Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (75 page)

The most junior private secretary, Michael Pattison,
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had joined No. 10 in late March and immediately found himself sitting in the officials’ box in the Commons watching the no-confidence debate. ‘I wasn’t at all sure about the lady in the blue rinse,’ he remembered.
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Bryan Cartledge,
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who was the private secretary assigned to foreign affairs, recalled that an atmosphere of ‘Lib–Labbery’ prevailed among No. 10 officials, and a fear of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘general stridency’.
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At lunchtime on the day of the handover of power, Jim Callaghan had collected all his closest Downing Street assistants, including the private secretaries, for a modest and melancholy farewell meal of cottage pie before going to take leave of the Queen. The civil servants present had fully expected to be the victims of the fierce new broom which would begin sweeping that afternoon. That night, however, they found themselves sitting at a scratch supper in the State Dining Room with the new Prime Minister, huddled at the end of the table by the fireplace eating cottage pie for the second time in a day.
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Mrs Thatcher had no plans to get rid of anyone.

In fact, in this area, she had almost no plans at all. To the constant surprise and frustration of many advisers and supporters who were on what Denis called the ‘Long March’ with her, Mrs Thatcher never showed much interest in how to organize matters and control appointments to achieve the results she sought. No one in her office was in charge of co-ordinating the work of government. She did not believe that the bureaucracy should be reshaped from top to bottom, but rather that it should be regalvanized. ‘It was not’, according to Richard Ryder, ‘the Maoists arriving at No. 10.’
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She was very correct about the non-political structure of the Civil Service and considered it a sign of inadequacy for all but the most senior ministers to have political advisers. Before the election, she had asked Richard Ryder
to be her political secretary in No. 10, and told him that only her personal secretaries, including his future wife Caroline Stephens, should come with her. For other appointments, she ‘wished to keep her options open’.
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She was obsessed by the need to keep entourages as small as possible. Although she disliked officials as a class, she loved individual examples of the breed and depended very heavily on them. The private office she inherited was touched and ‘astonished that she accepted us without any question’.
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Nick Sanders,
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another private secretary inherited from the Labour administration, recalled that Callaghan, though always courteous, had seemed to hold back from his officials what he was really thinking. Mrs Thatcher, on the other hand, ‘told us exactly what she thought’.
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John Hoskyns, who was the first head of her Policy Unit and therefore her leading non-career civil servant, remarked on ‘a strange contradiction: her instinct when she’s scared is to fight. But she was quite in awe of Whitehall mandarins.’
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But it may not have been a contradiction at all: she understood the importance of the men who made the machine work, and would always support them so long as they made it work for her. After a few months of governing, she looked up from her desk at Clive Whitmore,
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who had replaced Ken Stowe as her principal private secretary in June, and said: ‘Clive, I’d be able to run this Government much better if I didn’t have ministers, only permanent secretaries.’
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Mrs Thatcher’s chief method of exerting her will over the machine was not institutional but personal. She used every remark, every memo, every meeting as an opportunity to challenge existing habits, criticize any sign of ignorance, confusion or waste and preach incessantly the main aims of her administration. Just five days after her election victory, for example, Mrs Thatcher directed her private secretary to inform the Foreign Office of her dissatisfaction with the briefing documents produced for her so far. ‘She hopes that in future Departments will avoid wordy generalisations
and the re-statement of facts or conclusions which are, or should be, well known to all those for whom the briefs are designed. The Prime Minister, who is a quick reader, is fully prepared to tackle long briefs when necessary: but she would like their content to be pithy and concisely expressed.’
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Determined to work harder and know more than any other minister, she used the ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament every Tuesday and Thursday that the House was sitting as the means of familiarizing herself with the work of all departments. She would be briefed early in the morning about what was likely to be asked (though the device of the ‘open question’ meant that she could never know exactly), and then, over a light lunch which everyone ate holding plates on their knees, would rehearse possible answers with Nick Sanders, the relevant private secretary, Ian Gow, her parliamentary private secretary, and others.
