Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (76 page)

In forming her first Cabinet, as in her dealings with the Civil Service, Mrs Thatcher displayed a similar, slightly surprising tendency not to want to upset the institutional applecart. Her appointments sought political balance more than ideological affinity. She turned first to Willie Whitelaw, whom she immediately made Home Secretary and, in effect, though not in formal title, deputy prime minister. He had never disappointed her in the loyalty he had promised after she beat him for the leadership in 1975, and he possessed qualities and connections which she knew she lacked. Her friend Hector Laing
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once praised Whitelaw to her for his ‘low cunning and lovable dimness’. Mrs Thatcher laughed and said: ‘I’m not very good at either.’
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Cunning, lovability and at least the appearance of dimness were essential characteristics in the Tory tribe, so Whitelaw was indispensable. He did not arrive in London from his seat in the Borders until the Friday afternoon. When he had done so, he joined Mrs Thatcher and the Chief Whip, Humphrey Atkins, in No. 10 for the rest of the evening to advise her. Filling the hole left by the death of Neave, she offered Atkins the post of Northern Ireland secretary. When he had reluctantly accepted it, she rang Michael Jopling,
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also in the fastness of his northern constituency, to ask him to succeed Atkins. Jopling drove to London through the Friday night to help handle the process of appointments the following day.

When he accepted the post of deputy leader in 1975, Whitelaw had told Mrs Thatcher: ‘I shall give you my 100-per-cent loyalty on one condition: that you never make Keith Joseph Chancellor.’
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For this reason, she had never made Joseph shadow Chancellor, and now she kept her promise. Mrs Thatcher had to stick with the man whom the past four years had made the only logical choice for the Chancellorship, Geoffrey Howe. Her relations with Howe were not very easy, and she tended to say, ‘The trouble with people like Geoffrey – lawyers – is that they are too timid,’
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conveniently forgetting she was a lawyer herself. But although in her heart she would have preferred Keith Joseph, she was not seriously reluctant to give Howe the job for which, she could not deny, he was now well qualified. Her love for Joseph, which was the strongest of all her affections for her senior colleagues, did not blind her to the fact that he would have been
unable to bear the heat and burden of the Treasury. She made him Secretary of State for Industry.

It was only in those portfolios which dealt with economic matters that Mrs Thatcher sought out men who were ideologically sympathetic to her. As well as Howe and Joseph, she appointed John Nott, who had been one of the most original free-market economists in opposition, making him Trade Secretary. To assist Howe, she made John Biffen Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in charge of the control of public spending. This appointment was based on a misunderstanding. Mrs Thatcher had a great respect for Biffen’s intellect and what she called his ‘ability to think laterally’
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and believed, because of his opposition to the Heath U-turn, that he was at one with her. She also felt motherly towards him because he had suffered from depression and had to step down from the Shadow Cabinet for a year as a result. Biffen was grateful for her kindness over this episode. But he was a Powellite rather than a Thatcherite by belief, and a quietist by temperament. He was a lifelong Eurosceptic and he believed in balanced budgets and the control of inflation by monetary means, but he was not averse to high public spending in itself. Besides, he was not combative – ‘I don’t like the sound of breaking crockery’
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– and he disliked policy detail. He was not as much ‘on board’ as Mrs Thatcher thought. In an attempt to co-ordinate the advancement of economic policy and steer it through the rest of the Cabinet as things grew gradually rougher, these ministers – Howe, Joseph, Nott and Biffen – eventually established a secret breakfast with Mrs Thatcher every Thursday morning. Its existence was unknown to colleagues until revealed in the press in November 1980.

As secretary of State for Employment, Jim Prior was the only exception, the only Heathite with an economic job. With those listed above, he joined the important E Committee of the Cabinet, which dealt with economic matters, but he was never part of the Thursday breakfast club. Although Mrs Thatcher did not personally dislike him from the start (‘Jim’s a jolly, red-faced Englishman’),
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she had no doubt at all that he was wrong in his belief that trade unions should be appeased. She appointed him nevertheless because she felt she had to. Party unity demanded it, and she recognized that the arts of appeasement might well prove necessary in the short term. Although she expected that confrontation with the unions would one day come, she was not planning it or even, for the time being, wanting it. She believed that the immediate task was the steadying of the economy and the control of inflation. For the time being, Prior, who knew much more about the trade union leadership than any of her senior colleagues, and was trusted in this by large numbers of Conservative MPs, was the inevitable choice.

