The Lord and Lady Thatcher

welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson educated at eaton and cambridge charles moore wrote for and edited three of the great english journals the daily telegraph where he employed a young boris johnson the spectator and the sunday telegraph in 1997 lady thatcher asked him to write her biography naming two conditions that she would never read the manuscript and that the work would appear only after her death some two decades after he began the project charles moore has published the third and final volume herself alone raised to the peerage last october i should note charles moore now sits in the house of lords as the lord moore of etchingham charles two quotations from herself alone one she was master of the detail which appeared in the famous red boxes she worked on each night often until two in the morning she enjoyed political gossip but it was the paper rather than the plotting on the sofa or discussion and cabinet which she saw as the primary means of governing second quotation the effect on others of her extraordinary personality made greater by the fact that she was a woman operating a world of men is often the story itself the paper and the personality and i suppose this first question is really of course we come to her in a moment but the first question is about technique for two decades you're interweaving these two in that very room in which we see you now this is as sloppy a question as can be but still it's the way it forms itself in my mind how did you do it well um the funny thing is when you're doing this peter you just sort of get on with it um questions present themselves and you try to solve them i didn't have a sort of theory of how to do it i'll just say this though that there are of course two basic sources the written ones and the oral ones and because mrs thatcher had turned the key in the lock for me i had more or less total access to both government paper and her own papers and access to all the people who were closely associated with her and a lot of others who weren't so closely but it had something or other to do with her so interviewed 600 people for the books um and um and then this massive massive amount of paper because she was a very busy lady as you already made clear and she was prime minister for so long eleven and a half years and if you balance the oral with the written in a way you get that balance between that method of working on paper where she was used to write her views on the paper as she worked and then the personality the phenomenon which you get more from talking to individuals who knew her i'm just trying to think i the it's not my view alone although i'm very happy to state my view but in review after review after review this is being the three volumes together being called one of the great works of political biography it's right up there with robert blake on disraeli and martin gilbert on churchill and it occurs of course disraeli and all his contemporaries are dead for decades by the time robert blake even thinks of taking up a biography so he relies only on paper and martin gilbert's biography which goes on for actually decades the living witnesses tail off yeah but you didn't you didn't you you essentially you had every you had full you had everybody was still alive i guess is what i'm coming to i i missed i missed because of death about four very important people two of whom were murdered by the ira it should be said um two of her closest associates um but um you're right that it was there's a great difficulty right when is the right moment to write a biography like this um if you write it too early it's sort of semi-journalism it's all tied up in what everybody's having a row about if you write it too late you miss a lot of opportunities and i felt that being roughly um as i went along writing usually about 30 years after the events was about right actually i see it i see it's a bit of immediacy but a bit of perspective that was my hope anyway and one i just can't resist this mrs thatcher as you yourself say at least by the her final years in office she had quite a high regard for her own standing and intelligence and prestige and so forth truly she never inquired as to how it was going that is the case um you read out those two conditions that she set she set me and i must say i thought she was not going to follow them because she was not known for not interfering yes yes a very commanding personality and i thought she would worry but i misunderstood the nature of her egotism she undoubtedly had a great egotism but not the petty vanity of a lot of male politicians so she didn't do that thing of male politicians of wanting to look back and essentially get me to write their book yes she wasn't very interested in looking back she was interested in the next thing and in doing things and she didn't want to reflect so she actually didn't enjoy the whole business of looking back and um this was a great struggle when she wrote her own memoirs because she was very unsuited temperamentally to doing so so i think she thought she didn't put it quite in these terms but i think she thought uh i've done it he can write about it and um and she left it at that and she literally literally never asked me what i was writing or suggested that i should write something or that i shouldn't write something quite remarkable we talked a lot of girls but she never ever did she just didn't think that way it was extraordinary that is that that is extraordinary ron and margaret our audience is going to be substantially american so let's just go straight to what is likely to interest americans herself alone quote the coincidence of such like-minded occupants of the white house and ten downing street in power for eight years together had never happened before and has not happened since you don't mean to suggest that mrs thatcher and well let me just say how would you compare the working relationship between margaret thatcher and ronald reagan as against say churchill and fdr or later george w bush and tony blair well one key difference was um that the friendship between margaret thatcher and ronald reagan was forged in adversity they first met one another four years before she came into office and um five and a half years before he came into office uh he was out in the wilderness actually he ceased to be governor of california and he was running up for the nomination he didn't get in 1976 um she had just become leader of the conservative party and so in these adverse times when their views on the cold war and their views about economics were really unfashionable they met and they immediately hit it off and they immediately saw how much they agreed and they like one another's very contrasting personalities um and then she wins two four years later she becomes prime minister governor reagan ex governor reagan telephones 10 downing street to