Three faces of Thatcher

Politicians can be divided into two categories; those whose public face is different from their private face and those for whom they are the same; put another way, those who feel it necessary in public appearances to put on an act, and those who manage to remain themselves. Among the latter are (or were) such disparate characters as Jack Kennedy, Willy Brandt, Jo Grimond, Edward Heath, Neil Kinnock; and among the former Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon, Harold Wilson and Arthur Scargill (if you don’t like that list, you are welcome to make your own).

Prominent among the last-named is our Prime Minister, but she is almost unique in having not two faces but three. The first is the semi-private one, worn when she is not on public display; the second is the House of Commons one, seen and heard at Prime Minister’s Questions; and the third is the one adopted for television interviews. We are all familiar with the last two, but there can be few of us who have been given the opportunity to observe the first. It did, however, happen to me the year after Mrs Thatcher first came to power.

The occasion was the making of a BBC drama-documentary, of which I was the writer and presenter, on the life of Airey Neave, the MP who had masterminded her campaign for the party leadership and was subsequently assassinated by the IRA when a time-bomb blew up his car as it was leaving the House of Commons. Mrs Thatcher had agreed to give us an interview for the programme between 10.30 and 11.30 a.m. at No. 10 Downing Street. She arrived on the dot, chic and elegant as one had expected but also delightfully relaxed — knowing, of course, that it was not controversial political views that she was being asked to give but reminiscences of a much loved colleague and friend.