Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Jopling Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jopling]

My Lords, I speak as one of the dwindling band of those who appeared in the 1979 photograph of the Cabinet. I speak also as one of an even smaller band of members of her shadow Cabinet in prior years. Those of us who are left share with many more the sadness and affection that are felt at this time.

Much has been said over the past few days about Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, much of it has been said several times, but let me add two or three of my memories. I remember Margaret Thatcher above all as a particularly kind woman. I give one example. At the first Christmas for which she was Prime Minister, in 1979, she said to me, “Do you know of any of our people in the House of Commons who are going to be alone—through death, divorce or whatever—over this Christmas period? If you do, I would like to ask them to Chequers to come and stay over Christmas”. That, I thought at the time, was one of the most generous things from somebody with all the pressures on them of being Prime Minister.

There are some who say that she was a very bad listener. I would argue strongly with that. Maybe she was not a very good listener when some of her colleagues were embarking on what I call waffle. However, often I was at a meeting of Ministers when a Secretary of State had to come and propose a new policy. She would begin the discussion in her typically strident way, saying, “Well, Secretary of State, I am not very attracted to what you want to do, but let us hear it, if you must”. He would then explain what he wanted to do. Others would come in. Having listened, she would say, “Well, Secretary of State, if that is what you want to do, you’d better go on and do it. But if it all goes pear-shaped, don’t come back to me to bail you out”.

Of course, Margaret Thatcher loved, probably above all, an informed political debate. I have a memory of a very small lunch in Downing Street, when Pierre Trudeau come over from Canada to complain because we were not expediting as much as he would have liked the legislation to release British control over the Canadian constitution. At lunch, we quickly got that out of the way. Then Margaret Thatcher and Pierre Trudeau, who clearly disliked each other, embarked on a gloves-off confrontation of political philosophies. Francis Pym and I were the only outsiders present. It was a memorable experience to be a fly on the wall and listen to those two going hammer and tongs together.

The one word, I suppose, that many will think of with regard to Margaret Thatcher is “leadership”. Many people today who look back on Margaret Thatcher’s period with enmity were not alive when she was Prime Minister. A myth has grown which has led to the contentious attitude of some people today. They forget that, in 1979, Britain was on its knees. What needed doing had needed doing for decades. She set out to do those things. She changed Britain. She changed much of what went on in the world. She played a major part in bringing down what Ronald Reagan described as the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union.

Finally, I find the hostility that one hears from some people today hardly surprising. I do not believe that she would feel at all surprised by that hostility, bearing in mind what she had to do and the fundamental changes that she needed to bring about.