The drama began, as far as Margaret Thatcher was concerned, when Rupert Murdoch came to lunch at Chequers on 4 January 1980. A detailed, if circumspect, note of record was taken by Bernard Ingham who, on the instructions of the Prime Minister, did not circulate it outside the private office of No. 10. This account of the conversation marked ‘Commercial – In Confidence’ makes it clear that ‘the main purpose of Mr Murdoch’s visit was to brief the Prime Minister on his bid for Times newspapers’. Using this privileged access, Murdoch described the success of the Sunday Times (even in the depths of a recession it was turning away advertising), but stressed the high-risk nature of his bid by explaining that he could lose £50 million of his resources because, ‘turning round a £13–£17 million loss was a formidable undertaking at a time of deep industrial recession’.24
These observations about losses were the note of record’s coded reference to the massive legal obstacle in the way of a bid by Rupert Murdoch. Because he already owned the Sun and the News of the World, his bid had to be referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) in accordance with the Fair Trading Act of 1973. It would have been amazing if this problem had not been mentioned at Chequers by either the Prime Minister or Mr Murdoch. Equally amazing would have been no mention of the only route by which the Murdoch bid might be exempted from an MMC reference. This exemption could be granted if the newspaper, which was the subject of the bid, was making such large losses that it was ‘not economic as a going concern’.25
In the course of a long conversation about the bid for The Times and the Sunday Times, the notion that two such straight talkers as Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch would not have discussed either the MMC obstacle or the possible exemption from it was fanciful. The Prime Minister had no such inhibition when she came to chair the cabinet committee on the bid for The Times newspapers on 26 January 1981. For in her usual forceful style, she opened the discussion by emphasising that although the bid must be referred to the MMC, ‘There was an exception to this rule under S.58 (3)(a) of the Fair Trading Act, which gave the Secretary of State discretion to decide whether a reference should be made if he were satisfied that certain criteria were met’.26
The Secretary of State for Trade who was so pointedly reminded of his discretion in this way was John Biffen. His problem was that he could only grant his exemption if he was satisfied that neither The Times nor the Sunday Times was economic as a going concern. He told the committee that he was satisfied of this, but added ‘though only in the case of The Times was the issue clear cut’.27
When he announced his decision to grant Rupert Murdoch’s bid an exemption from being referred to the MMC, John Biffen faced a parliamentary storm in the shape of an Emergency Commons Debate. All speakers from the opposition parties, and several from the government’s side, questioned how he could possibly have decided that the profitable Sunday Times was not a going concern.
As a Conservative back-bencher who spoke and voted against John Biffen’s decision, I had a friendly private disagreement with him after the debate. He was charmingly embarrassed. ‘Ah well, there’s a political dimension to this.’ He smiled, pointing with his right index finger to the ceiling.28
Woodrow Wyatt produced a blunter explanation for the collusion with Murdoch: ‘I had bent the rules for him … Through Margaret I got it arranged that the deal didn’t go to the Monopolies Commission, which almost certainly would have blocked it.’29
The episode was not one of Margaret Thatcher’s finest hours, but in the dark days of 1981 she needed the support of Murdoch’s newspapers. She was ready to be a ruthless player of prime ministerial hardball in order to get her way.
PERSONALITY TRAITS ON AND OFF DUTY
Margaret Thatcher became increasingly skilful at getting her way, but the methods by which she achieved this revealed a complex personality. It was a myth that she was over-confident. As a later Principal Private Secretary, Robin Butler,** perceptively observed: ‘The key to her style was that she did not have excessive confidence. On the contrary, she lacked self-confidence. That was why she was so assertive. She had to pump herself up with adrenalin before any big occasion.’30
The same applied on many small occasions too. Because she lacked confidence, she felt she needed to master a brief right down to the smallest details before she went into a meeting. This over-preparation, accomplished by the burning of much midnight oil, enabled her to browbeat her ministers. One of her techniques was to fire questions at them about some obscure fact in a footnote to the main briefing paper under discussion. If they did not know the answer, she belittled them. This was her way of dominating her colleagues by exhibiting her own expertise on the minutiae of the subject.
