Gillian Shephard on working with Mrs Thatcher

Gillian Shephard’s The Real Iron Lady: Working With Mrs Thatcher, is out today. You can buy the book now for the special price of £13.99 (RRP £16.99), and below you can read the second part of the Mail on Sunday’s serialisation of the book. Read the first part here.
Whisky-fuelled battles in the dead of night… then handbags at dawn: Memories of Mrs Thatcher’s ferocious work ethic and what she really thought of the ‘Iron Lady’ tag
There are countless stories of how Margaret Thatcher’s long hours and vast appetite for work left her Ministers and officials gasping. She had the ability to dismiss fatigue apparently at will, as Harvey Thomas, Head of Press at Conservative HQ for 13 years, remembers.
‘One Saturday during the 1983 Election campaign, we flopped around a trestle table for a sandwich lunch. We were all shattered. I said wistfully and with a mild attempt at humour, “Well, we’ve all earned it, and I think it’s time for a siesta!”
‘A colleague smiled and we said enthusiastically, “Yes, that’s what a few of us need.” I looked across the table at Mrs T and said, “Well, that’s three of us in favour of a siesta, that’s almost unanimous.” ‘With a perfectly straight face she said, “It’s not unanimous, it’s a majority of one against.” We all laughed.’
Speechwriter Elizabeth Cottrell recalls burning the midnight oil with Margaret in No 10. ‘Finally Mrs Thatcher decided that we should stop – until the next day. But she must be sure that I was comfortable.
’So at three o’clock in the morning, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was running a bath for me, bringing me a nightdress and toothbrush, popping a hot-water bottle into the bed just in case it was cold! Nothing was too much trouble for her – it was incredible.’
Another former No 10 aide, Hartley Booth, who succeeded Mrs Thatcher as Finchley MP, says: ‘I was in her office with a colleague one night.
’We looked at our watches. “Is it one o’clock?” asked Margaret. We were so tired we did not have the spark to say, “Yes, could we go home now, Prime Minister?”
‘Instead, she said brightly, “I get a new lease of life at this time of the morning.”
‘And we duly went on until two o’clock, when she drew stumps. Later that morning in the Cabinet Room, Margaret referred to an item on Farming Today at 6am. She did not have more than four hours’ sleep that night.’
Although she enjoyed a robust argument – and often respected those who disagreed with her – there were times when she needed careful handling, as John Wakeham, who served as Chief Whip, soon discovered.
‘On the rare occasions she was wrong, I always felt I was more likely to get her to change her mind if I set about it slowly and with a little subtlety,’ he recalls.
‘When I was a Minister of State at the Treasury, I had made some rather radical tax proposals which she did not like too much, and she sent for me.
‘I felt my political career was about to end before it had really begun. I determined that my best course was to stick to my guns and keep smiling! After a long debate, she said, “All right, John, we will do it your way, but you had better be right. Let’s have a drink.” ’
Henry Plumb met Mrs Thatcher every two weeks when he was chairman of the European Parliament’s agriculture committee – an organisation she regarded with some suspicion – in the early Eighties. He took a more forceful approach with her than most.
‘On one occasion we met late at night and we had an extremely amicable conversation, accompanied by three large whiskies. As I was leaving, her mood suddenly changed, and she said, quite belligerently, “Henry, we must discuss the Common Agricultural Policy. I am not going to put any more money into the pockets of these peasant farmers in France, and elsewhere in Europe.”
‘I must have been emboldened by the three whiskies and I found myself saying, “If you will just shut up for one minute, I will tell you about the CAP.”
‘Not surprisingly, she looked a little startled and said, “You’d better come back in.”
‘I said, “Those peasants as you call them, the small farmers, get nothing out of the CAP. It is big farmers like your brother-in-law, on his farm in Essex, who are getting the money from the intervention payments they receive on their surplus wheat, £50 a ton while we still have a wheat mountain.
‘ “Yes, the CAP wants changing, but surpluses are not the fault of the so-called European peasants, their problem is social, not economic.” ’
[Margaret Thatcher’s sister, Muriel, was married to John Cullen, a farmer, in 1950, and they settled in Essex.]
‘Her jaw dropped. “How do you know my brother-in-law?” she asked.
‘ “I was on his farm only last week,” I said, “and I can tell you that what I said is right. You can ask him yourself if you want.” I left without being handbagged.’
The last time I saw Margaret in the House of Commons was the day before William Hague was elected as Leader of the Conservative Party in the summer of 1997.
Margaret had agreed to campaign for Hague and, on this day, she was simply indomitable.
We swept through the House with her in the vanguard, and sailed into the Tea Room, to the amazement of the newly elected Labour women MPs clustered there. She went straight up to a male MP, sitting enjoying a quiet cup of tea, and said: ‘Now, you must vote for William Hague!’
He said: ‘I certainly would, but I am a Liberal Democrat.’
It was a splendid if slightly farcical episode. But it did remind everyone in the Tea Room that day of just what verve and style she had brought to politics.
Margaret Thatcher was on the campaign trail again, and the effect was electrifying. Her extraordinary charisma brought her fame, if not always appreciation, across the planet.
Wherever I went, either as a government Minister or as an individual, people would ask questions about her. In Egypt, Uruguay and Paraguay I was besieged by women at receptions and meetings asking if I knew who were Madame Thatcher’s couturiers, hairdressers and visagistes [make-up artists]. Disappointingly for them, but fortunately for me, I did not know.
On the street more or less anywhere in the world, children trying out their English would rush up and shout ‘Mrs Thatcher, Mrs Thatcher’ and later ‘Iron Lady’, a sobriquet she told Sir Richard Parsons [a senior British diplomat] she would like to ‘divest’ herself of as she considered it ‘unhelpful’.
In August 1992, I had to act as interpreter for President Mitterrand at a private dinner.
John Major, her successor, was well established as Prime Minister by then, but it was clear who was on the mind of the French President, and he questioned me closely.
How had her downfall come about? Were British politicians mad to get rid of such an outstanding Prime Minister? Did I understand that such a thing could never happen in France, the constitution specifically prevented such a thing, and why did the British not have such constitutional arrangements?
What role had the Queen played in all this – surely she could have prevented such a disaster? (A question I thought particularly rich from a Republican.)
Margaret’s two decades in power, including an unprecedented third term of office, made a powerful and enduring impact – and not just upon Francois Mitterrand. As former Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley puts it, she has ‘profoundly altered Britain and our place in the world’.