The Iron Lady
Page 65
Lady Thatcher did a good deal of unofficial lobbying on behalf of British firms bidding for contracts around the world. She intervened, for example, to stop Kuwait backing down on an agreement to buy armoured cars from GKN, by ringing the Crown Prince and telling him firmly that he should stick to his word; another time she flew secretly from Hong Kong to Azerbaijan to help BP secure a major oil contract under the noses of the French and American ambassadors.39 As Prime Minister she had always believed in ‘batting for Britain’ – particularly in the arms trade – by face-to-face diplomacy with her opposite numbers, and after leaving office she did not cease to exert her personal influence wherever it could still be effective. Though it could never compensate for the loss of real power, this more than anything else did make her feel that she was still serving her country.
The first volume of her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, was published in October 1993. Although the real scores she had to settle were with those of her former colleagues who had ganged up on her, let her down or ultimately betrayed her, the media were sure to focus on what she had to say about her successor. Rumours abounded even before the Daily Mirror leaked her dismissive view that Major, as Chancellor in 1990, had ‘swallowed… the slogans of the European lobby’ and ‘intellectually… was drifting with the tide’.40 This was the start of an intensive blitz of book promotion accompanied by a four-part BBC television series.
Both the book and the series showed that the Iron Lady had lost none of her passionate intensity. The book has its longueurs, but it is still by far the most comprehensive and readable of modern prime ministerial memoirs: partisan, of course, but generally a clear and vivid account of her side of the arguments. Of course it aggrandises her role, exaggerates the degree to which she knew where she was going from the beginning, slides over her moments of doubt and hesitation and diminishes the contribution of most of her colleagues, aides and advisers. It is a shockingly ungenerous book. Nevertheless, it sold well. Lady Thatcher spent two weeks signing copies in bookshops all around Britain, then flew off in November to do the same in America and Japan.The paperback edition appeared in Britain in March 1995 and did even better. Meanwhile, her contract with HarperCollins obliged her to lose no time in getting on with the second volume covering her early years.
This, though autobiographically more interesting, had less commercial potential. Lady Thatcher was therefore persuaded to supplement the 450-odd pages describing her childhood and rise to power with another 150 pages giving her view of current events in the four and a half years since her fall. If The Downing Street Years had been unhelpful to her successor, The Path to Power, which appeared in May 1995 accompanied by another media circus, was much worse. This time she avoided personal criticism, but made it clear that she thought the Major Government had squandered her legacy and pursued the wrong policies in almost every area. At public meetings to promote the book she was still more outspoken. But by now she was simply ranting. Prejudice had finally taken over from politics, unmediated by the memory of responsibility. She was suddenly an opinionated and easily provoked old lady: press a button and she would respond with a tirade until she ran out of steam and had to be prompted with another question, which set her off again. Unfortunately for Major, she still made headlines and her words, as she set off on another whistle-stop signing tour around the country, gave encouragement to those in the party who were working for a change of leader.
Major accepted the challenge and got his response in first. On 22 June he startled the political world by resigning – as Tory leader, not as Prime Minister – and inviting his critics to ‘put up or shut up’: either put up a candidate to defeat him or else stop sniping. The obvious candidate, long seen as Lady Thatcher’s favourite – though she had never publicly endorsed him – was Michael Portillo. But Portillo decided, after some contrary signals, not to stand, and the much less charismatic John Redwood came forward instead. In this crisis of his premiership one might have expected LadyThatcher, who had been so affronted by the constitutional impropriety of a serving Prime Minister being driven from office by a party revolt, to have rallied to her successor’s support, whatever her reservations about him. In fact she remained studiedly neutral. She was promoting her book in America at the time of the ballot on 4 July, but issued a curt statement saying merely that Major and Redwood were ‘both good Conservatives’.41 This was very pointedly not an endorsement. She did bring herself to congratulate Major, however, when he won just enough votes to secure his position – 218 to Redwood’s 89 – and told Wyatt that she would henceforth support Major ‘because the alternative is even worse’. Tony Blair might be a new sort of Labour leader, she conceded but his party was as socialist as ever – though now pursuing its goal through European federalism – so it was vital for the Tories to win again.
