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[00:00:00] Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm

[00:00:17] Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

[00:00:24] Mark D’Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. For many people, Margaret Thatcher's tearful departure from Downing Street was the last they saw of the Iron Lady. But Mrs Thatcher remained a very active political player for many years after she left office. She was a force in Conservative politics and a thorn in the side of her successor. She was feted in America. She devoted a great deal of effort to batting for British business abroad.

[00:00:47] Ruth Fox: Peter Just has studied the post-premiership years of post-War Prime Ministers. He came into the studio to talk to us about his new book on the afterlife of Mrs T.

[00:01:02] Mark D’Arcy: So Peter, first all, let's set the scene here. Margaret Thatcher leaves office, what must have felt to her, very, very abruptly, after the Michael Heseltine leadership challenge and the political crisis that had led up to it. What was the impact on her? Did she step out of Downing Street and immediately find her feet as an ex-Prime Minister? Did it take a bit of a while to get over the whole experience? What went on?

[00:01:27] Peter Just: I think there was no doubt that it was totally devastating to her, the way she left and how quickly she left. Ian Dale in his biography - I shouldn't be plugging someone else's, but I will because he employed me - he talks about having post-traumatic stress disorder and I think that that is a totally legitimate thing to have said.

It was obviously totally devastating. It took her some time to recover, but I think all of our views have been shaped by that photograph of her getting in the car and crying, leaving Downing Street, about her life after that. Actually, when you look at it from 1991 onwards when she employed Sir Julian Seymour, we should pay tribute to him who he sadly died in March, he was the director of her office, and Sir Mark Worthington, who worked for her from 1992, they helped her build a completely new life. And actually there is a part of a life that we all know about in the UK, which is essentially around how she got on with John Major and the difficulty she caused his Government.

What is less well known, or was less well known until I wrote the book about it, is her global role. And actually that started incredibly early, so I think it was in February 1991, she went to a birthday party for Ronald Reagan and was feted in America. She was a superstar. She got two standing ovations.

So it's all quite early on abroad that new life started to be built. I think it just took longer here because of the nature of the issues that she continued to be involved in here were themselves, were they not, hugely politically controversial.

[00:02:50] Mark D’Arcy: But what were the options for an ex-Prime Minister? Because there were several ex-Prime Ministers around at the time, notably her immediate predecessor, James Callaghan. What were the options available? How could you go about being a former Prime Minister? What do you do?

[00:03:06] Peter Just: Well, Asquith said, didn't he, that the office of Prime Minister is what its holder is able to and choose to make of it. I think that's even more the case for an ex-Prime Minister. There is actually no defined role about what they actually do.

It's essentially up to them. She continued to attend Parliament. She didn't intervene very often, unlike Callaghan who was intervening all the time. But again, she had an international role that came about, not just because of her, it's because she was in such demand in other countries to go and visit them and do the lecture tours.

Of course, she needed to make money because she had absolutely no money in her bank account when she resigned as Prime Minister. So she had to go away, make a living. What do they do? I think it's entirely up to them, isn't it? They choose what they want to do. I think interestingly, from her onwards, they've tended not to stay around in Parliament very long, or certainly not in the Commons.

If you look at the eight who are still living, I think there are five of them no longer in Parliament. Even she wasn't there very often, or didn't intervene very often, rather. She continued to have that parliamentary connection because that place mattered to her.

[00:04:05] Ruth Fox: And that comes through in the book that, although she, as you say, she didn't take part very much and she actually, when she went from the Commons to the Lords, she actually struggled to find her feet a bit in the Lords, she was in an uncomfortable place. She much preferred the Commons clearly.

[00:04:20] Peter Just: Absolutely.

[00:04:21] Ruth Fox: There's sort of the fire and brimstone of Commons debate and the drama of it. I think my impression from the book was that she found the House of Lords all a little bit staid.

[00:04:29] Peter Just: I think you've been very generous about that, I think you've been very generous about what have you, and I didn't include it in the book, but she made her views quite clear to her Woodrow Wyatt, what she thought about the House of Lords.

