Inside Number Ten
The wider field over which the new Prime Minister had quickly to assert her authority was Whitehall. From the moment she took office she became responsible for the entire government machine. Yet the British Prime Minister has no department of his or her own through which to coordinate this extensive bureaucracy, merely a small private office, based in Number Ten, Downing Street, composed of an anomalous mixture of career officials inherited from the outgoing government, whose job is to provide continuity; a handful of personal staff carried over from the very different world of opposition, more often than not with no experience of government; and a scrum of more or less informal political advisers. Nowhere else in the democratic world does the changeover of power from one government to the next take place so quickly. Some discreet preparations are made at official level for a possible transition; but Mrs Thatcher was always wary of taking anything for granted, so this critical central structure had to be put together over a single weekend, ready to start running the country on Monday morning.
The two key permanent officials who met her when she walked through the door were her principal private secretary, Kenneth Stowe, and the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt. Both were due to be replaced before the end of the year, but both played important roles in introducing Mrs Thatcher to her new responsibilities. Emollient and self-effacing, Stowe managed the transition from Callaghan to Mrs Thatcher with exemplary smoothness, but stayed in Number Ten for only six weeks – ‘six very intensive weeks’ as he recalled.36 His replacement, Clive Whitmore, came from the Ministry of Defence. Though ‘very much the machine man’, in the view of one internal critic,37 Whitmore was instinctively in sympathy with her political objectives and they quickly formed a close working relationship, which lasted for the next three years, after which she sent him back to the MoD as Permanent Secretary at the unusually young age of forty-seven.
Sir John Hunt had been Cabinet Secretary – in effect the Prime Minister’s Permanent Secretary – since 1973: Mrs Thatcher was thus his fourth Prime Minister in seven years. He remembered her as Education Secretary under Heath, when it had never occurred to him that she might one day be Prime Minister.38 Hunt’s style was brisk and businesslike: as a newcomer feeling her way, Mrs Thatcher found him a bit managing. When he retired at the end of 1979 she was happy to choose as his successor the more obliging, indeed positively Jeeves-like, Robert Armstrong, a classic Eton and Christ Church-educated mandarin who had long been tipped for the top job. His only handicap was that he had been Heath’s principal private secretary and was still close to his old chief. But he was the model of Civil Service impartiality and selfless professionalism; and the conservative side of Mrs Thatcher’s character respected those traditional qualities so long as they were employed to serve and not obstruct her. Though far from Thatcherite by inclination, Armstrong served her, rather like Willie Whitelaw, with absolute loyalty and discretion for the next seven years.
The private office was headed by her political secretary, Richard Ryder, and the somewhat shadowy figure of David Wolfson. But Mrs Thatcher’s personal support team also had a strong female component, particularly in the early years, largely because she made so little distinction between work and home. When she titled the first chapter of her memoirs ‘Over the Shop’ and wrote that living in Number Ten was like going back to her girlhood in Grantham, it was not just a literary flourish, but described exactly how she lived. During her working day she was always popping upstairs to the flat at the top of the building to eat or change or work on a speech before coming down again for a Cabinet committee or to meet a foreign leader: smaller meetings with colleagues and advisers were often held in the flat. Denis, if he was around, sometimes sat in on these informal meetings: late at night it was frequently he who ended them by telling Margaret firmly that it was time for bed. Because she was ‘always on the job’ – as she once told a delighted television audience39 – she made no effort to protect her private space from the intrusion of work. Far more than with a male Prime Minister – who might wear the same suit all day and have his hair cut once a month – her clothes, her hair, her make-up were all essential props of her public performance, needing frequent, but very rapid, attention throughout the day.Thus her personal staff was much more mingled with her professional staff than was the case with Jim Callaghan or Ted Heath; secretaries might be pressed into cooking scratch meals at any hour of the day or night.[b] Though Mrs Thatcher made no secret that she enjoyed being surrounded by subservient men, and in eleven years appointed only one other woman – briefly – to her Cabinet, there was always a distinctly feminine flavour in her immediate entourage.
