I was looking through some old files this morning when I came across a cache of my interviews with Margaret Thatcher's associates. Most of the material never made it into the book, but only because if it had, the book would have been too heavy to lift. A lot of it is fascinating. I thought perhaps Ricochet would enjoy reading them. If there's any interest, I'll publish them all. 

Here's the transcript of my interview with Nigel Lawson, who served as Thatcher's Chancellor from 1983 to 1989: 

Lord Nigel Lawson, 7/16/07, by telephone

CB: First, I wonder if I could have your permission to record this call.

NL: I’ll give you permission to record the call gladly, with only one condition, and that is, if you are to use quotations or statements attributed to me you clear them with me first.

CB: Sure, that’s very fair. I’d be happy to do that. [NB: I did this, he was satisfied with the transcript.] Now, I believe I sent you the proposal for the book I’m working on. But I sent it to you a while ago, so perhaps I should remind you who I am—

NL: Right. Good idea. 

CB: I’m working on a book for Basic Books, an American publisher, called “Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.” It’s not a title I’m crazy about and it may be subject to revision. But the idea of the book is to follow in the series of “Why Orwell Matters,” by Christopher Hitchens. It is not intended by any stretch of the imagination to be a comprehensive biography; that’s been done and it’s been done very well. It’s intended to be a short, opinionated book for an American audience introducing the basic themes of Margaret Thatcher’s personality, her time in office, and achievements, but also to put these in an impressionistic, punchy, novelistic context – trying to make these events come alive for people who may not be all that familiar with her.  So I’m hoping that you can shed a bit of light ... I spent a happy weekend re-reading your memoirs, and I’m sure your first question (as indeed it was) is, “What on earth could I add?” And the truth is, in matters of economic policy, I don’t think there is anything I could possibly ask you that you didn’t treat. Your memoirs are wonderful and comprehensive and they answer all my questions about—

NL: --they’re very long.

CB: They’re not too long. I think it takes that long to treat a subject of that complexity. But I think you did answer every question I might reasonably ask, and quite a few that I wouldn’t have thought to ask, about economic policy. But there are many areas where I think you could help me fill out my portrait of her in other respects – the portrait of her personality, the portrait of her policies in non-economic--

NL: May I just interrupt you --

CB: Of course.

NL: -- to make one point, which I may have made to you in my reply to your original letter, I can’t remember, it was so long ago. One point, as a kind of background. I think the comparison with “Why Orwell Matters” is an interesting one, and it’s interesting in this way in particular: An author’s job, an author’s life, is a very solitary one. A writer’s life. Politics is not like that. Politics is a team game. And I think therefore ... I realize that you have to personalize this tremendously, and indeed Margaret Thatcher was tremendously important as an individual – and also she was very much the captain of her team – nevertheless, it is a fundamental difference that the achievements of her government (whether you agree with them or whether you disagree with them), and the changes that were made, were made by a team, and not just by her alone.

CB: Yes. A team which was informed by an ideology which has come to be associated with her name, but which obviously goes far beyond one person.

NL: Oh, it’s beyond one person. And indeed, in many ways it harks back to earlier values. I think the word “ideology” is always regarded as somehow opposed to “reason,” when in fact reason was at the very core of what we were doing. In a sense you could say that the previous consensus, although they thought of themselves as being terribly pragmatic, in fact they were governed by ideologies that simply didn’t work.

CB: Yes, I think that’s true. I think you and I are probably in broad agreement about the fundamentals here—

NL: OK, you carry on—

CB: I don’t know if it’s going to be – let’s say, you don’t have a hard sell here.

NL: Carry on.

0:04:38

CB: I have some specific questions. I made some notes in my book while I was reading, and I’ll just go through them one by one. I’m using the paperback edition of “View from Number 11,” the one published by Corgi, so I’ll refer to specific page numbers if you have it on hand.

NL: Oh yes.

CB: In the beginning of the book you refer to a work you wrote in 1976, “The Power Game.” And you wrote [in “The Power Game”], “So often it’s pure hazard which tips the scale of decision in the end.” Now, if you were reading a novel, you would of course think that this is foreshadowing, and you would expect this theme somehow to be carried through to the end of the book. But in fact, one comes away from the book [“View from Number 11”] with the impression of immensely deliberate, thoughtful policy put into action – which had very much the consequences that were expected, most of the time. Would you agree with that?

