Margaret Thatcher

Margaret
Thatcher
A Life and Legacy

D A V I D CA N N A D I N E

1
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In memory of
Mrs Thurman
‘The full accounting of how my political
work affected the lives of others is something
we will only know on Judgment Day.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1995)1
 TABLE O F CON TEN TS

Preface viii

1. Bound for Politics, 1925–59 1

2. Unexpected Leader, 1959–79 13
3. Challenging Beginnings, 1979–81 28
4. Victory Overseas, 1981–83 39
5. Enemies Within, 1983–86 59
6. Thatcherism Triumphant? 1986–89 79
7. Isolation and Defenestration, 1989–90 97
8. Aftermath and Afterlife, 1990–2013 111

Endnotes 127
Guide to Further Reading 133
Dramatis Personae 137
Glossary 147
Chronology 151
Opinion Polls 155
Index 156

vii
 PREFACE

I first encountered what was in retrospect Margaret

Thatcher’s avatar and anticipation during the autumn of
1955, when I began my formal education as a pupil at a
state-funded, Church of England primary school on the
western side of Birmingham. The school’s headmistress
was ‘Mrs Thurman’ (or ‘Mrs T’), and she was a figure by
turns unforgettable, intimidating, charismatic, and inspir-
ational. She was always impeccably coiffured, she often
wore well-cut blue suits, she was tirelessly and overwhelm-
ingly energetic, and when she lost her temper she was
utterly terrifying, reducing not only her errant pupils, but
also grown men, to quivering jelly and tearful wrecks. She
was a brilliant headmistress. Her motto for her school was
‘Only the best is good enough’, and she constantly urged
us all to strive to make the most that we could of ourselves.
It was not until later life that I came to realize just how
much I owed her. Unlike many in the teaching profession
of her day, Mrs Thurman was a staunch Conservative;
she was also a committed Christian, and a vehement
anti-Communist, and I can still recall the speech she gave,
at a morning assembly in 1956, denouncing the Soviet
 Preface

invasion of Hungary as an unconscionable act of tyranny

and aggression.
So when Margaret Thatcher burst upon the British polit-
ical scene during the 1970s, initially as Secretary of State for
Education, and subsequently as Conservative Party leader
and Prime Minister, I thought that I already knew some-
thing about this second ‘Mrs T’: for in her appearance,
energy, demeanour, and attitudes she seemed to bear a
close resemblance to Mrs Thurman, albeit multiplied by a
hundred. For most of the 1980s, I lived and worked in
Britain, and, like many people, I regarded Thatcher as in
some ways admirable, but in others difficult to take. From
1988 to 1998, I taught British history at Columbia Univer-
sity in New York: Thatcher was a marvellous subject on
which to lecture, she invested Britain and thus British his-
tory with renewed interest and fascination for a transatlan-
tic audience, and she was warmly and widely admired by
American Republicans, who could not understand why her
own party had turned against her in November 1990. On
returning to work in the United Kingdom, I found myself
sitting on a University of London committee that Margaret
Thatcher chaired, and the early impressions that I had
formed of her were amply confirmed. She was past her
prime-ministerial prime, but it did not require much imagina-
tion to recognize and appreciate how impressive she must
have been at the peak of her powers, both in terms of the
extraordinary force of her intimidating personality and her
complete mastery of the business in hand.
By the time Thatcher died in 2013 she had been in public
life for more than forty years, she had been the dominant

ix
Preface

figure in Britain during the 1980s, I had seen how she had
been regarded on both sides of the Atlantic, and thanks to
my earlier encounters with Mrs Thurman I had, albeit
inadvertently, been given more than just an inkling of the
remarkable person that she undoubtedly was. So when, two
years ago, my colleagues at the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography urged that I should contribute the entry on her,
I found the invitation – and the challenge – irresistible. It
would be the largest entry for any twentieth-century prime
minister since Churchill’s, but with the added complication
that while some people regarded her, like him, as having
been the saviour of her country, others saw her in a com-
pletely different light. ‘Divisive’ was the word often used to
describe Thatcher, by friend and foe alike, during her decade
of power and on into her retirement, and it continues to be
applied in the years since her death. In writing my entry on
her, I sought to be as even-handed as possible, viewing her
with what I regard as a necessary and deserving combination
of sympathy (she was a major historical figure, with many
admirable qualities) and detachment (her critics, both inside
the Conservative Party and far beyond, often had a case,
although not invariably so).
While I was working on my ODNB entry, Oxford Univer-
sity Press also decided to publish it as a separate, stand-alone
volume. Although my essay on Thatcher is one of the largest
in the Dictionary, it makes for a relatively concise book when
put between hard covers. As many authors have observed,
from Pascal onwards, writing short carries with it as many
challenges as writing long, and having produced histories
and biographies not only at length but also more briefly,

x
 Preface

I am well aware of just how different those challenges are.

And while history and biography are often regarded as close
and kindred activities, anyone who has tried their hand at
both genres also knows that in some ways the approaches
and sensibilities they require are far from being the same. In
the pages that follow, I have tried to give fitting attention
to each stage of Thatcher’s remarkable career, and to do as
much justice as the constraints of space allowed to the many
issues by which she was preoccupied in her public life. I have
also sought to set her biography in a broader historical
context, and to view her prime ministership from the
longer-term perspective that is now available, more than
a quarter of a century since she ceased to hold the office.
As such, this slim volume makes no claim to anticipate
or provide the ‘full accounting’ of Judgment Day to which
Thatcher attached such importance, but it does offer
what I hope is a readable and reliable version of her life
for our times.
In writing the original ODNB entry, and in preparing it for
publication as a book, my first thanks go to my colleagues at
the Dictionary, Philip Carter, Mark Curthoys and (especially)
Alex May, and to Jo Payne of Oxford University Press, not
only for persuading me to take on this task, but also for their
sustained help, constant engagement, and encouraging sup-
port while I was discharging and completing it. Three exem-
plary Britons, namely Charles Moore, Stuart Proffitt, and
Peter Riddell, made detailed and penetrating comments
on my earlier drafts, correcting errors of fact, and greatly
improving my final text. Four good American friends, Gary
MacDowell, Emerson S. Moore, and Dan and Michelle

xi
Preface

Waterman, constantly reminded me of the importance of

the transatlantic dimension and perspective. Linda Colley
and I lived through most of the 1980s together, and much
that I have written here has been influenced by her views
and informed by her recollections. And from the beginning
to the end of this enterprise, the daunting and demanding
shade of Mrs Thurman has never been far away. I dare to
hope that she would have approved of the result, and that
she might even have recognized some reflections of herself
in the pages that follow.
David Cannadine
Princeton
13 October 2016

xii
 1
Bound for Politics,
1925–59

‘I did not grow up with the sense of division and

conflict between classes.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1995)1

‘[Margaret] always stood out because teenage girls

don’t know where they’re going. She did.’
(Shirley Ellis, a childhood friend)2

Grantham to Oxford

Margaret Hilda Roberts was born at 1 North Parade, Grantham,

Lincolnshire, on 13 October 1925, the younger daughter of
Alfred Roberts and his wife, Beatrice Ethel, née Stephenson.
Although she distanced herself from her hometown at the
earliest opportunity, and seldom felt nostalgic towards it in
her years of power and fame, Grantham was very important
in the life and mental make-up of the woman who achieved
national renown and international celebrity as ‘Mrs Thatcher’.
Situated at the north-eastern extremity of the English midlands,

1
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

Grantham was a provincial market town, on the main road

(A1) and the east coast railway line (LNER) from London to
Edinburgh, with a population holding steady at about
20,000 throughout the inter-war years. There was little by
way of heavy industry or a factory-based working class, and
its civic politics were largely consensual and non-partisan—
except, as Thatcher remembered and regretted, in the case of
the Labour Party. The local grandees were the Brownlows,
who lived nearby at Belton House, and the fifth Baron
Brownlow was serving as mayor of Grantham in 1925, the
year of Margaret’s birth. There was no large-scale unemploy-
ment of the kind that was found in the manufacturing
towns and cities of the north, but Grantham shared the
hardships of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and in the
economic recovery that came later in the years immediately
before the Second World War. Despite the excellent rail and
road connections north and south, the great cities of Lon-
don and Edinburgh were far away, not only geographically,
but culturally and socially as well.
Inter-war Grantham was a somewhat claustrophobic pool,
where Alfred Roberts was becoming a big fish when his
second daughter (he and Beatrice had no more children)
was born. His father had been a Northamptonshire boot-
maker, from whom he may have inherited his unostenta-
tious Liberal politics; and in his sustained determination to
improve himself, and to be of service to his fellow citizens,
Margaret’s father might have stepped straight from the
pages of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, a book which later
became talismanic to his younger daughter. He had left
school at thirteen because, being one of a large family, he

2
 Bound for Politics

needed to earn his living, and he went into the grocery

trade. But he was also eager to make his way in the world,
and this he did by voracious reading, and by his active
involvement in the Methodist church. By the time he
moved to Grantham and married Beatrice Stephenson, he
had saved enough money to acquire a shop on North Par-
ade, and not long before Margaret was born he opened a
second store on Huntingtower Road. From this base Alfred
Roberts launched himself into the civic life of the town: he
was a lay preacher at the Methodist chapel; he became a
Rotarian and a justice of the peace; he was a local councillor,
elected as an Independent; he was a governor of Kesteven
and Grantham Girls’ School; and he would later become an
alderman and serve as mayor of Grantham in 1945–6.
Margaret Roberts was born above the family shop, and her
upbringing was spartan: there was no garden, the lavatory
was outside, and there was no hot water. Her parents were
not rich, although the family business would prosper in a
modest sort of way. But Alfred Roberts loathed any form
of extravagance and hated anything that smacked of self-
indulgence. The domestic regime over which he presided
was austere and puritanical, joyless, and lacking in warmth.
At least twice every Sunday, Margaret and her sister, Muriel,
were taken to worship at the Finkin Street Methodist
Church, where their father often preached the sermon.
From an early age the girls were taught the importance of
order, precision, and attention to detail; they were escorted
on weekly visits to the local library to borrow improving
books; as soon as they were old enough, they served behind
the counter in the family shop; conversation at home was

3
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

earnest and high-minded; and Alfred and Beatrice rarely

took holidays. Thrift, hard work, self-help, self-reliance, and
self-improvement were the governing imperatives of the
Roberts household; duty invariably came before pleasure,
and public service before personal gratification. Integrity
mattered above all else, and it was important to hold opin-
ions because they were right, not because they were popular.
These were the lessons learned, and the virtues internal-
ized, by the young Margaret Roberts, and as prime minister
she would later celebrate them as the ‘Victorian values’
which she believed had made the United Kingdom great
in the past, and which under her leadership would make
it great again. ‘We were Methodists’, she would recall,
invoking one aspect of her father’s legacy, ‘and Methodist
means method’.3 ‘Those poor shopkeepers!’, she allegedly
exclaimed in the summer of 1981, invoking another,
on hearing of the damaged retail stores in the Toxteth
riots.4 When prime minister, Thatcher would declare
that she owed ‘almost everything’ to her father.5 Her rela-
tions with her mother were never as close. Yet Margaret
learned more from Beatrice than she would later admit, for
although she would never be a conventional housewife,
she liked to clean, to sew, and to decorate and furnish the
places where she lived; she would often provide late-night
meals for her personal staff at 10 Downing Street; and she
would elevate the domestic verities of hearth and home
into governing principles and political imperatives. ‘Some
say I preach merely the homilies of housekeeping or the
parables of the parlour’, she told the lord mayor’s banquet
in November 1982. ‘But I do not repent. Those parables

4
 Bound for Politics

would have saved many a financier from failure and many

a country from crisis’.6
Alfred Roberts was self-made and self-taught, but he was
determined that his daughters should be given every educa-
tional opportunity he had been denied. Both girls attended
the local primary school, and later went on to Kesteven and
Grantham Girls’ School, of whose governors Roberts would
eventually become chairman. Margaret won a scholarship,
she was serious, intelligent, competitive, and hard-working,
possessed great powers of concentration, and was already
hyperactive and seemed able to get by with very little sleep.
She kept her distance from the other girls, and in later life
would prefer the company of men to that of women; but
she also played hockey for the school team, liked dancing
and going to the cinema, and evinced an early interest in
elegant and stylish clothes. She also took elocution classes,
won prizes for recitations, and became a confident and
well-prepared debater. She sat her school certificate in the
summer of 1941, and obtained distinctions in chemistry,
arithmetic, and algebra. In the sixth form she specialized in
the sciences, particularly chemistry, because she believed
they were ‘the way of the future’ (and she may have been
influenced by the fact that Grantham’s most famous son
was Sir Isaac Newton). She also evinced a growing fascin-
ation with the law, from seeing her father in action at the
magistrates’ court.
Margaret Roberts was brighter, more energetic, and
more ambitious than her sister, Muriel (who was training
in Birmingham to be a physiotherapist), and with the
encouragement of her father she set her sights on gaining

5
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

a scholarship to Oxford University (the money would be

essential). She sat the exam for Somerville College in the
autumn of 1942, but narrowly failed to win an award;
instead she was offered an ordinary place for the autumn
of 1944, and resigned herself to filling in with an extra year
at school, of which she now became joint head girl. But
someone who had taken a place at Somerville for the
autumn of 1943 unexpectedly dropped out; it was offered
to Margaret Roberts and she accepted, her father being deter-
mined to pay the bills somehow. ‘Margaret’, her final school
report concluded, ‘is ambitious and deserves to do well’.7
She would become a lifelong admirer of grammar schools,
which she regarded as providing a ladder of opportunity
for people from unprivileged backgrounds, and when she
accepted a peerage in 1992 she took her territorial designa-
tion from her school, not from her home town. Yet this
would not prevent her, as secretary of state for education
between 1970 and 1974, from acquiescing, albeit reluc-
tantly, in the closure of more grammar schools than anyone
in her position has done, before or since.

The road to Westminster

Oxford would eventually provide the route whereby Margaret

Roberts escaped the cloying limitations of English provincial
life. But the ancient university town was far from Grantham
in more ways than one, and when she first appeared at Som-
erville, she had spent scarcely a night away from home. She
was initially apprehensive, homesick, and lonely, and having
failed to win a scholarship, was almost always short of

6
 Bound for Politics

money. Then, as later, her response to adversity was to work

harder than ever, and harder than anyone else. As at school,
she was an able and highly motivated student, but neither of
the academics with whom she came into the closest contact
considered her brilliant. Janet Vaughan, who became princi-
pal of Somerville in 1945, thought her ‘a perfectly good
second-class chemist’;8 while Dorothy Hodgkin, the future
Nobel laureate and probably the most eminent woman with
whom Margaret ever dealt (both would become members of
the Order of Merit), rated her as ‘good. One could always rely
on her producing a sensible, well-read essay’.9 Hodgkin
employed her as a research assistant during her fourth year,
and Margaret duly obtained a sound second-class degree. For
the rest of her life she retained a genuine interest in the
sciences. She would later claim that being the first prime
minister to have graduated in one of those subjects was a
more signal achievement than being the first woman to
occupy 10 Downing Street, and the speech she delivered to
the Royal Society in 1988 expressing concern about global
warming would be the first by a major world leader.
Somerville tended to be left-wing in its political sympa-
thies, and that was certainly true of Vaughan and Hodgkin.
But Margaret Roberts had already espoused a very different
creed, and once again her father was the formative figure.
By the mid-1930s Alfred Roberts had become a Conservative
in all but name: he disliked the Co-operative Party, which
controlled Labour in Grantham and was opposed to inde-
pendent shopkeepers like himself. At the general election
of 1935 he signed the nomination papers of the local Tory
candidate, Sir Victor Warrender, and at the time of Munich

7
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

he was an ardent supporter of Neville Chamberlain and his

policy of appeasement. Margaret Roberts absorbed most (but
not all) of her father’s views, and her first direct involvement
in politics was working for Warrender on polling day. At
Somerville she joined the Oxford University Conservative
Association and in her final year became its president, the
highest political office to which a woman undergraduate
could then aspire, since membership of the Oxford Union
was restricted to men. She met such leading Tories as Peter
Thorneycroft (whom she made party chairman in 1975); she
campaigned in the general election of 1945 for Quintin
Hogg (who as Lord Hailsham she would appoint as her
lord chancellor in 1979); she reorganized the University
Conservative Association and increased membership; and,
as a young ‘representative’, she began to attend national
gatherings of the party faithful.
By the time she left Oxford in the summer of 1947
Margaret Roberts was a very different person from the anx-
ious and lonely figure who had arrived at Somerville four
years earlier. She would never fully conquer the insecurities
deriving from her lowly born status, but she was already set
on a political career, and her views were conventionally
Conservative: strong admiration for Winston Churchill, a
firm belief in the greatness of Britain and its empire, support
for the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and William Bever-
idge on employment and social security, and dismay at
the outcome of the general election of 1945 (and she read
F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which attacked the idea of an
ever more intrusive state and reasserted the importance of
free-market freedom, although it made little impact on her

8
 Bound for Politics

at the time). But Oxford had not been all work and politics,
as she had discovered a broader and richer life than Gran-
tham had offered. For the University Conservative Associ-
ation was a social as well as a political organization, and
despite being constantly short of money, Margaret Roberts
enjoyed the dinners and the dances, and she always dressed
well, borrowing clothes and jewellery from her sister. Oxford
also provided her first boyfriends, and she took one of them,
Tony Bray, to Grantham, where he attended chapel with her
parents. But, by then, Margaret was distancing herself from
her family and her home-town, and although she remained
loyal to her father’s values and example her professional,
political, and personal lives would all be spent in London
and the south-east.
After graduation Margaret Roberts found work as a
research chemist, initially with British Xylonite Plastics,
located at Manningtree in Essex (which produced the mater-
ials for spectacle frames), and then with J. Lyons & Co. at
Hammersmith in London (where she tested the quality
of cake fillings and ice cream). But while these were her day
jobs, her real passion was politics, and thanks to the con-
nections she had made in Oxford, her assiduous attendance
at party conferences, and her impressive performance before
the selection committee, she was adopted as the prospective
parliamentary candidate for the Dartford constituency in
Kent. There was no chance that she would win, since it was
a safe Labour seat, but in the general elections of February
1950 and October 1951, when she was the youngest Conser-
vative candidate in the contests, she campaigned with energy
and determination, attracted considerable media attention,

9
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

and reduced the Labour majority from 19,714 in 1945 to

13,638 in 1950, and 12,334 the following year. (The seat
was to remain in Labour hands until the 1970 election.) She
also continued to mix politics and pleasure. One boyfriend
was a Scottish farmer, Willie Cullen, who would later marry
her sister, Muriel; another was a doctor, Robert Henderson,
who was twice her age. On the evening of her adoption
meeting for Dartford she met a man who was ‘very reserved
but quite nice’, with ‘plenty of money’, and who was ‘a
perfect gentleman’.10 His name was Denis Thatcher, and he
and Margaret were married on 13 December 1951.
Like several of the men with whom she had gone out,
Denis Thatcher was considerably older than the woman
who would one day make his name world famous. He had
attended a public school, and had served as a staff officer in
the army during the Second World War, when he was men-
tioned in dispatches. He was active in the Dartford Conser-
vative Association, but he had no political ambitions
for himself. By the time he met Margaret Roberts he was
the manager of a prosperous family business, which made
paints, wood preservers, deck cleaners, and industrial chem-
icals, and for which he had worked, apart from the war years,
since 1934. He had married Margaret Kempson in 1942,
but by the time he was demobilized in 1946 she had left
him for another man, and they divorced soon after. Denis
was determined to remarry, but his careful courtship of
Margaret Roberts lasted well over two years. Nor was she
initially smitten with him, as she had been with Robert
Henderson. But Denis was an ex-soldier, he was athletic
and well-dressed, he knew about business and money, he

10
 Bound for Politics

had a certain ‘style and dash’,11 and he drove a Jaguar.

Although Margaret was the better educated of the two,
Denis was much richer, and offered a passport to the home
counties identity and respectability she was determined to
acquire.
Her marriage transformed the second Margaret Thatcher’s
life, beginning with their honeymoon in Madeira, which was
the first time she had been abroad, and she soon completed
the task of distancing herself from her home, her family,
her class, and her religion (Margaret and Denis married
at Wesley’s Chapel in London’s City Road, but thereafter
moved towards the Church of England, and in her last years
she was a regular worshipper at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea).
Denis reinforced many of her political views, especially her
dislike of the Labour Party and trades unions, and her sup-
port for the British empire in general and for white South
Africa in particular. He also brought her the financial secur-
ity she had not previously known, and she would never
have to work for a living. But being a full-time housewife
held no allure, and she decided to read for the bar, enrolling
at the Inns of Court School of Law in early 1952. She passed
her exams in December 1953, was called to the bar by Lin-
coln’s Inn soon after, and specialized in the subject of tax
law. The experience of mastering complex financial argu-
ments would stand her in good stead in later life, and she
came to believe that the rule of law was an essential aspect of
freedom and democracy. In August 1953 she had given birth
to twins: Carol and Mark. Margaret and Denis were genu-
inely fond of their children, but he was often abroad on
business, and she was determined that they would neither

11
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

interfere with her legal activities nor thwart her political

ambitions. The Thatchers could afford ample childcare,
and Carol and Mark were sent away to school at the earliest
opportunity.
Thatcher had made her position plain on such matters in
an article in the Sunday Graphic published in February 1952.
Women, she believed, should not feel obliged to stay at
home: they should embrace careers, thereby developing tal-
ents and abilities that would otherwise be wasted. More of
them should go into politics, and if they were good enough,
they ought to rise to high office: perhaps to be chancellor of
the exchequer or foreign secretary (but that was as far as she
was willing to speculate). Later that year an event occurred
which Thatcher never forgot or forgave, and which further
turned her against her home town and also against Labour-
controlled local authorities. After thirty years of public ser-
vice Alderman Alfred Roberts was brutally thrown off the
Grantham town council by the controlling Labour group, in
an act which his daughter regarded as mean-spirited, vin-
dictive, and ungrateful. The following month, in June 1952,
she renewed her search for a constituency, and she applied
unsuccessfully for several seats in the south-east. But her
persistence paid off, and in March 1958 she was shortlisted
for the safe Conservative seat of Finchley, a moderately
prosperous, petit bourgeois, owner-occupied London suburb,
with a significant Jewish population. She was adopted, and
at the general election of October 1959 she increased the
previous majority of 12,825 to 16,260. From this secure and
impregnable base, she would launch and sustain the most
extraordinary political career of modern times.

12
 2
Unexpected Leader,
1959–79

‘I think it would be extremely difficult for a woman to

make it to the top.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1974)1

‘I doubt that most of the Tory MPs who had voted for
Thatcher at the time understood quite what they had
done; perhaps she did not understand it herself.’
(William Waldegrave, 2015)2

MP to secretary of state

Margaret Thatcher was one of only twelve women Conser-

vative MPs among the Commons intake of 1959, but unlike
the rest of them she hit the ground running. By good for-
tune she immediately came second in the annual ballot for
parliamentary time to sponsor a private member’s bill,
which meant she introduced her first piece of legislation in
her maiden speech on 5 February 1960. The aim of the
measure was to prevent local councils from excluding the

13
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

press from their meetings, as some of them, usually Labour-

controlled, had recently been doing. It was an early example
of Thatcher’s abiding hostility to organized labour and trade
union power, and her speech introducing the bill was widely
praised for its command of detail, and for the fluency and
conviction with which she delivered it. In October 1961 the
prime minister, Harold Macmillan, appointed her parlia-
mentary secretary to the minister of pensions, the lowliest
rung on the government ladder, and a post usually given to
a woman, because pensions, like education, were deemed a
‘feminine’ subject. Thatcher rapidly mastered the complex-
ities of such arcane issues as national insurance, and on the
whole took a favourable view of her officials; indeed the
permanent secretary, Sir Eric Bowyer, rather admired her.
For three years Thatcher continued her work at the Min-
istry of Pensions. Despite some qualms that public spending
was increasing too much, she generally went along with
government policies, including the decision to apply to
join the Common Market. She thought Macmillan was los-
ing his grip by the end of his premiership, and she became a
strong supporter of the fourteenth earl of Home as his suc-
cessor in October 1963. At the general election of October
1964, which Labour won by the slimmest of margins, she
easily held Finchley, but with her majority reduced to 8,802.
Soon after, Denis suffered a nervous breakdown, and for a
time the Thatchers’ marriage seemed in jeopardy. The man-
agement of the family company was becoming increasingly
burdensome; he had a mother, a sister, and an aunt to look
after; and Margaret’s hyper-energy and almost complete
absorption in politics left him exhausted, lonely, and

14
 Unexpected Leader

confused. Later in 1964 Denis sailed to South Africa, where

he stayed for two months: neither he nor Margaret knew
whether he would return to her. It was the greatest crisis of
their marriage; but Denis came back, and soon afterwards he
sold the family company to Castrol on very advantageous
terms, and they immediately re-employed him. Castrol was
later taken over by Burmah Oil, of which Denis became a
director, and he eventually retired in 1975, the same year
that Margaret would win the Conservative Party leadership.
From 1964 to 1970 the Tories were in opposition, and Sir
Alec Douglas-Home (as the earl of Home had become on
disclaiming his peerage) resigned as party leader in July
1965. The effective choice as his successor was between
Reginald Maudling and Edward Heath, and Thatcher voted
for Heath because she thought he would be better at taking
on the Labour leader, Harold Wilson. During her years in
opposition she held six shadow posts. She was a junior
spokesman for pensions, then housing and land (from
October 1965), then Treasury affairs (after the general elec-
tion of March 1966, when she bucked the national trend by
increasing her majority to 9464); on being promoted to
the shadow cabinet in October 1967 she was successively
responsible for fuel and power, transport (from November
1968), and finally education (from October 1969). She
mastered these many different briefs with varying enthu-
siasm, but she engaged with all of them with unfailing
energy, application, and efficiency. Her combative Commons
performances consistently impressed by her command
of detail and her fearless determination to take on some
of Labour’s biggest names over such controversial issues as

15
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

the imposition of selective employment tax. But the chem-

istry between Thatcher and Heath did not work, as her
undeniable assertiveness grated with his incorrigible abra-
siveness, and he promoted her only belatedly and grudg-
ingly to the shadow cabinet, fearing—rightly, as it turned
out—that ‘we’ll never be able to get rid of her’.3
Being in opposition also gave Thatcher the freedom to
undertake extensive foreign travel for the first time: not for
self-indulgent holidays, but for serious and self-improving
purposes. She visited Israel, Sweden, and the Soviet Union,
but she paid little heed to the heartlands of Europe, and her
two longest and most important trips were to the United
States, in 1967 and 1969. Official Washington did not con-
sider her sufficiently significant to put itself out for her, but
she travelled widely across the country, and found America
exciting and enthralling. She liked the welcoming warmth
of its people; she admired their entrepreneurial energy,
their belief in the free market, and their determined and
simultaneous pursuit of wealth and self-improvement;
and she thought Britain might learn from the example of a
governing and fiscal regime that was less intrusive in its
reach and less punitive in its taxation. These were scarcely
original or nuanced views of a vast and varied country; but
to Thatcher, America’s values and aspirations bore a striking
resemblance to those she had learned at her father’s knee,
and the United States would become the model for what she
wanted to achieve in Britain. Yet while America offered
international validation for the corner-shop culture with
which she had grown up in Grantham, her ties to her home
town and family further attenuated as her own horizons

16
 Unexpected Leader

widened. Alfred Roberts saw little of his daughter in his later

years, and he died in February 1970, a few months before
she entered the cabinet.
When the Conservatives won the general election held in
June 1970, Thatcher was the obvious choice to be Heath’s
secretary of state for education: she had held the shadow
portfolio, and since it was thought necessary to have at least
one woman in the cabinet she had the most commanding
claim. She was not a transformative departmental minister:
she had no developed philosophy of education, beyond an
abiding loyalty to grammar schools and a belief in the
importance of élite universities, and she neither initiated
any major reforms nor carried any significant legislation.
She was impressive but not visionary, mastering the busi-
ness, combative in the Commons, and successfully fending
off the persistent Treasury demands that expenditure be
reined in. Indeed, Thatcher wanted more money for her
department, not less, as was set out in the policy document
Education: a Framework for Expansion (Cmnd 5174), pub-
lished in December 1972, which advocated and predicted a
massive rise in government spending on education over the
next decade. Her determination and energy earned her the
respect of her civil servants, but not their affection. Unlike at
pensions, she did not think much of them. She thought the
ethos of the department was ‘self-righteously socialist’,4 and
she regarded the permanent secretary, Sir William Pile, as
condescending and disloyal, and she vainly sought to get
him replaced.
Thatcher’s first decision as secretary of state was to cancel
Circular 10/65, by which the previous Labour government

17
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

had tried to force local authorities to embrace comprehen-

sive schooling. But the tide was running so strongly in that
direction that both Labour- and Conservative-controlled
councils continued to submit comprehensive schemes, and
she had little power to resist them. She rejected only 326 of
the 3,612 proposals she received, and the proportion of
pupils in England and Wales attending comprehensives
rose from 32 to 62 per cent during her tenure. She also
continued the policies of the Labour government by saving
the Open University, which Harold Wilson had established
in 1969: many of her cabinet colleagues wanted it closed
down, but she believed it extended educational oppor-
tunity. Within a year of taking office Thatcher became
embroiled in her first public controversy, when she sought
to abolish free milk for schoolchildren between the ages of
seven and eleven, so as to make some short-term savings.
The proposal aroused a storm of protest from the Labour
opposition and the popular press; she was denounced as
‘Mrs Thatcher, the milk-snatcher’, and declared to be ‘The
Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.5 The attacks hit her
hard; she briefly thought of leaving politics altogether, and
Heath considered sacking her. It later transpired that her
civil servants had failed to warn her of the likely public
fallout. This was the first time, but not the last, that she
was let down by poor staff work.
The ‘milk-snatcher’ fiasco seemed to vindicate Heath’s
view that education would be the highest office Thatcher
would achieve in public life. Despite the importance that
was attached to schooling in post-war Britain, the depart-
ment was widely regarded as a dead-end ministerial post,

18
 Unexpected Leader

whether held by a man or a woman. To be sure, it had a large

(and growing) budget; but this was primarily spent on
buildings and infrastructure. In schools the employment of
teachers and the control of the curriculum remained local
authority matters; and in higher education the University
Grants Committee had been created to keep the government
at arm’s length. From the outset of her tenure Thatcher
regretted these constraints, and after two years, by which
time the ‘milk-snatcher’ affair had largely subsided, she han-
kered for a more ‘mainline’ job. But Heath declined to
promote her, and education would be the only ministerial
portfolio she would hold before she became party leader.
Thereafter she kept her head down and avoided controversial
subjects, concentrating on expanding nursery education,
funding more primary schools, raising the school leaving
age from fifteen to sixteen, and establishing more polytech-
nics. (Despite her close involvement with the state sector
Margaret and Denis sent their own children to be edu-
cated privately: Carol at St Paul’s Girls’ School, and Mark
at Harrow.)
But while Thatcher was minding her own business at
education, Heath’s government was running into serious
trouble. He had come to power determined to get the United
Kingdom into the Common Market, which he duly did,
and he was also eager to shrink the state and free up the
economy. Yet he soon abandoned these domestic policies.
In 1971 the cabinet rescued Rolls-Royce and the upper
Clyde shipyards, despite an earlier undertaking never to
bail out such ‘lame ducks’. Early in the following year the
miners went on strike, and Britain was reduced to working a

19
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

three-day week. They won a 20 per cent pay rise, in response

to which Heath imposed a statutory freeze on wages and
prices. His attempts to curb growing trade union militancy by
legislation were unsuccessful, inflation reached double-digit
levels, the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East
meant oil prices would almost quadruple between October
1973 and January 1974, and by then the miners were prepared
to do battle again. In cabinet Thatcher spoke out against
trade union militancy, state support for lame ducks, and
the prices and incomes policy; but she gained little traction,
and in public she defended this succession of policy U-turns.
In February 1974 Heath called a general election, fought
on the question ‘Who governs Britain?’, in which Thatcher
played no prominent national part. Her Finchley majority
was almost halved, from 11,185 to 5,978, and although the
Tories gained a larger share of the national vote, they won
four fewer seats than Labour. Heath failed to form a coalition
with the Liberals, he resigned on 4 March, and Thatcher
again found herself in opposition.

