The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  Thus from the very beginning Mrs Thatcher’s restless interference centralised the business of government, while by concentrating everything on herself she underused the talents of others. As she grew more dominant, colleagues and officials became increasingly reluctant to tell her things she did not want to hear. The free circulation of information and advice within Whitehall was constrained by the requirement to refer everything upwards to Number Ten; while by battering and badgering, second-guessing and overruling her colleagues she strained their loyalty – ultimately to breaking point.34 As early as March 1980 her devoted PPS, Ian Gow, was worried that ‘Margaret did treat colleagues badly and it would boomerang’.35

  Unlike Ted Heath’s exceptionally harmonious Cabinet half a dozen years before, which had kept its own counsel even when pursuing sensitive and controversial policies, Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet was prone to leaks from the very beginning. The fact that more than half the Cabinet had serious doubts about the economic strategy to which they were committed was well known and widely reported. Mrs Thatcher blamed the so-called ‘wets’ for trying to subvert by hints and whispers policies they were unable to defeat in Cabinet. The truth was that both sides leaked; this was an inevitable consequence of a fundamentally divided Cabinet. The ‘wets’ confided their misgivings to journalists because they were denied any opportunity to influence policy from within; while for her part Mrs Thatcher, having been obliged to appoint a Cabinet most of whom she knew were out of sympathy with her objectives, felt justified in bypassing them and appealing, via the press, directly to the public, which she believed understood what she was trying to do. She was never a good team player, still less a good captain, because she never trusted her team. Even when she had replaced most of her original opponents with younger colleagues more loyal to her – whether from conviction or ambition – the habit of undermining them was too established to be abandoned. She was not loyal to them, she drove an unprecedented number of them to resign, and ultimately in November 1990 the collective loyalty of the survivors cracked.

  Inside Number Ten

  The wider field over which the new Prime Minister had quickly to assert her authority was Whitehall. From the moment she took office she became responsible for the entire government machine. Yet the British Prime Minister has no department of his or her own through which to coordinate this extensive bureaucracy, merely a small private office, based in Number Ten, Downing Street, composed of an anomalous mixture of career officials inherited from the outgoing government, whose job is to provide continuity; a handful of personal staff carried over from the very different world of opposition, more often than not with no experience of government; and a scrum of more or less informal political advisers. Nowhere else in the democratic world does the changeover of power from one government to the next take place so quickly. Some discreet preparations are made at official level for a possible transition; but Mrs Thatcher was always wary of taking anything for granted, so this critical central structure had to be put together over a single weekend, ready to start running the country on Monday morning.

  The two key permanent officials who met her when she walked through the door were her principal private secretary, Kenneth Stowe, and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt. Both were due to be replaced before the end of the year, but both played important roles in introducing Mrs Thatcher to her new responsibilities. Emollient and self-effacing, Stowe managed the transition from Callaghan to Mrs Thatcher with exemplary smoothness, but stayed in Number Ten for only six weeks – ‘six very intensive weeks’ as he recalled.36 His replacement, Clive Whitmore, came from the Ministry of Defence. Though ‘very much the machine man’, in the view of one internal critic,37 Whitmore was instinctively in sympathy with her political objectives and they quickly formed a close working relationship, which lasted for the next three years, after which she sent him back to the MoD as Permanent Secretary at the unusually young age of forty-seven.

  Sir John Hunt had been Cabinet Secretary – in effect the Prime Minister’s Permanent Secretary – since 1973: Mrs Thatcher was thus his fourth Prime Minister in seven years. He remembered her as Education Secretary under Heath, when it had never occurred to him that she might one day be Prime Minister.38 Hunt’s style was brisk and businesslike: as a newcomer feeling her way, Mrs Thatcher found him a bit managing. When he retired at the end of 1979 she was happy to choose as his successor the more obliging, indeed positively Jeeves-like, Robert Armstrong, a classic Eton and Christ Church-educated mandarin who had long been tipped for the top job. His only handicap was that he had been Heath’s principal private secretary and was still close to his old chief. But he was the model of Civil Service impartiality and selfless professionalism; and the conservative side of Mrs Thatcher’s character respected those traditional qualities so long as they were employed to serve and not obstruct her. Though far from Thatcherite by inclination, Armstrong served her, rather like Willie Whitelaw, with absolute loyalty and discretion for the next seven years.

  The private office was headed by her political secretary, Richard Ryder, and the somewhat shadowy figure of David Wolfson. But Mrs Thatcher’s personal support team also had a strong female component, particularly in the early years, largely because she made so little distinction between work and home. When she titled the first chapter of her memoirs ‘Over the Shop’ and wrote that living in Number Ten was like going back to her girlhood in Grantham, it was not just a literary flourish, but described exactly how she lived. During her working day she was always popping upstairs to the flat at the top of the building to eat or change or work on a speech before coming down again for a Cabinet committee or to meet a foreign leader: smaller meetings with colleagues and advisers were often held in the flat. Denis, if he was around, sometimes sat in on these informal meetings: late at night it was frequently he who ended them by telling Margaret firmly that it was time for bed. Because she was ‘always on the job’ – as she once told a delighted television audience39 – she made no effort to protect her private space from the intrusion of work. Far more than with a male Prime Minister – who might wear the same suit all day and have his hair cut once a month – her clothes, her hair, her make-up were all essential props of her public performance, needing frequent, but very rapid, attention throughout the day.Thus her personal staff was much more mingled with her professional staff than was the case with Jim Callaghan or Ted Heath; secretaries might be pressed into cooking scratch meals at any hour of the day or night.[b] Though Mrs Thatcher made no secret that she enjoyed being surrounded by subservient men, and in eleven years appointed only one other woman – briefly – to her Cabinet, there was always a distinctly feminine flavour in her immediate entourage.

  Lady Thatcher was justifiably proud of having created a happy family atmosphere inside Number Ten. However roughly she may have treated her colleagues and advisers, she was always immensely considerate towards her personal staff and towards all those – drivers, telephonists and the like – who kept the wheels of government turning. When her driver died suddenly in March 1980, she insisted, at the end of a very busy week, on attending the funeral in south London and comforting his widow.41 Likewise, when Bernard Ingham’s wife was involved in an accident in the middle of the Falklands war, she insisted that he must go and look after her: she told him firmly that she did not expect to see him back at work for several days.42

  Finally, there is the joyfully repeated story of a lunch at Chequers when one of the service personnel waiting at table spilled a plate of hot soup in Geoffrey Howe’s lap. The Prime Minister immediately leapt up, full of concern, not for her Foreign Secretary but for the girl. ‘There, there,’ she comforted her. ‘It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.’ The contrast between the way Mrs Thatcher fussed over her staff and the cavalier way she treated her colleagues – particularly Howe – was perfectly emblematic. With the benefit of hindsight, Ronnie Millar wondered whether she was ‘altogether wise to treat Sir Geoffrey any old how’.43

  Ber
nard Ingham became the Prime Minister’s chief press secretary towards the end of 1979.A pugnacious former Labour supporter, he quickly transferred his loyalty to his new mistress and became one of her most devoted servants. His robust and highly personalised briefings strained Civil Service neutrality to the limit, but Mrs Thatcher trusted him absolutely and he remained at the heart of her entourage until the end.

