Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Forsyth of Drumlean Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I join those who have paid respects to the Thatcher family. It is a terrible thing to lose one’s mother but to do so in the glare of international publicity and commentary must be particularly hard to bear. I think that we owe Carol, Mark and the family a great debt for having shared their mother with us for so long. We will all be thinking about them today.

The shadow Leader of the House, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, was kind enough to point out that from time to time I helped Lady Thatcher as she attended the House of Lords. However, it was becoming something of a burden. I found that trying to keep going with my job and being here to look after Margaret was quite difficult, so I thought that I would tackle this problem. I said, “You know, Margaret, you’ve been Prime Minister and you’ve done a great service to our country. You don’t need to come here as often as you do”. She turned to me and said, “Michael, when we accept appointment to this place, it is our duty to attend here. How many times have you been here in the past two months?”. That illustrated her love for Parliament and her devotion to it. Someone said earlier that she was scared of nothing. She was quite scared of the House of Commons. I remember seeing her knees knocking when she was making speeches. That was because she respected the House of Commons. When you were discussing policy she would often say, “What do we do about telling Parliament?”. This was always central to her, and she had great respect for our constitution.

I first met her through Keith Joseph, as a young man in my early 20s, at the Centre for Policy Studies, now so ably chaired by my noble friend Lord Saatchi, where they were trying to build the building blocks to turn around our country. As a young man I was told that Britain had no future—that it was best to emigrate. Somebody wrote an editorial in the Times saying that it would be impossible to govern without the support of the trade unions. I thought, “I’m going to have to get involved here”. I never wanted to be a politician, but I ended up becoming one because of Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and the battle of ideas. Ideas fascinated her. Whenever you had an issue or a policy discussion, she would always start by saying, “What are the facts?”, and then you would work out how you were going to sell this particularly difficult policy.

She was quite forgiving of mistakes, and I made a few. As a young man I was involved in her leadership campaign as chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students. We produced literature to encourage people to vote for her, which was aimed at young people. I made the mistake of sticking one of the stickers on the party chairman’s door in central office, and there was the most almighty row, because the slogan was, “Put a woman on top for a change”. I thought, “She will never speak to me again”, but typically, she pretended not to understand the double entendre.

It is said that you can judge people by their opponents, and that has been used in the context of the disgraceful minority of Trots and socialist workers who have behaved so badly in recent days. I will mention one thing about Gordon Brown. As Prime Minister, Gordon Brown invited Margaret to No. 10 on several occasions but on one occasion she was invited for the unveiling of a portrait—a portrait of Margaret that had been commissioned and paid for privately. In his tribute to her, Gordon Brown said that there were only three other oil portraits of Prime Ministers in No. 10 Downing Street. One is of Walpole and was the first portrait of a Prime Minister to hang in the Cabinet Room; another was of Wellington, who saved us from Napoleon; and the third is of Winston Churchill, who saved Britain and Europe from the Nazis. He went on to say, “And I think it is entirely appropriate, Lady Thatcher, given what you have done for our country, that the fourth should be of you”. I was astonished by that, and then I thought, “Well, actually, it is possible in politics to recognise brilliance and achievements while still disagreeing”. Gordon Brown deserves considerable credit for recognising that.

The noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, mentioned Margaret’s Methodism. Her religion was very important to her. However, she could be pragmatic about it. In her latter years a number of us tried to get her involved in social occasions. It is often said that she was not interested in the arts and music and so on, but that is nonsense. She was just so busy sorting out the country that she did not have time for it. I invited her to Ascot, and she said, “Well, I was brought up as a Methodist and we’re not really keen on this gambling, but I understand there are six races”. She opened her handbag and said, “I’ve got £5 for each race. Is that all right?”. The first race was run and she lost, and she looked extremely glum. I had seated her next to someone who was a racing expert, and I said, “What’s happened?”. She said, “We’ve lost”. I said to this chap, who was called Dominic Burke, “Dominic, if you lose the next race you’ll go the way of Michael Heseltine”. She said, “That’s quite right”. She won every single subsequent race. She had all this money and said, “I’m not sure the Methodists were right about this gambling”, and was so pleased that she stood on the balcony and joined in the singing of “Roll out the Barrel”. I thought, if only people could see the real Margaret Thatcher, and not the Margaret Thatcher that has been painted as an image.

A number of people have pointed to her having a feel and affection for, and an easy way with, ordinary folk. My noble friend Lord Lamont talked about this. When I worked for Flemings investment bank, we had a fantastic collection of pictures. She asked to see the pictures, so I arranged a dinner and a number of prominent people from the City came to it. They all sat down while we finished looking at the pictures. I was taking her up and everybody was waiting for her. Then the lift door opened and a cleaning lady came face to face with Margaret Thatcher and said, “Oh, Mrs Thatcher, I like you”. Margaret said, “My dear, what are you doing here at this time of night?”. She said, “I’m just finishing my shift, but I’m such an admirer of yours”. They got chatting and Margaret said, “Do you do the whole place yourself”. The cleaner said, “No, I’ve got all my friends downstairs but they won’t believe that I’ve met you”. Margaret said, “We’ll go and meet them”. I said, “But Margaret, we’ve got a dinner going”, but she went down and talked to all the cleaning ladies while everybody else had to wait. That was very typical of the way in which she operated.

Since 1990, she has been supported by a magnificent team of people. Of course, Denis was her main support until his sad death but Mark Worthington, her political secretary, really did work seven days a week and 24 hours a day. He did a brilliant job and sometimes dealt with very difficult issues which came up from time to time. I would particularly like to mention Cynthia Crawford, who was with her from the start. Crawfie organised her wardrobe and I can tell your Lordships that she was very careful about how she used her clothes and how they could be recycled. However, Margaret always turned out absolutely immaculately, down to the last day that she was here, for a lunch just before Christmas.

I went to the last lunch that she held in No. 10 before she left as Prime Minister, when Keith Joseph paid a handsome tribute to her. He had been the architect of so many of the ideas that she, with her pragmatism and clarity of mind, had gone on to implement. He said that she was a beautiful giant who had achieved more than any of us ever dreamt would be possible. I cannot add to how he put it. He is, sadly, not with us here today but made such a tremendous contribution quietly to the Conservative Party and its philosophy.