A former member of her Government described it to me as they thought she found it difficult there because it had a much more seminar-like setting. And in fact, Margaret Thatcher herself alluded to this, didn't she, when she wrote to John Major after her introduction, and she said, I hope it's gonna be as exciting as the Commons is during question time.

[00:04:53] Ruth Fox: And it just wasn't.

[00:04:53] Peter Just: It was never gonna be that, was it? No, no. It was never going to be that. And it's clear when you read the articles and the sketches and the commentary on her speeches in the Lords, they are of a different calibre to the ones that she gave in the Commons as a former Prime Minister, but even in the House of Lords, she would turn up, wouldn't she?

Particularly later on when she was ill, she would turn up for the important votes, and Baroness Royall, the then Leader of the House of Lords in 2013, spoke about this in a tribute to her, she was a presence.

[00:05:20] Ruth Fox: Sat there on the benches. And you wondered what she was thinking.

[00:05:23] Peter Just: Absolutely that, and she was a piece of living history, wasn't she? She was just this very great presence. Lord Norton, when I spoke to him about the book, he was a peer at the same time as she was towards the end of her life. And he said when you used to go in and she was there, it was like a physical presence and really interesting. Another story he told me actually, which I think is indicative of her as a nuanced person, when she spoke for the very last time in Parliament, was about General Pinochet, Geoffrey Howe also spoke, and they were sat next to each other on the benches. And Lord Norton said they were sat next to each other in an incredibly close way. And that's just really, in my view, a fascinating nugget about nuance.

[00:06:00] Mark D’Arcy: I would've thought that there might have been a little bit of discomfort there, because if any single individual was the author of Margaret Thatcher's fall, it was Geoffrey Howe and that devastating speech he made, the opening batsman find their bats had been broken by the team captain before the match.

And there were a few other people in the House of Lords on the Conservative benches who have also been perhaps in her Cabinet who weren't particularly supporters of hers by the end, and who she may have thought had a role in her downfall. I mean, how did she get on with them? Was diplomatic relations restored?

[00:06:31] Peter Just: It's a really good question, is that. I think if I may, I'm gonna bat this back by talking about the relationship with Edward Heath. Because, when we get older, allegedly we get more mellow, don't we? I've yet to, I've yet to -

[00:06:40] Mark D’Arcy: Not so far.

[00:06:42] Peter Just: Indeed, but she went to an event in the House of Commons to mark Heath's 50th, I think it was his 50th anniversary as an MP, and Tony Benn said to her, it's very good of you to come and she said, oh, well, as you know, as you get old, you get mellow.

So I suspect she probably mellowed. I think she understood that her place in history was secure and for all of the scrapping and the arguing and all of the bitterness of her immediate loss of power, actually, as time went on, you know, she was iconic, wasn't she, as I said, her place was secure. And then when she became ill, did that affect her?

Who knows, we can't say can we, we shouldn't really speculate, but did that affect her view of people? Because actually some of the bitterness had gone and she was remembering the good times. Because actually, without Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, she wouldn't have been the Prime Minister what she was, would she?

[00:07:29] Mark D’Arcy: But you mentioned Edward Heath. And as an ex-Prime Minister, he was a royal, all singing, all dancing, fur-lined copper-bottomed nuisance to Margaret Thatcher, attacking her policies from the back benches quite a lot as an ex party leader, indeed, to the point where there was really quite a lot of venom directed towards him.

[00:07:48] Peter Just: Yes, and that is what she said was one of the reasons why she stood down from the Commons, because of the impact of her being still an MP on John Major. That of course, potentially would've made a huge difference, wouldn't it? During the passage of the Maastricht Bill, if she was still in the Commons.

[00:08:03] Mark D’Arcy: She would've been the ring leader against him, perhaps.

[00:08:05] Peter Just: Absolutely, and in a much bigger, much more physical way in that very confined space in the Commons than she was when she had people down at the Lords to try and berate them.

