Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  Gow’s successor as the Prime Minister’s PPS was Michael Alison.* He seems to have been appointed for the kindly but not well-thought-out reason that he had given conscientious service as a junior minister but was not now being offered another ministerial job, so had better have something else. Except for the fact that both Alison and Gow were utterly loyal to Mrs Thatcher, their characters could scarcely have been more different. Brought up in a rich, dysfunctional and somewhat bohemian family (his sister Barley was one of the many illicit girlfriends of Roy Jenkins), Alison had been converted to evangelical Christianity at Oxford and had adhered to it earnestly ever since. As Edward Boyle, Mrs Thatcher’s Oxford friend and her predecessor as Conservative education secretary, put it, he was ‘the last person on earth for whom the word “Protestant” is a trumpet call’.37 While universally liked and respected, Alison was, in the view of Stephen Sherbourne, who shared an office with him, ‘not that interested in politics’ and therefore ‘not really suited to the job’.38 So godly was he that there were moments, sometimes during preparations for Prime Minister’s Questions, when he absented himself without explanation and slipped off to prayer meetings from which he could not be fished out.39

  Alison was undoubtedly a comfort to Mrs Thatcher. All secrets were safe with him. She trusted him, and benefited from his calm kindness. She was also interested in the religious perspective he brought to public affairs, and sought his advice on Church-and-state and moral issues and on Church appointments. He would receive and reassure the many people who wanted to see her about such matters (‘I gave him Mary Whitehouse,’* Stephen Sherbourne recalled).40 In his own prayers, Alison would seek divine guidance about which passages of Scripture would be most suitable for the Prime Minister. He would then read them to her on long car journeys, as well as improving books such as The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis. He regarded Mrs Thatcher as ‘the most religious Prime Minister since Gladstone’ and, in the view of his daughter Rosie, served her almost like a private priest.41 This gave her solace, and did something to mitigate the atmosphere of intrigue which tends to surround the ‘court’ of any prime minister.

  But in terms of party-political management, Alison was almost useless. On one occasion, Matthew Parris† came to see her on behalf of Tory MPs like himself who wanted her to take gay rights more seriously. Since he was now leaving the House, he plucked up the courage to tell her that he was himself homosexual. Mrs Thatcher’s only reaction, Parris recalled in his memoirs, was to say ‘There, dear … That must have been very hard to say.’42 Parris complained that, as he left the room, the ‘cold, churchy’ Alison asked him for the names of the other MPs for whom he spoke. Being a politician, Parris naturally assumed that Alison wanted the information to use against the men later. In fact, Alison told his secretary at the time, he had asked for the names so that he could pray for them.43 He was too good for the world in which his job forced him to move.

  As Mrs Thatcher’s connection with opinion in Parliament and party now weakened, so the role of No. 10 in the direction of policy grew. Alan Walters, now knighted for his services to Thatcherism, left after a few months to pursue his career in the United States, but he agreed to maintain an advisory role at a distance. As had been foreshadowed before the election by her anger about the CPRS leak, Mrs Thatcher was now determined to change the whole system of policy advice so that it could serve her more directly. In 1982, as we have seen (Chapter 2), she had strongly contemplated abolishing the CPRS but John Sparrow, whom she had just appointed to run it, persuaded her to think again. In April 1983, therefore, he had been startled by her writing ‘No further long-term work of any kind from now on’44 on a memo he sent her proudly setting out the CPRS’s new work programme. Once the election was out of the way, she told Sparrow that she wanted the CPRS wound up after all. This was a ‘shock’ to him.45 In his view, it was a mistake for her to want policy advice channelled to her alone rather than to the Cabinet in general; but this was certainly her purpose. She at last felt strong enough to close the Think Tank down and empower and expand her own Policy Unit. She told her new Cabinet that it was ‘Better for work to be done under political control’.46

