Sir Kevin Tebbit interviewing Lord Powell of Bayswater
23/04/2015
Sir Kevin Tebbit (KT): So here we are in No 10, the centre of the stage where
Margaret Thatcher's prime ministerial period was played out, and you Lord
Powell are seen and regarded by most people as her most important key advisor,
almost alter ego by the end. The closest civil servant, indeed the closest
professional advisor, to her. Tell me, how did it all begin when you first came
here through the door of No 10 in 1984, and took up the post. And perhaps you
can let me know how it progressed and how you moved from being as it were
just another advisor to being the critical person in her professional life
eventually?
Lord Powell (LP): Well I got to know Margaret Thatcher a bit before I got to No
10. In the late 70s I was in the Embassy in Germany and she came out on a visit the Ambassador was away - and my wife and I had to look after her which was
no easy task as you can imagine, even then. And I got a very clear picture already
at that stage of what she was like, what drove her. And to be honest I never
shared the conventional Whitehall view that she was a rather shrill housewife
from Finchley, it was very clear that she was something much more substantial uncomfortable, difficult for the Establishment to deal with. First of all being a
woman, I mean hell, how dare she!
But also she was really prepared to be prime minister on several grounds. First,
she actually knew much more about the world than most people gave her credit
for. You know, the Foreign Office in those early days used to think of her as
George Brown in a skirt. She wasn't George Brown in a skirt. She was somebody
who had traveled the world, to China, to Russia, to the United States. I mean,
even going right back to her childhood the family had followed meticulously the
rise of fascism in Germany in the Second World War and so on. So here was
somebody who came to No 10 very, very well prepared, but perhaps even more
importantly, with a very clear agenda. Margaret Thatcher knew, from the
beginning, she knew what she wanted to achieve, what she needed to achieve.
And she pursued that agenda absolutely remorselessly. She didn't take prisoners.
She was not inclined to see two sides of any question, it was her side and that
was it. And sometimes it was a rather brutal form of government, perhaps. But
when you look back on it, you have to say that her achievements were quite
remarkable and she did change this country out of all recognition. If one looks
back to 1979 and frankly the mess we were in, the mess the economy was in, the
miners’ strike, rubbish piling up on the streets, the unburied bodies and all this
and the lack of respect for Britain in the world, the decline in our national selfconfidence. Then you looked again in 1990 when she left, it just was not the same
country, it was a far better country. And a better country, actually, for everyone.
KT: Clearly from what you say you developed a very strong personal rapport
with her. If I can just quote from one thing you said, and I'd be very interested to
hear from you see how you saw the balance of these various qualities. You said,
'It is true that I developed a great personal sympathy, affection and respect for
Mrs Thatcher, no doubt about it'. How would you balance those three various
factors?
LP: Well, I was a civil servant in No 10, I remained a civil servant and I've never
ever joined a political party. So there was not any sort of political agenda on my
part. It was partly because I stayed a very long time here compared with most
civil servants. A really long time - I think only Bernard Ingham exceeded me.
Secondly, I guess I found it inspirational the way she knew what she wanted to
do, the changes she wanted to bring about. And working for someone who wants
to change the world is far more interesting, far more fun and gives you a far
greater degree of loyalty to them, than someone who only sees as the task to
preside over the country, administer it, and the old sort of Lord Salisbury view of
just floating slowly down the river putting out the occasional oar to stop the boat
hitting the bank. That was not Margaret Thatcher's view of being prime minister.
So there was a tremendous excitement to working alongside her. And if you were
energetic and believed that the country could be so much better than it was in
1979, then yes, one came to have a great personal respect for her. It didn't blind
me to the downsides too. I mean, she could behave pretty badly, particularly
towards her colleagues. One can explain that. I mean, rising to the top as a
woman was never going to be an easy task in the political context of Britain of
the 60s and the 70s. She had to struggle to the top and when she got there she
had to continue to assert her dominance over the all-male cabinet and the party.
And she could only do that by acting a very forceful way. Now, some people say
she was very presidential, and there is something in that, of course there is. It
wasn't just her - she was actually very democratic Margaret Thatcher and a great
respecter of parliament, almost to an exaggerated degree to be frank. It was
partly the effect of the expectations of the media, who increasingly wanted
someone who was ahead of everything, who was the person in the limelight. And
of course it continued after her - one saw it with Tony Blair too. John Major tried
to turn the clock back, to go back to the concept of the prime minister as the
chairman of cabinet and that was not Margaret Thatcher's view. Margaret
Thatcher's view of chairing a meeting was not to sit down and invite different
members of the cabinet to give their views and then sum up. Margaret Thatcher's
way of chairing a meeting was to sit down, announce the result and challenge all
comers to fight her for it.
KT: You've raised now the question of style and, I mean, in many ways the
sadder thing about Margaret Thatcher's heritage is far too many people focus on
style rather than substance of achievement. But since we're on style let me just
remind you of one of things you said, and I'd be grateful for your comment on it.
