Sir Kevin Tebbit interviewing Lord Powell of Bayswater23/04/2015

Sir Kevin Tebbit (KT): So here we are in No 10, the centre of the stage where Margaret Thatcher's prime ministerial period was played out, and you Lord Powell are seen and regarded by most people as her most important key advisor, almost alter ego by the end. The closest civil servant, indeed the closest professional advisor, to her. Tell me, how did it all begin when you first came here through the door of No 10 in 1984, and took up the post. And perhaps you can let me know how it progressed and how you moved from being as it were just another advisor to being the critical person in her professional life eventually? 

Lord Powell (LP): Well I got to know Margaret Thatcher a bit before I got to No 10. In the late 70s I was in the Embassy in Germany and she came out on a visit - the Ambassador was away - and my wife and I had to look after her which was no easy task as you can imagine, even then. And I got a very clear picture already at that stage of what she was like, what drove her. And to be honest I never shared the conventional Whitehall view that she was a rather shrill housewife from Finchley, it was very clear that she was something much more substantial - uncomfortable, difficult for the Establishment to deal with. First of all being a woman, I mean hell, how dare she!

But also she was really prepared to be prime minister on several grounds. First, she actually knew much more about the world than most people gave her credit for. You know, the Foreign Office in those early days used to think of her as George Brown in a skirt. She wasn't George Brown in a skirt. She was somebody who had traveled the world, to China, to Russia, to the United States. I mean, even going right back to her childhood the family had followed meticulously the rise of fascism in Germany in the Second World War and so on. So here was somebody who came to No 10 very, very well prepared, but perhaps even more importantly, with a very clear agenda. Margaret Thatcher knew, from the beginning, she knew what she wanted to achieve, what she needed to achieve. And she pursued that agenda absolutely remorselessly. She didn't take prisoners. She was not inclined to see two sides of any question, it was her side and that was it. And sometimes it was a rather brutal form of government, perhaps. But when you look back on it, you have to say that her achievements were quite remarkable and she did change this country out of all recognition. If one looks back to 1979 and frankly the mess we were in, the mess the economy was in, the miners’ strike, rubbish piling up on the streets, the unburied bodies and all this and the lack of respect for Britain in the world, the decline in our national self-confidence. Then you looked again in 1990 when she left, it just was not the same country, it was a far better country. And a better country, actually, for everyone. 

KT: Clearly from what you say you developed a very strong personal rapport with her. If I can just quote from one thing you said, and I'd be very interested to hear from you see how you saw the balance of these various qualities. You said, 'It is true that I developed a great personal sympathy, affection and respect for

Mrs Thatcher, no doubt about it'. How would you balance those three various factors? 

LP: Well, I was a civil servant in No 10, I remained a civil servant and I've never ever joined a political party. So there was not any sort of political agenda on my part. It was partly because I stayed a very long time here compared with most civil servants. A really long time - I think only Bernard Ingham exceeded me. Secondly, I guess I found it inspirational the way she knew what she wanted to do, the changes she wanted to bring about. And working for someone who wants to change the world is far more interesting, far more fun and gives you a far greater degree of loyalty to them, than someone who only sees as the task to preside over the country, administer it, and the old sort of Lord Salisbury view of just floating slowly down the river putting out the occasional oar to stop the boat hitting the bank. That was not Margaret Thatcher's view of being prime minister. So there was a tremendous excitement to working alongside her. And if you were energetic and believed that the country could be so much better than it was in 1979, then yes, one came to have a great personal respect for her. It didn't blind me to the downsides too. I mean, she could behave pretty badly, particularly towards her colleagues. One can explain that. I mean, rising to the top as a woman was never going to be an easy task in the political context of Britain of the 60s and the 70s. She had to struggle to the top and when she got there she had to continue to assert her dominance over the all-male cabinet and the party. And she could only do that by acting a very forceful way. Now, some people say she was very presidential, and there is something in that, of course there is. It wasn't just her - she was actually very democratic Margaret Thatcher and a great respecter of parliament, almost to an exaggerated degree to be frank. It was partly the effect of the expectations of the media, who increasingly wanted someone who was ahead of everything, who was the person in the limelight. And of course it continued after her - one saw it with Tony Blair too. John Major tried to turn the clock back, to go back to the concept of the prime minister as the chairman of cabinet and that was not Margaret Thatcher's view. Margaret Thatcher's view of chairing a meeting was not to sit down and invite different members of the cabinet to give their views and then sum up. Margaret Thatcher's way of chairing a meeting was to sit down, announce the result and challenge all comers to fight her for it. 

