For Downing Street, this mess confirmed the belief that the Coal Board was no good at running the dispute. MacGregor seemed too fierce against NACODS, too wobbly about the NUM. On 13 September, John Redwood minuted Mrs Thatcher with his view that the NCB senior management should pay much more attention to the NACODS problem: ‘It is vital that they are not totally preoccupied by the current talks with Scargill, so that their eye is taken off the ball.’128 MacGregor, under considerable strain, and not able to trust many of his colleagues, seemed bewildered. Even David Hart, who worked closely with MacGregor, told Mrs Thatcher that the NCB chairman was ‘an acute business negotiator who has not yet fully understood that he has been cast in the greater role of statesman … He has his “wets” as you had yours. He is more likely to give in to them.’129 ‘This’, Hart warned her, ‘is the greatest danger for you.’130* The new Bishop of Durham, Dr David Jenkins,† a left-wing theological radical, caused a stir by using his enthronement sermon in the cathedral to declare that neither side must win a victory. He proposed that MacGregor should withdraw from his chairmanship and Scargill from his ‘absolute demands’: ‘The withdrawal of an imported elderly American to leave a reconciling opportunity for some local product is surely neither dishonourable nor improper.’131 His suggestion was not taken seriously by many, and provoked one of those uproarious public debates which are often a feature of political interventions by Anglican bishops. But its focus on the shortcomings of MacGregor and the ‘moral equivalence’ it set up with Scargill were part of a trend which was difficult from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view. There was alarm at what could be presented as the intransigence of both sides. People cast around for compromises.
Robin Butler summed up the situation in a memo to his boss. Scargill had ‘made headway’ recently, he told her, with his argument that putting pressure on the NCB and the government was ‘the best way of finishing the dispute quickly’. ‘Most people,’ he went on, ‘including those in the unions, desperately want to see Scargill defeated but may be beginning to doubt that we have the means of doing it.’132 As if to prove him right, two days later NACODS members voted overwhelmingly to strike.
The NACODS leaders demanded not only the withdrawal of the NCB’s circular – a wish which was easily granted – but also their own solution to the question of uneconomic pits on which all talks with the NUM had foundered. They proposed a system of independent, binding arbitration when the closure of any pit was proposed. They would start a strike on 8 October – the day before the opening of the Conservative Party conference – unless they got their way. The government tactic in response was to get the Coal Board to string NACODS along in talks. As the Tories converged on Brighton, no agreement with NACODS had been reached. The strike start was delayed, but the threat still hung in the air. The political atmosphere was one of extreme unease.
The Conservative Party conference at Brighton in 1984 is remembered for the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in the early hours of the morning of Friday 12 October. (For a full account, see Chapter 10.) Mrs Thatcher, who was staying at the hotel – she was awake and working on the final drafts of her conference speech when the bomb went off – survived unscathed, but five people were killed and many others were injured, some very seriously. Public sympathy, at a rather low ebb when she arrived in Brighton, switched at once to Mrs Thatcher’s side. She was determined that the party conference should continue and she was widely praised for turning up at the conference as planned on the Friday morning. As the facts and therefore the mood changed, so too did her annual leader’s speech.
Early drafts suggest that she had originally intended to make a ‘different kind of conference speech … more of a single issue speech than normal’.133 The ‘speech that never was’ was much more partisan and more provocative than the one she actually made, and much of it would have focused on the miners’ strike. Mrs Thatcher had intended to start by warning the Conference of a ‘shadow that has fallen across … freedom since last we met’.134 Building on her summer theme of an ‘enemy within’ – though these words were not used in the text – the draft noted that ‘organised groups of influential men and women question, even repudiate Parliament and the rule of law’.135 These ‘views and voices’ were now to be found in the Labour Party,* which was ‘so willing to trumpet the cause of the present NUM leadership in its extreme and uncompromising objectives’.
