Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  Norman Fowler, on return from his travels, was not best pleased to discover that his department was preparing a memorandum for the Prime Minister on how the whole basis of the NHS might be changed. He need not have worried. Ken Stowe, well trusted by Margaret Thatcher since his time as her first Private Secretary at No. 10, produced a magisterially thorough report. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from it was that the upheavals involved in root and branch reforms of the NHS would be so dramatic that they would make the reforms themselves virtually unworkable.

  After Ken Stowe had presented his report and discussed it with the Prime Minister, she eventually gave a deep sigh and said, ‘Ken, the problem is there’s no constituency for change’.19

  Her caution seemed admirably pragmatic to the Permanent Secretary. ‘In terms of her personality’, recalled Sir Kenneth Stowe, ‘this was a good illustration of how this hard-driving, indefatigable, unstoppable Prime Minister could suddenly see that there were buffers in the way of what she wanted to do and that there was no point in hitting them.’20

  A few weeks later she finally killed off the speculation that she had plans to overhaul the health-care system by making a pledge in her party-conference speech that ‘the National Health Service is safe with us’.21

  This episode showed that within Margaret Thatcher the radical reformer and the cautious realist could co-exist as two sides of her personality. But the earlier story of the cabinet row over the CPRS proposals also showed that she could behave badly when she did not get her way.

  THE BEGINNINGS OF PRIVATISATION

  The cautious and the radical sides of Margaret Thatcher’s personality were evenly balanced when it came to launching what has been called ‘the jewel in the crown’22 of her domestic policy. This was privatisation, a policy that was popular at home and copied extensively around the world. Yet the Prime Minister needed a lot of convincing before she took her first tentative steps towards putting the idea into practice. During her first three years in power, she not only hesitated, she disliked the word privatisation so much that she refused to use it, sticking rigidly to the more negative and politically divisive term ‘denationalisation’. Yet as success bred success, she came to see that privatisation was one of her most important innovations, and also one of her most enduring legacies.

  Although privatisation had been talked about while she was Leader of the Opposition, nothing much came of those discussions. However, she did set up a cabinet sub-committee in 1979 labelled ‘E (DL)’, whose initials stood for economic disposals. It made an unimpressive start, disposing of a mixed bag of assets such as the British Freight Corporation, various motorway service stations and buildings owned by the water authorities.

  There were many ministers who made a contribution to the success of privatisation, but the cabinet colleague who persuaded Margaret Thatcher to implement the policy on the boldest scale was Patrick Jenkin, the Secretary of State for Industry. He was responsible for six nationalised industries. The largest of them, British Telecom, wanted to raise £28 billion to invest in new digital technology. ‘There’s no way you’ll ever get that from the Treasury,’ Jenkin told the BT chairman, Sir George Jefferson, ‘but this bird might fly if we could sell shares in it on the stock market.’23

  Once a privatisation plan had been devised, Patrick Jenkin presented it to the Prime Minister, who was sceptical. ‘Why do we have to do it in one go?’ she objected. ‘Why not do it separately in each of BT’s fifty-one areas? That would allow competition.’24

  After two meetings Patrick Jenkin persuaded her that the fifty-one areas she kept talking about were irrelevant lines on the map. So she gave her blessing to the whole-scale privatisation of BT. Because of the huge sums of new capital required (selling the first 50.2 per cent of the company’s shares eventually raised £3.9 billion), this sale was delayed until November 1984.

  In the months after the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher not only approved what she still called the ‘denationalisation’ of BT, she also gave the green light for the much quicker, if smaller, public offerings of shares in British Aerospace, Cable and Wireless, Amersham International, Britoil and Associated British Ports.

  Apart from the enormous breakthrough of the BT share flotation decision, the biggest privatisation in the first term of Margaret Thatcher’s government was the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC). At first she was surprisingly reluctant to allow this to take place, rejecting it twice in cabinet committees, apparently on the instinctive but incredible grounds ‘that Britain would somehow lose control of part of her oil’.25 However, the new Energy Secretary, Nigel Lawson, eventually won her round and 51 per cent of BNOC was privatised as Britoil in November 1982, with the share placing proceeds of £549 million going to the Treasury.

