Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Like many sensitive people, Mrs Thatcher found it hard to forgive and forget. ‘She’s a hater, you know,’ Edward Heath once told Aitken. ‘She can’t always separate the political from the personal, you see … She bears grudges.’ Aitken thought this was a bit rich coming from somebody himself making an attempt on the world grudge-holding record, but it was accurate enough. What was to Mrs Thatcher’s credit, though, was that she was unusually kind to her staff. On Barry Strevens’s first day as her bodyguard, one of her secretaries was giving him a lift when they had a minor car accident. When Mrs Thatcher heard about it, Strevens recalled, ‘she sat me down and fussed over me, fetching me a drink. I was taken aback by how motherly she was and her genuine concern.’ On another occasion, when he and a police sergeant were on patrol, the latter trod in dog excrement and managed to smear it all over Mrs Thatcher’s carpet. The sergeant panicked, but the Prime Minister said: ‘Never mind!’ Before they knew it, Strevens reported, ‘she’d got soap and water and was on her hands and knees scrubbing away’.23

  Strevens clearly idolized her, but there were many such stories. One of the Downing Street messengers, a lifelong Labour voter, told John Hoskyns that ‘he had never known Number Ten to be such a happy place as it was under Mrs Thatcher’. ‘She takes so much trouble over us all,’ he explained. If they had personal problems, she was all ears. If she suspected somebody had not eaten, she would bring food down from the flat. If one of their children was ill, she would be ‘talking about it for some days afterwards’. When the scandal of her minister Cecil Parkinson’s affair with his secretary broke in 1983, she was remarkably sympathetic. When the Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham’s dog Mini died, she wrote him a personal condolence letter. And she could be much more tolerant of ordinary human failings than outsiders realized. One private secretary told Charles Moore about an incident when he was having an argument on the phone with the Treasury. When he put the phone down, he exploded: ‘Shit! Fuck!’ – and then realized, to his horror, that Mrs Thatcher was only a few feet away. But her eyes were ‘shining with pleasure’. ‘Temper! Temper!’ she said happily.24

  The most famous and revealing story, though, concerns a meeting at Chequers in the early days of her premiership, when she was having lunch with her senior ministers. As was traditional, they were being served by Wrens,fn6 one of whom was very nervous. Carrying roast lamb, the Wren stumbled and spilled it all over Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was covered in ‘bits of meat and drops of gravy’. Mrs Thatcher immediately jumped to her feet – not to look after Sir Geoffrey, but to comfort the mortified Wren. ‘Don’t worry, my dear!’ she said. ‘It could happen to anyone!’ What the Chancellor of the Exchequer made of this can easily be imagined. Still, he got his revenge eventually.25

  There is, of course, a danger of substituting one caricature for another, of replacing the uncaring hammer of the working classes with the saintly dispenser of drinks and medicines. Even her admirers admitted that Mrs Thatcher could be staggeringly overbearing. In meetings she was notorious for talking too much, not listening to alternative views and refusing to admit defeat even when she was obviously wrong. Many of her ministers saw this as the insecurity of the anxious schoolgirl, desperate to prove that she knew better than anyone. But even her natural allies often found her insufferable. In arguments, wrote Ferdinand Mount, she became steadily ‘ruder and more dismissive, scarcely troubling to listen any more but merely repeating what she had said half-a-dozen times already’. Cecil Parkinson wrote of her ‘rudeness’ to her colleagues. Nigel Lawson deplored her ‘authoritarian’ and ‘irritating’ way of running meetings. Jonathan Aitken lamented her ‘unpleasant streak’ and ‘bullying manner’, while John Biffen found her ‘bossy and intemperate’. Even off duty she could be intolerable. In May 1980 she invited all the Permanent Secretaries, the most senior civil servants, to Number 10 for dinner. As her voice rose and the atmosphere became increasingly acrimonious, Sir Frank Cooper, who ran the Ministry of Defence, quietly slipped away. ‘Where has he gone?’ whispered one of the guests. ‘To tell the SAS to come and get us,’ muttered his neighbour.26

