Ingham said:
If ever there was a Prime Minister who needed a Press Secretary it was he, because it became clear at my interview for the job that she had absolutely no interest in the media except to grumble about it. She talked non-stop on this theme for twenty minutes, and her only brief to me was to say that she wanted me to get over her policies to the people who would believe in them.11
This was an odd instruction to a professional civil servant who had never been a Tory voter. Ingham was a blunt-speaking Yorkshireman who had served as a labour correspondent for the Guardian before joining the Government Information Service. However, he had been drifting away from his Labour roots because of his antipathy towards the abuses of power by militant trade unions. ‘I’d had enough of us being laughed at as a country’, he recalled. ‘I wanted to see reform, which was what Mrs Thatcher was offering even though it was far removed from Toryism.’
The new Press Secretary was amazed by the lack of interest his boss took in newspapers. To overcome this he produced his own daily digest of press cuttings which he insisted she looked at every morning, usually sitting alongside her to make sure she did so.
The dossier was almost her only window on the media. Whereas most prime ministers tend to worry a great deal about their own press coverage, Margaret Thatcher was gloriously insouciant to it. However she did care about the impact of her policies. It was of no concern to her that they upset the liberal consensus of the commentators. ‘You and I, Bernard, are not smooth people’,12 she said to him early on in their relationship. This was an essential ingredient in their bonding. ‘She was straight, direct, and tactless – probably the most tactless woman I’ve ever met in my life’, recalled Ingham. He replicated these qualities when dealing, sometimes rather brutally, with the self-perpetuating oligarchy of political correspondents known as the ‘Lobby’. They had access to the daily Downing Street press briefings, which Ingham conducted unattributably in a colourful style that was strikingly personal. Becoming an advocate for the Prime Minister’s convictions with the zeal of a convert, he would think nothing of rubbishing a hostile reporter’s question as ‘bunkum and balderdash’, or of planting stories detrimental to ministers who were falling out of his boss’s favour. This last practice caused much grief inside the cabinet.
At one meeting of ministers in the autumn of 1980, the Prime Minister grumbled that her government was being damaged by a spate of leaks. ‘Most of them coming straight from here’, muttered Lord Soames in a voce that was far from sotto. ‘What did you say, Christopher?’ demanded the Prime Minister. The Leader of the House of Lords was bold enough to repeat his grievance, to which she retorted: ‘No. We never leak.’13 If she believed that, she believed anything.
As the economic climate worsened in 1980–1981, the practice of leaking and counter-leaking intensified. Bernard Ingham was a tougher player of this game than anyone else. His loyalty to the Prime Minister and his disloyalty to those members of her government about whom she had expressed doubts stretched the limits of civil-service neutrality. But she always protected him, and he always championed her. It was a relationship that transcended the usual boundaries. Nevertheless, through Ingham she did indeed ‘get over her policies to the people’. He was a vital and successful player in communicating what Margaret Thatcher stood for and believed in. This was largely because he came to share in the same beliefs. He thought of her as ‘a liberator’ who gave ordinary British people new freedoms, opportunities and prosperity.14
The most unorthodox source of strength in Margaret Thatcher’s first years as Prime Minister were the ‘voices’. This was the civil servants’ term for the shadowy and changing cast of characters who somehow communicated with her out of hours in unrecorded meetings or telephone calls, and through unofficial channels. As she loved to surprise, she would often cite these voices at important decision-making meetings by saying ‘I hear that …’ or by pulling a sheet of paper out of her handbag, from which she quoted as proof that she had authoritative sources of advice from experts outside the government machine.
