There was a related problem of who would make the best local partners, with subsidy backing the wrong people. ‘Liverpool’s catastrophic black activist, Samson Bond [a London leftist brought in to deal with race issues by Militant], is funded by the Home Office,’169 a point which Mrs Thatcher underscored with her pen several times. Argument went back and forth within government about what should be done. Mrs Thatcher wanted more focus on inner-city youth, but still cogitated uncertainly about who should be in charge of it.
Into this discussion broke the Church of England. At the end of November, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, sent a handwritten letter to Mrs Thatcher enclosing a copy of Faith in the City, the large-scale report of his Commission on Urban Priority Areas, which offered, by its own account on its back cover, ‘a disturbing picture’ of those major cities ‘where economic, physical and social conditions are at their most acute and depressing’. ‘It is not, of course, a comfortable read for Archbishops or for Prime Ministers,’ wrote Runcie, but, ‘despite some reservations which I have about certain sections, I believe the contents have to be taken seriously.’170 The commission to which Runcie gave this somewhat tepid endorsement was made up almost exclusively of leading figures of the Anglican liberal-left of the era, sometimes known as ‘South Bank religion’, because of the influence of the Southwark diocese in the 1960s. It was chaired by Sir Richard O’Brien,* whom Mrs Thatcher had edged out of the Manpower Services Commission in favour of David Young. It included David Sheppard, Bishop of Liverpool,† Canon Eric James,‡ the director of Christian Action, and Professor A. H. Halsey,§ the leading socialist sociologist and former Reith lecturer.
Runcie himself was, according to his chaplain at that time, John Witheridge, ‘a bit of a Tory Wet’ who was ‘quite confused politically’.171 He had ‘a quiet respect for Mrs Thatcher’ and had not intended a political onslaught, but his own political confusion meant that he had left the field open for his more ideological fellows to launch an attack on Mrs Thatcher (though without naming her) and all her works. The report put forward an unreconstructed 1945-style programme of Keynesian government-sponsored works and dressed it in ecclesiastical vestments. Describing the Church as ‘the conscience of the nation’, the report declared that ‘too much emphasis is being given to individualism, and not enough to collective obligation.’172 It referred respectfully to Marx and to Liberation Theology (the quasi-Marxist thinking popular with some South American clergy at the time), disparaged the Protestant work ethic and ‘comfortable Britain’, and quoted with approval one submission which said: ‘The exclusion of the poor is pervasive and not accidental.’173 When she read this, Mrs Thatcher put two large question marks besides it and heavy lines below ‘not accidental’, well aware that she stood accused.¶ In the view of Richard Chartres, later Bishop of London,** who was Runcie’s chaplain when the report was first conceived, the recommendations and data about the life of the urban Church were valuable, but its theology was ‘pathetic’.174
All twenty-three main public policy recommendations of Faith in the City involved increased government spending. The report opposed council house sales, the private rented sector in housing, private schools, and university cuts. It attacked the government for a ‘dogmatic and inflexible macro-economic stance’ and declared that ‘for most low-income city residents, freedom of choice is a cruel deception.’ It also, in a section entitled ‘Order and Law’ – a deliberate inversion of the usual phrase so beloved of Tory conferences – questioned the idea that obedience to the law was necessarily important and concentrated on how law enforcement could be used to marginalize the poor. This chapter provoked the rather excitable Hartley Booth to warn Mrs Thatcher that the report ‘could play a dangerous role in subverting support for the hard-pressed forces of law and order, and in whipping up racial tension’.175
Brian Griffiths, as well as being an academic economist, was a well-instructed churchman. He wrote the Policy Unit’s ‘critical evaluation’ of the report for Mrs Thatcher, advising her to welcome it as ‘a serious investigation of a real problem’, but be ready to ‘express surprise’ at certain omissions and presumptions. ‘Express surprise’, he counselled, ‘that the recommendations of the report lay far more emphasis on central and local government than they do on the family.’176 Writing on top of all this, David Norgrove advised her: ‘This seems right to me. Kill it with kindness. A Church–Government row would keep the Report on the front pages.’ Even the combative Ingham advised against ‘a pre-emptive strike’ since this would ‘draw more attention to the report’.177 One unnamed minister, however, speaking to the Sunday Times, described the report as ‘pure Marxist theology’,178 thus lighting the blue touch-paper.* This was the sort of subject, beloved of newspapers, on which everyone could pitch in, along almost wholly predictable lines. The general effect was to amplify the idea that the government in general, and Mrs Thatcher in particular, were ‘uncaring’.
