‘We should not be under any illusion – the Government is looking defeat in the face’

The former minister’s memoir gives an inside view of the triumphs and toxic tribulations of government – all of which is happening again today, he tells Gordon Rayner

Norman Fowler is one of our greatest witnesses to the past 50 years of British history, because he was a participant in so much of it. His unbroken period of service in Parliament has encompassed 12 prime ministers, starting with Ted Heath, taking in front-bench service under Margaret Thatcher and John Major and, most recently, a five-year stint as Speaker of the House of Lords.

Lord Fowler – he was made a life peer in 2001 – was the health secretary who devised the unforgettable public information campaign about Aids in the 1980s; the transport secretary who privatised much of British Rail; he was in the Grand Hotel in Brighton when it was bombed by the IRA and he attempted to be the peacemaker when Thatcher, out of power and filled with resentment, turned on Major.

Surprisingly, he has never published his diaries, but – aged 85 – he has finally found the time to dig out his old notebooks and produce The Best of

Enemies, his contemporaneous take on the 1980-97 period. It makes for a fascinating read, not only because this is an “as new” diary of the Thatcher and Major years, written as events were unfolding, but also because Fowler adds his own reflections before each chapter, making him a historian of his own experience.

We meet in his flat in Fulham, west London, less than 50 yards from the Thames, which is precisely as you would imagine the home of a former Lord Speaker to be: exquisitely tasteful soft furnishings, books by the yard and coffee in a china cup with a saucer.

Fowler is a tall man with a spare frame. Though age has given him a slight stoop and stiffness of gait, his mind remains clear, with an impressive recall of names and events stretching back to Macmillan. He tells me he has made a resolution not to write any more books, because “it does take up a vast

‘That’s the pity with governments: ministers tend not to look back. It’s not a team game’

amount of your time and, when you’re 85, you’ve got to be selective with what you do”.

Will the book be a full stop on his career? “No! I want to get back to campaigning,” he says. “As Speaker I managed to campaign on [reform of ] the Lords, which I enjoyed immensely. “And I have consistently campaigned on HIV and Aids (for which he remains a UN ambassador) but I haven’t been able to do as much of that as I wanted to do over the last 18 months, so I’m going to go back to that.”

When he resigned from Thatcher’s Cabinet at the beginning of 1990 he was the first minister to say he was doing so to “spend more time with my family”. In his case it wasn’t a euphemism – he and his second wife Fiona had three children, the youngest aged six, and he had written in his diary of his regret at becoming “a rather distant figure”. He now has five grandchildren, aged from two to 16, whom he sees most weeks, but he is in no mood to become a full-time grandparent. “I don’t take enough time off,” he admits. “I can’t remember the last time we had a proper holiday, which is foolish.”

Lady Fowler, sitting in on the interview, appears to have long ago made peace with the knowledge that retirement is not on her husband’s agenda. “We accept that we like different kinds of holidays,” she says. “Norman likes sun and beaches, I like guided tours and seeing things.”

She reminisces about safari holidays with Leon Brittan, Ken Clarke and their wives. It brings the conversation around to the start of Fowler’s political career, when the three men were a tight-knit trio of young backbenchers in the mid-1970s who had all chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association as students.

All three went on to achieve high office: Brittan as home secretary under Thatcher and Clarke as chancellor under Major. All had their run-ins with Thatcher. Fowler’s was over the government response to the emerging threat of HIV/Aids in 1986.

“It was the first time I fell out with her,” he says, “but she was just wrong.” Fowler, as health secretary, proposed a bold and frank public health campaign, with blunt messages on the risks of anal sex and the use of condoms, which led to the “Don’t die of ignorance” campaign with its falling tombstone.

Thatcher was appalled, arguing that “children should not be exposed to unpleasant things”, he explains, and when Fowler’s plan was approved by an Aids committee chaired by Willie Whitelaw she tried to go around them by asking the Advertising Standards Authority to intervene and even trying to use the Obscene Publications Act to stop leaflets being distributed to homes. She even warned Fowler not to become known as the “Minister for Aids”. Fowler stuck to his guns and Thatcher had to give way, but he says: “We fell out over that and I was very lucky to survive the 1987 reshuffle.”

