The Real Iron Lady

by Gillian Shephard

  Michael Jopling, who as her Chief Whip from 1979 to 1983 was in a position to observe her closely, writes,

  It has often been said that she talked too much and interrupted her colleagues too often. I think this did become a problem in the later years, causing some resentment. But I have strongly resisted suggestions that she would not listen to the views of others. She was open to listening to new proposals, but she wanted to be both convinced herself and at the same time to be sure her minister was able to argue his case in the face of her own cross-examination. Often I heard her say, ‘Well, Secretary of State, you had better get on with your proposal. But if it goes wrong, don’t come back to me to sort it out.’

  She found it hard to dissemble, in which respect she did perhaps differ from the popular perception of a politician. Michael Jopling describes a meeting with Canadian Premier Pierre Trudeau.

  Argument was meat and drink to her. I shall never forget a very small lunch with Pierre Trudeau … whom she did not admire. He had similar feelings about her and the verbal fireworks on a series of world issues were, what she described about another of their meetings, ‘lively’.

  John Wakeham, who succeeded Michael Jopling as Chief Whip,

  very soon learned that if she took a letter out of her handbag it was not just important, it contained views she instinctively felt were right. On the rare occasions she was wrong, I always felt I was more likely to get her to change her mind if I set about it slowly and with a little subtlety.

  One example was when she wanted to write a letter which I felt was unwise, so I suggested that because the letter was so important, she should get a senior official to look at the drafting and tighten it up if possible. He was sent for, and after a good go at this, I suggested that as the letter was likely to leak to the press, it might be a good idea to get a press adviser to look at it. He was fetched, and after he had given his rather forthright views, the letter idea was abandoned and a more successful approach was adopted.

  My first serious encounter with her was when I was a Minister of State at the Treasury. I had made some rather radical tax proposals which she did not like too much, and she sent for me. I felt my political career was about to end before it had really begun. I determined that my best course was to stick to my guns and keep smiling! After a long debate, she said, ‘All right, John, we will do it your way, but you had better be right. Let’s have a drink.’

  Sir Richard Parsons, whose long and distinguished Foreign Office career included three ambassadorial posts, was well aware of Margaret Thatcher’s attitude towards civil servants and the Foreign Office when, as Leader of the Opposition, she visited the European Security Conference meeting in Belgrade in 1977. Sir Richard was the Leader of the British Delegation to this important body, a position he was given because, he says, the Foreign Office wanted someone ‘emollient’ to fill it. They were obviously right; his account illustrates that a little guile, and a gently humorous approach, could work wonders with Margaret Thatcher.

  Mrs Thatcher came out to see how I was performing. As Leader of the Opposition, she was cheered to hear that I was a poor feeble creature. She thought that this might be a good opportunity to smack at the Labour government. To her surprise, we got on quite well at a dinner given on her first night in Belgrade by my British colleague, our ambassador to Yugoslavia. Next morning she sent me a friendly note saying how much she had enjoyed our meeting.

  I sprang into life and made a few quick telephone calls to diplomatic colleagues from the Conference, and secured agreement that I should be called upon to speak that morning. I then, of course, invited Mrs T. to hear a specimen of my oratory. We proceeded to the Conference Hall, where she took a place behind me, arousing much interest among the colleagues. As privately planned, I was soon called upon to speak, and made a robust speech about human rights, denouncing in particular the poor performance of the Soviet Union. At the conclusion, Mrs Thatcher congratulated me warmly, saying that I had spoken well.

  As we adjourned for morning coffee, the effect of all this was slightly marred by the behaviour of our Russian colleague, an able man called Vorontsov. We were on quite good terms and sometimes lunched together in discreet seclusion. On passing Mrs Thatcher and myself, Vorontsov somewhat spoilt the effect of my efforts by giving me a satirical wink. Fortunately, Mrs T. did not seem to notice. On her return to London, she notably refrained from attacking me in the House of Commons. The Foreign Office were relieved and pleased. Shortly afterwards we were transferred to Madrid, where I served for four-and-a-half busy years from 1980 to 1984. This period encompassed the Falklands conflict.

  The Spanish Prime Minister, the able Calvo-Sotelo, had the sense to see that Mrs Thatcher could be an ally in getting Spain into the European Union and NATO and thus into democratic Europe. He helped us in various discreet ways which made a favourable impression.

  The time was right to try and make progress over Gibraltar. The trouble was that the Franco regime had closed the frontier between Gibraltar and the Spanish mainland. This was a great handicap to our side. If we could get the barriers removed, it would be much easier for Britain to support the return of Spain to the modern world. The advantage would be to both sides and under the leadership of our excellent Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, we agreed to draw up and submit to ministers a draft agreement which should do the trick. Calvo-Sotelo was to visit Downing Street for this purpose.

