The Real Iron Lady (8 page)

harder side of her was more obviously evident during the Miners' Strike of 1984–5, that year-long bruising battle with the strongest union in the country. It was a disaster for the miners, their families and their communities.

The TUC had been working hard to support the miners' families but particularly to find the basis for a settlement. With Norman Willis, I was one of those, along with ACAS, who shuttled quietly between Arthur Scargill and government ministers and civil servants in a vain attempt to find a settlement.

The culmination was a request from the TUC to meet the Prime Minister with a formula to end the strike. In truth, the strike was ending. Miners were going back to work in increasing numbers and the South Wales men, the most solid, the most loyal of the loyal, wanted an organised return. We all knew that, so did Mrs Thatcher. We wanted a deal which would at least be a basis for rebuilding relationships. We needed a face saver for the miners and a basis for a resumption of normality.

But at that meeting, Mrs Thatcher was adamant – no more talks with the NUM, they must return to work forthwith, they must accept
the closure of the pits. There was no generosity, no quarter, no echo of Churchill's ‘in victory, magnanimity'.

It was also a signal that the TUC as a whole was being relegated to a less influential role. The Iron Lady was emerging from this conflict as she had from the Falklands War, confident in her own judgement and determined to win her battles with her presumed enemies.

I am not a paid-up member of the Mrs Thatcher fan club.

I acknowledge fully her clear leadership, tactical skill, and a powerful executive ability to get things done her way, all admirable qualities in a Prime Minister, and qualities which mark her out as an exceptional Prime Minister. She put her stamp on the country and no one was in any doubt about what she wanted. That is a hallmark of effective leadership.

But I disagreed profoundly with the direction she took, while admiring her executive drive to achieve her ends. As time has passed, many of her causes have been shown to have failed the long-term interests of the nation, although they were short-term triumphs.

The North Sea tax revenues were spent on tax cuts for those in work – a formula which worked brilliantly in electoral terms but left us with little to show for the great opportunity for national renewal that was offered by the exploitation of North Sea oil.

Council house sales were another brilliant political manoeuvre, but the problem of providing housing for those who cannot afford to buy is worse now than it was in the 1980s.

Privatisation of the utilities has been widely copied abroad but many now are in the hands of overseas companies and none of the remaining British ones have emerged as global or European brands.

And what of liberalisation of financial markets? Mrs Thatcher presided over the ‘Big Bang', the deregulation of the financial markets. In 2008, we learned to our cost the huge downside risks of this. The burden of returning the banks to normality and paying off our debts will last for another generation.

And in my own backyard, the trade unions. Mrs Thatcher is widely acclaimed for her determination to take on and vanquish militant trade unionism, ‘the enemy within'. But in this battle there were many casualties, especially in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, and the inner cities. And the long-term effects are now clear: a major loss of manufacturing capacity and a rise in inequality as boardrooms have felt less constrained and have paid themselves salary and bonus increases unjustified by performance.

And finally, in taking a Eurosceptic stance, she missed the need, which has existed on and off since 1870, and is very evident today, to build our economy more on German lines, with excellent manufacturing, high savings, long-term thinking, high skills, and job security, worker participation and high standards of corporate governance. If only she had deployed her undoubted executive ability on these goals, what might we, and she, have achieved?

I have absolutely no doubt that she will go down in history as a great Prime Minister. She was an international statesman of great calibre.
She curbed the power of the trade unions and transformed British industry in the process. Her privatisation policy rolled back the frontiers of the state and became the example for nations around the world.

But on constitutional issues she displayed little vision or understanding. She was wrong to abolish the GLC, but she was wrong on Scotland too, and wrong in a very big way. And I do not just mean treating Scotland as a guinea pig for the introduction of the poll tax.

The Callaghan government fell following the two devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales. People tend to forget that in Scotland there was a majority in favour of devolution. It was just not a big enough majority to cross the threshold that Parliament had, very sensibly, decided to impose, but there was a real need to recognise the concerns of the Scottish people and some of us put to her that it would be sensible – remember that this was in 1979 – to have the Scottish Grand Committee meet, not in Westminster, but in Edinburgh and Glasgow and other Scottish cities, too, and to do so on a regular basis. There was also a case put to her to have a consultative group of heads of local government and other leaders from Scotland, with whom she would meet once a year. She would have none of it. And I well remember in 1996, chatting over a whisky with Donald Dewar. ‘What would have happened if we had done something like that in 1979?' I asked him. ‘You would have shot our fox,' he replied.

Finally, Margaret refused to grasp the need to make changes in the House of Lords. It seemed to me, and to many others, that a Second Chamber which was largely hereditary, and where that hereditary element was almost entirely Tory, was not something that would survive a Labour government with a decent majority. Far better to have a system, taking the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1801 as precedents,
whereby the hereditary peerage elected so many of their number to sit in the House each Parliament, and to create a situation where no party had a massive built-in majority. I even introduced a Private Member's Bill on the subject in 1984 but, again, Margaret would have none of it.

I often think that had she shown the same degree of foresight, determination and courage over constitutional matters as she did over foreign affairs and the domestic agenda, the history of the last twenty years would have been very different.

