Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. PEOPLE YELL Where there is error, may we bring truth. No! No! No! ALL: Hear! Hear! Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. The lady's not for turning. And where there is despair, may we bring hope. The 4th of May 1979, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was about to walk through the famous door of Number 10 Downing Street for the first time. Whilst she may have prayed here for hope and harmony, in reality, she polarised opinion. People either loved her or loathed her. Her supporters saw her as a conviction politician, someone who took on the unions at home and Britain's enemies abroad. Her critics say that she ramped up unemployment and created an atmosphere of greed. But 11 years later, when she finally left Number 10 Downing Street, every corner of Britain, every family in Britain, had been touched by Margaret Thatcher. Captions by Anne Langford. www.tvnz.co.nz/access-services Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright TVNZ Access Services 2013 Margaret Thatcher came to power at the end of a turbulent decade. It was a time of unremitting industrial strife. The outgoing Labour Government had floundered on yet another union confrontation. A council workers pay dispute left rubbish uncollected, the dead unburied. Margaret Thatcher offered a Tory spring to Labour's winter of discontent. She dominated your life in many respects, given the comparison in ages and what have you. What really inspired you in Margaret Thatcher? I think this sense that the country was in a complete mess when she took over. She was the first woman prime minister. She wasn't initially surrounded by people who all supported her, but she did a remarkable job at turning the country around. And, yes, I sort of grew up in the 1980s. Um, born in 1966. I was 14 in 1980. So it was a very formative decade for me. And I didn't agree with everything that she did, but I remember as a young guy interested in politics, I thought, basically, on the big questions, I thought she was doing the right thing. The old economic consensus of how you ran the economy, which had clearly failed; we had to manage the economy in a different way, in a new way, allowing markets to work better. She had a very clear understanding of the society in which she became leader. And she said what she meant; meant what she said, and if you voted for her, you got what she said. With Mrs Thatcher at Number 10, the domestic political scene had begun to change forever. The outside world was being transformed too. In Iran, the Shah was deposed, and Ayatollah Khomeini became the supreme leader of the new Islamic republic. And it was from this unlikely direction that one of Mrs Thatcher's first big tests came. It was to set the tone for her entire premiership. On the 30th of April 1980, a group seeking autonomy for the Khuzestan region in southern Iran, seized the Iranian embassy in London, taking 26 people hostage. I found myself in the embassy because I was asked to go and cover the American hostage situation in Tehran, and went down to the embassy to, actually, if you like, bang the table and get my visa. And within the space of a few minutes, gunmen stormed in through the front door, and very very quickly, I saw one ` he was jumping sideways around the room like a crab with a hand grenade in one hand, and a black pistol in his right hand, which gets your attention. It's pandemonium in there. To be quite honest with you, in those situations, I'm not sure anybody really cares what their demands are. It's very very personal. Mrs Thatcher took control of the crisis, and put the special air services, the SAS, on standby. She laid down at the beginning very positive criteria to which we were all to work. First of all, the terrorists were never to leave the country; secondly, they were to be tried in the United Kingdom, and thirdly, we would avoid violence if it was at all possible. It would be handled, therefore, by the police. It became very clear to me by the following morning that this was going to end very badly, and I allowed the stomach ailment which I had in Africa, to deteriorate into something which appeared to be much worse than that. And over the period of hours, managed to persuade the government to let me out, in fact, actually throw me out. Mrs Thatcher's strategy was getting results. Four other hostages were released over the next few days. On day six, the gunmen killed embassy press attache Lavasani. Mrs Thatcher sent in the SAS. It was the first time this shadowy, elite group had been seen on the streets of London. EXPLOSION Viewers were gripped as the drama unfolded on television. Five of the six hostage takers were killed. All but one of the remaining hostages were rescued alive. She had the vision to see what needed doing. She had the courage to take advice, and she backed the people who were carrying out her instructions. COMMENTATOR: There is a white flag. Mrs Thatcher's bold decision to send in the SAS marked her out as a special kind of leader; a politician with backbone. Her handling of the crisis was a template for the far greater challenges ahead. 