Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  ‘Nonsense! It is no such thing’, replied the Prime Minister, who went on to give us a sharp tutorial on the trade benefits of a single European market.5

  Within three years of this conversation, Margaret Thatcher was beginning to make a U-turn on her view of the SEA. There were two reasons for this. The first was her growing unease over the flood of European Directives and Orders, which had to be passed by the House of Commons in order to make British law conform to Brussels law. The second was Jacques Delors, the formidable new President of the European Commission, who was determined to use the SEA as the vehicle to bring about EMU.

  The SEA was intended to be the driving force for an expansion of trade within the single market. Unfortunately, it was also a harmonisation force, which dragged huge areas of British commercial life, quite unnecessarily, under the burdensome umbrella of EC regulation. An almost comic example of this, which considerably upset Margaret Thatcher once she understood it, was the European directive to harmonise lawnmower noise.

  The notion that Parliament had to pass new legislation to make the sound of British lawnmowers harmonise with Continental lawnmowers sounds farcical. Nevertheless, some 120 pages of densely detailed legal regulations dedicated to this purpose were solemnly presented to the House of Commons for ratification. Because this latest example of ‘Brussels interference’ was as understandable as it was ludicrous, we Eurosceptic MPs were able to have a field day with it.

  The pressure group of backbench Tory dissidents known as the Conservative European Reform Group (Chairman J. Aitken, Secretary T. Taylor), who regularly opposed such measures, suddenly expanded well beyond the usual twenty or thirty suspects. As a turbulent House neared its 1.30 a.m. vote on the Lawnmowers (Harmonisation of Lawnmower Noise Order) Regulation 1986, it looked as though as many as seventy-five rebels might be joining us in the ‘No’ lobby. The possibility of a government defeat was looming – panic at the whips’ office. The payroll† vote was mustered to the full, so much so that even the Prime Minister had to be dragged back from No. 10 to vote in support of the Order.

  When the Prime Minister arrived at Westminster, she wanted to know, ‘What is all the fuss about?’ Unfortunately, she asked a group of colleagues standing around in the corridor behind the Speaker’s chair, who happened to be Conservative European Reform Group supporters. She got an earful. One of the measure’s most vocal critics was the Birmingham MP Anthony Beaumont-Dark, who told her in no uncertain manner that this ‘idiocy’ would close factories all over the West Midlands. Another excited Brummie, David Bevan MP, helpfully imitated the sound of lawnmower engines at full throttle.

  Margaret Thatcher was not amused. But she got the point. ‘I shall look into this immediately’, she said before moving on. A few minutes later, her PPS, Michael Alison, came to tell us that the Prime Minister shared the concerns of our group and would be asking the Secretary of State for Trade what could be done. The answer was nothing. Lawnmower noise was duly harmonised by a smaller-than-usual majority. But the incident did demonstrate that the Prime Minister and an increasing number of her troops were becoming anxious about the encroaching effects of the SEA.

  Far more serious a threat to Margaret Thatcher’s favourable view of SEA was her realisation that Jacques Delors, the new President of the European Commission (EC), was using Article 20 of the Act to promote both EMU and a single currency. In her battles against him, Margaret Thatcher had to resort to semantic arguments about what she called ‘the studied ambiguity’ of Article 20.6 Her case was that it only referred to the progressive realisation of economic and monetary union, which was quite different to EMU itself. But this notional difference was not understood, let alone agreed, by any other European leader. Instead, as Delors frequently reiterated, the SEA was seen as the accepted gateway to EMU and the single currency.

  Jacques Delors soon became Margaret Thatcher’s bête noire. She knew little about him at the time of his proposed appointment, and received no guidance from the Foreign Office suggesting that this former French Finance Minister might prove to be a hostile force against the British government’s interests in Europe. However, she was sufficiently wary of the suggested appointee to seek advice from a British banker who had direct experience of working with Delors on a Brussels committee. This banker was Sir Ronald Grierson. He came to breakfast with the Prime Minister on 15 October 1984, the Monday after the IRA bombing in Brighton. Having fully expected his meeting to be cancelled, Grierson found himself being intensively questioned about the potential next President of the European Commission.