Perhaps surprisingly, when I was Chancellor, we never disagreed about entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, although we frequently discussed it.

Neither of us wished to enter a single currency but, like Nigel Lawson before me, I saw the ERM as an anti-inflation mechanism and, albeit reluctantly, Margaret saw the logic in that. She hated inflation, which was reaching towards 10 per cent, and had no other option available to bring it down.

When she and I eventually agreed that Sterling must enter the ERM, she was enthusiastic in discussing the timetable (which was
brought forward) and the political tactics of entry. If she had any reservations she never shared them with me. Legend puts out an absurd notion, that Margaret was ‘bullied' into entering by Douglas Hurd and me. This is, of course, risible. No one would have been able to ‘bully' Margaret into anything, even if they wished to try. She always gave as good as she got, which was both her strength and her weakness.

Like most famous people, Margaret Thatcher is surrounded by myths; in her case the myth of the handbag is one of the strongest. She is supposed to have used the handbag as a receptacle for all kinds of secrets with which she backed up her habit of interfering knowledgeably while she was Prime Minister in the affairs of every department. My own experience was the opposite, at least when I was Home Secretary between 1985 and 1989.

There were several matters in the Home Office portfolio about which the Prime Minister felt passionately, but she hardly ever intervened and by and large left me to carry on as best I could in what she recognised as a difficult job. For example, she never once in five years suggested that the government should make a move to restore capital punishment even though I knew that would be her strong preference. On the whole she left me alone, only complaining mildly when something happened to surprise her, for example a prison riot. Provided she was spared such surprises, she backed me strongly in Cabinet.

the scene somewhat altered, but this was inevitable. For ten years, she had been deeply immersed in foreign affairs; she knew the people with whom she had to deal, both on the British side and overseas. I got used to her occasional outbursts against her fellow Europeans, but these were usually reserved either for the attempts to brief her before a meeting, or for the press conference or Commons statement after it was over.

When Mrs Thatcher became our leader, like so many other women in the Conservative Party, I was excited, and determined to help her make it to Prime Minister. Having long been a keen European, I was well aware that there would be some difference of opinion and approach, but having always seen the Conservative Party as having a broad spectrum of views, I was determined to do my bit.

The first chance came when she appointed me a junior opposition spokesman on Health and Social Security in November 1976. Getting
to grips with pensions and social security was a formidable task, which she well knew. It was thus always heartening to have her quiet enquiries, and later, when I was a minister, her remarkable support. Once we were in government in that department, we all worked the ministerial machine to try to turn round MPs' enquiries and also to reform policy so as to keep the ever-spiralling budget under control and to rid the system of the incredible contradictions in entitlements.

It was in 1982, when we were legislating to remove strikers' benefits, that I knew of her full support. The Minister of State on the Social Security Bill Committee, Hugh Rossi, had a heart condition, and could not work after 1830 hours, so when debates went on, first in the Commons until 2200 hours and then in Committee through the night, with a timetable motion in force to deter the Labour opposition from their continual filibustering, I was on my own leading the government team. The most controversial part of the Bill was the removal of strikers' entitlement to social security. The opposition put down a wrecking amendment and we began to debate it at two in the morning! Within minutes of the start of the debate, the public gallery door opened, and in came the Prime Minister with a Private Secretary to listen. She remained with us for the full two hours the debate took, and wrote me a very kind note once we had defeated the opposition amendment.

There were many times when I was Minister of State for Transport when the Prime Minister gave quiet but firm encouragement, such as the battle to have seat belts made compulsory to save lives. Many backbenchers thought that this was anti-libertarian and so opposed the law change, but the Prime Minister gave me her full support to introduce the government-agreed measure, which has
since saved many thousands of lives and prevented much injury in road accidents.

From the day I went to the Foreign Office in 1986 to work on Europe and Africa, I knew that my real political battles would increase. In fact, the Single European Bill to get rid of trade barriers and establish much improved working with our European Community neighbours was exactly in line with our manifesto commitments, but it was at about the time when some outrageous statements from M. Delors of France and Signor Andreotti of Italy began to inflame the anti-European fever among a proportion of our backbenchers. Throughout the passage of the Bill, I had nothing but active support from Margaret.

Later, our views on Europe diverged, but there was rarely a time when I felt I would not be supported, and Margaret was the very person who had given me the real chance in politics to focus on Africa, the development of which has been my interest and concern since I helped two girls from Botswana back in 1955. While I was still Minister of Transport, I was encouraged by her to develop transport exports in Africa, and work in West Africa had encouraged me to sharpen up my conversational French. Thus as Minister for Africa from 1986 onwards, I had the chance to expand my interest and to help to resolve many issues, thanks to Margaret Thatcher.

Our views may have differed, but many discussions allowed me to learn a great deal from her and her colleagues in committees and Cabinet when I attended in the Foreign Secretary's absence overseas.

The early years of Margaret's premiership were very tough at times, but that was the time when the foundations of many reforms were laid. Even if we differed, as our experiences in life were so
changed by our exposure to the very challenges we had been elected to solve, I shall always be grateful for her advice and friendly guidance, so often given quite unexpectedly.