MARGARET THATCHER HERSELF ALONE
The evident mutual chemistry between Mrs Thatcher and Gorbachev was such that, on catching their first glimpse of each other, the two of them began smiling, greeting and speaking to each other, fully 10 paces apart!
Mrs Thatcher’s final years in office saw her dominate the world stage like no other British leader since Churchill. There was no shortage of major events to attend to – the end of the Cold War, the release of Nelson Mandela, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Her relationships with world leaders, from Reagan to Bush to Jacques Delors – and to the Queen at home – were key to the successes and failures of her diplomacy. But one issue gnawed at her above all – Europe. In these extracts from Charles Moore’s final volume of the authorised biography, Herself Alone, Mrs Thatcher wrestles with the growing conviction that increased European integration should be resisted. The pressure for Britain to play a greater role in the EEC came not just from Brussels but from her Cabinet colleagues, too. At every juncture, Mrs Thatcher’s instinct was to prefer the UK’s sovereignty to what she feared would become a United States of Europe. She resisted Britain’s entry into the ERM for many years, for example, despite the urgings (and plotting) of her closest ministers. Her famous 1988 speech in Bruges, in which she set out her belief that the EEC should be an economic rather than political project, remains a touchstone for Euroscepticism. Out of office, her scepticism grew stronger. She was dismayed by the Maastricht Treaty and John Major’s approach to it. In her final years, she became a Brexiteer before the word was invented, convinced that Britain would be better off out.
Europe: a power play
In the summer of 1988, the first moves were being made towards creating a European Central Bank and a single currency. Mrs Thatcher’s firm belief in the central importance of national independence was sharpened, as was so often the case with her surprisingly emotional temperament, by the personal. Although she never lost respect for the abilities of the President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors – “talented” was the word she always used about him” – her resentment against him grew. She disagreed with his centralising and socialist vision of Europe. Still more important, she was jealous of the power he was accumulating. Delors was acquiring an ever-more central role in fashioning the future of the Community. As Mrs Thatcher put it: “By the summer of 1988, he had altogether slipped his leash as a fonctionnaire and become a fully fledged political spokesman for federalism.” This set-to provided the model for increasingly notable public clashes. It also disturbed Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary. He had been close to Mrs Thatcher in the line taken over the Single European Act, but he became upset by the arguments over the “Delors package”. He worried about her “excessive rhetoric”. Later that summer, Mrs Thatcher’s public hostilities with Delors resumed. The casus belli was the general growth of Brussels’ power. Delors made the first move. Addressing the European Parliament on July 6 1988, he predicted that “10 years hence, 80 per cent of our economic legislation, and perhaps even our fiscal and social legislation as well, will be of Community origin”. He spoke of an embryonic European government. All this was a provocation. In Charles Powell’s view, it was a “turning point” for Mrs Thatcher: “In her mind, a Rubicon had been crossed.” Mrs Thatcher was due to make a speech on the future of Europe in Bruges in September. When a draft reached the Foreign Office, it caused unease, though not panic. There were some noises of protest from Geoffrey Howe. He had noticed “some plain and fundamental errors” and fretted about warnings against a “United States of Europe”, but he singled out one particular passage for praise: “Let me say bluntly on behalf of Britain: we have not embarked on the business of throwing back the frontiers of the state at home only to see a European superstate getting ready to exercise a new dominance from Brussels.” The final version of these words was to cause more controversy than any other part of the speech. When she rose to speak to the College of Europe on September 20 1988, Mrs Thatcher joked that inviting her to speak on Britain and Europe was rather like inviting “Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence”. It was a position she relished. Her speech began with a grand historical sweep, taking in the Romans, Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution and much more, all designed to show that Britain was part of European civilisation, but that “Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome”. Europe had often been threatened by tyranny, she said, and Britain had often fought “to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power”. In emotional words which did not appear in the drafts the Foreign Office had seen, she pointed out that 120,000 British troops lay buried “only miles from here” – “Had it not been for their willingness to fight and die, Europe would have been united long before now – but not in liberty, not in justice… It was from our island fortress that the liberation of