Lady Thatcher was justifiably proud of having created a happy family atmosphere inside Number Ten. However roughly she may have treated her colleagues and advisers, she was always immensely considerate towards her personal staff and towards all those – drivers, telephonists and the like – who kept the wheels of government turning. When her driver died suddenly in March 1980, she insisted, at the end of a very busy week, on attending the funeral in south London and comforting his widow.41 Likewise, when Bernard Ingham’s wife was involved in an accident in the middle of the Falklands war, she insisted that he must go and look after her: she told him firmly that she did not expect to see him back at work for several days.42
Finally, there is the joyfully repeated story of a lunch at Chequers when one of the service personnel waiting at table spilled a plate of hot soup in Geoffrey Howe’s lap. The Prime Minister immediately leapt up, full of concern, not for her Foreign Secretary but for the girl. ‘There, there,’ she comforted her. ‘It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.’ The contrast between the way Mrs Thatcher fussed over her staff and the cavalier way she treated her colleagues – particularly Howe – was perfectly emblematic. With the benefit of hindsight, Ronnie Millar wondered whether she was ‘altogether wise to treat Sir Geoffrey any old how’.43
Bernard Ingham became the Prime Minister’s chief press secretary towards the end of 1979.A pugnacious former Labour supporter, he quickly transferred his loyalty to his new mistress and became one of her most devoted servants. His robust and highly personalised briefings strained Civil Service neutrality to the limit, but Mrs Thatcher trusted him absolutely and he remained at the heart of her entourage until the end.
Another key figure in her first administration was her Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow. MP for Eastbourne since February 1974, Gow was a balding, tweedy solicitor who cultivated a self-consciously old fogeyish manner, though only in his early forties. He had scarcely met Mrs Thatcher before May 1979, and was astonished to be invited to become her PPS; but he too immediately fell under her spell. ‘Ian loved her,’ Alan Clark wrote after Gow’s murder in 1990, ‘actually loved, I mean, in every sense but the physical.’44 He escorted her everywhere, protected her in public and helped her unwind in private with late night whisky and gossip. At the same time he was the most sensitive link with the back benches that any Prime Minister ever had. ‘Known affectionately as “Supergrass”,’ according to Ronald Millar, ‘he had a knack of reporting back to the lady everything she needed to know about the gossip of the bazaars without ever betraying a confidence, a rare feat in the political world.’45 He was also an old friend of Geoffrey Howe, which helped lubricate the key relationship at the heart of the Government, one that later turned disastrously sour. Gow played a crucial part in Mrs Thatcher’s political survival in the dark days of 1981 – 2 when her premiership hung in the balance. She felt bound to reward him with a ministerial job in 1983; but thereafter she never found a successor with the same qualities. As a result her relationship with her backbenchers steadily deteriorated. Gow was unique and irreplaceable.
Finally there was Denis. It was the presence of the Prime Minister’s husband, coming and going as he liked amid the press of government business, frantic speechwriting and impromptu meals, that gave Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street much of its special flavour. Denis had officially retired from Burmah Oil in 1975, but he still had a string of non-executive directorships as well as his drinking chums and his golfing companions. He lived his own life, as he and Margaret had always done; but he was continually in and out, and when he was there he often sat in on meetings contributing his views without restraint. On business matters where he had real expertise – for instance on British Leyland – Margaret listened seriously to what he had to say. (She once said that she did not need briefing on the oil industry because ‘I sleep with the oil industry every night.’)46 On other subjects he served to keep her, and her staff, in touch with what the man in the golf-club bar was thinking.
Normally Denis would go to bed long before Margaret, leaving her working. But he was also very protective and she deferred to him. There are numerous stories of Denis breaking up late night speechwriting sessions by insisting in his inimitable way that it was time she went to bed (‘Woman, bed’); or reminding her, ‘Honestly, love,