Party leader to prime minister

Wilson formed a minority government; Heath determined

to remain Conservative leader, despite mounting back-bench
criticism, and he gave Thatcher the environment portfolio
in his shadow cabinet. In discussing the manifesto for
the next election, which it was widely recognized must
come soon, she reluctantly agreed to propose that the mort-
gage rate (then at an unprecedented 11 per cent) should
never go above 9.5 per cent. Yet she was privately unhappy

20
 Unexpected Leader

with this policy, which portended further state interven-

tion; and her free-market misgivings were corroborated
and encouraged by her friend Sir Keith Joseph and the
Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) which he now established,
and of which Thatcher became vice-chairman. Urged on by
Joseph, the CPS began to adumbrate a new Conservative
philosophy, which distanced itself from all Tory administra-
tions since 1951, including Heath’s. Nationalization, state
intervention, prices and incomes policies, and irresponsible
public spending were all denounced as the negation of the
true Conservative principles of free enterprise, a minimalist
state, and the strict regulation of public spending. Moreover,
unemployment was no longer the main threat to prosperity
and stability, as it had been during the inter-war years. The
great danger was inflation; and the solution was for govern-
ments to stop printing more money, as they had done since
the late 1950s, and to start printing less.
Encouraged by Joseph, Thatcher began to question the
basis of Conservative politics that had prevailed since she
had entered public life; she re-read Hayek and devoured
more recent works by such writers as Milton Friedman;
and she engaged with the free-market ideas being put
forward by Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon at the Institute
of Economic Affairs. But in public she kept close to her
shadow responsibilities, and barely expressed any dissent
from the leadership. When Wilson called another general
election for mid-October 1974, Thatcher’s specific policy
promises (to introduce the right to buy for council house
tenants, to keep mortgage rates below 9.5 per cent, and to
replace the domestic rates with a fairer system of local

21
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

taxation) were almost the only ones put forward in the

Conservative campaign. But she was less enamoured of
the manifesto commitment to a prices and incomes policy,
and she was especially annoyed at Heath’s call for a gov-
ernment of ‘national unity’, making it plain that she would
not sit round a cabinet table with such left-wing politicians
as Michael Foot and Tony Benn. Nor did it seem likely that
Heath himself, who had become such a divisive figure, could
lead an administration pledged to cross-party consensus. In
the end Labour gained an overall Commons majority of
three, the Conservatives lost twenty seats, and Thatcher
held Finchley by only 3,911 votes. Like many Conservatives
she believed that Heath had to go, and she hoped Joseph
would succeed him.
But Heath refused to stand down, and there was no formal
procedure for challenging, or deposing, an incumbent Tory
leader. He grudgingly conceded that the rules should be
changed, and following the adoption of recommendations
from a review chaired by Douglas-Home an election was
scheduled for February 1975, in which only Tory MPs
would vote. The first casualty of the jockeying to succeed
Heath was Joseph, who in a speech nine days after the
general election made some ill-judged remarks about the
intellectual and moral shortcomings of those at the lower
end of the social scale. There was a press and public outcry,
Joseph recognized that he could never win the Conservative
leadership, and Thatcher resolved to stand in his stead.
None of Heath’s former cabinet colleagues was prepared to
oppose him, and she began to gather support from back-
bench MPs who had had enough of his rudeness and

22
 Unexpected Leader

failures, and who admired her pluck in standing against

him. Thatcher’s campaign was expertly organized by the
back-bench MP Airey Neave, whereas Heath was merely
bad-tempered and resentful, mistakenly believing the lead-
ership would remain his. On the first ballot, held on 4 Feb-
ruary, she won 130 votes to Heath’s 119. Under the new
rules this was an insufficient majority, but Heath immedi-
ately resigned, never to hold office again, and his former
deputy, Willie Whitelaw, declared himself the candidate of
unity and moderation. But Thatcher’s bandwagon could not
be stopped, and on the second ballot, held on 11 February,
she beat Whitelaw by 146 votes to 79. It was a conclusive
victory, and at the age of forty-nine, she became the first
woman leader of a British political party.
Thatcher had been elected more because she was not
Heath, a difference which he gender advantageously em-
phasized, than because she offered alternative policies.
Most Tory MPs did not know what she thought on most
issues, or how much her ideas had been evolving in private
in recent months. Moreover, her shadow cabinet looked
very much like Heath’s, with the predictable exception
that he was not in it. (Heath never forgave Thatcher
for supplanting him, and would be her implacable but
increasingly impotent enemy for the rest of his days.) The
majority of her senior colleagues had remained his loyal
supporters until the end, and only one of them, Joseph, had
voted for her. So despite her victory in the leadership elec-
tion, Thatcher was in a weak position, for while her sex had
been an asset in differentiating her from Heath, it proved less
of an advantage once she had assumed the party leadership.

23
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

Tory grandees such as Lord Carrington, Sir Ian Gilmour,

Christopher Soames, and Whitelaw looked down on her, on
account of her gender and her lowly social origins, condes-
censions vividly articulated in Whitelaw’s description of her
as ‘governessy’.6 It was the same in the Conservative Research
Department, presided over by Chris Patten, where Thatcher
was referred to as ‘Hilda’ or ‘milk-snatcher’.7 And many Tory
MPs, drawn from the male worlds of public schools, regi-
ments, professions, boardrooms, and clubs, soon began to
wonder what they had been doing when they voted for her.
During her early months as Conservative leader Thatcher
was very much on probation. When Wilson called a refer-
endum on Britain’s continued membership of the Common
Market, she favoured staying in, but she left most of the
campaigning to Heath, which put him back in the limelight,
and for a brief time in a positive way. Although Wilson was
not the man he had been in the 1960s he was still clever and
cunning enough to get the better of Thatcher at prime
minister’s question time, while his successor from April
1976, James Callaghan, who had already been chancellor of
the exchequer, home secretary, and foreign secretary, patron-
ized her unrelentingly for her lack of experience of high office
and in international affairs. She could not command the
overwhelmingly male-dominated Commons, and nor was
she in full control of her own party’s policy-making process,
as revealed in two papers published by Conservative Central
Office, The Right Approach (1976) and The Right Approach to
the Economy (1977). They made a definite commitment to ‘the
firm management of government expenditure’,8 but there
was no comparable undertaking to tackle the trades unions,

24
 Unexpected Leader

while returning nationalized industries to the private sector

rated scarcely a mention. They were cautious and pragmatic
documents rather than ideological and crusading manifestos.
At this point Thatcher did not seem a plausible prime
minister in waiting, and nor, in her public views, was she a
Thatcherite avant la lettre. But as always she was determined
to improve and do better. She took advice from Gordon
Reece, a former television producer, about her clothes and
appearance, and worked with a voice coach at the National
Theatre to lower her pitch and soften her tone. She made
two speeches denouncing the Soviet Union for being set on
world domination, in response to which the Russian media
dubbed her the ‘Iron Lady’—much to her delight. She trav-
elled widely in Europe, the Middle East, south Asia, and the
Far East; she twice returned to the United States, where she
was taken more seriously than on previous visits; and in
April 1975 she met Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood
actor and governor of California, and by then a presidential
hopeful. She hired an advertising agency, run by the broth-
ers Charles and Maurice Saatchi, to handle the party’s public
relations, and they would coin for her the election-winning
slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’. The Conservatives gradually
gained ground in the polls, and Callaghan made a fatal error
in not calling an election in the autumn of 1978, preferring to
wait until the following spring. But the months in between
became known as the ‘winter of discontent’, as a succession
of destructive strikes by workers in the private and public
sectors, demanding inflationary wage claims, meant that for
weeks refuse went uncollected, graves went undug, ambu-
lances did not turn out, and petrol stations closed.

25
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

By then Callaghan seemed no more in control of events

than Heath had been five years before. Once again the gov-
ernment’s survival was threatened by militant industrial
action and by the soaring pay claims of the trades unions,
and these spelled the end of Labour’s attempts to establish
a voluntary incomes policy with their co-operation. Prices
and wages were rising, and inflation was increasing; but
so, too, was unemployment. This was a new and ominous
phenomenon, to which the name ‘stagflation’ was applied,
and it presented an unprecedented challenge to conven-
tional Keynesian economics, according to which stagnation
(when unemployment rose) and inflation (when prices rose)
were not supposed to co-exist. As Callaghan reluctantly
recognized, this meant it was no longer possible for the
government to spend its way out of recession, because
pumping more money into the economy would merely
drive up prices still further. Instead, and as Joseph and the
CPS had already recognized, Callaghan and his chancellor,
Denis Healey, concluded that the only option left was to try
to bring down inflation by restricting the money supply. But
although this major change in government policy had been
embraced before the Tories regained office and would claim
it as their own, it would not save the visibly disintegrating
Labour administration. On 30 March 1979 Thatcher carried
a no-confidence motion by 311 votes to 310, Callaghan
announced that he would be seeking an early election, and
parliament was dissolved.
At the beginning of the ensuing campaign the Conservatives
were fourteen points ahead of Labour in the polls, although
Thatcher’s personal rating lagged behind Callaghan’s until

26
 Unexpected Leader

election day itself. The Tory manifesto contained few specific

commitments: business and free enterprise would be encour-
aged, income tax cut, public borrowing reduced, and the
money supply more strictly controlled. But there was no out-
right opposition to an incomes policy, the trades unions were
not targeted for significant reform, and there was scarcely any
mention of the privatization of nationalized industry. Thatcher
fought a vigorous and energetic campaign, in which she de-
nounced the government’s dismal record, and declared that
Labour was no longer competent to rule. She also played
the patriotic card, lamenting that a once great country had
been brought so low, and expressing her firm conviction that
national decline could be reversed and Britain’s greatness
restored. Callaghan retorted that voting for the Tories, and for
their untried leader, was too big a gamble. But the electorate
disregarded his warning and returned the Conservatives with
an overall majority of forty-three; Thatcher herself more than
doubled her own majority in Finchley, to 7,878. On 4 May
1979 she became prime minister, confounding her own earlier
predictions as to what any woman might achieve in British
politics during her lifetime. From the steps of 10 Downing
Street she promised, in words erroneously attributed to St
Francis of Assisi, to replace discord with harmony, error with
truth, doubt with faith, and despair with hope.

27
 3
Challenging Beginnings,
1979–81

‘I do not greatly care what people say about me . . . This

is the road I am resolved to follow. This is the path
I must go.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1981)1

‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting

evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating
demand, they will bring inflation permanently under
control, and thereby introduce an automatic recovery
in output and employment.’
(364 economists, letter to The Times, 30 March 1981)

Domestic travails

The Thatchers moved into the small flat atop their official
residence: as in Grantham, Margaret was again living over
the shop. Yet, despite her confident manner and determined
public demeanour, she was genuinely unsure of herself now
that she had obtained the supreme office. She had never

28
 Challenging Beginnings

held a senior post in government, her ideas as to what she

would do were not thought through, and many in the
media and the corridors of power regarded her as a jarring
and untried extremist who would not last. Moreover, and
like Churchill in 1940 (a comparison she would have rel-
ished), Thatcher was far from being in command of her
cabinet. She kept Heath out, and he scornfully rejected
her strange offer of the Washington embassy. Whitelaw
had pledged his support as soon as Thatcher became Tory
leader; she made him home secretary and de facto deputy
prime minister, and he never let her down. She also gave her
two closest allies senior posts: Geoffrey Howe was made
chancellor of the exchequer, and Joseph became secretary
of state for industry. But most of her appointments were of
Heathite, ‘One Nation’ Tories: Carrington at the Foreign
Office, Francis Pym at defence, Michael Heseltine at environ-
ment, Peter Walker at agriculture, Jim Prior at employment,
Gilmour as lord privy seal, Soames as lord president, and
Hailsham as lord chancellor.
This was scarcely a government of like-minded colleagues,
and Thatcher only got her way on controversial matters
of economic policy by ensuring they were never openly
discussed in the full cabinet during her first year in office.
She faced similar challenges in bending the machinery
of government to her will: at education she had formed a
low opinion of civil servants, whom she regarded as more
concerned with thwarting change than with helping
ministers to implement it. But she was able to counter
this Whitehall inertia by her sheer energy and force of per-
sonality: she read all the papers she was sent, and often

29
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

returned them covered with critical comments; and she

made unannounced visits to the outposts of Whitehall to
find out what was going on. Not since Churchill had an
incoming prime minister kicked the civil service so hard
and worked it so unrelentingly. Yet despite her generally
hostile attitude to the men in Whitehall, Thatcher also
came to appreciate, and to depend on, the skills and support
provided by her two long-serving cabinet secretaries, succes-
sively Sir Robert Armstrong (1979–87) and Sir Robin Butler
(1988–90). She also appointed a loyal and bluff Yorkshire-
man, Bernard Ingham, as her press secretary, and Ian Gow as
her devoted parliamentary private secretary; between them
they kept her in close touch with the media and back-bench
Tory opinion.
Although Thatcher had been elected on the promise of
making a definite break with the failures of the Wilson,
Heath, and Callaghan administrations, there were many
indications, during the early years of her government, that
little had changed for the better. By the end of 1979 infla-
tion was forecast to reach an even higher level, and business
confidence had collapsed since the election. By the summer
of 1980 prices had risen 22 per cent in only a single year, and
wages by almost as much. By the spring of 1981 gross
domestic product was down 5.5 per cent in two years,
and unemployment stood at 2.7 million, an increase of
one million in the previous twelve months. There were
strikes in the steel industry ending with a 16 per cent pay
award, and by civil servants, which meant the payment
of pensions and family allowances, and the collection of
income tax, were for a time in jeopardy. Faced with the

30
 Challenging Beginnings

threat of further industrial action by the miners and their

allies, Thatcher overruled the National Coal Board’s plan to
close twenty-three uneconomic pits and lose 13,000 jobs: it
was a humiliating about-face. Despite his free-market convic-
tions Joseph agreed to bail out the ailing car-manufacturing
conglomerate, British Leyland, at a cost that would eventu-
ally be in excess of £1 billion, and while Prior’s Employment
Act of 1980 made it more difficult for trades unions to intro-
duce the closed shop, and outlawed secondary picketing, it
did little to curb labour militancy.
Nevertheless, Thatcher and Howe were determined to
signal that they were going to change course decisively,
even though it had been during the final months of the
Callaghan government that inflation had been identified
as the great enemy, and the restricting of public spending
proposed as the remedy. For they were also hostile to high
taxes, and were determined to subject the British economy
to the much-needed and bracing discipline of the free mar-
ket. In his first budget, delivered in June 1979, Howe cut the
standard rate of income tax from 33 to 30 per cent, and the
top rate from 83 to 60 per cent; public spending was reduced
by 3 per cent; and to balance the books, value added tax was
almost doubled, from 8 to 15 per cent. This significant break
with the recent past was justified on the grounds that since
every other remedy had been tried and failed, there was ‘no
alternative’. In October 1979 Howe announced the com-
plete lifting of exchange controls, which meant that in
future the value of sterling would be determined by the
foreign exchange markets, and the government would no
longer step in to defend the pound. The following month, in

31
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

a further effort to rein in the money supply, interest rates

were raised from 14 to 17 per cent, the highest level ever;
and in the budget he presented in March 1980 Howe reiter-
ated the government’s commitment to reducing public
spending and announced further cuts.
Yet in the short run these policies intensified the very
economic ills it was claimed they would cure. Raising value
added tax and interest rates fuelled inflation, and pro-
voked renewed calls for increased wage settlements, while
it also weakened consumer demand. At the same time
the free-floating pound initially rose in value on the foreign
exchange markets, because of high interest rates, which
made British exports less competitive, and further damaged
industrial output. Unemployment kept rising, and the
economy continued to contract, but Thatcher was adamant
that, unlike Heath, she would not change course. As she told
the Tory party conference in October 1980: ‘You turn if you
want to. The lady’s not for turning’.2 The next March,
Howe presented his third budget, which cut spending
and increased taxes when the economy was still in its down-
ward spiral. Government borrowing would be reduced by
£3.5 billion; a one-off windfall tax was announced on cer-
tain bank deposits; the personal allowance on income tax
was not increased; and duties on petrol, cigarettes, and alco-
hol were raised. The only consolation was that interest rates,
already lowered from their earlier record level, were further
reduced to 12 per cent. But Howe conceded that unemploy-
ment would rise to three million; his budget was not well
received; and 364 economists wrote to The Times warning
that ‘present policies will deepen the depression, erode the

32
 Challenging Beginnings

industrial base of our economy, and threaten its social and

political stability’.3
During her first years in office Thatcher was preoccupied
with trying to get the economy right, but there were two
other areas of domestic policy in which she was also
closely involved. The first, which would be of lasting sig-
nificance, concerned the sale of council houses. The dream
of ‘a property-owning democracy’ had long been a Tory
nostrum, and Thatcher sympathized with the aspirations
of those who lived in local authority accommodation but
who wished to purchase their homes. The Housing Act of
1980, steered through parliament by Heseltine, gave five
million council house tenants ‘the right to buy’, and at the
end of the first Thatcher administration nearly half a million
families had availed themselves of its provisions. Her sec-
ond additional domestic concern was Northern Ireland—a
subject on which she had no thought-out policy, beyond a
kind of instinctive unionism. She was determined never
to yield to Irish nationalist terrorism (the more so after
Airey Neave had been assassinated in March 1979, just
before she became prime minister), but she also recog-
nized that Dublin and Washington had serious interests
in this issue. She faced down the first round of hunger
strikes by IRA prisoners (who were demanding ‘political’
status) in December 1980, and in the same month she led a
British delegation to Dublin to meet with Charles Haughey,
the taoiseach. The meeting was inconclusive, and it was
scarcely coincidence that by then Thatcher, beset by domes-
tic travails, was increasingly involving herself in foreign
policy matters.

33
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

International initiations

When she became prime minister Thatcher had no first-

hand experience of high-level diplomacy. She wanted to
make Britain great again, not only domestically but inter-
nationally too; but she had little idea of how to go about
doing so. As a committed cold war warrior she had delivered
some powerful speeches, denouncing communism and the
Soviet Union, and she was an ardent admirer of the United
States. Although she had supported British entry she was less
enamoured of the Common Market than Heath, and she
would not warm to President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of
France. She had little time for the Commonwealth, and
least of all for its African leaders, who disliked her sympathy
for white South Africans, and she was unimpressed by the
United Nations, which she scorned as no more than a talk-
ing shop. She also regarded the Foreign Office mandarins as
incorrigible appeasers who were insufficiently attentive to
defending the national interest. But it was a sign of her lack
of sure-footedness that she had appointed Carrington to be
her foreign secretary, for he was an authentic grandee, with
liberal values and paternalistic instincts, and he had been a
close ally and supporter of Heath (as had Gilmour who, as
lord privy seal, represented the Foreign Office in the Com-
mons). But Carrington was also well travelled, the chemistry
with Thatcher worked, and he was the only member of her
cabinet who could tease her and get away with it.
From the outset Carrington sought to guide and educate
Thatcher in the subtleties and complexities of inter-
national affairs, and to rein in her more belligerent views

34
 Challenging Beginnings

and confrontational instincts. He did not always succeed,

but in the case of Rhodesia, which was the United King-
dom’s last remaining imperial entanglement in Africa, he
soon did. Since 1965, when Ian Smith, on behalf of the
white settler minority, had unilaterally declared independ-
ence, successive attempts to end the minority regime and
reach a settlement had failed. The country was ravaged by a
long-running civil war; the Commonwealth was divided as
to what to do; the Tory right was against any ‘sell out’ of
their ‘kith and kin’ to the African nationalists; and it was
unwilling to support the renewal of sanctions. Carrington
was determined to resolve the matter, but this meant tak-
ing Thatcher in a direction she did not wish to go, by
recognizing that the leaders of the Rhodesian Patriotic
Front, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, for whom she
had no sympathy, must be involved in any final settle-
ment. The Rhodesia issue dominated the Commonwealth
heads of government meeting at Lusaka in August 1979
where, at the beginning, Thatcher and such African leaders
as Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Julius Nyerere of Tanza-
nia were a long way apart. But Carrington persuaded her
to accept an agreement whereby Britain would host a
constitutional conference involving all interested parties,
install a temporary governor, supervise a general election
in which all Africans would vote, and police the transition
to independence.
Thatcher was not wholly happy with the deal struck at
Lusaka, but she left the conference more popular than when
she had arrived; despite her misgivings, she defended it in
public as offering the only way forward, and faced down the

35
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

Tory party’s Rhodesia lobby. The constitutional conference,

presided over by Carrington, took place at Lancaster House
between September and December, and Thatcher again re-
fused to support last-minute appeals on behalf of the white
settlers. Instead she sent out Soames, as interim governor,
even as the civil war was still raging; but he successfully over-
saw an election held in February 1980, and two months later
formally transferred power to an independent Zimbabwe.
The result, and largely thanks to Carrington and Soames, was
Thatcher’s first triumph in foreign affairs, as the Rhodesian
issue appeared to have been belatedly solved. Yet there was
concern that the wrong man had won the election, for the
Foreign Office much preferred Nkomo to Mugabe, believing
he would be more conciliatory. But Mugabe won, and long
after Thatcher had left power he would become increas-
ingly intransigent and authoritarian. She, meanwhile, was
never fully reconciled to the political fix she had agreed, later
lamenting that Britain had sold out the white Rhodesian set-
tlers for nothing more than a short-term deal. Nevertheless, at
the time she had gone along with a very ‘pragmatic’ solution.
In dealing with the European Communities (EC), Thatcher
was more intransigent, although not in the first instance
successfully. In 1978 British membership had cost £800
million; the following year it was heading towards £1 billion.
This was too much: Thatcher was becoming increasingly
suspicious of the unelected and unaccountable Brussels bur-
eaucracy; and these attitudes played well in the popular press,
at a time when she needed some popularity. She demanded a
substantial rebate in the British contribution, and at the
meeting of the EC leaders in Dublin in November 1979 she

36
 Challenging Beginnings

subjected them to a hectoring and undiplomatic harangue

the like of which none of them had heard before at such a
gathering. She refused the eleventh-hour proposal of a £350
million cut, but agreed the matter should be discussed again at
later meetings. In Luxembourg the following April the EC offer
to Britain was increased to £760 million, and in May 1980 an
outline settlement between Britain and the EC was negotiated
by Carrington and Gilmour, which was a further improve-
ment on the Luxembourg figure. Thatcher declared the terms
unacceptable; but Carrington and Gilmour took the fight to
the cabinet where, to her rage and dismay, they prevailed,
and the terms of the agreement were accepted.
Thatcher’s experiences at Lusaka and Dublin reinforced
her low opinions of the African leaders of the Common-
wealth and of the dominant Franco-German axis in the
EC. From the beginning of her premiership she was also
determined to challenge Moscow, and in more confronta-
tional terms than the Foreign Office recommended. In June
1979 she met the Soviet prime minister, Alexi Kosygin, in
Moscow, en route to the economic summit in Tokyo: she
more than held her own with him. Six months later, the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan, which Thatcher regarded as an
even more blatant act of aggression than the occupation of
Czechoslovakia eleven years before. But her attempts to urge
a co-ordinated Western response, including a systematic
boycott of the Olympic games to be held in Moscow the
following year, met with little success. As an ardent transat-
lanticist Thatcher looked on Britain’s relationship with the
United States as more friendly and important than that with
any other country; but she regarded President Jimmy Carter

37
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

as weak and indecisive, and with no vision for America’s

future. Nevertheless, she sought to establish cordial relations
in what would be the closing months of his one term of
office. At the end of 1979, when Carter was mired in the Iran
hostage crisis, she made a cheerleading visit to Washington;
and while he regarded her as ‘highly opinionated [and]
strong willed’,4 he admired her leadership and loyalty.
Thatcher’s great Anglo-American opportunity came when
Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in the election of November
1980, and the following February she again flew to Washing-
ton as (almost) the first foreign head of government to see the
newly inaugurated president. In many ways they were very
different figures: he was sunny, genial, charming, relaxed,
upbeat, and with little intellectual curiosity or command of
policy detail; she was domineering, belligerent, confronta-
tional, tireless, hyperactive, and with an unrivalled command
of facts and figures. But the chemistry between them worked.
Reagan had been grateful for her interest in him at a time
when the British establishment refused to take him seriously;
she agreed with him about the importance of creating wealth,
cutting taxes, and building up stronger defences against
Soviet Russia; and both believed in liberty and free-market
freedom, and in the need to outface what Reagan would later
call ‘the evil empire’.5 There were those in his administration
who thought her policies were not working, while she wor-
ried that the president wanted to cut taxes by too much. But
her visit was a huge success: she wowed Washington with her
energy and glamour; she consolidated her rapport with
the president; and it gave her a much-needed boost when
her standing at home was at its nadir.

