In short, Mrs Thatcher knew that stories were circulating about Brittan, did not believe them, and knew for a fact that at least some aspects of them were untrue. She would have been conscious that the circulation of such stories about a Home Secretary was particularly troublesome because the Home Office was the department in charge of MI5, but she did not see this as a good cause to get rid of her Home Secretary.*
While the rumours were not the cause of Brittan’s move, they did make him more moveable. Mrs Thatcher had quite other criticisms of Brittan of her own. She had not considered him adroit in the battle with the BBC over a documentary in a series called Real Lives in which the Corporation had outraged her by offering airtime to the IRA chief of staff, Martin McGuinness. She was also concerned, naturally, that her ministers should be good on television. Since she hardly ever watched television herself, her views on this subject tended to be formed by those who wished to influence her choice.139 In this case, they were right. Brittan was a poor television performer, seeming supercilious. In Brittan’s own view, which was also not wrong, he was the ‘fall guy’ for the government’s unpopularity, set up chiefly by Mrs Thatcher’s main window on the media world, Ingham.140 John Wakeham probably also influenced Mrs Thatcher against Brittan. He considered that Brittan had been ‘promoted a bit high and a bit quick’ and ‘wasn’t really up to the job’. The impression he had given in the capital-punishment debate that he was supporting the death penalty insincerely counted against him too.141
When Mrs Thatcher had discussed her proposed changes with the Chief Whip, John Wakeham, at Chequers, he had predicted that if she tried to move Brittan the first thing he would ask her was ‘What will be my position in the pecking order?’ Ever innocent of such hierarchical ideas, Mrs Thatcher said, ‘The pecking order? What’s that?’, as if unfamiliar with the phrase. When she spoke to Brittan, she reported to Wakeham afterwards, he did exactly as the Chief Whip had predicted: ‘John, you were quite right. That is all he asked.’142 Mrs Thatcher assured Brittan that his seniority remained unchanged, but he was insecure about his status and felt ill used. Although the DTI was undoubtedly a job more central to Mrs Thatcher’s reforming mission in government than the Home Office, it was traditionally lower in the hierarchy.* Douglas Hurd – whom Mrs Thatcher thought ‘a very calm person of great stature’,143 though in no sense a Thatcherite – became Home Secretary in Brittan’s stead. He was replaced as Northern Ireland secretary by Tom King, who, contrary to the advice from Whitelaw and Wakeham, remained in the Cabinet.
As foreshadowed, Norman Tebbit became party chairman. Jeffrey Archer was not elevated to the peerage, and therefore could hold no ministerial office. He was made Tebbit’s deputy chairman, however, with a brief to revive the party’s grass-roots enthusiasm. This made Tebbit, who had not been consulted, ‘a bit miffed’.144 According to Michael Dobbs, Mrs Thatcher had also put Archer into the post ‘to keep an eye on Norman for her’,145 part of the parallel operation.
Cecil Parkinson was not brought back. The justified fear of a further assault from Sara Keays prevented this, and although Mrs Thatcher allowed Parkinson to think that Wakeham and others were blocking his return, in truth she shared their anxieties and thought it was ‘a little bit soon’.146 Similar caution prevailed in the case of Lord Hailsham. He would have been succeeded as lord chancellor by Sir Michael Havers and that would have provoked a by-election when Havers moved from the Commons to the Lords. After the fright over nearly losing Willie Whitelaw’s former seat in 1983 (‘That really taught me a lesson’),147 Mrs Thatcher would not risk this, and decided to keep the seventy-seven-year-old Hailsham in place until the next election.
Mrs Thatcher had come to believe that right-wing ministers were particularly poor at presentation compared with those on the left of the party. Ridley, for example, was one of the ‘best brains’ in government, but ‘he couldn’t get on with television.’148 Concerned, in this exercise, more by presentation than by ideology, she made Kenneth Baker environment secretary to take forward the ‘community charge’ and take on the left-wing Labour councils. For this, she sacked Patrick Jenkin. She also made Kenneth Clarke, who was Wet in politics but strong in personality, paymaster-general, with a seat in the Cabinet. He was, in effect, the Department of Employment’s main representative in the House of Commons, because, doing for Employment what Gowrie had not let her do for Education, she had made a peer, Lord Young of Graffham, secretary of state.
David Young, whom Mrs Thatcher had made employment secretary, was promoted to do by stronger means what he had already been doing, originally at the Manpower Services Commission, and then as a minister. In August 1984, he had been sounded out for the chairmanship of British Petroleum. Rather than pursuing this, Young had gone to see Mrs Thatcher, using the possible BP job offer for leverage. He asked her to make him either her chief of staff or a peer and a minister.149 She decided on the latter and made him (unpaid) minister without portfolio. Young, the legendary job-creator, was busy creating his own. Ministerial colleagues instinctively resented him, since he was not a professional politician. Mrs Thatcher was often quoted, although there is no record of anyone ever having heard the words from her lips, as saying that ‘Other people bring me problems, but David brings me solutions.’150* This naturally enraged his fellow ministers, who thought of him as ‘teacher’s pet’. Tom King, who had cause to feel particularly threatened, complained to Alan Clark that ‘David Young was not a member of the club, never fought an Election, always wheedling away …’151 Young later admitted there was some truth behind these suspicions. Before he succeeded King, for example, he ‘would occasionally go behind his back, to my shame, to No. 10 to make sure things were going properly’.152 Indeed, this is what Mrs Thatcher had encouraged him to do: ‘She was asking me to double-check on her Employment Secretary,’ recalled Young; ‘she’s a moral coward when it comes to dealing with people.’