In most of her other appointments, Mrs Thatcher’s chief concern was to construct a government which reflected the balance of power and experience in the party. Before the election she told the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, ‘I’m going to have a very good Foreign Secretary and I shan’t go on any foreign trips at all. My job is to turn the economy round.’
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This was impossible, of course, since all prime ministers in modern times have to travel, but it was obvious that Lord Carrington was the man who fitted Mrs Thatcher’s frame of mind. Extremely senior and yet, because he sat in the House of Lords, no threat to her job, he had the relevant experience, contacts and prestige. That Carrington was well regarded in Washington also pleased Mrs Thatcher. ‘I view his appointment as Foreign Secretary as one of the most encouraging signals Mrs Thatcher could send us at the start of her stewardship,’ Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in a memo to President Carter.
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She was willing to accede to Carrington’s request that Ian Gilmour join him as the Foreign Office spokesman in the Commons and in the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal. Following similar principles, she appointed the veteran Lord Hailsham as Lord Chancellor, the same job he had done for Ted Heath, Francis Pym as Defence Secretary, and Christopher Soames as Leader of the Lords, Lord President of the Council and minister in charge of the Civil Service. Norman St John-Stevas was made Leader of the House of Commons and the rebellious Peter Walker was brought in from the cold in what was considered the unthreatening job of Agriculture. There were no women in Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet, apart from herself. Of the six most senior men in the Cabinet, all were older than she, and only two (Howe and Joseph) agreed with her economic strategy. For most of the older men, who had fought in the Second World War – and, in the case of Whitelaw, Carrington and Pym, won the Military Cross – there was a difficulty in taking their new Prime Minister seriously. They did not conspire against her, but neither did they think it very likely that she would survive. She was conscious of being patronized and of being in a minority.

The process of appointment proceeded efficiently on the morning of Saturday 5 May. The only hitch came when Mrs Thatcher offered Michael Heseltine the Energy portfolio. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve been rehearsing Environment for three years. That’s what I want to do.’ Mrs Thatcher’s handwritten list
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of her planned appointments shows that she had planned to offer Environment to the Labour defector Reg Prentice, but she gave in on the spot, fobbing Prentice off with a post outside the Cabinet. After Heseltine had left, she said to Michael Pattison, who had been present at the interview, ‘I don’t like one-to-one confrontations with Michael.’
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Even in opposition, she had felt wary about his ambition. One day, her protection officer, Barry Strevens, had told her that David Owen, as Foreign Secretary, had been so demanding in his dealings with staff that he had
got through eight drivers and two personal protection teams. Mrs Thatcher’s comment was: ‘That’s the mistake of promoting someone too early. We won’t make the same mistake with Michael Heseltine.’
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But, now that the time had come, Heseltine had forced her to do what she had wished to avoid. From the start, he proved both an awkward and a formidable customer. The Energy job was given instead to David Howell, one of the intellectual architects of the free-market ideas which had briefly appealed to Ted Heath when he was in opposition, and the man who claimed to have been the first to use the word ‘privatization’ in Conservative circles. When the Cabinet was complete, it was, in terms of party management, a successful balance of all the forces and talents available.

There was only one important deliberate omission – Ted Heath himself. Given the history between the two leaders, and the fact that her government’s majority of forty-three made Mrs Thatcher fairly safe from immediate revolt, few expected that she would feel the need to offer Heath a Cabinet post. She herself believed that ‘he would never have been able to take orders from a woman.’
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But Heath had maintained hopes. These were dashed by a letter from the new Prime Minister which arrived by despatch-rider at the house of Sara Morrison, with whom Heath was staying, early on the Saturday morning after the election. In it, Mrs Thatcher informed him that she had offered the foreign secretaryship to Peter Carrington, not to him. Heath took great offence at the fact that she signed the letter ‘Margaret Thatcher’, rather than just ‘Margaret’, though in truth she did this out of her habitual correctness rather than out of coldness.
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Heath was plunged into gloom. Matters were then made worse by the well-meaning suggestion of Carrington that Heath be offered the ambassadorship to Washington. ‘I thought a little sop would be a good idea, but it was a thoroughly bad idea,’ Carrington recalled.
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Jopling took round a second letter from Mrs Thatcher to Heath, this time signed ‘Margaret’, offering the post. ‘She’s trying to get me out of the bloody House,’ Heath complained,
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and he wrote her a curt letter of rejection (‘I am sure you will be able to find somebody to do the job’).
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The news of his refusal leaked from No. 10 to the press. From then on, throughout Mrs Thatcher’s administrations, Heath’s hostility would prove absolute.

