10

No! No! No!

Stoop, then, and wash. How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

—Cassius, THE TRAGEDY OF JULIUS CAESAR

In 2005, the French and the Dutch held referendums on the proposed European Constitution. The constitution—265 handsome pages, forty times the length of the American Constitution, unreadable, uninspiring, and an absolute tour de force of bureaucratic jargon—would have enshrined such self-evident truths as these:

As regards Huta Andrzej S.A., Huta Bankowa Sp. z o.o., Huta Batory S.A., Huta Buczek S.A., Huta L.W. Sp. z o.o., Huta Łabedy S.A., and Huta Pokój S.A. (hereinafter referred to as “other benefiting companies”), the steel restructuring aid already granted or to be granted from 1997 until the end of 2003 shall not exceed PLN 246 710 000. These firms have already received PLN 37 160 000 of restructuring aid in the period 1997–2001; they shall receive further restructuring aid of no more than PLN 210 210 000 depending on the requirements set out in the approved restructuring plan (of which PLN 182 170 000 in 2002 and PLN 27 380 000 in 2003 if the extension of the grace period under Protocol 2 of the Europe Agreement establishing an association between the European Communities and their Member States, of the one part, and Poland, of the other part, is granted by the end of 2002, or otherwise PLN 210 210 000 in 2003).²³³

I am told that visitors to the Library of Congress often find their eyes glistening when they contemplate the yellowed parchment of the American Constitution. I suspect this document might not have the same effect.

A few points to note: Every year, the European Commission produces more than 11,000 new regulations;²³⁴ and every year, according to the commission’s own findings, these regulations cost European businesses 600 billion euros.²³⁵ The commission’s rulings are intended to supersede those made by the elected officials of the member states. Although the European parliament is elected directly by the citizens of member countries, the vastly more powerful commission is not elected at all.

In both France and the Netherlands, the European Constitution was contemptuously rejected. And for obvious reasons: No matter how many times they have been told by their leaders that they are to cherish the ideal of European unity, ordinary Europeans feel a quaint, persistent attachment to their distinct cultural identities, their legal and educational traditions, and their sovereignty. What’s more, they don’t like all those regulations.

Margaret Thatcher warned that they might not.

The story of Thatcher’s downfall is often described, with justification, as a classic tragedy: a noble hero, a tragic flaw, reversal of fortune, downfall, purgation. “Ideology, aggression and arrogance grew on her,” wrote Anthony Bevins, the political editor of the Left-leaning Independent.

. . . and with each success her image and ego became more and more inflated. She began to believe that . . . if she could conquer the miners, she could go on to conquer Brussels, too . . . She spurned the advice of friends, cast them aside, and retreated increasingly into the bunker mentality that has destroyed so many leaders deluded by visions of immortality . . . [Despite] warnings of impending disaster, Mrs. Thatcher charged ahead regardless . . . The critical weakness was the refusal to listen. Unbending, unyielding, she could only break, and break her they did. To the end, she refused to heed the advice—if, indeed, there was anyone left with the nerve to brave her wrath by telling her the truth.²³⁶

Neil Kinnock agrees. “After she got the second victory—reduced majority, but not reduced enough—hubris set in. And you know the rest of the story.”

I do; others might not. Thatcher’s reluctance to bring Britain further into Europe divided her cabinet. In September 1990, Geoffrey Howe, her longest-serving cabinet minister, resigned in protest. His bitter resignation speech set in motion the train of events that led to the revolt of the Conservative Party and her resignation.

Those who see in Thatcher’s downfall the plot of Julius Caesar are not imagining things. Shakespeare anticipated every line in this story.

Certainly, Thatcher had by the end of her time in power become hostile to Europe. In Statecraft, written in 2002, Thatcher laid out the case against Europe with devastating precision:

You only have to wade through a metric measure or two of European prose, culled from its directives, circulars, reports, communiqués or what pass as debates in its “parliament,” and you will quickly understand that Europe is, in truth, synonymous with bureaucracy. It is government by bureaucracy for bureaucracy . . . The structures, plans, and programs of the European Union are to be understood as existing simply for their own sake . . . It is time for the world to wake up to it; if it is still possible, to stop it . . . ²³⁷

Her critics—particularly the members of her party who defenestrated her—do not take this argument at face value. Thatcher, they say, was hostile to the European project for no good reason. She was simply, in her fundament, a profound xenophobe who despised Europeans generally and the Germans in particular.²³⁸

As the author of a book titled Menace in Europe, I can hardly pretend neutrality on this subject. I agree with Thatcher and think it absurd to believe that the excellent arguments she advances in Statecraft are the reflection of nothing more than xenophobia. Permit me the indulgence of quoting myself: “No effort to unify Europe has ever succeeded. Most have ended in blood. The European Union is historically nuts. It reflects neither the will of a single nation-state, nor the will of an Empire, based on the ability of a central political entity to dominate its periphery, nor some form of established European national identity with deep historic roots. . . . The EU is in effect an empty empire.”²³⁹

Thatcher is known to history as the great Euroskeptic. As a Euroskeptic myself, I would be delighted to report that on this matter she has always been constant as the northern star. But this is not the case. The peculiar truth is that for most of her career, she was a passionate advocate of European unification. The charge that her policies represented nothing more than pathological xenophobia simply can’t be reconciled with the facts.

It is true that Thatcher didn’t much care for Germans. I ask Charles Powell whether he believes the claim that at heart, Thatcher simply loathed them. “Well, yes,” he says. “I think one has to be very candid, yes. She was antipathetic to Germany. Could never quite accept that it had changed. She had an antipathy above all to the German manner, really. [Helmut] Kohl, who tried very hard to get on to terms with her, had that German manner, had that sort of big booming German—that sense that Germany pays, and that therefore Germans were entitled to lay down the law. She just hated that. Now, what does it stem from? It stems from a girl brought up at an impressionable age coinciding with the rise of Nazism and the Second World War.”

