Home is where you go when you’ve nowhere else to go.
Margaret Thatcher
The queen’s relationship with Mrs Thatcher seemed to go through four stages:
At first, there was suspicion of her because she was a woman who achieved power on her own merit. Second, there was a fear that her policies were threatening the concept of consensus politics, to which Her Majesty was closely attached. Third, there was irritation at her grandiosity and constant upstaging of the monarchy, and finally, there was a relief after the storm, because the ‘other queen’ had finally moved on.
Mrs Thatcher was a British icon, and so was the queen. Not merely had they been at odds over political questions and the style of government, in a sense they were rivals for the same job. While in office, Thatcher had taken on both the role and the persona traditionally fulfilled by the monarch alone.
Indeed, Thatcher’s regal stance could be unnerving. At a Christmas party, Lady Annabel Goldsmith whispered to the guest standing next to her as Margaret walked in, ‘For God’s sake remind me not to curtsy, that’s what I did last time!’1
However, the most notorious example of this was the infamous royal ‘we’ she used when she emerged from 10 Downing Street to announce the birth of her grandson. Historian Peter Hennessy has written how history at its most cruel can be reduced to a single one-liner, and if so, Thatcher’s defining phrase must surely be ‘we are a grandmother’.2 The British people, as much as the queen herself, disliked the royal position being usurped in this way, and they were uncomfortable that a prime minister should be so powerful as to feel able to do so. Television journalist and host Richard Madeley was the first to ask her why she had said this. The Iron Lady explained that her husband Denis, who disliked the public limelight, wouldn’t come out to be with her on the steps of Number 10 as the new grandfather. Wanting to make sure she included him, she became tongue-tied and came out with the words that appeared so affected. Not everyone believed the explanation.
By the end of Mrs Thatcher’s time in office, the queen had come to accept Thatcher’s dominant presence. She invited her to the races and the queen mother paid her the compliment of asking her to stay at her Scottish home, Birkhall, on the Balmoral estate. Margaret never took up either invitation. She never liked country life and certainly didn’t want to make the same mistake as Harold Wilson.3 After Wilson had left office, the queen did not want to see him, although she had been fond of him when he was in power, not least for increasing her own Civil List payments. She had become bored with his bragging. ‘She thought he was absurd,’ stated Lord Charteris, ‘Rather like Toad in Wind in the Willows.’4 What Wilson forgot was that the queen has reigned for a long time, so none of her prime ministers are as special to her as she is to them.5 Nevertheless, the queen did attend the ex-prime minister’s 70th birthday party at Claridge’s as the guest of honour in 1995.
Margaret Thatcher’s exit from 10 Downing Street was something of a personal tragedy: she found herself on the political scrapheap and out of the game. What hurt her most was the fact she was no longer indispensable to Britain – and she couldn’t even begin to imagine a new role for herself, let alone actually occupy one. ‘She wasn’t interested in reinventing herself … she would never have changed,’ said Tim Bell. ‘She was a resolute woman … unshakeable.’6 As Charles Powell observed, ‘it was the exercise of power she was built for, and without that she felt life lacked purpose. A dreadnought is out of place in a fishing fleet.’7
She became more like an empress in exile than a retired prime minister. To combat her sense of impotence, she was determined to underline her gravitas and to let the world know she still mattered. She said, ‘It had come to an end … But what I did didn’t come to an end.’8 She always dreaded retirement, and still believed that she had a lot more to do. Margaret had always insisted that she would not retire until she had found a worthy successor to her ideas, something she never achieved. She was now airbrushed out of Tory Party history by the undistinguished grey men she had previously chosen to surround herself in order to make herself shine all the brighter.9
The day Margaret Thatcher left office, Woodrow Wyatt rang her in her Dulwich home and found her ‘coming down to earth with a bump’. Although Denis and Margaret had bought a neo-Georgian house in south London, after over a decade at Downing Street and Chequers, the new Lady Thatcher had long outgrown suburbia. There were other problems associated with not living ‘over the shop’. Deprived of the Downing Street office staff, the ex-prime minister had to make her own phone calls and had no idea how to use a push button phone, so she had to get advice from the police officers stationed in her garage.
Unhappy in Dulwich, Lady Thatcher borrowed a luxurious duplex flat in Eaton Square, Belgravia, owned by Mrs Henry Ford. It was grand and central. Baroness Thatcher, sitting under a portrait of Queen Isabella of Spain, held lunches there and complained bitterly how the wheel of fortune had turned against her.
The Thatchers eventually bought a four storey Georgian house, with too many stairs, at 73 Chester Square, just around the corner from Eaton Square. She filled her sitting room with prized possessions, including an extensive collection of porcelain. There was also a large portrait of her by American artist Nelson Shanks and, on another wall, a painting of Downing Street by Nick Ridley. Among the rows of snuffboxes and china was a silver-framed photograph of her looking rather overdressed, with the queen and the queen mother at Balmoral.