congratulate her on the switchboard won't put him through because they don't think he's important so he uh so he had to wait uh until um uh a bit later when i think he sent a as far as i remember he sent a letter which got through to her um but that was a very interesting thing and of course she was not pleased to know that he hadn't been put through um so by the time he became president she was already well advanced on her journey in office which was proving extremely difficult at the beginning and so you have the timing the friendship and the shared views and then because she won three elections and because no u.s president is allowed more than two terms she was actually the british prime minister for the whole of his time in office um and so this fdr and churchill that was forged when they were both at the top pretty much yes same with uh bush and um bush jr and blair um here was something that went back and had a much closer ideological and personal affinity charles you quote frank carlucci who served in the final couple of years of the reagan administration as national security adviser and then a secretary of defense here's frank carlucci once ronald reagan got through the talking points and the issues he wanted to tell jokes and have a light conversation but margaret was constantly business they seemed to be talking past each other but in the end it all came together close quote how on earth did it all come together i might if you i don't know if i ever mentioned this to you but bill clark once said to me he was national security advisor early in the administration and mrs in meetings in the oval office whenever she had something cross or difficult to say she would turn to him and say judge clark how could you have permitted this to happen and then the and the pres and bill clark would look at the president who was smiling and of course knew what was going on any but how did it all come together they may have admired each other but my goodness were they different kinds of people totally totally he very laid back um very general um some would say almost lazy she um working flat out very serious not many jokes some charm all right but not many jokes and um uh just very different she he she very much the executive he more the presidential figure it's partly to do with the different systems of government uh yes and um but i think there was a sort of complicity they had i think they thought um okay we have to have all these officials they they matter in a way but actually we agree more even than we can say about a lot of things and we want to help one another and that's what we're going to do and um she had her ways of doing it which was partly using feminine charm which i think is an important aspect of her story um she she had a sort of it sounds a bit explicit to say a sexual attraction to ronald reagan i don't mean it was in any sort of naughty way um but she liked this tall um uh impressive looking actor she liked his charm and she thought he was a sort of classic american and she like he liked what uh he saw as a classic english lady in margaret thatcher and there was definitely a sort of elegant flirtation there um and a sort of almost um a private communication which was beyond official them i think that was important and he also knew how to run something past the system and she used her handbag to do that and she literally used a handbag to do that because she would have a few things in the bag which would suddenly come out and so nobody could know in advance what was coming and she'd open her bag and she'd say now what about this and the piece of paper would come out that was making a point or a quotation that she wanted or she'd wave something she'd read in the newspaper um and this was a way of getting around the system despite her attacklessness in some ways and her sometimes fractious behavior she was actually a very good diplomat um when she wanted to be which she always did want with the president and she also though she was very flattering and friendly to him and deferential because he's the leader of the free world when she didn't agree my goodness she could make him feel it and there were several issues like that and i think it's important because it shows the strength of their friendship to recognize that they had strong disagreement um one was about the falkland islands which they overcame and he backed britain's reconquest one was about this um american invasion of grenada when he cut him he cut her reagan cut her out of the information and she was extremely upset about that and it took a lot of work to bring that to get back together again told me that he was with the president he was with the president when the call came through from mrs thatcher on grenada and the president actually literally went like this she was she was at him she was at him so hot and heavy and he hung up and said to edmy's margaret was not happy yes well that that was it and um very much so and the a bit of men defenses had to be amended there and the big big one so big that people could hardly comprehend it was that they really disagreed about nuclear weapons yes can i can i come to that a bit because i'm sorry no no no i just it's frustrating to try to talk about the third volume of this huge work in which you're so brilliant at portraiture which i'm getting i i'm listening some of that from you now but the amazing thing is the way you weave into this policy always remaining accessible straightforward clear and so forth but you cover a lot of policy so can we just just almost as an example of the work in herself alone let me take you through a couple of these differences between mrs thatcher and mrs reagan if i may and just have you have you explicate it for us so you cover the 1986 reykjavik summit between reagan and gorbachev in volume 2 her at her zenith very briefly reagan and gorbachev come close to agreeing to eliminate entire classes of nuclear weapons which left mrs thatcher horrified and now to quote this volume herself alone the possibility that reagan might again offer to get rid of nuclear weapons without regard to soviet overwhelming superiority and conventional forces gnawed away at her mrs thatcher and reagan never converged in their ultimate vision he retained his dream of a non-nuclear future she never lost her faith in the nuclear deterrent can you spell that out for us a bit by the way reagan with still i think there's still a lingering reputation mistaken but reputation of reagan is a war monger yeah yeah um it's very fascinating and i think it may be to do with it's something that actually mrs reagan observed um that ronnie was fundamentally optimistic and mrs actually less so mrs satcher had a more i think ultimately she was optimistic actually because she believed in the power of freedom but she was very very alert to threats of freedom um and she did not think that once the nuclear weapons had