  ‘I told Margaret Thatcher that Delors would be socialist, dirigiste, and extremely energetic in working for closer European integration’, recalled Grierson. ‘This was not what she wanted to hear.’7

  The Prime Minister ignored Sir Ronald’s warnings, agreed to the Delors appointment and accepted the blandishments of the other European leaders who assured her that the SEA would be a trade measure creating the single market. Margaret Thatcher in later years claimed that she had been deceived. ‘I trusted them. I believed in them. I believed this was good faith between nations co-operating together. So we got our fingers burned.’8

  Her Foreign Affairs Private Secretary at No. 10, Charles Powell, was even blunter. He recalled:

  Frankly, we were diddled. At the time we were concentrating on the advantages of the single market. The small print of the words in the Act did not seem to be a big deal, particularly after Chancellor Kohl had assured the Prime Minister that EMU was not going to happen. We underestimated, with the wisdom of hindsight, the steady accretions and pressures that followed.9

  This explanation that the Prime Minister and her wider entourage of expert advisers were all ‘diddled’ about the far-reaching constitutional implications of the SEA is difficult to accept. The fact of the matter was that the British negotiating team, led by Margaret Thatcher, agreed to an Act that gave away more British sovereignty than Ted Heath had ceded in 1973. What she may have underestimated was that Jacques Delors would so forcefully use the SEA not just to develop the single market, but also to advance the powers of the Commission, by expanding majority voting and pressing forward towards EMU.

  The moment when the scales fell from Margaret Thatcher’s eyes about the magnitude of Jacques Delors’ grand design for an integrated government of Europe came on 6 July 1988. That was the day when Delors gave a speech to the European Parliament predicting that over the next six or seven years ‘an embryo European government’ would be established, and that within ten years ‘80 per cent of the laws affecting the economy and social policy would be passed at a European and not at a national level’.10

  Margaret Thatcher was furious. Interviewed a few days later on the Jimmy Young Programme, she rubbished this scenario as ‘extreme’ and ‘over the top’. She added that Delors was a fantasist, whose prediction of monetary union was ‘some airy-fairy concept which in my view will never come in my lifetime and I hope never at all!’11

  Infuriated by what she saw as the President of the Commission playing the role of a politician, not least in a decidedly socialist speech to the TUC Conference, Margaret Thatcher decided to launch a counter-attack. She was scheduled to deliver an address to the College of Europe in Bruges on 20 September. Sir Geoffrey Howe had suggested that she might use this occasion to deliver a ‘positive’ view of the EEC. But the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary were growing further and further apart in their attitudes towards Europe.

  DISILLUSIONMENT WITH GEOFFREY HOWE

  Margaret Thatcher’s conversion to Euroscepticism was personal as well as political. The personal dimension came from her growing disillusionment with her Foreign Secretary. This feeling was mutual, but far rougher and nastier on her side. Her antagonistic bullying of Geoffrey Howe revealed the worst aspects of her personality.

  At the beginning of their eleven-year relationship in government, the accord between Chancellor and Prime Minister was a good one, despite some moments of turbulence. In the
battle to turn the British economy around they were a harmonious team, united in their strategic purpose and courageous in their political resilience. Throughout her first term, she was humbler in her certainties and more amenable to listening to the views of her senior colleague. At least twice a month Howe would go through from No. 11 on a Sunday evening for a drink with his boss alone in her flat above No. 10. These private conversations strengthened their public policy-making, which resulted in falling inflation, lower public expenditure and higher growth.

  After Sir Geoffrey became Foreign Secretary his problems with Margaret Thatcher grew more difficult. They had weekly bilaterals, which demonstrated as never before that their personal styles were chalk and cheese. She was brisk and business-like, displaying an impatience to take and implement decisions. He was rambling and discursive, preferring to talk round a subject obliquely, without an outcome. Even when they did agree a course of action, he would sum it up in slow motion, often adding some qualifying phrase that nettled her. Two such phrases, used by him ad nauseam in her view, were ‘with all due deliberate speed’ and ‘subject to contract and survey’.12 Howe never recognised, let alone understood, why these clichés excited the ire of his boss.