Europe itself [in 1944] was mounted.” That liberation remained incomplete: “We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people… have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.” The speech “caused absolute horror” in Brussels and among many European heads of government because it was so clearly aimed at them, especially at Jacques Delors. It might have been right, but it could not, in the prevailing European climate, have been persuasive to the elites who sat in her audience that day. Delors himself felt that “technically it was a good speech, well written, beautiful phrases. She was very direct, very comprehensible”. But he was in no doubt about its purpose: “I think she thought she could put a stop to the European project.” To European integrationists, the Bruges Speech was a declaration of war. Because they were many and, in European councils and all the European institutions, Mrs Thatcher was only one, they had the weapons with which to win. From then on, they were burning to use them. In truth, the Bruges Speech was both what its admirers praised and what its critics attacked. It was a visionary declaration of a way forward for Europe and a fierce piece of score-settling with people whose power threatened Mrs Thatcher’s own. In the light of posterity, the former looks more important than the latter, but posterity is never around when you need her. One person powerfully affected by the Bruges Speech was Geoffrey Howe. Despite his earlier endorsement, the manner of its presentation and its reception at home and abroad convinced him that Mrs Thatcher saw the question of Europe in a way which was increasingly divergent from his own and at odds with long-standing Conservative policy. He noted, for example, that this was the first time that a British prime minister had called into question the legitimacy of EEC institutions, rather than specific policies. It followed from this that the EEC and she – not to mention he and she – were on a collision course. On May 4 1989, the very day that Mrs Thatcher celebrated her 10th anniversary in office with a Cabinet dinner at the Carlton Club, Geoffrey Howe held a secret meeting with Nigel Lawson at No 11. He had been plotting a serious challenge to Mrs Thatcher’s authority. Since they had first tried unsuccessfully, in 1985, to concert Britain’s entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, Lawson and Howe had worked closely together on the subject. The two had “a working relationship, not a personal relationship”, but as economic collaborators in the 1970s, close colleagues in the Treasury in the early 1980s and Thatcherites who were nevertheless the two most senior victims of the Thatcher style of government, they were natural allies. They did not, in fact, agree about Europe – Howe being wholly pro-European, and Lawson sceptical – but they had, for differing reasons, maintained, indeed deepened, their faith in British membership of the ERM. Each time, over four years, that one had got into trouble with Mrs Thatcher for arguing for entry, the other had backed him up, quite often in public. In the previous year, at Howe’s instigation, they had sought, and been refused, a meeting to have the matter out with her. Now they decided to insist on such a meeting. On that morning of her 10th anniversary, they agreed to present to her a joint paper making both the political and economic case for ERM entry. They intended to make her an offer she could not refuse. Both men, in their memoirs, underplay the degree to which they worked everything out in advance. They were wary of any “conspiracy theory” about what they had done; but there can be no doubt that they did conspire. It was highly unusual, perhaps unprecedented, for the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor, using officials working secretly outside the formal system, to prepare such a démarche. This does not mean, however, that it was necessarily illegitimate. Given the importance of the issue, and the level of their frustration, it may have been justified. But it was indeed intended as a trap
I think she thought she could put a stop to the European project JACQUES DELORS
for Mrs Thatcher. In the end, however, all those involved got caught in it. Mrs Thatcher did not do what Howe and Lawson had asked. She avoided setting any date for ERM entry. She did, however, greatly soften her tone. The final draft of Mrs Thatcher’s speaking note for the Council in Madrid in June 1989 shows her explaining that the phrase “when the time is right”, rather than being a device for endless postponement, had real meaning. Based on what Alan Walters, her economic adviser, had drawn up, she set out what became known as the Madrid Conditions – the completion of the internal market, the abolition of exchange controls and a free market in financial services. If the above applied, she went on, and “provided inflation in Britain has indeed been brought down significantly as we intend [a reference to the need for inflation to ‘converge’ with Continental rates] – the conditions would clearly exist for sterling to join the ERM”. In October 1989, Lawson resigned as Chancellor, after Mrs Thatcher refused his request to sack Walters, with whom he had repeatedly clashed. Lawson was succeeded by John Major. Eventually, in the