Margaret Thatcher and the Britain she left behind

Margaret Thatcher and the Britain she left behind

PETER STOTHARD

 

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Charles Moore
MARGARET THATCHER
The authorized biography
Volume Two: Everything She Wants
821pp. Allen Lane. £30.
978 0 7139 9288 5

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TLS

Published: 11 November 2015

Margaret Thatcher by Peter Brookes, October 1982 Photograph: © Peter Brookes

 

 

This is the official book of Margaret Thatcher’s most effective days. Almost three decades have passed since the last word of its last page, the reminder from her most faithful aide that she was “mortal” after her third successive election win. Britain is a different country and “the Lady” as her friends often called her, is dead. The gentlemen of her court are following fast. But some of the greatest issues of her legacy remain alive: Britain’s place in Europe, its struggle to make itself heard, its uncertainty about what it wants to say. How can it be that she could do so much? Why can her current Tory successor do so much less? These are biographical as well as historical questions and her chosen biographer, Charles Moore, gives answers that relate directly to her character and life.

 

Tread around Parliament Square in 2015 on an autumn night. You can see many contributors to this most official of official biographies, those who gave Moore their time and hoped for his understanding. Watch the ghostly survivors of Margaret Thatcher’s second administration, pale-faced politicians of the1980s who once wanted her job, civil servants and the not so civil, spirits of feuds gone by, thin men in fatter faces now, who still like to feud from time to time. The House of Lords, Britain’s unelected Second Chamber, where she sent so many friends and enemies, is the book’s living index.

 

Look inside and down on the red leather benches where memories firm and fade and find the eager biographer. See sometime ministers sometimes still recognizable from their minutes of television fame. See former civil servants, faces that were never seen in their years of power. See that stooped man in the high-collared coat, once the greatest of the great anonymous, the man who for decades used to run the country, looking even now as though he would take back the role if asked.

 

Lady Thatcher’s life-teller (she took a peerage herself in 1992) has moved fast since he was first free to publish after her death in April 2013. Two of the most indexed of the political men followed their leader to the Tory Hades in the months before this second volume appeared. The deaths of Leon Brittan, who lost his job in a scandal that almost did for her as well, and Geoffrey Howe, the ally who became her political assassin, have directed fresh attention onto the extraordinary years that Moore so scrupulously describes.

 

He begins in 1982 when Britain’s first female Prime Minister is not yet the longest-serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century, when she is the victor of the Falklands War but still nervous about whether she will be blamed by officialdom for its beginning. It is as though Tony Blair had received the verdict on his responsibility for the Iraq War while it could still do him harm. Unimaginable now.

 

She escapes censure from the Franks Commission. In 1983 she wins her second general election. She survives an IRA assassination attempt but maintains the momentum for a peace deal with those who would have killed her. She protects British companies from American prosecution in ways that the British banks of today could only dream of. She introduces Mikhail Gorbachev to America. She woos Ronald Reagan and then successfully challenges him on his ideal of a world without nuclear weapons. She defeats the challenges of Arthur Scargill in the coalfields and Michael Heseltine in a bizarre dispute over a helicopter company, both men, the Marxist trade unionist and the messianic enthusiast for the European Union, who devoutly desired her fall. She wins her third consecutive election victory in 1987 despite bitter personal divisions among her own supporters. By then she is showing only the earliest signs of the isolation that three years later allowed Howe to realize the prediction of her mortality with a parliamentary knife.

 

For a biographer this is a formidable period, already densely documented by those who fought its battles. Moore is a former Editor of the Daily Telegraph and Spectator, a journalist by trade and polemicist by temperament. But here he is judicious, generally consistent, kind to his subject, hard only on some of those ghosts of Westminster who stand within it and behind her, just as they did when she was alive. This is a posthumous verdict on her as she insisted it should be. It is a verdict by a judge she herself chose, and it falls robustly (you can almost see her smile) on those not quite yet ready to cross the Styx, her last wave to them from the legendary handbag.