Some civil servants were thrown by the ‘voices’. Others welcomed them as a sign that the Prime Minister was on top of a game other than their own. Her first Private Secretary, Kenneth Stowe, was delighted to discover that the Managing Director of Morgan Stanley, John Sparrow, was writing her a weekly report of the City’s reaction to the government’s economic policies. Various eminent industrialists like Sir Arnold Weinstock of GEC, Sir Hector Laing of United Biscuits, Sir James Hanson of Hanson PLC and Sir Marcus Seiff, Chairman of Marks & Spencer,† also had their own hot lines to her. So did Enoch Powell, who was brought in to see her by Ian Gow, via the back door of No. 10, for at least six unrecorded meetings with the Prime Minister during her first two years.15
At a less lofty level of political and economic advice, the cleaning lady of the flat above No. 10 was frequently mentioned as an authentic representative of vox populi. The most persistent telephone caller was Woodrow Wyatt, a former Labour MP, News of the World columnist, horse-racing expert and wide-ranging man about town. The private office dubbed him ‘the Concierge’ because he was always passing on so much gossip, but Wyatt was also her channel to Rupert Murdoch, and a strong reinforcer of her political convictions.
On the foreign-policy front there were many voices. The Foreign Office were disconcerted that she paid so much attention to calls from Senator Jesse Helms Jr., the right-wing chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She also listened to the Soviet expert Robert Conquest and the former Foreign Office minister in Harold Wilson’s government, Lord Chalfont. Paul Johnson sent her historical perspectives on issues of the day. Professor Peter Bauer of the London School of Economics advised her on the need to make drastic reductions in Britain’s foreign-aid budget. ‘Our aid is a process by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries’, he told her.16‡
An important foreign-affairs interlocutor who came into his own at the time of the Falklands War was Professor Hugh Thomas, author of a seminal book on the Spanish Civil War. He was chosen by her to replace Keith Joseph as Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies, which remained her favourite think tank. ‘Your main job is to keep Alfred under control’, said the Prime Minister, referring to Alfred Sherman, its research director. He was another of the private voices who bombarded her with memoranda, saying that her economic policies were not going nearly far enough.
Hugh Thomas wrote many speeches for Margaret Thatcher, a process that could be exhausting since she would argue fiercely about her ideas and the words she should use to express them late into the night. Thomas recalled:
I remember one particularly long discussion on whether the word ‘prone’ or ‘supine’ was right for the context of a speech. I really enjoyed working with her because of her directness, her original views and her interest in the historical roots of a problem. I think she regarded the preparation for a speech as the way to test her policies by intellectual debate.17
Once someone in her orbit was established as a ‘voice’, she would call them up to seek their opinions on a wide range of subjects, sometimes those on which they had no particular expertise. At an early stage in her arguments with Lord Carrington about how to handle Rhodesia, Hugh Thomas was surprised to have his kitchen supper interrupted by the Prime Minister on the line, asking him detailed questions about Ian Smith and Bishop Muzorewa.
‘Who on earth were you talking to about Rhodesia?’ asked Hugh Thomas’s wife, Vanessa, when the call had ended.
‘Margaret Thatcher.’
‘But you don’t know anything about Rhodesia.’
‘I don’t – but she trusts my judgement.’18
That was the point of the ‘voices’. They were people whose judgement she trusted, often much more so than the judgement of the major departments of state, like the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office. It was unprecedented for a prime minister to engage in so much second-guessing of her own mini
sters and officials.
Eventually, this brought her into serious conflicts, most notoriously at the time of the clash between her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and her economic adviser, Professor Alan Walters, in 1990.# But at the beginning of her premiership, her wide-ranging contacts with the ‘voices’ seemed a refreshing innovation. She clearly felt that to implement the reforms that were required to change Britain, she needed additional sources of advice in order to challenge the consensualist wisdom of Whitehall. Closed government was being challenged by open argument. It was an intriguing and attractive characteristic of the new Prime Minister.
OLD STRIPEY AND STUBBORNNESS
The red boxes of official papers sent up to the Prime Minister’s flat by her private office every evening included one of a noticeably different size and colour. It was known as ‘Old Stripey’, because it had a large blue stripe across its lid. Margaret Thatcher always opened this box first. Only she and her Principal Private Secretary had a key to it. This was because ‘Old Stripey’ contained daily top-secret reports from the intelligence services and other highly sensitive material deemed to be for the eyes only of the Prime Minister.
