The Real Iron Lady

by Gillian Shephard

  Willie Whitelaw, himself the grandest of grandees, served Margaret Thatcher with the utmost loyalty. But even he, after he had left office, admitted that he would never have dreamt of socialising with the Thatchers.

  Small wonder then, that after a hostile press conference much later in her career, she remarked to Bernard Ingham: ‘The thing about you and me, Bernard, is that neither of us are smooth people.’ She might have added, ‘And nor are we One of Them.’

  When she went up to Oxford, she would have been justified in a certain pride in her achievement. No one in her immediate family had been to either Oxford or Cambridge. To win a place at seventeen years old, as she did, was a great achievement. Nor should she have found her background any kind of handicap: there would have been plenty of clever grammar school girls like her at Somerville. She was nice-looking, hard-working and diligent, and yet at the start she found Oxford ‘cold and strangely forbidding’.

  She was not given to self-pity, then or at any time later in her career, and threw herself into her work as a scientist, into church activities, music and, of course, politics. But at Oxford, it was her choice of party that made her an outsider. Much of the comment from her contemporaries of the time focuses on the fact that she did not seem to talk about much else apart from the Conservative Party. She was certainly not frivolous or given to undergraduate larks. The fact is that scientists at Oxford, certainly in the late 1950s when I was there, and probably to this day, spent much of their time out of college at the labs. They there-fore tended to eat and socialise together, rather than mix with those reading humanities subjects. They also had to do a fourth year of study before taking their final exams, so their rhythm of work was different. But the views of those at Oxford with her, tutors or undergraduates, were given after she had become Prime Minister, and political antipathy may have affected their later pronouncements. At the very least, their judgements seem remarkably untouched by any kind of academic detachment. Take the comments of Dame Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville for part of the time Margaret Roberts was there. ‘She was a perfectly adequate chemist. I mean nobody thought anything of her. She was a perfectly good second-class chemist, a beta chemist.’ The Nobel Prize winner Professor Dorothy Hodgkin thought well enough of her to invite her to be a research assistant in her fourth year, and said, ‘I came to rate her as good. One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay.’ But of course, Margaret Roberts’s real sin was to be a Conservative. That was the reason that she was not invited to Dame Janet’s social occasions at weekends and why some of her fellow undergraduates recall her as ‘unmemorable’ or as ‘someone who was never young’. For them, that she dared to be different from them was the unforgivable sin.

  And so history repeated itself, in the famous episode in 1984, when her old university refused to give her – the first and, so far, the only woman to become Prime Minister of Britain – the honorary degree they had awarded to Attlee, Macmillan, Heath, Wilson, Douglas-Home and Eden. The opposition was led by a committee of 275 objectors to the award, on the grounds that Margaret Thatcher had done irremediable damage to the cause of education and, in particular, higher education. This was undoubtedly the view of some; my own view of their collective motivation, however, has been for ever influenced by a very senior don gleefully telling me, at a college high table a few years later, that, ‘Oxford hadn’t had so much fun for years.’ Oxford’s reputation was not enhanced by its stance; I believe that the general public thought it petty, small-minded and politically motivated, and I regretted that my old university should apparently not care about the impression given by its stance. Margaret Thatcher’s public response was dignified. She said, ‘If they do not wish to confer the honour, I am the last person who would wish to receive it.’ Privately, the episode did not reinforce her enthusiasm for the Establishment.

  It was wonderfully summed up, in a typically double-edged way, by a remark of Harold Macmillan to Roy Jenkins in 1985, here reported in Anthony Kenny’s A Life in Oxford.

  Terrible business, Roy, this insult to the Prime Minister by our old University, terrible. You know, it’s really a question of class. The dons are mainly upper middle class, and they can never forgive Mrs Thatcher for being so lower middle class. But you and I, Roy, with our working-class ancestry, are above that kind of thing.