 

This is a posthumous verdict on her as she insisted it should be

 

Moore’s first volume, Not For Turning (reviewed in the TLS, April 3, 2014), covered Margaret Thatcher’s early life in Lincolnshire and London, her ascent to power after greater compromisers on Left and Right had failed, her personal character so suddenly and surprisingly fitted to the times. It celebrated her Stoic virtues, her “raw will”, as Ferdinand Mount concluded, her willingness to be brutal to her colleagues and to break up a meeting rather than chair it to an unwelcome conclusion. It was widely and rightly praised.

 

There will be a third volume, as yet unnamed, for the sadness, and sometimes the madness, of her defeat and drab retirement. This middle part of the journey, Everything She Wants, is a book of less biographical drama. It shows the same character in a series of changing scenes. No one gets a new life from this book, not its subject and certainly not its contributors. It reads as a weighing of deeds for a long while ahead, the book designed to go on and on when other accounts have gone.

 

So, listen to who has been setting the record straight. Most have been supporters of a kind but all have their own interests still. Hear Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, with dozens of notes and almost a column of his own in Moore’s index. He was the most powerful man in Britain at the time, perhaps best known now for the contribution he made in 1986 to popular quotations when explaining the difference between lying and being “economical with the truth”. Sir Robert Armstrong, as he was then known, held a single job as Cabinet Secretary, Head of the Home Civil Service, Prime Ministerial adviser on Ireland and security, a job that has since been divided and redivided. Little reached Margaret Thatcher without his knowledge or permission. She heeded him for the most part, and in the index under E for Exclusion (a good guide to reading Moore) he is excluded only, and with difficulty, from a Chequers discussion on how to deal with Gorbachev in 1987. His inclusions range from the use of MI5 to investigate industrial subversion, the investigation of ministerial leaks to the press, and the leaking of legal advice in the Westland helicopter affair, for which Thatcher, whose hands were not entirely clean, was lucky to survive.

 

Armstrong’s greatest legacy in this volume, detailed closely by Moore, is on Anglo-Irish relations, the maintenance in hard times of the long road that led eventually to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The Cabinet Secretary was the leader of the “realists” within Whitehall who recognized that the Irish government had to play a central role in any deal between the armed nationalist and unionist groups in the North. Thatcher knew less about Ireland than did her closest civil servant and was by instinct a sensitive and defensive Unionist. Never was that schism under greater threat than in the aftermath of the Brighton Bomb in 1984 when the IRA succeeded almost in bringing down a seaside hotel on the British government. Moore is himself a strong Unionist and nowhere in this account does the scholar trample harder on the columnist than when he notes “how little the policy on Northern Ireland actually changed” in the light of the blast that killed five of her party colleagues but was meant specifically for her. 

Volume one described how the Prime Minister wanted negotiations with the Republic handled in Downing Street and not the Foreign Office. In Volume Two Moore notes how Armstrong’s own views were even more “green” than those of her diplomats: there was even a monogrammed NA tie worn by supporters on both sides of the Irish Sea to denote the vital relationship between Dermot Nally, the Dublin counterpart of the Cabinet Secretary and Armstrong himself.

 

Irish policy reveals a truth about Margaret Thatcher’s character that critics have often failed to see: she knew that not all of her instincts were worth fighting for. Over two decades Ulster Unionism had proved itself incapable of protecting the Union. Northern Ireland’s peace and place in the UK were achievable only through the patient process of infiltrating the IRA, starving it of funds, and co-opting the Irish Republic by symbolic ties of every sort. At no point does Moore criticize Armstrong for his consistency, confining himself to the observation of a colleague that the Cabinet Secretary, while never over-stepping the mark, was prominent among those “all going behind her back”.

 

In 2015, such has been the changing of the times, Armstrong’s most often noted success is his keeping of the paedophile entertainer Jimmy Savile from a knighthood in 1983. Moore notes without comment how Thatcher’s keenness to greet “Sir Jimmy” resumed only after her minder had retired. In general, as he says, she was indulgent and dismissive of sexual gossip, taking a robust view of private life, tolerating allegations of homosexual promiscuity and “casual pick-ups” by her party’s Deputy Chairman, Peter Morrison (over three pages here) and commenting, when first told of Cecil Parkinson’s impregnation of his secretary, Sara Keays, that “Anthony Eden leapt into bed with any good-looking woman” and surely her party chairman could “sort this out”.

