There is No Alternative (13 page)

His last name presents another challenge. I have been told that he pronounces it
Pole
, but his brother Jonathan pronounces it
Powell
, to rhyme with
towel
. His brother was Tony Blair's chief of staff. I am not sure what to make of this but suspect it is evidence for the claim that they are all Thatcherites now. Left-leaning British newspapers, unable to find much to distinguish between the brothers politically, have fixated on their names; they declare the pronunciation
Pole
pretentious. As I offer him my hand, I worry that I've gotten it mixed up. Which is the pretentious pronunciation again, and which one is he?

“So nice to meet you,” I say.

“And you,” he replies.

The interchange offers no clues about his name. His part of it suggests that he may well be uncertain of mine.

Powell was Thatcher's closest advisor, “the second most powerful figure in the Government,” writes her biographer John Campbell, “practically her
alter ego
.”
⁴⁸
Powell and American National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft shared a secure line to each others' phones. Scowcroft called Powell directly when he needed to talk to Britain. Powell was, according to Scowcroft, “the only serious influence” on Thatcher's foreign policy.
⁴⁹
Powell's status as the prime minister's pet was greatly resented. Alan Clark, Thatcher's defense minister and an infamously indiscreet diarist, recalls the vexation of another close Thatcher advisor, Ian Gow, who lamented “the way the whole Court had changed and Charles Powell had got the whole thing in his grip.”
⁵⁰
The ever-irritable Nigel Lawson, Thatcher's chancellor, was equally dismayed by Powell's overweening influence: “He stayed at Number 10 far too long.”
⁵¹
Everyone—whether or not they liked him—agrees that Charles Powell is a highly intelligent man.

Given the descriptions I have read of him, I am expecting to encounter a suave, gregarious personality, but instead I find him a man of subdued affect. He is correct and courteous, but as we speak, I worry that I am failing to draw him out. Only later, when I transcribed the interview, did I realize that the language he used to describe the former prime minister was passionate.

“Tell me about your first impression of her,” I say. “I understand that you first met her when you were waiting with your wife for the by-election results in Germany—”

“That's right, yes—we were in the embassy in Germany. She came out to see Schmidt and Kohl.
⁵²
She was quite recently elected in the Opposition. Well, I think it was of this tremendous energy and zest, we'd got pretty used to this procession of rather dispirited politicians, of all three parties, trooping through Germany lamenting Britain's decline and so on, and here, suddenly, there was this woman, of whom we knew little at the time, who seemed to believe it could all be changed. It just needed
her
to be in power to bring about this tremendous change. It was invigorating.”

Energy, zest—everyone uses those words. She famously required no more than four hours of sleep at night. “She hated holidays,” Powell recalls. “She
loathed
holidays; she didn't like weekends, because they were a bit of an interruption, but that was all right because she could pretend they didn't exist by continuing working at Chequers, and making some of the rest of us work at Chequers, but holidays, after two days she was on the telephone, looking for excuses to come back to London.”
⁵³

“Would you describe the environment around her as tense?”

“The environment around her was
boiling
. A permanent state of everything sort of red hot. Like some kind of lava coming out of a volcano. It really was.”

 

“Did you like being around that?” The man before me is sedate, his hands folded primly in his lap. It is hard to imagine that a boiling environment would be to his taste.

“Well, it was pretty invigorating, but really tiring.”

I'll bet.

I ask him to tell me more about the way Margaret Thatcher looked to him, back in those early days. “Her posture was always upright,” he says. “She was very, very stiff-backed and upright, and she was always very tidy as well. A lot of British politicians are very sloppy, in their dress and so on—I don't want to actually name any names or be discourteous, but you can probably think of quite several, female as well as male. But she was always meticulous in her dress, and perhaps some of her earlier styles look a bit fussy now, but once she got into the power-suit dressing it was all part of it. She was really—you've got to think in terms of Margaret Thatcher Productions, almost, I mean there were the policies and the rhetoric, but there was also the hair, the dress, the lighting, and everything. She could have tremendous dramatic effect on the platform, whether at a party conference speech or a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress. It was all packaged. It was almost like a great diva, giving a performance.”

