The Iron Lady

indicated that she would not back any candidate but when the thirty-six-year-old William Hague emerged as the fresh white hope, she came off the fence to lobby for him. Hague had first come to prominence as a precocious schoolboy at the 1977 party conference, speaking from the podium under the benign maternal gaze of the leader, then had won a by-election in 1988. He was Mrs Thatcher’s political child if ever there was one; and she now appeared with him for an excruciating photo-call outside the House of Commons, at which she wagged her finger and lectured the camera as if it were a backward child:

I am supporting William Hague. Now, have you got the name? William Hague. For principled government, following the same kind of government which I led, vote for William Hague on Thursday. Have you got the message?⁵¹

Hague was duly elected, but over the next four years failed dismally to dent Blair’s popularity or restore the public’s faith in the Tories. Apart from the odd embarrassing eruption, Lady Thatcher finally began to fade from public view.

Shortly before Blair went to the country again in May 2001, Lady Thatcher – now seventy-five – descended on the party’s spring conference in Plymouth and made one of her characteristically cloth-eared jokes. On her way to the hall, she said, she had passed a cinema showing a film entitled The Mummy Returns. She did not seem to realise that this was a horror film – nothing to do with a cuddly mother figure. By applying it to herself she unwittingly evoked all the headlines and cartoons that had been portraying her for years as a ghost, a vampire, the undead or Frankenstein’s monster still haunting the Tory party.⁵² During the campaign Labour once again exploited her unpopularity with a poster combining Hague’s face with her hair, and her every appearance in the campaign served only to remind the voters why they did not want the Tories back. Labour was returned with its huge majority virtually undented, and once again the Tories were looking for a new leader.

Rejecting the far better qualified Ken Clarke, whose pro-European views now made him unacceptable, the party next elected the totally inexperienced Iain Duncan Smith, whose only qualifications were that he had been a leading rebel against Maastricht in 1993 – 4 and was now Lady Thatcher’s anointed favourite. The Week summed up the press consensus with a cover cartoon of her embracing the new leader under the headline ‘The Kiss of Death?’⁵³ Three months later a BBC documentary entitled The Curse of the Mummy revived her Plymouth joke to lay on her much of the blame for the party’s dire state.⁵⁴ Her refusal to go quietly into the political night had left the former Prime Minister now virtually friendless.

Silenced

Not only did she have few friends, but her family provided little consolation for her old age. ‘We have become a grandmother,’ she had proudly announced in 1989, when Mark’s first child was born. Four years later Diane Thatcher gave birth to a second. But Margaret saw her grandchildren only rarely – and not much more of her children. In 1994 Mark and Diane moved from Texas to South Africa, but seldom came to Britain. Carol spent most of her time in Switzerland in an on-off relationship with a ski instructor, but has never married. Neither of the twins, who turned fifty in 2003, exemplified the ideal of a close-knot family which their mother always strove to project.

Mark’s business dealings have continued to attract controversy. His American affairs came under investigation by the Texas courts in 1995. He was sued by his business partner for alleged conspiracy involving ‘mail fraud, wire fraud, tax fraud, bankruptcy fraud, money laundering, usury, common law fraud, deceptive trade practices, perjury, theft and assault’.⁵⁵ Eventually he settled out of court for $500,000 but he still faced another $4 million case being brought against his Grantham Company (which traded in aviation fuel) by the Ameristar Fuel Corporation, as well as charges of tax evasion. After a family summit his mother was reported to have cleared his debts to the tune of ?700,000⁵⁶: yet he somehow still continued to live like a millionaire. Later that year he moved, with Diane and the children, to Cape Town; but his shady reputation followed him and he continued to attract the attention of both the police and the South African tax authorities.⁵⁷ In 2005 he was charged with involvement in an attempted coup to overthrow the President of Equatorial Guinea. He pleaded guilty and was lucky to escape with a suspended sentence and a fine of three million rand (?265,000) – again paid by his mother. Soon afterwards Diane divorced him and returned to America. Banned from entering the United States and several other territories, Mark settled appropriately among the expatriate criminal fraternity in southern Spain.

In 1996, Carol published an affectionate biography of Denis, which drew a devastating picture of Margaret’s remoteness as a mother. She was even more explicit in some of the interviews that accompanied publication. ‘As a child I was frightened of her,’ Carol revealed. Mark had always been their mother’s favourite. ‘I always felt I came second of the two. Unloved is not the right word, but I never felt I made the grade.’ Though as an adult she had plainly grown fond of her father, she described her parents’ marriage as a union of two ambitious and primarily work-directed people, rather than a happy family unit. ‘Their priorities were not to each other or to us.’⁵⁸ ‘It was very much drilled into me that the best thing I could ever do for my mother was not to make any demands on her.’⁵⁹ In a curiously artless way Carol thus comprehensively torpedoed her mother’s pretence that family had always been the most important thing in her life.

For seventy years Mrs Thatcher’s health had been extraordinarily good. She had suffered from colds, from one or two specific conditions like varicose veins and Dupuytren’s contracture which had required minor operations, and increasingly from problems with her teeth. But considering the demands she had made on her constitution for the past forty years, it had held up astonishingly well. In so-called retirement she still got up early and kept herself busy all day, still exhausted her staff by her relentless schedule on foreign trips.Yet eventually the Iron Lady did begin to show signs of metal fatigue.While speaking in Chile in 1994 she suddenly lost consciousness and slumped forward onto the lectern. She quickly recovered, and apologised profusely to her hosts for her uncharacteristic moment of weakness; but this was probably her first very minor stroke.⁶⁰

The most visible sign of frailty over the next few years was a loss of short-term memory. She began to repeat herself and seemed not to take in what was said to her. So long as she had a script, she remained a true professional who could still turn in a faultless performance. But off-script she could be a liability, either too predictable – simply repeating lines she had used a thousand times before, sometimes just a minute earlier – or else alarmingly unpredictable. Denis or whoever was minding her at the time had to be skilled at nudging the needle on at the right moment. It was in Madeira, where she and Denis had gone to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary at the end of 2001, that she suffered a second minor stroke. Sometime early in 2002 she had a third, as a result of which it was announced on 22 March that she would do no more public speaking. But not before she had exploded one last bombshell with the serialisation of her latest book.

Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World was neither a third volume of memoirs, though it had autobiographical elements, nor – as its title might suggest – an instruction manual in the art of government. Rather, it was a survey of the international scene at the start of the new millennium, comprising Lady Thatcher’s view of how things had been allowed to slide since 1990 and what should now be done to put them right. Every few pages her prescription was summarised in four or five bullet points printed in bold type. The book was dedicated to Ronald Reagan ‘to whom the world owes so much’: its central message was contempt for the woolly internationalism of the ‘new world order’ and the importance of American global leadership. She seemed almost to welcome the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 as a vindication of her previous warnings, and positively looked forward to the Americans hitting back decisively and unilaterally:

So far…I am heartened by the fact that President Bush seems to have concluded that this is an American operation and that America alone will decide how it is to be conducted… That means taking out the terrorists and their protectors, and not just in Afghanistan but elsewhere too.⁶¹ [r]