  Yet this was only part of the picture. The older mandarins, with a healthy sense of their own importance, were often furious to find themselves browbeaten by a woman. But plenty of younger officials found her style refreshingly direct and loved working for her. The future MP George Walden, then an official at the Foreign Office, was struck by her ‘plain speaking’ and ‘can-do style’, and thought it was a myth that she would not listen. What she could not stand were waffle and weakness, but ‘if you made your point with conviction and could prove you were right, she would take the argument, while avoiding any appearance of doing so’. Some people wilted under the ‘electric blue eyes’. Others loved it. The economist Terry Burns, a Durham coal miner’s son who became chief adviser to the Treasury, was just 36 when she summoned him for their first one-to-one meeting. It was, Burns recalled, ‘the most frightening experience of my life at that point. I was drained by her directness and the intensity of her questioning.’ It was, he said, ‘without doubt the most exhausting yet also the most exhilarating meeting I ever had’.27

  Above all, her officials were always struck by her sense of duty. Matthew Parris thought ‘one of the nicest things’ about his former boss was that she ‘never grumbled’ when asked to ‘take some small trouble to help a nobody’. When letters came, she was ‘unstinting with her own time where personal replies were called for’. And the evidence of her papers bears this out. Given the pressure of life as Prime Minister, it is remarkable how often she took the time to write personal replies: a letter to a little boy who had offered her one of his hamsters, for example, or a letter to another boy who was worried that his parents were going to get divorced. ‘Perhaps the best advice I can give’, she told the latter, ‘is that you and your brother should talk to your mother and father. I am sure they will listen.’ Underneath she added a scribbled PS:

  And perhaps you would tell them that you have written to me, and show them this letter. I should so much like to know what happens. My own children had a happy time and I should like you to have the same.

  Perhaps you would let me know if you ever come to London and I could arrange for someone to take you to see Parliament, and I could speak to you myself.28

  Perhaps the most extraordinary exchange, though, came in the spring of 1980, when she received a letter from a boy called David Liddelow, aged 9. The son of a vicar in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, David wanted her to settle a theological dispute. ‘Last night when we were saying prayers my Daddy said everyone has done wrong things excep [sic] Jesus,’ he wrote. ‘I said I don’t think you have done bad things because you are the Prime Minister. Am I right or is my Daddy?’

  On 1 April, a day packed with meetings and Commons questions, Mrs Thatcher dashed off two handwritten pages in reply:

  Dear David,

  What a difficult question you ask, but I will try to answer it.

  However good we try to be, we can never be as kind, gentle and wise as Jesus. There will be times when we say or do something we wish we hadn’t done and we shall be sorry and try not to do it again. We do our best, but our best is not as good as his daily life. If you and I were to paint a picture it wouldn’t be as good as the picture of great artists. So our lives can’t be as good as the life of Jesus.

  As Prime Minister, I try very hard to do things right and because Jesus gave us a perfect example I try even harder. But your father is right in saying that we can never be as perfect as He was.

  Yours sincerely,

  Margaret Thatcher

  It is hard to imagine many other modern Prime Ministers writing those words.29

  Even before Mrs Thatcher walked into Number 10, she had achieved something beyond any other post-war premier. She had been credited with her very own ‘ism’: Thatcherism. The irony, though, is that it had been coined by her opponents as a term of abuse. They invented the word ‘Thatcherism’ to describe what they saw as her
right-wing fanaticism, which was supposedly out of step with the broad traditions of British political life. Not surprisingly, therefore, she tried to discourage it. In her first major speech after becoming Tory leader, she observed that ‘to stand up for liberty is now called a Thatcherism’, but dismissed it as one of Labour’s ‘tired and silly slogans’. And on the Today programme two years later, she again dismissed the idea of Thatcherism as an ‘ogre’, a ‘ridiculous’ idea invented by her opponents.30

