Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (41 page)

Instead of playing it safe, Margaret Thatcher overruled the Director of MI5, Sir Michael Hanley, and went public on Blunt. She confirmed in the House of Commons that he had been a Soviet agent. This caused a sensation. There was a parliamentary debate in which she spoke uneasily and unconvincingly as she set out a selective version of the Blunt story. The net effect was that a flood of further revelations on security matters followed with other MI5 operatives, most notably Peter Wright in his book
Spycatcher
, telling their stories, much to the Prime Minister’s anger. None of these revelations were prevented, and no other former spy since has been offered immunity from prosecution in return for co-operation with the authorities.

This useful mechanism was made useless by Margaret Thatcher’s decision to break the seal of confidentiality on the Blunt deal in the interests of openness. The irony was that she never again advocated any other form of openness or scrutiny in relation to the security services. One practitioner in this field described her handling of the Blunt affair as ‘Mrs Thatcher’s rush of blood to the head’.
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Margaret Thatcher hated to admit that she ever made any errors of judgement. She became positively proprietorial towards the security services. This led her to make further mistakes in relation to GCHQ and MI5.

In 1980, she became so angry about the selective strikes and pay demands of workers at GCHQ that she refused to settle the civil-service pay dispute that had
given rise to the problem. It became such a personal issue to her that she overruled the sensible settlement negotiated with the unions by Lord Soames, the minister responsible for the civil service. The Soames settlement figure of a 7.5 per cent pay deal was only 1 per cent above the Treasury guideline. Most ministers, including the Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, were minded to accept it. But at a stormy cabinet meeting, Margaret Thatcher threatened to resign if the Soames deal went through. Willie Whitelaw had to use all his skills as a trouble-shooter to calm her down. A few weeks later, he persuaded the Prime Minister to accept the original Soames figure. Her intransigence cost the government around £400 million. The strike ended, but so did the career of Lord Soames. She sacked him at the next reshuffle, apparently for the crime of being right about GCHQ and the other civil-service unions.

Prime ministerial stubbornness and the security services continued to go hand in hand. A later episode involving GCHQ in her second term arose when she became determined to ban its employees from being members of a trade union. Her view was that working for any part of the government’s security services was incompatible with being a trade unionist. Even when Sir Robert Armstrong had negotiated a compromise by which GCHQ staff could retain their union membership after signing a no-strike agreement (a deal which had prevailed for many years with the police), Margaret Thatcher refused to countenance it. The affair ended messily, with high-court judgments going both ways, the sacking of some GCHQ workers and eventually a Pyrrhic victory for the government. The outcome caused considerable uneasiness, not least for Sir Geoffrey Howe, who blamed the mess on the Prime Minister’s ‘absolutist instinct’.

‘It was probably the clearest example I had seen so far of one of Margaret’s most tragic failings: an inability to appreciate, still less accommodate, someone else’s patriotism’, he commented. ‘A citizen, she seemed to feel, could never safely be allowed to carry more than one card in his or her pocket, and at GCHQ that could only be Her Majesty’s card.’
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One final example of the Prime Minister’s ‘absolutist instinct’ in relation to the security services came over another side of the fall-out to the Blunt affair. Her ‘rush of blood to the head’ had caused a rush of articles and books about the curious goings-on at MI5 in the 1950s. Some of these publications were cleared by No. 10. although they had obviously been sourced from retired MI5 officers. One of them, Peter Wright, then decided to publish his memoirs,
Spycatcher
, in Australia where he had gone to live. Margaret Thatcher rightly felt that
Spycatcher
was a serious breach of the duty of confidentiality imposed on all former employees of the security services. She wrongly decided to fight in the Australian courts to get the book publication suppressed.