 

Moore provides a judicious reminder note that the age of consent for homosexual acts was then twenty-one and that many “pick-ups” then called “boys” would now, in law, be adults. There were specific warnings to Armstrong about Morrison’s private life in 1986 but Moore finds no evidence that Mrs Thatcher knew of these. Official concern related more to fears of Soviet blackmail than any offence at paedophilia. For a planned trip to Moscow in 1987, Morrison’s place was quietly taken by Parkinson instead.

 

Thatcher had to flatter Reagan that she shared his vision when she did not

 

The revelations about Savile, the clown who tricked his way into children’s hospital beds via the salons of bishops, BBC executives and the most senior politicians, has marked one of the many shifts in attitude between the years covered by this book and that of its publication. Suspicion for sexual abuse of children is the new trumping card in any hand. Consider Lord Brittan of Spennithorne, an important figure in Everything She Wants, often opposing Thatcher in European disputes, the powers of the BBC and capital punishment, holding the offices of Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, the final job from which he fell in the Westland scandal, covering the very significant guilt of his Prime Minister. But, when he died this year, his last column inches were filled with half-remembered fancies and politically motivated smears about alleged sexual behaviour with young boys. Nothing adverse has ever been proved against him. But, as Moore describes over several pages, Thatcher knew of the jumbled allegations. Her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, in the argot and spirit of the time, is quoted as saying that “he always seemed as quaint as a coot to me”.

 

Lord Brittan seems to have spoken frankly to Moore before his death and doubtless found a sympathetic hearer. Moore has a well-deserved reputation for defying popular fashions for outrage. In their interview Brittan noted the view of “big frog” and would-be Prime Minister, Michael Heseltine, about his own lesser status as “a jumped-up minor person”. Detailing the bizarre shadow battle for the Tory leadership that was disguised in an argument over “who should own Westland helicopters”, he accepted the “force in Heseltine’s claim that there wasn’t a full Cabinet discussion”, a critical issue at that time. Brittan told Moore that if Margaret Thatcher “had really defended me” he would have survived. But he was expendable and she did not really defend him. Moore’s biography of an extraordinarily successful and supremely defended politician vividly highlights here the fate, in dying as in life, of those who need not be defended too much.

 

Lord Howe of Aberavon, who also died before having to see Everything She Wants in the shops, scores heavily under E for Exclusion in the index. The quiet Welsh lawyer, with a power of rage more cold than quick, was one of her earliest supporters, her first Chancellor of the Exchequer (1979–83), Foreign Secretary (1983–9) and Deputy Prime Minister (1990) but, as Moore many times makes clear, she never liked him and frequently felt happier when he was away from her. Exclusions include “from meetings with Gorbachev, 623, 630”, “from policy discussions, 568, 603, 617”, “from Saudi arms deal. 289n, 568” and there is her jubilant reaction to his exiled months in 1986 as a European emissary on South African sanctions (“We must at all costs avoid bringing [his visit] to a premature conclusion”).

 

Moore cites an unpublished part of the memoirs of the US Secretary of State, George Shultz, who noted that “Margaret Thatcher had a wonderful Foreign Secretary who I saw a great deal of and came to admire. But Margaret Thatcher seemed to pay little attention to him”. Shultz writes that in Howe’s position he “simply wouldn’t have stood for it”, which is revealing if something of an exaggeration on his part. In these years there was much bypassing of the State Department by the White House and of the Foreign Office by Downing Street, and the winds of disagreement were felt and fanned in both capitals.

 

Dissonance was especially sharp over Ronald Reagan’s enthusiasm for the SDI “Star Wars” programme. Howe dismissed this as a useless “Maginot Line in space” and Thatcher herself feared it as an undermining of the British nuclear deterrent. But the diplomacy had to be presidential and personal. Thatcher had to flatter Reagan that she shared his vision when she did not. She deployed her proud status as a scientist. She enjoyed her claims of superiority in understanding “brilliant pebbles” and “garages in space”, all the time gently trying to ensure that the garages stayed on the drawing board and the pebbles on their beaches. Vast industrial forces were at work too. Her Foreign Secretary was just a nuisance.