  The idea caught on, of course. Yet although some aspects are obvious – low taxes, free markets, a smaller state, strong defence – historians have never really agreed what Thatcherism was. The most influential interpretation, still enormously popular in the academic world, appeared in January 1979 in, of all places, Marxism Today. According to the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, Thatcherism was a kind of ‘authoritarian populism – an exceptional form of the capitalist state’, arousing public support by exploiting issues such as crime, race and education.fn7 Soon other commentators weighed in with their own interpretations. Some saw it as a transatlantic import, with Mrs Thatcher heading a British subsidiary of the American New Right. Others looked across the Channel for parallels. The former Labour MP David Marquand thought it was a ‘sort of British Gaullism’, with Mrs Thatcher as the nation’s self-appointed saviour after years of retreat. His erstwhile colleague Austin Mitchell, however, likened her to a rather different French politician, the anti-tax populist Pierre Poujade. Thatcherism, he wrote, was simply ‘scrimping, saving and the politics of the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and Hayek under the bedclothes’.31

  As the years passed, the arguments went on. Some saw Thatcherism as an inevitable result of the decay of social democracy, others as a middle-class backlash against egalitarianism, still others as an unexpected product of the anti-Establishment radicalism of the 1960s. Was it a revolutionary attack on the institutions that had underpinned the post-war consensus? Or was she actually defending that consensus against the militant left? Did it reflect a new stage in the evolution of industrial capitalism, or a new phase in the Cold War? Or was it was the realization of the free-market ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman? Was it a defence of big business after years of falling profits, or was it an uprising of the self-employed and small businessmen? Was it about making the central government stronger? Or was it about weakening it? Was it, perhaps, all of these things at once? And if it was, does it really make sense to talk of ‘Thatcherism’ at all?32

  Among Mrs Thatcher’s allies, many did believe there was such a thing as Thatcherism. The most articulate, the future Chancellor Nigel Lawson, famously described it as ‘a mixture of free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, “Victorian values” (of the Samuel Smiles self-help variety), privatization and a dash of populism’. And even Mrs Thatcher, having resisted the label for so long, eventually conceded that there was something to it. ‘Sir Robin, it is not a name that I created in the sense of calling it an “ism”,’ she told Panorama’s interrogator Sir Robin Day in 1987. But then she went on:

  Let me tell you what it stands for. It stands for sound finance and Government running the affairs of the nation in a sound financial way. It stands for honest money – not inflation. It stands for living within your means. It stands for incentives because we know full well that the growth, the economic strength of the nation comes from the efforts of its people …

  It stands for something else. It stands for the wider and wider spread of ownership of property, of houses, of shares, of savings. It stands for being strong in defence – a reliable ally and a trusted friend.

  People call those things Thatcherism; they are, in fact, fundamental common sense and having faith in the enterprise and abilities of the people. It was my task to try to release those. They were always there; they have always been there in the British people, but they couldn’t flourish under Socialism. They have now been released. That’s all that Thatcherism is.

  It is a wonderfully revealing passage, but also a surprising one. Almost everything Mrs Thatcher said – honest money, living within your means, incentives, ownership, strong defence – could have been said by any Conservative leader since the dawn of time. But what is most striking about her definition is its simplicity. The most important words come near the end: Thatcherism, she says, is just ‘fundamental common sense’.33

  Of course not everybody saw it that way. To Sir Ian Gilmour, who served in Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet from 1979 to 1981, Thatcherism was merely ‘nineteenth-century individualism dressed up in twentieth-century clothes’, the bastard offspring of ‘Manchester Liberalism’. As he saw it, Mrs Thatcher was an interloper, a ghastly Gladstone-in-drag act who had somehow fooled his colleagues into giving her the reins of their party. Even some of her allies agreed with him. Her friend Woodrow Wyatt, a former Labour MP who had swung well to the right, claimed that she was ‘not a Conservative’, but a ‘radical making a revolution which horrifies many Conservatives’. The economist Friedrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom (1944) is often seen as a central influence on Thatcherite thought, described himself as a liberal and even wrote an essay entitled ‘Why I Am Not a Conservative’. And the other great idol of the free-market right, the American economist Milton Friedman, sounded a similar note. ‘The thing that people do not recognize is that Margaret Thatcher is not in terms of belief a Tory,’ he explained. ‘She is a nineteenth-century Liberal.’34

