Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  For some of her critics, Mrs Thatcher’s efforts to modulate her voice were a sign of her fundamental inauthenticity. Even during the 1979 campaign, the BBC’s Michael Cockerell told viewers that there had been two Margaret Thatchers on show: ‘“Our Maggie”, the housewife’s friend’ and ‘the crusading Iron Maiden, promising a radical blend of free enterprise politics’. When he put this to her, she smiled. ‘Oh, three at least,’ she said. What were the three? She laughed, and then thought for a moment. ‘There is a very logical one,’ she said, ‘there’s an instinctive one, and there’s just one at home.’5

  So who was she, really? The Grantham schoolgirl, the dutiful Methodist, the Oxford chemist or the businessman’s consort? A working mother, a populist crusader, a patriotic warrior or a radical reformer? The truth, of course, is that she was all of them, though not always at the same time. As Ronnie Millar remarked, politics is a ‘form of theatre’, and Mrs Thatcher was a performer to her fingertips. Like any true diva, she worked hard at her art, honing her speeches so that, in Millar’s telling phrase, she could ‘command’ her audience. She was a quick learner: shrill and hectoring in 1975, she had become huskier, almost confiding four years later. It helped that, unlike Heath, she enjoyed the show-business element of politics, which brought out what her biographer, Charles Moore, calls her ‘actressy’ side. She was very good at walkabouts and stunts, and even her fiercest opponents conceded that she had star quality. As Moore writes, ‘she always had a sense of occasion and of fun. She injected drama into these visits, and made the members of the public caught up in them amused and excited to be there.’ In the years to come, that sense of drama would become one of her defining characteristics.6

  What about the woman off-stage? One of the most acute accounts was written years later by the journalist Ferdinand Mount, who ran her Policy Unit after the Falklands War. Mount admired Mrs Thatcher enormously, but he was very conscious of her comic aspects. He first encountered her in the mid-1960s, when she struck him as ‘a little cross and unmistakably pretty’, as well as ‘entirely calm’. He found her voice painfully sharp, but she had lowered it by the time he came to work for her. One thing she never changed, though, was her ‘eager, waddling walk … like a hen who hasn’t the slightest desire to leave the coop’. Another astute observer, the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, seized on her walk in his book The Line of Beauty (2004). Making her long-awaited entrance at a party, she comes in with ‘her gracious scuttle, with its hint of long-suppressed embarrassment, of clumsiness transmuted into power’. Every word is perfectly chosen. The novelist Sebastian Faulks told Charles Moore that he had once met the elderly Lady Thatcher at a lunch party and advised her to read Hollinghurst’s novel. She had never heard of it, but as she left she said intently: ‘The Line of Duty. I shall remember that.’ As slips go, it could hardly have been more revealing.7

  One of the things that made Mrs Thatcher such a satisfying comic figure was that she had very little sense of the ridiculous. It is not true that she had no sense of humour: when one of her secretaries reported that a Tory MP had made a ‘massive lunge’ at her in a taxi, shambolically scattering her handbag all over the floor, Mrs Thatcher ‘cried with laughter’. Yet even her greatest admirers admitted that her sense of the absurd was underdeveloped, to say the least. Working for her, wrote Mount, was a ‘holiday from irony’. In particular, she was completely blind to double entendres, which were all the funnier because she was so painfully earnest. Introduced to a young man in Putney carrying a gigantic wrench, for example, she said seriously: ‘Goodness! I’ve never seen a tool as big as that!’ On another celebrated occasion, she walked into the Conservative Research Department holding a copy of the Sun, open at page two, where she had been impressed by the paper’s leader columns. ‘There!’ she triumphantly told her male aides, completely oblivious to the spectacle on page three. ‘What do you think of those two, eh?’ Even this, however, pales by comparison with the story of her tour of the Falklands in January 1983, perhaps the most emotionally satisfying moment of her political life. She was inspecting a huge field gun when a soldier asked if she would like to fire a round. At that she looked worried: ‘But mightn’t it jerk me off?’8

