Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  This book was conceived in 1997, when Lady Thatcher decided to choose an authorized biographer and offered the role to me. This allowed me full access to all her private papers, most of which she gave on permanent loan to the archives centre at Churchill College, Cambridge. (She chose Cambridge because her own university, Oxford, had refused her an honorary degree, a decision which – see Chapter 19 – hurt her more deeply than any other insult offered to her during her time in office, apart from the vote that forced her out in 1990.) By extension, and at her request, the Cabinet Secretary at the time, Sir Richard Wilson (now Lord Wilson of Dinton), granted me full access to the prime ministerial papers for the whole of her time in government, regardless of the restrictions of the ‘thirty-year rule’ (now a twenty-year one), but under the established conventions which require quotations from such papers to be vetted for national security.* This permission continues under his successors. Lady Thatcher also gave me interviews for the book, and encouraged all those close to her – many of whom had been discouraged from speaking before – to do the same. To my great benefit, she also insisted that she should not read the book’s manuscript and that it should not be published in her lifetime. This meant that she could not be accused of trying to control it – something which, to my surprise, she never seemed tempted to do.* As well as sources reached by these means, there are numerous others, from many countries, most notably the United States, where the rich material from the presidential libraries and other archives has been trawled and more than sixty witnesses have been consulted. The consequences of all of the above have been that hundreds of people have been interviewed, thousands of papers have been studied and millions of words have been read in the making of this book. By the time it is finished, it will have taken twenty years.

  This leads me to an apology for inadvertently misleading readers of Volume I. In its preface, I promised that there would be two volumes. In fact, as it turns out, there will be three. I was originally contracted for three in the 1990s, then decided that two would do it, and then realized, when I worked on the second volume and saw how good and extensive the material was, that three would be better after all. It means that faithful readers will have to wait a little longer to reach the end of the story, but at least it does also mean that the second volume will not be too heavy to read in bed. The third volume will cover Mrs Thatcher’s last three years in office, her fall, her life out of office and her death and funeral.

  The material for Volume II is rather different from that for Volume I. There, in the early years, the problem was of too few sources, although this was largely overcome by the revelations contained in the young Margaret’s letters to her sister Muriel. Here, the problem is of too many. There, Mrs Thatcher had more of a private life. Here, there is very little distinction between her life and her work. She and Denis lived over the shop in Downing Street. She brought work home at the weekends (to Chequers), took minimal holidays and, notoriously, worked all the hours that God sent. When she did buy a house of her own, in Dulwich in 1985, it was a mistake (see Chapter 19). Even her love of clothes became much more an expression of her use of power than of her private identity, reaching its apotheosis in her 1987 trip to Moscow (see Chapter 18). Except for Denis’s constant, reassuring presence, family life was largely sacrificed. Carol lived in Australia for part of the period, and never in Downing Street. Mark was driven by criticism of his business dealings to base himself in Dallas, Texas, from 1984, which caused anxiety for his mother about his security (see Chapter 9).

  So, as one would expect of a workaholic, most of the evidence about her life derives from studying her at work. Luckily for the biographer, Mrs Thatcher was in the habit of writing her views most expressively all over government papers, often adding exclamation marks, underlining what she liked and putting a wiggly line under what she thought ‘feeble’ or bureaucratic or excessively European. She was also of the last generation – being pre-email – who expressed their views in a systematic way on paper (usually by means of private secretaries, above all Charles Powell) without the terror of being hacked or going viral. Although she was by nature secretive about information and extremely conscious of the dangers of leaks, she was also almost incapable of concealing what she really thought. It is possible to see from official sources alone the extraordinary way in which she governed. It is sad to think that technology and Freedom of Information have made such frankness on paper very rare in government today. Life for the biographers of twenty-first-century prime ministers who succeeded her will, in this sense, be much harder than it has been for me. Private sources are also, of course, immensely important – take, for example, Sir David Goodall’s private account of the Anglo-Irish negotiations (see Chapter 10), Lord Burns’s contemporary notes on the disastrous 1985 meeting about the ERM (see Chapter 13) or Lord Young of Graffham’s amazing diary of the 1987 election campaign (see Chapter 20), all here quoted extensively for the first time. So are the memories of those who saw her in action. In the period covered, she became a global and a mythological figure: this book draws on the witnesses to this phenomenon.