'I've always thought there was something Leninist about Mrs Thatcher which
came through in her style of government: the absolute determination, the belief
that there is a vanguard which is right and if you keep that small tightly-knit
team together they will drive things through. There's no doubt that in the 1980s
No.10 could beat the bushes of Whitehall pretty violently, they could go out and
really confront people, lay down the law, bully a bit'. Now I think the challenge is
that during this period - particularly after 1983/84 - cabinet tended to be pushed
into the background, government departments were told what to do rather than
provided advice, and we saw, if not an American presidential style of
government, then a sort of French cabinet style. I think Mrs Thatcher would have
hated that sort of analogy! But that very small group of people driving things
forward. Is that an accurate description, has it been exaggerated? It was in this
building it all happened, I mean the accretion of power into No 10. Is it an
accurate description or do you think it's gone too far?
LP: I think fundamentally it is accurate, though it is exaggerated in some of the
descriptions of it, and it arose from many things. Partly the sense of isolation of
being a woman. She had to sort of fight these battles on her own in her own mind
and she was constantly having to be on guard against the men who would cabal
and plot against her. That drove this rather solitary sense, and the people she felt
she could rely on were those who had no political agenda, whose job was to help
her get done what she wanted done. Of course, the civil servants in No 10 would
often argue with her and suggest that, you know, perhaps it wasn't the best way
to proceed. And she argued fearlessly with them as she did with her cabinet
members. She never admitted that she was wrong, but sometimes you would
find the next day that she was saying what you had been saying the day before.
And the great secret was not to point that out, just to take it as a bonus. Secondly,
it was this agenda that she had, as I've already mentioned. I think very few prime
ministers have had such a sharp agenda. It wasn't ideological in the Lenin sense,
I wasn't suggesting that she was somebody given to communist ideas. It was
more the technique, the idea that there had to be a vanguard if anything was
going to get done. That if you left it to Whitehall and ministries and their vast
staff it would all get bogged down, there would be compromises, the edges
would be chipped off and you would be left with the sort of bumbling which had
characterised a lot of British government to be honest in the 50s, 60s and 70s.
And she was determined to change that - she wanted clarity, she wanted things
actually to be done. When you look back at the record, you have to say she was
justified. All that privatisation, the end of our nationalised industries, the buying
your own homes, the lower taxes. Almost everything was shaken up and rattled.
Well, perhaps not everything - in a way there was still an agenda that she would
love to have done had she stayed even longer. She would have I'm sure tackled
education more forcefully, and social security. But, by god, she changed a lot. So
to get it done, No 10 had to be clear what she wanted and what she expected.
Now, it was for ministers to come to meetings and to try to argue against that if
they didn't approve of it and they could take her on at their peril. A lot of them
flunked it, a lot of them of course were public schools boys who were not used to
arguing with women and she exploited that natural advantage. Their natural
tendency was to pull out a chair for a lady to sit down, Margaret Thatcher's
tendency was to kick the chair over, and hammer them. So it was a very different
style, hard for both sides.
KT: She also said they tended to be upper-middle class, but she was middle-class
making a big point of widening the years.
LP: Yes, absolutely right. Her roots are very important to understand Margaret
Thatcher. By one of those strange coincidences in life, I grew up just outside
Grantham. And we even occasionally talked about Grantham and Lincolnshire,
probably the only two people in the country who were doing so! But the fact that
she came from that particular background - the small shop, the thrifty, the
making your own way, all these sort of virtues, the idea that you had to be
constantly busy, always doing something. She has this wonderful description, in
one of the volumes of her autobiography, of how she spent her summer holidays
in Skegness doing stride jumping the public gardens and we didn't just sit about
dreaming, I mean heavens! Anyone who spent their early youth doing stride
jumping in Skegness public gardens is clearly somebody rather exceptional.
KT: She also used unofficial channels, the classic unofficial channel frustrating all
of the government departments - fortunately I was abroad most of this time so I
didn't get frustrated very much - but the handbag was very much the repository
of the unofficial channel. And I think you may recall when she came to NATO
when I was working for Lord Carrington, out of the handbag came the killer
piece of paper contrasting a great British exercise called 'Lion Heart' with a small
Franco-German one which she brought of the handbag, 'Cheeky Sparrow', and
opened it. How much of that sort of ‘handbag activity’ was there?
LP: There was a lot of it and actually I think it was rather positive. People she
had known would ring her up and pass on something. Even her sister used to
pass her views about farming and she would suddenly produce these from her
handbag, which used to cause apoplexy to the ministry of agriculture. I'll tell you
why I think it was healthy. It was matched in her use of seminars to help form
policy - bringing in people from outside government. She didn't just want the
views of ministers and civil servants, she wanted businessmen, academics,
foreigners, people who would bring a different perspective. That way of reaching
out beyond the establishment, breaking free as it were, I think was a very
positive sign and it did give her differing perspectives and original ideas. Some of
them worked rather well others were a disaster. There was a famous seminar on
Germany towards the end of her time which was set up by those of who thought
she ought to revise her views of Germany. The right conclusion was reached in
the seminar, that we should be nice to the Germans. Well, that lasted all of thirty
seconds in practice. We were horrid to the Germans! But in other cases I can
think of, in both domestic policy and foreign policy, it really did give her a good,
fresh view. It's a great pity that sometimes civil servants like to block prime
minister's access to outside views, to cocoon them within the system. Not for
Margaret Thatcher that wasn't.