She was known by her staff to be ‘utterly fascinated’19 by the product from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Her fascination increased because she built a close relationship with two outstanding security chiefs of that era. One was Sir Maurice Oldfield, ‘C’ or head of the Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. The other was Sir Antony Duff, Director-General of MI5, the domestic Security Service.
Also, in the age of IRA terrorism, she needed regular briefings on the threats in Northern Ireland. A description of how intensely she applied her mind to these issues came from Kenneth Stowe, who brought in the Northern Ireland Office’s Director and Controller of Intelligence, David Lanthorne, to brief her on a specific problem. ‘I vividly recall this meeting because it completely dispelled the legend that Margaret Thatcher was a bad listener’, said Stowe. ‘David Lanthorne briefed her for twenty minutes. She said not a word. Sitting on the edge of her chair, she kept her eyes on him with total concentration, absorbing everything.’20
Although her absorption with security issues was commendable, it also led her to some questionable judgements involving both MI5 and GCHQ. One early over-reaction by her, which shocked the security services, centred on the case of Sir Anthony Blunt.
Blunt had been recruited by Russian intelligence while at Cambridge University in the 1930s. In the 1940s, he acted as a Soviet agent at the same time as he was working for MI5. He passed many wartime secrets to Russian intelligence. After 1945, he left MI5 to work as an art historian. Then in 1952, he was appointed Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. In 1964, the government of the day offered Sir Anthony Blunt immunity from prosecution provided that he co-operated in the inquiries of the security authorities. Blunt accepted the offer. Buckingham Palace was also briefed on the immunity deal, which enabled Blunt to continue with his duties there for the next fifteen years.
This was the status quo that Margaret Thatcher inherited and was briefed about as an incoming prime minister. But in October 1979 the journalist Andrew Boyle outed Blunt in a book, which gave rise to a written Parliamentary Question. The public had become familiar with Third Man, Fourth Man, Fifth Man revelations from the Philby, Maclean and Burgess era of Cambridge spies in the 1950s, so no great stir was caused by Boyle’s book. The written Parliamentary Question could easily have been dealt with in the time-honoured formula, which maintains that it is long-established government practice not to provide answers to questions affecting national security.
Instead of playing it safe, Margaret Thatcher overruled the Director of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley, and went public on Blunt. She confirmed in the House of Commons that he had been a Soviet agent. This caused a sensation. There was a parliamentary debate in which she spoke uneasily and unconvincingly as she set out a selective version of the Blunt story. The net effect was that a flood of further revelations on security matters followed with other MI5 operatives, most notably Peter Wright in his book Spycatcher, telling their stories, much to the Prime Minister’s anger. None of these revelations were prevented, and no other former spy since has been offered immunity from prosecution in return for co-operation with the authorities.
This useful mechanism was made useless by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to break the seal of confidentiality on the Blunt deal in the interests of openness. The irony was that she never again advocated any other form of openness or scrutiny in relation to the security services. One practitioner in this field described her handling of the Blunt affair as ‘Mrs Thatcher’s rush of blood to the head’.21 Margaret Thatcher hated to admit that she ever made any errors of judgement. She became positively proprietorial towards the security services. This led her to make further mistakes in relation to GCHQ and MI5.
In 1980, she became so angry about the selective strikes and pay demands of workers at GCHQ that she refused to settle the civil-service pay dispute that had given rise to the problem. It became such a personal issue to her that she overruled the sensible settlement negotiated with the unions by Lord Soames, the minister responsible for the civil service. The Soames settlement figure of a 7.5 per cent pay deal was only 1 per cent above the Treasury guideline. Most ministers, including the Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, were minded to accept it. But at a stormy cabinet meeting, Margaret Thatcher threatened to resign if the Soames deal went through. Willie Whitelaw had to use all his skills as a trouble-shooter to calm her down. A few weeks later, he persuaded the Prime Minister to accept the original Soames figure. Her intransigence cost the government around £400 million. The strike ended, but so did the career of Lord Soames. She sacked him at the next reshuffle, apparently for the crime of being right about GCHQ and the other civil-service unions.