NL: Yes I would, but the reference to the book, which I did with my old friend Jock Bruce-Gardyne, was partly as background to where I’d been through, before I got into government. But nevertheless I would stand by that, for example, we were -- and it was luck -- we were terribly lucky at the time of the miners’ strike, which was quite an important event in the early to middle years of the Thatcher government, that Scargill was idiotic enough to call the strike in the spring, after the cold winter months which required maximum use of power had gone. So we had time during the summer to build up stocks enormously. Now, that was ... okay, that, we would have pursued the same policy anyway. But it was extremely fortunate for us that he made that blunder, and –

CB: --yes, and one thing that comes through was that you were prepared for him not to make that blunder.

NL: Oh yes.

CB: So I don’t see luck coming into it: It was just an additional advantage.

NL: Well let me give you another example -- and incidentally, I think that I do mention this in the book -- during the earlier years there was a ... partly but not entirely because of the confidence which the change of government brought about from the discredited Labour government to Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives ... there was a very substantial appreciation in Sterling. This imposed a considerable squeeze, a considerable tightening on the British economy, which helped us to bring inflation down. We were determined to bring it down anyway, but we didn’t predict this huge rise in the value of Sterling against other currencies. We didn’t predict that, and it wasn’t our policy, but what we did do, unlike our officials who wanted to somehow offset this, to somehow take measures to bring Sterling down --  because they were very concerned about the rising pound and industry suffering – we said, “No, we can make use of this opportunity, intelligently make use of this opportunity to get inflation down.” So very often, lucky is what you make it. In other words, opportunities arise which you haven’t foreseen, which you haven’t – weren’t part of your plans or programs, but you take advantage of them when they do arise. So certainly luck is not absent, but you’re quite right, you have to take advantage of it when it happens, you know, it’s the old Shakespearian tag, “There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” But then if you don’t take advantage of opportunities, you know, you come to grief.

CB: Yes. Well, it was just a very striking passage inasmuch as it seemed not to foreshadow any major message at all.

NL: It wasn’t meant to foreshadow. It was meant to, as it were, partly to say where I’d come from, partly to say what the facts of life are.

CB: Right.

NL:  And I think that is a fact of life.

CB: Right. Let me move on. I’m trying to get a sense of your early relationship with Mrs. Thatcher. You mention having first worked with her in her Housing Policy group. When did you first meet her?

NL: My first encounter with her, I think, was probably over the telephone, rather than face-to-face.

CB: When do you think that was?

0:09:55

NL: I think it was when we were – while we were engaged in – and I was heavily involved in this, in writing the manifesto for the first election of 1974, when she was Secretary of State for Education. And I was the person, a Conservative backroom boy then, I’d been asked to do a draft of the manifesto, and what I did was, therefore, on the basis of what the government’s policy was and what I understood its intentions were, was to do a series of chapters on various different things, and then send them to the ministers responsible for that area, each chapter, and say, “Let me have your comments, is this right, is this what you want to say?” And the vast majority of them just sent it straight back, they had no input at all. When I sent the education chapter to Margaret Thatcher, she sent it back heavily annotated and considerably improved, because she knew far more about education than I did. And I was very pleased by that, because it made it a much better chapter. But I did have to discuss a few things over the telephone with her, and that was I think my first encounter.

CB:  Did you have any sense in those initial encounters that you were dealing with someone who might one day be an extremely significant figure in the second half of the 20th Century? Did that enter your mind at all?

NL: Not at that time. No.

CB: Everyone says this. Everyone says, “We didn’t see it. We thought she was hardworking, we thought she was energetic, but we certainly didn’t see any kind of greatness in her personality.” What do think happened? In her?

NL: Well, we come back to accidental things. I think that when it was quite clear that Heath had to go – and it was a question of who should succeed him – she supported Keith Joseph, who made a speech in which he made a fool of himself to such an extent that he had to withdraw. So instead of her supporting Keith, Keith supported her. And that was ... they were offering, both of them, the major change of direction in the Conservative Party which a majority of Conservative members of Parliament realized was needed. And the -- or whether they recognized it as needed, I’m not sure that most of them did; I think it was more that they were fed up with Heath, and realized that his vision, if he had a vision at all, was a blind alley. So they wanted a change. But if Keith had not made that speech, she wouldn’t have put herself forward as a candidate.

