The Last Canadian Knight by Gordon Pitts

Author:Gordon Pitts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Published: 2017-07-25T15:22:17+00:00

Chapter 12

Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Day

“Now, Mr. Day, you sit here.”

Graham Day remembers those words from one of the first times he was summoned to 10 Downing Street. He had regularly met with the prime minister during his stint at British Shipbuilders, but the meetings would be more frequent and intense at Leyland. It represented, to Thatcher, the failure of top-down British industrial policy and labour intransigence. Leyland also had large implications for British trade and employment and, until Day’s arrival, had been a money pit for the government. So she paid a lot of attention to it.

They met in her sitting room, and Thatcher pointed to the chair at her left. Henceforth, he would sit in that chair. She proceeded to grill him on his plans to turn the auto company around. The questions were very specific, but he was new in his job and he had to give general answers: “I don’t know about that yet.” “Here are the things I think are the most important.” “These are the things I’m drilling down on.” But she was impatient, pointing out that Leyland’s previous bosses had constantly asked for money for things that never panned out.

He admitted he wasn’t sure where the exact truth lay. Maybe in the next couple of months he would know, and then he would tell her. “Whatever I tell you, even if I’m wrong, it will be what I believe to be the truth,” he remembers saying.

He came out of the session shell-shocked. About a month later, there was another meeting at No. 10—the same tough questioning about detailed projections. Emerging from the relentless assault, Day asked the civil servant accompanying him if he would face this kind of beating every time. The bureaucrat doubted there would be another meeting like this. Day should understand, he said, that her greatest fear was that he would tell her what he thought she wanted to hear, not what Day believed. “She may not agree with what you believe, but she is desperate to know what you really believe.”

He passed the test. He never faced another grilling of that intensity, and Thatcher came to appreciate the wry Canadian who told the truth. It was a durable relationship of mutual admiration and respect that continued through the most important decade of Graham Day’s life.

They were an odd couple: a shopkeeper’s daughter from the Midlands who had taken chemistry at Oxford and been drawn into Conservative politics; and a shopkeeper’s son from Halifax who combined a smooth baritone voice with a love of opera and the arts. But to the British establishment, he was, like her, an outsider. The upper echelons of British government and business were dominated by old boys from public schools (private schools, in Canadian terminology), graduates of elite Oxford and Cambridge, and members of the best clubs. She was an Oxford grad, but not one of them. And he was a rough-hewn colonial.

The men Thatcher enlisted to run the state companies often hailed from outside the classic establishment mould.

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