Charles Moore interviewing Sir Bernard Ingham
20/3/2015
Charles Moore (CM): Welcome Sir Bernard Ingham. It is a great pleasure for me
personally because in the 1980s I was the young editor of the Spectator and I was
very very frightened of you as you tried to, control - very successfully - control and
discipline the press and it's marvellous to be able to talk to you.
Bernard Ingham (BI): I hope you'll be as disciplined now.
CM: Certainly. I think most people think that you were Mrs Thatcher's Press
Secretary throughout her time, but actually you weren't because you came a tiny bit
later than she…
BI: Apart from the first four months.
CM: Yes. But I think it would be fair to say that you had a bigger experience of No 10
with her than any other person, except perhaps Denis. And therefore you are, in a
sense, the best witness. I'd like you to describe, if you would, what it was like when
you came in. You had already been a press officer. What job did you have to do as
you entered on, roughly, I think, 1 November 1979.
BI: Well it was 1st of November when I formally took over but I came in on the 1st
of October to learn the ropes, as it were, and why they were getting out Henry James
who was the temporary press secretary. Interestingly, Margaret Thatcher came to
power without a press secretary, which shows you a great deal about her in my view.
Apart from the privilege and honour of being able to work in No 10, which was aweinspiring in itself, I knew what I had to do and that was to promote and inform the
press and public about the government's policies and measures through the media.
And that involved talking twice a day to the lobby, the political correspondents, but
also to anybody else who rang.
CM: Tell me the difference - because there is some difference - between trying to do
that as you just described it, for the whole government, and trying to think
particularly of the prime minister's position.
BI: Well the prime minister is the head of the government, and of course there came
to be ructions over the line I'd put out as distinct, for example, that the Foreign
Office wanted to put out, or at least Geoffrey Howe wanted to put out. But, the prime
minister, as far as I was concerned, was the government as such. She couldn't have a
policy, she couldn't get it through the cabinet, and if the cabinet didn't object then
you assumed that that was cabinet policy.
CM: It was certainly part of your job wasn't it, and I've seen bits of paper that
suggest it, where you're essentially trying to maintain and advance her line, even if
quite a lot of other ministers don't like that.
BI: Well I was employed by her, I was employed by No 10, and I was certainly
employed additionally to promote and inform press and public to look after the
prime minister's interests with the media, and in effect manage her relations with
the media. And if I may so, Margaret Thatcher needed a manager of her relations
with media because she took not the slightest interest in them, unless of course she
felt her message wasn't getting over.
CM: Yes. Do say more about that, because I think though she was a person who did
realise that the media image mattered and she was very disciplined about how she
would present herself - how she would prepare a speech or do a broadcast - she
didn't instinctively think about these things and was inclined to neglect them
because she was concentrating on the business of government and therefore you
had to remind her. Is that right?
BI: Well she wouldn't read newspapers. I mean she thought it a waste of good
reforming time. She didn't watch many radio or television programmes. She listened
to the Today Programme at 6 o'clock in the morning and followed by Farming Today
which made her an instant expert on agriculture and not much television, apart
from Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. And so this presented me with a serious
problem. How on earth do you keep a prime minister in touch with what is going on
if she willfully refuses to take the slightest notice of the media?
CM: And what's the answer?
BI: Well the only answer that I could see was to persuade her to read a digest of the
morning papers, with a diary of the day's events, and a little note about what was
going on on radio and television. And we, when I say we I mean the private
secretaries and myself, persuaded her to meet us at 9 o'clock and go through this
digest.
CM: Five days a week?
BI: Five days a week - and I sometimes dictated one to her at Chequers - but five
days a week we tried to meet at 9am so that we could keep her in touch. She pretty
well stuck to that and the value of it was not simply that we prepared her for the day.
Her reactions prepared us for the day and as it turned out it was a very useful tool.
CM: How much was that trial and error? Did you try other things like forcing her to
read actual papers or did you go straight into this press digest and meeting idea
pretty quickly?
BI: Pretty quickly I went in, because all we had were sort of cuttings, an array of
cuttings, from Tory central office. It didn't work and therefore I thought, ‘We need to
bring it together in some sort of comprehensive and composite whole’.
