Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  These anxious feelings were barely discernible to the public. On the face of it, the result looked good for Margaret Thatcher. A vote of 314 to thirty-three was by normal standards a convincing victory. But a closer examination of the figures showed that in addition to the thirty-three votes cast for Sir Anthony Meyer, another twenty-four Tory MPs had spoiled their ballot papers and three more had abstained. This meant that sixty members of her party were now opposed to the Prime Minister.

  It also emerged from the sophisticated canvassing operations masterminded by Tristan Garel-Jones that a further forty-two MPs were so critical of Margaret Thatcher that they had to be ‘worked on’ by her campaign team before they reluctantly agreed to cast their votes in her favour. Some of these dissidents allowed themselves to be arm-twisted into the Prime Minister’s camp only after making it clear that they would not support her in a subsequent election unless she changed her ways or her policies.

  The most insistent demand from these invisible but audible opponents of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership was that the poll tax should be scrapped. Others wanted her to soft-pedal her hostility to the European Community. Among lesser complaints, the most frequent was that she had become too aloof and had stopped listening to her own MPs.

  These grievances had such a bitter edge to them that Tristan Garel-Jones decided he should pass them right to the top. With the help of Bernard Ingham, he saw the Prime Minister alone on a Sunday evening some two weeks after her apparently decisive defeat of Meyer.

  ‘I know I’m only the Deputy Chief Whip’, began Garel-Jones, ‘but I’ve got to warn you that there are 102 of our colleagues lurking in the bushes and they’re going to kill you.’16

  After such a dramatic opening, one might have thought that the Prime Minister would wish to listen carefully. But when Garel-Jones explained the high level of discontent over the poll tax, Margaret Thatcher responded with a lecture demonstrating that she had the right policy and would not change it. Ditto on Europe. ‘But all you’ve got to do is to pretend you like one or two people in the EEC’, protested Garel-Jones. ‘Can’t you just dissemble a little?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ retorted the Prime Minister, who embarked on a lengthy diatribe against Delors, Kohl, Mitterrand and other European leaders. It was too much for the Spanish-born Garel-Jones. Realising he was wasting his time in a dialogue of the deaf, he made his excuses and cut short the meeting. But as he departed, he paused to repeat his warning with a theatricality worthy of Sir Laurence Olivier. ‘Don’t forget that a year from now, those 100 and many more assassins will rise up from the bushes’, declared Tristan the prophet. To emphasise his point, he acted out the gesture of a killer flourishing his dagger and plunging it into a dying corpse. ‘And they will murder you, even while you are still serving as Prime Minister.’17

  After such a histrionic exit, Margaret Thatcher could hardly complain that she had not been warned. But, like Caesar on the Ides of March, she took no heed of the soothsayer. She felt she should devote her attention to more important matters.

  GREATER EVENTS

  While plotters squabbled at Westminster, great events were taking place on the world stage. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, swiftly followed by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. These developments were both a vindication and a challenge for Margaret Thatcher.

  Alone among European leaders, she had held the view since 1982 that the Iron Curtain might be cracking and that freedom for the oppressed peoples of the Warsaw Pact countries could be just around the corner of twentieth-century history. She had sensed this from her dialogues with Mikhail Gorbachev, from her visits to Hungary and Poland, and from her many private briefings from dissidents, intelligence experts and academics. In her Bruges speech she had spoken of her hope that Warsaw, Prague and Budapest would return to their roots as great European cities. Although this vision was coming to pass, it was not immediately happening in the form that Margaret Thatcher had hoped for, namely the enlargement of the European Community by the looser and wider participation of more independent nation-states.

  Instead, the short-term effects of the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany brought about demands for the European Community to bind itself together in both monetary and political union. This surge in the momentum for a full-blown federalist Europe was anathema to the British Prime Minister.

  She said as much at the Dublin summit in April 1990, as she highlighted the consequences of political union to the national parliaments, monarchies, heads of state and electoral systems of the member states. This ten-minute tour d’horizon of the problems which she described as ‘a tongue in cheek’ speech had the effect of sowing seeds of confusion, since it immediately became clear that there was little or no agreement at the summit about what exactly was meant by ‘political union’.18

  Margaret Thatcher also made an ill-judged attempt to block German reunification. Her obstructionism was a hopelessly lost cause. The Berlin Wall had come down amidst scenes of exultant rejoicing in the East. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s drive for reunification was enthusiastically supported by Washington and not objected to by Moscow. Margaret Thatcher’s only hope of stopping Kohl was to win President Mitterand over to her corner. She lobbied the French President at a meeting in Strasbourg in December 1989, pulling maps of Germany’s pre- and post-war borders out of her handbag. Pointing to Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania, she told Mitterand: ‘They’ll take all of that and Czechoslovakia too!’19

  However much he may privately have shared such fears, Mitterand was not about to break the Franco-German axis within the EU by opposing reunification. So Margaret Thatcher was left out on her own anti-German limb. She remained there in impotent isolation, often expressing her views in a style and language that gave the impression that she had become an anachronistic bigot.

