Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

I wonder if I could intervene briefly. I was elected in May 1979. The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, referred to the photograph of the first Thatcher Government. I can tell him that there was a group of about a dozen newly elected MPs—because that was all there was of us—deciding whether it would be better for our morale to be photographed as a group or individually. We decided that it was probably better to do it individually, although if I had had the wit I would have asked if we could have borrowed the Cabinet Room to do it in.

In a way one of Margaret Thatcher’s achievements was that she forced the Labour Party to reinvent itself. Following the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, I should say that it was also what Clement Attlee, later Lord Attlee, made the Tory party do after its reputation in the 1930s. Both those people had very different personalities but had a similarly dramatic effect on changes in the country. We need to remember that.

I also recall Jim Callaghan saying to me in May 1979 that the people he felt most sorry for were those of us who had just been elected, because, he said, “You will be in opposition for about 10 years”. Well, we were 18 years in opposition, which was when we forced ourselves to change. It is an important impact in British politics that our system forces political parties to change. If you do not listen to the electorate, the electorate ignore you, and you pay a very high price for that.

I want to say a few other things. Jim Callaghan also said to me at the time that he had hoped with North Sea oil that we would be able to make some changes to the economy that we needed to make. That was really where he was at. He felt that the economy needed to change, and that with the advantage of North Sea oil we could do it. Margaret Thatcher took a different view. She felt, as has been indicated a number of times, that you had to force change on people. This is where I part company, and it is a fundamental difference between the two parties. There were ways of bringing about the changes that were necessary then without some of the conflict that we experienced. You need only look at what Germany did, particularly with East Germany, to see how change of that type can be brought about differently. That is an important lesson. It is a powerful one.

Margaret Thatcher also had, as the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, knows, a strong suspicion if not dislike of trade unions. He and I debated that on one or two privatisations. I noted the good comments made by Matthew Parris in the Times yesterday about how she hated the closed shop, and hate was underlined by Margaret Thatcher. That is one of the ways in which she made some of the negative aspects of the trade unions change. I have never taken the view, and still do not take it, that trade unions are not a very important defence in a democracy; they are an important right for people. But I also acknowledge what we were blind to in the 1980s: that some of the practices within the trade union movement were not only doing us damage but were bad practices that needed to change. That is another message we should emphasise.

This may sound patronising but it is not intended to: when I questioned Margaret Thatcher in the House I sometimes felt that she was very much on the right track but was somehow missing the big opportunity. Council house sales are one such example. In my view, selling council houses would have been a brilliant policy if she had done what Hugh Rossi, I think, had suggested: reinvesting all the money from the sales of council houses into the building of new houses. Margaret Thatcher took the opposite view. If she had not, that would have been a truly brilliant policy. As it was, it was the right policy, but it was not followed through in the way I would have liked. Most people here have said that she followed through all her policies with determination. However, I should have liked her to have pushed over to the other side a bit on that policy so that we could have had the investment in housing that would have saved us a lot of the problems we have today.

I certainly did not like some of the language that was used. It has to be said that the language used about the trade unions was deeply damaging to the fabric of Britain, particularly in the north and the west. I was shadow Home Office Minister at the time and I looked at what the police were doing during the miners’ strike, the print union strikes and others. What troubled me was that when the phrase “the enemy within” was used, you had to know that the police officer facing the picket line was often a relative or close friend of the miner on the other side of the line, particularly in south Wales but also elsewhere in the UK. The phrase “the enemy within” began to fragment society in a deeply unsatisfactory way. In a way, her love of an argument and pushing it through with a passion and fury of her own made her enemies, which perhaps need not have happened.

I agree entirely with the comments made earlier about the Anglo-Irish agreement, although, as I think I have said in this House once before, we owe an awful lot to Jim Prior for that and for his strategic thinking on the Anglo-Irish agreement. That was absolutely right.