  From then on, Margaret Thatcher’s confidence in the policy grew. She had seen the future for privatisation, and became totally committed to it once she knew it worked. ‘Already we have done more to roll back the frontiers of socialism than any previous Conservative Government’, she told the 1982 Tory conference, ‘and in the next Parliament we intend to do a lot more.’26 She did.

  Another part of the revolution where Margaret Thatcher believed she was energetically rolling back socialism concerned the sale of council houses. Her 1980 Housing Act had established the ‘Right to Buy’. As a result, over 370,000 families living in council houses had bought their own homes at a substantial discount by the autumn of 1982. ‘… this is the largest transfer of assets from the State to the family in British history’, she proclaimed. ‘And this really will be an irreversible shift of power to the people.’27

  The sale of council houses was such a popular policy that it was visibly shifting political support from traditional Labour voters to Thatcher’s Tories. In my own Kent constituency, over two hundred ‘right to buy’ applications a month were flowing in from the poorest housing estates in Ramsgate by the turn of the year. The Labour Party, both locally and nationally, were vociferous in their opposition to these sales. Margaret Thatcher hit back equally vociferously, declaring that her opponents would never dare to reverse the policy ‘because they know we are right, because they know it is what people want’.28

  On the doorsteps of council homes this controversy attracted far more interest than any other political topic. As the MP for a deprived district of South East England with one of the highest concentrations of council housing in the region, I soon recognised that Margaret Thatcher had struck vote-winning gold. My agent and chairman calculated that in the South Thanet constituency approximately 3,000 traditionally Labour-supporting households, grateful for or eagerly waiting for their right to buy, had shifted their allegiance to the Conservatives by the summer of 1983. The only dedicated opponents of the policy seemed to be the Kent Miners and the Socialist Workers Party. Margaret Thatcher was firmly on the side of the council tenants.

  THE SUICIDE OF THE OPPOSITION

  The Labour Party were not only digging their own political graves over council-house sales, they seemed to have a death wish in several other policy areas. Their leader, Michael Foot, had in his heyday been a left-wing firebrand and a coruscating parliamentary debater. Charming, courageous and brilliant as a former newspaper editor and book reviewer, he was utterly unconvincing in the role of an alternative prime minister.

  As his fighting speech in the historic debate at the start of the Falklands conflict demonstrated, Michael Foot was no pacifist. But he was a longstanding and passionate supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament. His enthusiasm for this cause could not have been a greater contrast to Margaret Thatcher’s championship of a strong defence policy, whose centrepiece was Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent.

  In the middle of her first term as Prime Minister, she chaired a subcommittee of the cabinet, which took the decision to replace Britain’s Polaris nuclear weaponry with the American Trident (C4) missile system. But before it could be installed in British submarines, President Reagan started a programme of modernising
the United States strategic nuclear arsenal. As a result, America planned to use a more sophisticated Trident II (D5) missile system. Did Britain wish to buy this upgraded but more expensive version?

  Some senior members of the cabinet expressed doubts about Trident II, notably the Defence Secretary John Nott and the Foreign Secretary Francis Pym. Margaret Thatcher called their arguments ‘feeble and unrealistic’.29 But she had a fight on her hands, which she won by calling a meeting of the full cabinet where the doubters were outnumbered. She also launched a pre-emptive strike of her own ahead of the meeting, by declaring her personal support for the value for money of Trident II to a startled House of Commons.30 To no one’s surprise she got her way a few days later in cabinet. Her commitment to this form of nuclear weaponry was driven by national pride, always a key ingredient in her personality and her decision-making.

