I have just been telephoned by the BBC about my “interview with Margaret Thatcher” where she laid into David Cameron. Em, not quite. It was a comment of hers I reported in my News of the World column in April and repeated on Coffee House yesterday. It was picked up on ConservativeHome and ran in the Evening Standard, and then the Press Association and now the Daily Mail online. My friends are now calling up to congratulate me on interviewing a woman who hasn’t spoken publicly for years.
The truth is far less glamorous. I met Baroness Thatcher after Lord Lamont’s excellent Keith Joseph lecture in April and asked her about the Cameroon slogan “stability before tax cuts.” She looked at me as if I had gone quite mad. “Oh no,” she said. “You can’t have stability if you don’t have tax cuts.” Did she mis-speak? Hardly. One of her former advisers, also present, forcibly developed her point later. Today’s high public spending (now higher as a percentage of GDP than Germany’s) requires dangerous borrowing and huge tax burden. This discourages work, dampens growth and encourages consumers to borrow, to fill the hole the taxman has blown in their take-home pay: a spendthrift government is a threat to economic stability. So “stability before tax cuts” is a non sequitur. As several Thatcher-era Tories will tell you, with much passion.
There is much patronising nonsense spoken about Baroness Thatcher, that she somehow a lost and lonely figure who doesn’t know who she’s visiting or what she’s saying. One man who knows her well is Liam Fox, who sat beside her at his hugely successful Atlantic Bridge/Rudy Giuliani dinner on Tuesday. “She was the best I’ve seen her for several years,” he told me afterwards. “Fully animated and with an opinion on all major issues of the day.” Good to see that, aged 81, The Lady is still not for turning.
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