b Mrs Thatcher herself frequently cooked late-night meals too, often insisting on running up a quick supper (lasagne or chicken Kiev from the freezer) for aides or MPs helping with a speech. ‘Don’t stop her cooking,’ Denis would tell them. ‘It’s her form of therapy.’40
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c It could work the other way, however. Ronnie Millar recalls one time when she dragged Denis away from a party, telling him, ‘If you want me to poach your egg, come
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d The line derived from the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 verse play,
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e In fact, Foot was not a pacifist at all. As an ardent young journalist he had been one of the authors of
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f On 30 April 1980 six armed terrorists demanding autonomy for southern Iran seized the Iranian Embassy in Kensington, taking twenty hostages, including a police officer and two BBC journalists.Willie Whitelaw, as Home Secretary, was in charge of the six-day police operation to end the siege. But Mrs Thatcher took a close interest, making it clear that there should be no substantial negotiations and that the terrorists should not be allowed to get away with it. As soon as they started shooting hostages she approved Whitelaw’s decision to send in the SAS to storm the building – live on television, at teatime on Bank Holiday Monday – killing five of the terrorists and capturing the sixth. Afterwards she and Denis went in person to congratulate the assault team at their HQ in Regent’s Park.6
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g In fact it was much higher. It was revealed in 2002 that more Falklands veterans have taken their own lives since the end of the war than were killed during it.
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h Raymond Seitz, American Ambassador in London in the mid-1980s, accompanied numerous Senators and Congressmen to see her. ‘The visitor would start the conversation with something such as “Thank you for seeing me, Madam Prime Minister”… to which Mrs Thatcher would respond for about thirty minutes without drawing breath.’ She would finish with ‘one or two courtesy points about Ronnie’ before the visitor emerged dazed into Downing Street repeating, ‘What a woman! What a woman!’5
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i This was the first time anyone in Britain had seen a teleprompter – Reagan’s ‘sincerity machine’ – which enabled him to speak with unnatural fluency without looking down at his notes. Mrs Thatcher quickly adopted it for her own major speeches.
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j In
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k The censored words are presumably something like ‘to meet Mrs Thatcher’s view’. But then why censor them? One can only guess that they are less complimentary than that – something like ‘Mrs Thatcher’s obsession’.
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l ‘Fleet Street’, of course, ceased to be located in Fleet Street during the 1980s, largely as a result of Rupert Murdoch’s removal of News International to Wapping in 1985, which was followed by practically all the rest of the national press. But the name is still useful, and it was still correct at the start of the decade.
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m Colette Bowe is the one leading participant in the Westland drama who has not yet published her account of these events; but she has placed it in a bank for ultimate disclosure.