The version which she delivered, on the day after the bomb, moved the miners’ strike well down the order of the speech, and got rid of the attacks on Labour. But while Mrs Thatcher pruned the most partisan elements, what she said about the miners’ strike was still combative. She kept some of the strongest phrases – ‘Scabs? They are lions!’ she said of the working miners – and she even linked, by implication, the struggle against the terrorism she and her party had just experienced with the extremism of Arthur Scargill and his supporters. She spoke of ‘the emergence of an organized revolutionary minority’ prepared to exploit industrial disputes, and the threat of violence which lay behind their demands. She quoted Kipling: ‘We never pay anyone Danegeld, no matter how trifling the cost / For the end of that game is oppression and shame / And the nation that pays it is lost.’ For her, what was going on was ‘the battle to uphold the rule of law’ and ‘the right to go to work of those who have been denied the right to go to vote’. She concluded: ‘The nation faces what is probably the most testing crisis of our time, the battle between the extremists and the rest … This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.’136 The extremists at the top of people’s minds were now, of course, the IRA, but she meant Arthur Scargill and his militants too.
As befits the self-absorption of industrial disputes, the miners’ strike continued as if no bomb had gone off. Mrs Thatcher barely rested from her ordeal. From the government’s point of view, things got worse. Over the weekend immediately after the bomb, while Mrs Thatcher was recovering at Chequers, there was much toing and froing with NACODS. The union saw the NUM and then met the NCB: ‘it was a rough meeting, with NACODS taking on the role of NUM shock troops. They argued that they had a strong mandate for a strike and that their members could not be restrained much longer.’137 So desperate was Ian MacGregor for some sort of settlement that he even agreed to consider the deletion of the word ‘closure’ from the text of any agreement. After anxious discussion with Peter Walker and Tom King, Mrs Thatcher rang MacGregor on the Sunday afternoon. Speaking with a voice still weak from the effects of inhaling dust in the Brighton explosion, she told him that he would have ‘the full support of Ministers’ in resisting such a deletion.138 ‘The call ended with the Prime Minister emphasising again that there could be no further movement.’139 The government could agree to an independent colliery review body, but not one, as NACODS demanded, whose recommendations were binding. Ministers privately accepted that ‘if necessary, the possibility of a strike by NACODS should be faced.’140 The expected strike date was 25 October 1984.
The government was now seriously alarmed. It did not trust MacGregor to handle the negotiations right, nor to present them well. There was an awkward situation in which MacGregor seemed to the public too intransigent, but, to those who knew what was happening in the negotiations, too inclined to give in by mistake. Noting his own telephone conversation with Mrs Thatcher on 14 October, David Hart recorded: ‘MAC SELLS PASS SANS REALISING WTHR THRU OLD AGE OR TOTAL LACK POLITICAL AWARENESS I DON’T KNO.’141 The government knew that it had to make the ultimate decisions about NACODS, but was still nervous of getting more deeply involved. There was a flurry of activity. Peter Walker wrote to MacGregor to tell him that the work of the Coal Board’s advertising agency, which it employed to influence public opinion over the strike and frame public communications to miners, was useless. MacGregor agreed to recruit a new one. There were internal presentational changes too. Michael Eaton, the genial, pipe-smoking North Yorkshire area manager, was made public spokesman for the Coal Board, so that he, rather than MacGregor, would put
the case on television; but even this change was mis-presented, giving the impression that Eaton’s appointment represented a softening of Coal Board policy. Tim Bell, who was already helping MacGregor, also drafted in Gordon Reece to assist him. Walker himself tried to get more involved in negotiations, which caused anxiety in No. 10. Everyone was blaming everyone else for the way things were going wrong.
Mrs Thatcher was also – unusually in the history of the strike – embarrassed in Parliament. At Prime Minister’s Questions on 23 October, Neil Kinnock accused her of having a ‘hit list’ for closures and of blocking attempts at a reasonable settlement. Mrs Thatcher, wanting neither to give in nor to provoke NACODS by angrily resisting, had to take refuge in bland, procedural language. She looked both weak and obstructive at the same time.
