Bernard Ingham: A leader with faith in her principles who leaves lessons for good and ill

AFTER years trying to explain the phenomenon called Margaret Thatcher to audiences across the world, I thought I had cracked it. I defined five qualities that she brought to political leadership.
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Ideological security. She knew what she wanted to do and was comfortable with it.

Moral courage. She never went with the herd if she thought the herd was wrong.

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Constancy. Once she had made up her mind she did not change it; she was not a wobbler.

Iron will. She brought an unswerving determination to anything she set her hand to.

She did not want to be loved – arguably her greatest asset. She did not court popularity.

When Denis Thatcher heard me summarise her premiership – indeed her life – in these terms, he complained that I had missed out the most important. It was, he said, her deep religious conviction.

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It was a legitimate criticism. She brought something of a missionary zeal to her abiding beliefs that grew out of her Methodist upbringing in Grantham.

Indeed, there are those who would argue that what drove Margaret Thatcher was the non-conformist belief I shared with her that we had been put on God’s earth to leave it a better place than we found it.

Whether she did when you look at the politics of the 21st century is entirely another matter.

What she thought about the world around her in her declining years is mercifully known to no man or woman. For some years that remarkable brain of hers had ceased to absorb new information.

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Consequently our meetings, roughly once a month, were a voyage of discovery for her as I took with me a mental note of that day’s news.

Sometimes I succeeded in briefly registering a point with her. It was usually unwelcome news. All too often on these occasions she demanded to know – as in days of yore in No 10 – how we had got into this mess and what we were going to do about it. For a few cherished moments, you might have thought she was still running Britain.

If she had been, I think I can reliably say, without presumption, that it would have been a different Britain from the one we find today.

It is more difficult to say how. But let us look at 2013AD through the five qualities I argue she brought to political leadership.

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Today British politics is a conviction-free zone. David Cameron is under fire from the various strands of his own party as he strives to keep afloat a coalition with the Liberal Democrats for 
whom infinite flexibility is a condition of their continued existence.

The latest row over the welfare state shows that Ed Miliband does not know whether he is coming or going.

It is simply not possible to imagine we would be in this state with Margaret Thatcher at the helm. She was a conviction politician. She was death to coalition government, even if history shows she led a very awkward coalition called the Conservative Party.

Her convictions caused others to change. Perhaps 2013 shows they are still trying to adapt to her driving, striving, highly directional 11 years in office.

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Her moral courage and constancy kept the ship of state on course – whatever the weather within or without her party.

This made my life as a press secretary easy. I could brief with power and authority because I knew she would 
hold fast. There would be only one thing to do if I found myself back as press secretary today: to shoot myself.

It required an iron will – indeed one of tempered steel – to see her through the Wets of the early 1980s; IRA terrorism; the Falklands; the endless 
rows over sanctions against South Africa and the tensions over economic policy, which took a cool six years to bear 
fruit. And then there was her fierce Euroscepticism, acquired through experience, which eventually brought her down.

There isn’t much iron will around today. Instead, we have endless announcements of initiatives, often half-baked, which are either amended, watered down or dropped.

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Nor are they made in the House of Commons but against some associated backdrop. Parliament has been supplanted by choreography. That would have offended her principles.

But then, for all the care she took with her appearance, she was never comfortable with the media.

She told us to turn off the telly when she came on the screen. She held policy more important than courting the media.

Today’s politicians should try that approach some time. 
It can command global respect.