  On the morning of the day itself, I flew to London and arrived at No. 10 to find Mrs T. holding a briefing meeting with Lord Carrington and his officials from the FCO. I slipped into a modest place at the end of the table. The PM was saying that she was very unhappy about the draft agreement. It gave too much away, she thought, and would not be acceptable to the Conservative Party. I cleared my throat noisily. ‘What’s that noise you are making, Ambassador?’ snapped the Prime Minister. ‘I was trying to control my amusement, Prime Minister.’ ‘Amusement?’ echoed Mrs T. in a voice worthy of Lady Bracknell. ‘Perhaps you would care to explain.’ ‘The truth is, Prime Minister,’ I replied, ‘that this morning I saw off the Prime Minister of Spain at the airport in Madrid on his way to London. I heard him telling his officials the same thing as you. The draft would not be acceptable to his party.’

  ‘The Spanish Prime Minister is worried too, is he?’ responded the Prime Minister, with marked satisfaction. ‘That’s the first piece of good news I have heard today.’

  Everything was then smoothly agreed on our side. Afterwards Lord Carrington said to me very kindly, ‘You arrived just in time.’

  I learned something from this episode. Mrs T. had the reputation for being bossy and opinionated and averse to listening to both sides. But it was more complicated than that. She liked to hear both sides of an argument, properly explained to her. She would listen carefully if you knew your facts and were not afraid of deploying them. Heaven help you, though, if you tried a fudge. Then she would come out firmly on the winning side and present it to the world as if it were the only possible option. The Iron Lady was privately amenable to reason. How else could she have remained Prime Minister for so many years? But the public never quite spotted that and imagined that she became a kind of dictator.

  One might assume that Margaret Thatcher’s aggressive style would prevail at any meeting with the trade unions. But this is not how John Monks, describing himself at that time as ‘a “bag carrier” who accompanied the then TUC General Secretaries, Lionel Murray and Norman Willis, to critical meetings with her at times of national crisis’, writes of a meeting at No. 10 in 1981, following the inner-city riots.

  How times – and the power of the unions – change. In 1981, following the riots in Bristol, Brixton, Toxteth and Moss Side, when important parts of our cities were ablaze and tensions ran high, the TUC could demand and secure a meeting, not just with the Prime Minister but also with all her senior Cabinet colleagues with economic responsibilities. The situation was deeply disturbing. It felt like our civilisation was collapsing, as TV r
elayed dramatic shots of violence, looting and fires. Our purpose was to use the riots to press the government to act decisively on unemployment, which was up near the 3 million mark, and especially on youth unemployment and inner city dereliction.

  A delegation from the TUC General Council therefore met around half the Cabinet in 10 Downing Street.

  Mrs Thatcher was not the dominatrix on this occasion. She farmed out our various points to William Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine and others, obviously a pre-arranged tactic to lower the temperature. Not that it worked with the TUC. We are more comfortable with the broad brush than the technicalities and the meeting ended with nothing. But Mrs Thatcher was, on that occasion, the courteous diplomat, far from the fierce warrior against the unions that later became the dominant judgement of history.

  However, on a later occasion, John Monks writes that the

  harder side of her was more obviously evident during the Miners’ Strike of 1984–5, that year-long bruising battle with the strongest union in the country. It was a disaster for the miners, their families and their communities.

  The TUC had been working hard to support the miners’ families but particularly to find the basis for a settlement. With Norman Willis, I was one of those, along with ACAS, who shuttled quietly between Arthur Scargill and government ministers and civil servants in a vain attempt to find a settlement.

  The culmination was a request from the TUC to meet the Prime Minister with a formula to end the strike. In truth, the strike was ending. Miners were going back to work in increasing numbers and the South Wales men, the most solid, the most loyal of the loyal, wanted an organised return. We all knew that, so did Mrs Thatcher. We wanted a deal which would at least be a basis for rebuilding relationships. We needed a face saver for the miners and a basis for a resumption of normality.

  But at that meeting, Mrs Thatcher was adamant – no more talks with the NUM, they must return to work forthwith, they must accept the closure of the pits. There was no generosity, no quarter, no echo of Churchill’s ‘in victory, magnanimity’.

  It was also a signal that the TUC as a whole was being relegated to a less influential role. The Iron Lady was emerging from this conflict as she had from the Falklands War, confident in her own judgement and determined to win her battles with her presumed enemies.

  I am not a paid-up member of the Mrs Thatcher fan club.

  I acknowledge fully her clear leadership, tactical skill, and a powerful executive ability to get things done her way, all admirable qualities in a Prime Minister, and qualities which mark her out as an exceptional Prime Minister. She put her stamp on the country and no one was in any doubt about what she wanted. That is a hallmark of effective leadership.

  John Monks, as an experienced leader and negotiator, is able to recognise these qualities in someone with whom he had profound policy differences, as he goes on to explain.

  But I disagreed profoundly with the direction she took, while admiring her executive drive to achieve her ends. As time has passed, many of her causes have been shown to have failed the long-term interests of the nation, although they were short-term triumphs.

  The North Sea tax revenues were spent on tax cuts for those in work – a formula which worked brilliantly in electoral terms but left us with little to show for the great opportunity for national renewal that was offered by the exploitation of North Sea oil.

  Council house sales were another brilliant political manoeuvre, but the problem of providing housing for those who cannot afford to buy is worse now than it was in the 1980s.