Prime ministerial stubbornness and the security services continued to go hand in hand. A later episode involving GCHQ in her second term arose when she became determined to ban its employees from being members of a trade union. Her view was that working for any part of the government’s security services was incompatible with being a trade unionist. Even when Sir Robert Armstrong had negotiated a compromise by which GCHQ staff could retain their union membership after signing a no-strike agreement (a deal which had prevailed for many years with the police), Margaret Thatcher refused to countenance it. The affair ended messily, with high-court judgments going both ways, the sacking of some GCHQ workers and eventually a Pyrrhic victory for the government. The outcome caused considerable uneasiness, not least for Sir Geoffrey Howe, who blamed the mess on the Prime Minister’s ‘absolutist instinct’.
‘It was probably the clearest example I had seen so far of one of Margaret’s most tragic failings: an inability to appreciate, still less accommodate, someone else’s patriotism’, he commented. ‘A citizen, she seemed to feel, could never safely be allowed to carry more than one card in his or her pocket, and at GCHQ that could only be Her Majesty’s card.’22
One final example of the Prime Minister’s ‘absolutist instinct’ in relation to the security services came over another side of the fall-out to the Blunt affair. Her ‘rush of blood to the head’ had caused a rush of articles and books about the curious goings-on at MI5 in the 1950s. Some of these publications were cleared by No. 10. although they had obviously been sourced from retired MI5 officers. One of them, Peter Wright, then decided to publish his memoirs, Spycatcher, in Australia where he had gone to live. Margaret Thatcher rightly felt that Spycatcher was a serious breach of the duty of confidentiality imposed on all former employees of the security services. She wrongly decided to fight in the Australian courts to get the book publication suppressed.
Her appointed representative in this colonial-minded and therefore doomed endeavour was Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary. He received something of a mauling in the witness box at the hands of a pugnacious young Sydney lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who later rose on the Australian political ladder to become a senior minister
and Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister solicitously called up Robert Armstrong in Australia two or three times to encourage him as the trial progressed. It ended in ignominious defeat for the British government as the Australian courts, predictably, permitted the publication of Spycatcher. When the Cabinet Secretary returned home, Margaret Thatcher called him into her study and presented him with two bottles of Scotch whisky. It was her way of apologising for despatching him across the world on a mission made impossible by her own stubbornness.
As a result of such episodes, the Prime Minister’s reverence for the security services became something of an in-joke among the cognoscenti of Whitehall. It was not unconnected to her avid readership of the works of John Le Carré and Frederick Forsyth. Her later Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, found it positively comical to discover how besotted she was by the secret agencies, their establishments and their hardware. He saw public spending on them as ‘one of the very few areas of public life virtually untouched by the rigours of the Thatcher era’.23
Some of this hush-hush expenditure avoided cuts by being carefully concealed, with her connivance, in the Defence, Foreign Office and Home Office budgets. Larger sums were authorised, under her chairmanship, by the so-called Secret Vote Committee. This was so secret that it never actually met! Paying generously for the products of ‘Old Stripey’ was an example of how she was learning to get her own way by unorthodox methods.
A FAVOUR FOR RUPERT MURDOCH
One of the most questionable episodes of Margaret Thatcher’s first two years as Prime Minister was her bending of the rules on monopolies and mergers in order to allow Rupert Murdoch to purchase The Times and the Sunday Times. It illustrated both her political dependence on Murdoch’s newspapers and her political ruthlessness in imposing her will on the government and its legal procedures.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 35