KT: You've raised now the question of style and, I mean, in many ways the sadder thing about Margaret Thatcher's heritage is far too many people focus on style rather than substance of achievement. But since we're on style let me just remind you of one of things you said, and I'd be grateful for your comment on it. 'I've always thought there was something Leninist about Mrs Thatcher which came through in her style of government: the absolute determination, the belief that there is a vanguard which is right and if you keep that small tightly-knit team together they will drive things through. There's no doubt that in the 1980s No.10 could beat the bushes of Whitehall pretty violently, they could go out and really confront people, lay down the law, bully a bit'. Now I think the challenge is that during this period - particularly after 1983/84 - cabinet tended to be pushed into the background, government departments were told what to do rather than provided advice, and we saw, if not an American presidential style of

government, then a sort of French cabinet style. I think Mrs Thatcher would have hated that sort of analogy! But that very small group of people driving things forward. Is that an accurate description, has it been exaggerated? It was in this building it all happened, I mean the accretion of power into No 10. Is it an accurate description or do you think it's gone too far? 

LP: I think fundamentally it is accurate, though it is exaggerated in some of the descriptions of it, and it arose from many things. Partly the sense of isolation of being a woman. She had to sort of fight these battles on her own in her own mind and she was constantly having to be on guard against the men who would cabal and plot against her. That drove this rather solitary sense, and the people she felt she could rely on were those who had no political agenda, whose job was to help her get done what she wanted done. Of course, the civil servants in No 10 would often argue with her and suggest that, you know, perhaps it wasn't the best way to proceed. And she argued fearlessly with them as she did with her cabinet members. She never admitted that she was wrong, but sometimes you would find the next day that she was saying what you had been saying the day before. And the great secret was not to point that out, just to take it as a bonus. Secondly, it was this agenda that she had, as I've already mentioned. I think very few prime ministers have had such a sharp agenda. It wasn't ideological in the Lenin sense, I wasn't suggesting that she was somebody given to communist ideas. It was more the technique, the idea that there had to be a vanguard if anything was going to get done. That if you left it to Whitehall and ministries and their vast staff it would all get bogged down, there would be compromises, the edges would be chipped off and you would be left with the sort of bumbling which had characterised a lot of British government to be honest in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And she was determined to change that - she wanted clarity, she wanted things actually to be done. When you look back at the record, you have to say she was justified. All that privatisation, the end of our nationalised industries, the buying your own homes, the lower taxes. Almost everything was shaken up and rattled. Well, perhaps not everything - in a way there was still an agenda that she would love to have done had she stayed even longer. She would have I'm sure tackled education more forcefully, and social security. But, by god, she changed a lot. So to get it done, No 10 had to be clear what she wanted and what she expected. Now, it was for ministers to come to meetings and to try to argue against that if they didn't approve of it and they could take her on at their peril. A lot of them flunked it, a lot of them of course were public schools boys who were not used to arguing with women and she exploited that natural advantage. Their natural tendency was to pull out a chair for a lady to sit down, Margaret Thatcher's tendency was to kick the chair over, and hammer them. So it was a very different style, hard for both sides.

KT: She also said they tended to be upper-middle class, but she was middle-class making a big point of widening the years. 

LP: Yes, absolutely right. Her roots are very important to understand Margaret Thatcher. By one of those strange coincidences in life, I grew up just outside Grantham. And we even occasionally talked about Grantham and Lincolnshire, probably the only two people in the country who were doing so! But the fact that

she came from that particular background - the small shop, the thrifty, the making your own way, all these sort of virtues, the idea that you had to be constantly busy, always doing something. She has this wonderful description, in one of the volumes of her autobiography, of how she spent her summer holidays in Skegness doing stride jumping the public gardens and we didn't just sit about dreaming, I mean heavens! Anyone who spent their early youth doing stride jumping in Skegness public gardens is clearly somebody rather exceptional. 

KT: She also used unofficial channels, the classic unofficial channel frustrating all of the government departments - fortunately I was abroad most of this time so I didn't get frustrated very much - but the handbag was very much the repository of the unofficial channel. And I think you may recall when she came to NATO when I was working for Lord Carrington, out of the handbag came the killer piece of paper contrasting a great British exercise called 'Lion Heart' with a small Franco-German one which she brought of the handbag, 'Cheeky Sparrow', and opened it. How much of that sort of ‘handbag activity’ was there? 

LP: There was a lot of it and actually I think it was rather positive. People she had known would ring her up and pass on something. Even her sister used to pass her views about farming and she would suddenly produce these from her handbag, which used to cause apoplexy to the ministry of agriculture. I'll tell you why I think it was healthy. It was matched in her use of seminars to help form policy - bringing in people from outside government. She didn't just want the views of ministers and civil servants, she wanted businessmen, academics, foreigners, people who would bring a different perspective. That way of reaching out beyond the establishment, breaking free as it were, I think was a very positive sign and it did give her differing perspectives and original ideas. Some of them worked rather well others were a disaster. There was a famous seminar on Germany towards the end of her time which was set up by those of who thought she ought to revise her views of Germany. The right conclusion was reached in the seminar, that we should be nice to the Germans. Well, that lasted all of thirty seconds in practice. We were horrid to the Germans! But in other cases I can think of, in both domestic policy and foreign policy, it really did give her a good, fresh view. It's a great pity that sometimes civil servants like to block prime minister's access to outside views, to cocoon them within the system. Not for Margaret Thatcher that wasn't. 