Of course it does.²⁴⁰ And not just the Second World War: Thatcher was raised, like everyone of her generation, in the shadow of the First World War. “In our attic,” she recalls in her memoirs, “there was a trunk full of magazines showing, among other things, the famous picture from the Great War of a line of British soldiers blinded by mustard gas walking to the dressing station, each with a hand on the shoulder of the one in front of him.”²⁴¹

She was not yet fourteen when the Second World War broke out. I have heard that one of her secretaries once asked her what she believed her most meaningful accomplishment to have been. Surprisingly, she replied that it was rescuing her sister’s Jewish pen-pal, Edith, from the Nazis. After the 1938 Anschluss, she persuaded her father and his Rotary Club to help Edith escape from Austria and to shelter her in Grantham. This, Thatcher said, more than anything else, was her proudest achievement.²⁴² Thatcher mentions Edith only en passant in her memoirs: “One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind. The Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.”²⁴³

During the war, German bombing raids on Grantham killed seventy-eight of her fellow townspeople. She carried a gas mask with her to school. When the air raid sirens went off, she did her homework under her kitchen table. Yes, I’m sure this made an impression. The Germany of Thatcher’s adolescence—the age at which political prejudices tend to be shaped—was a nation of murderous, jackbooted thugs. Italy was ruled by a preposterous Italian bellowing from a balcony. The French and the Dutch were collaborators; Americans were liberators. It would be understandable if living through this era had persuaded Thatcher to believe that Britain should have no truck with the grand project of European unification. Certainly, this interpretation is often retrospectively imposed on the story.

But in fact it persuaded her—as it persuaded many—that little could be more important than European unification. “We should remember,” she said in 1961, “that France and Germany have attempted to sink their political differences and work for a united Europe. If France can do this so can we.” In the same speech she argued that if Britain failed to enter the Common Market—the precursor to today’s European Community—“We should be failing in our duty to future generations.” In response to those who feared Britain would cease to formulate its own foreign policy and lose its separate identity, she replied,

Sovereignty and independence are not ends in themselves . . . we have entered into many treaties and military alliances which limit our freedom of individual action. More and more we are becoming dependent for our future on action in concert with other nations . . . It is no good being independent in isolation . . . ²⁴⁴

Not precisely the voice of Euroskepticism, that.

Was this speech a youthful folly? A tactical concession to majority opinion? Not at all. Britain entered the European Economic Community in 1973 under the Heath government. In 1975, with his own cabinet divided over Europe, Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson called a national referendum. “Parliament has decided to consult the electorate on the question whether the UK should remain in the European Economic Community,” said the ballot. “Do you want the UK to remain in the EEC?”

Both the Labour and the Conservative parties were split. The left wing of the Labour Party, in particular, was vehemently opposed. Thatcher led the Conservative Party’s “Vote Yes” campaign. “The Community gives us peace and security in a free society,” she intoned, “a peace and security denied to the past two generations.” She pulled out the rhetorical blunderbuss to make her case, invoking the spirit of Churchill, who was, she intimated, looking down upon the British people from his throne in Paradise and urging them to vote yes.

It was Churchill who, at the Congress of Europe in 1948, said, “The movement for European unity must be a positive force, deriving its strength from our sense of common spiritual values. It is a dynamic expression of democratic faith, based upon moral conceptions and inspired by a sense of mission.”

It is a myth that the Community is simply a bureaucracy with no concern for the individual . . .

It is a myth that our membership of the Community will suffocate national tradition and culture. Are the Germans any less German for being in the Community, or the French any less French? Of course they are not!²⁴⁵

She specifically argued during this campaign that membership in the EEC militated against the expansion of the frontiers of the state in Britain. Remember these words:

Anything that the left wing of the Labour Party wants is probably bad for our country. And they desperately want us to leave Europe. Their reasons are clear. They fear that, if we stay in Europe, they cannot have their way. They cannot turn us into a socialist siege state, our society suffocated by a spendthrift government. So if they want us out, I say all the more reason to stay in.²⁴⁶

Two years later, she was still embracing this line, positioning herself firmly against those in her party who were voicing doubts about the wisdom of further integration.

. . . the [European] Community needs to strengthen itself. For we face dangers from within as well as from without. Dangers of disunity, dangers of disillusion. Some people are beginning to have doubts about the European idea in practice. At home, there are those, some of them politicians, who blame the Community for all our problems. Others, a small but vociferous minority, would have Great Britain pull out. That is not the position of the party I lead. We are the European party in the British Parliament and among the British people; and we want to co-operate wholeheartedly with our partners in this joint venture.²⁴⁷

Let no one tell you that Thatcher never succumbed to the European fantasy—nor that her subsequent hostility to further integration was motivated by nothing more than irrational and petty prejudice. It simply isn’t so.

So what changed?

Simply put, the romance between Thatcher and Europe soured as so many love stories do: They started to fight when the money got tight. She became progressively more infuriated, Powell recalls, by “the fundamental unfairness of the arrangements for British membership—and the budgetary part above all.”

Some 70 percent of the European Community’s budget was devoted to agricultural subsidies. Britain’s agricultural sector was smaller and more efficient than those of its European counterparts, and moreover its economy was not based upon agriculture. It was unacceptable, Thatcher felt, that at precisely the time she was asking the British public to accept broad public cuts in spending she should also ask them to subsidize inefficient European farmers to the tune of a billion pounds a year.

