It is hard to convey the full horror of speechwriting sessions when I worked
for Margaret Thatcher as head of her Downing Street policy unit. They would
start towards the end of July, though the party conference was not till the
second week of October, and they would last for anything up to three or four
hours. The first draft I served up was simply there to be torn apart and
binned, while she began to think what she might actually want to say.
At this stage various characters would flit in and out of the meetings,
offering a page or two, perhaps no more than a paragraph. Jeffrey Archer
would schmooze his way into one of these meetings, having buttonholed the
prime minister at a party and told her that he had some brilliant ideas and
a wonderful joke that would absolutely make the speech. The joke was brought
over by Jeffrey’s chauffeur in his Jag. It was typed out on beautiful cream
laid writing paper.
Five minutes later he rang: “Jeffrey here. What do you think of my joke?”
“It’s wonderful, Jeffrey - the prime minister will love it.”
In fact it was unusable, being too stale even for the undemanding standards of
a party conference. In any case Jeffrey’s principal purpose in getting into
these sessions was to remind her of his existence rather than to contribute
anything useful: “I think the main theme of your speech this year, Margaret,
should be to remind the country of the amazing things your leadership has
achieved for every single one of us” etc etc, until the oil was lapping
round our knees.
Then she would implore Matthew Parris to be pressed into service, which we
were all in favour of because he did have some excellent thoughts and
phrases. Unfortunately he was usually drafted in too early. By the time the
final version was taking shape, Matthew’s best stuff had been discarded.
Then there was David Hart. This remarkable figure, the son of a banker and
nephew of the austere philosopher HLA Hart, liked to present himself as a
man of mystery, in touch with the people whom the conventional Tory stuffed
shirts couldn’t reach. In fact he had been at Eton and lived in an enormous
house in Chester Street. He sported a thin mafioso moustache and grubby
tennis shoes under a pin-stripe suit – a costume that has since become de
rigueur for the owners of avant-garde art galleries.
He claimed to have a squad of West Indians on roller skates whom, at a
moment’s notice, he could dispatch all over London to find out what the word
on the street was. When the word on the street was relayed back to us from
these Chester Street irregulars, it often appeared to be indistinguishable
from the views of the average home counties Tory, though dressed up in the
patois: “Hey man, we don’t dig those crazy taxes.”
He would turn up at odd hours claiming to have an important message that he
must deliver personally to the prime minister. She quite liked this. She
often felt isolated and longed to see a fresh face who would tell her
something different.
In the later stages of the speechwriting at the party conference, David would
haunt the prime minister’s suite, vacuuming up quantities of the canapés and
drink provided and crossing out sections of the speech that had already been
agreed. I attempted to have him banned as a disruptive influence, but when I
went out for lunch I discovered on my return that he had come in and had
rewritten part of the text. Party functionaries had allowed him entry,
believing that such an outlandish figure must be working in some capacity
for security and thus allowed access to all areas.
But the mainstays of the speechwriting team were Ronald Millar and John Selwyn
Gummer. Ronnie, a successful West End playwright – famous for his
adaptations of CP Snow – had first stalked the corridors of power as
speechwriter to Ted Heath. He was a portly, fruity figure redolent of the
old West End of Binkie Beaumont and Terence Rattigan, though much nicer.
He had already been responsible for Mrs Thatcher’s two most famous utterances
since she became prime minister: first thrusting into her hand the prayer of
St Francis – “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony” etc – which he
claimed she read with eyes misting over and memorised so she could declaim
it on the steps of Downing Street; then giving her the line for her 1980
party conference speech, “You turn if you want to; the lady’s not for
turning.”
Ronnie said it had been hell to teach her to get this sentence right. She
could not grasp that the first “You” needed to be stressed, to echo the
“U-turn” in the preceding sentence. Her ear was unfailingly tinny and,
though she could be devastating and inspiring in unscripted harangues, the
sight of a written text would make her freeze.
After listening to her dismal read-over, Ronnie would jump up from the sofa
and, with beseeching arms outstretched, attempt to gee her up: “Come on,
darling, they want you to show you really feel it.” She would look up at
him, bewildered but dutiful, the novice on her first engagement in rep. By
Ronnie’s side, John Gummer seemed an insubstantial figure: a callow curate
alongside a well-dined archdeacon. I soon discovered that Ronnie and John
had developed a strong, though mostly cloaked, mutual dislike. John was
constantly urging that we should meet without Ronnie, who held up
proceedings with his tiresome thespian interruptions.
