The Mrs. Thatcher I knew

Margaret Thatcher was a woman who was always in a hurry. Always brusque replete with that handbag which appeared grafted onto her waist.

In the heady days of her visits to Northern Ireland it was reported that she and fellow ministers had been issued with a ‘health warning’ by the Northern Ireland Office Press Office “watch Mallie.” I was quite often excluded from gaining access, interviews being afforded only to BBC and UTV TV correspondents. I did however have some one on one interviews with her which were to put it mildly always ‘robust.’

Could I ever see myself sitting down with Margaret Thatcher to have ‘an off the record’ chat with her in her ‘down time’ as I can with Peter Robinson or Martin McGuinness? I doubt it. That was not because I couldn’t match her intellectually. It was because Mrs. Thatcher didn’t see any relevance attaching to me. I was an irritant with my microphone up her nose hitting her with a fusillade of rapid fire awkward questions.

I was viewed as the enemy, armed with intimate details emanating not just from inside the Republican and Loyalist camps but from inside her own camp. Over the years I had come to get to know many of her Secretaries of State very well, people like Jim Prior, Peter Brooke, Douglas Hurd and even Patrick Mayhew, a cabinet minister whom I forced to tender his resignation when I exposed him on the government’s ‘back channel talks’ with Sinn Fein.

These were men with whom I was sufficiently familiar to ‘pull them aside’ and have a word in their ear to test a theory picked up from a London or local civil servant. Mrs. Thatcher was still in office when Peter Brooke had been given clearance to open a line to Republicans.

All my journalist intelligence gathering went into the framing and informing of my questions when gearing up to cross-examine ‘The Lady.’ She was downright rude, a rudeness matched only by that of former Irish Taoiseach Charles J Haughey who, during one election said to me ” I’m (b)/(f)…ing sick of English journalists asking me about the North. There are no votes there for me.” I was simply asking him for a few minutes of his time for an interview.

Both Charles J Haughey and Mrs. Thatcher had no interest in the journalist apart from using him or her as a conduit for getting their message or should I say propaganda out.

Mrs. Thatcher hated loaded questions. She got them from me. Her response to the Northern Ireland situation was visceral, and subject to the events of the day. She hated Republicans and that was perfectly understandable given that they tried to kill her and many of her colleagues. She correspondingly detested the behaviour of Ian Paisley and Loyalist street protesters. The ‘one on one’ clashes between Margaret Thatcher and former DUP leader Ian Paisley are legendary.

Her approach to dealing with the IRA was very basic, draw a line along the border and seal it. She didn’t know the border was not a straight line. She wanted corresponding Vietnamese styled lookout towers on the Southern side of the border. The then Justice minister Alan Dukes resisted such towers arguing ‘spy’ holes would threaten the homogeneity of support for the Garda in the Republic of Ireland.

Mrs. Thatcher primarily bought into the Anglo Irish Agreement in the belief that, in the event of the two governments targeting the IRA, they could crack that organisation’s head like that of a snake. Those close to her contend that was her real interest in buying into the cross border arrangement.

The former Conservative Prime Minister’s contempt for me boiled over during the press conference in the aftermath of the signing of the Anglo Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle in 1985. Ian Paisley and Unionism were threatening to blow the house down because they alleged Margaret Thatcher was now in bed with Dublin.

“Loyalism is pledging to fight to bring this agreement down Prime Minster, will you stare it down,” I asked … Losing the run of herself Mrs. Thatcher replied ” The Right Honourable’s question doesn’t surprise me.” The Lady momentarily thought she was under fire in the House of Commons from some recaltricant Labour MP. The import of what she had to say got lost in the hilarity of the moment prompting SOS Tom King to remark “to call anybody but Mallie honourable.” He also bears a few scars inflicted by me from his days here.

Mrs. Thatcher came across as a politician in whose world there only lived one person - herself. Former Northern Ireland Secretary of State Jim Prior who was so wonderfully indiscreet used to regale us with tales about the same lady. I always wondered about all those males (and Prior wasn’t among them) who fawned over Margaret Thatcher.

I watched in awe one night in Hillsborough Castle in the Throne room when PM Thatcher was accessed to the so called captains and the kings of industry in Northern Ireland.

It was pathetic to observe the sycophantic behaviour of those individuals preening themselves to shake hands with the ‘Iron Lady.’ I reckon some of them melted when the issue left her.

Margaret Thatcher merited respect firstly as a woman and secondly because of her office. I afforded her both even though I could not espouse her political values.

Conceivably had Nationalism not lived through the hunger strike experience, PM Thatcher might have ended up with the same standing as Tony Blair in Nationalism. She has passed on. The depth of hatred for her in many sections of the Catholic nationalist community in the wake of the IRA hunger strikes is palpable. Within hours of the news breaking that Mrs. Thatcher had died, a West Belfast man said to me “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead is the first thing I thought.” I wish he hadn’t said that.

I resent all this dancing on the graves of the dead. We experienced this jingoism during the IRA hunger strikes, the Falklands, when Bin Laden was killed, and when Saddam was found in the hole in the ground. Is that the sum total of what we are?