The Iron Lady

councils by the end of the 1980s, fewer able and public-spirited people came forward to serve on them, while activism at the grass roots of the party shrivelled. Thus, when the triumphs of her General Election victories had passed away she left her successors a much weakened – and ageing – power base.

Spies, moles and ‘wimmin’

Behind the open political challenges of Scargill and Livingstone, Mrs Thatcher believed that her Government – and the country – also faced a persistent threat from a variegated coalition of left-wing dissidents, subversives and fellow-travellers, all more or less knowingly serving the interests of the Soviet Union, which must be countered by all means necessary in the cause of Freedom. Believing that she was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of evil both at home and abroad, she took very seriously anything which could be seen as a threat to national defence or the armed forces. Of Mrs Thatcher’s recent predecessors, Harold Wilson was the one whose obsession with security most nearly matched her own; but he was worried much of the time that the security services were spying on him. Mrs Thatcher, by contrast, had no doubt that she and they were fighting the same global enemy, and she welcomed enthusiastically all the help MI5 and MI6 could give her. She read all the intelligence reports with close attention, and after the Falklands became the first Prime Minister to attend meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, now located in the Cabinet Office.

It cannot really be said that the women’s ‘peace camp’ at Greenham Common posed a serious threat to national security. The 1983 election had delivered a resounding defeat to nuclear unilateralism, which was quite clearly a massive vote-loser for the Labour party. Nevertheless CND continued to march and campaign vigorously against nuclear weapons, while a few hundred heroically determined women kept up their stubborn vigil outside the US base in Oxfordshire where the first cruise missiles arrived at the end of the year, making occasional attempts to breach the perimeter before they were ejected. Their protest was ramshackle, eccentric, idealistic and very British, but essentially futile. In the Commons Mrs Thatcher worried that ‘such protests tend to give the impression to the Soviet Union that this country has neither the capacity nor the resolve to defend itself or to keep defence expenditure at a sufficient level to deter’.²³ Fighting for Freedom with a capital F, she was not so keen to see that freedom exercised. But in fact nothing burnished her Iron Lady image more effectively than the contrast between herself, with her immaculate hair and powerful suits, and the woolly-hatted feminists and mystical tree-huggers of the peace camp. She gloried in the contrast, confident that on this issue at least Middle England identified overwhelmingly with her.

Yet the women of the peace camp and other CND supporters were subjected to continual surveillance and harassment by the police and MI5. Not only was the camp itself frequently raided and broken up, but activists’ phones were tapped, their mail was opened and several suffered mysterious break-ins at their homes – leaving aside the unsolved murder of an elderly rose-grower of strong unilateralist convictions named Hilda Murrell. Nor was it only nuclear dissidents who were targeted. MI5 infiltrated NUM headquarters during the miners’ strike and made unprecedented use of bugging and phone-tapping to track the deployment of pickets. In 1985 it emerged that MI5 had also been asked to vet senior figures in the BBC; in January 1987 the police actually raided the Glasgow offices of the BBC and confiscated material relating to a series of programmes the Government did not like. The centralisation of policing during the miners’ strike; persistent allegations that the RUC and the security forces were operating a shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland; the removal of union rights from workers at GCHQ; and a new readiness to use the Official Secrets Act to pursue civil servants who leaked embarrassing documents – all created a disturbing sense of an authoritarian government using unprecedentedly heavy-handed methods to suppress what it regarded as dangerous dissent.

The Government also appeared needlessly authoritarian by its efforts to block publication of the memoirs of a retired MI5 officer, Peter Wright. There is no question that the book, Spycatcher, was a serious breach of the confidentiality expected of secret-service personnel; the Government was thoroughly entitled to ban it, as it had done many less sensational books before. The problem was that Wright was now living in Australia and he published his book there, as well as in Ireland and America, whence its contents quickly became available in Britain; extracts even appeared in the British press.Trying to stop its publication now was a classic case of shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher was determined to pursue Spycatcher – ‘irrespective of the outcome’ – in order to assert the principle that former spies could not with impunity write about their experiences.²⁴ In vain. Both the Supreme Court of New South Wales and eventually the House of Lords ruled that it was too late to keep secret what everyone who was interested had already read. The Government’s persistence long after the cause was lost merely made it appear stubborn and vindictive.

Faith in the City

Mrs Thatcher did not see enemies only in the shadows. She believed that the very pillars of the Establishment were against her. She considered that the whole professional class – the upper middle-class liberal intelligentsia and the distinguished generation of public servants which had dominated Whitehall since 1945 – was riddled with a sort of pale-pink socialism which was scarcely less corrosive than outright Trotskyism. Of course she made exceptions of individuals: but her instinctive preconception was that the whole traditional governing elite was made up predominantly of quislings and appeasers.

This liberal Establishment had several centres, only one of which – the Civil Service – was under her direct control. Over her decade in office she made a systematic effort, by a mixture of patronage and example, to mould the Whitehall village to her view of the world, and to a considerable extent succeeded. Four other centres of influence, however, remained more or less independent and overwhelmingly resistant to the Thatcherite gospel: the churches (particularly the Church of England); the universities; the broadcasters (particularly the BBC); and the arts community. Together these overlapping elites comprised what used to be called the political nation; nowadays sociologists classify them as ‘opinion formers’, while the tabloids call them the ‘chattering classes’. All felt themselves under attack by a Conservative Government which was out of sympathy with all their values and assumptions. Seen from Downing Street, conversely, they were all faces of the same hydra-like enemy which Mrs Thatcher believed she had been called to office to defeat.

More publicly than any other recent Prime Minister before Tony Blair, Mrs Thatcher was a practising Christian. Alec Home, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath had all in their different styles professed to be believers; but Mrs Thatcher advertised the religious basis of her politics more than any of them. She not only attended the parish church near Chequers most Sundays when she was there, but she never shied from asserting what she believed should be the central place of Christianity in national life. It is impossible to know the exact nature of her personal faith, but she was steeped in the language and practice of Christianity from childhood and believed in it implicitly as a force for good.

She blamed the Church, however – all the churches – for their abdication of moral leadership in the face of permissiveness and for a general loss of moral values in society. Whereas the Church of England had once been known as ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’, and her father’s brand of Methodism had been identified with self- reliance, individual responsibility and thrift, she thought the churches had become politically wet if not actually left wing, infected by a sort of soggy collectivism which looked to the state, instead of the individual, to solve all social ills. No one personified this sort of hand-wringing churchmanship better than the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, whom she appointed – in preference to the still more liberal Hugh Montefiore – soon after she became Prime Minister and who was therefore in office for almost her entire premiership. From the start Runcie did not shrink from criticising the harsh social consequences of her Government’s economic policies; and he particularly outraged her by his sermon at the thanksgiving service at the conclusion of the Falklands war when he prayed even-handedly for those who had died on both sides.

She was constrained from responding in public, partly because Runcie was a good friend of Peter Carrington and Willie Whitelaw but also because – improbably in the light of his donnish manner – he had a distinguished war record, winning the Military Cross as a tank commander, and therefore could not easily be