Mrs Thatcher got fed up with him too but as the time slots had been fixed in
advance Ronnie turned up all the same and, despite being told at the private
office that the session had been cancelled, proceeded at his stately gait up
the stairs and could be heard saying to some passer-by that he hoped he
might catch a word with the prime minister. The prime minister shot behind
the sofa, crouching slightly so that she could not be seen, beckoning me to
follow her. Ronnie put his head round the door but, seeing nobody in the
study, withdrew. His footsteps sounded slower as he went off down the
stairs. Mrs Thatcher surfaced giggling, for once resembling less the Iron
Lady than Miranda Richardson’s Elizabeth I in Blackadder.
It seemed strange to me that she should be prepared to devote quite so much
time to the one speech in the year in which she was assured of receiving a
rapturous standing ovation. I was still more surprised to see how nervous
she was just before delivering the speech each time, far more anxious than
before going to address a fractious House of Commons. She lapped up our
halting words of encouragement beforehand.
My incomprehension showed how little I really understood about the mechanics
of getting and holding power. I learnt a little more as the 1983 general
election approached. Geoffrey Howe had been put in charge of a small team to
draft a manifesto, with his adviser Adam Ridley and me to pull the stuff
together. Adam had been my fag at Eton.
All concerned were determined that the document should be as bland and
inoffensive as possible. This was not Mrs Thatcher’s view. She kept on
sending back the draft with “Dull, nothing exciting in this” scrawled across
it in her manic, sprawly hand. The manifesto group then tried to think of a
different way of being dull that at least sounded a bit livelier.
I offered a few flourishes: “Couldn’t we have a sentence about our magical
heritage of moorland and mountain?” I said wistfully. This was greeted with
derision, especially by Nigel Lawson. “Moorland and mountain” became a
catchphrase to describe anything flowery that needed to be cut.
The environment was not regarded as a serious subject by Tory hardheads at the
time. I kept on pressing Mrs Thatcher to tell them that it was the coming
thing, which she at least half believed. But when I went to see William
Waldegrave, who was the parliamentary undersecretary responsible for green
issues in the Department of the Environment, he told me that nobody had
spoken to him for weeks.
I wrote four, perhaps five drafts of the manifesto. Up to the last draft,
there was one big hole: Northern Ireland. Jim Prior had told us that the
whole question of getting his new assembly off the ground remained a matter
of the greatest delicacy and he would prefer to draft his own words and
settle them directly with the prime minister.
That was fine by us. The only snag was that the prime minister didn’t think
that Jim’s assembly would get off the ground in a million years and she was
deeply reluctant to give her explicit approval to any formula which
suggested that it had the faintest hope of success. So every time Prior sent
in his proposed formula, no answer came back. Time was desperately short.
The printers were waiting. Coming out of cabinet, Jim bearded her.
“Margaret, could you just bear to have a look at what I’ve come up with on
Northern Ireland for the manifesto?”
No, she couldn’t. But she was cornered. She actually had the dreaded piece of
paper in her hands, like a summons served by an importunate bailiff. Then
she saw me hanging about.
“Ferdy, would you have a look at Jim’s text?” I stood there with the paper
flapping in my trembling hand and Jim’s beady farmer’s face glaring at me.
Words swam up from the page. “A framework of participation . . . no
devolution of powers without . . . ” In that disputatious province, where
the placing of a comma can mean a mass walkout followed by riots, blazing
buses and half a dozen corpses, every nuance mattered. “Seems splendid to
me,” I said and passed the paper back to Jim. Everyone was happy. Jim had
got what he wanted and Mrs Thatcher had not been forced to say that she
agreed with a single word of it.
With these obstacles overcome, the manifesto was ready to go. But was she? On
Sunday May 8, a senior bunch of ministers plus Ian Gow, her PPS, David
Wolfson, her chief of staff, and me trooped down to Chequers. The official
business was to sign off the manifesto. The real question was to decide the
date of the election.
The local election results from the preceding Thursday were encouraging. Going
to the country seemed the most obvious decision imaginable. So I was
startled to discover that Mrs Thatcher was in an abject state of nerves.
Would she be accused of cutting and running, or of clinging on to power if she
didn’t go now? What about the summit due to be held in America, at
Williamsburg, at the end of May? Would it not be a dereliction of duty if
she missed it? On the other hand, if she went in the middle of an election
campaign, would she not look out of place, a provisional sort of figure,
lacking authority? Then what about Royal Ascot, which would fall in the last
or last but one week of the campaign if the election was held on June 16 or
23? Wouldn’t it look ghastly if the newspapers were full of toffs in toppers
and ladies in huge hats while they were stumping the country?
Laughable though it may seem, it was the Ascot factor that clinched the
decision in favour of June 9. But then, as she saw it, it wasn’t yet a
decision. She was like a child thinking of excuses to get out of something.
“Even if I wanted to call an election, the Queen could hardly be available
at such short notice.”
