Would that we had a Maggie now
MY GOD, but can you imagine what the state of chief EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier might be if Margaret Thatcher were prime minister? He’d be a smoking, radioactive column of ash. A husk. A ruin. Handbagged to destruction.
Theresa May is doing her best but as the countdown to Britain leaving the EU ticks remorselessly to zero, how I long for the force of nature that was Mrs Thatcher to sally forth into combat with the Brussels apparatchiks. She’d have been magnificent, wouldn’t she? As for Jeremy Corbyn, he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds against Maggie. I can almost hear her, see her, fixing Jezza with her deadly gamma-ray glare at PMQs.
“The gentleman opposite may have no confidence in his country, or its democracy, or the people’s decision to leave Europe, but I do. As I told Monsieur Barnier, the plain fact is that Europe needs Britain far more than Britain needs Europe. The days of being bossed by Brussels are over. If they are foolish enough to believe otherwise we will do very well on our own and they will be the worse off. No deal is better than a bad one. They know I mean that, so rest assured – I will secure us an extremely good one.” And so on. I was reflecting on Mrs Thatcher this week because I’ve been reading an outstanding new biography of her, People Like Us: Margaret Thatcher And Me, the memoir of Caroline Slocock. As a young civil servant Slocock became the first ever female private secretary to a British prime minister. She was Thatcher’s confidante and support in the turbulent last 18 months of her premiership and was present when her weeping boss read out her resignation speech in Cabinet – the only other woman in the room.
Slocock writes that she was personally traumatised by the episode, which she describes in haunting detail.
“Within a few words she started sobbing and couldn’t go on… it was absolute torture to hear and very profoundly shocking. I found it horrible to see her thus.”
She says that when Thatcher finally stumbled to her statement’s conclusion she turned her tear-stained face towards the men who had betrayed her and actually said: “I doubt you all heard that, so I’ll read it again.” And so she did, still racked with sobs. But the real message of this remarkable, beautifully-written account of the decline and fall of Britain’s first woman prime minister is how she juggled her natural femininity with an aggressive drive and her tendency to bully ministers.
Thatcher was a walking, talking conundrum and Slocock was by no means what her boss called “one of us”. She was a Left-leaning feminist working for a hard-Right anti-feminist (Thatcher believed it was up to women as individuals whether or not they succeeded, they should need no help). But she came to admire and respect her profoundly.
Slocock tells a charming story about the day she was interviewed by Thatcher for the job of private secretary. She says she was terrified and quite certain she wouldn’t get the post, simply because she was a woman and she’d heard the prime minister would never accept a female private secretary.
In fact Mrs Thatcher came down the stairs of No 10 smiling and carrying a bowl of flowers. “Caroline, I brought these hyacinths for you, I thought you’d like them.”
She got the job and writes fascinatingly about the contrast between her new boss’s kindness and thoughtfulness with her staff and her frustration and hostility towards the men who surrounded her in Cabinet.
This is a book about the deeply complex relationship between femininity and real, hard power: the clash between testosterone-driven male egos and a woman who had to manage them and simultaneously protect herself from them.
It’s a great read and I could not recommend it more highly.