Britain was receiving only £1 for every £1.50 it contributed to the EEC. It was the second-biggest net contributor after Germany, but one of the poorest member states. So upon taking office, Thatcher demanded a rebate. In November 1979, at the Dublin European Council, Thatcher began an epic argument with her European counterparts. It was to last five long years. “We are not asking the Community or anyone else for money,” she said repeatedly. “We are simply asking to have our own money back.” She threatened to withhold further contributions to the EEC if she did not get her way. To Europeans who wished to maintain the pretense that Europe was now one happy family, this demand seemed distinctly unfraternal. “Every meeting,” Powell recalls, “was turned into a battle about Britain’s contribution. It was seen as anti-European to argue about what your contribution was, and half of them pretended they didn’t know what they contributed.”

It did not take long for the members of the new European family to remember that idealistic rhetoric aside, they loathed one another and always had. At a meeting in Strasbourg, French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing insisted upon being served his meal before Thatcher. When next he visited her in London, she repaid him by seating him beneath portraits of Nelson and Wellington. “I suspect,” she purred, “that the distinguished Britons looking down on us from the walls—who were accustomed to a different sort of relationship between our two countries—would have been surprised and, in their hearts, pleased.”²⁴⁸ In her memoirs, she recalls Giscard gazing at the portraits and remarking upon the irony. “I replied that it was no less ironic that I should have to look at portraits of Napoleon on my visits to Paris. In retrospect, I can see that this was not quite a parallel. Napoleon lost.”²⁴⁹

The summits grew progressively more acrimonious and were marked each time by greater rudeness. Giscard would ostentatiously read his newspaper while Thatcher banged on and on about the budget; Helmut Schmidt would close his eyes and pretend to snore. Once, apparently, as Thatcher was raving about “my oil” and “my fish,” she punctuated her comments with the words “my God!” Someone in attendance loudly replied, “Oh, not that, too.” According to legend, during a 1984 summit meeting, she slammed her handbag on the table and screeched, “I want my money back!” This did not actually happen, but again, it is one of those anecdotes that suggests something about the mood of these encounters.

Finally, exhausted, François Mitterrand gave way. At the Fontainebleau Summit in 1984, the EEC agreed to give an annual rebate to the United Kingdom, amounting to 66 percent of the difference between Britain’s contributions and its receipts. Powell recalls the “electric tension” when Mitterrand said, at last, “Mrs. Thatcher should have what she wants.”

Thatcher won the fight, but the love affair was never the same.

It is so often that way.

Despite these conflicts, says Powell, Thatcher at this point still fundamentally believed that “Europe was on balance where Britain should be. It was OK. There were things like common fisheries policies that needed to be changed, improved, but she made this great campaign for the single market in Europe, and it was one of the great successes of Europe. It was certainly very much in our interests.” The Single European Act of 1986, a Thatcher initiative, established a European market, without frontiers, in which goods, services, people, and capital might move freely. This was, of course, consistent with the economic principles she stood for.

“What tipped her over the edge against Europe was really two things,” Powell says. “One was when they started to go to the single currency. She believed that was eroding national sovereignty to a point which was just unacceptable.” A single currency, Thatcher believed, necessarily entailed something very like a single economic policy: Britain would no longer be able to set its own interest rates or make adjustments to its exchange rates. In other words, it would no longer have access to the key economic instruments normally available to sovereign governments. Instead, these decisions would be made centrally, in the context of a huge federal European budget. To Thatcher, this idea was for obvious reasons anathema.

The second provocation came in the form of Jacques Delors, the socialist president of the EEC Commission. Delors was, in Thatcher’s words, on “the federalist express.” By 1988, she writes, “he had slipped his leash as a fonctionnaire.” Delors in that year announced to the European Parliament that in the coming five years, the European Community would become responsible for 80 percent of all legislation: An “embryo” European government, he said, might emerge.

To Europeans who had “no real confidence in the political system or political leaders of their own country,” Thatcher later wrote, it might be tolerable to have “foreigners” like Delors “telling you how to run your affairs.” But not to a proud Briton. “To put it more bluntly,” she sniffs, “if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too.”²⁵⁰

As if this wasn’t enough, Delors then pitched up in Britain to address the Trades Union Conference. “He used words to the effect that in a couple years’ time all important decisions about Britain will be taken in Brussels, not here,” Powell recalls. “And that just infuriated her, politically, I mean, made her just angry. She just thought, Well, now, they’ve really come clean on what the elite in Europe are really after. They’re after the extinction of national sovereignty.”

Delors won the trade unions over. Originally wary, their members became persuaded that the European unification project might well be a way to roll back Thatcherite reforms, particularly since the ballot box certainly wasn’t doing the trick. Ron Todd, the head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, heard Delors’s speech and emerged, inspired, declaring, “We have not a cat in hell’s chance of achieving [our goals] in Westminster, but we may have it in Brussels.”²⁵¹ The Labour Party agreed.

Thatcher remained committed to the overarching principle that anything the Labour Party wanted must be bad for Britain: If they were now for Europe, she was against it. “From then on,” recalls Powell, “she was determined to start a fight back.”

This is where the story gets ugly. Her clashes with Jacques Chirac in the European Council were, as Powell chastely puts it, “memorable.” In one of them, “He used a word about her so vulgar that all the interpreters screeched to a halt—she was totally unaware of it, not speaking any French at all. She didn’t—”

“And the word was?”

Powell blushes. “I wouldn’t dream of repeating it with your recorder on.”

“I’ll switch it off.”

“I wouldn’t say it even then. Um, but um—”

“Is there some way I can find out? Was it reported anywhere else?”