KT: I think one of the most interesting things, we've been talking for some time, I'd been talking to the foreign affairs advisor but of course, dealing with foreign policy you see more of a prime minister almost than anybody else because you see her on trips and get to know the total person, in a sense much more than a domestic advisor or home policy advisor would. But I expect we ought to turn to foreign policy since that is the formal subject. To me her foreign policy achievements are many. We start after the Falklands I expect in terms of when you arrived yourself, although I think that was a seminal moment. Perhaps you can say something about how she treated foreign visitors especially when they came into this building, into her centre of her power which she brought concentratedly here, what it was like? I suspect one of the most important ones in many ways, well the two, would have been Gorbachev and Reagan, where she

managed to achieve this unique ability to act effectively as the broker between the two of them. Perhaps you could say something about that, and any of the other people, I remember Peter Carrington used to tell me to great amusement of some of these other visits that took place here. 

LP: Well, yes. Margaret Thatcher was first of all very hospitable when she got to know heads of government from all around the world. And if they happened to be in London, even privately, she would encourage them to come to No 10 to have tea with her. She liked to keep in touch, and that's rather a contrast to a lot of subsequent prime ministers who regarded foreigners as a bit of a nuisance and an interruption of the working day. She almost always found time for foreign leaders. Of course the most important were President Reagan, who came here for meetings, came here for dinner and so on. Mr. Gorbachev who was here many, many times. President Mandela, when he was released from prison, came here and they had a leisurely lunch just off this room and a very long discussion. And because No 10 has this air, of something of a private house, it was actually rather a good place to have meetings and it doesn't have the stuffy formality of the Élysée Palace in Paris or even the White House. It's much more a place where you sit on sofas and armchairs and therefore the nature of the discussion can be more relaxed and more informal, and therefore very often more productive. An extraordinary range of people did come through, some of them rather unusual. I remember the Foreign Office insisted on her seeing the president of the then French Congo, a notorious Marxist. I advised very strongly against this, I said I didn't think this would be a meeting of minds but, ‘Oh we're so pleased that we persuaded her to come here’, and I said, ‘Well, I don't think this is going to work out but we'll try’. He arrived with his interpreter and sat down on the sofa obviously at Margaret Thatcher, who remarks, ‘I hate communists’. The African interpreter to his great credit, related this in French to the president as, ‘Madam the prime minister says that on the whole, in her long experience of politics, has found that she rarely agrees with the doctrines of Karl Marx’. And I thought the interpreter probably saved his life but he certainly deserved a medal! She could come out with these rather explosive comments sometimes and she was always frank. One of the great things about Margaret Thatcher was that she said what she meant and she meant what she said. People actually responded well to that at the end of the day, there was no diplomatic flummery and obfuscation. Sometimes it was not very helpful. I remember the time when Britain had not done very well at the World Cup at football and a lot of rather jeering German reporters - because Germany had won the World Cup - said, ‘What did it feel like to be beaten by the Germans at football?’ To which she replied rather briskly, ‘Well, I remember that we beat them at their national sport twice last century’. Now the Foreign Office had apoplexy about that and I was hauled over the coals by Douglas Hurd for allowing her say it, but actually it never occurred to me, she just came up with it! Another time when she came out of a European Council in Rome, having been - as so often - isolated 11 to one, with the 12 members of the EU, when she was asked how she felt about being isolated 11 to one: ‘Sorry for the others’, she said. This sort of refreshingly direct approach actually I think played rather well. She had another great advantage in foreign policy and that is in being a woman. She stood out.  There weren't many women leaders around at that time, Mrs. Ghandi for part of the time, the Norwegian prime minister, but

really whereas most male British prime ministers can walk down the street in Nairobi, or Kuala Lumpur or something and nobody would notice them, you couldn't not notice Margaret Thatcher. She was a very distinctive sight and so that made it easier for her as it were to play a world role and to be a spokesman. 

KT: And she really did play a world role. 

LP: She did. I think Margaret Thatcher had a real role. She was always very realistic, she knew that Britain didn't count for nearly as much as the United States, she never aspired to what Macmillan and Lord Hailsham tried to do in the 1950s, to be the third person between the United States and the Soviet Union, the broker. No - she was on the side of the United States. But she could also deal well with communist leaders, particularly with Mr. Gorbachev. 

KT: The famous quote, ‘I like Mr. Gorbachev, he's a man I can do business with.’

