Margaret Thatcher embodied all that Victorian progressives might have hoped for when they championed the worthy causes of economic liberalism, free trade, education for all regardless of class and gender. Whereas the socialists within the Labour Party wished to perpetuate the class struggle, and the Social Democrats wanted to keep the class divide merely to change the identities of its contestants, Thatcher’s revolution brought into being a Britain where class as such no longer mattered. Money mattered–it mattered more than it ever did. But all those very English things–things, paradoxically, which in her own person Thatcher almost parodied–deference, defining who you were by the way you spoke–as well as those non-Thatcherish things–a reverence for the past, romantic snobbery–were all blasted away by this very distinctive person, by far the most interesting Prime Minister of the post-Second World War years.
The times were ripe for her coming. In 1976, only a year after she became the party leader, the historian Robert Blake would say, ‘the post-war consensus is dead and… Butskellism is extinct. The particular form of welfare state which came into being in the late’forties and early’fifties is simply not viable any longer. It has been collapsing through its own contradictions for the last ten years, certainly for the last five.’
Blake went on to say that the British political world then (1976) divided between ‘those who wish to solve our ills by even more state intervention’. These he saw as ‘the Wedgwood Benns’ who would ‘lead us to a socialist slum of an East European “people’s democracy”, in which, however, well-intentioned the authors may be, freedom, as we know it will become extinct.1 and those–a much smaller number at this date–who believed that economic recovery–the prerequisite of any other form of recovery in those calamitous times–could only come about by diminishing bureaucracy, setting business free from government intervention, reducing taxes and making the notion of personal property–whether of those with modest means or of the rich–central to any other idea of law, public order and personal freedom.
Except to bigots this latter idea was by the end of our era accepted by almost all British politicians and a high proportion of the thinking adult population. Most British adults aspired, for example, to home-ownership.
Yet within Thatcher’s own party–and especially in her own Shadow Cabinet during her first administration–the home truths had not sunk in. These oafish men went on imagining that ‘consensus’ and ‘corporatism’, which had proved themselves so disastrous throughout the Heath–Callaghan years, would somehow save them. Thatcher’s gender was seen as part of her ‘extremism’ in espousing an alternative which was subsequently adopted not only by all three British political parties, but throughout the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe where she continued to be a heroine long after her political fall in Britain. Whereas her admirers, in America, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia, saw her as a courageous innovator, her detractors saw her in caricature sexist and snobbish stereotypes. Whatever reasons people had for disliking her policies–or indeed for liking them–were blown up into mythic proportions by her sex and class. On the day she resigned, Richard Ingrams placed in the window of his Wallingford bookshop a novel byP. D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Many of the jokes about her current during her premiership were primarily sex or sexist jokes, often recycled mother-in-law jokes in which she was seen as a ball-breaker. ‘We’ve all heard about the fellow who broke into the Queen’s bedroom, but have you heard about the fellow who broke into Margaret Thatcher’s bedroom? He has a new career as a very promising soprano.’…‘What does PMT stand for? Prime Minister Thatcher’… ‘Denis Thatcher went into a bookshop and asked the assistant, “Do you have a book called How to Control Your Wife?” “Our fiction section is upstairs, sir,” smiled the assistant’…‘After all those years of marriage, Denis Thatcher is finally developing an attachment for his wife–it fits over her mouth’… These are all from the Irish ‘comedian’ Des McHale.2 Paul Hogan, the Australian comic, just blatantly stated, ‘When I tell the folks back home that the Poms have got a Sheila as a prime minister they go hysterical.’ ‘Traditionally, politics has been a male preserve, and I think we did all find it difficult coming to terms with a woman leader’–so said a nonentity member of Thatcher’s first Cabinet, Jim Prior.3
In roughly the same era that the Church abandoned the symbolism of an all-male priesthood, Britain had elected its first female Prime Minister.4 It had enjoyed a female Head of State for the previous quarter-century. The role of the monarchy and of this monarch in particular was so understated as at times to be unnoticeable. Thatcher was never unnoticeable. From the first, her confrontational manner awoke ancient mythological archetypes in the public psyche. Periods of history when the ruler has been female–Boudicca leading the Iceni in their fatal last stand against the Romans, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, or the Imperialist and capitalist expressionism of the reign of Victoria–have excited energy, aggressiveness, bravado. For much of the Thatcher era–and this decade is the Thatcher Era in a way that none of the other eras into which my chronicle is divided can plausibly take its name from an incumbent Prime Minister–political life, and the administrative life of Westminster, went on as before. The civil service and the diplomatic service and the Palace of Westminster continued in its all but self-perpetuating mechanisms. Laws were debated and drafted in Parliament: budgets were drafted and assigned to different departments, Secretaries of State and Ministers, having hoped perhaps for this or that degree of expenditure, this or that change, modified their expectations and laboured to complete the mounds of paperwork which these aspirations engendered. The Thames still flowed. Men and women still swarmed into London by morning and out by evening on the same semi-efficient transport system, and in a great many demonstrable ways Britain was more or less the same place at the end of the era as at the beginning. But it did not feel the same. For the politicians and the civil servants, immediately from the day she took office, felt something had changed.
It was not long before the country at large became aware of it, too. Two Margaret Thatchers took possession of public consciousness. One, as has been noted, did so subliminally. This was the takeover of power, in a phallic male world, by a priestess; the Queen of the Night had overthrown Sosostris. This, Thatcher’s mythic significance, programmed involuntary responses of revulsion or admiration. But there was another Thatcher, of whom everyone was aware, a figure of unconscious comedy, the bustling, busy woman, a non-stop talker who shamelessly tongue-lashed Cabinet Ministers, senior civil servants, foreign dignitaries–almost anyone except underlings, to whom she was affectionate and polite. John Hoskyns, now installed as a policy adviser at Number 10, kept a record of the hyper-energy and irascibility, but also of the prodigious mastery of detail. The entry for Tuesday 14 August 1979 is typical. ‘Meeting at midday with Angus Maude, David ****, Norman ****, self and Margaret. First half hour or so disjoined and Margaret as ever, passionate at full throttle on every tiny issue–and big ones too.’
