we’re not trying to write the Old Testament.’47 At least at a superficial level he never lost the masculine authority which a husband of his class and generation expected to assert over his wife.[c] His interventions often came as a relief to her hard-pressed staff. Willie Whitelaw was another who frequently found that a quiet word with Denis was the way to get through to her when all else failed.
In fact, living and working above the shop, with neither of them commuting any more, the Thatchers were closer in Downing Street than at any previous time in their marriage. They were both excellent hosts, and Denis was infinitely skilful at supporting and protecting Margaret, talking to those she could not or did not want to speak to and deflecting people who tried to monopolise her. He accompanied her on the most important of her overseas trips, and developed his role as the Prime Minister’s consort with extraordinary tact and skill. He stuck firmly to his policy of never giving interviews and the press – particularly the travelling press accompanying the Prime Minister to international summits, who had ample opportunity to witness him sounding off over several stiff drinks on long flights home – respected his privacy by never quoting him. ‘He was off limits, out of bounds,’ Bernard Ingham wrote. ‘Everybody loves him because he is straight and decent and loyal.’48,49
Lady Thatcher has always paid extravagant tribute to Denis’s part in her career. In the early days his contribution was frankly more material than emotional: his money gave her the financial security to pursue her legal and political career. They lived very separate lives, which suited her admirably. But theirs was a rare marriage, which grew deeper the longer it went on: being the Prime Minister’s husband gave him the best retirement job imaginable. He had no defined functions, but he played an important humanising role and was always on hand when required, helping to calm her when she was upset or buck her up when she was depressed. At the end of the day, she told the 1980 party conference, ‘there is just Denis and me, and I could not do without him’.50 Many of her closest advisers felt that the one thing that might have induced her to resign before 1990 would have been Denis becoming seriously ill.
The Prime Minister and Whitehall
Mrs Thatcher hit Whitehall, in Peter Hennessy’s words, ‘with the force of a tornado’.51 While many officials had welcomed the prospect of a dynamic government which knew its own mind, and enjoyed a secure parliamentary majority, after years of drift and hand-to-mouth expediency under Labour, they were not prepared for the degree of positive hostility which the new Prime Minister exuded, and encouraged her ministers to express, towards the Civil Service as an institution. Both from her personal experience of the Department of Education and the Ministry of Pensions, and as a matter of political principle, she came into office convinced that the Civil Service bore much of the blame for Britain’s decline over the past thirty-five years: that civil servants as a breed, with some individual exceptions, were not the solution to the nation’s ills but a large part of the problem. She considered the public service essentially parasitic, a drag upon national enterprise and wealth creation: too large, too bureaucratic, self-serving, self-satisfied and self-protective, corporatist by instinct, simultaneously complacent and defeatist. She was determined to cut the bureaucracy down to size, both metaphorically and literally. Word quickly spread through Whitehall that Mrs Thatcher’s purpose was to ‘deprivilege’ the Civil Service.
First, the Civil Service was the softest target for the new government’s promised economies in public spending. An immediate freeze was placed on new recruitment and pay levels were held down. The resentment that resulted led to an unprecedented strike which in 1981 closed down regional offices, delayed the collection of tax revenues and altogether cost the Government around ?500 million before it was settled. All those directly involved would have liked to compromise earlier; but Mrs Thatcher was determined to make a demonstration of the Government’s resolve to control public spending and believed that cutting its own pay bill was the best possible place to start.
Second, she set up an Efficiency Unit in Number Ten, headed by Sir Derek Rayner, to scrutinise the working of every department, looking for economies. By the end of 1982 ‘Rayner’s Raiders’, as they were known, had carried out 130 of these departmental scrutinies, saving ?170 million a year and ‘losing’ 16,000 jobs. In the first four years of the Thatcher Government Civil Service numbers were cut by 14 per cent; over the following six years, as the privatisation of nationalised industries removed whole areas of economic activity and administration from the public sector, that figure climbed to 23 per cent, while salaries relative to the private sector fell still further.52 At the same time the core function of the service was shifted inexorably from policy advice to management: the efficient implementation of policy and the delivery of services. Senior officials who preferred writing elegantly argued memos increasingly found their time taken up by targets, performance indicators and all the other paraphernalia of modern business methods.
The new Prime Minister imposed her will not by structural reform or sacking people but by sheer force of personality: by showing the Whitehall village who was boss. One way of doing this was by constant requests for figures or information at short notice: even quite junior officials felt the presence of the Prime Minister continually prodding and pressing their minister for results, never letting an issue go but demanding ‘follow- through’.53 Another way was by personally visiting every department in turn, something no previous Prime Minister had ever done, confronting civil servants on their own territory, questioning their attitudes and challenging their assumptions. This alarming innovation dramatically signalled Mrs Thatcher’s determination to make her presence felt; at the same time it reflected her awareness of her inexperience of departments other than the Department of Education and Science (DES) and her genuine desire to learn. In fact these visits had two distinct aspects. On the one hand she was marvellous – as she had been at the DES – at going round talking to the junior staff, taking an interest in their work, thanking and encouraging them: something which most ministers do far too little beyond the immediate circle of their private office. Her encounters with their superiors, on the other hand, were often bruising: she lectured more than she listened, and the exercise tended to confirm rather than modify her preconceptions.
Over the next decade it was often alleged that she ‘politicised’ Whitehall by appointing only committed Thatcherites to senior positions. But she was not so crude as that. Mrs Thatcher certainly took a close interest in appointments and intervened more directly than previous Prime Ministers in filling vacancies, not just at Permanent Secretary level but further down the official ladder. She undoubtedly advanced the careers of her favourites, sometimes those who had caught her eye with a single well-judged briefing; conversely she sidetracked or held back those who failed to impress her. Thus the longer she stayed in office, the more she was able to mould the Civil Service to her liking. By 1986 the entire upper echelons of Whitehall were filled by her appointees.
There was nothing wrong in principle with this approach: quite the contrary. It was natural for a radical Prime Minister to want activist officials who would help, not hinder or obstruct. Most of the more unconventional choices Mrs Thatcher made were excellent appointments, fully merited. But questions did arise about her judgement, particularly lower down the scale: her instant estimates of people were not always accurate or fair. Officials often felt that she made up her mind about individuals on first impression and then never changed it. She did not always appreciate that it was sometimes the civil servant’s job to raise objections. In her memoirs Lady Thatcher boasted: ‘I was never accused of thinking like a civil servant. They had to think like me.’54 But equally it was not the official’s job to think like a politician. It was only in this sense, however, that she could be accused of ‘politicising’ the service. Even after ten years, Peter Hennessy wrote, ‘the Prime Minister… would… find it hard to muster a true believer from the top three grades of the Civil Service’.55 Really what she did over the next eleven years was to personalise it. Nevertheless there is no doubt that the effect was seriously to demoralise it.
11
Signals of Intent