Now Mrs Thatcher put Young in full charge. Showing further disregard for Leon Brittan, she ceded to Young extra areas of responsibility from the DTI, such as tourism and small firms, which he had requested. Young’s attitude differed radically from the tradition of the Department of Employment which had, historically, been the department for dealing with the trade unions. Rather than merely ameliorating the lot of the unemployed, he wanted to reduce their number. He addressed everything which tended to make getting a job difficult or undesirable – the benefit trap (tackled with his Restart programme), poor technical and vocational training, and the tax and regulatory difficulties which discouraged the creation and growth of small businesses. When Mrs Thatcher made Young employment secretary, she told him, ‘I want you to deal with unemployment by the next election.’153 He strongly believed in what Mrs Thatcher was trying to achieve, and greatly admired her leadership because she was ‘wonderful at focus and follow-through’. She came to be more than satisfied with her choice.* Indeed, his was one of her few important appointments which she did not partially regret. As she later put it: ‘I reckon he won the ’87 election for us because of his employment policies.’154
Perhaps because of the new faces brought in by the reshuffle, the Conservatives received rather more favourable media coverage during the conference season than they deserved. At Labour’s gathering in Bournemouth, Neil Kinnock scored a palpable hit with his attack on the behaviour of the Militant Tendency in Liverpool (see Chapter 11). The Tories had no comparable message of change or sense of direction. To great embarrassment, the newly appointed Jeffrey Archer attacked ‘the workshy young’ in a conference interview and compared his own return to wealth after near-bankruptcy favourably with their failures. As Norman Tebbit left the conference, which he had himself, as chairman, orchestrated, he said to Michael Dobbs: ‘That conference was a terrible balls-up: we were lucky to get away with it. It had no theme.’155
In her leader’s speech at Blackpool, Mrs Thatcher attacked the ‘courage’ Kinnock had shown at Bournemouth, by saying that it had come ‘long after the event�
�.156 She contrasted it with the ‘real courage’ shown by working miners, lorry drivers, steel men, railwaymen and dockers during the miners’ strike. She tried to make a virtue of her government’s lack of startling economic progress by speaking of ‘the realities of power exercised responsibly’ and ‘idealism tempered by realism’. And she was at pains to emphasize her commitment to dealing with unemployment. ‘No problem … occupies more of my thinking,’ she said, almost truthfully. She boasted that the millionth recruit would join the Youth Training Scheme by Christmas and that, in the last two years, 650,000 additional jobs had been created in Britain. She invited her audience to recall how they had supported her enthusiastically in the same hall when she had made her rousing first party conference speech as leader ten years earlier. She was applauded loyally, but not rapturously.
In political terms, it was perhaps a grim form of luck for Mrs Thatcher that riots had recently broken out in several black inner-city neighbourhoods. Although related to inner-city poverty and racial discontents in general, they were sparked by specific incidents with the police. In September, there were disturbances in Brixton and in Handsworth (in Birmingham); in early October, in Tottenham, north London. Although not nearly as extensive as their predecessors in 1981, the riots were fierce, some even bestial. In Broadwater Farm, Tottenham, an enormous modern ‘sink’ estate, whose walkways and dark stairs made crime easy, rioters protesting at the death of a black woman in a police raid attacked the police, who were trying to protect firemen fighting the effects of petrol bombs. One officer, PC Keith Blakelock, slipped as he emerged from a stairwell and was set upon by the mob. He received forty injuries from cuts or stabs. A six-inch knife was buried in his neck. He died shortly afterwards, the first policeman killed in a mainland British riot for more than 150 years. Bernie Grant, the black local Labour leader of Haringey Council,* said: ‘The youths around here believe that the police were to blame for what happened on Sunday and what they got was a bloody good hiding.’157 This was widely taken as excusing the murder. ‘Maybe it was a policeman who stabbed another policeman,’ he also said.158
The sheer savagery of PC Blakelock’s murder gave the Tories, who were gathering for their conference when it happened, a new solidarity. Bernie Grant’s comments created a political problem for the Labour Party, although Neil Kinnock quickly condemned his words. Norman Tebbit was characteristically laconic: ‘I do not think one can say unemployment is the cause of a gang of 100 people falling upon a single policeman and murdering him. If so, we could have been singularly short of policemen during the 1930s.’159 Mrs Thatcher herself was able to turn the traditional Tory subject of law and order into the centrepiece of her speech. She attacked ‘crime masquerading as social protest’, won her biggest applause for saying that most British people ‘regard the police as friends’ and identified the hard left – ‘socialism in action’ in the council chambers of Liverpool, Lambeth (home of the Brixton riots) and Haringey – as subverting the law. Into this, rather than merely asserting authority, she injected a note of compassion: ‘We are all involved. We cannot pass by on the other side.’160 She displayed concern for the decay of inner cities, which had happened, she said, because local institutions and the power of church, family and school had given way to the chill hand of the state. Mrs Thatcher was appalled by the details of PC Blakelock’s death and sent a handwritten sympathy letter to his widow. ‘The agony will be almost unbearable, and words of little comfort,’ she wrote. ‘But I want you to know that without the bravery of your late husband and others like him Britain would not be the country we know and love. This new terrorism in our midst is like a cancer – and similarly it must be overcome.’161
