Thatcher in the face of political defeat
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I interviewed Lady Thatcher twice in the 1990s. The wounds of her ejection from office were still raw but there was a touch of prime ministerial pomp about her; this was most definitely a graciously granted audience rather than another pit stop on a publicity tour.
One sensed, however, that her treatment at the hands of her party had been so inexplicable, so undeserved, it could never be assimilated.
When I asked about that famous picture of her driving away from Number 10 for the last time with tears in her eyes, she reacted as if I had attacked her. “I suppose I am allowed some emotion,” she snapped. Then, all in a rush, she told me that, three years after leaving, she still couldn’t drive down Whitehall without expecting to turn into Downing Street.
She made a show of philosophical resignation. “My dear, it happened,” she said several times as I asked about the events that had led to the party’s most successful prime minister being defenestrated in the space of a week. But it sounded as if she was trying to convince herself, not me, that the hurt was now fading.
And all the time she played with her pearls like a rosary – the pearls that Denis had given her.
The oddest confidence of all was her disclosure that before each of the elections she had fought from Downing Street – against the backdrop of thumping opinion poll leads – she had ordered that all her personal possessions should be packed up in preparation for potential defeat.
A sign, I suspect, not of a lack of confidence but an absolute respect for the democratic process that had first taken her to unimaginable heights – and then discarded her to spend a quarter of a century in contemplation of the lesser mortals who strode the political stage that should still have been hers.
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