Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Howard of Lympne Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

My Lords, in order to understand the true greatness of Margaret Thatcher it is necessary to remember the state of our country and our continent in 1979 when she became Prime Minister. Our country was in decline—a decline that many thought was permanent and some thought was terminal. I remember listening—I think it was in 1978—to one of the great gurus of the time. He saw no answer to our predicament. He said: “After the next election, we shall either have a Government that doesn’t try to do the things that are necessary, in which case failure and decline will inevitably continue, or we will have a Government that tries to do the things that are necessary, in which case it will become so unpopular that it will be bound to lose the election after next”. Margaret Thatcher proved him wrong and in doing so, as the Prime Minister said, saved our country.

It has been said many times, including this afternoon, that she was a divisive figure. She was. She had to be. There was no consensus on the right thing to do for our country. If she had waited for consensus, nothing would ever have happened. She saw what needed to be done and she did it with clarity, courage and conviction. It is also true that her divisiveness on occasion extended to members of her Administration. On one occasion, a Minister sent a paper to her that she rejected. He had the temerity to send it back with the words, “Prime Minister, this is government policy”. She replied: “It may be government policy but I don’t agree with a word of it”.

In 1979, as we all know, Europe was divided in two. The eastern half was subjugated to the yoke of communist tyranny. The part that Margaret Thatcher played, in partnership with Ronald Reagan, in freeing those countries, has been well documented. However, there is one aspect of the story that is less well known. In 1990, as her Employment Secretary, I went to Poland. My noble friend Lord Fowler, my predecessor, had set up something called the Know-How fund to help establish small businesses in the newly free countries. My opposite number was Jacek Kuron, who had been imprisoned for his opposition to communism. He took me to see Marshal Jaruzelski, the man whose regime had imprisoned him. Marshal Jaruzelski told me about the part Margaret Thatcher had played in the rise of Solidarity. He said: “She visited Poland during one of Solidarity’s strikes in the shipyards of Gdansk. She said to me: ‘You know, this isn’t an ordinary strike and you ought to talk to its leaders’. Until then, I had had no more intention of talking to them than I had of flying to the moon. But she persuaded me, so I began to talk to Lech Walesa—and you know what happened after that”.

All of us who have stood for elective office have hoped to make a difference. That has become rather a cliché but, like most clichés, it is true. There are very few people who have made a difference on the scale that Margaret Thatcher achieved. She saved our country; she helped bring freedom to half our continent. The light of her legacy will shine as a beacon down the generations.