Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Spicer Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Spicer]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Tebbit said that his top two PMs—using the terminology of today’s Sun—were Margaret Thatcher and Clem Attlee. Word has it that Clem Attlee was a very skilled sacker of Ministers. The norm when sacking a Minister would be something along the lines of, “Thank you very much for coming to see me, Michael. With your sophistication you will know that I’ve got to make room in my Government. You are a bit long in the tooth now, we’ve got younger men to look after and we would very much enjoy it if you would become Governor-General of the Bahamas and, with your wife, enjoy the rest of your life”. It is said that Clem Attlee would say, “Look, I’ve got to get rid of you by the time of the one o’clock news. Do you know why you’ve got to go?”. “No, sir”. “Because you’re no bloody good, that’s why”. The fact is that he, like Margaret Thatcher, was a strong Prime Minister.

I intend to intervene for a very short time, but I feel bound to do so. I was her PPS, although not for as long as my noble friend Lord Hamilton, and I was Deputy Chairman of the party at the time of the Brighton bomb, when my noble friend Lord Deben—he probably does not remember this—rang me from the police station where he and the Prime Minister had gone after the bomb exploded and said, “She’s got two things she wants you to do. One is to get the show on the road and the other is to open the shop at nine o’clock for the conference”. Those are my two credentials for joining the debate.

One memory I will share with the House goes back almost to her last day in government. I was Minister for Housing and she summoned me to the Cabinet Room. It was a one-to-one meeting—I was on my own with her—and she said the words that will always be in my mind. We had had our meeting and I was packing up my papers when she said, “Michael, you know we’ve failed to destroy the dependency culture”. That stuck with me. A lot has been said today about her caution, and I will say a word about it myself. What has not been said is that she did in some cases regret that caution. That is something that has not fully come over. It was not just the dependency culture, although she did regret that she had not done anything to make sure that the welfare state was focused on those who really needed support. In the modern idiom, she would have “done her nut” had she realised that it would be a Conservative-Lib Dem coalition Government who would be the first to do something about it.

On privatisation, there were all sorts of things that she would have liked. She did not privatise coal, the railways, the nuclear industry or the Post Office. With the really difficult one, electricity—as it happened I was the Minister who took the Bill through the Commons—I believe that it was very much the powers of persuasion of my noble friend Lord Parkinson against the advice of Walter Marshall, her great friend and mentor in many ways, that created the Bill that we eventually put through Parliament. It was very much touch and go as to whether we went ahead with that privatisation, because of her caution.

I stress her caution only because others have emphasised her sense of direction and the wonderful things that she achieved. Her caution stretched beyond privatisation to Europe, which has been mentioned already today. She did, I think, regret the Single European Act and how far she pushed the Maastricht treaty before it came into being.

All that is something of an antidote to some of the more critical things that have been said about her extremism and her desire to do things in a hurry. Far from it—I think that sometimes she felt that she had not done things in enough of a hurry. I want to put that to the House because I think her impetuosity has been much misinterpreted, and that has come across in several speeches today. She was a very cautious and very wise person, and that is why she was so effective. It was a great honour to serve with her in that context.