The Chamber places Members in face to face confrontations with their antagonists in opposition parties, separated only by the distance of one sword’s length, lulling the unwary into complacency and into forgetting that the greatest danger is always but a dagger’s length away, on the benches behind.
Michael Dobbs, House of Cards (1989)
When the history of the 1980s is written, the name Margaret Thatcher will appear on every page.
The Sun (1990)
On her political gravestone will be the words: ‘She Went Too Far’.
Peter Jenkins in the Independent (1990)
Margaret Thatcher’s achievement in 1987 of being the first party leader of the twentieth century to win three consecutive general elections, and her subsequent record as the longest serving prime minister of modern times, took her into uncharted territory. She had become so firmly entrenched in Downing Street that it was hard for many to envisage a time when she would not be there. Unfortunately, she herself appeared to be amongst that number, and her third term was marked by a series of comments that suggested she had no intention of leaving.
As early as April 1986 she was telling her friend Woodrow Wyatt that: ‘As I go on in this job I sometimes think I can’t go because who on earth is there to succeed me.’ She made the same point publicly two years later in an interview with the Sunday Times: ‘I shall hang on until I believe there are people who can take the banner forward with the same commitment, belief, vision, strength and singleness of purpose.’ In November 1989 she hinted there was a limit even to her ambitions, when she told the Sunday Correspondent that it was unlikely she would fight a fifth general election, if she won the next one, but she swiftly retracted and insisted that she was: ‘Quite prepared to carry on, yes. But let us get the fourth one over first.’ She added, ‘I have said I am quite prepared to go on, by popular acclaim.’ In 1990 she went still further in a note of congratulations to the Sun, then celebrating the twenty-first anniversary of its ownership by Rupert Murdoch: ‘Your 21st anniversary offers tremendous encouragement to a prime minister eleven and a half years into office. The Sun has become a great British institution. If it can come up fresh and bubbling and vital every day for 21 years, then so can I. And I shall do so.’ As Norman Tebbit remarked: ‘What would she do if she weren’t prime minister? One doesn’t see her retiring to gardening or making marmalade.’ (There were echoes here of Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born, who dismissed her solicitor’s attempts to make her realize that she would have to sell the manor house: ‘Can you see me eking out my days listening to The Archers and waiting for the mobile library?’)
Amongst the rank and file of the Conservative Party, such single-minded determination was greeted with great enthusiasm, as the chants of ‘ten more years!’ at the 1989 conference demonstrated. Amongst her senior colleagues, however, every such pronouncement merely increased the misery and bitterness felt by those who had their own aspirations. Most of those who might reasonably have expected to be contenders for the succession – Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson, Norman Tebbit, Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd – were now in their late-fifties or early-sixties and perfectly capable of making the necessary calculations: even if she retired midway through a fourth term, it would probably be too late for them. By 1988 there was already media talk of the next leader coming from a younger generation represented by the health secretary Kenneth Clarke, by the Scottish secretary Malcolm Rifkind and by John Major, the chief secretary to the treasury. Nor was Thatcher’s dismissive attitude to her cabinet much appreciated: ‘Some time there will come along a person who can do it better than I can,’ she conceded. ‘And I’m always on the lookout. But I expect myself to do it for the fourth term.’
The length of her tenure was also causing disquiet on the backbenches. ‘That’s the trouble with governments which have been in a long time,’ noted Wyatt. ‘There are so many people who lose their jobs as ministers or think they ought to have been given jobs and haven’t been.’ That was perfectly true, but there was an additional, more personal element to Thatcher’s predicament.
She had always prided herself on being different from other politicians, trusting her instincts to be in tune with the section of the electorate that she represented, even if they were diametrically opposed to the prevailing political wisdom. She would make up policy and take up positions on the hoof, so that when, for example, as leader of the opposition, she had commented on Weekend World that mass immigration meant ‘People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture’, she had no concrete proposals to put forward on immigration, just a gut feeling that she was speaking for those whose votes she needed. But the longer she was in office, the less reliable those instincts became and the further she drifted from the everyday world of her core constituency. By 1989 the privatization programme had reached the selling off of the water and sewerage companies and, though the share issue was again oversubscribed, there was a suspicion that things might now have gone too far; there were reported to be twenty-five different brands of bottled water on sale in an average branch of Tesco (the top brands costing more per litre than petrol), but still it felt wrong that the water coming out of the kitchen tap should be owned by a private company. So unpopular was water privatization that even the newly moderate Labour Party had a policy against it, albeit phrased in the vague terms of promising to bring the industry back under ‘some form of public ownership’.
1989 was also the year in which the issue of identity cards for football supporters came to a head. Encouraged by the initiative of Luton Town’s chairman, the Conservative MP David Evans, who had introduced a members-only policy at the club, the idea had been floating around for some time and the government had brought forward legislation to make the carrying of an identity card compulsory for anyone attending a match in England or Wales. In the wake of the Hillsborough disaster, the Football Supporters Bill received renewed attention in the highest quarters: ‘It must be the end of terraces,’ commented Thatcher in the aftermath of the tragedy. ‘We must have seats and tickets only.’ The debate raged all year over whether such a proposal was either feasible or just, alienating many of those young men in the South-East who, like their fictional representative, Harry Enfield’s character Loadsamoney, might otherwise be found in the Thatcherite camp. Nor did the eventual abandonment of the Bill, when the Taylor Report on Hillsborough came down firmly against the idea, do anything to reassure suburban Conservatives.
But the prime minister’s problem was an issue of perception as much as it was of policy, a feeling that – like Edna Everage, who had started as a Melbourne housewife and become the grandest of all dames – Thatcher had lost contact with everyday reality. Or, to take another figure from popular culture, it was revealing that when in 1988 Alexis Colby, the character played by Joan Collins, ran for public office in Dynasty, her point of reference was Margaret Thatcher: the Queen Bitch of American soap should have had little in common with the grocer’s daughter from Grantham, but the comparison was no longer as implausible as it once might have been. As part of her preparation for the general elections in 1983 and 1987, Thatcher had packed her bags ready to leave office, a personal reminder not to take anything for granted; now she was seriously talking about what she would do when she won the election after next. The erection of gates to prevent access by the public to Downing Street, while a perfectly sensible security measure, somehow symbolized the distant status of a prime minister removed from the people. And when she announced in March 1989, on the birth of a child to her son, Mark, that ‘We have become a grandmother’, the use of the royal ‘we’ did little to reassure those of her supporters who worried that she was becoming hopelessly out of touch.
But then, as Alan Clark pointed out, it was hard to remain in touch after ‘a decade of motorcades, in every capital city in the world’. She ‘had become a remote figure,’ complained the equally loyal Teresa Gorman; ‘she had lost contact with her street-fighters on the back benches.’ By late 1989 even Brian Walden, one of her stoutest supporters in the media, was asking her in a television interview about rumours that she was ‘slightly off her trolley’, and Thatcher, when confronted with opinion polls that showed she might be respected but was nonetheless disliked, simply couldn’t understand why the nation still hadn’t warmed to her: ‘I don’t know why they don’t like me,’ she complained.
