Thatcher’s Wordsmiths

On 8 October 1982 Margaret Thatcher told the Conservative Party Conference that ‘the National Health Service is safe with us’. This would prove to be among her most memorable lines. However, as Ferdinand Mount, later appointed to Thatcher’s policy unit, remembered in his 2008 memoir: ‘It was not what she wished to say.’ As a result, ‘it came out in the listless drone of a hostage reading a statement prepared by her captors – which is what it was’.

Mount’s depiction of Thatcher as a ‘hostage’ stands in stark contrast to her usual image as the ‘Iron Lady’. It raises questions about the authenticity of her conference speeches and, by default, the positions they articulated. Were Thatcher’s words her own? If not, who wrote them, and what implication did this have for the shaping of her policies?

Seven years earlier, in 1975, the playwright Ronnie Millar was in his London flat in bed, suffering from a hangover. At 9am he was roused from his sleep by Caroline Stephens, Thatcher’s diary secretary, who thrust a typewriter at him and instructed him to rescue the script that Thatcher had attempted to write and was due to deliver in two days’ time to the Conservative Party Conference. Millar was caught by surprise. Though he had written for Thatcher’s predecessor Edward Heath, he had not previously contributed to any of Thatcher’s major speeches. The following morning Millar joined a group of fellow speechwriters, or ‘wordsmiths’ as Thatcher preferred to call them, to work on the speech in her hotel in Blackpool. Millar continued honing the speech until minutes before it was delivered.

Thatcher’s ‘Blackpool experience’ made her realise, as she admitted to one of her speechwriters, that she found writing speeches from scratch ‘awkward’ and ‘difficult’. Consequently her 1975 speech, her first as leader of the Conservative Party, was the last she would attempt to write alone.

From 1975 to 1990 the majority of Thatcher’s set-piece speeches, including her conference speeches, were written not by a small team of speechwriters (as was the case for Heath), but by a vast panoply of wordsmiths. Thatcher relied on 28 in opposition alone and many more while prime minister.

Despite her later suggestions to the contrary, the recruitment of so many wordsmiths was driven not by a systematic speechwriting approach, but by Thatcher’s realisation that she was ‘in need of help’. As a result, she cultivated an eclectic group with a wide variety of backgrounds, education, and political allegiance; they included both ex-communists and dedicated ‘Thatcherites’. Some, including Millar, became enduring fixtures in the team. It was Millar who drafted some of Thatcher’s most memorable phrases, such as her reciting of the Prayer of St Francis of Assisi in 1979 and her declaration that the ‘lady is not for turning’ in 1980. Other writers would be recruited on a whim, and then rejected.

Thatcher’s promise to protect the NHS in 1982 was written by the Conservative MP John Gummer, a surprising choice given that Gummer was viewed as a leading ‘wet’, mistakenly suspected by the whips of being the author of a letter, published in the Observer, in which Thatcher was accused, among other things, of being ‘didactic, tart and obstinate’. Yet Thatcher found Gummer a good speechwriter.

Her adviser Alfred Sherman recalled that ‘doctrinal disputes’ would be fought out during speechwriting sessions. This created chaotic scenes as speechwriters vied for influence. Mount remembered an occasion when Gummer had successfully lobbied for Millar to be excluded from a speechwriting session. Millar turned up regardless. His arrival prompted Thatcher to hide behind a sofa, where she remained until he retreated. Whether this anecdote is accurate or not, it nonetheless serves to illustrate that the speechwriting process was understood as a factional affair.  It was not unknown for one speechwriter to return from their lunch break to find that a competitor had surreptitiously rewritten parts of a draft. John Hoskyns resigned from leading Thatcher’s policy unit in part because he struggled to exert influence over Thatcher’s 1983 conference speech, and so was unable to advance his preferred ‘Thatcherite’ agenda.

That Thatcher recalled being ‘forced’ by speechwriters to advance a line at odds with her own beliefs would seem to suggest that her speeches often articulated a position with which she was uncomfortable. Mount’s suggestion that Thatcher’s speechwriters could act as her ‘captors’ seems to ring true. This is not entirely the case, however. Though wordsmiths may have understood the act of speechwriting as being a politicised process, Thatcher did not. To her, speechwriters were ‘dental technicians’, providing an answer to a prosaic problem – the need to write speeches. Heath’s speechwriters were passed to Thatcher like ‘baubles’, retained by the new leader not for their ideological allegiance but for their ‘ability to write’. Thatcher was uninterested in ideology when it came to recruiting her speechwriting team.

Though Thatcher struggled to write her own words, she nonetheless took great interest in the writing process. A typical week in 1985 included approximately seven-and-a-half hours of speechwriting, and five hours of preparation for PMQs. During these hours Thatcher would scrutinise every word of a script. Early drafts would be consigned to the bin, and a rewrite would be demanded. Surviving drafts, now held in the archive of Churchill College, Cambridge, have ‘This is not a script for me’, scrawled in the margins in blue felt tip pen, and ‘Oh no! No, that won’t do at all’.

Thatcher may not have agreed with the sentiment of Gummer’s line that ‘the National Health Service is safe with us’; she had told the Cabinet that they ‘must not duck’ discussions about reforming the NHS. Yet any sense of ‘unease’ was overcome by her knowing that, politically, she had to say it, and did so willingly. A month earlier a report had been circulated before the Cabinet which discussed long-term options for funding the NHS, including the introduction of private health insurance. Ministers, recognising the potential toxicity of the arguments contained in the report, insisted that the ensuing discussion should not be minuted. The report was leaked and covered in the Economist and Thatcher was forced to publicly respond.

Thatcher did indeed say words with which she did not agree, which affected the policy agenda, and which were written by others. But a hostage to her speechwriting captors she was not.

Tom Hurst is the author of Making Speeches: The Speechmaking of Margaret Thatcher, 1975-1990 (Bloomsbury, 2025).