The Real Iron Lady (2 page)

ONE

intensely serious. The camaraderie, the relaxed, jokey, allusive style, the affectation of doing things well without trying, the view of politics and most other things as a game, these expressions of the ruling male culture which with Harold Macmillan had been carried to extreme lengths, all these were alien to her.

Margaret's policy was not to surround herself with a huge number of hangers-on and special advisers for paper clips. All of us had to have real practical jobs. My three departments (Home Office, Environment and Lord Chancellor's Department) provided a challenging bundle of issues.

It is a well-known fact that Prime Minister Thatcher was a hard worker. There were lots of examples of her prodigious powers of work. She would call for red boxes even on holidays, was prepared to wade through a pile of red boxes after lengthy foreign trips when anyone else would be wilting, while at the same time insisting that other people have holidays and rest. That last point did not, however, extend to speech writers. The immediacy and importance of producing the right words meant that her speech writing team were not given much rest.

David Willetts and I were in her study one night. Time went on. I believe it was the Spring Party Conference speech in 1987. We looked at our watches. It was one o'clock in the morning. ‘Is it one o'clock?' asked Margaret. We were so tired that David and I did not have the spark to say, ‘Yes, could we go home now, Prime Minister?' Instead, she said brightly, ‘I get a new lease of life at this time of the morning.' And we duly went on until two o'clock, when she drew stumps.

Later that morning in the Cabinet Room, Margaret referred to an item on Farming Today that she had heard on the radio earlier. The programme came on air at 6 a.m., so she certainly did not have more than four hours' sleep that night.

Her hard work was effective, but for those around her, it led to her learning things that other Prime Ministers never learned, and caused me ceaseless amazement. As policy adviser for the Home Office, I had to cover prisons and the police. I took the view that prisons were not for prime ministerial intervention, but that police matters would rightly
be of interest. So in addition to briefing her on the police, I would regularly flag up just a few paragraphs I thought relevant in
Police
magazine for her to read, only to find that she would then read the whole magazine from cover to cover.

One Saturday during the 1983 election campaign, in the Ballards Lane constituency office in Finchley, Roger Boaden (a senior CCO agent) and myself, a delightful Garden Room girl (a secretary from No. 10) and Mrs T. flopped around a trestle table for a sandwich lunch. It was late-ish in the campaign, and she had afternoon engagements and we were all shattered. I said wistfully and with a mild attempt at humour, ‘Well, we've all earned it, and I think it's time for a siesta!' Roger Boaden and our colleague smiled and both said enthusiastically, ‘Yes, that's what we need.' I looked across the table at Mrs T. and said, ‘Well, that's three of us in favour of a siesta, that's almost unanimous.' With a perfectly straight face she said, ‘It's not unanimous, it's a majority of one against.' We all laughed. However tired she was, duty triumphed.

Before any meeting with Margaret Thatcher, you really had to do your homework – she did! The Chief Secretary had one of the most arduous workloads in my day, lengthy two-month negotiations with all Cabinet colleagues and spending departments on the annual public expenditure round, and constantly being brought in on any new policy initiatives or projects where extra public spending was involved. Not unusually, I took two red boxes home to work on overnight, and over weekends.

I remember one occasion particularly well. I had a meeting at nine o'clock the following morning at No. 10 to discuss with the Prime Minister and a few other Cabinet colleagues a particularly complicated project – one of the forerunners of what became known as Private Finance Initiatives, or PFI. I had a lengthy briefing meeting the night before in the Treasury, and took home a voluminous brief. By 1.30 a.m., I had completed the main brief with several appendices to go.

Margaret Thatcher had been at the Commonwealth Conference in the Caribbean for two exhausting days, then had gone on to New York to make a speech at the United Nations General Assembly. She was flying back overnight for our 9 a.m. meeting. I reflected that she would not have had time to go into detail, and went to sleep.

The morning meeting was going OK until she turned to me and said,
‘John, what about Appendix C? I hadn't a clue what was in Appendix C so let the discussion carry on while I quickly flipped through the papers to see what it was. She was right, it was the one issue I had queried without satisfaction the previous day with my officials.

I lost the battle. In all the mass of briefing, and after a punishing overseas trip, she had found my weak spot. She asked me to go back to the Treasury and think again!

I accompanied her to Hillsborough in Northern Ireland for the ceremony at which the Anglo–Irish Agreement was signed by her and the Irish Taoiseach, Dr Garret Fitzgerald, on 15 November 1985. There was half an hour in hand before the ceremony began, and she and I, with Dr Fitzgerald and my Irish counterpart, Dermot Nally, were waiting in a side room. The Prime Minister said, ‘Well, Garret, we have half an hour to wait. I suggest we have a rehearsal. Dermot can ask me all the difficult questions that the media will be
throwing at me, and Robert can do the same for you.' And that is exactly what happened.

Margaret bustled in with Denis and, with drink in hand, discussed the day's events in Parliament. We sat down for dinner, amid small talk that bored Margaret even before the soup was served.

The Centre, founded by Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph in the late 1970s, was known in the press as ‘Margaret Thatcher's Private Think Tank'. By 1980, she was its Patron. We worked closely with the No. 10 Policy Unit, but the Prime Minister herself had naturally become somewhat distanced from our day-to-day activities. However, Alfred saw her regularly, often on Sundays, and would ring me in the evening with any relevant details from their meeting.