There was little consolation from family life. After the Thatchers had left Downing Street, Mark and Denis didn’t get on. Mark was often extremely rude to his father in front of Margaret and sometimes even in public. Lady Thatcher always sided with her son. While Denis gave her emotional support, Margaret turned to Mark to manage her financial and speaking affairs. He became her business advisor, literary agent, tour operator and chief fundraiser. She signed up to the Washington Speakers’ Bureau for a reported fee of $50,000 a lecture, a fee second only to Reagan’s. In the short term, this enabled her to enjoy the admiration of her global fan base.
She occupied herself with frenetic travels and speechmaking, sometimes startling well-intentioned questioners by pummelling them into the ground as though they were Neil Kinnock at PM’s Questions. Controversially, she also became a consultant to Philip Morris, the giant tobacco corporation, in a deal worth $1 million over three years. Advising them how to break into troublesome foreign markets, she upset the anti-smoking lobby in the process. The irony was that she disliked smoking, and while she was prime minister had actively sought to protect vulnerable teenagers from tobacco companies.10 The job attracted much negative press comment.
Margaret spent time writing her memoirs. ‘I think the first thing she wanted to do was to get down on paper her history,’ said Tim Bell.11 Meanwhile, Mark tried to secure a publishing deal. Obviously, every publishing house in the world was interested and a multi-million pound advance on royalties beckoned. In his memoirs, Alan Clark wrote dismissively, ‘Mark has been winding her up’, as he had claimed a book deal was worth $20 million.12 There was a general agreement that Mark was becoming a bit of a ‘problem’.13
Instead of striking a deal within weeks of leaving office, Mark procrastinated and missed the big opportunity. The legendary American super-agent, Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar, said publicly, ‘The son is the fly in the ointment. The son thinks he can be an agent. He’s decided he knows about publishing, and he’s an amateur.’14 Mark was negotiating at the time with newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell, who owned Macmillan Publishers. Mark wanted as much as $10 million, and Maxwell was offering $8 million. Despite Mark Thatcher and Robert Maxwell eventually agreeing a ‘handshake contract’ the deal collapsed, which was just as well, as five months later Maxwell died.15
With the negotiations going so slowly, a family friend and bestselling novelist, Jeffrey Archer, brought in respected literary agent, George Greenfield, to advise. By now, Mark was talking to Marvin Josephson, a New York literary agent. Within days of Josephson signing Thatcher as a client of his company, International Creative Management Inc., publishers were finally invited to bid and the deal went to Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins publishing house for £3.5 million.
Michael Sissons, a knowledgeable literary agent in London, summed it up best:
This was unquestionably, the most saleable autobiography of our times … So the project initially had enormous value, and to see that frittered away was immensely depressing. The value just seemed to fade because of the bad publicity, the indecision and the aura that Mark Thatcher’s involvement gave it.16
Despite, rather than because of, Mark’s intervention, within two years of leaving office Margaret was placed 134th in the Sunday Times ‘Rich List’ with an estimated wealth of £9.5 million. The memoirs, entitled The Downing Street Years, received a good reception from the critics, although she told the book buyers at Hatchards that she would have preferred the title ‘Undefeated!’17
A BBC documentary, The Downing Street Years, was also filmed. She came across as angry and bitter. ‘It brought out the very worst of her,’ said Lord Carrington. ‘I mean, she was horrid about everybody, and to everybody. And she wasn’t like that … she was the kindest person. But the one thing she didn’t want to be was to be thought of as kind … she wanted to be the Iron Lady.’18
Another missed opportunity as a result of Mark Thatcher’s management was the Thatcher Foundation, set up with the intention of preserving Lady Thatcher’s legacy, and promoting her ideas around the world. The ambition was to raise $20 million initially, and Margaret asked Mark to handle the financial affairs and act as chief fundraiser. Margaret Thatcher had always been generous to big business and now, in Mark’s mind, it was payback time and the new foundation provided an opportunity for big business to be generous to Margaret.
At one fundraising meeting, he read out a list of high-powered CEOs who had made their money during the 1980s boom and asked each one how much they were donating. When enlightened about the amounts, he was dismissive, ‘Chickenfeed. My mother made them. Now they have to pay up.’19
Just before her trip to the Far East, he telephoned a Hong Kong millionaire tycoon and told him, ‘It’s time to pay up for Mumsie.’20 When one leading industrialist offered to raise £7 million for the Foundation, Mark was dismissive. ‘That’s not good enough,’ he sniffed.
