The Real Iron Lady

by Gillian Shephard

  That was a dramatic enough Westminster event, but it was nothing compared with the night of 28 March 1979, when Jim Callaghan lost the vote of confidence in the Commons, clearing the way for a general election and allowing Margaret Thatcher to get her hands on the reins of power.

  Jill Knight was there.

  None of us who were MPs at the time will ever forget 28 March 1979. Britain had just been through the Winter of Discontent. Militants in the trade unions were holding the country to ransom and just about everybody was on strike. Birmingham’s car industry was being strangled by a rabid union leader known as Red Robbo. Constituents of mine who worked in the factories he controlled told me of the beating-up of any man who voted against strike action. The atmosphere of fear was tangible. Factories which made other goods were also strike-bound, but the local authority still demanded taxes from them, as long as the building was useable. So the owners took the roofs off them and I shall never forget how bleak those gaunt, headless buildings looked when I drove past. Miners, schools, street cleaners, dustmen, even grave diggers, were on strike.

  For Margaret, it was time to take a huge gamble. The country desperately needed an election, but the only way to get one was to put down a motion of No Confidence, and win it. But the political parties in Parliament then were so finely balanced that no one could predict how such a vote would turn out. Would she chance it? She made her decision: it was a chance Britain had to have. The motion was tabled.

  During the entire day of the vote, Westminster was in a fever of uncertainty. Colleagues kept rushing in with news of so-and-so changing his vote. Someone had been taken ill; another would not be able to get back because of the strikes. One Labour MP said he wanted a word with me, it was strictly private, but would I promise to give my Chief Whip a very confidential message to the effect that if we Tories promised to give him a peerage, he would vote with us. I delivered the message with as straight a face as I could muster, but the Chief almost fell off his bar stool with hilarity. That was one vote we did without. I might add that at this time, all the catering staff in Parliament were on strike. The bar staff were not. There was nothing to eat, but a very great deal to drink. A somewhat riotous atmosphere reigned.

  At 10 p.m. precisely, we trooped out to vote. Not a soul knew how it would go. Back to our seats, there was not a spare inch in the public or press galleries, or, of course, in the Chamber itself. After what seemed like an interminable time, the count was over. We were transfixed. In came the Labour Deputy Chief Whip, grinning from ear to ear. I saw Margaret, sitting on the front bench, go as white as a sheet. Two minutes later, our own Deputy entered. He held up one finger. We had won by one vote. The whole House erupted when Mr Speaker announced the result, and, with dignity, Mr Callaghan came to the despatch box to say that he would be handing in his resignation to Her Majesty in the morning.

  So Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, and set to work with a will.

  And as she stepped down after eleven-and-a-half years as Britain’s first and only woman Prime Minister, that final drama, too, was played out in the Chamber of the House of Commons, on the afternoon of 22 November 1990. We were all there. The Chamber was packed. The atmosphere was extraordinary and highly emotional, with everyone wondering if she would break down under the sheer weight of the occasion, our feelings veering from guilt to sympathy to admiration. Here was a woman who had led Britain for the past eleven years, who had been chucked out by her Cabinet and her party, and who still had the raw guts to come into the Chamber for Prime Minister’s Questions and to answer a No Confidence debate. Parliamentary occasions billed as epoch-making often turn to anti-climax. This one did not.

  Margaret Thatcher in The Downing Street Years gives her own account of the occasion.

  No one will ever understand British politics who does not understand the House of Commons. The House is not just another legislative body. On special occasions, it becomes in some almost mystical way the focus of national feeling. As newspaper comments and the reflections of those who were present will testify, I was not alone in sensing the concentrated emotion of that afternoon. And it seemed as if this very intensity, mingled with the feelings of relief that my great struggle against mounting odds had ended, lent wings to my words … The speech I rose to deliver does not read in Hansard as a particularly eloquent one. It is a fighting defence of the government’s record … which owes more to the Conservative Research Department than to Burke. For me at that moment, however, each sentence was my testimony at the bar of History. It was as if I were speaking for the last time, rather than merely for the last time as Prime Minister.