But on 24 October, against the pessimistic expectations of government, the NACODS executive decided to call off the strike. The union’s leaders realized that they did not have the necessary support from their members, who were less left-wing than they, now that their main demand had been conceded. The government’s Daily Coal Report gloated in a rather unWhitehall sort of way: ‘The news was announced this afternoon and represents a massive blow to Scargill.’142 This was the case. NACODS had been the NUM’s last hope of broadening the dispute and also – since the NUM had not dented the determination of the working miners – of shutting down the pits altogether. From now on, the NACODS formula became the benchmark for the reasonable settlement of the dispute, with the NUM steadfastly refusing to accept it.
With the NACODS problem out of the way, the legal net tightened on the NUM. Throughout the strike even Mrs Thatcher had reluctantly accepted that ‘Tory laws’ should not be at the centre of the dispute. The fear was that the use of such laws would unite the trade union movement and encourage it to try to destroy them, as had happened with Ted Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. From early days, many supporters of Mrs Thatcher’s battle had disagreed. In July 1984, Andrew Turnbull reported to Mrs Thatcher the view of Jack Peel,* the right-wing trade unionist with whom she was friendly, that the government had ‘missed a trick by not invoking the civil law’.143 Turnbull admitted to her that ‘If we had known how solid the working miners would be, how much coal could be moved by road and how long the striking miners would hold out we might have come to a different judgement some weeks ago.’144
As the summer progressed, various actions had been brought against the NUM. At the end of July, the High Court found that the South-West Area of the NUM had been in breach of an earlier order banning unlawful picketing of two haulage companies carrying coal and coke for British Steel. The union was fined £50,000. At the end of September, the High Court upheld an attempt by two working miners, Robert Taylor and Ken Foulstone, to have the strike declared unlawful. A writ alleging subsequent contempt was later served on Scargill, who was defying the court. Scargill was personally fined £1,000 and the union £200,000 for the contempt, with the threat of sequestration of the union’s assets if the fine was not paid. An attempt was made to kill Taylor at Manton in Nottinghamshire when he was visiting his mother after the death of his father, and the secretary of the local NUM was charged with ‘threatening to kill’. Using money raised privately and by public appeal, David Hart helped the National Working Miners’ Committee bring actions which, like ‘Gulliver’s ropes’ as he put it, would tie down the NUM in litigation: ‘Scargill had tremendous energy. The first goal of the legal actions was to sap that energy.’145 An order sequestrating the NUM’s assets was issued on 25 October. Eventually, the sequestrators found and froze £8 million of NUM money hidden in Dublin, Luxembourg and Zurich. Defiance of the court might be popular with enthusiastic strikers, but it drove the NUM into the position of an impoverished outlaw, and into the arms of dangerous friends.
On 28 October 1984, the Sunday Times revealed that Roger Windsor, the chief executive of the NUM, had visited Libya to solicit money to support the strike from the country’s dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi,* whom he met. Later, the paper established that $200,000 reached the NUM from this source. This visit had been arranged with the backing of Scargill, but without the knowledge of the NUM executive. Given the nature of Gaddafi’s regime this revelation was extraordinarily damaging. Libya was known to supply arms to the IRA, and in April a gunman inside the Libyan Embassy in St James’s Square had opened fire on anti-Gaddafi demonstrators outside, killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher, who was policing the protest. British intelligence had known what Scargill was up to and how money was being moved.146 Mrs Thatcher was aware of this, and of covert leaks to help the cause. There was an argument within the intelligence services, with MI5 arguing that the information should not be passed to the press, and SIS arguing that it should. SIS prevailed.147 On 5 November, Robert Armstrong informed Robin Butler that ‘Steps are being taken to prompt journalistic inquiries’ about the NUM’s connection with the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc.148 It duly emerged in the press that Scargill himself had visited Paris for a secret meeting to get money from the Soviet Union – $1.4 million was authorized to be paid across.149 This cast a shadow over the first visit of Mikhail Gorbachev, the future Soviet leader, to Mrs Thatcher at Chequers the following month (see Chapter 8). The NUM also collected money from Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.* It would have been hard for anti-Scargill propagandists to have constructed a less favourable picture than the actual truth. Here was the miners’ leader consorting secretly with the enemies of his country – the enemy within and the enemy without.