CB: It’s still a remarkable act of self-confidence and vision, and it’s not something that seems to have any ... there’s no indication in anything she’s done before this, not from anything I’ve heard or anything I’ve read, that she had previously seen herself in that role or in that way. And I’m wondering where this—

NL: Well she always had tremendous self-confidence. She’s a very remarkable person. But I think a lot of it comes down to her being a woman. She was always very conscious that as a woman in a man’s world, it wasn’t enough for her to be just as good as the men, because there were all these prejudices against a woman. Therefore she had to be better. And that drove her tremendously.

CB: And where do you think ... at what point do you think she said to herself, “I can go all the way to the top?” Because of course she initially said that she didn’t think that would happen in her lifetime, a woman as Prime Minister. Was there any event that you either know of or can imagine—

NL: I think for a long time she thought she would be the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer, maybe. You know, Treasury Secretary. She never saw herself as, she didn’t think it was possible that the Conservative Party would choose a woman, quite apart from anything else. And it did come really in the curious circumstances that I was talking about earlier, specific circumstances of there being purely a desire to get rid of Heath and the Heathites, not among all Conservative members, but a majority. And the leader of this was Keith Joseph, with her as a leading supporter. And when Keith more or less fell the first fence, or at least the second fence, quite early on, she had to take over.

CB: So where were you when she put her name forward – do you remember that in detail?

NL: Oh yes I do, very well. I don’t remember where I was, but I remember I was a relatively new Member of Parliament. I was very pleased. I thought that she would be a better leader than Keith. Keith was in many ways a cleverer person, but he was indecisive, and allowed himself to be pushed around by his officials even when he didn’t believe what they were saying. And he was too well-mannered. He didn’t like confrontation. Intellectually, he was very happy to be confrontational, and to put forth new ideas, but the actual real business of confrontation, you know, real life confrontation, he was uncomfortable with.

CB: And why do you think Mrs. Thatcher was so comfortable with confrontation? It’s certainly a very unusual personality trait in a woman.

NL: Yes, it is. She’s an unusual woman.

CB: Why do you think that is? Where did it come from? Do you think it’s just a force of nature, or do you think something in particular in her background accustomed her to being happy with a very high level of confrontation around her?

NL: I have no explanation apart from the partial explanation that I gave you -- that she early on concluded that for a woman to succeed in a man’s world, she really had to fight very hard, because, you know, the odds will be stacked against her.  So the answer to that is to be even better than the men and to fight even harder. She’s a fighter.

CB: Of course, if that explanation had much power, then you’d see more women doing what she did. I can’t help but feel that something ... of course, I suppose the answer ultimately is always going to be, “That’s just the way she was born.” One of these strange flukes of—

NL: --I think so. I think the way she was born, the way she was brought up by her father, who was a huge influence on her.

CB: Did you hear her talk about her father very much?

NL: Occasionally, yes. Occasionally.

CB: Did she ever say anything that would add to what we know about him, to what’s been published in other biographies?

NL: I don’t think so, no.

CB: You have an interesting comment – you say that Margaret was “thankfully free of middle-class guilt.”  I read that and I thought – why were you free of middle-class guilt? How did you escape that?

NL: I don’t know. But it was a ... it was a highly contagious disease which fortunately I had an immunity to, but why, I don’t know. And she did too. I think possibly ... her case and my case were different. I mean, I think in her case, it is partly because she did come from very much a lower-middle class background, and it was the upper-middle classes, who ran the Conservative Party, who were consumed with this guilt. I think that in my case, it was slightly different, because although I came from a more comfortably-off background, and had much more of an upper middle-class education and so on, nevertheless, being of Jewish origin, I think I was to some extent removed from the class system altogether.

CB: Yes, that’s the sense I got, and I was wondering if you might say something like that. There’s a big advantage, it seems, in Britain, to being just ever so slightly an outsider. One that she was able to use and that you were able to use.

NL: Yes, I think it’s a good thing – I think to be a complete outsider is not so good, but to be able to have, all the time, two perspectives, the insiders’ perspective and the outsiders’ perspective may be of help.

CB: Yes, I get that feeling – to be able to game the system, as an insider, but also to have a sense of the system’s weaknesses and the way in which it’s irrational.

NL: That’s right.

CB: And you mentioned in passing that she had a number of Jewish members of the Cabinet. I don’t think that’s an accident, not because I think she was a Semitophile of any kind, or because she had any intellectual reason for preferring Jews, but simply because the kind of people who would rise to the top in a mold-breaking government like hers would be people who would have a willingness to challenge entrenched institutional wisdom.

