MT's private files for 1989 - (6) Life at No.10

This Tenth: Playing Things Down

Neither the politics nor the economics of 1989 was a good backdrop for MT’s tenth anniversary in office on 4 May, an event No.10 was already wary of on more general grounds. The date raised inevitably the vexed issue of how much longer she might have it in mind to stay PM? Worse, events designed to celebrate the day could easily seem vainglorious and acquire (unintentionally or otherwise) a valedictory feel.

There was a personal issue too. We know from Carol Thatcher’s biography of her father that DT had made a serious attempt over Christmas 1988 to persuade his wife to retire at her tenth anniversary, and she had at least given the idea some thought, before rejecting it. One document suggests these discussions remained in his mind. Reviewing one of many invitations to a celebratory lunch, he warned “I think this 10th is going to be badly overplayed…. Pl. [please] let us be v. careful”.

Understandably then No.10 had a policy of playing down the tenth anniversary. Offers of celebratory lunches and dinners came in battalions, and almost all were turned down. There were to be no tenth anniversary interviews, bar one, with the Press Association, for which Ingham had the highest hopes, briefing her in some excitement on 2 May:

In practice this interview and pictures will go round the world as well as to every British media outlet.

You will also dominate the world's press tomorrow with the picture with [grandson] Michael which you have agreed to give to PA and a television pool camera from 10.15am. …

The interview generated a suitable quote, in which MT compared herself to a tigress defending her cubs and was rewarded with headlines and cartoons to match. The press event with grandson Michael generated some good pictures, though they could not efface the memory of her earlier remarks, at the time of his birth two months earlier, when she had announced “We are a grandmother”, a use of the "royal we" much mocked, then and later. In the files there is a transcript of her remarks by the No.10 Press Office in which ‘I’ is substituted for ‘we’, as if they were silently correcting a minor grammatical error.

Despite No.10’s best efforts, quite a few private or semi-public anniversary events made their way into the Prime Ministerial diary. There was lunch for the 1922 Committee at the Savoy on Wednesday 3 May where (mindful of place) MT made an after lunch speech playing on Gilbert and Sullivan, complete with double entendre, probably unintentional: “Gilbert had an acute sense of political satire. He turned the House of Lords into fairies (Willie – not sure how you would look with wings)”. “Every Prime Minister needs a Willie” is a quote impossible to pin down; she probably did say it, in some private setting, but when and where? There are press references as early as March 1989, so it can't have been here.

The next day there was a reception at No.10 followed by a cabinet dinner and another speech, more political this time. Then there was a private lunch for family and friends at Chequers on Sunday 7 May, including the Murdochs and several party donors. Among the few politicians there, John Major stands out, a clear mark of her favour.

The official world was not left out of the celebration. There was a lunch for No.10 Private Secretaries, past and present, to which most important staff were invited, on Friday 5 May, her Principal Private Secretary Andrew Turnbull delivering a skilful speech. Hosted by the Cabinet Secretary, Robin Butler, there were drinks with Permanent Secretaries on 8 May, a group with which she had had complicated relations over the years. By 1989 she had the advantage of seniority as well as rank: she had been in the top job longer than any of them.

One later event is notable, when she received the Freedom of the City at the Guildhall. It was followed by lunch at the Mansion House where (in Turnbull’s words) “the Prime Minister simply took wing and spoke without a text”. The Mansion House speech was probably the best of the lot, and for once, speaking without cameras present, she was in a mood for recollection, unworried about seeming valedictory, fascinating to her audience. She took them back to the early years of her premiership – to the 1981 budget and to the Falklands, topics full of emotion for her. This was how she spoke privately after she had left office, looking back to write her memoirs.

There were many gifts of course, ranging from the cabinet’s donation of a Nick Ridley watercolour of Chequers, a companion piece to his painting of Downing Street which they had given her the previous year; a cake from diamond dealer Willie Nagel (who sent her champagne a few months later when Lawson resigned), a rose bush from the Saatchi brothers, and a bar of soap from a child. There were vast numbers of letters, including a reasonably full roster of foreign leaders. The most notable absentee in the archive is Mitterrand, and that might simply be a filing error rather than a breach of the Entente Cordiale.

Health & Efficiency: Nutrition, Golden Acorns and Electric Baths

As noted, in the run-up to the tenth anniversary No.10 imposed a ban on Prime Ministerial feature-style interviews, the better to highlight the day. Inevitably, some journalists tried their luck and a few found ways round. Gail Sheehy of Vanity Fair was one, approaching MT through Woodrow Wyatt to be interviewed for a long profile in the magazine. Ingham ignored her calls, but then a rather embarrassed-looking handwritten note appeared on his desk from MT acknowledging that she had made a promise and asking him to make the arrangements.

The interview duly took place. When Ingham saw the transcript he scribbled scornfully: “This was a waste of time. There is nothing in this that is not already on the record. I knew it was a mistake to let this woman in”. But that was only the start. The profile appeared, under the title The Blooming of Margaret Thatcher, describing her as having “the nerves of a five-star general and, increasingly, the sexual charisma of a woman in her prime”. It talked of her “bedazzled male advisers”. All this will have caused Ingham’s teeth to grind, but he could live with it. The real damage was a swiping reference to MT’s fondness for health cures, and particularly “electric baths”, courtesy of the eccentric Lady Price, a friend/associate of MT who seems to have talked with Sheehy too. The impression of dottiness, of a woman “slightly off her trolley”, was not one that Ingham could treat lightly and the “electric baths piece” attracted a lot of attention one way or another in the world’s press.