“I don’t think anyone’s put it in any book, no, but it’s famous for being a vulgarism which would not normally be used in any sort of society, let alone what was supposed to be a polite—I mean, this is because he got very angry with her, this was about agriculture, his desire to protect the French farmers and so on—”

“And really, truly, the interpreters all screeched to a halt?”

“Yes, you could hear the brakes going on!”

“And how was the word translated in the end?”

“It wasn’t. There was just sort of, you know, this embarrassed pause.”

I couldn’t find anyone who would tell me what Chirac said, and I still do not know, but judging from Powell’s uncomfortable squirming—he was clearly mortified just thinking of it—it must have been quite something.

Chirac: Frappe mon cul poilu, sacrifice de putain, tu me casses les couilles! Retournez à la pute qui t’a accouchée!

Translator 1: [Whispers] Oh-là-là! . . .

Meanwhile, the obsessively regulatory character of the European project was becoming increasingly apparent. At one stage, directives on transport safety threatened to consign London’s famous double-decker buses to oblivion. The commission objected to calling Cadbury bars “chocolate” because they didn’t contain the regulation measure of cocoa solids. Thatcher, said Powell, “was pretty rapidly reaching the view that actually Britain should withdraw from the European Union. Now, she never said that publicly in a speech, but she came close to it.”

On September 20, 1988, Thatcher made her infamous speech to the College of Europe at Bruges. She began with a few pleasantries, then briskly offended everyone present by reminding them of the debt they owed to Britain:

Over the centuries, we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. We have fought and we have died for her freedom. Only miles from here in Belgium lie the bodies of 120,000 British soldiers who died in the First World War. Had it not been for that willingness to fight and to die, Europe would have been united long before now—but not in liberty, not in justice . . .

It was British support to resistance movements throughout the last War that helped to keep alive the flame of liberty in so many countries until the day of liberation . . .

It was from our island fortress that the liberation of Europe itself was mounted.

She professed her commitment to European cooperation. “I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone.” She then defined this as a distinctly more narrow category than envisioned by Delors:

. . . working more closely together does not require power to be centralized in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy.

Indeed, it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the center, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the center, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction.

We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

She concluded by warning against Utopian goals: “Utopia never comes,” she said. “We should not like it if it did.”²⁵² Subtext: You lot have certainly got yourself in trouble every time you’ve tried to create Utopia, haven’t you?

The Bruges speech seems eminently reasonable now, in the fullness of hindsight. It hardly appears to be an expression of fulminating xenophobia—or, for that matter, incipient madness and overweening pride. In 2000, Tony Blair returned to Belgium and allowed that many of Thatcher’s concerns had been justified. But at the time her words had the effect of a thunderclap.

“The Bruges speech was really like Martin Luther nailing his theses to the church door,” says Powell. “For the first time someone set out the limits of Europe and where it should go. It accepted most of what Europe had done up to that point, but it said: ‘Thus far and no further.’” Indeed, the profoundly offended audience responded with about as much enthusiasm as the Catholic church responded to Martin Luther. “Frankly, I am shocked,” said one European commissioner. “Maybe all her speech at Bruges was intended to keep her nationalist-minded right-wingers happy while the serious business in Europe is done more discreetly,” sniffed another.²⁵³

To those who subscribed to the view—not long ago Thatcher’s own—that in a unified Europe lay the solution to the long tradition of European carnage, Thatcher might as well have delivered this speech in a gas mask while calling for the immediate renewal of hostilities on the Western Front. The Belgian prime minister indignantly replied that European unification “is not based on a utopian concept but rather on some very practical considerations: the preservation of peace and prosperity on a continent torn by fratricidal strife.”²⁵⁴

This view was emphatically shared by Thatcher’s foreign secretary. In his memoirs, Geoffrey Howe describes Thatcher’s description of a Europe ruled by an appointed bureaucracy and through endless regulation as “sheer fantasy.” Listening to the Bruges speech was, he wrote, “a little like being married to a clergyman who had suddenly proclaimed his disbelief in God.”²⁵⁵

To those who saw European unification as inevitable, Thatcher’s intransigence seemed strategically witless: By alienating her European counterparts, they believed, she would ensure nothing but a diminished role for Britain. Neil Kinnock swiftly seized upon this point:

If we are to get a square deal or even a fair change in the Single Market we need a Government in Britain . . . that will participate in the development of Europe, that will play a direct influential role in fashioning the institutions and relationships of the Market within which our economy must work in order to prosper. Mrs. Thatcher’s failure to accept co-operation and to exert Britain’s sovereignty in a positive way is creating the threat of a two-tier Europe, with Britain firmly stuck in the second rank—passed by Italy in the 1980s, likely to be passed by Spain in the 1990s. We cannot afford that. We mustn’t afford it.²⁵⁶

For a change, Kinnock found a great deal of sympathy for this view—if not for him—in the Conservative Party.

“Do you think her sentiments about Europe were at the heart of her downfall?” I ask Powell.

“No. They were part of it, but they weren’t at the heart of it. They were the tactical excuse for it, unleashing Geoffrey Howe to start a process which led to a fear among many conservative MPs that the poll tax was going to prevent their re-election. And her increasingly high-handed treatment of her closest political colleagues probably cost her more votes, or combined to a much greater vote.”

“When you say ‘her increasingly high-handed treatment’—”

“Well, she used to berate Geoffrey Howe in cabinet—”

“When you say ‘berate’—”

“Well, just sort of slap him down or overrule him. She got very dismissive, in the end. Impatient. You know, after ten, eleven years in government, head of government when the military went to victories—she had the answers and wasn’t really interested in listening to reservations.”

