Major? He's just a baby with no backbone, hell-bent on destroying my legacy: What Mrs Thatcher really thought of those who betrayed her
By Jonathan Aitken|
Jonathan Aitken reveals how Margaret Thatcher's rudeness led to her downfall
In yesterday’s extract from Jonathan Aitken's enthralling new biography of Margaret Thatcher, he revealed her obnoxious rudeness to her ministers. Today, he tells how this led to her downfall, and how she raged against those who betrayed her
Her Christian faith was always important to Margaret Thatcher, the Methodist girl from Grantham. It is not generally known that she did a great deal of Bible reading even in her busiest years at 10 Downing Street and prayed and discussed religious matters with a handful of trusted friends.
After her fall from power, when she was consumed by bitterness, one of them suggested she should try to forgive those who had betrayed her. There was a pause, before she replied: ‘That’s not for me.’
That refusal to forgive was a terrible tragedy for her. A few weeks after her abrupt ousting as Prime Minister, I was walking to my home in Westminster one cold January evening and passed the house in Great College Street that had been loaned to her by Alastair McAlpine for use as temporary office.
Suddenly, Peter Morrison, her former PPS, popped his head out of the door. ‘Can you spare a moment, old boy? Margaret could do with some company.’
She was, he said, ‘like a bear with a sore head. She can’t stand the sight of the swine who stabbed her in the back.
‘But she knows you were a last-ditcher [sticking by her to the end]. So do her a favour and come in for a nightcap’.
This was an SOS. I soon discovered that Margaret’s state of aggression was elephantine as well as ursine and off the Richter scale of rampages.
For well over an hour, I listened to a hysterical rant in which she vilified those who had brought her down as ‘spineless, gutless Judases’.
If she had been equipped with tusks, she would have tossed and gored half the Conservative Parliamentary Party as she ticked off ‘my list of turncoats and traitors’.
The intensity of her rage was increased by the liberal glasses of Famous Grouse whisky being dispensed by the understandably tired Morrison, who rolled his eyes to the ceiling to indicate that he had heard this litany of denunciation many times before.
It was a painful, embarrassing and apparently recurring scene. At the time I felt heartbroken for her.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, I still feel the depths of her unbearable agony.
Jonathan Aitken (right) reveals what Margaret Thatcher (left) really thought of those who betrayed her
I was too polite to say so, but I thought this plain silly. The notion that she should be sitting around in the Commons as a former prime minister looking for work to do was a certain recipe for increasing her frustration.
Yet this was indeed the pattern for her last 18 months as a back-bench MP. Far from simmering down in the slower pace of life after high office, she boiled over with increasingly venomous anger.
She vented her spleen not just in private conversations, but also in public interviews. She repeatedly referred to herself as ‘the only undefeated prime minister’.
The problem was that she retained a hunger and a capacity for power, but had nowhere to exercise it. She found it impossible to fill this gap since she had no interests beyond politics.
She became recklessly indiscreet. I recall a dinner party when she openly mocked her successor John Major as ‘a puir wee bairn’ with ‘no courage and no backbone’ who was ‘hell-bent on destroying the legacy I left him’.
Much of this sneering came close to being irrational. Yet she had good reason to resent the way her own colleagues had dumped her — though, here again, she had been her own worst enemy.
Politics is a rough trade, but the end of Margaret Thatcher will go down as the most unpleasant and unattractive destruction of a Prime Minister in modern history.
It brought out the worst aspects of the Tory Party — panic, disloyalty, deviousness, score-settling and a cavalier disregard for the rights of the electorate.
Her fall had three separate ingredients. Her personality went off the rails because of an excess of hubris and a want of listening.
Her party went off the rails because of a surfeit of fear and a shortage of loyalty. And a pincer movement of two plotters — Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine — and the collapse of her support within the cabinet dealt her the killer blows.
