Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  In fact, 11 Hambledon Place, was, as Denis much later put it, ‘a great mistake’.139 Its purpose, he told Bowden at the time, was ‘not for me, you know. It’s for the widow woman on her retirement. I shall be pushing up the daisies but she will be still on the go. She can toddle down to the village shops with her basket. And if they need her for anything in the Lords, they can send a car.’140

  But in fact, as Mrs Thatcher began to notice while still in office, it was too far from central London, and too ill protected from the security point of view, to work. The Thatchers spent only a handful of nights there in the whole remainder of their time in Downing Street, and the twins were not attracted to the place.* Carol remembered spending only one night there, and found, when she went there again after her mother left office, that she did not know the way.141 As well as sheltering their money, however, the house performed a valuable psychological function which they naturally did not want to disclose at the time. Denis ‘recalled the appalling situation when Ted Heath got flung out without any notice at all … He didn’t have anywhere to go. I said to Margaret we’ve got to have somewhere to go when we go.’142 If No. 10 failed, they now had No. 11.

  Despite this insurance policy, Mrs Thatcher was always wary of acknowledging her political mortality. Once she had bought the house, Gerald Bowden encouraged her and Denis to register as voters in Dulwich, since it was a marginal seat and every vote counted. ‘No, Gerry,’ said Mrs Thatcher, ‘we will not put our names on the register right now [1986]. If we did it would be seized on by some journalist to suggest we don’t expect to be in Downing Street much longer. But after the next election, we shall most certainly register our residence at Hambledon Place.’143 This she and Denis duly did after she won again in 1987.

  Suburban housewife though, in some sense, she still was, the Margaret Thatcher of 1987 was a publicly much more majestic figure than when she had taken office eight years earlier. She was the senior statesman of the Western world, and she had learnt to dress accordingly. Those who advised her on clothes felt that she finally achieved her best style by 1987, both for her visit to see Gorbachev in Moscow in March and for the general election in June. ‘Her look solidified at its purest,’ according to the fashion historian Jane Mulvagh: it was the sartorial expression of the mental control which she exercised over government.144 ‘I introduced her to Dynasty padded shoulders,’ claimed Carla Powell of the mid-1980s,145 whereas Crawfie considered that it was she who persuaded her that her way of dressing looked old-fashioned. Crawfie enlisted the help of Margaret King at Aquascutum to put ‘power suits’ together for her which would give her the greatest possible confidence. She also catalogued all the clothes, noting which was worn when and naming them according to the place at which each appeared (‘Kiev’, ‘Versailles’) or because of what they looked like (‘Gloriana’). She was particularly pleased with the navy and white check suit which Mrs Thatcher wore in the election campaign, in which she ‘looked a million dollars’.146 Mrs Thatcher herself had a good memory for what she had worn when, and liked to wear old favourites, or, as she sometimes called them, ‘recipes’, revamped. They brought good luck, she believed.* She wore the same suit, for example, to sign the Hong Kong Agreement as she did for her Joint Address to both Houses of the US Congress.

  Certainly Mrs Thatcher became a convert to the dictum of the famous Vogue editor Anna Wintour that ‘everything comes from the shoulders’, lessening the bust and narrowing the waist. She had moved from the provincial woman looking smart of the 1950s and 1960s, through the almost municipal styles of the 1970s – patterns, pussycat bows, waistcoats without sleeves, pie-crust frill blouses and designs which tended to make her shoulders look weak – to a clearer, stronger look which worked better on television. This clothed her in block colours – sapphire, cerise, jade green, canary yellow – which stood out against grey men, as well as the staple black, which suited her well. In some respects, she came to dress like the Queen, wearing, for example, thick-heeled patent-leather shoes, first from Rayne and later from Ferragamo, and carrying, of course, the famous patent-leather handbag. For someone who was so busy and needed to change fast, dresses were vulnerable and complicated: suits were better. In autumn and winter, she told Angela Huth for the BBC, showing her examples on air, ‘I live a suit life.’147 As Carol put it, ‘She regarded her clothes as going with the job.’148 It was important to use materials which would not be full of creases, Mrs Thatcher told Huth. She preferred tweeds, brocades and British wool, for example, to frail silks or linen, and was preoccupied with ‘a very good line’.149 Blouses provided the required element of softness. From her mother’s expertise as a seamstress, she had learnt about attention to detail and quality, and various tips, such as not pressing a hem so hard that it became ‘a knife’s edge’ and could not be let down later. She was well upholstered, well covered and always perfectly groomed and coiffed, although, when travelling, she never took a hairdresser but relied on local stylists.† ‘She had very nice hair [although] a little bit on the fine side,’ recalled Eivind Bjerke, her stylist of choice in the US. ‘She liked it – in today’s parlance – a little bit old fashioned. She liked her hair soft. She liked it teased. She liked it rolled. She liked it sprayed. It also had to be something that, when she was photographed from all angles, would look good.’150 She was never informal, because she instinctively recognized that this would invite a familiarity which would weaken her, but she had learnt from her mother ‘Do not sit around in good clothes.’151 Could she ever afford to be ‘flamboyant, daring, sexy’, Angela Huth asked her: ‘Never! Nor would I wish to be.’152* For the interview, the BBC had absolutely insisted that Angela Huth ask Mrs Thatcher where she bought her underwear, which she was loath to do. Huth only plucked up the courage to ask her at the very end of three hours of filming.153 The reassuringly unsexy answer was Marks and Spencer.

