Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler]

My Lords, listening to the radio and watching television in the Isle of Wight, I was struck by the number of Conservatives at Westminster who said that Margaret Thatcher had brought them into politics. Some even suggested that they had been Thatcherites long before she even came to power.

Although I served with her in opposition and in government for 15 years in succession, I make neither claim. Mine was rather a different journey. In the leadership election of 1975 I voted for Ted Heath, and then followed that by voting for my noble and learned friend Lord Howe. It is fair to say that that was rather an exclusive campaign. We had 25 definite promises and pledges and we ended up with 19 votes, that being entirely par for the course in House of Commons elections. We had some good quality, however, in my noble friend Lord Brittan and my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke. As we chewed over the result in a small room upstairs, none of us was convinced that the party had made the right choice. It was then, to my total amazement, that Margaret Thatcher put me into her first shadow Cabinet; it is fair to say that that amazement was widely shared. I had never done a Front-Bench job before. I was put in charge of health and social security against Barbara Castle; I think that is known as a baptism of fire.

However, that proved a point about Lady Thatcher. Margaret was sometimes seen as surrounding herself with known supporters and yes-men. She had the confidence and the self-belief not to do that. As the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, said, you did not have to be “one of us” to be in her Cabinet. All three of us at the time were doubters, but all three of us became members of her Cabinet, and our very good candidate—who sadly got only 19 votes—became her excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, to whom she owed so much.

The second point is that she was personally kind and generous, and much concerned that her Ministers should not lose out in any way. I learnt about that in a roundabout way. After about 18 months I was moved from health and social security to transport. It was not the move that I was looking for. “What? Transport?”, I said to Margaret indignantly. She said, “Norman, I did transport. You can do transport”. That is exactly what happened. It proved to be a lucky move, for when the new Government were formed I went into the Cabinet, never having been even a junior Minister. Margaret Thatcher had a lengthy apology to make. She said, “I’m afraid we can pay in full only 22 Cabinet Ministers and you are the 23rd, so we will have to pay you at the rate of the Chief Whip”—my noble friend Lord Jopling, who is somewhere around. She said, “I am really very sorry about that”. I thought it best not to say that I would probably have done it for nothing had she asked, and we moved on.

I was fascinated by what the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, said about the visit of President Mitterrand to Downing Street. The noble Lord was lucky to face a socialist. My opposite number was a communist, M. Fiterman. The great thing was that after all these great events, you need a communiqué. It was a very genial meeting but there was nothing much we could agree on. The one thing we could agree on, at least in principle, was the need for a Channel Tunnel. The communiqué became about the Channel Tunnel. It ceased to be just an aspiration of the Department of Transport and from that moment became a proposal of No. 10 and went onwards.

My third point, on looking back on those momentous years, is that there were undoubted tragedies such as the Grand Hotel bomb. I remember as Health Secretary going back to Brighton the next morning—I had been there the night before—to visit some of the wounded. If I may say so, I remember the courage of many people, not least my two noble friends here today. There were other undoubted crises, such as the Falklands. That was the only time I remember Margaret Thatcher going round the whole Cabinet table and asking each Minister, one by one, whether they were in favour of sending a task force. Virtually everyone agreed; there was only one exception. However, I am bound to say that I at least agreed with my fingers metaphorically crossed because I joined the Army for my national service in 1956, at the time of Suez. That was not our greatest time. It seemed to me that if we could not get our forces efficiently from Cyprus to Egypt, it would be very difficult to get them to the other end of the world in the way that we did. The success of the Falklands was a tribute to our totally professional Armed Forces and to the consistency, determination and courage of Margaret Thatcher. My lesson from that was that the MPs who had voted for her as leader in 1975 had been proved absolutely right.

Above all, serving with Margaret Thatcher was always exciting. It was sometimes also great fun. Some say that she stamped all over her Ministers. It is true that if you were prepared to be handbagged she would oblige. She did not respect Ministers who came in with a proposal that they immediately withdrew when they heard the initial response from the Prime Minister. I learnt very early on that she really did enjoy an argument. Sometimes you actually won that argument as well.

She was an activist, she was a radical and she was, above all, a leader. Her death is obviously a terribly sad occasion and we all send our sympathies to Carol, Mark and the family. But above all, these days should be a recognition and a celebration of a great woman.

[Lord Waddington]

My Lords—