Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (45 page)

The hours at No. 10 are long. I never minded this. There was an intensity about the job of being Prime Minister which made sleep seem a luxury. In any case, over the years I had trained myself to do with about four hours a night. The Private Office too would often be working till 11 o’clock at night. We were so few that there was no possibility of putting work on someone else’s desk. This sort of atmosphere helps to produce a
remarkably happy team, as well as a formidably efficient one. People are under great pressure, and there is no time for trivia. Mutual respect and friendly relations are often the result. This feature of No. 10 shapes people’s attitudes not only towards each other but towards the Prime Minister whom they all directly or indirectly serve. The cheers and clapping when a new Prime Minister arrives may perhaps be a traditional formality. But the tears and regrets when the outgoing Prime Minister makes his or her final departure are usually genuine.

Number 10 is more than an office: it is intended to serve as the Prime Minister’s home. I never had any doubt that when the Callaghans had left I would move into the Prime Minister’s small flat at the top of the building. As we used to say, harking back to my girlhood in Grantham, I liked living over the shop but I was not able to move out of the house in Flood Street until the first week of June.

The flat at No. 10 quickly became a refuge from the rest of the world, though on occasion a good deal of business was done there too. It was right at the top of the building – but that was an advantage, for the stairs provided me with about the only real exercise I got.

Denis and I decided that we would not have any living-in domestic help. No housekeeper could possibly have coped with the irregular hours. When I had no other engagement, I would go up to the flat for a quick lunch of salad or poached egg on Bovril toast. But usually it was 10 or 11 o’clock at night when I would go into the kitchen and prepare something – we knew every way in which eggs and cheese could be served and there was always something to cut at in the fridge – while Denis poured me a night-cap.

Prime Minister or not, I never forgot that I was also MP for Finchley; nor, indeed, would I have wanted to. My monthly surgeries in the constituency and the correspondence which was dealt with from within No. 10 by my secretary, Joy Robilliard (who had been Airey Neave’s secretary until his death), kept me directly in touch with people’s worries. I always had the benefit of a first-class constituency agent and a strongly supportive constituency chairman, which as any MP knows makes a world of difference. I also kept up my own special interests which had been developed as a result of constituency work, for example as patron of the North London Hospice.

I could never have been Prime Minister for more than eleven years without Denis at my side. Always a powerful personality, he was a fund of
shrewd advice and penetrating comment. And he very sensibly saved these for me rather than the outside world, always refusing to give interviews. He never had a secretary or public relations adviser but answered between thirty and fifty letters every week in his own hand. With the appearance of the ‘Dear Bill’ letters in
Private Eye
, he seemed to become half the nation’s favourite correspondent.

Being Prime Minister is a lonely job. In a sense, it ought to be: you cannot lead from the crowd. But with Denis there I was never alone. What a man. What a husband. What a friend.

In some ways 10 Downing Street is an unusual sort of home. Portraits, busts and sculptures of one’s Prime Ministerial predecessors remind one of the nearly 250 years of history into which one has stepped.

Outside the flat I had displayed my own collection of porcelain, which I had built up over the years. I also brought with me a powerful portrait of Churchill from my room in the House of Commons. It looked down on those who assembled in the antechamber to the Cabinet Room. When I arrived, this area looked rather like a down-at-heel Pall Mall club, with heavy and worn leather furniture; I changed the whole feel by bringing in bookcases, tables and chairs from elsewhere in the building. There might be some difficult times to come in the Cabinet Room itself, but there was no reason why people should be made to feel miserable while they were waiting to go in.

Although it was not until I had been there some ten years that I had the most important redecorations done, I tried from the start to make the rooms seem more lived in. The official rooms had very few ornaments and when we arrived Downing Street had no silver. Whenever there was an official dinner the caterers had to bring in their own. Lord Brownlow lent me silver from his collection at Belton House: it sparkled and transformed the No. 10 dining room. One particular piece had a special meaning for me – a casket containing the Freedom of the Borough of Grantham, of which both the previous Lord Brownlow and later my father had been Mayor. The gardeners who kept St James’s Park brought in flowers and I also had the study repapered at my own expense. Its unappealing sage-green damask flock wallpaper was replaced by a cream stripe, which was a much better background for some fine pictures.

