In these circumstances, Mrs Thatcher liked to draw on other sources of information and advice. One of these was her Policy Unit, run by John Redwood. Particularly through two of its members, David Pascall and Peter Warry, and Redwood himself, it tried to maintain the aim of getting a slimmed-down, well-functioning coal industry to emerge from the dispute, rather than seeing a settlement as automatically desirable. Another important source of information was Bernard Ingham, who masterminded the narrative which was handed down to the public. Ingham was one of the few people close to Mrs Thatcher who knew the trade unions well. His contacts built up as labour correspondent of the Guardian in the 1970s enabled him to maintain informal links with union leaders during the dispute, and to interpret union behaviour to Mrs Thatcher. He could also make up for the inadequacies of the NCB’s press department, a factor which was to become more important as the strike continued.
Once it had become clear that the working miners were to be central figures in the drama, the government obviously wanted to know much more about them. This was difficult. Until a very late stage, they had no clear organization.* Mrs Thatcher found that the working miners ‘in many ways chimed with her view of the world’.66 They seemed to represent everything she most admired: they wanted to work, they resisted left-wing union militancy and they faced intimidation and violence bravely. For the Coal Board and the Department of Energy, however, the working miners often seemed more like a complication. Both were used to operating a close, even cosy relationship with the NUM, and so did not welcome a new element in the game. Mrs Thatcher constantly tried to counter this and insist that the working miners’ interests be considered at all times. But she lacked the information on the ground. It was here that her third and most eccentric source of advice came into play: a man called David Hart.† With a mixture of fantastical self-promotion and genuine knowledge and flair, Hart told her what he thought the working miners were up to.
Hart was the sort of insider/outsider for whom Mrs Thatcher had a soft spot. ‘She liked dangerous people, and he was one of them,’ observed Tim Flesher.67 Intermittently rich (he had been bankrupt in the 1970s), Hart was the son of a banker, very conscious of his Jewishness and fond of wearing his Old Etonian tie, though he had been unhappy at Eton. A libertarian, a Cold Warrior with several good contacts inside the Reagan administration, Hart, known as ‘Spiv’ to his close friends, was a resourceful campaigner for the causes he believed in, often backing them with his own money. He helped persuade the British-based American billionaire and philanthropist John Paul Getty* to contribute large sums to help the working miners organize. In particular, money went to assist their legal actions against Scargill and the NUM. Hart had known Mrs Thatcher through the Centre for Policy Studies since 1980, and liked to tell her what, in his view, ‘the street’ (an American phrase of which he was an early user in Britain) was thinking. He wrote her frequent reports from the street as well as offering his semi-solicited advice. All this interested her, and she gave him some access, despite the efforts of staff, who thought him too disreputable, to keep him at bay.†
Hart was also a novelist. In one of his novels, the hero, Dov, a thinly veiled, heroic autobiographical persona, says, ‘I am an eagle over England at last. In my highest flight. I look down and know that the Prime Minister is mine.’68 This accurately expressed Hart’s longing. The miners’ strike brought him closer, though not really very close, to fulfilling it. As soon as the strike began, and Nottinghamshire continued to work, he made it his business to visit the pit areas, sometimes in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, to find out what was happening. Hart took snuff like many miners, forbidden from smoking underground, who needed a cigarette substitute. This served to confirm in his own mind his surprising impression that he ‘fitted in’ in mining communities.69 From these forays, he would send Mrs Thatcher vivid despatches. At the end of April 1984, for example, he contrasted his visit to Nottinghamshire miners with his experience of a Scargill rally in Sheffield. At the latter, he told her, ‘I could not escape thoughts of Nuremberg … The stink of fascism.’ He warned her that although at present the Notts miners were ‘very angry with Scargill’ for trying to coerce them, if they were given the ballot they demanded they might vote for a strike.70 Mrs Thatcher read such reports carefully, underlining them throughout: ‘he did have some real intelligence,’ she later recalled.71 As time went on, Hart, who had also worked his way into the favour of Ian MacGregor, was able to give him and Mrs Thatcher a good deal of information about the working miners, and also, less helpfully, to stir her up against Walker.
