘how to handle things’.122 Although Mrs Thatcher had traditional views about marriage – she always disapproved of what were not then referred to as ‘partners’ – she was not personally censorious, preferring to see matters of love as part of the comédie humaine. She never pushed anyone out because of a sexual relationship, unless, as in the case of Cecil Parkinson, the exterior pressure became overwhelming.
Mrs Thatcher was often criticized by prominent women and by feminists for not doing enough for the cause of her sex. Certainly she was in no hurry to seek out and surround herself with female talent in Parliament. The testimony of individual women whom she knew, however, does suggest some solidarity with her sex. One example was Patricia Hodgson, who first came across Mrs Thatcher in the early stages of her career. In 1976, Patricia Hodgson became chairman of the Bow Group, the influential party ginger group, and, in March 1976, presided over its twenty-fifth-anniversary dinner, attended by the existing party leader and her predecessors – Heath, Home and Macmillan – an august quad which had never before been achieved. Careful preparations were made, and Patricia Hodgson checked with Mrs Thatcher about what she would wear in order to avoid any clash of clothes. It turned out to be the day of Harold Wilson’s resignation as prime minister, so this should have provided an opportunity for Mrs Thatcher, but in fact she performed badly in the Commons that day. She arrived at the dinner in a state of tension. To mark the grand occasion, the young Patricia had gone out and bought herself a cream oriental evening gown, forgetting her clothes agreement with the leader’s office. As she entered the room, Mrs Thatcher glared at her and snapped: ‘You said you’d wear blue.’ Presumably because of the unexpected rush of the day, she seemed ill prepared for her speech and spent the dinner saying and eating nothing, but scribbling her lines at the last minute. The tension was worsened by the fact that Ted Heath talked across the table to Macmillan within her hearing, shouting, ‘We’ve got to get rid of that dreadful woman.’ Mrs Thatcher’s speech was very poor, and she seemed anguished about it, going literally down on her knees to Home afterwards and beseeching, ‘Was it all right?’ It was not.123
The next day, Patricia Hodgson received a note of apology from Mrs Thatcher for her discourtesy the previous night, and an invitation to come and have tea. She accepted, and the tea – or sometimes dinner – became a regular annual event until, in 1985, Hodgson was made the secretary of the BBC. After the Corporation forbade further contact with the Prime Minister (see here) she and Hodgson had a ‘farewell’ lunch at Chequers at which they drank cheap Liebfraumilch. ‘It’s terribly good, you know,’ Mrs Thatcher told her. ‘It’s a special offer from the News of the World.’124 In these meetings, Mrs Thatcher occasionally asked her to help with the drafting of speeches, but otherwise appeared to have no ‘agenda’ in seeing her. She wrote her a couple of letters of support when she was experiencing a difficult pregnancy. Looking back at these various kindnesses, Patricia Hodgson said, ‘I ask myself “Why?” and I conclude that she simply wanted to maintain links with other women.’
Mrs Thatcher kept in mind the pressures which women could experience in a man’s world. On one occasion, her private office complained to her that too many ministers’ wives were trying to get in on their husbands’ official trips abroad ‘often with a fairly flimsy justification’.125 Would she intervene? ‘I think not,’ wrote Mrs Thatcher. ‘Some wives have a rotten time because husbands are away so much and late at the House so often that the odd visit is a kind of compensation.’ It should also be said, however, that most, though not all, ministers’ wives considered themselves more or less ignored by Mrs Thatcher. She visibly preferred the conversation of the men. She also did not necessarily take the woman’s side in questions of equality, and did not always realize that this might be held against her as indicating a lack of sisterly feeling. When the question of women priests came up, for example, she was instinctively against it, worrying that it would split the Church. One of her parliamentary private secretaries, Archie Hamilton, told her that, as a woman prime minister, she could not oppose the ordination of women. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what you are worried about: women are capable of greater spirituality than men and are less prone to sexual temptation.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Mrs Thatcher replied. Without conceding anything to Hamilton directly, she took his advice to heart and eventually came out in favour of women priests.126
A little later in Mrs Thatcher’s career, one woman analysed her by unusual means. Professor Alice Coleman, a geographer whose experiments in how to reduce crime by improving housing environments were later to interest Mrs Thatcher, was also a graphologist. Before she had met Mrs Thatcher, she subjected her handwriting to an extensive graphological analysis. It reported that Mrs Thatcher’s script showed her ‘highly intelligent’ and ‘clear-minded’, but without ‘mental imagination’: ‘She lays great stress on facts and objectivity, and replaces imagination by empathy and intuitive insight.’127 ‘She has a talent for getting work finished. In fact, she has no fewer than 28 traits that can be described as intensifiers to job completion,’ Professor Coleman thought. ‘Without being pernickety, she pays good attention to details, seeing the trees as important components of the wood.’ Professor Coleman even considered her to be ‘capable of warm emotions’, but added that ‘One effect of [her] strong willpower and self-control is that her emotional expressiveness does not reflect her inner warmth and generous nature. It is predominantly objective or even cooler, to an extent that might cause some people to regard her as cold and hard.’128 When she came to meet Mrs Thatcher, Coleman recalled that one thing particularly struck her, because it was rare in a politician: ‘She wanted to round out her knowledge. She wanted to find things out properly.’129