  The only third party who attended these mutually unendurable bilaterals was the Prime Minister’s Foreign Affairs Private Secretary, Charles Powell. He became so concerned by the stylistic gulf between the two principals that on one occasion he took it upon himself to suggest to Sir Geoffrey that he should come to the meetings with a set agenda and a prepared speaking note. The advice went unheeded. The Foreign Secretary continued to meander indecisively, and the Prime Minister reacted with increasing aggression.

  Margaret Thatcher developed the view that the change of job had changed Sir Geoffrey’s personality. She felt that her once resolute Chancellor had transmogrified into a vacillating Foreign Secretary. ‘His insatiable appetite for compromise led me to lash out at him in front of others’, was her description of their deteriorating relationship.13 These tongue-lashings could be vicious.

  ‘I know what you are going to say, Geoffrey, and the answer is no’,14 is how she began one meeting. ‘Your paper is twaddle, complete and utter twaddle. I don’t know how you have the nerve to submit it’,15 was her opening salvo at another. ‘If you know so much about industry, why don’t you go and work there’, was her insult to him during a presentation he made about European economic models. All these rude remarks were made in the presence of embarrassed officials.16

  She could behave even worse in front of fellow politicians. At the time when her doubts over the SEA were growing, she called in Bill Cash, the Eurosceptic Member for Stafford. ‘There were just the three of us in the room’, recalled Cash. ‘She didn’t just give Geoffrey a handbagging. He got a massive sandbagging. She was just utterly and impossibly rude to him.’17

  Sir Geoffrey Howe’s response to these torments was usually to suffer in silence. When her rants were in full flow, he would sometimes open his red box, take out a pile of letters and sign them in front of her. Occasionally, he would gradually return to the point she had been denouncing, ‘rather like a submarine coming up for air after a torpedo attack, with its conning tower wrecked and its hull badly damaged’, said one observer of this warfare. ‘Then it would be “bombs away” from her, all over again.’18

  She may have intuitively understood that her Foreign Secretary was smouldering with ill-will towards her. Because neither of them ever attempted to clear the air, their mutual resentment grew worse. It was not their policy disagreements over issues such as South Africa, ‘Star Wars’ and above all Europe that caused their split, however much they contributed to it. What drove Margaret Thatcher up the wall with her Foreign Secretary were intangible and irrational irritations. They were perhaps best encapsulated in the French phrase ‘une question de peau’. It was as though proximity to his presence had the effect of sprinkling itching powder on her skin.

  Four personal aspects of Geoffrey Howe’s life particularly irritated the Prime Minister’s skin: his ambition, his wife, his houses and his plotting. As grievances they did not add up to serious charges on objective examination. But Margaret Thatcher became incapable of objectivity towards her most senior colleague.

  After the departure from the cabinet of Willie Whitelaw, and perhaps for some while before that, Geoffrey Howe was the odds on favourite to become the next prime minister if a vacancy unexpectedly occurred at No. 10. Margaret Thatcher woke up to this reality at the time of Westland when she herself briefly thought that she might have to resign. She believed that Howe secretly harboured the ambition to succeed her, and suspiciously magnified the possibility in her mind.

  She spoke of it at least once to Ian Gow in the autumn of 1988. Being a friend and fan of the Foreign Secretary, he did not demur from the idea of a Prime Minister Howe, but pointed out that it was unlikely to happen because ‘Geoffrey is always so loyal’. ‘Not in private he isn’t,’ retorted Margaret Thatcher, ‘and anyway, it’s out of the question that he should be my successor. He’s quite past it. He will never, never, never succeed me!’19

  The eruption of her anger so distressed Ian Gow that he quickly left the flat at No. 10 and repaired to the smoking room of the House of Commons, where he poured out his heart and the story to one or two friends, including me.20 Our nocturnal consensus was that Thatcher–Howe relations was becoming much worse than the Macmillan–Butler antipathy of the 1950s. This eventually killed off Rab Butler’s expected inheritance of the Tory crown in 1963.