After the opening salvoes of the strike, the next crisis, from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view, came when the question of a national ballot returned to the fore. Confident of his majority on the NUM national executive, Scargill pushed for a rule change by which the existing threshold of 55 per cent of those voting for a strike before one could be called should be reduced to 50 per cent. The government was extremely nervous about this. Not only would a yes vote halt production, it would also, by legitimizing the strike, make the other unions, notably railwaymen and steelworkers, feel bound to act ‘in sympathy’ with the miners. Aware of Scargill’s unpopularity with TUC colleagues, the government was anxious not to encourage trade union leaders to make common cause with him. Early in April, it dropped its plan to reform the political levy by which union members had to pay money to the Labour Party. The plan had been to change it from a contracting-out system, whose inertia helped Labour, to a contracting-in one. Aborting this caused a rebellion on the Tory back benches, but the government was determined to avoid any confrontations which were not strictly necessary.
Scargill called a special delegate conference of the union in Sheffield for 19 April 1984 to approve his proposed rule change. The day before, John Redwood and David Pascall told Mrs Thatcher that, if Scargill were successful in lowering the voting threshold for a strike, the conference might ‘recommend a strike ballot which they would expect to win’.72 If that happened, and all movement of coal ceased, power-station stocks could last until the end of September, but supplies were already dropping and the public would ‘go soft’ if the dispute started to hurt them. In fact, the conference did vote for the rule change, but then rejected a proposal to call a national ballot at once. Scargill himself ensured that rejection because he was not sufficiently confident of victory in any national ballot and was over-confident about his ability to use mass picketing to coerce where he could not persuade. At Cabinet on 3 May, Brittan reported that Scargill had now ‘taken personal charge’ of the NUM tactics, trying to hit individual pits hard in order to achieve ‘the maximum surprise’.73 The day before, more than 8,000 pickets had appeared at Harworth colliery in Nottinghamshire. But Walker was nevertheless able to tell colleagues that the production and movement of coal now stood at its highest since the strike had begun.
Without the chance of settling anything via the ballot box, the physical fierceness of the dispute intensified. In his keenness to get his way, Scargill underestimated the fact that the NUM was a federation, with each area bearing a strong identity. The more his Yorkshire-based vanguard turned up to try to tell their Nottinghamshire neighbours what to do, the more Notts’ loyalty to the central union waned. After all, in their own area ballot, 73 per cent of Notts miners had voted against a strike. People spoke of the return of ‘Spencerism’, named after George Spencer, the Nottinghamshire miners’ leader who led a breakaway union after the failure of the coal strike in 1926. A demonstration of Scargill supporters mainly from Yorkshire, who arrived in Mansfield in Nottinghamshire in the middle of May, was violent, with 90–100 police injured, but it did little to stop the Notts men working. Walker reported to colleagues that Scargill had ‘made two statements which he could later regret’.74 He ‘had claimed the downfall of the Government as an explicit objective of the strike’, and he had made it clear to miners that the strike might have to continue until December. Mrs Thatcher reacted extremely strongly to the reports of violence again
st those trying to work and against the police. ‘Most decent people are sickened by it,’ she scribbled on the note of the meeting.75 The level of violence hardened her attitude to any possible settlement.
