The one man who silenced Thatcher

THE first dinner my wife and I ever gave in Washington was for the Thatchers. We were nervous. It was a great honour to have them under our roof. When I had travelled with Lady Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe around the world — during an early posting as Howe’s press secretary— she had made me proud to be British. She had the measure of every foreign politician she ever met. There is a book to be written about her relations with male foreign leaders: Gorbachev, who always blushed when he saw her; Reagan, who rarely resisted her advocacy; and President Samora Machel of Mozambique, whose infatuation with her was such that he once entrusted Howe with an enormous box of frozen prawns to give her. The guests for our dinner in Washington were a mixture of friends and politicians. Lady Thatcher still had huge drawing power in the U.S. She was apparently making a lot of money on the speech circuit. ‘ Will you say a few words?’ I asked her at dinner. ‘ What can I say that will interest people? Denis and I are has-beens now, you know,’ she replied, a tad disingenuously. ‘ No, no,’ I countered.‘People will be very disappointed if they leave without hearing you. Why don’t you talk a bit about Russia?’ She sprang to her feet and delivered a barnstorming, 20-minute speech about how she and ‘ Ron’Reagan had defeated communism and worked with Mikhail Gorbachev. This prompted Senator John Kerry, who was to lose to George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election, to respond with a paean of praise for Lady Thatcher and Britain. We were just about to break up at the end of dinner when one guest asked, almost as an aside, what she thought about recent developments in Europe. This was like a spark to dry tinder. In a flash, she was on her feet again, to deliver a caustic indictment of European integration. Eyes blazing, she began to bang on a bit. Suddenly, a voice rang out: ‘ Enough, woman, enough. Sit down.’ It was Denis Thatcher. His wife meekly obeyed.