Tributes to Baroness Thatcher

Lord Tyrie Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

We can see, from the speeches of the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson) and others, the deep emotions that Margaret Thatcher still inspires.

So many us from the Government side are still here for this debate simply because Mrs Thatcher was the inspiration for our going into politics in the first place. There was her sense of public service and duty and her conviction that even the toughest task, including Britain’s ungovernability, could be tackled. There was her conviction that the state had lost sight of its essential role of protecting our freedoms, that it was encroaching on them and that it had to be rolled back. Above all, there was her patriotism—she wanted to restore pride in our country and others’ respect for it. As far as the last century is concerned, she will come to be seen as the greatest standard bearer for freedom that the House has produced.

My first meaningful encounter with Margaret Thatcher took place at 7.15 am in a windowless back room in Conservative central office just before a press conference during the 1984 European elections. Having been at central office for only a few months, I was unnerved to find myself placed opposite her. She had, it seemed, read all the extensive briefing that we had prepared for her. She fixed me with a stare. Her first question identified an apparent contradiction in the briefing. Before I had time to admit that I did not know the answer, Geoffrey Howe, who was sitting next to me and did, saved me by replying.

Margaret Thatcher was kind enough to add me to a lunch party at Chequers after those elections. No doubt identifying me as the junior man, she told me to sit next to her for lunch. Within minutes, she announced to the table that I was far too thin and insisted on overseeing my consumption of two puddings.

I met Mrs Thatcher sporadically over the following few years. I was at the Treasury, with a ringside seat for the Thatcher-Lawson row, the rights and wrongs of which—and there were both—are for another day. More generally, I had a chance to observe several of her well-known traits. At the heart of her approach was her instinctive understanding that the restoration of prosperity depended on supply-side reform: breaking down the entrenched privileges—of the professions as much as of the trade unions; simplifying and reducing taxes; cutting back the tangle of regulation; and enhancing individual opportunity and aspiration. She wanted to break with the consensus of an over-mighty state and a dependent people.

Some have been arguing recently that Mrs Thatcher’s reforms are responsible for the failings of the banks today. I doubt that. Whatever the merits of the prudential regulation that came with the big bang in the ’80s, those rules were no longer in place when the crisis broke five years ago; they had been replaced by another set of rules put there in the 1990s in both the US and the UK. In any case, the notion that Mrs Thatcher, who cared most of all about the consumer and the taxpayer, would be an apologist for the banks, is implausible. She would have found the abuse of market power by some bank leaderships for their own gain at the expense of the rest of us every bit as deplorable as the behaviour of trade union leaders.

Most of Mrs Thatcher’s legacy on the supply side survives, although her supply-side reforms were, to some degree, reversed by the last Government. Perhaps I should take this opportunity to say that, in my view, the importance of the supply side is still not yet fully recognised by this Administration.

It has been said today that Mrs Thatcher’s judgment faltered at the end, and there was perhaps a touch of that hubris that always lurks in No.10’s bunker after a long stay. The pain of her reforms still lingers. Over the longer view, none of that, I think, will detract from her legacy. What will linger in the memory is the single most extraordinary achievement of any leader in the post-war era—that of turning a failing country and a basket-case economy into a country that had recovered its self-respect and had a future.