Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (39 page)

The outsider did not display the smooth personality, which so often characterises successful politicians. She used harsh words, sharp elbows and rough edges to accomplish her mission. The abrasive side of her nature could hurt those who got in her way or to whom she took an immediate dislike. Her penchant for instant judgement led to many unfairnesses. ‘I usually make up my mind about people within thirty seconds and 99 times out of a 100 I’m right’, she told her Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong.
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This self-caricature was absurd, yet it did surface in her early days at No. 10. There were encounters at which she made up her mind far too quickly and negatively about minister X or civil servant Y, with dire consequences for their careers. The Prime Minister’s intuition tended to be final.

Her first administration was an uncomfortable coalition of true believers and disloyal unbelievers. Inexperience caused her to appoint too many ministers in the latter category. She was also weighed down by a large middle ground of cabinet colleagues and senior Whitehall officials who saw their roles as complaisant managers of Britain’s decline. As she was dedicated to reversing it, there was immediate tension between her energetic radicalism and the centrist inertia of many of those around her.

The story of how she conquered this inertia is inspirational in some phases, unattractive in others. But before she could move forward on the most substantive parts of her mission, she first had to climb a steep curve of learning how to govern.

16

The learning curve

INSIDE NO. 10

On her first evening as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher hosted a small supper party, which signalled the tone for her way of working at No. 10. It was both hospitable and frugal; inclusive of official and political staffers; warm yet businesslike; and it ended early because there was more work to be done long into the night.

In 1979, No. 10 was a modest centre of government in comparison to the giant octopus it extended to during the Blair premiership. With less than a hundred staff, it was minuscule in relation to the White House or the Elysée Palace. It had no computers, no mobile phones and faced no demands from a twenty-four-hour news cycle. It had the feel of a private house whose hub was the appropriately named Private Office, manned with collegiate teamwork by six of Whitehall’s best and brightest high flyers. Margaret Thatcher brought only a handful of outsiders with her. One was her Political Secretary, Richard Ryder, who from his base in the Leader of the Opposition’s office had been discreetly planning the transition with Ken Stowe for some weeks.

Another pivotal newcomer was Caroline Stephens, an experienced former secretary to various Conservative MPs, including Ted Heath. She was the daughter of the Clerk of the Parliaments, a background that had helped to make her a strong member of the Thatcher team in the past four years of opposition. At No. 10 her title was Diary Secretary, but her remit was more like that of senior executive assistant, confidante and conduit for private messages. Denis made sure everyone had a glass of wine, and Margaret Thatcher spooned out the shepherd’s pie, which had been cooked at her Flood Street home and motored over to Downing Street.

This intimate group of guests at the first supper was supplemented during the first few weeks by additional political appointees, particularly Ian Gow, the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, or PPS; John Hoskyns, the Head of her Policy Unit; and David Wolfson, a personal aide whose independent wealth had helped to elevate him to the notional position of Chief of Staff at the Political Office. However, in this role his activity level became imperceptible. ‘As time went on, he did less and less’,
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said Kenneth Stowe. Wolfson’s habit of knocking off work at 6 p.m. in order to play bridge at the Reform Club was not in harmony with the intense work ethic of his boss.

Margaret Thatcher’s understanding of the civil service had been limited to her experiences of officials at the Department of Education. They were an insular breed; incorrigibly leftist in their political attitudes, and ineffably superior in their disdain for a right-wing secretary of state. As a result of her unhappy clashes with the educational priesthood of Curzon Street, the Prime Minister entered No. 10 with the mistaken suspicion that the whole of Whitehall would be similarly adversarial. But she became so impressed by the intellectual excellence and prodigious industry of the team of private secretaries working round the clock to serve her that she began singling out other exceptional talents inside the civil-service machine. ‘She was after capable managers, not just skilful policy advisers’,
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said her Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong. In that spirit, the Prime Minister developed an almost Leninist zeal for assembling a small band of outstanding officials who would help her drive the government towards her goal of rebuilding Britain’s national purpose and pride.

The Downing Street team she inherited had been handpicked by two outgoing senior civil servants, the Principal Private Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary. Both positions changed within weeks of Margaret Thatcher’s arrival, not at her request but because of the civil service’s timetable of rotations and retirements. So she had to appoint successors to these two vital positions, largely on the basis of her intuition.