Despite the preponderance of wets in her Cabinet, many of whom hoped and assumed it would be possible to get rid of her after the first setback, Thatcher set about the early stages of her capitalist revolution. She appointed as her Chancellor of the Exchequer a Welsh solicitor by the name of Geoffrey Howe. He had been Solicitor General in Heath’s government and was a recent convert to the One True Faith of monetarism. For nearly a decade, in various roles in Thatcher governments, he tolerated the rough edge of her tongue until his final act of revenge, which helped to topple her…‘Called in to sit in on [the] E[conomic Strategy Committee],’ wrote Hoskyns in an ominous diary entry. ‘I was rather shocked at the way Margaret told off Geoffrey in front of E…’
Howe was a clever man. His soporific boringness, toneless voice and tediously pale grey suits concealed a competent operator and a fervent convert’s zeal. Previous friends among the wets were appalled by Howe’s first Budget. In order to reduce the growth of the money supply from around 13 percent to 7–11 percent he raised interest rates from 2 percent to a staggering 14 percent. He reduced the public sector borrowing requirement from 9.25 percent to 8.25 percent in 1979–80. This meant colossal cuts in public spending–some £1,400 million–in social welfare, the National Health Service and the unprofitable nationalised industries. Howe also radically reordered the tax structure, moving from an emphasis on direct to indirect taxation. When before the Budget Peter Jenkins, a Guardian journalist, asked Sir Ian Gilmour, Lord Privy Seal and leading wet, whether it was true that VAT would be doubled, Gilmour replied that there had been ‘no question of any kind of Cabinet consultation’ about the matter and that it was ‘surely inconceivable that anything so silly could even be contemplated’.5
Prior whimpered, ‘It was really an enormous shock to me that the budget was…so extreme.’6 John Biffen, however, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, responded, ‘I do not deny that this is a severe package. The severity is made necessary by the situation we inherited.’7
In the same Budget, Geoffrey Howe reduced the highest rate of income tax from 83 to 60 percent, and the basic rate of income tax from 33 to 30 percent. This cost the Treasury over £4 billion in revenue, and, as the years unfolded, more tax revenue would be lost by the soaring numbers of unemployed, whose meagre dole money cost the tax-paying classes dear but was unable to stimulate the economy by spending. It was touch and go whether the medicine–what Denis Healey nicknamed sado-monetarism–would work.
Mrs Thatcher took on three principal enemies in the course of her eleven and a half years as Prime Minister. In the first of these two campaigns, she was decisively successful: when she confronted and overcame, first, the Argentinian invaders of the Falkland Islands, and secondly, the President of the National Union of Mineworkers–and, with him, the whole Marxian leviathan of organised labour which had demanded appeasement from the government classes since the Second World War. Her third foe was more amorphous. You could call them the chattering classes, an expression coined by her admirer the journalist Frank Johnson. You could call them the bien pensants. You could even call them the Establishment, or the New Establishment. Against these, she was never successful, and in the end ‘they’ got her. It is arguable that, with economic affairs in such a woeful state at the time of the IMF loan in 1976, some monetarist revolution would have been inevitable, whoever was the Prime Minister. Whether the ‘Revolution’ needed to take the sado-monetarist form, whether the medicine needed to have such drastic side-effects, is probably a debate for economists, all of whom would disagree with one another. One thing is sure–the ‘Thatcherite’ version of the revolution was the one which the British people experienced. And after it the old political, as well as economic, battle lines would never be the same again. Socialism, the attempt by socio-political means to overthrow global capitalism and replace it with corporatist state interventionism, was dead, seemingly forever. This happened in Thatcher’s political lifetime. She regarded it as a phenomenon for which she should take some credit. In her time, the number of home-owners in Britain increased hugely, largely because of her policy that council tenants should be allowed to buy, at usually very favourable rates, their own flats or houses. This encouragement of the upper-working and lower-middle classes to give themselves a leg-up in the world and to escape the dependency culture of the state was a characteristic part of the Thatcher revolution. Equally characteristic was the lack of apparent concern by government for those who were unable, by temperament or financial hardship, to take advantage of these arrangements; or those who, through the periods of soaring interest rates, and boom–bust economic roller-coasters presided over by the Thatcherite Chancellors–Howe, Lawson and Major–found their houses repossessed, themselves repossessed. There was never enough adequate housing built, or acquired, to compensate for the sale of the council properties in the early 1980s, with the inevitable consequence in the later part of the decade that, for the first time in living memory, homeless beggars began to appear on the streets of big cities, their huddled, sleeping-bagged presence a disturbing reminder, to the consciences of their fellow citizens, that all was not quite right with the Revolution. While the spivs seemed to become richer and richer–in the City, in the service industries–the old manufacturing towns slumped into near-extinction. The primary British skill of the Industrial Revolution–making, or producing, commodities which other nations wished to buy–seemed to have deserted them. Two million jobs in the manufacturing industries were lost. Everyone in the world seemed able to make, or mine, or spin, or produce saleable goods more skilfully and more cheaply than could the British. And as the recessions grew, so did the unemployment queues, from 5.5 percent in 1979 to 13 percent by January 1983. Unemployment more than doubled in a single year, 1980–81, and by mid-1982 three million were out of work.
But fairness must allow the Lady her due, and record her two great victories. Without the first of these, the successful expulsion of Argentinian forces from the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, she might never have survived beyond her first term in office; the grievous social consequences of the monetarist revolution in its early stages would probably have lost her the election, and the wets in the party, who had always hated her, would have proceeded in the traditional Tory manner to assassinate their leader as soon as possible. But Margaret Thatcher was blessed in her opponents and enemies. Leopoldo Galtieri, who seized control of a junta government in Buenos Aires in December 1981, needed to establish popularity at home and to silence opposition. The Malvinas, known by the British as the Falkland Islands, were and are a remote and barren group of islands, inhabited by 1,800 people, 600,000 sheep and several million penguins. Ever since the British took possession of the islands, in 1765, their right to be there had been questioned. The Spanish had attempted to repossess them in 1769. Dr Johnson pointed out that West Falkland was a place ‘thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, barren in summer, an island which not even the southern savages have dignified with habitation, where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia, of which the expense will be perpetual’. Throughout the post-colonial period, someone at the Foreign Office had been forever on the point of moving papers about his desk and persuading the Foreign Secretary or the Colonial Secretary to hand over administration of the islands to the Argentines, but it had never quite happened, and this procrastination, interrupted by much sabre-rattling on both sides at moments of crisis, was what was destined to save Margaret Thatcher’s career.
