There is something else which one feels. That is a sense of this country’s destiny: the centuries of history and experience which ensure that, when principles have to be defended, when good has to be upheld and when evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms. It is because we on this side have never flinched from difficult decisions that this House and this country can have confidence in this Government today.63
It was an astonishing performance, a parliamentary occasion to equal – or, rather, trump – Howe’s speech, which had precipitated the whole landslide just nine days earlier, never to be forgotten by anyone who was present in the House or watched on television. The Tory benches cheered wildly, wondering if they had made a dreadful mistake.
At the end of the debate Baker had a drink with her in her room. ‘She was still resilient and looked as if she had freshly stepped off the boat after a great tour.’64 She was still angry about what her own party had done to her. ‘They’ve done what the Labour party didn’t manage to do in three elections,’ she told Carol. But for the moment she was still on a high. ‘Carol, I think my place in history is assured.’65
Nominations for the second ballot had already closed.To maximise the anti-Heseltine vote, and avoid the appearance of a Cabinet stitch-up, it was decided that both Hurd and Major should stand, thus giving Tory MPs what many had been demanding: a wider choice. Hurd, the older and much more experienced man, was the safe pair of hands. Major was thirteen years younger and an unknown quantity. He had risen with astonishing speed and seemed to owe his career entirely to Mrs Thatcher’s patronage. But the fact that he was her protégé made it natural for those who felt guilty at ditching her to make amends by supporting him, though anyone who knew him at all well knew he was not a Thatcherite. ‘Many will vote for him thinking he is on the right wing,’ Willie Whitelaw correctly predicted. ‘They’ll be disappointed and soon find out that he isn’t.’66 Mrs Thatcher already had doubts herself, and initially declared that she would not endorse any candidate; but this was quickly forgotten, and over the weekend she did more canvassing for Major – mainly by telephone – than she had ever done for herself. She told them – and tried to believe it herself – that the best way of preserving her legacy was to support Major. Though she recognised that Hurd had been loyal, she had never really trusted him; more than Heseltine in some ways, he represented everything in the party that she had striven to reject, as she explained to Wyatt:
John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is far more in tune with the skilled and ambitious and worthwhile working classes than Douglas Hurd is.67
The short campaign was exceptionally gentlemanly, and, once the momentum had swung behind Major, the result was never in doubt. Heseltine had always known that his chance would have gone the moment Mrs Thatcher withdrew, and so it proved. The result of the voting on 27 November gave Major 185 votes to Heseltine’s 131 and Hurd’s 56. Though strictly speaking Major was still two votes short of an absolute majority, both Heseltine and Hurd immediately withdrew, leaving Major the clear winner – with, as Mrs Thatcher reflected wryly, nineteen votes fewer than she had won seven days earlier. Nevertheless it was the result she had campaigned for, so as soon as Hurd and Heseltine had made their statements she burst through the connecting door to Number Eleven to congratulate her successor. ‘It’s everything I’ve dreamt of for such a long time,’ she gushed. ‘The future is assured.’68 She wanted to go outside with Major while he spoke to the media, but was persuaded that she must let him have his moment of glory alone. She was photographed peeping sadly from an upstairs window while Major made his statement and answered questions. This was the moment when the reality of her loss of office must have hit her.
She had spent the previous few days packing up and holding farewell parties for her staff and supporters. It was for just this eventuality that she and Denis had bought a house in Dulwich in 1986, so at least she had somewhere to go; and the housewife in her was good at the business of packing and clearing up. So long as she was busy she had no time to grieve.
