On 31 March, the day before the tax was due to be introduced in England and Wales, a large demonstration organized by the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation ended in a riot in Trafalgar Square. There were more than three hundred arrests. Nearly four hundred policemen were injured amid fights and fires in the heart of London. The violence was condemned by all responsible groups, but the sense that the poll tax was contributing to a fragmentation of society was widespread. Following on from Brixton, Toxteth, the miners’ strike and Wapping, the protest-turned-riot had become one of the abiding images of Thatcher’s Britain alongside HMS Invincible returning from the South Atlantic, yuppie businessmen in red braces and estate agents’ ‘For Sale’ signs. It provided the occasion for The Times to come firmly off the fence and condemn the poll tax without equivocation:
So long as the tax remains in place, expediency will require the Treasury, and therefore national taxpayers to bear an ever greater share of local spending, as ministers hurl money at a lengthening line of losers. Since, in the early years of this Government, more local spending was rightly being pushed on to local rates, this reverse move is a real loss to local accountability, and makes a mockery of the prime motive for the charge … a brave, but possibly wise, Government might now admit that it had made a mistake and reintroduce rates as from 1991.20
Running concomitantly with the poll tax fiasco was the slide in support for the Conservative Party. Nine days before the Trafalgar Square riot, Labour had overturned a 14,700 Tory majority in a by-election in Mid-Staffordshire. The Prime Minister no longer looked impregnable. She was buffeted not only by the poll tax anger and the worsening economic climate but also by discontent among some of her most senior colleagues over her growing Euro-scepticism. The obvious challenger remained in the shape of Michael Heseltine who had languished with ill-concealed impatience on the backbenches since the Westland crisis, the continuing focus for Tory Jacobite hopes and plots. Two days after Jenkins had become editor, The Times had run a leading article advising Heseltine to ‘put up or shut up’.21 Yet, at that stage, the considered opinion was that Mrs Thatcher would survive a direct challenge. In April, the acclaimed biographer and Conservative Party historian Lord Blake wrote on the Op-Ed page an examination of the historical record of Thatcher’s predecessors and concluded it was highly unlikely that a Conservative leader would be deposed while still in office. ‘It will be surprising if any serious potential successor puts his name down as an opponent of Mrs Thatcher in a party election in the autumn,’ he prophesied, before adding, ‘an attempt to overthrow her would do the party far more harm than any which she can do by remaining … When Disraeli overthrew Peel, he doomed his party to 28 years of impotence’.22
In the months that followed, however, the Prime Minister appeared increasingly isolated. She had already lost Alan Walters, the last senior figure able to put up intelligent arguments against the Treasury’s zeal to lock sterling into the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System. In July, Nicholas Ridley, one of the few Cabinet ministers who had been genuinely enthusiastic about the poll tax, resigned after the Spectator published anti-German comments he had made to the magazine’s editor, Dominic Lawson, in connection with ceding power to a European central bank. In October, the cause of monetary union was boosted and the diminishing power of the Prime Minister over her Cabinet colleagues laid bare when John Major, the Chancellor, locked sterling into the ERM. Britain, once again, had incarcerated its currency into a house of correction that restricted its ability to float freely. Whenever it looked like sliding below its allotted fixed band (which was set at a 6 per cent margin around one pound equalling 2.95 Deutschmarks) the Treasury was committed to intervening to keep its value up. Major was determined to use a high exchange rate as his tool to fight inflation which, approaching 11 per cent, was back where it had been when Mrs Thatcher had first taken office in 1979. The announcement of ERM membership was accompanied by an entirely political (and consequently ephemeral) interest rate cut to 14 per cent.