So Ian Gow slipped out and rang the palace, who told him that the Queen would
be happy to see her at midday tomorrow. She gave him a cross look and
scarcely bothered to thank him for the trouble.
Even after she had said goodbye to her guests, she went on muttering in a
quiet, tearful undertone, “I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do at all. I
shall sleep on it. It’s always best to sleep on these things.”
For the only time when I was around (though there must often have been such
occasions in the privacy of their boudoir) Denis lost patience. “You can’t
do that, Margaret. They’ve all gone back to town saying it’s going to be the
9th. You can’t go back on that now. The horses have bolted, my dear.”
Without actually contradicting this unanswerable argument, she sat by the
embers of the fire looking glum and put-upon. At last, my sluggish
civilian’s brain began to understand.
The decisions that really matter to political leaders are those to do with the
getting and holding of power. Other decisions may turn out well or ill. They
may cost billions of pounds or hundreds of lives, but for enlisted
politicians those decisions are secondary. What matters to them is: will I
still be here after this? And the spectacle of Mrs Thatcher by the huge
Tudor grate at Chequers, exhausted by the day’s work like Cinders after a
hard time from the Ugly Sisters, made me realise it.
I really threw myself into her campaign speeches. In the evenings we would
spend an hour or two going over the next day’s. They were strange evenings,
usually just the two of us up in the flat, each with a glass of whisky, she
with her shoes off but fretful rather than relaxed.
Now and then the phone would ring; it would usually be one of her confidants,
Woodrow Wyatt most often, to whom she could pour out her complaints about
her colleagues, especially Francis Pym, who had just given an interview
saying that it would be a bad thing if the Conservatives won the election by
a landslide: “If it hadn’t been for the Falklands, I’d never have made him
foreign secretary. He’s so weak, Woodrow, and weak men always let you down.
Now he’s saying we don’t want a landslide. What are all our people going to
think?”
Far from these intimate late-night glimpses showing a softer, more easy-going
side to her, they tended to reveal just how steely her inner core really
was. She could forgive a personal peccadillo and was generally tolerant
about anything to do with sex. Towards her staff, especially the girls, she
was thoughtful and even indulgent. But to her colleagues, she was hard and
unforgiving.
“No, Francis, I can’t agree. I think it was a great mistake and I think it is
doing a lot of damage.” I could just hear Pym’s gloomy, rather grating voice
at the other end of the line and I could not repress a little sadistic stab
of pleasure although I had nothing against him and his remark seemed
harmless enough to me, in fact more likely to make people vote Conservative
rather than not. But I could see that from that moment his career was over,
and Mrs Thatcher’s first action on winning the election was to sack him.
She waltzed in with a majority of 144. Inside Downing Street, ministers and
soon-to-be ex-ministers were tramping in and out. I bumped into them several
times as they were coming or going, their faces barely recognisable because
they were so transfigured by their fate: Leon Brittan, normally pasty-faced
and hesitant of manner, glowing like a light bulb after being made home
secretary; Willie Whitelaw’s rich purple cheeks as white as paper after
being sacked from the Home Office and shunted upwards to the Lords. And
Cecil Parkinson looking like a leper.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Mrs Thatcher had been set on making him foreign
secretary. Now he had just told her he had been having an affair with his
secretary, Sara Keays, and she might be pregnant.
The next day happened to be Trooping the Colour. It had become a tradition
that the prime minister should invite her staff and their families to watch
the parade from the Downing Street stand, along with the cabinet and their
spouses. It was a deliciously odd scene: junior ministers still trooping in
and out to hear what she had in store for them, their paths crossed by
flocks of small children and cabinet members’ wives in best summer frocks,
their husbands still exhibiting the emotional shock of the day before, as
though promotion or demotion had caused a permanent change to their blood
supply.
Lunch had already started by the time Mrs Thatcher herself bustled in, fresh
from the latest round of ministerial bloodletting. She immediately began
handing round plates of coronation chicken to the children and asking the
quicker eaters if they wanted seconds. She was the Little Red Hen in the
fairy story who decides she has to do everything herself because nobody else
will do it.
My son Harry had briefly taken up autograph-hunting and he worked the room,
clocking up the white-faced Whitelaw and Parkinson for starters. Then Harry
moved on to get a signature from Denis Thatcher. Would it be all right to
ask Mark Thatcher for an autograph, too?
“I wouldn’t bother if I was you,” said Denis: “the boy can scarcely write his
own name” – which Harry thought the funniest thing he had ever heard. In
fact Mark was delighted to sign his name, saying as he did so, “Your father
was the architect of victory” – the only person, I am sorry to say, who took
this perceptive view.
They ought to have been happy days that followed. The second election victory
did make a huge difference. It was not simply that ministers had a greater
self-confidence that they could shift the status quo. Perhaps more
important, their officials became conscious that the Thatcher approach was
not simply a blip but might be here to stay a while.