On Sunday 18 July 1982 the usual call came through, this time with a difference: ‘Alfred Sherman here: I'm speaking from No. 10. The Prime Minister would like to talk to you. She hopes you can help her with a difficult speech. Here she is.' As I trembled with shock and fear, the familiar voice took over. It was an interesting assignment. Dame Margery Corbett Ashby, the co-founder of the Townswomen's Guild, had died in 1981, aged ninety-nine. The Guild had established an Annual Memorial Lecture in her memory and invited the Prime Minister to deliver the first one, on Monday 26 July. Dame Margery, born in 1882, had been a suffragette and a pioneer of social and educational reform – not what popular opinion would have called a ‘Thatcherite'.

Mrs Thatcher explained, clearly and crisply, what she wanted – a consideration of the century covered by Dame Margery's life – the changes it had seen and the underlying verities which had not changed. I saw that a great plus in working for her would be that she seemed to know exactly what she wanted. Her concluding remarks explained why I had received this surprising request. ‘Alfred tells me that you're an authority on the nineteenth century.' A gross exaggeration, but my PhD had involved a study of Victorian social reform. ‘None of the drafts I have had so far have quite caught the right tone. Could you produce one
for me? I'll have all the papers sent round in the morning and I would like the draft here by Tuesday 20th please.'

And that was that. I found the papers on my desk the next morning, and worked frantically. The draft went in as requested and I was summoned to see the Prime Minister on Friday 23rd at 3 p.m. This was a good sign, I was assured by Ian Gow, Mrs Thatcher's Parliamentary Private Secretary: she wouldn't even be seeing me if the draft was impossible.

I arrived promptly to begin one of the most amazing twenty-four hours of my life. The Prime Minister was moderate in her praise: ‘You've worked very hard. You've done what I asked you to do. As a skeleton, this has possibilities. I think we can build on it.' She fingered another draft on the table and tossed it aside contemptuously. ‘Not like this effort from the Research Department. Do they really think that I can preach party propaganda on an occasion like this?'

My spirits lifted. This suggested that I had got the right tone, but I prepared myself for similar trenchant criticism.

To my surprise, there was none. From the moment we set to work it was a joint effort, two people engaged in a common quest to perfect this speech. Mrs Thatcher obviously had a well-tried way of working. Each of us had a copy of the draft, while another was laid out, page by page, on the floor. It was to be a lecture, so was longer than most speeches. There were, at this stage, about thirty sheets. The Prime Minister had already marked where she wanted transpositions, expansions or contractions, or facts and figures to be checked. As amendments were made, a Garden Girl was summoned to take the pages down, section by section, for typing and re-typing.

Mrs Thatcher gave her attention to every detail, yet was always
keen to ensure that the main theme, constant change occurring against the background of eternal truth, ran consistently through the speech. She would read and re-read to make sure that each page achieved that balance. Her painstaking approach was tinged with an unexpected dry wit.

There was considerable trouble from the IRA in 1982 and I had mentioned the fact that in 1882 the Chief Secretary for Ireland had been assassinated in Phoenix Park, Dublin. ‘I'd better not say that,' she said. ‘It would sound as if I want something to happen to Jim Prior.' (Jim Prior was at that time Secretary of State for Ireland, and a leading ‘wet'.) Even though some of my favourite references were taken out, Mrs Thatcher was genuinely interested in them. There was a hymn by John Addington Symonds: ‘I haven't seen that since Sunday School, however do you know it?' she exclaimed. The Prime Minister's intellect showed itself in her appreciation of the research and her insistence on factual accuracy. There was nothing shallow in her approach – not a whiff of ‘the line to take' so dear to many, lesser, politicians. Then there was her Flaubertian concern for the ‘mot juste'. The thesaurus was much in use. I saw how she moulded the text into her own style, using, for example, the technique of repetition. When read cold, this can seem banal, but in oration it makes the words memorable.

This meticulous process took a very long time. In those days I lived in Huntingdon, and by around seven o'clock, I began to wonder if and how I was going to get home. Clearly, this was not something with which to bother the Prime Minister. At some convenient moment, I thought, I would suggest that I went across to the Horseguards Hotel to book a bed.

I was forestalled. With a sigh of satisfaction, after finishing a difficult page, Mrs Thatcher said, ‘You're not going to be able to get home tonight. You must stay here.' My feeble protests about the hotel were summarily dealt with. ‘Nonsense! We've still a lot to do and I need you.'

Apart from the Garden Girls, we had seen no one for about four hours. Now staff started to come in to say goodnight. One was asked to make sure that towels were put out for me, another to get something out of the fridge for our dinner. I assumed that there was a housekeeper, lurking somewhere, to prepare the meal. But at around eight o'clock, it was the Prime Minister who went into the kitchen to cook the chicken supreme. Afterwards we washed up together.

Conversation was surprisingly easy. We talked mostly about books and poetry and interesting aspects of the nineteenth century which had arisen from the speech. Then it was back to work. At some point Carol dropped in and was asked to make sure that her room was tidy, because I would be sleeping in it. Mark, who was staying at No. 10, came in to say goodnight.

On we went, draft following draft. We were both now in stockinged feet, with a drink to sip: whisky for her, gin for me. The tireless Garden Girls came and went.

Finally, at 3 a.m., Mrs Thatcher decided that we should stop – until the next day.