“What kind of language did she use?”

“She didn’t use bad language, never used bad language. ‘Forceful’ and ‘strident’ are the sort of words that come to mind. She could behave—it was pretty embarrassing at times to listen to it, frankly. You know, that she could treat someone like that. Because it was bound to have an effect, really, bound to.”

Enter now Geoffrey Howe, who until this point has not figured largely in my story not because he was insignificant—he was Thatcher’s first chancellor and her longest-serving cabinet minister—but because, honestly, he is boring. Mild-mannered. Bland. Uncon-frontational. In 1978, Labour Chancellor Denis Healey said that being challenged by Howe in debate was “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

There is a sequel to this anecdote. When in 1983 Healey congratulated Howe upon his appointment as foreign secretary, Howe told the House that it was “like being nuzzled by an old ram.” A nice riposte. But think about that: Howe had been stewing over that insult and storing up that response for five years.

Nigel Lawson writes that Thatcher found Howe’s “quiet, dogged manner intensely irritating. Increasingly, over the years, she felt compelled—to the acute embarrassment of everyone else present—to treat him as something halfway between a punchbag and a doormat . . . she went out of her way to humiliate him at every turn.”²⁵⁷ When I spoke to Lawson, I asked him just why, exactly, Howe’s manner irritated her so. “She bullied people who she thought were bully-able,” he said tersely. “Which is not a very attractive characteristic, but you know, nobody’s perfect.”

Howe was not the only one she had bullied. The list of those she had aggrieved was long. Lawson, by this point, was among them, and so was her former defense secretary, Michael Heseltine. She had enemies everywhere. But she did not believe they would dare rise up against her.

ARTEMIDORUS

Caesar, beware of Brutus; take heed of Cassius; come not near Casca; have an eye to Cinna, trust not Trebonius: mark well Metellus Cimber: Decius Brutus loves thee not: thou hast wronged Caius Ligarius.

CAESAR

What, is the man insane?

Thatcher’s popularity declined in 1989. Inflation was once again rising. She blamed Nigel Lawson. She claimed that her chancellor had been following an economic policy in preparation for monetary union without her knowledge and against her wishes. The story does not reflect well on her. If he was doing this without her knowledge, she was not in control; if he was doing this against her wishes, she was not in command. In either case, she was not accepting responsibility.

At the Madrid European summit, Lawson and Howe threatened to resign unless Thatcher agreed, at a minimum, to state the circumstances under which she would join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Thatcher saw the Exchange Rate Mechanism as the precursor to monetary union. She capitulated to their ultimatum because she had no choice, but she took revenge. She demoted Howe to leader of the House—a position he rightly saw as ceremonial—and from then on permitted her economic advisor Alan Walters, a caustic Euroskeptic, to eclipse Lawson.

When Howe first rose to speak in his new, diminished capacity, Lawson recalled,

A loud and long spontaneous cheer rose from the massed Conservative benches of a kind that is rarely heard. It was a tribute to the affection with which Howe was held within the Party. But more than anything else, it was a clear warning to Margaret. No experienced Tory Member could have failed to get the message—except perhaps one: Margaret Hilda Thatcher.²⁵⁸

Lawson resigned from Thatcher’s cabinet that October, stating—correctly—that Thatcher’s reliance on Walters had undermined him.

Lawson’s resignation came as a great shock to her. This in itself indicates that her uncanny political judgment had begun to fail her. Shortly after Lawson’s resignation, Thatcher was interviewed for ITV by Brian Walden. It is a remarkable exchange: It is clear that Thatcher is losing her grasp not only politically, but emotionally. It is the only interview I can recall watching in which Thatcher’s interlocutor pulverizes her. She appears bewildered, off-balance, flustered, and insane.

Walden: Prime Minister, it is fairly clear, is it not, what was getting up Nigel’s nose. It was not that you had an economic adviser who very quietly and silently whispered things to you in the still watches of the night. He felt that you were not seen to be united because Professor Alan Walters, a very able man, was making absolutely clear to anybody who cared to listen to him, fundamental disagreements that he had with the Chancellor. . . . Now surely he put that point to you and what did you say to that?

Prime Minister: Alan Walters is part-time as my adviser. He has only just recently returned . . . It is just not possible that this small particular thing could result in this particular resignation . . . I am very sad that [Lawson] has gone. But he has and now we must turn to the future. The same policies will continue because they are sound and we shall carry on in precisely the same way.

Walden: I want to ask you about that of course Prime Minister. But let us come back to Professor Alan Walters . . . [Thatcher says the same inane things] All right, well let us consider Lawson. I have to take it the way you have put it, Prime Minister, that you blame Nigel for the resignation, not yourself? . . . [Thatcher repeats herself] Of course, so let me ask you again, why did Nigel resign? You say he knew that he was unassailable, he knew that you loved him and that everything that he did was marvelous, but he resigned . . . [Thatcher repeats herself, voice rising] He was unassailable, you say; you were in agreement, you say; everything was going well, you say; and he said to you: “Margaret, you have got to get rid of Alan Walters!” Why didn’t you and keep your Chancellor? . . . [Thatcher repeats herself, voice hysterical, and begs him to change the subject] Do you deny Nigel would have stayed if you had sacked Professor Alan Walters? . . .

Prime Minister: [Nearly shrieking] I do not know!

Walden: You never even thought to ask him that?

Prime Minister: I do not know! Nigel had determined that he was going to put in his resignation. I did everything possible to stop him! I was not successful! No! You are going on asking the same question!

Walden: [Calmly] Of course, but that is a terrible admission, Prime Minister.