  Although Mrs Thatcher’s style was, in a sense, conventional, she rejected the cliché of the female executive which sought to imitate men – the pinstripe, the dull navy suit. She made sure she stood out, and her female equivalent of armour made her feel powerful, but she knew that being powerful is like being a lady: if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t. Her idea, though she probably did not put it to herself in this way, was that the story of her life was somehow told through her clothes.† She understood signifiers – and secretly regretted the fact that hats were too out of fashion for her to wear except on special occasions (‘They complete the picture’).154 She also understood the importance of sentiment in jewellery, wearing a watch from Mark, and a South African bracelet of semi-precious stones in a gold setting and an eternity ring, both presents from Denis.

  In a way, Mrs Thatcher’s attitude to her clothes was like that of a medieval knight to his armour. What she wore had to be beautiful and well made but also to perform its combative function. Her clothes must attract all eyes and repulse all attacks. Thus armoured, she could feel ready for her third general election as leader of the Conservative Party.

  20

  The last victory

  ‘There’s a woman who will never fight another election’

  ‘No one with a conscience votes Conservative,’ said Norman Tebbit.1 So Guardian readers were informed by their leading columnist, Hugo Young,* at the beginning of 1987, which was expected to be election year. The article, clearly benefiting from malicious but well-informed briefing, set out the differences between the party Chairman and Mrs Thatcher: ‘He is, she now thinks, the worst appointment she has made in her 12 years as party leader.’ In fact Tebbit had never uttered the words that Young attributed to him. He sued the Guardian for libel and eventually, more than a year later, won an apology, damages and costs.

  Hugo Young’s error was a striking example of a trap which, for the whole of Mrs Thatcher’s time as prime minister, the left fell into again and again. Many of them – not only on the hard left, but also moderates who admired writers like Young – really hated her. They thought what she was
doing was not merely mistaken, but evil, and they felt a visceral personal dislike for her. To such people, Norman Tebbit was the same, but even worse: the headline on Young’s piece was ‘A fate worse than Thatcherism’. These beliefs led them to make repeated, serious electoral mistakes. Since they thought Mrs Thatcher and her cronies were wicked, they tended to think that they had only to point this out loudly enough and voters would desert the Conservatives. Never, in any of the three general elections when they fought her, did they coldly analyse why she was winning, in order to ensure that she would lose. The Young piece was an example. Its essential subject – divisions between these two great figures of Thatcherism in the run-up to an election – was a politically important story, of potential use both to Labour and to the SDP–Liberal Alliance. But the false attribution to Tebbit of an unpleasant thought by those who hated him distracted from this. The sense of being morally superior to Mrs Thatcher and the Conservatives fired up many in the Opposition parties, but it also made them ill disciplined and unelectable.

  One person who understood this was Peter Mandelson, who had joined Labour Party HQ in 1985, and was working to ‘rebrand’ Labour and to change it. Although he disagreed with Mrs Thatcher and thought her ‘a better destroyer than a creator’,2 he did not hate her, and he saw Tebbit as the man who ‘embodied her appeal to the aspirant working class’. Tebbit was ‘a huge danger to the Labour Party’. Mandelson thought Labour needed to understand that several of the things she was doing – controlling the deficit, reforming trade unions and nationalized industries, and maintaining the Bomb – were right. Before Mrs Thatcher came into office, ‘there was a sense in which the trade unions had brought the country to its knees.’3

  Mandelson’s view was shared by the young Labour MP for Sedgefield, Tony Blair, who understood why she had ‘broken through to some of our support’.4 ‘My dad was a huge supporter of hers: he had working-class Tory attitudes,’ Blair recalled. In opposing her reforms which insisted on secret ballots before strikes, for example, ‘We were on the wrong side.’ Many of Blair’s colleagues kept saying that Mrs Thatcher was a ‘fascist’, and they would ‘sniff out’ moderates like him who did not agree. They would not recognize that Mrs Thatcher had a ‘philosophy which posed certain hard questions for us, a philosophy around aspiration’. They ‘underestimated her intellectual capacity’. The task, Blair believed, was to sift out ‘what was Tory in her and what was radical’, opposing the first and harnessing the second.