  In the months after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher became obsessed with a fear of Germany, which shocked some of those who heard her express it. She was careful to let out her feelings only in private settings and conversations. But there were so many of them that the news travelled quickly. One early indication of her anti-German views came at a private lunch at the Centre for Policy Studies in December 1989. She shocked several of those present, particularly one of her informal foreign-policy advisers on Eastern Europe, George Urban, when she said to him.

  You know, George, there are things that your generation and mine ought never to forget. We’ve been through the war and we know perfectly well what the Germans are like, and what dictators can do, and how national character doesn’t basically change.20

  In the same vein, she clashed with the Centre for Policy Studies’ Director Hugh Thomas, rebuking him for saying that German reunification marked the defeat of communism. ‘Don’t you realise what’s happening? I’ve read my history, but you don’t seem to understand.’21

  Even within her own cabinet, the Prime Minister was isolated. She held a seminar at Chequers in March 1990 at which she sought to persuade the assembled company of ministers, foreign-policy specialists and academics that German reunification presented a danger to British interests and to long-term stability in Europe. Virtually everyone disagreed with her. ‘Very well, very well, I am outnumbered round this table’, she eventually conceded. ‘I promise you that I will be sweet to the Germans, sweet to Helmut when he comes next week, but I shall not be defeated. I shall be sweet to him, but I will uphold my principles.’22

  It seemed as though Margaret Thatcher’s principles were locked in the time warp of the Second World War. In a note of the Chequers seminar, Charles Powell solemnly recorded, surely echoing his mistress’s voice: ‘Some even less flattering attributes were also mentioned as an abiding part of the German character: in alphabetical order, angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality.’ When this memorandum was embarrassingly released, Private Eye parodied it with its own memo along the lines of ‘Germans: wear moustaches, eat sausa
ges, drink beer in cellars, etc. etc.’23

  The Prime Minister’s prejudices were not all that far removed from the parody. She gave no credence to the view that the new generation of post-war Germany might be different from their forebears. Her line was that the national character of Germany had not changed, and that sooner or later the re-united country would exert its power, although by economic means not territorial aggression. ‘Germany is thus by its very nature a destabilising rather than a stabilising force in Europe’ was her judgement.24

  The only senior colleague who shared her attitudes was her Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Nicholas Ridley. He gave a recklessly anti-German interview to the editor of The Spectator, Dominic Lawson, in July 1990. In its sensational article, Ridley was recorded as saying that European Monetary Union was, ‘a German racket to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’

  To stir up even more mischief, the magazine’s front cover portrayed Nicholas Ridley drawing a Hitler moustache on a likeness of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In his article, Dominic Lawson opined that, ‘Mr Ridley’s confidence in expressing his views … must owe a little something to the knowledge that they are not significantly different from those of the Prime Minister’.25 It was a fair comment. As I knew from having lunched with Nicholas Ridley a week before The Spectator article, he was to a large extent repeating the anti-German vitriol which he had privately heard straight from His Mistress’s Voice.

  Margaret Thatcher tried hard to save Nicholas’s Ridley’s skin as the storm raged over his interview. Her initial view was that his gaffe was not a resigning issue. ‘It was an excess of honesty that ultimately brought him down’, she said.26

  The reason why he had to go was that the Chairman and Executive Committee of the 1922 Committee insisted on it. Ridley had been the high priest of political incorrectness for many an entertaining year, but the PC vultures got him in the end. He was the last keeper of the Thatcherite flame left in the cabinet, so his departure left her even more exposed.

  A sadder loss came on 30 July, when Ian Gow was assassinated by an IRA bomb placed under his car in the garage of his Eastbourne home. Margaret Thatcher immediately drove down from No. 10. She spent several hours comforting Ian’s widow, Jane, attending an evening mass at the family church – St Luke’s, Stone Cross. Of all the terrorist killings during her years as Prime Minister, the death of Ian Gow was probably the bereavement that touched her most deeply. She had built an enduring friendship with him in the tough and early years when he was her first PPS.

  He survived many difficult shared experiences, including his principled resignation over the Anglo-Irish agreement. The key to their political intimacy lay in the chemistry between their two personalities.

  There has never been, and perhaps never will be, such a successful Prime Minister–PPS relationship as the one that flourished between Ian Gow and Margaret Thatcher in her first term. It was founded on two pillars: his absolute loyalty to her, and her willingness to respond to his faithful reporting on the moods and murmurings of the Conservative Party in Parliament. Only when she had moved him higher to temporary ministerial office did she realise how much she missed him. Yet he remained her confidant. Although he failed to build bridges between her and his other great friend, Geoffrey Howe, Ian Gow always stayed unsycophantically yet reverentially close to ‘The Lady’, as he called her. His last great service was to minimise the effect of the 1989 stalking-horse challenge. If murder had not prevented him from repeating his pivotal role a year later, it is unlikely that the Prime Minister would have narrowly lost the first round of the 1990 contest.

