The late Queen has been described as the “only person Margaret Thatcher feared”, leading to the late Prime Minister having to undertake one surprising thing every time she met her.
According to Julian Haviland, a former political editor of The Times, Margaret Thatcher was so nervous to meet the late Queen, that she had to down a whiskey or two before each meeting.
Speaking of the pair’s apparent tense relationship, Mr Haviland revealed that the former Prime Minister had “quite a capacity” when it came to drinking that she would drown her nerves with alcohol.
Margaret Thatcher was the late Queen’s eighth Prime Minister during her 70-year long reign.
In an interview recorded shortly before his death, Mr Haviland said: “The one person in the world of whom Margaret Thatcher was frightened was the Queen.”
Mr Haviland, who worked for The Times between 1981 and 1986, recalled a moment when Margaret Thatcher met with the Queen for a meeting at Downing Street.
Speaking of the meeting, and her downing “an extremely large scotch”, he said, at the time, he thought it was because he had “shaken her a little”.
Recalling the memory, his own editor Charles Douglas-Home said to him: “It was Tuesday at 5pm and her next engagement was her weekly audience with the Queen.”
During seven-decade reign, the late Queen took on 15 Prime Ministers.
Her tense relationship with Margaret Thatcher sometimes appeared to hit the headlines, with one report by The Times speaking on the Queen’s thoughts of Margaret Thatcher’s approach to politics.
The report, which was from 1986, said that the Queen found her politics to be “uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive”.
In 1985, a diary entry by newspaper diarist Kenneth Rose said that the Queen took a not-so-positive view on Margaret Thatcher.
It read: “She stays too long and talks too much. She has lived too long among men.”
Files from 2017, that were previously not present, also claimed that the Queen was left enraged by the Prime Minister over her plans for defying Commonwealth leaders in a vote over apartheid, where she refused to back tougher sanctions on South Africa.
Reporting back to Dublin, an Irish diplomat said: “There is a wide view too that the Queen is in a rage with Mrs Thatcher over her handling of the sanctions (the Queen, it is said, sees the insensitivity as further damaging ‘her’ Commonwealth at a sensitive time).”
Despite their differences, the Queen did attend Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013.