  Mrs Thatcher’s former aide Matthew Parris once remarked, quite rightly, that she was a bit like the Wizard of Oz. To Dorothy and her friends, the wizard seems an almost supernatural figure, but he turns out to be just an ordinary old man from Omaha, Nebraska. And in some ways, despite everything, Margaret Thatcher was an ordinary middle-aged, middle-class woman from Grantham, Lincolnshire. When the journalist Louis Heren first met her in 1975, he thought her a ‘stereotypical middle-class competent Mum with a loving husband and a minimum of worries’. Her favourite colour was turquoise; her favourite food was Dover sole; her favourite childhood book was A Tale of Two Cities; her family teddy bear was called Humphrey. She bought her clothes from Marks & Spencer; she liked chocolates and whisky and soda; she loved Yes Minister. She was fond of classical music: her favourite composers, she told the Observer, were Chopin, Beethoven and Bach. Contrary to what is often thought, she liked reading. Her correspondence shows that during the mid-1970s she read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessedfn2 and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, while she often talked about her enthusiasm for John le Carré. She enjoyed poetry, spending the summer of 1976 ploughing through Rudyard Kipling’s collected poems, and she was able to quote – or rather, slightly misquote – Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Deceptions’ to him when they met in 1980. And despite her reputation as the enemy of tradition, she liked collecting antiques. She took a keen interest in paintings for Number 10, specifically requesting pictures of Nelson and Wellington, and was baffled that her predecessors had been ‘satisfied with inferior pictures’. At a reception in 1982 she gave the journalist Hugo Young a tour of the new paintings, proudly pointing out Walpole, Nelson and Pitt the Younger. ‘She knew them all,’ Young recorded; ‘the provenance of the pictures and of every item of silver.’9

  Most people would have recognized these as the tastes of a conventional middle-class Englishwoman in her mid-fifties. To Mrs Thatcher’s critics, however, they were evidence of her irredeemable unsophistication. She was, claimed the writer Jonathan Raban, a complete philistine, who knew nothing of ‘doubleness, contradictions, paradox, irony, ambiguity’, and who regarded books, art and ideas as ‘just so much Black Forest gateau’.fn3 Her government, agreed another writer, Hanif Kureishi, was run by ‘vicious, suburban-minded materialistic philistines’. Even on the right there were plenty of people who shuddered at her alleged intellectual limitations. She was a woman of ‘common views but uncommon abilities’, said the backbencher Julian Critchley. She had ‘absolutely no interest in ideas for their own sake’, said Oliver Letwin, a young member of her Policy Unit in the mid-1980s. ‘She has no ideas, not even views I think,’ Sir Ian Gilmour, her most waspish Conservative critic, told Hugo Young. All she had were ‘some strong prejudices’.10

  Even readers unsympathetic to Mrs Thatcher might think this a bit unfair. By these standards, how many of modern Britain’s political titans would pass muster? Did Jim Callaghan spend his free time relishing paradox, irony and ambiguity? The irony is that in some respects she was unusually keen on political and economic ideas. She certainly loved getting advice from intellectuals: as the Conservative Research Department’s Chris Patten recalled, she was always ‘seeing a crazed Swiss professor’. And although not an intellectual herself, she did have one familiar intellectual quality: she could not stop arguing. It was ‘her favourite recreation’, explained the Conservative treasurer Alistair McAlpine. ‘If she was truthful, this is what she would put in a biographical entry. She has a genuine and insatiable love of good argument. Of course, she is terrifically good at it. Her capacity to absorb detail makes her almost impossible to beat. She is so well informed.’11

  What is undoubtedly true, though, is that Mrs Thatcher was not blessed with much imagination. In some ways this was a strength, because she neve
r wandered from her narrow certitudes, but it also meant she could be painfully short of empathy. If people thought differently from her, they were not just different; they were wrong. It was as if she could not imagine what it was like to be poor, to be insecure, to be frightened of change, to be daunted by opportunities, to be intimidated by ambition. Even her allies were troubled by what Douglas Hurd privately called her ‘narrow horizons’, her ‘inability – not unlike Ted [Heath]’s – to put herself in others’ shoes’.12

  A glorious example came after she had left office, when she met Matthew Parris at a dinner party. She asked what he was up to: ‘You always have some grand plan, some wild and woolly expedition.’ He said he was planning a trip to the Desolation Islands, in the Indian Ocean. Before he could elaborate, she cut him off. She knew why he wanted to go, she said:

  You want to go thousands of miles to some remote and dangerous place, and climb to the top of a mountain, and look up at the moon and the stars, and say, ‘Here I am in a wild and dangerous place, miles from anywhere, looking at the moon and the stars.’