However, when complaints were reported back to mother, mother paid no attention, until some of her close friends and admirers briefed the Sunday Times. The result was a front page story on 21 April 1991, with the headline, ‘“Mark is Wrecking Your Life”, Friends Tell Thatcher’. The article contained a disparaging assessment of his inept leadership.
Eventually, the Thatcher Foundation moved into a fine Georgian property in Belgravia at 35 Chesham Place, where her private office was arranged to look like the study at 10 Downing Street. Mark Worthington, a former researcher to Tory MPs, served as her aide and gave her political briefings each day. He did his best to create the impression of relevance, and those wishing to visit called him for an appointment.21
There was an old leather-covered desk, and a high-backed chair by the fireplace where she would look at her papers with the help of a magnifying glass (she refused to wear reading glasses out of vanity). The offices were very feminine, filled with flowers and plants, and Mrs Thatcher wore a heavy scent, usually Chanel No. 5, which filled the air. All around the room were memories of past glories, busts of Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill and Denis. Two watercolours of Chequers, a portrait of her by Russian artist, Sergey Chepik, and some amateur paintings of the Falklands campaign hung on the walls.
Her favourite books were kept in a glass-fronted bookcase. Selected for inspiration, they included mostly political volumes or histories, such as The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy, Ronald Reagan’s Speaking My Mind and Barbara Tuchman’s book on the Holy Land, The Bible and the Sword. She would often read a large print version of the King James Bible to check her scriptural quotations. She was very annoyed when Denis threw out Reagan’s autobiography by mistake (or so he claimed).22
Despite its elegant offices, the Thatcher Foundation never fulfilled its potential. Some grants were awarded, including a scheme to educate students from the Eastern bloc in English public schools and a fund for Russian librarians to spend eight weeks in Washington.23 However, fundraising was scuppered by Mark Thatcher’s insensitive approaches to sympathetic businesses. Its greatest achievement was arguably the collation and distribution to universities of the complete public statements of Margaret Thatcher on CD-ROM.
Margaret’s moods were dark; the ex-prime minister often broke down and cried. Almost unhinged, she started to drink Scotch, largely because it was less fattening than a gin and tonic. With Denis pouring the drinks, as he now always did, she found her glass filled with quadruple shots of spirits. Fearful about gaining weight, she cut down on what she ate at lunch and the alcohol went straight to her head. Painfully, she had to have major dental work carried out and was forced to wear cumbersome plates, so she often slurred and hissed at guests. Naturally, people thought she was intoxicated as she could become loud, argumentative and unpleasant to those who crossed her.
She was, by temperament, belligerent.24 Her increased deafness and her mental decline made her conversation repetitive and impossible to understand. Again, many blamed the Scotch. Much of her unsteadiness was also caused by her determination to keep wearing high-heeled shoes, not, as gossips suggested, by too many whiskies.25
Denis, ten years older than Margaret, gave up his company directorships but kept up with his rugby, cricket and his boozy lunches. He spent much of his time carefully checking his bank statements and reading biographies. Although he had pressed his wife repeatedly since she left Downing Street to retire and look after him at home, she couldn’t give up work. Ever the loyal husband, he joined her on foreign tours and was physically not always able to keep up with the demanding schedules. He refused to take taxis because they were too expensive, and Margaret tried to make him take the official car, which she wasn’t officially allowed to do unless they were travelling together. Once, when he was jumping onto a bus in Piccadilly, he fell off, smashing his watch.
For seventy years, Mrs Thatcher’s health had been extraordinarily good. However, during a speaking engagement in Chile in 1994 she suddenly lost consciousness and slumped forward onto the lectern. She quickly recovered, and apologised, very embarrassed about what had happened. It was probably a first, very minor, stroke.
The most obvious sign of her delicacy was the loss of short-term memory. If she had a script, she could deliver an impeccable professional performance, but without one, repetitions would creep in. During a holiday with Denis to Madeira in 2001, she suffered a second minor stroke, and sometime early in 2002 she had a third. Afterwards, it was announced that she would do no more public speaking.
The more time Denis and Margaret spent together, the more spiky relations became. Margaret’s forgetfulness and repetitiveness proved an irritation. By the time Denis’s health collapsed, their marriage was going through a difficult patch. The hours they spent together dragged a little. When Denis was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he was admitted to the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, where, surrounded by family and friends, he died with Margaret holding his hand on 26 June 2003. His funeral took place in the chapel of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, after which he was cremated.