Domination was only one of her personality traits. She used it a great deal in public or semi-public battles. But in private she deployed subtler and more feminine wiles. They included judicious flattery, harmless flirtatiousness and even elaborately staged ‘poor me’ performances designed to elicit protective support at predominantly masculine meetings. She played the card of being a lone woman quite unscrupulously, often exploiting the inhibitions of some men to argue back against her. Her femininity, which she used as a technique when it suited her, was real. She liked her clothes to be admired, and was susceptible to the good looks of attractive colleagues. She enjoyed male flattery and gallantry, particularly when she could turn it to good use by winning a concession.
Although she was open to strong argument, she hardly ever conceded a point during the exchanges. However, a day or so later, she might present the same point as her own view, as if she had never argued against it.
When she flared up, she could sometimes pick on a minister or an official, and insult them quite gratuitously. ‘Have you actually read this paper, Chief Secretary?’ she once asked John Biffen.31 To a senior civil servant who kept silent during an all-day discussion on public expenditure she acidly enquired, ‘Do you speak, Mr Jones?’ She increased the pressure at the lunch break by asking him, ‘Do you eat, Mr Jones?’32
Her sharpness and rudeness in such rough and tumbles were often utterly unfair. She seemed to have a mental block against ever saying she was sorry. But occasionally she would at a later stage make a compensatory move, such as writing the victim a pleasant note on a different subject. Or she would invite someone who might be nursing hurt feelings up to her flat for a drink. This was the nearest she came to either apologising or relaxing.
She enjoyed an hour of Whitehall and Westminster gossip over an evening whisky, or occasionally going out to someone else’s home for a meal. Her favourite excursions were to the Carringtons’ country house at Bledlow, whose proximity to Chequers sometimes seemed a mixed blessing to her hosts. Or she would drop in for supper to Ian and Jane Gow’s tiny Kennington pied à terre in South London. The only problem with their hospitality was that on summer evenings the Prime Minister enjoyed drinking al fresco on the Gow’s patio. This alarmed her protection officers, because the patio was overlooked by council tower blocks, but it did not alarm her. ‘Snipers taking pot shots at Chester Way!’ (the Gow’s street) she scoffed. ‘I shall need a lot of convincing about that.’33
Other forms of R&R were never on her agenda. She had no idea how to relax. She had no hobbies, no hinterland and no close friends with ‘an old shoe’ quality of comfortable familiarity. Recharging her batteries was a practice she had never heard of. She kept going at full throttle on a combination of extra adrenalin and extra work. But despite her protestations that she needed neither sleep nor holidays, there were times when her closest aides inside No. 10 thought she was physically and emotionally frazzled. Even when these signs of exhaustion coincided with the doldrums of August, the problem of persuading her that she needed a break was not easily solved – as the story of her first prime ministerial holiday in Scotland demonstrated.
DOG DAYS ON ISLAY
During her first August in office, she kept the wheels of power turning, partly by inventing tasks and summoning bri
efing papers. But in response to some gentle prodding from Ian Gow and others, she did finally agree to take a short holiday; the question was where?
The resourceful Gow telephoned Peter Morrison and enquired whether he could possibly put up a couple of extra guests ‘on that family island of yours in Scotland’.34 Morrison immediately agreed, thinking that he was offering a bed to Mr and Mrs Gow. He was surprised when the prospective guests were revealed to be the Prime Minister and Mr Denis Thatcher.
Professing an unexpected enthusiasm for Scottish scenery (‘I love the Highlands and Islands’35), Margaret Thatcher set out for Islay House, Islay. This was an eighteenth-century mansion on a 73,000 acre estate owned by Peter Morrison’s father, Lord Margadale, looking out to sea across Loch Indaal on the most southerly tip of the Hebrides. Because the prime ministerial visit was at short notice, the twenty-four bedrooms of Islay House were already full with younger Morrisons and their friends, but the master bedroom was gladly vacated by Lord Margadale. The guest of honour enjoyed her first hours on the island with a short walk to the shores of the loch followed by a visit to a local distillery where samples of the local malt whisky were savoured by Denis.