Margaret and Denis went to Chequers for the last time for the weekend, attended church on Sunday morning and were heartbroken to leave the country home they had made good use of for the past eleven years. On Monday she paid a short visit to thank the workers at Central Office. She had been ‘very, very thrilled’, she said, that President Bush had telephoned after her resignation was announced. They had discussed the Gulf and it was in that context – in relation to Bush, not Major – that she had declared: ‘He won’t falter, and I won’t falter. It’s just that I won’t be pulling the levers there. But I shall be a very good back seat driver.’69
On Tuesday, while Tory MPs were still voting on her successor, she made her last appearance answering Prime Minister’s Questions. Again it was an occasion more for tributes than for recrimination. She told a Tory member that his was the 7,498th question she had answered in 698 sessions at the dispatch box. By the time she answered her last question a few minutes later the final tally was 7,501.70
Finally, on Wednesday morning, she left the stage, only with difficulty holding back the tears as she made her final statement:
Ladies and Gentlemen.We’re leaving Downing Street for the last time after eleven and a half wonderful years and we’re very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came eleven and a half years ago.
It had been ‘a tremendous privilege’, they had been ‘wonderfully happy years’ and she was ‘immensely grateful’ to all her staff and the people who had sent her flowers and letters:
Now it’s time for a new chapter to open and I wish John Major all the luck in the world. He’ll be splendidly served, and he has the makings of a great Prime Minister, which I’m sure he’ll be in a very short time.
Thank you very much. Goodbye.71
When the car arrived in Dulwich, a journalist asked her what she would do now. ‘Work. That is all we have ever known.’72 Her trouble would be finding enough to do.
27
Afterlife
Unemployed workaholic
BRITISH democracy is peculiarly cruel to its defeated leaders. The familiar spectacle of the removal vans in Downing Street the morning after a General Election is an undignified one. Mrs Thatcher had witnessed at first hand Ted Heath’s abrupt and unanticipated ejection from office in February 1974. It was very largely the example of his predicament, with no alternative home to retreat to, so that he was forced to squat for several months in a small flat lent him by a Tory MP, that had prompted her to buy an unsuitable house in Dulwich as some sort of insurance policy against a similar fate. Her dismissal was actually less abrupt than most: she had almost a week between her decision to resign and the moment of departure – six days to pack up and say her farewells. Yet her defeat was also more brutal, since it was inflicted not by the electorate but by her own MPs. In June 1983 and June 1987 she had been packed and psychologically prepared: in November 1990 she was not.
Mrs Thatcher was a compulsive workaholic, still full of energy, with no interests outside politics. The loss of office deprived her almost overnight of her main reason for living. She had always dreaded the prospect of retirement. ‘I think my definition of Hell is having a lot of time and not having any idea of what to do with it,’ she told She magazine in 1987.1 ‘Happiness is not doing nothing,’ she reiterated to Woman’s Own. ‘Happiness in an adult consists of having a very full day, being absolutely exhausted at the end of it but knowing that you have had a very full day.’2 When she talked of having a full day she meant a full day’s work; and what she meant by work was politics. She could no more walk away from politics than she could stop breathing.
‘There will always be work for me to do and I shall just have to find it,’ she had said in 1989.3 But she was quite unsuited for any of the big international jobs – NATO, the World Bank, even the United Nations – with which her name was sometimes linked: she was never cut out to be a diplomat. John
Major would have liked nothing better than to keep her fully occupied, preferably out of the country: but as he wrote in his memoirs, there was ‘no credible job to offer her’.4
It only made it worse that Major was her protégé whom she had promoted rapidly over the heads of his contemporaries and finally endorsed as her successor. While colleagues and commentators saw the importance of Major quickly proving himself his own man, free of nanny’s apron strings, Mrs Thatcher continued to treat him as her unfledged deputy whose job it was to carry on the work which she had regrettably been prevented from finishing herself. Just as she had wanted to join him on the pavement outside Number Ten for his first press conference, so she had to be dissuaded from sitting immediately behind him at his first Prime Minister’s Questions.5 She thought she was still entitled to be informed and consulted, and the fact that Major’s first big challenge was the Gulf war, which was in origin her war, helped cement that expectation: Charles Powell – who stayed with Major until the conclusion of the war in March 1991 – continued to give her weekly briefings far fuller than those given by convention to the Leaders of the Opposition. Yet still she felt cut off from the information flow which had been her lifeblood for eleven years, and as a result she became frustrated and increasingly critical.