It is true that she brought many of her troubles on herself. She stopped listening to her party and even to the most loyal of her colleagues. Her man-management became deplorable. Arrogance grew within her.
I recall a dinner party when she openly mocked
her successor John Major (right) as 'a puir wee bairn' with 'no courage
and no backbone'
Admittedly her treatment of Howe over many years had been deplorable and unpleasant, but my blood still boils when I watch television replays of him delivering his deliberately wounding resignation statement in the House of Commons.
For all their good years of service to the state, he and Heseltine will always be the villains of the piece for the parts they played in the downfall of a prime minister whose term of office should have been ended only by the votes of the electorate.
It was a time of collective madness. Even if you were a critic — as I was — of some of her mistakes and her high-handed behaviour, this was no justification for staging a coup.
SHE HATED MY CHOCOLATES - BECAUSE THEY WERE FOREIGN
It was easier to feel love and sympathy for Margaret Thatcher when she was vulnerable than when she was powerful
It was easier to feel love and sympathy for Margaret Thatcher when she was vulnerable than when she was powerful.
Having her to dinner in her old age was rather like entertaining an antique lighthouse. At first, you were not entirely sure if the lights were working. But gradually the electricity began to flicker at recognition of old landmarks.
Her conversation came in flashes of light out of a background of darkness. She knew what she wanted to say, but had to struggle to make herself understood.
She had conversational defence mechanisms which sometimes resulted in non sequiturs. ‘Would you like more gravy, Lady Thatcher?’ was met by: ‘I always say the most important thing in life is to make up your mind and then stick to it.’
Even when she dropped out of the conversation for a while, she seemed relaxed in her private world.
Although making the lighthouse laugh was a rare achievement, her enjoyment of a dinner with comfortable friends was apparent. She always made a point of popping into the kitchen to thank the cook.
And there were flashes of the old combative Maggie. At the end of one evening, when I was escorting her out of our front door, she harangued me: ‘Why does Jonathan give us Belgian chocolates? What’s wrong with English ones? Why doesn’t he have good old Terry’s English chocolates?’
I promised to do better next time, but she clearly thought I was someone else.
‘You won’t tell Jonathan I said that about the chocolates, will you?’ was her parting murmur to me as her detectives helped her into her car.
But thrown out she was. ‘What have we done?’ wailed a fellow MP to me immediately afterwards. He was not alone in his anguish.
Oddly, for most of the drama Margaret herself was largely a passive participant, almost an onlooker as events unfolded, seemingly outside her control.
Indeed, for almost the only time in her career she was too passive, remaining aloof from a battle she should have been leading.
The way she handled Heseltine’s leadership election challenge was downright sloppy — an adjective which could not be applied to any other episode in her political career.
She needed ministers willing to go into battle for their leader, but they had no stomach for the fight.
Most of them defected because they became paralysed at the prospect of Heseltine arriving as her replacement at No.10, a fear that turned into a stampede. To prevent him from becoming Prime Minister, they felt they needed a new face as leader. So she had to go.
As a back-bencher with a ringside seat at this debacle, I was amazed and ashamed by it.
I thought her achievements and virtues far outweighed her misjudgements and failings. Overthrowing her was a myopic and tragic mistake.
On the day she left Downing Street for the last time, Margaret Thatcher did not speak a single word to her husband on the 50-minute drive to their new home in Dulwich, south-east London.
She was in a black mood of bereavement, betrayal and blind fury that never really lifted.
Husband Denis Thatcher (left) bore the worst of these storms, but not always stoically. He, too, could become angry
The pain of her loss resulted in many outbursts and tantrums at home. Denis bore the worst of these storms, but not always stoically. He, too, could become angry.
Of course, Margaret had every justification for fury at the internal coup that had brought about her fall. But her anger and sickness of heart were so profound that she could not overcome them and go gently into the twilight of retirement.
Unfortunately, she was misled towards further furies by voices who pandered to her worst fears and prejudices.
