During her long prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher's political demise was frequently prophesied and, by her many critics, eagerly awaited. It was widely felt that she could not survive the desperate economic depression of 1980–1, for which her government's economic management was directly responsible. Many in her own party hoped that she would not. Her recovery after the Falklands campaign and her substantial election victory in 1983 silenced Tory doubters for awhile. However, it is reasonable to date the background to her eventual fall not to 1990 but to 1986, the year of the Westland affair and the consequential resignation of Michael Heseltine.
Westland was, in one sense, a political storm in a teacup. The financial difficulties of an ailing west of England helicopter company would not normally be the stuff of Cabinet crisis. However, they were portents of something much bigger. Westland gave an early indication of the deep divisions within the Conservative Party over Europe and it was not coincidental that it was eventually the challenge to her leadership of the strongly pro-European Michael Heseltine that brought the prime minister down. Westland is also a useful place to begin because it was the first occasion on which she thought herself vulnerable to a party coup against her. She later confided in her memoirs that, at the height of the crisis, I was considering my own position', knowing perfectly well that ‘there were those in my own Party and Government who would like to take the opportunity of getting rid of me’.1
Heseltine, her defence secretary, wanted to bale the Westland Company out, using funds provided by a European consortium. Leon Brittan, the industry minister, backed by No. 10, favoured a rescue bid from the US company Sikorski. The disagreement assumed critical proportions for two reasons. First, Heseltine was becoming increasingly alienated both by Thatcher's authoritarian style of government and her evident preference for US links over European ones. Second, what might – and should – have remained a battle within Cabinet became a public scandal because of leaked confidential material clearly aimed at discrediting Heseltine. Though a specific leak was traced to Brittan's department, there had clearly been collusion with No. 10, possibly orchestrated by Thatcher herself. Brittan was forced out of office. Thatcher's own position might have become parlous had a forensic parliamentary debater such as the young Robin Cook been in charge of the Labour assault rather than Neil Kinnock, all passion but no precision when presented with the rare opportunity of a prime minister lacking confidence and actually prepared to admit mistakes.2
Westland raised important doubts about the Thatcher government's style and policy. It also left Heseltine, much the most ambitious rival to the prime minister, out of office with time to plan his own future strategy from the back benches. The large election victory of 1987 removed any immediate threat to Thatcher's position but it also made her less cautious (see Chapter 3). Her style became yet more personal, authoritarian and less accountable. Ministers complained privately that she trusted unelected advisers more than she did them; she also set up ad hoc groupings to settle policy matters rather than have them discussed at Cabinet in their formative stages. Generally she honoured the conventions of Cabinet government more in the breach than in the observance. This had been the cause of Heseltine's departure.
The contrast between the first and second halves of her prime ministership is striking. In the earlier phase, she was generally able to choose when to remove ministers she did not trust. By the mid-1980s, she appeared to have fashioned a Cabinet with as many sympathetic and well-disposed ministers as it is feasible to secure in that diverse coalition of interests that every major political party must comprise. In the last three years of her prime ministership, however, she lost ministers to resignation at times that were often highly embarrassing.
The resignation of Norman Tebbit immediately after the 1987 election set a doleful pattern. There were strong compassionate reasons for his departure. His wife had been crippled by an IRA bomb during the Tory party conference of 1984 and Tebbit wanted to devote more time to her care. Thatcher preferred to believe – at least for public consumption in her memoirs – that this was Tebbit's sole reason for going: ‘his reasons were as personal as they were admirable. I did bitterly resent his decision. I had too few like-minded supporters in the Government, and of these none had Norman's strength and acumen.’3 The truth was not so simple. Behind the scenes, the 1987 election campaign had been a divisive one for the Tories. Tebbit, as party chairman, bringing Thatcher news about how her personality grated with the public, found himself the archetypal messenger being blamed for the message. In a characteristic gambit, the prime minister took her own initiative, employing a different advertising agency that, not surprisingly, presented less personally wounding findings.4 This was one incident among several as a previously close relationship became decidedly frosty. Tebbit went in 1987, at least in part, because he felt his authority being undermined. His shrewdness, intelligence and plain, thuggish ability to intimidate were much missed by Thatcher.