38
 4
Victory Overseas,
1981–83

‘It does no harm to throw the occasional man over-

board, but it does not do much good if you are steering
full speed ahead for the rocks.’
(Sir Ian Gilmour, 1981)1

‘The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office,

received a soubriquet as “the Iron Lady”. . . . In the next
week or two, this House, the nation and the right
honourable lady herself will learn of what metal she
is made.’
(Enoch Powell in the House of Commons, 3 April 1982)

Summer of discontent

By the spring of 1981 it did not seem as though anything the

Thatcher government was doing domestically was working.
Stagflation was intensifying, in that prices and wages were
still rising out of control, but so, too, was unemployment;
and Howe’s 1981 budget appeared to be making things

39
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

worse, not better. Her chances of surviving until the next

election, let alone of winning it, seemed minimal, and her
opponents in cabinet, by then disparagingly known as the
‘wets’, were becoming increasingly vocal critics. For every-
thing that Thatcher was doing, especially her determination
to contemplate, with relative equanimity, massive rises in
unemployment which in earlier decades would have been
deemed unacceptable, was anathema to those ‘one nation’,
paternalist Tories who formed the majority of her cabinet. To
be sure, Whitelaw had pledged his loyalty, and Carrington
was preoccupied with foreign affairs. But they were not indif-
ferent to the wrenching social consequences of what
Thatcher and Howe were doing to the economy, while Pym,
Gilmour, Soames, Prior, Walker, and Heseltine were exercised
by the government’s lack of social compassion and its seem-
ing indifference to the sufferings of ordinary people who,
they believed, were being sacrificed on the misguided altar
of monetarist dogma. They feared the social fabric of the
nation was being subjected to unprecedented assaults, and
during the spring and summer of 1981 their worst forebod-
ings were borne out.
In the middle of April serious disturbances occurred in
Brixton, a multiracial south London suburb with a history
of poor police–community relations and high unemploy-
ment, especially among young black men. Nearly three hundred
policemen and scores of people were injured, and twenty-
eight buildings were destroyed or damaged by fire. These
disorderly scenes were followed by protests at Toxteth in
Liverpool in July, along with lesser troubles at Moss Side in
Manchester, Handsworth in Birmingham, and Chapeltown

40
 Victory Overseas

in Leeds, and by another outburst in Brixton. To Thatcher’s

critics, this vindicated their view that the government’s
punitive economic policies, intensifying both depression
and inflation rather than mitigating either, were placing an
intolerable strain on the social fabric of the nation. For a
time the mood in the Tory party was close to panic, and at
the last cabinet meeting before the summer recess, held in
late July 1981, the ‘wets’, including Heseltine, Pym, Gilmour,
and Soames, expressed fears for the future of the country
and the party, while the veteran Hailsham likened what was
happening on the streets of Britain to what had occurred on
the streets of Germany in the early 1930s. But Thatcher was
unrepentant. She refused to concede that social deprivation
and economic hardship were the cause of the riots: the destruc-
tion of property, the looting of shops, and the attacks on the
police were crimes, and should be treated and punished as such.
The July cabinet was the high point of the ‘wets” attempt
to force Thatcher to change course. But they had no real
alternative policies to propose, and they were unwilling to
contemplate the supreme act of disloyalty, namely collect-
ive resignation. Thatcher was more determined and decisive
than they were and at the end of the summer she struck
back. In January she had already sacked Norman St John
Stevas, who had been leader of the Commons and minister
for the arts, and in September she mopped up the ‘wets’. She
dismissed Gilmour, who had publicly criticized the govern-
ment’s economic policies; she got rid of Mark Carlisle, who
had not done well at education; and she fired Soames, who
had forfeited her confidence by his mishandling of the
recent strike of civil servants. She also removed Prior from

41
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

employment, where he had been insufficiently robust in

his dealing with the trades unions, and exiled him to the
Northern Ireland Office. In the ensuing reshuffle she moved
Joseph to education; she made Nigel Lawson secretary of
state for energy; Norman Tebbit replaced Prior at employ-
ment; and she brought in Cecil Parkinson as paymaster-
general and Tory party chairman: all three new ministers
held views closer to hers than the men they replaced. But
although she had created a cabinet more to her liking, it did
not improve the government’s standing. In September 1981
the Tories were eight points behind Labour in the opinion
polls, and three months later only 25 per cent of voters were
satisfied with Thatcher’s performance, making her the most
unpopular premier since polling had begun.
Although there was little evidence for it at the time,
events were beginning to move Thatcher’s way. There had
been another massive increase in oil prices at the end of
1979, which further fuelled inflation; but the United King-
dom would soon be drawing its own supplies from beneath
the North Sea, and would become a net exporter, which
would increase government revenue, thereby making pos-
sible further tax cuts. Moreover, the recession bottomed
out just after the economists had published their letter in
The Times. Between 1981 and 1989 real growth would aver-
age 3.2 per cent a year, compared with sixteen months of nega-
tive growth during 1980 and 1981; and by 1983 inflation
would be down to less than 5 per cent. Meanwhile Callaghan
had resigned as Labour leader, and in November 1980 was
replaced by Foot. He proved no match for Thatcher at prime
minister’s questions, where her unrivalled command of detail

42
 Victory Overseas

invariably punctured his vague and often ill-informed verbos-

ity, and Labour began a march to the left that would render it
unelectable for more than a decade. Soon after Foot became
leader, the disaffected Labour quartet of Roy Jenkins, Shirley
Williams, David Owen, and William Rodgers established the
breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP). As in earlier reces-
sions, at the end of the nineteenth century and during the inter-
war years, Thatcher would enjoy the advantage of a divided
opposition, and under Britain’s first past the post electoral
system this would virtually guarantee her next two election
victories.
These uncovenanted domestic benefits were accompanied
by the beginnings of significant changes in the international
order. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 may
have caused Thatcher short-term political embarrassment,
but it was a deeply misguided overseas venture that would
eventually prove fatal to the continued existence of the Soviet
Union. At the same time, there was growing opposition in
Poland to continued Soviet rule, led by Lech Wałe˛sa, who was
the leader of the recently established trades union Solidarity,
based in the Gdansk shipyards; and while Thatcher was vehe-
mently opposed to organized, anti-capitalist labour militancy
in Britain, she was very happy to encourage it when it took
the form of anti-communist labour militancy elsewhere.
Moreover, in 1979, the former archbishop of Kraków, who a
year earlier had been elected Pope John Paul II, had made a
triumphant return visit to Poland, when millions turned out
to attend his speeches and his masses, which the authorities
were powerless to prevent. The iron curtain was beginning
to crack, and the deaths of Alexi Kosygin in 1980, of Leonid

43
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

Brezhnev two years later, and of Yuri Andropov in 1984,

suggested the days of Moscow’s Politburo gerontocracy were
numbered, and that there might be the prospect of some sort
of East–West détente.
Yet none of these developments was to Thatcher’s imme-
diate political advantage. The 1981 Conservative Party con-
ference, held in the aftermath of her cabinet reshuffle,
took place in an atmosphere of crisis and panic, intensified
by the worst poll ratings of any government since 1945, by
another emergency rise in interest rates to 16 per cent, and
by a powerful intervention by Heath, calling for a nation-
al recovery package to tackle unemployment. Soon after,
Shirley Williams overturned a Tory majority of 19,272 to
win Crosby for the SDP, at which point it seemed as though
no Conservative seat in the country was safe; and in March
1982 Roy Jenkins, the SDP leader, won Glasgow Hillhead, and
for a time was widely regarded as the man who would become
the next prime minister. Late in 1981 Thatcher claimed that
‘we are through the worst’;2 but, three years since her election
victory, the prospects of a second Tory win looked very slim.
By the spring of 1982 the three major parties, namely the
Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal–SDP Alliance, were at
level pegging in the polls, each likely to win between 30 and
33 per cent of the votes. The surge of the Alliance, combined
with the Labour lurch to the left, and the Tories’ continued
unpopularity, meant that most commentators were predict-
ing a hung parliament after the next election, which would
have spelt Thatcher’s doom. But in April 1982 Argentina
invaded the Falkland Islands, and her political fortunes
would soon be miraculously transformed.

44
 Victory Overseas

The Falklands War

The Falkland Islands are located in the south Atlantic, 8000

miles from the United Kingdom, and 300 miles from the
southern extremity of Argentina. They had been acquired
by Britain in 1833, as a significant staging post between the
Atlantic and Pacific oceans; and they were settled by sheep
farmers who were fiercely loyal to the crown. But British
possession had been repeatedly disputed by France and Spain,
and especially by Argentina, and by the 1970s the Falklands
were regarded in the Foreign Office as one of those embar-
rassing residues of empire, along with Rhodesia, Gibraltar,
and Hong Kong, of which they wished to be rid. The preferred
diplomatic solution was to cede sovereignty to Argentina, in
return for which the British government would continue to
administer the islands on behalf of the settlers. Such a ‘lease-
back’ scheme was favoured by Carrington, and in November
1980 he sent Nicholas Ridley, then a junior minister, to the
Falklands to try to persuade the 1800 islanders to accept it.
But they were determined to remain British subjects, and
Ridley returned to London empty-handed. Meanwhile, right-
wing Tories, already alarmed by what had happened in Rho-
desia, deplored the idea of another ‘sell-out’, and the leaseback
scheme was quietly dropped.
As a result the Falklands were no longer a high priority at
the Foreign Office; but they soon reappeared on the very
different agenda of the Ministry of Defence. In her reshuffle
of January 1981 Thatcher had replaced Pym with John Nott,
whom she believed would be more sympathetic to cutting
the costs of the armed forces as part of the government’s

45
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

policy of reducing public expenditure. Nott instituted a

review of Britain’s future military needs, which reported in
June and was particularly harsh on the Royal Navy, on
the grounds that a future large-scale war at sea was highly
unlikely. He proposed a reduction in the number of aircraft
carriers from three to two, and of frigates and destroyers
from fifty-nine to fifty. He also announced that the ice-
patrol ship HMS Endurance, which intercepted Argentinian
intelligence, and affirmed Britain’s continuing interest and
presence in the south Atlantic, would be withdrawn. These
decisions, which Thatcher supported, were taken as a signal
by the military junta then in power in Argentina, led by
General Leopoldo Galtieri, that the United Kingdom was
no longer seriously committed to the Falklands. In January
1982 the junta began making their invasion plans, and
although the British government would soon learn about
them, there was nothing they could do to prevent them
being carried out. Carrington and Thatcher urged President
Reagan to try to persuade Galtieri to stay his hand. But his
efforts were unavailing, the invasion duly place, and by 2
April the Argentinian flag was flying over Port Stanley, the
capital of the Falklands, instead of the Union Jack.
The loss of the Falklands was the greatest international
humiliation suffered by the United Kingdom since the
Suez fiasco of 1956. After a stormy Commons session and a
critical meeting of Tory back-benchers, Carrington resigned,
although he bore less responsibility than Nott, whose defence
cuts had emboldened the Argentinians to invade, and than
Thatcher, who had failed to take the subject seriously until
it was too late. She was now faced with a near-insoluble

46
 Victory Overseas

dilemma. As the ‘Iron Lady’, who regularly proclaimed her

courage, conviction, and consistency, and repeatedly insisted
that conflict was better than compromise, she could not
allow the Argentinians to get away with such a blatant act
of aggression, and had she done so she would have been
obliged to resign. But the alternative, namely mounting a
long-distance and hugely expensive military campaign to
win the Falklands back, was an enterprise fraught with risk,
and if it failed then she would also be finished as prime
minister. Her resolve stiffened by Admiral Sir Henry Leach,
Thatcher instructed the defence staff and the service chiefs
to assemble a naval task force. It set sail from Portsmouth
on 5 and 6 April, led by HMS Hermes and including HMS
Invincible, the same aircraft carrier Nott had earlier resolved
to sell to Australia.
Thatcher appointed a small war cabinet, consisting of
Whitelaw (he had commanded tanks in Normandy in
1944), Parkinson (for his smooth presentational skills on
television), Nott (as minister of defence), and Pym (who had
replaced Carrington at the Foreign Office). She was also well
served by Admiral Sir Terence Lewin as chief of the defence
staff; by Sir Anthony Parsons, Britain’s permanent represen-
tative to the UN, who carried a resolution at the Security
Council condemning Argentina’s invasion, which effectively
gave her cover for sending the task force; and by Sir Nicholas
Henderson, the British ambassador to Washington, who per-
sistently lobbied the Reagan administration, and put the
government’s case in a succession of television interviews.
But, to Thatcher’s annoyance, Reagan refused to come out
in her support, claiming that the United States was friends

47
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

with both Britain and Argentina, while his secretary of state,

Alexander Haig, sought to broker a diplomatic solution, and
spent the next few weeks shuttling between London, New York,
Washington, and Buenos Aires. Moreover, Jeanne Kirkpatrick,
America’s permanent representative to the UN, thought
the United States should remain friendly with the countries
of Latin America rather than support Britain. But the secretary
of defense, Caspar Weinberger, took a very different view,
covertly providing the task force with essential military
assistance, including the use of America’s Ascension Island
base in the mid-Atlantic for refuelling, the accelerated provi-
sion of Sidewinder missiles, and unprecedented access to US
intelligence.
The six weeks that it took for the task force to reach the
south Atlantic allowed ample time for a negotiated settlement,
but Thatcher was determined that such well-intentioned
peacemaking would not pre-empt the military victory she
believed was the only outcome the British people would accept.
She also recognized that she would forfeit international
support if she appeared too inflexible; but, fortunately for
her, the Argentinians were more intransigent than she
was, and twice rejected peace packages put forward by
the Americans. Yet still Reagan declined to give Britain the
endorsement Thatcher wanted, although he knew that if
she failed in the Falklands, he would almost certainly lose
his staunchest European ally. On 2 May the British submarine
HMS Conqueror sank the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano,
with the loss of 323 lives; two days later the Argentines sank
the British destroyer HMS Sheffield, killing twenty of her crew.
On 12 May the requisitioned Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth 2

48
 Victory Overseas

set sail from Southampton carrying 3,000 further troops, and

on 21 May the first amphibious landings on the Falklands
took place. Once battle was joined the British lost two frig-
ates, a destroyer, a transport ship, and a troopship, and there
was renewed pressure from the United States and at the UN
for a cessation of hostilities. But Parsons vetoed a Security
Council resolution calling for a ceasefire, while Thatcher gave
Reagan short shrift when he urged magnanimity. Meanwhile,
the conscript Argentinian army evinced little appetite for
battle, and on 14 June British troops recaptured Port Stanley.
The following day more than 11,000 Argentine soldiers sur-
rendered and, soon after, Galtieri fell from power.
Although Thatcher gave full credit to the service chiefs
who had planned the campaign and the men who had
fought her battles, she was the supreme architect and bene-
ficiary of their victory. She had taken huge military and
political risks, but her resolution and determination had
never wavered. She had indeed shown herself to be the
‘Iron Lady’, and as she welcomed ‘our boys’ back to Ports-
mouth, and took the salute at the victory parade, her domes-
tic political prospects were dramatically transformed. In the
summer of 1981 she had been the most unpopular prime
minister since polling began, facing a divided cabinet, a
demoralized party, and an SDP which seemed inexorably
on the rise. But neither Foot nor Jenkins had shone during
the war as their respective party leaders; by July 1982 her
own approval ratings had doubled to 51 per cent; and her
position suddenly became unassailable. She had stood up to
aggression, faced down a dictator, defended liberty, and
safeguarded the rule of law. No other Western leader could

49
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

claim as much, and this made Thatcher the darling of the

American right, even as it was bad news for the old men in
the Kremlin. She had saved Britain’s honour, avenged the
failure of Suez, reversed national decline, and made the
country great again. ‘We have ceased to be a nation in
retreat’, she proclaimed.

We have instead a new-found confidence—born in the eco-

nomic battles at home, and tested and found true 8,000 miles
away . . . Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic, and
will not look back from the victory she has won.3

Such were Thatcher’s claims; but the causes and conse-

quences of the Falklands War were more complex and
contradictory than that. British losses were relatively low,
but she wept openly and often when told of the latest
casualties, and wrote to the families of all the bereaved.
Although the commission of inquiry into the causes of the
war, led by Lord Franks, and reporting in January 1983, would
exonerate Thatcher from any blame, her government clearly
bore some responsibility for the Argentinian invasion. The
cost of the conflict, and the longer-term expenses of replacing
ships and equipment, combined with the additional outlay
for constructing a ‘Fortress Falklands’, and for keeping British
troops permanently stationed there, amounted to £3 billion,
a significant sum for a government determined to cut public
spending, even if it was funded out of the contingency
reserve. Had Nott’s proposed defence cuts, which Thatcher
had endorsed, been implemented more promptly, she would
probably have lacked the resources to assemble the task force;
and the plans to slash naval spending, which had helped

50
 Victory Overseas

precipitate the crisis, were quietly shelved. For all Thatcher’s

insistence that victory was an unalloyed national triumph, it
would have been impossible without the American assistance
authorized by Weinberger. And was it really the case that the
recovery of a few small islands at what seemed like the end of
the world, of which most people in Britain had never heard,
from a corrupt Latin American government and its incompe-
tent military, had at one single stroke arrested decades of
national decline?

Towards a second term

At the time little attention was paid to these qualifications

and questions: the war had been won, which was all that
mattered. Even Reagan had finally climbed off the fence. On
8 June 1982, during a pre-arranged visit to London, when
the battle in the south Atlantic was reaching its climax, he
saluted the ‘young men’ who were not just ‘fighting for
Britain’, but for ‘the belief that armed aggression must not
be allowed to succeed and that people must participate in
the decisions of government under the rule of law’.4 With
Anglo-American relations restored, and with the Argentin-
ian surrender a few days later, it was widely recognized that
Thatcher would win the next general election. But to ask for
a dissolution in the aftermath of victory might seem a cyn-
ical attempt to cash in on it. Instead, she insisted that her
government was intent on applying the lessons of the south
Atlantic to problems nearer home, of which the economy
remained the most pressing and persistent. Howe had
declared that the recession had ended during the third

51
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

quarter of 1981; but growth during 1982 was minimal, while

industrial output was the lowest since 1965. Unemployment
had reached three million, and despite the boost given by
what would be termed the ‘Falklands factor’, no British
government had ever been re-elected with so many people
out of work. There were also renewed calls from trades
unions and employers for the cabinet to take more action
to stimulate the economic recovery that was constantly
being promised but never actually arrived.
Unsurprisingly, the government’s preferred yardstick
for measuring the success of its economic policies was
not unemployment, but inflation. By the end of 1982 it
was down to 5 per cent, which enabled Howe to cut interest
rates to 9 per cent. The heavy shedding of manpower began
to yield higher productivity in those parts of the manufac-
turing economy that had survived, and in his 1982 budget,
delivered just before the Falklands invasion, he was able,
while keeping a tight rein on public spending, to offer
some targeted incentives to growth, among them more free
ports, and an increase in the number of enterprise zones.
Economic activity continued to pick up, albeit slowly, and
in the spring of 1983 Howe made some modest tax conces-
sions, not by cutting the basic rate again, but by raising
personal thresholds and allowances, increasing child bene-
fit, and restoring the cuts he had made the previous year
in unemployment benefit. By then the government could
claim its economic strategy was working: inflation was being
driven down, making possible a real economic recovery
built around productive jobs. Yet by the summer of 1983
gross domestic product would still be 4 per cent lower than

52
 Victory Overseas

in 1979, and manufacturing output 17 per cent down. This

was a deeper and more protracted depression than any other
European nation endured, and it left parts of south Wales,
lowland Scotland, and the north of England devastated.
Like the Tory ‘wets’ the opposition parties complained that
Thatcher lacked compassion; her retort was that toughness
and resolution had won out in the Falklands, and would
eventually win out at home as well.
Success in the south Atlantic also emboldened Thatcher to
push ahead in her assault on organized labour. In 1982 the
new employment secretary, Tebbit, carried a measure which
ended the privileged status granted to the unions by the
Liberal government in the aftermath of the Taff Vale judg-
ment of 1906. They would no longer be immune from civil
suits arising out of unlawful trades disputes, and the defin-
ition of illegal action was considerably extended. Tebbit’s
legislation also increased restrictions on the operation of
closed shops, made it easier for employers to sack persistent
trouble-makers, and provided funds to finance union bal-
lots. These terms were denounced by the TUC and the
Labour opposition, but public opinion was in favour; so
were many trades unionists, and the ever-upward trend in
unemployment weakened organized labour still further.
Long-running strikes by railwaymen and NHS workers
ended in defeat for the unions, and workers at British Ley-
land accepted a pay offer their leaders had urged them to
reject. A second distinctive policy began to take shape in
1982, namely privatization. By October that year 370,000
families had availed themselves of the ‘right to buy’ their
council houses that had been established in 1980, and the

53
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

government drew up plans to sell off British Telecom (BT).

They would not be implemented until after the election, but
Britoil, which had been established by Benn to give the state
a stake in North Sea production, was privatized in November
1982, raising £334 million.
‘We are only in our first term’, Thatcher told the party
conference the previous month, ‘but already we have done
more to roll back the frontiers of socialism than any previ-
ous Conservative government’.5 There was another arena
where socialism had to be fought, and that concerned the
continued existence of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. As a vehe-
ment anti-communist, Thatcher believed that such weapons
were the only way of ensuring world peace, and were also an
emblem of the nation’s continued power and independ-
ence. Soon after taking office her government had agreed
to replace Britain’s ageing Polaris weapons with Trident
missiles, manufactured in the United States. In January
1982 the Americans offered an even more sophisticated
version of Trident, and Thatcher drew on her close relation-
ship with Reagan to acquire it on very favourable terms. In
return she was willing to let the Americans deploy cruise
missiles at military bases in Britain, but these actions and
decisions brought back to life the long-dormant Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which made common
cause with the Labour leadership, who under Foot had
embraced unilateralism. Thatcher denounced CND and
excoriated Foot for advocating what she had already
described as ‘unilateral surrender’;6 and in January 1983
she removed Nott from the Ministry of Defence, where his
lacklustre performance had not impressed her during the

54
 Victory Overseas

Falklands War, and replaced him with the more flamboyant

and belligerent (and ambitious) Heseltine.
By this time Thatcher was under increasing pressure from
her party managers to decide on a date for the general
election, which they were confident she would now win.
While her approval ratings had been at record lows she had
given little thought to the possibility that she might be
returned to power. Before the Falklands War it seemed
unlikely she would be re-elected, and the conflict preoccu-
pied her to the exclusion of all else until the autumn of
1982. Only then did she realize there might be a second
term, but after the burdens and anxieties of the summer
she was more tired than she would admit, and she did not
give serious consideration to what she might do if re-elected.
When she addressed the party conference in October she
received a rousing, flag-waving reception, but her speech
was light on detail, beyond signalling the privatization of
Britoil and BT, celebrating the sale of council houses, and
promising to leave the health service alone. But the omens
were good: the Tories had been solidly ahead in the polls for
months; the SDP had peaked and was on the way down; and
Labour seemed in complete disarray. The local elections
held on 5 May 1983 were reassuring, as the Conservatives
gained 128 council seats in England and Wales. Thatcher
eventually settled for an election on 9 June; and although
she had no well-founded fear of losing, she took the precau-
tion of clearing up her personal belongings in 10 Downing
Street in case she had to depart in a hurry.
The Tory manifesto was little more specific than Thatcher’s
conference speech had been six months before: it committed

55
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

to the privatization of BT, British Airways, and ‘substantial

parts’ of British Steel, British Shipbuilders, and British
Leyland; and it promised the further tightening of trade
union law. But these were scarcely surprising proposals,
and the only novelty was the promised abolition of the
Greater London Council (GLC), and of the six large Eng-
lish metropolitan counties. This failure to put forward a
well-worked-out and radical programme would leave
the government struggling to regain some sense of pur-
pose during its second term. But, compared with Labour’s
irresponsible and ill-judged offering, it seemed a minor
masterpiece of realism and sagacity. Rightly described by
Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’,7
Labour’s proposals gave the impression that the last four
years had not happened: extending nationalization, mas-
sively increasing public spending, restoring the trade
union privileges recently taken away, withdrawing from
the EC, and embracing unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Thatcher denounced and ridiculed these proposals, and
the whole Tory campaign was built more around her than
any specific policies. She dominated the media and trounced
her television interviewers; and compared with her torrential
energy, impassioned conviction, and undoubted achieve-
ments, Foot and Jenkins seemed long-winded, old-fashioned,
and out of touch.
The outcome of the election was never seriously in doubt:
the only unresolved issue was just how great Thatcher’s
victory would be. In the end it was 144 seats over all the
other parties, which meant she became the only twentieth-
century Tory leader to increase her Commons preponderance

56
 Victory Overseas

from one general election to the next. She held onto her own
seat, Finchley, with a reduced share of the vote but a larger
majority, of 9,314. Labour had descended into fratricidal un-
electability, and Foot resigned the party leadership in October
1983; while the Liberal–SDP Alliance, by splitting the oppos-
ition vote, had done more to contribute to Thatcher’s victory
than to its own electoral prospects (it gained 25.4 per cent of
the vote but only twenty-three seats), and Jenkins fell on his
sword soon after. In reconstructing her cabinet after the elec-
tion Thatcher’s main aim was to get rid of Pym, whose hang-
dog looks and lugubrious manner had incensed her during
the Falklands War. She sacked him, and he never held office
again. She wished to replace him as foreign secretary with
Parkinson, who as party chairman had helped deliver her
election victory; but he revealed privately to her that he had
fathered a child by a woman who was not his wife, and she
gave the job to Howe instead, consoling Parkinson with the
lesser post of secretary of state for trade and industry. To
follow Howe at the exchequer, she appointed Lawson, who
had previously been secretary of state for energy; and after
she had given Whitelaw a viscountcy he left the Commons
and the Home Office (where he was replaced by Leon Brittan)
to become lord president of the council and leader of the
House of Lords.
Despite her triumph at the polls Thatcher was never popu-
lar with most of the electorate, and studies showed that her
values were not widely shared. In 1979 the Conservatives
had won with only 43.9 per cent of the vote, one of the
lowest showings achieved by a victorious party in modern
times; but, four years later, Thatcher’s hugely swollen Commons

57
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

majority rested on a lesser share of the popular vote: down

to 42.4 per cent. In Wales, Scotland, and large parts of
the north of England, where industry had collapsed and
unemployment was so high, her writ scarcely ran, and in
some ways, she was only prime minister of the south-east
of England and the rural constituencies. Yet that was all
Thatcher had needed to win, and she increasingly came to
believe, in the aftermath of the Falklands, that she was
invincible, and even, perhaps, infallible, convinced that
will-power and determination were what was needed to
secure success, and that she alone could provide them. In
dealing with her colleagues she would become even more
hectoring and overbearing; her outfits and her demeanour
would become increasingly regal; and she began to use the
royal ‘we’, as when she observed, apropos of the Falklands
War, that ‘We’re very grateful that we were in government
when it happened’,8 and later when she declared, on the
birth of her grandson, Michael Thatcher, ‘We have become
a grandmother’.9 These were signs of mounting hubris; and
sooner or later, nemesis would surely follow.