As she voiced her criticism more and more publicly she was accused of behaving as badly towards Major as Heath had done towards her. Yet Heath was widely seen as an embittered failure pursuing a lonely sulk, whereas she still had a huge following in the party, the country and indeed the world which made her criticism far more damaging and imposed on her a greater responsibility to deploy her influence discreetly and judiciously. This she manifestly failed – or refused – to do. The result was that for the Tories’ remaining seven years in office she made Major’s position vis-à-vis his own backbenchers almost impossible. By helping to exacerbate divisions in the party she contributed substantially to its heavy defeat in 1992, after which she continued to undermine the efforts first of William Hague and then – until her health began to fail – of Iain Duncan Smith to reunite the party around a new agenda. The wounds inflicted on the Tory party by her traumatic overthrow will never heal until her still-unquiet ghost is exorcised.
Back-seat driver
Woodrow Wyatt rang Mrs Thatcher in Dulwich the day after she and Denis arrived there and found her ‘coming down to earth with a bump’.6 She had no one to type letters for her or to acknowledge the thousands of letters of sympathy and bouquets of flowers she was receiving from members of the public. She did not even know how to operate the telephone or the washing machine. The one reassuring element of continuity was the police protection which still guarded her at all times; so finding herself unable to dial a number, she sought help from the Special Branch officers established in the garage. She still had a room in the House of Commons and John Whittingdale as her political secretary, but her first practical need was for a proper office. Alistair McAlpine came to the rescue by lending her a house in Great College Street, and she soon recruited a staff of eight. This arrangement served for the first few months, until the newly established Thatcher Foundation acquired an appropriate headquarters in Chesham Place.
Meanwhile, she quickly realised that Dulwich was not a sensible place for her to live. The only attraction of the house – for Denis – was that it overlooked Dulwich and Sydenham Golf Club. But it was hopelessly impractical for an ex-Prime Minister who intended to remain fully involved in public life, and whose schedule required her to be able to get home quickly to change between engagements. She needed to remain symbolically as well as literally in the thick of things. After just three weeks of commuting from Dulwich, therefore, she and Denis were lent a luxurious ground floor and basement duplex apartment in Eaton Square, Belgravia, owned by Henry Ford’s widow, while they looked for something more permanent. They eventually bought a ten-year lease – later extended to a life interest – on a five-storey, five-bedroom house nearby in Chester Square, just off Victoria, which was made ready for them to move into in the summer of 1991.
There were some consolations to salve her sense of rejection in the first few weeks. She received a warm – perhaps guilt-fuelled – reception in the Commons when she attended Major’s first appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions; and everywhere she appeared she was met with sympathy, tributes to her historic stature and admiration for her dignified bearing in adversity. On 9 December it was announced that the Queen had awarded her the Order of Merit – the highest honour in the sovereign’s gift, limited to just twenty-four individuals: Mrs Thatcher filled the vacancy left by the death of Laurence Olivier. More controversially, Denis was created a baronet. A few days earlier she and Denis had paid a well-publicised call on Ron and Nancy Reagan, who were passing through London, and took tea with them at Claridge’s, reliving past glories.
She was still resilient, determined to look forward and keep herself busy. ‘I have got to do a positive job, and do positive things,’ she told Wyatt. ‘I intend to go on having influence.’7 She knew she had to step back from daily domestic politics, but in the very first days she set herself three tasks. First, she intended to travel widely and lecture, particularly in America, partly to keep on spreading her gospel, but also to make money. She soon signed on with the Washington Speakers’ Bureau for a reported fee of $50,000 a lecture – second only to Reagan – and she commanded similar fees in Japan and all over the Far East. She made a clear rule, however, that she would accept no payment for speeches in Britain, or for speaking in Russia, China, Hong Kong or South Africa – anywhere, in fact, where she was speaking politically as opposed to just exploiting her name. She was determined not to compromise her independence where she felt she could still have influence.