None of this, of course, would have amounted to very much if things were going well elsewhere, if the economy had been sound. But it wasn’t. The Lawson boom was fast running out of steam, inflation, unemployment and interest rates were on the rise again, and the Labour Party was opening up a 12-point lead in the opinion polls. The economy was going into recession and the tax receipts from North Sea oil, which had done so much to ease the government’s position at the start of the 1980s and to fund the tax cuts in the middle of the decade, had already peaked and were now falling fast. Even Thatcher’s most ardent fans were starting to lose faith; when the right-wing trio of Alan Clark, Ian Gow and Jonathan Aitken talked in the spring of 1990, the mood was one of gloom: ‘We were stuck with the same inflation rate as when we came into power in 1979. Ten, eleven years of endeavour,’ recorded Clark, ‘and nothing to show for it but the passage of time and the intrusions of age.’ Norman Lamont, who had followed Major as chief secretary to the treasury, was admitting privately that inflation wouldn’t be brought down below 5 per cent in time for the next election and that he thought the Conservatives would lose. ‘The PM and the government are in deep trouble,’ wrote Edwina Currie in her diary in November 1989; ‘our confidence seems to have gone.’
And behind the economy lurked two issues that were to have devastating consequences for Thatcher: the poll tax and Europe. Of these, it was the poll tax that played most strongly in the country, and the attitude towards Europe that fixated her senior colleagues.
If the 1983 Labour manifesto was the longest suicide note in history, then one of the shortest – at least in political terms – was surely to be found in the 1987 Conservative manifesto: ‘We will legislate in the first session of the new parliament to abolish the unfair domestic rating system and replace rates with a fairer Community Charge. This will be a fixed rate charge for local services paid by those over the age of eighteen, except the mentally ill and elderly people living in homes and hospitals.’
The system of the domestic rates, a local property tax that raised revenue for councils, was deeply disliked, partly at least because of its perceived injustices: a pensioner couple whose children had left home could pay more, because they lived in a bigger house, than a childless couple who were both in work and living in a flat down the road. Under Edward Heath a system of rates rebates for the poor had been introduced, but that too created its own difficulties; by the mid-1980s less than half the population were paying rates at all, with the figures disproportionately skewed across the country, some inner-city areas having just a fifth of people paying the full amount. From a Conservative perspective, this was simply unfair, creating a system of representation without taxation, so that the residents of an upmarket area such as Hampstead were obliged to subsidize the poorer parts of the London Borough of Camden while knowing that they would always be outvoted by those who lived on the council estates of Gospel Oak and Somers Town. This was no way, it was argued, to build any sense of civic pride and responsibility, rather this was the undemocratic rule of those who contributed nothing. ‘My father always said that everybody should pay something even if it’s only sixpence,’ insisted Thatcher.
There was also a coherent intellectual case to be made that the idea underpinning the rates was outdated. Created in the late nineteenth century, when local government was principally concerned with infrastructure improvements that were of greatest benefit to householders, a property tax had then been appropriate; now local services tended towards individuals and a change of taxation structure was therefore needed. But the root of the issue was simpler than this. Rates were, for most people, the only taxes that had to be paid directly – income tax was deducted at source, while VAT and other sales taxes were incorporated into retail prices, obscuring their scale – and as such they were resented in a way that no others were. This was largely why the Conservative government had introduced the concept of rate-capping earlier in the decade, but its own actions helped to exacerbate the problem; in 1979, central government had contributed 61 per cent of the budgets of local authorities, by 1990 that figure had fallen to 39 per cent, and local tax-payers had been alienated at every step of the way, still making monthly contributions and yet seeing services cut.
As early as 1979 Tom King, the then minister for local government, was suggesting that the rates might be replaced by a poll tax, a flat-rate charge made not on property but on people and, although it took some time to emerge, this was the system that was eventually adopted for that 1987 manifesto. Conscious that the term ‘poll tax’ was politically loaded (the last time such a levy had been imposed was in 1377 and had helped provoke the Peasants’ Revolt) other language was employed, first the residents’ charge, then the services charge, before the community charge was settled upon, though few took any notice and it became universally known as the poll tax. The Labour Party was opposed from the outset, with Jack Straw insisting in 1986 that it was the party’s job to ‘wake up the nation to its full, ugly implications very soon’, but that was easier said than done. The issue simply didn’t feature in the election campaign the following year, no matter how hard Labour pushed: ‘we tried three times, with three separate press conferences, to get the story launched,’ remembered Bryan Gould, ‘but the press would not touch it.’
The first to benefit from the new tax was Scotland in 1989, where there was a legal requirement to have a revaluation of properties for the rates. Fearful of the negative political fallout that would result from such a process (revaluations were never popular), Scottish Conservatives pressed instead for an early introduction of the poll tax; as clear a political example of the old adage about frying pans and fires as one could wish to find. A storm of protest ensued, and something more than protest, for in this instance there was a simple direct action that individuals could take: a refusal to pay. Opponents claimed that Scotland was being used as a guinea pig and, though this suggested a touching faith in the government’s willingness to change course if its policies proved unpopular, the resultant anger helped build a massive campaign aimed at non-registration and non-payment. It was led not by the Labour Party, which had decided not to resist too strongly – ‘It was clearly much more sensible to keep the pressure on the Tories by allowing popular anger to find its own expression,’ explained Gould – but by the much reviled Militant, making its last and greatest contribution to British politics. So successful was the movement, at both national and grassroots levels, that by the end of the first year it was being reported that half a million people in Scotland faced legal action for nonpayment and that ‘sheriff officers who go to value goods for sale to cover debts are often met with large demonstrations’.
While it remained in Scotland, however, the poll tax was unable to harm the Conservatives too seriously, even if this was simply because most of the damage had already been done. Having been the largest party in Scotland within living memory, the Tories in the region had been hit hard during the Thatcher years, losing another eleven parliamentary seats in 1987 and being reduced to a rump of just ten MPs, compared to Labour’s fifty and only just in front of the SDP/Liberal Alliance on nine. But the tax was due to turn up in England and Wales just a year later in April 1990 and there was much nervousness on the Conservative benches. The more politically astute figures at the top of the party were already aware that problems were looming, even if they could do little about it. Alan Clark reported that early in the parliament William Whitelaw had been asked by a colleague what he thought about the poll tax: ‘The great man stopped in his tracks, and glared. His shoulders heaved, went into rigor, his face became empurpled and sweat poured down his forehead, cheeks and the end of his nose. He wrestled with some deep impediment of speech; finally burst, spluttering out the single word – “TROUBLE”. Then he turned on his heel.’ Chris Patten, who was appointed environment secretary in July 1989 and was thus responsible for the implementation of the tax, commented simply to one of his junior ministers: ‘It’s not going to work, is it?’
Both Whitelaw and Patten could ultimately be counted upon to remain loyal, but a total of fifty-three Tory MPs, including Michael Heseltine as well as many veterans of local government, voted against their own government at one stage or more of the poll tax legislation as it passed through the Commons. In another place, a rebellion in the Lords was defeated only by a mighty effort on the whips’ part in dragging to the chamber hereditary peers who had seldom, if ever, seen the red benches; one debate produced the second largest number of votes that had ever been cast in the Lords, and there was a certain irony in the way that a measure intended to make a tier of government more accountable and democratic was forced through by the most unaccountable and undemocratic members of the entire political establishment.