5 Mrs Thatcher knew that she would stand or fall on her election pledge to restore the country to economic health. One core ambition was to give ordinary working people a real stake in the economy. She said, 'Hang on, there's this whole group of people called council-house tenants 'who just take it for granted that they're forever excluded from the housing market.' Up and down the country, tenants were granted the right to buy their own council houses. Margaret was there in person to hand over the keys to the one millionth council-house tenant who bought his own home. We greeted each other outside, and we went inside, and we showed her around the house. Do you have another downstairs room...? She wasn't who I expected to be. You know, I didn't think she would be so easy to speak to. We were putting in a new fireplace, and I knew I could do some renovations to the house to what you want to make your... your mark. Cutting back local government and giving people a stake in a property-owning democracy, showed the sensitivity of Mrs Thatcher's political antennae. Huge, uh, housing estates were transformed. It turned out to be extremely successful. It was a big social reform. You could have coped with her allowing people to buy their own home as long as they replaced them with new housing. But building new council houses was exactly what Mrs Thatcher didn't want to do. As more gained a roof over their heads, fewer had a job. Her drastic economic policies fuelled accelerating unemployment. Britain cascaded into recession. There were calls from across the political spectrum for her to change course. Fear spread from the dole queues to the Cabinet table. It wasn't until after I, and one or two others of a more like mind to her, came into the Cabinet in '81 that she really had a Cabinet which was solidly with her through the most difficult times. Conservatives ` we're supposed to be people with our feet on the ground, down to earth ` that certainly was a part of what she was, but there was another part too, which some would say was an unconservative part, in that she was, without a doubt, a complete visionary. APPLAUSE Compromise and consensus were simply not in her vocabulary. Her C was conviction. And another single letter summed it up. U-turn if you want to. U-turn if you want to. LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE The lady's not for turning. All the time when the going was difficult, when 364 economists gave an opinion that our policies could not possibly succeed, I think we had a faith that we were trying something that, indeed, hadn't been tried for decades. Geoffrey Howe's first budget had cut taxes for the well-off. Now his 1981 budget flew in the face of economic orthodoxy. As the recession deepened, Mrs Thatcher instructed him to cut spending even further. Geoffrey Howe, the chancellor, came in, and with Mrs Thatcher's total support, took a number of steps which contributed directly to the devastation of Britain's manufacturing industry. Indeed, about a quarter of it was wiped out. People thought not just that she was pursuing harsh policies, but that she was uncaring. But did she deserve to be so loathed? I think that there are people who felt much more strongly, who hated and loathed her, and I think that's because of the experience that they had or they saw. The pressure bearing down on Mrs Thatcher worsened when in Northern Ireland a group of Republican prisoners in the H blocks at Long Kesh, led by Bobby Sands, began a hunger strike in March 1981. They wanted their special category status restored; in effect, recognition that they were political prisoners. Mrs Thatcher refused to concede under duress. There was a determination on Thatcher's part ` she wasn't going to give in, particularly to the Irish. And all that the hunger strikers wanted was to be recognised as political prisoners. In turn, the hunger strikers vowed to starve to death. Bobby Sands was the first to die in May 1981 after 66 days. Nine more followed, but still no concessions. The strike was ended on the 3rd of October. The IRA massively hit back with their bombing campaign. She was seen as steadfast in the face of terrorist bullying. The IRA personally blamed her for the 10 deaths, and vowed to take revenge. Along with Oliver Cromwell, she is the most loathed English person in the history of the last 1000 years. EXPLOSION, SIRENS WAIL As Mrs Thatcher's Britain crumbled, riots broke out; first in Brixton in London, and later in the summer in Toxteth in Liverpool. It was a truly remarkable turn of events in a country that simply hadn't seen anything remotely like that since the late 1920s, early 1930s. ALL CHANT By the end of 1981, Mrs Thatcher's personal popularity plummeted to an all-time low of 25%. But the opposition that might have seized the moment, split. Michael Foot's uncompromising socialism and hostility to Europe drove the right to despair, and four of their number out of the party. Her success was due to Labour weakness rather than her own strength. She