  Those are not the feelings of someone who saw herself as an outsider in Parliament, despite accusations from others that she was not clubbable and not a team player in the boys’ public school atmosphere which still prevails in the Commons.

  Her attitude to the conventions of Cabinet government was considerably more iconoclastic. Many historians have attributed her eventual loss of support within the Conservative Party to that very fact. There can be no doubt that in the end the Cabinet did for her: the worms finally turned. But she was very clear from the start that she was not interested in consensus government, even though her first Cabinets, as Michael Jopling points out in an earlier chapter, were a careful combination of supporters and opponents. It was not until 1983, after the Falklands and the Miners’ Strike, that she felt able to surround herself with ‘believers’.

  In Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister, Ian Gilmour defined it thus: ‘Mrs Thatcher regarded her first Cabinet not as an aid to good government, but as an obstacle to be surmounted. Her belief that dialogue was a waste of time rather than a means of arriving at an agreed course of action was part of her rejection of consensus politics.’

  But this, I think, was not simple bossiness. It came from her strongly held views about the role of a leader. In an interview with Kenneth Harris while she was still Leader of the Opposition, she said,

  If you choose a team in which you encounter a basic disagreement, you will not be able to carry out a programme, you won’t be able to govern … it must be a Cabinet that works on something much more than pragmatism or consensus. It must be a conviction government.

  I served in the Cabinet of John Major. He famously said that his predecessor had had the habit of announcing the conclusions of a Cabinet at the start of the meeting. One of his earliest decisions was to restore discussion and debate to the Cabinet; this he most certainly did. There was debate, there were votes, and majority decisions were taken. He was determined to involve colleagues in collective responsibility, and he was right to do so. But of course, colleagues lobbied one another for support on certain decisions, private meetings took place before Cabinet and ministers arrived briefed to the hilt by their departments; there was all the usual political manoeuvring that might be expected at the heart of the political process, so that, inevitably, what might have seemed an open Cabinet decision had in fact been pre-determined, but by colleagues, not by the Prime Minister.

  Margaret Thatcher had had only one Cabinet job before becoming opposition leader and then Prime Minister. She had not in any sense trained up for the job and everything about her personality suggests that she would expect her very closest political colleagues to be fellow travellers in all the causes they knew she stood for. Her management of Cabinet meetings in the early days of her premiership was, in fact, very orthodox. But after the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike and her election victory in 1983, her style became steadily more and more abrasive. Cabinet meetings became a one-woman band, and while some colleagues, like Nigel Lawson, welcomed them as an opportunity for quiet personal reflection, others chafed against her style and, on occasion, her rudeness.

  Geoffrey Howe, in his autobiography, describes a Cabinet meeting on 21 June 1989 which discussed the War Crimes Bill. This had been defeated by a huge margin in the Lords, and the question was whether the Parliament Act should be used to force the will of the Commons on to th
e Lords to get the policy through. Geoffrey Howe believed that the government should accept its defeat in the Lords, not least on the grounds that the Bill would ‘extend British jurisdiction, extraterritorially as well as retrospectively, and to do so for the sake of bringing proceedings, on the basis of evidence that was bound to be shaky because ancient, against defendants (i.e. Nazi war criminals) who were already in the twilight of their lives’. But Mrs Thatcher suddenly took a different view, possibly because

  it was only two weeks since she had visited Babi Yar in Kiev, the memorial to the 30,000 Jews the Nazis had murdered there. She seemed to be particularly provoked, however, by the fact that it was the Lords who were standing in her way. That argument would not have carried such weight during our earlier years in office. Now however, Margaret discounted arguments, much heeded in the Lords, from champions of tradition and justice, such as Lords Shawcross, Home, Hailsham and Whitelaw. The last two were no longer in her Cabinet. How we missed their voices on an issue like this! Cabinet loyalty to principles which they felt instinctively seemed to have departed with them. The discussion concluded, predictably, in accordance with Margaret’s wishes.

  The War Crimes Bill received Royal Assent in May 1991.