autumn of 1990, Mrs Thatcher succumbed to pressure from Major and Britain entered the ERM on October 5. For the Chancellor, this was indeed a happy moment. He was showing “that he could deliver this when Nigel couldn’t”. He had achieved what most of the great and the good had long advocated; and there he was, standing beside the most important figure to have resisted it – her persuader. Mrs Thatcher, though initially content, had made a fatal error. Her previous strict insistence on entering only when “the time was right” had collapsed, so she now lacked a coherent economic approach of her own. Above all, Mrs Thatcher had lost politically. “She was well aware,” recalled private secretary Barry Potter, “that the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary had outmanoeuvred her… I had a very, very strong feeling of her sense of resignation.” Major had not only confirmed his status as Mrs Thatcher’s “heir apparent”, but had now stepped out of her shadow. “He has killed the idea that he is Thatcher’s poodle,” one Cabinet colleague was reported as saying. “On the night we went in,” Charles Powell remembered, “I felt it was a necessary compromise,” but the truth was that “she no longer really had the power”. In her final days in office Mrs Thatcher raised the possibility of holding a European referendum. In interviews during her leadership battle with Michael Heseltine, she argued it might be necessary because for Britain to join a European single currency “would be such an enormous constitutional change”. When asked what the question would be, she answered: “Quite simple: Do you give up the power to issue your own currency? Do you give up the pound sterling?” In 1992, Mrs Thatcher’s predictions of what would happen were proved accurate and sterling was ejected, triggering a crisis for the government of her successor, John Major. In retirement, her Euroscepticism grew. In 1991 she spoke from the backbenches in a Commons debates ahead of the Maastricht summit. She gave a classic exposition of how the Delors plans, which had just been discussed in draft treaty form at the European Council in Luxembourg, proposed a “quite different destiny for Europe” from that offered when Britain had entered the Community in 1973. There would be “a kind of federal Europe achieved by stealth” and a single currency, leading to “the greatest abdication of national and parliamentary sovereignty in our history”. She warned of the EC’s habit of making sure that “vague commitments” were later turned into “highly specific and damaging proposals”. She made no criticisms of the government’s tactics, however, and ended by offering it “my full support” in the Maastricht negotiations. Her wording was careful, but her delineation of the “quite different destiny” clearly raised the standard of revolt over Europe. In a speech in the Commons on the Maastricht Treaty, she said “the only authority that we have is the authority given to us by the ballot box”: if people had not been offered the abolition of sterling at a general election there would be no mandate for it. She cited the constitutional authority, A.V. Dicey – “the only thing to do was to hold a referendum”, she said, repeating the idea she had advanced before losing office. Mrs Thatcher’s intervention was extremely awkward for John Major. It annoyed him because, by his own later account, “I was contemplating offering a referendum”, but “the fact that she had called for the policy killed the policy. I couldn’t get it through the Cabinet.” There was another factor which was urging her to speak out – guilt. It was a marked feature of Mrs Thatcher’s character that she would almost never directly admit error, but would often privately recognise it and find a way of making up afterwards. She felt this guilt over Europe because she came to believe she had signed away too much sovereignty in the Single European Act. This led her to try to warn against anyone making the same mistake again: Maastricht provided the key opportunity. She wrote to the long-standing Eurosceptic MP Teddy Taylor: “I would personally think it is terribly important that those who have been very doubtful about the European enterprise should have some kind of alternative strategy clearly set out…” she argued. “I have always felt that the best answer for us was to be a kind of free-trade and non-interventionist ‘Singapore’ off Europe, seeking contact and understanding with the growth areas of the world, but I have a feeling that such a scheme is perhaps too revolutionary even for my fellow Eurosceptics here in the Commons.” In private, Lady Thatcher had gradually come to think that Britain should find a way to leave the EU. She said this to many people, but in the manner of confiding a secret. Christopher Collins, for example, who helped with her memoirs, recalled: “We were alone and she said, in a kind of stage whisper, ‘I think we would be better off outside.’ I took the whisper to mean, ‘Don’t tell anyone I think that.’” One of the last votes she ever cast in the House of Commons was in favour of a Private Member’s Bill that would, if it had become law, have insisted on referendums on any future change in the European treaties. Eventually, it would lead to David Cameron’s Leave/Remain EU referendum, which finally took place in 2016.