KT: I think one of the most interesting things, we've been talking for some time,
I'd been talking to the foreign affairs advisor but of course, dealing with foreign
policy you see more of a prime minister almost than anybody else because you
see her on trips and get to know the total person, in a sense much more than a
domestic advisor or home policy advisor would. But I expect we ought to turn to
foreign policy since that is the formal subject. To me her foreign policy
achievements are many. We start after the Falklands I expect in terms of when
you arrived yourself, although I think that was a seminal moment. Perhaps you
can say something about how she treated foreign visitors especially when they
came into this building, into her centre of her power which she brought
concentratedly here, what it was like? I suspect one of the most important ones
in many ways, well the two, would have been Gorbachev and Reagan, where she
managed to achieve this unique ability to act effectively as the broker between
the two of them. Perhaps you could say something about that, and any of the
other people, I remember Peter Carrington used to tell me to great amusement of
some of these other visits that took place here.
LP: Well, yes. Margaret Thatcher was first of all very hospitable when she got to
know heads of government from all around the world. And if they happened to
be in London, even privately, she would encourage them to come to No 10 to
have tea with her. She liked to keep in touch, and that's rather a contrast to a lot
of subsequent prime ministers who regarded foreigners as a bit of a nuisance
and an interruption of the working day. She almost always found time for foreign
leaders. Of course the most important were President Reagan, who came here for
meetings, came here for dinner and so on. Mr. Gorbachev who was here many,
many times. President Mandela, when he was released from prison, came here
and they had a leisurely lunch just off this room and a very long discussion. And
because No 10 has this air, of something of a private house, it was actually rather
a good place to have meetings and it doesn't have the stuffy formality of
the Élysée Palace in Paris or even the White House. It's much more a place where
you sit on sofas and armchairs and therefore the nature of the discussion can be
more relaxed and more informal, and therefore very often more productive. An
extraordinary range of people did come through, some of them rather unusual. I
remember the Foreign Office insisted on her seeing the president of the then
French Congo, a notorious Marxist. I advised very strongly against this, I said I
didn't think this would be a meeting of minds but, ‘Oh we're so pleased that we
persuaded her to come here’, and I said, ‘Well, I don't think this is going to work
out but we'll try’. He arrived with his interpreter and sat down on the sofa
obviously at Margaret Thatcher, who remarks, ‘I hate communists’. The African
interpreter to his great credit, related this in French to the president as, ‘Madam
the prime minister says that on the whole, in her long experience of politics, has
found that she rarely agrees with the doctrines of Karl Marx’. And I thought the
interpreter probably saved his life but he certainly deserved a medal! She could
come out with these rather explosive comments sometimes and she was always
frank. One of the great things about Margaret Thatcher was that she said what
she meant and she meant what she said. People actually responded well to that
at the end of the day, there was no diplomatic flummery and obfuscation.
Sometimes it was not very helpful. I remember the time when Britain had not
done very well at the World Cup at football and a lot of rather jeering German
reporters - because Germany had won the World Cup - said, ‘What did it feel like
to be beaten by the Germans at football?’ To which she replied rather briskly,
‘Well, I remember that we beat them at their national sport twice last century’.
Now the Foreign Office had apoplexy about that and I was hauled over the coals
by Douglas Hurd for allowing her say it, but actually it never occurred to me, she
just came up with it! Another time when she came out of a European Council in
Rome, having been - as so often - isolated 11 to one, with the 12 members of the
EU, when she was asked how she felt about being isolated 11 to one: ‘Sorry for
the others’, she said. This sort of refreshingly direct approach actually I think
played rather well. She had another great advantage in foreign policy and that is
in being a woman. She stood out. There weren't many women leaders around at
that time, Mrs. Ghandi for part of the time, the Norwegian prime minister, but
really whereas most male British prime ministers can walk down the street in
Nairobi, or Kuala Lumpur or something and nobody would notice them, you
couldn't not notice Margaret Thatcher. She was a very distinctive sight and so
that made it easier for her as it were to play a world role and to be a spokesman.
KT: And she really did play a world role.
LP: She did. I think Margaret Thatcher had a real role. She was always very
realistic, she knew that Britain didn't count for nearly as much as the United
States, she never aspired to what Macmillan and Lord Hailsham tried to do in the
1950s, to be the third person between the United States and the Soviet Union,
the broker. No - she was on the side of the United States. But she could also deal
well with communist leaders, particularly with Mr. Gorbachev.
KT: The famous quote, ‘I like Mr. Gorbachev, he's a man I can do business with.’