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Gow would tell her which questions he had been able to ‘plant’ with whichever loyal Tory MPs had been drawn in the ballot. She would then go over to the Commons, armed with a book of about forty ‘subject notes’ per question time, and take her place on the bench at 3.10 for the fifteen-minute contest. ‘She had a virtually photographic memory and always knew more than the Opposition,’ recalled William Rickett,
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who served after Sanders as her private secretary for Questions.
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She hardly ever made a factual error. On one occasion during the Falklands War, her civil servants told her immediately afterwards that she had given an incorrect answer to a question about the Labour government’s sale of warships to Argentina. ‘She went ballistic’ at having been wrongly briefed, according to Rickett, but ‘it then turned out she’d been right after all.’
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From time to time, reforms attempting to make Prime Minister’s Questions more rational would be suggested to her, but Mrs Thatcher always opposed them, saying, ‘It would be seen as a sign of weakness if I proposed changes.’
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She did very well out of the combination of the parliamentary political joust and the twice-weekly cramming of facts. Her strongest form of self-criticism, she herself recalled in old age, was provoked ‘whenever I had not prepared thoroughly enough for something’.
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Her other method of control, used much more rarely, was to make visitations to different departments to see for herself what they were up to. These were memorably demanding occasions. In the case of the Department of Employment, with which, as the department closest to the trade unions, she was naturally out of sympathy, the outing was particularly
painful for her hosts. Due to some confusion at the front desk, Mrs Thatcher went upstairs without being greeted by Jim Prior and his junior ministers, who came down in one lift just after she had gone up in another. Prior, red-faced at the best of times, went purple in his race to catch up with her. When his panting party arrived, he found the Prime Minister already in full flood.
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At this meeting, Mrs Thatcher got into an argument with an able official called Donald Derx, who was so nettled by her hectoring that he said, ‘Prime Minister, do you want to know the facts or not?’ Derx had been lined up by the Civil Service for the highest posts. As a result of this incident, it was said, his career stalled.
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Such scenes were unpleasant, and sometimes resulted in unfair judgments being made, but they were also useful in helping her search for talent and energy. At a better-starred visit to the Ministry of Defence, she marked out an official called Clive Whitmore (see above), whom the mandarins, hoping she would notice him, had pushed to the fore. She promptly made him her principal private secretary in succession to Ken Stowe. The visits also had a very important general effect. They meant that Mrs Thatcher was feared. From first to last, for eleven and a half years, she sent tremors through the whole of Whitehall.

But she did not necessarily show clarity about lines of command. Mrs Thatcher’s rather unworldly vagueness, even weakness, about who should do which job caused immediate confusion. Adam Ridley, who had been giving her the main economic advice from the Conservative Research Department, fully expected to take charge in office, running the Policy Unit, perhaps with John Hoskyns in tow. Ten days before the election, Mrs Thatcher had, he had every reason to believe, offered him the job.
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Without receiving her final confirmation, he arrived at No. 10 before she did, having recruited Michael Portillo, George Cardona
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Michael Dobbs as the team which she had initially agreed. Richard Ryder, who knew that she had wanted to avoid appointing people to jobs in advance, reported Ridley’s precipitate arrival to Mrs Thatcher. She was not pleased.
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She told Ridley that the officials were ‘so marvellous’ that his team was not needed after all. He and Hoskyns, she suggested, should share the Policy Unit between them with, in effect, no support from anyone other than Norman Strauss.
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Piqued, Ridley refused, saying that such a unit would be too small. A place was found for him instead as special adviser to Geoffrey Howe, whom Mrs Thatcher had made Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his three juniors trickled down to other posts. John Hoskyns was put in
charge of the Policy Unit. He was allowed to bring Norman Strauss with him on the condition that Mrs Thatcher, who found Strauss’ eccentric manner and informal style of dressing alarming, never had to see him.