been invented it was going to be taken off the face of the earth and if that if it wasn't you had to have it if you were an important power in the free world you had to have it she really truly believed in the deterrent theory reagan i think perhaps not all the time um but broadly speaking thought that it was so um terrible the prospect of the destruction of everything and everybody that you had to do everything you could to get rid of it um and that ultimately that could be done and that was of course part of his interest in um the strategic defense initiative um which actually mrs thatcher came to support for more tactical reasons and that i think was the difference um it could have produced the most terrible eruptions it did produce some erections and the specific fear she had was that britain and europe would be left in the lurch in a way that the united states wouldn't be because the united states would not be subject to conventional invasion by the soviet union but we could have been so that was a big um problem and she thought that reagan at reykjavik that was the worst moment for her um might sort of as as some people would at the time have just sold the shop um and uh gone past everybody and condemned the world to an incredibly unstable situation but the point was that what now why didn't this cause a real falling out between them and the answer is because they wanted the same thing they wanted to win the cold war and they knew they were doing it together and they wanted to win it for the usual power reasons of all countries but also because they actually wanted the freedom of the countries of eastern europe and of the soviet union itself they cared about the citizens of those places which normal geopolitics hadn't cared about much and um so they had a common purpose and that that saw them through the whole thing charles can i i want to come back to the policy differences between the two of them one more actually they differed on gorbachev i'd like to return to that but you just touched on something that you that you elucidate in the book and you argue argue that mrs thatcher is the first prime minister since churchill which means not atlee not heath not wilson none of them not callaghan she's the first prime minister since churchill you argue who really feels at a human level for the people of eastern europe yes i think that's definitely true um it very well she actually hated communism fundamentally she didn't just think you know there's a danger in the world order um where you know this may be a problem uh because of soviet power though she did think that she was very concerned indeed about that she thought this is an evil system if you like those reagan's phrase an evil empire and um the world shouldn't continue like that and the fundamental reason why it was evil was its oppression of its own people even more than than the threats to other people and she particularly moved by that in the case of poland for which she had a very close affinity but actually it was true for all those countries and for the soviet people themselves and that's why they responded the most extraordinary scenes perhaps in her premiership were those that took place in the eastern bloc when she visited most important moscow in 1987 and poland in 1988 and actually armenia um and ukraine just before she left office enormous crowds huge huge sort of moving spectacle of people looking to her and cheering her and so on and of course they all weren't allowed to in theory um and um and she actually appeared on soviet television and two sort of great fat communist um journalists tried to beat her up on air live because it was part of gorbachev's um glasnost to show it all um in public which had never happened before but she absolutely walloped them and so millions and millions of soviet people were watching this and couldn't couldn't contain their excitement that she was challenging them and you know live on air and there was nobody was talking back to the bastards before fantastic all right the differing approaches between reagan and thatcher to gorbachev himself and in some ways to communism although you may you may talk me out of it i'm very prepared to be talked out of almost anything by you charles two quotations you contrast two 1987 statesmen statements one is by reagan and the other by thatcher this takes a moment but you'll see what i'm doing here and i draw draw this from your book of course in reagan's speech at the berlin wall in june this point about trust that is whether gorbachev could be trusted whether glasnost and perestroika were real this point about trust became a challenge where perestroika and glasnost and now you're quoting reagan the beginnings of profound changes in the soviet state he asked or are they token gestures intended to raise false hopes in the west so he sought tangible evidence there is one side the soviets can make that would be unmistakable mr gorbachev tear down this wall close quote now thatcher there are historic and courageous things happening in the soviet union under mr gorbachev's leadership she said three weeks after reagan's berlin speech these things should i believe have the support of the west because every enlargement of liberty of discussion every increase of initiative and enterprise is of a fundamental nature in human rights and and that we must welcome and hope that this courageous plan of mr gorbachev's will indeed succeed close quote well that's actually not a difference in shading or nuance reagan is saying oh yeah buster show us come here and get rid of the berlin wall and mrs thatcher is saying no no no no skepticism he's a courageous man of goodwill we must help him all right explain um it's partly where you stand in your own country mrs thatcher was never going to be outflanked on the right if if you can put it that way um so she would get the complete trust of all conservatives on this issue um i think reagan had a more difficult task with the republican party in um making them feel confident that he would sufficiently confront the soviet threat at all times so that's part of it um but i also think that she had persuaded herself when she met she invited gorbachev to her country house um checkers in december 1984 and he was not at that point the leader but he was likely to be the leader she persuaded herself that she could actually put it do business with this man and they some sort of chemistry again almost with a sort of sexual element and it had arisen and she loved the way they had such frank disagreements about everything and she thought i didn't i'll never again agree with this man but i can respect him and i'm interested in what he's trying to do and we should try to help him and i think precisely because she was not the big power she could take more risks than reagan and you might even say she took risks for reagan because she um helped to open up the situation and