21 Great Leaders: Learn Their Lessons, Improve Your Influence (33 page)

Thud!
The room shook violently. Windows shattered. Plaster rained from the ceiling.

Mrs. Thatcher knew that a terrorist bomb had exploded—though she mistakenly thought it was a car bomb in the street. The bomb had exploded in the room above hers. She would have died if the terrorists hadn’t put the bomb in the wrong place.

Within seconds, members of her staff came into the room to make sure that she and her husband, Denis, were unhurt. Detectives from her security detail arrived and told Mrs. Thatcher they should stay put for the moment. There was always the possibility of a second bomb, timed to kill people fleeing the first explosion.

About fifteen minutes after the blast, firemen led Mrs. Thatcher’s group down the main staircase and out through the foyer—other exits were blocked by rubble. Arriving in the foyer, Mrs. Thatcher realized the seriousness of the explosion. Debris had fallen from the upper floors and was piled near the entrance. The air was gray with cement dust that settled on her clothes and her tongue.

Once outside the hotel, Mrs. Thatcher, her husband, and several aides were placed in a police car and rushed to Brighton Police Station. Other members of her entourage soon followed, and the police provided them with tea and kept them informed as news became available.

Mrs. Thatcher knew who had planted the bomb. For a quarter century, Great Britain had endured a campaign of terror bombings carried out by the Irish Republican Army. Over the years, the IRA had wounded more than two thousand civilians and killed more than a hundred.

A little later, Mrs. Thatcher and her staff were taken to Lewes Police College, where she changed into a dark blue suit and turned on the television, hoping for news. She invited “Crawfie” (her longtime personal assistant Cynthia Crawford) to kneel and pray with her.

Finally, she took a fitful nap then awoke at six-thirty and checked the news. It was bad. Several were confirmed dead—all friends—and there were many injuries.

Mrs. Thatcher informed her staff and security that she intended to go forward and give her speech to the conference. She needed transportation immediately.

Later, at her scheduled speech, she said she would not dwell on the attack, but she did want to say, on behalf of the British people, that the bombing was “an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected Government…. The fact that we are gathered here now, shocked but composed and determined, is a sign not only that this attack has failed, but that all attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail.”
¹

Mrs. Thatcher’s speech received an emotional, thunderous ovation.

In all, five people were killed, including Member of Parliament Sir Anthony Berry and three wives of government officials. Thirty-four were injured, including Mrs. Thatcher’s friend Margaret Tebbit, who was paralyzed from the neck down.

After this attempt on her life, Prime Minister Thatcher’s bold leadership demonstrated not only her own unyielding will, but the unbreakable spirit of the British people.

Margaret Thatcher served as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990, the longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century. She led the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990 and retired from the House of Commons in 1992. Queen Elizabeth II granted her a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the county of Lincolnshire.

Mrs. Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on October 13, 1925. Her parents, Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, owned two grocery shops. Margaret and her older sister, Muriel, were raised in the flat above the larger of the two shops. She was raised in the Wesleyan Methodist faith and remained a devout Christian throughout her life.

When she was nine, Margaret received a prize for excellent schoolwork. When a grown-up suggested she was “lucky” to have received the prize, she responded, “I wasn’t lucky. I
deserved
it.”
²

Margaret won a scholarship to Kesteven and Grantham Girls’ School, where she attended from 1936 through 1943. She was awarded a scholarship to study chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, arriving in 1943. She was elected president of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1946. While at Oxford, she was influenced by free market writers, and especially by Friedrich von Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom
(1944),
³
a book that also influenced Ronald Reagan. She graduated in 1947.

Margaret Roberts specialized in the study of X-ray crystallography, using X-rays to study the atomic and molecular structure of crystals in salts, metals, and minerals. Though she would later gain fame as the first woman prime minister, she said she was actually prouder of being the first prime minister with a science degree.
⁴

In 1948, she applied for a job at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), the largest chemical manufacturer in Britain. ICI rejected her application, and the personnel department placed these comments in her application file: “This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated.”
⁵
In other words, she had the makings of a bold leader.

After a brief career as a research chemist, Mrs. Thatcher studied law. She was elected a member of Parliament representing Finchley (an area of North London) in 1959. She served as secretary of state for education and science under Prime Minister Edward Heath. In 1975, she defeated Heath for the Conservative Party leadership.

On January 19, 1976, Mrs. Thatcher delivered a speech at Kensington Town Hall titled “Britain Awake.” It was a blistering denunciation of Soviet expansionism. She said:

She made these remarks during the era of détente, when it was considered impolite for Western politicians to denounce the Soviets. She delivered the speech
seven years
before Ronald Reagan’s controversial “Evil Empire” speech in 1983.

In response to Mrs. Thatcher’s speech, the Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper
Krasnaya Zvezda
(
Red Star
) labeled her “the Iron Lady.” The Soviets intended it as an insult. Mrs. Thatcher accepted it as a compliment. In fact, the Soviet reaction elevated her prominence and increased her stock with the British people. Her biographer Charles Moore explained:

From then on, Margaret Thatcher was known among friends and foes alike as the Iron Lady. The nickname suited her well, especially in regard to her iron-hard yet ladylike leadership style—a bold approach to leadership if ever there was one. Margaret Thatcher went on to win election as prime minister in 1979.