The objections were numerous. First, there was the unfairness of an unavoidable tax that had no relation to the ability to pay; unlike, say, the BBC licence fee, which was similarly levied at a flat rate but which could be ignored if one chose not to own a television set, this could not legally be escaped, and every member of a local community was liable to the same bill (though there were discounts available to the very poorest). Obviously this meant that the wealthiest in society would face a substantial reduction in their liability and, coming immediately after the 1988 budget that had reduced the top rate of income tax from 60 to 40 per cent, it certainly gave the impression that the government was looking after the rich at the expense of everyone else: ‘The combination of the two was unfortunate, to say the least,’ admitted Nicholas Ridley, one of the few ardent enthusiasts for the new tax in cabinet. Second, there was a fear that the widespread rebellion in Scotland would spread south of the border: ‘The Rating and Valuation Association estimated there would be five million summonses a year for non-payment,’ noted Ian Gilmour. Third, there were democratic considerations that weighed heavy on some, including a suspicion that many people would fail to put their names on the electoral register in the hope of avoiding payment, though as Woodrow Wyatt pointed out, this wasn’t necessarily a major concern to the government: ‘As they will be those people most likely to vote Labour, it could be a benefit.’
Less noted at the time was the computer database that would be established. Emma Nicholson, then a Tory MP, was one of the few members with any experience in computing (she had been working in the industry as far back as the 1960s), and she worried about the way ‘knowledge about tax and savings, income and expenditure’ would be kept together on local authority computer systems that ‘had virtually no protection of any sort’. It wasn’t a concern that many of her colleagues appreciated, leaving her feeling that ‘we were demolishing a long-held bulwark against state power without either understanding what we were doing or even having a debate on it in parliament’. The state’s incompetence in the field of data protection was to become of ever greater concern in later years.
But above all these objections was one overriding complaint: most people would see a hefty increase in the amount they were asked to pay. ‘I am now inundated with letters about the new tax from horrified constituents who would have to pay five or six times as much as their rates,’ recorded Edwina Currie. ‘They are livid. For the first time, I’m beginning to wonder whether we will hold South Derbyshire.’ Far from benefiting the middle classes, who had always been portrayed as losers under the old rating system, the poll tax hit them disproportionately hard, a situation made worse by the fact that rebates were only available to those without any savings, and by the way that non-working married women were charged the full amount, effectively taxing a husband twice on a single income. The Conservative heartlands were likely to suffer.
And the introduction of this charge could hardly have come at a worse time. High interest rates were pushing up the cost of mortgages, and the large number of people who had bought their own homes for the first time during the Thatcher years, and might therefore be assumed to be favourably inclined towards the Tories, were amongst those most affected. Simultaneously, the relentless rise in house prices, on which the feelgood factor of the last few years had been based, slipped into reverse; the term ‘negative equity’, to describe a property worth less than the mortgage held on it, began to be heard for the first time. Amongst those hit was Thatcherism’s greatest cheerleader Kelvin MacKenzie, whose flat in Docklands had been bought at the height of the property market, and was now sold at a considerable loss.
Similarly personal debt, excluding mortgages, had doubled since 1981 as a function of the credit boom, leaving many families vulnerable to interest rate rises. During the consumer credit boom of the previous couple of years, wages had risen by 3 per cent per annum in real terms, while consumer debt was growing by 12.5 per cent. ‘Had the community charge been introduced during a period of modest and stable mortgage rates,’ wrote Bernard Ingham in his memoirs, ‘it would have been accepted.’ Whether he was right or not, the cumulative effect of this combination of factors was devastating on an already-fragile economy. Household spending was cut as hatches were battened down, and wage demands rose, fuelling the inflationary pressures already evident.
For the Labour Party the poll tax was, in the short term, a godsend. Its lead over the Conservatives stretched to 20 per cent, and the Mid-Staffordshire by-election, just ten days before the charge came into force in England and Wales, became effectively a single-issue referendum: Labour’s candidate Sylvia Heal overturned a huge Tory majority with a 20 per cent swing, the biggest movement of votes from Conservative to Labour for fifty years. Much less to the party’s taste was the spate of demonstrations through March 1990 at various town halls that frequently turned to violence. At an anti-poll tax meeting in Hackney, Paddy Ashdown found himself in the midst of a four-thousand-strong crowd engaged in a battle with the police: ‘No doubt about who was organizing this,’ he recorded. ‘Militant much in evidence, but a lot of anarchists as well. And the extreme unpleasantness and brutality on their faces was rather shocking.’ Other disturbances were reported not only in Lambeth and Haringey, but also in the most unlikely of towns, including Colchester, Taunton and Tunbridge Wells. This was emphatically not the image of the new responsible Labour Party that Neil Kinnock was anxious to project, and he was quick in his denunciation of ‘Toytown revolutionaries who pretend that the tax can be stopped and the government toppled by non-payment’.
The demonstrations culminated in a mass rally in Trafalgar Square on the eve of the tax’s introduction, attended by between two and three hundred thousand people (or forty thousand if the police were to be believed, for police figures had been straying further and further from reality all decade). And predictably it too turned to violence: riot police were in attendance, demonstrators threw placards and other missiles, mounted charges were made into the crowds, over three hundred were arrested, hundreds more injured, and small groups spent several happy hours rampaging through the West End and looting shops before things finally quietened down. Some Labour MPs turned up for the event, but they had mostly been the usual suspects from the left like Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway – all of them amongst the thirty members who had said they would join the non-payment campaign. The party leadership, on the other hand, merely joined in the traditional chorus of condemnation of violent protest, though it was still unable to offer any suggestions for alternative ways to challenge government policy, or even an alternative to the poll tax itself.
Probably the truth was that leaders of all the Westminster parties were genuinely taken aback by the scale of the anti-poll tax movement. After all the defeats of the previous ten years, it was largely assumed that resistance to Thatcherism was futile, but perhaps the difference this time was that the government had – whether through negligence, arrogance or stupidity – dreamt up a single policy that was capable of uniting the vast majority of the country. For the poll tax was deeply unpopular with almost everyone and, although most would not have expressed their objections by rioting, there was greater sympathy with the Trafalgar Square demonstrators than many commentators had expected. The complacency of the past few years was coming home to roost. As Mark Steel put it: ‘Thatcher, her minions, her press and her police were like a boxer who’s become too used to winning and doesn’t notice the hunger and speed of his next opponent, or the flab accumulating on his own stomach.’