almost the first thing she did i mean six days after seeing gorbachev for that first time she arrived in camp david to explain to president reagan why she think this guy mattered um and reagan was receptive to that and it probably helped him that she could be the forerunner on that stuff and and she could take some of the risks now the critics of mrs thatcher would say that she put too many eggs in gorbachev's fragile basket and i think there's some truth in that towards the end um when he was becoming very unpopular with the soviet um union within the soviet union she didn't really acknowledge that enough i think fundamentally um she saw movement she she saw that the west could now after having installed crews and pershing missiles bargain from strength and that's what she intended to do with the man she decided to trust all right you you are progressively disarming me um but i'm going to have one more go at you charles one more pair of quotations this is ronald reagan explaining his view of the cold war in a private conversation in 1977 this has become quite famous and he said to dick allen who would become his first national security adviser would you like to hear my view of the cold war i have this in my head because dick allen told me about it uh my view of the cold war is we win and they lose all right now herself alone broadcasting on moscow tv after the talks this is during her visit to the ussr in 87. is that correct all right uh yes yeah 87. mrs thatcher spoke of gorbachevs and here you quote her great historic mission we look forward to the soviet union becoming as well as a as well as a great military power a great international power a great and strong economic power close quote now all right so here's here's the in three volumes charles i find myself with a little bit of a mental reservation i find myself thinking oh i must raise this one with charles and now i have a chance to do so and and the reservation runs as follows that you you talk about the different political situations they both found themselves in fine actually there was one moment when don regan then chief of staff told us speech writers i was a speechwriter in those days the president wants you to ease up on gorbachev and we said impossible and so don regan walked us down the hall to the oval office and where we could hear it from the president himself and this is shortly after all right so yes there's no doubt that's going on and we speechwriters thought the old man had gone soft on communism but is it isn't it also possible that mrs thatcher she shared some of the honestly the confusion and naivete of gorbachev himself reagan's reagan sees all the way to the bottom of communism he knows the system cannot soviet communism cannot be reformed remove the gulag remove the iron fist and it will collapse whereas she really does seem to have supposed that the soviet union the soviet communism itself could be reformed all right i now leave it to you to tell me why i'm wrong in some way i don't think she really thought that um i i don't think she really thought that soviet communism could be reformed but i think she felt that they were winning to take up the reagan phrase um they the west were winning and the communists were losing and it was the duty to try and manage the defeat of the communists rather than um let extreme violence break out she was always very concerned by a reactionary communism that would hurl out gorbachev which actually nearly succeeded in the year after yes yes in 91 and she wanted the most orderly possible transition and she didn't want um the russians killing people in eastern europe or indeed anywhere i see and so it was a sort of management issue i think you feel that more if you live on the continent of europe than if you of course live way way in from way away from there in the united states i don't think there was a fundamental disagreement with reagan on that point that there was certainly quite a big difference of degree right right okay got it europe 1973 britain joins the european union or as it was at the time the european economic community with the support of margaret thatcher 1988 prime minister thatcher gives an address in bruges beldum during that speech she says this of course is in herself alone we have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in britain only to see them reimposed at a european level with the european super state exercising a new dominance from brussels close quote and in europe you write the speech caused this is your these are your words absolute horror between 73 and 88 what changed um she got to know the european community better and she didn't like what she saw um she didn't really know anything about foreign affairs until 1979 when she became prime minister um and then she had a bruising four-year negotiation about trying to get a budget rebate out of them and this the iron rather entered her soul about them as a result of that um she never was a mad enthusiast for the european community because she was worried about sovereignty but she felt it was an economic necessity and she also thought it was useful in the cold war as a sort of anti-communist alliance her closer encounters would it made her more disillusioned but even in the brute speech that you quote from that's a you're a skeptic speech but it's not an anti-european speech she's not saying let's get the hell out of here it's more trying to make a bigger better europe she says in the speech we must never forget the prague budapest and warsaw are great european cities which is throwing down a gauntlet to the soviets but also to the uh to europe to the to the european community because they were germans they weren't reaching out to these places so she was saying bigger and looser please and let's not have more statism let's have a a looser alliance of democratic nations of course you're right in the trajectory you uh your question implied say that she gets more and more across and by the time she left office in the end of 1990 she was very angry indeed because she didn't want a single currency that was being proposed can we can we come to that i've got a clip this is this is prime minister's question time november 22nd 1990. she has already announced that she will stand down in the leadership contest and indeed on six days later on november 28th she leaves downing street for the last time and in this clip we hear someone shout she'll be governor and yeah what what he means is governor of the european central bank will she tell us whether she intends to continue her own personal fight against a single currency and an independent central bank when she leaves office no she's going to be the governor on the present structure order the prime minister what a good idea i haven't thought of it but if i were there'd be no european central bank accountable to no one least of all to national parliament because the point of