He now ranks the Aids campaign as his prime achievement in politics. “Acquiring HIV was effectively a death sentence at the time,” he says. “There was no cure, no treatment and the one thing you could do was warn people of the dangers and that’s what we did.”

The tactic of grabbing people’s attention with the unvarnished truth was based on a successful public health campaign to reduce sexually transmitted diseases among First World War soldiers using prostitutes, and it saved lives. Yet no one bothered to ask his advice on public health messaging when the Covid pandemic hit.

“It’s a great pity about government,” he says. “Ministers tend not to look back, they want to make their own contribution rather than just developing what has gone before. To that extent it’s not a team game.”

Fowler is also proud of his record on privatisation when he was transport secretary in Thatcher’s first cabinet. When he took on the brief, British Rail’s subsidiaries included Sealink ferries and a hotel division that owned venues such as Gleneagles (open for only six months a year), while the British Transport Docks Board owned ports including Southampton, Cardiff and Hull. Even the removals firm Pickfords was publicly owned.

“No Conservative minister had made any real changes in transport since Ernest Marples (in the early 1960s),” says Fowler, whose three transport bills in three years earned him a reputation as an “activist minister” and paved the way for the full privatisation of British Rail. After he resigned from his third cabinet role – as employment secretary – in 1990, Fowler returned to the back benches but was persuaded by Major to return to the fray as party chairman in 1992. By then relations between Major and Thatcher had become toxic – hence the title of his memoir – and he made it his business to be a buffer between them, trying and failing to broker some sort of reconciliation.

In his diary for May 1992 (which he kept in a series of reporters’ notebooks, a hangover from his earlier career as a journalist) he writes that over lunch with Major at his home in Huntingdon he tries to discuss building bridges to Thatcher, but Major replies: “It would be a waste of time.”

Thatcher had given an interview to

Newsweek saying Major was not his own man, that there was no such thing as Majorism and that Thatcherism would long outlive them all. Yet Thatcher had done everything in her power to get Major into No 10 after being ousted in 1990. “She supported him because it was anyone but Heseltine,” says Fowler, “but then she simply pulled away the rug, and I don’t think any other prime minister has done that to a successor.

“Initially it came from a sense that she had been betrayed by her Cabinet – which I wasn’t in at the time – that Cabinet ministers she had appointed didn’t stand by her and if that was the case there was no reason she should stand by them. Her defeat was a complete disaster for the Tory party because it left probably the greatest Tory leader since the war bitter, disillusioned and telling people to remember what she achieved.”

He does not subscribe to the view that Thatcher should have gone “on and on”, as she wanted to do. “In an ideal world it would have been better had she gone to the electorate, won the election – though probably only just – and then, seeing the position, stood down of her own accord, rather than being bundled out. But things just don’t work out that way.”

Dealing with Thatcher became so awkward that her attendance at the annual party conference became a recurring headache for Fowler, as party chairman, to negotiate. In 1993, Major descended into a “black depression”, his diary notes, because Fowler had tried to “handle” her by inviting Thatcher for dinner in his hotel suite, which wrecked Major’s plans to take his staff out for fish and chips. “It would lead to stories that the poor old prime minister could find no one else to have dinner with but his staff, while the chairman was entertaining his predecessor at a slap-up dinner,” his diary says.

Reading Fowler’s diaries, it is impossible not to conclude that Major’s falling out with Thatcher was stoked in part by his own insecurity. Every time Major is given a bigger job in government, he expresses doubts that he is up to it. “He had a natural humility,” Fowler reflects, “he was not an arrogant man… and he was quite sensitive about his upbringing and his background. I remember one conversation with him when I said I thought we had got rid of all the class divisions in the Conservative Party and he said, ‘I’m not sure that is the case’.”

Fowler reflects that Major consolidated Thatcher’s achievements so successfully that “they were never changed”, adding: “He was a natural heir to Margaret Thatcher. If only the two could have got on.”