  You’ll go all that way. And you’ll succeed – oh yes, you always do. You’ll see the moon and the stars. And it will be worth one newspaper article, or at the most two. And then you’ll have to come all the way back again.

  Now take my advice, dear: don’t bother. You can see the moon and the stars from Spalding.

  Thousands of pages have been written about Mrs Thatcher, but none of them captures her better than that last line.13

  For Mrs Thatcher’s critics, one of the first items on the charge sheet was that she ushered in an age of unprecedented materialism. For Labour’s Denis Healey, she had inaugurated the rule of ‘fear and greed’. For the Observer’s Robert Chesshyre, she had persuaded people that ‘there was nothing wrong in being greedy’, and presided over a generation ‘raised in a materialistic ambience, devoid almost entirely of spiritual or cultural values’.14

  Yet Mrs Thatcher herself was neither materialistic nor greedy. Thanks to her Methodist upbringing, she was positively parsimonious. When, a month after she had she moved into Number 10, her aides forwarded the refurbishing bill for her approval, she went through it with a fine-toothed comb. She was horrified by the costs of the new linen (£464) and crockery (£209), and insisted on paying for the new ironing board herself. Contrary to what was often thought, the Downing Street flat was not free: she and her husband had to pay £3,000 a year in rent. When it was redecorated, Mrs Thatcher paid the bill herself. When her first-floor office was redecorated, she paid for that too. Uniquely among major world leaders, she organized her own cleaner. And even when she was not personally liable, she was obsessed with keeping costs down, getting rid of some of the photocopiers and prowling around to switch off the office lights. When her Welsh Secretary, Nicholas Edwards, sought permission to renovate his Cardiff office to provide a small one-bedroom flat for visiting ministers, she rejected the first quotation (‘I just don’t believe that a one-room + bathroom + kitchenette can cost £26,000’) and only gave the go-ahead after the Welsh Office found a cheaper solution.15

  Mrs Thatcher always thought of herself as house-proud. Talking to Living magazine, she claimed to love ‘turning out the airing cupboard’ or ‘straightening out’ the kitchen. In reality, though, she was only interested in one thing: work. Macmillan had famously gone to bed with a Trollope, but Mrs Thatcher just could not switch off. The idea of relaxing for its own sake struck her as deranged. She could not see the point of holidays, had no friends outside politics and spent little time with her family. As her Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Sir John Coles, recalled, ‘her main form of relaxation was political or economic discussion; she was often at her happiest with a whisky and soda in her hand and surrounded by half a dozen politicians, businessmen, bankers or economists engaged in a lively argument.’ Everything was political. Whenever the conversation moved away from politics, she could not wait to steer it back. She was always performing, always working, always on.16

  For her advisers, this could be wearying beyond belief. When her policy chief, John Hoskyns, first met her in 1976, he found her ‘a limited, pedantic bore’, relentlessly lecturing her listeners about ‘things we were quite well aware of’. Ferdinand Mount, too, was astounded by her total dearth of small talk. She would go on and on and on, in the same ‘one-paced assertive style’, no matter whom she was talking to. When her guests had left Number 10, she and Mount would have a glass of Scotch, she would kick off her shoes, and ‘she would resume the harangue, as though we had never met before, as though I had not heard the same spiel half-a-dozen times already that day’. Later, he recalled one evening at Chequers when, after her ministers had gone home, she asked another aide to play the piano. She sat ‘upright at the end of the sofa’, he remembered, ‘like a schoolgirl on her first trip to the Wigmore Hall’, and Mount wondered what was going through her head. ‘Is her mind drifting away to all the things she never speaks to us about, childhood, Oxford, her first kiss? Or is she making a mental note to call Alan Waltersfn4 about the inconsistencies in the latest money supply figures?’ It is pretty obvious which he thought more likely.17