As the violence grew, Mrs Thatcher began to feel anxieties about the Coal Board’s readiness to settle on the wrong terms. Being a nationalized industry and ‘unionized right up to Ian MacGregor’s feet’,76 the NCB was naturally predisposed to think that almost any deal was better than no deal. This was less true of MacGregor than of most of his colleagues, but it gradually became apparent that though ‘a remarkable man with very strong qualities, he was not very good at the negotiation of documents. He nearly signed away too much … Mrs Thatcher was always suspicious.’77 About two months into the strike, during widespread talk of a possible deal, Peter Gregson warned Mrs Thatcher:
Ministers will not wish to wake up one morning to find that the NCB is in the middle of a negotiation about closures without their ever having had the opportunity to discuss what the Government would wish to see come out of this strike … the Government has too much at stake to allow the NCB a completely free hand.78
It was lucky for Mrs Thatcher that each time possible concessions by the NCB seemed to be in the offing, Scargill rendered them impossible by refusing to budge from his position that no pit should ever be closed for economic reasons, but only if its seams were exhausted (or unsafe). A more skilled and less extreme union leader would have taken the trouble to work out the differences between the Coal Board, the Department and 10 Downing Street and exploit them.
Scargill liked to see himself in an ideological and heroic role. At the end of May, in an attempt to replicate his success at Saltley in 1972, he began a series of mass pickets designed to stop coke* being moved from the British Steel coking works in Orgreave, South Yorkshire. On 29 May, there was grave violence there, with darts and bricks thrown at police and sixty-nine people injured. Earlier that morning, Scargill, as Peter Walker put it privately, ‘invited his own arrest’.79 Mrs Thatcher reacted with genuine horror to the violence. Speaking at Banbury Cattle Market the following day, using the repetition which, in her, was usually a sign of vehemence, she said: ‘You saw the scenes that went on in television last night. I must tell you that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed. It must not succeed.’80
As trouble continued at Orgreave, she also expressed her concerns privately. She wanted the British Steel Corporation to use the law against the NUM. It was disinclined to do so, since, despite the picketing, its lorries were getting their coke out successfully. ‘You raised the question’, Andrew Turnbull wrote to her, ‘of whether it was right “to leave the police in the firing line” while no action was being taken in the civil courts. The key question is whether, apart from moral support, the police would be any less in the firing line.’81 If there were a sequestration of union funds because of a court case, he told her, the police would have to enforce it: ‘It must be doubtful whether this would help the police.’82 It was probably not true that sequestration, which involved chasing funds not people, would create much work for the police, but Turnbull was looking for ways of holding Mrs Thatcher back. For him, as for several of those working closely with her, Mrs Thatcher’s enthusiasm for invoking her own government’s laws against the NUM came into the category of ‘reckless ideas’83 which she tended to produce.† In this, perhaps surprisingly, there was agreement between Peter Walker and Norman Tebbit, the Trade and Industry Secretary, both of whom argued that the NUM’s fellow trade unions should not be provoked by any action they might see as high-handed. It was not that Walker, let alone Tebbit, the author of the 1982 Act, had doubts about the moral or practical merits of the laws. It was a matter of tactics. The ministers’ line was: ‘Keep the temperature down and don’t give the unions any pretext.’84 Mrs Thatcher ‘railed against this, but took the advice’.85 In her memoirs, she admitted that ‘there was much to be said for emphasizing the point that it was the basic criminal law of the country which was being flouted by the pickets and their leaders, rather than “Thatcher’s laws”.’86
Mrs Thatcher was less ready to listen to anything that smacked to her of appeasement. While the picketing of Orgreave continued, talks took place between the Coal Board and the NUM. Peter Walker reported to Mrs Thatcher MacGregor’s belief that the talks ‘had begun to move towards a satisfactory discussion of the issues’.87 Soon this reached the press as a story that MacGregor was going to come up with a new ‘Plan for Coal’. Downing Street became agitated that something was being cooked up without its agreement. ‘It was most important’, Mrs Thatcher summed up at a MISC 101 meeting on 12 June, ‘both that the NCB should continue to stand firm on the essentials of their case and that the Board’s handling of the talks should not allow the NUM the opportunity to misrepresent the outcome.’88 Luckily for her, Scargill quickly made any compromise impossible by putting out a ten-point programme demanding an extended lifespan for all pits, higher pay, earlier retirement and so on. He then pretended that the NCB had walked out of the meeting rather than discuss these ideas. The device had some media success and helped to promote a notion that Scargill and MacGregor were each as bad as the other. Turnbull expressed and fanned his principal’s anxieties: ‘What is surprising is not the outrageous nature of Mr Scargill’s demands but the fact that it was reported to you last Friday that Mr MacGregor was detecting signs of realism.’89 Doubts grew about the NCB’s capacity to communicate clear messages. Unhappy with the text of a proposed letter from MacGregor to all striking miners, No. 10 toyed with the idea of insisting on another draft of its own devising, though Robin Butler strongly advised that it would be dangerous to submit another text for Walker to send on to MacGregor, even if it were ‘anonymous’.90 The desire to keep out of the fight clashed with the longing to exercise closer control.