Her appointed representative in this colonial-minded and therefore doomed endeavour was Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary. He received something of a mauling in the witness box at the hands of a pugnacious young Sydney lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who later rose on the Australian political ladder to become a senior minister and Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister solicitously called up Robert Armstrong in Australia two or three times to encourage him as the trial progressed. It ended in ignominious defeat for the British government as the Australian courts, predictably, permitted the publication of
Spycatcher
. When the Cabinet Secretary returned home, Margaret Thatcher called him into her study and presented him with two bottles of Scotch whisky. It was her way of apologising for despatching him across the world on a mission made impossible by her own stubbornness.

As a result of such episodes, the Prime Minister’s reverence for the security services became something of an in-joke among the cognoscenti of Whitehall. It was not unconnected to her avid readership of the works of John Le Carré and Frederick Forsyth. Her later Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, found it positively comical to discover how besotted she was by the secret agencies, their establishments and their hardware. He saw public spending on them as ‘one of the very few areas of public life virtually untouched by the rigours of the Thatcher era’.
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Some of this hush-hush expenditure avoided cuts by being carefully concealed, with her connivance, in the Defence, Foreign Office and Home Office budgets. Larger sums were authorised, under her chairmanship, by the so-called Secret Vote Committee. This was so secret that it never actually met! Paying generously for the products of ‘Old Stripey’ was an example of how she was learning to get her own way by unorthodox methods.

A FAVOUR FOR RUPERT MURDOCH

One of the most questionable episodes of Margaret Thatcher’s first two years as Prime Minister was her bending of the rules on monopolies and mergers in
order to allow Rupert Murdoch to purchase
The
Times
and the
Sunday Times
. It illustrated both her political dependence on Murdoch’s newspapers and her political ruthlessness in imposing her will on the government and its legal procedures.

The drama began, as far as Margaret Thatcher was concerned, when Rupert Murdoch came to lunch at Chequers on 4 January 1980. A detailed, if circumspect, note of record was taken by Bernard Ingham who, on the instructions of the Prime Minister, did not circulate it outside the private office of No. 10. This account of the conversation marked ‘Commercial – In Confidence’ makes it clear that ‘the main purpose of Mr Murdoch’s visit was to brief the Prime Minister on his bid for
Times
newspapers’. Using this privileged access, Murdoch described the success of the
Sunday Times
(even in the depths of a recession it was turning away advertising), but stressed the high-risk nature of his bid by explaining that he could lose £50 million of his resources because, ‘turning round a £13–£17 million loss was a formidable undertaking at a time of deep industrial recession’.
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These observations about losses were the note of record’s coded reference to the massive legal obstacle in the way of a bid by Rupert Murdoch. Because he already owned the
Sun
and the
News of the World
, his bid had to be referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) in accordance with the Fair Trading Act of 1973. It would have been amazing if this problem had not been mentioned at Chequers by either the Prime Minister or Mr Murdoch. Equally amazing would have been no mention of the only route by which the Murdoch bid might be exempted from an MMC reference. This exemption could be granted if the newspaper, which was the subject of the bid, was making such large losses that it was ‘not economic as a going concern’.
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In the course of a long conversation about the bid for
The Times
and the
Sunday Times
, the notion that two such straight talkers as Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch would not have discussed either the MMC obstacle or the possible exemption from it was fanciful. The Prime Minister had no such inhibition when she came to chair the cabinet committee on the bid for
The Times
newspapers on 26 January 1981. For in her usual forceful style, she opened the discussion by emphasising that although the bid must be referred to the MMC, ‘There was an exception to this rule under S.58 (3)(a) of the Fair Trading Act, which gave the Secretary of State discretion to decide
whether a reference should be made if he were satisfied that certain criteria were met’.
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The Secretary of State for Trade who was so pointedly reminded of his discretion in this way was John Biffen. His problem was that he could only grant his exemption if he was satisfied that neither
The Times
nor the
Sunday Times
was economic as a going concern. He told the committee that he was satisfied of this, but added ‘though only in the case of
The
Times
was the issue clear cut’.
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When he announced his decision to grant Rupert Murdoch’s bid an exemption from being referred to the MMC, John Biffen faced a parliamentary storm in the shape of an Emergency Commons Debate. All speakers from the opposition parties, and several from the government’s side, questioned how he could possibly have decided that the profitable
Sunday Times
was not a going concern.

