The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

by Margaret Thatcher

  THE 1985 RESHUFFLE

  My first discussion about the 1985 reshuffle was with Willie Whitelaw and John Wakeham, now Chief Whip, over supper in the flat at No. 10 in late May. Willie and John were both shrewd and party to the gossip which constitutes parliamentary opinion. Each had his own personal likes and dislikes, which I would privately try to discount, but I listened to their advice very carefully. They urged on me a July reshuffle. I could not agree with them. I hated sacking ministers and I could not prevent myself thinking what it meant to them and their families, suddenly losing salary, car and prestige.[61] I used to like to feel that they would have the long summer recess in office before coming back in September to learn the bad news. The trouble was that the press would then spend the whole of that period speculating on who was to stay and who would go. So I eventually agreed to reshuffles at the end of July; but not yet.

  Planning a reshuffle is immensely complex. There is never a perfect outcome. It is necessary to get the main decisions about the big offices of state right and then work outward and downward from these. Nor is it possible always to give the best positions to one’s closest supporters. Not only must the Cabinet to some extent reflect the varying views in the Parliamentary Party at a particular time: there are some people that it is better to bring in because they would cause more trouble outside. Peter Walker and, to a lesser extent, Kenneth Clarke are examples, precisely because they fought their corner hard. There is another problem: I generally found that the Left seemed to be best at presentation, the Right at getting the job done — although Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson managed to do both.

  I wanted to ensure that the Government’s policies were presented properly between now and the general election. This meant some movement in the most senior three posts — Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary. Nigel Lawson was turning out to be an effective tax-reforming Chancellor. Geoffrey Howe seemed a competent Foreign Secretary; I had not yet taken the full measure of our disagreements. Leon Brittan was the obvious candidate to be moved: however unfairly, he just did not carry conviction with the public. I knew that he would be devastated, but it had to be done.

  I asked Leon to come to Chequers on Sunday afternoon 1 September where Willie, John and I were putting the final touches to the decisions. Willie is a good judge of character. He told me that the first thing Leon would ask when I broke the news to him was whether he would keep his order of precedence in the Cabinet list. To my surprise, this was indeed what he asked. Forewarned, I was able to reassure him. I was also able to say — and mean it — that with complex Financial Services legislation coming up to provide a framework of regulation for the City Leon’s talents would be well employed at the Department of Trade and Industry to which I was moving him.

  I replaced Leon at the Home Office with Douglas Hurd, who looked more the part, was immensely reassuring to the police, and, though no one could call him a natural media performer, inspired a good deal of confidence in the Parliamentary Party. He had become a harder and wiser man through serving as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He also knew the department, having earlier been Leon’s number two there. By and large, it was a successful appointment.

  I had to move Leon; but was I right to move him to the DTI? Although the main fault in what lay ahead certainly resided elsewhere, Leon’s attitude on going to his new department carried its own dangers. He was obviously shaken — friends later described him as somewhat demoralized — and determined to make his political mark. As a result he proved oversensitive about his position when the Westland affair blew up. All this made for errors of judgement when facing a ruthless opponent like Michael Heseltine. It turned out that the DTI had even more pitfalls for this civilized but not very streetwise politician than did the Home Office. At the time, however, it seemed that this was a job which would put Leon less in the limelight, while making the most of his formidable intellect and phenomenal industry, which was what I wanted. But even had Leon weathered Westland he would have found himself in difficulties over the question of privatizing BL.

  Leon’s position turned out therefore to be the key to the plan for the reshuffle. It might have worked out differently. For I thought long and hard about bringing Cecil Parkinson back to the Cabinet. I missed his dry views and great presentational skills. But my advisers were divided on the merits of doing so and in the end I reluctantly concluded that it was too soon.

  There were three departures from the Cabinet. Nigel Lawson had become almost as irritated with Peter Rees as Chief Secretary as Geoffrey Howe had been with John Biffen. Peter was an able tax lawyer and an amiable colleague. I always got on well with him. But I took the view that a Chancellor has the right to select his own subordinates. At Nigel’s request, I replaced Peter with John MacGregor. John had a good financial brain as he had shown as part of the Shadow Treasury team. Although I considered him very much a Ted Heath man, I had been impressed by his acumen and diligence and felt he would do this demanding job well — which he did.

  Grey Gowrie — after only a year in Cabinet, as Leader of the House of Lords — to my great regret decided that he wanted to earn more than a Cabinet member who was a peer — and therefore had no MP’s salary — was able to do. He decided to go back into business. He had a fine, highly cultivated mind and great style. I had offered him the job of Secretary of State for Education, planning to keep Keith Joseph, who I knew was thinking of retirement, as minister without portfolio. But that was not to be. Keith agreed to stay at Education a little longer.

