During the final days of the campaign she exuded the air of Prime Minister-in-waiting with increasing confidence. On the last Sunday before polling day, there was a rally of Conservative trade unionists at Wembley. She entered the hall to a chorus of ‘Hello Dolly’ – with new words by Ronnie Millar and recorded by Vince Hill. It began:
Hello, Maggie,
Well, hello, Maggie,
Now you’re really on the road to Number 10 …
Fourteen lines later it ended:
So here’s to you, Maggie,
Give ’em the old one-two, Maggie,
Maggie, we’re right behind you all the way!21
The penultimate line puzzled the star of the show. ‘What does “give ’em the old one-two” mean? What’s an old one-two?’ she asked. Millar had to explain that it was a boxing term for a knockout.22
Margaret Thatcher liked winning arguments with knockout blows rather than on points, but that was not how she presented her case in her final party political broadcast. She decided to play it safe – literally.
Her last words to the nation on the eve of the election were not just softly, softly; they were sugary, sugary:
Let us make this a country safe to work in; let us make this a country safe to walk in; let us make it a country safe to grow up in; let us make it a country safe to grow old in … May this land of ours, which we love so much, find dignity and greatness and peace again.23
‘Amen’, said one of my irreverent supporters in Thanet East to a group of us gathered round a television set to watch this performance. It was a let-down. The breathy pauses reeked of ham acting stuffed with sentimentality. ‘It’s not quite like the Margaret Thatcher I know’, I commented to my party workers.24
But how well did anybody know her?
ON THE EVE OF POWER
During the election I had two telephone conversations with Margaret Thatcher. They were mainly chats about what the canvass returns were showing in my constituency (a clear swing to the Conservatives of about 5 per cent) and how her speeches were playing on television. Among other topics she complained about the invisibility of her shadow cabinet, singling out the exception of Teddy Taylor, who she said was showing himself to be ‘a bonny fighter’ in Scotland.
These exchanges took place during the visits of Carol who was staying at my house in Thanet for much of the campaign. After the second call the thought struck me that the next time I spoke to Margaret she would be Prime Minister. She sounded totally confident of this destiny when I wished her good luck. ‘Not luck. We’ll win because we deserve to win’, she said.25
Her certainty triggered a mood of uncertainty in me. Even after four years of scrutiny as Leader of the Opposition, I thought she would arrive in 10 Downing Street as the ‘Unknown Prime Minister’. Neither her colleagues nor the country had really come to terms with her extraordinary personality, let alone the impact it might make on unforeseen events. I had spent more time with her at closer quarters than most back-benchers, but even so I was making the mistake of seriously underestimating her. Yet this underestimation of Margaret Thatcher was widely shared in 1979, partly through ignorance and partly because she had kept some aspects of her personality and plans carefully hidden.
I remember quite well what I thought about her on the eve of the election. It was a mixture of the intriguing, the exciting and the worrying. If my picture now seems too negative with the wisdom of hindsight, it was made up not only of my own observations but also of many parliamentary and personal views, which were insider talk at the time.
On the parliamentary front, I saw Margaret Thatcher as the least collegiate politician I had ever met. This was because she had no friends. Naturally she had legions of acquaintances with whom she was friendly, and a handful she trusted. But these were professional relationships. She could work with anyone if it served her purpose, but she relaxed with no one. She had no interests beyond politics. The concept of a disinterested personal relationship or a private hinterland was beyond her ken.
The intensity of her focus on the political tasks in hand seemed both admirable and alarming. Admirable because there was a huge job to be done in pulling Britain out of the slough of despond and disintegration into which it had descended. Alarming because government was thought to require a team effort, and she was no team player. Could she hold together her cabinet colleagues, her party supporters and ultimately the electorate while delivering the medicine that would bring the country back to recovery? Could she win over the House of Commons as Prime Minister?
Many people, including a large section of her parliamentary party, feared that she might be too confrontational a leader to achieve these goals.