Mrs. Thatcher was elected during the “Winter of Discontent” in early 1979, a time of economic hardship in Great Britain. The world was in the grip of an OPEC-engineered energy crisis, and widespread strikes by public-sector labor unions threatened to cut off the coal supply during a record cold winter. Prime Minister James Callaghan and his Labour government had no answer for these economic woes.

Mrs. Thatcher and the Conservatives mocked the Labour government’s disastrous record with the slogan “Labour Isn’t Working.” When the Callaghan government lost a no-confidence motion, Britons elected the Conservatives to a forty-four-seat majority in the House of Commons—and made Margaret Thatcher their prime minister.

Arriving at No. 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Thatcher told reporters, “I would just like to remember some words of St. Francis of Assisi which I think are particularly apt at the moment. ‘Where there is discord may we bring harmony; where there is error, may we bring truth; where there is doubt, may we bring faith; and where there is despair, may we bring hope.’ ”
⁸

Government documents from 1979, made public in 2011, revealed that Mrs. Thatcher and her husband Denis lived an amazingly frugal lifestyle at No. 10. In June 1979, a Labour member of Parliament demanded an accounting of government spending, including the Thatchers’ accommodations. Typically, a new prime minister will order changes and refurbishments costing tens of thousands of pounds. By contrast, Mrs. Thatcher submitted a bill of £464 for linen and pillows, and £209 for new crockery. A line item of £19 for an ironing board was crossed out and Mrs. Thatcher had written, “I will pay for the ironing board.” Another note in Mrs. Thatcher’s handwriting explained the modest expenses: “We use only one bedroom.”
⁹

Mrs. Thatcher introduced a program of free market economic initiatives (anticipating “Reaganomics” by two years) intended to cure Britain’s recession woes. Her policies emphasized lower taxes, spending restraint, deregulation, and loosening the grip of Britain’s trade unions on the economy. During her first two years in office, as economic indicators were slow to budge, her popularity dipped. Yet Mrs. Thatcher, confident her policies would bring prosperity, maintained her course.

By the fall of 1980, as the economy remained in the doldrums, many in the media and the Labour Party demanded Mrs. Thatcher perform a “U-turn” and reverse her economic policies. In a bold speech to the Conservative Party Conference on October 10, 1980—widely considered the defining moment of Margaret Thatcher’s political career—she said, “To those waiting with bated breath for that favorite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.”

She delivered that line like a hammer blow, and the hall erupted in cheers. At the end of her speech, she basked in a five-minute standing ovation. Liz Kulze of the
Atlantic
wrote that Margaret Thatcher “pulverized her opponents through the strength of her own preponderant will…. Yet, iron-fisted as she was, she managed to maintain that special brand of feminine sass all the way through.”
¹⁰

By early 1982, the economy was improving—but in April, the ruling junta in Argentina launched an invasion of the Falkland Islands. The Iron Lady sent a Royal Navy task force to kick Argentina out. Her bold response to the Falklands invasion sent her approval rating soaring.

She was deeply aware of the cost of war and keenly felt the loss of British lives. After the sinking of the HMS
Sheffield
, in which twenty British sailors lost their lives, she sat on her bed at No. 10 weeping. Her husband Denis, a WWII veteran, sat beside her and said, “That is what war is like, love. It is bloody. I know. I’ve been in one.”
¹¹

Because of her bold leadership at home and at war, Margaret Thatcher was easily reelected in 1983. A vastly improved economy won her a third term in 1987. The Sixth Side of Leadership prevailed.

The best way to illustrate Margaret Thatcher’s leadership style is through stories told by those who knew her.

Her biographer Charles Moore describes her as a feminine woman who enjoyed the company of strong, powerful men. She especially enjoyed going head-to-head in debates and clashes with strong, powerful men. “She did not have many close women friends,” Moore wrote. “It was always men that excited her attention, affection, and competitiveness.” She admired great men like Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, and France’s François Mitterrand. It was Mitterrand who described her as having “the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” Moore adds, “She was always on the lookout for ‘great men’ and was wont to say that ‘when a big man has a big idea I never like to stand in his way.’ ”
¹²

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan met a couple of times in the 1970s before either of them had become a head of state. Reagan called on her at the House of Commons in April 1975 and again in November 1978.
¹³
During their conversation over tea in 1978, Reagan told Mrs. Thatcher that he “intended to try and become President.” In reply, Mrs. Thatcher boldly predicted, “I
am
going to become Prime Minister.”
¹⁴

James Baker, Reagan’s chief of staff, recalled, “President Reagan recognized Margaret Thatcher as a philosophical soul mate…. When Prime Minister Thatcher took office, the clock had run down on Britain’s post-war experiment in socialism…. But Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan shared an optimistic dream of what she later called ‘boundless opportunity built on enterprise, individual effort, and personal generosity.’ ”
¹⁵

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a Conservative politician who was secretary of state for Scotland under Thatcher during the late 1980s, observed that Mrs. Thatcher had an excellent relationship with Ronald Reagan even though she loudly disagreed with him on a number of issues—proof that leaders can express bold positions and still remain friends. Rifkind noted that Thatcher disagreed with Reagan over the Reykjavik summit (she thought he made too many concessions to the Soviets). She was livid when the United States invaded Grenada without advance notice to Great Britain. She called Reagan in the Oval Office to give him the rough side of her tongue.