Allegations of excessive power from No. 10 were also the key reason for the still more damaging departure of the chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson, in October 1989. He and Thatcher fundamentally disagreed about entry to the European Monetary System (see Chapter 7) and about the exchange rate policy to be followed before entry. Thatcher resented Lawson's increasing tendency to push his independent opinions while on overseas trips. Lawson was much the most economically literate of Thatcher's chancellors, a forceful personality anyway and well able to punch his then considerable weight.5 When Thatcher made it clear that she favoured the advice being given to her by her economic adviser, Alan Walters, to that of her own chancellor, Lawson told her that either Walters went or he did. In the event, both departed. Substantial damage was done by this very public evidence of disaffection. Thatcher could hardly afford to lose someone of Lawson's quality anyway while complex financial negotiations over Europe were in train. The affair strengthened the impression that the prime minister, who traded on the strength of conviction leadership, could not tolerate equally strongly held opinions in others, and especially those coming from Cabinet colleagues.
Downing Street's influence was not restricted to the prime minister. Ministers either temporarily or permanently out of favour tended to be ‘talked down’ in unattributable briefings held by Sir Bernard Ingham. Ingham, a Yorkshireman with a Labour Party background, was Thatcher's chief press secretary throughout her premiership. He possessed a temperament that veered uncertainly between the bluff and the brutal. He also had an overdeveloped sense of his own importance and delighted in passing political black-spots onto lobby journalists, knowing that they would be written up eagerly in the next day's broadsheet newspapers. Thatcher, who called him ‘the greatest’ of her supports,6 probably never understood how much resentment the Ingham press machine caused. In her last years of office, this worked against her since it gave Conservative politicians of much greater significance than Ingham a lingering sense of resentment. When it comes to their own careers, politicians, like most people, have long memories.
Ingham also contributed to Thatcher's lack of sensitivity about the increasing fragility of her political position by the late 1980s. Unlike most politicians of the modern era, she was relatively uninterested in what the press said about her. Her job, as she saw it, was to lead; the press's was to comment on her leadership. Responding to hostile press criticism – and there was no shortage of it – was a sign of weak leadership. Ingham's role was to produce a digest of the day's key press coverage that Thatcher could absorb almost at a glance. The problem, however, was that Ingham had frequently ‘planted’ stories – favourable to the government – which duly appeared in Thatcher-supporting newspapers such as The Sun or The Times. Ingham had himself therefore been at least partially responsible for the cast of press coverage on which Thatcher relied. It is reasonable to assume that, until it was too late, she learned little about the negative stories that might have provided a truer picture of her weakening support within the party. Inured to success (often against the odds and in the face of massive unpopularity) over a decade, she was now unprepared for failure. In fact, by the end of 1989 it was a nice judgement whether Thatcher – ‘the most vilified Prime Minister of modern times’7 – was a more divisive figure with the British population as a whole or within the parliamentary Conservative Party.
That party was becoming ever less biddable, though Thatcher did not recognise the sea change. She spent little time in the lobbies and the tea rooms, getting to know the new MPs elected in 1983 and 1987. She assumed, rather than cultivated, their loyalty. Many were of a different generation from hers and their understanding of the world was also different. Many had also been elected with small majorities. They viewed the increasingly adverse opinion polls with alarm and wanted reassurance that their stripling political careers would not be cut off at the next election. In 1990, bad by-election results of huge anti-Tory swings in Mid-Staffordshire and usually rock-solid Eastbourne emphatically failed to provide it.8 Meanwhile, the divisive issues would not go away. In particular, the Conservatives were more at odds than ever on Europe.
Six weeks after the Lawson resignation, Thatcher faced her first leadership challenge, from an obscure left-wing, pro-European Tory backbencher, Sir Anthony Meyer. She and her entourage mismanaged this. As Charles Powell later admitted, Thatcher and her entourage greatly underestimated the importance of a challenge from someone he loftily dismissed as ‘this insignificant man’.9 Thatcher's easy victory was not the point. The contest was the point. It gave sixty Tory MPs the opportunity of a secret ballot to demonstrate that the prime minister did not have their confidence. In a party whose two rationales might be said to be loyalty to the leader and election victory, this was deeply significant. Thatcher had won the Conservatives three successive elections, given them a lease on power for a generation and yet a backbencher of whom almost no one outside Westminster had heard could demonstrate her vulnerability. Her real opponent, though, was not Sir Anthony Meyer but Michael Heseltine. Over the next twelve months, while all Westminster insiders knew that the next year would see another, and much more threatening, challenge, Heseltine fixed on a mendacious mantra that he solemnly intoned to enquiring journalists. He ‘could foresee no circumstances’ in which he would oppose Thatcher in a leadership contest. No one, least of all Thatcher, believed him. Heseltine, she knew, had many faults: lack of a sense of political opportunity was not one of them.