As was generally the case in moments of disorder, Mrs Thatcher was much more concerned than most politicians by the details of what had actually happened, especially to the victims of riot, and less inclined to move straight into discussing policy changes. When the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, reported to her, in Blackpool, on the riots in Tottenham, she gave a sort of stream of consciousness reaction:
the ferocity of the night’s events and the weapons used was evidence of a new situation … It was a great pity that so few arrests had been made … it might even be necessary to demolish houses in different estates in order to help policing. Extra search lights might be employed. Above all, the Government should stand up for the police.162
When the Police Federation privately told her Policy Unit that they wanted to brief Mrs Thatcher in detail on the appalling injuries suffered by PC Blakelock, the unit discouraged the idea, to spare her feelings. ‘We believe unless you request this information that you should not be troubled,’ Hartley Booth, of the unit, told her.163 Booth also informed her, from what he said were police sources, that ‘the ingredients of Napalm … have been supplied to individuals in the Tottenham area.’ If so, the police would need protective clothing and plastic bullets. Concerned and perhaps over-credulous, Mrs Thatcher rose to the bait. ‘This is most disturbing,’ she wrote. ‘Is everything possible being done to assist the police in their duties?’164 It was left to a civil servant, her private secretary David Norgrove, to point out gently that rumours were ‘flying around’. There was always a danger that Mrs Thatcher’s concern for detail could be misdirected if her advisers did not exercise enough restraint. Stephen Sherbourne recalled that, in her middle period in office, Mrs Thatcher’s authority was considered so great that it was important to invoke her name very sparingly in Whitehall: people would respond excessively to whatever they thought might be her will.165 What the Prime Minister seriously wanted, in terms of policy, had to be distinguished from what she might say on the spur of the moment: her true wishes were sometimes different from her whim. She herself knew this, as is evidenced by her preference for government conducted more through work on paper than through sofa conversations.
The broad fact was that Mrs Thatcher was very interested in the state of the inner cities, and had been thinking about them increasingly for some time. ‘I got fed up with [the state of] inner cities. There was no one responsible for them.’166 This was part of the reason she had made David Young employment secretary. Instead of seeing the inhabitants of what were called Urban Priority Areas as passive victims of a bad system or government neglect, she wanted them to be participants in shaping a better future. For this to happen, business opportunities had to be made easier and, she believed, local government finance had to be reformed. If, for example, left-wing councils could set their business rates prohibitively high without suffering electoral retribution, they would, and jobs would leave their areas. This contributed to her thinking about the poll tax (see Chapter 11).
The official papers on the subject of inner cities at this time show Mrs Thatcher confronted with a piquant contrast. As bad news poured in about riots, so did good news about her largest urban regeneration project. ‘Yesterday,’ Kenneth Baker wrote to her on 3 October 1985, ‘I met the American bankers and developers who want to build a huge new financial centre in London’s Docklands.’167 They would put £1.5 billion into the regeneration of Canary Wharf, involving 45,000 financial jobs and about the same again in supporting employment. The plans were ‘visually stunning’. This huge development remains central to the financial success of London to this day. The London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), invented by Mrs Thatcher and Michael Heseltine in 1981, was achieving these results because it had the power to overcome local government objections and grant planning permission for commercial development and private housing. At this time, there were about 30,000 unoccupied private sector dwellings in Greater London, often sat on by Labour councils unwilling to sell but unable to afford to renovate. The LDDC also bought up public sector land which was lying idle and helped improve transport links. It was often harder to extend such opportunities to other inner cities, most of which were less depopulated than the London Docks and therefore more difficult to transform physically.
More broadly, Mrs Thatcher’s government was no
t united on its approach to the inner cities. In departmental terms, too many cooks were spoiling the broth. From an ideological perspective, there was a half-stated disagreement between the more ‘One Nation’ Conservatives who thought that government money would do the work, and the Thatcherites, who were more interested in economic opportunity, non-state institutions and individual human character as means of transforming the inner cities. Booth and Letwin, the idealistic young moralists at the Policy Unit, wrote to Mrs Thatcher to point out that ministers wanted all sorts of different things – black middle-class entrepreneurs for Lord Young, refurbished council blocks for Kenneth Baker, a reduction in youth alienation for Douglas Hurd. But none of this reached the root, they declared:
when things were very bad in the great depression of the 1930s, people in Brixton went out, leaving their grocery money in a bag at the front door … Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder. David Young’s new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade.168
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