58
 5
Enemies Within,
1983–86

‘The 1983 general election result was the single most

devastating defeat ever inflicted upon democratic
socialism in Britain.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1993)1

‘I was up to my neck with Scargill. We broadly merged

the miners’ strike and the GLC campaign . . . I always
thought the miners could defeat Thatcher.’
(Ken Livingstone, former leader of the GLC)2

Alone of all her sex

Nevertheless, for the time being Thatcher’s position was

unassailable: she was conquering inflation, she had van-
quished Galtieri, and she had won two general elections.
She had seen off Foot and Jenkins (and their successors,
Neil Kinnock and David Owen, would fare little better).
Reagan in the United States and François Mitterrand in
France had both been elected presidents after she had

59
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

become prime minister, and within a few months the

advent to power of Helmut Schmidt in Germany and of
Andropov in Russia meant they, too, would be her juniors.
As a result Thatcher would soon play an increasingly senior
and confident role on the global stage. A further indication
of her unique position was the many names by which she
was becoming known, and the varied, indeed contradictory,
attitudes and identities, fears and fantasies they suggested.
She was the ‘Good Housewife’ or the ‘Grocer’s Daughter’ (or
‘La Fille d’Épicier’, according to Mitterrand’s predecessor,
Giscard d’Estaing). She was the ‘Iron Lady’ or the ‘Warrior
Queen’, or even ‘Britannia’ or ‘Gloriana’. To her admirers she
was ‘Maggie’ or ‘the Blessed Margaret’ (a nickname coined
by Stevas, along with ‘Tina’, for ‘There Is No Alternative’) or,
less flatteringly, ‘the Great She-Elephant’ (according to Julian
Critchley); but to her opponents she was ‘That Bloody
Woman’ or ‘Attila the Hen’. No male prime minister had
ever been known by so many admiring and vituperative
sobriquets. Was this sexism, or celebrity, or both?
For the whole of her public life Thatcher was a woman in
an overwhelmingly man’s world, and she had only reached
the top by seeming to suppress the tender, nurturing, emol-
lient qualities often associated with wives and mothers, and
by demonstrating the assertive, domineering, and aggressive
attributes more commonly associated with alpha males. She
was combative and competitive, she scorned consensus and
compromise, and she constantly emphasized her will-power,
determination, tirelessness, and courage. She regarded her
dealings with foreign heads of government, with her own
cabinet, and with the civil service as trials of strength she

60
 Enemies Within

was determined to win; and the same was true of her perform-
ances in the Commons, especially at question time, where
she eventually achieved an unrivalled mastery. As President
Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, put it
in a comment that may say as much about him as about her:
‘In her presence you pretty quickly forget that she’s a woman.
She doesn’t strike me as being a very female type’.3 Indeed, as
both party leader and prime minister she seemed to be not so
much a ‘real woman’, but much more of a ‘male type’—hence
the puppet caricature of her, created for the satirical television
programme Spitting Image, where she was dressed in a man’s
business suit and wearing a tie, and where her demeanour was
unfailingly harsh and severe.
It was this abrasiveness that led Barbara Castle to complain
that Thatcher was completely insensitive to the particular
difficulties that ordinary women faced when ‘struggling to
deal with a home, earn a wage, deal with an elderly parent . . .
and sickness in the family’.4 She had even less sympathy with
the left-wing female activists who protested at the arrival of
American missiles at Greenham Common, and feminism was
a cause and a creed to which she was wholly unattracted. She
claimed to be viscerally opposed to any form of politics built
around adversarial group identities, and she preferred to
think of people as individuals, rather than as collectivities
going into battle to achieve shared goals and objectives—
indeed, she went further, and at one point claimed that
‘there is no such thing as society’, though she went on to
qualify her statement by adding, ‘There are individual men
and women, and there are families. . . . It’s our duty to look
after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour’.5 As

61
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

someone who believed, like her father, in personal self-

improvement, and making the best of one’s talents, she felt
no inclination to put herself out for other women; she had no
time for positive discrimination or affirmative action; and she
regarded the very idea of the mutually supporting sisterhood
of ‘Women’s Libbers’ as incomprehensible. Indeed, during
her eleven years of prime ministerial power only one other
woman sat in Thatcher’s cabinet, Baroness Young, who was
briefly leader of the Lords from 1981 to 1983, when she was
demoted to being a minister of state at the Foreign Office
to make way for the ennobled Whitelaw. At no time during
her premiership did any other female sit on her Commons
front bench.
Nevertheless, there was one woman with whom Thatcher
had to do business throughout her prime ministership—a
woman, moreover, who had been at the very top in domes-
tic and international politics for the best part of three dec-
ades before she entered 10 Downing Street, and who would
continue in that position for at least as long after she left
it, namely Queen Elizabeth II. Although born within a few
months of each other, the prime minister and her sovereign
were never natural soul mates in the way that Thatcher and
Reagan were. They came from different worlds, culturally,
socially, and geographically; unlike Thatcher, the Queen was
an instinctive paternalist in domestic matters, preferring con-
sensus and compromise to conflict and confrontation; and in
foreign affairs she was devoted to the Commonwealth, for
whose leaders Thatcher had little respect. In 1986 the Sunday
Times would run a story, deliberately leaked by the Queen’s
press secretary, that she was ‘dismayed’ by her ‘uncaring’

62
 Enemies Within

prime minister,6 which Buckingham Palace never explicitly

denied. In public Thatcher was exaggeratedly deferential to
her sovereign, curtseying more deeply than any other woman;
but in private she could not hide her nervousness and inse-
curities, sitting on the edge of her seat and rarely seeking royal
advice. So, while relations between premier and monarch
were scrupulously correct, they were never warm or friendly.
Yet Thatcher also appeared in a variety of quintessen-
tially womanly guises, one of which was as a ‘de-eroticised’
female,7 devoid of sexual attraction or allure. She was feared
or denounced as a virago or a fishwife, living in a permanent
state of outrage, quarrelsomeness, and bad temper, and mak-
ing the most stout-hearted men feel inadequate and appre-
hensive in her presence. Alternatively, she was the fierce
headmistress keeping an unruly class in order; the dragon
sister on the hospital ward ensuring that the male patients
took their medicine; or the stern nanny teaching the boys to
eat their vegetables. That was how she behaved when chair-
ing cabinet meetings, announcing at the beginning of each
item for discussion the conclusion that she wanted reached;
and that was how she treated the briefings from ministers
and civil servants, returning them peppered with comments,
underlinings, and question marks. In yet another guise she
was a latter-day Queen Boudicca, urging her troops into
battle, who delighted in donning combat gear or being photo-
graphed in a British army tank. Or she was Lady Bracknell, a
century on, for whom the handbag was an instrument of
gendered aggression, rather than an essential repository for
make-up and other female necessities. Time and again
Thatcher made it plain that she took a dim view of the male

63
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

species: ‘If you want something said’, she once observed, ‘ask
a man. If you want something done, ask a woman’.8
But Thatcher also took trouble to present herself as appeal-
ing and alluring to the opposite sex. She was always impec-
cably coiffured; her eyes were sky blue, her skin was clear, and
her complexion fair; she applied carmine lipstick in consid-
erable quantities; and she invariably wore high-heeled shoes
to draw attention to her elegant legs. She took great care with
her clothes, often changing her outfits several times a day,
and preferring well-tailored suits in strong colours. She also
exploited her gender, treating her cabinet colleagues in a way
which no male prime minister could have done: brushing
fluff from their shirt collars, straightening their ties, and
buttoning (but not unbuttoning) their jackets. Even in the
Commons she would occasionally play the feminine ingénue.
On one occasion when Foot offered to take Thatcher to dinner
every time the government reneged on a promise, she replied
that it was ‘a lady’s prerogative to say “no” ’.9 During the
Falklands War she came to feel a particularly strong affinity
with the men in uniform, and she also had a weakness for
handsome males of a certain age, who stood up straight and
wore well-cut suits, who may have reminded her of Denis’s
earlier ‘style and dash’, and of which type Cecil Parkinson was
a conspicuous example. Conservative men such as Alan Clark
found Thatcher’s combination of political authority and sex
appeal extremely attractive, and she knew it.
Thatcher was also the beneficiary of the still-prevailing
code of male gallantry which meant that few of her colleagues
or adversaries were willing to stand up to her, or pay her out in
her own confrontational coin. One of her back-bench critics,

64
 Enemies Within

Critchley, admitted that Tory men had ‘been brought up to

believe that it’s extremely rude to shout back at women’;10
while Kinnock conceded that, as Labour leader, he felt inhibited
at prime minister’s questions from being too aggressive.
Thatcher also cried in public, which was hardly how an
‘Iron Lady’ might have been expected to behave: when she
failed to get her way at Lusaka during some preliminary
discussions over Rhodesia; when her son, Mark, disappeared
for six days during a trans-Sahara motor rally; and when she
made her last journey from Downing Street to Buckingham
Palace to resign as prime minister. Above all she remained the
good housewife, though this was no more than a residual
activity. ‘The home’, she once observed, ‘should be the centre
but not the boundary of a woman’s life’,11 and that was what
she made 10 Downing Street. She took great trouble in select-
ing the pictures for the public rooms, she borrowed silver
from Lord Brownlow, the nearby Grantham grandee, and
she treated her personal and domestic staff with a kindness
and consideration she conspicuously failed to display when
dealing with her male colleagues.
As the undisputed alpha female of her generation Margaret
Thatcher was thus a bundle of gendered contradictions,
which by sheer force of personality she concealed and carried
off with sustained bravura and conviction. She was also sup-
ported, throughout her time at Downing Street, by a husband
whose money had made her public career possible, and who
self-effacingly subordinated his life to hers, yet who could
also order her to bed when she had stayed up working too
late. But while she was, after her fashion, a devoted and
appreciative wife, she was always a more distant than a

65
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

nurturing mother. Carol, of whom she did not think much,

went off to make a career in Australia; while Mark, on whom
she doted, was packed off to Dallas in Texas after some con-
troversial involvement in arms dealing in the Middle East.
Two quotations illustrate the paradoxes Thatcher denied
and the inconsistencies she exploited which made her the
remarkable woman of power she eventually became. At the
end of the Falklands War she held a dinner at 10 Downing
Street for the senior officers who had contributed most to
the victory. Their wives were invited to the post-prandial
reception, and at the end of the meal Thatcher stood up and
said, ‘Gentlemen, shall we join the ladies?’.12 Some time after,
President Mitterrand, who did not make his predecessor’s mis-
take of treating her as a grocer’s daughter, described Thatcher
in very different terms, declaring that she combined ‘the
eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’.13

Hard times

Despite her commanding Commons majority, and a cabinet

she had remade in her own image, Thatcher’s second term
did not begin well. Having sacked Pym, she hoped the Com-
mons might make him speaker; but MPs opted for Bernard
Weatherill instead. The Queen’s speech, setting out the
government’s legislative programme, was lacklustre, with
few concrete or original proposals, and no radical or coher-
ent agenda. The decision to bestow hereditary peerages on
Whitelaw and on George Thomas, the outgoing speaker,
seemed anachronistic and quixotic: there had been no such
creations since 1964, and as Whitelaw’s children were all

66
 Enemies Within

daughters, and Thomas was unmarried, neither title would be

passed on to the next generation. (Thatcher also ennobled
Harold Macmillan in 1984, as earl of Stockton; and that title
would pass on his death to his grandson.) Her promotion
of Gow to the post of minister of state for housing, and his
replacement as Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary by
the austere and ungregarious Michael Alison, combined with
a significant intake of new MPs, meant that she was less in
touch with back-bench opinion during her second term than
in her first. In July 1983 the new chancellor, Lawson, was
compelled to announce a £500 million package of emergency
spending cuts, to reassure the City there would be no loosen-
ing of monetary policy; the cuts fell heavily on defence and
health, displeasing both the right and the left. Meanwhile,
and despite Thatcher’s oft-repeated claim that the recession
was over, unemployment continued to rise.
There were other early indications of second-term frailty
and fallibility. Thatcher went into hospital in August 1983,
for an operation to repair a detached retina, and then took
an unheard-of two weeks’ holiday in Switzerland. The Tory
party conference was overshadowed by revelations concern-
ing Parkinson’s extra-marital affair and love child, and he
was compelled to resign from the cabinet (and was replaced
at trade and industry by Tebbit). But Parkinson was not the
only political friend who caused Thatcher embarrassment
that autumn. In late September, she had again visited Reagan
in Washington in the hope of devising a common policy
for dealing with Soviet Russia. The following month, and
unknown to Thatcher, Reagan agreed to a request from the
Organization of Eastern Caribbean States to intervene on the

67
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

island of Grenada, where the prime minister, Maurice Bishop,

had been killed in a left-wing coup, and on 25 October he
dispatched American troops. But Grenada was a Common-
wealth country, the Queen was its head of state, and Thatcher
was furious that the president had not consulted or informed
her before authorizing the invasion. Moreover, the new for-
eign secretary, Howe, had told the Commons on the previous
day that there was no such American plan. Far from being
Reagan’s partner, Thatcher seemed more like his poodle. She
felt let down and humiliated not to have been taken into his
confidence, and this was the worst rift of their partnership.
The year 1983 did not end well, with serious protests at
Greenham Common, following the arrival of the first Ameri-
can cruise missiles to be based in Europe, which seemed fur-
ther evidence of the United Kingdom’s craven subordination
to the United States. Nor did 1984 begin more auspiciously.
In January, and at Thatcher’s urging, Howe banned, by means
of an order in council, the existence of trades unions at the
Government Communications Headquarters, the intercept
centre located outside Cheltenham. Intelligence personnel,
the prime minister insisted, should not be in a position to
endanger national security by taking industrial action; but
the decision was deeply controversial, and the government
was criticized for being high-handed and authoritarian,
and for mounting yet another assault on organized labour.
Two months later, in his first budget, Lawson sought to
further his predecessor’s policy of moving from direct to indir-
ect taxation, and of favouring business, by raising personal
thresholds, extending VAT, and slashing corporation tax:
but such regressive measures led to criticism that he was

68
 Enemies Within

more interested in helping the rich than assisting the poor.

Meanwhile, there were complaints outside and inside the
Conservative Party that a government which had spent mil-
lions of pounds to win back the far-off Falklands was unwill-
ing to spend lesser sums to alleviate the great and growing
social problems at home.
By this time the public mood was again turning against
Thatcher. In May 1984 the Conservatives suffered signifi-
cant reverses at the local elections; the following month
Labour gained fifteen seats in the European parliament elec-
tions, and the SDP captured the safe Tory seat of Portsmouth
at a by-election. Pym published a ‘one nation’ critique of the
government entitled The Politics of Consent and, on the eve
of the summer recess, Thatcher made an unimpressive reply
to the first no-confidence motion moved by Kinnock since
becoming Labour leader. With unemployment at well over
three million, and still rising, she bowed to pressure by
appointing the businessman David Young, ennobled as
Lord Young of Graffham, to be the so-called ‘minister for
jobs’. At the party conference held in Brighton in October,
two issues dominated, and neither suggested the government
was in full control. The attempt to blow up the Grand Hotel
by the IRA killed five people and seriously injured an-
other thirty-four, and made plain that the Northern Ireland
‘troubles’ were no nearer to being solved. Thatcher (who was
the target of the bombers) was lucky to escape with her life,
and made a courageous defence of freedom and liberty in
her conference speech, which she insisted on delivering
later the same day. But most of it was devoted to an attempt,
which did not entirely convince, to show that she cared

69
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

deeply about the problems and consequences of unemploy-

ment. Once again the ‘one nation’ Tories protested that the
government was callously indifferent to the plight of the
unemployed. There was also a sterling crisis in January 1985
which compelled Lawson to raise interest rates to 14 per cent.
In the same month Thatcher’s alma mater refused to
grant her an honorary degree—an unprecedented snub,
since all her Oxford-educated predecessors, from Attlee to
Heath, had been so recognized. The university had changed
her life, and Somerville had elected her to an honorary
fellowship in 1970, when she became education secretary.
But she had been dismayed by the widespread student
protests during her term of office, she had been annoyed
by the letter written by the 364 economists in 1981, and
she deplored what she regarded as the incorrigible hostility
of academics to the enterprise culture of wealth creation.
Moreover, the cuts in public spending during her first
administration had hit higher education hard, not only in
the humanities but in pure science as well. She also wanted
universities to contribute more to economic growth, and
was determined to make them more publicly accountable.
Since 1945 it had been customary for Oxford to award
honorary degrees to its prime-ministerial alumni during
their first year of office, but in Thatcher’s case the matter
was not seriously raised until late in 1984, by which time
academic opinion had turned deeply hostile. Her sup-
porters also underestimated the local opposition (as with
the ‘milk-snatcher’ episode, the staff work was poor), and
pressed ahead regardless; but convocation, the university’s
governing body, rejected the proposal by 738 votes to 319.

70
 Enemies Within

Thatcher never forgave Oxford for inflicting such a humili-

ating slight.
Still, the issue of unemployment remained, and Lawson
was obliged to dress up his March 1985 budget as being ‘for
jobs’. He reduced national insurance and put additional
money into youth training schemes, but the result was gen-
erally regarded as uninspiring. At the county council elec-
tions held in May the Tories lost heavily to the Liberal–SDP
Alliance, and again found themselves trailing third in the
opinion polls. Three months later the government lost the
previously safe seat of Brecon and Radnor to the Alliance, and
the Conservatives’ poll ratings sank to 24 per cent. This was
as bad as the dark days of 1980–81, as the public did not
believe economic recovery was happening, and Thatcher
again fell back on making a virtue of her determined refusal
to change policy. The autumn of 1985 brought no relief. In
September and early October riots broke out again, not only
in Brixton and Toxteth, but also in Tottenham and Hands-
worth. Soon after, a House of Lords select committee pub-
lished a report warning of the irreparable loss of industrial
capacity since 1979, and casting doubt on the government’s
claim that the expanding service sector would more than
compensate. Once again Thatcher was compelled to declare
at the party conference that dealing with unemployment
was her top priority. But it kept rising, and at the end of
1985 the Church of England published a report, Faith in the
City, deploring the demoralization and social breakdown in
many urban areas.
In the course of that year a further issue arose that would
cause increasing difficulties for Thatcher for the remainder of

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

her prime ministership. As chancellor Lawson was a figure of

considerable intellectual self-confidence; Thatcher was some-
what in awe of him, and never bullied or humiliated him as
she had his predecessor, Howe. He initially shared her belief
in the need to keep a tight rein on public spending and to
bring inflation down, but he also had ideas of his own. Some
of them concerned the reform and simplification of the tax
system, and in the aftermath of the fall and recovery of
sterling in January 1985, Lawson came to believe the United
Kingdom should join the exchange rate mechanism (ERM) of
the European monetary system, so as to prevent such desta-
bilizing fluctuations in the currency markets in future. He was
supported by Howe and Robin Leigh-Pemberton, the gov-
ernor of the Bank of England, and in February 1985 Lawson
and Howe put the case to Thatcher for joining the ERM, when
the time was right; but she was unpersuaded. In November,
when circumstances seemed more propitious, a larger group
of ministers discussed the matter, and Whitelaw also came
out in support. But Thatcher declared she would resign if
Britain entered the ERM, since it would involve an unaccept-
able diminution of national sovereignty. For the next five
years, she would resist all efforts by Lawson and Howe to
change her mind, and this fundamental disagreement would
eventually end their careers and her prime ministership.

Tainted victories

During the first two and a half years of her second term there
were many signs that Thatcher’s government seemed to
have lost its way on the home front, and three particular

72
 Enemies Within

episodes, from which she emerged victorious, also exposed

her to much additional controversy and criticism. The first
was the divisive and protracted dispute between the govern-
ment and the coal miners. On taking office in 1979 Thatcher
expected another confrontation with them, which she
was determined to win: partly to avenge the defeat they had
inflicted on Heath’s government, and partly because her
policy of taming the unions would be in ruins if she lost.
But she was only prepared to take on the miners when she
was ready, which was why she had shied away from doing
battle with them in February 1981. Meanwhile, large stocks
of coal were built up at many power stations, while others
were converted to burn oil, making it possible for Thatcher
to sit out a long strike. In March 1983 Lawson confirmed
the appointment of Ian MacGregor, a hard-headed Scots-
American businessman, as chairman of the National Coal
Board with effect from September; and in the same year the
government passed its third instalment of trade union
reform, which made union leaders more accountable to
their members by requiring secret ballots. By then the
National Union of Mineworkers was led by the militant
Arthur Scargill, who opposed all pit closures, even though
the Coal Board was heading for a loss of £250 million in
1983–4; and he was determined to bring Thatcher down.
In the spring of 1984 the Coal Board announced the
closure of twenty uneconomic pits, and Scargill called the
miners out on a strike that would last for twelve months.
There was solid support for him in Yorkshire, Scotland, and
parts of south Wales; there was mass picketing of working
pits, power stations, coal depots, and ports; and there were

73
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

violent confrontations between the militant miners and the

police which were regularly televised on news bulletins. But
Scargill had refused to hold the ballot which the law now
required, and many miners, especially in the Nottingham-
shire coalfield, declined to join the strike. His disregard of
the requisite democratic procedures, and his oft-expressed
desire to overthrow the government, meant that neither
the TUC nor the Labour Party would endorse his quasi-
revolutionary objectives, and such sympathy as existed for
the miners was outweighed by widespread revulsion at the
picketing, intimidation, and ensuing violence. Thatcher
implausibly insisted that the strike was an industrial dispute
between management and workers in which the govern-
ment declined to intervene, but she was on stronger ground
in condemning Scargill’s assault on freedom, democracy,
and the rule of law. This was the greatest domestic crisis
she faced, but after a bruising year Scargill was effectively
defeated. By the end of October 1984 it was clear there was
sufficient coal to last the winter, miners began to go back to
the pits, and the following March their union delegates
voted for a full return to work.
As well as crushing the external foe in the south Atlantic,
Thatcher had now vanquished what she described as ‘the
enemy within’;14 but there were other people and organiza-
tions that she also wished to bring to heel. She had virtually
grown up in the Grantham town council chamber, and the
preservation of local government autonomy, as a counter-
poise to the ever-extending reach of Whitehall, was a deeply
ingrained Conservative belief. But municipal authorities no
longer seemed to Thatcher what they had been in her father’s

74
 Enemies Within

day. Since the Second World War, she believed, they had
become inefficient, extravagant, irresponsible, and often
Labour-controlled, with the result that local government
spending, like that of central government, had got out of
control. These faults were especially marked in the recently
created bodies that oversaw England’s major conurbations:
the GLC (set up by Wilson in 1965) and the six metropol-
itan counties of Merseyside, Greater Manchester, South
Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and the West
Midlands (established by Heath in 1974). The GLC was
controlled by the provocatively left-wing Ken Livingstone
(‘Red Ken’ to the Tory tabloids); the Liverpool corporation
was dominated by the so-called Militant Tendency and led
by Ted Knight (‘Red Ted’); and David Blunkett was the chief
commissar of the so-called ‘People’s Republic of South
Yorkshire’. Thatcher was determined to emasculate these
men and extinguish these municipalities.
In December 1983 the environment secretary, Patrick
Jenkin, introduced a bill to give the government the power
to cap the level of rates that any council might raise. It was
denounced by Heath in the Commons, and met with serious
opposition in the Lords, but it reached the statute book
in June 1984, and Jenkin immediately imposed a cap on
eighteen local authorities, of which sixteen were Labour-
controlled. Most of them, including the GLC and Liver-
pool, tried to defy the government, by threatening not
to set any budget for the following financial year; but they
were forced to yield, not least because the Labour leader,
Kinnock, disowned such practices. Next, in the autumn of
1984 the government introduced legislation to abolish the

75
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

GLC, having previously failed in its efforts to cancel the

elections to it scheduled for the following year. Once again
Heath led the opposition in the Commons, and the govern-
ment’s majority fell to twenty-three in the Lords; but the bill
became law, and the GLC ceased to exist at the end of March
1986. Thatcher claimed that this resulted in an annual sav-
ing of £40 million, but the abolition of the GLC left one of
the greatest cities in the world with no central authority
responsible for strategic planning and infrastructural invest-
ment. In the same measure the six metropolitan counties
were also abolished, and many of their functions were
handed back to the old city corporations of Manchester,
Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham, and Sheffield.
Yet the greatest risk to Thatcher’s position during her
second term came neither from Arthur Scargill nor from
her controversial local government reforms, but from a cab-
inet crisis that blew up late in 1985, for the unlikely reason
that Westland plc, the United Kingdom’s only maker of
helicopters, was facing bankruptcy. Heseltine, the defence
secretary, was determined it should be acquired by a con-
tinental consortium to ensure the continuing presence
in Europe of a vital defence industry. But Brittan, whom
Thatcher had recently demoted from the Home Office to
the Department of Trade and Industry, supported the West-
land shareholders, who preferred to sell to the American
corporation Sikorski. He was backed by Thatcher, but Hesel-
tine mounted an increasingly public campaign in favour
of his alternative, European, option. By December 1985
Thatcher and Brittan were clear that Heseltine’s scheme
was dead; but, in defiance of the cabinet conventions of

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 Enemies Within

collective responsibility, he continued to pursue it, lobbying

his business contacts to keep it alive. Thatcher failed to rein
him in, and both sides began briefing against each other and
leaking letters to the press. At a cabinet meeting on 9 Jan-
uary 1986 the Westland matter was raised again, and Hesel-
tine stormed out and publicly announced his resignation.
In the ensuing uproar Brittan failed to give a convincing
response to accusations that he had been party to some of
the leaked letters, and on 24 January he, too, resigned.
This was a shambles. Thatcher no longer seemed in com-
mand of her government, where cabinet responsibility had
publicly broken down, and where she had failed to stop
Heseltine pursuing his policy of seeking European support
for Westland. She had been complicit in leaks and briefings
by one of her own colleagues, namely Brittan, against an-
other, Heseltine. Her refusal to publish a report on the affair
by the cabinet secretary, Armstrong, further fuelled the suspi-
cions that she was being less than candid, and that there was
some sort of cover-up. And while there was little sympathy for
Heseltine’s theatrical resignation, there was a widespread feel-
ing that she had let Brittan go so as to save her own skin.
Thatcher’s complicity in the leaks was known to some people
in 10 Downing Street and at the Department of Trade and
Industry, and Brittan could have ended her career had he
publicly revealed all he knew about her involvement. But
she survived the emergency Commons debate held at the
end of January. Kinnock failed to ask precise and probing
questions about what she knew and what she had done, and
fell back on vague generalities. Thatcher replied in a carefully
worded speech, admitting ‘regret’ at what had happened,15

77
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

while Heseltine and Brittan both stayed their hands, and

urged that it was time to move on.
None of these three victories enhanced Thatcher’s repu-
tation and nor did they improve the standing of her govern-
ment. Although many believed Scargill had to be beaten, the
protracted miners’ strike, and the violence, bitterness, and
recriminations that accompanied it, were not easily recon-
ciled with Thatcher’s wish to replace discord with harmony,
and in many mining communities she would never be
forgiven. The abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan
counties seemed motivated more by partisan vindictiveness
than by any serious attempt to make local government work
better; it was an extraordinary assertion of centralizing
power by a prime minister pledged to roll back the state;
and while in the short run Ken Livingstone lost the battle for
London, he would eventually win the war, being elected
the city’s first mayor in 2000. The Westland affair was even
more damaging, casting doubt on Thatcher’s command of
her cabinet, and on the honesty and transparency she had
so often proclaimed as being the essence of her politics and
her personality. For the first time since 1982 there were
mutterings in the Conservative Party about a leadership
contest. Nothing came of them, and the Westland affair
soon blew over; but during the early months of 1986 the
Tories were still third in the opinion polls, and it would
be from the back benches to which he had retired that
Heseltine would eventually mount the challenge that
would end Thatcher’s premiership.

78
 6
Thatcherism
Triumphant? 1986–89

‘The first seven years of Conservative government

have produced some benefits for Britain . . . The next
seven are going to produce more. . . . And the next
seven after that, more still.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1986)1

‘In a year she’ll be so unpopular you won’t believe it.’