It was the custom at Islay House for charades to be played after dinner. The Prime Minister sat uneasily through one round of these theatricals. She then retired to her bedroom, which was situated immediately above the wood-panelled ballroom where the games were taking place. The clan Morrison in full post-prandial cry were not a quiet family. With the decibels rising, they were surprised that their festivities were interrupted by some sharp knocks from the ceiling. For some reason no one associated these signals with the Prime Minister’s wish to have peace and quiet in her bedroom above.
The revels continued, moving from charades to a game called ‘Pull the Key’. This consisted of tying the large Victorian house key on a string, passing the string down every girl’s dress and up every man’s trousers as they stood in a line. Then at the moment critique, the key was pulled down the line accompanied by the inevitable cacophony of squeals, shouts and loud laughter.
The noise was more than Margaret Thatcher could bear. Unable to concentrate on her reading, she decided to take a nocturnal walk. So she donned her cloak and strode out into the gloaming. Thinking she had gone to bed, her Scotland Yard close protection detail had set off for a local pub. So the Prime Minister, believing she knew the geography of Islay from an earlier visit in her opposition days, strode out across the heather alone and unaccompanied.
There was, however, one police officer still on duty in the vicinity of Islay House. He was a dog handler from Strathclyde Police, tasked with keeping dangerous intruders away from the Prime Minister. This constable and his dog maintained their vigil on a hillock several hundred yards away. It was a lonely night shift until suddenly around 11.30 p.m. he spotted a hooded figure marching briskly across the moor. In the gloaming it was impossible to see anything more than the outline shape and direction of the walker, who by this time was heading back towards Islay House.
The policeman shouted a challenge to the suspected intruder. There was no response. So he let his dog off the leash. Seconds later the Alsatian pounced on the hooded figure, who was knocked backwards and pinned to the ground. As the handler arrived on the scene he was horrified to discover that the suspect captured under his dog’s paws was none other than the British Prime Minister.
Alas, there is no record of the dialogue between the police officer and the Prime Minister. All that is known is that a dishevelled Margaret Thatcher, an apologetic constable and a tail-wagging Alsatian arrived back at Islay House together shortly before midnight.
Peter Morrison led the profuse apologies and tried to treat the incident with humour. But the lady was not for joking. ‘Her cloak was dirty, she was shaken up and pretty fed up’, he recalled later. ‘She went straight to bed. But the next day, in a chilly sort of way, she was good about it. She never wanted it mentioned again. So, of course, I hushed it up.’36
All was forgiven and forgotten. The incident passed into legend among her inner circle, with the punch-line question: ‘How on earth did the dog dare?’ This was a variation on an earlier jest by Lord Carrington who interrupted a colleague talking hypothetically about ‘If the Prime Minister was run over by a bus …’ with the interjection, ‘The bus would not dare’.37
REFLECTION
The analogy of the bus was to be tested in the coming months as various fast-moving political vehicles did their best to flatten Margaret Thatcher. Both on the economy and in foreign policy, she was about to travel through dangerous territory.
The reasons why she showed such strength in standing up to these pressures are to be found in the power of her personality. She was certain about her objectives. She had the character to stick to her guns. She surrounded herself with an inner core of staff and advisers who she felt were supporters and believers in her mission to restore Britain’s pride as a nation. And she psyched herself up with adrenalin to the point where she positively relished being opposed.
There was an interesting difference between the perception of Margaret Thatcher inside the government she was leading and the wider perception of her by the country. Those who had voted for her wanted her to succeed after the chaos of the ‘winter of discontent’. But for all the good-will towards her, the jury was out and the suspicion was widespread that she might not be capable of dealing with the unions and the economic problems. Inside the Tory Party, the hesitations about her were palpable. Ted Heath remained a brooding presence poised to ferment trouble. He was by no means the only brooder.