LP: Quite by good fortune we identified President Gorbachev very early in the proceedings. It arose from one of these seminars, where she said she wanted to know and get to know the next generation of Soviet leaders. We identified three and invited all three to come, Mr. Gorbachev was the one who accepted. He was at the time a new, youngish, member of the Politburo in charge of agriculture, not seemingly terribly relevant to the main themes of the Cold War.  But he came, and she instantly identified him as a wholly new sort of Soviet leader. Somebody who didn't just stand reading out a prepared document, surrounded by advisors and had no flexibility as to what he could say. No, this was a politician, a guy who could argue and present a case be lively, answer her back, wasn't interested in being surrounded by advisers, wanted to talk to her. And she understood the opportunity which that offered, not, of course, that she thought his ideas made much sense. Even his belief that communism could be reformed, she just took the view that communism was an absurd doctrine you couldn't reform, it was best to get rid of it. Nonetheless she understood his policies of perestroika, the restructuring and change in Russia. She was able to persuade President Reagan early on that the Americans should take him very seriously, should start to have their own dialogue with him and they were skeptical at the beginning but they found that she was right about that. Of course she, as it were, handed the baton to President Reagan to do the serious business in arms control and all the other issues. 

KT: And then almost got out of hand at Reykjavík. 

LP: Well, it almost got out of hand at Reykjavík because, of course, President Reagan's belief in his doctrine…

KT: Star Wars, SDI…

LP: …Star Wars and so on. Margaret Thatcher, in the beginning had been rather skeptical of Star Wars, but when she realised how attached Ronald Reagan was to it she decided it made more sense to play along with it and to give him some support, in return for which she wanted his support for the continuing

importance of nuclear weapons in the defence of Europe and in Britain's own defence. But had President Reagan come out openly as a unilateral nuclear disarmer then her own defence policy at home would have looked absurd and every one would have taken up the Neil Kinnock policy of, ‘Take to the hills’, I seem to remember, it was described at the time. 

KT: Sitting in Washington at the time, I was made personally aware of the importance she was attaching to her nuclear weapons, as you may recall. 

LP:  People were usually fairly clear about the importance which Mrs. Thatcher attached to it, she didn't bother to hide it.

KT: Lord Powell, on Mrs. Thatcher's world view, I think one of the interesting things is the way in which that was carried forward and played out because today leaders pick up the telephone and talk to each other all the time - I'm never quite sure whether there's much value in that, they say they’re in contact - but she didn't really do it like that. Partly technology, partly her style, could you say a bit more about how she presented that world view to others?

LP: Yes, well, Margaret Thatcher disliked the telephone as a means of communication and although she occasionally had to use it, she was never comfortable with it, she was convinced that every call was being intercepted. President Reagan took a slightly different view - he rather liked to call her up, so of course she had to go along with that.

KT: Sitting here in her office as it were, yes...

LP: She much preferred to sit down with someone, preferably with as few other people present as possible. I doubt there's ever been a British prime minister who traveled with smaller delegations. She didn't want large numbers of foreign office officials, let alone members of her cabinet traveling with her who might have been inclined to pipe up and contradict something she said, or express a different view. She believed that she knew best what was in Britain's interests, and she would represent that herself. But she was a great respecter of our ambassadors on the spot. She wanted to be briefed about whichever country it was she was going to, she wanted to talk to him or her and hear what they had to say, not the officials sitting back in London. So I think, from that point of view, the Foreign Office got a good deal from her. But it was again the individual style, she was an individual, she wasn't interested in chartering vast British Airways planes to go round the world, we clattered along in an old Royal Air Force VC10, facing backwards, stopping to fill up with petrol every two hours or so. It was a not very dignified way of traveling I have to tell you, but that was part of her sense of economy. The other great thing about her active diplomacy and foreign travel was that she was adamant that she must never be seen to be enjoying herself. So we did absurd things like visiting eight countries in seven days, so that no one could think that she was having a good time. If very occasionally she wanted to sneak something in… I remember going with her to Sri Lanka and she suddenly announced that she thought my wife would love to see some emeralds. I said, ‘’Well, does she? News to me!’ ‘Oh no, I think she does, I think she does, I