(Denis Thatcher to Carol Thatcher, 12 June 1987)2

Zenith

Although her second administration was buffeted by these

political headwinds and cabinet cross-currents, it also wit-
nessed the heyday of what was increasingly being described
as ‘Thatcherism’, or ‘popular capitalism’. In March 1986, two
months after the Westland affair, Thatcher declared that ten-
ants were ‘jumping’ at the opportunity to purchase their
council houses, workers to buy shares in privatized compan-
ies, and trade unionists to exercise control over their leaders

79
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

via the ballot.3 The first of these claims was certainly correct.
By September 1986 a million council houses had been sold
and by the end of her premiership the number had reached
one and a half million. As a result owner occupation grew
from 55 per cent of the population in 1980 to 67 per cent ten
years later, while local authority support for public sector
housing significantly declined. For Thatcher, council estates
were the seedbeds of socialism, vandalism, and crime, where-
as home ownership was the defining virtue of good citi-
zenship, and she successfully opposed all suggestions from
Howe and Lawson that tax relief on mortgages should be
phased out. Thatcher believed that increasing the number
of home owners would help strangle socialism and embed
Conservative values more deeply; moreover, by 1990 pro-
ceeds from council house sales had netted £28 billion for
the Treasury.
This social revolution in home ownership was well under
way by the beginning of Thatcher’s second term; but it was
only after 1983 that the privatization of state-owned corpor-
ations, many of them nationalized by Labour after 1945,
became a major plank of government policy. The sale of
shares in BT began in November 1984, and within eighteen
months this raised almost £4 billion. Next came British Gas:
as with BT, the shares were deliberately undervalued, they
were many times oversubscribed, and prices rose spectacu-
larly on the first day of trading. The third high-profile pri-
vatization was of British Airways; shares were eleven times
oversubscribed, and prices rose by 82 per cent on the open-
ing day. On the eve of the 1987 election Rolls-Royce was also
returned to the private sector, thereby reversing Heath’s

80
 Thatcherism Triumphant?

controversial nationalization sixteen years before. Privatiza-

tion was pragmatic and piecemeal, but it provided Thatcher
with a defining purpose for her second administration: putt-
ing nationalization irrevocably into reverse, and enlarging
the population of shareholders who had a stake in the cap-
italist system. She was eager to press further ahead (electri-
city and water would be earmarked for selling off in the next
election manifesto), and by 1989 the proceeds of privatiza-
tion amounted to £24 billion.
The successful sell-off of nationalized industries enabled
Thatcher’s second administration to regain some political
momentum, as did the cumulative effect of the deregulation
of restrictive practices carried on by management and unions
alike, which helped to bring into being what was called the
‘enterprise economy’. One reason Thatcher became so crit-
ical of universities and the Church of England was that
academics and clerics seemed so hostile to business, which
she (urged on by Denis) regarded as an essential activity and
an admirable calling. During her second term she increas-
ingly preached the gospel of wealth creation, and events and
developments seemed to bear her out. Between 1983 and 1990
more than three million new jobs were generated, mostly in
the service sector, which went some way towards making up
for those that had earlier been lost in manufacturing, and
by the end of her premiership more than 10 per cent of the
workforce was self-employed. The most spectacular deregula-
tion, which was the natural corollary to the earlier abolition of
exchange controls, was the opening up of the City of Lon-
don, known as the ‘Big Bang’, which took place in October
1986. Traditional gentlemanly practices of doing business

81
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

were swept away; overseas banks, finance houses, and their

employees were welcomed; and London was reinvented as a
competitive international financial centre that could hold
its own with Frankfurt, Tokyo, and New York—a reinven-
tion vividly symbolized by the construction of new tall
buildings in the old square mile and the regeneration of
Docklands.
The transformative effect of these changes was undoubted,
but they also had their downsides. In championing the sale of
council houses Thatcher showed an intuitive understanding
of the aspirations of many ordinary people; but the resulting
decline in the stock of public housing, combined with soaring
property prices later in the decade, meant there would be a
significant shortage of affordable accommodation for many
families on low incomes. Privatization made former nation-
alized industries more efficient and competitive, and was a
policy that would subsequently be taken up in many other
parts of the world; but it did not always end monopoly, the
government used the proceeds as income to finance further
tax cuts rather than to invest in long-overdue infrastructural
repairs, and there was always the risk that the nation’s essen-
tial utilities might end up in foreign ownership, as some
indeed did. The creation of many new jobs in the service
sector was undeniable, but it was largely confined to the
south-east of the country, and the old manufacturing regions
were devastated by de-industrialization: the closure of the
factories, mills, steelworks, and mines on which the liveli-
hoods of entire communities had depended. And while the
‘Big Bang’ rejuvenated the City, it also gave rise to what critics
deplored as a materialistic culture of rampant greed, where

82
 Thatcherism Triumphant?

speculation and a fast profit were more important than the

creation of real wealth. It was a far cry from the spartan thrift
and self-denial of Alfred Roberts.
All this helps explain why, between 1981 and 1987, aver-
age wages rose by 3 per cent a year. Hire-purchase restric-
tions had been lifted in 1982, and financial deregulation led
to an unprecedented credit boom, as banks and building
societies competed to offer ever easier loans; credit cards
and cash-dispensers became widespread by the middle of
the decade; and shops also stayed open for longer, so oppor-
tunities to spend also multiplied. Instead of being a nation
of unionized producers, Britain was becoming, as Thatcher
hoped it would, a nation of individualized consumers. But
they were not, as Thatcher preached, good housekeepers, for
the average British family was spending much more than it
earned: indeed, personal indebtedness rose four times as fast
between 1983 and 1987 as average incomes. Much of this
borrowing financed home purchases, as average prices more
than doubled between 1982 and 1989, and the number of
mortgages doubled in 1986–7 alone. But while in the short
run this credit spree and spending boom could be sustained,
many people, including those who had bought their council
houses, found that their homes were worth less than their
mortgages when recession returned in the early 1990s. More-
over, unemployment went on rising until 1986, and a quarter
of the population was living on less than half the national
average income; but Thatcher did not seem to mind.
She was more concerned about the problem of domestic
rates (the primary form of local government income), which
she disliked as a tax that was only levied on property owners,

83
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

and she was eager to find a way to prevent Labour councils

from increasing charges on householders, many of whom
voted Tory. Late in 1984 two junior ministers at the Dep-
artment of the Environment, Kenneth Baker and William
Waldegrave, began working on a proposal to replace rates by
a scheme whereby everyone who used council services would
pay towards the cost of them, whether they owned property
or not. Thatcher became more fully engaged in the issue the
following February, after protests in Scotland against the
recent re-evaluation of the rates, and in May 1985 she told
the Scottish Tory party conference that the rating system
would be reformed, and that a new scheme would be first
introduced north of the border where the grievances were
strongest. Lawson warned Thatcher that the proposed reform
would prove ‘completely unworkable and politically cata-
strophic’,4 which was a prescient prediction. In January
1986 Baker, who had recently been promoted to be secretary
of state for the environment, published a green paper, Paying
for Local Government, which set out the detail of what was
termed the ‘community charge’. It received a mixed reception
in the Commons and in the media, but by the end of the year
the bill to abolish domestic rates in Scotland had been passed,
and the community charge would come into full operation
there on 1 April 1989.

The nation and the world

Although Thatcher was prime minister of the United King-

dom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, she knew little
about the manufacturing cities and industrial centres of the

84
 Thatcherism Triumphant?

midlands and the north, and showed scant sympathy for

their de-industrializing plight. Wales and Scotland were
largely foreign countries to her, but as a committed unionist
she was opposed to any calls for devolution. There was
continuing bloodshed and violence in Northern Ireland,
along with terrorist attacks in London, while the attempt
to murder her at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in October
1984 only intensified her loathing of the IRA. Yet during her
second term she came to recognize there must be a political
solution to this unending carnage, and that view was shared
by Garrett FitzGerald, who had become Irish taoiseach in
December 1982, and also by the Irish lobby in Washington
to which Reagan, whose forebears came from Tipperary, was
sympathetic. In the aftermath of the Brighton bombing
Thatcher’s initial discussions with FitzGerald did not go
well; but their personal relations were good, Reagan gently
urged her to adopt a more accommodating attitude, and she
began to understand that the law-abiding Catholic commu-
nity in the north had to be reconciled to the British state.
The ensuing conversations were largely carried on, not by
the Northern Ireland Office (where Douglas Hurd had
replaced Prior late in 1984), but by the Cabinet Office, and
the Ulster Unionists, who were opposed to any such conver-
sations, were deliberately kept out. The eventual result was
the Anglo-Irish agreement, which Thatcher and FitzGerald
signed at Hillsborough Castle on 15 November 1985, which
created a joint Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference,
thereby recognizing Dublin’s involvement in any future
peace process, and offering some reassurance to the Catholic
population of Ulster. As over Rhodesia, Thatcher had to be

85
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

nudged and encouraged, this time especially by the cabinet

secretary, Armstrong, in a direction she was not wholly
comfortable in going, and her doubts were borne out by
the outraged reaction of the Ulster Unionists to what they
regarded as a British betrayal. Nor did the violence and
killing in Northern Ireland abate thereafter, and the agree-
ment failed to deliver the cross-border co-operation against
terrorism for which Thatcher had hoped. But opinion in the
republic and in Britain was generally in favour; the agree-
ment did help convince the Americans that Britain was
genuinely trying to resolve the Northern Ireland problem;
and it was the tentative beginning of a process which would
end with the Good Friday agreement of 1998.
Having held on to the Falklands and let go of Rhodesia
during her first term, Thatcher was now faced with ano-
ther late imperial challenge in the form of Hong Kong, the
United Kingdom’s last great colony, on which the lease
was due to expire in 1997, when it would revert to China.
Much as she would have liked to deliver another Falklands-
like triumph in the Far East, this was impossible both mili-
tarily and legally, as the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had
made brutally plain to her when she had visited him in
Beijing in September 1982. Britain’s best hope was to try to
ensure that the colony’s capitalist way of life would be
preserved following the unavoidable advent of Chinese
rule. Thatcher recognized these would be the best terms
she could get for the Hong Kong people, and Howe eventu-
ally secured an agreement in September 1984 whereby the
Chinese government, which in fact had no wish to destroy
Hong Kong’s prosperity, guaranteed its ‘special status’, once

86
 Thatcherism Triumphant?

they had repossessed it, for fifty years. In December,

Thatcher flew to Beijing to sign the agreement, and then
went on to reassure the people of Hong Kong that this was
a good deal. The suppression of dissidents in Tiananmen
Square, Beijing, in June 1989 would severely shake her
confidence in the Chinese government’s bona fides; but the
settlement was the best that could realistically have been
hoped for, and she would attend the final handover in 1997.
Once again Thatcher had acquiesced in a ‘pragmatic’ solu-
tion which went against her combative and confrontational
instincts that were as marked in overseas as in domestic
affairs. But in the case of South Africa, which was a British
and Commonwealth issue, she was more defiant and deter-
mined, for she consistently opposed the widely held view
that economic sanctions were the necessary means to end
white minority rule, and she seemed to relish the isolation
and opprobrium she endured as a result. The fact that such
opinions were held by many Commonwealth and European
leaders merely strengthened her conviction that she was
right. For Thatcher saw the issue of apartheid in cold
war rather than post-colonial terms: white South Africa
was part of the West, whereas the African National Cong-
ress (ANC) was at best a communist-backed, and at worst
a terrorist, organization. If the ANC was allowed to pre-
vail, Thatcher believed, the South African economy would
be destroyed, and a government would be installed that
would be more sympathetic to Moscow than to Washing-
ton. Imposing economic sanctions would make this out-
come more likely, not less; whereas increasing trade with
South Africa, instead of reducing it, would open up the

87
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

nation to the outside world, strengthen its economy still

further, and improve the chances of a peaceful transition
to black majority rule, which she reluctantly recognized
must eventually come.
Although Thatcher’s view of South African affairs possessed
a certain internal logic, she made two serious misjudgements.
In standing out against the rest of the Commonwealth
she was also setting herself against the Queen, who cared
far more for it than Thatcher ever did. Moreover, in denoun-
cing the ANC as a communist and terrorist organization,
she failed to recognize that other members shared Nelson
Mandela’s strong commitment to democracy and the rule of
law. Instead, she was determined to block the imposition of
further sanctions. In September 1985 she vetoed such a
proposal by the EC, and the following month, at the Com-
monwealth heads of government meeting in Nassau, she was
equally unyielding, although she had no supporters from any
other member country, and Howe found her intransigence
embarrassing. At a meeting held in London twelve months
later, the Commonwealth leaders overrode British dissent
and agreed to implement the sanctions package proposed
at Nassau. Britain, Howe lamented, was branded as the
‘sole defender’ of apartheid.5 Thatcher had hoped that by
fending off further punitive measures she would be able to
persuade South Africa’s prime minister, P. W. Botha, to
embrace reform voluntarily. But he was as uncompromising
as she was.
Thatcher’s relations with Commonwealth leaders deteri-
orated during her second term, but those with the EC for a
time improved—or at least seemed to do so. In June 1984

88
 Thatcherism Triumphant?

she achieved a permanent budget settlement at Fontaine-

bleau (the deal Carrington and Gilmour had negotiated
in 1981 was about to expire), grudgingly agreed to by
Helmut Kohl and Mitterrand so as to keep her quiet; but it
was less of a triumphant deal than she claimed. The follow-
ing year she supported the appointment of Jacques Delors as
president of the European Commission, and backed the
Single European Act (1986), furthering the original commit-
ments enshrined in the treaty of Rome to the free movement
of goods, services, capital, and people; but she would later
regret it, because it extended the powers of the commission
and the Strasbourg parliament, and was a significant step in
the direction of that greater integration which she deplored.
The high point of Thatcher’s enthusiasm for Europe was her
agreement with Mitterrand, announced in January 1986,
that Britain and France would collaborate in constructing a
Channel tunnel to link London and Paris by rail. It was the
sort of practical project she found more appealing than the
visionary schemes for a united Europe that, to her dismay,
Delors would soon embrace, but she would not mention it
when she came to write her memoirs.
As during her first term, Thatcher’s most significant over-
seas preoccupations were Britain’s relations with the United
States and the continuing cold war. The conclusion she drew
from Reagan’s belated support over the Falklands, and his
failure to consult her over Grenada, was that she must get
even closer to him. She was also looking for a younger Soviet
leader who might replace the ailing Politburo gerontocracy
(Andropov died in 1984, and his successor, Konstantin
Chernenko, lasted barely a year), and she discovered him

89
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

in Mikhail Gorbachev, whom she invited to Chequers in

December 1984. She found him open-minded and prepared
to argue; promptly declared she could ‘do business’ with
him;6 and advised Reagan to do the same, which he did,
once Gorbachev took over on Chernenko’s death. But these
decisions and developments carried their own risks. In April
1986 Thatcher allowed the use of British-based American
F111s to bomb Libya, in retaliation for attacks on US service-
men and tourists in Europe. There was widespread oppos-
ition in Britain, even as Thatcher was determined to show
herself Reagan’s staunchest ally. And when Reagan met Gor-
bachev in Reykjavik six months later, he was so convinced
that the Strategic Defense Initiative (known as ‘Star Wars’)
would render the United States invulnerable to Soviet missile
attack that he offered to cut America’s strategic nuclear weap-
ons by half in five years, and to eliminate them entirely in a
decade. Thatcher was horrified, for Reagan was ignoring Brit-
ain’s independent deterrent, and showing himself more of a
unilateralist than Foot or the CND.

‘Ten More Years’?

For most of its second term Thatcher’s government fared

poorly in the polls. The defeat of Scargill did not give her
the lift that the victory over Galtieri had earlier provided;
unemployment remained high, and economic recovery was
slow and uneven; the Westland crisis had weakened her
moral and political authority; and her relations with Reagan
continued to be more tense in private than she let on in
public. But by the autumn of 1986 the polls began to improve

90
 Thatcherism Triumphant?

for the Tories, as the policies pursued by Howe and Lawson

finally began to produce results. In his March budget
Lawson had cut the basic rate of income tax by one penny
to twenty-nine pence in the pound, and towards the end of
the year unemployment began to fall for the first time
since Thatcher took power. Moreover, low inflation and low
interest rates combined to make Britain one of the fastest-
growing economies in the EC, and in the aftermath of the
Big Bang the City of London was beginning to thrive. There
was talk of a ‘British economic miracle’, but the so-called
‘Lawson boom’ was both partial and fragile, for it depended
on a consumer surge driven by increasing household indebt-
edness, and on using the income derived from North Sea oil
and privatization to finance tax cuts. In 1986 industrial
investment was still lower than it had been when Thatcher
became prime minister, and the following year Britain’s
gross national product fell behind that of Italy.
Nevertheless, the beginnings of the ‘Lawson boom’ and
the apparent success of ‘popular capitalism’ meant that the
Tory party conference in October 1986 was more upbeat
than its recent predecessors, as ministers promised further
privatization and increased spending on hospitals and the
police. Thatcher insisted that the Conservatives were the
caring party, exulted that privatization was being taken up
around the world, and denounced Labour’s commitment to
a non-nuclear defence policy and the closure of American
bases in Britain as irresponsible and unpatriotic. By the end
of the year the Tories had consolidated their lead in the
polls, and they maintained and hardened it through to
the following spring. In March 1987 Lawson produced a

91
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

vote-winning budget, cutting the standard rate of income

tax by a further two pence, while also increasing spending
on health and other services. Soon after, Thatcher paid a
triumphant visit to Moscow, to do more ‘business’ with
Gorbachev during seven hours of formal talks: on British
television she appeared a world leader of unrivalled stature,
as welcome and influential in the Kremlin as she was in the
White House. This was high-level summitry, but it was also
deliberate pre-electioneering, and soon after her return, she
announced that the poll would be held on 11 June.
Yet the Conservative electoral campaign was less confident
and coherent in 1987 than it had been four years earlier.
The manifesto was poorly written, and although full of
policy proposals, in an effort to be more specific than its
predecessor, many of them had not been thought through.
Thatcher had also come to distrust Tebbit, whom she had
moved from trade and industry to be party chairman in
September 1985, and she intruded Lord Young into Conser-
vative central office, but the result was a divided and often
ill-focused Tory campaign, beset by personal rivalries and
animosities, whereas Labour’s effort, overseen by Peter Man-
delson and Bryan Gould, was a great improvement on its
predecessor. Some in central office thought Thatcher had
become a liability, because her campaigning style, like her
prime ministerial manner, was increasingly hectoring and
overbearing, and they argued that she should play a less
prominent part than in 1983. She also made some unex-
pected gaffes at press conferences and in interviews, and
when a poll published a week before the election suggested
that Labour was closing the gap, she panicked and became

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 Thatcherism Triumphant?

convinced that everything was going wrong. There was a

succession of blazing rows at central office which led White-
law to conclude, presciently, that ‘that is a woman who will
never fight another election’.7
During the campaign’s final days Thatcher recovered
her nerve and composure, and the Tories commandingly
outspent their opponents on last-minute advertising. The
voters still did not trust Labour on defence or the economy,
while the Liberal–SDP Alliance failed to become the second
party in the state, but was still popular enough to split the
opposition vote. As a result Thatcher won by another land-
slide, even though it was not quite on the scale of 1983, as the
Tories did badly in Scotland, Wales, and the north of Eng-
land, and drew most of their support from the shires, the
suburbs, and the south-east of England. They lost twenty-
one seats, while Labour gained twenty, and the Alliance
won a mere twenty-two. Labour’s share of the vote increased
from 27.6 to 30.8 per cent, and the Tory share declined
slightly, from 42.4 to 42.2 per cent, while the Alliance only
obtained 22.6 per cent. As in 1983 Thatcher easily held Finch-
ley (though her majority was reduced slightly, to 8,913), and
her ambition to retain her three-figure Commons preponder-
ance was just realized, even as it was reduced from 144 seats to
102. Although the Conservatives had won three successive
general elections between 1951 and 1959 they had done so
with three different leaders; no one man had achieved so
many victories since before the Great Reform Act of 1832,
and for a woman to have done so was even more remarkable.
Thatcher had been compelled to reshuffle her 1983 cabinet
several times in the aftermath of such events as Parkinson’s

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

enforced resignation and the Westland affair, and following

the election she reshaped it again. Howe stayed at the Foreign
Office, Lawson at the Treasury, and Hurd at the Home Office
(where she had moved him in September 1985 from North-
ern Ireland), while Whitelaw continued as deputy prime
minister and leader of the Lords. Hailsham retired as lord
chancellor, and was followed briefly by Lord Havers and
at greater length by Lord Mackay of Clashfern. Parkinson
returned to the cabinet as secretary of state for energy, while
Walker, the previous holder of that office, was moved to be
Welsh secretary. Yet this was scarcely a ‘Thatcherite’ govern-
ment, and many of its members were ‘up and coming prag-
matists from the centre-left of the party’,8 among them
Kenneth Baker, Kenneth Clarke, Norman Fowler, Tom King,
and John Major, who entered the cabinet for the first time as
chief secretary to the Treasury. Joseph, her mentor and most
loyal supporter, had already retired from the cabinet in May
1986, having fallen foul of the teachers’ unions in his drive
for educational reform. Tebbit, once one of her key sup-
porters, had become so disenchanted with Thatcher that he
decided to leave the government, though he also did so to
care for his wife, who had been permanently disabled as a
result of the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel. More dam-
aging would be the retirement of Whitelaw in January 1988
on health grounds: he had been utterly loyal to Thatcher, but
also gave candid advice as to what she should or shouldn’t do.
He was irreplaceable, and his departure left the prime minis-
ter increasingly isolated.
But, compared with the indecisiveness that the Thatcher
government had displayed in the immediate aftermath of

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 Thatcherism Triumphant?

the 1983 electoral triumph, the early months of her third

term represented a much more active and purposeful begin-
ning. Thatcher herself chaired an inter-departmental com-
mittee which in March 1988 pledged £3 billion in aid for
the inner cities. There was a further phase of privatization,
beginning with British Petroleum, which would be foll-
owed by the sale of the nine existing water authorities and
of the twelve regional electricity distribution companies. At
education, where he proved a more emollient and effective
minister than Joseph had been, Baker passed legislation
setting up a national curriculum, giving schools the right
to opt out of local authority control, and abolishing the
inner London education authority. At health, Clarke
empowered hospitals to become self-governing ‘NHS trusts’
within the health service, funded by the taxpayer but with
control of their own budgets. And between December 1987
and July 1988 Thatcher drove through the legislation which
would introduce the community charge in England and
Wales, which became known as the ‘poll tax’ (since it was
levied on individuals not properties, and made no distinc-
tion between rich and poor), despite the opposition of
Heath, Heseltine, and Gilmour in the Commons, and even
more strenuous and protracted hostility in the Lords.
By launching such a veritable frenzy of legislation and
new initiatives Thatcher was determined to prove there
would be no slowing down during her third term, and that
she might just go ‘on, and on, and on’.9 The Conservative
Party conference in the autumn of 1987 was an unabashed
victory rally, with no equivalent of the Parkinson revelations
that had marred the proceedings in 1983, and Thatcher

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

immodestly hinted at her intention of beating Lord Liver-

pool’s record of fifteen continuous years in office. Until
early 1989 the government’s poll ratings held up much better
than they had during the first two years of her first and second
terms; and on 3 May 1989 Thatcher completed ten years in
power, making her the longest serving prime minister of the
twentieth century, surpassing Asquith’s continuous term
and Churchill’s two separate stints at 10 Downing Street.
Her comment was suitably regal: ‘we feel quite a sense of
achievement that we have completed ten years . . . during
that time, Britain has been transformed’.10 And at the party
conference that autumn the Tory faithful, to whom she
seemed indomitable, invincible, infallible, and indispens-
able, gave her a rapturous reception, chanting ‘Ten more
years, ten more years’.11 Yet within little more than twelve
months, she would be gone.

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 7
Isolation and
Defenestration,1989–90

‘I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been

pretty hostile of late.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 12 November 1990)1

‘I had lost the Cabinet’s support. I could not even

muster a credible campaign team. It was the end.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1993)2

Injury time

After a decade in power it was increasingly clear who were

Thatcher’s friends, and who were her enemies. At the 1987
election the press had supported her government by a mar-
gin of three to one: The Daily Mirror, The Guardian, and The
Independent were left of centre, but The Times, The Daily
Telegraph, The Express, The Daily Mail (and their Sunday
siblings), The Sun, and the News of the World were strongly
Thatcherite. In 1981 Rupert Murdoch had acquired The
Times and the Sunday Times, despite his already extensive

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

share of the newspaper market. Thatcher always denied any

involvement in these transactions, but in fact she had met
with Murdoch early in the year, something she later and
consistently refused to acknowledge. In October 1990 Sky
TV was allowed to take over its only rival, British Satellite
Broadcasting, again without reference to the Monopolies
Commission. Throughout her years in power Thatcher
helped Murdoch expand his media interests, and backed
him in his battles with the print unions (notably during
the Wapping dispute of 1986–7), and he was a loyal sup-
porter in return. She bestowed knighthoods on well-
disposed editors, such as David English of The Daily Mail
and Albert (Larry) Lamb of The Sun. She gave peerages to
favoured businessmen such as John King (British Airways),
Arnold Weinstock (GEC), Victor Matthews (Trafalgar House),
and Jeffrey Sterling (P&O). And, when making public
appointments, she sought to put in like-minded people, as
when she replaced Gordon Richardson, the governor of
the Bank of England who did not share her belief in monet-
arism, with Robin Leigh-Pemberton, who did: ‘is he one of
us?’, she was reputed to have asked each time she was pre-
sented with a suggestion for appointment.3
On the other side of the political divide were those organ-
izations that were not of Thatcher’s ‘way of thinking’, such
as the universities, the arts establishment, the Church of
England, and the BBC. There, also, she determined to put
in her own people, to bring these wayward cultures to heel,
as at the BBC, where she appointed Marmaduke Hussey, the
former managing director of Times Newspapers, to be chair-
man of the governors; his first act was to sack Alasdair Milne,

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 Isolation and Defenestration

the widely respected director-general. Yet the greatest threat

to Thatcher’s position did not come from her political
opponents, but from those who claimed to be on the same
side. She would always be the darling of the Tory party
conferences, but while she had purged the ‘wets’ from her cabi-
net, they had not gone away, and as her tenure at Downing
Street lengthened, she made new enemies in her own party.
During the eleven years that she held office thirty-six cab-
inet ministers departed, and several of them, such as Gilmour
and Heseltine, became fierce critics. Many ministers resented
the way that Bernard Ingham would brief the press against
them, and by her third term the cabinet was no longer the
place where decisions were taken, but merely where they
were reported. At the same time Thatcher was increasingly
out of touch with her back-benchers: those who had been in
parliament a long time were resentful that she had not given
them jobs, while she scarcely knew any of those who had
arrived in 1987.
It was the same in the country as a whole, where Thatcher
was a self-styled populist premier who was never all that
popular: although she obtained two overwhelming Com-
mons majorities, most of the votes in 1983 and again four
years later were cast against her. There were also many
who lost out during the 1980s; the boom times in the City
and the south-east, along with de-industrialization and
high unemployment elsewhere, meant that inequality mark-
edly increased. Between 1979 and 1992 average household
incomes rose by 36 per cent: but while those of the top
10 per cent went up by 62 per cent, those of the bottom
10 per cent fell by 17 per cent. The poll tax only made

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

matters worse, since it was levied in such a way that thrifty,

prudent home owners, many of whom had recently bought
their council houses, were worse off, whereas those with
high incomes were often better off. When it came into
force in Scotland in April 1989 there was widespread refusal
to pay. The following year it was introduced in England and
Wales, where the opposition was even more pronounced. In
March 1990 there were protests in Manchester, Bristol, and
Birmingham, and several London boroughs, and there was a
massive demonstration in Trafalgar Square which turned
ugly, with rioting and looting. Thatcher came to regard
commitment to the poll tax as the ultimate test of personal
loyalty, but it was widely seen as an avoidable and unneces-
sary fiasco for which she was personally responsible.
It was against this darkening political and economic back-
ground that Lawson delivered his first post-election budget in
April 1988, embodying and proclaiming the ‘bourgeois tri-
umphalism’ that erstwhile supporters had come to deplore
in the aftermath of Thatcher’s third election victory. He cut
the standard rate of income tax again from twenty-seven to
twenty-five pence in the pound, while slashing the top rate
from 60 to 40 per cent. This was another budget which bla-
tantly favoured the rich, and since it coincided with cuts in
unemployment benefit, housing benefit, and child benefit, it
intensified the view that the Thatcher government was indif-
ferent to increasing inequality. Moreover, the chancellor’s
give-away bonanza was fatally mistimed, for it merely stoked
the ‘Lawson boom’, largely based on rising house prices and
expanded consumer credit, which was getting out of control.
By the end of 1989 inflation was back to 10 per cent, which

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 Isolation and Defenestration

was what it had been ten years earlier; interest rates had been
pushed up to 15 per cent; and unemployment, while it had
recently fallen, was still at two million. The combined effect of
renewed inflation and increased interest rates hit the new,
Thatcherite middle class—of self-employed businessmen,
and owners of recently purchased homes—particularly hard.
Thatcher had been worried that the economy was over-
heating since the autumn of 1986, and there was another
subject on which she increasingly came to disagree with her
chancellor. For Lawson, like Howe, was in favour of joining
the ERM, a policy to which the premier was viscerally hostile
from 1985 to 1990. But it was widely understood that one
day Britain would indeed join, and Lawson began to prepare
the ground by trying to align sterling with the Deutschmark.
Thatcher was flatly opposed to this policy, and to strengthen
her hand in dealing with Lawson she brought back Alan
Walters, who had worked for her between 1981 and 1983,
to be her economic adviser. To complicate matters still fur-
ther she was becoming increasingly antagonistic to the EC
and to Jacques Delors; and in this view she was reinforced by
Charles Powell, who had been her private secretary for inter-
national affairs since 1984, but who was by this time widely
regarded as her de facto foreign secretary. His hand was
much in evidence in the speech Thatcher delivered at Bruges
in September 1988, where she said many complimentary
things about Britain’s destiny being in Europe, but the most
memorable sentence gave a very different message: ‘We
have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state
in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level
with a European super-state exercising a new dominance

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

from Brussels’.4 To Howe and Lawson alike, these views were

anathema.
The long-festering disagreement between Howe and Law-
son on the one hand, and Thatcher on the other, finally
erupted in June 1989, at the European Council meeting in
Madrid. They both urged that she should undertake to join
the ERM by the end of 1992. She refused to follow their
advice, on the grounds that the time was not right, which
effectively left her isolated. She thought that Howe and
Lawson had backed her into a corner, and in July she took
out her rage and frustration by sacking Howe from the
Foreign Office (where she replaced him with Major), and
making him leader of the Commons instead. Although she
gave him the title of deputy prime minister, the demotion of
Howe was widely regarded as vindictive and ungrateful, and
the ensuing cabinet reshuffle was not well received. Nor was
Lawson happy, since the advice Thatcher was getting from
Walters merely reinforced her determination not to join the
ERM. By the autumn of 1989 Lawson had had enough,
and he resigned in late October (making Walters’s position
untenable; he also quit a few days later). Thatcher moved
Major back from the Foreign Office to replace Lawson, and
translated Hurd from the Home Office to the Foreign Office.
Ironically it was Major and Hurd who prevailed where Howe
and Lawson had failed, for in October 1990 Thatcher finally
agreed that Britain should indeed join the ERM.
The quarrels between Thatcher, Howe, and Lawson over
Europe, combined with the poll tax débâcle and the return
of inflation and high interest rates, increasingly gave the
impression that the government was losing its way. Having

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 Isolation and Defenestration

held up unexpectedly well in the polls since June 1987, public

opinion turned sharply and decisively against Thatcher
and her colleagues early in 1989. That summer the Con-
servatives suffered their first national defeat under her lead-
ership, when Labour won forty-five seats to the Tories’
thirty-two in the elections to the European parliament.
Labour also moved ahead in the opinion polls, where it
would remain for the rest of Thatcher’s premiership. In
November 1989 Sir Anthony Meyer, an obscure Europhile
Tory back-bencher, challenged Thatcher for the party lead-
ership. She won by 314 votes to his 33 (with a further three
abstentions and 24 spoilt papers); but the very fact there was
a contest was more disturbing than comforting. By late 1989
Labour was heading towards a 50 per cent approval level;
by February 1990 it was regarded as the party most likely to
win the next election; and by the spring, Thatcher’s per-
sonal rating had plummeted to 20 per cent, worse than
in 1981. Her cabinet colleagues were finding her increas-
ingly impossible to work with, while many Tory MPs were
coming to believe that the best way to preserve the Thatcher
legacy, and to keep their own seats, might be to get rid of
Thatcher herself.

