The Iron Lady
Page 48
First, Mrs Thatcher had no scruples about using the Prime Minister’s power of patronage in a frankly partisan manner to reward her supporters. She revived the award of honours for political services – abandoned by Harold Wilson – and gave them in abundance: peerages to discarded ministers and an average of four or five knighthoods a year to long-serving MPs. She was even more blatant in honouring the proprietors and editors of loyal newspapers and other friendly journalists. And then there was a steady flow of honours to businessmen and industrialists in recognition of donations to Tory party funds, a well-documented correlation unequalled since the time of Lloyd George.
One of MrsThatcher’s most provocative announcements on taking office was to declare her intention of reviving hereditary honours, which had been in abeyance since Macmillan’s invention of life peerages in 1960. Having asserted the principle, however, she did nothing about it for four years, and then undercut the point by awarding them only to those – Willie Whitelaw and George Thomas – with no heir to inherit. She also wanted to give a hereditary title – the only sort he would accept – to Enoch Powell (who also had only daughters), but was dissuaded by Whitelaw. The following year Macmillan, at the age of ninety, belatedly accepted the earldom traditionally due to former Prime Ministers. But that was the extent of the revival until 1992 when John Major was persuaded, allegedly at Mrs Thatcher’s personal request, to award a baronetcy to Denis. Though she herself took only a life peerage in 1992, this bizarre resurrection ensured that on Denis’s death in June 2003 Mark inherited his title.
A second area where Mrs Thatcher was blatantly partisan was in making appointments to public bodies. From the chairmanship of nationalised industries to the dozens of obscure quangos, boards and advisory bodies of which British public life is made up, she took a close interest in getting into place men (and occasionally women) who were, in the phrase indelibly associated with her premiership, ‘one of us’ – that is, if not actually paid-up Conservatives, at least sympathetic to her purpose. She had equally little compunction about getting rid of people she found unhelpful, like the Governor of the Bank of England, following differences over monetary policy in 1980 – 81. His replacement was a former Tory leader of Kent County Council and chairman of the National Westminster Bank, with no central banking experience at all, but a sound monetarist.
Perhaps the Governor of the Bank needed to be a supporter of the Government’s central policy. But Mrs Thatcher’s interest in public appointments extended far beyond economic matters into the area of culture and the arts. Potential bishops and potential governors of the BBC were blackballed on frankly political grounds, and even nominations for trustees of national galleries were closely scrutinised and sometimes rejected on a hint from Downing Street. Right across the board Mrs Thatcher used the power of patronage systematically to assert her hegemony in every corner of national life.
A change of government in 1997 made very little difference. Tony Blair inherited the new conventions of Mrs Thatcher’s patronage state and simply exploited them more ruthlessly than even she had dared, for the benefit of New Labour. Thus Thatcherite hubris in the 1980s met the nemesis it deserved in the late 1990s. But the civilised tradition of bipartisanship – hitherto one of the unsung decencies of British life – had been destroyed for ever.
Rival queens
One question that continued to fascinate the public about the phenomenon of a woman Prime Minister was how she got on with the Queen. The answer is that their relations were punctiliously correct, but there was little love lost on either side. As two women of very similar age – Mrs Thatcher was six months older – occupying parallel positions at the top of the social pyramid, one the head of government, the other head of state, they were bound to be in some sense rivals. Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to the Queen was ambivalent. On the one hand she had an almost mystical reverence for the institution of the monarchy: she always made sure that Christmas dinner was finished in time for everyone to sit down solemnly to watch the Queen’s broadcast. Yet at the same time she was trying to modernise the country and sweep away many of the values and practices which the monarchy perpetuated. She and Elizabeth had very little personally in common – though Denis and Prince Philip got on well. The Queen was said to dread her weekly audience with her Prime Minister because Mrs Thatcher was so stiff and formal. It was not, as some suggested, that Mrs Thatcher was too grand, rather that she displayed an exaggerated reverence. ‘Nobody would curtsey lower,’ one courtier confided;12 and the Queen wondered ‘Why does she always sit on the edge of her seat?’13
If the Queen dreaded Mrs Thatcher coming to the Palace, however, Mrs Thatcher loathed having to go once a year to Balmoral. She had no interest in horses, dogs or country sports and regarded the outdoor life – long walks and picnics in all weathers – which the Royal Family enjoyed on holiday, as ‘purgatory’.14 Though she frequently told interviewers that she loved nothing better than a country walk, she never had any suitable shoes and had to be forced into borrowed Hush Puppies or green wellingtons.15 She could not wait to get away and on the last morning was up at six as usual, with her thank-you letter written, anxious to be off as soon as Denis was ready. The Queen was almost certainly equally glad to see her go.