CM: I think people would be interested to understand, because the media has
changed so dramatically now, so multi-faceted, it is 24-hour, etc. etc. Really you
were dealing with relatively few entities weren't you?
BI: Dealing with about 11 newspapers.
CM: Yes. And three television channels only..
BI: And radio. But of course there were also all the provincial press that had to be
coped with, and I took the view that we should look after all of them including,
sometimes, local newspapers. And she used to have local editors in here from timeto-time. So we tried to look after everybody.
CM: And the ‘worlds’...
BI: And the world.
CM: I mean, my impression is that once you had Britain's first woman prime
minister the world interest grew enormously, absolutely hugely, and therefore the
pressure must have been correspondingly large.
BI: Oh, everybody wanted to talk to her. And in Russia, they wanted to kiss her! But,
you know, she was a pretty explosive international commodity.
CM: Yes. And how do you balance it… If you go to a press conference now with the
prime minister, and it's one of those ones perhaps in a foreign country where people
shout out questions, there's an unspoken rule that television has to ask first because,
you know, get the question in first, that's what matters most. Was that true in your
day?
BI: No. Although in practice I would always try to make sure that television had
their go. Well I used to preside over the prime minister's press conferences abroad
and I called the questions. I didn't want people saying that she was showing
favouritism or whatnot, I would do it, and I tried to give everybody a go. I mean I
once gave, much against my better judgement, a go to an extremely florid lady,
middle-aged lady, in the Washington Rotunda. And blow me, she asked about pets’
therapy. Can you imagine in the middle of an international press conference, the
British prime minister is asked about pets’ therapy? And Mrs Thatcher said out of
the side of her mouth 'What is pets’ therapy?' And I said it sounds like a risqué
magazine to me. Which didn't go down very well. And Mrs Thatcher gave her a
lecture for five minutes which no doubt [INAUDIBLE] the entire international press
about the British policy towards the disabled.
CM: Did you try to plant a question from time to time?
BI: I didn't try to plant but, well, I didn't say, ‘You, ask that question.’ But what I said
was ‘I suppose you'll be asking that question won't you?’ There are ways of doing it I
suppose.
CM: Yes. And how much did you see it as your business to forge alliances with
publications or channels for her?
BI: I didn't. I came to this building absolutely determined, on the basis of my
experience of the previous 12 years looking after ministers, that I would have no
favourites. They would all get the same opportunity with the news. Now what they
asked me outside that was their affair and if they behaved with me then I would
help them.
CM: But if some of them were more friendly than others, wasn't that advantageous
for her to cultivate the relationship and therefore a reasonable thing for you to
consider?
BI: My objective was not to fall out. Mrs Thatcher would say that was keeping in
with them, I suppose, because I wasn't causing any ructions. But she took so little
interest that she wasn't telling me to look after so-and-so, that never occurred.
CM: Here's an important point, which I don't think people understand because it is
different now. You were not what is now called a spin doctor.
BI: No, I regard it as a term of abuse.
CM: Yes. Because you were always a member of the regular civil service.
BI: Government Information Service, yes.
CM: And you were not therefore permitted to have any party allegiance.
BI: I didn't have any party, no.
CM: And, for example, therefore you did not attend Conservative Party Conference
or press conferences there or anything?
BI: I never went to Mrs Thatcher's constituency.
CM: Yes. And so this is a very different world isn't it from Alastair Campbell and
what has happened since? This is a much more, sort of, straight down the line press
and information job.
BI: One or two prime ministers did bring in journalists from outside. Joe Haines, for
example, with Harold Wilson. But they were temporary civil servants and observed
the laws, as it were. The convention died, I am sorry to say, on 2nd May 1997.
CM: Am I right, therefore, that… 2nd May 1997, for anyone who has forgotten, is
when Tony Blair became prime minister. Am I right therefore that one of the
conventions was that you didn't attend cabinet meetings?
BI: I didn't. I wasn't aware that it was a convention and if the prime minister had
wanted me there, she could have had me there, but I think the judgement was that it
was better if you weren't there, because nobody could then argue that you, I, was
leaking on behalf of the prime minister. I do not know whether some of my
successors with John Major sat in cabinet or not.
