The Real Iron Lady

by Gillian Shephard

  One of the most telling points in Keith Simpson’s account is the reaction of his Secretary of State, George Younger, explaining that he had undergone an experience very familiar to every Cabinet minister. There is no excuse for rude or bullying tactics, of course, although they are commonplace in my experience, not only in political life, but also in boardrooms, at university high tables and in every profession. But there is too much evidence to ignore that Mrs Thatcher did become increasingly overbearing in her approach, particularly in the second half of her premiership. It is also the case that you cannot get the best out of colleagues with such an approach. In the end, the worms turned. The outsider was herself ejected.

  As far as Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine of Us and Them was concerned, the civil service and its works were definitely Them. Her attitude, formed at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance where she was a junior minister, and at the Department of Education and Science where she held her first Cabinet post, never altered, although she had real respect and indeed affection for a number of individual officials.

  It is at least possible that the condescending attitudes she met from senior officials in her first ministerial posts influenced her later attitude. In Hugo Young’s One of Us, the Permanent Secretary, Sir Eric Bowyer, was apparently concerned, when she arrived at the Ministry of Pensions, that her family responsibilities, with her two young children and a husband, would hamper her ability to put in the hours necessary. He was further concerned that her immaculate appearance meant that she spent hours at the hairdresser’s and the dressmaker’s. He need not have worried, since her home life was efficiently organised, and with her addiction to heated rollers and skill with a needle, she was well able to take care of her own grooming. In the end, he was forced to concede that she worked as hard as anyone and harder than many. But she may well have asked herself if he would have had the same anxieties about a new young male minister.

  It was the same at the Department of Education and Science, where Sir William Pile, the Permanent Secretary, was struck by her obvious distrust of the civil service and her determination from the moment of her arrival to put her stamp on policy and to get very prompt action from the Department – apparently a new experience for Sir William and his colleagues. I am led to wonder what her predecessors thought their roles were.

  I have a lot of sympathy for Margaret Thatcher’s attitude. I found in my encounters with civil servants some of the most dedicated and knowledgeable people imaginable in any profession. But I also found loftiness worthy of any episode of Yes, Minister. On my first morning as Minister of State at the Treasury, in December 1990, I was visited by the Permanent Secretary, the very grand Sir Peter Middleton. He said, ‘I think you should know at once that in the Treasury, junior ministers are of no account. Our work is done with the Chancellor. For your information, the Treasury does not introduce measures with 38 million losers, like the poll tax, and by the way, there is no lavatory for women ministers, as you are the first we have had.’ I howled with silent laughter for weeks.

  Margaret Thatcher believed that to govern was to act. Action and results were what mattered, and process, of which obviously the civil service was not only the master, but also an essential part, was of no interest to her. Ian Beesley in an earlier chapter of this book recalls a seminar for junior ministers in 1985, where Margaret Thatcher declared, ‘You have been appointed to get results, not just to hold office.’ She confirms this in The Path to Power, where she writes of detecting in the Department of Education and Science ‘opposition between my own executive style of decision-making and the more consultative style to which [the officials] were accustomed’. Worse, she also detected a self-righteously socialist ethos. In short, ‘It was soon clear to me that on the whole I was not among friends.’

  Later on, she came to regard some of the most senior civil servants who worked with her at No. 10 as her most trusted friends and colleagues.

  Robert Armstrong, as Secretary of the Cabinet, certainly fell into that category. He recalls two occasions on which she agreed reforms to the civil service and which illustrate superbly how a good relationship between an elected politician, even a potentially hostile one, and a skilled official can achieve smooth change.

  In the autumn of 1981, the Prime Minister decided, after taking advice from Sir Derek Rayner (her adviser on efficiency in government) to abolish the Civil Service Department and to divide its functions between the Treasury and the Cabinet office, which took responsibility for organisational, welfare and conduct and disciplinary issues. The Permanent Secretary of the Civil Service Department took early retirement and it was necessary to appoint a successor to him as Head of the Home Civil Service. The Prime Minister accepted by recommendation that the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, Sir Douglas Wass, and I should be joint heads, but when Douglas Wass retired eighteen months later, she decided that his successor should not be appointed Joint Head of the Civil Service. ‘I don’t want to go on with a Pinky-and-Perky arrangement, Robert, you’ll have to do it on your own.’ As I thought (and still think) that it is right that the Secretary of the Cabinet should be the Head of the Home Civil Service, I did not demur.

  Towards the end of my term of office I thought the time had come for the issue of a memorandum of guidance on the duties of civil servants in relation to ministers. I prepared a draft and discussed it with my fellow Permanent Secretaries. When I had a final draft, I sent it to the Prime Minister, who was the Minister of the Civil Service, explaining that I proposed to issue it on my own authority as Head of the Home Civil Service and was not asking for her to give it her formal approval, but that I wanted her to be aware of it and I hoped that she would lay it before Parliament as an annex to a Written Parliamentary Question. She was entirely content with this arrangement.