LP: Quite by good fortune we identified President Gorbachev very early in the
proceedings. It arose from one of these seminars, where she said she wanted to
know and get to know the next generation of Soviet leaders. We identified three
and invited all three to come, Mr. Gorbachev was the one who accepted. He was
at the time a new, youngish, member of the Politburo in charge of agriculture,
not seemingly terribly relevant to the main themes of the Cold War. But he came,
and she instantly identified him as a wholly new sort of Soviet leader. Somebody
who didn't just stand reading out a prepared document, surrounded by advisors
and had no flexibility as to what he could say. No, this was a politician, a guy who
could argue and present a case be lively, answer her back, wasn't interested in
being surrounded by advisers, wanted to talk to her. And she understood the
opportunity which that offered, not, of course, that she thought his ideas made
much sense. Even his belief that communism could be reformed, she just took the
view that communism was an absurd doctrine you couldn't reform, it was best to
get rid of it. Nonetheless she understood his policies of perestroika, the
restructuring and change in Russia. She was able to persuade President Reagan
early on that the Americans should take him very seriously, should start to have
their own dialogue with him and they were skeptical at the beginning but they
found that she was right about that. Of course she, as it were, handed the baton
to President Reagan to do the serious business in arms control and all the other
issues.
KT: And then almost got out of hand at Reykjavík.
LP: Well, it almost got out of hand at Reykjavík because, of course, President
Reagan's belief in his doctrine…
KT: Star Wars, SDI…
LP: …Star Wars and so on. Margaret Thatcher, in the beginning had been rather
skeptical of Star Wars, but when she realised how attached Ronald Reagan was
to it she decided it made more sense to play along with it and to give him some
support, in return for which she wanted his support for the continuing
importance of nuclear weapons in the defence of Europe and in Britain's own
defence. But had President Reagan come out openly as a unilateral nuclear
disarmer then her own defence policy at home would have looked absurd and
every one would have taken up the Neil Kinnock policy of, ‘Take to the hills’, I
seem to remember, it was described at the time.
KT: Sitting in Washington at the time, I was made personally aware of the
importance she was attaching to her nuclear weapons, as you may recall.
LP: People were usually fairly clear about the importance which Mrs. Thatcher
attached to it, she didn't bother to hide it.
KT: Lord Powell, on Mrs. Thatcher's world view, I think one of the interesting
things is the way in which that was carried forward and played out because
today leaders pick up the telephone and talk to each other all the time - I'm never
quite sure whether there's much value in that, they say they’re in contact - but
she didn't really do it like that. Partly technology, partly her style, could you say a
bit more about how she presented that world view to others?
LP: Yes, well, Margaret Thatcher disliked the telephone as a means of
communication and although she occasionally had to use it, she was never
comfortable with it, she was convinced that every call was being intercepted.
President Reagan took a slightly different view - he rather liked to call her up, so
of course she had to go along with that.
KT: Sitting here in her office as it were, yes...
LP: She much preferred to sit down with someone, preferably with as few other
people present as possible. I doubt there's ever been a British prime minister
who traveled with smaller delegations. She didn't want large numbers of foreign
office officials, let alone members of her cabinet traveling with her who might
have been inclined to pipe up and contradict something she said, or express a
different view. She believed that she knew best what was in Britain's interests,
and she would represent that herself. But she was a great respecter of our
ambassadors on the spot. She wanted to be briefed about whichever country it
was she was going to, she wanted to talk to him or her and hear what they had to
say, not the officials sitting back in London. So I think, from that point of view,
the Foreign Office got a good deal from her. But it was again the individual style,
she was an individual, she wasn't interested in chartering vast British Airways
planes to go round the world, we clattered along in an old Royal Air Force VC10,
facing backwards, stopping to fill up with petrol every two hours or so. It was a
not very dignified way of traveling I have to tell you, but that was part of her
sense of economy. The other great thing about her active diplomacy and foreign
travel was that she was adamant that she must never be seen to be enjoying
herself. So we did absurd things like visiting eight countries in seven days, so
that no one could think that she was having a good time. If very occasionally she
wanted to sneak something in… I remember going with her to Sri Lanka and she
suddenly announced that she thought my wife would love to see some emeralds.
I said, ‘’Well, does she? News to me!’ ‘Oh no, I think she does, I think she does, I
think you should arrange for somebody to bring them to the embassy so that you
can see them and tell her about them’. So I said, ‘Well, alright’. Sure enough, when
we got there I said to the High Commissioner, ‘Please can we get somebody to
bring in some emeralds’. Of course, the one person who wanted to look at them
was Margaret Thatcher! But this was never to be public, it was all behind the
scenes. But coming back to something else you said, about her world view. I
don't think she really had a world view as such - she had a view about Britain's
role in the world, on that she had very strong views, derived partly from history.