Benn reported receiving just one hostile communication in the wake of the riots, an anonymous answerphone message saying: ‘You fucking cunt! Now you’ve lost the next election for us.’ Assuming that the man responsible was a Labour supporter, his analysis was probably wrong: Labour’s refusal to take any decisive role in the campaign was far more damaging to its prospects than were the actions of a handful of maverick MPs articulating the views of the electorate. The task of providing opposition to the government seemed to have slipped off the party’s agenda, and the lack of a clear lead was hardly inspiring; Kinnock had now spent longer in opposition than any of those who preceded him as Labour leader and he, like Thatcher, was looking as though he had run out of steam. The local elections that followed in May seemed to suggest opinions were hardening – in Scotland the Conservatives actually increased their share of the vote, but they were overtaken by the Scottish National Party, which supported the tactic of non-payment – and over the summer the Labour lead in the opinion polls began to fall.
While the streets were thus providing the setting for mass displays of anti-Thatcherite sentiments, the prime minister was suffering a series of blows in Westminster as well, all of them related in one way or another to the issue of Britain’s role in Europe. At its heart was the exchange rate mechanism (ERM) of the European Monetary System, a measure that was intended to stabilize the exchange rates of the participating currencies by tying them loosely to the value of the Deutschmark, with the intention that over time the ties might be tightened and a single currency would ultimately be introduced.
The ERM was launched in 1979 and, although the United Kingdom (suspicious as ever of all such initiatives, from the European Community itself through to the Eurovision Song Contest) declined the offer to be a founding member, it enjoyed establishment support from the beginning. Now is ‘a good time for Britain to join’ advised The Times as early as 1981 and by the middle of the decade, the chancellor Nigel Lawson too was an advocate. Even the Labour Party, as part of its repositioning, came round to supporting British membership, with its new economic team of John Smith and Gordon Brown hoping that, in the event of a Labour government ever coming to power in the future, it might thereby avoid the currency crises that had so regularly plagued its predecessors. But Thatcher remained adamantly opposed, seeing the ERM – quite correctly – as part of the federalist project that would see yet more power siphoned off from British institutions to a centralized Europe. Lawson responded by unofficially linking the value of the pound to the deutschmark, which seemed to be getting the worst of both worlds, tailoring Britain’s economic policy to the fluctuating exchange rate of a foreign currency, while having no reciprocal influence on the Bundesbank. Amongst the results were the unpredictable movements in interest rates that seldom reflected the needs of the British economy.
The deep division between prime minister and chancellor over such a major decision was damaging to the stability of the government, and in early 1988 Thatcher made it publicly clear that she didn’t approve of Lawson’s shadowing of the deutschmark. She went on to announce that Alan Walters, who had been her chief economic adviser in the early days, would be returning the following year to the same post after an absence of five years lecturing at Johns Hopkins University. This was generally understood to be an attempt by Thatcher to shore up her position in the dispute with Lawson, since Walters shared her opinion of the ERM (it was ‘half-baked,’ he commented), and was bound to end in tears, one way or another. ‘Walters is often right but is unbelievably tactless, and that all makes it harder for Nigel to back down,’ reflected Edwina Currie, as the splits became ever more open. Even Walters’ supporters were bound to admit that his dogmatic manner was not calculated to smooth ruffled feathers. ‘He was no politician,’ conceded Nicholas Ridley, himself not noticeably gifted in diplomacy; ‘indeed, he was a person who despised politics.’
By June 1989, as John Smith taunted Thatcher and Lawson in the Commons, singing the theme song from Neighbours (‘Neighbours should be there for another’) while they sat stony-faced opposite him, the situation had become politically untenable. The occasion was a debate on the European summit that month in Madrid, where – though this was not on public record at the time – both Lawson and Howe, now the foreign secretary, had threatened to resign unless Thatcher agreed a definite date for Britain’s entry into the ERM. She called their bluff and her private response was scorn personified: ‘My foreign secretary said if I didn’t commit myself to a date, he’d resign. Well, I didn’t commit myself, and he hasn’t resigned. What sort of foreign secretary have I got?’ she sneered. Instead she reshuffled her cabinet the following month, keeping Lawson but moving Howe to become leader of the House and giving him the meaningless title of deputy prime minister. In his place came John Major, the latest of her long line of favourites.
But still the problem persisted and, with the return of Walters now imminent, Lawson issued a ‘him or me’ ultimatum, which left Thatcher decidedly unimpressed. ‘I told him not to be ridiculous,’ she remembered. ‘He was demeaning himself even by talking in such terms.’ But Lawson was serious and, as Ridley pointed out, ‘she couldn’t have met his request without making herself look humiliated and impotent’. And so, at the end of October 1989, Lawson resigned. Shortly afterwards, Walters also resigned and, just as Thatcher had managed to lose both Michael Heseltine and Leon Brittan over the Westlands fiasco, so now she was deprived of both chancellor and economic adviser. Another reshuffle followed and Major, after all of three months as foreign secretary, moved to another of the great offices of state as chancellor of the exchequer.
Thatcher could not help but be damaged by the resignation, but it was hardly terminal, since the issue of the ERM was not one to excite great public interest at a time when a descent into recession seemed more likely than not. Nor was the situation entirely unprecedented: Harold Macmillan had suffered the resignation of his entire treasury team in 1958 and yet had remained in power for another five years. Certainly she gave no indication that she might moderate her abrasive style, even though it was now considered a liability by almost everyone. ‘After she had lost Nigel Lawson,’ wrote Tory MP Julian Critchley, ‘the pundits claimed that the one-time Iron Lady was suffering from metal fatigue, a condition which in no way diminished the intensity of her opinion or the rapidity of her tongue.’ Even when the unthinkable happened and she was challenged for the leadership, for the first time since she had been elected by the party nearly fifteen years earlier, she continued to imply that she had no intention of ever relinquishing it.
The system then operating to choose the leadership of the Conservative Party was one of the most subtle and sophisticated that had ever been devised. Its creator was Humphrey Berkley, a Conservative MP in the mid-1960s (though he later joined the Labour Party, before defecting to the SDP and then rejoining Labour), and it allowed for an annual election at the start of each parliament. Any MP was entitled to stand, provided they had a proposer and seconder, whose names need not be made public, and only MPs were entitled to vote. In order to win the first ballot a candidate needed to obtain not merely a clear majority of the votes cast but also a margin of 15 per cent over the second-placed candidate; if this condition was not met, then a second ballot would be held in which a simple majority would be sufficient to win. But crucially the rules allowed for candidates to enter the contest in the second round. The intention was to allow a so-called stalking-horse candidate to be run against an incumbent leader, that is an MP who stood no chance of winning, but whose job it was to establish in the first round whether the leader enjoyed a sufficiently overwhelming body of support. Other, more weighty candidates could thereby keep their hands clean lest the challenge prove unsuccessful and they be accused of disloyalty; but if the challenge did prove that the leader was vulnerable, they could happily join in for the second ballot, insisting that they were standing for the good of the party rather than from any vaulting ambition on their own behalf.
This was precisely the system that had brought Margaret Thatcher to the leadership. She had challenged Edward Heath in 1975 when no one else was prepared so to do, and in some quarters she was regarded as being a stalking-horse. When she secured more votes than Heath in the first round, his position was revealed as being so weak that he had no choice but to step down, allowing what were supposed to be the serious candidates – led by William Whitelaw – to enter the fray. Except that she had built up such momentum that she won through. Theoretically she had been re-elected to the post in the autumn of every year since, though no challenger had ever dared make himself known. Now, in the wake of Lawson’s resignation, a champion entered the lists on behalf of all those who felt she had reigned too long.
