The Iron Lady

lent a luxurious ground floor and basement duplex apartment in Eaton Square, Belgravia, owned by Henry Ford’s widow, while they looked for something more permanent. They eventually bought a ten-year lease – later extended to a life interest – on a five-storey, five-bedroom house nearby in Chester Square, just off Victoria, which was made ready for them to move into in the summer of 1991.

There were some consolations to salve her sense of rejection in the first few weeks. She received a warm – perhaps guilt-fuelled – reception in the Commons when she attended Major’s first appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions; and everywhere she appeared she was met with sympathy, tributes to her historic stature and admiration for her dignified bearing in adversity. On 9 December it was announced that the Queen had awarded her the Order of Merit – the highest honour in the sovereign’s gift, limited to just twenty-four individuals: Mrs Thatcher filled the vacancy left by the death of Laurence Olivier. More controversially, Denis was created a baronet. A few days earlier she and Denis had paid a well-publicised call on Ron and Nancy Reagan, who were passing through London, and took tea with them at Claridge’s, reliving past glories.

She was still resilient, determined to look forward and keep herself busy. ‘I have got to do a positive job, and do positive things,’ she told Wyatt. ‘I intend to go on having influence.’⁷ She knew she had to step back from daily domestic politics, but in the very first days she set herself three tasks. First, she intended to travel widely and lecture, particularly in America, partly to keep on spreading her gospel, but also to make money. She soon signed on with the Washington Speakers’ Bureau for a reported fee of $50,000 a lecture – second only to Reagan – and she commanded similar fees in Japan and all over the Far East. She made a clear rule, however, that she would accept no payment for speeches in Britain, or for speaking in Russia, China, Hong Kong or South Africa – anywhere, in fact, where she was speaking politically as opposed to just exploiting her name. She was determined not to compromise her independence where she felt she could still have influence.

Within two years she was placed 134th in the Sunday Times list of the country’s richest people, with personal wealth estimated at ?9.5 million.⁸ Much the biggest part of this income, however, derived from her second task – the writing of her memoirs. These clearly had huge commercial potential. In June Mrs Thatcher signed up with an American agent, Marvin Josephson, who swiftly accepted an offer of ?3.5 million from HarperCollins – part of Rupert Murdoch’s empire – for two volumes to be published in 1993 and 1995.

It was a substantial deal. But the timetable was demanding, requiring her to write the first volume, covering her entire premiership, in not much more than eighteen months. It was announced that she would write every word herself; but no one seriously believed this. She had never claimed to be a writer. Her method of composing speeches had always been to edit, criticise and exhaustively rewrite the drafts of others; and it was the same with her memoirs. Like her valedictory speech to the House of Commons on the day she resigned, but on a vastly bigger scale, Mrs Thatcher took the project immensely seriously, treating every word as her vindication before the bar of history. She did not intend to pull her punches – and nor did she. But directing the writing of the book gave her something serious and all-consuming to do with her time; and completing it on schedule was a formidable achievement.

Her third project was to set up some sort of institution to preserve her legacy and propagate her ideas around the world, but this fell foul of British charity law. In July 1991 the Charity Commission refused to grant the Thatcher Foundation charitable status since it was not politically neutral: this seriously affected its ability to raise funds, since companies could not claim tax relief. By 1993 no more than ?5 million had been raised. The Foundation was nevertheless established with its headquarters in Chesham Place (near Hyde Park Corner), which provided a suitably imposing office where Mrs Thatcher could receive foreign visitors: several remarked that its fine staircase and chandeliers, mementoes of the Falklands and a large globe were curiously reminiscent of Downing Street – though far grander.

Branches were also opened in Washington and Warsaw, with the object of spreading free-market ideas and Western business practice in the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. The specific initiatives announced, however, were small beer. The Foundation evolved instead into an educational trust. In 1998 it gave ?2 million to endow a new chair of enterprise studies at Cambridge. The previous year Lady Thatcher had donated her papers to Churchill College, together with funds to catalogue them and build a new wing of the Archives Centre to house them. The Foundation also paid for the distribution to libraries all round the world of a CD-ROM of her complete public statements produced (at its own expense) by Oxford University Press, and it funds a Margaret Thatcher website. All this has helped to make the record of her life available to historians; but it was not the crusading vehicle for global Thatcherism that was originally envisaged.