Confrontation came naturally to her. ‘I don’t think we should bother too much with the centre ground’, she said in an unguarded moment during a meeting of the CPG at my house in 1977.26 ‘I couldn’t waste any time having internal arguments’, she told the Observer a few weeks before the election in the context of needing a cabinet of like-minded colleagues.27 This must have been the reason she so fiercely resisted Peter Thorneycroft’s suggestion that she should share a platform with Ted Heath in the closing stages of the campaign.
By chance, Ted Heath came down to visit his father and stepmother in Broadstairs the weekend before election day. I took a walk with him from Will Heath’s house in Dumpton Park Drive down to a pub in Viking Bay. For the previous three weeks Ted had been a highly visible figure on the nation’s television screens. Late in the day he had transformed himself into an exemplary loyalist, speaking mainly on foreign affairs. There was speculation that he might be signalling a willingness to be the next Foreign Secretary. Without asking about this directly, I said that his contribution to the campaign effort had made many people hope that there could be reconciliation in the air between him and Margaret Thatcher.
‘Hmm …’, responded Ted Heath. ‘Are they really saying that?’ I nodded. There was a long silence. ‘She’d find it difficult’, he eventually said. ‘She’s a hater, you know. Probably hates me.’ I was bold enough to say that I thought it looked the other way round. ‘She can’t separate the political from the personal, you see’, Heath responded. ‘She always takes the narrow view. Doesn’t realise that you have to make compromises. She bears grudges.’28
Although this was rich coming from him it was probably an accurate view. In private I had heard Margaret Thatcher being scathing about MPs whose main fault seemed to be that they had stood against her in the election (Jim Prior and John Peyton), or stood up to her in arguments (Michael Heseltine). She could get surprisingly personal. ‘In the shadow cabinet she had to win every single argument and ram it home,’ said her admirer Norman St John-Stevas, ‘and she could be quite bitter about those who she disagreed with.’29 But in line with the conventional hypocrisy of politics she was pleasantly agreeable to these same colleagues in public.
Another exercise in her art of dissembling was that Margaret Thatcher presented herself in the election as a moderate consensualist. There were no signs that she would confront the miners, privatise huge swathes of industry, scrap incomes policy or demand rebates from the European Union. Yet she had been quite willing to talk privately about such ideas. She just kept them in the closet, along with her personal likes and dislikes. Everything was subordinated to winning the next election.
This dissonance between the public and private Margaret Thatcher extended into personal issues. I thought she was a more attractive character than the world perceived. I saw her as courageous, kind, feminine and considerate to the least important people in her orbit. Yet I knew there was also an unpleasant streak in her, which manifested itself in her bullying manner towards colleagues she thought were being slipshod in their preparations for policy discussions. At least she only punched people who boxed at her weight.
On the good side, the greatest plus was her courage. This was visible not just on the big stage, where she dared to challenge Ted Heath for the leadership and delivered brave speeches o
n foreign and domestic policy. She was also fearless in her approach to a host of smaller decisions. To give just one example:
In 1978 I helped to organise Richard Nixon’s first visit to Europe following his resignation from the presidency after Watergate. At that time he was an international pariah. The Foreign Secretary, David Owen, tried to block his private visit. The Speaker of the House of Commons cancelled a planned reception for him. Two ex-prime ministers, Ted Heath and Harold Macmillan, refused to meet the former President.
In the middle of all these rejections from the great and the good, I asked Margaret Thatcher whether she would be willing to see Nixon. She replied unhesitatingly, ‘Of course I would be delighted to meet him’. When I reported her attitude to the nervous Speaker, George Thomas, he did a volte-face about the cancellation of his party. ‘What a woman! What courage!’ he exclaimed. ‘That puts a completely different complexion on matters. I think I shall give my reception after all.’ At Speaker’s House Margaret Thatcher struck up a good relationship with Richard Nixon, later receiving him in 10 Downing Street when she became Prime Minister.30 It was not the first or the last time that her ‘infection of a good courage’31 changed events.