As if to confirm the left-wing caricature of her habits and attitudes, Mrs Thatcher became, while prime minister, a suburban house-owner. At Easter 1985, after a tour of five countries in eleven days, in which she lost her voice while speaking to the Sri Lankan parliament, and everyone involved had returned to Britain utterly exhausted, the private secretaries begged her for a rest and asked if they – and therefore she – could have Whitsun off. She agreed, but as the Whitsun recess began to approach, she started to talk of holding an economic seminar at Chequers. ‘If you let me go to Chequers,’ she wailed, ‘and don’t let me do anything over Whitsun, I shall die.’130 So the private office agreed to furnish one private secretary per day. Two of these days fell to Robin Butler. For the second, Mrs Thatcher had asked to visit the St Christopher Hospice in Sydenham, founded by Dame Cicely Saunders,* and the question arose as to what she should do afterwards. The hospice was near Butler’s house in Dulwich, and when he asked Mrs Thatcher what she would like, she asked if she and Denis could simply have ‘a quiet supper’ with the Butlers there. Robin’s wife Jill agreed, on condition that she would not have to entertain the Thatchers while getting supper ready, and so her husband took them for a walk in Dulwich Park, which was looking at its best with all its rhododendrons out. Because Mrs Thatcher was always interested in ‘new build’, Butler also arranged for her to see a development of executive houses which was going up beside the park. ‘I th
ought this was entertainment,’ he recalled. ‘It never crossed my mind this would be a purchase.’131†
The Thatchers, however, were in house-moving mood, and ready to be seduced, as prospective buyers often are in early summer. They had decided not to try to renew the lease on their house in Flood Street, Chelsea, and had sold the remainder of it the previous year. They then looked at a house in Kent Terrace, Regent’s Park, but felt stretched by the financial demands of its landlords, the Crown Estate. Mrs Thatcher believed she could not afford it. ‘Of course, you can. Borrow!’ advised Butler,132 but Mrs Thatcher, always cautious with her own money, was not inclined to go down the path that so many British people were then following under the Chancellorship of Nigel Lawson. ‘What happens if I die?’ she riposted to Butler.
So when she saw the Barrett home under construction, and interrogated a plasterer on a ladder – who only realized halfway through the conversation that he was talking to the Prime Minister – about how best to do the cornices, Mrs Thatcher was smitten with the place. This was to be their bolthole and their retirement home. It was within 10 feet of the Dulwich and Sydenham golf course, and Mrs Thatcher immediately persuaded herself that this would be very nice for Denis, though in fact he had played on the course, which has heavy clay, and had ‘absolutely loathed it’.133 For his part, Denis decided that it would be very nice for Margaret because she could ‘walk out and watch the Dulwich boys playing rugby’. ‘I wondered’, said Robin Butler, ‘how two people married to each other for so long could know so little about each other’s tastes.’134
Butler pointed out to Mrs Thatcher that she had arrived through Dulwich Park and had therefore not seen the much less pleasant route which she would have to take through Brixton (scene of the 1981 riots) to Westminster if she were to live there. His advice was ignored. The Thatchers bought the mock-Georgian five-bedroom house, 11 Hambledon Place, with the work still in progress, for about £350,000, shortly before her sixtieth birthday. She relayed to the media Denis’s view that it was very important ‘to get back into bricks and mortar’ because prices were shooting up. ‘For the first time in my life,’ she enthused to Woman’s Own, ‘I’ve got the kitchen I’ve always wanted … It’s going to be a country kitchen.’135 She may have fantasized a little about cooking in it. Her daughter Carol recalled from her childhood that if her mother ‘ever got any spare time from the flat-out pace of her life, she’d bake something’.136 Mrs Thatcher probably spoke the truth when she said that ‘planning the house and where everything will go will be the only relaxation I’ll have.’137 A decorator produced by the local Conservative MP Gerald Bowden* to help the Thatchers get the house ready for moving in in the autumn of 1985 was surprised, when he visited the house, to find the Prime Minister wearing a heavy workman’s apron and thick rubber gloves. She got down on a kneeling pad and started to work away at paint spots on the bare floorboards in readiness for the laying of the carpets the following day.138 Quite soon, the house was habitable, neatly and brightly furnished in the chintzy Peter Jones style which Mrs Thatcher favoured.
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