  Ferdinand Mount, who ran the unit, naturally disagreed with Sparrow’s view. In government, he believed, you could only inch forward in the right direction, and the best way for the Prime Minister to do this was through a policy unit which could be mandated only by her. It could ‘tell her how badly some things worked in government (which no one else does)’ and get close to important departments in order to make sure her ideas and wishes provided ‘a course of injections into the Whitehall bloodstream’.47* The unit, which already contained John Redwood, now duly expanded, with additions in the course of the coming months which included Oliver Letwin from Keith Joseph’s office, David Willetts† from the Civil Service (where he had earlier been Nigel Lawson’s private secretary), Bob Young* and David Pascall† from the Think Tank and Peter Warry‡ direct from industry. The Policy Unit, which had been growing in strength since its uncertain beginnings, now became central to the projection of Mrs Thatcher’s will throughout government, particularly in all economic and industrial questions not led by the Treasury.

  This was to have two consequences. The first was that ministers would sometimes become extremely annoyed at what they saw as lèse-majesté. Many stories are told, for example, of Norman Tebbit’s rage when he felt that Mrs Thatcher was being influenced by Policy Unit advisers trespassing on his ministerial patch. By his own account, he was so infuriated to find her quoting against him from a unit briefing about the motor industry that he told her, ‘Prime Minister, you have done me the honour of making me, as secretary of state, your principal adviser on this matter. I would be grateful, therefore, if you would take my advice. Good day.’48 He then walked out. Norman Lamont recalled another meeting, also in relation to the motor industry, when Mrs Thatcher, Tebbit and he met alone. Mrs Thatcher started to press Tebbit very hard on the issue. ‘Suddenly, Norman got very angry. He threw his papers on the floor and said to her: “If you think you can do my job better than me, you can have it.” Margaret went very pale. It was the only time I’d seen her really crumple.’49 This anger resembled that which Francis Pym had felt about the appointment of Anthony Parsons or which Nigel Lawson later exhibited about Alan Walters, or which most Cabinet ministers felt, from time to time, about Bernard Ingham. It arose from the sense that they were not allowed to be masters in their own house.

  The second consequence was that, much more than in the past, policy action could be driven forward from No. 10. Original ideas therefore had more chance of being translated into action. This would be seen, mainly to advantage, in the privatization programme and the conduct of the miners’ strike, and also, much more controversially, in relation to European policy and the invention of the poll tax. The trend would help to Thatcherize the government Mrs Thatcher led, but also increased the resentments felt against her.

  In the first full week of her second term, Mrs Thatcher found herself addressing a set of disparate and largely uncongenial problems. These included Hong Kong, where Howe reported that the Chinese had falsely claimed that Mrs Thatcher had already conceded sovereignty to them, and Zimbabwe, about which she had a long and uncomfortable meeting with Robert Mugabe discussing his increasingly tyrannical imposition of a one-party state, rigged trials of RAF officers (who were Zimbabwean citizens) and rumours of political murders. The seemingly endless question of Britain’s budget contribution to the European Community appeared quite unaltered by electoral victory. Mrs Thatcher told the Cabinet that it was supposed to be solved by the upcoming European Council in Stuttgart, but there was ‘no sign of that’.50 When Cecil Parkinson ventured that the Germans were ‘desperately keen to help’, Mrs Thatcher added tartly, ‘Short of producing the money.’ There was inconclusive talk, as in the past, of Britain legislating to withhold its contribution.

  The Stuttgart Council took place over the next two days. Although Mrs That
cher gave and received the usual hard pounding, the meeting went better than she had feared. It had been ‘v. difficult’,51 she told the Cabinet the following week, but ‘We owe a fantastic amount to Kohl [the Germans held the EEC presidency at this time]. I don’t know how he bettered Mitterrand, but he did.’ Britain’s position, urged on Mrs Thatcher by a ‘pincer movement’ of Foreign Office officials and Geoffrey Howe, Robert Armstrong and Robin Butler,52 was to concede a readiness eventually to consider increasing the Community’s ‘own resources’ (the percentage of taxes permitted to it by the member states) so long as fair budgetary mechanisms and controls on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) were agreed first. Thanks to Kohl’s chairmanship, Mrs Thatcher also won agreement for another year of temporary rebate for Britain, pending permanent settlement. She wrote to Kohl with unaccustomed warmth, congratulating him on his ‘well-deserved triumph’53 in beating down French objections to this compromise. ‘What I am really afraid of is next year,’ she told the Cabinet. ‘It will be very rough.’54

