Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (77 page)

In 1979, there were no computers at all in Downing Street and Mrs
Thatcher drew heavily on the services of the career secretaries and typists, traditionally known as the ‘Garden Room girls’ because they worked in the two basement rooms which look on to the garden of No. 10. They took dictation, summoned by buzzers, in which a single buzz represented the principal private secretary and more buzzes represented more junior officials, and they generally made everything work. Each night they locked the carbons and ribbons for their electric typewriters in the safe, since these would bear the impression of secrets they had typed during the day.
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Mrs Thatcher strongly approved of the traditional smallness of the No. 10 set-up. It meant, in the words of Jane Parsons, who ran the Garden Room when the Thatchers arrived and had worked for every prime minister since Attlee and Churchill, that the whole enterprise felt like ‘a cosy family unit and the PM was head of the family’.
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Some of the girls would enter No. 10 through the door in the garden wall, wheeling their bicycles.
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A few prime ministers, notably Heath and Wilson, had been rather difficult or stand-offish about this ethos, but the Thatchers loved it. Denis, making himself available, said, ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to do so long as it doesn’t coincide with rugger.’
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Mrs Thatcher would ‘bounce’ into the Garden Room to see what was going on. Sometimes, wandering round the various offices when she didn’t have enough to do, she would riffle through in-trays and snatch up correspondence from the public. On one occasion, she came across a letter from a small florist in Wandsworth who said that his business was being undermined by the supermarket sale of flowers. From then on, she placed all her flower orders with him.
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On another, shortly after she had arrived at No. 10, Mrs Thatcher was standing with the private secretaries, asking one of them how their telephone system worked.
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Suddenly she grabbed the phone as the light flashed and said, ‘No. 10 Downing Street.’ On the other end was Stephen Wall,
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a Foreign Office official. Alerted by the half-recognized voice, he said, ‘Who am I
speaking to?’ ‘It’s the Prime Minister,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘Oh good,’ said Wall, with some presence of mind, ‘then I’ll get an answer quicker than usual.’
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She liked to watch her own office in action. One private secretary was at his desk one day having a long argument with the Treasury on the telephone. He felt he had lost the battle, and as he put down the receiver, he said, ‘S***! F***!’ Then he noticed that the Prime Minister had come in and was sitting at the desk beside him. Her eyes were shining with pleasure. ‘Temper! Temper!’ she said.
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This cosiness extended to the Thatchers’ life at Chequers, the large country house in Buckinghamshire bequeathed by Lord Lee of Fareham for all British prime ministers, and staffed by the armed services. Mrs Thatcher liked to be driven there on Friday evenings and return, usually in time for supper, on Sunday. At Chequers, as in London, Mrs Thatcher quickly established a mixture of formality – she and Denis always dressed neatly and smartly – with friendliness towards those working for her. The duty private secretary each weekend had to stay in a cottage on the estate. A nervous Michael Pattison, on his first weekend in the role, came with his young family. To his surprise, the Thatchers invited them all to drinks before Sunday lunch. His two-year-old daughter climbed over Mrs Thatcher on the sofa and removed one of her earrings.
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‘She met with a very soft response,’ he remembered.
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For anyone who had experienced the Heath days, such a scene was unimaginable (even allowing for the fact that Heath would not have worn earrings).