On 18 June 1984, the climactic ‘Battle of Orgreave’ took place. The pickets, estimated at between 5,000 and 10,000 strong, confronted about 5,000 police. Conducted in a series of advances and retreats, in some of which police horses forced back the pickets, the battle was fierce, but the NUM never succeeded in preventing the lorries loaded with coke from leaving the plant. Twenty-eight police officers, and many more pickets, were injured and ninety-three arrests were made. Orgreave looked, Andrew Turnbull recalled, ‘like the Wars of the Roses’91 and it carried the implication of civil war which goes with that comparison.* The contest produced images of violence which could be deployed by both sides. Orgreave quickly became a talismanic name in the legends of trade unionism. It was later the subject of the Dire Straits song ‘Iron Hand’ (1991), and was re-enacted for Channel 4 television in 2001.† For the majority of the public at the time, however, it confirmed a growing view that the NUM, and Scargill in particular, were committed to unjustified violence. A Gallup poll in July showed that 79 per cent of the public disapproved of the methods used by the NUM. More important still, Orgreave proved that, in enormous confrontations, the police now had the numbers, the equipment and the will to prevail. The defeat of Scargill’s pickets at Orgreave also emboldened miners who wanted to return to work. In the last full week in June, the number of those at work rose by 1,400 on the week before, bringing the total working to 53,000. This was not a seismic change, but it was clear that the attempt to break the will of the working miners had failed. Scargill at Orgreave exorcized for Mrs Thatcher the demon of Scargill at Saltley twelve years earlier.
It did not automatically follow, however, that the government would win. It remained possible that key trade unions would combine successfully against it. With so much unease in the air, there was the chance, on the one hand, that a longing for peace and moderation would undermine the Prime Minister and, on the other, that she would find herself conceding too much. In mid-June, the Conservatives lost the previously safe seat of Portsmouth South to the SDP–Liberal Alliance in a by-election. A few days later, immediately after the scenes at Orgreave, th
e Daily Telegraph reported that the Queen had been ‘shocked’ by the clashes.92 There was a risk that Mrs Thatcher would be blamed for overreaction and thus be held responsible for the clashes. If public opinion came to see Mrs Thatcher’s desire to defeat Scargill as personal and vindictive – with MacGregor as the agent of her wishes – then it would turn against her.
But those who believed that Scargill should be clearly defeated also felt demoralized. With NCB–NUM talks continuing, working miners were worried by the prospect of Coal Board concessions to Scargill: all such rumours discouraged new recruits to their cause, and they feared that they would be left unprotected by any settlement and subject to revenge attacks for having been ‘scabs’. Conservative supporters could not really understand why the trade union laws which they had warmly supported were being shunned, and they hated the police being made to endure so much violence. The idea that, for the sake of temporary peace, Scargill might be allowed to live to fight another day was anathema to millions. Any sense of government weakness also reflected badly on Mrs Thatcher herself. Many were puzzled as to why she seemed to hold back. With a speech draft sent on 16 July, Ronnie Millar wrote a note expressing this frustration: ‘I am sure the country is just waiting for you to take this gentleman [Scargill] apart.’93 Luckily for Mrs Thatcher, there was no deep ideological difference within the Cabinet about the issue – Scargill’s politics and personality brought the enemy into plain view. There was no faction in her own party against her. But there was a genuine dilemma about handling.
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