Prime Minister: I do not know! Of course I do not know!

Walden: You do not know you could have kept your Chancellor, possibly, if you had sacked your part-time adviser? . . . Let me sum you up so far. You do not accept blame for the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, you do not know why he resigned, he is to tell me himself, you can offer no guidance on that. And you do not accept that the other resignations from your government, or the other sackings from your government, have arisen because you cannot handle strong men . . . You come over as being someone who one of your Back Benchers said is “slightly off her trolley,” authoritarian, domineering, refusing to listen to anybody else . . .

Prime Minister: Nonsense, Brian! I am staying my own sweet reasonable self, . . . reasonably, firmly, strongly—

Walden: Prime Minister, I must stop you there!

Prime Minister: No, you must not!

Walden: I must! Thank you very much indeed!²⁵⁹

In November 1989, Thatcher was challenged for the leadership of the Conservative Party by Anthony Meyer, an unknown backbencher. She defeated him handily, but it was now clear that the knives had been unsheathed. She did not seem to sense it. Asked by an interviewer where she stood, she replied, “In the lead, I am the Leader, I am Prime Minister. That is where I am and I shall just carry on as I have always carried on.” Did that mean she would go on ad infinitum? he asked. “No, no, no,” she said blithely. “I did not say ad infinitum—no-one can go on ad infinitum . . . One is, after all, finite.”²⁶⁰

CAESAR

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

By the fall of 1990, the Conservative Party had come to see Thatcher as a liability. Europe was not the only reason for this. The introduction of the so-called Community Charge—a fixed-rate tax for local services—was intended to expose the wastefulness of Labour-controlled local governments. It replaced a tax pegged to the notional rental value of a taxpayer’s house. Thatcher hoped that voters would at last realize how much the Labour councils were really spending and throw the bums out. But unsurprisingly, a tax that appeared to penalize the poor at exactly the same rates as the rich was not well-received. In March, a demonstration in London against the poll tax turned into the worst riot seen in the city for a century. Millions refused to pay. Protestors resisted the bailiffs and disrupted the court hearings of the debtors. At Balliol—a very left-wing college—students were constantly organizing and marching against the poll tax. All through that autumn they were making banners and passing around leaflets and petitions. I watched this with puzzlement: It seemed to me that for a change they were right. The poll tax was insanity. I couldn’t figure out what Thatcher was thinking.

Thatcher refused to compromise or change the tax.

CAESAR

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.

 

But I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.

The economy was headed toward recession. The Conservatives were trailing in the polls. The Conservative Party is not known for loyalty. In 1975 Thatcher herself had studied the omens, then challenged and vanquished Ted Heath.

“The most tearing blow,” Neil Kinnock recalls, “was the fact that we were 14, 16 points ahead on the day she went through the door. And an objective assessment of the reasons for her departure will take account of her arrogance, the distance that she developed between herself and her party, the poll tax—but really, what lit the fuse was that month after month after month we were way ahead in the opinion polls, and the Tories were starting to worry about their own security. Political security. So a group said, rightly, ‘If she stays there, we’re going to lose the next election.’ They were right about that.”

It is impossible to say if they were right about that. She never had the chance to put the matter to the test. “You might not like it,” says Powell, “but for eleven years, every time the British people were given a chance to express a view on it”—“it” being Thatcherism and Thatcher—“they supported it, voted for it, and I think she would have won the election in 1992 as well, had she stayed in. She was always a pragmatist. She always knew how to retreat sometimes. She was very good in Europe. You had to adjust, obviously, you could never have outright victory on anything in Europe, and she was very good at blowing smoke and retreating behind the smokescreen . . . on the poll tax, the community charge, she would have done exactly what John Major did, that is, loan some of the costs off of central taxation and make some changes, and I think would have won the 1992 election on the back of it. You always have to remember she was dislodged by a coup d’état, not by any democratic procedure.”

At the end of October 1990, upon returning from a European Council meeting in Rome, Thatcher again made it clear to the Commons that she was vehemently opposed to the idea of a European single currency and the development of a federal Europe. “The President of the Commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate.” With this, she sucked in a great lungful of air, and then with all the drama of a concert soprano hitting the high note of a tragic aria cried out: “NO! NO! NO!” ²⁶¹

This spectacle pushed the long-suffering Howe over the edge. On November 1, 1990, he resigned.

It was obvious now to everyone—but her—that the rats were briskly paddling away. “I don’t think she realizes what a jam she’s in,” Alan Clark wrote in his diary. “It’s the bunker syndrome. Everyone around you is clicking their heels. The saluting sentries have highly polished boots and beautifully creased uniforms. But out at the Front it’s all disintegrating . . . whole units are mutinous and in flight.”²⁶²

On November 13, Howe plunged the first dagger. His resignation speech was by far the best of his career. It was, in Thatcher’s words, “cool, forensic, light at points, and poisonous.”²⁶³ He would from then on be remembered, she predicted, “not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skilful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own.” The evaluation is bitter, to be sure, but not unfair.²⁶⁴ No one remembers Howe for anything but this speech.

It was essential, he warned,

. . . not to cut ourselves off from the realities of power; not to retreat into a ghetto of sentimentality about our past and so diminish our own control over our own destiny in the future . . .

It would have spared us so many of the struggles of the last 20 years had we been in the Community from the outset; had we been ready, in the much too simple phrase, to “surrender some sovereignty” at a much earlier stage. If we had been in from the start, as almost everybody now acknowledges, we should have had more, not less, influence over the Europe in which we live today. We should never forget the lesson of that isolation, of being on the outside looking in, for the conduct of today’s affairs . . .