The Falklands invasion was, indeed, one of those great strokes of luck which come upon some politicians. At the time of Galtieri’s decision, Thatcher was in all likelihood heading for political defeat, as the horrible effects of the monetarist revolution began to be felt. Then, in the early hours of Friday 2 April, news reached the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall that Argentinian troops had landed on the islands at Mullet Creek. A small force of British Marines was powerless against the Argentinian fleet, now moored off East Falkland, and a large fighting force, backed up by troop-carriers, guns and two Alouette helicopters. The Marines did what they could, firing 1,200 rounds of small-arms fire and they let off three 84mm Carl Gustav anti-tank rockets.8 but surrender was the only course. Before long the officer commanding the Marines, Lieutenant Keith Mills, and the Governor of the Falklands, Rex Hunt, clad in full gubernatorial regalia of feathered hat and white uniform, had had no alternative but to surrender to the superior forces of General Oswaldo García. So far the casualties were four Argies dead. But what were the British government back in London going to do about the crisis?
Harold Wilson or James Callaghan would have attempted to get out of the problem by means of negotiation. Having consulted with the service chiefs, Margaret Thatcher knew that she was running a colossal risk if she were to attempt the retaking of the Falklands by force. It required the sending of a task force accompanied by tanker ships, supply ships and hospital ships. The journey would take weeks, giving the enemy the chance to build up their defences. Once arrived, there was the formidable task of landing on the islands and engaging with the Argentinians, who would by then have had probably eight weeks to dig themselves in, and who could hold the islanders hostage. Loss of life looked inevitable and victory by no means certain. When Thatcher told the Cabinet of the venture, only the Trade Secretary John Biffen, one of her monetarist supporters, dissented. The alternative was that the government, who had allowed the invasion to take them by surprise in spite of intelligence suggesting a build-up of Argentinian aggression, would have been forced to resign.9
During the subsequent war, between 2 April and 14 June 1982,255 British and 650 Argentinian lives were lost. Perhaps the most controversial engagement of the campaign involved the sinking of the Argentinian ship General Belgrano by the British submarine Conqueror. Of all the events of the war, it was the one which was the most emblematic of the Prime Minister’s character. Three hundred and sixty-eight young Argentinian lives were lost when the ship was sunk–outside the agreed exclusion zone. Thatcher was obliged to take the decision to sink the ship, and her executive courage impressed the military and naval top brass. They were not used to dealing with Prime Ministers who took such decisions so readily. Nor, in all the subsequent and highly predictable hullabaloo, did she show the slightest penitence. The following Christmas at Chequers, when showing composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the film director David Puttnam (he of Chariots of Fire) round Chequers, she paused and said, ‘This is the chair I sat in when I decided to sink the Belgrano.’10
The British public had not been able to enjoy anything like this since the Second World War, which most Britons were now too young to remember. When news of the sinking reached the the Sun on the night of 3 May, most of its journalists were on strike; it was three non-union staff who in fact thought up the headline which many thought typical not only of that newspaper but also of the Thatcher era: GOTCHA!
‘I agree that headline was a shame,’ said proprietor Rupert Murdoch. ‘But it wasn’t meant in a blood-curdling way. We just felt excited and euphoric. Only when we began to hear reports of how many men had died did we begin to have second thoughts.’ In subsequent editions of the paper the headline was altered to the less catchy, and characteristically inaccurate, ‘DID 1200 ARGIES DIE?’
Those who were ‘horrified’ by the headline would be those who eventually had the satisfaction of seeing Margaret Thatcher’s political demise. They included the dons, and the clergy, and those who could see ‘no future’ for Britain outside Europe, who thought it would have been perfectly possible to continue with the consensus politics of the previous forty years, and somehow to work out the economic difficulties without the drastic monetarist remedy. These could be deemed liberal, or enlightened, Britain and, because they were unused to their voice not being heard in the land, they believed, correctly as it turned out, that it was only a matter of time before Thatcher and Thatcherism were eradicated. There was another group, however, who saw the Falklands War, and its enthusiastic reception in some circles in Britain, with an even heavier heart. This was the left, the old formal left, the communists of various colourings and their fellow-travellers. By means of the trades unions (some of them)–and with it the possibility of disrupted and disruptive organised labour; history and sociology departments in universities–and with them the possibility of student unrest; some of the back benches of the Commons, and their gang of fellow-travelling sillies in the media and the Church, the serious left had always known that, short of a revolution, they stood no chance of actually governing Britain. But they had sway and influence. The Falklands War was the first time they began to see that this influence was not merely on the decline. It was about to be eliminated–at first in Britain, and later across Eastern Europe–remaining eventually, by the end of our period, only extant in some parts of the United States, France and Northern Europe. ‘The Falklands crisis represents a truly enormous setback for the Left and even for liberal attitudes in Britain. It has brought to the surface of the Right-wing press an hysteria and intolerance which must make one tremble for what might occur in a really serious crisis.’11 The left saw immediately that, whatever the war’s origins, its consequences would be electoral triumph for Thatcher. Many voters who would not have considered themselves especially belligerent felt that a fundamental principle had been established. Regardless of who should have been in charge of the Falklands/Malvinas at the beginning of 1982, they were, as a matter of law and fact, British sovereign territory. The Argentinian dictatorship had brutally invaded. Britain had responded legally, and with prodigious skill and efficiency. When the Argentinians surrendered Port Stanley on 14 June it was a moment not simply of relief; it was a vindication of right. That was how a majority saw matters at home in Britain. The grown-up stuff–that in this day and age we should not be solving international difficulties by means of warfare; that battleships were a thing of the past; that royal princes (Prince Andrew) flying helicopters in military engagements belonged to a vanished age–these protests only inclined the cheering readers of the Sun and the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail to feel that something truly miraculous had taken place. The military victory was not miraculous, for these voters had always believed in the skill and courage of the armed forces. It was the political will, and the executive courage of the Prime Minister, which they loved. Here was a real war, with casualties and ships being sunk and battles being fought. And it was being directed, not by an old man who had himself been a soldier; not by a uniformed Churchill in peaked naval cap, but by a suburban ‘little woman’, a person whom the vast majority of her supporters could recognise as ‘one of them’.