CM: Did you literally never sit in cabinet?
BI: No. In cabinet committees, yes. But not cabinet itself.
CM: And what's the distinction there in your mind?
BI: The cabinet is the ultimate decision-making body. And Mrs Thatcher was a fairly
secretive person. And we got our briefings from the private secretaries at lunch
through that door there on Thursdays.
CM: It was sort of, almost like a little canteen lunch wasn't there, when you all got
together, not with her of course.
BI: No, no, no, she was in her study preparing for questions. And we were on tap.
CM: Yes. You say she's secretive. Sometimes I've found when I've studied the
documents that you get quite angry with her because you just jolly well haven't been
told something you need to be told. Now there's no suggestion, I think, that she's
deliberately cutting you out, because she always treated you well as I understand,
but sometimes her natural secrecy means that you haven't been told. I've found a
memo, for example, when the Top Salaries Review Board has decided that top
people should get far greater pay rises than anyone else and reading between the
lines I'd say you didn't think that was such a brilliant idea. But anyway, regardless of
what your idea was, you were shocked, because you only had half an hour between
hearing the first piece of information and briefing the press.
BI: Yes.
CM: And so you were rebuking her.
BI: I blew up.
CM: Yes.
BI: In a big way. And she agreed with me that I should not have been kept in the
dark. But I'm afraid that if you have a secretive minister then that reinforces the
secretiveness of the machine. And the British machine is probably the most
secretive, at least it was until Tony Blair came along, the most secretive in the world.
I spent the whole of my 24 years in government fighting the secrecy of the machine,
as a government information officer. That's funny isn't it.
CM: Yes. And succeeding or failing?
BI: Failing generally. If by that you mean opening it up generally, didn't.
CM: The characteristic form of briefing that you most frequented I guess is the lobby
briefing. And what that meant is that you were briefing members of the
parliamentary lobby off-the-record so then they would report something like
'government sources say' or 'sources close to the prime minister'. Tell us a bit more
about how those briefings, how they happened, when they happened and what the
sort of thing you said in them was.
BI: Well, people seemed to think that the lobby was the prime minister's lobby, or
the press secretary's lobby, or the government's lobby. It wasn't. It was the lobby's
lobby. And technically they invited me to brief them on every occasion I went there
whether it was here or in their room at the House. And the reason it was off-therecord, unattributable, was that parliament expects ministers to report to it, and
doesn't expect bods like me to stand up and publicly announce policy. And indeed
Betty Boothroyd got pretty shirty about the way in which they did leak things in
advance. So I regard the lobby system, in the way in which you brief them, as a sort
of logical response to the constitution.
CM: Yes. But it creates problems doesn't it, because it becomes slightly hard to pin
down, and it particularly created problems not so much with the media, I think, but
with Mrs Thatcher's colleagues, because they would say, ‘Hmm, what's Bernard
been saying?’ And of course they would think that Bernard had occasionally done
them damage. This is a regular thing that happened with the so-called ‘wets’ in the
early era particularly with Francis Pym, Jim Prior, it happened later on in relation to
Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson. Having interviewed all of these people over the
years for my book I have a long litany of complaints about this.
BI: Well I'm not surprised.
CM: How would you respond?
BI: Oh I would simply say that they're barmy. Like all politicians they gossip like
mad as to who is up or who is down and then they blame the press secretary. Now
there are three occasions when I stand convicted. One was when I told the lobby offthe-record - but it didn't last, of course it didn't - that Francis Pym's being so
cheerful keeps him going, Francis Pym, now if I'd have said he's a very, oh he's very,
very glum man, I'd have got away with it. No, off the top of my tongue, Mrs Thatcher
had never told me to say anything at all about it, but he'd made a speech of
inspissated gloom in the same week that the chancellor of the exchequer had said
things were improving. Naturally the lobby came to me and said, ‘What's going on?