  One person who took the possibility of a Geoffrey Howe succession with the utmost seriousness was his wife, Elspeth. She was the personification of a familiar adage in the Westminster village: ‘Margaret is bad with wives.’ This was true. From her yanking handshake which pulled women she did not want to converse with past her at high speed in a reception line, to forgetting their names or talking past them with bored dismissiveness, the Prime Minister generally gave the impression in her encounters with cabinet wives that none of her colleagues had such a thing as a ‘better half’.

  She was more respectful towards the spouses of grandees like Celia Whitelaw or Iona Carrington. But if there was one wife who irritated her more than any other, it was Elspeth Howe.

  The explanation for this tension was that Lady Howe was a formidable character in her own right. Forthright in her opinions, feminist in her sympathies, sharp-tongued in her humour and fiercely supportive of her husband in his battles, she had an inner strength that grated against Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Iron Lady’ persona. There were no overt clashes between the two of them, although many sensed their antagonism. John Biffen memorably compared the Elspeth–Margaret relationship to that of ‘two wasps in a jam jar’.21

  Elspeth Howe kept her opinion to herself. Margaret Thatcher was less successful in this, scornfully deprecating the ‘feminist views’, ‘the progressive attitude’ and the ‘equal opportunities‡ mindset’ of the Foreign Secretary’s wife. There was not much substance in these grumblings, but they did illustrate that both personally and politically Margaret Thatcher and Elspeth Howe were poles apart.22

  A third area of bitchiness – no other word for it will do – that began to trouble Howe–Thatcher relations concerned the Foreign Secretary’s official residences: No. 1 Carlton Gardens and Chevening in Kent. Because the Howes were good home-makers and hosts, they made the most of these two ‘tied cottages’, particularly Chevening, which is one of England’s most beautiful country houses. They loved its parkland walks, its trees, its splendid eighteenth-century library, and its relaxing atmosphere of elegance and grace.

  Political guests who were lucky enough to be invited to both Chequers and Chevening often said they preferred the atmosphere of Chevening. There is no suggestion that Margaret Thatcher ever had such feelings for she enjoyed Chequers to the full.

  She mysteriously developed the view that the Howes were using Chevening to build up a base of support for a future leadership bid. She comp
lained that they were using the house ‘to hold court’ – a phrase she used unkindly on more than one occasion.23

  If there was a rational explanation for the Prime Ministerial jealousy that seeped out over Chevening, it may have started because several MPs returned from lunches, dinners or overnight stays with the Howes saying how much they had enjoyed themselves. Geoffrey Howe on duty could seem a rather stodgy figure. Off duty at Chevening, he relaxed into being a genial host, an amusing raconteur and a whizz at the billiards table.

  If there was a serious issue that could ever make a section of the Conservative Party contemplate replacing Margaret Thatcher with Geoffrey Howe, it was Europe. However improbable this imaginary threat seemed to the world, the fear of it lurked in the back of her mind. This was why her feud with the Foreign Secretary grew to be personal as well as political. So when she began working on her Bruges speech, in the summer recess of 1988, she had not one but two objectives. She wanted to check the Jacques Delors vision of a federal Europe and she wanted to checkmate the ambitions of Geoffrey Howe.

  THE BRUGES SPEECH

  Margaret Thatcher’s speech in Bruges was a carefully crafted and powerfully phrased oration. Read in its totality, it can be seen as a balanced mixture of strong support and sharp criticism for the European Community. But, as she must have known, it was the negative parts of the speech that made the biggest headlines.

  She began with a barbed jest about how her invitation to speak about Britain in Europe could be compared to ‘inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence!’ In the next paragraph she sounded uncomfortably like an alien invader determined to overthrow the status quo of the Community as she declared: ‘Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution.’

  She rowed back from that early hint of confrontation by emphasising that ‘Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’