She thought we had a great history as a country that had really helped shape the
world, had always been at the forefront of diplomacy, had played an active role
in world wars and setting up the United Nations and all these things. But it was
Britain's role and Britain's interests she was concerned about. She didn't have
much time for many multi-lateral organisations. NATO yes, she was a great
supporter of NATO, but the United Nations was so-so, and the EU was not
particularly favoured either. She always saw a great link between foreign policy
and what she was trying to do at home. Foreign policy was linked to her agenda
for changing Britain. The Cold War, she saw in the context also of the evils of
socialism, and the Soviet Union equaled Arthur Scargill in some ways, that was
part of that agenda. Support for the United States and President Reagan was the
free market agenda, and the need for Britain to get back to a proper free market
and not have nationalised industries and so on. She was much more concerned
with that interplay rather than putting the world to rights. There is actually a
chapter in her autobiography called 'Putting the World to Rights', but it certainly
wasn't her idea, it was some skilled draftsman must have put that title in because
she never thought in those terms. The only area that you could say she was
ideological was of course the East-West relationship. Where she was a very
powerful and strong anti-communist, always had been, did not like or approve of
detente, thought it was a mistake and policy of weakness. And in Ronald Reagan
she met the perfect partner for that point of view. That is why from the very first
moment they met when she was in opposition and he was out of office of any
sort, they gelled because they had the very same ideas that communism was evil
and needed to be defeated, not accommodated. That you had a strong defence,
that high taxes sap the will of a nation, and so on. So you wouldn't really say that
President Reagan was particularly ideological in one sense, he wasn't anything
like what you see now in the United States, the Tea Party, no. But it was a
considered attitude and a considered strategy. And I always rather enjoyed, the
no doubt apocryphal story of President Reagan being presented on his arrival in
the White House as president, with some vast ring folders, and on asking what
they were, was told, ‘These are your national security strategies Mr. President’,
to which he replied, ‘Well, I don't need them, I know what my strategy is - we
win, they lose’. This ability to simplify the great issues of foreign policy was
actually one that Margaret Thatcher shared. She could take the broader view, she
didn't get lost in the weeds on foreign policy. She did sometimes in the domestic
area but not much on foreign policy. She could see the big picture and judge
where things were going. She had this concept from quite early on of wanting to
gradually try to wean the east Europeans away from the Soviet Union. She went
early on to Hungary to visit them. We invited the east European leaders here to
Downing Street to meet her and gave them lunches and dinners and so on. Then
we went to Poland at the crucial moment, at the very moment when the system
was about to change. She was very active in foreign policy - one must remember
that. I think probably more active in terms of travel and engagement, than almost
any prime minister since.
KT: I suspect the only other ideological thing that perhaps she got wrong, even
for those like myself, who admired her hugely, was over German reunification at
the end, which she found very difficult to come to terms with.
LP: Yes, Margaret Thatcher did find it extremely difficult to come to terms with
German reunification. To her credit, she says in her own autobiography that this
was her greatest failure. But I think one has to look at the reasons for it, to see
that she wasn't bad and she wasn't mad but she had a strategy. It stemmed, of
course, from her knowledge, her perception of Germany in the 1920s and 30s. At
her most impressionable age, fascism was on the rise, Nazism was on the rise
and we had the Second World War. That shaped her view of Germany, she never
trusted Germany again after that. Intellectually, she knew that Germany of the
1970s and 80s was entirely different. But instinctively she was never, never
comfortable with the Germans. Her particular concern about German
reunification was the risk that it would damage, undermine, even lead to the
deposing of President Gorbachev because if it went too fast then his own
conservative enemies in the Soviet Union would get rid of him. And she was very
anxious that that shouldn't happen. She talked to Mr. Gorbachev about that early
on and he was supportive of it. More importantly, she talked at great length and
on several occasions to President Mitterrand who was even more vociferous
than she was in the early months of this…
KT: He got it wrong even more clearly…
LP: …but who suddenly changed his policy quite late in the day and got himself
on the right side of the line, leaving her high and dry on the other. Now she
wasn't opposed to German reunification just like that, she couldn't be, every
Western leader had signed up to German reunification for 50 years, but she
didn't want it to go too fast. Her concept was that you would start with a
confederation of the two Germany's, followed by a federation, and then gradually
you would move onto the reunification. That wasn't a stupid idea but it entirely
failed to take account of the pace of events. Everyone was caught short by the
pace of events in German reunification, including Helmut Kohl. The difference
was he very skillfully rode the waves like a surfer at every stage. He was behind
the game, but managed to coast in on top of the wave. Whereas she in a
characteristic Thatcher fashion preferred to be embattled and to stand out
against it. But, as I say, she admitted that she got it wrong and she did and for a
while I think it damaged our relations with the Germans.
KT: Did Kohl visit No 10, I think he did?
LP: Chancellor Kohl came many, many times. To his great credit, Chancellor Kohl
tried very hard to form a strong, personal relationship with her. For instance, he
would always buy her a little present, not just a sort of foreign ministry present
but a little personal thing that he would bring along for her. She always gratefully
accepted them. Margaret Thatcher knew that she ought to get on with Chancellor
Kohl - after all he was a conservative of a sort and she should be on the same
side. But somehow it never worked. The great test for me was when he invited
her to go for a weekend to his part of Germany, down in the Rhineland, to see
how things were, and that she would come to understand the context in which he
worked and what sort of person he was. So she duly went off and I trotted along
behind her and we spent a happy day touring the villages in his part of the world.