During the leadership crisis of November 1990, Thatcher was evidently as bemused as she was resentful about the ‘disloyalty’ that she believed destroyed her. As a prime minister of eleven years' standing she felt that she had earned much greater loyalty, especially from ministers, most of whom owed their careers to her preferment. Yet, when push came to shove and in a lachrymose parade to her private room in the House of Commons, those ministers would tell her she must go. Though her fall resulted from a complex interaction of factors, she should certainly have been asking sharper questions of Ingham as to its cause, since it was his job both to know and to tell. Too few ministers in November 1990 felt that they could rely on her long-term loyalty to them to pledge it to her in the short term. They had observed how many of their predecessors had been treated. They also knew how influential leaks from the prime minister's office could be in stimulating damaging press comment about their chances of survival at the next Cabinet reshuffle.
The actual contest of November 1990 was precipitated by two factors. The first was that a damagingly large number of Tories felt that the next election was unwinnable under Thatcher's continued leadership. The second was the highest-profile resignation of all, that of Geoffrey Howe. 1990 had been a very difficult year. Partly because of Lawson's earlier policies to prepare Britain for ERM membership, interest rates had soared to 15 per cent, making home-owners' mortgages ruinously expensive while the value of their houses was also tumbling. Inflation – the key evil of Keynesianism in Thatcher's eyes -had risen above 10 per cent again. Whatever its economic merits – and few were prepared to back it even on these grounds – the poll tax (see Chapter 5) was proving a public-relations disaster. At the end of March, a demonstration against it in London's Trafalgar Square degenerated into rioting and 400 policemen were injured. Thatcher, preferring as ever to recall the horrors of public disorder rather than the depth of feeling to which it had given rise, stated simply: ‘I was appalled at such wickedness.’10
Two more of Thatcher's long-serving ministers, the shrewd Norman Fowler and Peter Walker, that long-preserved yet largely symbolic proof of the prime minister's tolerance of wets, chose to resign early in 1990. A third, the clever but unguarded Etonian right-winger Nicholas Ridley, was forced out for telling a journalist – actually Nigel Lawson's son – even more prejudicial things about Germany than Thatcher privately believed: ‘I'm not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot [meaning a German-led federalist European community]. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’11
The Cabinet seemed to be falling apart. Those few experienced ministers who remained openly, and embarrassingly, squabbled on another key European issue – the European Monetary System. Opinion poll findings were dismal, confirming that 1989 losses in the European elections were no flash in the pan. The newspapers talked up the prospects of a Labour victory, perhaps soon. Every five years or so, backbenchers need the electorate to sustain both their generous pension entitlements and their often profitable links to private industry. Many, not all in marginal constituencies, were decidedly jumpy by the summer of 1990. By early November, one of the most besotted of all Thatcherite loyalists, Alan Clark, was recording in his diary: ‘The papers are all very bad. Tory party falling apart, the death blow, that kind of thing. Something in it, I fear, unless we can get a grip on events.’12
Twelve days after Geoffrey Howe's resignation on 1 November 1990, he addressed the Commons in the traditional resignation speech. It destabilised Thatcher's position, this time fatally. Howe was by a considerable stretch the most senior minister in the government after Thatcher. He alone had a record of continuous Cabinet service under her since 1979 and he had held the two most senior offices of state below the premiership – chancellor of the exchequer and foreign secretary – for four years and six years respectively. He was not, however, a high-profile minister. He was a thoroughly nice and considerate man. Yet people tended to remember not him, but what was said about him – most notably Denis Healey's caustic jibe that being attacked by him in Parliament was like being savaged by a dead sheep. Howe had, however, left his best for last, determined to prove that the old bruiser's famous put-down was somewhat less than the whole truth.
He was no longer foreign secretary, having been removed from that office much against his will in July 1989 for excessive Europeanism and possibly also for excessive deference to the hated FO official line. He had insisted on the honorary title of deputy prime minister but took little comfort from it; his star was clearly on the wane. Thatcher's evermore strident anti-Europeanism chafed with him throughout 1990 but he was goaded to resignation by some spectacular words on the subject in answer to a question from the leader of the opposition. He believed that Thatcher's stance on Europe was diminishing the nation's influence where it mattered.