didn't have an effective opposition. The Labour Party was split right down the middle. Eventually, the so-called 'gang of four', Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers broke away to form the Social Democratic Party. She faced, effectively, no united opposition. Indeed, it was entirely disunited. In 1981, turmoil raged on the domestic front. But in just a few short months, Mrs Thatcher would face the toughest choice any leader ever has to confront ` whether or not to go to war, and in this instance, it was 8000 miles away in the south Atlantic. A brutal dictatorship had seized power in Argentina in a military coup in 1976. In the face of a mounting economic crisis and civil unrest, the generals ordered the arrest, torture and execution of tens of thousands of opponents. Argentina had long claimed sovereignty over the Falklands, which they call the Malvinas. Now, seizing the islands by force, was just the populist diversion the regime needed. General Galtieri was in considerable difficulty in Argentina, and as all dictators do, you decide to find something popular that will take people's minds off it. The actual first time I saw an Argentine soldier was about 8 o'clock in the morning as they advanced up the front road. As a 15-year-old, it was both a fearful time and an exciting time. The Conservative Government had waivered over the Falklands' long-term future. Galtieri's invasion finally forced a Thatcherite response. Just as she had with the Iranian embassy siege, Mrs Thatcher turned to the experts. Her question was, 'Could we retake the islands?' And I said yes. And I should have stopped there, really, cos that was the end of my business. But I didn't. I went on. I said, 'Yes, and we must.' 'Why do you say that?' she snaps. I said, 'Because if we don't, if you're not entirely successful, 'if there's any pussyfooting, then we shall be a different country whose word will count for little.' That really was a turning point. She had great confidence in Henry Leach, and he gave her confidence. Mrs Thatcher had made up her mind. Nevertheless, the nation's shock at the invasion meant someone had to take the blame. I thought it much best for me to go. There should be a new foreign secretary, and start again. Mrs Thatcher ordered a task force to be assembled. They began the long journey to the south Atlantic. A 20-mile total exclusion zone around the Falklands was established. Any Argentine air or naval craft which crossed that line was libel to be attacked. On the 25th of April, British troops took back one of the outlying South Georgia islands. Mrs Thatcher was jubilant. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. < What is your reaction? I rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the Marines. Goodnight. A defining moment in Mrs Thatcher's premiership came on the 2nd of May. The Conqueror, a nuclear submarine, was in contact with the Belgrano; uh, that she posed a threat, and sought authority to take her out. And that was given, and it took 10 minutes. The cruiser Belgrano went down with the loss of 323 crew. 700 men were rescued from the sea. It was wrong because the Belgrano was steaming away from the British fleet and the Falkland Islands when it was torpedoed. She was in a known submarine area, and so the course... her heading at any one time, if she was sensible, would have been 60 degrees difference two or three minutes later. What would people have said if they heard we had the Belgrano in our sights, and we let it go, and then the Belgrano sank one of our aircraft carriers? As the task force neared the Falklands, it became increasingly vulnerable to Argentinian air attack, especially when the troops transferred to the landing ships in Bluff Cove for the final assault on Port Stanley. EXPLOSION Then Mrs Thatcher was told the news she dreaded. Sir Galahad was hit by bombs dropped by Argentine air force Skyhawks. The bizarre thing about a bomb going off in close confine to you is you can't hear the bomb. Within a period of about eight hours, I went from being able to see and a physically fit man to being a very damaged and, um, not sure if he would live soldier ` casualty. I was the worst injured to come back alive. 48 people, including 32 Welsh Guardsmen, lost their lives. It was an incredible risky enterprise. Uh, it was the most difficult period, and for, I suppose, 11 weeks it was a very intense period of emotion` emotionally draining. After a long yomp across the islands, British troops finally entered Port Stanley on the 14th of June, and Major General Jeremy Moore accepted the Argentines' surrender. There were 255 fatalities amongst the British armed forces in the conflict, along with 649 Argentines, and three islanders. Mrs Thatcher will always be held in the highest of regard by all Falkland Islanders. There is a bank holiday on the 10th of January, which is Margaret Thatcher Day, which was declared following her visit in 1983. The returning task force was met with public rejoicing. Mrs Thatcher relished the role of victorious leader. What had started out as a risky gamble, had ended up a triumph. It was her finest hour. This is the most fantastic operation that we've undertaken. We are all very privileged to have taken part in it, and I couldn't have her coming in without coming to welcome her. With victory in the Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher had established a worldwide reputation as a tough, determined leader, prepared to use force to protect British interests. It was a reputation she was to build on in years to come. A remarkable combination of forces propelled Margaret Thatcher to her huge second-election victory in 1983. As well as the Falklands factor, the Opposition was in disarray, and the economy had turned round. With her popularity now secure, Mrs Thatcher set about a battle on home soil, curbing union power. She called them 'the enemy within'. I think we had a situation in which elected government after elected government had been, really, kicked out because of the abuse of trade-union power. Mrs Thatcher was determined it wouldn't happen to her. She oversaw a swathe of legislation which restricted trade unions, particularly the mighty National Union of Mine Workers. If they could be defeated, then the whole of organised labour could be brought to heel. All of a sudden, Arthur Scargill is the leader, and in '81, they challenged us, and we had to back off because we couldn't take them on. We weren't ready. But that was a warning to us, and from that moment on, we prepared ourselves. It was arranged that it would take place just when... in the spring when the coal stocks were high. Sitting on a mountain of coal, the National Coal Board decided to close 20 pits. The miners were determined to resist. But Arthur Scargill refused to hold a national strike ballot. Without it, the cautious Nottinghamshire miners continued to work. All it needed was the idiocy of Scargill in beginning a strike as the winter of 1983, '84 was coming to an end, and doing it, moreover and more damagingly, without the backing of a democratic mandate. Miners held local ballots instead, and in some areas, voted to strike even if they weren't under direct threat of closure. The reason we went on strike was because we just wanted to keep what we had ` status quo. That's all we wanted. We weren't asking for anything else. Just so that we could keep on working. Mrs Thatcher was adamant there should be enough police to contain the picketing. She used the force of the state against the miners in a way that I've never seen before and don't hope to ever see again. I got, along with my two brothers and a few others, we got arrested outside this pit. The most violent confrontation came at the Orgreave coking plant in Yorkshire. In June 1984, thousands of miners picketed the plant to stop it operating. They were met with a matching number of police drawn from 10 counties. CROWD PROTEST All the men of Orgreave, and along with busloads of others from south Wales, and we were like lambs to the slaughter there. It was the most frightening experience of my life. In the midst of the pivotal industrial dispute of Mrs Thatcher's time in office, came a shattering blow from an old foe during the Conservative Party conference. The Provisional IRA finally took revenge on Mrs Thatcher for her stance over the hunger strike. A massive bomb planted three weeks beforehand, detonated in a bathroom at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. The attempted assassination of Mrs Thatcher left five people dead, including treasury minister John Wakeham's wife, Roberta. Trade secretary Norman Tebbit was gravely injured. His wife, Margaret, was permanently disabled. A further 34 people were taken to hospital. To the outside world, Mrs Thatcher was uncannily calm amidst the physical and emotional carnage. Life must go on as usual. Life must go on as usual. < And your conference will go on? Life must go on as usual. < And your conference will go on? It will go on. She was concerned about those of us who had been injured at Brighton, and she always felt some sort of guilt for it, that it was a bomb which was more aimed at her than at anybody else. I rang Downing Street. I was obviously heavily sedated and drugged. And I said, 'I think they've closed the hospital for the weekend, and I think they've left me here.' Anyway, she rang the consultant, and she asked for a report. She said, 'I'm not worried about his physical health, I'm worried about his mental health.' And she was very endearing at that time. Two years later, IRA man Patrick Magee was found guilty of planting the bomb and five counts of murder. He was sentenced to 35 years in jail. The miners strike continued into the spring of 1985, but a steadily growing number of miners were going back to work. The people who went back were scabs in my view. I had contempt for them then, and I've got contempt for them now. On the 3rd of March, the strike formally ended. Mrs Thatcher had won another key battle. The National Union of Mine Workers, the vanguard of the labour movement, had been crushed. Mining communities were split forever. There's at least two that I know of who went back to work, and I wouldn't pass them... I wouldn't speak to them if they passed me by here. Life in the valleys is totally different. Definitely changed for the worst. Mrs Thatcher's pit closure programme went ahead. A way of life had ended, and the way of doing politics. Consensus was gone. Conviction and determination had triumphed ` the core values of Thatcherism. It was, at the end, seen as an enormous victory, um, for the new way of conducting industrial relations. We have seen a new birth of leadership in Britain, and that is the most important thing, the most enduring thing that is going to come out of this coal strike. By her radicalism, she shifted the consensus of British politics to the centre-right. And so large parts of what she did, bitterly opposed at the time, have become part of the furniture and accepted wisdom of British politics. Ah, what's this? A little discussion. Two entrenched views. A real-estate website. Oh, he wants a new home. Ah, but she has some ideas about renovating. Either way, I'm thinking they don't have a lot of spare time to get their loan, right? That's why ANZ has more home-loan specialists than any other bank, and they'll come to you. My money's on the renovation. Imagine what you could do if you won back your home-loan repayments for a whole year. There are 10 chances to win every month. On the 27th of August 1981, a group of women set out from Wales to march to a military base just outside Newbury. They arrived on the 5th of September. 96 NATO cruise missiles were to be based here, and those have remained for a remarkable 19 years. It's Greenham Common. I was very curious, and I was very impressed by the banner it come under. It was 'women for life on Earth'. The night I came down, there was just a piece of black tarpaulin thrown over between two trees and on the ground, and not enough blankets to go round. We were under threat all the time from bailiffs and from the law. In 1984, 600 police arrived here about 6 o'clock in the morning, cleared everything out. Tore the banners down, and we were like refugees on the side of the road. They arrested you? They jailed you? They arrested you? They jailed you? Yes, I-I had about, um, 20 visits to Holloway. This was a conflict. It was an absolute conflict. It was, um, women without any sort of power at all, a visible power of status or office or anything like that. The idea of a missile carrier carrying out I don't know how many warheads around the Hampshire countryside, and appearing in little villages in the middle of the night. This was not like a nuclear weapon on a submarine that you couldn't see. This was something coming out regularly. And I couldn't believe it when they surrounded the base ` these women. The coaches were going down the M4 all day to get there, and I couldn't believe this. It had an enormous effect, but it-it brought just hundreds of thousands of women into the peace world, because it was women. Whatever else she did, she showed that women can get to the very very top. She was a woman, because... In a way, the essence of her, the strength of the woman, was just misdirected. I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown... I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown... LAUGHTER So just how significant was it that Margaret Thatcher was a woman? I remember saying to somebody after Mrs Thatcher had become leader of the Opposition, who was saying, um, 'Of course it's a good thing for you as a woman politician, isn't it?' And I said, 'No, because if she's good, then I lose as a politician, 'and if she's not, I lose as a woman.' What she was was, um, just somebody who felt that she could, frankly, manage the boys better than they could manage themselves. I remember on one occasion, I had some very tough questions in the House of Commons, and afterwards, I said to her, 'Well, what did you think of that?' She said, 'You did well. After all, we have to make sure they don't get the better of us.' When you were really up against it, she'd put her handbag on the table, open it, and bring out a scruffy bit of paper. And she said, 'Did you know that in Croydon 'the children... half the children in a class last week didn't turn up at all? They played truant. 'Can you tell me why that happened, Secretary of State for Education?' And she had been told by her hairdresser that morning that that had happened. She was such an argumentative and decisive and fierce woman at times. One of the greatest impacts that Margaret Thatcher had by virtue of being the first woman prime minister, is that there was an entire generation which, from the moment it was old enough to make any sense of politics at all, until the moment it was old enough to vote, knew nothing except a woman prime minister. She then becomes particularly close to Ronald Reagan. Mrs Thatcher did the thinking, and that was all right by him. Fine by him. The unlikely friendship between the girl from Grantham and the B-movie actor proved historic. Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, and authorised a massive build-up of military spending by the USA and NATO to counter the Soviet Union, which he dubbed 'the evil empire'. Mrs Thatcher had always been proud of her image as 'the Iron Lady'. The Iron Lady of the Western world. LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE Well, she was more than an 'iron lady' because iron has a tendency to be brittle. She was a woman of steel. In 1984, a younger, more modern Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was to become general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party the following year, visited Britain. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had finally found someone they could do business with. (SPEAKS RUSSIAN) The first tremors of the tectonic shifts to come were Gorbachev's introduction of more openness, 'glasnost', and the attempt to restructure Soviet society ` 'perestroika'. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty abolishing the cruise missiles based in Britain, was duly signed in 1987. Two years later, on the 9th of November 1989, that great symbol of a divided Europe, the Berlin Wall, was breached, and jubilant East Europeans poured through. This is the wall the East Germans themselves built, and they don't like to see it broken down from the West. Of course, she played her part because she was a staunch anti-communist. Margaret Thatcher's most important role in Europe was alongside President Reagan in making circumstances impossible for the Soviet Union to go on. That's cobblers. I don't` The man who ended the Cold War was Gorbachev, who did the things that Thatcher would never have done. He-He called for a unilateral halt to Soviet nuclear testing. On the domestic front, the success of the earlier 'right to buy' scheme emboldened Mrs Thatcher to drive forward plans to privatise the huge swathes of the economy which were publicly owned. The first big privatisation was British Telecom. The idea that there might be more than one telephone network appeared to people completely bizarre; that the deregulation and the expansion of telecoms would lead, not to just one competitor network, but to many and many and many. Other privatisations swiftly followed. The motor industry, the steel industry, Rolls-Royce, aerospace, ship building, post office... You can go on and on and on. The grocer's daughter simply didn't believe that government should own businesses, that giving workers a stake was good, and giving taxpayers a profit, even better. Mrs Thatcher also oversaw a revolution in the way the city of London worked ` the 'big bang'. London had fallen behind New York mainly, in Margaret Thatcher's view, because it was over-regulated and old-fashion. I think she did well to weaken the old-boy network in the city. I think it has permanently changed the city. It just led to a change in attitude, I think, and made it a lot more competitive. London, I think, after the 'big bang' reforms, became undoubtedly the most important financial centre. The deregulation of the city was an extraordinarily far-sighted decision. As the city boomed, what some saw as a culture of greed, was born, which came to symbolise Mrs Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s. I think a lot of integrity went with the 'big bang' reforms. Some of the side effects are probably the 'greed is good' culture, and the problems we've had with the 'credit crunch' are in some way a reflection of that. EXPLOSION Once again, when war came, it came out of the blue. Saddam Hussein ordered his troops into Kuwait in August 1990. Convinced by her experience in the Falklands and in her dealings with the Soviet Union, Margaret Thatcher was certain that force must be met with force. I think George Bush would have been persuaded to use force eventually, anyway. I think that she accelerated. She brought forward the moment when he got up and said, 'I am the president of the United States, and this aggression must not stand.' She insisted that Peter de la Billiere, who she had known since the Iranian embassy siege, should be commander-in-chief of Britain's forces in the Gulf War. She liked to go on working with people she knew. She unambiguously said, 'If we needed a division, we should have a division.' If you look back at Margaret Thatcher's, um, military activities... military operations, they were all successful. And that was, in large part, due to her. And if you say, 'Well, this general or that general helped make them successful,' well, yes, he did, but he did so because he was given the resources to do the job by Margaret Thatcher. Decisive action to evict the invaders would, in due course, be successful, but it would be under a new prime minister, John Major. For Margaret Thatcher, a sequence of events had begun which would culminate in the worst rioting ever seen in the heart of London, right here in Trafalgar Square, and for the first time, sticking to her guns would end in defeat. Mrs Thatcher had turned her gaze to the tricky problem of the local authorities. First for the chop was the GLC led by Ken Livingstone, who'd long been a thorn in Mrs Thatcher's side. Thatcher clearly saw the GLC as a focus of opposition, and I'm proud to say we were. She had had this line that there is no alternative, and in everything we did, we were shouting out, 'Oh yes, there is.' Livingstone was using it as a campaign to destroy. He said again and again, 'My task is to destroy Margaret Thatcher,' and he was using the ratepayers' money of London to destroy Margaret Thatcher. So Margaret Thatcher didn't think that was quite fair. The GLC was abolished on the 31st of March 1986. With the GLC out of the way, Margaret Thatcher could turn to the question of paying for local government. The new system, the 'community charge', introduced a single flat-rate tax on every adult. We were always searching for a way of trying to give more power to local authorities, but if you do that, you've got to make them responsible for their own money and raising their own tax. The tax was introduced first in Scotland in 1989. It caused a flood of protests. By the time it was introduced in England and Wales in 1990, the flood of protests had become a storm. Many people refused to pay. Had she taken on one too many dragons? She basically flew caution to the wind, and she then not only did things which she had been advised against doing, but she also, in a sense, took her advice, not so much from ministers, but from the advisors around her. It is a real danger for prime ministers to be isolated, and she caught it just as so many have. I think the thing that got her was her old friend Hubris, by which we mean 'extreme pride'. On the 31st of March 1990, a big demonstration in central London against the tax turned ugly. ROCK MUSIC I don't think anyone who came on the demonstration came to have a ruck with the police. That wasn't my reason for coming on the demonstration. I was coming on it because it was a particularly bad law and it was a particularly unpopular law. You're 17, so you kinda don't really know the implications of what you're doing, what you're going on, or I didn't really think that far ahead. On the day, I was milling around Trafalgar Square. The crowd was so big that I didn't actually get into Whitehall. Um, so, I had arranged to meet my mother by the South African embassy over there. I kinda got caught up in the, kind of, incidents around here, and then I reacted to what was happening, and then I, kind of, went rioting, basically. Afterwards, the images started appearing in the newspapers. Actually, I handed myself in, then I went on the run, then I came back, got arrested again. I then went to court and got convicted and went to prison. Got 21 months. It was a first offence, so I kind of think I was probably unlucky in as much as because I was in the newspaper, that meant that I had to get a pretty heavy sentence. Everyone talks of a broken society all the time, but from my point of view, that's a legacy of her time. Well, the poll tax was what really destroyed her, and it was symbolic, really, of what was going wrong. And the longer she stayed in the office, the more autocratic she became. The amazing thing about this poll tax was that normally, um, Margaret Thatcher, more than any other politician I've ever met, knew the exact impact on the pocketbooks of what she called 'our people'. It was just too much. You were getting poll taxes of �300 a head for an elderly lady in Wigan, and it was just not acceptable. The idea that you can sell an immaculately conceived policy without some presentation and very fierce argument, is, I think, ludicrous. I think the poll tax was damn near unsaleable. I thought that, um... I thought she was going to lose the next election, and I thought the poll tax was extremely unpopular and very unwise, and I thought, really, that, um, her time would come when it would be better if she went out on a high. The crisis came to a head over Europe. Mrs Thatcher had always had an astonishing tenacity in dealing with her European counterparts. In her first term, she argued with them over Britain's contribution to the European budget, until they were literally too exhausted to continue. The difficulty was that she became really rather strident about it, and, um, you know, 'I want my money back.' This persistence, some called it stubbornness, lasted right until the end of her premiership. Faced with mounting European pressure to increase EEC power, she dug her heels in. No! No! No! No! ALL: Hear, hear! No! No! ALL: Hear, hear! No! A deep divide over European policy had opened up in Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet. Both her chancellor, Nigel Lawson, and her foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, threatened to resign. Mrs Thatcher knew she couldn't survive those twin blows. The threatened resignation by Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson was catastrophic for all of them. They were her two key acolytes. Margaret Thatcher and I worked very closely together for a very long time. Uh, right at the end, the relationship turned sour. Uh, by that time, people had got tired with her. They got tired of her stridency. Uh, they had also felt, I think