Fairly soon after I was elected, the Falklands issue came up. I have heard the quotes from Enoch Powell, and they were absolutely right. What interested me and taught me a lesson was that, as a result of defeating General Galtieri, the dictatorship in Argentina fell. It might be beneficial if the people of Argentina think about that. Although it might not have been the intention in the first instance, it was the outcome. It might be contentious to say this, but it also is my belief that that helped to bring about the end of the juntas in South America, which we all took for granted at that time. One after another they fell. One of the messages was that you need to stand up to dictators. Again I might regret some of the language that was used—not least in the Sun at the time, which played on the worst aspects of nationalism—but the reality was that standing up to a dictator like that had benefits for the Argentinian people as well as being the right thing to do.

In a way, what saddens me the most is the divisions between the north and south of Britain and with Wales. If the policies in Scotland had been different, the Tory party would still be significant in Scotland. I for one as a Labour politician often prayed for the Tory party to recover in Scotland. If it had not been destroyed, the SNP would not be where it is today: namely, a threat to the union, which Margaret Thatcher would have been appalled by. In part, it came about because of the assumption that Scotland could be taken for granted. It cannot, and the same applies to Wales and other parts of Britain, including the north of England.

I think that history will judge her well. She was a major political figure by any standards. She argued dramatically and with great passion, but in doing so at times she sowed the seeds of bitterness. She loved an argument, she loved a challenge and she loved change. In that way, she was a Tory radical, not a one nation Tory. It is an important lesson for us all that you can be a great leader in a democracy but that no great leader changes things without hurting people. I say this not as any criticism of Margaret Thatcher, but I think that we should be careful about going down the road of military involvement in funerals, because there is danger in linking that to political parties. That might cause us problems in future.

Margaret Thatcher was an extraordinary performer as Prime Minister and very influential. That taught me a lot, but it is important that we recognise that there is a balance. People who are doing what are to my mind foolish things, such as having parties in the street, are totally wrong, but we need to recognise that in a democracy minorities have to be heard. No Prime Minister can govern entirely compassionately—Prime Ministers have to take tough decisions and hurt people—but in doing that they need to try to get some balance in the community. That requires compassion as well as conflict.

[Lord Wakeham]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wakeham]

My Lords, I sense the mood of the House and shall be as brief as I can. I do not intend to say anything about the great issues surrounding Margaret Thatcher, but I was her Chief Whip for the whole of her second term in office, and I want to say one or two little things about what I would call the human and personal side.

Frequently, late at night, I would have a long talk with her about the events of the day. I am afraid that the things that she said on those occasions will go with me to the grave, but anybody who had the slightest doubt about her sense of humour had only to be there on one of those evenings. She had a very agreeable sense of humour, even if, on some public occasions, she managed to conceal it.

Secondly, I have to say to my noble friend Lord Tebbit how much I appreciated what he said about the kindnesses that we received after Brighton. The kindnesses and support that we got were way beyond the call of duty, to the point where I held my wedding reception at No. 10: the first time, I think, that anybody had been married in No. 10 since Lloyd George’s daughter when he was Prime Minister. It was very special that we were allowed that.

My last point has a degree of topicality. I remember when the chairman of the Procedure Committee in the Commons came to see Margaret Thatcher to say that he had a wonderful idea for improving Prime Minister’s Questions. He had the bright idea that instead of Questions being on Tuesday and Thursday, they should be on Wednesday for half an hour. She looked him steely in the face and said, “What do you think the House of Commons would like?”. That was the end of it. Things stayed as they were.

She had more madness—not madness, more reason—than she admitted. Of course she knew that every Tuesday and every Thursday, she had to be, as she put it, match fit for Prime Minister’s Questions. That was a great advantage. However, there was a second great advantage in that her whole Government knew that on Tuesdays and Thursdays the boss was in the House of Commons defending the Government. If any department had not sent a note as to what issues were coming up, I used to get the message and would very tactfully ring some fellow who was towards the end of his political career, although he did not know it at the time.

We have heard great things from all noble Lords, but all I would say about her is that she was an extremely human person to work for and that to do so was of course the greatest privilege.