Mrs Thatcher had left it to her new Chief Whip, Jopling, to draw up a list of the seventy or so proposed appointments to junior ministerial posts. He
noticed that she was not looking for factional advantage in these choices; ‘She named a few as “my people”, but gave no impression of political bias; she saw it all in terms of talent.’
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On Sunday, he joined her and Whitelaw for lunch in No. 10 to discuss the list. It was, he discovered, her first sight of the flat which she and Denis were to inhabit for more than eleven years.

The flat, which was at the top of the house, was small and almost poky. Cynthia Crawford, who helped sort it out, found its laundry room ‘full of dead plants’.
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Its kitchen was no more than a galley.
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It suited Mrs Thatcher, however. She liked the idea of ‘living over the shop’, as in her Grantham childhood,
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and the convenience of being so close to the work she loved. Security was greater, and she hoped that her children could come and see her easily.
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Denis, retired since 1975, though with various non-executive directorships, was happy to throw himself into the life of No. 10. ‘Margaret thought I helped at receptions,’ he remembered. ‘I thought I might as well enjoy it.’
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The couple continued to live in Flood Street until early June, while the flat was being refurbished, and then moved in. Denis paid rent to the government of £3,000 per year for the flat; Mrs Thatcher paid for its redecoration and also, at her own request, for the redecoration of her first-floor study in No. 10, which looks over St James’s Park, banishing the sage-green wallpaper which she disliked. Due to the remarkable strictness of government rules on such matters, the Thatchers were provided with no help of any kind in looking after their flat. They paid cleaning women themselves, and it fell to them, in practice to Mrs Thatcher herself, since Denis had old-fashioned views on these matters, to procure, generally with the help of Caroline Stephens and more junior secretaries, their own food and cook it. Denis was known to hurry home from drinks with chums after ringing No. 10 – ‘She says if I don’t come now dinner will be cold, and by that she means it will have
got
cold.’
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Quite often, owing to the demands of office, he came home to nothing, but he did not mind unduly, being a man who preferred drinking to eating. He used to fear what he called ‘cosmic obloquy from her’ when he did not eat whatever food was put before him.
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Mrs Thatcher’s lack of time meant that
the more wholesome sort of convenience foods – fish pie from Marks and Spencers, for example – were consumed in large quantities. Sometimes she would get Downing Street caterers to cook something for her freezer, at her own expense. Sherry Warner, who worked there from March 1981, used to sell her moussaka.
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Mrs Thatcher herself usually ate quite heartily but without much attention, treating food as fuel.
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She drank plentiful quantities of Famous Grouse whisky with ginger ale, ‘but she was never drunk’. Denis ‘was on the Gordon’s’.
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Living in the No. 10 flat also made it easier for the Thatchers to call on the help they needed which the normal government machine did not provide. David Wolfson was the unpaid chief of staff of her political office. Those in the professional Civil Service often wondered what purpose he served, but Wolfson saw it as his job to ‘be aware of the few things that mattered and to make sure that she saw the right people at the right time’.
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Wolfson’s links with the business world gave Mrs Thatcher comfort, and so did his money. Cynthia Crawford, always known as ‘Crawfie’, a secretary who was to become more and more important in the smooth running of Mrs Thatcher’s life, and to serve her right up until her death, was paid for by Wolfson. Mrs Thatcher also brought into No. 10 the highly trusted personal staff she had used in opposition. Richard Ryder, in day-to-day reality, though not in title, ran the political office. Caroline Stephens, who was to marry Ryder in 1981, was the private papers secretary. Alison Ward, the longest-serving Thatcher employee, came as constituency secretary. Tessa Jardine-Paterson, who came as a political secretary after having worked for Mrs Thatcher in Parliament, remembered that she and her colleagues always saw it as part of their jobs to rustle up drinks and even meals for Mrs Thatcher. They felt perfectly happy to do so because she herself was so unsnooty in her readiness to help in such matters, often plunging her hands into the sink to wash up with the words ‘It’s much easier to do it yourself.’
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She also brought with her her two trusted personal detectives, Barry Strevens and Bob Kingston. Despite the fact that Mrs Thatcher was an egotist, she was also almost always extremely considerate towards staff and their families. ‘It was a great mistake to tell the Prime Minister that one of your children had got measles or something, because she’d go on talking about it for some days afterwards … she could carry this to really quite absurd lengths for a Prime Minister.’ She would send drivers home if they were not needed and check that those working for her had eaten, which was often difficult to do in No. 10 because, although it had vast state kitchens for banquets, it had no canteen: ‘She hated being a nuisance. She never, ever put herself first.’
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