[00:08:14] Ruth Fox: That's interesting, isn't it, because although it's not recorded, she's not making those big speeches in Hansard once she's in the Lords, occasionally she intervenes, but relatively quiet in terms of her participation in the House, she might actually have been one of those peers that the Labour government would be ousting now for lack of participation. But she didn't participate that much, openly, publicly in the Chamber. She obviously wasn't on committees and that kind of thing, but she, as you say, she's a presence. She's there, she's holding meetings behind the scenes.

[00:08:45] Peter Just: Absolutely. And they caused John Major a huge, huge irritation. After she died, Michael Forsyth wrote, I quote it quite a bit in the book, an absolutely brilliant article about her, in the Telegraph or the Sunday Telegraph, and he went down to see her about these meetings because they were causing John Major so much angst. He described the reaction she gave him when he said, I've come to tell you to, you know, I'm concerned about your reputation, that you're gonna get attacked by the Government. And there was apparently a thermonuclear explosion. I think the issue on Maastricht for her, it was so existential, wasn't it, for the future of the country, for the future of parliamentary sovereignty, that she thought that this was an issue that demanded she do what she actually did. It's really interesting because she spoke so infrequently on it. I wonder if some of that was because actually she was very, very busy during that period trying to finalise the first volume of her memoirs. And had she not actually had her memoirs to finalise, she would've been freer. Would she have actually intervened more in the Lords? We can never tell. She may have done.

[00:09:47] Mark D’Arcy: Because she was a challenge to the Major Government on all sorts of different levels. Not only was she orchestrating back bench rebellions on Maastricht and stiffening the spines of Conservative MPs to vote against their Government, but she was also a challenge on the ideological level because her Government had been one thing and the Major Government was drifting away from it. She felt that the flame was not being kept by her successor, despite her famous remark that she was a very good backseat driver, she wasn't backseat driving John Major's Government.

[00:10:18] Peter Just: No. In her defence and I'm not here to defend her, my book is just about the things she did, I think the people who rebelled on Maastricht, yes, she gave them encouragement, but at the end of the day, they were responsible for how they acted. They were responsible for how they voted. It's really interesting because if you compare her actions on that with her actions on Bosnia, which were equally critical, if not even more critical of the Major Government, she found an echo in the House of Commons that was very, very tiny, if at all, in comparison with Maastricht, because actually on Maastricht there were so many Conservative MPs who agreed with her position, on Bosnia they didn't.

[00:10:50] Ruth Fox: Can we just explain for listeners, Peter, what her position on Bosnia was, for younger listeners who are not familiar with the Balkan problems of the 1990s.

[00:10:59] Peter Just: Yes. This was the very unhappy breakup of what was Yugoslavia and on Bosnia. The Bosnian Muslims were essentially being exterminated by the Serbs, and she was very clear that this was very, very bad. She described it, and she's like, a little like an accomplice to massacre, her criticism of the West.

Essentially what she wanted was the Bosnian Muslims to have the arms embargo against them lifted so they could defend themselves and also support them through the targeted military strikes on Serbian positions. So she was a very lone, not the sole, lone voice, but there weren't very many people on the Conservative benches who agreed with her on this issue.

But she still caused Major difficulty just not quite in the same way as on Maastricht, because there weren't as many Tory MPs agreeing with that.

[00:11:42] Mark D’Arcy: And you've been rooting in the National Archives and found some actually very funny internal correspondence at this point where John Major has to go along to some Thatcher related event, where there's a lot of internal debate. Should he go? Will she make mischief? If the Prime Minister's there, will she somehow embarrass her successor?

[00:12:01] Peter Just: Yes, there was a dinner at Downing Street, a very, very jolly dinner at Downing Street in 1995 that John Major gave, and then there was a bigger thing at a hotel and the seating plan there, a memo went up to John Major and it was suggested that in the spirit of healing, I think is the expression, he might wish to sit between, I think it was Christine Hamilton and Rosemary Lamont.