  She once startled Sir Anthony Parsons, her foreign affairs adviser, by saying to him, ‘Do you know, Tony, I am so glad I don’t belong to your class.’ ‘What class would that be, Prime Minister?’ Parsons replied. ‘The upper middle class who see everybody’s point of view but have no view of their own.’ This exchange, recorded by Peter Hennessy in The Prime Minister, is extremely revealing of her whole attitude to the class hierarchy in Britain.

  She appeared to have no time at all for the whole Establishment, the traditional ruling elite. She gave the impression of wanting to take them all on: the BBC, Oxford and Cambridge, the civil service, especially the Foreign Office, and the state-funded professional classes. She had a strong distaste for local government, which might seem surprising given her own father’s eminent town hall career; on the other hand, she may have been shocked, as were most people with any kind of regard for the democratic process, by the fact that immediately after the 1979 general election, which she won handsomely, some militant-controlled councils announced that they would challenge the result. We used to sit in the House of Commons Tea Room, gloomily reckoning up all the interest groups her government, and ours for that matter, had offended and wondering quite how this might play out at the polls. Not that it seemed to matter to her. No one could have been less concerned with political popularity.

  This iconoclastic disregard for the conventions certainly extended to the management of her Cabinet and her attitude to the civil service, even to other ministers’ special advisers (although not to her own). On occasion, she actually seemed to take the view that she was nothing to do with her own government – or ‘the government’ as she sometimes used to refer to it – and that one of her roles was to protect the public from it. Compared with all her successors, she enjoyed very favourable press coverage, but, far from being grateful, she treated even the most well-respected journalists with disdain.

  Her attitude to Parliament was somewhat different. Michael Brunson writes in A Ringside Seat that she told him ‘Parliament could hold up her plans for a year, but no more’, which implies that she had a healthy respect for the conventions and role of Parliament, and nothing more than that. She was certainly not clubbable, and regarded the Commons as a place of work, a place in which to perform, but not one in which to spend all one’s waking hours. When she first became an MP, she had young children and a busy home and constituency life, and would certainly have left the House promptly after votes.

  For that reason, some have claimed that she was a bit of an outsider in Parliament too. But when I was a backbencher and junior minister during her time as Prime Minister, my impression was that she took great care over her relations with the House of Commons. She was very frequently in the Commons, as statistics confirm. For one thing, she voted in more than 30 per cent of divisions when she was Prime Minister. Tony Blair voted in about 5 per cent. Milburn Talbot, Head Doorkeeper in the Commons, recalls her coming in most evenings, after some outside engagement, to vote, to have meetings in her room behind the Speaker’s Chair, or to be around, ‘always marvellously dressed in a long gown, and wafting clouds of perfume. She always had a word for the doorkeepers and the policemen.’ I think she enjoyed the atmosphere of repartee and gossip. Allan Rogers, the former Labour MP for the Rhondda, not exactly a fellow traveller, enjoyed paying her extravagant compliments on her appearance, to which she used to reply, ‘You Welsh, you’re such flatterers!’

  She would regularly go into the less salubrious cafeterias and into the Members’ Dining Room to eat and chat to people. Sometimes she would appear in the Strangers’ Dining Room, and I can remember my stepson being struck dumb by her sudden appearan
ce at our table. On one occasion, I remember her coming into the Tea Room during an all-night sitting at around 5 a.m., where we were slouching, unwashed and bleary-eyed, around a table on which were the remains of the night’s teas, coffees and sandwiches. ‘You’ve been eating buns,’ she cried accusingly. No one had the courage or energy to argue, although there were points that might have been made.

  Janet Fookes has a very positive memory of Mrs Thatcher’s attendances in the Commons.

  When she was Prime Minister, I noticed the frequency with which she would be voting in the division lobbies late into the evening, even if her crowded itinerary meant that she was getting up early the next day, often on a gruelling overseas visit. It was clear that she had a strong sense of duty towards the House of Commons as an institution, and a concern that she did not expect members of her party to be voting when she had chickened out.

