Peter Gregson: Civil servant who urged Thatcher to amass the huge coal stocks that helped to thwart the 1984 miners' strike

Gregson had avowed a sense of 'deep depression' at Heath’s giving in to the miners in 1972

Intellectual muscle: Gregson in 1988 (Photoshot)

The civil servant Peter Gregson supplied the intellectual muscle that allowed Margaret Thatcher to defeat the miners’ strike led by Arthur Scargill in 1984. He counselled the building up of stocks of coal at power stations over many months. This meant that the government could hold out against strikers’ demands, sure in the knowledge that the dispute would not put the nation’s lights out. Gregson later became Permanent Secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry.

The strike proved to be the turning point at which trades union power in Britain, of which the miners had long been the aristocrats, would be broken.

Three years previously, in February 1981, the government had retreated from confrontation over proposed pit closures, considered necessary in the face of operating losses, by some reckonings, of just over £3 per tonne of coal, and a sale price 25 per cent above the international market rate.

Instead, it quickly began to work out how best to handle the crisis everyone knew was coming, and in June 1981 Gregson was appointed deputy secretary in the Cabinet Office with a brief to advise on the economy. He brought to the job long experience of earlier governments’ attempts to reform Britain’s failing industrial sector, as a civil servant since 1961 in the Board of Trade, the Department of Trade and Industry, and, from 1975 until 1977, as secretary to the Labour government’s National Enterprise Board. Gregson had also been Private Secretary both to Harold Wilson and to Edward Heath when each was Prime Minister, between 1968 and 1972.

In 1981, Gregson was made chairman of an official group focusing on preparation of the coal industry in case a strike should break out, and was also put in charge of the work the Cabinet Office was doing on trades union reform. At the time, industrial troubles were compounded by riots in cities including Liverpool.

Gregson had avowed a sense of “deep depression” at Heath’s giving in to the miners in 1972, and was keen for a strategic approach. By autumn 1983 he reported that stocks of coal at power stations were almost as high as storage capacity allowed – giving the government the all-important “endurance”, or means to sit out a strike. He wrote to Thatcher on 14 September 1983: “There is no case for making a special effort to avoid a miners’ strike this year in particular.”

The miners did not strike until March the following year. By May 1984,when Ian (later Sir Ian) MacGregor, the National Coal Board chairman, appeared to be on the point of giving way, Gregson warned Thatcher: “the Government has too much at stake to allow the NCB a completely free hand.”

By July, when progress seemed to have stalled, he furnished Thatcher with a triple plan: of getting more men back to work; presenting Scargill as a bully with anti-democratic motives; and extending “endurance” through high coal stocks. If that did not work, Gregson told her, it might be time to start closing pits and bringing in imported coal.

So important was Gregson that when Thatcher cut short her summer holiday that August to rush home and fret about the strike, he was at once summoned to No 10. He had been enjoying a day up a ladder looking after his apple trees in his garden. He reassured her that things were not going wrong.

The strike eventually crumbled, with more and more men going back to work, and ended in March 1985. Gregson chaired the group that composed a report on it.

In June 1985 he was made Permanent Under-Secretary at the Department of Energy until 1989, thereafter reaching the top as the DTI’s civil service chief, before being appointed GCB on his retirement in 1996.

A scholarship boy from a family of modest means, Gregson himself grew up in one of the miners’ heartlands, Nottinghamshire. He won a place at the independent Nottingham High School, then took a further scholarship to Balliol, Oxford, to read classics.

His brilliance gave him entrée to the exclusive Leonardo Society, a group of 15 undergraduates who met every second Friday in term time to read and discuss papers on the sciences or the arts. His contribution is immortalized in Up at Oxford, a memoir published in 1992 by his acquaintance and fellow Balliol man, the Indian writer Ved Mehta. On one occasion, Mehta recalls, the youthful Gregson suggested one of their number offer a paper on wine-tasting, and “bring a lot of wine”. Gregson then held forth about ancient philosophy: “one shouldn’t overrate (it)… for instance, the ancient philosophers were foxed by Zeno’s conundrum of the race between Achilles and the tortoise.”

Gregson graduated in 1959 with a double First in Mods and Greats (Classics). He did his national service as a 2nd lieutenant with the Royal Army Educational Corps attached to the Sherwood Foresters, then joined the Board of Trade in 1961 as an assistant principal. Two years later, his talents gained him the position of Private Secretary to the Minister of State. He was promoted principal in 1965.

He never married, and lived for many years in Beckenham, Kent. In retirement he was vice-chairman of the Beckenham Decorative and Fine Arts Society.

ANNE KELENY

Peter Gregson, civil servant: born Haworth, West Yorkshire 28 June 1936; CB 1983; GCB 1996; KCB 1988; died Kent 12 December 2015.