NL: Well that may be so. It certainly wouldn’t stand in their way.

CB: You describe the first few weeks in government, and you say it’s difficult to describe the excitement of those few weeks, but I think it’s very important for me to at least try to convey the excitement. I think it would have been wonderful to have been there. And I wonder if you can tell me a little bit ... when you talk about the excitement, do you happen to remember, say, having any conversations when you went home, with your wife--

NL: No, I’m not very good at that sort of thing and indeed if I had been able to, I would have put them in the book.

CB: You said that you always slept well. At that time do you remember the excitement carrying over ... I’m trying to figure out a detail to bring it alive ... if you don’t—

NL: I’m afraid, I know it’s very feeble, but I can’t help you.  I strongly recall the feeling right from beginning that this was really special. That you know, I had by good fortune – again fortune – found myself in the right place at the right time, and there was really something worthwhile, more important than I’d ever done before and more important than I’d probably ever do again to be done. But it was ... just a matter of getting on to it and doing it, and when you get home at night switching off, because you have to switch off, otherwise you don’t sleep.

0:23:28

CB: Yes, I imagine I wouldn’t in those circumstances. I think it’s one of the characteristics of people who perform well in those circumstances is that they have the ability to switch off, and that itself is very rare.

NL: It’s very necessary.

CB: You have a description of Cabinet meetings on page 128 which I found very interesting. You talk about – and this is something I’ve heard from other people as well; this seems to be in congruence with other accounts of her style – you talk about her conduct of meetings, which you describe as authoritarian and combative and discursive, sounding off at random, generally going around in circles and getting nowhere. I’ve heard this from many people, it seems to be the common consensus about how she managed. I can imagine it very well; of course I’ve had managers like that, as everyone has. What I would really like is a concrete sense of the language she used that made so many people just go ‘round the bend: What sort of things would she say that made people so frustrated?

NL: Well, I don’t think really I can ... this is where I said earlier that I don’t think I can add anything to the book. We’re talking now about really, what, 25 years ago, you know, and I don’t remember details now of 25 years ago, and indeed I have a mind anyway which focuses very greatly on what seems to me the key issues, the key problems, and the irrelevant details don’t stay in mind very long. But I think the descriptions I do give, from recollection, do give you a picture of the sort of thing, the flavor, of Cabinet meetings when she was Prime Minister, and Cabinet committee meetings were actually worse. She felt that she could be even more discursive in Cabinet committee meetings. Since most of the business is actually done in Cabinet committee meetings rather than the main cabinet, that was a slight disadvantage.

CB: What was a slight disadvantage?

NL: Well, the fact that she could be so discursive.

CB: And, it seems, bullying as well – poor Geoffrey Howe keeps coming up--

NL: She bullied people who she thought were bully-able, which is not a very attractive characteristic, but you know, nobody’s perfect. 

CB: What was it about Geoffrey Howe that made him seem so eminently victimizable?

NL: I think the fact that he never answered back. He would just let her have her say and then plow on with what he was saying before, he would not actually engage what she had just said. I don’t know what it was. I think these things are about personal chemistry, aren’t they, really.

CB: That’s exactly what I’m trying to get a feeling for – I was talking to Charles Powell, for example, who said she would harass everyone, because she knew they wouldn’t really fight back, and I quote him now, “Really, the only one of her ministers I ever saw really slug it out with her, toe-to-toe, was Nigel Lawson.” And I wanted to get a sense of what it was about your personality that allowed you to say, “I’m not going to put up with this,” or “I need to stand up to this,” or “I can stand up to this.”  Again, why were you different from the others in your willingness to slug it out?

NL: I don’t know. I suppose perhaps ... I’m a little bit more difficult. Also, I think that what I would say is that what I have always believed in is saying what I think ... not speaking with two voices, not speaking with a forked tongue. I will never say something to the person I’m discussing something with and then go behind their back and say something completely different. So if I disagreed with her I would say it to her straight to her face. Whereas there were others who would disagree with her who felt – maybe they were right, I don’t know – that it wasn’t sensible to say to her face, they would go, you know, to the tea room or something and talk to friends and say it.

CB: To what extent was this because they were disconcerted by taking on, in an adversarial way, a woman?