She saw a hopeful model for a Tory recovery in the Republicans’ sweeping gains in the 1994 mid-term congressional elections in America, under the born-again leadership of Newt Gingrich. ‘After an unhappy period when the momentum stalled,’ she declared in Washington, the Republicans ‘have now decided to regard the 1980s as a springboard, not an embarrassment. And the political dividend has been huge. I hope that British Conservatives will raise their sights and learn lessons from America.’42 By the same token she saw the Democratic President Bill Clinton as ‘nothing but a draft dodger and a coward’,43 as well as hopelessly woolly. ‘He’s a great communicator,’ she acknowledged. ‘The trouble is he has absolutely nothing to communicate.’44
She was on more solid ground when she kept to the world stage. In March 1996 she made one of her most prescient speeches when invited to speak at Fulton, Missouri, where, fifty years earlier, Churchill had coined his great image of an ‘iron curtain’ descending across Europe. With the help of her speechwriter, the now indispensable Robin Harris, she rose to the occasion with a Churchillian survey of the world after the end of the Cold War, highlighting the rise of ‘rogue states’ – was she the first to use the phrase? – ‘like Syria, Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya’ and the danger from ‘the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction’. The world, she warned, ‘remains a very dangerous place… menaced by more unstable and complex threats than a decade ago’. But she feared that with the risk of imminent nuclear annihilation apparently removed, ‘we in the West have lapsed into alarming complacency about the risks that remain’. Her preference was explicitly for pre-emptive military action to remove the threat – a policy that would have to wait for the presidency of the younger George Bush, acting under the provocation of the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. In the meantime she merely urged the West to press on with the development of ‘effective ballistic missile defence which would protect us and our armed forces, reduce or even nullify the rogue state’s arsenal and enable us to retaliate’. She called for a reinvigoration of NATO both by extending its membership to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic and by allowing it to operate ‘out of area’ to defend the West’s security. But as always she saw all progress and safety in terms of American leadership, with Britain as America’s first ally. ‘It is the West – above all perhaps the English-speaking peoples of the West… which we all know offers the best hope of global peace and prosperity. In order to uphold these things, the Atlantic political relationship must be constantly nurtured and renewed.’45
With the 1997 General Election only months away and a Labour victory seemingly almost certain, she did not want to be seen to rock the boat. For some time she had been telling friends that the country had ‘nothing to fear’ from Tony Blair, a patriot who, she said, ‘will not let Britain down’.46[q] But now an unnamed ‘ally’ told The Times: ‘She will not be blamed, or allow the blame to be heaped on her friends, for losing the Tories the election… Whatever misgivings she may have, she fears a Blair Government even more.’47
Once again she was determined not to be sidelined when the election came. No sooner had Major announced the date than she was on the pavement outside C
hesham Place giving an impromptu press conference, as she had so often done in Downing Street, to try to quash reports that she was secretly supporting Blair. ‘The phrase “New Labour” is cunningly designed to conceal a lot of old socialism’, she warned. ‘Don’t be taken in… Stay with us and with John Major until we cross the finishing line.’48 She appeared with Major twice during the campaign, and made a number of barn-storming forays on her own to selected constituencies without rocking the boat too vigorously.
Eighteen years of Conservative Government ended on 1 May 1997 in an even bigger Labour landslide than the polls had predicted. Labour won 419 seats and the Liberal Democrats – benefiting from widespread tactical voting – 46, reducing the Tories to a rump of 165 (their worst result since 1906) and giving Blair a majority of 179, which dwarfed even Mrs Thatcher’s two big wins in 1983 and 1987. Lady Thatcher viewed this debacle with mixed feelings. On the one hand, she was a lifelong party warrior and believed enough of her dire warnings about resurgent socialism to deplore the state to which her old party had been reduced. On the other hand, she could not disguise a certain satisfaction in contemplating the shipwreck which she believed her successors had brought upon themselves by discarding her in 1990. She did not consider the alternative view that she had left Major a poisoned legacy – an economy running into recession, declining public services and a party already deeply split over Europe – and had done everything in her power over the past seven years to undermine his authority and widen the rift. Many commentators saw 1997 as the electorate’s delayed verdict onThatcherism.All but the most committed partisans thought a change of government overdue and healthy.
At a deeper level, however, 1997 can be seen as Mrs Thatcher’s greatest victory, which set the seal on her transformation of British politics. She had set out, on becoming leader in 1975, to abolish socialism and twenty years later she had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. By her repeated electoral success, by her neutering of the trade unions, by the privatisation of most of the public sector and the introduction of market forces into almost every area of national life, she – and her successor – had not only reversed the tide of increasing collectivism which had flowed from 1945 to 1979, but had rewritten the whole agenda of politics, forcing the Labour party gradually and reluctantly to accept practically the entire Thatcherite programme – at least the means, if not in its heart the ends – in order to make itself electable. Blair was a perfectly post-Thatcherite politician: an ambitious pragmatist with a smile of dazzling sincerity, but no convictions beyond a desire to rid Labour of its outdated ideological baggage. The rebranding of the party as ‘New Labour’ was the final acknowledgement of Mrs Thatcher’s victory. ‘We are all Thatcherites now,’ Peter Mandelson acknowledged.49 She had not only banished socialism, in any serious meaning of the word, from political debate, but she had effectively abolished the old Labour party. ‘New’ Labour was as dedicated as the Tories to wealth creation and market forces, even if it hoped – as Major, too, had done – to pursue them with more humanity than Mrs Thatcher had often shown. Back in the polarised 1970s the dream of most pundits had been that Britain should become more like America, with two capitalist parties differing in style and tone but agreed on essentials, like the Republicans and Democrats. The rise of New Labour had now brought this to pass. But instead of an alternation of parties, the consequence was almost fatal to the Tory party.