More seriously, while Mrs Thatcher regarded having to attend the Queen as a waste of time – by contrast with every other engagement in her day, she would read the agenda only in the car on the way to the Palace – the Queen had real grounds for resenting Mrs Thatcher. First, she feared that the Government’s policies were wilfully exacerbating social divisions: she worried about high unemployment and was alarmed by the 1981 riots and the violence of the miners’ strike. Second, she was upset by Mrs Thatcher’s ill-concealed dislike of her beloved Commonwealth: she was disturbed by the whole South African sanctions controversy which regularly pitted Britain against all the other members, with embarrassing calls for Britain to be expelled. At the Commonwealth heads of government conference every other year, from Lusaka in 1979 onwards, the Queen worked hard to make herself the focus of unity while Mrs Thatcher often seemed bent on splitting the organisation apart.
The Queen also worried about defence cuts affecting the survival of cherished regiments with which she or other members of her family had connections: while Mrs Thatcher was concerned solely with military capability, Her Majesty was more interested in cap badges and mascots. She worried about Mrs Thatcher’s hostility to the Church of England, of which she was the Temporal Head, and about the effect of constant cost-cutting on other voluntary organisations of which she was patron. Sometimes Mrs Thatcher was obliged to defer to her. But she refused to allow the Queen to visit the European Parliament or – following her own triumphant visit – the Soviet Union. More than by any of these minor tussles, however, the Queen could not fail to be irritated by Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly regal style.
The impression that Mrs Thatcher was developing monarchical pretensions first gained currency when she took the salute at the forces’ victory parade through the City of London at the end of the Falklands war.Then the following January her visit to the islands was unmistakably a royal progress to accept the thanks and adoration of the population. Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in the Observer that she was developing a parallel monarchy, becoming ‘a new style elective executive monarch, as distinct from the recessive ceremonial one.’16
From now on the trend only increased. Her foreign tours were more and more like the Queen’s, with all the trappings of crowds and walkabouts, little girls presenting bouquets, guards of honour and nineteen-gun salutes. As the Queen grew older and less glamorous – royal glamour being increasingly concentrated on the young Princess of Wales – Mrs Thatcher became more powerful and wreathed in myth, the very embodiment of Britannia. To the crowds who came out to see her, she far more than the Queen now embodied Britain.
She was also quicker off the mark than the Palace in visiting the scene of disasters. Whenever there was an accident or terrorist attack Mrs Thatche
r always dropped everything to go at once – as her schedule allowed her to do: when the IRA bombed Harrods at Christmas 1983, for instance, she and Denis were attending a carol service at the Festival Hall, but immediately left at the interval. By contrast, Downing Street briefed, ‘the Royal Family couldn’t be relied on to go’ at all, and certainly not for several days.17
Mrs Thatcher was embarrassed by reports of differences with the Palace and did her best to play them down. Strongly though she supported the monarchy, however, both with loyal words and with public money, the indirect effect of Thatcherism during the 1980s was not kind to the Royal Family. On the one hand, the management of the royal finances – like those of other national institutions – came under closer scrutiny as the old deference waned: palaces, yachts, trains and retainers once taken for granted now had to be justified on a value-for-money basis. On the other, the media – led by the increasingly uninhibited Murdoch press – threw off all restraint in prying into the private lives and marriages of the younger members of the family. The 1990s was a difficult decade for the House of Windsor.
As Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher drew skilfully on a range of feminine roles – housewife, mother, nurse, headmistress – to project her message; but the longer she went on, the more she grew into the role of queen, which she could play so much better than the frumpy occupant of Buckingham Palace. The Falklands transformed the Iron Lady almost overnight into Boadicea, the warrior queen who had fought the Romans. Increasingly she came to identify with Elizabeth I – Gloriana – who had presided over England’s first great period of mercantile expansion and national assertion, surrounded by her court of flatterers and buccaneers, all eager to do her bidding and dependent on her favour. She encouraged the comparison by her susceptibility to handsome protégés like Cecil Parkinson, flatterers like Woodrow Wyatt, favourite businessmen like Lord King; and even adopted the chilling phrase, when one of her ministers displeased her, ‘Shall we withdraw our love?’18 In her memoirs she echoed Elizabeth by writing that ‘I did not believe I had to open windows into men’s souls.’19 And it was surely no accident that at the crisis of her premiership in November 1990 she appeared at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the City wearing a defiantly regal, high-collared Elizabethan dress, looking like Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love.
Above all she increasingly used the royal plural. In truth the widespread mockery she attracted for this habit is a bit unfair. In her early years she was criticised for the opposite habit of talking about the Government in the first person singular. ‘Unemployment is the most difficult problem that I face,’ she told Sue Lawley in 1981. ‘I do feel deeply concerned when I have people who want jobs and can’t get them. But I know that I can’t conjure them out of thin air.’20 She even talked possessively about ‘my coal mines’21 and ‘my housing estates’.22 This language inevitably provoked allegations of personal rule. Nevertheless, when she was later criticised for using the plural she protested that she did so because she was ‘not an “I” person’:
I am not an ‘I did this in my Government’, ‘I did that’, ‘I did the other’ person. I have never been an ‘I’ person, so I talk about ‘we’ – the Government… It is not I who do things, it is we, the Government.23
Sometimes, when she wanted to stress collective responsibility, this was true. At other times, however, she distanced herself from the Government and used the first person singular to give the impression that its failings had nothing to do with her. In fact she veered wildly between singular and plural, sometimes in the same sentence, as in her assurance to Sue Lawley that she cared about unemployment: ‘I wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.’24 Her every waking thought was so taken up with the business of governing that she really made no distinction between herself as an individual and herself as leader of the Government, or more specifically the leader of the travelling circus which accompanied her.
Increasingly, however, she began to use the plural when she quite unambiguously meant herself alone. ‘We are in the fortunate position in Britain,’ she told an interviewer on her way to Moscow in 1987, ‘of being, as it were, the senior person in power.’25 ‘When I first walked through that door,’ she declared in January 1988,‘I little thought that we would become the longest serving Prime Minister of this century.’26 And most famously, the following year, again on the steps of Downing Street: ‘We have become a grandmother.’27
The cult of Maggie
By the middle of the decade Mrs Thatcher had become an institution, a seemingly permanent part of the national landscape, around whom there grew up a personality cult unlike anything seen in Britain before. For a start she gave her name to an ‘-ism’ as no previous Prime Minister had done: a relatively clear, if sometimes contradictory body of ideas, attitudes and values to which her personality gave unusual coherence. She exerted a hold on the national imagination that went far beyond politics. Old and young alike could not imagine life without her. When elderly patients were asked by psychiatrists to name the Prime Minister, it was said that for the first time in forty years they always got it right. Meanwhile, small boys were reported wistfully asking their fathers: ‘Dad, can a man be Prime Minister?’ To her admirers she was ‘Maggie’, to her opponents simply ‘Thatcher’ – but both held her responsible for everything, good or bad, that happened in what a flood of books inevitably called the Thatcher decade: half the population believed that she was single-handedly saving the country, the other half that she was single-handedly wrecking it.