When the question involves Margaret Thatcher, the answer is ‘yes!’ RONALD REAGAN’S CHIEF OF STAFF
On the world stage Ronald Reagan: a special relationship
The world leader with whom Mrs Thatcher had her closest relationship was Ronald Reagan. Their admiration was mutual. Each continued to help the other after leaving office. When Mrs Thatcher was pushed out of Downing Street, the Reagans hurried to help her. The watchword, as expressed to her chief of staff, Julian Seymour, by Reagan’s chief of staff, Fred Ryan, was: “When the question involves Margaret Thatcher, the answer is ‘yes!’” In 1993, to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s 82nd birthday, Lady Thatcher flew to California to help raise money for the former president’s library. She stayed at the Bel Air Hotel and was driven thence to the Reagans’ ranch, Rancho del Cielo, in the Santa Ynez Mountains near Santa Barbara many miles north. As she approached, Lady Thatcher remarked that the eight-lane highway suddenly seemed to have very little traffic on it. One of the
local policemen explained to Julian Seymour: “President Reagan likes to sterilise the freeway when Lady Thatcher comes.” He did not try, however, to sterilise the ranch, which was quite a simple place with no central heating or air-conditioning, a long way up a dirt track.
Despite pouring rain and repeated warnings that the Reagans lived in casual style there and wore jeans, Lady Thatcher turned up, recalled Fred Ryan, in “white shoes, white dress, purse that matches, hat that matches, put together for the most perfect occasion”. As she arrived at the ranch, she exclaimed: “This is an adventure.” It was perhaps this sense of an adventure which sustained the friendship of two people of such different temperaments.
On the same trip, Lady Thatcher saw for the first time at close quarters that something was not right. When Reagan toasted her at the library dinner, he repeated his toast, using the very same words twice. Understanding what had happened, she covered up for him in conversation afterwards. “Well, he did it to emphasise a point,” she said. The following year, in Washington for Reagan’s 83rd birthday, she delivered a tribute to him at another fundraiser.
In the Green Room before the event, she found the president disorientated. “Ronnie, we’re in Washington,” she assured him. She also realised, and felt momentarily hurt, that he at first did not recognise her. In a television documentary made four years later, she euphemised what had happened: “I thought he was probably very tired.”
Reagan and Lady Thatcher had always enjoyed a close correspondence, but it was perhaps no coincidence that after this “bad night” Reagan wrote to her in particularly emotional terms: “Throughout my life, I’ve always believed that life’s path is determined by a Force more powerful than fate.
“I feel that the Lord brought us together for a profound purpose and that I have been richly blessed for having known you. I am proud to call you one of my dearest friends, Margaret; proud to have shared many of life’s significant moments with you; and thankful that God brought you into my life.” Already Reagan had slipped into the past tense.
He wrote to her with similar warmth for her 69th birthday on October 13. Three weeks later, Reagan published his famous letter to the American people, announcing his Alzheimer’s: “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life…” Lady Thatcher spoke to him shortly afterwards on the telephone, which led Reagan to write to her of the “countless blessings” that had been “showered upon” him in his life: “My association with you and Denis over the years is among the most treasured of these.”