  It is true that, with her Methodist middle-class roots, free-market rhetoric and open distrust of the party establishment, Mrs Thatcher sometimes sounded like a Victorian Liberal. In 1983 she joked that ‘if Mr Gladstone were alive today he would apply to join the Conservative Party’. But if she was really a Liberal, what had she been doing in the Conservative Party since 1943? Why did nobody notice? Why did they make her leader of their party? The obvious answer is that she was saying nothing that most Conservatives did not themselves believe. Free-market liberalism had been part of their repertoire since Sir Robert Peel’s day, while cutting taxes, rolling back the state and encouraging private enterprise had been Tory themes for decades. And if a true-blue Conservative leader such as Andrew Bonar Law or Stanley Baldwin had read Mrs Thatcher’s party conference speeches, he would surely have agreed with almost every syllable.35

  Of course this contradicts the common view that Thatcherism was a revolution in British political economy, marking a great break between one era and another. Yet it is telling that Mrs Thatcher never sought to dissociate herself from her party’s history. ‘All my predecessors – yes, I agree, Disraeli; yes, Harold Macmillan,’ she told Robin Day, ‘I would say I am right in their tradition.’ Nigel Lawson said much the same. Was Thatcherism really ‘some alien creed masquerading as Conservatism’, he wondered in 1980, before answering his own question: ‘I can only say that, as a Conservative, it feels pretty Conservative to me.’ Yes, the government sometimes invoked ‘new sages – such as Hayek and Friedman’. But that was simply because these writers were ‘reinterpreting the traditional political and economic wisdom of Hume, Burke and Adam Smith’. So what was so new about Thatcherism? ‘In economic terms,’ Lawson concluded, ‘very little.’36

  In many ways Lawson was right. Thatcherism was nothing new. Almost all its common themes – dissatisfaction with the welfare state, distrust of the trade unions, anxiety about the advance of socialism – had been Conservative grass-roots sentiments for decades. When the young Margaret Roberts got involved with national politics in the late 1940s, her supposedly radical ideas were already very common among the kind of people who stuffed envelopes and knocked on doors for the party. No wonder, then, the activists fell so hard for her after she secured the leadership. Not since the 1930s had a Conservative leader been so obviously in touch with the rank and file. As Lawson observed, her predecessors had treated the ordinary party members as little more than cannon fodder. ‘Harold Macmillan had a contempt for the party, Alec Home tolerated it, Ted Heat
h loathed it,’ he wrote. ‘Margaret genuinely liked it. She felt a communion with it, one which later expanded to embrace the silent majority of the British people as a whole.’ This was one of the secrets of her appeal. She was one of them.37

  One of the common misconceptions about Thatcherism, especially on the left, was that it was a fixed, coherent, ‘neoliberal’ creed with clearly defined methods and principles. But this is nonsense. Thatcherism was not a rigid, monolithic project. It was always fluid, always changing. In 1976 Mrs Thatcher had talked about standing up to the Soviet Union; in 1979 she emphasized taming the unions; by the end of 1984 her focus had already shifted to privatizing the public utilities, which she had not even mentioned five years earlier. Some historians even think there was no one ‘Thatcherism’ but ‘several different Thatcherite projects’ competing for attention. What is certain is that there was no blueprint, not even Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, because Mrs Thatcher did not believe in blueprints. ‘Vision, not blueprint; values and principles, not doctrines,’ she told a Conservative audience in 1977. Even the word ‘monetarism’ rarely passed her lips. Instead she preferred to talk about ‘sound money’ and, of course, ‘good housekeeping’.38

  This was not just spin. Mrs Thatcher was a practical politician, not a political philosopher. As she herself told Michael Cockerell in 1979, she was guided by ‘instincts and feelings’, not doctrines or textbooks. This does not mean, of course, that she was a mere opportunist. Her principles were clear and unchanging: free markets, low taxes, law and order, strong defence, a horror of inflation and so on. But like any successful politician, she was flexible about how she interpreted them. She liked winning elections; if that meant downplaying some elements or compromising on others, she was perfectly happy to do so. She usually hid this pragmatic side from the public, because she was worried it would make her look like Ted Heath in a dress. But her civil servants saw how she really worked. ‘More often than not,’ thought John Coles, ‘her approach to a new problem was hesitant and cautious.’ Her longest-serving Cabinet Secretary, Robert Armstrong, even remarked that he had never met a politician who was more skilful ‘in combining rhetoric which was faithful to her principles with policies that were totally pragmatic’.39