Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  As secretary of State for Employment, Jim Prior was the only exception, the only Heathite with an economic job. With those listed above, he joined the important E Committee of the Cabinet, which dealt with economic matters, but he was never part of the Thursday breakfast club. Although Mrs Thatcher did not personally dislike him from the start (‘Jim’s a jolly, red-faced Englishman’),43 she had no doubt at all that he was wrong in his belief that trade unions should be appeased. She appointed him nevertheless because she felt she had to. Party unity demanded it, and she recognized that the arts of appeasement might well prove necessary in the short term. Although she expected that confrontation with the unions would one day come, she was not planning it or even, for the time being, wanting it. She believed that the immediate task was the steadying of the economy and the control of inflation. For the time being, Prior, who knew much more about the trade union leadership than any of her senior colleagues, and was trusted in this by large numbers of Conservative MPs, was the inevitable choice.

  In most of her other appointments, Mrs Thatcher’s chief concern was to construct a government which reflected the balance of power and experience in the party. Before the election she told the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, ‘I’m going to have a very good Foreign Secretary and I shan’t go on any foreign trips at all. My job is to turn the economy round.’44 This was impossible, of course, since all prime ministers in modern times have to travel, but it was obvious that Lord Carrington was the man who fitted Mrs Thatcher’s frame of mind. Extremely senior and yet, because he sat in the House of Lords, no threat to her job, he had the relevant experience, contacts and prestige. That Carrington was well regarded in Washington also pleased Mrs Thatcher. ‘I view his appointment as Foreign Secretary as one of the most encouraging signals Mrs Thatcher could send us at the start of her stewardship,’ Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in a memo to President Carter.45 She was willing to accede to Carrington’s request that Ian Gilmour join him as the Foreign Office spokesman in the Commons and in the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal. Following similar principles, she appointed the veteran Lord Hailsham as Lord Chancellor, the same job he had done for Ted Heath, Francis Pym as Defence Secretary, and Christopher Soames as Leader of the Lords, Lord President of the Council and minister in charge of the Civil Service. Norman St John-Stevas was made Leader of the House of Commons and the rebellious Peter Walker was brought in from the cold in what was considered the unthreatening job of Agriculture. There were no women in Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet, apart from herself. Of the six most senior men in the Cabinet, all were older than she, and only two (Howe and Joseph) agreed with her economic strategy. For most of the older men, who had fought in the Second World War – and, in the case of Whitelaw, Carrington and Pym, won the Military Cross – there was a difficulty in taking their new Prime Minister seriously. They did not conspire against her, but neither did they think it very likely that she would survive. She was conscious of being patronized and of being in a minority.

  The process of appointment proceeded efficiently on the morning of Saturday 5 May. The only hitch came when Mrs Thatcher offered Michael Heseltine the Energy portfolio. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve been rehearsing Environment for three years. That’s what I want to do.’ Mrs Thatcher’s handwritten list46 of her planned appointments shows that she had planned to offer Environment to the Labour defector Reg Prentice, but she gave in on the spot, fobbing Prentice off with a post outside the Cabinet. After Heseltine had left, she said to Michael Pattison, who had been present at the interview, ‘I don’t like one-to-one confrontations with Michael.’47 Even in opposition, she had felt wary about his ambition. One day, her protection officer, Barry Strevens, had told her that David Owen, as Foreign Secretary, had been so demanding in his dealings with staff that he had got through eight drivers and two personal protection teams. Mrs Thatcher’s comment was: ‘That’s the mistake of promoting someone too early. We won’t make the same mistake with Michael Heseltine.’48 But, now that the time had come, Heseltine had forced her to do what she had wished to avoid. From the start, he proved both an awkward and a formidable customer. The Energy job was given instead to David Howell, one of the intellectual architects of the free-market ideas which had briefly appealed to Ted Heath when he was in opposition, and the man who claimed to have been the first to use the word ‘privatization’ in Conservative circles. When the Cabinet was complete, it was, in terms of party management, a successful balance of all the forces and talents available.

  There was only one important deliberate omission – Ted Heath himself. Given the history between the two leaders, and the fact that her government’s majority of forty-three made Mrs Thatcher fairly safe from immediate revolt, few expected that she would feel the need to offer Heath a Cabinet post. She herself believed that ‘he would never have been able to take orders from a woman.’49 But Heath had maintained hopes. These were dashed by a letter from the new Prime Minister which arrived by despatch-rider at the house of Sara Morrison, with whom Heath was staying, early on the Saturday morning after the election. In it, Mrs Thatcher informed him that she had offered the foreign secretaryship to Peter Carrington, not to him. Heath took great offence at the fact that she signed the letter ‘Margaret Thatcher’, rather than just ‘Margaret’, though in truth she did this out of her habitual correctness rather than out of coldness.50 Heath was plunged into gloom. Matters were then made worse by the well-meaning suggestion of Carrington that Heath be offered the ambassadorship to Washington. ‘I thought a little sop would be a good idea, but it was a thoroughly bad idea,’ Carrington recalled.51 Jopling took round a second letter from Mrs Thatcher to Heath, this time signed ‘Margaret’, offering the post. ‘She’s trying to get me out of the bloody House,’ Heath complained,52 and he wrote her a curt letter of rejection (‘I am sure you will be able to find somebody to do the job’).* The news of his refusal leaked from No. 10 to the press. From then on, throughout Mrs Thatcher’s administrations, Heath’s hostility would prove absolute.