When Reagan was living in the twilight of dementia, Lady Thatcher knew, having first been asked years earlier, that she would deliver the public eulogy in Washington National Cathedral at his death. Fred Ryan recalled that, soon after Reagan left office, “the question came up of: ‘Who do you want to do eulogies?’ Number one was Margaret Thatcher. It came from Reagan. He was very clear: if Margaret Thatcher would do it, he wanted Margaret Thatcher. We let her know that.”
She made sure she was ready for the occasion at any time. In August 2000, for example, she went to stay in Vail, Colorado, with Gay Gaines, a leading Republican fundraiser and activist, and her husband.
Mrs Gaines was riveted by the Thatcher luggage. Vail, being a small mountain resort, is not a place to which smart formal clothes need be taken, but: “When she arrived at my house she had this enormous case. It looked like a trunk almost. I said: ‘I don’t have an upstairs maid. I’m going to help you unpack.’ She said: ‘No, no, dear.’ I said: ‘Please let me help you unpack.’
“I’ve never seen a more beautifully packed bag. She showed me how she laid clothes over the edge, in each direction, and then put in tissue. And then more clothes and then more tissue. So that when you folded the pants or dress back there were no creases or wrinkles. She had all her top clothes for Vail. The next layer was what she was going to wear on the Forbes boat [belonging to the billionaire Steve Forbes]. The last layer was what she was going to wear at Mrs Petrie’s house – very dressy, Southampton, etc. And at the very bottom of her suitcase were black pantyhose, black slip, black dress, black purse, black shoes.
“I said: ‘What’s that?’ She said: ‘Gay, dear, I never know when Ronnie might pass.’”
President Reagan died on June 5 2004, aged 93, and the funeral service was held in Washington National Cathedral on June 11. It had become clear from 2002 that Lady Thatcher would not be well enough to deliver the speech in person, so, with this in mind, she was filmed, about a year before Reagan died, making the speech in a grand room at the Institute of Directors in London, dressed in mourning and speaking with appropriate solemnity.
This videotape was then played at the funeral, with Lady Thatcher watching from the congregation.
George Bush
Her relationship with Reagan’s successor, George Bush, was not as close. He wanted to assert his independence against a prime minister who, when he took office, was the dominant figure on the international stage.
Unlike Reagan and Mrs Thatcher, Bush and Mrs Thatcher were not complementary characters. After his first meeting with her, at a formal luncheon in Houston, Texas, in 1977, when she was Leader of the Opposition and he was a presidential hopeful, Bush publicly described her as “a bright lady… frighteningly bright”. The word “frighteningly” hinted at a slight unease which would always be present. Bush felt that he had to be on his best behaviour with her, and found this constraint irritating. She, according to Charles Powell, also felt faint difficulties: “Bush was a man’s man, liking off-duty to wear jeans and cowboy boots and drink beer out of a can. She was always in her high heels.”
When asked in later years if Reagan had allowed Mrs Thatcher too much influence, Bush replied: “I think in retrospect, yes… I think he was just smitten by her. She really spoke for Reagan. In all international meetings: ‘Ronnie and I think this. Ron and I want to do that.’ And he would sit there and nod and say: ‘Yeah!’… I was determined that I couldn’t do it that way… I just don’t think the role of the president is to sublimate his own views, or the United States’ views, to somebody else, no matter how good an ally and friend.”
Over Christmas of 1988, preparing for office, Bush held long meetings with his closest advisers at Camp David, and shared his concerns about Mrs Thatcher. “I just can’t continue the way President Reagan did with her,” said Bush. “I respect her. I like her. But I’m the president of the United States!”
Nelson Mandela
Throughout the late 1980s Mrs Thatcher fought against Commonwealth efforts to increase economic sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Despite her political isolation, she was working behind the scenes to bring about reform and secure the release of Nelson Mandela. This involved secret contact with the ANC. When he left jail in 1990, Mandela arrived in the UK as part of a world tour.
