The Margaret Thatcher Interviews: The Wet Lord Speaks
Of the interviews I've put up on Kindle, this is one of the most interesting. Lord Walker of Worcester, who died, sadly, in 2010, was Margaret Thatcher's Energy Secretary. So he had an intimate knowledge of the issues involved in the miners' strike.
But what's particularly interesting about him is that he was a Wet: A devout Keynesian to the end. His descriptions of his interactions with the prime minister offer a great deal of insight into her personality:
PETER WALKER: I think the surprise, to people like John Hoskyns and others, is that she asked me to be the minister to handle it [the Energy portfolio], I mean, you know, from the point of view of the right wing of my party, I was a terrible neocommunist myself, you know... And in her autobiography, she says nothing but nice things about me—there are no nasty attacks on this left-wing neocommunist, you know, and we became good friends, I mean, there are—
CB: Well, she felt it was very important to put a—
PETER WALKER: Well, she knew I had different … I mean, in her autobiography she says, right, “He was a very good minister. But I could never give him one of the big departments, because his economics were unsound.”
CB: Hmmm.
PETER WALKER: And, in all the periods I was in her cabinets, um, if I disagreed with her on something outside my department, I would ring Number 10 to her private office, and say to the head of her private office, “Could you tell the Prime Minister I would like to have a chat with her about X.” And always, within the hour, a phone call came back, “a time is fixed”—normally at 5:00 in the evening. And I’d go around there, and I’d go upstairs and we’d have a glass of whiskey each, and I’d tell her, you know, what I thought about this, and she would sometimes say, “Peter, you always get it wrong,” you know, and other times she’d say, “How very interesting,” and listen, and the reputation she had of never listening was wrong. What was true was that quite a number of her colleagues spent all their time praising her, and saying, “How marvelous, Prime Minister, we agree with you.” And funnily enough, she didn’t really like that. I mean, she occasionally showed she didn’t like it. But, somebody like myself, who when I disagreed with her, went and said, privately, “I disagree with you on X,” um, and the biggest one of them, um, quite interestingly maybe for your book, is with Gorbachev.
CB: Mmm-hmm?
(To find out what he said next, you must buy the book.)
His account of the miner's strike is fascinating:
PETER WALKER: And then when various coal fields like Nottingham decided they wouldn’t strike, because they’d had a ballot against the strike, [Scargill] then sent violent pickets to, you know, beat up people who were going into the pits, and then tried to get a nationwide strike by that method, which he obviously achieved. Um, and, then I discovered, later, that in fact all the money was in fact coming in from the Soviet Union. And, um … substantial sums of money. It was being delivered to Yorkshire, to a pub in Yorkshire, in cases of ten-pound notes, which were then used to pay the miners. And the miners who were picketing were paid 40 pounds a day in cash for picketing, and if they used their own car, another 40 pounds. And they had high levels of social security anyway. So cash-wise, they were doing exceedingly well. And, um, then when it was leaked to one of the Sunday papers that money was coming in from the Soviet Union—
CB: To the Mirror?
PETER WALKER: No, the Sunday Times, and the Sunday Times came out on Sunday saying, you know, next week another 1.3 million pounds is coming in from the Soviet Union, and um, brilliantly he put out a statement saying, “Yes, this is quite right, it is. This is a collection that Soviet miners have made for their Comrades.” And he got away with it, really, I mean, the public said, “Ah, you know, that’s very nice of these Russian miners—”
CB: Who managed to come up with this hard currency—
***
CB: During the time in question, was there ever a moment when you doubted that the government would win?
PETER WALKER: Never. No.
CB: You were always completely confident? Why was that?
PETER WALKER: Well yes, of course, I knew that it was such, fundamentally, a political strike. If he had found a way of closing all the pits, I would have imported coal. I mean, there’s plenty of coal to be imported. And I would have put the army in charge of protecting the lorries. I mean, it was a strike you couldn’t lose. If you’d lost, it would have been a total disaster for democratic capitalism. It would have been unbelievable. Now, I knew that in whatever I wanted to do, I was absolutely confident that if I said, “Look, we’ve got to import coal, you know, we’ve got to have the army monitoring the delivery of coal,” I would have had the support of the Cabinet, and Margaret. But I was never anywhere near that. There was never a moment when the coal stocks went down. And, um, he tried to do other things, like stop spare parts going in to the power stations, and we found ways to smuggle them in, you know—
CB: How do you smuggle spare parts into power stations?
PETER WALKER: Well, instead of having them in a lorry, you have them in a motorcar. And somebody drives in—
CB: What kind of spare parts?
PETER WALKER: I have no idea. But I know, he said, “Yeah, we mustn’t just stop the coal coming in,” he was trying to stop maintenance people coming in, and you know, anything that will close the power stations. And, um, there’s one spare part, in one power station on the south coast, which broke down due to wear and tear, and there was a spare one in the northeast, and I arranged someone in a private motor car to take it down and deliver it. So things like that which happened. I mean, the sort of thing was – the Soviet thing. He used to go to the Soviet Embassy every week—
CB: He just walked boldly into the Soviet Embassy?
