In the gladiatorial combat of Prime Minister’s Questions, quick repartee, a ready wit and a feel for the mood of the House are vital skills for dominating the frequently boisterous atmosphere. Despite her earlier successes in parliamentary debates, Margaret Thatcher often lacked those skills while Leader of the Opposition. Time and again her troops left the chamber after PMQs feeling deflated. I recall one such down moment in the tea room when Cranley Onslow, later to become Chairman of the 1922 Committee, observed, ‘Hasn’t quite got the pitch of the wicket yet, has she?’ To which Nicholas Budgen replied, ‘It’s the pitch of her voice that’s more worrying’.10
Her shrill voice was a problem. She overcame it by taking lessons from a speech therapist recommended by Gordon Reece who taught her breathing techniques. These and the repeated chanting of the mysterious word ‘Ingakokka’ deepened her tones. Reece also tutored her for television appearances with visual recommendations such as, ‘Avoid lots of jewellery near the face … Watch out for background colours which clash with your outfit.’11
But while her style in the media improved, the substance of her speeches in the House of Commons did not. Some of her earliest parliamentary performances in her new role were a near disaster.
On 22 May 1975 she moved an opposition motion condemning the government’s failure to curb the accelerating rate of inflation. As this was 21.7 per cent and rising, her target should have been easy to hit. Instead, she delivered a turgid recital of statistics, which bored the House and offered no alternative policies. Harold Wilson had no trouble running rings round her. She had a bad press for the speech. The Sunday Times described it as ‘a disappointing flop … it lacked fizz and originality and her voice had its usual garden-party quality’.12
The combination of disappointing parliamentary performances and a divided shadow cabinet meant that Margaret Thatcher’s base of support in Westminster looked insecure. Willie Whitelaw loyally deflected the rumblings of criticism, but even he became affronted from time to time by her confrontational methods of man-management. One such flashpoint in the early weeks of her leadership was the sudden dismissal of the Director General of Central Office, Michael Wolff.
This row was pointless and easily avoidable. Michael Wolff was a decent and thoughtful Conservative Party administrator who had previously been a Telegraph leader writer and chief researcher to Randolph Churchill for the first two volumes of his mammoth filial biography of Sir Winston. The only fault in Wolff was that he had been appointed to the top job at Central Office by Ted Heath. For this reason alone Margaret Thatcher sacked him.
What she did not seem to know was that in the wiring of the Conservative establishment, Michael Wolff and his wife Rosemary belonged to a network of powerful friends. None of them would have quarrelled with the leader’s right to have her own man at the head of the party’s administration. But there are right and wrong ways of making such changes. Instead of easing Wolff out, or changing his responsibilities, she fired him with a summary brutality that made her look spiteful. That was the view of Jim Prior who nearly resigned over the issue.
Also protesting vigorously on Wolff’s behalf were Willie Whitelaw, Peter Carrington, Ian Gilmour and Geoffrey Howe. In retrospect, the fuss looked like a storm in a tea-cup, but at the time it was a serious revolt. On the night of the firing, I recall an incandescent Jim Prior banging the wood panels on the walls of the division lobby and refusing to vote for an opposition motion on the Finance Bill as he said over and over again, ‘Vindictive and nasty! Vindictive and nasty!’13
Perhaps The Times was right to describe Michael Wolff’s dismissal as ‘the act of a down-right fool’.14 It was a misjudgement on Margaret Thatcher’s part to have stirred up major ill feeling in her shadow cabinet over a minor personality issue. It was an early warning sign that the way she handled people could make her seem an unpleasant character.
By contrast, she was running a happy ship in her private office. She inherited one private secretary from Ted Heath, Caroline Stephens, who organised her diary and became her closest and most trusted aide for the next fifteen years. Another key figure was her constituency secretary, Alison Ward. She looked after the personal aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s life, such as hair appointments, clothes and liaison with her family. From the Daily Telegraph came twenty-five-year-old Richard Ryder, an exceptionally talented writer and administrator.* He gradually emerged as the Leader of the Opposition’s de facto chief of staff, his influence waxing as Airey Neave’s waned. Richard Ryder and Caroline Stephens married in 1981 after an office romance that was discreetly encouraged by their boss. Margaret Thatcher in the role of Cupid sounds unlikely casting, but in this matchmaking endeavour her arrows found their mark.
This inner team formed a genuine affection for the leader they served so well. They noticed one or two interesting features of her evolving character. Some of these qualities became well known in her Downing Street years, while others never quite emerged in full view yet remained a central part of Margaret Thatcher’s personality.
First, she was a good listener in one-on-one meetings when she wanted to learn something, but a poor one in large groups where she wanted to get her way. The shadow cabinet was the uneasiest of these wider gatherings, partly because she talked too much herself and paid too little attention to the views of her colleagues.
Second, she could be surprisingly disorganised in her allocation of priorities and time. She was a poor delegator of tasks, and over-generous in the attention she paid to those who agreed with her. She had her early court favourites, such as Alfred Sherman from the CPS, the Soviet expert Robert Conquest and the former Labour MP turned News of the World columnist Woodrow Wyatt.
Third, beneath her outer carapace of simple certainties and self-belief there lay an inner level of insecurity and vulnerability. Some of her insecurities were social. On her way out to a dinner party given by Lord and Lady Carrington, she anxiously asked her secretary Caroline Stephens, ‘Do you think I should wear white gloves?’15
She had other sartorial qualms and questions before attending events at which members of the royal family would be present. She was helped with some of these problems by advice from Lady Tilney, the wife of the Conservative MP for Liverpool Wavertree, Sir John Tilney.† However helpful that advice was, Margaret Thatcher, the Grantham dressmaker’s daughter, always had a good dress sense of her own. As Guinevere Tilney told her friends, ‘Margaret has an instinctive flair for colours and quality designs’.16
Another area of insecurity was intellectual inadequacy. Margaret Thatcher felt she had a good brain but not a great mind. This humility gave her an exaggerated respect for exceptionally clever colleagues such as Keith Joseph and Ian Gilmour. Realising that she had to live off other people’s ideas, she was constantly seeking reassurance from intellectuals who would provide her with the philosophical fire-power she needed to reinforce her own instincts.
As for her vulnerabilities, she rarely showed them outside her inner circle of core aides. She could be hurt by personalised criticism, by family worries, by condescension from arrogant parliamentarians and by rejection from people she wanted to be on her side of the argument but who were not. She showed her bruised feelings in a revealing interview with Woman’s World in September 1978:
‘There are times when I get home at night and everything has got on top of me when I shed a few tears, silently, alone.’ She says she is a very emotional person. ‘I have never known a person to be insensitive about things which are wounding and hurtful and I am no exception.’17
These weaker aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s personality made her a gentler and more attractive figure to the handful of people around her who were in the know. Because her leadership of the opposition was so insecure in the early days, the chinks in her armour were visible to insiders. The impregnable, invincible Iron Lady was a character who had yet to make her appearance, not only in the pages of the Red Star newspaper (which invented the nickname in 1976), but also on the stage of Briti
sh politics. To many waiting in the wings, she was still thought of as an interim leader who might not last the course.
Although her speeches were not going down well at Westminster, she was having more of an impact in the country. But even to the most adoring of Tory audiences she was repeating old formulas in new words. There was no ideological revolution of fresh ideas and new politics which eventually emerged as Thatcherism. She promised to fight socialist extremism, to champion thrifty self-reliance and to create wealth before it was distributed. The only novelty in such views was that they were being proclaimed by a leader who was a woman. If she had a more radical agenda in those early days, it was almost invisible.
She had one or two campaigning successes. On her first visit to Scotland she was given an enthusiastic welcome by some of the largest crowds ever seen in the centre of Edinburgh. In South London she broke the then convention that party leaders did not campaign in by-elections when she came down to support the Conservative candidate, Peter Bottomley, in West Woolwich. When he won the seat in June 1975 by overturning a Labour majority of 3,500 it was the first electoral success the party had achieved for two years. Margaret Thatcher was so excited by this first sign of progress under her leadership that she gave a vigorous ‘V’ for victory sign to the media. To their amusement, she put her two fingers up the wrong way round. Even after her mistake was explained to her, she had difficulty in understanding why she had made an obscene gesture.