  Ian Beesley recounts her cautious attitude towards the role of Parliament.

  She was sensitive to the mood and will of the House of Commons. The Rayner/Efficiency Unit wanted to conduct a study of the costs imposed on government by Parliament through parliamentary questions, briefing for debates, appearances at Select Committees etc. She would not entertain the idea; it was not the job of the government to scrutinise Parliament.

  Both Michael Jopling in his role as Chief Whip and Patrick Cormack as an influential backbencher recall that she was sufficient of an insider to encourage the playing of parliamentary games within the House of Commons.

  Michael Jopling writes,

  After the 1979 election, she announced her whole ministerial team on the Sunday evening, following polling day on the Thursday. Over a drink that evening, I said that she had not yet invited anyone to be her Parliamentary Private Secretary. She asked me if I had any ideas. ‘Would you buy Ian Gow?’ I offered. She readily agreed, and when I phoned him he asked if eight o’clock would be a suitable time for him to report at No. 10 the following morning. ‘I think nine o’clock would be more appropriate,’ I suggested.

  I think that history has not reflected the influence that Ian Gow had on Margaret Thatcher over the next four years. For instance, I have always felt that his strong eurosceptic views drew her more and more into that position over the early years of government.

  She turned a blind eye to some of Ian’s activities in causing mischief by encouraging dissent to causes which were close to his and her heart, although contrary to the government’s policy. An example was the difficulty we had in passing Jim Prior’s Northern Ireland Bill, which was unpopular with some of our own members and Enoch Powell, who was then an Ulster Unionist MP. In the end, I had to tell her that it was taking so long that we must move a timetable motion. [Michael Jopling means by this that Conservative MPs had been holding up the progress of their own government’s Bill by filibustering, or making over-long speeches, raising unnecessary points of order and so on, and encouraged to do so by the Prime Minister’s own PPS.] She said, ‘I hope you realise, Michael, that you are the first Chief Whip to move a guillotine motion against our own side?’ But she agreed.

  Deep waters indeed.

  Patrick Cormack recalls another covert operation when Margaret Thatcher was Leader of the Opposition.

  Most of my memories of this time are associated with a small and rather unusual dining group I convened. For many months I used to meet Reg Prentice, at that time Minister for Overseas Development in the Callaghan government, almost on a weekly basis, after Cabinet meetings and we would have lunch together at the Reform Club (in Pall Mall). It became increasingly clear that he was not only disenchanted by his supremely unattractive constituency party in Newham, but he was also less and less in sympathy with the Labour government of which he was a member and with the Prime Minister who had appointed him. It was out of these meetings that we formed a little coterie. It consisted of three Labour and three Tory MPs. The other Labour members were John Mackintosh and Brian Walden, and the Tories were Julian Amery, his brother-in-law Maurice Macmillan and me. Being the most junior, I acted as organiser/secretary.

  Even now, I will not give the full inside story of that remarkable episode in late 1970s political life. Sufficient to say that we formed a line of communication to the Leader of the Opposition. Brian Walden met her from time to time, and even helped to draft some of her speeches. And I took Reg to see her at her home in Flood Street, both before and after he left the government. It did not take long after he had returned to the backbenches for him to join the Conservative Party. He was adopted to fight the safe seat of Daventry at the next election. In our meetings, Margaret showed herself very alive to the dramatic possibilities produced by the conversion of a Labour Cabinet minister to the Tory cause. She also saw the attraction of working closely with those in other parties and made some of her own approaches, sometimes assisted by us. One in particular was to Roy Jenkins. Reg himself was given an assurance that he would be in any future Conservative government, and both he and we thought that would mean a Cabinet position. Another by-product was a book of essays by new converts from the left, which I edited. Entitled Right Turn, its leading piece was by Reg.

