Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (2 page)

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge all those who have helped me in the research, preparation and production of this biography of Margaret Thatcher.

There are two treasure troves of Thatcher papers to which I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude. One is the Thatcher Archive at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. I particularly thank Dr Allen Packwood the director of the Churchill Archives Centre and the Thatcher Archivist Andrew Riley. The other and closely linked main source of papers is the Margaret Thatcher Foundation and its website. Its editor Christopher Collins and its head Julian Seymour deserve the highest praise for their vision and their industry in making such huge resources of historical material on Margaret Thatcher so easily available to scholars, students, historians and biographers.

I have trawled through several other collections of source material and would like to thank the staff of the British Library, the British Library Newspapers, the Churchill Archives Centre, the Templeman Library at the Univeristy of Kent, the Boris Johnson newspaper cuttings archive and the Hans Tasiemka Archives.

The old agricultural saying ‘There’s no manure like the farmer’s foot’ applies to political biography. So I am immensely grateful to the many helpful guides and welcomers who showed me around places and institutions which were part of Margaret Thatcher’s life story.

At Grantham I would like to thank Michael and Diana Honeybone, former teacher at KGGS, who escorted me around the locations in the town, the schools and the churches which the young Margaret and the Roberts family attended. In particular I am grateful to local historian Malcolm G. Knapp and Denys Lambley of the Finkin Street Methodist Church. My thanks also go to Ian Todd, Assistant Head Teacher of Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, Mrs Janet Thompson, the Archivist, and Diane Barrett, Office Manager at the school; also to Mark Anderson, Head Teacher of Huntingtower Community Primary Academy, Grantham, and Margaret Lockwood, Office Manager. Sandra Good, the proprietor of Living Health on North Parade, kindly showed me around what used to be Roberts Food Stores on the ground floor and the flat above where the family lived, including the room where Margaret Thatcher was born.

At the University of Oxford I appreciated visiting Margaret Thatcher’s old room at Somerville and touring the college with the distinguished historian Dr Franklyn Prochaska, husband of the Principal Dr Alice Prochaska.

At the Royal Hospital Chelsea I was most grateful to be shown around and briefed by the Lieutenant Governor, Major General Peter Currie, and the Chaplain the Revd Dick Whittington.

The most enjoyable sources were the living witnesses to Margaret Thatcher’s career in public life, some ninety of whom gave me interviews. Their names are listed, with gratitude, at the end of the book.

Lastly, I must thank the many previous authors who have written books on Margaret Thatcher. Most biographers assimilate fragments, large or small, from their predecessors’ writings. I am no exception to this practice and I would particularly like to thank the earliest Thatcher biographers, Patricia Murray, Ernle Money, George Gardiner, Russell Lewis and Penny Junor. I also much appreciated Hugo Young’s portrait
One of Us
, the two-volume biography by John Campbell and the first volume of the official biography by Charles Moore published earlier this year.

Finally, the greatest thanks of all go to my own home team of researchers and secretarial helpers.

The chief researcher on my two-year biographer’s journey was Jacqueline Williams, whose diligence and dedication in unearthing the raw material of history was magnificent. She was ably assisted by two talented interns from Oxford University, Mark Holmes and Tom Perrin, whose enthusiasm was infectious as we read through the first draft of the manuscript and made many changes. I am also grateful to my daughter Victoria Aitken for her encouragement and occasional research.

The brunt of the typing of the manuscript was borne by the excellent Prue Fox. She was supported by Helen Kirkpatrick and Rosemary Gooding, while the onerous task of scheduling interviews and collating the draft chapters was superbly executed by Susanna Jennens.

I would also like to thank everyone concerned with this book at my publishers Bloomsbury, particularly my editor, Robin Baird-Smith, and his assistant editor, Joel Simons.

The last but really the first helper, encourager and sharer of my workload has been my beloved wife Elizabeth. She walked every step of the road of my author’s journey, and the book is lovingly dedicated to her.

Jonathan Aitken

July 2013

Prologue

After the applause comes the appraisal.

The applause created the most moving moment at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. As her coffin was carried out of St Paul’s Cathedral on the shoulders of military pallbearers while the choir sang
Nunc Dimittis
to the hauntingly beautiful setting of Stanford in G, the first sight of her cortège by the crowds spontaneously produced a swelling wave of sound.

It was so unexpected that those of us still seated beneath the great dome of Christopher Wren’s ecclesiastical masterpiece were startled. For days the London media had been predicting hostile protests. So at this fleeting instant I and many others in the congregation wondered whether we were hearing the ultimate anti-Thatcher demonstration.

Far from it. For it quickly became clear that the great roar rolling up from Ludgate Hill and other streets near St Paul’s bore the unmistakable resonance of massive cheering.

What were those crowds cheering her for? Some were too young to have known the age of Thatcher. Many more were likely to have disagreed with the values and the policies she championed. But on the day of her obsequies the overwhelming majority seemed ready to salute her life’s journey for its achievements, breakthroughs and for its footprints on the sands of time.