  I regretted in a different way the loss of Patrick Jenkin. No one could have been more conscientious than Patrick — loyal, kind, selfless. But I could not have the constant haemorrhage of political support which his inability to put over a case in the Department of the Environment caused. I was becoming increasingly worried about what to do with the rating system which would be an even more difficult issue than GLC abolition. So I appointed Ken Baker to succeed Patrick. It was a good decision. Ken turned the tables on the Left, proved a superb communicator of our policies and was the foster-father of the community charge.

  I had brought David Young into the Cabinet as minister without portfolio the previous year and I now had him succeed Tom King, who went to be Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. It is difficult to conceive of a greater contrast than David and Tom. I had started off with a wrong view of Tom King, inherited from Opposition. I had thought that he was a man with a taste for detail who, when I made Michael Heseltine Secretary of State for the Environment in 1979, would complement Michael’s very broad-brush approach. I then made the uncomfortable discovery that detail was not at all Tom’s forte, as the way in which we became steadily more enmeshed in almost incomprehensible formulae for rate support grant amply demonstrated. At Employment — in particular on the whole question of trade union political funds where he adopted a half-hearted compromise — he had not shown himself to best effect. Norman Tebbit, his predecessor, was unimpressed; and I felt rightly so. At Northern Ireland, Tom subsequently demonstrated the other side of his character, which was a robust, manly good sense that won even hardened opponents to his point of view, at least as far as is possible in Northern Ireland. Even though from the standpoint of Ulster affairs it was a slightly difficult time to put in a new Secretary of State, with negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in its final stages, Tom went with good grace and to good effect.

  David Young did not claim to understand politics: but he understood how to make things happen. He had revolutionized the working of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) and at the Department of Employment his schemes for getting the unemployed back into work made a major contribution to our winning the 1987 general election. He shared Keith Joseph’s and my view about how the economy worked and how jobs were created — not by government but by enterprise. He understood the relationship between the price of labour and the number of jobs. And he had that sureness of touch in devising practical projects which make sense in the marketplace that fe
w but successful businessmen ever acquire. The ‘Action for Jobs’ programme was the single most effective economic programme we launched in my term in office. As a general rule I did not bring outsiders directly into Cabinet, feeling that previous experience of this — as with John Davies in Ted Heath’s Government — had not been altogether happy. David Young was an exception and proved eminently worthy of being so.

  If the Government’s presentation was to be improved something had to be done about Conservative Central Office. Central Office rightly claims that it is a universal scapegoat for whatever goes wrong. It is blamed by the Government when the Party is restive or lethargic. It is blamed by the Party when the Government seems insensitive or out of touch. But equally there is no doubt that the performance of Central Office is variable and by this point it was causing alarm. John Gummer just did not have the political clout or credibility to rally the troops. I had appointed him as a sort of nightwatchman: but he seemed to have gone to sleep on the job. It was time for a figure of weight and authority to succeed him and provide the required leadership. In many ways, the ideal man seemed to be Norman Tebbit. Norman is one of the bravest men I have ever met. He will never deviate on a point of principle — and those principles are ones which even the least articulate Tory knows he shares.

  There were, though, arguments against Norman’s appointment. He was still not well and would indeed have to undergo more painful surgery at a very difficult political time for us. He was not a first-class administrator. I later came to have some vigorous arguments with him. There were also those who said that he and I were too close politically. They argued that what was needed, in John Biffen’s foolish phrase, was a more ‘balanced ticket’, which seemed to me a recipe for paralysis.

  But there was no doubt in my mind that Norman was the man for the job, and so it proved. I knew he wanted it, though he never asked me for it. I thought that one day he might succeed me if we won the election, though Party Chairmanships have generally been something of a poisoned chalice. Above all, I knew that the rank and file of the Party would give their all for Norman Tebbit, whom everyone admired for bearing his sufferings with such heroism, never complaining but never concealing either that, whatever politics might bring, it was his own family and Margaret Tebbit’s needs which came first. Norman was better than an inspiration: he was an example. So I appointed him Chairman of the Party; he remained a member of the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. At least for the moment, party morale soared.

  Norman needed a Deputy Chairman who would be able to make those visits to the Party around the country which Norman’s health precluded him from doing. Only someone with a high profile already could do this successfully and I decided that Jeffrey Archer was the right choice. He was the extrovert’s extrovert. He had prodigious energy; he was and remains the most popular speaker the Party has ever had. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Jeffrey’s political judgement did not always match his enormous energy and fund-raising ability: ill-considered remarks got him and the Party into some awkward scrapes, but he always got himself out of them.

