Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (38 page)

‘Isn’t he awful? Isn’t he awful!’ was her heckling of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, as he tried to explain to the cabinet why high-court judges merited their salaries and pensions. When she spotted Lord Soames glancing at his watch during a late-morning discussion of civil-service pay (for which he was responsible), the Prime Minister sniped, ‘If you want to go to lunch, Christopher – you can go now’.
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And to more than one minister who seemed to be relying too heavily on his departmental brief, her rebuke was, ‘Your civil servants have got at you again. I’m not surprised.’
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These snipings were never recorded in the cabinet minutes. But so many of them are well remembered that there is no doubt that Margaret Thatcher could display an unpleasant edge to her style of leadership. Its saving grace was that she mostly reserved her bullying for people her own size. It was the grandees of the Tory Party rather than junior ministers and officials who bore the brunt of her rough style. But it could get nasty. After one rumpus involving next week’s business in the House of Commons, a shaken Norman St John-Stevas left the cabinet room making the comment, ‘No one will ever believe it is like this!’
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One of Margaret Thatcher’s most unbelievable outbursts in cabinet during the government’s early months came on Tuesday 20 November 1979. Patrick Jenkin, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Security, was due to move the second reading in the House that afternoon of a Social Security Bill that would lead to significant reductions in public expenditure. He outlined the main points of the legislation to his colleagues. ‘Where are the cuts in benefits for strikers’ families?’ demanded the Prime Minister. Patrick Jenkin replied that the Legislation Committee of the Cabinet, chaired by Willie Whitelaw, had come to a clear decision that this issue should be dealt with in a separate Social Security Bill during the next session of Parliament.

‘Why not in this one?’ demanded the Prime Minister. After the same explanation, the matter might have rested on this note of disappointment, but
for an intervention from the Leader of the House of Commons, Norman St John-Stevas. He commented that in fact there were powers given to the Secretary of State in the small print of the schedules of the existing bill which would allow him to cut benefits for strikers’ families.

‘Good. Do it at once!’ said Margaret Thatcher.

‘Then I shall have to tell the House in my speech this afternoon’, replied Jenkin.

‘No you won’t. Let them find out’, was the retort from the Prime Minister.

There then followed a fierce argument. Patrick Jenkin said that he could not and would not conceal from Parliament the intention to use such a politically sensitive power.

‘Yes you can. Just let them find out!’ Margaret Thatcher kept repeating. Patrick Jenkin stuck to his ground, despite the hard pounding. ‘Well none of us are going to get to St Margaret’s until we’ve settled this’, declared the furious Prime Minister. She was referring to a memorial service at St Margaret’s, Westminster, which many of the cabinet were scheduled to attend at 12 noon.

In an acrimonious discussion, Willie Whitelaw and Lord Carrington supported Jenkin, saying that no Secretary of State could possibly get away with the course of action suggested. Faced with the opposition of these two heavyweights, Margaret Thatcher gave way – but with bad grace.

‘She became extremely snarly,’ recalled Patrick Jenkin, ‘and as she swept out of the Cabinet Room on her way to St Margaret’s she practically shouted at me: “This is the worst decision we’ve made since we’ve been in government!”’
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Immediately after this scene, an upset Jenkin walked across to No. 11 Downing Street with his old friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘Well, Patrick,’ said Geoffrey Howe consolingly, ‘you’ve seen the downside now – but the upside is well worth it.’
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This did not remain Howe’s point of view during his later years in the cabinet. But at the time his words were a good guide for himself and for other senior ministers. They had their rough passages with Margaret Thatcher, but most of them believed in the upside of her leadership.

CHALLENGING THE CIVIL SERVICE

Yes Minister
had not been invented as a television series in 1979, but the culture it caricatured was already firmly embedded in Margaret Thatcher’s mind as a
reality. She came to power with an instinctive distrust of the civil service, born of her unhappy experiences at the Department of Education. She never lost this attitude towards the Whitehall machine, yet more and more she came to rely on a small number of individual civil servants whom she saw as kindred spirits of talent and energy. This paradox between her suspicion of the institution and her enthusiasm for individuals within it gradually gave her government the feel of a guerrilla army headed by a rebel leader.

