Dale Memories of Margaret Thatcher

A Portrait, By Those Who Knew Her Best
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84954-612-6
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 592 Seiten

Margaret Thatcher is a British icon. There is no denying her place in history as Britain's greatest peacetime Prime Minister. The reaction to her death confirms that twenty-three years after leaving office she still bestrides the political scene, both in Britain and around the world, like a colossus. Margaret Thatcher was elected to Parliament in 1959. Twenty years later she became Britain's first woman Prime Minister. She achieved two further landslide election victories, making her the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool. She resigned in November 1990 after eleven-and-a-half years at the pinnacle of British politics. Memories of Margaret Thatcher brings together over 200 personal reminiscences and anecdotes from those who - whether political friends or opponents, observing her from the press gallery or toiling to keep her flame alight in the constituencies - experienced close encounters with the Iron Lady. They include, among others, Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, Norman Tebbit, Cecil Parkinson, Matthew Parris, Michael Howard, Paddy Ashdown, Adam Boulton, Lord Ashcroft, Sebastian Coe, Boris Johnson, Ann Widdecombe, William Hague, Sir Bernard Ingham, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Esther Rantzen, Dame Ann Leslie, David Davis, Liam Fox and many more. Amusing, revealing, sympathetic and occasionally antagonistic, these observations combine to give a unique portrait of the political and personal life of a remarkable woman. They show the deeply private and compassionate nature of a woman who will forever be known as the Iron Lady.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dale, Iain

Leseproben

I became a Thatcherite at the age of sixteen. Thirty-four years later I still hold to the beliefs and values that defined Margaret Thatcher’s time in office. Twenty-three years after her fall from power, Margaret Thatcher and her legacy still have an important and telling influence on British political life, in the same way that Gladstone and Disraeli did a century earlier. Even though she hadn’t made a full speech for ten years by the time she died, she retained the ability to make news and influence current-day politicians in a way which no other politician could. But with her legacy come a lot of myths, myths which I hope this book can help dispel.

She is loved and hated in equal measures. The bile and venom on the internet whenever her name is mentioned has to be seen to be believed. She is often held to be responsible for all the ills of today’s economy and society, even though it is more than two decades since she left Downing Street. She was inexplicably blamed for the recent banking crisis, her critics conveniently ignoring that it was the Labour government who introduced a new system of banking regulation in the late 1990s.

But those of us who remain firm adherents and defenders of the Thatcherite legacy must also recognise that times move on and that what was right for the country in the 1980s might not be the medicine that the country needs now. I think the secret is to understand how Thatcherite principles can be applied to today’s politics, rather than to get hung up on individual policies.

Perhaps, though, the main lesson that today’s politicians must learn from Margaret Thatcher is to look at her policy of ‘sound money’. We seem to conveniently forget how much of a basket case the British economy was in 1979, when the Conservatives won the election. Only three years earlier the Labour Chancellor, Denis Healey, had humiliatingly been forced to go to the IMF. Nationalised industries were overmanned and inefficient and British industry was clinging onto the glories of an industrial past, without realising that other countries were overtaking us in an increasingly competitive international market. It wasn’t the Thatcher government that destroyed British manufacturing in the 1980s. It was weak management and rampant trade unions which combined to prevent the modernisation of working practices that was proving so disastrous to the British car, steel and coal industries, among many others. Margaret Thatcher forced industrial leaders to wake up to the fact that without standing up to the trade unions they might as well give up.

She also woke up a nation which had got used to its decline in world influence, and had never really recovered from Suez. It wasn’t just the Falklands War that put the ‘Great’ back into Great Britain, it was the strong diplomacy deployed in her dealings with the European Community and the Soviet bloc that restored a pride and self-respect to Britain which had been missing for decades. And it brought a new respect from other countries and world leaders. We were no longer regarded as a soft touch in international negotiations. All this came as a deep shock to the Foreign Office mandarins, who were in the business of ‘managing decline’.

In the introduction to a previous book on Margaret Thatcher, I said that an aim of the book was to give the reader insight into the character of Margaret Thatcher and her political views. It is even more the case with this book and I hope it goes some way to destroying the myth of a hard, uncaring and ill-meaning politician. I hope that you, the reader, will enjoy the anecdotes in this book and will forgive me for getting the ball rolling with my own!