Having failed in her efforts to keep Kenneth Stowe, she chose as his successor Clive Whitmore, a Ministry of Defence technocrat. A high-flying former grammar-school boy from Surrey, he had impressed the Prime Minister when he gave her his department’s briefing on the nuclear deterrent. For three tumultuous years, which included the Falklands War, they worked together efficiently in a professional relationship that never became personally close. It ended when
she promoted Whitmore, at the unusually young age of forty-seven, to be Permanent Secretary of his old department.

Her choice for the top job in the civil service was Sir Robert Armstrong. ‘I want you to succeed John Hunt as my Cabinet Secretary, and I would like you to know that I haven’t thought of having anyone else’, was how she opened her meeting with him on 9 July 1979. It was both flattering and surprising to Armstrong. He was far from confident of being appointed. His closeness to Ted Heath, when working as the Prime Minister’s Private Secretary from 1970–1974, was expected by some to count against him.

Although Armstrong had experienced some difficult moments when handling the Heath–Thatcher relationship, she had come to like and trust him. It also helped that they went back a long time, for they had overlapped at Oxford in 1946 as fellow members of the Bach Choir, conducted by Sir Thomas Armstrong, Robert’s father. The meeting at which he was appointed ended on a musical note when Robert Armstrong asked whether it would be possible to combine his duties as Cabinet Secretary with the role of Secretary to the Directors of Covent Garden. ‘Of course you must continue at the Opera, but please take me some time,’ replied the Prime Minister. Her first Royal Opera House evening with him was to a performance of Mozart’s
Cosi Fan Tutte
, which she much enjoyed, but observed that, ‘the plot is rather immoral!’
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The plot at No. 10 Downing Street was soon being driven by Margaret Thatcher’s principles – moral, political and personal. On the personal front, she was noticeably solicitous towards her staff, both in small acts of kindness towards individuals at moments of trouble and in the motherly interest she took in them at all times. She made great efforts to know about the family lives of her team, because she wanted to create a happy atmosphere within her own circle. Beyond the walls of No. 10 and Chequers, she made little attempt to do this in her wider worlds of Westminster, Whitehall or the cabinet.

‘She was vinegary with her cabinet, but honey with her staff’, observed one of her private secretaries seconded from the Foreign Office, Bryan Cartledge. ‘I think the reason why at that time No. 10 worked so very well as a unit was because it was small, and everyone knew everyone else.’
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Work had always been the driving force of Margaret Thatcher’s life, and it reached its zenith during her early months of power. All prime ministers are over-burdened, but she doubled the normal workload by the intensity of her
attention to detail, her critical questioning and her enthusiasm for seeking alternative sources of advice. The equivalent of the royal sceptre as her instrument of rule was the Prime Minister’s box or boxes. These were the red-leather containers of paperwork which went up to her flat at night and got ‘done’ in the early hours of the morning. The word ‘done’ covered a variety of actions, such as decisions approved, appointments confirmed, minutes noted and briefing papers absorbed.

No prime minister in living memory had tackled their boxes with the voracious industry shown by Margaret Thatcher. ‘She reads every paper she gets and never fails to write a comment on it’, said one of her private secretaries. ‘ “No!”, “Nonsense”, “Needs more briefing” or “Do this again” are what she’s constantly writing.’
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She was also frequently asking her private office to send out notes beginning, ‘The Prime Minister wants to know why …’ or ‘The Prime Minister’s view is …’ The effect of such missives was electrifying. No previous head of the government had ever been so personally involved and interventionist in the workings of Whitehall departments.

Another of her innovations was a regular demand to see the authors of the papers that flowed through her red boxes. At these encounters, her style was to cross-examine the official she was meeting, often with the aggression of a barrister attacking a hostile witness. It was trial by ordeal, her way of satisfying herself that a proposal or a presentation could stand the test of adversarial argument.

One newcomer who found himself enduring this baptism of fire was thirty-six-year-old Terry Burns. The son of a Durham miner, who had become a professor at the London Business School, Burns was unexpectedly recruited into Whitehall in 1979 as Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury. He was preparing to give the cabinet a presentation on the outlook for the economy when Margaret Thatcher summoned him to Downing Street for a one-on-one grilling. Burns recalled:

It was the most frightening experience of my life at that point. I was drained by her directness and the intensity of her questioning. There were no short answers to the points she was raising, but she didn’t want long answers. And she jumped around. If I responded with details, she switched to principles. If I talked about principles, she demanded details. All the time she was prodding to discover my instincts and to test
my knowledge. It was without doubt the most exhausting yet also the most exhilarating meeting I had ever had.
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Margaret Thatcher’s early style of government consisted not only of testing her officials and ministers but also of setting an example. The certainties of her own moral compass were her driving force, not least in the important arena of reducing public expenditure.