  Legends abound about the conduct of the Cabinet in the later years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. I have been told more than once of colleagues who were physically sick the night before Cabinet if they had a difficult presentation to make. Spitting Image, the satirical political puppet show, showed appalling scenes of the Prime Minister shouting at her ministers, cowing them into silence and treating them with the utmost disdain. In earlier chapters of this book, John Major and Geoffrey Howe write about displays of rudeness in Cabinet from Margaret Thatcher. David Howell, a member of her Cabinet, is quoted by Peter Hennessy in The Prime Minister:

  If by conviction government it is meant that certain slogans were going to be elevated and written in tablets of stone and used as the put-down at the end of every argument, then of course that is what happened … Of course there is a deterring effect if one knows that one’s going to go, not into a discussion where various points of view will be weighed and gradually a view may be achieved, but into a huge argument where tremendous battle lines will be drawn up and everyone who doesn’t fall into line will be hit on the head.

  You might have thought that ministers’ special advisers would perhaps be exempt from the challenging treatment handed out to their masters, but it was not so.

  Elizabeth Cottrell describes a meeting of special advisers in September 1987.

  The Prime Minister began by suggesting that we advisers were an unnecessary extravagance. ‘What use are you?’ she asked. After a long silence one bold spirit ventured, ‘You see, Prime Minister, we can say the ridiculous.’ Her answer came, sharp as an arrow, ‘I sincerely hope you don’t.’

  One by one, advisers and their departments’ policies were shot down in flames. Little resistance was offered. Then it was my turn. I had just been appointed special adviser to Richard Luce, Minister for the Arts, then not even a Cabinet post. Mr Luce had put forward some very modest proposals to charge for certain library services. Mrs Thatcher, some thought surprisingly, was opposed to these. ‘Tell your minister to stop this – he’s quite mistaken, libraries should be free,’ she declared.

  I remembered that evening in 1982 and gathered up my courage. ‘You are wrong, Prime Minister,’ I replied. There was a moment of appalled silence, while my colleagues waited in fearful glee for my annihilation. But she asked, in a perfectly measured tone, ‘Why, Elizabeth?’ and I tried to explain. I’m not sure if I converted her, but she listened intently and acknowledged that some of my arguments held water. After all, it is difficult to be terrified of someone who had run you a bath at three o’clock in the morning.

  Keith Simpson, MP for Broadland, was, before he was elected to the Commons in 1997, Special Adviser to George Younger, Secretary of State for Defence. He describes a meeting for special advisers held a year after Elizabeth Cottrell’s.

  In July 1988, John Whittingdale, Margaret Thatcher’s political secretary, wrote to all special advisers inviting them to a meeting with her in Downing Street on 3 October just before the Party Conference. In John’s words, it was ‘a three-line whip with no bisques’. The previous meeting between Margaret Thatcher and the special advisers had been a year before [described above by Elizabeth Cottrell], and when I asked them what it was like, it became apparent that it was something that filled them with both apprehension – because she really grilled them over policy – and expectation – because it was a privilege to have such an opportunity with a very busy Prime Minister.

  I took advice from Andrew Dunlop, my predecessor at the MoD, and then in the Policy Unit, and Archie Hamilton, who had been her PPS and was now Minister of State for the Armed Forces. Both emphasised that you had to be on top of your brief, to expect to be interrupted and challenged and under no circumstances to be overwhelmed by her questions and sheer verbal firepower.

  The civil servants in George Younger’s private office were filled with foreboding. I was told that while she admired the armed forces and placed a high priority on defence of the realm, she believed the MoD was profligate, incompetent and hopeless at procuring weapons and equipment. I was told that on my shoulders rested the reputation of my Secretary of State, the MoD and, not least, my own future. Gulp!

  Classically, George Younger was relatively relaxed about the meeting and said he assumed I would be well briefed and would know how to deal with her – ‘Good luck.’