Mrs Thatcher did not welcome the controversy. Despite her combative nature, she never wanted a fight with the Church. John Gummer, who discussed the report with her, noticed that she felt ‘hurt’ by it. There was a strong moral and religious base to her politics, and she ‘saw the Church as an important part of the stability of society’.179 ‘She didn’t like its implication that she didn’t care: she did.’ She felt inhibited in disagreeing with Runcie himself, both because of his office and because he had ‘had a good war’.* It was a pity, thought John Witheridge, that Runcie did not see her privately to talk matters over: ‘If he’d had more confidence, he might have exerted more influence.’180† On the whole, the Church was more uncharitable to Mrs Thatcher than she to the Church: ‘She was politer than we might have been.’181 Privately, she was irritated by the ‘unbelievably woolly’182 passages of the report and the fact that it showed no understanding of how an economy works. She also disliked, of course, any passages which seemed left wing. Gummer admitted inciting her to particular outrage by pointing out to her the report’s suggestion that churches in Urban Priority Areas should use ‘banners designed and made locally’183 for their worship. The report probably had in mind depictions of Christian scenes and symbols in contemporary settings, but she thought of banners as things carried by activists on protest marches.
In Gummer’s view, Mrs Thatcher’s was ‘what my father [a clergyman] called a cut-flower religion’ – neatly preserved and presented, but no longer alive. She had absorbed the precepts of Grantham Methodism and not continued from there: ‘I never detected any religious influence afterwards.’184 This was not right, although it was true that Mrs Thatcher was utterly uninterested in churchy controversies, or in theology. She continued to think hard about the Christian’s duty to God and consequent duty to his or her neighbour. She was not one of those who thought Christianity should be merely private, with nothing to say about the life of society, but she was frustrated by the sense that the Church was trading on its spiritual and moral prestige to pronounce on economic matters which it failed to understand.
Casting about for backing for her views from other religious authorities, Mrs Thatcher was pleased by the writings of the Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits.‡ He wrote a commentary on Faith in the City, entitled ‘From Doom to Hope’. The two had first met when Mrs Thatcher was Education Secretary. She had been impressed by Jacobovits’s remark that her job meant that she was ‘really the Minister of Defence’.185 She admired his emphasis on education and effort as the means of conquering poverty and prejudice. In ‘From Doom to Hope’, the Chief Rabbi argued that Jews had broken out of the ghetto because ‘we worked on ourselves, not on others’ and ‘hallowed our home life’. He thought it sad that Faith in the City ‘falls short of hailing work as a virtue in itself’ and declared that ‘Cheap labour is more dignified than a free dole.’ He quoted a medieval Jewish teacher who had made his point with a Hebrew pun: ‘He who is poor (rash) is going to be a leader in the future (rosh).’ She is supposed to have told Jakobovits that she wished sh
e could make him archbishop of Canterbury. Since she could not, she made him a peer in 1988, the first chief rabbi to enter the House of Lords. It could be said that Faith in the City pricked her conscience, but not in the direction the report intended.
Perhaps not wholly coincidentally, Mrs Thatcher came to the view that Jakobovits’s co-religionist, David Young, should be put in charge of inner-city initiatives, driving private sector ‘task forces’. Rather than fretting about ‘black alienation’ and entering into identity politics, these would ‘develop a viable private sector base in the inner cities’.186 Mrs Thatcher preferred ideas which she thought came from the bank of the Jordan in biblical times than those from the South Bank of the Thames in the 1960s.
In a scribbled note to Mrs Thatcher, Robert Armstrong suggested that the task-force plan be announced soon to ‘pre-empt … the Member for Henley (Mr Heseltine) [who had resigned from the government over the Westland crisis three weeks earlier (see Chapter 14)] who – Lord Young suspects – may before long turn his restless energies to the problems of inner cities and (especially) Liverpool’.187 Mrs Thatcher acted accordingly.