His diaries do, of course, cover some of Thatcher’s finest moments, including the Falklands War in 1982 (when some Cabinet ministers, including Francis Pym, foreign secretary, thought a deal could be done rather than going to war, he says) and the 1984 Brighton bomb, which killed five people, including Sir Anthony Berry, the deputy chief whip.

His contemporaneous account is of being woken by “an enormous cracking bang” and then silence. His diary reflects the confusion as hotel guests tried to make sense of what had happened and of Thatcher’s determination to carry on with the conference, after Marks & Spencer had opened early to provide people with replacement clothes. His memories now are that “it really was like the First World War because there was dirt and dust coming down from the ceiling and this long line of Tory delegates and ministers trudging out into the open”.

Fowler’s wife Fiona had had breakfast that morning with Roberta Wakeham, wife of chief whip John Wakeham. Fiona had gone back to London, Mrs Wakeham stayed in Brighton and was killed. Fowler went to visit the injured in hospital in his role as health secretary, where he came across an injured Norman Tebbitt (whose wife Margaret was left in a wheelchair for the rest of her life) and Wakeham, grieving for his wife.

‘Labour didn’t win in 1997 because of Blair. It was because the Tories lacked impact’

“Norman was trying to be as cheerful as he could [he is said to have been asked by a nurse if he was allergic to anything and replied “bombs”] and Wakeham was also trying to be cheerful. They all reacted magnificently really but, my God, what a thing.”

Fowler’s last ministerial role was as employment secretary, where he was shadowed in the late 1980s by “a lawyer called Tony Blair”, his diary records. When Blair becomes the front-runner to replace the late John Smith as Labour leader, Fowler writes that: “I never found Blair particularly formidable.” Does he still think that?

“Yes. It’s very difficult for an Opposition leader to be formidable. Thatcher wasn’t and it was the same with Blair. I don’t think Labour won in 1997 because of Blair, it was because of the lack of impact of the Conservative Party. Starmer isn’t formidable, he just needs to play it safe.”

Fowler says there are “undoubtedly” parallels between 1997 and the coming general election, particularly because both governments lost their reputation for competence. He holds Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt in high regard and thinks calls from some MPs for Hunt to be replaced as Chancellor are “mad and wrong”. He adds: “Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have done terrible damage to the party and the one way they can turn this around is by showing that there are still people of great competence in the Government.”

He is far from convinced it will happen. While complacency was a problem for Major’s Tories who kidded themselves “it would be OK on the day”, the current crop already seem to have conceded defeat, he suggests.

“I am astonished that there are 50 Tory MPs so far that have said they are standing down. It’s not a time for ministers to start making a run for the job they think they are going to get on the assumption that they lose.

“We should not be under any illusion – I think the Government is looking defeat in the face.”

He is also scathing about the failure of successive Conservative prime ministers to reform the House of Lords. “They have done precisely nothing and I think that’s deplorable,” he fumes. “Rishi says he is an agent for change, and if ever there was an issue which stood out for change it is this.”

During his five years on the Woolsack, he had plenty of time to reflect on the state of the upper chamber, and he proposes a “two out, one in” system to slim it down from more than 800 members to around 500, who should be part-elected and part-appointed, and remain in Westminster (calls for it to be moved to the North are “silly”, he says).

“It’s a second chamber, it does an important job, but we get people who are appointed to the Lords, get sworn in and you never see them again. It’s crazy.”

The fire has certainly not gone out in Fowler’s belly, and he is determined to see Lords reform in his lifetime. Having long campaigned for LGBT rights, he says he is also going to have to “get into” the debate around trans rights, saying he needs to learn more about the topic, while holding true to his core belief in “allowing people the freedom to make their own choices”.

“It’s all a question of time,” he says wistfully. “I’m 85 and still complaining that I haven’t had time to do things. I feel I have still got many things to do but I haven’t got enough time to do them.” Lady Fowler, it seems, may have to carry on booking holidays without him for some time yet.

The Best of Enemies’ (Biteback, £25) is published on Tuesday