As Thatcher had done years before, Howe summoned to arms the spirit of Winston Churchill:

I have to say that I find Winston Churchill’s perception a good deal more convincing, and more encouraging for the interests of our nation, than the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people, scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy,” to “dissolve our national identities” and to lead us “through the back-door into a federal Europe.” . . .

The tragedy is—and it is for me personally, for my party, for our whole people and for my right hon. Friend herself, a very real tragedy—that the Prime Minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation. It risks minimizing our influence and maximizing our chances of being once again shut out. We have paid heavily in the past for late starts and squandered opportunities in Europe. We dare not let that happen again. If we detach ourselves completely, as a party or a nation, from the middle ground of Europe, the effects will be incalculable and very hard ever to correct.

He concluded on an ominous note. “I have done what I believe is right for my party and my country. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long.”²⁶⁵

These words were widely interpreted as they were meant: They were an invitation to Michael Heseltine, Thatcher’s longtime adversary, to force a leadership election.

BRUTUS

If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: —Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.

ALL

None, Brutus, none.

Heseltine: Big hair. An oily charisma. A self-made millionaire with eight gardeners and a personal arboretum. The press called him “Tarzan.” On Spitting Image they depicted him in a superhero cape: By day, Michael Heseltine is a suave millionaire MP. By night, he is a vain, ambitious little weasel. “The Tory Party Leadership? This is a job for Blondeman! Into the Blondemobile!”

Heseltine was more than ready to strike the coup de grâce. After months of declaring that he could “foresee no circumstances” under which he would challenge the prime minister, he suddenly saw them clearly.

On November 20, 1990, Heseltine was defeated, 204–152, in the first ballot for the party’s leadership. But according to the party’s rules, this was not sufficient to give Thatcher an outright victory. Thatcher was at the time at a summit in Paris. She did not return to campaign for the second round.

A fatal misjudgment.

She underestimated the seriousness of the challenge. She did not cajole or reassure her wavering supporters. “It’s absolute madness,” wrote Clark in his diary. “There’s no Party mileage whatever in being at the Paris summit. It just makes her seem snooty and remote. And who’s running the campaign? Who’s doing the canvassing? Who’s putting the pressure on?”²⁶⁶

Charles Powell understands her decision thus: “A lot of people say, ‘Well, why wasn’t she in London for her reelection as Party leader instead of sitting in Paris at this great conference on the end of the Cold War?’ And in her view, of course they were going to reelect her as leader of the Party after all she’d done for them. Why should she be groveling in the House of Commons’ tea room soliciting votes from people who she created, got elected, had given ten years in government? I mean, they owed it to her, her right place was representing Britain in the triumphal conclusion of the Cold War, and it never occurred to her to go. I think that attitude—it’s perfectly easy to understand, but that’s what brought her down.”

CAESAR

[To the Soothsayer] The ides of March are come.

SOOTHSAYER

Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

“The whole house is in ferment,” wrote Clark. “Little groups, conclaves everywhere . . . in the corridors it is all whispering and glancing over shoulders . . . a great basket of bitterness, thwarted personal ambition and vindictive glee. Talk of country, or loyalty, is dismissed as ‘histrionics.’”²⁶⁷

In the end, one of Thatcher’s great strengths—her ability to stand remote from the men around her—became her great liability. “One of the qualities that men tend to have,” Nigel Lawson says to me, “or Englishmen, you know, from the sort of background that most of the cabinet came from, is clubbability. They’re extremely clubbable. And there’s a kind of men’s club atmosphere. She had no element of clubbability in her at all. Now, I say this is both a strength and a weakness. It was a strength because it disconcerted the men. They didn’t quite know how to deal with a leader who was unclubbable. And this therefore made it easier for her to exert the power she wished to exert and the leadership she wished to exert.

“It was a disadvantage because it did rather, and increasingly, separate her from the rest of her cabinet, all of whom were men . . . So it was an all-male cabinet and she became separated because of this lack of clubbability, not merely from the people she may have not minded being separated from, but also from her actual supporters within the cabinet. And this contributed to her downfall in two ways. The most important way is that she did become rather out of touch, and she didn’t—obviously, she thought she was completely self-sufficient—she didn’t need anybody else. She also didn’t interact, after a time. She did in the beginning, when she first came in, but less and less so . . . and that made her less sure-footed. And the other thing of course is that it meant that there wasn’t, when she stood for the leadership . . . there wasn’t the degree of emotional support from her colleagues that I think she thought she deserved.”

Before she even returned to London, it was already over.

On the evening of November 21, a series of ministers visited her in Downing Street. They told her, one by one, that she had lost the support of the party. She would not win the second round.

“She looked calm, almost beautiful,” wrote Clark.

“Ah, Alan . . . ”

“You’re in a jam.”

“I know that.”

“They’re telling you not to stand, aren’t they?”

“I’m going to stand. I have issued a statement.”

“That’s wonderful. That’s heroic. But the Party will let you down.”

“I am a fighter.”

“Fight, then. Fight right to the end, a third ballot if you need to. But you lose.”

There was quite a little pause.

“It’d be so terrible if Michael won. He would undo everything I have fought for.”

“But what a way to go! Unbeaten in three elections, never rejected by the people. Brought down by nonentities!”

“But Michael . . . as Prime Minister.”

“Who the fuck’s Michael? No one. Nothing. He won’t last six months. I doubt he’d even win the election. Your place in history is towering . . . ”

Outside, people were doing that maddening trick of opening and shutting the door, at shorter and shorter intervals.