think you should arrange for somebody to bring them to the embassy so that you can see them and tell her about them’. So I said, ‘Well, alright’. Sure enough, when we got there I said to the High Commissioner, ‘Please can we get somebody to bring in some emeralds’. Of course, the one person who wanted to look at them was Margaret Thatcher! But this was never to be public, it was all behind the scenes. But coming back to something else you said, about her world view. I don't think she really had a world view as such - she had a view about Britain's role in the world, on that she had very strong views, derived partly from history. She thought we had a great history as a country that had really helped shape the world, had always been at the forefront of diplomacy, had played an active role in world wars and setting up the United Nations and all these things. But it was Britain's role and Britain's interests she was concerned about. She didn't have much time for many multi-lateral organisations. NATO yes, she was a great supporter of NATO, but the United Nations was so-so, and the EU was not particularly favoured either. She always saw a great link between foreign policy and what she was trying to do at home. Foreign policy was linked to her agenda for changing Britain. The Cold War, she saw in the context also of the evils of socialism, and the Soviet Union equaled Arthur Scargill in some ways, that was part of that agenda. Support for the United States and President Reagan was the free market agenda, and the need for Britain to get back to a proper free market and not have nationalised industries and so on. She was much more concerned with that interplay rather than putting the world to rights. There is actually a chapter in her autobiography called 'Putting the World to Rights', but it certainly wasn't her idea, it was some skilled draftsman must have put that title in because she never thought in those terms. The only area that you could say she was ideological was of course the East-West relationship. Where she was a very powerful and strong anti-communist, always had been, did not like or approve of detente, thought it was a mistake and policy of weakness. And in Ronald Reagan she met the perfect partner for that point of view. That is why from the very first moment they met when she was in opposition and he was out of office of any sort, they gelled because they had the very same ideas that communism was evil and needed to be defeated, not accommodated. That you had a strong defence, that high taxes sap the will of a nation, and so on. So you wouldn't really say that President Reagan was particularly ideological in one sense, he wasn't anything like what you see now in the United States, the Tea Party, no. But it was a considered attitude and a considered strategy. And I always rather enjoyed, the no doubt apocryphal story of President Reagan being presented on his arrival in the White House as president, with some vast ring folders, and on asking what they were, was told, ‘These are your national security strategies Mr. President’, to which he replied, ‘Well, I don't need them, I know what my strategy is - we win, they lose’. This ability to simplify the great issues of foreign policy was actually one that Margaret Thatcher shared. She could take the broader view, she didn't get lost in the weeds on foreign policy. She did sometimes in the domestic area but not much on foreign policy. She could see the big picture and judge where things were going. She had this concept from quite early on of wanting to gradually try to wean the east Europeans away from the Soviet Union. She went early on to Hungary to visit them. We invited the east European leaders here to Downing Street to meet her and gave them lunches and dinners and so on. Then we went to Poland at the crucial moment, at the very moment when the system

was about to change. She was very active in foreign policy - one must remember that. I think probably more active in terms of travel and engagement, than almost any prime minister since. 

KT: I suspect the only other ideological thing that perhaps she got wrong, even for those like myself, who admired her hugely, was over German reunification at the end, which she found very difficult to come to terms with. 

LP: Yes, Margaret Thatcher did find it extremely difficult to come to terms with German reunification. To her credit, she says in her own autobiography that this was her greatest failure. But I think one has to look at the reasons for it, to see that she wasn't bad and she wasn't mad but she had a strategy. It stemmed, of course, from her knowledge, her perception of Germany in the 1920s and 30s. At her most impressionable age, fascism was on the rise, Nazism was on the rise and we had the Second World War. That shaped her view of Germany, she never trusted Germany again after that. Intellectually, she knew that Germany of the 1970s and 80s was entirely different. But instinctively she was never, never comfortable with the Germans. Her particular concern about German reunification was the risk that it would damage, undermine, even lead to the deposing of President Gorbachev because if it went too fast then his own conservative enemies in the Soviet Union would get rid of him. And she was very anxious that that shouldn't happen. She talked to Mr. Gorbachev about that early on and he was supportive of it. More importantly, she talked at great length and on several occasions to President Mitterrand who was even more vociferous than she was in the early months of this…

KT: He got it wrong even more clearly…

LP: …but who suddenly changed his policy quite late in the day and got himself on the right side of the line, leaving her high and dry on the other. Now she wasn't opposed to German reunification just like that, she couldn't be, every Western leader had signed up to German reunification for 50 years, but she didn't want it to go too fast. Her concept was that you would start with a confederation of the two Germany's, followed by a federation, and then gradually you would move onto the reunification. That wasn't a stupid idea but it entirely failed to take account of the pace of events. Everyone was caught short by the pace of events in German reunification, including Helmut Kohl. The difference was he very skillfully rode the waves like a surfer at every stage. He was behind the game, but managed to coast in on top of the wave. Whereas she in a characteristic Thatcher fashion preferred to be embattled and to stand out against it. But, as I say, she admitted that she got it wrong and she did and for a while I think it damaged our relations with the Germans. 

KT: Did Kohl visit No 10, I think he did? 