His resignation speech was as action packed as anything in his political life. It contained a cogent recantation of the monetarist policy that he had implemented as chancellor a decade earlier. It accused Thatcher of dithering about entering the European Monetary System, which had helped to cause the recent damaging increase in inflation. It also included a withering denunciation of the prime minister's ‘nightmare image’ of a European Community stalked by malevolent anti-democrats who wanted to destroy national sovereignty. He had already said enough to earn a place in the pantheon of twentieth-century parliamentary political speeches. But he had not quite done. His final sentence was dynamite: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’13
Michael Heseltine had been presented, gift-wrapped, with just the opportunity he unconvincingly asserted he could not foresee, but for which the last four years of his life had been a preparation. The next day he announced that he would be a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
Only during the last ten days of an eleven and a half year premiership did both luck and political judgement desert Margaret Thatcher at the same time. She did most things wrong from the day she knew she must fight another leadership battle until she emerged, tear-stained, from the steps of No. 10 Downing Street to return her seals of office to the Queen. And yet she so nearly won. She chose the wrong team which fought an appallingly mismanaged campaign and ended up underestimating Heseltine's support by about seventy votes.
Thatcher was also in the wrong place at the wrong time. On 20 November she was representing Britain at a European Security and Co-operation Summit in Paris. It was more of a ceremonial than a business meeting but the presidential top brass were there and she did not wish to be left out. Given the stakes involved, she should have stayed in Westminster to bargain or wheedle for Tory backbenchers' votes. After more than eleven years at the helm, she presumably thought herself above all that grubby politicking. She was wrong.
Still, a European engagement was fitting in its way. Europe had brought her low and it was appropriate that her prime ministership should in effect end there with the news, telephoned through to the British Embassy in Paris early in the evening that she had failed by four votes to obtain the required majority over Heseltine to win on the first ballot. One hundred and seventy-eight Conservative MPs had failed to back her and most insiders calculated that existing support would haemorrhage away in any second ballot. Yet she initially planned to fight on. Within minutes of learning the result she was on the steps of the embassy barging a surprised BBC reporter out of the way and announcing that she would contest the now-necessary second leadership ballot. It looked rude and it sounded impetuous. It was certainly a miscalculation. That Tuesday evening, the real projections were being made not by her but by ministers in London. While they were calculating, she was getting a rare injection of high culture thanks to a French-style banquet with ballet laid on. Even at that late stage, low politics might have served her better. Only the ministers' proces-sion to her Commons office one by one twenty-four hours later finally persuaded her to release her grip. The BBC announced her resignation on the morning of 22 November 1990.
Nigel Lawson, no longer in government but still very close to many Cabinet colleagues, knew why ministers deserted her:
… there were many, particularly among her ministerial colleagues, who had allowed their loyalty to get the better of their judgement in the first ballot but would not have done so in the second. Those reasons boiled down to one: the conviction that Margaret had become an electoral liability, and that the Conservative Party could win the coming general election only under a new leader.14
The resignation announced, she produced a feisty de-mob happy per-formance in the House of Commons, in which she lambasted the Labour Party as of old for its temporising nature and for betraying the British people.15 This may have induced a retrospective sense of guilt in some Tory deserters. At all events, enough rallied around Thatcher's own chosen successor, John Major, to ensure that he comfortably defeated Heseltine in the second ballot from which she was now an enforced absentee. Because a third candidate, Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, had also entered the contest, Major polled fewer votes in winning the leadership than Thatcher had done in – effectively -losing it. This reflection did not ease her often graceless retreat to the fringes of political life. Her memoirs make clear her sense of betrayal. She gives a blow-by-blow account of the interviews that took place with almost all of them in the prime minister's room in the House of Commons and concludes:
I was sick at heart. 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 whereby they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.16
No matter; she was gone. The next day, The Guardian, never a friend to Thatcher, published a one-word reader's letter that recalled, with savage irony, the lady's response to success in the Falklands almost a decade earlier. That word was: ‘Rejoice!’.
