Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (40 page)

Although Margaret Thatcher had been an MP for twenty years, she never really understood the spirit of the House, let alone the spirits of her own back-benchers. She was too intense, too short on humour, too impatient, perhaps too womanly in a man’s world to fully understand the changing moods of the parliamentary village. By contrast, Ian Gow adored Westminster life. He became a master of Commons procedure and traditions. His quirky style combined with his granite integrity won him friends in many quarters. Above all, he was a man of principle, which soon endeared him to the woman of principle who had become his boss.

Gow worked longer hours than anyone other than the Prime Minister in No. 10, for he would arrive there before 7 a.m. and would often not depart until after midnight. He had three great strengths.

The first was his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, whose MPs affectionately nicknamed him ‘Supergrass’. He reported their murmurings and mischiefs with a humorous fidelity that appealed to Margaret Thatcher’s enjoyment of gossip, and kept her attuned to her power base with a depth of understanding that was never again achieved after Gow left her inner circle with a ministerial promotion in 1983.

Second, he achieved a personal rapport with her that was unequalled by any other political colleague. Over late-night tumblers of Famous Grouse whisky in the flat above No. 10, he reinforced her own convictions. For in every major policy area, from relations with the EEC to balancing the public finances, Gow was a hardliner with the driest of dry views, which were often more arid than her own.

Third, he was a straight arrow who won her absolute trust. He exercised immense influence over her in matters that ranged from who she should invite to dinner to who would make good ministers. The appointment of his erratic but endearing friend Alan Clark
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to the government in 1983 spoke volumes for
Gow’s powers of persuasion over ‘The Queen’s First Minister’, as he pedantically insisted on calling her.

Margaret Thatcher developed an extraordinary chemistry with her closest advisers. The only ones who approached the Gow level of professional intimacy were her Private Secretary and Adviser on Foreign Affairs, Charles Powell, from 1983 onwards, and Bernard Ingham who started his eleven-year reign as Press Secretary in October 1979.

Ingham said:

If ever there was a Prime Minister who needed a Press Secretary it was he, because it became clear at my interview for the job that she had absolutely no interest in the media except to grumble about it. She talked non-stop on this theme for twenty minutes, and her only brief to me was to say that she wanted me to get over her policies to the people who would believe in them.
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This was an odd instruction to a professional civil servant who had never been a Tory voter. Ingham was a blunt-speaking Yorkshireman who had served as a labour correspondent for the
Guardian
before joining the Government Information Service. However, he had been drifting away from his Labour roots because of his antipathy towards the abuses of power by militant trade unions. ‘I’d had enough of us being laughed at as a country’, he recalled. ‘I wanted to see reform, which was what Mrs Thatcher was offering even though it was far removed from Toryism.’

The new Press Secretary was amazed by the lack of interest his boss took in newspapers. To overcome this he produced his own daily digest of press cuttings which he insisted she looked at every morning, usually sitting alongside her to make sure she did so.

The dossier was almost her only window on the media. Whereas most prime ministers tend to worry a great deal about their own press coverage, Margaret Thatcher was gloriously insouciant to it. However she did care about the impact of her policies. It was of no concern to her that they upset the liberal consensus of the commentators. ‘You and I, Bernard, are not smooth people’,
¹²
she said to him early on in their relationship. This was an essential ingredient in their bonding. ‘She was straight, direct, and tactless – probably the most tactless woman I’ve ever met in my life’, recalled Ingham. He replicated these qualities when
dealing, sometimes rather brutally, with the self-perpetuating oligarchy of political correspondents known as the ‘Lobby’. They had access to the daily Downing Street press briefings, which Ingham conducted unattributably in a colourful style that was strikingly personal. Becoming an advocate for the Prime Minister’s convictions with the zeal of a convert, he would think nothing of rubbishing a hostile reporter’s question as ‘bunkum and balderdash’, or of planting stories detrimental to ministers who were falling out of his boss’s favour. This last practice caused much grief inside the cabinet.