  ‘Such a stalwart … so steadfast in his faith … so courageous in his convictions’ were three of the phrases Margaret Thatcher used when talking to me about Ian Gow after his funeral in Eastbourne on 8 August.27 Ian would have reciprocated the compliments. He would also have seen, more clearly than she could see, that the months ahead were going to be hard pounding for a Prime Minister who, for one reason or another, had lost virtually all her truest bondsmen.

  REFLECTION

  ‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.’ Lady Bracknell’s words in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest can be adjusted to apply, all too appropriately, to Margaret Thatcher’s losses of her senior cabinet colleagues in the 1989–1990 period. It may even be argued that the Prime Minister herself bore a passing resemblance to Lady Bracknell because of her domineering wilfulness, her refusal to listen and the symbolic wielding of her handbag to silence dissent.

  Seen purely in terms of man-management, there is little doubt that the departures from their posts of the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were blows to the government that could easily have been avoided. Less gratuitous rudeness; more collegiate teamwork; an observance of convention that the views of the holders of the great offices of state have primacy over the opinions of Downing Street advisers – such changes in Margaret Thatcher’s style of governance could have avoided the debacle at the top of her cabinet.

  But it was not that simple for two important reasons. First, the faults of personality were far from one-sided among the dysfunctional trio who headed the British government in this period. Second, the splits between them were not just about man-management. They were also about important issues of foreign and economic policy where divisions between the principal office holders ran deep. With the wisdom of hindsight and history, it is now possible to offer an answer to the question: Who was right?

  What Shakespeare called ‘the insolence of office’28 grows with the years spent in occupancy of great positions. At the height of the personality clashes described in the last three chapters, Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for a full decade. Nigel Lawson was the second longest serving Chancellor of the twentieth century. His six years and four months in the job were exceeded only by the seven years and one month of David Lloyd George. Geoffrey Howe had been Foreign Secretary for six years, preceded by four years as Chancellor. All three had grown not only in experience, but also in over-confident certainty that their views were right.

  Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson were both resentful of the Prime Minister’s challenges to the received wisdom of their departments. They both thought that they were in charge of foreign and economic policy. They could be secretive, sneaky and devious in their public and private efforts to outmanoeuvre the Prime Minister in order to get their own way. Un-collegiate behaviour was by no means a one-way street among the top three figures.

  Geoffrey Howe’s enthusiasm for closer monetary and political union with Europe was the fault-line in his relationship with Margaret Thatcher. But it has since emerged that she was on the right side of that line, and that he was spectacularly wrong. Who today would defend Howe’s championship of EMU during the 1980s, now we can so clearly see the disaster of the Eurozone and the single currency of the present day?

  Similarly with Nigel Lawson, most economists would now say that his enthusiasm for Britain joining the ERM was a strategic mistake. So were his policies of shadowing the Deutschmark, and of sowing the seeds of a recklessly inflationary boom in his 1988 Budget. Again, as we look back with the perspective of history, it appears that it was the Prime Minister, not the Chancellor, who made the better judgements.

  Margaret Thatcher was not always right She could be petty (as she was over the official residences); vindictive (in authorising Bernard Ingham to brief against the authority of the Deputy Prime Minister); and foolishly stubborn (in fighting to keep Alan Walters). Yet these were unhappy sideshows. On the important policy questions that separated the Prime Minister from her Foreign Secretary and her Chancellor, Margaret Thatcher has largely been vindicated by subsequent events. Whatever the errors of her tactics, and the excesses of her zeal and her language, Margaret Thatcher was right on the great issue of Britain’s i
nvolvement in European Monetary and Political Union. It is the paradox of history that because she was right, she fell.

  35

  Countdown to the coup

  THE INVASION OF KUWAIT

  Margaret Thatcher’s last months as Prime Minister were dominated by the two issues that brought her down: the poll tax and Europe. They were compounded by her inability to hold on to her support base within the Conservative parliamentary party. Yet, although she handled her domestic problems with a singular lack of skill and subtlety, she remained an influential figure on the world stage, particularly when shaping the West’s response to the invasion of Kuwait.

  On 2 August 1990, the day when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and declared it to be Iraqi territory, Margaret Thatcher was at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, preparing to address its fortieth anniversary conference, which was to be opened by President George H.W. Bush. The coincidence of the two leaders being together had the effect of strengthening the Western response. The President’s first reaction to the crisis was that Arab diplomacy should be given a chance to bring about the withdrawal of Iraqi forces and the restoration of the lawful government of Kuwait.

  The Prime Minister was underwhelmed by this approach. During the next few weeks of the crisis she was the voice of the hawkish tendency within the Western alliance. Her most famous advice to the US President, ‘Well, all right, George, but this is no time to go wobbly’,1 was given in the context of an Anglo-American disagreement about whether or not to go after two Iraqi tankers which were violating the rules of the immediate Western blockade of the Gulf. On that occasion George H.W. Bush’s instinct to prefer diplomacy to naval intervention was the course of action that prevailed. But the President took the Prime Minister’s phrase to heart, repeating it like a mantra almost daily to his staff, as if to prove that he would be resolute in leading the US response to the invasion. In this way the spirit of the Iron Lady hovered over the White House like a guardian angel warning against wobbliness in the build-up to the war.