The Final Curtain
The killing of Margaret Thatcher’s political career has a dark lustre about it, like something from a book of old stories. She had conducted her premiership with a sense of vivid and immediate self-dramatization, the heroine of peace and war, fighting pitched battles in coalfields and on the streets, word-punching her way through triumphal conferences, haranguing rival leaders, always with a sense that history was being freshly minted, day by day. This is why so many insults levelled at her tended to twist into unintended compliments – the Iron Lady, La Pasionara of Privilege, She Who Must Be Obeyed, the Leaderene, the Blessed Margaret, even the Great She-Elephant. Reflected in her bloodied breastplate the eighties glowed more luridly than any other modern decade, flashing gold with the City’s new wealth, sunny as the Soviets collapsed, livid in its confrontations and cruelty nearer to home. She had no sense of her own limits. The world was made anew. Her fall lived up in every way to her record. When a great leader topples, poetry requires that her personal failings bring her down. The story insists it must be more than a trip on the carpet, weariness or age. And this story’s ending lives up to its earlier scenes.
There were several powder-trails that led towards the final explosion. One was the poll tax. Another was economic policy, and Europe, which had become almost the same thing. We have seen how Lawson wanted to tie the pound to the anti-inflationary expertise and reputation of the West German Central Bank, ‘shadowing’ the Deutschmark in the European exchange rate mechanism. In effect, he was looking for somewhere firm to plant down policy in the queasy morass of the new global financial free-for-all. Thatcher disagreed. She thought currencies should float freely, Ariel to his Caliban. She also knew that the ERM was intended one day to lead to a single European currency, part of the European Commission President Jacques Delors’s plan for a freshly buttressed European federal state. Lawson, dogged, bull-like, ignored her and shadowed the German currency anyway, a fact somehow both denied yet generally known. Thatcher read about it in the newspapers. When the cost of Lawson’s policy became excessive she finally ordered him to stop. He grumpily agreed but the two of them stopped talking.
Bruges in Belgium is a pretty town. Thanks to the channel tunnel and cheap flights, British people flock there for romance, beer, art and chocolate. When Margaret Thatcher rode into town in 1988, year of hubris, none of these things was on her agenda. She had come to make her definitive speech against the federalism now openly advancing towards her. The Foreign Office had tried to soften her message. She had promptly pulled out her pen and written the barbs and thorns back in again. She had not, she informed her audience, ‘successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain’ (a claim already anatomized) ‘only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new level of dominance from Brussels.’ There was much else besides. Her bluntness much offended continental politicians and the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. Next, she reappointed as her economic adviser a lugubrious and outspoken monetarist academic, Sir Alan Walters, who was contemptuous of Lawson’s exchange rate policy and said so, repeatedly. Thus she was taking on Howe and Lawson, the two Chancellors of her revolutionary years, together. A dangerous split was becoming evident at the top of government. She seemed not to care, biffing Howe about as carelessly as she always had. Nor was anyone much convinced when she told the world she ‘fully, gladly, joyfully, unequivocally, generously…fully, fully, fully, fully’ supported Lawson as her Chancellor. People said she had no sense of humour. They were wrong. It was just a slightly strange one.
Then Jacques Delors, the wry and determined French socialist, re-entered the story, with his fleshed-out plan for economic and monetary union, which would end with the single currency, the euro. To get there, all EU members would start by putting their national currencies into the ERM, which would draw them increasingly tightly together – just what Lawson and Howe wanted and just what Thatcher did not. Howe and Lawson, Pinky and Perky, ganged up. They told her she must announce that Britain would soon join the ERM, even if she left the single currency itself to one side, for the time. She wriggled, then fought back. On the eve of a summit in Madrid where Britain had to announce her view the two of them visited her in private, had a blazing row and threatened to resign together if she did not give way. Truculently she did, and the crisis passed. But she was merely waiting. Four weeks after the summit, in July 1989, Thatcher hit back. She unleashed a major cabinet reshuffle, compared at the time to Macmillan’s ‘night of the long knives’ in 1962. Howe was demoted to being Leader of the Commons. She reluctantly allowed him the face-saving title of Deputy Prime Minister, a concession rather diminished when her press officer, Bernard Ingham, instantly told journalists it was a bit of a non-job. Howe was replaced by the relatively unknown John Major, the former chief secretary. Lawson survived only because the economy was weakening and to lose him was thought too dangerous just then.
So the drama advanced. The atmosphere in the Commons was a combustible mix of sulphur and adrenalin. Lawson was having a bad time on all sides, including from the Labour shadow chancellor John Smith. When Thatcher’s adviser Walters had another pop at his ERM policy, he decided enough was enough and resigned on 26 October, telling the Prime Minister she should treat her ministers better. She pretended to have no idea what he was on about. Lawson was replaced by the still relatively unknown John Major, who was having an interesting autumn. Around them all, the world was changing. A few days after these events, East Germany announced the opening of the border to the West and joyous Berliners began hacking their wall to pieces. Then the communists fell in Czechoslovakia. Then the Romanian dictator Ceaus¸escu was dragged from power. A few weeks after that, in February 1990, Nelson Mandela, a man she had once denounced as a terrorist, was released to global acclaim. In the middle of all this the Commons had witnessed an event which seemed the opposite of historic. Thatcher had been challenged as leader of the Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer, an obscure, elderly pro-European backbencher much mocked as ‘the stalking donkey’. It was a little like Ronnie Corbett challenging Mike Tyson to a punch-up. Yet, ominously for Thatcher, when the vote was held sixty Tory MPs either voted donkey or abstained. In the shadows, prowling through Conservative associations and the corridors of Westminster was a more dangerous creature. Michael Heseltine, no donkey, self-expelled from the Thatcher cabinet four years earlier, was looking uncommonly chipper. Tory MPs whimpered to him about the trouble they were in with the poll tax. He sympathized, trying neither to lick his lips nor sharpen his claws too obviously.