And in the brackets a civil servant puts "joke" and John Major writes under it "bad one". So it is just, the whole of human life clearly is in the National Archives. But what's totally brilliant about the National Archives is we've spoken quite a lot about our criticisms of the Major Government, haven't we here? And that's what the public knew because that's what the public saw and that's what was reported. Actually, go and look in the National Archives. Even all of that time where she was being very publicly difficult to the Major Government, behind the scenes, she was actually being extremely helpful and useful.

So in 1991, a memo goes up to - very early in 1991 - a memo goes to one of the consulate generals in America from the British Embassy, and it describes her as, although she's no longer a member of the Government, she's clearly a major asset to Britain, which she was. And you see in the National Archives various letters going from Ministers to her saying about issues, political and commercial that she could promote on her visits.

We should give a shout out here immediately to Douglas Hurd, who, if there's one hero throughout the story of Margaret Thatcher's life after Downing Street, it is Douglas Hurd. Who was on the receiving end of quite a few imperious letters and probably sat through quite a few imperious meetings with her as an ex Prime Minister.

So all the time she's being critical publicly here around the globe, she's promoting our political and commercial interests, and as late as 1994, there's a memo goes around the Foreign Office about, we recognise here in the Foreign Office the value to Britain's foreign policy of her travels abroad. It's very interesting, isn't it, about what you see and what…

[00:13:47] Ruth Fox: That was one of the things I found interesting, is the degree to which she was promoting British business abroad when she was on these trips. So she might be going to, say, a university or somewhere, to give a speech, but actually behind the scenes she'd be doing quite a lot of work on other days, promoting a British company, unless there were two British companies in competition with each other, in which case, she'd like to stay out of it.

[00:14:08] Peter Just: Absolutely, quite right. I was lucky enough to meet Sir Julian Seymour, actually, just a few days before he died and we talked about this, and he said that outside of America, one third of her time in the places she visited was spent on promoting British interests. So she would actually ask advice about what do you want me to do commercially? What do you wish me to do politically? And she, you know, she was very good at taking advice and briefs.

[00:14:28] Ruth Fox: Do former Prime Ministers get access to security briefings in the way that, for example, we know former Presidents and former senior officials in the American Government get? Because there's obviously been that debate about security access being withdrawn by the Trump Government from officials in the US. I don't know the answer to that.

[00:14:44] Peter Just: Neither do I. So I need to go and do some more research. Clearly I need to write…. I need to write another book. Clearly they have police security, or some of them do for a certain period of time. She was one who, for the rest of her life, continued to have security protection. In terms of what do they receive, it was thanks to her, wasn't it, that they eventually introduced the Public Duties Cost Allowance to help them fund their lives because they'd been Prime Minister. They have a role as a former Prime Minister. But in terms of the documents that they see, the answer is actually, I don't know. That's a good question for me to go and look at.

[00:15:14] Ruth Fox: But that's also interesting that she was instrumental in getting greater support for former Prime Ministers. And there's some wonderful anecdotes in your book about Sir Robin Butler, than the Head of the Civil Service, about how this is all negotiated. Because of course, John Major has to sign off on it.

[00:15:28] Peter Just: Indeed, indeed. Sir Robin Butler is also a person who deserves a huge amount of praise and, if Douglas Hurd is a political hero, I suspect the official hero is Lord Butler for having to, well, he was dealing with five of them at one time, wasn't he? Which is interesting. He met her very early in 1991 because actually she was so snowed under with correspondence, in the end she had to put a letter in The Times, to say "I can't respond to everything, I'm really sorry, but I've got too much". So he was instrumental in getting this allowance put forward. When it was first suggested to John Major, he was happy for options to be explored. And then when the options went up to him, he obviously took a rather different view because he thought it might be seen that he was lining up his own exit. And on one of the memos I think he writes the word jokes. But in a way she acted as a shop steward for former Prime Ministers. I think we've seen former Prime Ministers differently since her, just because of her pure star quality. The first one who was a woman, which I think we should never lose sight of. So actually in the still world of men, so I can say it, she just stood out. This demand that there was for her around the globe continued to give her a presence. But she herself very often spoke about the dignity of the office of a former Prime Minister.