  Another key figure in her first administration was her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow. MP for Eastbourne since February 1974, Gow was a balding, tweedy solicitor who cultivated a self-consciously old fogeyish manner, though only in his early forties. He had scarcely met Mrs Thatcher before May 1979, and was astonished to be invited to become her PPS; but he too immediately fell under her spell. ‘Ian loved her,’ Alan Clark wrote after Gow’s murder in 1990, ‘actually loved, I mean, in every sense but the physical.’44 He escorted her everywhere, protected her in public and helped her unwind in private with late night whisky and gossip. At the same time he was the most sensitive link with the back benches that any Prime Minister ever had. ‘Known affectionately as “Supergrass”,’ according to Ronald Millar, ‘he had a knack of reporting back to the lady everything she needed to know about the gossip of the bazaars without ever betraying a confidence, a rare feat in the political world.’45 He was also an old friend of Geoffrey Howe, which helped lubricate the key relationship at the heart of the Government, one that later turned disastrously sour. Gow played a crucial part in Mrs Thatcher’s political survival in the dark days of 1981 – 2 when her premiership hung in the balance. She felt bound to reward him with a ministerial job in 1983; but thereafter she never found a successor with the same qualities. As a result her relationship with her backbenchers steadily deteriorated. Gow was unique and irreplaceable.

  Finally there was Denis. It was the presence of the Prime Minister’s husband, coming and going as he liked amid the press of government business, frantic speechwriting and impromptu meals, that gave Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street much of its special flavour. Denis had officially retired from Burmah Oil in 1975, but he still had a string of non-executive directorships as well as his drinking chums and his golfing companions. He lived his own life, as he and Margaret had always done; but he was continually in and out, and when he was there he often sat in on meetings contributing his views without restraint. On business matters where he had real expertise – for instance on British Leyland – Margaret listened seriously to what he had to say. (She once said that she did not need briefing on the oil industry because ‘I sleep with the oil industry every night.’)46 On other subjects he served to keep her, and her staff, in touch with what the man in the golf-club bar was thinking.

  Normally Denis would go to bed long before Margaret, leaving her working. But he was also very protective and she deferred to him. There are numerous stories of Denis breaking up late night speechwriting sessions by insisting in his inimitable way that it was time she went to bed (‘Woman, bed’); or reminding her, ‘Honestly, love, we’re not trying to write the Old Testament.’47 At least at a superficial level he never lost the masculine authority which a husband of his class and generation expected to assert over his wife.[c] His interventions often came as a relief to her hard-pressed staff. Willie Whitelaw was another who frequently found that a quiet word with Denis was the way to get through to her when all else failed.

  In fact, living and working above the shop, with neither of them commuting any more, the Thatchers were closer in Downing Street than at any previous time in their marriage. They were both excellent hosts, and Denis was infinitely skilful at supporting and protecting Margaret, talking to those she could not or did not want to speak to and deflecting people who tried to monopolise her. He accompanied her on the most important of her overseas trips, and developed his role as the Prime Minister’s consort with extraordinary tact and skill. He stuck firmly to his policy of never giving interviews and the press – particularly the travelling press accompanying the Prime Minister to international summits, who had ample opportunity to witness him sounding off over several stiff drinks on long flights home – respected his privacy by never quoting him. ‘He was off limits, out of bounds,’ Bernard Ingham wrote. ‘Everybody loves him because he is straight and decent and loyal.’48,49

  Lady Thatcher has always paid extravagant tribute to Denis’s part in her career. In the early days his contribution was frankly more material than emotional: his money gave her the financial security to pursue her legal and political career. They lived very separate lives, which suited her admirably. But theirs was a rare marriage, which grew deeper the longer it went on: being the Prime Minister’s husband gave him the best retirement job imaginable. He had no defined functions, but he played an important humanising role and was always on hand when required, helping to calm her when she was upset or buck her up when she was depressed. At the end of the day, she told the 1980 party conference, ‘there is just Denis and me, and I could not do without him’.50 Many of her closest advisers felt that the one thing that might have induced her to resign before 1990 would have been Denis becoming seriously ill.