The service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral for Victory on 26 July infuriated the right wing by its conciliatory attitude, its expressions of regret for the young Argentinians slain, and its profession of hatred for war itself. In one of his ‘Dear Bill’ Letters, the fictitious Denis Thatcher wrote:
I had taken the precaution of ingesting a few pretty stiff ones across the road in the Barbican Arms, and my recollection of the opening moments is not all that clear, but I realised as soon as the Proprietor made her entrance, in total silence without so much as a breath of applause, let alone the massed trumpeters or Cup Final cheering we had expected, that someone had blundered. When Runcie finally minced up into the pulpit and adjusted his frock, instead of rendering thanks to the great Bartender in the Sky for the sinking of the Belgrano and all his other mercies viz unexploded bombs, crass bungling by Argies, massacre at Goose Green etc., we got a lecture, would you believe, on the evils of war with the strong suggestion the whole episode need not have happened…M. inevitably was fit to be tied, shredded her programme, looked at her watch several times during the homily, and when it came to shaking hands with the Primate at the West Door, gave him a radioactive look that left him smouldering.12
The real-life Denis, however, had said that the sermon was ‘better than expected’, but this was ‘more than could be said for the rest of the bloody service’.13 The truth is that the sort of people who draft services in St Paul’s Cathedral were never going to vote for Thatcher, or encourage Thatcherism; their lip-curling and disapproval, sensed throughout the Thatcherite ranks, was only one of many indications of disapproval which egged on the first-time home-owners and would-be purchasers of council houses, who found themselves the natural allies of the entrepreneurs, the moderate trades unionists who had had enough of being bullied by Marxists, and the old-age pensioners who did not mind it when interest rates increased the income from their savings in the building society. The sneering disapproval of those who considered themselves more sophisticated actually exacerbated the Thatcherites’ taste for another battle.
In his diary, Alan Clark noted that, during the service held in Plymouth to commemorate the Falklands War, Dr David Owen had ‘bellowed out the words’, ‘God who made Thee mighty, make Thee mightier yet’.14
The 1983 General Election was a foregone conclusion. It had been helped on its way, not merely by the war, but also by the short-term, or apparent, success of the monetarist economic miracle. On 30 March, 1981, three hundred and sixty-four academic economists had signed a letter to The Times stating, ‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the Government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control and thereby introduce an automatic recovery in output and unemployment; present policies will deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability.
‘There are alternative policies.
‘The time has come to reject monetarist policies and consider which alternative offers the best hope of sustained recovery.’
Nigel Lawson was to write proudly in his memoirs, ‘Their timing was exquisite. The economy embarked on a prolonged phase of vigorous growth almost from the moment the letter was published. So far from launching the economy on a self-perpetuated downward spiral, the Budget was a prelude to eight years of uninterrupted growth and left our economic critics bewildered and discredited.’15
Lawson, as perhaps the most adventurous of Thatcher’s Chancellors of the Exchequer, was bound to say this; and in his monetarist triumphalism he overlooked the fact that the despised academics in their letter to The Times got some things right: Thatcher, Howe and Lawson did help to exacerbate social problems by pursuing policies which destroyed manufacturing industry and increased unemployment. This, like the GOTCHA! attitude to the Argies, was very much what the fans wanted. For decades, the suburban classes had watched while members of big trades unions were able to clobber their bosses, especially those in the nationalised industries, by inflationary wage demands. In times of inflation, it was the middle classes, with mortgaged houses, who paid in higher interest rates for the short-term triumphs of the union barons. And for many such voters it was a chance to exact revenge on the collective bullyism of the left. The left, the numerically diminishing working classes, or as Auberon Waugh always referred to them, the ‘working’ classes, of course fought to maintain the status quo, as did the great liberal majority of academics, civil servants and their like. The knowledge that Thatcher intended to ‘deal with’ the unions was undoubtedly one factor in the electoral triumph of 1983, when she increased her majority by over a hundred seats–to 144.16 True, because of the peculiarities of the British electoral ‘first past the post’ system, this figure concealed another fact–that Conservative votes had actually diminished in the election by 700,000. In 1983 only just over thirteen million people voted for Thatcher. Those who would belittle Thatcher’s popularity point out that this was well less than half the possible adult electors. That somewhat misses the point. Thatcher never believed, and nor did her enthusiastic supporters, that she was loved by all of the people all of the time. Unpopularity, as well as popularity, was an essential ingredient in her political success. She was extremely fortunate, in her first two terms of office, in her enemies. The Thatcherites deplored not only the left, who were her natural enemies, but also the wets, the liberals, the consensus politicians, who wanted to hold back from a showdown.
And there was no doubt that a showdown was coming. Enter stage left the President of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, a gift from the gods. In 1980, Derek Ezra, the chairman of the National Coal Board, had warned the government that unless it injected more cash into the ailing British coal industry there would have to be pit closures. A ‘hit list’ was leaked, the following year, of between twenty and fifty uneconomic pits which were ripe for closure, a leak which led to unofficial strikes in Kent and South Wales, followed by a hasty retreat by Thatcher. She did not want to repeat the fate of Heath, who was seen off by the miners. When she took on the miners she would do so on her own terms, and, after years of preparation, when she had insured that sufficient supplies of cheap foreign coal had been imported, and the army and the police primed for the conflict. She also needed a less conciliatory figure than Ezra at the NCB. For her role as general in the war against the working class, she chose the self-made Scots-American Ian MacGregor, who had already earned the nickname ‘Mac the Knife’ while running British Steel, and cutting the workforce by half. Was he a fit match for Scargill? Arthur Scargill, schooled in the Young Communist League, had remained in the party long after the Hungarian atrocities of 1956 had driven out tenderer souls. He first came to prominence in 1972 during the miners’ strike, when he organised ‘flying pickets’ who had turned back the police at the Saltley Gate pits in the Midlands. Wearing a baseball cap, Scargill seemed willing to do Thatcher’s work for her, coming on the television news night after night and mouthing threats against the police, verbal assaults on the management of the NCB and unapologetic, hectoring expressions of hope that a socialist paradise would soon spread from his own luxurious flat in the Barbican across the coal fields of England, Wales and Scotland until it made intrusions into the suburbs of Middle England.
‘We had more people arrested at Saltley…than in the rest of the strike put together. I was the only official of the NUM arrested and subsequently convicted. It was incredible. I was taken to court for picketing and for organizing picketing…you will not get real control of the society in which we live, unless you commit and convince the working class of the need to struggle’……‘If we get another Saltley then thewhole picture can change from one where you have a peaceful road to one where you do not have a peaceful road.’17 There was no doubting Scargill’s ability as an orator and as an agitator. For a limited few (as in the case of his great enemy Thatcher) there was a great personal appeal. He was boyish in appearance, with a high, pink complexion, and an intelligent, bright pair of eyes. But the zest for going too far made him ultimately better suited as a political demagogue than as a union leader. Gormley had known exactly how to lure Ted Heath up to the edge of the heffalump trap: he did not even need to push. Scargill, who was a well-read Marxist, sensed a coming apocalypse. He wanted a battle. Thatcher therefore did not need to make her supporters’ flesh creep with fear of the Red Peril; Scargill did the job for her.
