Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Butler of Brockwell Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Butler of Brockwell]

My Lords, I have listened to all the wonderful tributes paid this afternoon and this evening, and I have asked myself whether there is anything which I can add. There are just one or two aspects which I should like to add. I was not going to speak about the Brighton bomb because her resolution and courage on that occasion has been widely dealt with. However, since the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who I am glad to see in his place, referred to it and to the tragicomic aspect of it, I should supplement the picture that he gave of his crawling to the door, opening it and meeting Margaret Thatcher’s face on the other side. As he may remember, she was gorgeously attired in the blue evening dress that she had been wearing for the blue ball, which added to the absurdity of that tragic situation.

I am very pleased that reference has been made to the kindness shown to Lady Thatcher by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. I believe that another person should be added. He is a colleague of mine on the Cross Benches and was a colleague at No 10; namely, my noble friend Lord Powell of Bayswater. He and his wife have been splendid to Lady Thatcher in her latter days. Indeed, I think that on Sunday evening, he was the last person, outside her family, to visit her. About a month ago, my noble friend said that he had been with her on a Sunday afternoon. I asked him what he talked to her about because, of course, in her latter months, she found conversation difficult. He said, “We didn’t talk. We turned on the television and we watched ‘Songs of Praise’ and we sung the hymns together”. I think that that is a lovely picture of those two doing that.

The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, has spoken splendidly about the support which Margaret Thatcher gave him as Cabinet Secretary, and her support for the Civil Service and the esteem in which she held it. I do not want to add to that, except to endorse everything that he said as being the case during my experience in the post which he occupied before me.

I should like to take up what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, said about her role as a lawyer. I am very glad he referred to that. I had a word with him outside the Chamber. Another aspect that needs to be emphasised was the way in which she upheld the rule of law, which was a very important principle in her life. I was travelling in a car with the Prime Minister when we saw on a newspaper hoarding that the High Court had found against the Government in the judicial review about the Government’s banning of unions at GCHQ. She was going to the House of Commons that afternoon and it was clear that, quite understandably, the Labour Party would make a lot of this and would be jubilant about it because it had supported the trade unions in opposing the Government’s action. She said, “Well, we must appeal but if the court rules against us, we must of course accept its judgment. We cannot ask the miners to accept the rule of law if we, the Government, are not prepared to accept it ourselves”. That is just one illustration of the principle that she held.

When judicial review was gaining force and I was head of the Civil Service, I suggested to Margaret Thatcher that we might arrange a seminar between senior civil servants and some of the judges so that the judges would know more about the way in which decisions were taken in government. “Absolutely not”, she said. “I am not going to have any appearance of the Executive appearing to interfere with the independence of the judges. We must keep them strictly separate”. That is an aspect of her principles and her Administration that I do not think has been much mentioned.

The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, spoke of his experience working with her as Cabinet Secretary. Although the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, was here earlier, nobody has spoken about the experience of working with her as a Private Secretary. Like the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, I was her Principal Private Secretary, in my case between 1982 and 1985. Inside No.10, having the privilege of seeing her in that intimate setting, we of course saw a very different person from the one that the public saw outside. The public saw the bravura performances and the confidence. She has been charged with being overconfident, even arrogant, but you saw a very different picture, before the great public appearances, inside No. 10—somebody whose motivation and force was not built on overconfidence but was in fact built on lack of self-confidence. I say that because I heard her say it herself publicly, after she left office. She said it was something that the media never really realised about her. I believe that that was the driving force behind her perfectionism in her appearance, in her dress, in her speeches and in her grip on her briefing. All those things had to be perfect before she would appear in public. There was a reference earlier to the conference speech after the Brighton bomb and her sitting in the green room, saying, “I am not sure I can go through with this”. Gordon Reece said, “Of course you can go through with it”. I am absolutely certain that she was always going to go through with it. Many times, I saw her say beforehand that she was not sure she could do something and then go out and give a bravura performance.

When I was Principal Private Secretary, in briefing her for Prime Minister’s Questions, I did not brief her on the facts—other people did that—but regarded my job as being to calm her down, usually by reassuring her that her case was good in answer to a Question and, just occasionally, if she was sleepy after lunch, to work her up a bit and say, “Prime Minister, I think you have to worry about this Question, this is quite difficult”. It was about getting the horse to the starting gate with exactly the right amount of perspiration on the flanks, and then she would perform superbly in the House of Commons.

I was very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, said earlier that criticisms that she never listened were quite misplaced. She did listen, but talked at the same time—she could listen while she talked. It is true that she regarded attack as the best form of defence but she was also always willing to learn. Finally, I just offer an anecdote to the House which I think illustrates these three characteristics. It relates to a time after she had ceased to be Prime Minister and after I had ceased to be Cabinet Secretary. She very kindly came to my college at Oxford to talk. In the course of her remarks to the students, she said that one of the things that she worried about in modern life, and the life facing their generation, was the number of children born illegitimate. When it came round to questions, one of the students said to her, “Lady Thatcher, don’t you think it is a little unfair to use the word ‘illegitimate’ of a child throughout its life when it has had no influence over the circumstances of its own birth?”. Her eyes flashed and she said, “Well, what would you call them? I can think of another word but I think it would be even more unkind”. I thought, “Goodness, what’s going to happen?”, but the moment passed. She came to dinner and chapel, and in the lighter part of the evening we were having a drink in the Master’s Lodgings before she and Denis went back to London. We were talking about other things completely when she suddenly said, “You know, Robin, that young man who asked me this afternoon about the word ‘illegitimate’ had a point didn’t he?”. That was quite characteristic. I will wager that she never used the word illegitimate again. She was always prepared to learn, even from a student. She hit back immediately but then she thought about it and took the point.

Those are just three reminiscences I have out of a treasure house of memories. I never had any doubt while I was working with her as Private Secretary and Cabinet Secretary that I was a witness to greatness as well as to great events. Those are memories that I will treasure all my life.