  Mrs Thatcher had left it to her new Chief Whip, Jopling, to draw up a list of the seventy or so proposed appointments to junior ministerial posts. He noticed that she was not looking for factional advantage in these choices; ‘She named a few as “my people”, but gave no impression of political bias; she saw it all in terms of talent.’53 On Sunday, he joined her and Whitelaw for lunch in No. 10 to discuss the list. It was, he discovered, her first sight of the flat which she and Denis were to inhabit for more than eleven years.

  The flat, which was at the top of the house, was small and almost poky. Cynthia Crawford, who helped sort it out, found its laundry room ‘full of dead plants’.54 Its kitchen was no more than a galley.* It suited Mrs Thatcher, however. She liked the idea of ‘living over the shop’, as in her Grantham childhood,55 and the convenience of being so close to the work she loved. Security was greater, and she hoped that her children could come and see her easily.† Denis, retired since 1975, though with various non-executive directorships, was happy to throw himself into the life of No. 10. ‘Margaret thought I helped at receptions,’ he remembered. ‘I thought I might as well enjoy it.’56 The couple continued to live in Flood Street until early June, while the flat was being refurbished, and then moved in. Denis paid rent to the government of £3,000 per year for the flat; Mrs Thatcher paid for its redecoration and also, at her own request, for the redecoration of her first-floor study in No. 10, which looks over St James’s Park, banishing the sage-green wallpaper which she disliked. Due to the remarkable strictness of government rules on such matters, the Thatchers were provided with no help of any kind in looking after their flat. They paid cleaning women themselves, and it fell to them, in practice to Mrs Thatcher herself, since Denis had old-fashioned views on these matters, to procure, generally with the help of Caroline Stephens and more junior secretaries, their own food and cook it. Denis was known to hurry home from drinks with chums after ringing No. 10 – ‘She says if I don’t come now dinner will be cold, and by that she me
ans it will have got cold.’57 Quite often, owing to the demands of office, he came home to nothing, but he did not mind unduly, being a man who preferred drinking to eating. He used to fear what he called ‘cosmic obloquy from her’ when he did not eat whatever food was put before him.58 Mrs Thatcher’s lack of time meant that the more wholesome sort of convenience foods – fish pie from Marks and Spencers, for example – were consumed in large quantities. Sometimes she would get Downing Street caterers to cook something for her freezer, at her own expense. Sherry Warner, who worked there from March 1981, used to sell her moussaka.59 Mrs Thatcher herself usually ate quite heartily but without much attention, treating food as fuel.60 She drank plentiful quantities of Famous Grouse whisky with ginger ale, ‘but she was never drunk’. Denis ‘was on the Gordon’s’.61

  Living in the No. 10 flat also made it easier for the Thatchers to call on the help they needed which the normal government machine did not provide. David Wolfson was the unpaid chief of staff of her political office. Those in the professional Civil Service often wondered what purpose he served, but Wolfson saw it as his job to ‘be aware of the few things that mattered and to make sure that she saw the right people at the right time’.62 Wolfson’s links with the business world gave Mrs Thatcher comfort, and so did his money. Cynthia Crawford, always known as ‘Crawfie’, a secretary who was to become more and more important in the smooth running of Mrs Thatcher’s life, and to serve her right up until her death, was paid for by Wolfson. Mrs Thatcher also brought into No. 10 the highly trusted personal staff she had used in opposition. Richard Ryder, in day-to-day reality, though not in title, ran the political office. Caroline Stephens, who was to marry Ryder in 1981, was the private papers secretary. Alison Ward, the longest-serving Thatcher employee, came as constituency secretary. Tessa Jardine-Paterson, who came as a political secretary after having worked for Mrs Thatcher in Parliament, remembered that she and her colleagues always saw it as part of their jobs to rustle up drinks and even meals for Mrs Thatcher. They felt perfectly happy to do so because she herself was so unsnooty in her readiness to help in such matters, often plunging her hands into the sink to wash up with the words ‘It’s much easier to do it yourself.’63 She also brought with her her two trusted personal detectives, Barry Strevens and Bob Kingston. Despite the fact that Mrs Thatcher was an egotist, she was also almost always extremely considerate towards staff and their families. ‘It was a great mistake to tell the Prime Minister that one of your children had got measles or something, because she’d go on talking about it for some days afterwards … she could carry this to really quite absurd lengths for a Prime Minister.’ She would send drivers home if they were not needed and check that those working for her had eaten, which was often difficult to do in No. 10 because, although it had vast state kitchens for banquets, it had no canteen: ‘She hated being a nuisance. She never, ever put herself first.’64