NL: I think there was a lot of that. I think this was another thing which was both a strength and a weakness for her. I don’t know if I say this in the book or not. One of the qualities that men tend to have, or Englishmen, you know, from the sort of background that most of the Cabinet came from, is clubbability. They’re extremely clubbable. And there’s a kind of men’s club atmosphere. She had no element of clubbability in her at all. Now, I say this is both a strength and a weakness. It was a strength because it disconcerted the men. They didn’t quite know how to deal with a leader who was unclubbable. And this therefore made it easier for her to exert the power she wished to exert and the leadership she wished to exert. It was a disadvantage because it did rather, and increasingly, separate her from the rest of her Cabinet, all of whom were men. There was a short time when she brought in a woman in but it didn’t work out so she sacked her. So it was an all-male Cabinet and she became separated because of this lack of clubbability, not merely from the people she may have not minded being separated from, but also from her actual supporters within the Cabinet. And this contributed to her downfall in two ways. The most important way is that she did become rather out of touch, and she thought she was completely self-sufficient, and that she didn’t need anybody else. She also didn’t interact, after a time. She did in the beginning, when she first came in, but less and less so. So she was out of touch, and that made her less sure-footed.

CB: When you say lack of clubbability, I want to make sure that I’m understanding—

NL: --and the other thing, I’ll come back to that—

CB: --go on—

NL: And the other thing of course is that it meant that there wasn’t, when she stood for the leadership in 1990, wasn’t it, there wasn’t the degree of emotional support from her colleagues that I think she thought she deserved.

CB: Well, that comes through very clearly in your memoirs and also comes through very clearly in other memoirs. And this is something that I hear over and over again, that there was ... I think what you’re calling a lack of clubbability ... there was a lack of social grace, a lack of sense of humor, there was a lack of warmth and empathy. Is that what you mean by that word?

0:31:52

NL: Well, maybe to some extent, but I think that there is this ... there is a kind of male bonding clubby gene or whatever, that most men have. Totally non-sexual, nothing to do with that. And I think that maybe women have it with other women, I think that she did feel an affinity to other women, or certainly to other hard-working women, instinctively. But she didn’t, you know, it was different from the sort of male clubbiness. There may be a better word, but that’s the word that comes to mind.

CB: When you say that, again, I’m asking for the particulars—

NL: You need particulars, and I can’t help you.

CB: Does any scene come to mind as an example of this, of this lack of clubbability? I’m trying to nail down what exactly that means, in practical terms, so that I can explain it.

NL: Well I think a symptom of it – but it’s actually more fundamental, but this is a symptom of it – was her complete lack of interest in any social relationship with any of her colleagues.

CB: And yet you do talk about being invited to dinner at her home – this was all in the context of political relationships, not social relationships?

NL: Yes, absolutely. And it was not all that frequent, and, you know, many people it never happened at all to. Even me, who was very close to her for many years, it happened very seldom. It was also I think partially because there wasn’t perhaps ... no ... interest in anything else outside the political scene. I mean, she was interested in ideas, and religion, and so on, but she wasn’t interested in sports, she wasn’t—

CB: --she wasn’t the woman you’d go to for a good game of snooker.

NL: Absolutely.

CB: I get the picture. Yet you do mention in your book her having a warm, feminine social touch in matters ... for example, sending a note to your wife when she was ill, and—

NL: Absolutely, she was very, very good at that – far better than I have ever been

CB: So it’s a conflicting portrait of having some social strengths, based on that femininity, and some liabilities, and I’m trying to figure out just how important this is, and I think you’re telling me that it was quite important.

NL: I think it was, yes.

CB: This lack of clubbability – was this something that the electorate sensed, ever, or was it strictly confined to personal political relationships?

NL: I think it was the latter.

CB: Because obviously she was able to put across a personality to which the electorate responded over and over again, and it’s confusing to me to hear these accounts of her lack of social skill and to try to reconcile that with such a very effective politician ...

NL: Well, I think yes. I think – well, there were people who worshipped her. But the electorate as a whole, I don’t think that they loved her. I think they respected her, which is far more important. But I think it was that.

CB: And she was conscious of that, wasn’t she. I’ve heard that she envied Ronald Reagan’s ability to—

NL: --that’s right, exactly. She did. And that’s a very good contrast, because he had all these warm, lovable qualities which she lacked.

CB: Did she ever try to cultivate them, or do you think she said to herself, “That’s just not me and I can’t do that?”