‘You’re not being seduced by your Martians, are you?’
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This was the question she put to her Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Employment, Peter Morrison, in the autumn of 1979. The imagery was revealing. For one part of Margaret Thatcher liked to believe that civil servants lived on another planet. She was determined to attack it, to reduce the number of aliens and to ‘de-privilege’ them. These star wars had mixed results, but they quickly highlighted the impact of the Prime Minister’s personality on the government machine.

One immediate target for her reforming zeal was the Department of the Civil Service. She put a freeze on its recruitment; cut its jobs by 14 per cent; and created her own Efficiency Unit, under Sir Derek Rayner, the Managing Director of Marks & Spencer, whose departmental scrutinies found savings of over £200 million. These upheavals caused grief for Sir Ian Bancroft, Permanent Secretary at the Department of the Civil Service, who became the Sir Humphrey she loved to hate.

Their first conflict came in June 1979, when she was told by him that her Principal Private Secretary, Kenneth Stowe, would be moving to Belfast as Permanent Secretary of the Northern Ireland Department, at the end of the month. Margaret Thatcher resisted the departure of a first-class Private Secretary who had been with her for only three weeks. Ian Bancroft resisted back, explaining that Stowe’s new post was his promotion to a higher civil-service grade. The Prime Minister retaliated with the argument that he could surely be awarded the higher grade in his existing post. Bancroft objected, which she thought was unreasonable.
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The deadlock was only broken when Bancroft played what was called ‘the sympathy card’. He argued that after four years at No. 10 serving three prime ministers, Stowe needed to spend more time with his young family.
It was a little-known side of Margaret Thatcher that she was extremely considerate to the family needs of her staff. So she gave way gracefully to Kenneth Stowe, whom she honoured with a farewell dinner, but she behaved grudgingly to Bancroft. Her grudge against him worsened after a disastrous evening which she later described as ‘one of the most dismal occasions of my entire time in government’.
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According to Lord Carrington, who was present at this memorably awful event, the prospects for it could not have been more positive. How it all went wrong is a revealing story about Margaret Thatcher’s personality.

In early 1980, she invited all Whitehall’s Permanent Secretaries and their wives to dinner at No. 10. ‘No Prime Minister had ever done such a thing before’, recalled Carrington. ‘The mandarins were immensely flattered. They were eating out of her hand. They would have done anything for her – that is until she got up to speak.’

Margaret Thatcher’s idea of an after-dinner speech to this select gathering of Britain’s top civil servants was to tell them that they were a useless and inefficient bunch who should stop obstructing the government, and do what they were told. The twenty-three Sir Humphreys were not the only ones to be affronted. ‘I was appalled’, said Carrington. ‘It was so silly for such a clever woman to be so gratuitously rude. She could have got her point across in any number of better ways, but instead she showed her worst side in a stream of governessy hatred.’
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Inevitably, the response to this opening diatribe was a cool one. Sir Ian Bancroft, as Head of the Civil Service, made the first speech of reply. In the view of the Prime Minister this was ‘a menu of complaints and negative attitudes’,
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while the question and answer session went from bad to worse.

This ill-humoured soirée happened to take place the day after a terrorist siege of the Iranian Embassy had been ended by the Special Air Service (SAS) making a dramatic rescue of the hostages. One of the Permanent Secretaries at the dinner, Sir Frank Cooper, from the Ministry of Defence, temporarily slipped out of the room during the question period. As he left, Sir Lawrence Airey, the Second Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, muttered that he hoped Frank had gone to summon the SAS to rescue the present company of hostages. Margaret Thatcher overheard, and did not appreciate the joke.

Sir Lawrence Airey was soon afterwards moved out of Whitehall to become Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. At least he fared better than Bancroft,
who retired early after his entire department was closed down in 1981, its functions delegated to the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. But in its short-term impact and in its longer-term effects, Margaret Thatcher’s dinner for Whitehall’s top brass was an unmitigated disaster.