Margaret Thatcher is the reason I became actively involved in politics. She inspired me, as a sixteen-year-old, to join the Conservative Party and do my bit to help revive Britain. One of the tasks of today’s political leaders is to provide a lead, to inspire, to motivate. Margaret Thatcher was able to do that in a way few politicians in this country have been able to emulate. My first tentative footstep into the political arena was to set up a Conservative organisation in 1982 at the very left-wing University of East Anglia. Only a few months later followed my first encounter with Margaret Thatcher when she invited the chairmen of the various University Conservative Associations to a reception at No. 10.

For a country boy like me, it was unbelievable to have been invited and it was something I had been looking forward to for months. Just to climb those stairs, with the portraits of all past Prime Ministers on the walls was worth the trip on its own. And there at the top of the stairs was the Prime Minister. She had obviously perfected the art of welcoming people to receptions and as she shook you by the hand and wished you a good evening, she moved you on into the room without you even knowing she was doing it. Most of the Cabinet were there – I remember discussing with Cecil Parkinson the number of free running shoes he had been sent after a recent profile had announced to the world that he was a keen runner. He offered me a pair but it turned out his feet were much smaller than mine! We were constantly plied with wine and I made a mental note to stop at two glasses. But after the second glass was emptied I felt rather self-conscious without a glass in my hand so grabbed another. Just as the Prime Minister walked by I took a sip. All I remember is my stomach heaving and me thinking that I was about to throw up at the Prime Minister’s feet, thus ending a glorious political career which had hardly got off the ground. Luckily I managed to control my stomach and all was well. It turned out that it was whisky in the glass, rather than white wine.

Later in the evening, as I was talking to my local MP, Alan Haselhurst, the division bell sounded. Although there were at least forty MPs there, none made a move to leave to go and vote over the road in the House of Commons. Mrs Thatcher started to look rather irritated and was obviously none too impressed. In the end she walked to the middle of the room, took off one of her shoes and banged it on the floor. There was instant silence. The Prime Minister then spoke. ‘Would all Conservative MPs kindly leave the building immediately,’ she instructed. ‘And the rest of us will stay and enjoy ourselves!’ Naturally we all laughed uproariously, enjoying the sight of the MPs trooping out of the room in a somewhat sheepish manner.

After I graduated I went to work at the House of Commons as a researcher for a Norfolk Member of Parliament, Patrick Thompson. He was not a particularly well-known MP and never courted publicity. He had a marginal seat and devoted himself to his constituency rather than join the rent-a-quote mob. It served him well as he held his seat for the next two elections. If ever there was an MP less likely to be involved in sleaze it was him. But one day, a careless error by me left him open to charges of dirty dealing. We ran a businessmen’s club in the constituency, called The Westminster Circle. It served two purposes – firstly to keep the MP in touch with local businesses and secondly to raise a little money for the very poor constituency association. For 100 a year, business people joined and were given a dinner in the House of Commons, usually addressed by a Cabinet minister, and another dinner in the constituency, addressed by a more junior minister. These clubs were common in all parties up and down the country. But in a publicity leaflet designed to attract new members I had used the phrase ‘with direct access to government ministers’. By this I had meant that they would be able to meet and speak to a government minister at the dinner. In those pre-‘cash for questions’ days we were all rather innocent. But it proved to be my undoing – and very nearly my employer’s.

Early one Tuesday afternoon Patrick found out that at that day’s Prime Minister’s Questions, the Liberal leader, David Steel, would raise this subject with the Prime Minister. He immediately went to see her in her office behind the Speaker’s Chair. He must have been quaking in his boots but he later told me she had been brilliant. She sat him down, offered him a coffee and heard him out. She did not disguise her dislike for Steel and thought it typical of him to operate in this manner. She told him she would let Steel have both barrels, and of course she did! He returned to the office after PM’s Questions and related the events of the day to me. I had been completely oblivious, which was just as well as I would no doubt have been having a premonition of what a P45 looks like.

A few months later I was having lunch with a couple of Tory MPs in the Members’ cafeteria. We had just finished our lunch when in walked Mrs T. and her entourage. She grabbed a tray and chose a light lunch of Welsh rarebit. Unfortunately, as we had finished, I did not have cause to hang around too much longer so left the room, cursing that we had decided to have an early lunch. A few minutes later I realised I had left some papers and magazines on the table in the cafeteria and returned to retrieve them. As luck would have it, the Thatcher group had sat themselves at the table we had been sitting at and Mrs T. had her elbow plonked on my papers. I decided to summon up the courage and interrupt them to ask for my papers. Just as I had started I looked down at the pile of papers and to my horror saw that my copy of the new issue of was on the top of them and the front cover had a particularly nasty photo of Denis Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher...