Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Waldegrave of North Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waldegrave of North Hill]

My Lords, it is a very great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Forsyth. I think that the House has already paid tribute to his own role in support of Lady Thatcher in later years; it is one that should indeed be on the record.

I was her last appointment to the Cabinet. In the run-up to the first Gulf War, I was going across two or three times every day as Minister of State at the Foreign Office until she said, “Come in, William, I want a word with you. You are to be Secretary of State for Health”. This was unexpected news to me, as it was to the rest of the country and certainly to the health service. She looked at me and said, “I think you need a large whisky. I will have one too. Now, Kenneth has stirred them all up”—that was my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke—“and I want you to quieten them all down”.

She was extremely pragmatic, in the best sense, about the health service. She made it perfectly clear to me that if I thought that the reforms which had just been launched were not well based, it was up to me to stop them. As a matter of fact, I came to believe that they were the right thing to do and tried to follow them through. However, that showed that although she was often described as an ideologue—this is a point that has been made today—she was not. She did not fall into the mistake of thinking that there were grand theories to explain everything. She stuck to common, decent morality and then looked at the facts.

I want to make two small points in relation to that. It has been said already by the noble Lord, Lord May, above all, and by others that her science training was crucial to her. I think that it was; she was the first and only woman to be Prime Minister and the first and only scientist to be Prime Minister. I hope that there will be more of both. As the noble Lord, Lord May, said, she played an extremely important part in a number of crucial scientific issues, of which perhaps the most famous was the work to take action to stop the production of CFCs—chlorofluorocarbons—which were damaging the ozone layer. It did no harm, of course, that some of the crucial science which led to the proof of the damage to the ozone layer had been done by British scientists, by the British Antarctic Survey, so it was respectable science. She acted.

It was not always so successful. As a Minister in the Department of the Environment, I tried to persuade her to impose flue gas desulphurisation on the power stations to stop acid rain. She did not want to do it, partly because she did not want to put the price of coal up and damage the coal industry even more, although this may sound paradoxical to some. I plotted with Horst Teltschik, who ran Chancellor Kohl’s office, and said to him ahead of a bilateral summit in Bonn, “Will you get your man to really put some pressure on over this, because I think she might move”. She obviously saw me coming a long way in advance. We arrived in Bonn in helicopters and got out. There was a local inversion—a local hot day—and therefore smog. “Now Helmut”, she said to the cowering Chancellor—he was always a little nervous of her, as were others—“I will tell you what you have here. You have got an inversion and a smog. If you had proper clean air laws, like we do in England, that would have put paid to all that. I will explain the chemistry to you if you like”. He did not want to know the chemistry and no more was heard over that weekend of my plot. She was not an ideologue, she was somebody who looked at the evidence.

The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said of course that we must not forget the towering contribution of Gorbachev to the reformation of Europe. But who was it who first spotted that Gorbachev was the person with whom we were going to be able to “do business”? As a footnote here, we should pay tribute to a brave man, Oleg Gordievsky, who briefed her that Gorbachev was going to be a man you could do business with, but then she sold Gorbachev to Reagan, and the rest was history.

As another example, where she is often misinterpreted, she understood that FW de Klerk was something different and that all the clamour about sanctions was irrelevant. She preserved Britain’s position, so that when things began to move in South Africa, well briefed by a formidable ambassador in the noble Lord, Lord Renwick, we had leverage and she could say to de Klerk, “We will help you do this”. That is what Mr Mandela himself recognised. He paid tribute to her role in the final transition days from apartheid in South Africa. It is a crude and completely ignorant caricature to say that she was on the wrong side in South Africa—when it came to it, she played a crucial part.

The House deserves one apology from someone like me, who is a member of the University of Oxford, which she loved. I was present once when she was at a dinner at Somerville, my mother’s college, and spoke so movingly about what Somerville had meant to her, a grammar school girl coming into the world, and how passionately she supported the equality of opportunity that those colleges provided. It was a disgraceful example of the perennial ineptitude of the collectivity of the University of Oxford, which has nearly always managed to get these issues wrong—it got it wrong over Asquith and it got it wrong over her. It remains a disgrace and I only wish that there were some way of putting that right posthumously, but there is not.

In 1973, my then boss, Lord Rothschild, made a speech—or at least he gave a lecture which was then leaked—saying that in the year 2000 Britain would be half as rich per capita as France, which caused displeasure to the then Government of Mr Heath. It did not happen and instead we just overtook France. What had happened in between? Lady Thatcher had happened.