 

At his death, last month, Lord Howe had the unfortunate distinction of being remembered more in a phrase about him rather than by him, the taunt from Labour’s Denis Healey (they died within a few days of each other), that being attacked by Howe in the House of Commons was like being “savaged by a dead sheep”. The reputation of one of the Tory Party’s hardest workers of the time is hardly enhanced here and yet the sheep was always much less mild than it appeared. The fatal moment in 1990 when Margaret Thatcher could not ignore Geoffrey Howe and took a savaging from him instead will come in Volume Three.

 

The “Saudi Arms deal”, from which Howe was “excluded”, is one of the few instances in this volume when the Prime Minister’s family and policy were entwined – uncomfortably for all. Moore notes that neither Howe nor Thatcher says anything substantive in their own memoirs about the Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, the £42 billion set of contracts to supply Tornado jets and associated equipment. This was the “biggest single deal that anyone has ever done for the United Kingdom”, according to the then Head of Defence Sales, James Blyth, and one “in which it was Mrs Thatcher who pulled the mutton over the threshold” for the King. 

Moore notes that Lord Heseltine in his memoirs exploits this silence to suggest that her role was as small as she publicly claimed, saying that Mrs Thatcher played merely “her part in the process”. This, the biographer declares in one of the few cases of journalistic hyperbole to escape his scholarly blue pencil, is “one of the greater understatements of history”. Really?

 

Al-Yamamah was undeniably, however, one of the murkier topics in this patch of history. The reasons for Thatcher’s silence included more than royal confidentiality, and the knowledge of other inducements (call them kick-backs, bribes, local customs or whatever) that were pushed over thresholds to secure the deal. There was also the role of her businessman son, Mark, who was visiting many of those very same thresholds at the very same time in his career as a Middle East consultant. Moore cites her daughter Carol’s memory of motherly advice against “cashing in”. But throughout this period there were frequent press charges that Mark Thatcher was doing exactly that, charges that he always denied. When he was encouraged by her advisers to move to the United States, his security became a major maternal concern. “This feeling was probably stronger in her mind than it would have been in the more compartmentalized mind of a typical male political leader”, Moore writes with again less than his usual elegance, ending an awkward topic for both biographer and subject.

 

Occasionally there are other signs throughout the book of an author with an unwonted style. As every reader of his past and current journalism will know, Moore is by nature a crisp, ironic and witty writer, powered by principle and sensitive to detail. For all his praiseworthy calmness in assessing documents here, the mass of his scholarship too much and too often overwhelms this rarer art. He weighs a fact, weighs it again and many times writes a sentence that he would never have written for – or even allowed into – his newspapers. Immediately after the success against Arthur Scargill and the miners, Mrs Thatcher is advised against triumphalism. Moore comments that “there was sense in this view but it probably underestimated the extent to which a failure to say something important in politics tends to be interpreted as evidence of self-doubt or divided counsels”. Call for the sub-editors.

 

He makes some oddly tentative links between what he sees and what he thinks, as though working to some hidden scholar’s rule. When Thatcher reacts to the miners’ violence at the Orgreave coking works by saying “It must not succeed. It must not succeed”, Moore comments that she was “using the repetition which in her was usually a sign of vehemence”. Yes, indeed.

 

The miners’ strike, the most important domestic event of the period, is covered fairly from the point of view of the victors. There is perhaps too little sense of the problem experienced by the Coal Board Chairman, Ian McGregor, in managing a dispute which was not supposed to be political but which so profoundly was. Margaret Thatcher, in another consistency of her character, wanted control with the fewest signs of strings. From many of her supporters in the business community she received – and grew too accustomed to – the most grotesque levels of flattery. McGregor was rougher and his voice in this book is quieter than that of those with a more courtly disposition.