We went to a restaurant and had his favourite lunch, which was tripe. She chased
it round her plate and tried to hide it under her fork and various other things.
Then as the highpoint before our return we were taken to the great Romanesque
cathedral in Speyer where the early Roman emperors have their tombs. While
she was being shown these precursors of the European Union, Chancellor Kohl
took me behind a pillar and said, ‘Now, look. Now she's seen me in my natural
environment, here at the very heart of Europe close to the French border, surely
she'll realise I'm not German, I'm European. And it's your job to convince her!’ So
I said, ‘Well alright Chancellor, I will see what I can do’. We took our leave after
that and went back to the airport where she had one of those tiny Hawker 125s
with room for about three passengers. She climbed up the steps, she threw
herself into her seat, kicked off her shoes and said, ‘Charles, that man is so
German!’ At that point I'm afraid I aborted my mission to convince her that ‘No,
no, no Prime Minister, he's European’, it just wasn't going to work.
KT: So that story about the cream buns is completely apocryphal.
LP: The cream buns in Austria, no, that I'm afraid has no foundation whatsoever.
KT: If I may just move to another area which obviously very difficult for her
personally, particularly after the Brighton Bombing. The question of relations
with Ireland. Of course, it's often forgotten, with Garret FitzGerald, actually
signed I think in 1985, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which finally began to bring
things together between Britain and the Irish Republic, and much went on from
there. How did you see her handling that issue, as somebody who believed
deeply in the United Kingdom and Britain and wanted to see progress but
obviously had a deep commitment to Northern Ireland and the Union?
LP: Margaret Thatcher was always uncomfortable with Ireland, with Irish affairs
and with the negotiations that lead to the eventual Anglo-Irish Agreement. The
government papers on this, which will be released in the next months, I think
will show the depths of her unhappiness about it. She saw the problem basically
in terms of terrorism. The problem with the IRA coming across the border,
committing terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland. She didn't think a great deal
of the disadvantages suffered by the Catholic community. Security was always
the number one issue in her mind. Security and sovereignty. As long as the
majority of the people in Northern Ireland wanted to be part of Britain, then they
should be so. Intellectually she understood that some means had to be found of
winning the confidence of the minority community in Northern Ireland, the
Catholic community. And if terrorism was ever to be eliminated they had to be
brought along to accept that there should be a fairer system of government with
no discrimination. And so intellectually she agreed to embark, hesitantly at every
step, on the negotiating process. Even though along the way she lost some of her
closest political friends and allies, in particular Ian Gow, who had been her
parliamentary private secretary and later minister in the Treasury. But she had
to be cajoled, persuaded and that was done by partly by ministers, partly by
some very senior civil servants. But at the end of the day, she had to take
responsibility for it herself and she knew it was right, and so she signed up. But
you know, rather the same way, as another not entirely similar situation, that of
Hong Kong where she had to agree to hand over sovereignty or hand back
sovereignty for Hong Kong to a communist country. Those two issues, Northern
Ireland and Hong Kong, she never really in her heart of hearts accepted. Indeed
rather like Mary Tudor who was said to have 'Calais' written on her heart,
Margaret Thatcher had ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Hong Kong’ written on hers.
KT: But there were many more light moments I think. I can remember again
Lord Carrington telling me these hilarious events where a foreign visitor would
come a long way to see her and for the first half an hour or 20 minutes, he
wouldn't get a word in edge-ways, as she, as it were, presented her world view.
Did you find that happening very often, we're looking at the high spots but in
terms of normal run of business?