In late May 1990, Mrs Thatcher was informed by the Foreign Office that the ANC sought a “private holiday” for Mandela on his travels. He was exhausted and had asked if he could have a weekend in England before flying to North America.
An elegant, spacious and well-secured house in Kent was provided. As well as rest, the purpose of the visit was for Mandela to meet Oliver Tambo, the other grand old man of the ANC, whom he had not seen since his imprisonment in 1963.
At the house, the Mandelas were reunited with Oliver and Adelaide Tambo. Touching photographs were taken of the two couples embracing on the lawn. Very unusually for government documents, these were enclosed with the minutes of the meeting sent to Mrs Thatcher.
Acting impulsively, after drinking “a tumbler and a half of hot port” at dinner, Mandela decided to try to reach his ultimate host. Using a telephone number he had got from his friend Anthony Sampson, he rang Charles Powell, the Prime Minister’s foreign affairs adviser.
As Powell at once reported to Mrs Thatcher: “Nelson Mandela telephoned me out of the blue at about a quarter to midnight tonight… He said that he was very anxious to see you before leaving… He was extremely apologetic for the appearance of discourtesy in suggesting it at such short notice.”
There was no time for the two to meet immediately, but when they did so in Downing Street on July 4 1990, she let him speak at length – (“his initial comments lasted over 50 minutes uninterrupted: possibly a record”) – and she was very taken with his “courtliness and obvious sincerity”.
Mandela thanked her for her role in his release and for her opposition to apartheid, which was “clear beyond all reasonable doubt”. Although he did not give ground on sanctions, he encouraged her to think that the issue would quite soon become irrelevant. What mattered were the negotiations.
Mrs Thatcher chided him for recent remarks he had made in Dublin about the IRA, but was otherwise conciliatory. She agreed about apartheid, describing it as “wrong, immoral and contrary to the dignity of man”. She tried to move him on his support for nationalisation, giving him a lesson on the nature of an open economy.
She said that South Africa was now “a land of hope” which needed visions for the future, not old nostrums. To this last point, he replied encouragingly that the ANC had not yet made up its mind: “He might also quote the example of Mr Gorbachev, who had had the courage to say that the system to which he had devoted his life was seriously deficient.”
Both accepted that, as Mandela put it, their disagreements were not important “so long as they agreed on the main goal of getting rid of apartheid”. At the end of lunch, Mandela told her that he looked forward to the day when “he and President F.W. De Klerk would be able to come to No 10 Downing Street”.
They had talked for so long that the press waiting in Downing Street began to chant “Free Nelson Mandela!”
Mikhail Gorbachev
Mrs Thatcher was the first Western leader to identify Mikhail Gorbachev as a Soviet leader she could “do business with”. She convinced US President Ronald Reagan of his sincere support for domestic reform and nuclear weapons control. In December 1987, Gorbachev was invited to Washington for a summit.
It did not take Gorbachev long to decide that he would visit Britain en route to Washington, rather than on the way back. That was advantageous to Mrs Thatcher. It made it less likely that she could be excluded from American counsels, as had happened at the near-disastrous Gorbachev/Reagan summit at Reykjavik in 1986. His would be the first visit by a Soviet general secretary to Britain since Khrushchev in 1956.
The proposed meeting place was RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, the largest Royal Air Force station. The principals could hardly wait: “The evident mutual chemistry between the two of them was such that, on catching their first glimpse of each other and before he was clear of his aircraft or the engines had gone quiet, the two of them began smiling, greeting and speaking to each other, fully 10 paces apart! With both interpreters doing their best to project audibly over the engine noise, too, there were four loud voices being thrown back and forth, all at the same time.”
First, the two leaders discussed the situation within the Soviet Union. Flattering Mrs Thatcher, Gorbachev “wanted to say to the Prime Minister, personally, since there was a rather special relationship based on mutual sympathy between them, that he was ready to go a very long way indeed with the policy of perestroika”, and that this would include “a policy of democratisation”.