Margaret was devastated with grief. Denis had always been her best friend, as she had never made time in her life for other friendships to grow. They became much closer in Downing Street than they had ever been in the earlier part of their marriage.26 Denis and Margaret, whose relationship was often rather formal and a bit stiff, had loved each other perhaps more than they ever knew. For months she couldn’t work, sleep or function. Behind the Thatcher facade of success was a lonely woman who lived only for her work, and Denis had been her one link to normality. ‘Denis dying,’ explains Tim Bell, ‘had an enormous impact on her because he was absolutely her rock through everything, and he was fantastic at the job.’27
‘I think she would have found it very much more difficult without him. I think he is a huge component of the story,’ said Michael Dobbs.28
New losses, like that of Ronald Reagan who died of pneumonia in 2004, sharpened her pain. Each year, until his withdrawal from public life, she had attended and spoken at his birthday party. He had wanted her to perform a eulogy at his funeral, the first time a foreigner had been asked to do such a thing for a former president. Margaret constantly worried about whether she could do him justice. Eventually, Reagan’s death coincided with her own ill health, and she recorded it in advance in London and listened to herself in Washington Cathedral, before attending the final interment at the Reagan Library in California with Nancy, family and friends.
Her family provided little consolation for her in old age. She rarely saw her grandchildren, Amanda and Michael, and saw little more of her children. Her childhood had never been that affectionate and such patterns tend to be repeated. She was never the sort of granny to knit socks or get stuck into Lego. Mark and his family now lived in South Africa and seldom came to Britain. Carol spent most of her time in Switzerland in an on–off amour with a ski instructor called Marco Grass. She and her mother had never gone shopping together nor enjoyed girls’ days together at the spa. Carol had neither the academic talent nor the ability to make money, traits that Lady Thatcher respected. There was little intimacy, as it had never been a close-knit family, and as a consequence Mark and Carol spent little time in their increasingly frail and forgetful mother’s company.
‘Look, you can’t have everything,’ an elderly Margaret Thatcher said some years ago, in a revealing interview in Saga magazine:
It’s been my greatest privilege being prime minister of my country … Yes, I wish I saw more of my children. We don’t have Sunday lunch together; we don’t go on holiday skiing anymore. But I can’t regret. And I haven’t lost my children. They have their lives. I took a different life.29
Carol published an affectionate biography of her father, Denis, which drew a devastating picture of Mrs Thatcher’s remoteness as a mother. ‘As a child I was frightened of her,’ Carol revealed.30 If anything, the emotional wounds between matriarch and belligerent daughter festered rather than healed after Margaret left Downing Street.31 After one clash with her mother, Carol stormed out of the family house, then Chester Square in Belgravia, shouting, ‘Lady Thatcher, you were a great prime minister, but you are an awful mother!’
Nevertheless, Margaret became extremely proud of Carol’s success in the television reality programme I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here! Friends vetted some of the less tasteful incidents, including the moment when Carol was filmed urinating by her camp bed, but she was glued to the screen for the parts she saw, including the final, and was delighted by her daughter’s courageous victory. Lady Thatcher had no objection to a bit of vulgarity, particularly when Carol turned her triumph into financial success with several television and book offers.
This new harmony didn’t last. Carol’s second book, A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl, revealed intimate details of Margaret’s ‘dementia’, as Carol referred to it. Carol disclosed in that memoir the exact moment she realised there was a problem. Over lunch with friends in 2000, Lady Thatcher inexplicably confused Yugoslavia with the Falklands. ‘I almost fell off my chair,’ said Carol. ‘Watching her struggle with her words and her memory. I couldn’t believe it. I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless, and 100 per cent cast iron damage proof.’32
It was wrongly assumed that the former prime minister was in an advanced state of Alzheimer’s disease. People thought that she had retired completely and couldn’t be invited to private functions. There were even discussions in the press about whether someone with mental health problems could vote in the House of Lords. For several days, Lady Thatcher’s staff kept the information from her, but in the end she had to know. When she read it, she was shocked at seeing, in print, facts about her condition. Margaret was deeply wounded that her daughter could behave in such a fashion.33
Worse was to come when a political scandal engulfed her son, now Sir Mark Thatcher, after he had succeeded to his father’s baronetcy. Mark was placed under house arrest in South Africa and charged under the country’s anti-mercenary laws for his involvement in a failed political coup in Equatorial Guinea. After plea bargaining, he was convicted and given a four year suspended sentence as well as a fine of about £240,000 ($370,000). Margaret put up £100,000 of the bail money to get him released from police custody and helped with his fine. On his arrest, his wife Diane divorced him and left with her two children, Amanda and Michael, for her native United States. She perhaps summed it up best when she said, ‘Mark was given one of the best seats at the banquet of life, and he’s blown it.’34
Mark’s convictions mean that he cannot live in the United States, and he now lives in Europe and has remarried. Carol was openly contemptuous of her mother’s decision to bail him out, and the entire episode deepened the two women’s estrangement. In December 2005, it was widely reported that Margaret had a fainting fit while at her hairdresser. A stroke caused it. Mark rushed to his mother’s hospital bedside. Carol, although in London, stayed away. She also absented herself from Chester Square during the following Christmas, alienating herself from her mother as much as her brother.