And so again, for - we should say this, forgive me - for all of the criticism of John Major's policies, publicly always she was very supportive of his position of party Leader and Prime Minister, and so issued statements backing him as the Leader of the party and the Prime Minister from 1992 onwards.

[00:16:54] Mark D’Arcy: I suppose there's an interesting thought here that it's quite rare now for a British ex-Prime Minister to have the level of international clout that Margaret Thatcher enjoyed for quite a long period after she left office. I think you know, the Duke of Wellington, apparently after winning the Battle of Waterloo, was considered to be a great European power in his own right. Margaret Thatcher may not quite have had that status, but she was someone who was feted when she went to America. She did a eulogy at Ronald Reagan's funeral.

[00:17:23] Peter Just: Yes, indeed. I think she would robustly challenge you on that, if I may. When I was doing my original PhD research, I interviewed a member of her Government, in 2000, and he said to me she never lost her status as a world power, did she? So she would back up to you and say, I'm not bothered about being a European power.

[00:17:37] Mark D’Arcy: Quite a first strike capability maybe, but…

[00:17:39] Peter Just: Indeed. But she was a continuing world power, and when you look at them all, Churchill obviously was the same, but he was symbolic. The difference between Churchill and her, is that actually for so long after 1992 to about 2002 when she had effectively had to retire because she was ill, she continued to want to make a difference on policy.

So, although she always had a very symbolic role across the globe, she also had a very practical one, which is the difference with Churchill. And then after 2002, I talk about in the book actually, that's when her symbolic mythology and legendary status really, really are cemented. What would be interesting in the future is, what will our perceptions of Blair be as a former Prime Minister? Because even now, 18 years on, he's still trying to influence policies through his global institute. I mean, he's got a proper global role in a way that none of them previously have had in institutional terms.

[00:18:32] Mark D’Arcy: She did have a continuing role though in Conservative Party politics for a very long time. And remember her popping up to endorse William Hague's leadership bid against a joint leadership bid by her old Cabinet minister, Ken Clarke, and her old policy guru in Downing Street, John Redwood. So she endorsed Hague over those two and possibly made the difference.

[00:18:50] Peter Just: Absolutely. As she did in 2001 with Iain Duncan Smith. Obviously in those two, was it a question that she positively supported the people who ended up winning? Or was it that she had a particular view of the other candidate, which in this instance was Kenneth Clarke.

[00:19:04] Ruth Fox: Kenneth Clarke, yeah. She wasn't keen on his pro-European views.

[00:19:07] Peter Just: Indeed. And there's a really wonderful letter that she sent to the Telegraph in August 2001, endorsing Iain Duncan Smith, and she manages to use a quote from Oscar Wilde, which I thought was extremely interesting, about experience being the word we use to describe our mistakes, and it would've been quite refreshing for Ken Clarke to explain his mistakes because actually it was him who made them between 1990 and 1997, not Iain Duncan Smith. It's a really wonderful handbagging type of letter.

[00:19:29] Ruth Fox: You describe her post premiership years, though, as - her afterlife, beyond Downing Street - as a blend of high drama and low farce. So we've covered the high drama, but where does the low farce come in?

[00:19:42] Peter Just: The low farce is, what is it about this person that causes us, and then this becomes our responsibility, to have the reaction to her that we actually have.

So you see it in some of, when she was doing the general election campaigns in '92 and '97 and 2001, particularly in 1992, where the crowds would go mad. Because she was there, she was like a proper superstar. There's this wonderful leader in The Sun, which compares her to Madonna and Diana, Princess of Wales. It's really fantastic. And then in 1997, she goes to a Tesco and somebody's knees gave way as she arrives, and then somebody revealed that they'd named their dobermann Margaret after her. It's a really…

[00:20:18] Mark D’Arcy: A backhanded compliment.