Does anybody know what is going on?’ Next one, John Biffen, who made a television
programme in which he said, as a member of the cabinet, that Mrs Thatcher was a
liability to her party and should be replaced by a collective leadership. The lobby
came at me like the Chinese army. I had no answer as to why he was remaining a
member of the cabinet. So I simply said, well you know, it spoke to his nature; he's a
well-known semi-detached member of the cabinet, in the sense that he was a
member of it but furiously apart from it.
CM: You thought you were defending him in a way?
BI: Well not really. I didn't think I was defending him at the time but it turned out
that I defended both him and Francis Pym. Their transgressions were completely
forgotten and I was thumped.
CM: And your third one?
BI: Third one was Geoffrey Howe, who on having bargained to become deputy
prime minister got his acolytes to tell the press what a wonderful job this was and
what he'd be doing. And I knew what Willie Whitelaw had done and nobody would
have done more as deputy prime minister than Willie Whitelaw. And so I corrected
what would not happen, such as, for example, deputising for the prime minister
when she was abroad. In these days of modern communication you don't need
deputies when you're abroad. And so I was accused of killing the job under his feet. I
didn't.
CM: But you're being a bit innocent there aren't you....
BI: No.
CM: Yes you are, because you knew perfectly well that she was absolutely fed up
with Geoffrey and Geoffrey was absolutely fed up with her, and the whole business
of him having this job was to do with the fact that she wanted him out of foreign
secretary but she didn't quite dare sack him, and she was trying to find some semidecorous way of maintaining the position. So there was an element of mischief
involved.
BI: Well there wasn't an element of mischief on my part. I was enraged that they had
given a wrong account of what the job would be. And either you're in the business of
fact or you're not. Now if I'd have been a bit more wily, I would have said, ‘This is
going to get you into trouble lad’, but I was very annoyed.
CM: I think you were quite wily though weren't you? You didn't survive that long by
not being wily?
BI: Well, except I also was loyal, and I didn't go around hammering all these
ministers who think that I did.
CM: No. But it tells us something, I think, about the development of her government
over these many many years, that all this sort of thing became more problematic in
the later period. There was a more fundamental division between her and her senior
colleagues.
BI: I fully accept that she ran a terribly wearing government. She used to say: ‘If you
want something done get a woman to do it. Men are only good at talking.’ And she
was absolutely tactless. I mean her first words to Mr Gorbachev: ‘I hate communism.’
Totally tactless, and very wearing. Giving everybody a very bad example by the
number of hours she worked. Knowing more about their jobs than some of them did.
And it was a wearing, and also you had arguments about economic policy, and later
you had arguments about European policy, and of course the poll tax.
CM: What you said about her just then is, you phrase it as a criticism, but in a way
it's praise isn't it, because it is the way she drives everything on; that she's so
concerned about the actual policy, that she wants to get things done, and those are
great achievements, though they could be very difficult to work with. But is there
nevertheless a fundamental criticism of her, which did become more apparent in the
later period, that she really was not properly trying to work with senior colleagues,
that she was almost picking a quarrel with them and that there was a fundamental
friction that she wasn't trying to correct.
BI: I take what you're saying, if you're saying that she wasn't a natural calmer of the
atmosphere, you're quite right. The result I think of 11 years of very hard, wearing
government and serious differences over policy meant that towards the end people
were leaving government to ‘spend more time with their families’, my joke is,
without consulting their families. And every time we went abroad somebody
seemed to go and ‘spend more time with their family’. Now it was perfectly clear
that the government was breaking up.
CM: From when, would you say?
BI: Oh, early '90, possibly late '90, early '90. And I had to, in presentational terms,
try to hold it together. It was very very difficult, because the longer you are in office,
and the rougher I suppose you've been, the more complaints there are against you,
especially when you get economic problems and Europe dividing you, then I think
the prime minister is in difficulty.
CM: I'll come back to how it all progressed and fell apart, but tell us a little more
about dealing actually with her. What sort of thing did she come to you - well she
didn't come to you but you went to her - what sort of thing did she ask your advice
on? How far did she take you into overall political discussion or did she treat you in
what we now call a silo, in which you simply and solely deal with media questions?