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According to Hoskyns, she had already decided before the election that he, not Ridley, should advise her. One evening, at dinner with the Wolfsons in early March, Denis had taken Hoskyns aside and told him that he would get the appointment. ‘You spark her,’ he told Hoskyns, while Adam Ridley ‘cannot see the wood for the trees’.
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There was, in addition, an ideological question involved. Though not an out-and-out Heathite, Ridley was not a monetarist either. Despite Chris Patten’s ‘litmus test’ approach to the appointment of Ridley,
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Mrs Thatcher decided to defy the centrists and prefer the more radical Hoskyns. What she failed to do, however, was to sort this out directly with the people involved. In his diary for Tuesday 8 May, Hoskyns noted: ‘I had to bring to a head a problem she would not face.’ Even more surprising, she did not have much idea about what the Policy Unit should do, and never, in all Hoskyns’s time there, tasked it with any particular job. It always had to generate its own momentum. Tim Lankester,
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who was her first economic private secretary, noted that ‘she wasn’t very interested in strategy.’
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From the other side of the official fence, Hoskyns thought exactly the same. The most missionary of all modern prime ministers never sat down to define her mission or to plan its implementation.

In such a hurry to get on with her task, as she saw it, of rebuilding the British economy, Mrs Thatcher tended to grab whatever tools lay to hand, rather than try to forge new ones. One such body was the Central Policy Review Staff, known as the Think Tank, which had been founded by Ted Heath. Under the Cabinet Office rather than directly answerable to the Prime Minister, its job was not political. Its purpose was to think, as people did not then put it, ‘outside the box’, and investigate policy issues too long term for the ordinary run of Civil Service life. Its head could attend any Cabinet committees on whose subject the Think Tank was working, and would produce useful briefing notes for these. But, because of its structure, floating free of any chain of departmental or prime ministerial command, the CPRS tended, despite its high intellectual calibre, to be ineffective. Its reports were both too controversial for comfort and too unimmediate to demand action.
In 1979, for instance, it was working on a report on the future of the motor industry and another on alcohol abuse. Mrs Thatcher could not at first see the point of it. She called in the Think Tank’s head, Sir Kenneth Berrill,
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and said, ‘If I want to know about industry, I ask Keith Joseph. Why should I ask you?’ Berrill’s reply was ‘You’ll get independent input.’
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Dr John Ashworth,
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the Chief Scientist, who worked within the CPRS, asked to see Mrs Thatcher shortly after she had arrived at No. 10. As he entered, the Prime Minister said: ‘Who are you?’ ‘I am your Chief Scientist,’ Ashworth replied. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Thatcher, ‘do I want one of those?’ He explained his work, mentioning that he was completing a report about the then almost unstudied subject of climate change. Mrs Thatcher stared at him: ‘Are you standing there and seriously telling me that my government should worry about the
weather
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She told Ashworth that she was not going to have a minister for science at all: ‘I’m a scientist. I shall be my own Minister for Science.’
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But, despite this typically, frighteningly challenging way of approaching the matter, Mrs Thatcher quickly realized that, her Policy Unit being so small and staffed by people without experience of the workings of government, she needed experts who could help with progress-chasing. After a bit, the two organizations found they could make common cause, as both, regardless of their precise political views, shared a desire to rescue Britain from the collapse of the Winter of Discontent. Both enjoyed working for Mrs Thatcher because, as Berrill remembered it: ‘She’s active, highly critical: you’re on your toes. I didn’t have to say what she’d like to hear … I never found a subject on which you were wasting your time analysing something as deeply as you wanted.’
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She communicated her passion for reform and for new ideas. But, at the Policy Unit, in the CPRS and in the regular Civil Service, officials quickly came to recognize that Mrs Thatcher was not, in the normal managerial sense, much good at running things, despite her appetite for official paper. As John Ashworth put it: ‘She hated muddle, but she also caused it, because she did not really appreciate how bureaucracies need sharp lines.’
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She did not know how the machine worked and, as Hoskyns put it, ‘My worry was that she didn’t know what she didn’t know.’
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