  She was also persuaded to sign at Stuttgart the Solemn Declaration on European Union. This committed the signatories to bring about ‘an ever closer union of the peoples and Member States of the European Union’, a change from the original Treaty of Rome, which had spoken only of the ‘peoples’ being in ever closer union. ‘I went along with it,’ wrote Mrs Thatcher, because ‘I could not quarrel with everything, and the document had no legal force.’55 The customary Foreign Office approach, in which specific, detailed gains were considered more important than issues of principle which could be dismissed as theoretical, prevailed. As so often with these windy European generalizations, however, the Declaration was indeed as solemn as its name: its intent was to move towards something much deeper than anything Mrs Thatcher ever wanted. It would come back and hit her two years later.

  In parliamentary affairs, Mrs Thatcher faced two thorny difficulties – the Speakership and MPs’ pay. The first was of her own making. Having alienated Jack Weatherill by trying to get him to withdraw and having failed to ignite a spark in Pym, she sought an alternative candidate. She had greatly liked the incumbent Speaker George Thomas who, though Labour, had showed compliance, not to say servility, in favour of the executive and against backbenchers.* She feared, correctly, that Weatherill would be more independent-minded and, indeed, said as much to him: ‘You won’t look after us like George Thomas did.’56 She tried to buy him off with the offer of a junior post at the Foreign Office, but he refused. She wanted to secure the Speakership for Humphrey Atkins,† about whose enforced resignation because of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982 she felt guilty. This too failed, however, because of what Weatherill called a ‘peasants’ revolt’ in which the Labour Party combined with Tory backbenchers to indicate that they would support him. He became Speaker unopposed. So Mrs Thatcher began the new Parliament with a botched attempt to manipulate it and a Speaker chosen in defiance of her. Weatherill continued not to oblige her: ‘If I was accused of favouring the Labour Party it was probably true.’57‡ He saw the House of Commons as a safety valve for a frustrated opposition, and wanted to weaken the extreme left which was pushing the party to take to the streets.*

  The matter of MPs’ pay always arose after a general election, on the constitutional grounds that each new Parliament must decide its own salaries, rather than being bound by the last. Now MPs felt they had fallen behind in what was still an era of high inflation, and wanted more. Like the Speakership, this was ultimately a matter for Parliament, not for the government; but in this case Mrs Thatcher had more justification for intervening. It was hard for her to maintain a policy of public sector salary restraint if the Parliament ultimately enforcing that restraint was voting itself much larger rises. An official report commissioned from Lord Plowden suggested that MPs should be made comparable with a level of the Civil Service and recommended that their salaries should rise from £14,510 to £19,000 a year. This seemed quite out of the question to Mrs Thatcher, who suggested a 4 per cent increase. Eventually, a compromise, unfavourable to her wishes, was reached by which MPs’ pay would rise gradually and, by the end of the Parliament, reach the Plowden recommendation plus a bit extra. As compensation for the lack of jam today, various allowances were made more generous – a slightly surreptitious means of handing out money which would eventually, in the twenty-first century, attain the proportions of a scandal. Even with these concessions, MPs still defied her wishes by voting that their pay be linked to that of a higher Civil Service grade than had been proposed. Mrs Thatcher probably had little choice but to resist the demands, but her approach – which adversely affected ministers’ pay as well as that of backbenchers – added to the ill will among her parliamentary colleagues before the Parliament had really got going. Mrs Thatcher volunteered, as she had done since 1979, to take only the standard Cabinet minister’s salary of £40,000 a year, forgoing the extra £10,000 to which she was entitled. Such self-sacrifice probably made her even less popular with her ministers, who would have felt the implied reproach.†