NL: Apart from changing her voice to make it more attractive and less strident, I don’t think she made any changes at all, no.

CB: This was before the days when politicians were completely managed by image consultants ...

NL: Yes, but even, yes, but even now, if it had been happening today, I don’t think she’d have had any time, or very little time, for image consultants. She did listen to what’s that man’s name, I’ve got his face in mind but can’t remember now, you’ll have it from the records. Not Tim Bell, the other one –

CB: I’m not sure. [It was Gordon Reece.]

NL: Anyway, you know, there was a limit to the extent that she would have any time for image consultants. She prided herself, quite rightly, on being a conviction politician. And the modern idea of politics as being all about image is not something that appealed to her at all. Nor to me, but that’s neither here nor there.

CB: I have some detailed questions for you. Specifically, I want to go over some of the history you discuss in parts of your book. On page 146, and I’m going to ask a number of questions about your memories of the coal strike—

NL: I hope you won’t take too long.

CB: I’ll be very brief. You have a very interesting comment. You say, incredibly, that you had some difficulty persuading the Coal Board to play its part. And that comment is not followed up by any further discussion. This comment is when you’re talking about the Vale of Belvoir—

NL: Beaver.

CB: I’m sorry?

NL: It’s pronounced Beaver.

CB: Is it really?

NL: Yes. But English pronunciation is always a bit weird.

CB: Yes, that’s definitely weird. But very charming. So you’re talking about the Vale of Beaver. And you say you had some difficulty persuading the Coal Board to play its part, which surprised me. I wonder if you could tell me more – what kind of difficulty and why would that be?

NL: Oh, because they were extremely unimaginative. They put forward a plan, and program, which they had convinced themselves was right, and the fact that they were not going to, you know, if they didn’t support the compromise they would end up with nothing at all – which would not be very clever – they took a long time to realize that.

CB: That makes sense. On the next page, you talk about Arthur Scargill, you talk about your first meeting with him, and his “amazing nonsense, garnished with spurious statistics, proving that even the most unproductive pits were highly economic.” Now this is something I keep hearing – I’ve spoken to a number of people in the mining industry, they say that these pits were economic, they just required more investment. What I’m looking for – where were they getting these statistics? Were they simply making them up, or did they have some case which could plausibly be made? What was the basis of the claim?

NL: Well, with Scargill, he just made everything up. But I think that if you look behind that, what they ... they had not the most elementary economic or business model in their mind. They just thought if there is coal there, and coal has a commercial value, then clearly it should be mined. They had no regard for costs at all. And therefore if it costs more than 100 pounds to mine 100 pounds of coal, that was not something that entered their thinking.

CB: When it’s said that more investment would have made these pits economical, what kind of investment are proponents of this idea referring to? Is it new technology?

NL: Yes, they’re talking about basically mechanization, a greater degree of mechanization. But the point is, it wouldn’t have made it economic. It would have made it technologically possible to drill deeper and all that kind of thing, but it wouldn’t have made it economic.

CB: Was there any serious energy economist at the time who was saying that they could be made economic? 

NL: I don’t think there was one.

CB: So Scargill is really arguing from a complete veil of lunacy.

NL: Absolutely.

CB: Yeah, this is my judgment as well. I just wondered whether there was any serious reason for him to be saying this.

NL: No.

CB: Although you’re probably the wrong person to ask that—

NL: No, he believed to be true whatever he wished was true..

CB: Now, given that this seems very obvious and clear ... you mention on page 148 the advice you were given, to get someone who was not afraid of Scargill. Why were so many people afraid of Scargill? Why was it so hard to find someone who wasn’t afraid of Scargill?

NL: Because there had been this feeling, particularly since the strike toward the end of the Heath government, that a miners’ strike could never be won by the public, by the government, that the unions would always win. And therefore you had to be very careful not to alienate Scargill sufficiently to enable him to get a majority for a strike.

CB: Was there something about Scargill’s personality that had people so nervous around him?

