Thatcher’s Wordsmiths
Margaret Thatcher struggled to write her own speeches. Who put the words in her mouth?
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?
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