One by one, the inner core of true Thatcherites fell back. Her bone-dry Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, had to resign after being rude about the Germans in a magazine interview – given, piquantly, to Lawson’s son Dominic. John Major turned out to be worryingly pro-European after all. Ian Gow, one of her closest associates, though no longer in the government, was murdered by an IRA bomb at his home. Abroad, great world events continued to stalk the last days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and she urged President George Bush the elder towards what would become the first Gulf War – ‘Don’t wobble, George.’ There was another summit in Rome and further pressure on the Delors plan. Again, Thatcher felt herself being pushed and dragged towards a federal scheme. She vented her contempt and anger in the Commons, shredding the proposals with the words, ‘No…No…No!’ And at this point the one person who could never have been expected to finish her off, did so.
For years Geoffrey Howe had absorbed her slights, her impatience, her mockery, her snarls. He had taken it all, with the rubbery fatalism of the battered husband who will never leave. Now, observing her flaming anti-Brussels crusade, he decided he had had enough. She probably tipped him over the edge by turning on him savagely and unfairly over some legislation that was not ready, but he had decided to go. On 13 November 1990 he stood up rather lugubriously in the House of Commons and did her in. His resignation statement was designed to answer the story put around by Number Ten that he had gone over nothing much at all. To a packed chamber he revealed that Lawson and he had threatened to resign together the previous year and accused her of sending her ministers to negotiate in Brussels like a cricket team going to the crease, having first broken their bats in the changing room. She was wrong over Europe, he insisted; and then threw the door open to the further leadership challenge that was now inevitable: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long.’ Television cameras had just been allowed into the Commons. Across the country people could watch Howe, with Nigel Lawson nodding behind him, could see Heseltine’s studied, icy calm, and observe the white-faced reaction of the Prime Minister herself. The next day Heseltine announced he would stand against her as leader. She told The Times that he was a socialist at heart, someone whose philosophy at its extreme end had just been defeated in the Soviet Union. She would see him off, of course.
The balloting system for Tory MPs required her to beat Heseltine by winning both a clear majority of the parliamentary party and being 15 per cent ahead of him in votes cast. At a summit in Paris, surrounded by many old enemies, she heard that she had missed the second hurdle by four votes. There would be a second ballot. As one of the few people in public life who could swarm all by herself, she swarmed out of the summit, somehow found a BBC microphone and announced that though disappointed, she would fight on. Then she returned with heroic sangfroid to sit through a ballet with the other leaders, who were pleasant enough to her face. While she watched the ballet, Tory MPs were dancing through Westminster in anger or delight. It was a night of softening support and hardening hearts. Many key Thatcherites believed she was finished and feared that if she fought again, Heseltine would beat her. This would tear the party in two. It would be better for her to withdraw and let someone else assassinate the assassin.
Even then, had she been in London throughout the crisis and summoned her cabinet together to back her, she might have pulled it off. But by the time she was back and taking advice from her whips the news was bleak. In what was probably a tactical mistake, she decided to see her cabinet one by one in her Commons office. Douglas Hurd and John Major had already given her their reluctant agreement to nominate her for the next round of voting but the message from most of the rest of her ministers was strangely uniform. They would personally back her if she was determined to fight but, frankly, she would lose. That would mean Heseltine. Better, Prime Minister, to stand aside and free Major and Hurd from their promises of support. Later, she was wryly amusing about the process. It looked very much as if most of them had agreed the line beforehand. The whips concurred. The cabinet were going through the motions of supporting her if she insisted, but they did not mean it, or mean her to believe it. She had lost them. Only a few ultras, mostly outside the cabinet, were sincerely urging her to continue the struggle. One was that wicked diarist and right-wing maverick Alan Clark, who told her to fight on at all costs: ‘Unfortunately he went on to argue that I should fight on even though I was bound to lose because it was better to go down in a blaze of glorious defeat than to go gentle into that good night. Since I had no particular fondness for Wagnerian endings, this lifted my spirits only briefly.’
So it was over. In their various ways, her cabinet were too tired to support her any longer and her MPs were too scared of the electoral vengeance to be wreaked after the poll tax. She returned to Downing Street, conferred with Denis, slept on it, and then announced to her cabinet secretary at 7.30 the next morning that she had decided to resign. She held an uncomfortable cabinet meeting with those she believed had betrayed her, saw the Queen, phoned other world leaders and then finished with one final splendid Commons performance – ‘I’m enjoying this!’ – vigorously defending her record. Come back, cried one emotional Tory MP. When Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street for the last time in tears, she already knew that she had successfully completed a final political campaign, which was to ensure that she was replaced as Prime Minister by John Major, rather than Michael Heseltine. She had rallied support for him by phone among her closest supporters. They felt he had not been quite supportive enough. She also harboured private doubts. So ended the most extraordinary and nation-changing premiership of modern British history.