As a chivalric hero, however, Sir Anthony Meyer was not quite as impressive as one might have hoped. An hereditary baronet and a long-serving MP on the outermost liberal fringe of the party, he was five years older than Thatcher and virtually unheard of by the public, though he had been amongst those voting against the cancellation of the GLC elections. The term ‘stalking-horse’ was considered too grandiose for the occasion and Meyer was instead dubbed the stalking-donkey by the press. Mock as they might, he seemed content with his role and told anyone who would listen that his quarrel with the prime minister was about style as well as content: ‘She seems to be convinced that she is invincible as well as infallible,’ he said, and he persuaded enough others that he secured the votes of 33 MPs with 24 others spoiling their papers. Thatcher, of course, won easily (she got 314 votes), but the fact that she had been challenged at all, let alone that there was a decent-sized minority refusing to support her, was worrying. ‘Although we all went round saying it was a great victory, it did give her prestige a knock,’ wrote Currie in her diary, and Ian Gow, an ardent Thatcherite, admitted that ‘he had a hard time persuading many colleagues to vote for the PM’. But she sailed on regardless. ‘I think that is good enough for me to carry on,’ she remarked breezily, paying no heed to Tory MP Tristan Garel-Jones when he warned: ‘There are a hundred assassins lurking in the bushes, prime minister. Those people will come back and kill you.’
For the first half of 1990 the government’s main task was to ride out the storm over the poll tax, but that was a purely negative stance, offering little in the way of encouraging the demoralized troops in Westminster or in the country. Spitting Image depicted politicians from all parties singing a version of the Moody Blues’ hit ‘Go Now’ to Thatcher (now portrayed as a straitjacketed madwoman), while the journalist Ronald Butt, who had long been a staunch defender in The Times, was worrying that the Labour Party ‘is increasingly seen as the responsible, moderate and socially responsive party. It is the Tories who are now disliked as doctrinaire, extreme and socially hard-faced.’ And so the atmosphere of gloom, depression and defeatism continued.
At almost any other time, the unexpectedly impressive performance of the England football team – which reached the semi-finals of the World Cup that summer, prevented only by a penalty shoot-out from meeting Argentina in a final that would surely have avenged the 1986 defeat – would have played in the government’s favour with the mood of positive optimism that descended on the country. The sense of hopefulness, after years of under-achievement, was reinforced by the fact that the team included some of the most creative players in the world with John Barnes, Peter Beardsley and Chris Waddle, and by the emergence of Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne, arguably the most talented and inspiring footballer England had yet produced. Almost single-handedly, with his charismatic ability on the pitch, and his engaging public persona that verged on the idiot savant off it, Gascoigne dragged football out from its post-Heysel doghouse; when he was shown a yellow card in the semi-final and tears welled up in his eyes as he realized he would miss the final should England get through, his place in popular mythology was assured and the cult of Gazza-mania was born. Even when the team was subsequently taken to Downing Street to receive the congratulations of the prime minister and Gascoigne turned out to be one of the few people outside the Conservative Party to have something good to say about Thatcher (‘I gave her a hug – it wasn’t bad, she was nice and cuddly like’), it did him no harm.
On the other hand, it did her no good. And nor did the World Cup adventure itself, for she had already made clear that she viewed all football fans as potential hooligans, and the thwarted identity card scheme had made her into a hate figure on the terraces, even amongst those with little interest in politics. To compound the issue, the previous season had been soundtracked by chants of ‘We’re not paying the poll tax’ ringing out from grounds around the country. Not even the readmission of English clubs into European competition, following their enforced exile, could remove the feeling that fans weren’t seen by this government as decent members of society. More subtly, there was the fact that the new national hero was far removed from previous icons; a media-literate footballer who showed his emotions to the extent of crying during a match was a long way from the traditional hardman image of the game, and hinted at a cultural shift away from the world inhabited by Thatcher.
None of this, of course, registered much in Westminster where the issue of Europe was still lurking beneath the troubled waters. In the summer of 1990, three weeks after that semi-final defeat to West Germany, it surfaced in an entirely unexpected way. Nicholas Ridley, the last true believer in the cabinet, was then the trade and industry secretary and had even been Thatcher’s preferred choice to replace Lawson as chancellor before she realized what a hostage to fortune the appointment of such a blunt politician would be. Her judgement was vindicated when he gave an interview to the Spectator magazine in July 1990, in which he shared his candid thoughts on European integration, calling the European Monetary System ‘a German racket designed to take over Europe’ and stating flatly: ‘I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’ In case he wasn’t being sufficiently controversial, he threw in a reference to Auschwitz and described France as being Germany’s poodle. ‘We appreciate frankness,’ flinched Karl von Hase, a former German ambassador to Britain, ‘but this is brutality.’
The fact that his interviewer, and the magazine’s editor, was Dominic Lawson, son of the former chancellor, led some to suspect that Ridley had been tricked into making such incriminating and decidedly indiscreet remarks – he noted drily that the younger Lawson ‘turned out not to be helpful’ – but he wasn’t the only one using such imagery. Thatcher’s own hostility to the unification of Germany was well known, and she was said to speak ‘far too emotionally in private about a Fourth Reich’. Furthermore, an opinion poll earlier in the year had shown that over half the British population were concerned about the possible return of fascism in a reunified Germany, and another poll taken after Ridley’s interview revealed broad support. Nonetheless it was difficult to see how a man seen to make such offensive remarks about the two leading nations in Europe could continue to serve in the British government, and within the week his resignation had been proffered and accepted.
Ridley had never exactly kept his opinions a secret in Westminster, but the Spectator interview gave the public a much starker image than had previously been available of where the right wing of the Conservative Party now stood. It reinforced the opinion of those supportive of Europe that the inner circles of Thatcherism were irreconcilably hostile to the country’s partners, while those who were themselves of a sceptical persuasion were hardly cheered that anyone venturing a dissident comment could be so easily forced out of his job. His departure left Thatcher even more isolated in her cabinet, for although his replacement, Peter Lilley, was another Thatcherite, he was hardly one of the same weight and calibre as Ridley.
Meanwhile, John Major found himself in a position of considerable and growing strength, for despite his youth and relative lack of experience, and despite the fact that his career had been entirely dependent on Thatcher’s patronage, it was politically impossible for her to dismiss him after Nigel Lawson’s departure. Clearly unassailable for the moment, he achieved what his two predecessors had failed to do: in October 1990 he announced Britain’s entry into the ERM. Displaying unexpected political flair, he made the announcement on the last day of the Labour Party’s conference, stealing all their headlines, and, to complete the boldness of the move, he cut interest rates by 1 percentage point at the same time. Most political and financial commentators applauded the move, including Lawson (‘I warmly welcome this historic decision which I have long advocated’), though there were doubts expressed about the timing: the British level of inflation at nearly 11 per cent was almost twice that of the European average, and there was a threat of a new world recession, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that had seen a sharp rise in oil prices. At the Conservative conference the following week, Ridley spoke to a fringe meeting and correctly predicted that the pound and the deutschmark ‘will never have a stable relationship’.