In the short term the main thing she could do was to travel extensively, which both got her out of Major’s hair and enabled her to enjoy the adulation of her admirers around the world. As a global superstar she was far more recognisable than her unknown successor, and she met with rapturous receptions wherever she went. During 1991 she made five visits to the United States – in February to attend Ronald Reagan’s eightieth-birthday celebrations in California and inspect the still unfinished Reagan Library in Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles; in March to receive the congressional Medal of Freedom from President Bush at a lavish ceremony in the White House, followed by her first paid lectures in Republican strongholds like Dallas, Texas, and Orange County, California; in June to give two major speeches about world affairs in New York and Chicago; in September and again in November for further lecture tours. America was more than ever her spiritual home, and during and after the Gulf war she still had some standing in Washington, even if more often than not she had to be content with seeing Vice-President Dan Quayle – usually for breakfast – rather than the President. But she also went in May to South Africa for what was essentially the state visit she had never managed to make as Prime Minister, where she was feted by President de Klerk but boycotted by the ANC; and then to Russia where she met both Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and was mobbed in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad. In September she aroused extraordinary enthusiasm in Japan and was given the red-carpet treatment in China (overshadowing a visit by Major a few days later). In October she was hailed as a heroine by crowds in Poland; and in November she was welcomed as the liberator of Kuwait, whence she returned ‘reverberating with vitality’.⁹

Wherever she travelled she felt no inhibitions about plunging into local politics. In South Africa she urged Mandela and Chief Buthelezi to talk and it was even suggested that she might act as a mediator to bring them together.¹⁰ In Russia she gave strong backing to her now embattled friend Gorbachev, urging students at Moscow University to keep faith with perestroika; at the same time, however, she firmly supported the right of the Baltic republics to independence (which was not then the view of the British Government).¹¹ Three months later, when Gorbachev was briefly deposed by a hardline Communist coup, and Western capitals held back to see the outcome before committing themselves, Mrs Thatcher took the lead in urging the Soviet people to take to the streets in protest. She openly supported the defiance of Boris Yeltsin, holed up in the Russian parliament building, and even managed to hold a twenty-five-minute telephone conversation with him to express her encouragement. ¹² Likewise, arriving in Warsaw, where the post-Communist government had been making deep cuts in subsidies and public services, she was ‘not at all shy about wading into the Polish election campaign, praising the embattled finance minister and dismissing left-wing parties’.¹³ The whole world was now her constituency: or, as she herself put it with her habitual royal plural, ‘We operate now on a global scale.’¹⁴

But she could not confine herself entirely to the world stage. The issues she felt most strongly about inevitably impacted on domestic politics.Any criticism she made of the Government’s stance towards Iraq, the disintegration of Yugoslavia or – above all – Europe was inescapably a comment on her successor’s lack of judgement, experience or resolution. At least she could have no complaint about the conduct of the war to liberate Kuwait. In her first intervention in the Commons on 28 February she simply congratulated Major on the war’s successful conclusion and accepted his tribute to her staunchness the previous August. She did not yet criticise the coalition’s failure to overthrow Saddam, though she did point out that the problem of Iraq was not resolved and warned darkly that ‘the victories of peace will take longer than the battles of war’.¹⁵ Within a few weeks, however, she was demanding that the Government should send troops to protect the Kurdish population fleeing from Saddam’s forces in northern Iraq. In fact Major was already working on a plan to create ‘safe havens’ for the Kurds, for which he was able to secure French, German and eventually American backing; so on this occasion he was able to neutralise her intervention. It would not always be so easy.

In the autumn of 1991 Mrs Thatcher took an early, clear and courageous view on the break-up of Yugoslavia, which put her bitterly at odds with the Government over the following years as the complex inter-ethnic