Out of office, she could not find the self-discipline to stop complaining and carping. Because her wounds had not healed, they festered.
She encouraged denigration of the man she had anointed as her successor and legitimised opposition towards him inside the party. It was a bad blot on her record.
She openly mocked his cabinet ministers, even though she knew she shouldn’t.
At a drinks party given by the MP Alan Duncan in 1997, she ran into Michael Portillo, the new Defence Secretary, who told her that he had been putting out many invitations to tender for defence supplies since he assumed office.
‘Invitations to tender!’ snorted the former PM in tones of ringing scorn. ‘You’ll never win a war, Michael, with invitations to tender!
‘I know about these things. You’ll have to do far better than talking about invitations to tender.’
As she stalked off, she was heard to mutter to herself: ‘I know I mustn’t! I know I mustn’t’!’
But the fierceness and the frequency of her grumblings took their toll.
Although the Conservative Party did not actually split, it looked and behaved as though it was a house bitterly divided against itself.
This was the dark side of the Thatcher legacy.
For her, there was more darkness to come. When her mind began to fail, it was a shock for those closest to her. She’d always had ‘a memory like a website’, according to her daughter, Carol. The signs that slowly and inexorably the shutters were closing down were upsetting.
She drew on all her reserves of determination and willpower to cover up the failings in her memory.
When she saw her doctors, she put on a virtuoso performance not only of being completely on the ball but of hitting every medical question for six.
She was never diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But there are at least 48 different types of dementia and related illnesses. She held them intermittently at bay for some three years through a combination of personal strength and carefully balanced medication.
But her inner circle knew the worst, for she grew increasingly forgetful, distressingly repetitive, unpredictably volatile, frail in body and unsteady on her feet.
The unsteadiness was caused by her insistence on wearing high-heeled shoes, not, as was sometimes rumoured, by too many whiskies. Although she drank more in retirement than in power, she usually watched her intake carefully.
‘How many units of alcohol is that, dear?’ she asked me in 2007 when I was refilling her glass of claret over dinner in my home. This form of measurement (unheard of by Denis) had been introduced to her by an American doctor.
She heeded his advice, but not to the letter. She was easily persuaded to have one last nightcap of champagne on the grounds that ‘it’s weaker than whisky, they tell me’.
After Denis’s death in 2003, she was often lonely and in need of company.
For her, there was more darkness to come. When her mind began to fail, it was a shock for those closest to her
Her final years, however, were more content than they looked from the outside. Thanks to her medication, she was generally calm.
She did become upset when Carol spoke publicly about her dementia. A far worse blow came when Mark was embroiled in an alleged plot to organise a coup in Equatorial New Guinea. She put up £100,000 of bail money to get him released from police custody in South Africa, and helped pay the £265,000 fine.
Although she loved her son through thick and thin, this and other episodes caused some disillusionment with him in old age. The outward sign of this was her decision not to appoint him as an executor of her will.
One blessing was that she had no money worries. She could afford excellent carers and was comfortable and well looked after.
There was also a regiment of supportive friends, headed by Charles Powell, her former private secretary, who was extraordinary in his devotion to her.
Throughout the 22 years between her departure from Downing Street and her death, he saw her two or three times a month, and was her last visitor the evening before she died.
After more than an hour with her, he thought his 87-year-old former boss was weary, but her spirits good. Her heart was strong and there was no reason why she should not have lived into her 90s.
But it was not to be. The next morning, sitting in an armchair while reading a picture book, Margaret Thatcher suffered a stroke that ended her life.
It was a mercifully sudden and easeful end.
EXTRACTED from Margaret Thatcher: Power And Personality by Jonathan Aitken, published by Bloomsbury Continuum on October 24 at £25. © Jonathan Aitken 2013. To order a copy at £20 (p&p free), call 0844 472 4157.
Jonathan Aitken will speak about his book in London on November 7. For details, visit bloomsburyinstitute.com.
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