There were less woeful times as well. In October 2005, Lady Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday with a party at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London’s Hyde Park. Attended by 650 guests, Times journalist Andrew Pierce called it ‘the ultimate 80s revival night’.35 The queen and Prince Philip were guests of honour, along with Tony Blair and most of her 1980s Cabinet colleagues, minus Lord Heseltine.
The red carpet was rolled out for Lady Thatcher’s arrival, and she appeared dressed in a navy blue cocktail coat and a Camilla Milton silk chiffon dress. The party would be one of the last big public events that she would host. Guests included Joan Collins, Dame Shirley Bassey, June Whitfield, P.D. James, Terry Wogan, Lord Lloyd-Webber, Sir Jimmy Young, Jeremy Clarkson, Princess Alexandra and President Cossiga of Italy. There was a rare appearance from John Profumo, who had retreated from public life in 1963 after lying to the Commons over his relationship with Christine Keeler. Jeffrey Archer, who was jailed for perjury, also attended. His wife, Mary Archer, said, ‘Lady Thatcher may appear to be the Iron Lady, but her friends saw a warm, kind and thoughtful person who does not desert you when you are not in vogue.’
Even Sir John Major, who accused Lady Thatcher of undermining his premiership, made a surprise appearance, a sign that their feud was over. Geoffrey Howe also seemed to have been forgiven. He said, ‘Her real triumph was to have transformed not just one party but two, so that when Labour did eventually return, the great bulk of Thatcherism was accepted as irreversible.’
However, the quote of the night went to Joan Collins who said, ‘She is the Iron Lady, and I want to be just like that when I grow up.’36
Cecil Parkinson also attended:
I think one of the most poignant moments of Margaret’s eightieth birthday, was when the queen took Margaret under her wing that night. She was holding her arm and escorting her for quite a part of the evening. And that was a real sign of concern and friendship to me … The queen did care about her, as a person, and respected her and wanted that evening to be a great success for her.37
In 2008 she was admitted to hospital for tests after she felt ill at the House of Lords. After that, there were only rare public appearances. Lady Thatcher was spotted watering the roses in the Temple Gardens in London’s legal district, hunched and frail in raincoat and scarf under the watchful eye of her police protection; it was a weekly routine she liked to perform until she got too delicate even for that. There was another sighting of the former prime minister sitting on a park bench in London enjoying the sunshine in March 2011, patting a playful dog.38
At Christmas 2012, suffering abdominal pains, she was rushed to the hospital to remove a growth in her bladder. It wasn’t a difficult operation, but when she was released from the hospital she couldn’t manage the stairs at Chester Square. Instead, she moved into a luxurious suite at the Ritz Hotel where she received round-the-clock nursing. Reading the papers, she noticed a large picture of Meryl Streep, playing her in the film The Iron Lady. ‘How elegant!’ was the response. However, it was unclear whether she was paying tribute to the actress or herself. Margaret never saw the film, and those around her kept her shielded her from the fact that it focused on her dementia.39
In contrast to Lady Thatcher’s deterioration, the queen and the royal family started to make a comeback in public opinion. Edwina Currie pointed out, ‘The queen and Buckingham Palace finally got their act together, just as Mrs Thatcher went into decline.’
The opening of the state apartments at Buckingham Palace following the fire at Windsor Castle had been very successful. Similarly, the queen’s golden wedding celebrations, after the death of Diana, showed Her Majesty was able to listen to criticism. At a lunch hosted by Prime Minister Tony Blair, dubbed a ‘people’s banquet’, she acknowledged the difficulty royalty experienced in reading public opinion. ‘But read it we must,’ she said.40 Buckingham Palace stressed the queen’s continuity, adaptability, permanence and endurance, and words like glamour and mystique were dropped from the vernacular.41
Amongst the staff at Buckingham Palace, there was a new sense of urgency and purpose. The queen had stated in her memorable speech, made the evening before Diana’s funeral, that there were ‘lessons to be learned’ and that was now taken up as a mantra. Taking the public’s temperature became an obsession at the palace.