PETER WALKER: Yes, and I told the press, “Look, keep your tabs watching the Soviet Embassy, he goes there every week for instructions!”
CB: And why do you think, why weren’t his Soviet handlers, or advisors, giving him better advice? Had they misunderstood the situation fundamentally, do you think?
PETER WALKER: The Soviets? No, I think, they knew he was a good, hard-line Marxist, knew the miners had power ...
The following exchange caught my eye in light of George Savage's question about whether America can find its own Thatcher:
CB: Well, if you were a politician looking at Britain and saying, “I want to do for my country what Margaret Thatcher did for Britain, I want to raise it from malaise, I want to invigorate the economy, and I want to promote an entrepreneurial culture, I want to create a property-owning democracy,” to what extent would it be possible to look at Margaret Thatcher’s example and say, “Yes, I can do what she did,” – or to what extent was it specifically British, local to a particular time and place—
PETER WALKER: I don’t think it’s specifically British, all those things you can do. But your problems will be different in every country. In the United States you have a great advantage, you have an acceptance of the entrepreneurial spirit for a long time. You’ve had an acceptance in the United States of the mobility of labor. In the United States people do move hundreds of miles to get a different job. You’ve got all that, we didn’t have that, and she changed that, to more the American way. But I think, you know, certain countries, I think the United States made the terrible mistake, first, of declaring independence from us, but having made that mistake, to decide they’d set up a political system where nobody could ever govern again, you know, a checks and balances system. I think in a modern world that’s going to be disastrous. ...
A prescient comment, no? I wish I'd known then what I know now, I would have asked him to elaborate.
A final comment about Scargill:
PETER WALKER: … the other interesting thing about Scargill, myself, is that he saved my life. Do you know this story?
CB: Not at all!
PETER WALKER: Well, when he, um, bombed the hotel in Brighton, not he, but—
CB: The IRA—
PETER WALKER: The IRA, yes, I had this morning meeting, every day of the strike, in London at 7:30. So I couldn’t stay, as a Cabinet Minister, at the Conference. I had to go back each night to have my early morning meeting. And the room I had, at the, at Brighton, I gave to my PPS. You know the term PPS?
CB: Of course.
PETER WALKER: I gave to my PPS, and he was killed, in that room, on that night.
CB: I didn’t realize that. I’m sorry.
PETER WALKER: So had it not been for the miners’ strike, I would have been killed in the room that night. I don’t think Mr. Scargill knows he saved my life, it wasn’t probably his main intention.
CB: I’ve always been impressed by Mrs. Thatcher’s courage in the wake of that incident, and I wonder about your recollections of it---
PETER WALKER: Yeah, um, I drove down to Brighton the next morning, and, you know, it’s on the radio and it all happened, and um, I didn’t know that my PPS, Tony Berry, had been killed. But um, no, she did, and I’m not in anyway undermining the courage of that, but there was nothing else she could do. The idea, with the IRA, that you said, “We won’t continue the conference, we’ll abandon it--” [shakes head] and you know, she did, quite rightly, quite well, everything she could and should have done.
I was quite sad to learn that he had passed away. He was a kind man, very generous with his time, and he had a great many interesting things to say about politics. A loss.
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Comments :
Mar '11
Re: The Margaret Thatcher Interviews: The Wet Lord Speaks
That is what is so sad about Mr Obama - he doesn't accept the entrepreneurial spirit. Hopefully he is an aberration, and not the future of the US.
I remember Peter Walker from the UK TV in those days - yes, a little wet, but a good man - sorry to hear he has gone.
Sep '10
Re: The Margaret Thatcher Interviews: The Wet Lord Speaks
What an interesting conversation. I have known about Soviet involvement in western labor movements, but I had no idea of this particular connection or of cash payments to strikers. Remember when we were children and we were fed a steady diet of detente and unilateral disarmament? We just needed to understand that the Soviets were just like us. None of this stuff ever came up.
I am with DW above. Our president thinks we can all work for non-profits and the government and everything will be fine.
Oct '10
Re: The Margaret Thatcher Interviews: The Wet Lord Speaks
What does PPS stand for? Google isn't coming up with anything.
Re: The Margaret Thatcher Interviews: The Wet Lord Speaks
Private Parliamentary Secretary.
Dec '10
Re: The Margaret Thatcher Interviews: The Wet Lord Speaks
Claire, it's amazing what the suppostion that "if you are a worker you are automatically morally superior" can do. Any level of violence, brutality, intimidation all the way to terrorist bombing can be instantly justified. We spend too much time on the exciting major tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung. It is these little petty tyrants who have also multiplied human misery. When we let them off easy they multiply in the background. Then when the pot boils over and they show themselves in force we wonder what we did to upset them.
We didn't do anything to upset them and that's the problem.
Apr '11
Re: The Margaret Thatcher Interviews: The Wet Lord Speaks
It was interesting to see him bring up the odd bit about Scargill "saving" his life. I wonder if after all those years as an adversary, he found some way of saying something nice about Scargill without approving of the man. I'm probably reading him wrong, but those kinds of comments can be tells to the inner conflicts in a person's heart.