that kind of european central bank is no democracy taking powers away from every single parliament and being able to have a single currency and a monetary policy under interest rates which takes all political power away from us as my right honourable friend said in his first speech after the proposal of single currency a single currency is about the politics of europe it is about a federal europe by the back door so i'll consider the honorable proposal now where were we obviously my questions about europe but apart from anything else it does just remind one she was alone in this in this in this playground of boys it was just astonishing and as you say she just that moment announced her resignation that day and yet she's so full of so buoyed up by what she's talking about that she overcomes the inner misery and this is fantastic performance yeah she dominates that chamber which is not an easy thing to do um all right well but you this trajectory of uh of her thinking on europe which of course brings to the quest the question that i'm sure you've been asked ten thousand times but i can't resist asking it myself what would she have made of brexit john o'sullivan who was a speechwriter for her said mrs thatcher would have favored brexit and charles poll perhaps her most important as i understand it from your book certainly in the final years her most important foreign policy adviser charles paul had said now lord paul he's your colleague in the upper chamber charles paul has said no no no she would have opposed brexit charles moore will now cast the deciding vote well i always refuse to answer the question what would she have done because i feel my only selling point is knowing what she did and i feel that people tend to um put a wish their own wish into her into her voice sometimes for things that you know might happen might she might have said and what i do know however is that once she left office she she was in favor of us leaving the european union and she was never in favor of that when she was in office um just before she fell she gave interviews in the struggle of the leadership including wanted to me actually as a journalist in which she called for a referendum on the single currency because she felt that the british people would vote against a single currency she did this without any consultation with colleagues and they were furious because the whole idea of a referendum was something they wish to avoid she took it up very strongly and she repeated it ever afterwards and it was put the foundation of what happened in the brexit referendum of 2016 because gradually through her pushing to a large extent the idea of the referendum got forced into the british uh political agenda and all parties came to agree with it on and off and finally they had it the word brexit i think hadn't been invented by the time mrs thatcher died in 2016 but uh 2013 i'm sorry um and the referendum was three years later 2016. um but she was in favor of us leaving she told me so um she told many other people so but she never said it publicly because she was advised that after all she was out of office by now that it would be so divisive within the conservative party um that she just didn't want that sort of trouble at her time of life that was really the argument that it was too unkind to our successors too difficult to exhausting and so on and um she she needed holding back she wanted to speak out but actually she didn't but her view was clear i see i see all right the fall we've we've talked about her announcement in november of 1990 that she would not stand for the tory leadership hold on let me just say this here's what an american sees she wins three general elections she wins the falklands war she never loses any vote of confidence in the house of commons and in 1990 she's one of the dominant figures on the entire planet and then her party does her in can you explain as briefly as possible succinctly as possible the mechanics of how it happened for us it's very confusing there's no counterpart in the american political system to a party leadership election and then why it happened um it was very confusing to us um but the uh but essentially because the prime is is the person who can command a majority in the house of commons that's really all the prime minister is um if a large number of people in her parliamentary party um decide they want her out um they can get her out and that's perfectly within the constitution and you don't need a general election for that um and that's what happened though by the way it's interesting it's a good trick question who won the tory leadership election of 1990 with the largest number of votes answer margaret thatcher she she won but not with enough votes to prevent a second ballot and she resigned rather than face a very controversial second ballot but you can see why she would mind so much about that and when i saw her afterwards and she was writing her memoirs i said what are you going to call them and she said undefeated and the reason she um said that which sadly she didn't call them in the end was this a point you're making and i'm adding to she was never beaten she won every single general election which she contested and she won the leadership election which caused her to resign so you can see why she would feel confused about the situation too however it was understandable she'd been in office too long um she had developed with her colleagues the very unpopular poll tax a form of local tax and and she had fallen out with her senior colleagues they're not with the public about europe because they were much more in favor of european union than she was and they were thoroughly fed up uh with her on that issue and she was also had very fractious personal relations with her senior colleagues so if you bring all that together and you under the british system you're in for 11 and a half years it's very rebarbative and um uh combative and the next generation wants its day in the sun and so on i think it becomes more comprehensible and everybody could see that she was never going to go unless she actually got beaten in some way and that was true that was true she had no plans for stepping down she would have she would have taken she would say so from she said she would say so sometimes but in fact she would never have gone unless she was defeated in a general election in my view and dennis her husband tried to persuade her to leave after 10 years in office may 89 and she said oh yes yes quite oh yes yes i will but i don't think the queen would like it to happen quite yet which she made up that excuse and um and um and so they felt it's time to praise her out i think that's really what it was um can i we've been talking about mrs thatcher's foreign policy but briefly well let's just play another clip if we could this again is from the same day uh and uh she has announced that she's stepping down but