LP: Chancellor Kohl came many, many times. To his great credit, Chancellor Kohl tried very hard to form a strong, personal relationship with her. For instance, he would always buy her a little present, not just a sort of foreign ministry present but a little personal thing that he would bring along for her. She always gratefully

accepted them. Margaret Thatcher knew that she ought to get on with Chancellor Kohl - after all he was a conservative of a sort and she should be on the same side. But somehow it never worked. The great test for me was when he invited her to go for a weekend to his part of Germany, down in the Rhineland, to see how things were, and that she would come to understand the context in which he worked and what sort of person he was. So she duly went off and I trotted along behind her and we spent a happy day touring the villages in his part of the world. We went to a restaurant and had his favourite lunch, which was tripe. She chased it round her plate and tried to hide it under her fork and various other things. Then as the highpoint before our return we were taken to the great Romanesque cathedral in Speyer where the early Roman emperors have their tombs. While she was being shown these precursors of the European Union, Chancellor Kohl took me behind a pillar and said, ‘Now, look. Now she's seen me in my natural environment, here at the very heart of Europe close to the French border, surely she'll realise I'm not German, I'm European. And it's your job to convince her!’ So I said, ‘Well alright Chancellor, I will see what I can do’. We took our leave after that and went back to the airport where she had one of those tiny Hawker 125s with room for about three passengers. She climbed up the steps, she threw herself into her seat, kicked off her shoes and said, ‘Charles, that man is so German!’ At that point I'm afraid I aborted my mission to convince her that ‘No, no, no Prime Minister, he's European’, it just wasn't going to work. 

KT: So that story about the cream buns is completely apocryphal. 

LP: The cream buns in Austria, no, that I'm afraid has no foundation whatsoever. 

KT: If I may just move to another area which obviously very difficult for her personally, particularly after the Brighton Bombing. The question of relations with Ireland. Of course, it's often forgotten, with Garret FitzGerald, actually signed I think in 1985, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which finally began to bring things together between Britain and the Irish Republic, and much went on from there. How did you see her handling that issue, as somebody who believed deeply in the United Kingdom and Britain and wanted to see progress but obviously had a deep commitment to Northern Ireland and the Union? 

LP: Margaret Thatcher was always uncomfortable with Ireland, with Irish affairs and with the negotiations that lead to the eventual Anglo-Irish Agreement. The government papers on this, which will be released in the next months, I think will show the depths of her unhappiness about it. She saw the problem basically in terms of terrorism. The problem with the IRA coming across the border, committing terrorist atrocities in Northern Ireland. She didn't think a great deal of the disadvantages suffered by the Catholic community. Security was always the number one issue in her mind. Security and sovereignty. As long as the majority of the people in Northern Ireland wanted to be part of Britain, then they should be so. Intellectually she understood that some means had to be found of winning the confidence of the minority community in Northern Ireland, the Catholic community. And if terrorism was ever to be eliminated they had to be brought along to accept that there should be a fairer system of government with no discrimination. And so intellectually she agreed to embark, hesitantly at every

step, on the negotiating process. Even though along the way she lost some of her closest political friends and allies, in particular Ian Gow, who had been her parliamentary private secretary and later minister in the Treasury. But she had to be cajoled, persuaded and that was done by partly by ministers, partly by some very senior civil servants. But at the end of the day, she had to take responsibility for it herself and she knew it was right, and so she signed up. But you know, rather the same way, as another not entirely similar situation, that of Hong Kong where she had to agree to hand over sovereignty or hand back sovereignty for Hong Kong to a communist country. Those two issues, Northern Ireland and Hong Kong, she never really in her heart of hearts accepted. Indeed rather like Mary Tudor who was said to have 'Calais' written on her heart, Margaret Thatcher had ‘Northern Ireland’ and ‘Hong Kong’ written on hers. 

KT: But there were many more light moments I think. I can remember again Lord Carrington telling me these hilarious events where a foreign visitor would come a long way to see her and for the first half an hour or 20 minutes, he wouldn't get a word in edge-ways, as she, as it were, presented her world view. Did you find that happening very often, we're looking at the high spots but in terms of normal run of business?

LP: Well, yes, it is certainly the case that Margaret Thatcher tended to dominate conversations in which she was one participant. Though I have to say President Gorbachev was a pretty good match for her on that as well. There is a famous story of her, of course, of her and Lord Carrington going to see the very ancient Italian president who was in his 90s. On the way there, Margaret Thatcher asked Peter Carrington, ‘What should I talk to him about?’ Lord Carrington said, ‘Well, just ask him about the political situation in Italy’. An hour later, they emerged and she had not said a word even though half way through the conversation Peter Carrington passed her a note that said, 'Prime minister, you're talking too much'. It was just part of her character and most people took it well. There were some, principally some of the Europeans felt that she tended to pipe up too much at European meetings. Indeed at some of the European Councils, I could see occasionally by five or six in the evening she was beginning to flag a bit, so I took it upon myself to sneak in with a glass of whisky and soda and put it down in front of her, and sure enough it revived her spirits wonderfully. After I'd done this four or five times, it was the German presidency…