  In Whitehall, Mrs Thatcher’s work ethic became the stuff of legend. As her civil servants recalled, she was always exceptionally well prepared and virtually never made a factual error. They may have found her annoying, hectoring or plain wrong, but they very rarely questioned her intelligence or hard work. John Coles thought her tireless application was ‘the habit of a lifetime’, since she ‘had been brought up to regard hard work as a virtue’. Another mandarin, Robin Butler, thought it was born of anxiety: because Mrs Thatcher was always the outsider, the lone middle-class woman surrounded by patrician men, she was determined to prove she was better than they were. Either way, no other post-war Prime Minister won so many plaudits for being so well informed. She was ‘really amazing’ in her ‘mastery of briefs’, her Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, told Hugo Young.fn5 He might ‘spend most of a night getting into some big brief’. Yet at the next day’s Cabinet she would stroll in and prove herself ‘completely on top of it’.18

  But all this came at a cost. Even before she became Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher was famous for her lack of sleep. At five in the morning she often listened to the BBC World Service news, and by seven she was already at work. In the evenings, wrote John Coles, she commonly worked until ‘midnight or beyond’, curled up on the sofa with a glass of watered-down whisky, while ‘if there was a major speech in the offing it was not uncommon to work till 2.00 or 3.00 a.m.’ This was, by any standards, a punishing routine, especially since she worked at weekends. Perhaps she felt that, as a woman, she could not afford to show weakness. But even her stamina had its limits, and her intimates could tell when she was flagging because she would talk more than ever. In the archives there are three very telling letters, all dated 31 July 1980, written by government whips who had been round for dinner the night before. All express the same sentiment in slightly different words: ‘I do hope that you do get a chance of a rest’, ‘I do hope that you get a proper break’, ‘I do hope that you have a good rest’. Clearly they were trying to tell her something.19

  All this is a useful reminder that Margaret Thatcher was not just a political icon but a human being. Of course some people found this impossible to believe. Among her critics it was widely thought that she had no human feelings at all, which was something no sane person would have said about Churchill or Macmillan. Raymond Briggs drew her as the ‘Old Iron Woman’, while the Comic Strip parodied her as the ‘Ice Maiden’. ‘Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?’ wrote Adrian Mole in a poem for the New Statesman. ‘Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep?’20

  She did, and she never denied it. Contrary to her public image, Mrs Thatcher was an anxious and not always immensely confident person, a surprisingly common trait in successful politicians. Matthew Parris thought her apparently serene command was ‘tinged with a panic’ that she was always ‘ma
naging not quite to betray’. Robin Butler, who worked with her first as Principal Private Secretary and then Cabinet Secretary, thought her lack of confidence was ‘the key to her style … That was why she was so assertive. She had to pump herself up with adrenaline before any big occasion.’ Even her long-serving bodyguard, Barry Strevens, noticed that things sometimes seemed to get her down. There would, he recalled, be a ‘slight crack to her voice and if she was upset, her shoulders drooped and she somehow seemed smaller than usual’. Rather sweetly, he would offer her a mint to cheer her up.21

  None of this was a secret. ‘Do you get nervous sometimes?’ asked an interviewer from the News of the World in 1980. ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘Of course you do, you never get rid of it.’ Then the reporter asked the question that bothered Adrian Mole: ‘Do you ever wake up in the night and worry about some problem?’ Yes, she said: she had spent a ‘very uneasy night’ before the last European summit. As for the crying, she never hid it. ‘There are times when I get home at night and everything has got on top of me when I shed a few tears, silently, alone,’ she told Woman’s World. Nobody liked hearing ‘things which are wounding and hurtful … and I am no exception’. While she was Leader of the Opposition, the rakish Tory backbencher Jonathan Aitken, then going out with her daughter Carol, once found Mrs Thatcher in the sitting room, ‘red-eyed, visibly upset’. When he asked what was wrong, she sniffed that one of her own MPs had been ‘unbelievably unpleasant’ to her in the Commons and ‘said I was wrecking the party’. ‘He was probably pissed,’ Aitken said. ‘Don’t let it get to you.’ ‘I hurt too, you know,’ she said sharply, getting up and walking out. It was then, Aitken wrote, that he realized ‘the Iron Lady had a soft centre’.22