LP: Well, yes, it is certainly the case that Margaret Thatcher tended to dominate
conversations in which she was one participant. Though I have to say President
Gorbachev was a pretty good match for her on that as well. There is a famous
story of her, of course, of her and Lord Carrington going to see the very ancient
Italian president who was in his 90s. On the way there, Margaret Thatcher asked
Peter Carrington, ‘What should I talk to him about?’ Lord Carrington said, ‘Well,
just ask him about the political situation in Italy’. An hour later, they emerged
and she had not said a word even though half way through the conversation
Peter Carrington passed her a note that said, 'Prime minister, you're talking too
much'. It was just part of her character and most people took it well. There were
some, principally some of the Europeans felt that she tended to pipe up too much
at European meetings. Indeed at some of the European Councils, I could see
occasionally by five or six in the evening she was beginning to flag a bit, so I took
it upon myself to sneak in with a glass of whisky and soda and put it down in
front of her, and sure enough it revived her spirits wonderfully. After I'd done
this four or five times, it was the German presidency…
KT: Not on the same event…
LP: …different events. That's true. Chancellor Kohl beckoned me over and said, ‘I
wish you would stop doing that, you're just making her more difficult.’ And I said,
‘To be honest Mr Chancellor, that's the whole point’. And he was never pleased
with me after that, I had failed him once more. There was something about
Margaret Thatcher of 'I argue, therefore I am'. She reached her views by
argument. A lot of people don't, they come to meetings with briefs, what their
officials tell them they should say, she came with a clear idea of what she wanted
to say. But she could be persuaded to change. At the end of the day Margaret
Thatcher was pretty pragmatic, particularly in Europe. She knew when she had
got as much as she was going to get out the negotiation. She knew when in the
naval sense that she had to 'make smoke and retreat' and Bernard Ingham could
always present it as triumph anyway, which was a great advantage. But if you
look back, she knew the point had come in getting our money back, 67 percent
was going to be the most we were going to get and that was a lot more than
anyone thought we would ever get but that was the moment to stop. There were
other issues too when she knew that was the case, she had to be pragmatic and
she could be. If you think about, given her background you would not have
expected her to be complicit in an arrangement which handed Rhodesia to
Robert Mugabe but she took the view that this had to be a democratic process, if
we ensured fair elections and Rhodesians voted by a large majority for Mugabe
than that was it. A lot of people would not have accepted that. There were many
examples of her pragmatism in that way.
KT: Well I think we've talked about her assertiveness, we've talked about her
pragmatism, what we haven't talked about I guess is her sensitivity. I mean even
those of us who only in a very junior way came across her, were surprised at her
kindness and her sense of you know the ability to engage with people at a very
personal level. You must have seen that all time.
LP: Yes, Margaret Thatcher was determined so far as possible to hide her private
nature. She was so determined always to present this strong outward face. She
thought that any perception of anything less than that would be taken as a
weakness, would be exploited by her rivals, her enemies, her opponents
whatever it was and she did tend to see more of them than most of us. You're
quite right she was very kind, particularly to people working closely with her,
the Garden Room girls in No 10, the messengers and so on. In her private life, she
was a fund of knowledge of English poetry, could quote it at enormous length
from our main poets, she adored opera and concerts, her one relaxation of the
year was two or three days in Salzburg going to the opera, listening to concerts
and so on. But as I've said, she thought the British people would not want to see
her enjoying herself or betraying weakness and she went to great lengths to
conceal those. But I have very happy memories of her, and particularly in
retirement, she came to stay with us several times down in Italy. I have a very
happy memory of putting her to pick cherries, I said I would pay her the normal
rate for cherry-pickers, £3.50 an hour. She was quite happy with that and picked
cherries busily for an hour. Then she said, ‘Can I have my £3.50?’ I said, ‘Well,
hang on, income tax at 40 percent prime minister, so that takes it down to £2.60’.
She was a bit unhappy about that, but she accepted it, and so reached out her
hand, and I said, ‘Well there are other charges aren't there, national insurance,
that's another 25p’. I just thought it was healthy for politicians to be reminded
what they do to other people. In the end, she took it in. She loved being driven
around the Italian countryside, visiting some of the great cathedrals and so on.
What was amazing was the public response she evoked. Wherever she went in
Italy very large crowds would spot her and instantly identify her, be all round
her, photographing her. What I never quite liked to point out to her was by far
the largest numbers of the people who did that were either Germans or Japanese.
Who were the great tourist groups in Italy but that didn't seem to worry her too
much.
KT: Of course right at the beginning, she got on very well with Mr Cossiga. I
remember very much Cossiga capturing her at one stage and taking her for a
private drive around the hills of Rome, losing the bodyguards.
LP: President Cossiga was always sending her large bunches of roses. I used to
have to warn her that I might have to declare these to Denis, that there was
another man in her life that was constantly sending these big bouquets of red
roses. They met for the last time in our home, both in retirement, he was
probably the only Italian she ever liked.
KT: Who of course allowed the basing of cruise missiles in Italy, which helped to
bring together the INF deal.
LP: She had a great respect for President Mitterand which is again slightly
curious. She should have had a great respect for Chancellor Kohl and got on well
with him, actually she got on much better with President Mitterand - socialist
and a Frenchman, two very large counts against him. That I think was because
first of all, he had a strong sense of nation, France as a great nation, and she
respected France as a nation. Secondly, he had a great sense of history. He really
did reach back into history to form his views and she liked to sit and talk with
him in a much broader, more philosophical sense about current developments
than was ever possible with Chancellor Kohl, which was always about what's the
current deal in the EU or NATO or about short-range nuclear weapons. President
Mitterand was prepared ruminate, philosophise much more and she enjoyed
that. The person I think she respected almost most all in the world was Lee Kuan
Yew of Singapore. She saw him as a man of strong principles, strong government,
agent of change and a remarkable grasp of the broad currents of international
affairs. Every time we headed towards Asia she would always want the plan
diverted through Singapore so she could find out what he thought about events.
That was a very close relationship.
KT: Clean and tidy pavements and things like that too.