KT: Not on the same event…

LP: …different events. That's true. Chancellor Kohl beckoned me over and said, ‘I wish you would stop doing that, you're just making her more difficult.’ And I said, ‘To be honest Mr Chancellor, that's the whole point’. And he was never pleased with me after that, I had failed him once more. There was something about Margaret Thatcher of 'I argue, therefore I am'. She reached her views by argument. A lot of people don't, they come to meetings with briefs, what their officials tell them they should say, she came with a clear idea of what she wanted to say. But she could be persuaded to change. At the end of the day Margaret Thatcher was pretty pragmatic, particularly in Europe. She knew when she had got as much as she was going to get out the negotiation. She knew when in the

naval sense that she had to 'make smoke and retreat' and Bernard Ingham could always present it as triumph anyway, which was a great advantage. But if you look back, she knew the point had come in getting our money back, 67 percent was going to be the most we were going to get and that was a lot more than anyone thought we would ever get but that was the moment to stop. There were other issues too when she knew that was the case, she had to be pragmatic and she could be. If you think about, given her background you would not have expected her to be complicit in an arrangement which handed Rhodesia to Robert Mugabe but she took the view that this had to be a democratic process, if we ensured fair elections and Rhodesians voted by a large majority for Mugabe than that was it. A lot of people would not have accepted that. There were many examples of her pragmatism in that way. 

KT: Well I think we've talked about her assertiveness, we've talked about her pragmatism, what we haven't talked about I guess is her sensitivity. I mean even those of us who only in a very junior way came across her, were surprised at her kindness and her sense of you know the ability to engage with people at a very personal level. You must have seen that all time. 

LP: Yes, Margaret Thatcher was determined so far as possible to hide her private nature. She was so determined always to present this strong outward face. She thought that any perception of anything less than that would be taken as a weakness, would be exploited by her rivals, her enemies, her opponents whatever it was and she did tend to see more of them than most of us. You're quite right she was very kind, particularly to people working closely with her, the Garden Room girls in No 10, the messengers and so on. In her private life, she was a fund of knowledge of English poetry, could quote it at enormous length from our main poets, she adored opera and concerts, her one relaxation of the year was two or three days in Salzburg going to the opera, listening to concerts and so on. But as I've said, she thought the British people would not want to see her enjoying herself or betraying weakness and she went to great lengths to conceal those. But I have very happy memories of her, and particularly in retirement, she came to stay with us several times down in Italy. I have a very happy memory of putting her to pick cherries, I said I would pay her the normal rate for cherry-pickers, £3.50 an hour. She was quite happy with that and picked cherries busily for an hour. Then she said, ‘Can I have my £3.50?’ I said, ‘Well, hang on, income tax at 40 percent prime minister, so that takes it down to £2.60’. She was a bit unhappy about that, but she accepted it, and so reached out her hand, and I said, ‘Well there are other charges aren't there, national insurance, that's another 25p’. I just thought it was healthy for politicians to be reminded what they do to other people. In the end, she took it in. She loved being driven around the Italian countryside, visiting some of the great cathedrals and so on. What was amazing was the public response she evoked. Wherever she went in Italy very large crowds would spot her and instantly identify her, be all round her, photographing her. What I never quite liked to point out to her was by far the largest numbers of the people who did that were either Germans or Japanese. Who were the great tourist groups in Italy but that didn't seem to worry her too much. 

KT: Of course right at the beginning, she got on very well with Mr Cossiga.  I remember very much Cossiga capturing her at one stage and taking her for a private drive around the hills of Rome, losing the bodyguards.

LP: President Cossiga was always sending her large bunches of roses. I used to have to warn her that I might have to declare these to Denis, that there was another man in her life that was constantly sending these big bouquets of red roses. They met for the last time in our home, both in retirement, he was probably the only Italian she ever liked.

KT: Who of course allowed the basing of cruise missiles in Italy, which helped to bring together the INF deal.

LP: She had a great respect for President Mitterand which is again slightly curious. She should have had a great respect for Chancellor Kohl and got on well with him, actually she got on much better with President Mitterand - socialist and a Frenchman, two very large counts against him. That I think was because first of all, he had a strong sense of nation, France as a great nation, and she respected France as a nation. Secondly, he had a great sense of history. He really did reach back into history to form his views and she liked to sit and talk with him in a much broader, more philosophical sense about current developments than was ever possible with Chancellor Kohl, which was always about what's the current deal in the EU or NATO or about short-range nuclear weapons. President Mitterand was prepared ruminate, philosophise much more and she enjoyed that. The person I think she respected almost most all in the world was Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore. She saw him as a man of strong principles, strong government, agent of change and a remarkable grasp of the broad currents of international affairs. Every time we headed towards Asia she would always want the plan diverted through Singapore so she could find out what he thought about events. That was a very close relationship.

KT: Clean and tidy pavements and things like that too.

