Thatcher’s ‘Anonymous Source’ Goes Public With His ‘Kill the Messenger’ Memoirs

He was the most anonymous--and perhaps powerful--of men. He was a British official who could affect the affairs of this nation, its allies, and its enemies. But, for all intents and purposes, for the 11 years of Thatcherism he did not exist.

Now he has gone public. The eminence producing “The Iron Lady” is the celebrity of the moment. His biography “Kill the Messenger” of his years in 10 Downing Street is causing a political sensation.

Bernard Ingham was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s anonymous spokesman. Under the British system, what he said was off the record. But his views were reported around the world. Thatcher “was understood” to support such a policy. She “had let it be known” that she favored so and so.

More than anyone else, he was attuned to Thatcher’s political priorities and proclivities. What she thought, he relayed with authority. He invented Thatcher’s famous description of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev as “someone we can do business with.”

But not all Ingham’s interventions were as benevolent or positive. He attracted the reputation of being a political assassin, a hired hand who would stab an out-of-favor minister in the back as soon as look at him. During the 1980s he was known as the second most powerful person in the land.

He dismissed, with discreet declamation, one wavering Cabinet member as “semi-detached,” and reacted to another minister’s pessimism by disparagingly saying, in his broad Yorkshire brogue, “It’s being so cheerful as keeps him going.”

He has now denied that his assessments masked Thatcher’s view of either of them, and says: “The notion that she implicitly licensed me to rubbish ministers is rubbish.”

He has even apologized for his acidic asides, saying that as a civil servant he should have withheld judgment of politicians, but not without waspishly adding: “Each of the remarks was all the more offensive for being accurate.”

Another of his targets was perceived to be Sir Geoffrey Howe, unceremoniously removed from the foreign secretary’s post to the largely honorary position of deputy prime minister. Ingham informed parliamentary correspondents of just how the deputy premier’s title was bestowed at the prime minister’s whim and was largely meaningless. His guidance added to Howe’s humiliation.

Howe’s revenge, months later, was to deliver the House of Commons indictment of the government’s hostility to European unity that finally forced Thatcher to put her leadership of the Conservative party to a fateful vote.

The previously most sensitive issue he handled was what is known as the Westland Affair. It involved the takeover of the British Westland helicopter company. Most of the Cabinet, including Thatcher, favored it being acquired by the U.S.-based Sikorsky group.

But the then-Defense Minister Michael Heseltine wanted it to be part of a European consortium. Heseltine lost the argument and stormed out of the Cabinet meeting--and the government. It was a political sensation here.

Such single-minded obsession, in Ingham’s mind, disqualified Heseltine from future consideration of ever becoming prime minister. This did not stop Heseltine from launching the leadership challenge in the wake of Howe’s Commons speech that led to Thatcher’s downfall last autumn, although it did not bring him the premiership.

The Cabinet Office, which has the right of censorship over the recollections of civil servants like Ingham, deleted his judgment on Heseltine from his book as being too politically sensitive. But that did not stop him from decrying the behavior of Heseltine, now environmental secretary, in a recent television interview.

The interview was the first public on-the-record statement of a man whose reputation was built on private utterances.

In one of the most touching recollections, Ingham told of finding Thatcher in tears after she realized that she would have to resign.