There was a choreographed change of style. Before the Diana tragedy, if the queen visited a school, she would stand in the doorway and listen to the teacher. Now she made a point of sitting down with the children. Buzzwords such as ‘listening’, ‘modernisation’ and ‘informality’ were used. There were changes to royal protocol. Bowing and curtsying to royalty became optional, and unoccupied royal residences automatically had a Union Jack hanging over them, to be lowered to half-mast should the need arise.42
Even Camilla Parker-Bowles was rehabilitated. For years, the queen refused to receive her. It was said on this issue that ‘the Head Lady is not for turning’.43 To her, he could either become king and put Camilla aside, or marry her and reconsider his future. It sounded liked the ultimatum given during the abdication crisis to the Duke of Windsor. However, members of the family like Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Chatto, and key palace courtiers like Sir Michael Peat, recognised that the queen would appear hard-faced and out of touch.44 Finally, the queen met Camilla at Highgrove, a necessary gesture if there was to be any hope of building a better relationship with Charles.
There were setbacks. At the ceremonial decommissioning of the Royal Yacht Britannia, after forty-four years in service, photographers caught the queen crying. Some tabloids picked up on the fact that, by comparison, she had wept no tears at Princess Diana’s funeral.
Prince Charles also remained a problem. His detractors dismissed him as a privileged crank, and his handwritten letters regularly landed on the desk of government ministers. Newspaper reports in August 2013 revealed that the prince had held thirty-six meetings with Cabinet ministers since Britain’s coalition government came to power in 2010. Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times alleged that Prince Charles had placed ‘moles’ at the heart of Britain’s government and that he was interfering in the political process. A recent rash of articles has proposed bypassing the Prince of Wales in favour of the shiny younger royals: King William and Queen Katherine would certainly sparkle. Such leapfrogging is unlikely to occur, however, as Charles has recently taken on many of his mother’s officials roles, including the state opening of Parliament and presiding at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sri Lanka, in 2013.45
The film The Queen, starring Helen Mirren, which dealt with the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, did a great deal to boost Elizabeth II’s reputation. When the actress stood up to received her Oscar for her performance, many agreed with the sentiments of her speech:
… for fifty years and more Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle. She’s had her feet planted firmly on the ground; her hat on her head, her handbag on her arm and she’s weathered many, many storms. And I salute her courage and her consistency.
In 2013, the British Social Attitudes Survey showed that the monarchy emerged as the only institution to gain in popularity. It did so because it stands for continuity in a world of relentless transformation. This return to favour has been boosted by key events such as the queen’s diamond jubilee celebrations, the opening ceremony of the Olympics and the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton.
The monarchy has successfully updated itself. As the queen’s former press secretary, Ron Allison, points out:
If I’d suggested that someone plays their guitar on the roof of Buckingham Palace or that James Bond should walk into the palace to escort the queen by helicopter to the Olympics … I would have got laughed out of Court … amazing changes in attitude … Wonderful.46
One person, however, failed to attend any of these gatherings – Baroness Thatcher. On the morning of Monday, 8 April 2013, sitting in an armchair in her suite looking at a picture book, she suffered another stroke. Within fifteen minutes of the attack, her heartbeat stopped. It was a quick and painless death. She was 87 years old.47
A Buckingham Palace spokesman issued a statement saying the queen was ‘sad to hear of the news of the death of Baroness Thatcher’, and that she would be sending a private message of sympathy to her family. Almost immediately the press speculated, ‘Will the queen attend her funeral?’ When it was announced that the queen would be attending, Sir Mark Thatcher appeared on the steps of Baroness Thatcher’s Chester Square home. He stated, ‘First of all, and most importantly, I would like to say how enormously proud and equally grateful we are that Her Majesty the Queen has agreed to attend the service next week at St Paul’s. I know my mother would be greatly honoured as well as humbled by her presence.’48
In her final days, Margaret was surrounded by the people who cared for her most, and as one tabloid harshly pointed out, it had not been her family. Mark and Carol Thatcher were both abroad, Mark in Marbella and Carol in Switzerland. The Daily Mirror wrote, ‘She died in a hotel room among the people who cared for her … a devoted select group that did not include her own children.’49 It seemed rather a lonely end; she was tended by two carers, Kate and Anne, with affection and gentle teasing. A small circle of long-standing friends, such as Conor Burns MP, who made weekly visits to see her, regularly visited her during her final days. Former defence secretary, Sir Gerald Howarth was another frequent visitor, as was Alison Wakeham, the wife of John Wakeham MP, who was so badly injured the night of the Brighton bomb. Others included Mark Worthington, who was her loyal private secretary for more than two decades, and Lord Powell, her foreign affairs advisor. Cynthia Crawford would stay for one or two weeks at a time and Sir Bernard Ingham, her indomitable press secretary, also visited.50
Julian Seymour, who became the head of Mrs Thatcher’s private office in 1991, and who later handled all her legal, financial and administrative arrangements, was appointed the principal executor of her will. It was a simple document that divided her estate into three equal parts, one to Mark, one to Carol and one to her grandchildren.51
Margaret had meticulously planned her funeral. As early as 2002, during Tony Blair’s premiership, discussion began with the Cabinet office, and before Gordon Brown left Downing Street in 2010 the detailed preparations for what was called ‘a state funeral in all but name’ had been approved.52 A former royal courtier, Sir Malcolm Ross, who had overseen the funerals of the queen mother and Princess Diana, was a key figure in this process. The codename for the plans was ‘True Blue’, to give it a more Conservative feel.53
The press were divided about her death. Compared to the outpouring of grief for Princess Diana and the queen mother, there were split opinions. Several public figures, including the Bishop of Grantham, Lord Prescott and George Galloway MP, criticised the scale of the event, with estimates of the expense rising up to £10 million in total. In the event, it was reported by Downing Street that the cost to the government and taxpayer would be £3.6 million, of which £3.1 million was for police and security.54 Following the bombing of the Boston Marathon on 17 April, two days before the funeral, 4,000 police officers were deployed.