Global wobbles

By the time of her third election victory Thatcher was the

unrivalled senior figure on the international stage, at least in
terms of personality, if not of power. She had often been
more pragmatic in foreign affairs than she let on, and had
generally fared better when she adopted that approach. She

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

had been intransigent over the Falklands, to her great bene-

fit; but over Europe she became increasingly belligerent,
with less obviously successful results, and having grudgingly
given way over joining the ERM, it was at the wrong time and
the wrong rate. She constantly stressed her close relationship
with Reagan, but although the chemistry was good, and she
could always overwhelm him in argument, she was more the
junior partner than she would ever publicly acknowledge,
and their disagreements, over the Falklands, Grenada, and
‘Star Wars’, had been deep. And while Thatcher had been
the first western leader to recognize Gorbachev’s significance,
and liked to present herself as a latter-day Churchill, broker-
ing high-level conversations between Washington and Mos-
cow, the reality was that once Reagan and Gorbachev had
begun to talk to each other, they no longer needed her as their
intermediary.
Reagan’s second term had only a year and a half to run
when Thatcher secured her third electoral victory, and for
much of it he was mired in the Iran–Contra scandal. By this
time, under pressure from members of his own administra-
tion, he had backed off from his belief in the ‘Star Wars’
deterrent and thus from unilateral nuclear disarmament,
much to Thatcher’s relief. Within the limits of diplomatic
politesse he had done all he could to express support for
Thatcher’s re-election, including humiliating the Labour
leader, Kinnock, on his visit to Washington in March 1987,
when he had been allowed barely twenty minutes in the
Oval Office. Soon after her victory Thatcher returned to
Washington, and gave Reagan a ringing endorsement when
he was low in spirits and in the polls. In June 1988 he made a

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 Isolation and Defenestration

farewell visit to Thatcher in London, when each paid the other

extravagant public tributes. In November that year she was his
last official visitor to the White House, when she saluted the
outgoing president, and tried to establish closer links with his
successor, George H. W. Bush, who had been Reagan’s vice-
president. But the chemistry between them did not work so
well. Sensitive to accusations of wimpishness in the election
campaign, and being by American standards a well-born son
of privilege, Bush was determined not to be intimidated or
patronized by Thatcher as Reagan had often been.
This American distancing from Thatcher became apparent
in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the col-
lapse of communism in the autumn of 1989. Thatcher took
pride and pleasure in claiming that this further extension of
freedom was what she and Reagan had worked for; but that
was only one of the reasons why communism foundered,
and by no means the most important; and ironically, for
someone who so welcomed this development, the conse-
quences were in many ways not to her liking. She was
determined to thwart the reunification of Germany, which
she (mistakenly) regarded as portending a return to 1939
yet (rightly) feared would diminish British influence on
both sides of the Atlantic. But Bush was equally determined
that reunification would happen, and working with Kohl
and Mitterrand, and eventually with Gorbachev, he largely
ignored and increasingly isolated Thatcher, and helped
bring about an outcome which she was powerless to pre-
vent. As a result the future American route into Europe
would be more via Berlin than via London. While the cold
war had persisted Britain had enjoyed privileged access to

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

Washington, as America’s essential continental partner, which

Thatcher had exploited to the full; but once it was over the
US–UK ‘special relationship’ would never be as close again,
and a reunified Germany would be re-established as the
major European power, not just economically, but politic-
ally and internationally too.
The collapse of communism almost coincided with the
beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa. There,
too, Thatcher aspired to be a peace broker, but this was an
implausible ambition, given her intransigence over sanc-
tions and her continued hostility to the ANC. In 1989 the
equally stubborn President Botha was replaced by the more
accommodating F. W. de Klerk, and Thatcher pressed him to
begin releasing African political prisoners and to negotiate a
settlement that would bring in black majority rule; but at
the Commonwealth heads of government meeting at Kuala
Lumpur in October 1989 there was another row over sanc-
tions, as Thatcher publicly repudiated the very agreement
whose adoption she had proposed. Meanwhile, de Klerk
gradually began to release the prisoners; early in 1990 all
those who remained were freed, including Mandela, and
the ban on political organizations such as the ANC was lifted.
Thatcher and Mandela finally met in London in July: she was
impressed by his dignity and lack of bitterness, but still feared
he was a Marxist; he found her formidable but unyielding on
the subject of sanctions and suspicious of the ANC. After her
fall she would grudgingly concede that the only possible
rulers of a post-apartheid South Africa would be Mandela
and the ANC; but it was not the outcome she had wanted,
and she was never wholly comfortable with it.

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 Isolation and Defenestration

During her final months in power the invasion of Kuwait

by Saddam Hussein in August 1990 provided further evi-
dence of Thatcher’s declining influence in world (and espe-
cially Anglo-American) affairs. The news broke when she
was in the United States, attending the fortieth anniversary
conference of the Aspen Institute in Colorado, so she had
ample opportunity to urge that President Bush should stand
firm, and later claimed much credit for his having done so.
But even as she once again denounced dictatorial aggres-
sion, this was not as straightforward a war for Thatcher as
winning back the Falklands had been, for Kuwait was an
independent nation, not a British colony; and through-
out the 1980s the United Kingdom had been supplying
arms to Iraq to assist Saddam in his fight with Iran. More-
over, Bush needed no stiffening from Thatcher. It was he,
not she, who was the Western leader, in charge of putting
together the international coalition that would expel Sad-
dam from Kuwait; and in the subsequent military campaign
the United States was overwhelmingly the dominant part-
ner, while Britain played a very subordinate part. In any
case, by the time Kuwait was liberated Thatcher was no
longer in Downing Street.

Endgame

By the early autumn of 1990 the signals for Thatcher were

far from encouraging, both domestically and internation-
ally, although it was unclear whether she noticed or even
cared. In the aftermath of her Bruges speech, relations with
most of her cabinet colleagues were more tense and vexed

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

than ever; the Tory party was becoming increasingly divided

over Europe; the poll tax had been a disaster; and the ‘Law-
son boom’ seemed out of control. Stagflation was returning,
and 1990 increasingly seemed like 1979 all over again,
which cast serious doubt on Thatcher’s claim that the pain
endured by many people and places in the intervening years
had been worth it. She had also lost out over the reunifica-
tion of Germany, and her influence both in Washington
and in Europe was seriously declining. At home and overseas
she was increasingly isolated and embattled; but she gave
no sign of it in her confident speech to the party conference
in October 1990, where she took all the credit she could for
the fall of communism, vowed never to appease Saddam,
insisted that Britain would not join the single European cur-
rency, and scorned and ridiculed Labour. Once again the
party faithful demanded ‘Ten more years’. But on 2 November,
Howe resigned.
His ostensible reason was Thatcher’s response to the late
October meeting of the European Council in Rome, where
there had been a push to establish a single European currency
by 2000, which she vehemently opposed. When reporting
back to the Commons, her prepared statement had passed
off without incident, but in answer to a subsequent ques-
tion, she rejected Delors’s plans for a more consolidated
continent with the words ‘No. No. No’.5 Howe, who by
this time was the only surviving member of her original
1979 cabinet apart from Thatcher herself, thereupon quit,
declaring it was impossible for Britain to retain a position of
influence in European affairs when she was so intransigent.
He made his case with far greater force in the Commons,

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 Isolation and Defenestration

stressing that the United Kingdom should have joined the

ERM much earlier, and ridiculing Thatcher’s ‘nightmare
image’ of a European super-state. It was, he concluded, no
longer possible to reconcile his ‘instinct of loyalty’ to the
prime minister with the ‘true interests’ of Britain.6 It was a
devastating performance, and all the more so coming from a
mild-mannered and long-suffering minister, who was taking
his belated revenge for the decade of bullying and humili-
ation he had endured at Thatcher’s hands.
Heseltine had been biding his time since his dramatic
resignation in 1986, and he now seized his opportunity,
challenging Thatcher for the Tory leadership, in a contest
she was confident she would win. But her campaign team,
led by George Younger, lacked focus, co-ordination, and
drive; many back-benchers had had scarcely any dealings
with her; and those with marginal seats feared they
would lose them if she led the party into the next election.
She would again be let down by poor staff work, and
made matters worse by departing to Paris on the eve of the
ballot, to a meeting of the Commission on Security and Co-
operation in Europe, attended by Bush, Gorbachev, Kohl, and
Mitterrand. It was a celebration of the end of the cold war,
and Thatcher wanted to claim her share of the credit, but
her decision to go made her seem even more remote from
her MPs. In the first ballot, held on 20 November, she won
204 votes to Heseltine’s 152 (with 16 abstentions), which
was four short of the margin required. She returned to
London determined to fight on, but soon realized her support
was ebbing away. She consulted her cabinet colleagues indi-
vidually, most of whom told her that, having failed to secure

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

the requisite votes on the first ballot, she could not win
on the second. The next morning, 22 November, Thatcher
announced her withdrawal from the contest, only staying
on as prime minister until the party elected her successor as
leader.
Having grudgingly agreed to resign, Thatcher produced a
final bravura parliamentary performance later the same day,
replying to a Labour no-confidence motion which was ren-
dered pointless by her impending departure. Facing down
her enemies on both sides of the house, she defended her
record, demolished all interruptions, and restated the case
that both domestically and internationally she had halted
and reversed Britain’s decline. It was an extraordinary dis-
play of parliamentary courage and command, and led many
Tories to wonder how the party could have been so mis-
guided as to ditch their most successful leader of modern
times. But they had done the right thing, for while Thatcher
would always retain some loyal supporters she had stayed
too long, and the cabinet, the Commons, and the country
had had enough—of the bullying and berating, the hector-
ing and handbagging. Just as she had been elected leader
because she was not Heath, so Major, who succeeded her on
28 November, became leader because he was not Thatcher.
Indeed, the two most memorable phrases of his campaign
were scarcely veiled criticisms of his predecessor’s excesses:
the idea of a ‘classless society’ signalled a different view of
the growing inequality that Thatcher had not merely toler-
ated but also justified, while a ‘nation at ease with itself ’
offered an alternative vision to the ten unrelenting years of
conflict and confrontation that had gone before.

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 8
Aftermath and Afterlife,
1990–2013

‘I had passed from the well-lit world of public life,

where I had lived so long, into . . . what? . . . I would
have gone mad without work.’
(Margaret Thatcher, 1995)1

‘Oh for an hour of the Iron Lady – although admittedly

she went mad at the end.’
(Lord Dacre to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 6 November 1997)2

Discontented retirement

Thatcher left 10 Downing Street on 28 November 1990, and

having taken her farewell of the Queen she departed with
Denis for the home in Dulwich they had purchased in 1986.
It was too far from central London, and they soon moved
to a large town house, 73 Chester Square, in Belgravia. But
finding the right place to live was the least of Thatcher’s
post-prime ministerial problems. She never came to terms
with her brutal defenestration, which was the same fate,

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

magnified many times over, that her father had suffered

when he had been unceremoniously ejected from Gran-
tham town council, and for the rest of her life she would
be bitter and resentful about it. According to one close aide,
‘she never had a happy day after being ousted from office’.3
All of her adult life she had lived for work, for politics, and
for power; but she was now down and out, and there was
no possibility of another high-level job, because she had
offended too many people and was rightly regarded as an
impossible colleague. Until her health gave way she spent
much of her time travelling the world, giving lucrative
speeches to the faithful who still turned out to cheer her,
especially in the United States, but also in Japan and the Far
East. Denis had always been reasonably well-off, her lectures
were well paid, and Major immediately awarded all former
prime ministers an additional annual allowance.
Thatcher was, as she conceded, ‘comfortable’ in retirement,
but she was never contented. Her largest immediate task at
least made her yet more comfortable, as Murdoch’s Harper-
Collins paid £3.5 million for her memoirs, which appeared in
two volumes in 1993 and 1995. She wrote little of them
herself, but took the project very seriously, and the books
bear the strong imprint of her intimidating personality. She
was concerned to secure her reputation, and this was the more
urgent because her former colleagues were publishing their
own versions of events, some of which were highly critical,
among them Heseltine (Where There’s a Will, 1987), Gilmour
(Dancing with Dogma, 1992), Lawson (The View from No. 11,
1992), and Howe (Conflict of Loyalty, 1994). The first volume to
appear was The Downing Street Years, in which Thatcher offered

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 Aftermath and Afterlife

a highly tendentious account of Britain’s ‘decline’, likened

herself to the earl of Chatham in believing that she alone
could save the country, and then described how she believed
she had done so. Like Thatcher herself the book was devoid of
humour, and was conspicuously lacking in magnanimity,
since she described everyone who disagreed with her as a
knave or a fool or an incompetent. It sold well, but the second
volume, The Path to Power, in which she implausibly claimed
she had always been a Thatcherite, even under Heath, and
offered some controversial comments on international devel-
opments since she had left office, aroused less interest.
Thatcher sought to secure her legacy in other ways, one of
which was by donating her massive archive to Churchill
College, Cambridge: this was a deliberate snub to Oxford,
whose failure to award her an honorary degree still rankled,
and it also meant her papers would be ‘with Winston’s’.
But she relented slightly when it came to issuing a CD-ROM
of her complete public statements, which was produced
by Oxford University Press in 1998. She also set up the Thatcher
Foundation to promote her ideas around the world, which
established offices in London, Washington, and Warsaw.
But the money did not come in as she had hoped; the high-
profile, high-impact role she had envisaged for it never
came off; and it gradually evolved into a more modest edu-
cational philanthropy. One reason the funds did not flow
was that Mark Thatcher told too many potential donors who
had done well during the 1980s that it was ‘payback time’.4
His own business affairs, in which he traded shamelessly on
his mother’s name, continued to attract controversy and
investigation from the tax authorities, and in 1996 he relocated

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

to South Africa. Carol, meanwhile, continued her career as a

jobbing journalist, but she, too, exploited her name by pub-
lishing an affectionate biography of her father in 1996, which
was also highly critical of her mother.
For someone as hyperactive as Thatcher these were insuffi-
cient tasks to keep her busy, and since she had never devel-
oped a hinterland of outside interests, she soon returned to
front-line British politics. She had supported Major’s bid
to succeed her, being determined to thwart Heseltine, and
she was much relieved that he won the general election of
April 1992, albeit with a much reduced majority. But though
Thatcher would never feel the personal animosity towards
Major that Heath continued to display towards her, she did
not regard him as a figure of comparable stature to herself,
and she was never fully reconciled to the fact that someone
else had taken her place in 10 Downing Street. She regretted
his attempts to embrace more consensual policies, as exem-
plified by his (very sensible) decision to replace the hated poll
tax with a banded council tax. She felt vindicated in her long-
standing opposition to the ERM when Britain was humiliat-
ingly forced out of it in September 1992, and she deplored
the Maastricht treaty, which Major had helped to negotiate,
and which came into force in November 1993, because it
greatly strengthened the central institutions of what had
now become the European Union (EU), and also paved the
way for the establishment of a single European currency. By
means of such calculated and destructive interventions,
Thatcher encouraged the Eurosceptics in the Tory party and
the right-wing press, which undermined Major’s authority

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 Aftermath and Afterlife

and contributed to the landslide defeat at the general election

of May 1997, a defeat which Thatcher (mistakenly) viewed as
just punishment by the voters for his abandonment of her
policies. Five years later she published Statecraft: Strategies for a
Changing World, a coda to her memoirs, in which she once
again denounced the EU.
Although she was increasingly becoming a caricature of
her former self, Thatcher was much honoured in these later
years. On becoming Tory leader, she had been made an
honorary member of the hitherto all-male Carlton Club;
eight years later she was (controversially) elected a fellow
of the Royal Society; and in 1989 she was given the freedom
of the City of London. Soon after her resignation as prime
minister she had been made a member of the Order of
Merit and Denis was given a baronetcy, and in 1991 she
was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George
H. W. Bush. The following year, having stood down from
the Commons, she was created a life peer, and in 1995 she
was appointed a lady of the Garter. From 1992 to 1998 she
was chancellor of the University of Buckingham, and from
1993 to 2000 she was chancellor of the College of William
and Mary in the United States. She unveiled a full-length
statue of herself, intended for the central lobby of the Palace
of Westminster, at the Guildhall Art Gallery in 1998, but it
was decapitated by a protester in 2002 (it was subsequently
restored and remains in its original location). Thatcher later
unveiled another life-sized statue in the central lobby, the
first occasion when a former prime minister had been com-
memorated in his or her lifetime. Every year the Falklands

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

celebrate Margaret Thatcher day on 10 January, the date of

her visit in 1983, but she remained conspicuously uncom-
memorated in Grantham at the time of her death.
Thatcher was often depicted in the media, and so was
Denis. Throughout her time at 10 Downing Street, Private
Eye ran a series of letters, purporting to be Denis’s personal
correspondence, but in fact written by Richard Ingrams
and John Wells, which depicted him as a gin-swilling reac-
tionary, with a keen eye for events and people, and always
trying to escape the wrath of ‘the Boss’. They gave rise to
a number of annual editions of the collected ‘Dear Bill’
letters, and a stage version, Anyone for Denis?, was produced
at the Whitehall Theatre in 1981, one performance of
which the Thatchers gamely attended. Two years later
the BBC commissioned Ian Curteis to write The Falklands
Play, dramatizing the events of early 1982, and depicting
Thatcher sympathetically as a strong leader. But the BBC
refused to broadcast it while she was still in office, allegedly
because it was too favourable to her, and it was not until
2002 that it was eventually produced on both radio and
television. In 2004, BBC4 broadcast The Long Walk to Finch-
ley, a drama based on Thatcher’s early career; and in 2009
BBC2 produced Margaret, which focused on her fall from the
premiership. Two years after, Meryl Streep played Thatcher
in the film The Iron Lady. It met with mixed reviews, and was
regarded by Thatcher’s friends as in poor taste; but Streep’s
performance, for which she won an Oscar, was widely
admired for its perfect rendition of Thatcher’s voice and
intonation, and for its vivid depiction of the dementia
from which she was by then suffering.

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 Aftermath and Afterlife

Thatcher’s last years were indeed sad and lonely. The

earliest public indication of her physical and mental deteri-
oration had been in 1994 when she lost consciousness at a
speaking engagement in Chile. This was probably a minor
stroke, and she began to experience short-term memory loss.
She suffered another such incident in Madeira at the end of
2001, where she and Denis had returned to celebrate their
golden wedding anniversary. Early the following year, after
one more stroke, it was announced that she would under-
take no more speaking engagements, although that did
not prevent her attending Ronald Reagan’s funeral in Wash-
ington in June 2004, or from delivering a pre-recorded trib-
ute. By then Thatcher was truly alone, because exactly a
year before, Denis had died of heart failure at the age of
eighty-eight. For virtually the whole of their marriage, he
had been her most loyal supporter, he had played the part of
prime ministerial consort to perfection, and he was the best
and perhaps the only real friend she ever had. In October
2005 Thatcher celebrated her eightieth birthday, at a party
attended by the Queen, Prince Philip, and the prime minis-
ter, Tony Blair, and the following year she paid her last visit
to the United States. In 2009 she fell and broke her arm; two
years later her House of Lords office was closed; and in
December 2012 she moved into a suite in the Ritz Hotel.
There she died, following another stroke, on 8 April 2013, at
the age of eighty-seven.
In death as in life Thatcher was controversial and divisive.
The British newspapers that had supported her produced
extended obituaries and lavish commemorative editions,
and David Cameron and his prime ministerial predecessors

117
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

paid fulsome tributes. But reactions were predictably more

hostile in Argentina and South Africa; many Labour MPs
boycotted a special Commons session devoted to applaud-
ing Thatcher’s legacy; and there were spontaneous celebra-
tions in former mining communities and in Glasgow,
Brixton, Liverpool, Leeds, and Cardiff. The song ‘Ding-
Dong! The Witch is Dead’ (from the musical The Wizard of
Oz) rose to number two in the UK singles chart, there was an
anti-Thatcher demonstration in Trafalgar Square, and there
were fears that her ceremonial funeral might be marred by
further protests; but in the event the crowds were generally
peaceful. Planning for it had begun in 2009, under the
appropriate codename of ‘Operation True Blue’, Thatcher
had agreed all the details, and it was held in St Paul’s Cath-
edral on 17 April 2013, in the presence of her friends and
enemies from the British political establishment, and also
the Queen and Prince Philip (who had not attended a former
prime minister’s funeral since Churchill’s, in 1965). All liv-
ing US presidents were invited: none attended (and nor
did Gorbachev), but the American right was represented by
Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and Newt Gingrich, and
former president de Klerk of South Africa was also among
the mourners. After the service Thatcher’s body was cre-
mated, and her ashes were later interred in the grounds of
the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, close by those of her husband.

Appraisal

Thatcher’s magnificent obsequies invited comparison with

those earlier accorded in the same church to Lord Nelson,

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 Aftermath and Afterlife

the duke of Wellington, and Sir Winston Churchill. Did her

life and achievements rank on the same epic scale as theirs?
From one perspective, the answer must be no. The recon-
quest of the Falklands was an audacious military campaign,
in which much bravery and great resourcefulness were dis-
played, not least by Thatcher herself, and which temporarily
boosted national morale. But this late colonial expedition
was not a victory to equal the battle of Trafalgar, the battle
of Waterloo, or the battle of Britain, either in the scale of the
conflict or, despite her claims to the contrary, in the world-
historical significance of the outcome. However insistently
and repeatedly she talked her country up, Thatcher’s Britain
possessed fewer ships than in Nelson’s day, fewer troops than
in Wellington’s, and fewer fighter planes than in Churchill’s,
and this perforce limited what she could achieve on the
global stage. But, from another perspective, these compari-
sons work to her advantage, for all three were born in circum-
stances and places more advantageous than hers: Nelson,
the son of a clergyman, in a Norfolk rectory; Wellington, the
younger son of an earl, in Dublin; and Churchill, the grand-
son of a duke, in Blenheim Palace. In making her life’s
journey from the Grantham grocer’s shop to St Paul’s Cath-
edral, Thatcher travelled further than they did, and had a
much higher mountain to climb.
The more apt comparisons are with those other prime
ministerial outsiders who, like Thatcher, started out with
scarcely any advantages: Benjamin Disraeli, who was Jewish,
a novelist, and chronically in debt in his early years; David
Lloyd George, the son of a Welsh schoolteacher who died
soon after he was born; Andrew Bonar Law, whose father

119
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

was a clergyman in Canadian New Brunswick; Ramsay Mac-

Donald, who was the illegitimate offspring of a farm labourer
and born in Lossiemouth; James Callaghan, who was the
son of a Royal Navy chief petty officer; and John Major,
whose father was a music-hall performer who later made
garden ornaments. Thatcher’s social origins were inferior
to Disraeli’s, and closer to Lloyd George’s and Bonar Law’s,
but they were superior to those of MacDonald, Callaghan,
and Major. Moreover, and unlike any of them, Thatcher
enjoyed two huge advantages: an Oxford education, which
launched her into the élite social and political circles where
she would spend the rest of her days, and a rich spouse who
subordinated his life to hers. So, on balance, she was prob-
ably better placed by her twenties than they were, and she
became an MP at an earlier age than any of them had been,
except Disraeli and Bonar Law. In fact, the more appropriate
resemblances are with Harold Wilson and Edward Heath
(though neither would have been flattered by them). Like
Thatcher, they were lowly born outside London, they went
to grammar schools, and their lives were transformed, and
their early disadvantages in great measure overcome, by
their undergraduate years at Oxford.
But such comparisons are all with men, and as such they
fail to do Thatcher justice, for it was as a woman in the over-
whelmingly male world of politics that she was both
uniquely disadvantaged, but also uniquely successful, and as
prime minister for eleven years she set a record for continuity
and endurance in the highest office that was unrivalled
by any figure since Lord Liverpool. Throughout her premier-
ship, she was the dominant figure in British public life,

120
 Aftermath and Afterlife

and she not only made the political weather, but went some
way towards changing the political climate, too. At her best
her energy was tireless, her stamina inexhaustible, her cour-
age dauntless, and her patriotism beyond question. For much
of her time as prime minister she commanded the cabinet,
the civil service, the Commons, and parts of the country to a
degree, and for a duration, which no other prime minister
in modern times has rivalled. And on the international stage
she possessed a star quality which no world leader in her day
could equal, and which no twentieth-century British premier
has attained, with the exception of Churchill. She was a force
of nature, and for a time it did indeed seem as though she
would go ‘on and on and on and on’. The unrivalled ascend-
ancy she achieved, and not only despite, but also because of,
her gender, is vividly captured in a question which, well into
her time at 10 Downing Street, a young boy put to his father:
‘Daddy, are men ever prime minister in this country?’.
Such remarks could not be made about any other premier:
as a woman of power there was no one in modern British
history with whom Thatcher might be compared. But she
was neither the first nor the only long-serving female prime
minister in the second half of the twentieth century. Siri-
mavo Bandaranaike (Ceylon: 1960–65, 1970–79, and 1994–
2000) got there well before her and lasted longer; Indira
Gandhi (India: 1966–77 and 1980–84) was another precur-
sor and contemporary; while Golda Meir (Israel, 1969–74),
had come and gone before Thatcher arrived. During, and
after, her time at 10 Downing Street there were two other
women who held power for long spells: Gro Harlem Brunt-
land (Norway: 1981, 1986–9, and 1990–96), and Benazir

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Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

Bhutto (Pakistan: 1988–90 and 1993–6). From this global

vantage point Thatcher appears less unique as a woman of
power. Yet most of these comparisons also work to her
advantage, for she made a greater international impact
than any of them, and with one exception they all enjoyed
an easier path into politics, and to the very top, than she did,
thanks to the benefits of family connection and dynastic
advantage. Mrs Bandaranaike took over as prime minister
from her assassinated husband; Mrs Gandhi was Jawaharlal
Nehru’s daughter; Benazir Bhutto’s father had been prime
minister before her; and Gro Harlem Brundtland belonged
to a prominent political family. Only Golda Meir came up
by a route even harder than Thatcher’s: for she, too, worked
in the family’s grocery shop, but did not marry a rich and
supportive husband.
Thatcher’s prime ministership combined a unique per-
sonal story with an extraordinary political dominance, and
both were rendered the more remarkable on account of her
gender. She also cared greatly about her posthumous repu-
tation. But the verdicts of historians are neither uniform nor
final, and least of all in the case of someone as controversial
as she was—and still is. To her admirers she was the saviour
of her country, who put the ‘Great’ back into Britain after
decades of decline. Domestically she tamed the trades
unions, reversed the trend towards nationalization, rolled
back the state, created a vigorous enterprise economy, and
forced the Labour Party to accept the brave new world she
had created; while internationally she raised the Anglo-
American relationship to levels of intimacy and importance
not seen since the days of Churchill and Roosevelt,

122
 Aftermath and Afterlife

pioneered privatization which many other countries subse-

quently took up, and played a major part in ending the cold
war and in bringing freedom and liberty to eastern Europe.
But to her critics Thatcher was a narrow, provincial, and
vindictive ideologue, whose hard-faced politics were devoid
of compassion for the less well-off; increased inequality by
legitimizing a culture of greed and by cutting taxes on the
rich; undermined such bastions of liberal decency as the
civil service, the universities, and the Church of England;
destroyed the United Kingdom’s sense of national solidarity
and civic pride; and failed to invest the profits derived
from North Sea oil and privatization in the country’s
long-term future.
These views are not easily reconciled, although there is
some agreement that Thatcher performed better before 1986
than after, and also that she achieved less than she set out to
do or claimed that she had done. Domestically she failed to
curb public spending significantly; she did not change
popular attitudes regarding the welfare state or the enter-
prise economy; and far from rolling back central govern-
ment, she increased its intrusiveness and control in many
areas of local and national life. As a global figure she was the
first to recognize that the emergence of Gorbachev might
lead to the ending of the cold war, but the unintended
consequence was that Britain’s influence in the United
States and in Europe was diminished not enhanced, while
in the case of German reunification and the collapse of
apartheid in South Africa she was emphatically on the
wrong side of history. She was also the beneficiary of deeper
historical trends and longer-term changes which had

123
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

nothing specific to do with her. The recession of the late

1970s and early 1980s was a global phenomenon, which
resulted in a widespread turn to the right, not only in
the United Kingdom but also in the United States, West
Germany, Canada, Denmark, and Norway. In all these
countries, the desire to reduce public spending, to balance
the budget, to allow market forces free play, and to cut
taxes became the stated aim of government policy (and
the same was true of ostensibly left-wing administrations
in Australia and New Zealand). And in Britain the shift
from a northern-based industrial economy, with a manual,
unionized working class, to a consumer-oriented, white-
collar service economy increasingly concentrated in the
south-east of England would have happened whoever
might have occupied 10 Downing Street.
Yet the fact remains that Margaret Thatcher did more than
anyone else to disrupt the political consensus that had
existed from 1945 to 1979; she did shift the centre ground
of public debate to the right; and after her fall in 1990, and
even after her death in 2013, British politics on both the
right and the left was largely played out in her shadow. All
subsequent Tory leaders felt compelled to worship at That-
cher’s shrine, even as they also sought, with varying degrees
of conviction and success, to distance themselves from her
and set new agendas. Lacking her prodigious energy, her
global charisma, and her grassroots party support, none of
them was as successful as she was in concealing the contra-
dictions or in papering over the cracks of contemporary
Conservatism: was it consensual or confrontational, com-
passionate or ‘nasty’, libertarian or controlling, populist or

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 Aftermath and Afterlife

authoritarian, English or British, pro- or anti-Europe, nation-

alistic or globalized? These questions remained unanswered.
Meanwhile, under Tony Blair, New Labour’s espousal of
many Thatcherite nostrums paid enormous electoral divi-
dends between 1997 and 2005, and Thatcher took all the
credit she could for what seemed to be Labour’s abandon-
ment of socialism and nationalization, and its embrace of
the free market, free enterprise and wealth creation; but after
2010 the party became increasingly uncomfortable with that
accommodation and legacy, while the spectacular resurgence
of Scottish nationalism owed at least as much to loathing
of Thatcher as to the meltdown of Labour.
By her determined and assertive leadership Thatcher per-
suaded people, in Britain and elsewhere, that she was in
command of events, and knew what to do and how to do it.
She became the only twentieth-century premier to give her
name to an ideology, but ‘Thatcherism’ was a political phe-
nomenon rather than a coherent philosophy. She stressed
her unswerving convictions and dislike of consensus, yet she
could be more cautious and compromising than she admitted
in public. She possessed some simple, core beliefs, but when
it came to cutting public spending and income tax, to selling
off nationalized industries, and to dealing with Europe, she
often made things up as she went along. She stressed her
integrity and preached the politics of morality, but she repeat-
edly resorted to devious means to undermine her cabinet
colleagues. She relished battle and was a good cabinet
‘butcher’, devoid of sentiment or scruple, yet she was deeply
hurt when she was finally paid out in her own coin. She
abhorred class politics, but invariably championed the

125
Thatcher: A Life and Legacy

lower and middle middle class, and she disliked the trad-
itional working class, the public-school educated upper mid-
dle class, and most of the aristocracy. She was deeply and
romantically patriotic, but this was not easily reconciled
with her belief in free markets, liberal economics, and global-
ization. As Peregrine Worsthorne observed, she sought to
make the world safe for the Victorian values of her father,
yet she actually made it safer for the more suspect ethics of her
son. ‘You and I’, she once told Bernard Ingham, ‘are not smooth
people’.5 There are times when nations may need rough treat-
ment. For good and for ill, Thatcher gave Britain plenty of it.

