MARGARET THATCHER was a “sharp, bossy, down-to-earth and at times abrasive” prime minister who wanted to be treated as a lady but not referred to specifically as a woman.
That was the view of Ireland’s ambassador in London, Eamon Kennedy, who prepared a dossier on the prime minister for the department of foreign affairs in advance of Charles Haughey’s Downing Street meeting with her in May 1980.
Kennedy, who had met Thatcher in the Irish embassy and in Downing Street, said she had a “tidy, efficient, hard-working mind and, while she impresses by her crisp grasp of detail and her down-to-business, time-is-valuable approach, she sometimes gives offence to her Cabinet by treating them as if she were an aggressive school-mistress, handing out marks to the hawks and criticising the wets”.
He said he had been told that morale was low at cabinet meetings as economic problems worsened and her “hawkish monetarists” were coming under growing pressure.
His notes are contained in State papers just released by the National Archives.
He wrote that Mrs Thatcher “takes great care to impress as the well-groomed, well- tailored lady who wants to be graciously treated as such, but not, as it were, referred to specifically as a woman”.
She was “not above using her considerable feminine charms to good effect” and was understandably proud of being the first woman prime minister in the West, “but she is anything but a feminist”.
She “takes a glass of scotch and soda in moderation”, he added.
The dossier said her dedication to work sometimes resulted in too much concern with finicky details and not enough delegation.
“Ministers complain of constant interference in the work of their departments . . . she will turn up unexpectedly at all hours of the night in the House of Commons to check on the performance of a junior minister.”
The Irish ambassador said Thatcher had “a dangerous tendency to make up her mind on major issues almost by instinct without prior consideration in Cabinet.
“She seems to come quickly to her decisions on a kind of intuition and then, as it were, to let Cabinet try to change them if they can.
“As a result, she has only narrowly avoided disastrous decisions, eg on mortgage rates, MPs’ pay, Cambodian boat people and Rhodesia.
“She just hasn’t the wide experience in foreign, economic, financial and home ministries which most prime ministers have had and this lack of wide experience means that her instinctive reactions may be unwise, especially on foreign affairs.”
Her outlook and personality were “little Englander” rather than European and she would think of her European partners as being wet on East-West issues.
Mr Kennedy said the murders of Airey Neave and Lord Mountbatten had left “deep psychological scars” on Thatcher’s Irish outlook but that was not to say that she would be hostile to “bold, pragmatic and imaginative proposals aimed at coming to grips with the problem at last in a radical, even, indeed, revolutionary way”.
He recalled how she quoted St Francis of Assisi after her electoral victory when she said “where there is discord, may we bring harmony”.
“They are surely a strange combination, Maggie Thatcher and St Francis,” Mr Kennedy observed.
“Perhaps the relation is that they are both courageous radicals from a small-town, conservative background who saw the need to change things fundamentally in their own way,” he added.
