Cecil Parkinson, Charles Powell, John Simpson and Steve Hilton remember Margaret Thatcher

Cecil Parkinson: Underestimated – but unbowed

Even among Mrs Thatcher’s original shadow Cabinet, there were those who simply did not believe that she would be capable of dealing with the problems of a declining country. To a man they were wrong.

Each underestimated the determination of Margaret Thatcher. She did not regard the manifesto on which she had been elected as a set of pledges designed merely to win an election and to be abandoned when the going got tough. She intended to honour hers: to reduce the role of the state; to transfer power to the people. Trade union members were given the right to elect their leaders at regular intervals and to vote before being called out on strike. People would keep more of what they earned and taxes at all levels were to be reduced. Millions of people were given the right to escape from the grip of local authority bureaucrats and buy their council houses. The state-owned industries were returned to the private sector.

These were the right policies but they were also doggedly followed through by a leader who was not prepared to bend before short-term unpopularity. She did what she thought right and not what would produce a good headline, an approach that was vindicated as each of her successive election victories was greater than the last. Few MPs could claim that record, even fewer prime ministers.

Cecil Parkinson was Cabinet minister, 1983, 1987–1990

Charles Powell: The sunset years

Margaret Thatcher was not happy about losing office and she did not hide it. An election defeat she could have handled: she invariably prepared for it by packing up all her belongings in the No. 10 tenement flat on the eve of elections. Being defenestrated by her own parliamentary party was a different matter. She made life uncomfortable for her successor by leaked complaints about ‘the government’.