Working for Mrs Thatcher

A doctor providing geriatric care once told me of the damage Mrs Thatcher had done to the NHS. He used to employ a simple test to find out whether his elderly patients had become seriously gaga. He would ask them who the Prime Minister was: as their minds weakened so the only name they came up with was Winston Churchill. But after Mrs Thatcher had become Prime Minister even the most confused of his elderly patients gave the right answer. Now of course his test can work again. Right through until the middle of the next century, elderly people in nursing homes will be assuring polite young doctors that Mrs Thatcher is the Prime Minister.

I joined her Downing Street staff at the beginning of 1984 during the miners’ strike. Meetings with her on any subject would be interrupted by private secretaries dashing in as if they were messengers from one of Shakespeare’s history plays with reports that ‘Nottinghamshire is with us’, ‘Kent is rebellious’, or ‘Yorkshire is in turmoil’.

But she was no mediaeval monarch. The critics claim that she only got her way by bullying and bossing her Cabinet colleagues — the Spitting Image caricature of her government. But that is to misunderstand her style. She could indeed be tough and aggressive. If you put forward a proposal she was quite likely to come back at you with a series of hostile questions: ‘Won’t that push up government spending? It’s just more regulation — you haven’t thought it through; how can it be made to work?’ But that was not being autocratic, that was testing the proposals put in front of her. It was her means of getting at the truth. And she was always wary of bureaucratic arguments.