I felt that Downing Street should have some works by contemporary British artists and sculptors, as well as those of the past. I had met Henry Moore when I was Secretary of State for Education and much admired
his work. The Moore Foundation let No. 10 borrow one of his smaller sculptures which fitted perfectly in an alcove in the main hallway. Behind the sculpture was hung a Moore drawing, which was changed every three months; among my favourites were scenes of people sleeping in the London underground during the Blitz.

I was conscious of being the first research scientist to become Prime Minister – almost as conscious as I was of being the first woman Prime Minister. So I had portraits and busts of some of our most famous scientists placed in the small dining room, where I often lunched with visitors and colleagues on less formal occasions.

On this first evening, though, I could do little more than make a brief tour of the main rooms of the building. Then I entered the Cabinet Room where I was greeted by more familiar faces – among them my daughter Carol. There was Richard Ryder who would continue for a time as my political secretary, responsible for keeping me in touch with the Conservative Party in the country; David Wolfson (now Lord Wolfson) who acted as my Chief of Staff, bringing to bear his charm and business experience on the problems of running No. 10; Caroline Stephens (later to become Caroline Ryder) who became my diary secretary; Alison Ward (later Alison Wakeham) my constituency secretary; and Cynthia Crawford – known to all of us as ‘Crawfie’ – who acted as my personal assistant and who has stayed with me ever since. We did not waste much time in conversation. They were anxious to sort out who was to go to which office. I had exactly the same task in mind: the choice of my Cabinet.

Choosing a Cabinet is undoubtedly one of the most important ways in which a Prime Minister can exercise power over the whole conduct of government. But it is not always understood how real are the constraints under which the choices take place. By convention, all ministers must be members of either the Commons or the Lords, and there must not generally be more than three Cabinet members in the Lords, thus limiting the range of potential candidates for office. In addition one has to achieve distribution across the country – every region is easily convinced it has been left out. You must also consider the spectrum of Party opinion.

Even so, the press expect the Cabinet of some twenty-two ministers to be appointed and the list to be published within about 24 hours – otherwise it is taken as a sure sign of some sort of political crisis. So I do not think that any of us at No. 10 relaxed much that day, which turned out to be a long one. I received the usual detailed security briefing which is given to incoming Prime Ministers. Then I went upstairs to the study accompanied
by Willie Whitelaw and our new Chief Whip, Michael Jopling. We began to sift through the obvious and less obvious names and slowly this most perplexing of jigsaws began to take shape, and Ken Stowe sought to contact those involved to arrange for them to come in the next day.

I knew that the hardest battles would be fought on the ground of economic policy. So I made sure that the key economic ministers would be true believers in our economic strategy. Geoffrey Howe had by now thoroughly established himself as the Party’s chief economic spokesman. Geoffrey was regularly bullied in debate by Denis Healey. But by thorough mastery of his brief and an ability to marshal arguments and advice from different sources, he had shown that beneath a deceptively mild exterior he had the makings of the fine Chancellor he was to become. Some of the toughest decisions were to fall to him. He never flinched. In my view these were his best political years.

After becoming Leader in 1975, I had considered appointing Keith Joseph as Shadow Chancellor. Keith had done more than anyone else to spell out in his speeches and pamphlets what had gone wrong with Britain’s economic performance and how it could be transformed. He is an original thinker, and combines humility, open-mindedness and unshakeable principle and is genuinely sensitive to people’s misfortunes. Although he had no doubt of the rightness of the decisions which we were to make, he knew that they meant unviable firms would collapse and overmanning become unemployment, and he cared about those who were affected – far more than did all our professionally compassionate critics. But such a combination of personal qualities may create difficulties in the cruel hurly-burly of political life which Chancellors above all must endure. So Keith took over at Industry, where he did the vital job of altering the whole philosophy which had previously dominated the department. Keith was – and remains – my closest political friend.

John Biffen I appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He had been a brilliant exponent in Opposition of the economic policies in which I believed, but he proved rather less effective than I had hoped in the grueling task of trying to control public expenditure. His later performance as Leader of the House where the qualities required were acute political sensitivity, good humour and a certain style was far happier. John Nott became Secretary of State for Trade. He, too, had a clear understanding of and commitment to our policies of monetary control, low taxes and free enterprise. But John is a mixture of gold, dross and mercury. No one was better at analysing a situation and prescribing a policy to deal with it. But
he found it hard, or perhaps boring, to stick with the policy once it had been firmly decided. His vice was second thoughts.

It seemed prudent in the light of our effective performance in Opposition and the election campaign to maintain a high degree of continuity between Shadow Cabinet and Cabinet posts. Willie Whitelaw became Home Secretary, and in that capacity and later as Leader of the Lords he provided me personally and the Government as a whole with shrewd advice based on massive experience. People were often surprised that the two of us worked so well together, given our rivalry for the leadership and our different outlook on economics. But Willie is a big man in character as well as physically. He wanted the success of the Government which from the first he accepted would be guided by my general philosophy. Once he had pledged his loyalty, he never withdrew it. He was an irreplaceable Deputy Prime Minister – an office which has no constitutional existence but is a clear sign of political precedence – and the ballast that helped keep the Government on course.

But some changes in portfolios were required. I brought in the formidable Christopher Soames to be Leader of the House of Lords. Christopher was his own man, indeed excessively so, and thus better suited to solo performances than to working in harmony with others. Peter Carrington, who had led the Lords skilfully in Opposition, became Foreign Secretary. Peter had great panache and the ability to identify immediately the main points in any argument; and he could express himself in pungent terms. We had disagreements, but there were never any hard feelings. We were an effective combination – not least because Peter could always tell some particularly intractable foreign minister that whatever he himself might feel about a particular proposition, there was no way in which his Prime Minister would accept it. I was determined, however, that at least one Foreign Office minister should have a good grounding in – and sound views on – economic policy. I had Peter bring in Nick Ridley.

Two other appointments excited more comment. To his surprise, I asked Peter Walker to be Minister of Agriculture. Peter had never made a secret of his hostility to my economic strategy. But he was both tough and persuasive, priceless assets in dealing with the plain absurdities of the European Community’s Common Agricultural Policy.

And despite the divergences of opinion between Jim Prior and the rest of us during Opposition there was no doubt in my mind that we needed him at Employment. There was still the feeling in the country, and indeed
in the Conservative Party, that Britain could not be governed without the tacit consent of the trade unions. It was to be some years before that changed.

By about 11 p.m. the list of Cabinet was complete and had been approved by the Queen. I went upstairs to thank the No. 10 telephonists who had had a busy time arranging all the appointments for the following day. Then I was driven home.

On Saturday I saw the future Cabinet one by one. It all went smoothly enough. Those who were not already Privy Councillors
*
were sworn in at Buckingham Palace. By Saturday afternoon the Cabinet was appointed and the names announced to the press. That gave every new minister the weekend to draft instructions to his department to put into effect the manifesto policies.

My last and best appointment was of Ian Gow as my Parliamentary Private Secretary (or PPS). Ian’s combination of loyalty, shrewdness and an irrepressible sense of fun was to see us all through many difficult moments.

On Tuesday at 2.30 p.m. we held our first Cabinet meeting. It was ‘informal’: no agenda had been prepared by the Cabinet Secretariat and no minutes were taken. (Its conclusions were later recorded in the first ‘formal’ Cabinet which met on the customary Thursday morning.) Ministers reported on their departments and the preparations they had made for forthcoming legislation. We gave immediate effect to the pledges in our manifesto to see that both the police and the armed forces were properly paid. As a result of the crisis of morale in the police service, the fall in recruitment and talk of a possible police strike, the Labour Government had set up a committee on police pay under Lord Justice Edmund Davies. The committee had devised a formula to keep police pay in line with other earnings. We decided that the recommendations for pay increases due for implementation on 1 November should be brought forward. This was duly announced the following day. We similarly
decided that the full military salary recommended by the latest Report of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body should be paid in full, as from 1 April.