  There was a grimmer matter on which the House of Commons staged yet another occasion which, by convention, the government could not control. On 13 July 1983, the House debated and voted on the return of capital punishment, which had been suspended since 1965. The subject was always treated as a matter of conscience, and was therefore unwhipped.* In theory, this debate, which Mrs Thatcher wanted, served her turn. She had always supported the death penalty, and this had done her no harm with potential Conservative voters, especially working-class ones. At the general election, Tory candidates who opposed the death penalty had been given a rough time by voters, even more so by their constituency associations. Now, with such an overwhelming Conservative majority, it even seemed possible that ‘the rope’ – always anathema to the ‘chattering classes’, the BBC and so on, but always strongly supported in opinion polls – could at last return. But whereas Margaret, the battling housewife and mother of two, could rage against detestable crimes and call for the ultimate deterrent, Mrs Thatcher, the Prime Minister, knew that actually bringing back capital punishment would be a legislative and political nightmare, setting her colleagues against one another. It was more important for her to be seen to be on the ‘right’ side of this question than for her will to prevail. She therefore let it be known that she did not think the vote would go her way.† This made it easier for fellow Tories to vote against her wishes without seeming disloyal.

  Willie Whitelaw had always been an abolitionist and this had made restoration very hard so long as he had been Home Secretary. There was much speculation about the way his successor, Leon Brittan, previously an abolitionist too, would proceed. When he spoke in the House, Brittan continued to argue against capital punishment in most cases, but now said that he felt it was justified for terrorist murders. His argument was considered ‘lawyerly’ in the unflattering sense of that word and therefore not morally persuasive. The Commons rejected the death penalty for murder of a policeman by a majority of 81 and for murder plain and simple by a majority of 145. None of this could exactly be regarded as a defeat for Mrs Thatcher, who pronounced herself ‘not surprised at the result’.58 In practical terms this was probably what she wanted. But there was something inglorious about it.

  By July, the talk in Parliament and press was of Mrs Thatcher’s ‘banana skins’ and ‘lack of direction’. Mrs Thatcher felt it herself. She defended the government, telling the BBC’s John Cole, ‘I don’t think it’s been accident prone at all,’59 but in a private interview that month she quoted an ‘old Balliol phrase’ (of Benjamin Jowett): ‘Don’t expect too much and don’t attempt too little,’ which, she said, she kept repeating to Cabinet colleagues.60 She had to remind them, she went on, that they were not ‘22 miscellaneous heads of department, but custodians of a general strategy’. As always, though, she did not have what others would recognize as a general strategy. She had a purpose – the transformation of Britain from semi-socialism to a freer socie
ty and a liberal economy – but no programme for achieving it. She might have persuaded colleagues to readier collaboration if she had given them a bit more flattery and credit. Butler noted: ‘She did not refer once by name to any of her Cabinet colleagues … I find this absolutely extraordinary.’61

  Most of these difficulties were more atmospheric than substantive. Difficulties with the economy were more tangible. The need to win a general election had, as always, done damage to the public finances. On the morning of 7 July, The Times carried a leak about what was not far short of a spending crisis. At Cabinet that day, Nigel Lawson confirmed to colleagues, who were suspicious about the rush, that the PSBR was ‘substantially higher than forecast for last 6 months’62 and that there was ‘considerable concern abt our commitment to [our] strategy … So something has to be done. Extremely difficult, and not happy politically.’ The overall burden of tax in relation to GDP was now 38.75 per cent whereas, in Labour’s last year, it had been only 34.75 per cent. More than £1 billion was needed off the PSBR, so the Chancellor demanded a 1 per cent reduction in money allocated for pay all round and 2 per cent off non-pay ‘cash blocks’. ‘We also have to increase the disposals programme,’ he added. (His use of the favoured Treasury word ‘disposals’, rather than ‘privatization’, indicated his department’s overwhelming concern for how much money could be raised rather than what would happen to the industries sold.) Lawson immediately encountered some resistance. Michael Heseltine complained that ‘everyone will say there were secret plans.’63 It was agreed that the Chancellor would have to make a statement to the House that afternoon, but he also promised to return to Cabinet a fortnight later to present his ideas in full.