The first woman Prime Minister had needs previously unknown in Downing Street. Frequent hairdressing was required and, once television cameras were introduced to the House of Commons in 1989, these appointments became twice weekly. As had happened when Mrs Thatcher was education secretary, the private office was uneasy about putting the word ‘hairdresser’ into the diary on the grounds that it detracted from the dignity of the office. It asked Caroline Stephens how to deal with this self-invented problem. After discussion, the phrase ‘Carmen rollers’ was agreed as a sort of code.
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Mrs Thatcher’s clothes were looked after, in the early days, chiefly by Lady (Guinevere) Tilney, wife of Sir John, who had befriended Margaret Thatcher when they were both looking for parliamentary seats in the late 1940s. Lady Tilney was known, slightly mockingly, as ‘the Mistress of the Robes’, and was also responsible for organizing Downing Street receptions. Crawfie later succeeded to the informal title.
Strict government rules prevented the acceptance of personal presents of any substantial value, but Mrs Thatcher was allowed to take such gifts on loan. She wore British clothes on these terms, and also the many jewels which Arab potentates tended to press upon her. With her seamstress’s love of getting detail right and her wartime generation’s devotion to ‘make do and mend’, she combined a very smart appearance with economy. Care was taken to record which dress she wore at which occasion, and dresses were given nicknames for easy recognition. One with red and white circles on it, for example, was called ‘Balloons’.
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Her attitude to her appearance and that of her surroundings combined two things which were potentially in conflict – her love of propriety and economy, and her love of attractive, high-quality objects which would enhance the dignity of the premiership and the prestige of Britain. One official noted that she had ‘an almost Queen Mary-type’ magpie desire for pretty things. One day early in her first administration, she discovered that one of the ministerial flats in Admiralty House, vacant at the time, had several good bits of government furniture. She procured the key and personally led a party of the No. 10 steward, her appointments secretary and her detective to the flat. She walked round, pointing at pictures, chairs and so on, and saying ‘I’ll have that and that.’ The party of burglars, carrying their loot, then returned to No. 10 with the Prime Minister at their head.
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Although extremely conscious of her femininity, Mrs Thatcher had frequently to be reminded of the symbolic importance of her role as the leading elected representative of her sex. As part of her drive to reduce the number of quangos which received large sums of public money, Mrs Thatcher found herself confronted with the two such that were the direct responsibility of the Cabinet Office. John Hunt, assisted by John Ashworth, told her that she must choose between cutting the National Council for Women and a scientific body, the Advisory Council for Applied Research and Development (ACARD). Without hesitation, Mrs Thatcher, the scientist, said: ‘Can’t get rid of ACARD. Better get rid of the other one.’ Ashworth pointed out to her that she was the first woman Prime Minister and it might look bad to get rid of the National Council for Women. Mrs Thatcher reluctantly agreed and the result, which the two officials in this
Yes, Prime Minister
game had intended, was that both quangos survived.
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Probably the most important member of Mrs Thatcher’s personal entourage was her parliamentary private secretary. Adam Butler and John Stanley, the latter having become known in the Thatcher team as ‘Flapper Jack’ because of his tendency to panic, had left for junior ministerial positions. Now that she was Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher chose as her PPS Ian Gow, the MP for Eastbourne. Because he had been a friend of his fellow
Wykehamist Geoffrey Howe since working as an assistant in Aberavon during the 1959 election, Gow had supported Howe’s leadership bid in 1975 and was therefore not, at first, close to Mrs Thatcher. He was PPS to Airey Neave, however, until Neave’s assassination, and so his move to Mrs Thatcher herself in 1979 came naturally. After the election, Gow’s friendship with Howe became an advantage, since it helped good communication between No. 10 and the Treasury. Gow, bald, bespectacled, usually in a heavy three-piece suit, had the half-pompous, half-obsequious manner of a private doctor (his father’s profession) or solicitor (his own) between the wars. This was part of an elaborate self-parody. Gow was a keenly intelligent and intensely diligent man. He was completely, chivalrously committed to Mrs Thatcher, whom he was the first to describe as ‘The Lady’. ‘I shall love her’, he declared to the less enamoured Howe, ‘till the day I die,’
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and he saw his job, normally considered only a useful step on the ladder to higher things, as the great task of his life. He was at his desk at seven every morning, having often stayed up into the small hours doing his boss’s business in the House of Commons the night before.

Gow’s commitment to Mrs Thatcher was ideological as well as personal. In the eyes of officials, who found his mode of operation ‘difficult’ because he would pretend that he had not seen official papers when he had, he was the closest upholder of her sense of purpose: ‘She drew from him the spirit of what she was trying to achieve.’
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For his part, Gow regarded bureaucrats collectively as ‘Martians’, and enjoyed battles with them. Self-consciously an old fogey, though only forty-two years old at the time of the 1979 election, he had an extreme reluctance to trust any official who had a beard, a prejudice shared by Mrs Thatcher who liked to declare that ‘Only men with weak chins have beards.’
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Gow was also a romantic who could quote entire speeches by General de Gaulle from memory. He was
particularly attracted to the more High Tory aspects of Thatcherism, and was a strong supporter of the Union with Northern Ireland. It was through Ian Gow that Mrs Thatcher was to have many meetings with Enoch Powell in the first years of her premiership, Gow smuggling Powell into No. 10 by the back door.