Within two years she was placed 134th in the Sunday Times list of the country’s richest people, with personal wealth estimated at £9.5 million.8 Much the biggest part of this income, however, derived from her second task – the writing of her memoirs. These clearly had huge commercial potential. In June Mrs Thatcher signed up with an American agent, Marvin Josephson, who swiftly accepted an offer of £3.5 million from HarperCollins – part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire – for two volumes to be published in 1993 and 1995.
It was a substantial deal. But the timetable was demanding, requiring her to write the first volume, covering her entire premiership, in not much more than eighteen months. It was announced that she would write every word herself; but no one seriously believed this. She had never claimed to be a writer. Her method of composing speeches had always been to edit, criticise and exhaustively rewrite the drafts of others; and it was the same with her memoirs. Like her valedictory speech to the House of Commons on the day she resigned, but on a vastly bigger scale, Mrs Thatcher took the project immensely seriously, treating every word as her vindication before the bar of history. She did not intend to pull her punches – and nor did she. But directing the writing of the book gave her something serious and all-consuming to do with her time; and completing it on schedule was a formidable achievement.
Her third project was to set up some sort of institution to preserve her legacy and propagate her ideas around the world, but this fell foul of British charity law. In July 1991 the Charity Commission refused to grant the Thatcher Foundation charitable status since it was not politically neutral: this seriously affected its ability to raise funds, since companies could not claim tax relief. By 1993 no more than £5 million had been raised. The Foundation was nevertheless established with its headquarters in Chesham Place (near Hyde Park Corner), which provided a suitably imposing office where Mrs Thatcher could receive foreign visitors: several remarked that its fine staircase and chandeliers, mementoes of the Falklands and a large globe were curiously reminiscent of Downing Street – though far grander.
Branches were also opened in Washington and Warsaw, with the object of spreading free-market ideas and Western business practice in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. The specific initiatives announc
ed, however, were small beer. The Foundation evolved instead into an educational trust. In 1998 it gave £2 million to endow a new chair of enterprise studies at Cambridge. The previous year Lady Thatcher had donated her papers to Churchill College, together with funds to catalogue them and build a new wing of the Archives Centre to house them. The Foundation also paid for the distribution to libraries all round the world of a CD-ROM of her complete public statements produced (at its own expense) by Oxford University Press, and it funds a Margaret Thatcher website. All this has helped to make the record of her life available to historians; but it was not the crusading vehicle for global Thatcherism that was originally envisaged.
In the short term the main thing she could do was to travel extensively, which both got her out of Major’s hair and enabled her to enjoy the adulation of her admirers around the world. As a global superstar she was far more recognisable than her unknown successor, and she met with rapturous receptions wherever she went. During 1991 she made five visits to the United States – in February to attend Ronald Reagan’s eightieth-birthday celebrations in California and inspect the still unfinished Reagan Library in Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles; in March to receive the congressional Medal of Freedom from President Bush at a lavish ceremony in the White House, followed by her first paid lectures in Republican strongholds like Dallas, Texas, and Orange County, California; in June to give two major speeches about world affairs in New York and Chicago; in September and again in November for further lecture tours. America was more than ever her spiritual home, and during and after the Gulf war she still had some standing in Washington, even if more often than not she had to be content with seeing Vice-President Dan Quayle – usually for breakfast – rather than the President. But she also went in May to South Africa for what was essentially the state visit she had never managed to make as Prime Minister, where she was fêted by President de Klerk but boycotted by the ANC; and then to Russia where she met both Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and was mobbed in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. In September she aroused extraordinary enthusiasm in Japan and was given the red-carpet treatment in China (overshadowing a visit by Major a few days later). In October she was hailed as a heroine by crowds in Poland; and in November she was welcomed as the liberator of Kuwait, whence she returned ‘reverberating with vitality’.9
The Iron Lady Page 63