Between the pair of them were the lives of tens of thousands of coal miners and their families, and of the towns and villages which were sustained by their earning power. In South Wales, in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Kent, the miners were divided, most of the 25,000 Nottinghamshire miners, for example, being opposed to Scargill, realistic about the possible future of their industry and opposed to the strike. The dispute therefore became not merely (from Thatcher’s perspective) a battle with the communists and wreckers; it became a civil war among the working class, with ‘scabs’ on the one hand and foolhardy left-wing loyalists on the other. As the cruelly long months of the strike were extended, more and more miners, however much it stuck in their throats to do so, felt forced by economic hardship to return to work, even though crossing the picket lines to the cries of ‘Scab! Scab!’ from their fellow workers led to lasting wounds and breaches within families and communities.
Scargill had made three attempts, since becoming President of the NUM in 1979, to call for a national strike and on each occasion he was defeated by ballot. He would have been defeated again in 1984, but this time he did not call a ballot and merely called his union out on strike against the will of many–probably a majority–of his membership. MacGregor was not nearly as belligerent as either Thatcher or Scargill probably wanted him to be. The offer he had made to the miners was a £33,000 redundancy pay for a man aged forty-nine in the case of closed pits. Unlike Thatcher, and in common with most miners, MacGregor actually wanted to save jobs in the industry, and he did not have in mind any solution as draconian as, say, the Wilson government which, during the 1960s, closed more than two hundred pits.18
Thatcher’s line, carefully dictated by her monetarist advisers, was that this was not a government versus miners dispute. That had been the mistake of Ted Heath in the old corporatist days. Governments did not negotiate with unions. Their bosses did–in this case the National Coal Board. All that was required of a government was to watch, and to support the police when the fisticuffs got out of hand.
The idea that the government were not involved, from the start, with the resistance to Scargill, was a fiction. As well as insisting that the Central Electricity Generating Board stockpiled cheap Polish coal at the power stations, the government had also made sure that the ‘police’ at the trouble spots were in fact members of the army wearing police uniforms. One of them told Tony Benn in 1986, ‘I was in the army until last year, and during the miners’ strike I was at Catterick Camp and we were regularly put into police uniforms and sent on to the picket lines. We didn’t like it particularly…At Nottingham, of the sixty-four policemen in our group, sixty-one were soldiers and only three were regular policemen–an inspector, a sergeant and one bobby.’ He said that the soldiers used were from the Military Police, the SAS and the Green Jackets.19
When, in the House of Commons, Thatcher insisted that the government was not intervening in the coal strike, Michael Foot, now resigned as the leader of the Labour Party, to be replaced by Neil Kinnock, rose from the back benches and said that she had ‘lied to the House’. Most unusually, the Speaker did not ask him to withdraw the comment.20 For the miners, both those who lost their jobs and those who attempted, by means of work and moderate negotiation, to keep them, the strike had brought nothing but anxiety and wretchedness. And in the end there was nothing which they, or MacGregor, or anyone else could do to make British coal competitive in the global marketplace. By the end of the century every mine in Britain would have closed.
As so often in Thatcher’s career, the point of the war with Scargill was not its actual consequences but its mythic significance. Though her actual success in government owed much to her phenomenal grasp of detail (Quintin Hogg said that he had never known any other barrister who could master a brief, or a mass of government documents, with a more telling and thorough eye than she21), it was not the hard work and the detail which made the Thatcher magic successful in its glory days. She worked, by contrast, with a theatrical flourish; not with oratory–she was a leaden and boring speaker–but with the telling event, and with large emblematic gestures. The Argentinian forces might–just might–have been persuaded to leave the Islands by the intervention of some outside figure such as the President of Venezuela. But Thatcher’s war showed that Britain was still capable of independent military action in the world. Likewise, Scargill’s strike could have been averted by government, the NCB and the anti-Scargill miners uniting to express their common cause. But Thatcher had wanted, and achieved, a fight against what she called ‘the enemy within’.
The ‘police’, in reality the army, who occasionally confronted the miners, were seen by Thatcherite television viewers as holding the pass against violent anarchy and communism. It was, to use the phrase of Denis in a ‘Dear Bill’ Letter–‘Comrade Scargill’s fifty-nil defeat at the hands of my good lady the Grantham Mauler’.22 The rest of the world could see the Iron Lady in action. This was the woman who, in her alliance with Ronald Reagan (first inaugurated as President of the United States in January 1981), in her championing of the Solidarity movement in Poland, in her persistent verbal onslaughts on the Soviet Union, had come to be seen, throughout Eastern Europe, as a real champion of the anti-communist cause. In Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, they had actually been living for decades under governments which thought the things which Arthur Scargill thought. They did not regard her as a joke.
Moreover, she was manifestly a person of steely personal courage. In the middle of the miners’ strike, on the night of 11 October, a bomb exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where she and the rest of the Conservative leadership were staying during the Party Conference. It was planted by the IRA ‘because prisoners in Northern Ireland were being tortured’.23
There was no doubt that they had intended to kill Thatcher and as many as possible of her Cabinet. Five people were killed. John Wakeham, the Chief Whip, and Norman Tebbit were badly injured, and Tebbit’s wife was paralysed for life. Thatcher would undoubtedly have been killed had it not been for the diuretic consequences of late-night whisky consumption. As Alan Clark put it in his diary: ‘Mrs T had been saved by good fortune (von Stauffenberg’s briefcase!) as she was in the bathroom. Had she been in the bedroom she would be dead.’24
She was determined not to allow the IRA the satisfaction of seeing her in any way rattled. She walked about among the rubble talking to reporters with a prodigious sangfroid and only a few hours later, with not a hair out of place, she stood in front of the packed Conference to deliver her speech as usual. ‘It was an attempt not only to disrupt and terminate our conference…It was an attempt to cripple Her Majesty’s democratically elected government.’ There was something simply impressive about her demeanour on that day. Even her enemies were bound to see that.