126
 ENDNOTES

EPIGRAPH

1. Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (London: HarperCollins,

1995), p. 606

CHAPTER 1

1. ibid., p. 24
2. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1,
Not For Turning (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p. 30
3. P. Murray, Margaret Thatcher: A Profile (London: Star Books, 1978),
p. 17
4. Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London:
Macmillan, 1989), p. 223
5. remarks outside 10 Downing Street, 4 May 1979, Complete Public
Statements
6. speech at Lord Mayor’s banquet, Mansion House, 15 Nov 1982,
Complete Public Statements
7. Young, One of Us, p. 11
8. Hugo Young and Anne Sloman, The Thatcher Phenomenon
(London: BBC, 1986), p. 17
9. ibid.

127
Endnotes

10. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol.

2, Everything She Wants (London: Allen Lane, 2015), p. 81
11. Thatcher, The Path to Power, p. 66

CHAPTER 2

1. Evening Standard, 15 October 1974

2. William Waldegrave, A Different Kind of Weather (London:
Constable, 2015), p. 90
3. James Prior, A Balance of Power (London: Hamilton, 1986), p. 42
4. Thatcher, The Path to Power, p. 166
5. The Sun, 25 Nov 1971
6. Young, One of Us, p. 118
7. The Independent, 11 Sept 1999
8. The Right Approach to the Economy (London: Conservative and
Unionist Central Office, 1977), p. 6

CHAPTER 3

1. speech to Conservative Central Council, Cardiff, 28 March 1981,

Complete Public Statements
2. speech to Conservative Party Conference, 10 Oct 1980, Complete
Public Statements
3. The Times, 30 March 1981
4. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (London: Collins,
1982), p. 113
5. speech to National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, 8 March
1983, Complete Public Statements

128
 Endnotes

CHAPTER 4

1. The Times, 15 Sept 1981

2. interview, Independent Radio News, 31 Dec 1981, Complete Public
Statements
3. speech to Conservative rally at Cheltenham, 3 July 1982,
Complete Public Statements
4. New York Times, 9 June 1982
5. speech to Conservative Party conference, 8 Oct 1982, Complete
Public Statements
6. Hansard, House of Commons, fifth series, vol. 987, col. 742, 26
June 1980
7. Denis Healey, The Time of My Life (London: Michael Joseph, 1989),
p. 500
8. Daily Express, 23 July 1982
9. BBC News, 28 Feb 1989

CHAPTER 5

1. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993),

p. 339
2. Moore, Everything She Wants, pp. 162, 167
3. Young, One of Us, p. 304
4. ibid, p. 306
5. Woman’s Own, 31 Oct 1987
6. Sunday Times, 20 July 1986
7. Young, One of Us, p. 305
8. speech to National Union of Townswomen’s Guilds Conference,
20 May 1965, Complete Public Statements
9. Hansard, House of Commons, fifth series, vol. 999, col. 447,
19 Feb 1981

129
Endnotes

10. Young, One of Us, p. 310

11. Dame Margery Corbett Ashby Memorial Lecture, 26 July 1982,
Complete Public Statements
12. Moore, Not for Turning, p. 758
13. Young, One of Us, p. 383
14. speech to 1922 Committee, 19 July 1984, Complete Public
Statements
15. Hansard, House of Commons, sixth series, vol. 90, col. 653,
27 Jan 1986

CHAPTER 6

1. speech to Conservative Central Council, 15 March 1986, Com-

plete Public Statements
2. Carol Thatcher, Below the Parapet: The Biography of Denis Thatcher
(London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 246
3. speech to Conservative Central Council, 15 March 1986,
Complete Public Statements
4. Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical
(London: Bantam Press, 1992), p. 573
5. Moore, Everything She Wants, p. 573
6. interview, BBC1, 17 Dec 1984, Complete Public Statements
7. Michael Dobbs, ‘From Glory to Infamy’, BBC Radio 4, 28 March
2010
8. John Campbell, Margaret Thatcher, vol. 2, The Iron Lady (London:
Jonathan Cape, 2003), p. 537
9. interview for Today programme, BBC Radio 4, 6 June 1987,
Complete Public Statements
10. press conference, 4 May 1989, Complete Public Statements
11. Campbell, The Iron Lady, p. 708

130
 Endnotes

CHAPTER 7

1. speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Guildhall, 12 Nov 1990,

Complete Public Statements
2. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, p. 855
3. Young, One of Us, p. vii
4. speech to the College of Europe, 20 Sept 1988, Complete Public
Statements
5. Hansard, House of Commons, sixth series, vol. 178, col. 873, 30
Oct 1990
6. Hansard, House of Commons, sixth series, vol. 180, col. 463 and
col. 465, 13 Nov 1990

CHAPTER 8

1. Thatcher, The Path to Power, p. 465

2. R. Davenport-Hines and A. Sisman (eds), One Hundred Letters from
Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 401
3. Margaret MacMillan, History's People: Personalities and the Past
(Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2015), p. 79
4. D. Palmer, The Queen and Mrs Thatcher: An Inconvenient Relation-
ship (Stroud: The History Press, 2015), p. 201
5. Young, One of Us, p. 166

131
 G U I D E TO FU R T H E R R E A D I N G

Margaret Thatcher has been the most commented on,

researched, and written about prime minister since Winston
Churchill. Early books about her, as opposition leader and
during her first years as premier, included both the adula-
tory – such as George Gardiner’s study of Margaret Thatcher:
From Childhood to Leadership (London: William Kimber,
1975), Ernle Money’s Margaret Thatcher: First Lady of the
House (London: Frewin, 1975), and Patricia Murray’s Margaret
Thatcher: A Profile (London: Star Books, 1978) – and the
hostile, such as Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques’s The Politics
of Thatcherism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983); Hall
and Jacques had been among the first to identify ‘Thatcher-
ism’ as a distinctive political creed, with the potential to
re-orient British politics (in ways they did not like), in a
series of seminal articles for the magazine Marxism Today.
There was also considered contemporary analysis offered
by seasoned journalists including Peter Riddell (The Thatcher
Government, Oxford: M. Robertson, 1983, later followed by
The Thatcher Era and Its Legacy, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991),
Peter Jenkins (Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution, London: Cape,
1987), and Hugo Young (One of Us, London: Macmillan,

133
Guide to Further Reading

1989), as well as early appraisals of Thatcher and her impact

by political scientists including Dennis Kavanagh (Thatcher-
ism and British Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),
Andrew Gamble (The Free Economy and the Strong State: The
Politics of Thatcherism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1988), and the contributors to Robert Skidelsky’s edited vol-
ume, Thatcherism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989).
Even while Thatcher was still in Downing Street, the polit-
ical battles of her premiership were being re-fought in the
memoirs of her colleagues, as they would be in her own.
The former began with Francis Pym’s The Politics of Consent
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984) and continued with
autobiographies by James Prior (A Balance of Power, London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1986), Michael Heseltine (Where There’s a
Will, London: Hutchinson, 1987), Norman Tebbit (Upwardly
Mobile, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), and, after
Thatcher’s resignation, Bernard Ingham (Kill the Messenger,
London: HarperCollins, 1991), Nigel Lawson (The View from
No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical, London: Bantam Press,
1992), and Geoffrey Howe (Conflict of Loyalty, London: Mac-
millan, 1994), among many others. Thatcher’s own memoirs
appeared in two volumes with Rupert Murdoch’s Harper
Collins: The Downing Street Years (1993), covering her prem-
iership, and The Path to Power (1995), dealing with her earlier
life. These and other belligerent and partisan retrospections
were deftly finessed by John Campbell in his biography, Mar-
garet Thatcher, Vol. 1, The Grocer’s Daughter, and Vol. 2, The
Iron Lady (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000 and 2003).
Thatcher’s retirement from public life, along with the
opening up of her own vast archive as well as the public

134
 Guide to Further Reading

records, initiated a new phase of academic research. In

1998 Oxford University Press published a fully searchable
CD-ROM edited by Chris Collins, Margaret Thatcher: The Com-
plete Public Statements, which enabled the user to browse and
research her public utterances ranging from radio interviews
to answers to prime minister’s questions; much of the con-
tent of this disk has now been put online, along with other
public papers and a range of helpful contextual material,
by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation at http://www.mar
garetthatcher.org/. Simultaneously, the Policy Institute at
King’s College London has been publishing online the results
of an oral history project on ‘Margaret Thatcher and No. 10’,
at http://www.thatcherandnumberten.com/. Thatcher’s own
vast archive, comprising more than one million documents
and occupying some three hundred metres of shelving, has
been deposited at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cam-
bridge (pointedly not in her alma mater’s Bodleian Library),
and is gradually being opened up to researchers. Among the
other items there is the handbag which she famously swung
at cabinet meetings and international summits in the mid-
1980s.
The wealth of new material on Thatcher, and her promin-
ence in British politics, have given rise to a veritable academic
industry, with many hundreds of journal articles and dozens
of books already exploring one aspect or another of her ideas,
aims, policies, or image. A particularly useful collection of
assessments was published as a special issue of the journal
British Politics in April 2015, as ’25 Years On . . . The Legacy of
Thatcher and Thatcherism’. Much of this academic research
on Thatcher, as well as the vast written and spoken legacy of

135
Guide to Further Reading

Thatcher herself, has been incorporated into the official biog-

raphy by Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher, Vol. 1, Not For
Turning, and Vol. 2, Everything She Wants (London: Allen
Lane, 2013 and 2015), and its impending completion in a
third volume will signal the end of another phase of inter-
pretation and historiography. It seems clear that Margaret
Thatcher will continue to fascinate biographers and histor-
ians for many years to come; but already, a more nuanced and
complex picture has emerged of someone who, in her public
images and political utterances, made certainty and confron-
tation her stock-in-trade.

136
 DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Armstrong, Robert, Baron Armstrong of Ilminster (b. 1927)

Civil servant; permanent secretary, Home Office, 1977–9; cabinet
secretary, 1979–87, and head of the home civil service, 1983–7;
kt 1978, life peer 1988
Baker, Kenneth, Baron Baker of Dorking (b. 1934) Conser-
vative politician; MP 1968–70 and 1970–97; junior minister,
Trade and Industry (1981–4), Environment (1984–5); secretary
of state for Environment, 1985–6, Education and Science,
1986–90; chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster and Conservative
party chairman, 1989–90; Home secretary, 1990–2; life peer 1997
Benn, Tony, formerly Anthony Wedgwood Benn; briefly
2nd Viscount Stansgate (1925–2014) Labour politician; MP
1956–60, 1963–83 and 1984–2001; postmaster-general, 1964–6;
Minister of Technology, 1966–70; secretary of state for Industry,
1974–5, Energy, 1975–9; leading figure on Labour left; succeeded
father 1960 but renounced peerage 1963
Bowyer, Sir Eric (1902–1964) Civil servant; permanent secre-
tary, Ministry of Materials, 1953–4, Ministry of Pensions and
National Insurance, 1955–64; kt 1950
Brittan, Leon, Baron Brittan of Spennithorne (1939–2015)
Conservative politician; MP 1974–88; junior minister, Home Office,
1979–81, Treasury, 1981–3; Home secretary, 1983–5; secretary of

137
Dramatis Personae

state for Trade and Industry, 1985–6; member, European Commis-

sion, 1989–99; kt 1989, life peer 2000
Bush, George H.W. (b. 1924) Oil executive, US Republican pol-
itician; congressman, 1967–71; vice-president of USA, 1981–9;
president of USA, 1989–93
Butler, Robin, Baron Butler of Brockwell (b. 1938) Civil
servant; principal private secretary to prime minister, 1982–5;
second permanent secretary, Treasury, 1985–7; cabinet secretary
and head of home civil service, 1988–98; kt 1988, life peer 1998
Callaghan, James (Jim), Baron Callaghan of Cardiff
(1912–2005) Labour politician; MP 1945–87; chancellor of the
exchequer, 1964–7; Home secretary, 1967–70; Foreign secretary,
1974–6; prime minister, 1976–9; leader of opposition, 1979–80; life
peer 1987
Carrington, Peter, 6th Baron Carrington (b. 1919) Conser-
vative politician; succeeded father 1938; junior minister, 1951–6;
first lord of Admiralty, 1959–63; leader of House of Lords, 1963–4;
secretary of state for Defence, 1970–4, Energy, 1974; Foreign secre-
tary, 1979–82
Carter, James (Jimmy) (b. 1924) Peanut farmer, US Democrat
politician; congressman, 1963–7; governor of Georgia, 1971–5;
president of USA, 1977–81
Castle, Barbara, Baroness Castle of Blackburn (1910–2002)
Labour politician; MP 1945–79; minister of Overseas Development,
1964–5, Transport, 1965–8; secretary of state for Employment,
1968–70, Social Services, 1974–6; MEP 1979–89; life peer 1990
Clark, Alan (1928–1999) Conservative politician; MP 1974–92
and 1997–9; junior minister, Employment, 1983–6, Trade,
1986–9, Defence, 1989–92; best known for publication of Diaries
Clarke, Kenneth (Ken) (b. 1940) Conservative politician; MP
since 1970; government whip, 1972–4; junior minister, Transport,
1979–82, Health and Social Security, 1982–5; paymaster general,
1985–7; chancellor of Duchy of Lancaster, 1987–8; secretary of
state for Health, 1988–90, Education and Science, 1990–2; Home

138
 Dramatis Personae

secretary, 1992–3; chancellor of the exchequer, 1993–7; lord

chancellor, 2010–12; minister without portfolio, 2012–14
Delors, Jacques (b. 1925) French socialist politician; minister of
finance, 1981–4; president of European Commission, 1985–95
Foot, Michael (1913–2010) Labour politician; MP 1945–55 and
1960–92; secretary of state for Employment, 1974–6; leader of
House of Commons, 1976–9; leader of opposition, 1980–3
Galtieri, Leopoldo (1926–2003) Argentine general and dictator;
career army officer; commander in chief, 1980; unelected president
of Argentina, 1981–2; imprisoned for incompetence 1986–90;
under house arrest for human rights abuses 2002
Gilmour, Ian, Baron Gilmour of Craigmillar (1926–2007)
Conservative politician; MP 1962–92; junior minister, Defence,
1970–4, secretary of state for Defence, 1974; lord privy seal,
1979–81; succeeded father as baronet 1977, life peer 1992
Gorbachev, Mikhail (b. 1931) Russian politician; last general
secretary of Communist Party of Soviet Union, 1985–93; last presi-
dent of Soviet Union, 1990–1; introduced glasnost (‘openness’) and
perestroika (‘reform’), leading to end of Soviet communism
Gow, Ian (1937–1990) Conservative politician; MP 1974–90; par-
liamentary private secretary to prime minister, 1979–83; junior
minister, Housing and Construction, 1983–5, Treasury, 1985;
murdered by IRA
Harris, Ralph, Baron Harris of High Cross (1924–2006)
Economist and political thinker; founding director, 1957–87,
chairman, 1987–9, joint president, 1990 onwards, Institute of
Economic Affairs; life peer 1979
Hayek, Friedrich August (1899–1992) Austrian–born econo-
mist; British subject, 1938; later based in USA and Germany;
leading figure in revival of liberal economics and rise of monetar-
ism; Nobel prize 1974
Heath, Sir Edward (1916–2005) Conservative politician; MP
1950–2001; junior whip, 1951–5, chief whip, 1955–9; minister of
Labour, 1959–60; lord privy seal, 1960–3; secretary of state for

139
Dramatis Personae

Industry and Trade, 1963–4; leader of opposition, 1965–70; prime

minister, 1970–4; leader of opposition, 1974–5; kt 1992
Heseltine, Michael, Baron Heseltine (b. 1933) Publisher,
Conservative politician; MP 1966–2001; junior minister, Trans-
port, 1970, Environment, 1970–2, Trade and Industry, 1972–4;
secretary of state for Environment, 1979–83, Defence, 1983–6;
secretary of state for Environment, 1990–2, Trade, 1992–5; deputy
prime minister, 1995–7; life peer 2001
Hogg, Quintin, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone
(1907–2001) Lawyer, Conservative politician; MP 1938–50 and
1963–70; junior minister, Air, 1945; first lord of the Admiralty,
1956–7; minister of Education, 1957; lord president of the coun-
cil, 1957–9 and 1960–4; lord privy seal, 1959–60; secretary of state
for Education, 1964; lord high chancellor, 1970–4 and 1979–87;
succeeded father as 2nd Viscount Hailsham 1950, disclaimed
peerages 1963, life peer 1970
Home, Alexander (Alec) Douglas–, Baron Home of the
Hirsel (1903–1995) Conservative politician; MP 1931–51 and
1963–74; junior minister, Foreign Office, 1945, Scottish Office,
1951–5; Commonwealth secretary, 1955–60, Foreign secretary,
1960–3; prime minister, 1963–4; leader of opposition, 1964–5; For-
eign secretary, 1970–4; succeeded father as 14th Earl of Home 1951,
disclaimed peerages 1963, kt 1962, life peer 1974
Howe, Geoffrey, Baron Howe of Aberavon (1926–2015) Bar-
rister, Conservative politician; MP 1964–92; solicitor-general,
1970–2; junior minister, Trade and Industry, 1972–4; chancellor
of the exchequer, 1979–83; Foreign secretary, 1983–9; lord presi-
dent of the council and deputy prime minister, 1989–90; kt 1970,
life peer 1992
Hurd, Douglas, Baron Hurd of Westwell (b. 1930) Diplomat,
Conservative politician; MP 1974–97; junior minister, Foreign
Office, 1979–83, Home Office, 1983–4; secretary of state for North-
ern Ireland, 1984–5; Home secretary, 1985–9; Foreign secretary,
1989–95; life peer 1997

140
 Dramatis Personae

Ingham, Sir Bernard (b. 1932) Journalist and press officer;

entered journalism 1948; director of information, Employment,
1973, Energy, 1974–7; civil servant, Energy, 1978–9; chief press
secretary to prime minister, 1979–90; kt 1990
Jenkins, Roy, Baron Jenkins of Hillhead (1920–2003)
Labour, Social Democrat and Liberal Democrat politician; MP
1948–76, 1982–7; junior minister, Commonwealth, 1949–50; min-
ister of Aviation, 1964–5; Home secretary, 1965–7 and 1974–6; chan-
cellor of the exchequer, 1967–70; president, European Commission,
1977–81; co-founder, Social Democratic Party, 1981; life peer 1987
Joseph, Keith, Baron Joseph (1918–1994) Barrister, Conserva-
tive politician; MP 1956–87; junior minister, Commonwealth,
1957–9, Housing, 1959–61, Trade, 1961–2; minister of Housing,
1962–4; secretary of state for Social Services, 1970–4, Industry,
1979–81, Education and Science, 1981–6; succeeded father as
baronet 1944, life peer 1987
Kinnock, Neil, Baron Kinnock (b. 1942) Labour politician; MP
1970–95; junior minister, Employment, 1974–5; leader of oppos-
ition, 1983–92; member of European Commission, 1995–2004;
life peer 2005
Kohl, Helmut (b. 1930) German Christian Democrat politician;
minister-president of Rhineland–Palatinate, 1969–76; chairman of
Christian Democratic Union, 1973–98; chancellor of Germany,
1982–98; oversaw reunification of Germany, 1990
Lawson, Nigel, Baron Lawson of Blaby (b. 1932) Financial
journalist, Conservative politician; MP 1974–92; financial secre-
tary to Treasury, 1979–81; secretary of state for Energy, 1981–3;
chancellor of the exchequer, 1983–9; life peer 1992
Macmillan, Harold, 1st Earl of Stockton (1894–1986) Con-
servative politician; MP 1924–9, 1931–45, 1945–64; junior minis-
ter, Supply, 1940–2, Colonies, 1942; minister resident, north–west
Africa, 1942–5, Air secretary, 1945; minister of Housing, 1951–4,
Defence, 1954–5; Foreign secretary, 1955; chancellor of the exche-
quer, 1955–7; prime minister, 1957–63; created earl 1984

141
Dramatis Personae

Major, Sir John (b. 1943) Banker, Conservative politician; MP

1979–2001; junior minister, Home Office, 1981–3; junior whip,
1983–5; junior minister, Health and Social Security, 1985–7;
chief secretary to Treasury, 1987–9; Foreign secretary, 1989;
chancellor of the exchequer, 1989–90; prime minister, 1990–7;
kt 2005
Mandela, Nelson (1918–2013) South African politician; leading
figure in African National Congress; imprisoned, 1962–90; first
president of post-apartheid South Africa, 1994–9
Maudling, Reginald (1917–1979) Conservative politician; MP
1950–79; junior minister, Civil Aviation, 1952, Treasury, 1952–5;
minister of Supply, 1955–7; paymaster–general, 1957–9; Trade
secretary, 1959–61; secretary of state for Colonies, 1961–2; chan-
cellor of the exchequer, 1962–4; Home secretary, 1970–2
Mitterrand, François (1916–1996) French socialist politician;
minister for Veterans, 1947–8, Overseas France, 1950–1, Interior,
1954–5, Justice, 1956–7; first secretary of Socialist Party, 1971–81;
president of France, 1981–95
Murdoch, Rupert (b. 1931) Australian-born media magnate;
American citizen, 1985; extensive media interests, especially in
Australia, USA, UK; chairman and chief executive, News Corpor-
ation; owned, among others, Sun, News of the World, Times, Sun-
day Times, and controlling stake in Sky satellite television in UK
Neave, Airey (1916–1979) Conservative politician; MP 1953–79;
junior minister, Transport, 1954, Colonies, 1954–6, Transport,
1957–9, Air, 1959; organized Thatcher's campaign for leadership,
1975; head of Thatcher’s private office and spokesman on North-
ern Ireland, 1975–9; murdered by Irish National Liberation Army
Nott, Sir John (b. 1932) Conservative politician; MP 1966–83;
junior minister, Treasury, 1972–4; secretary of state for Trade,
1979–81, Defence, 1981–3; kt 1983
Parkinson, Cecil, Baron Parkinson (1931–2016) Conserva-
tive politician; MP 1970–92; junior minister, Trade and Industry,
1972–4, Trade, 1979–81; paymaster general, 1981–3; secretary of

142
 Dramatis Personae

state for Trade and Industry, 1983, Energy, 1987–9, Transport,

1989–90; life peer 1992
Pile, Sir William (1919–1997) Civil servant; permanent secretary,
Education and Science, 1970–6; chairman, Board of Inland Revenue,
1976–9; kt 1971
Powell, Charles, Baron Powell of Bayswater (b. 1941) Car-
eer diplomat; counsellor for Rhodesia negotiations, 1979–80; pri-
vate secretary to prime minister, 1983–91; kt 1990, life peer 2000
Prior, James (Jim), Baron Prior (b. 1927) Conservative polit-
ician; MP 1959–87; junior minister, Trade, 1963, Power, 1963–4;
minister of Agriculture, 1970–2; leader of House of Commons,
1972–4; secretary of state for Employment, 1979–81, Northern
Ireland, 1981–4; life peer 1987
Pym, Francis, Baron Pym (1922–2008) Conservative politician;
MP 1961–87; junior whip, 1962–4; chief whip, 1970–3; secretary of
state for Northern Ireland, 1973–4, Defence, 1979–81; leader of
House of Commons, 1981–2; Foreign secretary, 1982–3; life peer
1987
Reagan, Ronald (1911–2004) Actor, US Republican politician;
governor of California, 1967–75; president of USA, 1981–9
Reece, Sir Gordon (1929–2001) Journalist, television producer,
public affairs consultant; ITV from 1960; adviser to Margaret
Thatcher, 1975–9; director of publicity, Conservative Central
Office, 1978–80; kt 1986
Ridley, Nicholas, Baron Ridley of Liddlesdale (1929–1993)
Conservative politician; MP 1959–92; junior minister, Education,
1962–4, Technology, 1970, Trade and Industry, 1970–2, Foreign
Office, 1979–81, Treasury, 1981–3; secretary of state for Transport,
1983–6, Environment, 1986–9, Trade and Industry, 1989–90; life
peer 1992
Roberts, Alfred (1892–1970) Margaret’s father; grocer; JP; mayor
of Grantham 1945–6
Roberts, Beatrice (née Stephenson) (1888–1960) Margaret’s
mother

143
Dramatis Personae

Roberts, Muriel (married name Cullen) (1921–2004) Mar-

garet's sister; physiotherapist
Scargill, Arthur (b. 1938) Trade unionist; miner, 1953; NUM
branch committee, 1960, national executive, 1972; president,
NUM, 1981–2002; co-founder, Socialist Labour Party, 1996
Seldon, Arthur (1916–2005) Economist; editorial director, Insti-
tute of Economic Affairs, 1957–88; founding editor, Economic
Affairs, 1980; joint president, Institute of Economic Affairs,
1990 on
Soames, Christopher, Baron Soames (1920–1987) Conserva-
tive politician, son-in-law of Winston Churchill; MP 1950–66;
junior minister, Air, 1955–7, Admiralty, 1957–8; secretary of
state for War, 1958–60, minister of Agriculture, 1960–4; ambassa-
dor to France, 1968–72; member of European Commission,
1973–7; kt 1973, life peer 1978; governor of Southern Rhodesia,
1979–80; leader of House of Lords, 1979–81
Tebbit, Norman, Baron Tebbit (b. 1931) Conservative polit-
ician; MP 1970–92; junior minister, Employment, 1972–3, Trade,
1979–81, Industry, 1981; secretary of state for Employment,
1981–3, Trade and Industry, 1983–5; chairman, Conservative Party,
1985–7; life peer 1992
Thatcher, Carol (b. 1953) Margaret’s daughter; freelance jour-
nalist and media personality; author of several books including
biography of father
Thatcher, Sir Denis (1915–2003) Margaret's husband; business-
man (Atlas Preservative, Castrol, Burmah Oil); golfer; created bar-
onet 1991
Thatcher, Sir Mark (b. 1953) Margaret’s son; businessman
(motor racing, construction, property, loans, arms); prosecuted
for tax evasion in US, 1996, moved to South Africa; convicted in
South Africa, 2005, for role in Equatorial Guinea coup attempt;
succeeded father 2003
Waldegrave, William, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill (b.
1946) Conservative politician; MP 1979–97; junior minister,