The good headlines were but fleeting. The week after the conference, a by-election was held in Eastbourne, following the murder of Ian Gow by the IRA, and a safe Tory seat that had previously been held with a seventeen thousand majority fell to the Liberal Democrats on a swing of 20 per cent. The mood of misery that had temporarily lifted from the Conservatives settled again: under heavy media and political pressure, the government had done what was asked of it and joined the ERM, and still nothing was going right. Worse yet, Thatcher continued unrepentantly to use anti-European rhetoric, despite the change in policy. On 30 October she reported back to the Commons on another summit meeting, this time in Rome, where she had found herself in a minority of one on the question of the single currency, and she was unequivocal in her denunciation of Jacques Delors: ‘He wanted the European parliament to be the democratic body of the Community,’ she told the Commons. ‘He wanted the commission to be the executive and he wanted the council of ministers to be the senate. No! No! No!’ The intransigence implied by that triple negative was all the more powerful since it was televized, the House having recently agreed, against her wishes, to allow cameras into the chamber.
Eurosceptics were much heartened by her position – the Sun addressed the issue of monetary union with one of its most famous headlines: UP YOURS DELORS! – but for many it was profoundly disheartening, and for one man in particular this was the last straw. On 1 November Geoffrey Howe resigned from the government in protest at her continued inflexibility. ‘Well, now I’m really fucking depressed,’ despaired Edwina Currie. That night Edward Heath was on the BBC programme Question Time, exhibiting what might be termed cautious jubilation, hinting that Howe might now challenge for the leadership – the annual election was due within weeks – and replying when asked if this was the beginning of the end for Thatcher: ‘Well, there is always the beginning of an end for every prime minister. It remains to be seen.’ Two days earlier the first contact had been made by the two teams digging the Channel Tunnel, a symbolic joining of Britain to the Continent for the first time since the last Ice Age, and there were many who saw it as a fitting moment for the European issue that was tearing away at the soul of the party to be resolved once and for all.
A resigning minister is entitled to make a statement to the House, traditionally heard in silence and without interruptions, and there was some, though not very feverish, anticipation about what Howe would say. But the Commons was in recess and silence descended for a fortnight, during which time two more by-elections were held in Bootle and in Bradford North; both were Labour seats, but the Conservative performance was again poor, particularly in the marginal constituency of Bradford North which saw a swing from Tory to Labour of 16 per cent and the Conservative candidate pushed into third place by the Liberal Democrats.
The depression deepened on Tory benches, with even the good and faithful servant Bernard Ingham reporting an MP had told him ‘that for the first time his constituents were blaming Mrs Thatcher herself for the circumstances in which they found themselves.’ The Northern Ireland minister Richard Needham, in a conversation on his car phone, gave his opinion that ‘I wish the old cow would resign’, only to find that the call had been intercepted by a terrorist group and leaked to the press. ‘I don’t think she realizes what a jam she’s in,’ wrote Alan Clark, reaching for his customary stock of wartime metaphors. ‘It’s the Bunker syndrome. Everyone round you is clicking their heels. The saluting sentries have highly polished boots and beautifully creased uniforms. But out there at the Front it’s all disintegrating.’ There was much speculation over the possibility of a leadership challenge, though few were prepared to speak out publicly; one of those who did was Anthony Meyer, making clear that things had moved out of his league by now: ‘If Conservatives think, as they mostly do, that we cannot win with Margaret Thatcher, then they must stand up and be counted against her. With the right leader, and in my view that right leader is Michael Heseltine, the Tory Party can win a historic fourth term.’ Nearly five years after he walked out of the cabinet, it seemed as though Heseltine’s day of destiny was finally about to dawn.
Most importantly, those two weeks saw Howe become increasingly infuriated, both by Thatcher’s attitude to his resignation, which he considered ‘patronizing and self-righteous’, and by a speech she gave at the Guildhall in London to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, in which she used a cricketing image to emphasize her continued self-belief while all around were doubting her: ‘I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And, in case anyone doubted it, I can assure you there will be no ducking the bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling’s going to get hit all round the ground. That’s my style.’ It was, as journalist Alan Watkins pointed out, a messy metaphor – apart from anything else, ‘ducking was precisely what one did with bouncers’ – but the meaning was clear enough: not even Howe’s resignation was sufficient to prompt any change in direction. And so he worked quietly on his speech.
Howe was in a unique position within the party. He had stood as a candidate against Thatcher in the leadership election of 1975 and, though he had picked up just nineteen votes, he proved remarkably resilient. By 1988 he was the only one of her rivals from that contest to remain in government – William Whitelaw and James Prior having departed, and Hugh Fraser, Edward Heath and John Peyton having never served under her. In fact, he was the last surviving member of the original Thatcher cabinet from 1979 and, in the words of Chris Patten, he ‘was almost a permanent part of the British constitution’. He was popular with the parliamentary party, though there was no equivalent feeling amongst the electorate, where he was regarded as the man who brought the country the first Thatcherite recession and who had then proved to be, at best, an anonymous foreign secretary. Even amongst Conservative supporters, he was not exactly popular, regularly trailing Tebbit and Heseltine as their choice for the succession. If he had an image, it was as one of the dullest senior politicians of recent times, ‘an unbelievably boring speaker,’ noted Teresa Gorman. Nicknamed Mogadon Man for his low-key delivery, he had once literally sent David Owen to sleep during a live television programme on which they were both appearing, and was best known as the target of one of Denis Healey’s better jokes – being criticized by Howe, Healey had said, was like being savaged by a dead sheep. That was intended, of course, as a putdown, even if the visual image it conjured up was not entirely reassuring: zombie sheep on the rampage sounded like something dreamt up by Sam Raimi, director of The Evil Dead, though it was not until his resignation statement that Howe lived up to such a billing. And even on the day of that speech, Alan Clark still felt that it couldn’t make any difference: ‘Who gives a toss for the old dormouse?’ he asked his diary, rhetorically.
But there was life in the dormouse yet. With Lawson sitting supportively by his side, Howe candidly explained to the Commons why he felt it was impossible for him to continue to serve in Thatcher’s government. He ridiculed ‘the nightmare image’ she conjured up of ‘a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people, scheming, in her words, to extinguish democracy, to dissolve our national identities, to lead us through the back door into a federal Europe’. It was a tragedy for the country, he said, ‘that the prime minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation.’ He even picked up her cricketing imagery and somehow ended up still more confused than she had been: ‘It’s rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find the moment the first balls are bowled that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain,’ he declared, which made no sense at all. But again, one could see the point towards which he was fumbling, and in any event the really shocking fact was that a former chancellor and foreign secretary was prepared publicly to attack the prime minister who had appointed him, accusing her of undermining her senior colleagues. And in perhaps the most powerful passage of his speech, he seemed to assault the patriotic foundations of her philosophy, arguing both he and Lawson had spent years trying to persuade Thatcher not to let Britain ‘retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past and so diminish our own control over our destiny in the future’. He followed that with positive references back to Harold Macmillan and Winston Churchill, clearly seeking to place Thatcher outside the Conservative mainstream, as though she were being excommunicated.
