People Like Us: Margaret Thatcher and Me

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Fact Articles predominantly based on historical research, official reports, court documents and open source intelligence. This is an excellent, highly readable memoir which really does shed new light on the “Iron Lady." Chris Hallam As someone who worked closely with Mrs Thatcher in the last 18 months of her premiership, I was intrigued at how she would be portrayed. I was the first female private secretary at No 10 – one of five in her private office inner circle – and she let me slip through, despite her alleged ban on giving that role to a woman.

Theresa May does not excite such strong emotions, “but I think that’s because she’s not a powerful woman; she’s in quite a weak position”. Caroline thinks Theresa May shares a number of qualities with our previous female Prime Minister: “Being prepared to be unpopular, and determined against all odds to drive things through; personally courageous, and stepping up to what some people are calling a poisoned chalice… women taking on a difficult job men largely won’t do.” Bedford School, from the age of eight, provided happier memories. Afterwards: university. Cambridge. Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, challenged Javid to “abolish Conservative cronyism” at the DHSC, starting by ruling that Tory peer Dido Harding will not be made the next chief executive of NHS England. Last month, the UN Commission on Human Rights said that the Government’s Illegal Migration Bill, now part of UK law, breaks international law. And in June, the Government introduced regulations – which cannot be amended by Parliament and receive limited scrutiny – that overturned a Lords Amendment to primary legislation to change the threshold for restrictions on protests from ‘serious disruption’ to ‘more than minor’. And so it goes on.It’s also true to say that even if she didn’t devote her career to helping other women, she did do something. She introduced independent taxation for women who were married. And I know, because I wrote with her a speech to The 300 Group (which campaigned for more females in Parliament, the European parliament, local government and public life) that she very sincerely did want to see more women in powerful positions, and thought that would be important. She did have difficult relationships with some of her more-powerful ministers, but I think that’s because she felt under threat. And all her life, by virtue of being a woman, she’d been battling her own side, I suppose, as well as the status quo in Britain.” I was at her side as she travelled around Britain, I saw her dress down her ministers in private and I was the only other woman in the Cabinet room when she broke down in tears, as she resigned. I wrote an account two years ago of our relationship and the person I saw up close, in People Like Us: Margaret Thatcher and Me, because I wanted to put the record straight on her as a woman. Caroline began when “you could see these rifts developing on Europe”. The Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, were key figures at odds with the PM. The poll tax hadn’t helped, and there was friction over the UK joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Something had to give. Caroline set up Civil Exchange in 2011. She is also a founding member of A Better Way, a network hosted by Civil Exchange which is committed to improving services and strengthening communities. She is a co-convenor of the network.

We went into the study, which in those days was a very feminine room, and she put the hyacinths between us. We sat in two armchairs and she interviewed me.” I had long conversations with one of the two writers, Jonathan Lynn, in 1978 and 1979 about what civil servants were like, before Yes Minister came out. He was then the director of the Cambridge Theatre Company and I’d written a play, Outside In, about a civil servant in the health service who stays at home because he can’t see any point in going to work. Daniel is Managing Director of DHA, a public sector relations organisation specialising in achieving social change. He is a communications professional with nearly twenty years’ experience at senior levels of central and local Government and the not-for-profit sector. It seemed Margaret Thatcher had, whether formally or through the vibes she gave off, created a bar on the promotion of women. As Caroline says, “the word had gone out, at least for a period, that she would not work with a woman”. Lynne Berry has more than 30 years experience in the voluntary, public and not for profit sectors. She has worked in central and local government, been Chief Executive of two national charities (recently WRVS and earlier the Family Welfare Association), Chief Executive of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the General Social Care Council and Executive Director of the Charity Commission. In addition she has been Chair and Trustee of many national charities.

We fell in love talking about civil service reform! (Truly)

A sense of betrayal hangs in the air of the Cabinet Room as prime minister Margaret Thatcher reads out her resignation statement. She breaks down after every few words. When she manages to reach the end, she says: “I doubt you all heard that, so I will read it again.” She doesn’t seem to notice that others, including her cabinet colleagues, are also in tears. From 1989 to 1997 David worked with the national disability charity, Sense, latterly as managing director. Over eight years he helped transform it from a former self-help group into the leading organisation in its field in the world. During that time it grew eightfold. We should recognise her achievement as a woman, getting to the place she got to, and also look at her honestly for who she was as a person – and take away this mythology as an Iron Lady/Spitting Image hag and see her for what she was: a really remarkable woman able to do things that the men around her were unable to do.”

You can wander into Halesworth and the post office goes on and on, and you can buy anything from a screwdriver to a lawnmower and a food mixer, as well as envelopes and stamps. You can’t find shops like that in London. It’s almost a bygone era.” Finally, social infrastructure is strengthened by working collaboratively and right across sectors. People who believe in prevention need to attend not just to the child (and the adult the child later becomes) but also to ‘the villages’ in which we all live. That’s one of the things she hopes to combat – and that we stop thinking of powerful women as manly. Caroline suggests: “There was a particular edge, to the way in which she’d been hated, that I think has to do with her being a woman. I’m not saying it’s as straightforward as saying ‘She was a woman and therefore she was disliked’. She was a powerful woman, and we tend to dislike powerful women. I think we need to confront that prejudice.”

The Crown, of course, is full of dramatic licence. It was before my time, but I very much doubt, for example, that she did not have the right clothes for Balmoral, as we always took pains to find out what clothes were needed for every trip, and I included the details in every brief.

Daniel set up DHA in 2000 with the idea that people and society are at the heart of policy-making and communication and has since worked with Government departments, major national agencies including the Arts Council England, the Audit Commission, the Association of British Orchestras, the Charity Commission, NHS Direct, the Equal Opportunities Commission and charities including Scope, Help the Aged, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The guys there were really nice and used to refer to me as a ‘drop in’, but eventually I decided to move to London. I needed a job and it was a choice between a temporary vacancy in the civil service or selling soft toys. Soft toys might have been a great career but you had to work on Saturdays, so I decided on the civil service job.One said the video monitoring was “utterly unacceptable” while a second said malicious people had bugged the health secretary’s office and were snooping on him. He might have qualified as a bus conductor and then rejected the chance of selling soft toys to instead join the civil service, but it was nailed-on that John would become a writer. Eventually. Look at the rich seam of his childhood: