REFLECTION
The final months of Margaret Thatcher’s eleven years as Prime Minister were dominated by two contradictory features: her inability to listen to her political friends at home and her ability to make far-sightedly bold judgements on major international issues.
Longevity in high office often leads to arrogant remoteness. The nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton expressed this in his aphorism, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.49 There was nothing corrupt in the venal sense of the word about Margaret Thatcher. But in the decaying or decomposing meaning of the word, her political antennae were falling apart. She was looking tired. Her Defence Secretary, Tom King, noticed ‘her worrying new tendency to yawn with exhaustion at cabinet meetings’.50 Whether it was from tiredness or stubbornness, she was no longer a listening politician.
All sorts of friendly voices tried to warn her about the danger signals. Right up to the time of his assassination, Ian Gow kept begging her not to let her irritation with Geoffrey Howe fester into an irreparable rift. Tristan Garel-Jones, who had played a key role in minimising the Meyer vote in the 1989 leadership election, told her in the bluntest of terms that she could lose up to a hundred more votes to Heseltine in any future contest if she did not sort out the poll tax. George Younger urged her to tone down the aggression in her anti-European rhetoric because over half the party were still pro-Europe. These well-intentioned suggestions were made to the Prime Minister in late 1989, but she took no notice of any of them.
Perhaps the most balanced flow of advice came from the Executive of the 1922 Committee, who met her on a monthly basis. All shades of party opinion were represented at these small gatherings. The overwhelming majority of the Executive were supporters of the Prime Minister and wanted her to continue in office. But she ignored their suggestions with an ill-disguised contempt that was painfully reminiscent of Ted Heath’s rudeness to the 1922 Committee fifteen years earlier.
One of Margaret Thatcher’s keenest supporters on the back benches was Dame Jill Knight, whose popularity with her colleagues ensured her re-election as Vice-Chair of the 1922 Committee for over a decade. She became disappointed with the Prime Minister’s intransigence, particularly on the poll tax. ‘Sadly, Margaret got to the point where she just wouldn’t listen to any of us’, she recalled. ‘She hunkered down in her Downing Street bunker with Charles Powell and Bernard Ingham, and preferred their opinions to those of us who knew what was going on in the country and in the House. It was terribly sad.’51
The sadness of her supporters was matched by the high spirits of her adversaries. Michael Heseltine sensed that the Prime Minister was on the skids, so he greased them with cunning and diligence. Support for him was growing since he was the obvious rallying point for discontent, even though he seemed cautious about actually raising the standard of rebellion. But even those who opposed Heseltine’s policies, particularly towards Europe, saw him as a formidable challenger. One of the most vocal Eurosceptics, Tony Marlow, the MP for Northampton North, was gloomily predicting ‘a new Prime Minister by Christmas’ as early as mid-October.52 To the listeners who agreed with this forecast, the PM in waiting was Hezza.
Yet for all her mistakes, her high handedness, and her poor party management, Margaret Thatcher remained a colossus who bestrode the world as well as the domestic stage. Her preparations for the coming conflict in the Gulf were applauded by the defence and foreign-policy specialists in the House. There was a feeling that if it came to hostilities over Kuwait, then Britain’s experienced Prime Minister was indispensable as a war leader.
On Europe, opinions on Margaret Thatcher were more divided. Yet, as the dust began to settle after her ‘No. No. No’ denunciation of Delors, there was a growing feeling that she had been right to take a strong stand against European Monetary Union. The Tory party began shifting its ground in response to her strong leadership. It was moving towards the much more Eurosceptic-inclined policy it has embraced today. All this started to happen in the early days of November 1990. Like all huge policy upheavals, it was confusing at first. But few now would argue in the age of the eurozone crisis that Margaret Thatcher was wrong to sound the tocsin of battle about British opposition to monetary and political union in Europe.
Perhaps it was the realisation that Britain had arrived at a crossroads of European policy that encouraged Sir Geoffrey Howe to unsheathe his dagger, as he prepared what turned out to be the most dramatic resignation statement in parliamentary history.
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* The first of these lines was the battle cry of the East Kent Regiment. The second came from Rear Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles, MP for Winchester, addressing the 1922 Committee in 1975.
† GATT: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, forerunner of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
‡ Annie’s Bar was a popular watering hole in the Palace of Westminster, frequented by MPs and Lobby correspondents.
36
End game
HOWE GOES FOR THE JUGULAR
The days leading up to Geoffrey Howe’s resignation statement were packed with tension at Westminster. Margaret Thatcher was worried, although this was hard to discern from the carapace of calm with which she carried out her public duties at constituency events and at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. But she let the mask slip in her speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on Monday 12 November, where she gave way not to emotions of anxiety but to an excess of bravado. Using the imagery of cricket, she struck a high note of defiance:
I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And in case anyone doubted it, can I assure you there will be no ducking bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling’s going to get hit all round the ground.1
Margaret Thatcher’s sally into the unfamiliar language of Wisden not only revealed her ignorance of cricket* (bouncers usually should be ducked!); it acted as a further provocation to Sir Geoffrey Howe. As he sat in the pavilion composing his resignation speech, he seized the opportunity offered by her metaphor, proving himself to be no flannelled fool when it came to venomous spin. Yet almost no one, particularly the Prime Minister, believed he was capable of knocking out her middle stump.