  Nor did Margaret Thatcher’s general antipathy blind her to the rights of public servants. Ian Beesley writes,

  Even on an issue on which she was determined, such as banning trade union membership at the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ), I recall her reflecting aloud that people were being asked to give up a right and should be compensated for doing so – causing a very senior figure to comment that he had heard the shops in Cheltenham were currently buoyant. Thatcher dropped her head to look into her lap, and only came up smiling when the rest of the attendees laughed. She did not readily get a joke.

  Despite these benign examples, however, she remained until the end of her premiership defiantly of the view that the whole of the civil service, the professions, local government and indeed most of the Establishment got in the way of the legitimately elected government.

  Indeed, on occasion, she felt she had to take the side of the people against the government. Stephen Sherbourne, her political secretary, would on occasion hear her with Denis, talking about ‘the government’ as if she were nothing to do with it. She was always delighted to find a source of information which contradicted the advice she was being given from an official channel. As John Wakeham said in an earlier chapter, ‘I 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.’

  Ian Beesley agrees:

  We organised an ‘eye-catching demonstration’ of the scale and burden of government forms, with the help of the Plain English Campaign and its joint leader, Chrissie Maher. An exhibition of forms was staged in the central lobby of the Palace of Westminster, and the Plain English people had brought two elderly ladies from Salford to bring alive the problems some people had in filling in the forms for benefits. The two were sat on upright chairs and went to stand when the Prime Minister approached them. She insisted they sit back down, and then knelt to hear their story and to have it repeated directly to Norman Fowler, who was then Secretary of State for Social Security. The empathy was clear. Government was failing those and others like them because the bureaucratic processes were too cumbersome, the forms they had to complete were too unintelligible and
the individuals too proud to admit defeat.

  As far as her relations with the newspapers were concerned, Margaret Thatcher had what I once heard described as the simple policy of not reading them, knighting their editors and ennobling their proprietors. Michael Brunson, the distinguished ITN political commentator, writes:

  In her dealings with the media, Mrs T. employed the same brisk efficiency that she brought to government. Not for her what one later Downing Street Press Secretary called ‘the daily necessity of throwing chunks of red meat to the press pack in order to satisfy their insatiable appetite for news’. By and large, she talked to us only when she had something important to say. Occasionally she would chat for a few minutes after a one-to-one interview and let slip a remark which could perhaps be used as deep background – once telling me, for example, that all the House of Commons really did was to hold up what she wanted to achieve for a year, or when a colleague learned that she was planning an inflation target of 3 per cent – something which she had not previously vouchsafed to her Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Peter Riddell writes:

  Margaret Thatcher did not have much time for working political journalists, like those of us who ran political teams in the Press Gallery. She regarded us as a mixture of the ill-informed, the ill-intentioned and the ill-directed. Journalism was not really a proper job. She would never use a term like ‘reptiles’ about us as her beloved husband, Denis, did. But there was a similar feeling of detachment and contempt.

  Her preferred media contacts were with proprietors and ideologically sympathetic editors and columnists, those who were ‘one of us’. This was in marked contrast with some of her predecessors, like Harold Wilson, and all her successors, who, at least during their rise to the top and in their early years as Prime Minister, cultivated friendly relations with political editors and correspondents, using first names at press conferences.

  For Mrs Thatcher it was always Mr Riddell, never Peter. And in many ways, quite right too. I have never called a serving Prime Minister by their first name, however well I knew them beforehand, and however friendly our relations afterwards. Mrs Thatcher created a certain mystique out of distance. There was always a little danger about her, apprehension of a damning put-down or memorable eruption.

  Bernard Ingham was her faithful emissary to us, with his bluff Yorkshire bark, and occasional bite. He was his mistress’s voice, intuitively understanding her instincts and moods, even if often anticipating rather than directly reporting on them. Bernard was always the loyal retainer below stairs, not a confidant sharing her late-night thoughts in the flat over a glass of whisky. He was an interpreter, and a very good one. He was not himself a player, unlike, say, Alastair Campbell during the Blair years. Bernard was there to handle the media on her behalf so that she would not have to do so.

  Her fierce antagonism towards the Establishment and all its works marked much of her domestic policy. The professions, the City, the academic world, the civil service, the press – all of them came into her sights. She was too much of a career politician to extend that antipathy to the House of Commons. But in the end, she was not in power for those who started with advantage on their side, but for the kind of working people she had grown up with in Grantham. And they rewarded her for that with their votes in three successive general elections.

  NINE

  ‘WITH DENIS THERE I WAS NEVER ALONE. WHAT A MAN. WHAT A HUSBAND. WHAT A FRIEND.’