The manner of Thatcher's departure, and her abiding bitterness about it, had an enormous impact on politics in the 1990s. This is considered in detail in Chapter 11. It is as well to deal here with a myth entitled ‘the martyrdom of the blessed Margaret’. The tone for those who believe it is well set by one of the great toadies of British politics. Woodrow Wyatt was a Labour MP for more than twenty years before professing his admiration for Thatcher's politics in the 1970s, leaving the party and writing increasingly sycophantic pro-Thatcher newspaper pieces. He was rewarded with a life peerage in 1988. Part of his journal entry for 22 November 1990 reads thus:
The fateful day. Twenty-seven years ago John Kennedy, President of the United States, was assassinated. She was assassinated this day. … That fearful crew, the Tory Party, had let her down. She was reported as saying her Cabinet hadn't got any balls yesterday and she was quite right. … We [he and other members of his Club] all agreed that it had been a most shameful episode in Tory Party history. … How I wish Margaret had consulted me about her campaign managers and the style of her campaign earlier and properly. … My brave darling, my heart bled for her.17
The surprising thing about this self-indulgent and lachrymose guff from a grown man of great experience and some sophistication is not its appearance but, purple passages aside, the typicality of response. Most of those who remained Thatcher supporters – a sadly diminished band in the upper echelons of the party by 1990, it must be admitted – did indeed believe that she had been betrayed.
Bernard Ingham was as loyal to the Thatcher myth in the 1990s as he had been to his political mistress herself during her years in power. He pointed out to anyone who would listen that Thatcher had been stabbed in the back by her own ministers. These were the very people from whom she had a right to expect greatest loyalty, because -in almost every case by 1990 – she had promoted them and nurtured their careers. His observations were characteristically direct: Had Thatcher lost a general election? No; she had proved one of the Conservatives' most spectacular winners three times in succession. Had Thatcher lost the confidence of Parliament? No; the parliamentary majority of 101 she had won in 1987 had barely diminished since then and she could easily win any vote of no confidence. Had she lost the leadership election? Emphatically not; she had been within four votes of knocking Heseltine out in the first ballot. Was she less popular with the Conservative Party in the country? The evidence of the annual party conferences continued to show that Thatcher was lauded this side idolatry. So, the only explanation was ‘betrayal’.18 St Margaret was a martyr to treachery from those who thought only of their own ambitions and not either of their party or their country.
Thatcher herself was not to be outdone. Her memoirs leave no doubt about what she thought of government ministers who ‘had decided to dispense with my services’, although she had headed governments that – as she modestly put it – ‘had pioneered the new wave of economic freedom that was transforming countries from eastern Europe to Australasia … restored Britain's reputation as a force to be reckoned with in the world’ and achieved ‘our historic victory in the Cold War’.19
Thatcher's fall was, in truth, a far less unusual, still less shocking, occurrence than these words imply. There is no convincing zealots, of course, but the reality of Thatcher's fall is both more prosaic and more typical than the Wyatts and the Inghams suggest. The twentieth-century Tory party was both more loyal to successful leaders and more ruthless in dispatching wounded ones than were other parties. Virtually all Labour leaders, though they usually had to fight tooth and nail to preserve party unity, have gone at times of their own choosing. Conservative leaders have been pushed with surprising frequency. Arthur Balfour, despite winning back substantial support in the elections of 1910 after the Liberal landslide of 1906, was in effect forced to resign in his political prime in 1911 when the Conservatives lost their battle with Asquith and Lloyd George over the powers of the House of Lords. A parliamentary rebellion in a Conservative-dominated House of Commons sent an ailing Neville Chamberlain on his way in 1940. Although Anthony Eden formally resigned on grounds of ill-health in 1957, he was not at death's door and would have found it very difficult to hang on after the humiliations of Suez. His successor, Harold Macmillan, was also under enormous pressure when a conveniently troublesome (though not, as it turned out, cancerous) prostate gave him an excuse to resign six years later. He too, faced, a leadership challenge he would have found it difficult to resist, with backbenchers fearful that their party stood no chance in the forthcoming election against the modernising Labour leader Harold Wilson. Macmillan's successor, Lord Home, was given his marching orders months after he turned a likely Conservative rout in 1963 into the narrowest of defeats at Labour's hands a year later. And Thatcher herself knew all about the political demise of Edward Heath early in 1975 (see Chapter 1).
The plain truth is that Conservative leaders are punished for losing general elections or for looking likely to do so. Labour, which was, until 1997, much more used to electoral failure, has traditionally been much more indulgent of it. In the Thatcher case, Nigel Lawson's unsentimental assessment was spot on. Her own fall was as efficiently dispatched as had become normal. Politics is a rough, unforgiving game and the Conservatives play it more ruthlessly than their opponents. Thatcher perished by its rules although, as we shall see, not quietly (see Chapter 11).