BI: I think she regarded me as being more a part of the team than I actually was in
terms of knowledge. That's why she got shirty over my being kept in the dark about
top salaries. But I don't think that weighted a great deal with her. For my part, I
found that she was as readable as a book. You could read the tea leaves with
astonishing clarity and that kept me going without necessarily a great deal of
information, although you could work out what is going on. Because don't forget I
had access to what went in to her boxes at night. But I found that after a few months,
I thought this was going to be a terribly hard ride, she'd come to office not exactly
the endorsement of the nation, well certainly not a landslide, I think a lot of people
felt that she might fail or make it worse. And the lobby certainly were expecting her
to u-turn. I played u-turn with them for two and a half years. So notwithstanding
that extremis, if you like, and the annus horribilis of 1981, we got on like a house on
fire, because I could read her and she relied on me to get on with it.
CM: Was she correspondingly nice to you?
BI: Oh, we had our tiffs, and this sort of thing, but yes, I found it a joy. I've been
speaking latterly to a number of people who worked with her and they all say what
a joy it was to work in No 10.
CM: The contrast I've found with interviewing all these people is, the people who
worked for her in No 10 almost all liked her very much, and the ministers who
worked with her as cabinet ministers usually found her unbearable. Fair distinction?
BI: I think unbearable is going it a bit...
CM: It got more so, let's say that then...
BI: Well I think they got more tetchy, that's absolutely true. But I think the people
who did work for her, she was very loyal to them, and if you were loyal to them, if
you were loyal to her, she counted loyalty a very very… an enormous plus in
anybody.
CM: And would she say to you, ‘Bernard, what should we do about this?’ I don't
mean a problem with the media, I mean, a problem.
BI: Occasionally yes. I mean, for example, over football hooliganism where I was a
keen soccer fan, I was appalled at what was going on and she certainly listened to
me over that, and she, having been a labour correspondent, being in the department
of employment with In Place of Strife, with Robert Carr's Industrial Relations Act,
she listened to me on industrial relations.
CM: I find for example in the miner's strike which is of course the great climatic
battle for her that you have a role that extended beyond the press secretary role
because of the background you've just described. So you were telling her things
about trade union mentality and indeed you had some trade union contacts.
BI: And I also had contacts within the NCB too. Earlier I didn't give you the third arm
of being a press secretary. You are part of the intelligence system. It is astonishing
what journalists will tell you. And it is very valuable to have a press secretary who is
feeding information into the system. Take for example, the poll tax. Mrs Thatcher
was holding a press cabinet committee on the poll tax and I was invited to tell
people what the public were saying. And so I said, ‘Well, I've just come from a lobby
briefing where they say two things. First of all, the king in his castle will pay exactly
the same as the pauper in his hovel. And secondly, it will be very difficult to collect.’
Whereupon, she sniffed, and told me in no uncertain terms, ‘Well, you go back and
tell them that the rich already pay far more than anybody else to local government
and to central government too, and secondly, it may be difficult to collect in
“bedsitter-land” but it won't be difficult to collect elsewhere. Now go and educate!’
CM: When you conveyed a message like that, there's always a fine line between
simply, neutrally passing on an opinion and sometimes expressing your own
because you are choosing what you think is important. For example I think I would
accuse you, although personally I would be sympathetic to this, of presenting
European questions in what would now be called a Eurosceptic way, when you
reported those endless European Councils to us journalists and therefore to the
world. You did very much a sort of Britain battling against the, the headline in your
mind is ‘Maggie wins in Brussels’ sort of...
BI: I don't know. Maggie in a minority of one again. Exactly the same as the
Commonwealth.
CM: One of the things you had to do of course, because you were always talking
naturally about how people were presented in the press, was tell her if ministers
were doing badly in that area, and this would have, therefore you would have an
influence on what happened next, because of reshuffles. She had to decide, for
example, 1985, she came to the conclusion, which I think was your view, that the
three main ministers, whatever their merits, Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson and
Geoffrey Howe, were poor presenters, and the message wasn't getting across,
therefore something had to happen, which in that case was the moving of Leon
Brittan. What role did you really have in all of that? And how was that balanced
against things like how good a departmental minister is someone?
BI: She never asked me how good they were.