Another plus was her kindness. She had a soft touch for anyone down on their luck, ill, bereaved or suffering any kind of adversity. Once she became the Iron Lady, this image eclipsed her gentler side. But compassion was a real part of her private personality, despite all the noise in the opposite direction. I saw this myself in several small ways: concern for my dying godfather, Selwyn Lloyd; a couple of kind notes when I was in hospital; caring for Airey Neave’s widow, Diana; sending flowers and letters to the families of other sick or dying colleagues; insisting the Central Office staffers took days off when they had family problems such as a sick child. Her later image as an uncaring prime minister had some political validity, but at a personal level she cared.
One other aspect of the lesser-known Margaret Thatcher was her consideration for those who worked for her. In those days, the Leader of the Opposition’s office was an overworked, highly stressed crucible of controversy. I knew two of the key figures working there quite well – Richard Ryder, the de facto head of her private office, and Caroline Stephens, her personal assistant. Clam-like in their discretion, they were experts in managing her personality. It was a more tumultuous force than they ever let on, but equally forceful was the mutual respect. Just as no man is a hero to his valet, no political leader is without flaws to their private office, but she was something of an exception to this adage.
Margaret Thatcher was always a considerate boss. She could be short on apologies after she had gone over the top during a drama, but to her staff she was long on gentleness and kindness. Those two words are not naturally associated with the Iron Lady, but in her time as Leader of the Opposition they were true.
As for her feminine side, this was obvious in many ways starting with her good dress sense, her eye for colours and her interest in curtains, fabrics and furnishings. I remember when she came to a family lunch in my mother’s home, how she spent five minutes commenting with some expertise on a hand-painted Chinese wallpaper in the dining room, running her fingers delicately over the flow of the artist’s brush strokes.
As for other aspects of her femininity, it did not require much in the way of male imagination to see Margaret Thatcher as a woman of sensuality as well as strength. We were photographed walking away from Westminster Abbey after Selwyn Lloyd’s memorial service. Taken shortly before the general election of 1979, her hat is tilted at a jaunty angle; her confident eyes, her wide hips, her full yet trim figure and her elegant ankles all convey the impression of a fine-looking woman.
Being a woman political leader caused huge reactions in the political and media arena, but I could see that this almost unique status was of little interest to her. She was underwhelmed by the cause of feminism. She asked for and gave no quarter in arguments with her male colleagues. This put them at a disadvantage because they did not know how to answer her vigorous point scoring, let alone her diatribes.
She was at her most obnoxious when tearing a strip off a colleague, partly because she had no idea how to do this, except by going on and on with increasing unpleasantness.
Denis, who took his fair share of tongue-lashings, once said to me, ‘You just have to let her bollockings flow over you. Even the right royal ones don’t last that long.’32
On one occasion when I received a right royal bollocking from Margaret Thatcher while she was Leader of the Opposition, it was an alarming experience. Late one evening in the House of Commons, she called me into her office and in tones of fury erupted: ‘I hear you told Willie Whitelaw he was like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Well, let me tell you …’ Three minutes later, by which time the flow of molten lava had covered Willie’s war record, disloyalty to colleagues, my arrogance, his hurt feelings, the importance of party unity and goodness knows what else, I finally got a word in edgeways.
I replied that I had not said what she thought I said. This seemed to infuriate her even more. Larger rockets were fired in my direction. But I stood my ground and insisted that my comment had merely been that the opposition had made ‘a Pavlovian response’ to a government announcement about the handling of complaints against the police. This was some way from attacking Willie Whitelaw personally.
Margaret Thatcher took no notice. She banged on as if I had compared her deputy to Adolf Hitler. ‘But it’s in Hansard’, I protested. ‘When you read it you’ll see that its mild stuff and not offensive. I’m sorry if Willie took it the wrong way.’ The realisation that my criticism of Whitelaw had not been a private ad hominem row but a public argument about policy on the floor of the House of Commons slowed her down – but not much. Mount Vesuvius went on rumbling but stopped erupting. The bollocking was over.