Applause is usually thought inappropriate at a funeral, but Margaret Thatcher broke so many conventions and ceilings in her life that the shattering of one more establishment custom in death seemed right. She would have enjoyed those cheers. Not only did they symbolise the affection of her fans; they also marked one last victory over her foes.

Because she was such a political polariser, it was anticipated that her adversaries from the militant left would turn out to give their old enemy a farewell booing. I encountered some of them on my walk towards St Paul’s. These would-be troublemakers were hostile enough to give me and others attired in our
tailcoats a few jeers. But a friendly apple-cheeked woman in the same part of the crowd had a different message. ‘Don’t you worry about them lot,’ she said in her West Country burr. ‘We’ll drown them out.’ And they did.

The subtleties that were important elements in the make-up of Margaret Thatcher were often drowned out. She herself concealed many of them. She could be politically cautious while preferring to sound proudly radical. She had an overdeveloped sense of privacy. Throughout her life she suppressed personal information, insecurities, emotions and inconvenient truths behind a façade of carefully projected self-certainty. She became the most famous woman in the world on account of her highly visible political directness. Yet on the less visible sides of her character she could be more difficult and complicated than most people guessed.

The paradoxes in Margaret Thatcher have long intrigued me. Ever since I first met her nearly fifty years ago, it was clear that her most important feature was the strength of her personality. This was the force that drove her forward, conquered the obstacles in her path, shaped her vision for Britain and won three successive general elections. Her successes in domestic and international politics never softened her argumentative nature or smoothed her sharp edges. She irritated many of her colleagues, infuriated most of her opponents and challenged the comfortable consensus of the status quo at every opportunity. She was much easier to admire from afar than to work with at close quarters. She could be personally kind to her staff but impersonally unpleasant towards those whose views or misfortunes lay outside her field of empathy. She was never an easy person.

Because of these and many other complexities, I hope that a biographical portrait of Margaret Thatcher that focuses on her personality may make a contribution to her historical appraisal. But it would amount to pointless psychobabble if the portrait was not grounded in the narrative of how she sought, won, wielded and lost power. For this was the context in which she lived her life.

As her journey progressed her personality changed. There was a metamorphosis from Grantham to grandeur; from humility to hubris; from a realistic courageousness in fighting her corner to a reckless Ride of the Valkyries.

The Shakespearean nemesis of the coup against her was an agony, as were her outpourings of bitterness that followed it. The personality shifts that
accompanied these dramas deserve interpretation, sometimes critically, sometimes sympathetically.

In the latter category, it needs to be said that some of the grandeur and the hubris were not of her own making. It was twentieth-century history that cast her as a figure on the world stage. She became an icon of freedom to the peoples of Eastern Europe. Women across global and political boundaries admired her for breaking the highest barriers of male-dominated leadership. She liberated millions of her aspiring fellow countrymen in areas such as home ownership, class barriers and economic opportunity. She was ahead of her time, but right, in challenging the pressures from the UK’s foreign-policy and financial establishments towards joining the single currency and the Eurozone. She restored national pride and economic strength to Britain. These were such momentous achievements that she would have been inhuman not to have been tempted towards some feelings of vaulting self-aggrandisement.

The changes in her personality carried a price tag. It was paid in the currency of hurt feelings by those damaged in her personal and political battles. They included bullied colleagues, derided officials, ignored communities and neglected family members. Ultimately she herself joined the ranks of the wounded, for her ousting from power was calculated, craven and cruel. She never recovered her equilibrium after her fall.

I had a ringside seat at many private and public spectacles in the Margaret Thatcher saga. Before I met her she was a name to conjure with in our home. My father was present in the House of Commons to hear her maiden speech. He repeatedly told my mother how impressed he had been by the young Member for Finchley. After a conversation with her in the tea room three days later he was so taken with her intensity and beauty that he frequently compared her to the film star Virginia McKenna.
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When I first met Margaret Thatcher during the 1966 general election, she was the junior opposition spokesman for housing and land and I was the youngest Conservative parliamentary candidate in the country. She reminded me that she had been in the same position as candidate for Dartford in 1950. On that occasion and on some subsequent encounters when I was a candidate,
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I did
not share my father’s enthusiasm for her. The feeling was mutual. ‘That young man needs his wings clipped,’ I heard her say in a piercing voice at a Young Conservative conference we had both been addressing in 1972.

Entering the House of Commons in February 1974, I started out as a Ted Heath admirer, unsurprisingly since his home town of Broadstairs was in my constituency and I was a frequent guest at the home of his father. But Ted’s weaknesses grew all too apparent at first-hand observation.
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Also at first hand I witnessed the earliest stirrings of the Thatcher bandwagon in the form of Peter Morrison’s manoeuvres with the upper-class splinter group called ‘toffs for Thatcher’.
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I also followed the more solid support she received from members of the Economic Dining Club and a group of Treasury Committee specialists headed by my friends Peter Rees and Norman Lamont. Amidst the extraordinary turbulence of the 1975 Tory leadership election I reckoned, after numerous conversations with players like Hugh Fraser, Airey Neave, Edward du Cann and Ted Heath himself, that I had a well-informed insider’s view
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of how Margaret Thatcher won the crown, even though I was not a cheering member of her coronation party.

Her opposition years were the most fragile period of her career. It was the time when I came to know her well. She was a warmer and more interesting character than I had expected. Although she was struggling in the House of Commons at the gladiatorial battles of Prime Minister’s Questions (which she usually lost), she came across as a strong and attractive leader to many back-benchers and to the party in the country. I saw her interest in new ideas at meetings of the Conservative Philosophy Group
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in my home, and in House of Commons discussions on Home Office policy after being made a junior front-bench spokesman on police matters.

At this same time I began to understand the private side of her personality because for three years I dated her daughter Carol. She was one of the great loves of my life, but I handled our romance badly. Nevertheless, while the relationship
was in full swing I caught many glimpses of a little-known Margaret Thatcher. She was hospitable, feminine, confiding, dysfunctional within her family, direct with her daughter’s boyfriend and much more vulnerable than I had realised. One night I found her in tears in her Flood Street home because some back-bench critic had told her she was ‘wrecking the party’. I told her to ignore it but she left the room in emotional distress saying: ‘I hurt too, you know.’
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The ‘winter of discontent’ was the turning point for Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Opposition and she seized her opportunities brilliantly. I think I was the second person (ironically the first was Jim Callaghan) to tell her, in Westminster Abbey after a memorial service, that her party political broadcast of 17 January 1979 had started a sea change in public opinion.
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Soon after Margaret Thatcher won the general election and became Prime Minister, my romance with Carol ended. ‘You have brought great personal distress to the Queen’s First Minister,’ said her Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) Ian Gow. I understood his message. It was conveyed in other ways, not least in leaks to journalists. Although this was painful, I thought it was reasonable that I should have been sent to Siberia. What mother does not feel angry if she thinks her daughter’s happiness has been destroyed by a young man? Margaret Thatcher’s human instincts were entirely understandable.

Siberia was not outer darkness. I continued to stay in touch with the Prime Minister vicariously. Ian Gow was one of my best friends and late-night drinking companions. So was his successor as her PPS, Michael Alison (but with less drinking!). So were numerous senior and junior ministers and whips. The parliamentary club is a small one and a good vantage point for watching a new prime minister.

Like many others I grew into becoming a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher because of her courage. The Falklands War, the 1981 Budget and the victory over Arthur Scargill in the 1984 miners’ strike were shining examples of this cardinal virtue. The stories of her personality during these epic battles soon filtered through from insiders of whom the most indiscreet was Willie Whitelaw and the most extraordinary David Hart.
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In addition to the wealth of material available in archives and collections of papers, I kept my own diaries and other records throughout my twenty-three years in Parliament alongside Margaret Thatcher. From these and from many contemporary sources I hope it has been possible to portray her with some fresh brush strokes on my biographer’s canvas.

It has to be said that I occasionally saw her, and have painted parts of her personality, in unattractive colours. For example, I remember growing angry at her outrageous behaviour towards my friend Bernard ‘Jack’ Weatherill
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before and after he became Speaker of the House of Commons. Her constant bullying of Geoffrey Howe
^‡‡‡
was worse. She could be nastily unpleasant to a minister or an official against whom she had formed an instant, and sometimes inexplicable, dislike. She was cruel in her constant disparagement of her chosen successor as Prime Minister, John Major.
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She had little empathy or sympathy for those members of society who were too different or too disadvantaged to appreciate her self-help philosophy.

On the other side of the coin her virtues far outweighed her occasional streaks of viciousness. Great men and women often have their Achilles heels. Margaret Thatcher’s failures of behaviour were painful to those on the receiving end of them. But on the big picture of politics it was the strength of her personality that made it possible to achieve what was thought almost impossible.

While her second and third terms as Prime Minister continued, I was no longer exiled to Siberia. As a back-bencher I saw her quite often, occasionally in one-to-one conversations whose subjects ranged from problems with an RAF base in my constituency, to the obduracy of the Kent miners,
^****
to conversations about the King of Saudi Arabia and former US President Richard Nixon.
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At one point she sent me a message through her PPS Michael Alison saying that I would not have to wait long before being brought into the government. This never happened, not I think because of lingering feelings about Carol but because I came to be regarded by the whips as an intolerable nuisance over Europe.

This was ironic because the Prime Minister was becoming far from unsympathetic to the rebellions against European legislation organised by the Conservative European Reform Group (CERG)
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of which I was chairman. Indeed, when she got into trouble over her own galloping Euroscepticism it was CERG’s supporters in the House of Commons who became her most vociferous backers.

The fall of Margaret Thatcher had three ingredients. Her personality went off the rails because of an excess of hubris and a want of listening. Her party went off the rails because of a surfeit of fear and a shortage of loyalty. A pincer movement of two plotters and the collapse of her support in cabinet dealt her the killer blows.

Watching this tragedy unfold was the saddest spectacle I ever witnessed in politics. My blood still boils when I watch, in television replays, my grimaces of anger immediately behind Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement in which I was ‘doughnutted’ by the cameras.
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