Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Palumbo Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Palumbo]

My Lords, I have three very short, random stories. On one occasion, my wife asked Margaret what she thought of Tony Blair. “My dear”, she said, “I do not think of him”. That was all.

We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord King, about Margaret’s support for Desert Storm, the first war in Iraq. We have heard that it was to some extent due to her that there was the backbone to go to war. I asked her some years later what she would have done if the second Iraq war had come on her watch. She said, “It is not sufficiently or fully realised that I was a scientist before I became a politician. As a scientist what we need are facts, evidence and proof. If we have the facts, and we have the evidence and we have the proof, we can check and recheck, and check as many times as is necessary before coming to a considered view. The answer to your question is that we had very few facts. We had no evidence and we certainly had no proof, so I would not have committed one single member of the armed services to a war from which they may not have returned. What I would have done was to give George Bush the sort of assistance that Ronnie Reagan gave me in the Falklands; that is to say, logistical support and intelligence support, but nothing more. And I would have told Bush so to his face”. She was very definite about that.

When she offered me, some years before, the chairmanship of the Arts Council, she said to me, “Mr Palumbo, I want you to understand one thing very clearly, and you must not forget it. The Government have no money. You are being asked to supervise the distribution of a great deal of money, and you must spend it wisely and carefully because it is taxpayers’ money, not government money”. That is advice that I shall obviously never forget, no more than I shall forget a wonderfully kind and utterly magnificent lady.