and she will leave office in six days here's her summing up there is there is one statistic that i understand is not however challenging and that is that over her 11 years the gap between the richest 10 and the poorest 10 in this country has widened substantially that's right how can she say at the end of her chapter of british politics that she can justify many people in a constituency such as mine being relatively much poorer much less well-housed and much less well provided than it was in 1979 surely she accepts that is not a record that she or any prime minister can be proud of mr speaker all levels of income are better off than they were in 1979 but what's the honourable member is saying is that he were rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich that way you will never create the wealth for better social services what a policy yes he would rather have the poor poorer provided the ritual that is the liberal policy yes it came out he didn't intend it to but he did well to the i give way to the honorable gentleman i'm extremely grateful the the prime minister is aware that uh i detest every single one of her domestic policies and i've never had that and i think that the honorable gentleman knows that i have the same contempt for his socialist policies as the people of east europe have experienced it i think i must have hit the right nail on the head when i pointed out that the logic of those policies are they'd rather have the poor poorer once they start to talk about the gap they'd rather the gap was that down here so long as the gap is smaller so long as they go smaller they'd rather have the poor poorer you do not create wealth and opportunity that way you do not create a property owning democracy that way trus she is i mean it is just the sheer apart from anything else the sheer animal vitality after 11 years in office she dominates the chamber even though she's just suffered this mortal political blow it is just astonishing all right here's the question if you'll permit me a bit of a personal musing 1979 a few months after she became prime minister for the first time was when this american began to study at oxford young as i was and little as i knew about economics i could feel the difference between new york from which my plane departed and britain and in particular i remember friends telling me that the king's road was the fashionable shopping street for young people in london and charles it was grim and the offerings were very by comparison with manhattan the cars were older people were not as well dressed you could just see it and feel it and by a decade later when i would return to london after a decade of mrs thatcher's economic policies the king's road sparkled as if it were madison avenue now i just don't know how you how how does one i just don't know how one tells the generation that cannot remember britain in the late 70s what she accomplished how how how does one do that well it's a behind the complicated story one one interesting statistic helps mrs was always associated um with division because there are so many massive arguments going on but actually here's an example of harmony that her policies um produced when she came into office in 1979 29 plus million working days were lost to strikes in that year and when she left office uh in 1990 fewer than 2 million working days were lost to strikes so there's a landscape of industrial relations completely transformed to actually to be more harmonious than before less divisive than before because strikes have been one of the biggest problems of the 1970s and have done much to cause the conditions you observed um i think that was really important that trade union reforms which were careful and gradual were immensely uh important and so was the liberation of markets privatization um the reduction of regulation and the reduction of tax that was more successful at the higher rates than it was at the lower i actually think that less successful and people under one people's always says that mrs thatcher um carried out so many cuts in government spending actually there were no net cuts in government spending in her time um obviously some things were cut but there were no net cuts um she actually didn't uh significantly reduce the share of the state's state's share of the economy but what she did do was grow the economy um and she gave a completely different attitude to econ to brought about a completely different attitude to opportunity and to entrepreneurism so that people did start to think well yes i can do this and that's what you were seeing in that clip um she was not in favor of equality uh if it took away opportunity she wanted opportunity and that would lift people and i think to a marked degree it did she steps down in 1990 you you're poignant moving fascinating on her final years you mentioned by the way a trip that she took to asia and the united states in 1997 and i hope if you'll permit me one more indulgence of one photograph of that uh trip she's visiting the hoover institute what strikes me about this all these years later is that the supposedly woman of iron she took our our oldest daughter and mrs thatcher is just instinctively what you what you miss here is that she knelt down and chatted with the children and she instinctively posed our daughter in the middle of the picture very in the most loving and gentle nurturing sort of way was quite a thing all right but back to business um the way we remember her i have bad news for you more people in this country are going to watch season four of the crown then are likely to read herself alone and that requires me i'm sorry i fear you're correct yes well that that requires me to ask a couple of questions about the portrayal of mrs thatcher in the crown accurate enough as regards her personality and comportment um i think julian anderson's portrait is powerful in one respect um she gets this woman of immense seriousness and determination who is coming from what americans call the wrong side of the tracks um and is making her way in immensely difficult circumstances with utter determination and that's very well portrayed i think and the emotional intensity that goes with that that's definitely important part what it doesn't get is first is the development of mrs thatcher in all those years in office nor does it get the sort of humanity um uh which you observed in your her dealings with your daughter mrs satchel was not a pompous person um and she was not actually a haughty person though she was very frightening could be very frightening if she she loved work she adored work and if she worked well with people she was immensely kind to them and rewarded them and the womanly side of her the motherly side came out because she was always very nice to secretaries dorm and detectives private secretaries she'd often cook food for them because under the strange british system there's no