Yet this was just the moment when I began to experience a nagging discontent.
You couldn’t really speak of a personality clash. On the contrary, I came to
admire Mrs Thatcher rather more. She continued to have the capacity to
surprise.
I was fascinated when Tony Parsons, her debonair, chain-smoking new foreign
policy adviser, told me that she had asked for a big Chequers seminar on the
USSR and was annoying the Foreign Office by demanding papers from every
outside expert imaginable. Her turn towards the East was rapid and
unexpected. It was announced that Hungary would be her first port of call,
and by chance I went to lunch that week at The Spectator and the Russian
ambassador was there, an urbane fellow.
“Now please, you tell me, sir, why is your Mrs Thatcher choosing to go to
Hungary?”
“Well, I don’t have anything to do with foreign policy but I can tell you for
free I haven’t a clue.”
“You are playing games with me. This Iron Lady suddenly becomes palsy with the
evil communists and you tell me you don’t know a sausage.”
“I promise you, I really don’t know a thing.”
His Excellency looked at me with baleful frustration, scarcely able to contain
his annoyance at the inscrutability of the British. At this moment I was
saved by the Spectator cook Jennifer Paterson, later TV star of Two Fat
Ladies, handing round the stew and booming into the ambassador’s ear in her
throaty contralto, “Do you know my brother? He’s the British consul in Ulan
Bator,” which His bewildered Excellency thought must be some kind of weird
British joke but was in fact the truth.
So if Margaret had not lost her dynamic allure, why was I increasingly so keen
to get the hell out? There was the grind, of course. We had begun the same
build-up to the conference speech, this year at Blackpool, and the same
wrecking crew of speechwriters was blundering through the same motions. The
whole business seemed twice as bad as the year before.
It must have been about 11.30pm on the Thursday in the Imperial hotel that I
resolved to myself that this would definitely be the last time. Just then,
there was a knock at the door and Robin Butler shimmered in.
“Mr Parkinson would like a word, prime minister.”
She shooed us out. We passed Cecil in the passage. His face was a strange grey
deathmask colour. The press officer at No 10 had just read over the worst
bits of an interview with Sara Keays in the next morning’s Times. This was
her response to the statement he had put out earlier in the week setting out
the facts of their affair. It was clear that she was not going to go away,
but he was.
It was time for me to go away, too. But I knew this would not be possible
unless I could come up with a plausible successor. The only one in immediate
view on my staff was John Redwood, fellow of All Souls, director of
Rothschilds, still only 32 and a bit other-planetary in manner, but
hard-working and enthusiastic. To my horror, though, he beat me to it.
“I think it’s time I moved on. I think I’ve set the wheels in motion and my
best work is done here.”
“Oh dear,” I said. “That’s exactly what I think too – about myself, I mean,
not you. And I think you would be the ideal person to take over.”
Here our conversation grows hazy, in my memory at least. We both remember John
saying something to the effect that this might alter his view, but he also
remembers himself asking why I didn’t wish to stay on, because I admired her
so much and got on with her so well.
“Admire her?” goes the Redwood version of me. “I hate her.”
I have no recollection of this moment, which must have been as dramatic as the
bit in Rebecca when Laurence Olivier as Maxim de Winter uses the same words
about his dead wife. Perhaps I have suppressed it. But whether or not his
report is accurate (and John is truthful, as Martians tend to be), he has
accurately conveyed my fevered state of mind.
I left No 10 at the end of the year. By the time of my leaving party, my
bonhomie was fully restored, as was my admiration for this strange, tense,
ruthless but deeply honourable and usually honest woman.
It was a fine moment to walk out into Whitehall for the last time and breathe
the damp night air as a free man. It was as good as being told that you
don’t have cancer any more. In fact, 10 years later, when I was told
precisely that after a disagreeable interlude, I remember thinking: this is
as good as leaving No 10.
None of the things you read about as happening to someone who is drafted in to
serve a great man or woman happened to me. I never came to think less of
her, as valets are supposed to do. She remained heroic, intolerable often,
vindictive, even poisonous sometimes, but always heroic.
Equally, I never became fond of her. That insistent, harsh concentration could
never become endearing. “I’m not here to be nice,” she would say, which was
just as well. It is easy to slip into thinking that some of the things she
achieved could have been achieved in a kinder style and at a lesser cost. I
rather doubt it. There are times when what is needed is not a beacon but a
blowtorch.
© Ferdinand Mount 2008 Extracted from Cold Cream: My Early Life
and Other Mistakes, by Ferdinand Mount, to be published by Bloomsbury
tomorrow at £20. Copies can be ordered for £17.50 including postage from The
Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