Chesterton once said that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting; it had never been tried. The same could be said of Thatcherism. Although John Hoskyns, Keith Joseph and the inner cabal of monetarist mullahs who had tried to steer her in their direction, a combination of external events, the nature of the British economy and her own character made it ultimately impossible. She spent more on the Health Service, for example, than Harold Wilson, in his wildest or most extravagant dreams, would have promised. (Health spending rose by 32 percent in real terms during the 1980s.25) The pure Thatcherite doctrine, taught by the guardians, was that it was their duty to get government off the backs of the people. But Thatcher, while convinced of this as a rhetorical device, was too bossy by temperament ever to wish to put it into practice. She was by nature an interventionist. She used her power to intervene in the economy just as much as Heath or Wilson had done–for example, it was at her personal insistence that high interest rates were imposed in 1980–81 on an economy already experiencing a high exchange rate and recession.26
The nationalised industries could be disbanded and sold off; the rates of income tax could be lowered; home-ownership could be encouraged and made more common. In the end, however, the bills for an unwieldy, centralised welfare system had to be paid: enormous sums of money had to be doled out to the National Health Service and ‘benefits’ showered down upon the old, the halt, maimed and blind, as well as upon the millions of unemployed put out of useful work by the monetarist experiment. Thatcherism, if by that is meant the pure word of monetarism, was not really any more a practical possibility in the messy, confused real world than doctrinaire Marxism was.
Thatcherism, however, meant something more than mere doctrine. It was a certain style.
For anyone as politically ambitious as Michael Heseltine, the question of Europe must sometimes have caused him worries. British membership of the European Economic Community was never very popular in the country at large and in the Conservative Party it was increasingly unpopular. In order to challenge the leadership of Thatcher, he would have to embrace opposite policies, and this meant, inevitably, adopting a vigorously pro-European stance. Not a good recipe for favour with the broadly anti-European public.
Thatcher herself, in common with almost all British politicians of the period, had in fact a very changeable attitude to the question of Europe. As a member of Heath’s Cabinet, she had been not merely accepting of the EEC, she was a keen advocate; and certainly for most of the years of her premiership she supported economic membership of the community, while wishing to keep to a minimum any commitment to the more collectivist or pan-European dreams (things changed a little after she went into exile and became a focal point for the more hysterical Eurosceptic tendency). She forced the Single European Act through a reluctant House of Commons in 1986 but two years later expressed herself surprised by the intentions of Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission, wanting a ‘fully fledged political spokesperson for federalism’, with a single European currency and a Social Charter regulating workers’ rights. In 1989, at a European Summit meeting in Madrid, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and Chancellor Nigel Lawson confronted her with an ultimatum. Unless she committed Britain to entering the ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) they would both resign. Subsequent events proved the wisdom of her reluctance to sign up to the scheme, but ‘The Ambush before Madrid’, as she called it, caught her on the hop and she was already beginning to lose her grip by then. Seeing the cataclysmic effect on savings and jobs which the collapse of the ERM caused in Britain she would have done much better to dispense with the services of Lawson and Howe, who both vanished into obscurity the moment they retired.
The European debate can be seen as an endlessly circular dispute between economic and political experts on the pros and cons of this or that vision of the future. But in Britain, where everything reduces itself to triviality, the question of Europe has always been a question of something else. The Establishment, the New Establishment, liked Europe because of, not in spite of, the fact that it is anti-democratic. The Little Englanders’ objections to Europe were that its executive was unaccountable, that its bureaucracy was unnecessarily interfering, that its inner workings were profoundly corrupt and that its attempts at joint sovereignty, joint currency were unworkable. For the New Establishment, such considerations were ‘embarrassing’, ‘negative’. While there were Establishment sceptics, there are not many. The Eurosceptics were seen as beyond the pale by the People Like Us who found Thatcher intolerable.
The European question both highlighted and tried to sideline the central paradox of Margaret Thatcher’s political philosophy, and the position of Britain during her incumbency. A belief in free trade had always, since the old quarrels about it split the Tories in the 1840s, entailed the willingness to follow the market, regardless of narrow nationalism. While signing up to various documents on the continent of Europe undoubtedly diminished the sovereignty of the British Parliament, it could be said that these encroachments upon the national identity were often scarcely noticeable.
The great event, from an economic, and hence from a national and political viewpoint, in Thatcher’s period as First Lord of the Treasury, was the abolition of fixed commissions in the London stock market. This was what was known as ‘Big Bang’, on 27 October 1986. Between 1979 and 1984, foreign firms had handled some 95 percent of the £12 billion new overseas investments of insurance companies and pension funds generated by the North Sea oil boom. Something had to change and it was Thatcher’s government, with its belief in allowing as much freedom to the market as possible, which made the inevitable decision. This enabled non-British firms to take over existing broking and jobbing houses in the City of London, and to create enormously rich conglomerates. Electronic dealing, now technically possible, brought to an end the arcane rituals of the stock market floor, men in top hats, bells ringing, and so on. The old Forsyte Saga–style banking firms and stockbroking families retreated before the invasion of American and European firms. By 1990,154 of 408 Stock Exchange member firms were foreign, mostly Japanese, American, Swiss and French. By 1995, Barings, S. G. Warburg, Kleinwort Benson and Smith New Court had been absorbed into Dutch, Swiss, German and American banks. There had never been more money in the City of London in its history. And this created, in Britain itself, a class of super-rich city slickers, yuppies, Porsche drivers, second and third home-owners, crankers up of the housing market, competers for places in private schools, draughtsmen and women of a new social map, in which previous levels of income, and standards of living, seemed puny. But while it brought in untold wealth–wealth which would remain in Britain untaxed in many cases, until Gordon Brown’s government laid down plans to charge ‘Non Domiciled’ (the so-called Non Doms) for their place in Britain–it could not be said to have left Britain unchanged. If Britain was less British at the end of our times than it was at the beginning, this was undoubtedly because of Europe, because of immigration, because of the Americanisation of popular culture and the cosmopolitanisation of eating habits. But a key factor, and one which actually played its part in all the foregoing, was Big Bang and the deregulation of capital. Not least, it had the effect of making London supremely more important, as a wealth producer, than anywhere else in Britain. As the manufacturing wealth of the North declined, as the mines of Scotland, Wales, Nottinghamshire and Kent were closed down, London became ever more the centre of British life. Provincial British and aspirant immigrants flocked to London if they could. ‘Britain’ was in the process of becoming a synonym for London, a multi-national, multi-racial city state, based in London, and largely indifferent to the fate of Manchester or Leeds.