budget uh for the prime minister to eat unless they have um uh distinguished visitors so she would actually cook simple meals upstairs when they were all writing speeches together that sort of thing and there's none of that sort of humanity coming through in the portrait and therefore i think none of the sort of odd way in which mrs thatcher was persuasive to people she didn't just lecture people though my goodness she could lecture she had a sort of she she used her sex and her talk of being a housewife a phrase you probably wouldn't use now to reach out to voters and say we women understand these things we know the reality of economics we know what it's like to live under inflation we know how to budget for a household and these men with all their jargon they don't they fooled you and we've got to recapture the situation this sort of direct relationship between mrs thatcher and millions of voters even a lot of voters who actually didn't like her but still understood what she was talking about was very very important and that somehow doesn't come through she seems completely cut off from reality in the crown and of course the actual political account that the crown gives is very much the standard left-wing version so does the ludicrous scene when the man who got into the queen's bedroom the sort of vagrant who got in gives the poor queen a lecture like a labour party speech of the period why mrs saturn is so wicked and queen appears to agree with him and says afterwards uh when somebody says the man's a lunatic he's she says no no he's like the fool in in king lear um as if he were very wise somehow which in fact the queen is not interested in shakespeare and doesn't like fools but um uh you know there's sort of unreality there um right right i thought some of the stuff with the queen was well done the tension and unease between the two of them that was right but the rudeness was utterly wrong on both sides they were never literally never rude to one another and one of the things that people can't get hold of they always want in these dramas for the queen and mrs etcher to have an argument never ever happened never literally never and one specific point mrs thatcher never would have asked the queen to dissolve parliament as she absurd bit when she's falling from office when she rushes to the palace yes and says um please dissolve parliament so that i don't have to leave office i mean why that would mean by the way that wouldn't mean she didn't leave office it would probably mean she did but um but i mean it's just unthinkable the whole thing she would never ask the queen would never have agreed the whole thing is bilge by the way john o'sullivan sorry was stick with the palace for a moment longer john o'sullivan made the point the other day that the important relationship in the royal fam the queen and mrs thatcher it was a an often uncomfortable relationship although respectful to which i'd like to return in a moment but that the queen mother and mrs thatcher understood each other and got on famously yeah that is that so that is correct yes um i think it's partly to do with different roles um the queen mother having been a sort of retired since 1952 um had a certain greater freedom um uh whereas the queen has to be and she particularly feels this i think totally correct so it would be un un regal of her to be seen to favor one prime minister rather than another another and she simply doesn't think that way obviously she might personally prefer one to another but she never ever discloses something which suggests um a political view um in any sort of partisan manner and so that that's part of the reserve all the time um queen mother was very sort of obviously patriotic and she thought that mrs actually was restoring britain's greatness i think it was as simple as that i see charles can you final question about the the palace i think again our listeners our viewers are going to be americans can you sum up you you note that there were tensions between mrs thatcher and the queen but that mrs thatcher leaves office and the queen gives her the order of merit which is in the sovereign's personal gift it's not given on anybody's advice later she makes mrs thatcher a a a what a garter dame is that the way to put it garter knight again that's the highest honor in britain only 24 seats in saint george's chapel it's in the sovereign's personal gift she attends mrs thatcher's 70th birthday celebration the queen attends mrs thatcher's 80th birthday celebration and then as you note you note all of this of course but then as you note the queen attends mrs thatcher's funeral the first time the sovereign has attended the funeral of the prime minister since the funeral of winston churchill so it is clear that the queen had whatever the personal difficulties or awkwardness is the queen esteems mrs thatcher very highly why do we care why in your system does it matter why did it matter to mrs thatcher that the queen thought just ex i guess what i'm saying is explain the this is 20 21 by the time most people will see this and you we and this 95 94 95 year old lady still matters in britain why yes well partly for the basic constitutional reason that she's the head of state um and she really fulfills that role um so and so ex-officio and in her personality and in her longevity she represents continuity and trust um and very few of us can remember any other way um you know i'm 64 and i was born after the queen came to the throne um and uh i mean that's an extraordinary extraordinary uh thing and with mrs thatcher a strong monarchist a strong traditionist despite her in some ways revolutionary tendencies um it mattered tremendously that the respect she felt for the queen should be understood by the public um and uh she would of course worry about the queen's good opinion the queen doesn't really bestow um praise and she doesn't even lester she bestow criticism she's very she keeps it all in um and so her for example if she thinks if the queen thinks that um you might be making a mistake she will never say you're making a mistake she might say are you sure i think that's about as close as it gets um and you say you sh so she says a lot by saying very little um the interesting thing about their relationship is that this was unique and a bit of a shock for both of them the head of state and the head of government both women in a almost completely man's world and it took a bit of getting used to on both sides but you're completely right to come back to the respect it was very important that the queen did all the things you said about the order of merit de gato and so on and coming to the funeral the only one she attended other than churchill's and a friend of mine spoke to her afterwards and said something about um it was a wonderful funeral but did she did mrs actually really deserve uh the gun carriage you know which is normally which carried