The bitterness revealed by such comments was, it was assumed, an explosion of the accumulated, pent-up frustrations of being patronized, bullied and ridiculed by Thatcher (they had shared ‘seven hundred meetings of cabinet or shadow cabinet over the last eighteen years,’ he pointed out). But there was also the anger felt by many in the political establishment, both in Britain and in Europe more widely, that Thatcher was reneging on the nation’s commitment to what was then still known as the European Economic Community, though it would soon be renamed the European Union. The debate between those who feared, like Thatcher, that democracy and national independence were being sold out, and those who subscribed to the federalist dream of a fully integrated Europe, was to dominate the Conservative Party for the whole of the next decade, but in the immediate moment there was the raw political thrill of hearing such a senior figure launch a coup. ‘The conflict of loyalty, of loyalty to my right honourable friend the prime minister,’ he said in his peroration, ‘and of loyalty to what I perceive to be the true interests of the nation, has become all too great.’ And he ended with a direct incitement to revolution: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’
The verdict was almost unanimous: nothing in Howe’s political career became him like the leaving it. ‘This was the most stunning speech I have ever heard in the House,’ reported Paddy Ashdown. ‘It rocked the government on its heels. Thatcher sat white-faced and, from time to time, bit her lip as if to stem the pain.’ Peter Jenkins, writing in the Independent, went further: ‘It was more than a resignation speech; it was a bill of impeachment.’ And Tony Benn had little doubt: ‘It has certainly transformed everything. We have really come to the end of the Thatcher era, I think.’ After so many false dawns, this time he was right. Heseltine, who had been wavering about whether to strike, responded instantly to the challenge of Howe’s last sentence and announced that he would be standing against Thatcher for the leadership of the party. Ever the populist, he signalled to the wider public that he was motivated by more than the European issues so beloved of the political elite: ‘A significant consequence of my election as a leader would be an immediate and fundamental review of the poll tax, which I believe to be important for the revival of government fortunes.’
The date for the vote had already been fixed for the following Tuesday, which left the Thatcher camp very little time to rally their disaffected troops, but in any case it was far from certain that they understood how serious the situation was. When Emma Nicholson asked Brian Griffiths, head of the policy unit at Downing Street, to pass on a message that she wouldn’t be voting for Thatcher, his surprised response – ‘Are you telling me that this election actually matters?’ – revealed how lightly the challenge was being taken. Thatcher herself was sufficiently blasé that she was due to be out of the country, at a conference with other European leaders in Paris, on the day of the ballot. But there was a mood in the country for change, and there were enough Conservative MPs who felt the same that the leadership should have been worried. ‘She failed to see change in British society under her nose, or prepare for it,’ was Edwina Currie’s verdict; ‘she slew the old dragons, but continued to wear the same bloodstained armour. Meanwhile a nicer, gentler, kinder Britain is waking up. She wanted to handbag it.’ A spate of polls in the Sunday newspapers revealed that with Heseltine as leader, the Tories would benefit from a swing of between 6 and 10 percentage points and would overtake Labour.
On the evening of that same Sunday, BBC1 began transmission of a new drama series, Andrew Davies’ adaptation of the novel House of Cards, written by the Conservative Party’s former chief of staff, Michael Dobbs, and inspired by William Whitelaw’s perceptive comment to him during the 1987 election: ‘There is a woman who will never fight another election campaign.’ In one of the most fortuitous pieces of scheduling in television history, the series concerned a leadership struggle in the Conservative Party and, though it was set in a post-Thatcherite near-future, it opened with her image; Ian Richardson, playing the Tory chief whip Francis Urquhart, was seen at his desk, picking up a picture of Thatcher and turning to the camera to address the audience directly: ‘Nothing lasts for ever. Even the longest, the most glittering reign must come to an end some day.’ The previously unthinkable was being acted out on national television.
When the results were announced Thatcher had a clear majority – 204 votes to Heseltine’s 152 – but not quite the margin of 15 per cent of the total electorate needed for outright victory. There would have to be a second ballot, and Thatcher immediately announced from Paris that she would be standing again. She returned to the Commons to report on the conference (‘She was announcing to the House the official end of the Cold War – perhaps the most important event of the whole decade,’ noted Ridley ruefully), but the real action was behind the scenes. Later that night, members of the cabinet and others went in to see her individually; virtually all told her that she had no hope of winning and that, rather than end her premiership in ignominious defeat, she should step down for the sake of the party. It was also brought home that this was the only way to beat Heseltine, since it would release other members of the cabinet to stand against him. She was reportedly shocked by such open disloyalty – ‘They sold me down the river,’ she exclaimed – but was left with little option. And so, on Thursday, 22 November 1990 Margaret Thatcher, who had been in office longer than any other prime minister in the memory of anyone then living, announced that she would not be putting her name forward for the second ballot, that she would resign as leader of the party and as prime minister once a successor had been chosen.
In the country there was a mixture of shock, disbelief and release. Paddy Ashdown reported that he had heard the news announced at Glasgow airport ‘and that everyone had burst into spontaneous clapping and cheering. I gather the same thing happened at King’s Cross and Victoria.’ The future Labour MP Oona King was working as a temp in Vauxhall and immediately took an early lunch-break so she could go to Downing Street to celebrate: ‘I grabbed a thick ink marker, a piece of cardboard and ran for the lift. In the foyer I drew up my impromptu placard: “I’m 23 years old and I’ve waited exactly half my life for today: bye-bye Maggie.”’ And on the BBC London radio station, GLR, Johnnie Walker told his listeners he was raising a pint of Guinness to toast Thatcher’s demise: ‘Can you imagine life without Maggie Thatcher? Some people have never known another prime minister. There’re going to be street parties all over the country.’ He was promptly sacked by the station controller, Matthew Bannister.
Her final appearance in the Commons as prime minister was in a vote of no confidence that had been pointlessly and incompetently called by Labour. She was at the very top of her form, reminding the House what a formidable politician she could be – ‘Why did they sack you?’ called out the Militant-supporting MP Dave Nellist – while Kinnock was correspondingly dreadful, which augured ill for the immediate future of his party. Labour had set such great store on her personal unpopularity that it was far from clear whether it would be able to respond positively to her departure. She was an ‘evil woman,’ snapped Jack Straw, seemingly furious that the bogeywoman, on the fear of whom so much rested, had been slain by her own side.