LP: Yes, but also the principles of government and how you do things. She recognised he wasn't as democratic as maybe some other governments. But she saw what he had done to raise Singapore from the terrible state it had been in when Britain handed it over and what he had made of it. And I think she probably drew some analogies in her mind of Britain in 1979 and what she wanted to make of it. There were others - she reacted very well to President Mandela. There's an interesting new book out, which shows really how much influence she had on the South African government in bringing them to decide to release Mandela from prison. Far more influence than sanctions ever had. He came here relatively soon after he had been released - to the fury of the Labour Party and the sanctions people - he insisted on coming her to Downing Street to see her. They had a long lunch together and a long talk after lunch together. He was a very remarkable man and she I think was deeply affected by her meetings with him. She was famous for having described the ANC years earlier as a 'terrorist organisation'. In a sense it was, it used terrorism, you can argue about the cause but it used terrorism. But in Mandela she found someone with the

quite remarkable capacity to forgive and not to show bitterness about the past. And a capacity to look forward as to how South Africa could be made into a successful country. So a lot of these personal relationships were important to her and important in our foreign policy too. 

KT: A wonderful period. Coming back to where we started, during that period, this place, No 10, became a centre of power almost not previously seen, certainly for the previous thirty or forty years, where No 10 grew power unto itself, the role of ministries was marginalised in some senses - they took orders they did not necessarily provide all the advice. A small group of people in No 10 wielded enormous power and authority including yourself. Cabinet tended to be used to rubber-stamp issues. Even Cabinet Committees tended to be pushed aside to much smaller groups. And of course individuals, as you said yourself, her cabinet colleagues were often treated rather roughly. Do you think that she could have done even better if she'd had a more consensual, collegiate style? I mean, this brought her down in the end. Could she have been more accommodating, had she broadened out rather more consulted more widely? Often if you only consult the ones who think like you, ‘One of us’, you tend to go down rather narrow byways. Did you try, did you feel that if you could have broadened out her way of working it would have been more positive or do you think this was inevitable? 

LP: I'm going to give you an absolutely unqualified answer to that - no. I think if she would have proceeded via the traditional ways of consensus and compromise and so on Britain would be stuck in something close to what it was like in the late 1970s. I think if you're really going to bring about change in the world you have to give a strong forceful lead, bring others with you by persuasion preferably, but if necessary by beating their brains until they accepted. That simply had to be the case. Of course it goes partly with being prime minister for a very long time. After twelve years you know the business of your ministers far better than they know it themselves. They had probably been minister for pensions for two years - she had been dealing with pensions since the late 1950s. So of course she knew it all better than they did. I'll make another comment too, that although yes, it is true that No 10 was very powerful in her time, she never built it up in terms of numbers. If you look at the imperial Blair No 10, there must have been four or five times as many people working here - special agencies for this, special this and that. And even now it's an awful lot bigger than it was in her time. She didn't try to build a prime minister's department, something that would match the White House or the Elysée or the Bundes Council, no, she took No 10 as it was. The same size, or arguably slightly smaller than it had been in Neville Chamberlain's time. Just used the instrument as a way of protecting herself.

KT: A small policy unit, that she created…

LP: A very small policy unit, I think maximum, from my recollection, is probably five people and most of the time four. There was Bernard Ingham's small press operation, a private office of five people, a diary secretary, one political secretary, a parliamentary private secretary, you're talking 13 or 14 people. That's a very small number. It has a great advantage, a small organisation like

that. There's no hierarchies, things don't have to wind the way up the bureaucracy or anything, if you wanted to know the prime minister's view you stuck your head round the door and said, you know, ‘Prime minister, nuclear war or do we surrender?’ You got a clear instruction and you could transmit it to the rest of Whitehall. There were no delays in No 10, I think, in those days. We didn't hold things up, we were efficient but we were non-political. It was an executive function, carried out by people who were basically administrators, not some sort of political operation. All this stuff about civil servants and she only liked people who were 'One of us' - absolute rubbish. I don't think she had the slightest interest in whether her civil servants had political views. In fact I think frankly she thought of them as sort of political eunuchs.

KT: So you weren't politicised?

LP: I didn't feel I was politicised but I know a lot of other people thought that I was, which is one of the reasons why, over seven getting on for eight years here, I decided I wouldn't go back into the civil service. It was for two reasons, one is I thought I'd had the best job I would ever get, so there was no point in going for something lesser. Secondly, because I did recognise that some others, particularly in the civil service, thought that I must be politicised. Anyway I thought it would be a good idea to have a fresh challenge, to try an entirely different way of life and so I was 48 at the time, I went off into business and spent since then something like 28 years happily in business. I've been very happy to have had, as it were, both careers. It's good in life to have a bit of variety. 

KT: Well Charles, Lord Powell, thank you for giving us this unique insight into one of the greatest periods of British political history. Absolutely fascinating. 

LP: Thank you very much.