John Hoskyns, less than a month after his appointment as Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, met a senior City friend at a Rifle Brigade regimental dinner, who asked him: ‘Is it true you’re now working for Mrs Thatcher? … You must be the most frightful shit.’38 Hoskyns noted in his diary that the remark ‘captured perfectly the ambivalent attitude of my friends towards the new government and its leader’.39
The ambivalence was however lessening at the heart of government in Whitehall. For every Sir Humphrey who was being obstructive in the face of the new broom, there were several younger deputy secretaries or assistant secretaries who were being singled out by her as ‘good doers’.40
They encountered her up close in the abrasive decision-making meetings that she used to hammer out policies. They saw, as the world came to see, that their new boss had extraordinary qualities of energy, courage and determination to change Britain. ‘There’s a feeling round here of “Enfin, nous avons un maître” ’,41 said a rising young star of the Foreign Office, David Gore-Booth, echoing the words of French bureaucrats soon after the arrival of Napoleon in Paris in 1792.
However hard Margaret Thatcher was trying to become master in her own house, her climb up the learning curve of government was proving more difficult than she expected, in two areas.
One was the economy, which was responding far too slowly to the medicine she had prescribed for it. The other was foreign policy, where her inexperience brought her into much creative tension with her Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington.
________________
* Rt Hon. Alan Clark (1928–1999), barrister, diarist and historian; Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton, 1974–1992, and Kensington and Chelsea, 1997–1999; PUSS, Department of Employment, 1983–1986; Minister for Trade, 1986–1989; Minister of State, Ministry of Defence, 1989–1992. Debonair, dashing and forever dicing with danger in his private life, Alan was one of my closest parliamentary friends. In his diaries he describes me as ‘my old standby for many a dirty trick’. Always life-enhancing but rarely reliable, Alan stood out as a colourful bird of paradise in a monochrome House of Commons.
† The Prime Minister not only listened to them, but she elevated them all to the House of Lords.
‡ When Margaret Thatcher tried to implement Professor Bauer’s recommendations for cuts in the foreign-aid budget in 1980–1981 she was thwarted by Lord Carrington who threa
tened to resign as Foreign Secretary over the issue. There were limits to the influence of the ‘voices’.
# See Chapter 30.
** Robin Butler, Baron Butler of Brockwell (1938–), Private Secretary to Edward Heath, 1972–1974; Private Secretary to Harold Wilson, 1974–1975; Principal Private Secretary to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1982–1985; Secretary of the Cabinet and Head of the Home Civil Service, 1988–1998; created Life Peer, 1998.
17
First steps in foreign affairs
LEARNING FROM LORD CARRINGTON
Margaret Thatcher and Lord Carrington had an occasionally stormy but generally successful relationship as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Because they both had strong wills and short fuses, they had many fierce arguments. One of the most heated of their rows blew up in Washington, DC, a few minutes before the start of a summit with the recently inaugurated President Ronald Reagan in February 1981.
The Prime Minister was in a state of tense excitement about her meeting with the new leader of the free world. She had encountered Reagan twice on his visits to London, when she was in opposition and he was in the wilderness as an ex-Governor of California. She had taken a shine to his good looks, his courtly gallantry and his conservative credentials. Now he was in the White House she hoped that they might be able to energise the UK–US ‘special relationship’, making it far more productive than it had been in the first twenty months of her premiership, working in harness with Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter.
With these aspirations in mind, Margaret Thatcher brought a strong team to Washington on her RAF VC10. Along with her Foreign Secretary, she was accompanied by Sir Robert Armstrong (Secretary to the Cabinet), Sir Michael Palliser (Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office) and Sir Frank Cooper (Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence). All of them had submitted briefing papers, which she studied and annotated with her habitual diligence.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 36