[00:20:19] Peter Just: Indeed, but it's really fascinating about our reactions to her. There's not loads of it in the book. I touched on it, that even when she was ill after 2002, she would go and she would attend these parties and events and receptions all over the place. So there's a wonderful photograph of her with Vivienne Westwood, which was the story about, it was headlined, "The Ironed Ladies", and allegedly she once said to Vivienne Westwood, "Your clothes aren't for normal people, are they, dear?" That is totally wonderful. And there's a wonderful, wonderful photograph of her with Bob Geldof at the British Library for a reception, I think it was to do with Rudyard Kipling. And I thought he said something really perceptive in 2017 about her, that "there's this wide anarchic streak in the English, Margaret Thatcher was essentially Johnny Rotten in drag". But you watch her, you watch, I think it's extremely perceptive on many levels, but if you watch her from 1990 onwards, particularly during the general election campaigns, she herself is playing a role of Margaret Thatcher, isn't she? So that almost borders on the farcical side of things.

I remember this wonderful story in the book about when she went in 1992 to support John Whittingdale, I think it was. And one of the reporters said to her, do you think the campaign hasn't got enough oomph? And she turned around to me and said, "That's what I'm here for, dear." So she played up, didn't she, to this character that was very pantomime-esque.

[00:21:39] Ruth Fox: Yeah.

[00:21:39] Peter Just: And I think that's some of the farce is how she performed the role of Margaret Thatcher, whilst also we must never lose sight of the fact whilst also she was a person of pure substance. For all the showbusiness, there was, behind all of that, there was the substance.

[00:21:56] Mark D’Arcy: Did she ever contemplate a Second Coming? Was there ever a moment when Margaret Thatcher might have gone back into Downing Street?

[00:22:03] Peter Just: I think not. I think she knew, didn't she, she was out, and that she had one chance, and that was that.

[00:22:09] Mark D’Arcy: But there was this tremendous nostalgia amongst the party faithful, and certainly indeed at least a section of the Conservative MPs, to bring back Margaret Thatcher. And the feeling was that her defenestration had permanently scarred the Conservative Party.

[00:22:22] Peter Just: Yes. But again, on that, absolutely. That is one of the things isn't it. I mean, Chris Patten was the person, wasn't he, who said she ruined or destroyed, whatever the word was, she ruined the Conservative Party. Actually, no, she didn't. The people who did that were, she would say, the people who had brought her down, but then the people after that who continued to call her in aid for various, in inverted commas, 'nefarious purposes'. So I think we need to focus the responsibility on where the responsibility should be focused. Certainly she did things that in retrospect, maybe were bad and were not great, but actually lots of other people were calling her name in aid to do those type of things, and there was all the leaking, wasn't there, of her private conversations, which was not great. I wonder though, how many former Prime Ministers in the privacy of their own home or their dinner parties or amongst friends and family reflect whether or not things would be different if they were back there themselves? I'm sure it's part of human nature, that bit of Norma Desmond that we all probably have as human beings. Actually, you know, Prime Minister is probably even, even greater. And she was repeatedly during her life after Downing Street compared to Norma Desmond. But I mean, it was just her, wasn't it? Her old persona was that type of "everything would be better if I was still there", but I can't believe she seriously contemplated a return.

[00:23:33] Ruth Fox: And the myth in a sense of Margaret Thatcher persists. because even now, all these years on, every time we have a Conservative Party leadership campaign, the question of who's sort of the Thatcherite candidate, who's gonna be that kind of figure, a dominant figure for the leadership of the party, comes up.

You see it abroad. I mean, you touch on this a little bit in the book about how, for example, in Italy, a country that's had so many economic and political problems and crises and sort of comparable with Britain in the 1970s, and how Giorgia Meloni the new Prime Minister, not so new now, but at the time that she was first elected as Prime Minister in Italy, is compared, you know, will she be the Italian Thatcher?

You've had sort of French governments where people have sort of said, what we need is a Thatcher at the helm to battle the trade union domination of French politics and so on. So it kind of goes on and on, but actually in the Conservative Party, the reality of what she was and how she behaved and what her politics were is now somewhat removed from what people kind of absolutely assume it is, because she was incredibly pragmatic. But a lot of Conservatives forget that.

