Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Read Online Free PDF Page B

was considering the possibilities. Julian Seymour had recommended me for the job.
    She stressed that she would not be making up her mind quickly, but was I interested? Naturally I was. So I sent her an inscribed copy of my 670-page biography of Richard Nixon and hoped for the best.
    Meanwhile, I learned that the field of authors under consideration had narrowed down to four runners – Simon Heffer, Antony Beevor, Charles Moore and myself. Some months went by. Then Margaret said to me, ‘I’m afraid I have decided not to ask you to be my official biographer because’ – and nothing could possibly have prepared me for the next four words – ‘you’re too old’.
    For a moment I thought I must be mishearing her. But in the next few sentences she explained she was going to make it a pre-condition that her official biography should not be published until after her death. I was left to draw the conclusion that she expected to outlive me. This seemed an optimistic assumption on her part since at the time (1996) I was fifty-four to her seventy. Perhaps she had other reasons. Whatever they may have been, she made a wise choice in appointing the excellent Charles Moore to be her official biographer.
    One of the oddities of conversations with Margaret Thatcher in her retirement was that they sometimes contained an ambush of eccentric unpredictability. Two subjects on which she showed this side of her personality concerned the dangers (as she saw them) of a reunited Germany and the opportunities created by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
    On the first subject she often lurched into embarrassing tirades against Helmut Kohl and his German reunification policies. On one occasion in 1997 she was giving a drink to a group of Eurosceptic Tory MPs who included Iain Duncan Smith, Bernard Jenkin, Bill Cash and Richard Shepherd. They were gathered in the Chesham Place offices of the Thatcher Foundation which overlooked the German Embassy in the same street. As the former Prime Minister’s denunciations of the Bundestag and the Berlin government became particularly vehement, Richard Shepherd gestured towards the Embassy and joked, ‘CarefulMargaret, they’ll hear you!’ Raising her voice and shaking her fist at the gates of the German Embassy she shouted across to the other side of Chesham Place, ‘Oh I do hope so!’ 8
    A more endearing example of her spontaneous reaction to a foreign-policy issue occurred later the same year when she went to visit Sir James Goldsmith at Montjeu, his country house in France. Escorted by her host and accompanied by her fellow house guests, Bill and Biddy Cash, she and Denis went for a walk on the estate. To her surprise they came across, in a woodland grove, a huge bronze statue of Lenin. Margaret Thatcher insisted on posing for a photograph in front of this monument to the founding father of communism saying, ‘I just want to show him we won!’ 9
    Winning battles remained on her agenda in the late 1990s. On the whole they were not political. She made occasional speeches in the constituencies of MPs she wanted to help, including a fiery one for me in South Thanet in which she all but called for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU. But because she was so alienated from the official Conservative policy towards Europe she was a major contributor to the rift in the party which intensified the size of the government’s defeat in the 1997 election.
    Before that debacle took place she was always keen to do her bit for some cause in Britain’s interest where she felt she could make a difference. British exports generally and defence exports in particular received considerable help from her as she travelled across the world, well briefed by the Foreign Office to put right words into the ears of the heads of state or government she was visiting. As the following story shows, she could be at her best in the Gulf.
    STILL BATTING FOR BRITAIN
    Margaret Thatcher has remained a heroine in the Gulf for the part she