NL: Well it was really about the National Union of Mineworkers. I think that if he’d been – I mean, Scargill was a fanatic, and he was politically motivated. And I think most people, most businessmen find that very disconcerting and they didn’t know how to handle that. But if he had been the leader of the workers in any other industry, I don’t think people would have been frightened of him. It was because he was the leader of the miners, and the miners would not only win a strike, but would win it partly because at that time, when the vast bulk of the electricity in the United Kingdom was generated by coal-fired power stations, a miners’ strike meant that the electricity disappears and, you know, all the lights go out. And that’s quite a serious business. So it was felt that he had this massive industrial power, which he was prepared to use, and he was also prepared, he was seen from the early episodes, he’d be prepared to use intimidation and very, very ugly methods which maybe other trade union leaders would have shrunk from.

CB: But largely you think the sense of intimidation people felt around Scargill was because of his position, not his personality.

NL: Oh I do, yes. Definitely.

CB: Okay, that’s what I wanted to understand, because I had this image of men cowering in the face of Scargill and I couldn’t figure out quite why.

NL: No, he wasn’t an imposing personality. His resistance to rational argument gave him a strength of a kind, but it was not he who was strong, it was the President of the National Union of Mineworkers who was strong, provided he could count on the loyalty of the mineworkers. And that was why it was very important to try and engineer a state of affairs in which he didn’t have the complete support of the mineworkers.

CB: I get the feeling that one of the people who was afraid of him, or certainly couldn’t form an effective response to him, was Neil Kinnock. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about why he was so ineffective in his role there.

NL: Who?

CB: Neil Kinnock.

NL: Neil Kinnock? Well, I think he was ambivalent. I don’t know about him being ineffective.

CB: Well, he never came out and called for a ballot, he never took a firm stand.

NL: Well, he was a very weak man. He was and is a very weak man. But on this particular issue, I mean, his heart and upbringing were with the Welsh miners.

CB: That does not necessarily—

NL: --although he had no time for Scargill, he would not wish to, as it were, appear in any way to be on the side of the Conservative government rather than the National Union of Mineworkers.

CB: Sure, but if he was watching the National Union of Mineworkers walk off a cliff, you’d think he would have stepped in at some point—

NL: Well, nobody knew that they were walking off a cliff. We can say that now with a bit of hindsight. I remember in the middle of the strike I found myself in Washington for some reason or other and the Ambassador gave a dinner for me and invited all the big industrialists, businessmen he could find ‘round the table, and he had quite a few, and not one of them believed we were capable of winning the strike, they all assumed the union was going to win.

CB: But you weren’t in doubt, were you?

NL: What?

CB: You weren’t in doubt.

NL: No, no, but I’m talking about the opinion at the time.

CB: Given the stockpiling of coal [beeping on phone] – hello?

NL: Yes.

CB: --given the very well-developed plans for lasting quite bit longer than in fact you did, why was there doubt that you could outlast them?

NL: Well, I don’t think – we didn’t publish the figures, for a start, of the --

CB: --well, I understand that Peter Walker took journalists up in helicopters to show them.

NL: Yeah, but we didn’t publish the figures. And anyhow, I think people were guided by the history. Although it is perfectly true that in the General Strike of the 1920s the miners had eventually succumbed but after a very, very long time, after the rest of the trade unions – because that was a general strike, not a miners’ strike – but there had been the victory of the National Union of Mineworkers over the Ted Heath government, and there’d also been the surrender to the National Union of Mineworkers in 1981, only a few months before I’d became Energy Secretary, which I talk about in the book.

CB: Yes, of course. But that was before plans had been made to withstand the strike—

NL: Exactly. But peoples’ thinking was conditioned by those early events.

CB: It seems--

NL: Shall we move on to something else? Because we have a limited time.

CB: Sure. You have an interesting comment about her transferring her affections to Gorbachev from Reagan, when she found that Bush was somewhat of a less inspiring figure than Reagan. I found this a very striking comment. You’re almost talking about her as if she were a schoolgirl with a crush, who needed a father figure to look up to – is that how you meant that comment to come across?

NL: Well, I think it was a personal thing, but I wouldn’t think it was a father figure, so much. My psychological interpretation would be slightly different. I think people who are in positions of power come very easily after a time to value power more highly than anything else. And when they encounter someone who has even more power than they have, they are in awe of it. And I think that was the question with Reagan, though she was very happy to criticize him when she thought he was getting things wrong. But nevertheless, she was to some extent in awe of him. And also at that time, nobody fully realized the extent of the fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union.

[The rest of the interview is unrecorded, unfortunately; the land line went dead and with it the digital recorder attached to the phone. I called back on my mobile. Lord Lawson briefly expanded upon the above comment and wished me well with the book.]