He is right. Margaret Thatcher often seemed like an exceptionally gifted actress playing the role of Margaret Thatcher. On television, she fills the screen. The eye is ineluctably drawn to her, so that everything and everyone else in the frame is dwarfed by comparison. Hollywood executives call this quality
It
. Marlon Brando had
It
, and so did Marilyn Monroe. But neither of them had nuclear weapons.

Let's look at one of those Margaret Thatcher Productions in slow-motion. Part of it is on YouTube, in a clip titled “Margaret Thatcher Talking about Sinking the
Belgrano.
”
⁵⁴
During the Falklands War, Britain declared a two-hundred-mile exclusion zone around the islands, warning that any Argentine ship within the zone was subject to destruction. The Argentine cruiser
Belgrano
was outside this zone, sailing away from the islands. Thatcher or-dered
it sunk nonetheless. The attack killed 323 Argentine sailors. An outcry over the carnage ensued, in Britain and abroad; some charged that this was a war crime. Whatever you may think about the sinking of the
Belgrano,
do note this: The Argentine navy thereafter refused to leave port.

Here is Thatcher, responding to critics who have charged her with obfuscating the circumstances leading to the decision to sink the
Belgrano.
She is in the television studio with interviewer David Frost, an ordinarily articulate man who is not known for backing away from power but who in her presence appears oddly goofy. Her hair is sprayed into a stiff golden helmet; not a strand is out of place. Her rouge is flawless. Pale lipstick highlights a mouth that on another face might be described as sensuous. She is wearing pearl earrings; the broach on the lapel of her stern navy suit complements her blouse. The effect, as Powell said, is immaculately tidy.

You may tune in on YouTube to see the rest. Study the voice: Like a trained stage actress, she projects from the chest and uses the full range of her vocal register. Her body remains still; she does not fidget or shift or even gesture. Note the varied rhythm of her speech—one moment slow and deliberate, the next insistent and percussive. “What I know, Mr. Frost,” she says—and she pronounces his name,
Mr. Frost
, as if a
Mr. Frost
is some thoroughly disgusting species of bug—“is that the ministers have
given
the information to the House of Commons. They said that
one
thing was not correct. I was the
first
to say, ‘Right,
give the correct information
.' And the correct, and
deadly
accurate information was given.” The word “deadly” flows easily from her tongue. She is leaning forward, intense, alert. Her eyes are blazing. You are looking at a woman who has given the order to kill 323 young Argentine men, and her glowing complexion suggests that this has not troubled her sleep one bit. Indeed, she looks as if she has had an exceptionally good night's rest.

“But
I
do not spend my days,” she continues—in response to a question he has not asked—“
prowling
around the pigeonholes of the Ministry of Defense looking at the precise course of action.” She says
I
as if the
I
in question is something magnificent, and the very hint that such a vital magnificence—
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
, the human embodiment of the British people and their destiny!—would do something as lowly as
prowl
(never mind that Mr. Frost never said this) is contemptible. There is now something like a bat squeak from Mr. Frost. “One moment!” she pronounces, lifting an imperious finger. “
One moment
!”

Mr. Frost tries haplessly to get a word in, fumbling with his papers. “Woodrow Wyatt says you only respect people who—”
⁵⁷

“One moment,” she demands.

“Yes,” he says meekly and falls silent. Her voice is lower now, and all the more menacing for it. Given her expression you would not be entirely surprised to see laser beams shoot from her eyes and vaporize this disgusting Mr. Frost, bringing the death toll to a salutary 324. “That ship”—she says this slowly, her mouth narrow, her voice full of controlled fury and contempt—“was a danger to
our boys
.”

Our boys
: These are in fact
men
she is talking about, every last one of them over the age of majority and armed with fearsome weapons, and the use of the word “boys” sounds at once fiercely maternal—a tiger protecting her cubs—and intensely patronizing.
Those
boys are our heroes, as all right-thinking men and women know, and you, Mr. Frost, are not fit to shine their shoes. But they are still
boys
, just as you, Mr. Frost, are a silly stripling. The lot of you—
boys
. But you are
my
boys, and that is why despite your childish foolishness, I shall protect you and set you on the right course. “
That's
why that ship was sunk,” she says. “I
know
it was right to sink her.” A pause. Mr. Frost has gone mute. “
And I would
do
. . . the
same
. . .
again
.”