The left wing Daily Mirror asked on its front page, ‘Why is Britain’s most divisive prime minister getting a ceremonial funeral fit for a queen?’ Inside, another headline stated, ‘No! No! No! Public don’t want same send off as for royalty’.55
Amongst the bouquets that lay outside her home in Belgravia was a pint of milk, a reference to her early nickname as ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’. A petition was organised over the internet to demand that her funeral should be paid for entirely by her family, as a large proportion of the public hated her with a vengeance.
After anarchists had threatened a mass ‘party’ to celebrate her death, there were fears that there would be violent demonstrations, which would force the police to use the Public Order Act.56 One of the more idiotic protests was a downloading campaign to ensure that the BBC were forced to play a 70-year-old number from The Wizard of Oz (‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!’) on their Top 40 chart show, The embarrassed BBC wasn’t sure whether they should play it, and eventually, after tying themselves up in knots, gave it seven second’s airtime on Radio 1. 57
Many of her closest friends thought the funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral was a little too much. ‘I think it would have been much better to have had a great big do in Westminster Abbey … all the pomp and ceremony, but no soldiers … remarkable though she was, she wasn’t Winston Churchill,’ said Lord Carrington.58
‘I was not in favour, and I think it went a little too far. That was my judgement beforehand,’ said Michael Dobbs. ‘My judgement afterwards was that actually they got away with it.’59
Sir Bernard Ingham disagrees:
Leave aside her being the first woman PM of the UK, she was the outstanding peacetime PM of the twentieth century, achieving more I think against a hostile environment than Attlee, who had vast public support. Mrs T came to office with the nation wondering whether Britain was governable anymore. She changed the nature of Britain and its standing in the world. I would have thought she was worth some ceremony on her death.60
The cost of the funeral threw the spotlight onto the ownership of Margaret Thatcher’s £6 million home. The Daily Mirror’s chief reporter, Andy Lines, pointed out, in an article entitled ‘Thatcher the Tax Snatcher?’, that the property was, in fact, owned by what he called, ‘a mysterious company with links to three notorious tax havens’. The paper’s financial experts explained that it would have been a device to help her heirs avoid a potential £2.4 million bill for inheritance tax on the property.
The house was officially owned by Bakeland Property Company, based in the British Virgin Islands. The company’s address was a post office box in a small town in Liechtenstein. John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network complained, ‘This does not pass the smell test.’61
Other newspapers rushed to her defence, calling her ‘The Woman Who Saved Britain’, and demanded that the nation give her a state funeral. Simon Heffer, one of the leading Daily Mail columnists, said, ‘it will be an insult to history to deny her this honour.’62 The Sun called her a ‘Humble grocer’s girl who took on the world’.
On the day of the funeral itself, the national mood changed, and the student protests and silly downloads evaporated. Amongst the crowds lining the streets, hostility was minimal, and not a single arrest was made. Thousands of Lady Thatcher’s supporters cheered and applauded her cortège, drowning out the scattered protestors.
Inside St Paul’s Cathedral, Queen Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip led the 2,300 mourners. In a break with royal etiquette, they weren’t the last to arrive. That honour was left to Margaret’s coffin.
The funeral address was delivered by Margaret Thatcher’s favourite bishop, Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, clad in a black cope designed for and last used at Churchill’s funeral. Margaret, a devout Methodist in her youth who switched to the Church of England following her marriage, knew her King James Bible, Charles Wesley’s hymns and Cardinal Newman’s prayers. All were included, with the most powerful reading coming from her 19-year-old American-born granddaughter, Amanda Thatcher, who stole the show with her poise and confidence. The Daily Mail called her the ‘Iron Granddaughter’.63
The queen’s presence marked only the second time in her reign that she had attended the funeral of a former prime minister. The other time was the state funeral of Winston Churchill in 1965. Traditionally, the queen doesn’t attend the funerals of ‘commoners’, normally sending representatives such as senior members of the household or members of the royal family. The perceived risk has always been that if she were to make herself available for one, she would need to for all, for every crowned head, foreign world leader and national dignitary. In 1881, this protocol prevented Queen Victoria from attending the funeral of Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister that she had much loved. She compensated by sending a wreath of primroses, his favourite flowers.