  Privatisation of the utilities has been widely copied abroad but many now are in the hands of overseas companies and none of the remaining British ones have emerged as global or European brands.

  And what of liberalisation of financial markets? Mrs Thatcher presided over the ‘Big Bang’, the deregulation of the financial markets. In 2008, we learned to our cost the huge downside risks of this. The burden of returning the banks to normality and paying off our debts will last for another generation.

  And in my own backyard, the trade unions. Mrs Thatcher is widely acclaimed for her determination to take on and vanquish militant trade unionism, ‘the enemy within’. But in this battle there were many casualties, especially in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, and the inner cities. And the long-term effects are now clear: a major loss of manufacturing capacity and a rise in inequality as boardrooms have felt less constrained and have paid themselves salary and bonus increases unjustified by performance.

  And finally, in taking a Eurosceptic stance, she missed the need, which has existed on and off since 1870, and is very evident today, to build our economy more on German lines, with excellent manufacturing, high savings, long-term thinking, high skills, and job security, worker participation and high standards of corporate governance. If only she had deployed her undoubted executive ability on these goals, what might we, and she, have achieved?

  Patrick Cormack also regrets lost opportunities.

  I have absolutely no doubt that she will go down in history as a great Prime Minister. She was an international statesman of great calibre. She curbed the power of the trade unions and transformed British industry in the process. Her privatisation policy rolled back the frontiers of the state and became the example for nations around the world.

  But on constitutional issues she displayed little vision or understanding. She was wrong to abolish the GLC, but she was wrong on Scotland too, and wrong in a very big way. And I do not just mean treating Scotland as a guinea pig for the introduction of the poll tax.

  The Callaghan government fell following the two devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales. People tend to forget that in Scotland there was a majority in favour of devolution. It was just not a big enough majority to cross the threshold that Parliament had, very sensibly, decided to impose, but there was a real need to recognise the concerns of the Scottish people and some of us put to her that it would be sensible – remember that this was in 1979 – to have the Scottish Grand Committee meet, not in Westminster, but in Edinburgh and Glasgow and other Scottish cities, too, and to do so on a regular basis. There was also a case put to her to have a consultative group of heads of local government and other leaders from Scotland, with whom she would meet once a year. She would have none of it. And I well remember in 1996, chatting over a whisky with Donald Dewar. ‘What would have happened if we had done something like that in 1979?’ I asked him. ‘You would have shot our fox,’ he replied.

  Finally, Margaret refused to grasp the need to make changes in the House of Lords. It seemed to me, and to many others, that a Second Chamber which was largely hereditary, and where that hereditary element was almost entirely Tory, was not something that would survive a Labour government with a decent majority. Far better to have a system, taking the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1801 as precedents, whereby the hereditary peerage elected so many of their number to sit in the House each Parliament, and to create a situation where no party had a massive built-in majority. I even introduced a Private Member’s Bill on the subject in 1984 but, again, Margaret would have none of it.

  I often think that had she shown the same degree of foresight, determination and courage over constitutional matters as she did over foreign affairs and the domestic agenda, the history of the last twenty years would have been very different.

  As John Major points out earlier in this chapter, myths about Margaret Thatcher’s style of government, and in particular, her disagreements with ministerial colleagues on policy issues, have abounded since she left office. The three accounts which follow, from John Major, Douglas Hurd and Lynda Chalker, dispel some of those myths about very particular policy differences and events.

  John Major writes:

  Perhaps surprisingly, when I was Chancellor, we never disagreed about entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, although we frequently discussed it.

  Neither of us wished to enter a single currency but, like Nigel Lawson before me, I saw the ER
M as an anti-inflation mechanism and, albeit reluctantly, Margaret saw the logic in that. She hated inflation, which was reaching towards 10 per cent, and had no other option available to bring it down.

  When she and I eventually agreed that Sterling must enter the ERM, she was enthusiastic in discussing the timetable (which was brought forward) and the political tactics of entry. If she had any reservations she never shared them with me. Legend puts out an absurd notion, that Margaret was ‘bullied’ into entering by Douglas Hurd and me. This is, of course, risible. No one would have been able to ‘bully’ Margaret into anything, even if they wished to try. She always gave as good as she got, which was both her strength and her weakness.

  Douglas Hurd, Home Secretary and then Foreign Secretary to Margaret Thatcher, recalls the myth of the handbag:

  Like most famous people, Margaret Thatcher is surrounded by myths; in her case the myth of the handbag is one of the strongest. She is supposed to have used the handbag as a receptacle for all kinds of secrets with which she backed up her habit of interfering knowledgeably while she was Prime Minister in the affairs of every department. My own experience was the opposite, at least when I was Home Secretary between 1985 and 1989.

  There were several matters in the Home Office portfolio about which the Prime Minister felt passionately, but she hardly ever intervened and by and large left me to carry on as best I could in what she recognised as a difficult job. For example, she never once in five years suggested that the government should make a move to restore capital punishment even though I knew that would be her strong preference. On the whole she left me alone, only complaining mildly when something happened to surprise her, for example a prison riot. Provided she was spared such surprises, she backed me strongly in Cabinet.