By this time, the press was excited about the Westland affair, and the disagreements between ministers were exposed to the public. ‘This has been one of the most extraordinary episodes in British government in recent years,’ wrote Geoffrey Smith in The Times. ‘The public battle that has raged between ministers was the sort of thing that one expects with American administrations, but not with British governments.’61 Leon Brittan made a statement to the Commons on Monday 16 December, explaining government policy. The government was not taking sides over bids for Westland, he said, and was leaving matters to the market. Sitting on the front bench with him, Heseltine was seen to shake his head in disagreement.
On Wednesday 18 December, Mrs Thatcher summoned an informal meeting at the flat in Downing Street with the Chief Whip John Wakeham, Whitelaw, Brittan, Robert Armstrong and Bernard Ingham. In assembling this small group, she was probably trying to learn from her mistake of the ERM meeting the previous month. Although, in this case, she did not face comparable isolation, she needed to have the wiliest minds in government assisting her. Feeling that the standing of the entire government was threatened, she wanted to find a way of stopping Heseltine in his tracks. She believed that he was consciously and clearly breaking collective Cabinet responsibility.
At the start of the meeting, the politicians met alone, with the officials kept on hand. Brittan, who, of those present, was suffering most from the row, suggested that Mrs Thatcher should see Heseltine and order him to stop his campaign. Although no one said it in so many words, this was not going to happen, because the relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Heseltine was simply too poor.62 Another way of making the demarche to Heseltine which Brittan wanted was for Mrs Thatcher to write him a letter. Wakeham felt this was a bad idea, because ‘I wanted to steer the ship into calmer waters,’63 but did not think it was his place to say so. Instead he suggested, ‘Such a letter is bound to leak, so let’s get the drafting exactly right.’64 Robert Armstrong was brought in. His draft, which survives, is short and blunt. ‘You were on the front bench in the House yesterday when I made clear the Government’s position concerning the future of Westlands,’ he had Mrs Thatcher writing, ‘namely that it is a matter for the company to decide.’ This had been agreed, the draft went on, at E Committee on 9 December. An ultimatum followed: ‘In this situation no Minister should use his position to promote one commercial option in preference to another – so long as he remains in government.’65
Once the draft was complete, Mrs Thatcher still could not decide whether the letter should be sent. Wakeham suggested that she send for Ingham for his opinion. On reading the draft, Ingham said: ‘I think it’s weak.’ ‘Weak!’ exclaimed Mrs Thatcher. ‘What’s strong?’ ‘Sacking him,’ said Ingham. ‘Are you saying that I should sack him?’ ‘No, I’m just saying what’s strong.’66 The press secretary’s view was that, if Heseltine received such a letter, or were summoned by Mrs Thatcher to be told the same thing orally, ‘he would just resign.’67 Mrs Thatcher later recalled Ingham saying, ‘The public aren’t ready for it, and wouldn’t understand it.’68 Brittan, still angry with Ingham over what he believed had been his role in demoting him in the reshuffle, protested that this political discussion should not be taking place in the presence of a non-political civil servant, which Ingham was.69 He disliked Ingham’s ‘excessive and baleful influence’.70* But Mrs Thatcher agreed with Ingham: ‘I didn’t like sacking a Minister unless it was absolutely clear … that there were reasonable circumstances to do it.’71 Ingham was not expelled from the meeting, and the letter was not sent.
So nothing happened. To Bernard Ingham, here was an example of how Willie Whitelaw, for all his prestige as a fixer, was ‘a lightweight’: ‘He did nothing about Westland. He should have said to Heseltine, “We’re not having this.” ’72 Curiously enough, Heseltine also believed that Whitelaw ‘might help broker an acceptable outcome’,73 but his messages to Whitelaw went unanswered because Whitelaw was away playing golf.74† Looking back on it all when she came to write her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher said that the most justified criticism of her was not for bullying or provoking Heseltine too much but for holding back from disciplining him. Her counter self-justification took its cue from Ingham’s argument about public reaction: ‘I knew the politics of it.’75 Heseltine, in other words, was too popular with the party in the country. The ground for his departure had not been prepared.
The Cabinet met the following day, the last meeting before Christmas. ‘I need a line on Westlands/Cabinet by 11a.m.,’ wrote a rather exasperated Ingham to Nigel Wicks. ‘I can continue to play resignation/sacking away (unless you advise caution),’ he went on, and he wrote a question on his note leaving a blank for Wicks to fill in: ‘Is Mr Heseltine isolated in Cabinet? Answer: ?’76
The short answer to Ingham’s question was now ‘Yes’. Leon Brittan stated the government line and the latest news about the company, which was that the shareholders would now decide its future on 13 January. According to Robert Armstrong’s contemporaneous notes, Mrs Thatcher, supporting Brittan, said, ‘No Minister … is authorised to lobby for one side or the other, because that goes against our decision.’77 Then, as a challenge to Heseltine, she added, ‘Is that clear? Is that accepted?’ Heseltine said that, as minister, he would have to answer questions for both bids about what he called the government ‘workload’ on the company. ‘It must not be done in any way wh: favours one bid rather than another,’ Armstrong noted Mrs Thatcher saying, and she repeated similar words when Heseltine argued for the maximum margin of discretion. Nigel Lawson weighed in on her side, and so did Willie Whitelaw, who ended the discussion. The Prime Minister had to answer questions in the House that day, Whitelaw said. Turning to her, he went on, ‘When you state the policy again, you must be speaking with united voice in Cabinet … Hope we can stick to that. Hope Cab. can agree you are speaking for whole Govt.’ ‘Is that confirmed?’ Mrs Thatcher asked the assembled company. ‘Cab: Confirmed’ is how Armstrong recorded the conclusion of the meeting. Whatever Heseltine’s private thoughts, he acquiesced in the unanimity.