The whole thing was aggravated further when Sheehy moved on to profile Gorbachev. No.10 was forced to come up with a text for her, drafted by Powell, describing the boss’s relationship with the Soviet leader, purely for background. Nothing Powell wrote was ever less than fluent and interesting, so perhaps some good came of the whole thing, but it left Ingham steaming.

Close reading of her private files confirms MT’s fondness for health cures. Veteran romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, with whom she corresponded fairly regularly and lunched with in November 1989, sent her a lucky charm in the form of a “golden acorn” as well as treatments of some kind, exact nature uncertain. We do know there were energy supplements called “nutrimental capsules”. Cartland to MT, 8 Jun 1989:

In case you ever feel tired, I am enclosing the very latest product we have in the Health Movement, which takes oxygen to every part of the body, including the brain. / My son, aged 51, says that he wakes up in the morning and feels like a boy of 16, and at nearly 88 I find it fantastic.

There were also chats and visits from Sir Emmanuel Kaye, fork-lift truck manufacturer by day, luminary of the “Health Movement” by night, also a Glyndebourne buddy of the Thatchers. He dabbled in homeopathic cures and actually called on MT in her flat for half an hour on Feb 8 having sent her a letter detailing friends he had helped with his remedies. He had evolved a procedure he called ‘body tuning’. Whether he did any tuning for her is deeply, thankfully unknown.

The Greening of Politics: Friends in High Places

One feature of the 1989 European Election was the remarkable success of the Green Party, which won third place with 14.5 per cent of the vote. This result proved to be a one-off, but there was no question that green issues were rising fast on the political agenda. MT could reasonably claim to have anticipated the trend. In her years of greatest ascendancy she had taken up environmental issues ahead of her peers and made impressive contributions. The Montreal Agreement phasing out CFCs owed a lot to her, and to the Reagan Administration, which valued her lead. As had happened so often before, their joint stance caused it to be said that the political right as a whole was staking out a position. In her Royal Society speech of September 1988 she had sounded the alarm at climate change, the first such speech by any major world leader. In 1989 there was a major UN conference on the Ozone layer in London, which she opened and closed. And she made a major speech on the environment at the UN itself at the end of the year.

Politics grinds small. Never one to miss an opportunity to follow through, she carefully cultivated relations with figures in the green movement. Not all made the grade. Lord Melchett of Greenpeace (a former Labour minister) got short shrift; Jonathan Porritt, some time advisor to the Prince of Wales, received more considerable attention and occasional invitations to No.10. She corresponded respectfully and met with Professor James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis; she quoted him in speeches also. But the real prize was what you might call the soft green lobby.

In 1989 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds celebrated its centenary and an approach came to No.10, via Lord Home: would the Prime Minister undertake an engagement for them? Historically the Conservative Party has had a difficult relationship with the RSPB, for the sad reason that all too many Conservative leaders over the years have preferred to do their birdwatching down the barrel of a gun. MT and DT in fact were very much not that kind of Conservative. They made no parade of it, but they thought shooting birds cruel. There was no hypocrisy then in her willingness to do something for the RSPB.

It did no harm at all that the president of the RSPB at that time was a likeable tv personality, Magnus Magnusson, quizmaster of the BBC’s Mastermind. He had a catchphrase: “I have started, so I’ll finish”, which perhaps she should have used in answering those difficult questions about her leadership later in the year. Better still were the numbers of voters an RSPB engagement stood to reach. As an event was put together, it was suggested that MT should give a certificate to the 50,000th RSPB member. And by that was meant the 50,000 member joining during the centenary year. The RSPB was an organisation on a scale Britain's political parties could not hope to rival.

There was a snag or two. The RSPB wanted MT to name a train in their honour, the Avocet. This had the drawback that it would be taking place in a railway station, in the absence of birds (except for stray pigeons), generating pictures of a grey rather than green variety.

There was an unanticipated problem too, which was that British Rail got upset. There was a phone call from a man called Sid at their headquarters followed by an emotional letter explaining that the Avocet was an experimental train of no importance in the history of locomotive design, a one-off, altogether unworthy of Prime Ministerial attention. A far more significant locomotive class was about to be launched, and British Rail was hoping MT would name one of them. They suggested calling it the Michael Faraday, appealing to her scientific side. Rather cattily, they pointed out that MT had not been the RSPB’s first choice: Joan Collins and Joanna Lumley had been approached before her, but had turned the chance down.

Prime Ministers cannot afford to be precious about such things: being third choice for the RSPB was better than not being chosen at all. In the end the business was done, in fact it was almost a state occasion. British Rail was placated to the extent that the chairman Sir Bob Reid attended and actually presented her with a model of the unworthy train. Birdwatcher royalty was present, in the form of comedian Bill Oddie, as well as everyone's favourite fictional Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Jim Hacker MP, Yes Prime Minister star, Paul Eddington. The Post Office even issued stamps. Riding the thermal rather cleverly MT got herself invited during the ceremony to see some real birds at the organization's headquarters in Sandy later in the year. She travelled there by train, on the Avocet itself of course. There were excellent photos of her standing in the middle of a field looking through a giant pair of binoculars, as green as anything. In theory she was birdwatching, actually she was looking at the photographers in the hope that voters would spot her.