Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Wilson of Dinton Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Dinton]

My Lords, I add my own tributes to the wealth of tributes which we have heard today—not, of course, at a political level, but as an official who served the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, for three years, from 1987 to 1990, as head of her domestic and economic secretariat under the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, and then under the noble Lord, Lord Butler. It was period of extraordinary and rapid change in so many areas: local government, with the community charge—I still cannot call it the poll tax; we were trained not to—the National Health Service; privatisation; education, with the introduction of the curriculum; the inner cities; and so on. The list felt endless.

Mrs Thatcher depended very heavily on briefing. She would use it once she came to the conclusion that she could rely upon you, and she did so very intensively so you had to get it right. There were occasions when she would disagree with one of her colleagues in a meeting. She would challenge them as to whether they were right or not on the strength of a brief. I can tell you, you learn things about the human body—your pores open in moments of stress—which I will not forget.

The other side of the coin was that she worked enormously hard; this, I am sure, is well known. We delivered lots of briefs to her in the evenings, and by the morning she would have mastered and be ready to use them to challenge with enormous skill. I remember saying to her on one occasion, “You must have worked very late to get all this into your mind”. She said, “Well, I find midnight is the worst. By 12.30 I get a second wind”. That, for me, captures it.

She was also very generous in the way in which she treated people who worked for her. She attributed to you qualities which you certainly did not have. I remember sitting down next to her at one meeting. She was deep in thought, and turned to me and said, “Now, can you explain to me what a put option is?”. That is quite a difficult question cold, when a lot of other Ministers are coming in. On another occasion, when Ministers were discussing the national curriculum, she was passionate about the importance of schoolchildren learning poetry by heart. She launched unexpectedly into some Robert Browning, which she quoted at some length. Then she could not remember what came next, and turned to me as the secretary and said, “Now what happens?”. Of course, I had not the faintest notion what happens next. It was very generous of her to think that one might know, but of course I did not.

She was also very kind, sometimes in a rather clumsy way. I was summoned on a Saturday to Chequers to explain to her a very complicated submission which I had put to her on the Friday night about how we might make the poll tax work or avoid some of the more difficult consequences which it seemed likely to have. It was really, really technically difficult. I was shown in to see her and she gave me a cup of tea. I had that in one hand and in the other she put an enormous cream bun, so covered in icing sugar that when we spoke there were clouds of it. We then had this very difficult and serious discussion while I held these two objects in my hands. It was a good meeting but it was slightly unusual.

We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, about her caution. There were all sorts of sides to that quality. I used to be astonished by the certainty with which she felt that she knew and understood what the British people were feeling and thinking, and where they stood, whatever everyone else among her colleagues were saying or thinking.

One example which comes to mind was that a decision had been taken that the National Dock Labour scheme should be abolished. That was being planned in great secrecy and we had reached the point where Ministers were in a position to give the go-ahead. There was fear of a strike, and so on. When we met the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher said, “I can see that all the plans are ready but I should say that we are not going to go ahead with this decision today. We are not going to make the announcement. It is January and it is cold and foggy. The public are depressed and have had enough bad news. This is not the right time. We will wait until the spring, when the sun and the daffodils are out, and it will be all right”. I found myself thinking, “How do we record this?”, but we recorded it and lo and behold, the Government waited until the spring and the decision went exactly as she said. It was fine, but there was a sense in which she was certain about the timing. It was all going on in her head and it was very impressive.

The other side of Mrs Thatcher, which I hope does not get overlooked, was her interest in science. I remember No. 10 organising groups of PhD or post-doctoral researchers to come and meet her. She would grill them for an afternoon and they would emerge looking exhausted, while she would look hugely refreshed by the experience of having cross-examined them on their science.

I think it was in the autumn of 1988 that, having read over the summer about climate change, she decided that it was a really big problem which people had underestimated. I am not sure that the world remembers it but she made a speech to the Royal Society—way ahead of international opinion, or opinion in this country—in which she very clearly set the problem out in scientific terms. She drew attention to the threats that it had for future generations and the moral imperative that she thought that Governments had to act on it. That was a very important landmark in people realising that it was a problem. It illustrates the limitations of the power of even a great Prime Minister such as Mrs Thatcher that very little happened immediately because of it, but it is interesting that her scientific background led her into that insight.

I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, will not mind my remembering that when she had finally surrendered her office to Her Majesty the Queen, he gave a small impromptu party to enable some of us who had worked for her to say farewell. I remember two things about that occasion. One was that she was going round saying very intense things. I am not even sure that she entirely knew what she was saying to everyone. I remember her coming up and saying to me, “What I always feel about problems in government is that the important thing is to work out what is the right thing to do. You may not be able to achieve it, or not immediately, but that has to be your starting point. That has to be your goal”. For me, that is what marks her out as an outstanding and extraordinary leader, perhaps above all.

The other thing I remember is the noble Lord, Lord Butler, himself saying in his speech to her, “Prime Minister, when we are old and retired the only really interesting thing about us will be that we worked for you”. That was a lovely compliment and today we are all proving that compliment to be right. I certainly feel hugely privileged for having worked for her. Those are three years that I would not have missed for all the world.