Despite the Woolwich by-election reducing the government’s overall majority from four to three, inside 10 Downing Street there was a growing confidence that the novice Leader of the Opposition was proving no match for the experienced Prime Minister. Harold Wilson’s principal briefer for Prime Minister’s Questions was Bernard Donoughue. He recalled:
We couldn’t believe our luck. At first Harold was quite nervous about having to face a new Tory leader. He resented Heath’s departure, saying, ‘I’ve watched that man for ten years, and I know every move he’s going to make. Now I’ve got to learn the whole thing over again’. But after a few months of dealing with Margaret he knew she couldn’t lay a glove on him. He was too wily and she was too wooden. She just kept reading out prepared questions, which weren’t holding the House.18
Her lack of spontaneity at the despatch box was causing a slow burn of discontent on the back benches behind her. The murmurings were increasing. Questions ranging from ‘Have we made a terrible mistake?’ to ‘How can we help her to do better?’19 kept being asked among Tory MPs.
As one symptom of these troubled times I recall an anxious discussion at the summer meeting of the Alf Bates club. This was a dining group of Conservative colleagues who had been elected to the House in 1974. It was organised by Peter Morrison, who humorously named the club after a long-haired Labour MP whose left-wing views had particularly riled him. Besides Peter and myself, its members included Michael Spicer, Sir George Young, Alan Clark, Alastair Goodlad, Tim Renton, Leon Brittan, John Moore and several others. The question that we discussed at the end of July 1975 was, ‘Will the lady last?’
On the whole, we thought she would, at least for a while. But there was no ringing endorsement of our leader except from her uber-loyalists, Morrison and Moore. All of us wanted her to succeed, yet there was hanging in the air a worried feeling that she might prove to be only a temporary occupant of her position. As we dispersed for the long summer recess of 1975, the trumpets for Margaret Thatcher were giving an uncertain sound.
PERSONAL GLIMPSES
In the summer of 1976, I began dating Carol Thatcher. Our relationship became serious, lasting for over three years. It was not greeted with unqualified enthusiasm by the Leader of the Opposition, aka ‘Mum’. She advised her twenty-two-year-old daughter to be careful of an involvement with the thirty-three-year-old bachelor MP for Thanet East. This warning was given after she had seen us talking rather too intensely over a jug of Pimm’s at a summer drinks party hosted by John Moore and his wife Sheila, at their home in Wimbledon.
Romancing the boss’s daughter was always likely to be a risky journey, but young love is oblivious to risk. What Stendhal calls L’égoisme à deux takes no notice of warnings or chilly noises of parental disapproval. Carol and I pressed on regardless. After a few months there was a thaw in the temperature, and I was invited to Sunday lunch at Scotney Castle, a National Trust property in Kent where Margaret and Denis Thatcher rented a flat.
My welcome was mixed. Denis was characteristically genial, asking knowledgeable questions about ‘my patch’, his phrase for my constituency. Atlas sold a lot of paint in Ramsgate to customers I knew, so that was a point of conversation. By contrast, Mark was in a sulk, so made no conversation at all. Carol was cross with her brother. Ignoring these sibling tensions, Margaret wanted to talk shop. This meant a serious conversation about the Middle East, ‘a subject on which I seem to remember you think I don’t know very much about’, she said with a glare rather than a twinkle in her eye. She had just come back from a visit there, thankfully not to Sinai but to Damascus and Cairo.
After a monologue on the politics of the region, she mentioned that after her meeting with the Syrian President, Hafez al-Assad, his Ambassador, Adnan Omran, had presented her with an elaborately jewelled insignia in Islamic calligraphy. ‘There it is’, she said, pointing to a golden frame hanging above the mantelpiece in the dining room. ‘Is your Arabic good enough to tell me what it says?’ Perhaps unfortunately, my limited linguistic skills were equal to this task. ‘It says: “There is only one God and his name is Allah”.’
‘Oh my goodness!’ said Margaret, looking flustered, evidently unaware that she had been exhibiting the first teaching of the Koran on her wall. ‘Just as well we didn’t ask the padre to lunch’, joked Denis.