LP: Yes, but also the principles of government and how you do things. She
recognised he wasn't as democratic as maybe some other governments. But she
saw what he had done to raise Singapore from the terrible state it had been in
when Britain handed it over and what he had made of it. And I think she
probably drew some analogies in her mind of Britain in 1979 and what she
wanted to make of it. There were others - she reacted very well to President
Mandela. There's an interesting new book out, which shows really how much
influence she had on the South African government in bringing them to decide to
release Mandela from prison. Far more influence than sanctions ever had. He
came here relatively soon after he had been released - to the fury of the Labour
Party and the sanctions people - he insisted on coming her to Downing Street to
see her. They had a long lunch together and a long talk after lunch together. He
was a very remarkable man and she I think was deeply affected by her meetings
with him. She was famous for having described the ANC years earlier as a
'terrorist organisation'. In a sense it was, it used terrorism, you can argue about
the cause but it used terrorism. But in Mandela she found someone with the
quite remarkable capacity to forgive and not to show bitterness about the past.
And a capacity to look forward as to how South Africa could be made into a
successful country. So a lot of these personal relationships were important to her
and important in our foreign policy too.
KT: A wonderful period. Coming back to where we started, during that period,
this place, No 10, became a centre of power almost not previously seen, certainly
for the previous thirty or forty years, where No 10 grew power unto itself, the
role of ministries was marginalised in some senses - they took orders they did
not necessarily provide all the advice. A small group of people in No 10 wielded
enormous power and authority including yourself. Cabinet tended to be used to
rubber-stamp issues. Even Cabinet Committees tended to be pushed aside to
much smaller groups. And of course individuals, as you said yourself, her cabinet
colleagues were often treated rather roughly. Do you think that she could have
done even better if she'd had a more consensual, collegiate style? I mean, this
brought her down in the end. Could she have been more accommodating, had she
broadened out rather more consulted more widely? Often if you only consult the
ones who think like you, ‘One of us’, you tend to go down rather narrow byways.
Did you try, did you feel that if you could have broadened out her way of working
it would have been more positive or do you think this was inevitable?
LP: I'm going to give you an absolutely unqualified answer to that - no. I think if
she would have proceeded via the traditional ways of consensus and
compromise and so on Britain would be stuck in something close to what it was
like in the late 1970s. I think if you're really going to bring about change in the
world you have to give a strong forceful lead, bring others with you by
persuasion preferably, but if necessary by beating their brains until they
accepted. That simply had to be the case. Of course it goes partly with being
prime minister for a very long time. After twelve years you know the business of
your ministers far better than they know it themselves. They had probably been
minister for pensions for two years - she had been dealing with pensions since
the late 1950s. So of course she knew it all better than they did. I'll make another
comment too, that although yes, it is true that No 10 was very powerful in her
time, she never built it up in terms of numbers. If you look at the imperial Blair
No 10, there must have been four or five times as many people working here special agencies for this, special this and that. And even now it's an awful lot
bigger than it was in her time. She didn't try to build a prime minister's
department, something that would match the White House or the Elysée or
the Bundes Council, no, she took No 10 as it was. The same size, or arguably
slightly smaller than it had been in Neville Chamberlain's time. Just used the
instrument as a way of protecting herself.
KT: A small policy unit, that she created…
LP: A very small policy unit, I think maximum, from my recollection, is probably
five people and most of the time four. There was Bernard Ingham's small press
operation, a private office of five people, a diary secretary, one political
secretary, a parliamentary private secretary, you're talking 13 or 14 people.
That's a very small number. It has a great advantage, a small organisation like
that. There's no hierarchies, things don't have to wind the way up the
bureaucracy or anything, if you wanted to know the prime minister's view you
stuck your head round the door and said, you know, ‘Prime minister, nuclear war
or do we surrender?’ You got a clear instruction and you could transmit it to the
rest of Whitehall. There were no delays in No 10, I think, in those days. We didn't
hold things up, we were efficient but we were non-political. It was an executive
function, carried out by people who were basically administrators, not some sort
of political operation. All this stuff about civil servants and she only liked people
who were 'One of us' - absolute rubbish. I don't think she had the slightest
interest in whether her civil servants had political views. In fact I think frankly
she thought of them as sort of political eunuchs.
KT: So you weren't politicised?
LP: I didn't feel I was politicised but I know a lot of other people thought that I
was, which is one of the reasons why, over seven getting on for eight years here, I
decided I wouldn't go back into the civil service. It was for two reasons, one is I
thought I'd had the best job I would ever get, so there was no point in going for
something lesser. Secondly, because I did recognise that some others,
particularly in the civil service, thought that I must be politicised. Anyway I
thought it would be a good idea to have a fresh challenge, to try an entirely
different way of life and so I was 48 at the time, I went off into business and
spent since then something like 28 years happily in business. I've been very
happy to have had, as it were, both careers. It's good in life to have a bit of
variety.
KT: Well Charles, Lord Powell, thank you for giving us this unique insight into
one of the greatest periods of British political history. Absolutely fascinating.
LP: Thank you very much.