  Because there is so much material in these five years, there is a problem of narrative structure. Wherever possible, the author should convey the fact that a prime minister must deal with completely disparate things, frequently without notice, all at once. In this volume, for example, on the same day in 1986 as US aircraft, taking off from British bases, bombed Libya, Mrs Thatcher also had to face the defeat of her Shops Bill (to permit Sunday trading) – the only time any of her governments lost a second reading vote in the House of Commons. The easiest way to convey this mêlée of events is to stick to a single, blended, chronological narrative of everything. Quite often, however, this is not possible, because of the need to give a clear, detailed and coherent account of one important issue at a time. In this book, most of Mrs Thatcher’s dealings with Reagan and with Gorbachev in Cold War matters are presented in this way. So are the miners’ strike, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the story of South African sanctions. Every effort, however, is made to remind the reader, as the story unfolds, that other things are happening off-stage. One apparently unrelated incident frequently affects another, and almost always affects the main player in the drama, her attitudes, her political fortunes and her decisions. It should be borne in mind that this is the biography of Margaret Thatcher, rather than the complete history of her governments. There were important areas on which even her active gaze seldom fell – for example, rather surprisingly, most Home Office matters. These can therefore – usually at least – be omitted. She is the one constant presence – which is what, due to the force of her personality, it felt like to colleagues at the time. This book is Act Two of a three-act play in which the central character almost never leaves the stage.

  For similar thematic reasons, although the broad chronological framework is maintained, there are some issues better grouped with related matters, rather than presented at the exact time they occurred. This applies to her dealings with intelligence and with privatization, both of which featured relatively little in the first volume but appear extensively here. By the same token, most of Mrs Thatcher’s reforms of the social security system and of the National Health Service will appear in the final volume, although they were quite important in the period covered by this one. The same applies to her attitude to AIDS and public health, the row about the publication of the book Spycatcher and most of her somewhat uneasy relationship with Scotland. In some subjects, such as the discussion in Chapter 19 of Mrs Thatcher’s mythological status in the culture of the time, matters covered sometimes run beyond the 1982–7 dates. In two instances – the US invasion of Grenada and the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s letter in the Westland affair – I have departed from the chronological sequence to imitate the fact that, in both cases, it was only later that the main participants discovered what had really happened. To assist the reader, a chronology, collating different subject areas against the dates, is provided at the front
of the book.

  There is another difference between Volume I and Volume II. The first was written when Lady Thatcher was alive, most of the second when she was dead. This probably affects the way I have written: it certainly affects the way people read. On 17 April 2013, as the Queen stood in St Paul’s Cathedral, beside the coffin of the longest-serving of her twelve prime ministers and the only one who shared her sex, Margaret Thatcher passed into history. This meant that interest in her became even stronger, but also that the mythology, both favourable and unfavourable, grew stronger too. The biographer must not succumb to this. He must never answer the many ‘What would Mrs Thatcher do today about x?’ questions which he is asked, for the simple reason that he does not know. Rather than becoming marmoreal, or speculative, his work must continue to be detective. He is still trying to discover the truth about this extraordinary woman who was too driven ever to examine herself.

  I have given well over 100 talks about Mrs Thatcher since she died. At first, I was surprised by how rarely audiences asked me about politics. She was a political obsessive, and her political legacy – in terms of economic policy, national sovereignty, international alliances, attitudes to liberty, military affairs, totalitarianism and society itself, the ‘-ism’ which bears her name – is of immense interest. Yet these subjects are rarely raised directly, whereas ones about her as a worker, a colleague, a wife and mother, a public performer, a leader and a Christian very frequently are. I have concluded that people are not bored by Margaret Thatcher’s politics, but what they want to get at is her. It is her character in relation to great ideas and great events which fascinates them. This is closely connected to the most obvious fact about her – that she was the first woman, in the whole of Western democratic history, who truly came to dominate her country in her time. The pronoun ‘she’ is where it all starts, and perhaps where it will finish.

  Part One

  * * *

  FOUNDATIONS

  1

  Liberal imperialist

  ‘I’m leader of this great nation, and I haven’t made up my mind’

  In October 1982, Margaret Thatcher became the senior elected leader in the Western world. Her three years and five months as prime minister meant that she had led her country continuously for longer than any of her counterparts among the major Western powers. It was a position she was to retain for more than eight years, until her fall in November 1990. Since her arrival in office in May 1979, Ronald Reagan had replaced Jimmy Carter as president of the United States, and François Mitterrand had defeated Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in France. On 1 October 1982, Helmut Schmidt, who had been chancellor of West Germany since 1974, lost a vote of confidence in the Bundestag and resigned, to be replaced – initially without an election – by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl.* In little more than three years, therefore, Mrs Thatcher had moved from being the ingénue of international politics to being the doyenne. And because of the huge change in her international standing brought about by victory in the Falklands, the transformation was swift and dramatic. Although she was not a great one for noticing dates and ticking off anniversaries, she was undoubtedly conscious of her new status, and pleased with it. She felt that her beliefs were being vindicated, and that she was more than ever entitled to expound and export them to the whole world.