There would inevitably be moments when the bubble burst. The story of Nick Leeson, born in a council house in Watford, reached its strange conclusion in 1995. Sitting in front of a computer screen in Singapore, the twenty-eight-year-old trader appeared single-handedly to bring down one of the most solid and ancient of banking dynasties–Barings–when he disastrously miscalculated and went on buying as the Nikkei index tumbled in February 1995. Yet, though he was, sociologically speaking, very much a product of his times (and he would not have been the sort of chap the Barings would entertain on a shooting party or at their London club), he was only doing what everyone in the City, since Big Bang, had hoped to do–making money not by solid investment but by gambling. ‘Hedging’–protecting an open position in order to minimise risk–was an illusion of which Marx himself would have been proud, had he imagined it in the more apocalyptic pages of Capital. ‘In layman’s terms,’ remarked the Sunday Times, as Barings went down, ‘Barings’ top team chose to smash through red light after red light in a craven chase for “easy” profits. Then, in the final moments, when it was clear that the next stop was a brick wall, they scrambled desperately to find someone, anyone other than themselves, to blame. Leeson, the oik from Watford, looked the perfect fall guy.’27
Though Leeson went down–literally–he went to prison while the ‘top team’ were ‘sitting at home nursing their credibility back to pieces and always knowing what their friends were saying behind their backs.28–the ethos which destroyed him was not laid aside. The sheer venality, the savagery, the way that money gobbled and destroyed not only its greediest lovers, but also the entire culture which spawned it, was the theme of Martin Amis’s most successful novel, Money. Significantly, it was set in New York. Like his friend Salman Rushdie, whose best novel, Midnight’s Children, chronicled the lives of Indians born at the moment of national independence, the fecund imagination of Amis could not focus on the mother country. The revitalisation of London by Big Bang by the most ‘patriotic’ of Prime Ministers had mysteriously blown Britain sky high.
One of the early-warning signs that the New Establishment intended to fight back had been given in December 1984, when the ruling executive of Oxford University, the Hebdomadal Council, proposed the names of seven people whom it wished to honour with doctorates the following summer. There were some academics, Sir Geraint Evans, the former President Pertini of Italy and the Oxford graduate of Somerville College Margaret Hilda Thatcher, born Roberts. Normally, when the Hebdomadal Council proposes names for honorary degrees, the 2,500 or so Oxford teaching staff (the dons) allow the matter to proceed without protest. But they possessed a parliament where they could debate matters which they deemed important. And it soon became clear that they wanted to have their pathetic little moment of power. The seven previous British Prime Ministers had been honoured by Oxford with degrees, Attlee, Macmillan, Heath and Wilson within a year of taking office, and Douglas-Home and Eden receiving doctorates before they reached Number 10. The university had even given a degree to the bonehead Jim Callaghan. They were unable to stand back and consider the justice of promoting Thatcher. She was a person of high intelligence who had, in her way, shed glory on her old college, the more so since, while studying under science dons who were not merely left-leaning but actually communist, she had gone her own way and joined the University Conservative Association (OUCA), while being conscientious. ‘I came to rate her as good,’ said her tutor Dorothy Hodgkin, later a Nobel Prize winner. ‘One could always rely on her producing a sensible, well-read essay.’ Yet, when Thatcher returned to Somerville as Prime Minister, neither the former Principal, Janet Vaughan, nor Hodgkin would so much as consent to meet her. And now the university teachers en masse–if so petty a swarm could be described as a masse–voted against her being allowed an honorary degree by 738 votes to 319. All sorts of bogus justifications were produced for this exhibition of Lilliputian malice–Thatcher’s supposed philistinism, or the government ‘cuts’ in expenditure on libraries, the ‘arts’ and so forth. As a matter of fact, Thatcher was no more philistine than many politicians, and she was considerably more intelligent. Whatever view might be taken of her politics, it was surely quite an achievement to have risen from modest origins to become the first woman Prime Minister; and it might have been thought that the university would have been big enough to see that her journey was unimaginable without Oxford, that she was indeed Oxford’s daughter, and as such one who deserved an honour.
But the 738 ninnies who voted against her all supported that very influential class, the New Establishment. The vote to snub Thatcher showed them at their nastiest. The vote to appoint Roy Jenkins as Chancellor of the University a couple of years later, in March 1987, showed them at their most foolish. Puffed up, pompous and vacuous, Woy was the embodiment of all that these people would consider ‘civilised’. This New Establishment had no more democratic mandate for determining the course of public affairs than had the Old Establishment of Etonians, senior bishops and civil servants, the army and the clubs. But the dismissal of Thatcher and the elevation of Woy to a position once occupied by the 1st Duke of Wellington and later Lord Curzon made it very clear, not merely that Thatcher, as a public figure, was living on borrowed time, but also that the New Establishment would never allow such a revolutionary phenomenon to happen again.
As a matter of fact, the political success of the Lady had been in large measure because the fastidious Woy, who, upon his return from the Continent, where he had served as a very well-dined President of the European Commission, could not dirty his hands any longer with engagement with the Labour Party. The formation of the Social Democratic Party, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unelectable hopelessness of the Labour leadership, made it very easy for the Conservatives to win elections in the 1980s. Woy had been an incompetent Home Secretary and a disastrous Chancellor of the Exchequer. But in his person, manner and friendships he appeared to stand for all the things which the New Establishment stood for, whereas Thatcher blatantly did not. When Jonathan Miller referred to her ‘odious suburban gentility and sentimental saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy’.29 he was at least making clear where everyone stood. Britain was technically a democracy. The commuter classes–the majority of those working in the South East–might have supposed that they had enjoyed the supremacy of the trades unions and organised labour, in their alliance with leftist academics, for long enough; nor did they want, perhaps, to return to the days of being patronised by the Old Establishment or, before that, by the aristocracy. Perhaps this class–the class from whom H. G. Wells emerged and for whom he wrote–imagined that they might, just for once, be allowed their say. Their favourite newspaper, the Daily Mail, had made Mrs Thatcher politically. But the very expressions on the faces of such as Dr Jonathan Miller when that publication was mentioned would have been enough to remind the Pooters that their decade of whoopee was not to be allowed to last.
It would have been good for the New Establishment if a Social Democratic Party could have beaten the Conservatives outright; failing that, they realised that their best bet would have been that a Social Democrat fifth columnist such as Douglas Hurd or Kenneth Clarke could be fielded to defeat Thatcher in a challenge for the Conservative leadership. But they knew this was never going to be practicable. To defeat the Lady, they would have to field a paradoxical candidate–not one of their own, but a maverick from the ranks of the spivs, a man who from his rise to riches through property speculation and motoring magazines might have seemed like the classic Thatcherite–and perhaps for this very reason became the snarlingly envious anti-Thatcherite Michael Heseltine.
The ‘moderate’ views of Heseltine–by which he meant a desire to return to the failed corporatist economics of the Heathite past, and his ‘passionate commitment’ to Europe–were more often heard among the sophisticated classes than the raw language of Thatcherism. To that extent his views went with his bought furniture and his Palladian house, Henford, near Banbury. Politicians who had inherited such houses tended, like Ian Gilmour, to be wets.