  In the run-up to the 1987 election, Labour was still not collectively ready for this task. At the Labour conference of 1986, Peter Mandelson had persuaded the party to adopt the red rose, rather than the red flag, as its emblem, and make itself what would now be called ‘user-friendly’. It was he who, despite Labour’s self-imposed ban – because of the Wapping dispute (see Chapter 14) – on any contact with Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, kept secretly in touch with them.5 But although he knew that Neil Kinnock wanted to change the Labour Party and help it escape from its prison of left-wing dogmatism, in policy terms this had hardly begun. Kinnock had felt forced to devote most of his energies to fighting the hard left in his party rather than confronting the Prime Minister of the country. As Kinnock himself put it, ‘She was partly winning because we were so brilliantly losing.’6 From the time he had become leader in 1983, Kinnock had believed that it would take ‘two innings’ (that is, two elections) to defeat the Conservatives. First he had to control and heal his party, and fight off the threat from the SDP–Liberal Alliance, which, he feared, seemed to many like a better version: ‘Labour with the Bomb and without the unions. It did really seem as if they could knock us into third place.’7

  Besides, Kinnock was, in many ways, a soft-left sentimentalist. ‘Peter, you’re trying to strip me bare,’ he protested when Mandelson urged him to move away from unilateral nuclear disarmament.8 As Mandelson wrote: ‘Our image and packaging were finally changing. Our product – as resolution after resolution at the party conference made clear – was not.’9 This was what had made Mrs Thatcher so happy about the 1986 Labour conference. According to Charles Clarke, Kinnock’s chief of staff, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s greatest strength was our uselessness.’10 As the new year began, her confidence that the main opposition was still facing the wrong way grew. A few days after Hugo Young’s article, a projection by the television programme Weekend World (based on a Harris poll), gave the Conservatives a majority of 100 in the next House of Commons. It was a statistical fact, of which Mrs Thatcher was informed, that in the previous seven general elections, the party in the lead four or five months before polling day had won.11 So, despite Mrs Thatcher’s habitual hesitation on this subject, early summer dates for the election were beginning to pencil themselves in to her diary.

  At the end of February, the state of the electoral waters was tested with a by-election in the previously marginal Labour seat of Greenwich in south London. In the 1983 general election, the Alliance had come third and the Conservatives a close second. In the by-election, the Alliance candidate, Rosie Barnes, triumphed with more than half of the total vote, 6,611 votes ahead of Labour. The Conservatives slumped to a mere 11 per cent of the vote, but were not disheartened because the clear loser was Labour, who had needed to win. The Labour candidate was a supporter of the Ken Livingstone wing of the party. She was vilified by the press for her private life and unfavourably compared with the personable and family-minded Mrs Barnes. The fact that, despite all its alleged modernization, Labour could have chosen such a candidate at this moment was taken as a welcome sign by the Tories that it had not changed much.

  Other events seemed to be good auguries for the Conservatives. In the same month, British Airways was at last privatized, with share applications eleven times oversubscribed. Days before this triumph of popular capitalism, the last big battle of militant trade unionism had been lost. After more than a year on strike, the print unions, beaten by the threat of fines and sequestration, by the ‘scab’ labour of the electricians’ union and by a successful police operation to keep the plant open, surrendered in the Wapping dispute. Rupert Murdoch had succeeded in introducing the new technology to his newspapers, and had done so not by making a deal with the unions but by defeating them. The way was now open for all newspapers to follow suit, permitting them to make decent profits at last and escape from what they saw as the tyranny and disruption of militant trade unionism. Given how much favourable difference this change made to Fleet Street (which, as a geographical centre for newspapers, disappeared as a result), the support for Mrs Thatcher by most of the print media was sealed. So was their confidence in her future success. She was now virtually guaranteed a good press in any election campaign.

  These events were all confirmations of Mrs Thatcher’s power, and ability to bring change. So, on a global scale, was her visit to Moscow (described in Chapter 18). One of the few cards which the left had with public opinion on the nuclear issue was the claim that Mrs Thatcher was too confrontational with the Soviet Union, thus threatening world peace. This fitted in with criticisms of Mrs Thatcher for being too uncritically close to President Reagan. (The A-Team, or Strategy Group, conscious of the Westland–BL–Libya effects, had warned her of ‘Ronald Reagan’s crisis of credibility’ and perceptions among the public of what it called British ‘poodleism’ towards the US government.)12 That she was now going to talk to the Soviet leader – candidly, even fiercely, but in a friendly spirit – took this card away.

  The prospect of Mrs Thatcher’s Moscow visit made it all the more important for Neil Kinnock to seek respectability on the world stage and in the NATO alliance. ‘I wanted to show’, he recalled, ‘that a Labour leader could go anywhere.’13 This meant trying to get on terms with the US administration. Anxious to break with his predecessor, Michael Foot, who had been positively proud not to have visited America for twenty-five years, Kinnock had flown to Washington in February 1984, and there met President Reagan for the first time. He was, in many ways, an admirer of the Ameri
can way of life, but on the subject of nuclear weapons, which he discussed with Edward Streator, Minister at the US Embassy in London, before his first visit, conversation ‘came to a screeching halt’.14 He said, Streator recalled, ‘Glenys* would never let me stay married to her if I yield an inch on nukes. So I’m for nuclear disarmament.’15 Reagan had been very reluctant to meet Kinnock. ‘Why do I have to do it?’ he asked. ‘I’ve seen what the guy thinks. He thinks all the wrong things.’16 Nonetheless, the 1984 meeting passed off ‘reasonably amicably’,17 with the two men agreeing about the horror of nuclear weapons, though Reagan specifically stated his opposition to unilateral disarmament.