The Prime Minister’s restless interventionism did not stop at clashes with Permanent Secretaries. She embarked on a tour of all the major government departments. At the lower levels of Whitehall these visitations were popular events. Margaret Thatcher had a charming, almost royal touch when it came to meeting junior members of staff, thanking them for their work and appreciating their contribution to the government. But when she moved into meetings with the higher echelons of senior officials, the visiting princess could turn into a tigress. She pounced on individuals, gnawing away at them on points of detail as if she wanted to demonstrate that she was better briefed than the departmental experts. Some of them were reduced to jelly by this experience. Others fought back.

During one of her earliest visits, to Jim Prior’s Department of Employment, an outstanding Deputy Secretary responsible for policy and trade-union law, Donald Derx, became locked into an argument with her about the law on secondary picketing. Frustrated by her ignorance, he eventually silenced her with the question, ‘Prime Minister, do you really want to know the facts?’ Derx never climbed higher on the civil-service promotion ladder after this exchange. Jim Prior blamed his blockage on the ‘black mark’ Derx received that afternoon.
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Margaret Thatcher did want to know the facts, but how they were conveyed to her was an art form that the ablest communicators in Whitehall soon mastered. She responded best to clever energetic officials who offered her advice in the form of positive solutions rather than negative caution. She preferred feisty advisers who spoke their minds bluntly. She was impatient with polished circumlocutions of the ‘with great respect, Prime Minister’ variety.

The Permanent Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Sir Michael Palliser,
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was a particular
bête noire
of hers. She disliked both his Europhile views and his fastidiously diplomatic style of presentation. She preferred to test policy by argument and engagement. Her reactions were abrasive, with a bias
against smooth men who she thought sounded condescending when they sought to reassure her that the status quo was working. Her hostility to Palliser resulted in him being denied the life peerage that FCO Permanent Secretaries were accustomed to receive on their retirement. Many people, including many top Mandarins, thought that her treatment of Palliser was ‘very unfair’.
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First impressions counted heavily in these encounters. Cecil Parkinson, a junior trade minister in 1979, gave an amusing illustration of the Prime Minister’s instant reactions to civil servants. When she made her visit to the Department of Trade, he sat next to her as she grilled each of its senior officials on the opposite side of the table about their responsibilities and objectives. He recalled:

She had a list of the officials present, and she made a mark under their names as they spoke. Some of them were noted with a dotted line and others with a solid line. I soon realised that the dots were for the baddies as she saw them, and the line for the goodies. There were only two categories and everyone fitted into one or the other.
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Although her methods of shaking up Whitehall were unusual, the mandarins got the message. The new Prime Minister was determined to impose her vision and her will on the entire government machine.

REFLECTION

At the beginning of her eleven and a half year reign at No. 10 Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher’s style of leadership was a perplexing mixture of intuition, caution, angry reactions and courageous initiatives.

Her personality was a work in progress that many were observing, but few understanding. She was respected for her dedication, but not yet for her judgement. She had won an election, but it was unclear how long she would last as Prime Minister. She had a strong sense of mission, but a weak grasp of how best to accomplish it.

The weakness, well perceived by her, was that she had to manage a cabinet and a civil service that were far from committed to her cause. As she grappled with the complexities of government, she recognised one simplicity: she would have to fight on many fronts to deliver the regeneration of Britain she had promised to the electorate.

Margaret Thatcher was no stranger to fighting difficult battles. Throughout her career she had struggled, often against tremendous odds, to circumvent the
forces of prejudice, condescension and obstructionism that flourished against a rising woman politician within the elitist worlds of Westminster and Whitehall. Having defeated them by her rise to the top and to the unique status of becoming the first woman leader of a major Western democracy, she ought to have been able to throw off most of the insecurities and pressures for compromise that had troubled her even when Leader of the Opposition. Yet those experiences had both scarred and energised her. Now that she was Prime Minister, she continued to think of herself as an outsider who had to fight her ground every inch of the way.