As a Conservative back-bencher who spoke and voted against John Biffen’s decision, I had a friendly private disagreement with him after the debate. He was charmingly embarrassed. ‘Ah well, there’s a political dimension to this.’ He smiled, pointing with his right index finger to the ceiling.
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Woodrow Wyatt produced a blunter explanation for the collusion with Murdoch: ‘I had bent the rules for him … Through Margaret I got it arranged that the deal didn’t go to the Monopolies Commission, which almost certainly would have blocked it.’
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The episode was not one of Margaret Thatcher’s finest hours, but in the dark days of 1981 she needed the support of Murdoch’s newspapers. She was ready to be a ruthless player of prime ministerial hardball in order to get her way.

PERSONALITY TRAITS ON AND OFF DUTY

Margaret Thatcher became increasingly skilful at getting her way, but the methods by which she achieved this revealed a complex personality. It was a myth that she was over-confident. As a later Principal Private Secretary, Robin Butler,
^**
perceptively observed: ‘The key to her style was that she did not have excessive confidence. On the contrary, she lacked self-confidence. That was why she was so assertive. She had to pump herself up with adrenalin before any big occasion.’
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The same applied on many small occasions too. Because she lacked confidence, she felt she needed to master a brief right down to the smallest details before she went into a meeting. This over-preparation, accomplished by the burning of much midnight oil, enabled her to browbeat her ministers. One of her techniques was to fire questions at them about some obscure fact in a footnote to the main briefing paper under discussion. If they did not know the answer, she belittled them. This was her way of dominating her colleagues by exhibiting her own expertise on the minutiae of the subject.

Domination was only one of her personality traits. She used it a great deal in public or semi-public battles. But in private she deployed subtler and more feminine wiles. They included judicious flattery, harmless flirtatiousness and even elaborately staged ‘poor me’ performances designed to elicit protective support at predominantly masculine meetings. She played the card of being a lone woman quite unscrupulously, often exploiting the inhibitions of some men to argue back against her. Her femininity, which she used as a technique when it suited her, was real. She liked her clothes to be admired, and was susceptible to the good looks of attractive colleagues. She enjoyed male flattery and gallantry, particularly when she could turn it to good use by winning a concession.

Although she was open to strong argument, she hardly ever conceded a point during the exchanges. However, a day or so later, she might present the same point as her own view, as if she had never argued against it.

When she flared up, she could sometimes pick on a minister or an official, and insult them quite gratuitously. ‘Have you actually read this paper, Chief Secretary?’ she once asked John Biffen.
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To a senior civil servant who kept silent during an all-day discussion on public expenditure she acidly enquired, ‘Do you speak, Mr Jones?’ She increased the pressure at the lunch break by asking him, ‘Do you eat, Mr Jones?’
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Her sharpness and rudeness in such rough and tumbles were often utterly unfair. She seemed to have a mental block against ever saying she was sorry. But occasionally she would at a later stage make a compensatory move, such as writing the victim a pleasant note on a different subject. Or she would invite
someone who might be nursing hurt feelings up to her flat for a drink. This was the nearest she came to either apologising or relaxing.

She enjoyed an hour of Whitehall and Westminster gossip over an evening whisky, or occasionally going out to someone else’s home for a meal. Her favourite excursions were to the Carringtons’ country house at Bledlow, whose proximity to Chequers sometimes seemed a mixed blessing to her hosts. Or she would drop in for supper to Ian and Jane Gow’s tiny Kennington
pied à terre
in South London. The only problem with their hospitality was that on summer evenings the Prime Minister enjoyed drinking
al fresco
on the Gow’s patio. This alarmed her protection officers, because the patio was overlooked by council tower blocks, but it did not alarm her. ‘Snipers taking pot shots at Chester Way!’ (the Gow’s street) she scoffed. ‘I shall need a lot of convincing about that.’
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