  I knew that the Prime Minister would quiz me about defence budget overruns and the cost of new weapons, including a replacement main battle tank for the army, where the choice was between the German Leopard, the American Abrams and the British Challenger. I had read a note by Charles Powell from her private office about when recently she had met the chairman of Vickers, who were lobbying for Challenger. She told him she was fed up buying British equipment that didn’t work. He replied that his tanks were made under warranty. Magisterially, Margaret Thatcher replied, ‘It is no good the British Army going to war with tanks under warranty!’

  Cometh the day, cometh the trial. Late on the afternoon of 3 October, all the advisers, about a dozen of us, gathered in the Cabinet Room with John Whittingdale and Robin Harris, Director of the Conservative Research Department. Charles Powell hovered in the wings. The Prime Minister came in, and my immediate reaction was to think she looked tired, frail and somewhat bowed. She fiddled with her necklace and the neck of her jacket all the time. But any first impression of frailty and tiredness was soon swept away as the meeting began. She told us that she wanted to hear what we were putting into our ministers’ speeches for the Party Conference, what were the main issues in our departments, and looking for ideas for the future. She emphasised the need to control public expenditure and emphasised the role of the individual as against the state. She was quite pessimistic about public borrowing and credit, and, in a swipe at the Treasury, said if we were a Labour government, critics would have a field day.

  Then the inquisition began as she went round the table questioning adviser after adviser about ministerial plans and policies. I was fascinated to observe how my colleagues dealt with her aggressive line of questions and continual interruptions. The Treasury advisers were over-confident and rather arrogant initially, but soon retired hurt. Despite their valiant efforts, the advisers at Transport, Health and Social Security were brushed aside. Patrick Rock at Environment and Anthony Teasdale at the FCO argued their corner and were not overwhelmed by her questioning. The Cabinet table began to resemble a casualty clearing station.

  Finally she came to me and said, ‘You are Keith Simpson at Defence, what have you got to say for yourself?’ Perhaps with more bravura than common sense, I replied, like Oliver Twist, ‘We’d like some more money.’ There was a split second of total silence, then the Prime Minister, in that well-known raised voice said, ‘More money!’ For about tw
o minutes, although it appeared longer, she worked herself up to a splendid fury, and, without pausing for breath, launched a violent attack on the MoD and all its failing – extravagant budgets, overspends, procurement failures. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my fellow advisers looking either very apprehensive at me having raised a whirlwind or gleeful that I was the object of so much focused fury. It was impossible to get a word in edgeways, and later I said to my wife, Pepi, that I’d learned in our marriage to let exhaustion come into play and then attempt to explain my case. Briefly I was able to point out that government policy was strong defence, she had agreed on new equipment, including a replacement tank, and that the MoD under George Younger, who had replaced Michael Heseltine – at that point a startling glint appeared in her eye – was getting to grips with MoD failures. She merely nodded and passed on to the next adviser. The meeting ended with neither tea nor a proper drink.

  I left thinking that I had been well and truly chewed over. But at the door the Prime Minister stopped me and, to my surprise, said I had argued my case very well and that she valued robust debate.

  It took about ten minutes to get back to the ministerial floor in the MoD opposite Downing Street. I was greeted by members of the private office wailing and tearing their clothes, saying how could I have got into an argument with the Prime Minister, what was I thinking of, the reputation of the MoD was irreparably damaged, I could expect an interview with George Younger when he heard what I had said. It was fascinating to think that all over Whitehall, private offices had been in contact with No. 10 to find out what had happened at the advisers’ meeting.

  Later I told George Younger the gist of the meeting and he roared with laughter, saying it was a good learning experience, and now I realised what Cabinet ministers went through. Looking back on the meeting, I thought what a formidable and remarkable Prime Minister she was, who after nearly ten years had command over so much policy and had clear, if at times rigid, objectives and prejudices. Certainly I had learned a lesson about ‘going over the top’ in the face of such a formidable politician. Perhaps I should have followed the example of Peter Luff, the DTI adviser, who had managed to hide behind others so that Margaret Thatcher could not see him and was thus never questioned. His minister, David Young, congratulated him on this achievement!