CM: But you expressed a view to her, didn't you, which influenced her choice of
minister?
BI: Well she said to me, ‘I cannot have the three leading members of my government
who cannot communicate.’ And I thought it would be helpful if we could get
somebody who could communicate, but I hadn't spent my time arguing that they
were not doing their job.
CM: Nevertheless you, presumably, sometimes did tell her without being asked that
X was making a mess of something or, did you sometimes say that Y should be
promoted or? Would that be part of your...
BI: Well if I did...I kept out of this.
CM: You didn't sit in on sort of reshuffle meetings?
BI: No. What I can't categorically deny is that my attitude in a meeting might not
convey a message to her. I can't deny that. But I did not spend my time saying
‘promote this’, ‘get rid of that’.
CM: And how often did you meet her just in a sort of chatty way, that she passed
your room or…?
BI: Well she did come down to my room on several occasions but, she was rather
surprised at the number of parties being held in the evening too. How many times?
CM: How often was casual chat?
BI: It was entirely dependent upon the day. For example, Thursday, we had the
meeting at 9am to assess the day's press and whatever. Then we had questions in
her room at the house, briefing for that. Then we had the post-mortem of the
questions and then whatever else was happening. And if we had a big interview then
I'd be with her for most of the morning.
CM: If you had to choose a moment that you saw her under the greatest stress, apart
from her final, her end, which I will come to shortly… Would you pick one? A
moment of complete either personal or political tension, misery, crisis, where you
saw her under the sort of maximum pressure?
BI: Well I think, under the feeling that she might be out, I would have thought that it
was the Westland affair. Although I still don't believe that she said ‘I might be out by
6 o'clock’ very seriously indeed. I mean, I regard the Westland affair as one of the
most hypocritical, silly, and idiotic nonsense that I ever had to put up with. I really
am amazed at some of these sensitive plants who live in Westminster.
CM: What about the moment where she was sort of most on her mettle, and if you
like proudest of?
BI: Well, early 1986 she could hardly contain her joy in telling me that her policies
were at last working. And I was alone with her in her study and she was like this.
CM: Anything trigger that? Any particular thing trigger that?
BI: I can't remember what triggered it but she...
CM: They certainly were going right...Yeah. Take us to the end. You said earlier that
you could see it coming really from early 1990. And of course she was out, had to
resign, in November. How did that sort of crystallise? I remember personally
interviewing her about four days before she fell and I couldn't believe how she was
so all over the place. She didn't know what to do about the situation she was in and
you know she ended up becoming incredibly, sort of, discursive and wandering.
What was going on there in her mind as it got like that?
BI: Well she said to me, as ministers fell by the wayside, to spend more time with
their family, that, ‘I can't rely on any one of them. I'll have to do it myself won't I?’
Now people would say that that was arrogant. I think it was despair. And I think
there was increasing despair about the way the government was falling apart which
may have been exacerbated by Denis' feeling that she ought to have left on her tenth
anniversary.
CM: Yes. Did you have a view of the time, for yourself?
BI: No because there was nobody obvious to succeed her. But I thought that she was
getting towards the end. She'd lived a very wearing life herself. So I sometimes think
we underestimated the vote for the ‘stalking donkey’ as he was described, Sir
Anthony Meyer, in 1988.
CM: '89, yeah.
BI: But right up to September of 1990 I remember talking with Charles Powell and
asking him what he thought the was the likelihood of a challenge, and he said, ‘It
looks as though it is going away.’ And then, suddenly, Geoffrey Howe exploded with
his ‘broken bat’ and Michael Heseltine had to… we’d left him with no option. Now I
frankly did not believe that the Tory party, the stupid party, was so stupid as to get
rid of her, but it did. Although of course there was the supermajority required and
she'd have walked it on...
CM: She did technically win the contest which forced her to resign didn't she?