The queen’s attendance didn’t stop the press speculating on their relationship in the days running up to the funeral. Articles appeared about their strained relationship: their clashes over the Commonwealth; Thatcher’s refusal to impose sanctions on South Africa; and Elizabeth’s ‘dismay’ about her ‘uncaring’ prime minister, who was dividing Britain. There were also anecdotal stories like the one concerning the depth of Margaret Thatcher’s curtsies. Nevertheless, in the end Lady Thatcher would have been delighted that the king’s daughter had paid such an enormous tribute to the grocer’s daughter by attending her funeral.
Probably one of the more interesting and reflective tributes was made by actress Meryl Streep, who played Mrs Thatcher in The Iron Lady and won her third Oscar for the role:
To me she was a figure of awe … To have come up, legitimately, through the ranks of the British political system, class bound and gender phobic as it was, in the time that she did and the way that she did, was a formidable achievement … To have given women and girls around the world reason to supplant fantasies of being princesses with a different dream: the real life option of leading their nation; this was groundbreaking and admirable.64
1 ‘The Lighter and Softer Side of the Iron Lady’, Andrew Roberts, Sunday Telegraph, 14 April 2013.
2 Muddling Through: Power Politics and the Quality of Government in Post-War Britain, Peter Hennessy (Victor Gollancz, 1996).
3 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
7 Memories of Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait, Iain Dale (Biteback Publishing, 2013).
8 ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, Sunday Times, 21 March 2004.
9 Edwina Currie: Diaries, Edwina Currie (Biteback Publishing, 2012).
10 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
11 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
12 Diaries, Alan Clark (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993).
13 Thatcher’s Gold, Paul Halloran and Mark Hollingsworth (Simon & Schuster, 1995).
14 ‘Maggie’s Big Problem’, Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair, June 1991.
15 Thatcher’s Gold, Paul Halloran and Mark Hollingsworth (Simon & Schuster, 1995).
16 ‘Maggie’s Big Problem’, Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair, June 1991.
17 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
18 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
19 Sunday Times, 21 April 1991.
20 Observer, 25 June 1991.
21 ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, Sunday Times, 21 March 2004.
22 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
23 Thatcher’s Fortunes: The Life and Times of Mark Thatcher, Mark Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran (Mainstream, 2005).
24 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
25 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
26 The Iron Lady, John Campbell (Penguin, 2009).
27 Interview, Tim Bell, 2013.
28 Interview, Michael Dobbs, 2013.
29 ‘The Woman Who Saved Britain’, Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.
30 Below the Parapet, Carol Thatcher (HarperCollins, 1996).
31 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
32 A Swim-on Part in the Goldfish Bowl, Carol Thatcher (Headline, 2002).
33 Not for Turning, Robin Harris (Bantam Press, 2013).
34 Daily Mirror, 10 April 2013.
35 Times, 14 October 2005.
36 Ibid.
37 Interview, Cecil Parkinson, 2013.
38 ‘Frail Final Years’, Andrew Pierce, Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.
39 Ibid.
40 The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy, Ben Pimlott (HarperCollins, 1996).
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Elizabeth: The Woman and Queen, Graham Turner (Macmillan/Daily Telegraph, 24 May 2002).
44 Ibid.
45 ‘The Forgotten Prince’, Time Magazine, 4 September 2013.
46 Interview, Ron Allison, 2013.
47 Daily Telegraph, 10 April 2013.
48 Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.
49 Daily Mirror, 10 April 2013.
50 ‘Frail Final Years’, Andrew Pierce, Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.
51 Daily Mirror, 10 April 2013.
52 Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality, Jonathan Aitken (Bloomsbury, 2013).
53 Daily Telegraph, 9 April 2013.
54 ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Funeral’, Oliver Wright, Independent, 9 April 2013.
55 Daily Mirror, 9 April 2013.
56 BBC News, 25 April 2013.
57 Daily Mirror, 10 April 2013.
58 Interview, Lord Carrington, 2013.
59 Interview, Michael Dobbs, 2013.
60 Author’s correspondence with Sir Bernard Ingham, 2013.
61 Daily Mirror, 10 April 2013.
62 Daily Mail, 9 April 2013.
63 Daily Mail, 18 April 2013.
64 Hollywood Reporter, April 2013.