Michael Heseltine badly miscalculated his timing. Had he challenged Thatcher after the Westland affair he might at least have lived up to the image which he cultivated for the blue-rinsed ranks of Conservative rallies and conferences: namely, that of a swashbuckling man of courage. In fact, he had been too cowardly to risk losing the prize he so coveted. For years he had been preparing for the moment when he would become Prime Minister. In his absurd country house–absurd because he and his wife managed to transform a nice old Palladian seat into something with the gleaming, brand-new atmosphere of a ‘country house’ hotel–he had hung portraits of previous Prime Ministers such as Disraeli, giving the impression to any visitor that this was a mere waiting room for Chequers. For years he had plotted and smarmed and muttered his way round the smoking rooms and tea rooms of the Palace of Westminster. But although there were those who admired him for his supposedly compassionate Conservatism, others saw him merely as the spiv of spivs, a figure who made the lesser spivs such as Parkinson seem positively aristocratic. The result of the first ballot was a humiliation for Heseltine–Margaret Thatcher 204, Michael Heseltine 152, Abstentions 16. Had the Conservatives devised a sane method of electing their party leader, the Lady would have been safe. But she fell four votes short of the required surcharge of those entitled to vote.
When she heard the news she was in the Paris embassy. Twice in our period, a woman who bestrode the stage and dominated the British news was to meet her fate in Paris. Thatcher bustled out of the embassy and down the steps to say words which had been prepared for her in the event of this calamity–for no one who understood politics could fail to realise that a calamity is what it was. ‘I’m naturally pleased that I got more than half the parliamentary party and disappointed that it’s not quite enough to win on the first ballot so I confirm it is my intention to let my name go forward for the second ballot.’
But back in Westminster her Cabinet had decided that enough was enough. There was little doubt by now that the lobby fodder of the Conservative back benches had decided that Thatcher, once the election winner, was now a liability. They would desert her at the second ballot. Her most ardent supporter, Alan Clark, believed she’d be lucky to get ‘90 f***ing votes’.30 Fairly obviously, the end had been reached, and when she summoned each of the Cabinet individually to give her advice, only the ultra-loyalists such as Cecil Parkinson and Michael Portillo told her to stay. Most of them told her to go. The next day she went to see the Queen and told her that as soon as the party had chosen a new leader she would herself resign.
She then went down to the House of Commons at a quarter past three to reply to an Opposition vote of censure of the government. No one who witnessed that scene could forget its drama. There must have been other women in the chamber of the Commons, but if so they did not seem visible. What was memorable was this small, immaculately dressed woman standing in the middle of a baying mob of males. Her old enemies Heath and Heseltine had already received cheers (from the Labour benches) as they entered the House to see the spectacle. But when she came in, things were different. The Conservatives cheered and waved their order papers, but the Labour members shouted ‘Judas!’ And justifiably so. Thatcher now stood in front of the party which had betrayed her and opposite the party which hated her, and she had never displayed herself so impressively.
‘The Opposition’s real reason [for the motion] is the leadership election for the Conservative Party, which is a democratic election according to rules which have been public knowledge for years. That is a far cry from the way in which the Labour Party does these things.’
She was asked about her visit to Europe.
Margaret Thatcher: Europe is strongest when it grows through willing co-operation and practical measures, not compulsion or bureaucratic dreams.
Alan Beith: Will the Prime Minister tell us whether she intends to continue her personal fight against a single currency and an independent central bank when she leaves office?
Dennis Skinner: No! She’s going to be governor! (Laughter)
Margaret Thatcher: What a good idea. I hadn’t thought of that. But if I were, there’d be no European Central Bank, accountable to no one, least of all to national Parliaments. Because the point of that kind of Europe with a central bank is no democracy, taking powers away from every single parliament, and having a single currency, a monetary policy and interest rates which takes all political power away from us. As my right honourable friend [Nigel Lawson] said in his first speech after the proposal for a single currency, a single currency is about the politics of Europe. It is about a federal Europe, by the back door. So I’ll consider the honourable gentleman’s [Mr Skinner’s] proposal. Now where were we? I’m enjoying this. I’m enjoying this.
Michael Cartiss: Cancel it. You can wipe the floor with these people.
Later, Dennis Skinner shouted at the Conservatives, ‘She’s a better man than the whole pack of you!’ In the morning, she had been unable to read her resignation speech to the Cabinet without breaking down, but now she was like a great diva, high on adrenaline, and there was tremendous poignancy in her final parliamentary hour.
The Cabinet performed their ritual assassination of Mrs Thatcher because of personal detestation. By the end, her judgement had deserted her and the riotous public reaction in April 1990 to her scheme to introduce a Poll Tax was only one indication of this fact. Had she resigned after eight or nine years in office, her standing would have been higher with the public. The truth is that the disloyal speeches of Ministers such as Geoffrey Howe–who resigned in a huff at an undignifiedly late stage, allegedly over ‘Europe’–did not damage Thatcher in the eyes of her supporters. They merely showed up her Cabinet for the spineless and disloyal bunch everyone had always seen them to be. (As in the joke: Waiter at luncheon table when Thatcher was taking the Cabinet for a treat at the Ritz: ‘Yes, madam, and what will it be?’ Thatcher: ‘I’ll have a steak, please.’ ‘And for the vegetables, madam?’ Thatcher: ‘They’ll have the same.’)
None of the vegetables will be remembered. Thatcher always will, not merely as a Prime Minister, but as an emblem. She was not loved. She had never set out to be loved–this was part of her electrifying appeal.
Heseltine had toppled his enemy, but he was not to be given the satisfaction of replacing her as Prime Minister. For that there were too many people in the parliamentary party who hated him. The result of a second ballot for the leadership came two votes short of the required majority, but no one doubted that it would lead to the collapse of the other two candidates–Douglas Hurd 56 votes, Heseltine 131 and John Major 185. No one outside the world of political obsessives had much idea of who John Major was. He had been Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in fast succession, but was he given these elevated offices of state because he was the obvious man for the job, or because the previous occupants of these posts had been unable to tolerate working any longer for Thatcher in her acrimonious decline? With his grey suits, grey hair, grey smile and amiable, bespectacled face, John Major left no impression at all; he was not like the Thatcher favourites of earlier years, spivs such as Parkinson or wide boys such as Archer. Yet, with what must have been irrational optimism, when she heard of his election the former leader burst into the room. She threw her arms around the new Prime Minister’s wife, Norma Major, and exclaimed, ‘It’s everything I’ve dreamed of for such a long time. The future is assured; the future is assured.’31