Quote:Papers released under 30 year rule reveal full force of Thatcher's fury

Alan Travis and Owen Bowcott
The Guardian, Wednesday 30 December 2009

The arrival of Margaret Thatcher, the Grantham grocer's daughter, as Britain's first female prime minister sent shockwaves not only through Whitehall and Westminster but across the world – even if the Japanese did think she needed a crack squad of "karate ladies" to protect her at her first summit.

Today, the cabinet papers from Thatcher's earliest days in office are finally released under the 30-year rule. The 1979 files provide a fascinating insight into the way she took a grip, first of her ministers, then the country with a pugnacious style that is revealed in hostile handwritten remarks in the margins of previously secret documents.

The Downing Street files show that within a month of taking office Thatcher told Geoffrey Howe, her chancellor, that the two Treasury papers on public spending cuts he put forward for their first budget were "not nearly tough enough" and that his proposal to double VAT to 15% would simply stoke inflation. A paper on pay policy by the employment secretary, Jim Prior, was so "thoroughly deficient in content" that she ordered it not to be circulated to the cabinet.

Again and again her furious handwritten notes in the margins of the files reveal her impatience at the cautious approach of Whitehall and some of the "wets" in her own cabinet. "This will not do" makes regular appearances, as does "too small" whenever public spending cuts are being discussed. She just as often responded with her blue felt-tip pen with the single word "no", heavily underlined.

Her early struggles to reduce an £8bn public spending borrowing requirement through spending cuts and increases in indirect taxes while cutting the basic rate of income tax to 30p are an object lesson for any incoming prime minister next year faced with a deficit of £176bn.

The files show that at her first meeting with the Soviet premier, Alexey Kosygin, the woman they had dubbed the "iron lady" lectured him on the plight of the hundreds of thousands of boat people risking their lives fleeing communist Vietnam after he suggested that they were all drug-takers or criminals. "The prime minister told Mr Kosygin that the refugees who were being picked up by British ships were … hardworking people, not drug addicts, and a high proportion of them were children."

But the Downing Street papers also disclose a shocking degree of personal racism in her own response to the Vietnamese boat people, initially resisting an informal UN request that Britain take 10,000 refugees on the grounds that there would be riots in the streets if they were given council housing ahead of "white citizens". She made clear to her cabinet colleagues that she had "less objection to refugees such as Rhodesians, Poles and Hungarians, since they could more easily be assimilated into British society".

Mrs Thatcher even bizarrely proposed to the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, that they jointly buy an Indonesian island to resettle all the boat people. This forerunner of Oliver Letwin's 2003 idea for an "asylum island" to take all of Britain's asylum seekers was only blocked when Singapore complained that it would set up a rival entrepreneurial city.

The files disclose that Thatcher's first months in power reveal a torrent of pungent political aphorisms that were to sustain her in power for the next 13 years. Vetoing Lord Carrington's suggestion that Foreign Office negotiators should meet Robert Mugabe before the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe settlement, the prime minister scribbled in the margin of one letter: "No – Please do not meet leaders of the 'Patriotic Front'. I have never [underlined] done business with terrorists until they become prime ministers. MT"

An enthusiast for nuclear power, Thatcher admitted in a dispatch about Pakistan's ambitions: "There was little one could do if a country was determined to obtain nuclear weaponry."

A letter from July 1978, while she was still leader of the opposition, reveals Thatcher's legally inspired reluctance to concede that mistakes had ever been made. Opposing plans to publish a history of military intelligence in the second world war, she observed: "I was taught a very good rule by my two Masters at Law, both of whom are now judges: never admit anything unless you have to; and then only for specific reasons and within defined limits."

As for the "karate ladies", the cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, rejected the Japanese proposal for an all-female protection squad at the Tokyo summit, saying that Thatcher was going as "prime minister, and not as a woman per se".

Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Is it really 30 years since the old witch introduced Shock Therapy to Britain?

It transpires that whilst Thatcher the Milk Snatcher was lecturing the Russkies on human rights, she was secretly attempting to "buy" an island near Indonesia to stick dusky and slanty-eyed asylum seekers.

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