BI: Yes. I mean it was a punishing vote against her though which you could argue
challenged any authority that she had. I just didn't believe that she would go. But I
think she went with a major unanswered question nobody's answered. She never
answered me on it, and nobody else has. And that is, ‘Why she didn't fight?’ Here
was a born fighter for what she believed in. She did not fight, in the way I would
have expected, to retain the prime ministership and the leadership of her party. And
everybody will speculate as to why. But she didn't have a really high-powered
committee behind her. She had Sir Peter Morrison who had been widely criticised,
at least he got the arithmetic right, he told her how many people would vote for her
but said he'd allowed 15 percent for lying and, blow me, all 15 percent lied. Which
shows you what politicians are like. So I am mesmerised, I still am, I can't
understand why she didn't fight.
CM: Is a possible explanation pride? Here you are, you've been leader for 15 years,
you've been prime minister for 11 and a half, if all this lot want to have a go at you,
you're going to crawl to them, if you have your record, you offer it, reluctantly, but
you don't want the challenge, but it comes, and in the end you say take it or leave it
and that's the only dignified thing you can do.
BI: Well there is some evidence for that because she did say to me, ‘If they don't
know who they're voting for now, they never will.’ I still don't square that with her
natural fighting tendencies.
CM: Did you see a moment where it changed because obviously to start with she
was fighting, and then there came a moment, the Tuesday, the Wednesday,
apparently in Paris itself when she heard the result of the first ballot, when she
decided? Can you pin it down?
BI: I think she decided overnight. I mean I decided overnight because our
ambassador, Ewen Fergusson, in Paris, gave Charles Powell and myself the use of his
Rolls-Royce, and I said ‘This is the last time I shall be using an ambassadorial RollsRoyce.’ And I told Ewen Fergusson that, ‘This is the last time we shall be coming
your way.’ And he looked pained but I think he probably agreed. And then she went
through all this rigmarole with cabinet ministers and then she decided overnight
that she wanted to, was going to resign.
CM: And you Bernard? Did you leave at once, after her resignation?
BI: I left, yes, I...
CM: You didn't do a few weeks for Mr Major or...
BI: Oh no, no. I went with her. I said that, ‘I've had enough.’ I'd had 24 years in the
front line. I needed a break and I was very very tired. I didn't realise how tired I was
until I stopped.
CM: It's unique, this length of time and the importance of this period, probably more
important than any period since the Second World War, the most important peacetime period.
BI: Well it changed the nature of Britain.
CM: Yes. If you had to sum up in a couple of sentences what pride or regrets you
have about that time, that period working with her, what would you say?
BI: Well the first thing I would say is that it was enormously rewarding because
over the 11 years you felt that you hadn't wasted your time. She had changed the
nature of Britain and she had raised Britain's standing in the world. And nobody
who travelled with her could be any doubt about that. They really did warm to her
and wanted to talk to her and as I said, in Russia, wanted to kiss her. So I think, she
changed the nature of Britain, raised the standing in the world and then sorted it our
financial arrangements until Nigel Lawson unfortunately let it go, although John
Major recovered it, well John Major and Ken Clarke. Brought the unions back within
a framework [INAUDIBLE], which nobody would have expected to occur. And
started a new movement called privatisation. Now, I wish some privatisation had
been carried out better but, nonetheless, I think that, as I look back, I think that it is
with great pride and joy that the 11 years that I worked here produced some very
substantial improvements in the country. And I'm sorry, desperately sorry, that so
many people had to suffer the consequences. It was very, very hard over the first
seven years until 1986 when she said, ‘They're beginning to work.’ And that I think
demonstrates the, I think the five qualities that Margaret Thatcher brought to
political leadership. One was ideological security, she knew what she wanted to do.
The other one was moral courage. She wasn't going to be beaten, she was going to
do what was right. I think that takes you back to the Methodism of Grantham.
Constancy. When she made up her mind, she didn't change it. Absolute
determination. And finally, and I think this is probably the greatest quality: she
didn't want to be loved. God save me from politicians who want to be loved. I think it
is sufficient to be respected and she was respected. There is one little coda to this. I
gave this assessment at a dinner that Denis Thatcher was at. And he said, ‘You've
forgotten the most important of the six qualities.’ Not five, six he said. And that is
that she was motivated, strongly motivated, by a deep religious conviction.
CM: Bernard Ingham, absolutely fascinating talk. Thank you very much.