In her absence two other challengers stepped into the ring to fight it out with Heseltine: Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, and John Major. Thatcher made no bones about who she would be supporting: ‘It may be inverted snobbishness but I don’t want old style, old Etonian Tories of the old school to succeed me and go back to the old complacent, consensus ways,’ she remarked in private. ‘John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is far more in tune with the skilled and ambitious and worthwhile working classes than Douglas Hurd is.’ Perhaps in recognition of the way that Thatcher’s anti-elitism had – at least for now – reshaped British political life, this turned into one of the few talking points of the campaign leading up to the second ballot. Hurd’s father and grandfather had both been Conservative MPs and his privileged, patrician background (Eton, Cambridge, diplomatic service) would in earlier generations have been seen as constituting an impeccable c.v., but in this post-Thatcher world he was immediately put on the defensive, forced to argue that he only went to Eton because he had won a scholarship: ‘That is what social mobility is all about, I understand.’ In retrospect Hurd was to claim that had Thatcher known then that Major had had an affair with Edwina Currie, she would ‘probably not have backed him’, and his own chances would thereby have been enhanced, but his more serious problem was that opinion polls showed he had no chance of beating Labour, while Heseltine and Major were both said to be capable of so doing.
The support for Major in the country was a surprise to many, but it reflected the truth of Currie’s analysis some months earlier: ‘When she goes, the new PM, whether Tory successor or Labour, will be pro-Europe and gentler on social and economic issues, more interventionist, more helpful to minorities, treading more gently in the international scene.’ Michael Dobbs had made the same point in House of Cards, as one of his characters reflected on the mood of Tory MPs: ‘They wanted a new fashion. Something less abrasive, less domineering; they’d had enough of trial by ordeal and being shown up by a woman.’ Even Alan Clark, dismissing the prospects of Heseltine, could see the need for change: ‘people are sick of passion, they want reassurance.’
So they did, and Major seemed to be the best option for providing it. Above all, his courteous affability meant he had made no enemies and he carried no obvious ideological baggage. He was assumed to be a Thatcherite, not least by Thatcher herself, but there was precious little evidence for such a belief save for his non-establishment background; rather he was a cipher on whom all sectors of the party projected their own attitudes, and there was a suspicion that, like the Peter Sellers’ character Chauncey Gardiner in the film Being There (1979), Major benefited from people hearing what they wanted to hear. Even on the question of Europe, there was some doubt quite where he stood; as Teresa Gorman pointed out, both the pro- and anti-European factions ‘thought he was “their man”’. Outside Westminster, he might be little known to the public, mocked by Spitting Image as the grey man of politics whose greatest enthusiasm was for peas, but he seemed down-to-earth, decent and reliable, the kind of man you could count on to water your plants while you were away on holiday and at least his love of cricket might mean an end to mangled metaphors.
On the second ballot Major scored just under 50 per cent of the vote, technically not enough to win outright, but Heseltine, who had seen his own vote fall, could read the writing on the wall; he immediately withdrew from the contest, followed by Hurd, and Major was promptly elected unopposed as leader of the Conservative Party and therefore as prime minister, the youngest person to hold the post so far in the twentieth century. It was less than four weeks since Howe’s resignation, and less than two since his Commons statement, an extraordinarily rapid regicide compared, say, to the six months it took Tony Benn to fail to secure the deputy leadership of a party that was in opposition. Major’s unexpected victory was the culmination to one of the most sensational episodes in modern politics, though not everyone noticed, for despite the fervour at Westminster, in the rest of the country everyday life continued as normal. On the day of the second ballot, the television personality Gyles Brandreth, who would later become a Tory MP, was in Shepperton Studios, making an advert for frozen potato waffles and found that he was the only person present who seemed to care about the result: ‘In the world of Birdseye Waffles, no one seems the least bit interested in who our next prime minister is going to be.’
The removal of Thatcher and her replacement by Major brought an immediate dividend for the Conservatives. Heseltine returned to the cabinet as environment secretary, charged with finding a replacement to the poll tax, Major found himself with a higher poll rating than Thatcher had ever achieved, and the country appeared to have concluded that it now had the change of government it had been seeking. Within the party itself there was said to be deep anger at the manner of Thatcher’s despatch, and certainly there were strains reminiscent of those between Labour and the SDP in the early 1980s; Howe found Keith Joseph physically turning his back on him, with the words: ‘I’m sorry, Geoffrey: we’re not friends anymore.’ But it was notable that none of those who voted for Heseltine on the first ballot were deselected as MPs by their local parties (save for Anthony Meyer, but he was being punished for the stalking-donkey episode), and it was to take another couple of years for the full bitterness to become truly apparent and for Europe to reveal itself as still being the single most divisive issue for Tories.
For the moment, they too shared in the national sense of relief. The last few months of Thatcher’s premiership had been uncomfortable ones for the faithful, seeming to reprise so many of the uglier features from the dark days of 1980-81 that it was reasonable to ask whether ultimately it had all been worth it. Interest rates and inflation were back into double figures, there were riots on the streets, and the government was caught up in pay disputes with the public sector, led by ambulance workers, causing journalists to recall the winter of discontent under James Callaghan. Even on a personal level, the end carried echoes of the beginning: Thatcher’s victory in 1979 had been overshadowed by the murder of her close political ally Airey Neave by terrorists; this year it had been another friend, Ian Gow. Britain was undeniably a different country to the one she had inherited, but it was far from certain that even she believed the changes that had been made were the ones she intended, or – if they were – whether they were secure enough to survive. Her continued refusal to accept that there was anyone with sufficient resolve to carry the struggle forward suggested a certain lack of confidence in her legacy. Perhaps most telling of all, Larry Lamb, the editor who had first brought the Sun out in full support of her leadership, the man who had written the front-page editorial in 1979 urging his readers to vote for the radical change she offered, had by the end of the decade ‘lost his faith in Mrs Thatcher after seeing what her tenure of office had done to the country.’ In moments of deep reflection, he said he had ‘created a Frankenstein’s monster.’
Back in 1982 with the first success in the Falklands War, Thatcher had urged the nation to ‘rejoice, just rejoice’, and it had duly done so. There was not much rejoicing at her departure, once the immediate moment had passed. The sheer weight of time meant that many of those in the country who had been hit hardest by her policies were simply demoralized by now. Mark Steel was performing at a benefit for a trades council in Nottingham on the night of her departure and was greeted by a Labour activist with the words: ‘I don’t know why you’re so pleased about Thatcher going. They’ll only put someone else in her place.’ Opposition politicians who, like Labour’s future deputy leader John Prescott, regarded her as ‘the devil incarnate’ were left with the reality that while the faces might have changed, the Tories were still in power, and might yet reinvent themselves under John Major, as they had in the wake of their 1945 election defeat. ‘He is a new type of Thatcherite really,’ reflected Tony Benn; ‘not strident, probably slightly less ideological, more sympathetic to Europe, a hard man in terms of financial policy, but confident.’ Even in intellectual and artistic circles, there was such distrust of the lower-middle-class ordinariness of the new prime minister that there was a reluctance to be too jubilant.
And so, despite Johnnie Walker’s suggestion, there were no street parties, no wild festivities. Perhaps the only place where there was genuine rejoicing was on the wet wing of the Conservative Party. Certainly in the eyes of Ian Gilmour there was much to celebrate in the end of doctrinaire determination and the return to a more consensual form of politics, and he saw in her removal a happy resonance of the collapse of communism. ‘Margaret Thatcher’s overthrow brought to many in the Conservative parliamentary party a feeling of liberation,’ he wrote: ‘the occupation had at last ended, and after being for so long, as it were, part of Eastern Europe we had rejoined the West.’