‘Or the constituents from Finchley’, I added in the same bantering tone. This was supposed to be a light-hearted reference to the high percentage of Jewish voters in her Finchley electorate. Margaret was not amused. Fixing me with a gimlet stare, she said in a reproving tone, ‘I will invite anyone I like to lunch here’.
Despite my faux pas, I enjoyed this and other visits to Scotney. Denis and Carol were warm and endearing characters. Neither adjective seemed appropriate for Margaret, yet she was attractive because of her looks and her energy. She was an excellent if monomaniac hostess, insisting on doing all the wine pouring, cooking and washing up herself, interspersed with imperious commands to the onlookers such as, ‘Watch out!’, ‘Move your elbows, dear!’, ‘Look sharp!’, ‘Out of the way!’ and ‘Drink up!’
Her specialities were Sunday roasts and coronation chicken. She bustled around the kitchen at high speed like a television chef on fast forward. With the same acceleration, she cooked breakfast every morning for Denis, who could get pernickety if his bacon was not grilled in a certain way.
My perception of life chez Thatcher was that it was never dull but never relaxed. Even when politics were not being discussed, intensity ruled. Superwoman ran her home super-efficiently. She bossed her family around a great deal, but none of them seemed particularly responsive to her commands. Denis withdrew behind the sports pages of the Daily Telegraph. Carol withdrew from the line of fire of too much maternal criticism. Mark wanted too much maternal attention. Dysfunctionality ruled. Everything in their lives was subordinated to the challenges of being Leader of the Opposition. Margaret was permanently as taut as a piano wire. She seemed admirable, but abnormal. I was probably at fault too, for being excessively on edge.
As an occasional insider to Thatcher family life, I sometimes saw unexpected sides to the outwardly tough matriarch. Three worth mentioning were glimpses of her frugality, vulnerability and maternal affection.
The frugality appeared on an evening when I bought four tickets for a performance at the National Theatre of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. She had somehow assumed that I had been able to get these tickets as free house seats for Denis and herself, because my sister Maria Aitken was in the cast playing the lead role
of Elvira. When Carol corrected this impression during the evening, Margaret declared, ‘I insist on going halves with you’. I brushed this offer aside, and despite her not-so-mild protests I refused to tell her what the cost of the tickets had been. She was not so easily thwarted. The next day, in my pigeonhole at the Members’ Lobby, she sent me a blank cheque signed ‘Margaret H Thatcher’. She became cross with me after discovering from her bank statement that I never filled it in or cashed it.
The vulnerability was well hidden, but it was there. One night, after an 11.30 p.m. vote in the House, I dropped Carol home at Flood Street. Margaret was on her own in the sitting room reading some papers. I put my head round the door to say goodnight, and saw that she was red-eyed, visibly upset. So I asked what was the matter. ‘Nothing really’, she sniffed. ‘One of our colleagues was unbelievably unpleasant to me in the division lobby … said I was wrecking the party … ’ This seemed such an unlikely cause of tears that I treated it rather insouciantly. ‘He was probably pissed’, I said. ‘Don’t let it get to you.’ ‘I hurt too, you know’, she said, getting up and leaving the room. It was the first sign to me that the Iron Lady had a soft centre.
As for maternal affection, I had observed early on in my relationship with Carol that the usual outward signs of mother–daughter tenderness were rare. However, there was an inner bond of some strength as the following story of a skiing weekend illustrated.
In the winter of 1978 Carol was given a ten-day holiday in the Swiss resort of Verbier by her parents. I planned to come and join her there for a long weekend in the middle of it. Because of problems with airline seat availability at the height of the skiing season, my travel plans only worked if I flew back to London on a Monday evening flight from Geneva. Unfortunately, after the tickets had been bought, this particular Monday turned out to be a date unexpectedly chosen by the opposition for some contentious parliamentary voting. It required all Conservative MPs to be present in the House on a running three-line whip from 3.30 p.m. onwards. As I could not be on the ski slopes and in the division lobbies at the same time, and as no alternative flights were available, my weekend with Carol in Verbier had to be cancelled, to our great disappointment.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 24