A Lioness in Winter, Margaret Thatcher Is Restless in Her Den

Except for a lecture circuit foray into the United States, it has been the cruelest of seasons for Margaret Thatcher, a lioness in winter.

Spring holds little promise of better times.

Friends say the former British prime minister is coming to grips with frustration and anger, but a gaping void exists for the woman who dominated Britain for 11 1/2 years and was a leading figure on the world stage for all that time.

Her days of glory ended abruptly last November when she was toppled after a revolt within her governing Conservative Party.

It is unlikely that work for the Margaret Thatcher Foundation she is organizing to promote her free-market philosophies or her lectures in the United States can match the heady time of her power.

“She’s looking for something new and she hasn’t found it,” says her former press secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham. “She’s lost an empire and has yet to find a role.”

The party, the government and most voters appear relieved that “Battling Maggie” retreated to the wings.

The Tories’ poll ratings zoomed from 15 points behind the Labor Party during her last year in office to nearly 10 points ahead in the first three months after she lost power. Labor drew even or went about 5 points ahead after the Persian Gulf War.

Her successor, the quiet, diffident-sounding John Major, achieved a 59% approval rating during the war in which Britain was an active partner with the United States. Thatcher peaked at 53% after winning a second term in 1983.

Part of Major’s attraction is just not being her, polls say. A Gallup Poll asking voters to compare them showed that Major scored heavily on qualities such as willingness to listen, friendliness and understanding their problems. Thatcher was ahead on strength of personality.

Thatcher, 65, was dumped by legislators because they feared she would lead them to defeat at the next election.

It was a combination of the so-called poll tax, her unpopular new local government tax; her increasing isolation in the European Community; her autocratic style, and the enemies within the party that longtime leaders acquire.

“They got scared. Absurd,” Thatcher said in an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC during her U.S. trip in March.

Or, as she told the 250 local Conservatives who packed into a church hall for the annual meeting of her north London constituency of Finchley: “I’m still around.”

“I think it would be a terribly good thing for the Conservative Party to have a senior elder statesman, especially a matriarch to stand behind our present prime minister,” she added.

That was more the vintage Thatcher--resilient, brave, defiant or angry. Just occasionally the pain shows through, friends say.

Thatcher’s trip to collect the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, was a sort of emergence from self-imposed seclusion.

In Britain, she seldom goes to the House of Commons. When she does, she appears ill at ease crammed into one of the back benches with the party’s rank and file.

The traditional seat for ex-prime ministers, a corner seat below the gangway that separates the House, is already embarrassingly full--occupied by the unforgiving figure of Edward Heath, whom she ousted in 1975 as party leader.

“We miss her desperately,” says Matthew Parris, satirist and parliamentary commentator for the London Times.

“She was a larger-than-life figure who always lived up to our expectations. She’d make a joke, go off the deep end, be rude to someone. . . . John Major simply refuses to make enemies or make an exhibition of himself. We’re in a state of crisis.”

But it’s not just the seating that keeps Thatcher away. It’s the whole situation.

Friends say she genuinely does not want to carp at 47-year-old Major, her choice to succeed her after she accepted defeat.

But increasingly Thatcherism is under attack. She complained recently of a “tendency to undermine what I have achieved.”

Now, with the poll tax killed off in mid-March, some commentators are bracing gleefully for Thatcher to speak out. “We’re simply waiting for Krakatoa to erupt,” columnisW. Johnson wrote in the left-wing weekly New Statesman and Society.

Dumping the poll tax, a deeply unpopular local tax, was a U-turn and a final acknowledgement that Thatcher had made a mistake.

Major’s speeches are littered with un-Thatcherite references to “social markets.” The annual spring budget included increased state benefits for children and trimmed tax breaks for the better-off.

Her ideological commitments were clear; Major’s are still debated. Her presence was formidable and forbidding; he still seems deferential and, despite his gray hair, boyish.

Thatcher thrived on confrontation--with labor unions, with opponents of her defense policies, with the moderate, “wet” tendency within her own party. Isolation only increased her sense of rightness, and she admitted thriving on the adrenaline that came from being in a fight and knowing “you’re on your own now.”

Major, in tackling the poll tax, launched a prolonged round of consultations within the government and the party, and was content to let a subordinate, Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine, take the lead. In foreign policy, Major also seems to be allowing Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd to run the show.

In America, Thatcher fulminated against German domination in Europe, just before Major went to Bonn to mend fences with Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

Loyalists rally ‘round, and pressure groups with her as president have sprung up in the party--groups with such evocative names as the Conservative Way Forward “to keep alive her vision” and No Turning Back.

She has become president of the Conservative Way Forward and of the Bruges Group of Tory legislators and academics who bitterly oppose the European Community’s drive toward a federal-type Europe.

However, Sir Fergus Montgomery, a legislator who helped run her campaign to oust Heath, says he does not see a Thatcher group fomenting rebellion in the party.

“God knows she’s had enough to put up with from the previous leader of the party, who’s behaved disgracefully,” he said. “It’s simply not in her to do that sort of thing.”

Thatcher chose to return to the spotlight in the United States, the country she most admires and where the admiration is widely reciprocated.

Britain deals its political leaders a swift and brutal end compared to the precisely scheduled retirements and lavish benefits of U.S. presidents.

She gets a pension of $31,675, about what a senior secretary makes in London. In addition, from April 1 there’s a new annual allowance of $52,600 for all ex-prime ministers for office expenses.

She also gets a dingy office in the Commons as long as she is still a member, and bodyguards and a bulletproof limousine for life.

A former Conservative Party treasurer, Lord McAlpine, has lent her a suite of offices near the Commons.

Thatcher and her husband, Denis, at first retired to a home they had owned for years in suburban Dulwich. Within a month, they were back in London, in an apartment borrowed from a friend.

Denis Thatcher, immensely proud of his wife and used to her 16-hour days, is having to adjust too.

“He has always taken an active interest in our operation, but now he’s spending more time with us,” said Tim Penfold, a director of Attwoods waste disposal company where Thatcher is deputy chairman.

One intimate says Thatcher can’t get down to writing her memoirs.

“She keeps talking about all kinds of things, like what sort of computer system she will have, but she doesn’t get started,” he said.

Nor has she decided whether to resign her seat in the Commons, take a title and sit in the unelected House of Lords.

Since returning from America, she has been inundated with speaking invitations but has not yet accepted any, said her spokesman, Abel Hadden.

Her hero, Winston Churchill, lost an election immediately after leading Britain through World War II. But nothing quite like the Thatcher downfall has happened in this century: a prime minister in good health with a big parliamentary majority ditched by her party.

And that’s the hardest part. Even now, as she told Barbara Walters, she hears the phone ring and “immediately you think, ‘Oh, goodness, the United Nations is sitting’--and then you realize it’s no longer you anymore.”