The following day the official record confirmed that my comment had indeed been a mild and impersonal one. Perhaps it was a misjudgement on my part, but nothing that remotely justified all that rage from Margaret Thatcher. Within a week she was going out of her way to be pleasant to me – which I sensed was her way of correcting her over-reaction. She hated to admit she had been in the wrong.
This minor incident was not uncharacteristic of Margaret Thatcher with her dander up. There were several colleagues who had been bruised by her voluble and personalised criticism. Ironically, one of them was Willie Whitelaw, who in 1976 moaned to friends, ‘I have never been spoken to that way in my life’, after she had lambasted him for not knowing his Home Office brief properly.33
There was a special skill in handling Margaret Thatcher which few of her political colleagues acquired in opposition, although one or two became adept at it in government. She had fewer people around her between 1975 and 1979 who knew how to cope with her volatility. They were Caroline Stephens, Richard Ryder, Ronnie Millar, Gordon Reece and Tim Bell. In their different ways they each brought out the best of her by understanding through the prism of her femininity not only her high peaks of achievement but also her low moments of vulnerability. And of course there was Denis. He put up with a lot but he was the rock of trust on which her ultimate confidences were reposed.
As polling day loomed, there was a growing sense that Britain was facing a watershed election. Whatever their political allegiances, most people knew that we could not go on with the economic and political failure that had characterised the locust years of the 1970s. One key figure who understood that the tectonic plates of political Britain were shifting was James Callaghan. In the closing phase of the campaign he made one or two comments to his staff that revealed his understanding of what was happening in the mood of the electorate. When his speech-writer served him up a draft that included a personal attack on his opponent, he rejected it, saying, ‘I’m not going to go for Mrs Thatcher like that. In a week or so she may be Prime Minister of Britain.’34
Bernard Donoghue, the Prime Minister’s closest political aide, detected a growing respect in Callaghan’s min
d for what Margaret Thatcher was saying in her election speeches and broadcasts. Even when the polls suggested the gap between the parties was narrowing Callaghan remained privately sceptical about his own prospects. Driving back from a Labour Party rally in the last week before polling day, Donoghue offered the view that victory could yet be theirs if the momentum continued. As the car rounded Parliament Square, the Prime Minister disagreed:
Every thirty years or so there comes a sea change in politics … Then it does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves. I suspect there is now such a sea change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.35
That sea change was the final ingredient in Margaret Thatcher on the eve of the election. She was riding to power on the crest of a wave. The force was with her, and it was exciting to watch. She generated her own electricity which both attracted and repelled. If you were anywhere near her field you felt the current. You sensed that she was going to give the nation a shock – but would it energise the body politic or make it fall apart? She was sure of the answer, but most members of her party in Parliament, whatever they might hope or fear, were much less certain.
VICTORY
There was no lack of certainty about the result in Margaret Thatcher’s mind as polling day dawned, although she professed to be nervous. After casting her vote at nine in the morning in Chelsea Town Hall for the Conservative Candidate Nicholas Scott, she tried a laboured jest: ‘We never count our chickens before they are hatched, and we don’t count No. 10 Downing Street before it is thatched.’36 She wrote the line herself. Jokes were still uncertain instruments in her hands.
The polls and the papers were good. Her most ardent new supporter in the media, the Sun, for the first time urged its largely Labour readership, ‘Vote Tory This Time – It’s the Only Way to Stop the Rot’.37 Rupert Murdoch had initially been anti-Thatcher in her early days as opposition leader, but scenting her success, he had come round. So had the swing voters. All the final opinion polls put her in the lead by margins of between 2 and 10.5 per cent. But she was careful to suppress her optimism as she spent the afternoon doing the usual tour of committee rooms in her Finchley constituency. Then she returned to Flood Street for the unusual luxury of a nap.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 31