14
Helicopter crash
‘Her hands were not entirely clean’
When she came to compose her memoirs in the early 1990s, Margaret Thatcher was heard to remark, ‘I can’t even remember what the actual Westland thing was about now.’1 She was not alone. To many, both at the time and subsequently, it seemed mysterious that an argument over the future of a West Country helicopter company, then worth about £30 million, should have convulsed a successful government with a parliamentary majority of 140. Yet that is what happened, and by the end of it all much would be revealed about how her government worked – or did not work. For the first time, Mrs Thatcher would find her personal reputation assailed not only by her political opponents – she was used to that – but by at least one ‘enemy within’, and even by allies. Her methods of exercising power would be exposed and her integrity seriously questioned.
The immediate cause of the explosion was not so much the issue of Westland itself, but the character of the Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine. Said to dislike working for a woman, Heseltine had never been close to Mrs Thatcher, personally or politically. In spite of Mrs Thatcher’s own reservations about Heseltine’s character (see here), he had performed well for her politically at Defence, notably by his vigorous prosecution of the campaign against CND over the installation of US cruise missiles in Britain. When, in July 1984, one of his own civil servants, Clive Ponting, had leaked to the Labour MP Tam Dalyell* papers which he thought showed government duplicity over the sinking of the Belgrano, Heseltine had been fiercer than she† in supporting Ponting’s prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. (To the government’s embarrassment, the prosecution failed.) But Heseltine always maintained markedly different views from Mrs Thatcher – more pro-European, more corporatist, more enthusiastic about regional policy. By 1985, seeing no prospect of further advancement for himself under the existing dispensation, he was chafing at the bit. Mrs Thatcher was not blind to these warning signs. At the end of her visit to Washington, DC, that February, on which Heseltine accompanied her, she pulled aside David Hannay, then working at the British Embassy there: ‘I remember her quizzing me quite strongly as to what Heseltine had got up to while he was there, in terms that implied she had total distrust in him.’2
It was Heseltine who first alerted Mrs Thatcher to the growing problem with Westland, Britain’s only helicopter manufacturer. Signs of trouble had appeared late in 1984. At the end of April 1985, he informed her that the company was running out of work, due to the collapse of a big order from India which she had done much to promote. He said he favoured a ‘market solution’ with new management, and thought this might come from an entrepreneur called Alan Bristow. He found it hard to see ‘a single British specialist helicopter company competing in worldwide markets in the longer term’.3 He did not think the United Kingdom should place extra orders to rescue Westland.
Nevertheless, government minds now bent to finding more work for the company. Mrs Thatcher jumped at an eccentric request from Kenneth Kaunda, the President of Zambia, who wrote asking for twelve Westland helicopters paid for out of the British overseas aid programme to check on poachers of elephants and ‘the rhino, the eland, the leopard, cheetah and the black lechwe’.4 ‘I hope this can be done very quickly,’ Mrs Thatcher scribbled on the covering letter. ‘It may help Westlands.’* Concerned about the propriety of the aid programme, the Foreign Office intervened against the Kaunda request which, Geoffrey Howe told Mrs Thatcher, ‘verges on the ludicrous’.5 The High Commission in Lusaka intercepted her encouraging reply to Kaunda and made sure it was not delivered.
Other ideas were not much more successful. In the course of the early summer, the Bristow offer went awry because the government refused the backing he sought. Ministerial meetings, in which Mrs Thatcher took a part, were hastily called to try to stave off receivership and the consequent loss of 1,700 jobs in Yeovil in Somerset.† Foreign interest was not ruled out, although the Trade and Industry Secretary, Norman Tebbit,* discouraged an approach from Marmon Inc. of Chicago because ‘I do not find the prospect of American ownership welcome.’6 No. 10 had good links with Sir John Cuckney,† the chairman of Westland recently appointed to sort matters out, who came from an MI5 background. He had a high reputation as a ‘company doctor’, and had impressed Mrs Thatcher with his rescue of John Brown Engineering, the company for whose interests in the Siberian oil pipeline she had fought so strongly against President Reagan (see Volume I, pp. 582–3). One of Cuckney’s early acts as chairman was secretly to hire Gordon Reece to advise him on political relations and PR.‡ From the first, Cuckney was interested by the pre-existing possibility that Sikorsky, the helicopter division of the American company United Technologies, might buy a big minority stake in Westland.
