‘HOW COULD ANYONE LEAD THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY WITH A VOICE THAT SOUNDED LIKE BROKEN GLASS?’ Credit: PA IMAGES
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Along a narrow corridor behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, in a part of the building closed to visitors, a door opens onto a staircase leading to the rooms that the Prime Minister uses as his or her parliamentary base. The suite at the far end of the corridor is traditionally allocated to the opposition. In 1987, when working for the Labour Party, I had left Neil Kinnock’s office and was heading towards the debating chamber when my way was barred in that narrow corridor by a small, sinewy woman, whose face was oddly familiar. Most of the women working on the parliamentary estate in those days were support staff who deferred to the professionals and kept out of their way, but this one stood her ground. If I had been better tuned to the rhythms of parliamentary life, I might have noted that it was that time in the afternoon on a Tuesday or Thursday when the 15-minute ritual of Prime Minister’s Questions ended. Its participants were dispersing. The person blocking my way was Margaret Thatcher.
It took a moment to process this startling fact. She noted my astonishment, which seemed to amuse her, and with a half-smile she raised a finger and swept it from side to side, as if in imitation of a car’s widescreen wiper. The gesture was telling me that I was going to make way for her, but I could choose which way to stand aside. I pressed myself against the wall to the left as she swept by.
Lady Thatcher was a one-off. In public, she could be strident, righteous, humourless, and sometimes shockingly indifferent to the consequences of her government’s actions. In 1980, I was invited by the Workers’ Educational Association to Consett, in county Durham, to give a talk to steelworkers who were using their free time to make up some of what they had lost by leaving school at 14. About a week after that interesting day every member of that audience was thrown out of work. The Consett steelworks was breaking even, but the newly appointed head of British Steel, Ian MacGregor – the same man who would later lay waste to Britain’s mining communities – decided that its ratio of profitability to running costs was inadequate. In that small town, built around its steel works, 4,700 jobs were destroyed by the distant Mr MacGregor. The unemployment rate rose above 50 per cent. Mrs Thatcher was challenged during a subsequent visit to the North East of England about the region’s shocking unemployment, to which her government had so casually contributed, and replied that complaining would only discourage private investment. “Standing there as moaning minnies – stop it!” she said.
And yet, in private, she was curiously engaging. Some politicians hold strident views in public to conceal a private feeling of inadequacy, but that was in no way true of Mrs Thatcher. She was confident to the core, and utterly convinced of the rightness of her beliefs, which meant that she had no fear of journalists. She was the last Prime Minister who would mingle with journalists without a spin doctor standing guard.
The public became aware during the Tony Blair years that prime ministers are constantly protected by a phalanx of spin doctors from uncontrolled contact with the media. This was actually already happening before 1997. I once succeeded during a trip to Moscow in getting into conversation with John Major. I tried to prompt him to say something unguarded by telling him that the newspaper I was working for, The Observer, was interested in the phenomenon of journalists who were also political activists, knowing that this was one of his bugbears. “Oh, I can you tell stories about that!” Major exclaimed. But a voice interjected: “Yes, but you’re not going to, are you, Prime Minister?” A civil servant, Jonathan Haslam, was listening. John Major obediently shut up.
During the short time when I came into Margaret Thatcher’s orbit, in the last couple of years of her premiership, no civil servant or adviser would have spoken to her like that. The first time that I was on a foreign trip travelling in the prime minister’s plane, the journalists aboard were called forward in groups of four to talk to her on whatever topic they chose. She made some comment about relations with Europe, whereupon the Political Editor of the Daily Mail, Gordon Greig, laughed in her face sand said: “Does Geoffrey Howe agree with that?” It was an open secret then that her relations with Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Deputy Prime Minister, were close to breaking point.
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