A resignation speech from the departed Deputy Prime Minister was bound to be a significant event. Yet in the days before he delivered his bombshell there was no expectation of an impending apocalypse. In the Commons, Howe was regarded as a capable but colourless speaker. Even if he decided to be severely critical of the Prime Minister, most MPs anticipated that she would survive it. On past form, Howe had been unimpressive when trying to wield the knife. It was ‘rather like being savaged by a dead sheep’ had been Denis Healey’s disparaging description of Sir Geoffrey’s best-known previous attempt at launching an ad hominem attack on an opponent.2† The taunt was much cited as the political world waited to hear what he had to say.
It may never be clear, perhaps even to himself, when precisely the worm turned in Geoffrey Howe and changed his instinct to be loyal into a determination to have revenge. Was there an accumulation of bitterness over Margaret Thatcher’s numerous acts of rudeness to him, which finally boiled over? Or was there a sudden rush of anger caused by unpleasant surprises from 30 October onwards. Her ‘No. No. No.’ denunciation of Jacques Delors; her effrontery in pretending that the differences between Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister were about style not substance; and her boastful assertion that she would hit his bowling all over the ground had been blows for Sir Geoffrey’s pride. But did they add up to a casus belli for an all-out war? On past form, it seemed improbable.
Like Brutus in Julius Caesar, Howe struggled to be seen as an honourable man. He had hesitated, retreated and avoided confrontation for years, before aligning himself with the Cassiuses and Cascas of the Conservative Party who were plotting to bring about the political death of Margaret Thatcher. But once he finally decided to make his move, he delivered the unkindest cut of all.
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At 3.30 p.m. on Tuesday 13 November, Sir Geoffrey Howe made far and away the most memorable and effective speech of his career. His purpose was to destroy the Prime Minister using a lethal blend of sarcastic humour mingled with personal poison. The House was spellbound, realising that history was being made.
Howe began with a joke about the claim that he had resigned over issues of style, not substance. ‘If some of my former colleagues are to be believed,’ he said, ‘I must be the first Minister in history who has resigned because he was in full agreement with Government policy.’3 Even the Prime Minister managed to simulate laughter at that one, but her smile soon vanished as her former Deputy moved into stiletto plunging mode, blaming her for damaging the government and its efforts to control inflation by delaying entry into the ERM.
Then he compared the European vision of Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan with
the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people scheming, in her words, to ‘extinguish democracy’, to ‘dissolve our national identities’, and to lead us ‘through the back door into a federal Europe.’ What kind of vision is that … ?
By now, there were perceptible shivers running down the Tory back benches, as Sir Geoffrey exposed raw nerve after raw nerve on the rift over European policy.
He accused the Prime Minister of sabotaging the efforts of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England to put forward Britain’s hard ECU proposal, by casually dismissing the very idea ‘with such personalised incredulity’. How on earth, he asked, are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England ‘to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that type of background noise?’ Sharp intakes of breath from all parts of the House followed that phrase.
Worse reactions followed as Sir Geoffrey poured scorn on Margaret Thatcher’s cricketing allusions, linking them with a better one of his own to her treatment of the Chancellor and Governor: ‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’4
By coincidence, I was sitting on the fourth bench below the gangway immediately behind Sir Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement. This meant that I was ‘doughnutted’ in the television pictures of virtually every word he uttered. My agonised grimaces were thus captured for posterity and have been replayed many times since. They were also recorded in his diary by Alan Clark, who wrote of the moment of the broken bats analogy, ‘Everyone gasped, and I looked round to catch Jonathan’s eye. He had that special incredulous look he occasionally gets, mouth open.’5
However incredulous my expression, it was nothing to the waves of emotion that rippled through the House in various forms. Labour and a few members of the Howe–Heseltine fan club guffawed derisively. Thatcher loyalists reeled in horror, some with eyes closed as if to avert their gaze from the brutality of the killing. It was the equivalent of the cathartic moment in Shakespeare’s play when Julius Caesar is struck down with the assassin’s cry, ‘Speak, hands, for me!’6
A few feet along the back benches, I saw Dame Elaine Kellett Bowman start to weep. Dame Jill Knight gripped the bench in front of her, seeming to writhe in pain as though she had been physically stabbed herself. As for the most important lady in the House, on whom all eyes were focused, she appeared as steady as a rock. But ‘underneath the mask of composure, my emotions were turbulent’, Margaret Thatcher recalled. ‘I had not the slightest doubt that the speech was deeply damaging to me.’7
After the damage came a few mock turtle tears as Howe spoke of his ‘sadness and dismay’ over the ‘very real tragedy that the Prime Minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation’. Then, in the last sentence of his statement, the ex-Chancellor, ex-Foreign Secretary, ex-Deputy Prime Minister put a deadly thrust into his ex-colleague the Prime Minister: ‘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.’8
Stunned silence was the immediate response of the House. There were no sounds of ‘hear, hear’, no groans of disapproval, and only a single muted rumble of ‘Shame!’ from Michael Carttiss, the MP for Great Yarmouth. But as the chamber emptied, the collective shock at having witnessed an assassination was replaced by a growing hubbub of speculation. For we all knew that the landscape of British politics had irreversibly changed. Howe’s last twenty-six words were seen as a carefully calculated call to Michael Heseltine to unsheathe his sword and destroy the Prime Minister.