The No. 10 Policy Unit, keen to advance Thatcherite ideas of open competition, disliked any thought of state rescue. As early as 5 July, it urged that foreign owners should not be ruled out: ‘From a defence and industrial point of view, a bid from Sikorsky might be far better [than another Bristow bid].’7 In this spirit, Mrs Thatcher’s office informed the DTI that ‘While she has noted the general arguments against an American takeover, she believes that a different American offer would have to be judged on its merits.’8 At this stage, there was not much overt politics involved. But already Cuckney was somewhat irritated by Michael Heseltine. He had been to see him at the end of June, and found him ‘pretty arrogant and laid back … He was sitting in a jumper on a full-length sofa and didn’t get up. He was not frightfully interested and told me to see Clive Whitmore [the Permanent Secretary].’9
The Cabinet reshuffle that September had significant consequences for the Westland story. While Heseltine stayed at Defence, Leon Brittan now replaced Norman Tebbit at the DTI. Brittan’s demotion from the Home Office – for such, whatever the formal position, he rightly understood it to be – hit him hard. To observers in No. 10, he seemed ‘a slightly changed character’.10 It was in this grumpy and uneasy frame of mind that he now confronted the problem of Westland.
Michael Heseltine was not disposed to make matters easy for him. He had always hankered after the job which Brittan had just reluctantly accepted, and he liked to think that, in Defence, ‘I can have my own industrial policy.’11 In his view, he ‘offered to help’ the new Secretary of State: he felt that he had built up a great deal of relevant expertise in his dealings with the Europeans over the European Fighter Aircraft.12 Brittan saw it otherwise: ‘To him, I was the jumped-up minor person, and he was the big frog.’13 Although Heseltine did not enter the Westland issue with strong views on the company’s future, he did have earlier experience of dealing with Mrs Thatcher on industrial matters. He had claimed a role in industrial policy by circulating a paper to the E Committee of the Cabinet, setting out his interventionist views. She had reluctantly permitted him to do this.
Although he had found little support among colleagues, it had made her ‘pretty furious’.14 Heseltine had also been hardened by a battle at the end of the previous year with Norman Tebbit and Mrs Thatcher about the building of two new Type 22 naval frigates. Tebbit had wanted them both built at Swan Hunter on Tyneside. Heseltine, who always pushed the cause of Liverpool, felt differently. In his view Tebbit unfairly changed the rules of competition by insisting that Cammell Laird, based on Merseyside, be allowed to bid for only one of the two frigates, whereas Swan Hunter was free to bid for both. Heseltine intimated that he would resign if he did not get his way. ‘Margaret backed me,’ he recalled;15 but she did this only because she felt he was threatening resignation, and was left ‘seething’ at Heseltine’s tactic.16
Norman Tebbit was also a significant figure in the drama, but a somewhat uncertain ally for Mrs Thatcher at this time: he had quarrelled with her over policy towards British Leyland (see Chapter 15). He, like Heseltine, felt he had learnt from the argument over Cammell Laird. Tebbit was close to Willie Whitelaw, the Deputy Prime Minister. Whitelaw had advised Mrs Thatcher to give Heseltine what he wanted over Cammell Laird, but had also confided in Tebbit that he felt Heseltine had been a ‘bloody shit’ in the affair.* Tebbit and Whitelaw watched Heseltine’s behaviour over Westland together, and recognized certain symptoms. They concluded quite early on, Tebbit recalled, that he was ‘fishing for an issue on which to resign’.17
In early October, when Leon Brittan first wrote to Mrs Thatcher about the future of Westland, the tone of discussion was rational on all sides. He explained that either the Sikorsky bid, or an emerging joint European bid of the German MBB, the French Aérospatiale and the Italian Agusta, was possible. He opposed John Cuckney’s suggestion that the government should underwrite the sales of forty-five W30-160 helicopters, and argued that Westland was ‘not central to the aerospace industry’. He thought that Sikorsky was the most likely buyer, but also that Westland ‘should be encouraged to pursue the possibility of a European solution’.18 Charles Powell, informing Mrs Thatcher that Brittan wanted an early meeting to discuss it all, did not see a great urgency, given her crowded diary: ‘You simply can’t do this.’19 Heseltine, who would later make much of Brittan’s suggestion that a European solution should be encouraged, set to work. Brittan recalled that he had no personal preference in the matter and that his attitude to Heseltine’s interest in a European solution was ‘ “Good luck! But it’s an industrial matter, not a defence matter.” The Government shouldn’t force anyone: it didn’t own the company.’20
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