The Iron Lady

said, that President Bush had telephoned after her resignation was announced. They had discussed the Gulf and it was in that context – in relation to Bush, not Major – that she had declared: ‘He won’t falter, and I won’t falter. It’s just that I won’t be pulling the levers there. But I shall be a very good back seat driver.’⁶⁹

On Tuesday, while Tory MPs were still voting on her successor, she made her last appearance answering Prime Minister’s Questions. Again it was an occasion more for tributes than for recrimination. She told a Tory member that his was the 7,498th question she had answered in 698 sessions at the dispatch box. By the time she answered her last question a few minutes later the final tally was 7,501.⁷⁰

Finally, on Wednesday morning, she left the stage, only with difficulty holding back the tears as she made her final statement:

Ladies and Gentlemen.We’re leaving Downing Street for the last time after eleven and a half wonderful years and we’re very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came eleven and a half years ago.

It had been ‘a tremendous privilege’, they had been ‘wonderfully happy years’ and she was ‘immensely grateful’ to all her staff and the people who had sent her flowers and letters:

Now it’s time for a new chapter to open and I wish John Major all the luck in the world. He’ll be splendidly served, and he has the makings of a great Prime Minister, which I’m sure he’ll be in a very short time.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.⁷¹

When the car arrived in Dulwich, a journalist asked her what she would do now. ‘Work. That is all we have ever known.’⁷² Her trouble would be finding enough to do.

27 Afterlife

Unemployed workaholic

BRITISH democracy is peculiarly cruel to its defeated leaders. The familiar spectacle of the removal vans in Downing Street the morning after a General Election is an undignified one. Mrs Thatcher had witnessed at first hand Ted Heath’s abrupt and unanticipated ejection from office in February 1974. It was very largely the example of his predicament, with no alternative home to retreat to, so that he was forced to squat for several months in a small flat lent him by a Tory MP, that had prompted her to buy an unsuitable house in Dulwich as some sort of insurance policy against a similar fate. Her dismissal was actually less abrupt than most: she had almost a week between her decision to resign and the moment of departure – six days to pack up and say her farewells. Yet her defeat was also more brutal, since it was inflicted not by the electorate but by her own MPs. In June 1983 and June 1987 she had been packed and psychologically prepared: in November 1990 she was not.

Mrs Thatcher was a compulsive workaholic, still full of energy, with no interests outside politics. The loss of office deprived her almost overnight of her main reason for living. She had always dreaded the prospect of retirement. ‘I think my definition of Hell is having a lot of time and not having any idea of what to do with it,’ she told She magazine in 1987.¹ ‘Happiness is not doing nothing,’ she reiterated to Woman’s Own. ‘Happiness in an adult consists of having a very full day, being absolutely exhausted at the end of it but knowing that you have had a very full day.’² When she talked of having a full day she meant a full day’s work; and what she meant by work was politics. She could no more walk away from politics than she could stop breathing.

‘There will always be work for me to do and I shall just have to find it,’ she had said in 1989.³ But she was quite unsuited for any of the big international jobs – NATO, the World Bank, even the United Nations – with which her name was sometimes linked: she was never cut out to be a diplomat. John Major would have liked nothing better than to keep her fully occupied, preferably out of the country: but as he wrote in his memoirs, there was ‘no credible job to offer her’.⁴

It only made it worse that Major was her protege whom she had promoted rapidly over the heads of his contemporaries and finally endorsed as her successor. While colleagues and commentators saw the importance of Major quickly proving himself his own man, free of nanny’s apron strings, Mrs Thatcher continued to treat him as her unfledged deputy whose job it was to carry on the work which she had regrettably been prevented from finishing herself. Just as she had wanted to join him on the pavement outside Number Ten for his first press conference, so she had to be dissuaded from sitting immediately behind him at his first Prime Minister’s Questions.⁵ She thought she was still entitled to be informed and consulted, and the fact that Major’s first big challenge was the Gulf war, which was in origin her war, helped cement that expectation: Charles Powell – who stayed with Major until the conclusion of the war in March 1991 – continued to give her weekly briefings far fuller than those given by convention to the Leaders of the Opposition. Yet still she felt cut off from the information flow which had been her lifeblood for eleven years, and as a result she became frustrated and increasingly critical.

As she voiced her criticism more and more publicly she was accused of behaving as badly towards Major as Heath had done towards her. Yet Heath was widely seen as an embittered failure pursuing a lonely sulk, whereas she still had a huge following in the party, the country and indeed the world which made her criticism far more damaging and imposed on her a greater responsibility to deploy her influence discreetly and judiciously. This she manifestly failed – or refused – to do. The result was that for the Tories’ remaining seven years in office she made Major’s position vis-a-vis his own backbenchers almost impossible. By helping to exacerbate divisions in the party she contributed substantially to its heavy defeat in 1992, after which she continued to undermine the efforts first of William Hague and then – until her health began to fail – of Iain Duncan Smith to reunite the party around a new agenda. The wounds inflicted on the Tory party by her traumatic overthrow will never heal until her still-unquiet ghost is exorcised.

Back-seat driver

Woodrow Wyatt rang Mrs Thatcher in Dulwich the day after she and Denis arrived there and found her ‘coming down to earth with a bump’.⁶ She had no one to type letters for her or to acknowledge the thousands of letters of sympathy and bouquets of flowers she was receiving from members of the public. She did not even know how to operate the telephone or the washing machine. The one reassuring element of continuity was the police protection which still guarded her at all times; so finding herself unable to dial a number, she sought help from the Special Branch officers established in the garage. She still had a room in the House of Commons and John Whittingdale as her political secretary, but her first practical need was for a proper office. Alistair McAlpine came to the rescue by lending her a house in Great College Street, and she soon recruited a staff of eight. This arrangement served for the first few months, until the newly established Thatcher Foundation acquired an appropriate headquarters in Chesham Place.

Meanwhile, she quickly realised that Dulwich was not a sensible place for her to live. The only attraction of the house – for Denis – was that it overlooked Dulwich and Sydenham Golf Club. But it was hopelessly impractical for an ex-Prime Minister who intended to remain fully involved in public life, and whose schedule required her to be able to get home quickly to change between engagements. She needed to remain symbolically as well as literally in the thick of things. After just three weeks of commuting from Dulwich, therefore, she and Denis were