As the position of the NUM became more and more compromised, the working miners gained in confidence. The day after the Libyan story broke, Chris Butcher, alias Silver Birch, asked if he could bring a group of working miners to see Mrs Thatcher. Walker advised strongly against this. He was concerned about jealousy between Silver Birch and the Working Miners’ Committee – he ‘regards the latter as more formidable’, Turnbull told Mrs Thatcher; ‘– in his view the Silver Birch Group is something of a publicity exercise financed by the Daily Mail.’150 Mrs Thatcher, however, full of enthusiasm for the working miners, did not like this cautious, but probably sensible, advice. She was often being tempted by David Hart’s suggestions that she should pay a visit to a working miners’ community to show solidarity with them. ‘It will be difficult to refuse,’ she wrote on the memo. ‘Could I not see representatives of both? – Separately.’151
In fact, she did not see Silver Birch.† It was easier to show her support for working miners by treating the issue in a humanitarian rather than a political way. This she did by corresponding with, and receiving delegations from, the wives of working miners. In the middle of September, she met a group of three wives, from Wales, Derbyshire and Kent. (This last, Mrs Irene McGibbon, made a strong impression when she spoke at the Conservative Party conference the following month.)* Her visitors told her about intimidation, the need for transfers from troubled areas when the strike finished, the unhelpfulness of the BBC to their cause and the support for the NUM among NCB managers in some areas. Mrs Thatcher’s manuscript notes of the meeting reveal her strong reaction to what she heard:
Fear
Threat
Hands knees – rocks
… Totally disillusioned
… NUM ‘slush fund’
Danger to life.
Churches – money to miners
Hoax 999 …
… Picketing – outside home152
Such stories fed Mrs Thatcher’s indignation against the strikers and her solidarity with those who defied the strike. All through the dispute, there were horrible attacks on working miners and their families – the wife of a working miner who was held down by youths in Nuneaton while others scraped her face with a Brillo pad (to remove the ‘scab’); the miner who, a fortnight after returning to work, committed suicide because of threats; the mobs that beset the homes of working miners. Less than a week after the Brighton bomb, the house of Mrs McGibbon was attacked with paint bombs after t
he Morning Star had deliberately published her home address. Perhaps because of her sex, Mrs Thatcher was more conscious of the effect on the families of the working miners than were her male colleagues. The government files on the dispute are full of her exclamations, underlinings and expressions of disgust at their ill treatment, and that meted out to the police, by Scargill supporters. Her thinking about the entire dispute was governed not only by her determination that the NUM should lose, but also by her desire that the working miners should win.
On 30 November 1984, the violence reached a dreadful climax. ‘News has just reached us’, wrote Bernard Ingham to Mrs Thatcher, ‘of an incident in the coal dispute.’153 A three-foot concrete garden post had been thrown from a roadbridge at a taxi carrying a working miner on the way to the Merthyr Vale pit in South Wales. The miner was unhurt, but the driver, David Wilkie, was killed. ‘I have said’, Ingham went on, ‘that you are horrified and utterly condemn this murderous activity.’154 Arthur Scargill, who had previously avoided any criticism of violence, was forced to condemn this attack. He did so on a platform shared by Neil Kinnock, and when he uttered the word ‘condemn’, Kinnock leapt up to applaud. This meant that Scargill’s full words were drowned out. What he actually said was that he condemned such attacks when they happened ‘away from picket lines’.* By chance, on the very same day as the attack, the High Court appointed a receiver to run the affairs of the NUM. The effect of Wilkie’s killing – for which two miners were sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence later reduced to eight years after the conviction ws changed from murder to manslaughter – was to lower the level of violence. This had risen as the strikers had become more desperate. By 4 December 1984, a total of 8,688 arrests had been made in the course of the dispute. Now the fight went out of them.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 Page 23
