Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I joined my noble friend Lord Jopling’s Whips’ Office in 1982. The highlight of our year was when the Prime Minister came to have dinner with us, which normally ended with a question and answer session when her praetorian guards of Whips were treated rather like backsliding leftists. However, it was always a very invigorating occasion. It was a great honour for us when she then suggested that she might return the favour and that we might come with our wives to have lunch at Chequers. Unfortunately, that never happened because the Brighton bomb came in between, so instead dinner was laid on in Downing Street for both the Lords and the Commons Whips.

That meal ended in the same way, with the Prime Minister saying, “Right, does anybody have any problems or concerns they would like to raise?”. I remember that my noble friend Lady Trumpington asked the first question, about pensions. She got slapped down pretty swiftly, and then John Major, who was the Treasury Whip, piped up and said, “Prime Minister, there is deep concern in the country on the following issues”. She went for him such as I have never seen. A row erupted of such seriousness that it ended on a very sour note. At one stage, we thought that John Major might even walk out of the room, and we were very concerned that he may have completely destroyed his political career. As we walked from the dining room to the drawing room in Downing Street, Denis Thatcher came up to him and said, “Don’t worry, dear boy, she gets like this sometimes”. The next day, she reconciled the position with John Major, and three months later he was a junior Minister in her Government. That story is becoming better known and is very significant, because it indicates the sort of woman that she was. She loved the row but never had any feelings of bitterness. She respected people who stood up to her and never held it against anybody at all.

I came to get to know her much better in 1987, when I was made her PPS. If I am brutally frank, I was not terribly good at the job. I did very badly when Alan Clark came to see her as Minister of Trade, and I totally failed to tell the Prime Minister something. I do not think she was aware that Alan Clark always rather prided himself on having two attributes of Adolf Hitler, namely that he was a vegetarian and hated foxhunting. His pitch to the Prime Minister was that he considered it a very good idea if labels were to be put on furs saying, “The fur being sold here has been caught in an extremely inhumane trap”. It would have been rather like having a health warning on cigarettes. The Prime Minister was absolutely appalled by this and said, “Alan, what on earth makes you so concerned to do this?”. He said, “Prime Minister, didn’t you know that I’m a vegetarian?”. She looked at him and said, “But Alan, you are wearing leather shoes”. He drawled, “I do not think you expect your Ministers to wear plastic shoes, Prime Minister”. Needless to say, the pleas got nowhere because the calculation that Alan Clark had not made was that because the Prime Minister was MP for Finchley, many of her Jewish constituents were furriers and the last thing she was going to do was ruin their business.

She was very interesting. She never read the daily papers. I remember taking that up with her at one stage and asking why she did not. Every morning in Downing Street, we used to get the most wonderful summary of absolutely everything that was in the daily papers from Bernard Ingham’s press department. I would give my eye teeth to get hold of that today; it was a brilliant piece of work. However, she used to say, “I never read the daily papers because they write such harmful and personal abuse about me and my family that I could never get the job done that I have to do”. Later, when John Major was Prime Minister and having his problems with the media, I raised this with him. I said that she had never actually read the daily papers, and he looked at me as if I had gone slightly weak in the head. Certainly, part of her thing in life was that you have to do the job you are faced with and that it really was not good enough to be reading the papers every day, or you just could not get on with what needed to be done.

I always remember a meeting, held at Downing Street at five o’clock in the evening, to discuss a policy paper. I thought that it would all go quite calmly; I knew that the Cabinet Minister who was presenting the paper was a friend and somebody she supported. He had no opportunity to present his paper as such. She launched into him and said, “It strikes me that the problems with this are the following”, and so forth, and another furious argument took place, leaving us all looking at our feet and wondering, “Goodness, where is all this going to go?”. She always kept to the timescale, which was half an hour for the meeting. We were coming to the end, and she summed up by saying, “Of course, I agree with absolutely everything you are trying to do here. I just thought I’d play devil’s advocate and make sure that you’d thought out all the arguments”. That is just one of the reasons why she was a very great Prime Minister.

As the leader of the Conservatives she was always terribly bored that the socialists had something called “Socialist International”. She thought that this gave a lot of respectability to left-wing parties, and she could not quite understand why the Conservatives should not have the same thing. She was, therefore, very much party to setting up something called the European Democrat Union, which later moved on to be the International Democrat Union. Although she never took me, as her PPS, on foreign trips, this was a party political occasion, because the IDU meeting was being chaired by Chancellor Kohl. We sat in the most enormous room in the Reichstag building—this was, of course, before the wall came down—and Chancellor Kohl gave a speech to welcome everybody that I strongly suspect was written by somebody else. She just made a few short notes, and when it came to her opportunity to speak she pointed through the window and said, “People tell me that the building that we can see over the Berlin Wall, out through this window, is the headquarters of the East German intelligence service. People also say to me that they are probably listening to every word we are saying here today, in which case I would like them to know—”, and she then went into a great tirade about how freedom was what we were all fighting for, and that freedom would conquer in the end. How right she was; the wall came down not very much later.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford alluded to the fact that she was brought up as a Methodist, but she was always very much an adopted member of the Church of England. When I was sitting with her in the House of Commons, waiting to vote late in the evening, she was going on about the worrying question of women priests. She said that she did not think that there should be women priests in the Church of England because she thought it would split the Church of England. I took issue with her and said, “I don’t think, Prime Minister, that as a woman Prime Minister you can really take objection to women becoming priests. Anyway, I don’t know what you’re so worried about; I think women are capable of greater spirituality than men, and they are also less prone to sexual temptation”. “Oh, I don’t know about that!” she said. As always with Margaret Thatcher, she never agreed that you had won the argument, but some weeks later Bernard Ingham would put out a very small press release, saying, “Thatcher backs women priests”, and so forth. So she came round in the end.

The noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, referred to the fact that she could survive on three or four hours’ sleep. I had to spend quite a bit of my time travelling in an armour-plated Daimler, whose roof was of course lowered to make it more bomb-proof. It had a very inadequate air-conditioning system, and we usually had very large policemen and drivers sitting in front. The heat used to accumulate massively, and I have to say that both she and I used to nod off quite regularly. It became rather embarrassing when my wife went around saying, “Archie spends much of his time sleeping with the Prime Minister in the back of her car”.

Margaret Thatcher first came to stay with me in the country shortly after she stood down, in January 1991. It was interesting. We were sitting there in the evening and the telephone rang. It was John Major ringing her up to say that the hostilities were about to begin in the Gulf. Needless to say, she stayed up the whole night listening to the wireless to hear what was going on. I was Minister for the Armed Forces but went to bed and listened to the news the next morning. That might be one of the reasons why she was Prime Minister and I never was. It was an indication of her extraordinary determination to be involved, and, of course, it was a war that she had been very much involved with in the beginning.

The Thatchers came to stay with us quite regularly from that moment. We even had them to stay twice for Christmas. Shortly after Denis died, she came to stay with us down in Devon. At that stage, she still thought that Denis was alive. There was a period of her life, which was quite short, I think, when she was not really reconciled to the fact that he had died. It is regrettable that so much of that film, “The Iron Lady”, should have been on the period in her life when she thought that her husband was still with us. She was never really the same again after he died. It knocked her very hard. He was a great companion to her and life was extremely difficult for her from that moment on.

She was a very great lady. She was an evangelist. She was not like most modern politicians. She had a mission. But everything that she stood for will survive her. From my point of view, it has been a very great privilege to have served with her and to have served in her Government.