Margaret Thatcher by Iain Dale
Margaret Thatcher’s colleagues began by underestimating her. She was a woman in what was still a man’s world, which meant that voting for her was a satisfyingly conspicuous way to protest against the leadership of Edward Heath, with whom by 1975 Conservative backbenchers were fed up, for he had led them to defeat, and was abominably rude to them.
Thatcher, by contrast, was eager to listen and to learn. But few if any of the backbenchers who supported her as the anti-Heath realised she had the qualities needed to become one of the great Prime Ministers.
They admired her courage, but not much else. Iain Dale does not convey, in one of the first in a series by Swift Press of concise lives of our Prime Ministers, the intensity of the disgust and derision she aroused.
Her air of suburban gentility revolted a certain kind of snob. In artistic circles she was considered grotesque: as the novelist Ian McEwen said after her death, “It was never enough to dislike her. We liked disliking her.”
She had studied at Oxford, yet the clever men of Oxford refused her an honorary degree. Nearer to home, as Ferdinand Mount records in Cold Cream, “the Soameses and Gilmours”, members of her first Cabinet, “were just patronising, regarding the popping up of this suburban little person as a temporary interruption”.
Mount remarks that when Alfred Sherman, in the early years of her leadership an indispensable adviser, went round hissing that “Margaret is surrounded by enemies”, he was speaking nothing less than the truth.
Dale asserts during his account of the Falklands crisis in 1982:
“There weren’t many occasions during her eleven and a half years in office when her position was under threat, but this was one of them.”
This is quite wrong. Thatcher could have been overthrown on numerous occasions. As Dale himself says, she never gained the upper hand as Leader of the Opposition over either Harold Wilson or James Callaghan, and if the latter had held an election in the autumn of 1978, before the Winter of Discontent, the Conservatives would probably have lost, and out she would probably have gone.
In her first years from 1979 as Prime Minister, when both unemployment and inflation were out of control, her opponents within the Conservative Party could well have overthrown her.
In 1984 the IRA nearly succeeded in murdering her, in the 1984-85 strike the National Union of Mineworkers might have done for her as they did for Heath, and in 1986 the Westland Affair almost led to her downfall.
But even as I compiled this incomplete catalogue, I could not help reflecting that a brave and skilful leader can benefit from having the right opponents.
“We’re so lucky to have him,” I recall Sir John Page, MP for Harrow West, say with a genial smile as some speaker at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference condemned the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill. Page meant the Conservatives were lucky to have Scargill, whom he made sound like an old and valued friend.
For while Thatcher had deferred taking on the miners until coal stocks were high, Scargill had made the blunders of beginning the strike without a ballot, and at the end of winter.
Victory in 1982 in the Falklands immeasurably strengthened her hand, but having omitted to say how deeply she was loathed, Dale also fails to convey how deeply she was loved.
Testimony to that effect can be found in another of his many books (he has written or edited more than 50), Memories of Margaret Thatcher: A portrait, by those who knew her best, a collection of 250 accounts of meeting her which Dale first compiled in the year 2,000 and has just updated.
Here is Major-General Julian Thompson describing the luncheon held at Guildhall in London for members of the Falklands Task Force in October 1982:
“After lunch, the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher as she was then, rose to speak. Before she began, there was a prolonged, spontaneous standing ovation, cheering and clapping for her, led by the junior ranks in Guildhall without any encouragement or lead being given by the officers present, but quickly taken up by all of us with the greatest enthusiasm; we wanted to show our affection for her. I was sitting opposite some of the members of her Cabinet, who were open-mouthed in astonishment. We adored her, and would have done anything for her. In all my years’ service, I have never seen anything like it. In the last hundred years, I can think of no politician except Winston Churchill who struck such a chord with servicemen, who usually have no time for politicians.”
Charles Powell, her adviser on foreign affairs from 1984-90, reminds us in this collection that Thatcher was greeted by ecstatic crowds in Poland, Russia, Georgia and Armenia, and writes:
“She was ready to go toe to toe with any world leader from Gorbachev to Deng Xiaoping. She had the huge advantage of being unembarrassable, a quality not always shared by her Private Secretary. I recall a meeting with President Mitterrand in Paris during which the President took her for a stroll in the Elysée garden. I sat down in the sun for a blissful moment of peace with my French opposite number, only to be shaken from my reverie by the sight of Mitterrand hurrying back, clutching a blood-stained handkerchief to himself. For a moment of panic I thought: ‘She’s gone too far this time, she’s bitten him!’ It turned out to have been an over-enthusiastic puppy which did the damage, but it was a nasty moment.”
Sherman first met Thatcher in the spring of 1974:
“She was then 50 [actually 48: she was born on 13 October 1925], with grown-up children, but there was then something girlish about her: her enthusiasms, the simplicity of her beliefs, her trusting nature. She reminded me of nineteenth-century explorers, aware that their ambience was strange and dangerous but unquestioningly confident in themselves.”
No book can tell the whole truth about Thatcher, or resolve all the paradoxes in her life and times. Dale remarks, quite rightly, that “Charles Moore’s magnificent trilogy cannot be surpassed”.
He also admits, ruefully, that writing a short book, as he has done, is “far more difficult than writing a longer one”.
If one relates every important episode, and excludes every minor one, the result is liable to be a bland paraphrase, a mere textbook, which cannot be read for pleasure.
A more epigrammatic style is required, and a careful selection of the most characteristic material.
Thatcher’s opponents long instilled in her a valuable awareness of her own vulnerability. She loved to take her stand on the rock of principle, but what care she took to avoid losing her footing.
Dale quotes Sir John Coles, her Private Secretary from 1981-84 (who can with profit be read at greater length in Memories of Margaret Thatcher):
“I recall my surprise when she said to me, just two or three days after the Conservative victory of June 1983, ‘I have not long to go.’ For someone who had just won a majority of 140 seats this was a remarkable statement. When I queried it she said, ‘My party won’t want me to lead them into the next general election – and I don’t blame them.’ A graphic example of her detachment from conventional political wisdom and her sense of future political developments.”
For it was her own party which ditched her in the end, after she had for several years failed to cultivate her backbenchers, and even fallen out with ministers such as Sir Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson who had once been among her most valuable supporters.