Three weeks after the election, just before attending his first European summit, Blair outraged old Labour stalwarts by inviting Lady Thatcher to Downing Street. ‘She has a mind well worth picking,’ his spokesman explained, ‘and he wants to see her again.’50 She was happy to give him the benefit of her advice. Blair, with his huge majority, his personal self-confidence and vaguely messianic leanings, was – as William Rees-Mogg wrote in The Times – her ‘natural successor’ in a way that poor, insecure John Major had never been. Major’s seven-year tenure in Number Ten quickly shrivelled to a mere fractious coda to the Thatcher years. Meanwhile the shattered Tory party had to elect a new leader. Lady Thatcher initially indicated that she would not back any candidate but when the thirty-six-year-old William Hague emerged as the fresh white hope, she came off the fence to lobby for him. Hague had first come to prominence as a precocious schoolboy at the 1977 party conference, speaking from the podium under the benign maternal gaze of the leader, then had won a by-election in 1988. He was Mrs Thatcher’s political child if ever there was one; and she now appeared with him for an excruciating photo-call outside the House of Commons, at which she wagged her finger and lectured the camera as if it were a backward child:
I am supporting William Hague. Now, have you got the name? William Hague. For principled government, following the same kind of government which I led, vote for William Hague on Thursday. Have you got the message?51
Hague was duly elected, but over the next four years failed dismally to dent Blair’s popularity or restore the public’s faith in the Tories. Apart from the odd embarrassing eruption, Lady Thatcher finally began to fade from public view.
Shortly before Blair went to the country again in May 2001, Lady Thatcher – now seventy-five – descended on the party’s spring conference in Plymouth and made one of her characteristically cloth-eared jokes. On her way to the hall, she said, she had passed a cinema showing a film entitled The Mummy Returns. She did not seem to realise that this was a horror film – nothing to do with a cuddly mother figure. By applying it to herself she unwittingly evoked all the headlines and cartoons that had been portraying her for years as a ghost, a vampire, the undead or Frankenstein’s monster still haunting the Tory party.52 During the campaign Labour once again exploited her unpopularity with a poster combining Hague’s face with her hair, and her every appearance in the campaign served only to remind the voters why they did not want the Tories back. Labour was returned with its huge majority virtually undented, and once again the Tories were looking for a new leader.
Rejecting the far better qualified Ken Clarke, whose pro-European views now made him unacceptable, the party next elected the totally inexperienced Iain Duncan Smith, whose only qualifications were that he had been a leading rebel against Maastricht in 1993 – 4 and was now Lady Thatcher’s anointed favourite. The Week summed up the press consensus with a cover cartoon of her embracing the new leader under the headline ‘The Kiss of Death?’53 Three months later a BBC documentary entitled The Curse of the Mummy revived her Plymouth joke to lay on her much of the blame for the party’s dire state.54 Her refusal to go quietly into the political night had left the former Prime Minister now virtually friendless.
Silenced
Not only did she have few friends, but her family provided little consolation for her old age. ‘We have become a grandmother,’ she had proudly announced in 1989, when Mark’s first child was born. Four years later Diane Thatcher gave birth to a second. But Margaret saw her grandchildren only rarely – and not much more of her children. In 1994 Mark and Diane moved from Texas to South Africa, but seldom came to Britain. Carol spent most of her time in Switzerland in an on-off relationship with a ski instructor, but has never married. Neither of the twins, who turned fifty in 2003, exemplified the ideal of a close-knot family which their mother always strove to project.
Mark’s business dealings have continued to attract controversy. His American affairs came under investigation by the Texas courts in 1995. He was sued by his business partner for alleged conspiracy involving ‘mail fraud, wire fraud, tax fraud, bankruptcy fraud, money laundering, usury, common law fraud, deceptive trade practices, perjury, theft and assault’.55 Eventually he settled out of court for $500,000 but he still faced another $4 million case being brought against his Grantham Company (which traded in aviation fuel) by the Ameristar Fuel Corporation, as well as charges of tax evasion. After a family summit his mother was reported to have cleared his debts to the tune of £700,00056: yet he somehow still continued to live like a millionaire. Later that year he moved, with Diane and the children, to
Cape Town; but his shady reputation followed him and he continued to attract the attention of both the police and the South African tax authorities.57 In 2005 he was charged with involvement in an attempted coup to overthrow the President of Equatorial Guinea. He pleaded guilty and was lucky to escape with a suspended sentence and a fine of three million rand (£265,000) – again paid by his mother. Soon afterwards Diane divorced him and returned to America. Banned from entering the United States and several other territories, Mark settled appropriately among the expatriate criminal fraternity in southern Spain.
In 1996, Carol published an affectionate biography of Denis, which drew a devastating picture of Margaret’s remoteness as a mother. She was even more explicit in some of the interviews that accompanied publication. ‘As a child I was frightened of her,’ Carol revealed. Mark had always been their mother’s favourite. ‘I always felt I came second of the two. Unloved is not the right word, but I never felt I made the grade.’ Though as an adult she had plainly grown fond of her father, she described her parents’ marriage as a union of two ambitious and primarily work-directed people, rather than a happy family unit. ‘Their priorities were not to each other or to us.’58 ‘It was very much drilled into me that the best thing I could ever do for my mother was not to make any demands on her.’59 In a curiously artless way Carol thus comprehensively torpedoed her mother’s pretence that family had always been the most important thing in her life.