144
 Dramatis Personae

Education and Science, 1981–3, Environment, 1983–8, Foreign

Office, 1988–90; secretary of state for Health, 1990–2; chancellor
of Duchy of Lancaster, 1992–4; minister of Agriculture, 1994–5;
chief secretary to Treasury, 1995–7; life peer 1999
Walters, Sir Alan (1926–2009) economist; academic appoint-
ments at Birmingham, 1951–68, LSE, 1968–76, Johns Hopkins,
1976–91; adviser to World Bank, 1976–80 and 1984–8, prime min-
ister, 1981–4 and 1989; kt 1983
Whitelaw, William, 1st Viscount Whitelaw (1918–1999)
farmer, Conservative politician; MP 1955–83; junior minister,
Trade, 1956, Treasury, 1957–8; junior whip, 1959–62; junior min-
ister, Labour, 1962–4; leader of House of Commons, 1970–2; sec-
retary of state for Northern Ireland, 1972–3, Employment, 1973–4;
Home secretary, 1979–83; created viscount 1983; leader of House
of Lords, 1983–8
Wilson, Harold, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx (1916–1995)
Economist, Labour politician; MP 1945–83; junior minister,
Works, 1945–7, Overseas Trade, 1947; Trade secretary, 1947–51;
leader of opposition, 1963–4 and 1970–4; prime minister,
1964–70 and 1974–6; life peer 1983

145
 GLOSSARY

African National Congress (ANC) The main opposition

grouping fighting the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the
governing party in South Africa after the first democratic elections
in 1994
Anglo-Irish Agreement Signed by Thatcher and Garrett FitzGer-
ald on 15 November 1985 guaranteeing no change in Northern
Ireland’s constitutional position without majority consent, but
giving the Republic of Ireland an advisory role in the governance
of Northern Ireland
apartheid ‘Separateness’; the policy of strict racial segregation
enforced by the ruling National Party in South Africa from 1948
to 1994
‘Big Bang’ The deregulation of the securities market in the City
of London on 27 October 1986, when the London Stock Exchange
became a private limited company
cabinet The senior 20–24 politicians in the governing party or
coalition who in theory collectively form the highest level of gov-
ernment (the prime minister being 'first among equals’), and all but
a handful of whom have individual responsibility for a government
department
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) Movement
founded in 1957 to advocate unilateral nuclear disarmament by
the UK as a step to global disarmament; peaked in early 1980s

147
Glossary

Centre for Policy Studies Think-tank founded by Sir Keith

Joseph and others in 1974 to champion classical liberal econom-
ics; early advocates of monetarism, deregulation, privatization
closed shop A practice whereby employment in a certain trade or
company either was restricted to members of a given trade union
or carried with it an obligation to join a trade union
Common Market The UK term for the European Economic
Community, one of the three European Communities (see below)
community charge Otherwise known as ‘poll tax’; the form of
local taxation introduced in Scotland in 1989 and in England and
Wales in 1990, replacing a property tax (rates) by a uniform indi-
vidual tax
comprehensive schooling A system of public-funded schools
which have no selection criteria
European Communities The European Economic Community
(otherwise known as the Common Market), the European Atomic
Energy Community, and the European Coal and Steel Community,
which the UK joined in 1973; merged as one of three ‘pillars’ of the
European Union in 1993
Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) Established 1979, a precur-
sor to the euro, which sought to reduce exchange rate instability
by tying European currencies within margins of each other; UK a
member 1990–2
Greater London Council (GLC) London-wide administrative
body in existence from 1965 to 1986; abolished by Thatcher,
and powers largely devolved to boroughs before formation of the
Greater London Authority in 2000
Institute for Economic Affairs Think-tank founded by Ant-
ony Fisher in 1955 to promote classical liberal economics and free
market ideas
Irish Republican Army (IRA) Usually refers to the Provisional
IRA, formed in 1969 in a split from the Official IRA; pursued violent
action to further the aim of a reunification of Ireland; agreed to
ceasefire in 1997

148
 Glossary

junior minister A member of the government who serves in the

second tier, not part of the cabinet, and usually directly under a
cabinet minister
Keynesianism A set of economic theories associated with or
derived from John Maynard Keynes, which among other things
validate an interventionist role for the government in the econ-
omy, particularly during recessions
Methodism An offshoot of the Church of England based on the
teachings of John Wesley (1703–1791), with an emphasis on the
primacy of scripture and good works
monetarism An economic theory that tight control of the
money supply restrains inflation and promotes economic growth
Open University Distance learning and research university
established in 1969, first students enrolled in 1971
poll tax See community charge
prices and incomes policy A tool of state intervention in eco-
nomic management aimed at by both Labour and Conservative
governments before Thatcher, to restrain inflation by means of
statutory control of wages and prices; introduced by Heath in 1972
privatization The return to the private sector of previously
nationalized (or government-owned and -run) industries
Single European Act Treaty signed by EC member states in
February 1986 (in two cohorts: Thatcher signed on behalf of the
UK on 17 February), establishing a timetable for creating a single
market and introducing qualified majority voting in the Council
of Ministers (representing governments) to achieve it
stagflation A combination of economic stagnation and inflation
(difficult to explain through conventional Keynesian economics)
Thatcherism A set of beliefs, attitudes and policies variously
defined, but with at its core a belief in free market economics and
a ‘small state’
Tory Conservative
Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) A declar-
ation on 11 November 1965 by the white minority regime in

149
Glossary

Southern Rhodesia that it regarded itself as fully independent of

the UK; ‘rebellion’ ended with return to colonial rule in 1979 and
independence in 1980 as Zimbabwe
Westland affair Cabinet crisis in 1985–6; began as a dispute over
rival US and European bids for Westland Helicopters, but focused on
issues of integrity, including the leaking of private correspondence
‘wets’ Centrist or ‘one nation’ Conservatives, more inclined to
government economic intervention and more extensive welfare
provision than ‘Thatcherites’
whip A party political post in the House of Commons and House
of Lords whose incumbent is responsible for trying to ensure party
discipline

150
 CHRO NOLOGY

13 Oct 1925 born in Grantham

Sept 1936 begins education at Kesteven and Grantham
Girls’ School
Oct 1943 begins chemistry degree at Somerville College,
Oxford
Oct 1946 elected President of Oxford University
Conservative Association
June 1947 completes chemistry degree
31 Jan 1949 selected as Conservative candidate for Dartford
23 Feb 1950 general election: defeated at Dartford, Labour
government formed
25 Oct 1951 general election: defeated at Dartford,
Conservative government formed
13 Dec 1951 marriage to Denis Thatcher
Jan 1952 begins legal training; resigns as candidate for
Dartford
15 Aug 1953 birth of Carol and Mark Thatcher
1 Dec 1953 qualifies as a barrister
31 July 1958 adopted as Conservative candidate for Finchley
8 Oct 1959 general election: elected MP for Finchley,
Conservative government formed
5 Feb 1960 makes maiden speech in House of Commons

151
Chronology

9 Oct 1961 appointed parliamentary under-secretary for

Pensions and National Insurance
10 Oct 1963 Harold Macmillan resigns as prime minister,
succeeded by Alec Douglas-Home
15 Oct 1964 general election: Labour government formed,
Thatcher shadows pensions
25 July 1965 Douglas-Home resigns as Conservative leader,
succeeded by Edward Heath
18 Oct 1965 moves to shadow Housing and Land
31 March 1966 general election: Labour remain in power
19 April 1966 moves to shadow Treasury as deputy to Iain
Macleod
10 Oct 1967 appointed to shadow cabinet, responsible for
Fuel and Power
14 Nov 1968 moves to shadow Transport
21 Oct 1969 moves to shadow Education
18 June 1970 general election: Conservative government
formed, Thatcher becomes secretary of state for
Education and Science
30 June 1970 issues Circular 10/70, withdrawing compulsory
move to comprehensive schooling
6 Dec 1972 publishes white paper, Education: A Framework for
Expansion
28 Feb 1974 general election: minority Labour government
formed, Thatcher shadows Environment
10 Oct 1974 general election: Labour government formed
with slim majority
7 Nov 1974 Thatcher moves to shadow Treasury as deputy to
Robert Carr
21 Nov 1974 decides to run for leadership of Conservative
Party
4 Feb 1975 defeats Heath in first ballot for Conservative
leadership; Heath resigns

152
 Chronology

11 Feb 1975 elected Conservative leader on second ballot

5 April 1976 James Callaghan elected Labour leader, becomes
prime minister
3 May 1979 general election: Conservative government
formed with majority of 43, Thatcher becomes
prime minister
25 Dec 1979 Russia invades Afghanistan
18 April 1980 Zimbabwe becomes independent
26 March 1981 Social Democratic Party formed
30 March 1981 364 economists write to Times to denounce
Thatcher’s economic policies
2 April 1982 Argentina invades Falklands
14 June 1982 Falklands: Argentine surrender
9 June 1983 general election: Conservative government
increases majority to 144
25 Nov 1983 US invasion of Grenada
12 March 1984 miners' strike begins
25-26 June 1984 Fontainebleau European Council: British rebate
on European budget
12 Oct 1984 Brighton bombing (IRA attempt to assassinate
Thatcher)
16 Dec 1984 Mikhail Gorbachev visits Chequers
19 Dec 1984 Thatcher signs Joint Agreement with China on
Hong Kong
3 March 1985 end of miners’ strike
15 Nov 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement
2 Dec 1985 Luxembourg European Council: Single European
Act agreed
9 Jan 1986 Michael Heseltine resigns over Westland affair
11 June 1987 general election: Conservative government
re-elected with majority of 102
26 Oct 1989 Nigel Lawson resigns as chancellor of the
exchequer

153
Chronology

31 March 1990 ‘poll tax’ riot in Trafalgar Square

2 Aug 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait
3 Oct 1990 German reunification
5 Oct 1990 UK joins Exchange Rate Mechanism
1 Nov 1990 Geoffrey Howe resigns
14 Nov 1990 Heseltine stands for Conservative leadership
20 Nov 1990 Conservative leadership election first ballot
22 Nov 1990 Thatcher announces decision not to contest
second ballot
28 Nov 1990 resigns as prime minister, succeeded by John
Major
30 June 1992 enters House of Lords as Baroness Thatcher
26 June 2003 Denis Thatcher dies
8 April 2013 Margaret Thatcher dies
17 April 2013 funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral

154
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10
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Feb-81
May-81
Aug-81
Nov-81
Feb-82
May-82
Aug-82
Nov-82
Feb-83
May-83
Aug-83 ELECTION JUNE 83
Nov-83
Feb-84
May-84
Aug-84
Nov-84
Feb-85

Percentage Satisfied
May-85
Aug-85
Nov-85
Feb-86
May-86
Aug-86
Nov-86
Feb-87
May-87
Aug-87 ELECTION JUNE 87
Nov-87
Percentage Dissatisfied

Feb-88
May-88
Aug-88
Nov-88
Feb-89
May-89
Aug-89
Nov-89
Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way Margaret Thatcher is doing her job as Prime Minister?

Feb-90
May-90
Aug-90
© Ipsos Mori. Used with permission.

Nov-90
O P I NI O N PO L L S
 INDEX

Afghanistan 37, 43, 153 Brezhnev, Leonid 43–4

African National Congress 87–88, Brighton bombing (1984) 69–70,
106, 147 85, 94, 153
Alison, Michael 67 British Broadcasting Corporation
Alliance, see Liberal-SDP Alliance (BBC) 98–9, 116
Andropov, Yuri 44, 60, 89 British Leyland 31, 53, 56
Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) British Xylonite Plastics 9
85–86, 147, 153 Britoil 54, 55
apartheid, see South Africa Brittan, Leon 57, 76–7, 137–8
appeasement (of Germany) 7–8 Brownlow, fifth Baron 2
Argentina 44, 45–51, 118, 139, 153 Brownlow, seventh Baron 65
Armstrong, Sir Robert 30, 77, 137 Bruntland, Gro Harlem 121–2
Brzezinski, Zbigniew 61
Baker, Kenneth 84, 94, 95, 137 budgets 31, 32–3, 39, 52, 68–9, 71,
Bandaranaike, Sirimavo 121–2 91–2, 100, 124
Bank of England 72, 98 Bush, George H.W. 105, 107, 109,
Belgrano 48 115, 138
Benn, Tony 22, 54, 137 Butler, Sir Robin 30, 138
Beveridge, William 8
Bhutto, Benazir 121–2 Callaghan, James 24, 25, 26–7, 30,
‘Big Bang’ 81–3, 91, 147 31, 42, 120, 138, 153
Bishop, Maurice 68 Cameron, David 117
Blair, Tony 117, 125 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Blunkett, David 75 (CND) 54, 90, 147
Bonar Law, Andrew 119–20 Carlisle, Mark 41
Botha, Pieter Willem (P.W.) 88, 106 Carr, Robert 152
Bowyer, Sir Eric 14, 137 Carrington, Peter, Lord Carrington
Bray, Tony 9 24, 29, 34–7, 45–7, 89, 138

156
 Index

Carter, Jimmy 37–8, 61, 138 Critchley, Julian 60, 64–5

Castle, Barbara 61, 138 Cullen, Muriel, see Roberts, Muriel
Centre for Policy Studies 21, Cullen, Willie 10
26, 148 Curteis, Ian 116
Chamberlain, Neville 8
Channel tunnel 89 Dacre, Lord (Hugh Trevor-Roper)
Cheney, Dick 118 111
Chernenko, Konstantin 89, 90 Dartford (constituency) 9, 10, 151
Chile 117 de Klerk, Frederik Willem (F.W.)
China 86–7, 153 106, 118
see also Hong Kong Delors, Jacques 89, 101, 139
Church of England 11, 71, 81, Deng Xiaoping 86
98, 123 d’Estaing, Giscard 34, 60
Churchill, Winston 8, 29, 30, 96, Disraeli, Benjamin 119–20
104, 118, 119, 121, 122, 133
Churchill College, Cambridge 113 Eire, see Ireland
Clark, Alan 64, 138 Elizabeth II, Queen 62–3, 68, 88,
Clarke, Kenneth 94, 95, 138–9 111, 117, 118
closed shop 31, 53 Ellis, Shirley 1
Common Market, see European English, David 98
Communities European Communities 14, 19, 34,
Commonwealth 34, 35–6, 37, 62, 36–7, 56, 87, 88–9, 101–2,
65, 68, 87–8, 106 108–9, 114–15, 125, 148
Lusaka CHOGM 35–6, 37, 65 budget rebate 36–7, 88–9, 153
community charge 83–4, 95, Bruges speech (1988) 101–2, 107
99–100, 102, 108, 114, 148, 154 see also Exchange Rate Mechanism
comprehensive schools 17–18, European Union (EU), see European
148, 152 Communities
Conservative Central Office 24 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM)
Conservative Party 7–9, 10, 12, 15, 72, 101–2, 104, 108–9, 114,
17, 19–20, 21, 22–4, 25, 27, 40, 148, 154
44, 54, 55, 57–8, 69, 71, 78, 80,
84, 91, 92, 93, 95–6, 99, 103, Faith in the City 71
108, 114–15, 124–5 Falklands 44, 45–51, 52, 53, 55, 57,
conferences 9, 32, 44, 54, 55, 67, 58, 64, 66, 69, 86, 89, 104,
69, 71, 84, 91, 95, 96, 99, 108 115–16, 119, 153
Conservative Research Finchley (constituency) 12, 14, 15,
Department 24 20, 22, 27, 57, 93, 116, 151
Co-operative Party 7 FitzGerald, Garrett 85
council house sales 33, 53, 79–80, Foot, Michael 22, 42–3, 49, 54, 56,
82, 100 57, 59, 64, 90, 139

157
Index

Fowler, Norman 94 Harris, Ralph 21, 139

France 34, 37, 45, 59, 89, 142 Haughey, Charles 33
Franks, Oliver, Lord Franks 50 Havers, Michael, Lord Havers 94
Friedman, Milton 21 Hayek, Friedrich August (F. A.) 8,
21, 139
Galtieri, Leopoldo 46, 49, 59, Healey, Denis 26
90, 139 Heath, Edward 15, 16, 17, 18,
Gandhi, Indira 121–2 19–20, 21–3, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32,
general election (1950) 9–10, 151; 34, 44, 70, 73, 75, 76, 80–1, 95,
(1951) 9–10, 151; (1959) 12, 110, 113, 114, 120, 139–40,
151; (1964) 14, 152; (1966) 149, 152
15, 152; (1970) 10, 17, 152; Henderson, Sir Nicholas 47
(Feb 1974) 20, 152; (Oct 1974) Heseltine, Michael 29, 33, 40, 41,
21–2, 152; (1979) 26–7, 153; 55, 76–8, 95, 109, 112, 114,
(1983) 55–8, 95, 99, 153; 140, 153, 154
(1987) 92–3, 99, 153; (1992) Hodgkin, Dorothy 7
114; (1997) 115 Hogg, Quintin, Lord Hailsham 8,
George, David Lloyd 119–20 29, 41, 94, 140
Germany 37, 41, 60, 105, 106, 108, Home, Sir Alec Douglas- 14, 15, 22,
123, 124, 141, 154 140, 152
Gibraltar 45 Hong Kong 45, 86–7, 153
Gilmour, Sir Ian 24, 29, 34, 37, 39, Housing Act 1980 33
40, 41, 89, 95, 112, 139 Howe, Geoffrey 29, 31–2, 39, 40,
Gingrich, Newt 118 51–2, 57, 68, 72, 80, 86, 91, 94,
Good Friday Agreement (1998) 86 101–2, 108–9, 112, 140, 154
Gorbachev, Mikhail 90, 92, 104, Hurd, Douglas 85, 94, 102, 140
105, 109, 123, 139, 153 Hussein, Saddam 107, 108
Gould, Bryan 92 Hussey, Marmaduke 98
Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) 68 income tax 27, 30, 31, 32, 43, 52,
Gow, Ian 30, 67, 139 68, 91–2, 100, 125
grammar schools 6, 17–18, 120 inflation 20, 21, 25, 26, 28, 30–2,
Grantham 1–6, 7, 9, 12, 16–17, 28, 39–40, 41, 42, 52–3, 59, 72, 91,
65, 74, 112, 116, 119, 151 100–1, 102, 149
Greater London Council 56, 75–6, Ingham, Bernard 30, 99, 126, 141
78, 148 Ingrams, Richard 116
Greenham Common 61, 68 Inns of Court School of Law 11
Grenada 67–8, 89, 104, 153 Institute for Economic Affairs
21, 148
Haig, Alexander 48 interest rates 20, 32, 44, 52, 70, 91,
Hailsham, Lord, see Hogg, Quintin 101, 102

158
 Index

Iran 38, 104, 107 Lawson, Nigel 42, 57, 67, 68, 71–2,
Iraq 107, 154 80, 84, 91–2, 94, 100–2, 112,
Ireland 33, 85–6 141, 153
Irish Republican Army (IRA) 33, 69, Leach, Sir Henry 47
85, 94, 139, 148, 153 Lewin, Sir Terence 47
Israel 16, 121 Liberal-SDP Alliance 44, 49, 57,
71, 93
J. Lyons & Co 9 Libya 90
Japan 112 Lincoln’s Inn 11
Jenkin, Patrick 75 Liverpool, Lord (Robert Jenkinson)
Jenkins, Roy 43, 44, 49, 56, 57, 96, 120
59, 141 Livingstone, Ken 59, 75, 78
John Paul II, Pope 43 Lloyd George, David, see George,
Jones, Hugh Lloyd- 111 David Lloyd
Joseph, Sir Keith 21, 22, 26, 29, 31,
42, 94, 95, 141 MacDonald, Ramsay 120
MacGregor, Ian 73
Kaufman, Gerald 56 Mackay, James, Lord Mackay of
Kaunda, Kenneth 35 Clashfern 94
Kempson, Margaret 10 Macleod, Iain 152
Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ Macmillan, Harold 14, 67,
School 3, 5–6 141, 152
Keynes, John Maynard 8, 149 Madeira 117
Keynesianism 26, 149 Major, John 94, 102, 110, 112,
King, John 98 114–15, 120, 142, 154
King, Tom 94 Mandela, Nelson 88, 106, 142
Kinnock, Neil 59, 65, 69, 75, 77, Mandelson, Peter 92
104, 141 Matthews, Victor 98
Kirkpatrick, Jeanne 48 Maudling, Reginald 15, 142
Kissinger, Henry 118 Meir, Golda 121–2
Knight, Ted 75 Methodism 3, 4, 5, 11, 149
Kohl, Helmut 89, 105, Meyer, Sir Anthony 103
109, 141 Milne, Alasdair 98–9
Kosygin, Alexi 37, 43 Mitterrand, François 59, 60, 66, 89,
Kuwait 107, 154 105, 109, 142
monetarism 21, 26, 28, 31–2,
Labour Party 2, 7, 12, 14, 15–16, 22, 39–40, 98, 139, 147, 149
24–7, 42–3, 44, 49, 53, 54, 55, Monopolies Commission 98
56, 57, 69, 74, 75, 80, 91, 92–3, Mugabe, Robert 35–6
103, 108, 110, 118, 122, 124–5 Murdoch, Rupert 97–8,
Lamb, Albert (Larry) 98 112, 142

159
Index

National Coal Board 31, 73–4 Private Eye 116

National Union of Mineworkers privatization 53–4, 55–6, 79,
(NUM) 30–1, 73–4 80–1, 82, 91, 95, 122–3, 125,
Neave, Airey 23, 33, 142 149
Nelson, Horatio, Lord Nelson Pym, Francis 29, 40, 41, 45, 47, 57,
118–19 66, 69, 143
Newton, Sir Isaac 5
Nkomo, Joshua 35–6 Queen, see Elizabeth II, Queen
North Sea oil 42, 54, 91, 123
Northern Ireland 33, 69, 85–6 Reagan, Ronald 25, 38, 46, 47–8,
Nott, John 45–6, 47, 50–1, 49, 51, 54, 59, 62, 67–8, 85,
54–5, 142 89–90, 104–5, 117, 143
nuclear weapons 54, 61, 68, 90, Reece, Gordon 25, 143
91, 104 Rhodesia, see Zimbabwe
Richardson, Gordon 98
‘One Nation’ Conservatives, see Ridley, Nicholas 45, 143
‘wets’ riots (1981) 4, 40–1; (1985) 71;
Open University 18, 149 (1990) 100, 154
opinion polls 25, 26–7, 42, 44, 49, Ritz Hotel 117
55, 57–8, 69, 71, 78, 90–2, 96, Roberts, Alfred 1, 2–5, 7–8, 12, 17,
102–3, 155 83, 112, 126, 143
Owen, David 43, 59 Roberts, Beatrice 1, 3, 4, 143
Oxford University 5–9, 70–1, 113, Roberts, Muriel 5, 9, 10, 144
120, 151 Rodgers, William 43
Oxford University Conservative Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 122
Association 8, 9, 151 Royal Hospital, Chelsea 118
Royal Society 115
Parkinson, Cecil 42, 47, 57, 64, 67,
93–4, 95, 142 Saatchi, Charles and Maurice 25
Parsons, Sir Anthony 47, 49 St Paul’s Cathedral 118, 119
Patten, Chris 24 Scargill, Arthur 73–4, 76, 78,
Pemberton, Robin Leigh- 72, 98 90, 144
Pile, Sir William 17, 143 Schmidt, Helmut 60
Poland 43 Scotland 53, 58, 73, 84, 85, 93,
poll tax, see community charge 100, 125
Powell, Charles 101, 143 Seldon, Arthur 21, 144
Powell, Enoch 39 Sheffield, HMS 48
prices and incomes policy 20, 21, Single European Act (1986) 89,
22, 26, 149 149, 153
Prince Philip 117, 118 Smiles, Samuel 2
Prior, Jim 29, 31, 40, 41–2, 85, 143 Smith, Ian 35

160
 Index

Soames, Christopher, Lord Soames stands for parliament 9–10, 12

29, 36, 40, 41, 144 as junior minister (1961–4)
Social Democratic Party (SDP) 43, 14, 152
44, 49, 55, 69, 153 in opposition (1964–70) 14–17, 152
see also Liberal-SDP Alliance at education (1970–4) 6,
Somerville College, see Oxford 17–19, 152
University 1975 leadership election 22–3,
South Africa 34, 87–8, 106, 152–3
118, 123 as leader of opposition (1975–9)
Southern Rhodesia, see Zimbabwe 23–4, 153
Soviet Union 16, 25, 34, 37, 38, as prime minister (1979–90) 27,
43–4, 50, 87, 92, 104, 108, 123 28–110, 118–26, 153–4
Spitting Image 61 as woman 12, 13, 18, 23–4,
stagflation 26, 39, 108, 149 60–6, 120–2
Sterling, Jeffrey 98 and House of Commons 24, 30,
Stevas, Norman St John 41, 60 42–3, 61, 64, 67, 77, 99, 109,
Streep, Meryl 116 110, 115, 121, 151
strikes 19–20, 25, 30–1, 41, 53 and cabinet 29, 34, 37, 40, 41–2,
miners’ strike (1984-5) 59, 73–4, 44, 49, 52, 57–8, 60–1, 62, 63,
78, 153 64, 66, 67, 71–2, 76–8, 93–4,
Suez crisis (1956) 46, 50 97, 99, 102–3, 107–10, 121,
Sweden 16 125, 135
and civil servants 14, 18, 29–30,
Tanzania 35 60–1, 121, 123
Tebbit, Norman 42, 53, 67, 92, and local government 13–14,
94, 144 21–2, 56, 74–6, 79–80, 83–4
Thatcher, Carol 11–12, 19, 66, 79, and trade unions 14, 19–20,
114, 144, 151 24–5, 30–1, 53, 68, 73–4,
Thatcher, Denis 10–12, 14–15, 64, 79–80, 122
65, 74–5, 79, 81, 111, 112, and media 18, 25, 30, 92–3,
114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 144, 97–8, 99, 114, 116
151, 154 and economic policy 20–1,
business career 10–11, 14–15 24–5, 28, 29, 30–3, 39–43,
nervous breakdown 14–15 51–4, 67, 79–84, 91–2,
Thatcher, Margaret, 100–1, 122–4
birth and upbringing 1- 6, 151 and foreign policy 16, 25,
schooling 5–6, 151 34–8, 45–51, 86–90, 103–7,
at university 6–9, 151 122–4
career as chemist 9 ‘one of us’ 98
qualifies as a barrister 11, 151 values 4–5, 16, 38, 61–2, 80, 81,
political influences 3–4, 8–9, 21 82–3, 125–6

161
Index

Thatcher, Margaret, (cont.) Waldegrave, William 13, 84,

‘Thatcherism’ 23, 25, 79–82, 113, 144–5
120–1, 122–6, 149 Wales 53, 58, 73, 85, 93
fall from power 107–10, 154 Wałesa, Lech 43
retirement 111–17 Walker, Peter 29, 40, 94
Thatcher Foundation 113 Walters, Alan 101, 102, 145
memoirs 112–13, 115 Warrender, Sir Victor 7, 8
statues 115 Weatherill, Bernard 66
death and funeral 117–18, 154 Weinberger, Caspar 48, 51
historiography 112–13, 122, Weinstock, Arnold 98
133–6 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur
Thatcher, Mark 11–12, 19, 65, 66, Wellesley) 119
113–14, 126, 144, 151 Wells, John 116
Thomas, George 66–7 Westland affair 76–8, 79, 90,
Thorneycroft, Peter 8 94, 150
Trades Union Congress (TUC) 53, 74 ‘wets’ 29, 40, 41–2, 69, 70,
99, 150
Ulster Unionists 85–6 Whitelaw, Willie 23, 24, 29, 40,
unemployment 2, 21, 26, 30, 32, 47, 57, 62, 66–7, 72, 93,
39–40, 44, 52–3, 58, 67, 69–70, 94, 145
71–2, 81, 82, 83, 90, 91, 99, Williams, Shirley 43, 44
100–1 Wilson, Harold 15, 18, 20, 21, 24,
Unilateral Declaration of 30, 75, 120, 145
Independence (UDI), see Worsthorne, Peregrine 126
Zimbabwe
United Nations 34, 47, 49 Yom Kippur War 20
United States 16, 25, 34, 37–8, Young, Janet, Baroness Young 62
47–8, 50, 51, 54, 67–8, 85–6, 87, Young, David, Lord Young of
89–90, 91, 92, 104–6, 107, 108, Graffham 69, 92
112, 115, 117, 122–3, 153 Younger, George 109
University Grants Committee 19
Zambia 35
Vaughan, Janet 7 Zimbabwe 35–6, 45, 65, 86,
‘Victorian values’ 2, 3–4, 126 149–50, 153

162