To set an example, she made a point of switching off the lights in unoccupied rooms at No. 10. Such gestures, which included cutting the number of photocopiers in her office, were her ‘ludicrous obsession that we must get the economy right by small savings of candle ends’,
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according to John Hoskyns. Whether or not she was obsessive, she sent out several early signals about the need for frugality with small items of government expenditure.

One bee in her bonnet was the necessity of cutting down the number of civil servants that prime ministers had traditionally taken abroad as their entourage on overseas trips. So when she made her first visit to France, she insisted that her party had to fit into a Hawker Siddeley HS-125 corporate jet with seating for eight passengers. When they landed at Le Bourget, the French Prime Minister and his large entourage could hardly believe their eyes when this tiny aircraft halted at the red carpet and disgorged Margaret Thatcher, Lord Carrington, her Private Secretary, her Special Branch protection officer and three Foreign Office officials.
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Another candle end that caught her eye was a note in one of her red boxes asking her to approve the sum of £1,836, which the Property Services Agency had spent on refurbishments to her flat above No. 10 shortly before her arrival. Although this was not a large sum for cleaning and making minor improvements to the Prime Minister’s official residence, she queried it and asked for further and better particulars.

A Private Secretary sent her a minute on 25 June 1979 detailing the refurbishment costs. Alongside the charges of £209 for replacing crockery and £464 for replacing linen and pillows, he commented: ‘I find these figures almost impossible to believe.’

‘So do I!’ scribbled Margaret Thatcher, at the foot of the page. ‘I could use my own [linen] and my own crockery … Bearing in mind we only use one bedroom, can the rest go back into stock?’ Highlighting another item costing
£19 that she thought should not be paid for by the taxpayer, she instructed, ‘I will pay for the ironing board myself’.
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This marginalia emerging from the red boxes highlighted the Prime Minister’s eye for detail and also her insistence on being her own woman at No. 10. She was determined not to become a prisoner of what was later called, ‘the bubble’ of official life and advice. To avoid this, she made determined efforts to break away from the grip of the machine. It was her wish to receive alternative streams of advice from outside sources, which the private secretaries called the ‘voices’. She also forged a bond with one or two insiders on her team whose contact with the wider world caused her to label them ‘my bridge builders’.
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BRIDGE BUILDERS AND VOICES

The two most important bridge builders from No. 10 to the wider world were Ian Gow and Bernard Ingham, respectively her Parliamentary Private Secretary and her Press Secretary. Both were remarkable English characters who could have stepped from the pages of Dickens or Thackeray. Their idiosyncrasies, their formidable abilities and their near-idolatry for their boss made them pivotal players in communicating the personality of the Prime Minister to parliamentarians and the media.

Ian Gow’s idiosyncrasies were his engagingly eccentric camouflage for his dedicated professionalism. He pretended to be such a caricature of a period-piece politician that he looked unlikely to have much rapport with Margaret Thatcher. With his half-moon spectacles, old-fashioned waistcoats, gold watch chain, orotund manner of speaking and enthusiasm for White Ladies (the cocktail), Gow could have been amusingly portrayed in a
Spy
cartoon of the Victorian era. As he hardly knew the Prime Minister when she came to power in 1979, he was unsurprised but unhappy for the first three days after the election when his name did not appear even in the most junior lists of ministerial appointments.

But Margaret Thatcher had noticed Ian Gow’s relentless harrying of the Labour government for their profligacy with public expenditure. His mordant House of Commons wit and his quaint mannerisms appealed to her. So did his background as a former officer in the 15th/19th Hussars serving in Ulster at the height of the troubles; as an old-fashioned country solicitor specialising in wills and trusts; and as a churchwarden in his local parish church. Almost as an afterthought to her administration making, she appointed Ian Gow to the unpaid
post of her PPS, without at the time fully appreciating either his unusual gifts or the importance of the job he had to do.