  In 1979, there were no computers at all in Downing Street and Mrs Thatcher drew heavily on the services of the career secretaries and typists, traditionally known as the ‘Garden Room girls’ because they worked in the two basement rooms which look on to the garden of No. 10. They took dictation, summoned by buzzers, in which a single buzz represented the principal private secretary and more buzzes represented more junior officials, and they generally made everything work. Each night they locked the carbons and ribbons for their electric typewriters in the safe, since these would bear the impression of secrets they had typed during the day.65 Mrs Thatcher strongly approved of the traditional smallness of the No. 10 set-up. It meant, in the words of Jane Parsons, who ran the Garden Room when the Thatchers arrived and had worked for every prime minister since Attlee and Churchill, that the whole enterprise felt like ‘a cosy family unit and the PM was head of the family’.66 Some of the girls would enter No. 10 through the door in the garden wall, wheeling their bicycles.67 A few prime ministers, notably Heath and Wilson, had been rather difficult or stand-offish about this ethos, but the Thatchers loved it. Denis, making himself available, said, ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do so long as it doesn’t coincide with rugger.’68* Mrs Thatcher would ‘bounce’ into the Garden Room to see what was going on. Sometimes, wandering round the various offices when she didn’t have enough to do, she would riffle through in-trays and snatch up correspondence from the public. On one occasion, she came across a letter from a small florist in Wandsworth who said that his business was being undermined by the supermarket sale of flowers. From then on, she placed all her flower orders with him.69 On another, shortly after she had arrived at No. 10, Mrs Thatcher was standing with the private secretaries, asking one of them how their telephone system worked.† Suddenly she grabbed the phone as the light flashed and said, ‘No. 10 Downing Street.’ On the other end was Stephen Wall,‡ a Foreign Office official. Alerted by the half-recognized voice, he said, ‘Who am I speaking to?’ ‘It’s the Prime Minister,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘Oh good,’ said Wall, with some presence of mind, ‘then I’ll get an answer quicker than usual.’70 She liked to watch her own office in action. One private secretary was at his desk one day having a long argument with the Treasury on the telephone. He felt he had lost the battle, and as he put down the receiver, he said, ‘S***! F***!’ Then he noticed that the Prime Minister had come in and was sitting at the desk beside him. Her eyes were shining with pleasure. ‘Temper! Temper!’ she said.71

  This cosiness extended to the Thatchers’ life at Chequers, the large country house in Buckinghamshire bequeathed by Lord Lee of Fareham for all British prime ministers, and staffed by the armed services. Mrs Thatcher liked to be driven there on Friday evenings and return, usually in time for supper, on Sunday. At Chequers, as in London, Mrs Thatcher quickly established a mixture of formality – she and Denis always dressed neatly and smartly – with friendliness towards those working for her. The duty private secretary each weekend had to stay in a cottage on the estate. A nervous Michael Pattison, on his first weekend in the role, came with his young family. To his surprise, the Thatchers invited them all to drinks before Sunday lunch. His two-year-old daughter climbed over Mrs Thatcher on the sofa and removed one of her earrings.* ‘She met with a very soft response,’ he remembered.72 For anyone who had experienced the Heath days, such a scene was unimaginable (even allowing for the fact that Heath would not have worn earrings).

  The first woman Prime Minister had needs previously unknown in Downing Street. Frequent hairdressing was required and, once television cameras were introduced to the House of Commons in 1989, these appointments became twice weekly. As had happened when Mrs Thatcher was education secretary, the private office was uneasy about putting the word ‘hairdresser’ into the diary on the grounds that it detracted from the dignity of the office. It asked Caroline Stephens how to deal with this self-invented problem. After discussion, the phrase ‘Carmen rollers’ was agreed as a sort of code.73 Mrs Thatcher’s clothes were looked after, in the early days, chiefly by Lady (Guinevere) Tilney, wife of Sir John, who had befriended Margaret Thatcher when they were both looking for parliamentary seats in the late 1940s. Lady Tilney was known, slightly mockingly, as ‘the Mistress of the Robes’, and was also responsible for organizing Downing Street receptions. Crawfie later succeeded to the informal title. Strict government rules prevented the acceptance of personal presents of any substantial value, but Mrs Thatcher was allowed to take such gifts on loan. She wore British clothes on these terms, and also the many jewels which Arab potentates tended to press upon her. With her seamstress’s love of getting detail right and her wartime generation’s devotion to ‘make do and mend’, she combined a very smart appearance with economy. Care was taken to record which dress she wore at which occasion, and dresses were given nicknames for easy recognition. One with red and white circles on it, for example, was called ‘Balloons’.74 Her attitude to her appearance and that of her surroundings combined two things which were potentially in conflict – her love of propriety and economy, and her love of attractive, high-quality o
bjects which would enhance the dignity of the premiership and the prestige of Britain. One official noted that she had ‘an almost Queen Mary-type’ magpie desire for pretty things. One day early in her first administration, she discovered that one of the ministerial flats in Admiralty House, vacant at the time, had several good bits of government furniture. She procured the key and personally led a party of the No. 10 steward, her appointments secretary and her detective to the flat. She walked round, pointing at pictures, chairs and so on, and saying ‘I’ll have that and that.’ The party of burglars, carrying their loot, then returned to No. 10 with the Prime Minister at their head.75