Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Marlesford Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marlesford]

My Lords, I suppose that one thing that one thinks most about Margaret Thatcher is that she was the most courageous challenger. One reason why I think she will have an increasing part in the history books is that she presided over and contributed to the ending of one of the great political struggles in this country: the struggle between capitalism and socialism as economic systems.

Margaret Thatcher could always see the real point. For three and a half years, I was in Whitehall as an adviser and worked a certain amount with a think tank. I remember well that, on one occasion, the presentation made at Chequers by the think tank was to show where the Government were going, even if they did not want to go there. I remember that the noble Lord, Lord Butler, was demonstrating the way in which inflation would reach unthinkable double digits. There was a silence, broken by Margaret Thatcher thumping on her blotter at the Cabinet table in Chequers, saying, “If that chart is true, we have lost the next election”. Then Tony Barber, who was the Chancellor at the time, waded in to say that it was not true—but of course it was.

I point out to the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, who said what a pity it was that Margaret Thatcher had not tried to talk more to the union leaders, that no one could have tried harder to talk to the union leaders than Ted Heath. Indeed, we had something called tripartite government, which was government, industry and unions. A fat lot of good that did.

After the 1974 election, I used, as a fonctionnaire, to attend meetings of the shadow Cabinet. They were very difficult meetings because Mr Heath did not accept that he had made mistakes and that things had to change. He and Sir Keith Joseph used to spar. I remember, on one occasion, Ted Heath saying to Keith Joseph, “I suppose that you’d let British Leyland go to the wall”. Keith Joseph said, “Of course I would, if it could not put its house in order”. Ted replied, “In that case, you would have blood on the streets”. It was all awkward and difficult. As the shadow Cabinet left the room, I was following behind, when Margaret Thatcher came up to me and said, “Mark, you know, Keith has nearly had enough, and the day he goes, I go”. It was basically from that moment that she realised the need to make a challenge that had never previously been made.

I was struck by the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, about the unions. Of course there was huge variation. Some union leaders were people of great patriotism who did a wonderful job, but there were others, often in powerful positions, who used their position not in the interests of their members but to lead them over the economic cliff, often into economic suicide and unemployment. In British Leyland, Red Robbo was leading the union. It was a hopeless system. Now, as a result of restructuring, we once again have a great automobile industry in this country. We could never have done that if that challenge had not been made.

I would describe one of Margaret Thatcher’s great contributions as being to what I call liberation politics. She liberated a lot of people who had had no prospects because they were in the proletariat herd. She hugely enlarged the middle class—the bourgeoisie—of this country. As a result of the structural changes that she introduced, we are a much more equal society than we were then. Far more people—tens or hundreds of thousands of people—now have the opportunity to run their own lives in a way that they did not have before she was around and was Prime Minister.