  The Prime Minister and Whitehall

  Mrs Thatcher hit Whitehall, in Peter Hennessy’s words, ‘with the force of a tornado’.51 While many officials had welcomed the prospect of a dynamic government which knew its own mind, and enjoyed a secure parliamentary majority, after years of drift and hand-to-mouth expediency under Labour, they were not prepared for the degree of positive hostility which the new Prime Minister exuded, and encouraged her ministers to express, towards the Civil Service as an institution. Both from her personal experience of the Department of Education and the Ministry of Pensions, and as a matter of political principle, she came into office convinced that the Civil Service bore much of the blame for Britain’s decline over the past thirty-five years: that civil servants as a breed, with some individual exceptions, were not the solution to the nation’s ills but a large part of the problem. She considered the public service essentially parasitic, a drag upon national enterprise and wealth creation: too large, too bureaucratic, self-serving, self-satisfied and self-protective, corporatist by instinct, simultaneously complacent and defeatist. She was determined to cut the bureaucracy down to size, both metaphorically and literally. Word quickly spread through Whitehall that Mrs Thatcher’s purpose was to ‘deprivilege’ the Civil Service.

  First, the Civil Service was the softest target for the new government’s promised economies in public spending. An immediate freeze was placed on new recruitment and pay levels were held down. The resentment that resulted led to an unprecedented strike which in 1981 closed down regional offices, delayed the collection of tax revenues and altogether cost the Government around £500 million before it was settled. All those directly involved would have liked to compromise earlier; but Mrs Thatcher was determined to make a demonstration of the Government’s resolve to control public spending and believed that cutting its own pay bill was the best possible place to start.

  Second, she set up an Efficiency Unit in Number Ten, headed by Sir Derek Rayner, to scrutinise the working of every department, looking for economies. By the end of 1982 ‘Rayner’s Raiders’, as they were known, had carried out 130 of these departmental scrutinies, saving £170 million a year and ‘losing’ 16,000 jobs. In the first four years of the Thatcher Government Civil Service numbers were cut by 14 per cent; over the following six years, as the privatisation of nationalised industries removed whole areas of economic activity and administration from the public sector, that figure climbed to 23 per cent, while salaries relative to the private sector fell still further.52 At the same time the core function of the service was shifted inexorably from policy advice to management: the efficient implementation of policy and the delivery of services. Senior officials who preferred writing elegantly argued memos increasingly found their time taken up by targets, performance indicators and all the other paraphernalia of modern business methods.

  The new Prime Minister imposed he
r will not by structural reform or sacking people but by sheer force of personality: by showing the Whitehall village who was boss. One way of doing this was by constant requests for figures or information at short notice: even quite junior officials felt the presence of the Prime Minister continually prodding and pressing their minister for results, never letting an issue go but demanding ‘follow-through’.53 Another way was by personally visiting every department in turn, something no previous Prime Minister had ever done, confronting civil servants on their own territory, questioning their attitudes and challenging their assumptions. This alarming innovation dramatically signalled Mrs Thatcher’s determination to make her presence felt; at the same time it reflected her awareness of her inexperience of departments other than the Department of Education and Science (DES) and her genuine desire to learn. In fact these visits had two distinct aspects. On the one hand she was marvellous – as she had been at the DES – at going round talking to the junior staff, taking an interest in their work, thanking and encouraging them: something which most ministers do far too little beyond the immediate circle of their private office. Her encounters with their superiors, on the other hand, were often bruising: she lectured more than she listened, and the exercise tended to confirm rather than modify her preconceptions.

  Over the next decade it was often alleged that she ‘politicised’ Whitehall by appointing only committed Thatcherites to senior positions. But she was not so crude as that. Mrs Thatcher certainly took a close interest in appointments and intervened more directly than previous Prime Ministers in filling vacancies, not just at Permanent Secretary level but further down the official ladder. She undoubtedly advanced the careers of her favourites, sometimes those who had caught her eye with a single well-judged briefing; conversely she sidetracked or held back those who failed to impress her. Thus the longer she stayed in office, the more she was able to mould the Civil Service to her liking. By 1986 the entire upper echelons of Whitehall were filled by her appointees.