Advising him to be the sort of politician who seized opportunities, rather than giving up in the face of problems, Mrs Thatcher raised the comparison between their two situations which she enjoyed making: “She had noticed that Mr Gorbachev was constantly explaining his objectives to the people.”
She was sure this was right. Mr Gorbachev interjected that the Prime Minister’s understanding was remarkable. The Prime Minister added that her own first two years in office had been he most trying, but she had pressed on. “The most difficult undertaking of all was to change people’s attitudes.”
On a visit to Moscow in 1989, so confident was Mrs Thatcher in her relationship with Gorbachev that she chose to share her candid concerns about German reunification. As Powell’s highly restricted note recorded it, Mrs Thatcher expressed anxiety that, if events moved too fast, “the situation might blow up in all our faces”.
She sought Gorbachev’s assessment of Communist East Germany, where greater democracy was expected. “That would awaken fears in some quarters of German reunification,” she said. “Although Nato traditionally made statements supporting Germany’s aspiration to be reunited, in practice we would not welcome it at all.” She had discussed the matter with at least one other western leader. She would “welcome some reassurance about Mr Gorbachev’s attitude”.
Powell’s note rendered Gorbachev’s reply: “He could see what the Prime Minister was driving at… she could be reassured. They did not want German reunification any more than Britain did.”
Despite these assurances, in early 1990 Gorbachev bowed to the pressures of events and accepted reunification as reality. “This is one thing I really think Gorbachev got very wrong,” Mrs Thatcher recalled. “If he was going to sell the reunification of Germany, he should have got much more out of it. He sold it much too cheap.”
The Queen
In April 1995, Mrs Thatcher was made a Lady of the Garter. In 1987, the Queen had changed the rules so that, for the first time, non-royal women were allowed to join the medieval Order of the Garter, the only religious order to have survived the Reformation in England. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother had at first resisted this change, but when she learnt of her daughter’s wish to give the Garter to Lady Thatcher, she became a warm supporter of it. Of all the Royal family, she was the most admiring of the first woman prime minister. Lady Thatcher herself was very pleased, because the honour touched the romantic spirit in her. Replying to a Grantham school friend, Shirley Walsh (née Ellis), who had written to congratulate her, she said: “There is something very special about an ‘Order of Chivalry’. The very word conveys all that is best in this Country.”
The Queen also honoured Lady Thatcher by agreeing to attend her 70th birthday dinner, which was held at Claridge’s. She had not done this for any of her previous prime ministers. Lady Thatcher had made a point of inviting John Profumo, the Conservative minister disgraced in 1963 after lying to the House of Commons about his affair with Christine Keeler. He had ever since devoted his life to good works, and Lady Thatcher much admired him for this. She wanted to assist his belated rehabilitation.
She was pleased that the Queen welcomed Profumo to sit next to her at the dinner. On October 13 2005, Lady Thatcher was 80 years old. A birthday party for more than 300 people was given by benefactors at the Mandarin Oriental (then better known as the Hyde Park Hotel). As she had for her 70th, the Queen came. The affair was a grand buffet, which allowed the Queen to circulate with Lady Thatcher at her side. The two old ladies looked cosy together – two grandmothers enjoying themselves. After the speeches, the Queen said to Lady Thatcher: “I’m afraid I must go now.” “What a good idea,” replied Lady Thatcher. “I think I’ll go, too.” “You’d better not!” said the Queen. “It’s your party.”
I just can’t continue the way President Reagan did with her. I respect her. I like her. But I’m the President of the United States! GEORGE HW BUSH
Tomorrow
In Day 3 of the Telegraph’s extract we discover how Lady Thatcher was an early advocate for tackling climate change; the Salman Rushdie and Barbara Cartland connection; and what life was like for Denis’s widow.