At one meeting of ministers in the autumn of 1980, the Prime Minister grumbled that her government was being damaged by a spate of leaks. ‘Most of them coming straight from here’, muttered Lord Soames in a
voce
that was far from
sotto.
‘What did you say, Christopher?’ demanded the Prime Minister. The Leader of the House of Lords was bold enough to repeat his grievance, to which she retorted: ‘No. We never leak.’
¹³
If she believed that, she believed anything.

As the economic climate worsened in 1980–1981, the practice of leaking and counter-leaking intensified. Bernard Ingham was a tougher player of this game than anyone else. His loyalty to the Prime Minister and his disloyalty to those members of her government about whom she had expressed doubts stretched the limits of civil-service neutrality. But she always protected him, and he always championed her. It was a relationship that transcended the usual boundaries. Nevertheless, through Ingham she did indeed ‘get over her policies to the people’. He was a vital and successful player in communicating what Margaret Thatcher stood for and believed in. This was largely because he came to share in the same beliefs. He thought of her as ‘a liberator’ who gave ordinary British people new freedoms, opportunities and prosperity.
¹⁴

The most unorthodox source of strength in Margaret Thatcher’s first years as Prime Minister were the ‘voices’. This was the civil servants’ term for the shadowy and changing cast of characters who somehow communicated with her out of hours in unrecorded meetings or telephone calls, and through unofficial channels. As she loved to surprise, she would often cite these voices at important decision-making meetings by saying ‘I hear that …’ or by pulling a sheet of paper out of her handbag, from which she quoted as proof that she had authoritative sources of advice from experts outside the government machine.

Some civil servants were thrown by the ‘voices’. Others welcomed them as a sign that the Prime Minister was on top of a game other than their own. Her
first Private Secretary, Kenneth Stowe, was delighted to discover that the Managing Director of Morgan Stanley, John Sparrow, was writing her a weekly report of the City’s reaction to the government’s economic policies. Various eminent industrialists like Sir Arnold Weinstock of GEC, Sir Hector Laing of United Biscuits, Sir James Hanson of Hanson PLC and Sir Marcus Seiff, Chairman of Marks & Spencer,
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also had their own hot lines to her. So did Enoch Powell, who was brought in to see her by Ian Gow, via the back door of No. 10, for at least six unrecorded meetings with the Prime Minister during her first two years.
¹⁵

At a less lofty level of political and economic advice, the cleaning lady of the flat above No. 10 was frequently mentioned as an authentic representative of
vox populi
. The most persistent telephone caller was Woodrow Wyatt, a former Labour MP,
News of the World
columnist, horse-racing expert and wide-ranging man about town. The private office dubbed him ‘the Concierge’ because he was always passing on so much gossip, but Wyatt was also her channel to Rupert Murdoch, and a strong reinforcer of her political convictions.

On the foreign-policy front there were many voices. The Foreign Office were disconcerted that she paid so much attention to calls from Senator Jesse Helms Jr., the right-wing chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She also listened to the Soviet expert Robert Conquest and the former Foreign Office minister in Harold Wilson’s government, Lord Chalfont. Paul Johnson sent her historical perspectives on issues of the day. Professor Peter Bauer of the London School of Economics advised her on the need to make drastic reductions in Britain’s foreign-aid budget. ‘Our aid is a process by which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries’, he told her.
^16
‡

An important foreign-affairs interlocutor who came into his own at the time of the Falklands War was Professor Hugh Thomas, author of a seminal book on the Spanish Civil War. He was chosen by her to replace Keith Joseph as Chairman of the Centre for Policy Studies, which remained her favourite think
tank. ‘Your main job is to keep Alfred under control’, said the Prime Minister, referring to Alfred Sherman, its research director. He was another of the private voices who bombarded her with memoranda, saying that her economic policies were not going nearly far enough.