  Margaret Thatcher prided herself on being an outsider. She chose to marry, in Denis, a man who could hardly have been more of an insider. No one could have been more clubbable than he was. A keen sportsman and golfer with a real skill for affable small talk, he had a knack for putting others at their ease if he felt they were uncomfortable in any way. His clear and consistent views, which chimed with those of the Telegraph, were supportive of his wife and impatient of her critics. His hail-fellow-well-met manner successfully concealed his knowledgeable and successful business acumen, his wicked sense of humour and his ability to send himself up. Ever present at dinners, functions and conferences, often heard muttering ‘leftie’, ‘nonsense’ and so on, there was the Prime Minister’s husband. He was in many ways her mainstay, and he really did resemble the caricature of himself so memorably portrayed in the famous ‘Dear Bill’ letters in Private Eye.

  The contributors to this book have been sparing in their mentions of Denis, although such mentions as there are, are appreciative of his role and character. I can recall meeting Denis only once. I had been invited with my husband to lunch at Chequers early on in my very junior ministerial career. We were both rather dreading it, not knowing quite what to expect, but, when we arrived, Denis picked out Tom as the other non-political person in the room and whisked him away to have an excellent and long chat about sit-on lawn mowers, which they both greatly enjoyed.

  Denis was almost as popular as his wife in her constituency of Finchley. Harvey Thomas writes that Mrs Thatcher regarded Finchley as ‘her real foundation’ and adds: ‘The marvellous Denis felt the same way! They both knew whatever political issues and battles she had to face as Prime Minister, the friends in Finchley were always there, ready to encourage her at any hour.’ As of course was Denis.

  Sir Richard Parsons, the former ambassador, is the one exception among the contributors to this book to provide an account devoted solely to Denis. It describes a hilarious conversation between him and the wife of the Spanish Prime Minister. The occasion was the visit of the Spanish Prime Minister to Downing Street for the signing of an agreement between Spain and Britain on the relaxation of access between Spain and Gibraltar.

  The Spanish delegation appeared and agreement was soon reached. Lunch followed. The two Prime Ministers were at the first table with the two foreign ministers. I was placed at the second one, with Mrs Calvo-Sotelo, wife of the Spanish Prime Minister, and Denis Thatcher. Denis Thatcher tried to present himself in public as a jovial idiot but I could see at once that he was no such thing. He started by giving a parody of the weird figure he liked to present.

  ‘I have been to Spain several times,’ he began heartily. ‘One of my favourite spots for the hols. Good cheap booze and quick service when you clap your hands. Jolly good golf too!’ He enthused for some time about the material pleasures of the warm south. Special emphasis was laid on the cheap booze. I was to transmit all this nonsense to dignified Mrs Calvo-Sotelo.

  ‘Mr Thatcher is saying how much he admires the civilisation of your beautiful country,’ I told her in my best Spanish. ‘Your great history, your devotion to the Christian faith, the work of your brave missionaries in South America and your wonderful religious paintings,’ I droned on, as Denis Thatcher recalled with gusto how cheap the cigars were on the Costa del Sol.

  ‘Do go on,’ murmured Mrs Calvo-Sotelo in Spanish. I realised that she spoke English almost perfectly. It was a happy occasion. I saw then that Mrs T. was lucky in her mate.

  And so she was, and even luckier that she knew it.

  TEN

  ‘WOMEN SHOULD AIM HIGH, IN POLITICS NOT LEAST.’

  So wrote Margaret Thatcher in the Sunday Graphic in 1952, on the accession to the throne of the young Queen Elizabeth II. She added, ‘Why not a woman Chancellor, a woman Foreign Secretary?’

  Most of her biographers, and, in particular, feminist commentators, point out that although in 1952, before she started on her own parliamentary career, the young Margaret Thatcher apparently believed that there was no limit to women’s potential, she did nothing to help them fulfil that potential once she herself had reached the top.

  It is indisputable that Margaret Thatcher did not promote women into her Cabinet. Although she made Janet Young Leader of the House of Lords, the first woman to hold that post, and in that capacity Lady Young attended Cabinet from 1981 to 1983, people were quick to point out that it did not really count, because it was a House of Lords position. It was a different matter in the Commons. She appointed a number of able women to ministerial posts; some
, like Lynda Chalker and Angela Rumbold, reached the position of Minister of State, but she promoted them no further. She encouraged her junior women ministers and took notice of what they said. The same went for Conservative women MPs, who saw her regularly and lobbied her on concerns particular to women, especially on the regular occasions when it seemed that the Treasury might have its eyes on an issue especially relevant to women, for example child benefit. She was close to senior women in the Conservative Party, as Joan Seccombe later explains. She was very conscious of the women’s vote, and from the very beginning of her political career, quite shamelessly appealed to women voters by being prepared to be interviewed about clothes and domestic matters. She constantly explained policy matters by using household examples: the housewife needing to balance her budget, for example. But the fact that she did not bring other women into the Cabinet cannot be ignored.

  It is also indisputable that she failed other feminist tests. She did not take up the cause of reducing unequal treatment for women in the workplace, although she could have done; she had, after all, always worked herself. Given her strong belief in self-help, she might well have made much of the need to engage in public life the 52 per cent of the population accounted for by women. She could have encouraged more women to come into politics, although she did support Emma Nicholson’s High Flyers initiative in the early 1980s which had that aim, and was indeed very successful.