Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Three, by Charles Moore
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone
The afternoon she resigned as Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher was swatting away questions in the House of Commons. Jonathan Aitken asked her to continue to ‘raise her voice’ after leaving office in favour of a referendum on Europe. Raise her voice she certainly did.
That day marked the real beginning of the Tories’ 30-year civil war. In booting her out, the Europhiles won the battle, but oh how they lost the war. She would have loved to live to see the last surviving of her assassins, and the boldest, Ken Clarke, by a beautiful symmetry himself booted out of the Tory party.
This third and final volume of Charles Moore’s stupendous biography – as rich, entertaining and acute as the first two – ends with both bangs and whimpers.
In her very last years, after a series of small strokes, his heroine – and she is never less than that, though he never minimises her faults – declines into dementia, drinking too much, entertaining any unsavoury dictator who cares to call, expecting Denis (who died in 2003) to come in through the door any moment, and roused from her glum reverie at the lunch table in the House of Lords only when Kenneth Baker asks her to join them in singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary – the words of which she remembers perfectly.
But before the shadows fall, she makes her views as thumpingly clear as ever. She denounces the Maastricht Treaty (and votes against it) as ‘leading to a federal Europe achieved by stealth’ and ‘the greatest abdication of national and parliamentary sovereignty in our history’. She accepts the presidency of the Bruges Group (well, after all, she had made the speech), sends £5,000 of her own money to Bill Cash’s European Foundation, and eggs on the ‘bastards’ who are plaguing John Major. Even in death she remains the darling of her sadly shrunken party, the immortal queen over the water.
She never said out loud that Britain would be better off outside the EU, but she did say, ‘I have always felt that the best answer for us was to be a kind of free-trade and non-interventionist “Singapore” off Europe’ – precisely what today’s Brexotics dream of.
She foreshadowed too the anxieties about those pesky global elites,
warning of the emergence of ‘a whole new international political class’ unsympathetic to the interests of ordinary voters.
When he retired in 1987, where this volume starts, Willie Whitelaw warned, ‘The trouble is that, when Margaret leaves, she will leave the Conservative party divided for a generation.’
Her knack of losing friends was almost as remarkable as her gift for influencing people. One after another, they went, sacked, disgraced, or driven to distraction: Brittan, Biffen, Tebbit, Howe, Lawson, Gow. She couldn’t even keep her closest advisers in Number 10 from one another’s throats.
I hadn’t realised what a long losing battle Robin Butler fought to get Charles Powell exiled to a distant embassy.
The squabbles between the ministers and the consiglieri melded with poisonous effect: Lawson insisted she choose between him and her economic adviser, the deadly, soft-voiced Alan Walters. In the end, both went. Moore says that it was only ‘latterly’ that she became too imperious to work with (her staff always found her sweet and thoughtful to work for), but she was like that from the start.
A memo sent by her first Policy Unit chief, John Hoskyns, in August 1981 reads, ‘You break every rule of good manmanagement. You bully your weaker colleagues. You criticise colleagues in front of each other and in front of their officials. They can’t answer back without appearing disrespectful, in front of others, to a woman and to a Prime Minister. You abuse that situation. You give little praise or credit, and you are too ready to blame others when things go wrong.’
She treated Howe as her personal punchball. At Ian Gow’s funeral, after he had been murdered by the IRA – an atrocity that left Thatcher desolate – Howe delivered an eloquent and touching tribute. After the service, the Prime Minister could not resist saying, in front of Gow’s sons, ‘Why don’t you speak up, Geoffrey? You mumble.’ It was fitting that he should also deliver her coup de grâce in the mildest oratorical masterpiece the Commons has ever heard.
Her tin ear for human relations extended to whole countries. The Anglo-irish Agreement of 1985 had to be negotiated out of her direct line of vision, and she wasn’t too keen on the Good Friday Agreement either. Her hatred of the Germans left her isolated as the only Western leader who stuck out against German reunification until the last moment.
Yet when she is faced with individual misfortune, her compassion wells up. She makes a point of inviting Jack
Profumo to her 70th-birthday party and seats him next to the Queen. When it emerges that Sir Maurice Oldfield, the former head of MI6, has been holding orgies with rent boys, she goes and visits him on his deathbed, feeling guilty that, by bringing him out of retirement to co-ordinate security in Northern Ireland, she may have hastened his exposure.
As Moore puts it in his fine epilogue, ‘It would be wrong to say that Margaret Thatcher was unimaginative – she was capable of great leaps of bold thought – but her imagination was inspired only if her sympathies were engaged. If they were not, she tended to become more stubborn, hectoring and dogmatic.’
His own sympathies are mostly hers – especially on Europe – but he sets out the opposing views not only with fairness but with a degree of empathy of which his subject would not, alas, have been capable.
This imaginative capacity – intermittent though it was – enabled her to see far beyond the supposedly limited horizons of the suburban housewife. There was a marvellous quickness in the way she seized on Gorbachev as ‘a man whom I could do business with’, and a great tenacity in the way she stuck with him when perestroika seemed to be faltering.
Nor should we forget her panache, for example, in telephoning Yeltsin off her own bat when he was besieged in the Kremlin; or how, when in Namibia for purely ceremonial purposes, she intervened to stop civil war breaking out; or her secret contacts with Nelson Mandela, while she appeared to be pandering to the Tory Right in opposing economic sanctions on South Africa.
Her zest for action to combat climate change was equally trail-blazing – though she partially recanted in old age, which was a pity.
At her peak, she could show tact and discretion. She could even keep her mouth shut when she disagreed. The
Silences of Mrs Thatcher would not be quite as slim a volume as you might think. She became more gung-ho when out of office. Moore says she was not one of those who wanted to overthrow Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War. A few years later, I heard her say at least three times in the same evening that ‘we should have gone on to Baghdad’.
We must not exaggerate the onset of her decline. All through her last three years in power, she was busy hatching reforms: ending the iniquitous Dock Labour Scheme, opening up the legal profession, bringing down top rates of tax, liberating state schools from local authority control. No subsequent government has overturned her major reforms.
So, love her or loathe her (and I have done both in my time), what ultimately unhorsed her? By the end, she was widely disliked in the country, and she knew it. Moore mentions the minority who actually rejoiced at her death, but not the vague though unmistakable sense of relief that greeted her political demise. A gruelling period of governance had come to an end. Henceforward, less would be expected, and no doubt less achieved.
The immediate reason for her downfall was the Poll Tax, probably the worst policy idea since its predecessor provoked the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Most of her ministers were too scared to oppose it or had brainwashed themselves into thinking that it might work. Interest rates reached 15 per cent; inflation was grinding up towards 10 per cent. To her dismay, she discovered that government expenditure was now taking more of people’s money, rather than less.
The ill-fated double act of Thatcher and Lawson had created a most unthatcherlike policy, which reached its nadir when she was persuaded to let sterling enter the ERM at far too high a rate, while herself demanding an unsustainable quid pro quo in the form of a cut in interest rates. It wasn’t Europe that did for her. She let herself down.