Coronavirus quarantine letting me reflect on time with Thatcher - Bernard Ingham

MY incarceration because of this coronavirus pestilence is proving very therapeutic. I fill the afternoons living in the past by transcribing my No 10 press secretary diaries during most of the Thatcher years.
Sir Bernard Ingham was press secretary to Margaret Thatcher.Sir Bernard Ingham was press secretary to Margaret Thatcher.
Sir Bernard Ingham was press secretary to Margaret Thatcher.

One book, covering 1989-90, has already been published – The slow downfall of Margaret Thatcher. Two others are finished – 1986 Her Annus Horribilis – six years before the Queen’s – and 1987-88 entitled Triumph and Trouble.

The Thatcher Foundation at Churchill College, Cambridge, says my almost hour-to-hour daily record is of historical value so I have now turned to 1983-85, provisionally entitled “Banana skins and the NUM”. If her Government could tread on a banana skin in much of that period it did, but it was Arthur Scargill who came the cropper.

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You might reasonably say that at my age this latest effort is a race against time – and fate. But while I am at it you may care to hear of the fun I had.

Sir Bernard Ingham is updating his diaries on his life and times with Margaret Thatcher.Sir Bernard Ingham is updating his diaries on his life and times with Margaret Thatcher.
Sir Bernard Ingham is updating his diaries on his life and times with Margaret Thatcher.

First, the city with a jinx on me – Melbourne, Australia. My official car was wrecked with me inside it by rioting students at Monash University for no better reason than Mrs Thatcher, attending the 1981 Commonwealth conference, was speaking there.

Then we fell out over my handling of one of Edward Heath’s ritual attacks on her. She sought the impossible – to get her retort in without looking as if she was dancing to his tune. Imagine, if you can, she fuming in one corner of the back seat of her car and me steaming in the other. It’s a wonder the driver wasn’t boiled alive. But we soon got over it at the CHoGM press reception. The return journey was all sweetness and light.

Worse was to come on a later visit to the city. IRA supporters were lying in wait and caused a minor riot at a shopping mall. The Times recorded that I was nearly run over by a police car outside the Body Shop – something that eluded my attention at the time. And then, blow me, the police chief in a midnight confrontation said it was all our fault. Melbourne was not good for my temper or blood pressure.

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The 1983 New Delhi CHoGM, as Commonwealth conferences are called, was by comparison idyllic, especially in Goa to which the conference “retreated” for supposedly more relaxed discussion. Unfortunately, the power supply was, to say the least, unpredictable. When the lights went out for the umpteenth time as Denis Thatcher was dressing for dinner he charged on to the verandah of his bungalow, next to that of his host, Mrs Indira Gandhi, and addressed the whole of the Fort Aguada hotel complex in the following terms: “This bloody place is high on the buggeration factor.” Pure Denis.

Sir Bernard Ingham was press secretary to Margaret Thatcher.Sir Bernard Ingham was press secretary to Margaret Thatcher.
Sir Bernard Ingham was press secretary to Margaret Thatcher.

In fact, CHoGMs, with Mrs Thatcher usually in a minority of one over South African sanctions, are lifting with yarns. Take Vancouver 1987. On arrival we found Canadian PM, Brian Mulroney, as usual, leading the charge for sanctions. But Christopher Meyer, the FCO spokesman, had found that Canadian exports to South Africa had risen while the UK’s had fallen.

In my experience the Canadian media are altogether too holier-than-thou. When they came at us at our initial briefing Meyer said out of the corner of his mouth: “What shall I do?” “Give it to ’em with both barrels,” I replied. He did.

And so the balloon went up just as it did in Kuala Lumpur in 1989 when the ChoGM refused to set out UK arguments against sanctions. Mrs Thatcher and John Major decided to publish them separately. The howled outrage from the conference – and some journalists – proved conclusively their tenuous grasp of the principles of democracy.

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Notwithstanding her handbagging of Ronald Reagan over the need to stand up to the Argentine, the invasion of Grenada, his offer to Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik to get rid of nuclear weapons and his budget deficit, life in the USA was altogether calmer.

I always argued that when Rhett Butler kissed Scarlett O’Hara on the helicopter pad at Camp David all was well with the world. He always did.

To end on a domestic note, I joined the PM on a “Buy British” crusade in a corridor in the Commons where two or three political journalists are gathered together.

Where were their suits made, she demanded. The late Chris Moncrieff, the PA’s sartorially challenged political editor and occasional contributor to these columns, showed her his collar: “Made in Britain”.

“More like Oxfam, to me”, she sniffed. Pure Maggie. Happy, care-free days, relatively speaking.

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