  As part of her commitment to nuclear peace-keeping in Europe at a time when Soviet SS20 warheads were being targeted on the West, Margaret Thatcher agreed to allow the stationing of 144 US cruise missiles at Greenham Common in Berkshire and at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire. Predictably, their deployment in 1983 became the focus for anti-nuclear protests. The dormant CND movement, supported for the first time by the Leader of the Opposition, became resurgent with numbers reminiscent of its Aldermaston marches in the 1960s. With relish, the Prime Minister picked up the gauntlet thrown down by demonstrators, such as the Greenham Common Women for Peace who encamped on the perimeter of the cruise-missile base.

  ‘We really are a true peace movement ourselves’, she riposted at a London press conference with Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, in February 1983. ‘We are the true disarmers, in that we stand for all-sided disarmament, but on a basis of balance.’31 Her annexation of her opponents’ labels showed that she had learned a trick from an earlier Tory leader, Benjamin Disraeli, when he famously taunted: ‘We have caught the Whigs bathing and run away with their clothes.’32

  The nakedness of the opposition was painfully exposed on defence. Margaret Thatcher exploited it by promoting Michael Heseltine to Defence Secretary in January 1983. She was mistrustful of him, but she recognised his talent for public relations. He used it ruthlessly in caricaturing both the well-meaning leftism of the peace campaigners and the muddled unilateralism of official opposition. By the time the coming election began to loom in the national consciousness, the gulf between Labour and Conservative policy on national security had never looked wider. Overshadowing the day-to-day argument on defence, Margaret Thatcher held the trump card of her military resolution in the Falklands. She barely needed to play it.

  For different reasons, the Alliance of the Liberal and Social Democratic Parties were faring little better than Labour against Margaret Thatcher in the popularity stakes. The SDP leader, Roy Jenkins, was well past his prime when he was returned to Parliament in a by-election. His interventions in the House of Commons seemed as dated as his plummy voice and pompous mannerisms. David Owen was a more incisive, but also a more divisive, figure within the Alliance. Margaret Thatcher respected him, and had been grateful for his support in debates during Falklands War. But his internal squabbles with the Liberal leader, David Steel, soon gave the Alliance the appearance of a marriage of inconvenience. It looked too fractious to be relevant to the long-term governance of Britain.

  By the spring of 1983 Margaret Thatcher should have known that she could win a general election whenever she decided to call one. Yet she was curiously hesitant to make this move. Conservative Central Office, under the chairmanship of Cecil Parkinson, was gung-ho for an early poll as soon as possible after the 1983 electoral register came into force in February that year. The party’s experts believed that the new constituency boundaries were worth thirty extra seats to the Tories. Even more important, the polls showed the government to be some fourteen and twenty points, respectively, ahead of Labour and the Alliance, with the gap growing.

  Tempted by these portents, the Prime Minister flirted with the idea of a late spring election. At the annual dinner of the Confederation of British Industry, she fanned the flames of poll fever by emulating Jim Callaghan’s incursion into music-hall lyrics. In October 1978 he had inflicted upon the TUC conference his rendition of an old ditty about the expectant bridegroom: ‘There was I, a-waiting at the Church.’ In April 1983 Margaret Thatcher quoted another music-hall song of the same vintage. ‘Some say Maggie may … others say Maggie may not.’33 No one had told her that the heroine of these verses was a Liverpool prostitute.

  While her party managers kept up the pressure for June, she baulked at it. ‘I must not be boxed in’, she told Cecil Parkinson at the end of a Chequers meeting about the manifesto and other election details in early April.34

  One month later, again at Chequers, the party high command gathered to try and persuade her to give the green light. Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson and Chief Whip Michael Jopling were there from the cabinet. Parliamentary and personal advisers included Ian Gow, Michael Spicer, Tim Bell, Gordon Reece, David Wolfson and Ferdinand Mount. All of them wanted her to go to the country. In addition to the prevailing good news from the polls, the Conservatives had won 128 seats in the local government elections on 4 May. Yet at this Chequers election summit on Sunday 8 May, Margaret Thatcher was in a most uncharacteristic mood of dither.