“Alan, it’s been so good of you to come and see me . . . ”²⁶⁸

Clark was the only one who encouraged her. The others hewed to their script. “As I well realized,” Thatcher writes, “they had been feverishly discussing what to say in the rooms off the Commons Cabinet corridor above my room. Like all politicians in a quandary, they had sorted out their ‘line to take’ and they would cling to it through thick and thin. After three or four interviews, I felt I could almost join the chorus.”

Of course I support you, they told her, one by one. This is a travesty. You have my complete loyalty. But we’re outnumbered—you’re going to lose. You must step down, so that we can defeat Heseltine, who will destroy everything you’ve worked for . . .

“I was sick at heart,” Thatcher remembers. “I could have resisted the opposition of opponents and potential rivals and even respected them for it; but what grieved me was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words by which they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.”

ANTONY

This was the most unkindest cut of all;
For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms,
Quite vanquish’d him: then burst his mighty heart;
And, in his mantle muffling up his face,
Even at the base of Pompey’s statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell.

After the last visitor left, she dictated a brief statement. She would resign.

“They demonstrated the ruthlessness of the officer class,” says Kinnock. “It was quite an operation, but they got rid of her. And I had to tell my people, ‘Celebrate, and get drunk tonight, and then wake up in the morning and know that we have just lost our greatest political asset.’ Which is the truth.”

It is said that Ted Heath cried “Rejoice! Rejoice!” when he heard the news. When later he was asked whether he had indeed said this, he replied no: He hadn’t said “rejoice” twice, he’d said it three times.

BRUTUS

People and senators, be not affrighted;
Fly not; stand stiff: ambition’s debt is paid.

I remember where I was when I heard. Everyone who lived in Britain then would. I was in Holywell Manor, the graduate annex of Balliol College. There had been rumors all week that she might resign, that Heseltine would challenge her, but truly, no one believed it would really happen. It was inconceivable. I had never known a Britain in which Margaret Thatcher wasn’t the prime minister.

A student burst through the door, shouting: She’s resigned!

CINNA

Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.

Everyone knew who “she” was. Almost everyone in earshot began cheering, punching the air. The elderly porter in the porter’s lodge looked stricken. We raced to the lone television set in the building to follow the story. The college bar was opened early. All day long there were choruses of “Ding, dong, the witch is dead!” That night, at least a dozen students were found passed out or vomiting in the rose bushes.²⁶⁹

FIRST CITIZEN

This Caesar was a tyrant.

THIRD CITIZEN

Nay, that’s certain:
We are blest that Rome is rid of him.

On November 28, the prime minister tendered her resignation to the Queen. One week later, she was driven away from Downing Street.

She was in tears.

ANTONY

O mighty Caesar! dost thou lie so low?
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure? Fare thee well.

Kinnock called for a motion of no confidence in the Conservative government. In defeat, Thatcher seized the opportunity to deliver one of her most astonishing performances. “Each sentence,” she recalls, “was my testimony at the bar of History. It was as if I were speaking for the last time, rather than merely for the last time as Prime Minister.”

She began by recalling Nicholas Henderson’s famous missive from Paris describing the state of Britain when she took power: “We talk of ourselves without shame as being one of the less prosperous countries of Europe,” she quoted from the dispatch. The prognosis for Britain in 1979, she reminded those present, was terminal decline.

“Conservative government has changed all that,” she reminded the House. “Once again, Britain stands tall in the councils of Europe and of the world, and our policies have brought unparalleled prosperity to our citizens at home.”

For Brutus is an honorable man.

“The average pensioner now has twice as much to hand on to his children as he did 11 years ago . . . ”

So are they all, all honorable men—

“We are no longer the sick man of Europe . . . ”

And Brutus is an honorable man.

“Britain no longer has an overmanned, inefficient, backward manufacturing sector, but modern, dynamic industries . . . ”

And Brutus is an honorable man.

“We have worked for our vision of a Europe which is free and open to the rest of the world, and above all to the countries of eastern Europe as they emerge from the shadows of socialism . . .”

In the middle of this speech, an immortal moment:

 

The Prime Minister: I am enjoying this!

 

This is the astonishing thing: She genuinely does appear to be enjoying this. I would swear she is having a simply splendid time. It is a bravura performance. Sheer arrant pride, bustling about as if she hadn’t a single care, chest out, immaculately powdered and lacquered, not a trace of self-pity. If ever I am thus humiliated, I pray I could put on a face like that.

They knew it, too, the House. They were in the presence of an indomitable spirit. You can see it and you can hear it—they are watching her and thinking, My God, she’s magnificent. And a heartbeat later: My God, what have we done?

Mr. Michael Carttiss: Cancel it! You can wipe the floor with these people!

The Prime Minister: Yes, indeed.

“Under our leadership, Britain has been just as influential in shaping the wider Europe and the relations between East and West. Ten years ago, the eastern part of Europe lay under totalitarian rule, its people knowing neither rights nor liberties. Today, we have a Europe in which democracy, the rule of law and basic human rights are spreading ever more widely, where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw pact has been removed: where the Berlin wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end.”

And sure he is an honorable man.

“There is something else which one feels. That is a sense of this country’s destiny: the centuries of history and experience which ensure that, when principles have to be defended, when good has to be upheld and when evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms.

“It is because we on this side have never flinched from difficult decisions that this House and this country can have confidence in this Government today!”²⁷⁰

The House was stunned.

The motion of no confidence was defeated, 367 to 247.

But it was too late: She was gone.

FIRST CITIZEN
O piteous spectacle!
SECOND CITIZEN
O noble Caesar!
THIRD CITIZEN
O woeful day!
FOURTH CITIZEN
O traitors, villains!

 

 

WHAT HAVE THEY DONE?
—Daily Express