The Iron Lady

(from 1986) Paul Channon, to whom may be added the senior, sometimes cantankerous but generally supportive figure of Lord Hailsham. Then, coming into the Cabinet between 1984 and 1986 was a new generation of ambitious former Heathites who were happy, after a period of probation, to turn their coats: Douglas Hurd, John MacGregor, Kenneth Baker, Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm Rifkind.

Mrs Thatcher’s most ardent allies and supporters worried that she was storing up trouble for the future by promoting too many of these fair-weather friends from the left of the party, rather than true believers from the right. But she scarcely seemed to worry any more about the left – right balance, because by 1983 she thought the economic argument had been won. She was uneasily aware that the ablest candidates tended to be of the left; but she appointed them as individuals to serve her, not as representatives of wings of the party.

In addition there were three unclassifiable individuals who belonged to no group: Peter Walker, the last survivor of the old wets; John Biffen, one of Mrs Thatcher’s original ‘true believers’, now increasingly out of sympathy with her approach; and Michael Heseltine, an ambitious loner already identified as the likeliest challenger if ever the Prime Minister’s authority should slip.

This was the personnel: but the Cabinet as a body had a much diminished sense of corporate identity. It met only once a week, on Thursday, compared with twice a week under previous administrations, and rarely enjoyed anything approaching general discussion. Moreover, Mrs Thatcher created fewer Cabinet committees than her predecessors. Sometimes she would set up an ad hoc committee of three or four ministers, often chaired by herself, to deal with a subject that had arisen; more often than not she would simply get the relevant minister to prepare a paper for herself alone; she would then interrogate him on it personally with two or three of her advisers from the Cabinet Office or the Policy Unit, thus acting as ‘judge and jury in her own cause’ without reference to the Cabinet.¹ This might almost be a definition of presidential government. None of these practices originated with Mrs Thatcher: but she took them further than any of her predecessors. Cabinet was reduced to an occasion for reporting decisions, not the mechanism for taking them.

Dealing with the Prime Minister one to one was a testing business, too. She was still always formidably well briefed from a variety of different sources – the official departmental brief, another from the Policy Unit and often a third in her handbag whose origin the unfortunate minister never quite knew, which she would produce triumphantly to catch him out; she could always find a weak point even when he thought he had everything covered. At her best she had not only read everything but had, in Charles Powell’s words, ‘a phenomenal recall of detail’. She did not just absorb information but actively digested what she read.²

She made it her business to give ministers a hard time. ‘I think sometimes a Prime Minister should be intimidating,’ she once declared. ‘There’s not much point in being a weak floppy thing in the chair, is there?’³ Much of the time this approach was highly effective, so long as she was dealing with a strong character who could handle her firmly, argue his corner and bring her round to a sensible policy if necessary. On this view her destructive style was simply a way of testing policies – and the minister who would have to defend them – against every possible line of attack before she agreed to them. But the longer she stayed in the job, the more she tended to have formed her view in advance and the less prepared she was to listen to other arguments.After 1983 she became increasingly irrational and harder to deal with. Ministers would look forward to a vigorous discussion, one recalled, only to find themselves subjected to a one-sided tirade: they became afraid to mention this or that subject for fear of setting her off on some hobby horse.⁴ Her briefing was now not always so well focused.

Mrs Thatcher prided herself on liking a good argument; but she argued to win – or, as she told Nigel Lawson bluntly during their difference about the exchange rate in 1988: ‘I must prevail.’⁵ She never learned to concede even a small point with good grace. There was another revealing episode when John Major first caught her attention at a whips’ dinner at Number Ten in July 1985, at a time when the Government was trailing in third place in the polls. Major took the chance to tell her frankly about backbench worries: she became angry and attacked him in unfairly personal terms. The story is that she was impressed by the way he stood up to her and promoted him soon afterwards. Denis actually congratulated him and told him, ‘She enjoyed that.’ But Major did not enjoy it at all: he thought she had behaved unforgivably when he was only doing his job, part of which was to tell her unpalatable truths.⁶ Viewed positively, this was an example of Mrs Thatcher working constructively, testing subordinates through tough argument with no quarter given but no grudges taken. Alternatively, it was an example of sheer bad manners which nearly provoked Major to resign: a bullying type of man management which was not productive but steadily alienated her best supporters.

If a Prime Minister needs to be a good butcher, Mrs Thatcher passed that test with flying colours. As well as those she got rid of for ideological reasons, several ministers who in her view failed to deliver were sacked. The turnover of ministers was extraordinarily high. Over the whole eleven years from 1979 to 1990 no fewer than thirty-six Cabinet Ministers departed. Eight resigned as a result of a policy failure, personal or political embarrassment or disagreement with the Prime Minister. Thirteen retired more or less voluntarily either through ill health, to ‘spend more time with the family’ or to go into business. But fifteen were involuntarily removed. Though Mrs Thatcher always claimed to hate sacking people, the casualty rate was designed to keep the survivors on their toes. By the time Howe resigned in October 1990 the Prime Minister herself was the only survivor from her first Cabinet.

The decline of Parliament

Mrs Thatcher was never a great parliamentarian. Though she revered the institution of Parliament she never liked the place or had any feel for its ambience or traditions. Her sex was a factor here, partly because as a young female Member she could never be one of the boys – she had a young family to get back to, and she would never have been one for sitting around in bars anyway – but also because she found it difficult to make herself heard without shouting, particularly when she became leader and a target for Labour heckling. But even after she had established her command of the House, she never wooed or flattered it: her manner was always to hector and assert, and when she was interrupted or in difficulties she would simply shout louder.

She knew she was not a good speaker, was nervous before she had to make a speech and consequently overprepared. Her speeches tended to be loaded with statistics and came alive only when she was interrupted and had something to respond to. As a result she spoke as rarely as possible in debates – far less frequently than her predecessors. More often she made statements (after every European summit, for instance) and then answered questions, which was what she was good at. The twice-weekly circus of Prime Minister’s Questions suited her down to the ground. She had no respect for Neil Kinnock and took great delight in exposing his inadequacy in front of her baying supporters. But it did not add much to the dignity or usefulness of Parliament.

The abuse of Prime Minister’s Questions had started with Harold Wilson, but it became more systematic under Mrs Thatcher. Bernard Weatherill, who succeeded George Thomas as Speaker in 1983, tried to put a stop to these abuses, but Mrs Thatcher would not hear of it. She did not see Question Time as an opportunity for accountability to the House, but as her chance to project her message to the nation – via radio, which had started broadcasting the proceedings in 1978. Weatherill wanted to restore the former practice whereby questions of detail were deflected to the departmental minister concerned, leaving the Prime Minister to answer for broad strategy.⁷ But Mrs Thatcher liked open questions precisely because they enabled her to display her command of detail: the fact that she might be asked about anything gave her the excuse she needed to keep tabs on every department. She regarded Prime Minister’s Questions as ‘the real test of your authority in the House’ and prepared for them with obsessive thoroughness: she prided herself that ‘no head of government anywhere in the world has to face this sort of regular pressure and many go to great lengths to avoid it’.⁸ This shallow gladiatorial bunfight, she thought, was what Parliament was all about.

With the security of huge majorities after 1983 Mrs Thatcher had no need, most of the time, to bother about the House of Commons. She certainly did not bother about the opposition. She saw no need to cut any deals with the Labour party, and was suspicious of Leaders of the House like Pym and Biffen who were too accommodating to them. Whenever any difficulty arose, her bible was Erskine May, the parliamentary rule book.⁹ She was more sensitive to her own back benches. During her first term, when her position in