  I also made quite a large number of changes in the ranks of junior ministers. Two future Cabinet ministers came into the Government — Michael Howard at the DTI and John Major who moved from the Whips’ Office to the DHSS. John Major was certainly not known to be on the right of the Party during his first days as an MP. When as a whip he came to the annual whips’ lunch at Downing Street with the other whips he disagreed with me about the importance of getting taxation down. He argued that there was no evidence that people would rather pay lower taxes than have better social services. I did not treat him or his argument kindly and some people, I later heard, thought that he had ruined his chances of promotion. But in fact I enjoy an argument and when the whips’ office suggested he become a junior minister I gave him the job which I myself had done first, dealing with the complex area of pensions and national insurance. If that did not alert him to the realities of social security and the dependency culture, nothing would.

  I felt that the reshuffle had given the Party and the Government a lift. I believed that we had created a stronger administration, good at both policy and presentation, that could weather any storm and see us through to the next election. But it was not to be. ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men [and women], Gang aft a-gley.’

  THE WESTLAND AFFAIR

  There are differing views even now of what the Westland affair was really about. At various times Michael Heseltine claimed that it was about Britain’s future as a technologically advanced country, the role of government in industry, Britain’s relationship with Europe and the United States and the proprieties of constitutional government. Of course, these are all interesting points for discussion. But Westland was really about none of these things. Michael Heseltine’s own personality — not mine or any other member of the Government’s — alone provides a kind of explanation for what arose. Michael is one of the most talented people in politics. His talents are selective and cultivated to what always seemed to me the point of exaggeration. But anyone who has seen him on television or on a public platform will quickly accept that they are real enough.

  Michael and I are similar in some ways, very different in others. We are ambitious, single-minded and believe in efficiency and results. But whereas with me it is certain political principles that provide a reference point and inner strength, for Michael such things are unnecessary. His own overwhelming belief in himself is sufficient. Shortly before Christmas 1985 when the Westland affair was rapidly getting out of hand he sent me a handwritten letter in which he wrote that he knew I would ‘understand the depth of [his] convictions in this matter’. He was all too correct.

  My relations with Michael Heseltine had never been easy. When I became Leader of the Party in 1975 I wanted to move him out of his post as Shadow Industry spokesman where his interventionist instincts were out of place. He agreed to take the Environment portfolio on condition that he did not have to do so in Government. Working with Hugh Rossi — a great expert on housing — Michael presented our policy on the sale of council houses very effectively. After our election victory I offered him the Department of Energy — an important job at the time, since the fall of the Shah was sending oil prices sharply upwards. Hearing this, he said that if that was all, he would prefer to become Secretary of State for the Environment. I bowed to this. There Michael — assisted by Tom King — did not prove particularly successful in curbing local authority spending. He came up with no feasible alternative to the rating system, which was at the root of much of the problem since many voters did not pay local authority rates. But Michael was far less interested in local authority finance than in being ‘Minister for Merseyside’. In that capacity he made a great impression, which was undoubtedly politically helpful to us. Though for the most part his efforts had only ephemeral results, I would not blame him for that: Liverpool has defeated better men than Michael Heseltine. Apart from the sale of council houses and Merseyside, what came to obsess Michael was introducing new management systems into government. This seemed to me a most commendable interest and I encouraged him, arranging at one point a seminar with other ministers to discuss it.

  But Michael was clearly restless and when John Nott told me that he did not intend to stand again for the next Parliament, I decided to give Michael his big chance and put him into Defence. There Michael’s strengths and weaknesses were both apparent. He defended our approach to nuclear arms with great panache and inflicted a series of defeats on CND and the Labour Left. He reorganized the MoD, rationalizing its traditional federal structure. Supported by me in the face of departmental obstruction, he brought in Peter Levene to run defence procurement on sound business lines.

  These were real achievements. But Michael’s sense of priorities was gravely distorted by his personal ambitions and political obsessions. For while Michael Heseltine was becoming increasingly obsessed with a small West Country helicopter company with a turnover of some
thing over £300 million, far more important issues escaped his interest. In particular, the Nimrod Airborne Early Warning System project which would have to be cancelled by George Younger in December 1986 after £660 million had been spent was running into grave difficulties while Michael Heseltine was at Defence. It would have been inconceivable for Leon Brittan, who was to fare so badly at Michael’s hands, to have let such a situation continue. The Nimrod affair constituted a unique — and uniquely costly — lesson in how not to monitor and manage defence procurement. A minister has to be prepared to work through the details if he is going to come to the right decisions and this Michael was always unwilling to do.

  However complex the psychological drives of Michael Heseltine, the basic issue at stake in Westland was clear enough. It was whether the directors and shareholders of a private sector firm, heavily but not exclusively dependent on government orders, should be free to decide its future, or whether government should do so. In this sense an important issue was indeed at stake in Westland. If government manipulates its purchasing power, if it arbitrarily changes the rules under which a particular company’s financial decisions have to be made, and if it then goes on to lobby directly for a particular commercial option — these things are abuses of power. All my reading, thinking and experience has taught me that once the state plays fast and loose with economic freedom, political freedom risks being the next casualty.