  Within ten days of her Falklands victory on 14 June 1982, Mrs Thatcher was addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, expounding her doctrine of ‘peace with freedom and justice’, rather than ‘peace at any price’.1 She boldly described the nuclear deterrent as a ‘priceless achievement’, because it made such peace possible globally.2 In her speech to her party’s conference on 8 October, she made it clear that freedom and justice were not just the guarantors of the carve-up between West and East, but dynamic forces opposed by ‘political systems evil enough to seek to enslave the whole world’. She declared that the Communists had attempted to crush Solidarity in Poland because the Soviets ‘knew that the beginning of freedom spelt the beginning of the end for Communism’.3 Her message was that freedom everywhere was on the march. Back at home, 370,000 families had now bought their council houses since the Conservatives came into office (‘There is no prouder word in our history than “freeholder” ’). Citing her government’s privatizations, Mrs Thatcher claimed that ‘already we have done more to roll back the frontiers of socialism than any previous Conservative Government.’4 In short, her battles, both at home and abroad, had the same purpose, and she was winning them.

  Mrs Thatcher’s dealings with her ministers reflected her new dominance. One official witnessed this first-hand during the summer of 1982:

  In Cabinet, Mrs Thatcher’s authority seemed absolute, and her manner that of a headmistress dealing with recalcitrant staff. Willie Whitelaw,* massive, bushy eyebrows raised, was allowed something of a moderating role. But Peter Carrington had by that time resigned, and her other male colleagues … seemed uncertain how to disagree with her without provoking rebuke: as someone said, she came across as though she were ‘everyone’s mother in a bad temper’. ‘WHO authorised this memorandum?’ she demanded at one of my first Cabinet meetings, waving a paper indignantly before her. Silence. ‘WHO authorised it?’ Eventually, the Secretary of State for Wales, who sat at an awkward angle from her, poked his head cautiously round the Cabinet Secretary (Robert Armstrong†) and said, ‘I did, Prime Minister.’ Pause. ‘But I cleared it with the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ Geoffrey Howe‡ simply studied his papers. ‘And with the Foreign Secretary.’ Francis Pym§ remained similarly silent. ‘Well, it should NEVER have been issued.’5

  It had always been Mrs Thatcher’s way to hector her colleagues, but in the past this tendency had been somewhat restrained by her inexperience and the weakness of her own political position. Now these restraints were lessened. An official himself, Goodall noted how the situation was less irksome for his breed than for her fellow politicians: ‘Often outspokenly rude to Ministers (especially, as time went on, to Geoffrey Howe) and invariably acerbic in argument, she was never, in my experience, actually rude to officials.’6 He described her thus:

  Although equally assertive both at the meeting table and in informal conversation away from it, Mrs Thatcher’s personality is in other respects dramatically different; at a meeting there is something actually repellent about the poisoned smile and didactic way in which she reiterates her points. In informal conversation, she sheds her scaly covering, her smile becomes normal, her femininity apparent and one can argue with her in a friendly, even bantering way. But it is still extraordinarily difficult to find a point of entry to put a case counter to the one she is making.7

  Mrs Thatcher’s refusal to provide that easy ‘point of entry’ was essential to her way of working. Given that she was radical, always kicking against the pricks of bureaucracy and inertia, she would not have been able to maintain momentum if she had made life easy for nay-sayers. But it is also true that her way of working – though usually invoking huge loyalty and admiration from her own staff – stored up resentment from Cabinet colleagues, even those who were her political allies. In the latter part of 1982, however, this did not seem to matter much. She took advantage of her new situation to preach and to prevail.

  One of the more common complaints against Mrs Thatcher from Tory critics was that she was not really a conservative at all. The Wets* and their allies in the press tended to describe her as a ‘nineteenth-century liberal’, a doctrinaire free-marketeer who wished to reduce the subtleties of human society to the dry facts of a balance sheet. This was never the case. Although it is true that, for a Conservative politician, Mrs Thatcher was exceptionally and tenaciously devoted to certain economic beliefs – for example, that inflation is ‘a disease of money’ – it is not true that economic doctrines were the source of her beliefs. She was much more historically minded than that, although her sense of history was more romantic than accurate. She was also much more specifically British and less austerely theor
etical than her critics alleged. Thatcherism was more like a vision than a doctrine. She carried in her head a picture of her country derived from its past greatness and energetically projected on to its future. It was more restorationist than revolutionary, though the restoration would sometimes require revolutionary methods. From her earliest political declarations as a young candidate in Dartford, this vision had been present, but, after victory in the Falklands, she made it more explicit.

  In a lecture on ‘Women in a Changing World’, delivered in July 1982, Mrs Thatcher said she took inspiration from a Latin motto on her inkstand at Chequers. Translated, it read: