Margaret Thatcher’s first priority in 1979: slash the Civil Service

During Margaret Thatcher’s first months in power she clashed with ministers, cold-shouldered civil servants and declined an offer of 20 “karate ladies” to guard her at an international summit, secret government papers reveal today.

One of her first moves on taking office in May was to start cutting Civil Service jobs. The Government machine needed cutting by at least 5 per cent, she insisted, but ideally closer to 20 per cent.

Any minister who tried to block her was given short shrift. “This paper is much too sketchy and cannot possibly be included,” she wrote on a draft paper in which Christopher Soames, the Lord President of the Council, suggested that the mass redundancies planned by the Prime Minister were less than prudent. “What are we doing with 566,000 that can’t be done with 500,000?”

There was no let-up in her battle with the Civil Service, even over Christmas. Sir Ian Bancroft, head of the Civil Service, asked in a letter dated November 20 whether the Prime Minister might send a Christmas message “to make it clear” that ministers “do appreciate the work done by the services”, and to avoid public servants seeking sanctuary with the unions. A suggested message was even drafted.
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“I write this to you not as a matter of routine but because I want you to know that I and my colleagues in the Government have greatly appreciated the way the Civil Service has faced its task since we took office last May,” it read. “The new year will be a challenging one for ministers and civil servants. But in the meantime I wish you a well-earned and happy Christmas.”

Sir Ian overestimated the Iron Lady’s desire for a lull in hostilities. Her private secretary responded that she had “decided that she does not wish to send such a message. She has commented that of course she wished everyone in the Civil Service a happy Christmas but that an ‘official’ message does not seem quite right.”

Mrs Thatcher’s forthright, if pragmatic, style was also evident in her dealings with Rhodesia after the April 1979 election, which resulted in a power-sharing arrangement that involved neither of the main nationalist parties. When it was suggested that Lord Harlech, emissary to Rhodesia, should meet the Patriotic Front there, she scribbled: “No! Please do not meet with the ‘Patriotic Front’. I have never done business with terrorists until they become prime ministers.”

In the months before the world got used to Mrs Thatcher, many would make mistakes in their dealings with her. The Japanese intended to deploy 20 “karate ladies” to protect her at an economic summit in Tokyo. Mrs Thatcher was having none of it.

A civil servant from the Protocol and Conference Department wrote: “The Prime Minister would like to be treated in exactly the same manner as other visiting heads of delegation: it is not the degree of protection that is in question but the particular means of carrying it out. If other delegation leaders, for example, are each being assigned 20 karate gentlemen, the Prime Minister would have no objection to this; but she does not wish to be singled out.”

Guns, it turned out, were more her style than karate. When the Government was having problems getting arms for the Royal Ulster Constabulary because the US refused an export licence for a Ruger handgun, Mrs Thatcher revealed her expertise at a White House meeting with President Carter. “Almost all the other police forces in the UK had similar US weapons to those which had been ordered for the RUC,” the minutes said. “The RUC itself already had 3,000 of the weapons in question. It seemed very strange to deny them the remainder of the order and thereby deny a significant number of the members of the RUC the right to defend themselves effectively. She herself had handled both the gun which the RUC at present used and that which was on order. There was no doubt that the American Ruger was much better.”