[00:24:41] Peter Just: I could not agree with you more. It's very bad when you all agree on a podcast, isn't? Anyway…

[00:24:45] Ruth Fox: It's a book. It's a book, Peter.

[00:24:48] Peter Just: I clearly could not agree with you more, I mean, throughout the book, and Julian Seymour stressed this to me when I met him, but I had already arrived at the conclusion myself, we need to look at her in the nuanced way that she actually was. For all the, "I'm this great ideologue", and "I'm this", and "I'm that", actually, fundamentally she was a sublime and supreme politician. I would go so far as to say she was probably our last proper Prime Minister in terms of being a proper substantial politician. We've lost sight of that. We've lost sight of her purpose when she was Prime Minister. We've lost sight of her skills in the job where she knew to avoid things. So she did u-turn. It's complete nonsense to say she never u-turned because of course, saying one day "fight on, I fight to win" and then resigning the next day is probably the biggest u-turn. But actually she was very good at avoiding needing to u-turn because she saw the problem in the coming and she avoided it. She knew some things she couldn't actually do at the time, she wanted to do them, she put them to one side. The classic example there is dealing with the miners. She waited and then actually the other great thing about her is she had the one thing that all politicians actually need, which was luck. And I think we lose sight of those three things. Her purpose, her skills, and the circumstances, i.e. the luck that she actually had, and we've lost sight of that essentially because of the way we have come to view her. After 1990, on all the Conservative leaders, but it's not just Conservative, it's also the Labour ones to be fair, bang on about her leadership, but don't then go on and display the same leadership skills that she had for so long as a Prime Minister and, actually, if she didn't have leadership skills, she wouldn't have been Prime Minister for 11½ years, would she, if she wasn't a supreme politician.

[00:26:21] Mark D’Arcy: I suppose what you've got now is the siren call of a Thatcher legend that doesn't really reflect how Margaret Thatcher governed, who she actually was. What you've got is this idea of a strong leader kicking aside opponents, "damn the torpedoes, I'm going for it". Which she never really quite was. She was, much as Ruth was saying, a much more cautious, much more pragmatic figure. But this lure to play that role, I think sometimes pulls potential successors down. Naming no particular Liz Truss.

[00:26:54] Peter Just: Poor Liz Truss, she's just an extreme example, isn't she, effectively, of all of them. They have all tried to role play Margaret Thatcher to a greater or lesser extent of whatever party they are. And you see in the book how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown reacted to her. And actually on that, we always think, don't we, about what she gave them. But actually what we should start to think about and I talk about a bit in the book, is actually what did Gordon Brown and Tony Blair give her in terms of credibility, by talking about her and aping her in the way that they did, that she wouldn't otherwise have had. But they all try and be her without actually understanding her. So I talk in the book about the person and the persona. They all pursue the persona. So few of them have actually properly studied and understood the person who, as you said, was completely cautious. She wouldn't have survived for 11½ years if she weren't astute politically, and cautious, would she, she just wouldn't.

[00:27:41] Mark D’Arcy: But she used to boast that Tony Blair was her finest achievement, or that Tony Blair's reformation of the Labour Party was her ultimate triumph.

[00:27:48] Peter Just: Indeed. And again, on that, I wonder, if I dare challenge her on that, if she was still here with her handbag functioning. I think we can over exaggerate that to the extent that certainly, when he resigned, she wrote to him and said about his support for ending the situation in the Balkans, i.e. the Kosovo War, and also our alliance with America. Would she have agreed with him on issues to do with the European Union? Clearly not. She clearly had some doubts about the policies around Northern Ireland. Had the Labour Party moved to where she was? Yes, absolutely. But clearly as well, we need to give credit to Neil Kinnock because some of that work had actually started under him, hadn't it? Tony Blair effectively just speeded it up and was much more comfortable talking about her than Kinnock ever would've been, or even John Smith would've been.