quite rightly, that she was not as surefooted as she had been at the beginning. Margaret Thatcher hadn't liked being ambushed. In a little over a year, both men were gone. It was Geoffrey Howe's resignation that had the greatest impact. His statement to the House was devastating. It's rather like sending your opening batsman to the crease, only for them to find the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats had been broken before the game by the team captain. that their bats had been broken before the game by the team captain. LAUGHTER Well, I sat in the debate when Geoffrey made his speech. I was only about three places along the front bench away from Margaret. And you could hear the knives thudding in as Geoffrey threw down this challenge to her. She sat there impassive, waxen and sort of furious. It was the signal Michael Heseltine, who had always wanted to be prime minister, was waiting for. He declared that he would stand in a leadership contest against Mrs Thatcher. The leadership election was a disastrous piece of politics for the Conservative Party's point of view and from her point of view. The result came out as Mrs Thatcher attended a conference in Paris. She narrowly failed to win outright, but vowed to keep going. She dashed straight out into the courtyard of the embassy where the media were gathered. It wasn't the game plan that I'd expected. Very pleased that I got more than half the parliamentary party, and disappointed that it is not quite enough to win on the first ballot. But when Mrs Thatcher consulted her colleagues one by one, she realised that she didn't have enough support inside the Cabinet to continue. This was a terrible mistake from Margaret's point of view because it brought all the Cabinet together, waiting in the Cabinet corridor, um, before going in to see her, one by one, and we all discovered that practically all of us thought she should pack it in. When people voted for her in the first round, a lot of people did that rather reluctantly. I was notoriously the first one called in, and I said, 'Ma'am, the fact is you've been defeated. 'This will be the charge of the light brigade. You will lose.' There's no disgrace for a prime minister to stand up for what she believes in, and if she doesn't get the support, resigning. All my colleagues sitting in a circle and gazing at me, and one of them said, 'Did you tell her?' I urged her to fight on, and she said she was puzzled because the Cabinet had advised her, to a man, to resign. She did not fight in the way in which I would have expected her to fight. She went back to the flat, talked to Denis, and the next morning she said, um, she was standing down. Margaret came down the stairs by herself, and you could see that she was quite buttoned up and red-eyed. Yes, I think... She was deeply upset by it all. On her last day in office, she responded to the motion of no confidence in the House of Commons, and she gave this magnificent handbagging performance. I am enjoying this! I am enjoying this! And one of the backbenchers on the Conservative side called out and said, 'Take your resignation back!' She resigned on the 22nd of November 1990. One of the most remarkable political careers since the Second World War, was over. Ladies and gentlemen, we're leaving Downing Street for the last time after 11� wonderful years, and we're very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very very much better state than when we came here 11� years ago. APPLAUSE Margaret Thatcher's tearful departure after 11 years as prime minister marked the end of an era. Although she became a powerful figure on the backbenches, she was no longer at the centre of power. What then of her legacy? Subsequent leaders have looked in the mirror, I think, and said, 'What would Margaret Thatcher do in this situation?' As prime minister, she was magnificent. I thought what she did was damaging, wrong, and, uh, on the other hand, you have to recognise that she stuck to her guns, and people respect that. No. I don't think she done any good for this country at all. She was a prime minister who will never be forgotten. Overall, I think she had a significant impact for the better of Britain. She was such a formative and massive figure in politics, of course, and people still talk about the Thatcher era, what Margaret Thatcher did, the leadership she showed. We talk about her more than some of her successors, so she casts an enormous shadow over British politics. Yours is a very different Conservative Party to hers. Do you think she approved of what you've done? Well, I wouldn't say... There are some differences, but there are some similarities, and I hope that she would approve, because she was a Conservative and she was a moderniser. And both were vital. Conservative, because her values and instincts and principles were very clear, but she was a moderniser because she profoundly believed that Britain's best days lay ahead. She thought if we sorted out our problems, and actually confronted them, then we weren't managing decline ` we had great opportunities for the future.