  After the 1979 general election, he was made Minister for the Disabled, outside the Cabinet. Having played a fairly significant part in orchestrating his defection, I was somewhat disappointed that there was no place for me in the first Thatcher government.

  [In fact, Patrick Cormack was approached by the late Jack Weatherill to see if he would like to become a Whip, but Patrick turned down the offer, in what he describes as ‘possibly the most mistaken decision of my political life’.]

  Margaret Thatcher herself would have made no claims to be the kind of orator whose speeches filled the Chamber of the House of Commons. Indeed, I heard her say on many occasions, ‘If you want a speech made, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.’

  Peter Riddell confirms that:

  She was never a natural orator. She was always rather awkward and obviously uneasy with the artifices of speech writers. Her success came from the power of her personality, the force of the conviction politician, the sabre rather than the rapier. Hence her most memorable speeches were all about the circumstances – the Iron Lady being tested during the Falklands conflict or in the aftermath of the Brighton bomb in October 1984. On both these occasions, it was less the soon-to-be forgotten words that impressed than the expression of the personal will of the leader.

  I believe that she had strong respect for the conventions of Parliament. She may not have been a devotee of the gossipy Tea Room and bars, but she knew how much backbenchers mattered. Tellingly, she writes in The Downing Street Years about the afternoon of her first Cabinet meeting:

  In all this activity of government making and policy setting, however, I knew I could not neglect the backbenchers. After twenty years in the House of Commons, through six parliaments, I had seen how suddenly trouble could arise and the business of the House be put in jeopardy. So on the Tuesday evening, before Parliament assembled the following day, I had invited the chairman and officers of the 1922 Committee for a talk to celebrate our victory and discuss the work of the coming parliamentary session … Even in less stormy times, a heavy legislative programme is only possible when there is a good working understanding between No. 10, the 1922 Committee, the Whips’ Office and the Leader of the House.

  And she knew very well that it was the Commons that had the power to make a party leader – and to destroy a party leader. Patrick Cormack recalls the events which led up to her election as Leader of the Conservative Party.

  I had no personal dealing with her during those rather fraught years of the Heath administration, which was brought to a shuddering halt when he made the fatal mistake of asking the country who ran it, in the second Miners’ Strike. I was one of those who spoke out against a premature election. Although Heath won more votes than Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, he was out, and an unhappy leader of an increasingly fractious party during the months leading up to the seco
nd 1974 election in October.

  When Ted Heath failed again, it was quite clear that his days were numbered. All over the Palace of Westminster, one would find Conservatives talking of, and often plotting for, a change at the top. I was one of a small group, convened by Nigel Fisher and Airey Neave, who talked of various potential successors. Keith Joseph had ruled himself out by a rather injudiciously worded speech. Incredibly, Edward du Cann was briefly considered, and then one night Airey Neave came along, looking particularly conspiratorial, and said, ‘What about Maggie?’ It was the first time I had heard her called that. Initially his suggestion was met with almost total scepticism but, as it became increasingly clear that she was the only politician of any real stature who might have the courage to allow her name to go forward, we coalesced around her and the bandwagon began to roll.

  The rest, as they say, is history, but I had my own ringside seat. I was leading a small deputation from the National Association of Widows, including Eve Macleod, its president (the widow of Iain Macleod), and June Henner, the founder and chairman, who happened to come from Staffordshire, to see the Leader of the Conservative Party. The date fixed was after the first ballot and before the second, and so it was the Acting Leader, Robert Carr, we saw. And we saw him on the very afternoon that the second ballot was declared. Indeed, our meeting was interrupted by a phone call giving the result and, when he came back from taking it, he handed a piece of paper to Eve Macleod and me, announcing Margaret Thatcher’s triumph. ‘Well, she ought to be sympathetic to widows,’ was Eve’s immediate response.

  Later that evening, Airey Neave hosted a celebration party for those of us who had taken part in the campaign and, at a suitable moment, Margaret herself arrived, with a broad but determined smile and an immediate pep talk.