[00:28:38] Ruth Fox: One of the Prime Ministers we haven't talked about is Theresa May. Because she, as a former Prime Minister, is one of those Prime Ministers that is spending a lot more time in Parliament, is active in, was in the Commons in the final few years of her time as an MP, and now in the Lords. Obviously the second female Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher, and yet she's gone in a different way. Her reputation was not good when she left office, but maybe her participation in Parliament afterwards is helping restore that reputation. And also, of course, the fact that she was followed by Prime Ministers like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, which, um, she looks good by comparison, but she's sort of using Parliament in a different way, in ways that I think will help restore her reputation.

[00:29:28] Peter Just: Absolutely. She's a great concern to me, because I... About former Prime Ministers, remarkably we've had 50 of them and remarkably little has actually been written about them. Kevin Theakston wrote a book in 2010 looking at them all, from Walpole down to Blair, I think he ended with, and more recently, two academics I think you know, Louise Thompson and Alia Middleton wrote about their participation in the Commons, and I've written a couple of things before this book, so remarkably little is known about them. Theresa May is a brilliant example and is, in my view, seems to be going down the same road as Jim Callaghan, and why she's a concern to me is because my thesis has always been that Jim Callaghan was the most parliamentary active Prime Minister ever in British history, intervened In Parliament almost 500 times. If Theresa May continues to intervene as she does now, she is absolutely going to beat him. Her intervention rate in relation to other former Prime Ministers in the Commons was phenomenal. She was only Prime Minister, wasn't she, for three years. She's got unfinished work. When you look at the things she intervenes on, they are things that she started as Prime Minister and obviously she intervenes quite a lot on domestic policy issues, which will relate back to her time as Home Secretary. But absolutely, she is showing, isn't she, one way of being a former Prime Minister and continuing to serve her country in this parliamentary way. And the other person who actually we should give credit to because he's also extremely interesting, is Rishi Sunak. Up to now he is in that Callaghan / Theresa May mode, in a way that John Major was in those four years that he was in the Commons.

[00:30:55] Mark D’Arcy: And surely it is good for Parliament to have at least a handful of people who've been in Downing Street who face those big lonely decisions in Downing Street and are still there to give the benefit of their experience, good or ill, to the wider House of Commons or House of Lords.

[00:31:11] Peter Just: Absolutely. You are totally correct. Again, we mentioned it before, but Margaret Thatcher intervened in Parliament just 15 times, towards the end of her life when she was ill, she would turn up quite a lot to attend votes, but even someone like that who intervened so rarely in Parliament, still felt it was important to be a member of one of the Houses.

[00:31:26] Mark D’Arcy: I suppose you don't have to be there making speeches. You can be there whispering into the shell-like ears of other people.

[00:31:33] Peter Just: Absolutely that. If I may, I think you're old enough to remember Ted Graham, who was Chief Whip for the Labour Party in the Lords, and I interviewed him way back in the late 1990s about, particularly about Jim Callaghan, and he said "He'd come up to me every now and then, because he'd recognised the position I had and he'd say to me, let's have a chat. So we'd sit in the division lobby." That is probably what we've lost, isn't it? It is something I want to look at more about. Does it make a difference if a Prime Minister is no longer in Parliament but engages with it?

So, for instance, Blair, Brown and Major have all given evidence to select committees. They all have clearly contacts, private contacts, with MPs and with Lords. But is this something qualitatively different to their engagement with Parliament if they're not a member of it? And actually, to broaden out what you've said, I think it's the case, isn't it, as well that Cabinet ministers don't go to the Lords either in the way that they used to go. So you are right. We are losing some of that experience and expertise of actually governing and the process of Government. And is that actually making things better? Or is it making things worse? You would imagine now with a House full of new MPs, they might benefit from the wisdom of - perceived wisdom sometimes - of former Prime Ministers and former Cabinet Ministers.

[00:32:42] Mark D’Arcy: Well, Peter Just, it's been a fascinating excursion down the little travelled road of the world of ex-Prime Ministers. Thanks very much indeed for joining us on Parliament Matters.

[00:32:51] Peter Just: Thank you very much for having me.

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[00:33:28] Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at @HansardSociety.

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