 

Moore concludes Part one (he calls it “Foundations”, followed by “Shocks” and “Recovery”) with an acceptance that there is “some truth in the charge that Mrs Thatcher’s policies encouraged people to get rich quick”. But “getting rich, quick or otherwise, is broadly speaking better for a country”, he continues, “than getting poor slowly, which was the situation Mrs Thatcher’s policies sought to remedy”. This is good rhetorical language from a Tory leader writer and columnist, but it is a style more often blue-pencilled away. Odd traces do remain: that Lord Weinstock of GEC, an assiduous player in debates over British Telecom and Westland, was “a shameless monopolist” and that Sir Denis Rooke, engineer and Chairman of British Gas was “a born monopolist”, the first accusation more accurate than the second could possibly be; that Lymeswold was an “unpleasant new English cheese” and that only by conducting labour disputes directly between employers and employed “could sanity return to British industry”.

 

Dogged documentary analysis is Moore’s dominant manner. This is as strong in the use of American government sources as of self-serving British memoir. There is a startling section on the American invasion of the Commonwealth island of Grenada in 1983, based both on US archives and the recollections of Lord Renwick of Clifton, one of her few favoured Foreign Office men. To anyone who remembers only the “Maggie and Ronnie” Valentine’s Day shows, Moore explains just how deep was Reagan’s deception of his closest ally in his decision to crush a coup that had replaced a moderate Marxist government with another deemed a greater threat. He said he would consult her and he did not. There was “no consultation at all”. Although democracy in Grenada was secured, Mrs Thatcher was “seriously perturbed and affronted”. Moore shows how justified was the anger that seemed somewhat excessive at the time. Anyone directing a film of the affair could make a wonderful scene from the Prime Minister having to “retire” with the ladies after a dinner when she had hoped to interrogate the American ambassador.

 

Everything She Wants takes its name from a popular song of the time by the duo Wham!, a lyric described on Wikipedia as the cry of “a man rapidly approaching desperation at the material demands of his partner”. Appropriate as this will seem to some of its less favoured participants, it gives a misleading impression of the book itself. For the most part it is a relentlessly official scene.

 

There is some passion from the diaries of Lord Young of Graffham, the man whose obituary tag will be for “bringing her solutions when other ministers brought her only problems”, a quotation which there seems no evidence of her ever having uttered. Young’s role in the 1987 election campaign, in his “parti pris” account, helps the biographer explain the extraordinary bitterness, tension and violence which accompanied that last electoral success. Young himself is not exempt from blame.

 

Lord Tebbit, constantly in pain after the Brighton bomb, sometime supporter and increasingly embittered critic, is shown to exult in the sexual setback to his rival, Cecil Parkinson. He plots. He is thought to plot. He hurls papers to the floor. There is some flash of feminine colour in the details of Mrs Thatcher’s clothes and even a favoured lipstick (Honey Raisin by Clinique, gloss), but in a single section towards the end and without much enthusiasm. The same afterthought treatment goes to her appearances in fictions of the time. Much more could have been made of what journalists call “the colour”. These pages read as the last disavowal of the author’s old trade. Even the most authorized official biography is about a life.

 

Meanwhile, among the voices chattering to Charles Moore beside the River Styx, the overall tone is Mandarin grey, with only the occasional bright flash. Thatcher’s loyal Foreign Affairs adviser, Lord Powell of Bayswater, issuer of the “mortality” warning, notes wryly how her Moscow security guard in 1984 kept her high heels, not a handgun, in his coat. Lord Butler of Brockwell, Armstrong’s successor as Cabinet Secretary, describes her endurance of another high-heeled walk, this time across a dark Hawaiian airfield to visit Pearl Harbor, a brief break for tourism between seeing Gorbachev in Britain, Reagan in Washington, while stopping by at Peking to sign the agreement to hand back Hong Kong.

 

This was arguably the week of Britain’s greatest global influence since Sir Anthony Eden was hopping in and out of bed. There will be no such week in Volume Three, though many more chances for friends and enemies to wave each other a last goodbye. When all is done, and everyone in this book is gone, Charles Moore’s successors will still feel fortunate at his determination, personal forbearance and gentle understanding.

Peter Stothard is Editor of the TLS. His books include On the Spartacus Road: A spectacular journey through ancient Italy, 2010, and Alexandria: The last nights of Cleopatra, 2013. He was Editor of The Times from 1992 to 2002.