Gow’s chief role as PPS was to keep open the links between the Prime Minister and her parliamentary party, links which had broken, with such disastrous results, in the days of Ted Heath. He did this by a huge amount of controlled but sustained drinking with Members of Parliament. ‘Cars run on petrol,’ he would say, ‘I run on alcohol,’ and he was particularly fond of White Ladies (two parts gin, one part Cointreau, one part lemon juice). When he arrived in No. 10, and found himself sharing a handsome ground-floor office next to the Cabinet Room with Richard Ryder, he immediately denounced the room as ‘appalling’ on the grounds that it did not have a fridge.
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One was soon installed, and filled with the produce of El Vino’s, the Fleet Street bar owned by David Mitchell, one of the new administration’s junior ministers. Gow devoted endless hours to listening to the complaints of Members of Parliament. Finding discontent, he would approach the diary secretary and say, ‘X is unhappy and needs to be loved. Please get him in to see Margaret.’
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With the large intake of new Conservative MPs in 1979, roughly a third of the parliamentary party was more or less unknown to the leader. Gow remedied this, taking her regularly to the tea-room, and ‘day by day getting her to connect’.
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Known half-affectionately as ‘Supergrass’, he would attend the meetings of Conservative backbench committees in Parliament and report to Mrs Thatcher who had said what. Building on her own remarkable tendency to criticize ‘the government’ as if she, as Prime Minister, had nothing to do with it, Gow was not above concerting parliamentary resistance to proposals from Cabinet colleagues which she did not like. In this respect, he could sometimes cause unnecessary trouble. But he was the most useful sort of aide for a leader – the one who knows his principal’s mind so completely that he does not need to ask her permission before he acts. Unfortunately for posterity, however, most of Ian Gow’s operations and thoughts were not committed to paper, and, when he was murdered by the IRA in 1990, he left few written records. The testimony of his contemporaries is that no one was more important in helping Mrs Thatcher survive the potential political crises of her first years, and that his role, after he left the post in 1983, was never so successfully replicated by his successors.

This personal team, instantly loyal, cohesive and overworked, had to cope with the astonishing demands of their boss’s routine. Mrs Thatcher would rise at about six in the morning, listening first to the news on the
BBC World Service and then to Radio 4’s
Today
programme. In the course of the night she would have demolished two or sometimes three of the red boxes that her private office had handed to her the previous evening. At about eight, Caroline Stephens would meet the private secretaries in the study below and then take up urgent requests to see Mrs Thatcher to the flat where, though she had always been up for hours, she was sometimes dressing in her bedroom. Denis, who also rose early, was invariably out of the bedroom by this time, and at his desk in his own study in the flat.
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After 8.30, the Prime Minister would descend from the flat to her study and begin a day of meetings, which would normally end up, during the parliamentary session, in the House of Commons. She took virtually no exercise, without any apparent ill effects, except for going up and down the stairs to the flat. These journeys were required, among other things, to use the lavatory, because there was none for her on the same floor as her study, though her staff noted her ability, like the Queen, never to seem to need to ‘go’.

She allowed herself no leisure. She would work, or talk about work, until one or two in the morning, occasionally catnapping for fifteen minutes at about 11 p.m. In the evening, she would often take her shoes off, tuck her legs beneath her on the sofa, and chat – always shop – with a glass of weak whisky to help her. Sometimes, Denis would join her, with rather more to drink, but there were often occasions when she ignored him in the pressure of business. On one evening, her husband came in after dinner when she was engaged in composing a big speech about Rhodesia. He offered a few comments to which she paid no attention, and then went up to the flat. About half an hour later, the ceiling of the room in which Mrs Thatcher was sitting shook with a tremendous crash. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘That must be Denis. I think he must have fallen out of a broom cupboard.’ She made no attempt to find out what had happened.
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The hardest task for her entourage was to make her go to bed. Although she did, indeed, have immense stamina and a huge appetite for work, she was not as invincible as she believed. She got very tired, and when this happened, she talked more and achieved less.