her coffin and normally associated with victory in war which of course there was a victory in war a small war the falklands and my friend said he virtually sort of shriveled up under the queen's gaze um for having made the suggestion that the kaufman should not be on the uncarriage um she thought it quite appropriate excellent um we come to a summing up and i wonder whether just another couple of questions but another another clip here and this is someone who honest i almost certain the two of you must have known each other well you'll see he's very much unmissed is that your side and yet she felt that she had to embellish it with a complete doctrine which she borrowed from the institute of economic affairs you know about the the need for a marketize a market solutions to every social problem now i'm all in favor of market solutions where they apply but not every social problem does have a market solution and there are there is a need for the maintenance of of traditions in in education and in culture and in the law which are not traditions of free enterprise but much more conditions of uh some kind of collective renunciation uh you know the people the pronunciation of the state i know renunciation of one's own uh individuality you know that's what a culture is partly so and i think she wasn't sensitive to all that part aspect of things charles overwhelmed the doctrine that everything fit into an economic doctrine and she missed things as a result um by the way i should say that was that was the late roger scrutin in an interview four years ago you did know it you must have known it of course i did i've just written an article about him yesterday as his love of fox hunting for the new foundation of his starting in the united states but um no um roger's on to something but i think he exaggerates i think what you have to remember is what mrs actually was up against the problem she's trying to deal with as with all politicians what are they trying to deal with at the moment in which they gain power and what she was trying to deal with was too much socialism too much government interference and too much economic failure and therefore she had to talk about free markets individualism opportunity enterprise getting the state off the backs of the people and so on because that was the big issue at that moment um this didn't mean that that was all she was interested in she had a strong sense of british tradition she had a romantic not always very accurate idea of british history she loved the british armed forces she understood the importance of social order and the she had a strong idea of a christian social order and she had an idea of the beauty of our heritage and culture um all things that um those are all things that roger uh himself rightly admires and i think they're all they're all there in her i think she's a rather fascinating mixture of a conservative conservative and a radical conservative and both those um uh things were sort of competing within her nature in a creative manner just a couple of final questions two decades of work charles two decades of work and now it's done what come i say what comes next for you which is i mean you write for the spectator you write for the telegram you're a busy man i honestly i don't know how you were able to do all the writing on the side so to speak while you were working on the biography still in all you've got a big hole in your life how do you intend to fill it uh well just right now peter i'm rather pleased to have a hole um and actually it doesn't seem as big it doesn't seem as as big a hole to me as you might think because so much seems to be going on and the world's going mad and there's absolutely tons to write about um and i you know i'm not um i haven't got time hanging heavily on my hands i do have a theory about writing books which is that if you wonder whether a book should be written you probably shouldn't write it you should only write it because you really must write it and i felt when i got this extraordinary opportunity to write this book such an important story and such extraordinary access that it'd be mad not to write it it would be wrong um i not looking to do another book for the sake of it or even because it might be a bit of fun it's got to be really worth that extraordinary effort because though i've been very busy as an editor over the years and a writer what i realized is that writing a big book is far more demanding than any of those other things because it's fundamentally so lonely and you have to try and be the sole architect of an enormous structure when you can't really or i can't really make the ground plan um and um and so um uh i've i've done that and i'm very pleased and honored to have done it and um i'm not rushing to do something else i i see that mrs thatcher laid the foundation all you had to do charles was build the cathedral on top it is a magnificent thing one last time just for the sheer pleasure of it just a few more seconds of margaret thatcher six days before she leaves office a single currency is about the politics of europe it is about a federal europe by the back door so i'll consider the honorable gentleman's proposal now where were we i'm enjoying this i'm enjoying this herself alone she was high-minded and highly educated yet had a common touch she was fierce but kind rude and courteous calculating yet principled matter of fact yet romantic frank yet secretive astute yet innocent rational yet capricious puritanical yet flirtatious she had an icy stare and a warm heart close quote what does what claire loose the playwright mid 20th century player but clary lou claire loose used to say that history would give even the greatest figure only a single sentence which is not quite the right thing to say to a man who's just written three volumes but how what what do we need to cling to what's the final state what's the final lesson of mrs thatcher for all of us well do you know um despite all the importance of the ideology if you like and the views that you put forward um in a way it's the example of woman leadership it's a special thing that a remarkable woman could bring to a male world that really added the value um and i think it's to do with a certain loneliness in that situation and also with perfectionism which is something that a woman will tend to feel much more than the club of men will ever feel so what i think is extraordinary in her story is that she did her best and it's remarkable how few people really do that right charles moore lord moore of etchingham thank you thank you peter for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation i'm peter robinson you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 149,506

Keywords: Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lord Baron Moore of Etchingham

Id: u04bvMIhfbM

Length: 61min 52sec (3712 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021