Hugh Thomas wrote many speeches for Margaret Thatcher, a process that could be exhausting since she would argue fiercely about her ideas and the words she should use to express them late into the night. Thomas recalled:

I remember one particularly long discussion on whether the word ‘prone’ or ‘supine’ was right for the context of a speech. I really enjoyed working with her because of her directness, her original views and her interest in the historical roots of a problem. I think she regarded the preparation for a speech as the way to test her policies by intellectual debate.
¹⁷

Once someone in her orbit was established as a ‘voice’, she would call them up to seek their opinions on a wide range of subjects, sometimes those on which they had no particular expertise. At an early stage in her arguments with Lord Carrington about how to handle Rhodesia, Hugh Thomas was surprised to have his kitchen supper interrupted by the Prime Minister on the line, asking him detailed questions about Ian Smith and Bishop Muzorewa.

‘Who on earth were you talking to about Rhodesia?’ asked Hugh Thomas’s wife, Vanessa, when the call had ended.

‘Margaret Thatcher.’

‘But you don’t know anything about Rhodesia.’

‘I don’t – but she trusts my judgement.’
¹⁸

That was the point of the ‘voices’. They were people whose judgement she trusted, often much more so than the judgement of the major departments of state, like the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office. It was unprecedented for a prime minister to engage in so much second-guessing of her own ministers and officials.

Eventually, this brought her into serious conflicts, most notoriously at the time of the clash between her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and her economic adviser, Professor Alan Walters, in 1990.
^#
But at the beginning of her premiership, her
wide-ranging contacts with the ‘voices’ seemed a refreshing innovation. She clearly felt that to implement the reforms that were required to change Britain, she needed additional sources of advice in order to challenge the consensualist wisdom of Whitehall. Closed government was being challenged by open argument. It was an intriguing and attractive characteristic of the new Prime Minister.

OLD STRIPEY AND STUBBORNNESS

The red boxes of official papers sent up to the Prime Minister’s flat by her private office every evening included one of a noticeably different size and colour. It was known as ‘Old Stripey’, because it had a large blue stripe across its lid. Margaret Thatcher always opened this box first. Only she and her Principal Private Secretary had a key to it. This was because ‘Old Stripey’ contained daily top-secret reports from the intelligence services and other highly sensitive material deemed to be for the eyes only of the Prime Minister.

She was known by her staff to be ‘utterly fascinated’
¹⁹
by the product from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Her fascination increased because she built a close relationship with two outstanding security chiefs of that era. One was Sir Maurice Oldfield, ‘C’ or head of the Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. The other was Sir Antony Duff, Director-General of MI5, the domestic Security Service.

Also, in the age of IRA terrorism, she needed regular briefings on the threats in Northern Ireland. A description of how intensely she applied her mind to these issues came from Kenneth Stowe, who brought in the Northern Ireland Office’s Director and Controller of Intelligence, David Lanthorne, to brief her on a specific problem. ‘I vividly recall this meeting because it completely dispelled the legend that Margaret Thatcher was a bad listener’, said Stowe. ‘David Lanthorne briefed her for twenty minutes. She said not a word. Sitting on the edge of her chair, she kept her eyes on him with total concentration, absorbing everything.’
²⁰

Although her absorption with security issues was commendable, it also led her to some questionable judgements involving both MI5 and GCHQ. One early over-reaction by her, which shocked the security services, centred on the case of Sir Anthony Blunt.

Blunt had been recruited by Russian intelligence while at Cambridge University in the 1930s. In the 1940s, he acted as a Soviet agent at the same time as he was working for MI5. He passed many wartime secrets to Russian intelligence.
After 1945, he left MI5 to work as an art historian. Then in 1952, he was appointed Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. In 1964, the government of the day offered Sir Anthony Blunt immunity from prosecution provided that he co-operated in the inquiries of the security authorities. Blunt accepted the offer. Buckingham Palace was also briefed on the immunity deal, which enabled Blunt to continue with his duties there for the next fifteen years.

This was the status quo that Margaret Thatcher inherited and was briefed about as an incoming prime minister. But in October 1979 the journalist Andrew Boyle outed Blunt in a book, which gave rise to a written Parliamentary Question. The public had become familiar with Third Man, Fourth Man, Fifth Man revelations from the Philby, Maclean and Burgess era of Cambridge spies in the 1950s, so no great stir was caused by Boyle’s book. The written Parliamentary Question could easily have been dealt with in the time-honoured formula, which maintains that it is long-established government practice not to provide answers to questions affecting national security.