  Her nervousness was highlighted by the silliness of her doubts. Would she be accused of cutting and running if she said yes, or of clinging to power if she said no?

  How could she possibly break her promise to President Reagan that she would attend the G7 summit in Williamsburg, Virginia at the end of May? Or, if she did attend it, would she look out of place as a transitional leader lacking in authority? Political arguments highlighting the electoral advantages of attending a summit of world leaders, and historical references to the precedent set by Clement Attlee attending the Potsdam Conference during the 1945 general election campaign gradually calmed her fears.

  Then she started a hare running about the negative public relations fall out from Royal Ascot, which was taking place in mid-June. Wouldn’t it look terrible if the media was full of Tory ladies in huge hats and Tory toffs in tailcoats while she was on the stump fighting for re-election? Incredibly, it was her paranoia about the imaginary Ascot factor that finally made her plump for 9 June.

  Just when she seemed to have chosen the date, the Prime Minister’s indecision became final. She thought of a new excuse for procrastination. ‘Even if I wanted to call an election’, she objected, ‘The Queen could hardly be available at such short notice.’ Ian Gow slipped out of the room, called the Palace, and returned to report that Her Majesty would be graciously pleased to see the Prime Minister at noon the following day. As Cecil Parkinson recalled her body language, ‘I am still not sure that the look she shot him was one of gratitude’.35

  So the die was reluctantly cast. The ministerial and other guests departed. But even after most of them had left, Margaret Thatcher was seen by Ferdinand Mount sitting disconsolately by the embers of the fire in the great Tudor Hall at Chequers muttering, ‘I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do at all. I shall sleep on it. It’s always best to sleep on these things.’ To which Denis retorted, ‘You can’t do that, Margaret. They’ve all gone back to town saying it’s going to be the 9th. You can’t go back on that now. The horses have bolted, my dear.’36

  Denis was right. The next day, the Prime Minister went to the Palace, the Queen agreed to the dissolution of Parliament and the election was announced for 9 June.

  A LANDSLIDE VICTORY

  Although the 1983 general election was effectively over before it began, Margaret Thatcher’s nervous wariness about the result continued. She spent several hours at the start of the campaign clearing out boxes of clothes and clutter from No. 10 in case she was not coming back. This was a reaction guided by superstition rather than psephology for the polls continued to show that the Conservatives were in an unassailable lead of between
15 and 20 per cent.

  She dominated the campaign which, in contrast to 1979, was well organised by Conservative Central Office. Almost every day began with a press conference, which she ruled with a rod of iron. In the early stages she corrected Francis Pym for suggesting that the sovereignty of the Falklands might one day be negotiable. Later, she slapped him down brutally for ruminating that landslides on the whole do not produce successful governments. Most cabinet ministers were allowed only walk-on parts at these morning conferences, since Margaret Thatcher answered nearly all the questions herself.

  The rest of her electioneering day tended to be arranged for the benefit of the cameras. Photo-opportunities of the Prime Minister serving fish and chips in Yorkshire; trying out one of the earliest mobile phones (which weighed 2.2 lb, or 1 kg!) in Reading; or wading through horse manure in Cornwall. All made good footage on the evening news.

  Her most awkward television moment came on BBC Nationwide, when a tenacious teacher, Diana Gould, repeatedly questioned her about inconsistencies in her answers as to whether the General Belgrano was steering towards or away from the task force when she ordered it to be torpedoed. Visibly infuriated by this unexpectedly knowledgeable interrogation from a member of the public, Margaret Thatcher came off the air firing verbal torpedoes at the programme makers. ‘Only the BBC could ask a British Prime Minister why she took action to protect our ships against an enemy ship that was a danger to our boys’, she expostulated.37

  The viewers were on her side. They reacted negatively against Denis Healey talking about Margaret Thatcher having ‘rejoiced in slaughter’.38 Neil Kinnock dealt with a heckler shouting that at least Mrs Thatcher had ‘showed guts’ with the retort, ‘It’s a pity others had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it’.39