Depending on your point of view, Howe had either given an unpopular leader her deserved come-uppance, or he had committed an unforgivable act of malicious insurrection. Many Tory MPs were apoplectic at what some were calling co-ordinated treachery. This derived from the speech’s implied invitation for Michael Heseltine to stand against Margaret Thatcher. Both Howe and Heseltine subsequently denied any collusion. Perhaps their remarkable collaboration happened by telepathy.
HESELTINE ENTERS THE RING
Scenes close to internecine mayhem exploded within the Tory Party during the hours after Geoffrey Howe’s statement. It was reported that two colleagues came to blows in the tea room, but even without the fisticuffs the angry divisions were erupting, with colleagues ferociously arguing the toss on questions like: Was Howe a regicide or a hero? Had Elspeth written the most venomous parts of the speech? Was Heseltine a party to the plot? The most frequently repeated inquiry of the day was: ‘What happens next?’
Cabals and conclaves were forming in the corridors, the bars and the smoking room with raised voices and jabbing fingers. The only people who looked happy were Michael Heseltine’s camp followers, headed by William Powell, Michael Mates and Keith Hampson. They were in a frenzy of excitement. It did not take long for their hero to pick up the gauntlet so helpfully thrown at his feet. The following morning, Michael Heseltine formally announced his candidacy. The 1990 Tory leadership battle had begun, with the first ballot fixed for Tuesday 20 November.
There were two enormous surprises in the next few days. They were that both the challenger and the incumbent lost the election. This was only partly a product of the complex rules, which ordained that for either of them to win the contest outright without a second ballot, the victor had to achieve a simple majority plus 15 per cent – a total of 208 votes.
What stymied Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine was not the artificial target of 208 votes. It was that they both carried too much baggage to reach this winning post, and that they both ran campaigns of considerable incompetence.
Michael Heseltine should have been an entirely credible candidate to become leader of the party and the next prime minister. He had the necessary ministerial experience. He was an outstanding speaker, blessed with the gift of political charisma. He had spent the past four years running a well-planned and handsomely financed campaign to become Margaret Thatcher’s successor. And yet when his hour came, in the most favourable circumstances imaginable, Heseltine failed. Why?
The answer lies in what is known as the ‘ocean liner test’ – an amusing analogy invented by Nye Bevan and embellished by Michael Foot. It compares a sojourn in the House of Commons to setting off on a long voyage with a collection of fellow passengers you might never have picked to be your companions. But by the time the ship has crossed the Bay of Biscay and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, the changing seas and the shared experiences of shipboard life have made it possible for the leading figures on the boat to have their characters assessed with remarkable accuracy. These favourable and unfavourable judgements are the House of Commons equivalent of the separation of the sheep and the goats. In the context of the 1990 leadership election, all that needs to be said is that Michael Heseltine failed the ocean liner test.
Yet, even with these strong tides running in his favour, Heseltine could not build sufficient momentum to pull ahead of Margaret Thatcher. This was partly because his campaign was badly run. His principal lieutenants, Michael Mates, the MP for Petersfield, and Keith Hampson, the MP for Ripon, did not have sufficient organisational skills.
To counter the impression that he was leading a second eleven team, Hezza turned his strategy into a one-man band operation. The cat who walked by himself now had to canvass by himself. He did this rather embarrassingly, standing for hours at a stretch in the Members’ Lobby, accosting colleagues as they went in and out of the chamber. ‘How about coming my way?’ he asked me on the steps of the stone-flagged corridor leading down from the lobby to the Members’ Cloakroom. ‘Your talents have been overlooked for far too long. We’d love to have you with us.’10
Variations on these lines were deployed to dozens of other colleagues. Some were flattered, while others were repelled by Hezza’s synthetic smiles and ersatz charm at these forced encounters. Norman Lamont mocked Heseltine for canvassing ‘like a child molester, hanging around the lavatories and waiting to pounce on people’.11 Even for Michael Heseltine, a shy and sensitive man beneath the flashy surface, these advances must have felt almost as maladroit as they seemed to his targets.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 78