The Times did not condemn Major’s decision outright, but its tone was decidedly sniffy. Certainly there were arguments for joining the ERM: it would smooth out the currency volatility that affected the half of Britain’s manufactured goods exported to the other ERM member states across the English Channel and would act as an anti-inflationary ‘discipline’. But the leading column doubted the wisdom of this ‘one-club’ approach to economic management. ‘The German Bundesbank has, in effect, been asked to take the lead role in British monetary policy’ the paper noted with the same analysis – but not the xenophobic rhetoric – that had ended Ridley’s Cabinet career.23 It would shortly become apparent that in wrestling with the huge costs of reunification, the German Bundesbank had more pressing concerns than caring about what was good for British interests. In the meantime, Britain could brace itself for worse unemployment. By 15 November, the jobless total had gone back up to 1.7 million and showed no signs of levelling off.
Whether joining the ERM would defeat inflation remained to be seen. The policy had the enthusiastic endorsement of the Bank of England, the CBI, the TUC, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Financial Times. Some of these supporters appeared to be motivated not just by economic analysis but also by the recognition that joining represented a move towards Britain’s engagement with the European Community and no less excitingly a slap in the face to Margaret Thatcher. Major had ridden roughshod over the Prime Minister’s proviso that ERM membership could not take place until there was inflation rate convergence in his desperate search for a quick fix solution to Britain’s mounting problems. Britain’s inflation rate was double the European average. These shortcomings became obvious to critics as the months passed, but The Times’s initial assessment that the manner in which Britain was taken into the ERM demonstrated that ‘politics has triumphed over economics’ and that the timing ‘could hardly be less propitious for much of British industry’ stood against the grain of received opinion at the time.24 The Financial Times’s analysis that ‘both politically and economically, entry is shrewdly timed’ did not say much for its judgment in either matter. Its stable mate, The Economist, fell into the same category. But it was not alone as opinion writers across the broadsheet spectrum endorsed the move. The relief was expressed with even greater adulation in the mid-market press. The Daily Mail was beside itself with joy. Murdoch’s Today was delighted by the ‘historic’ move.25
On Fleet Street the most prescient writer proved to be Anatole Kaletsky. While the City traders trundled into work on Monday 8 October for the first day of ERM membership, Kaletsky forecast not the ‘golden scenario’ almost universally being attributed to the move but, rather, a testing time ahead. ‘Like every country that chooses to pamper its consumers with an overvalued exchange rate (a policy that Germany and Japan have always tried to eschew) Britain will eventually have to pay a hefty price for deindustrialisation,’ he warned. The notion that ERM membership would bring lower interest rates was wishful thinking: ‘If international investors begin to catch a whiff of devaluation, either before or soon after a general election, then the supposed support for sterling provided by the ERM rules could turn into a political burden … Sterling may jump to the top of its target band this morning, as virtually everyone seems to be expecting. But how long it stays there is another matter.’26
Acronym-adept pro-Europeans hoped that Britain’s entry into the ERM meant the economy was finally being attuned to the prospect of EMU. When the prospect was pushed onto the agenda at a summit of European leaders in Rome at the end of October, Mrs Thatcher made it clear that monetary union would come, in effect, over her dead body. For those tired of her hectoring style, this was not so much a threat as an incitement. It was Sir Geoffrey Howe who decided to wield the knife. His resignation from the Cabinet plunged the Government back into crisis.
Treated dismissively by a Prime Minister who had shunted him from the Foreign Office to the ill-defined post of Deputy Prime Minister, How
e’s resignation looked all too predictable in hindsight. Yet this made it no less destructive. He had been the last remaining member of Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet in 1979. All others had passed by the wayside. Indeed, as The Times pointed out, his long-standing commitment to monetarism made him, in some respects, a Thatcherite before Thatcher. However, if he was attempting to instigate a successful challenge to her leadership, the paper believed he would fail. ‘The next generation of Tory leaders are certainly in waiting, but they are waiting within the cabinet, not outside it.’ The cause of European union was, it reasoned, a poor one to choose. ‘Undoubtedly the Europe issue is dividing the party,’ the leading column conceded, ‘but it is not another tariff reform, nor another appeasement. The debate is over degrees of sovereignty, subsidiarity, even just the mood music of European cooperation.’27 This was a misjudgment. Like tariff reform and appeasement in the past, it would indeed become the most divisive issue in Tory politics during the 1990s. The Times’s failure to perceive the extent of the ideological disagreement led it to discount the danger in which the Prime Minister was about to find herself. This complacency was shattered a fortnight later when Howe delivered his resignation speech in the House of Commons. The front page headline, ‘Howe attack leaves MPs gasping’, summed up the atmosphere in the chamber and, in a reference to the old claim that an attack by Sir Geoffrey was like being savaged by a dead sheep, Mel Calman provided a pocket cartoon of a fat sheep with the remains of the Iron Lady’s legs dangling from its jaws with the simple caption, ‘Howe’s that?’28 Within hours, Michael Heseltine announced he would challenge for the leadership.
The next morning, The Times carried an interview by Robin Oakely in which the challenger laid out his stall. He was, he boasted, far more of an electoral asset than the existing Prime Minister. Furthermore, he would reform (and presumably abolish) the poll tax and engage positively on Europe (code for sign up to the single currency) so that the City of London did not lose out from EMU. The following day a Times/MORI opinion poll appeared to support the first of his claims. It suggested that with Heseltine in Downing Street the Tories would gain a ten-point lead over Labour in the polls. For Tory MPs, anxious at how the poll tax was making their seats dangerously marginal, Heseltine appeared to offer a lifeline.
Ever since Simon Jenkins had assumed the editorship, his paper had been advising Heseltine to get on with his clear desire to stand against the Prime Minister and settle the matter once and for all. On 12 November, the day before Howe’s speech, the leading column had teased the potential challenger further by ending, ‘If Mr Heseltine fails to throw his cap into the ring, he will thoroughly deserve to have it stuffed down his throat.’29 Having helped to goad him into a position where Howe’s resignation would have made his silence look like cowardice,30 The Times prepared to let him down with an almighty thud. Three days before the first ballot of the 372 Tory MPs, the paper ran an anonymous profile of Heseltine in which he was portrayed as ambitious to a degree unusual even among driven politicians. It suggested that he would have no more of a collective approach to Cabinet government than had Mrs Thatcher. The picture painted was certainly not personally attractive and read, in parts, like a professional hatchet job.31 Instead, The Times rallied to the Prime Minister’s tattered standard. The leading article, entitled ‘The Case for Thatcher’, was written by Simon Jenkins. She was in the fourth year of her third administration and, ‘unlike those previously accused of splitting the party, such as Peel or Joseph Chamberlain, she has not radically departed from her last election mandate’. Ousting her, the editorial said, ‘would rank even higher in the catalogue of political ingratitude than Churchill’s 1945 election defeat, for Churchill was rejected by his opponents, not his erstwhile supporters’. It concluded that so long as Mrs Thatcher made it clear she would henceforth rule through a triumvirate with John Major and Douglas Hurd, ‘she can still win the Tories an election. She does not deserve decapitation tonight.’32
Did The Times’s appeal for loyalty to the leader rally any wavers? Certainly, it did not persuade enough of them. Far less persuasive was the manner of the Prime Minister’s election campaign. She spent the last three days of it in Paris for the OSCE summit that effectively ended the Cold War. Although she emerged from the ballot with 204 votes to Heseltine’s 152, under the rules the margin was four short of an outright victory. There would have to be a second ballot. From the steps of the British Embassy in Paris, she strode into the glare of the arc lamps to announce she would fight on. But in Westminster, colleagues were already plotting her downfall and Robin Oakley’s report described her future as ‘in grave doubt’.33
The Times’s first inclination was to hope that Heseltine would ‘honourably stand down’. Since he would not, Mrs Thatcher should face the second ballot. After all, with Douglas Hurd and John Major having intimated that they would not stand against her, she would have a straight fight against Heseltine and had already beaten him once.34 As the hours passed, so the news from the lobby forced Jenkins and his leader writers to reconsider their advice. The so-called ‘men in grey suits’ were ganging up on La Dame de Fer. News arrived that two-thirds of the Cabinet had allegedly told her it was time to go and panic was spreading that Heseltine might actually win the second ballot. To see this prospect off, The Times came up with a new proposal: Mrs Thatcher should stand again but should also release Hurd and Major from their loyalty pledges so that they too could stand. ‘The entry of other candidates,’ the paper reasoned, ‘would almost certainly prevent Mr Heseltine from getting the necessary 187 votes for outright victory.’35 This was doubtless true, although the result risked demonstrating that the party of government was evenly divided over four different options, none of them commanding a quorum of loyalty on their own. The more obvious option was the one Mrs Thatcher reluctantly felt compelled to adopt. She would fall on her sword so that her revolution might live, at least in some form, under a successor who was not Michael Heseltine.
‘Bravura end of Thatcher era’ ran the headline on Friday 23 November. Having announced her intention to resign, she had proceeded to give a commanding performance on the floor of the Commons. From his sketchwriter’s vantage point above the Speaker’s Chair, Matthew Parris watched the scene. Observing Kinnock’s stint at the dispatch box made him question whether the right party was holding its leadership election – ‘he gulped and blathered, staggering blindly around a verbal grocery shop, knocking tins off shelves’. Mrs Thatcher, by comparison, delivered ‘one of her finest parliamentary performances’. Had it not been too late, Parris wondered if ‘the mess of pin-striped tumbleweed blowing in the wind behind her might have blown her way after all … “Why did they sack you?” Labour’s Dave Nellist shouted. I looked across at the Tory benches. Not a few of them were wondering the same thing.’36
The truth was that the Tory benches were caught between anxiety for what they had done and excitement that the circus had a further performance to run. With Mrs Thatcher’s decision to exit, Hurd and Major lost no time in entering the ring. Jenkins went to visit Major, whom he found suffering from toothache. ‘Why not wait another term, you’re still young?’ Jenkins suggested. It was not well received. Major shot back, ‘Well, aren’t you a bit young to be editor of The Times?’ Major was right to be confident for he held the best cards. The Brixton born son of a one-time trapeze artist and garden gnome specialist, his credentials fitted perfectly the Thatcherite creed of opportunity and social mobility. He played on this, declaring his wish to create a ‘classless society’. At a time when the economy was in difficulties and business and home owners were facing mounting debts they could no longer meet, Major conveyed the demeanour of an approachable bank manager, ever ready to look again at ways to lighten the burden. Given the divisive toxins coursing through the Tory body politik, Major’s ability to appear a picture of sweet reasonableness was his great asset. ‘I believe in a very broad church Conservatism,’ he told Robin Oakley in his pre-second ballot interview in The Times. Di
scerning which hymn sheet Major sang from would preoccupy the paper’s finest political minds for years to come. With momentary self-delusion, Thatcher telephoned Jenkins before the second ballot to assure him that Major was ‘pure gold, pure gold!’.37
In contrast, Hurd resembled the perfect Tory patrician: the son of an MP and sometime agricultural correspondent of The Times, educated at Eton and Cambridge (President of the Union), former diplomat, a writer of thrillers in his spare time, a capable and unflappable Home and Foreign Secretary. In the face of Major’s classless appeal, Hurd’s attempts to play down his background – he went to Eton on a scholarship – were treated with derision. Tories who wanted to bring home the Thatcher revolution felt that Major at least looked like the real thing. Mrs Thatcher anointed Major as her successor of choice and, on the morning of the vote, so did The Times – the only broadsheet newspaper to do so. Its reasoning was different, airing instead its suspicion that ‘by inclination and intellect he sits on the left’, but believed his relative youth and demeanour marked him out as the candidate to trump Kinnock’s pretensions towards shaping the agenda for the 1990s.38 Murdoch did not interfere with the editorial position of his broadsheets. In the course of a telephone conversation with Jenkins, he asked, almost in passing, which candidate The Times had decided to support. Jenkins was given the impression Murdoch scarcely even knew who Major was at that stage.39 The ‘Murdoch press’ went their separate ways. The Sunday Times backed Heseltine as did Today, edited by David Montgomery. Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph announced its support for Hurd. The Times, at any rate, backed the winner. At forty-seven, John Major became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Rosebery in 1894.
The History of the Times Page 53
