was a pupil at the Bar,’ she once told the House of Commons, ‘my first master-at-law gave me a very sound piece of advice, which I tried to follow. He said: “Always express your conclusion first, so that people do not have to wait for it.”’ As Prime Minister she made this her regular practice.16 After a brisk exchange of views, often head-to-head with a single colleague, she would then leave Whitelaw to sum up, which he would do with skilful bonhomie, blandly smoothing away the disagreements while making sure the Prime Minister got her way, or at least was not visibly defeated.
‘She certainly was aggressive,’ one member of that Cabinet confirms, but ‘I never felt that she was dominant… On all sorts of issues there was a pretty good ding-dong discussion…’ Yet more often than not she did dominate, not only because she was always thoroughly prepared, but because she had no hesitation in berating ministers in front of their colleagues if she thought they did not know their stuff. Moreover, as Jim Prior wrote, colleagues were given no time to develop an argument at length. ‘If a minister tended to be in the slightest bit longwinded, or if she did not agree with his views, Margaret would interrupt.’17 She was the same in smaller meetings, with both ministers and officials.
She was in fact a very good listener when she respected the expertise of the person she was talking to, and really wanted to hear what he had to tell her. To hold her attention, however, it was essential to make your point quickly and then stick to it. ‘Waffle was death,’ a senior mandarin recalled.18 Much of her irritation with Geoffrey Howe stemmed from the fact that he never learned to make his point quickly. She relished argument for its own sake, and would often take a contrary line just to provoke one. It was through argument that she clarified her own mind. ‘She would argue vigorously,’ the head of her policy unit, John Hoskyns, recalled, ‘to satisfy herself that the thinking she was being given was good.’19 Though she read all the papers, her staff quickly learned that she was never persuaded of anything on paper alone: she had to test the case in argument before she would accept it.20
At the same time she was extraordinarily difficult to argue with, because she would never admit to losing an argument, but would become ‘unbelievably discursive’ and illogical if the point was going against her, abruptly changing the subject in order to retain the upper hand.21 Alan Clark, recording a bout with the Prime Minister some years later, characteristically saw her illogicality as quintessentially feminine: ‘no rational sequence, associative lateral thinking, jumping rails the whole time’.Yet he concluded: ‘Her sheer energy and the speed with which she moves around the ring makes her a very difficult opponent.’22 She argued not merely to clear her mind, but to
It was possible to change her mind, but she would never admit to having been wrong. She would furiously resist an argument by every device at her disposal one day, only to produce it unblushingly the next day as her own, with no acknowledgement that she had shifted her ground or that her interlocutor might have had a point.23
Some colleagues reckoned that this aggressive manner was both necessary, at least in the beginning, and effective. Lord Carrington suggests that it was the only way that Mrs Thatcher, as a woman, could have asserted her authority in the circumstances of 1979 – 81.24 John Hoskyns likewise believes that she had to be ‘impossible, difficult, emotional, in order to try to bulldoze… radical thinking through’ against those he termed ‘the defeatists’ in the Cabinet.25 Even Geoffrey Howe, the butt of so much of her worst bullying, told Patricia Murray in 1980 of the exhilaration of working with Mrs Thatcher in these early days:
Oh, yes she is
Others, however – particularly those colleagues less resilient than Howe and less robust than Prior – thought her method of government by combat counterproductive and inimical to sensible decision making. David Howell, a thoughtful politician who had naively imagined that the Cabinet would function as the forum for an exchange of ideas, was disillusioned to discover that, on the contrary, ‘certain slogans were… written in tablets of stone and used as the put-down at the end of every argument’. ‘In my experience,’ Howell concluded, ‘there is too much argument and not enough discussion.’27 Another member of the 1979 Cabinet thought it ‘an absurd way to run a Government’.28 To these critics, Mrs Thatcher’s inability to delegate and her insistence on interrogating her ministers about the smallest detail of their own departments reflected a deep- seated insecurity, not so much political as psychological: she had to be on top all the time, and keep demonstrating that she was on top. The schoolgirl had not only done her homework, but had to prove that she had done it. On this analysis her aggression was essentially defensive.
The negative results of this method were that she exhausted herself and did not get the best out of others. Though she liked to boast that she was never tired so long as there was work to be done – ‘it’s when you stop that you realise you might be rather tired’29 – and wrote in her memoirs that there was ‘an intensity about the job of Prime Minister which made sleep a luxury’, many of those who worked most closely with her insist that this was not true. Undoubtedly her stamina was remarkable. She could go for several days with four hours’ sleep a night, and rarely allowed herself more than five or six. But her staff could see that she was exhausted more often than she ever admitted: one sign was that she would talk more unstoppably than ever.30 Her refusal to acknowledge physical weakness was another way of asserting her dominance. Any minister unwise enough to admit that he needed sleep would find himself derided as a feeble male. Alternatively, she would express motherly concern; but this, George Walden noted, was another stratagem:
What she was saying when she commented on how terrible you looked was that you were a man and she was a woman, you were a junior and she was Prime Minister, and yet unlike you she was
In the same way she would insist that other people must have their holidays while refusing to admit that she might need one herself. ‘I must govern,’ she told a member of her staff in the summer of 1979.32 Holidays, she frequently implied, were for wimps.33 But her inability to relax also conveyed the message that she did not trust anyone to deputise for her. She believed that if she stopped for a moment, or let slip her vigilance, the Civil Service would quickly resume its paralysing inertia, her feeble colleagues would backslide and her enemies would combine against her. By not trusting her ministers to run their own departments, however, Mrs Thatcher ultimately diminished them.
Thus from the very beginning Mrs Thatcher’s restless interference centralised the business of government, while by concentrating everything on herself she underused the talents of others. As she grew more dominant, colleagues and officials became increasingly reluctant to tell her things she did not want to hear. The free circulation of information and advice within Whitehall was constrained by the requirement to refer everything upwards to Number Ten; while by battering and badgering, second-guessing and overruling her colleagues she strained their loyalty – ultimately to breaking point.34 As early as March 1980 her devoted PPS, Ian Gow, was worried that ‘Margaret did treat colleagues badly and it would boomerang’.35
Unlike Ted Heath’s exceptionally harmonious Cabinet half a dozen years before, which had kept its own counsel even when pursuing sensitive and controversial policies, Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet was prone to leaks from the very beginning. The fact that more than half the Cabinet had serious doubts about the economic strategy to which they were committed was well known and widely reported. Mrs Thatcher blamed the so-called ‘wets’ for trying to subvert by hints and whispers policies they were unable to defeat in Cabinet. The truth was that both sides leaked; this was an inevitable consequence of a fundamentally divided Cabinet. The ‘wets’ confided their misgivings to journalists because they were denied any opportunity to influence policy from within; while for her part Mrs Thatcher, having been obliged to appoint a Cabinet most of whom she knew were out of sympathy with her objectives, felt justified in bypassing them and appealing, via the press, directly to the public, which she believed understood what she was trying to do. She was never a good team player, still less a good captain, because she never trusted her team. Even when she had replaced most of her original opponents with younger colleagues more loyal to her – whether from conviction or ambition – the habit of undermining them was too established to be abandoned. She was not loyal to them, she drove an unprecedented number of them to resign, and ultimately in November 1990 the collective loyalty of the survivors cracked.