Love her or hate her, she was inescapable, like a force of nature. Alternative nicknames proliferated, invented by Julian Critchley, Denis Healey and others:‘The Great She-Elephant’, ‘Attila the Hen’, ‘Catherine the Great of Finchley’, ‘the Maggietollah’ (by analogy with Iran’s Islamic revolutionary dictator, Ayatollah Khomeini), or just ‘That Woman’. But all were too contrived and none replaced the simple ‘Maggie’ which in itself contained all the different personas she had adopted. There is a wider range of resonant role models available to a woman politician than to a man, and Mrs Thatcher played them all, from housewife and mother (even, to the troops in the Falklands, a pin-up), through a variety of female authority figures to domestic battleaxe.When her enemies tried to turn these images against her, they only enhanced her aura of power. The domestic battleaxe bullying feebler men fitted into a well-loved British comic tradition immortalised in music hall and seaside postcards; while the image of the cruel queen – Rider Haggard’s chilling She (‘She Who Must be Obeyed’) or Kali (‘the grim Indian goddess of destruction’) – merely lent her a semi-mythical capacity to inspire fear that is not available to a male Prime Minister. Male tyrants are simply loathed, but a powerful woman attracts fascinated admiration from both sexes.
The media were equally fascinated by the feminine side of her personality: they were always on the lookout for tears or other signs of weakness which might reveal ‘the woman within’. She famously wept twice on television, once when Mark was lost in the desert in 1981, and again in 1985 when telling Miriam Stoppard about her father’s deposition from Grantham council. Yet to the despair of feminists, Britain’s first female Prime Minister did nothing to feminise the male world of politics. She never had any truck with equal opportunities or political correctness. ‘What has women’s lib ever done for me?’ she once demanded.28 The virtue she admired above all others and claimed for herself was strength. ‘If you want someone weak,’ she once told Jimmy Young, ‘you don’t want me. There are plenty of others to choose from.’29
Yet at the same time she was very feminine, and derived much of her power from exploiting her femininity. ‘I like being made a fuss of by a lot of chaps,’ she once remarked.30 Whether by calculation or instinct, she was skilful at wrong-footing men who did not know how to argue with a woman as bluntly as they would have with another man. They never knew whether she was going to mother them, flirt with them or hit them over the head – metaphorically – with her handbag. Her handbag (that most feminine appendage, carri
ed by practically every woman from the Queen downwards) became an important component of her image. Other Prime Ministers have had their identifying props, like Churchill’s cigar or Wilson’s pipe, but Mrs Thatcher’s handbag became much more than that. It was the physical symbol of her authority, like a royal mace or sceptre, which announced her presence. It was also a miraculous receptacle, like Mary Poppins’ portmanteau, from which she could seemingly produce at will the killer quotation or statistic to win an argument. And above all it became an active verb, so that when she belaboured some offending minister she was said to ‘handbag’ him. Nothing more potently embodied a woman’s dominance over a Cabinet of men.
She enjoyed denigrating men while asserting the superiority of women. Yet she found very few others of her own sex worthy of promotion either within government or the wider public service. Janet Young, the only other woman to sit briefly in her Cabinet, was sharply disparaged in her memoirs as not up to the job.31 Lady Young in turn commented that Mrs Thatcher simply did not like women.32 She claimed special virtue for women, but liked being the only one. Increasingly as she got older she did not encourage other women to follow the example of her own career, but told them that their special role was as home-makers and mothers, bringing up the family. She supported the right of women to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists or politicians, she told the Conservative Women’s Conference in 1988. How could she not? But, she went on, ‘many women wish to devote themselves mainly to raising a family and running a home. And we should have that choice too.’33