At Prime Minister’s Questions that afternoon, Neil Kinnock sought to exploit the obvious differences between Heseltine and Mrs Thatcher. She was able to respond simply that the future of Westland was ‘a matter for the company to decide … That is the position, and it was reaffirmed by the Cabinet this morning.’78 The BBC that night reported this as a ‘snub’ for Heseltine. In private, Heseltine complained to friends of his ‘humiliation’ in Cabinet.79
Heseltine did not let up. If anything, he redoubled his campaign. He talked frequently to newspaper editors. Clive Whitmore, his Permanent Secretary, recalled him being ‘always on the phone lobbying’.80 Mrs Thatcher regarded him as a ‘Svengali or Rasputin’ attempting to threaten companies like BAe and GEC with the loss of MOD contracts if they did not back the European bid: it was ‘real strong-arm stuff’.81 She thought he saw himself as ‘a knight in shining armour’.82 She did not mean the phrase as a compliment.
Heseltine also sought to overthrow the Cabinet consensus on government neutrality over the bids for Westland. On 23 December, he wrote to Mrs Thatcher about what he said was a ‘significant development’83 – the latest version (20 December) of the European offer. He said he had not publicly expressed any ‘personal preference’ since the Cabinet meeting the previous week (‘Said 6 Sea-kings [that is, the order for six Sea King helicopters] would only go to European offer on Sunday radio’, scribbled Mrs Thatcher crossly). But now he believed that there were wider policy issues at stake which, ‘in my view, would warrant further collective discussion’. The government would be criticized for ‘having no preference’ between what he called ‘a British-led offer [his imaginative term for the European bid] and a US-led one’. His latest manoeuvre was to seize upon the Italian company Fiat, which was part of the Sikorsky bid, because Fiat was partially owned by Libya. Given the hostility of the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, there was a ‘possible Libyan involvement’ and th
e danger of ‘grave embarrassment’ to the government and to the national interest, he alleged.* He had asked the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to look at this, he told her. The government should indicate, Heseltine concluded, that ‘subject to the commercial interests of the parties being protected, it would prefer a British/European solution’.84
In an accompanying personal note to Mrs Thatcher which, he emphasized, he was not copying to colleagues, Heseltine reminded her that, in October, Leon Brittan had favoured a European solution. Referring to his last sentence about how the government should now back the European bid, he wrote, ‘I know that [it] … will not be an easy one for you. I know also that you will understand the depth of my convictions in this matter.’85 She did indeed understand, not least because Heseltine allies had leaked the points in his letter the previous weekend. They had also publicly promoted the suggestion that in no circumstances would the MOD buy Black Hawk helicopters. This was a way of saying that the Sikorsky bid would be a dead end for shareholders. On Christmas Eve, a letter was sent by the MOD to Lloyds, the merchant bank of the European consortium, stating that Westland would not be able to be part of any European helicopter project if it went ahead with manufacturing Black Hawks, for which MOD had neither the need nor the money.
So strong, indeed, were the depths of Heseltine’s convictions that he sought to sway John Cuckney directly. One of his greatest difficulties throughout had been that the chairman of the company whose future he was trying to decide did not like what he was doing. In defiance of the non-intervention agreed by the Cabinet on 19 December, Heseltine called Cuckney at home in Kent with talk of a ‘programme’ which would persuade him to back the European bid.* Cuckney told him that he could not leave home because he was tending to his wife, who was seriously ill, so Heseltine said he would bring down a team to present the proposals. ‘He angered me,’ Cuckney recalled. ‘It was not an attractive development. He was slightly insensitive.’86 Reluctant to see Heseltine, he rang his lawyers, who advised against the meeting since Heseltine was ‘trying to bounce you’.87 The meeting did not take place. Cuckney told Heseltine on Christmas Eve that ‘I have no power to do as you ask.’88
None of the participants in the Westland saga passed a very happy Christmas, with the likely exception of Gordon Reece, who knew that he was about to receive, at Mrs Thatcher’s behest, the knighthood of which he had felt cheated in the previous Parliament (see Volume I, p. 410). He spent Christmas lunch at Chequers with her and Denis and the other guests.†
Michael Heseltine, with his usual flair for the dramatic, saw the chance to make a point. On Boxing Day, Chris Moncrieff,‡ the political editor of the Press Association, got a call from the Defence Secretary: ‘Have you heard about my family holiday in Nepal? Well, I’m not going on it.’ ‘That’s a story,’ said Moncrieff. ‘You’ve got to get it from my press office, not me,’ said Heseltine. Farcically, when Moncrieff did as Heseltine had asked, the press secretary refused to check the story with Heseltine on the grounds that he should not disturb a Cabinet minister on Boxing Day. In the end, Heseltine had to arrange to be disturbed by his own press secretary, so that the story could get out.89 He wanted it known as early as possible that he was staying at home to fight.
With the Westland shareholders’ decision expected on 13 January, both sides spent the Christmas season preparing for a showdown. The struggle was now fought out through a series of letters. The first came from Cuckney, who was seeking to defuse a potentially powerful argument against the Sikorsky bid. Heseltine’s camp claimed that, were a non-European entity to hold even a minority stake in the company, Westland would no longer be considered ‘European’ and would thus be shut out of the European market. Writing to Mrs Thatcher by prearrangement with Powell, Cuckney wanted an assurance that this would not be the case.90 Mrs Thatcher, of course, obliged and the next day the draft reply to Cuckney, written by Charles Powell, reached Heseltine’s office for comment. In short order, Downing Street then received a letter from the Attorney-General’s office, giving the opinion of the Solicitor-General,* Sir Patrick Mayhew.† It warned Mrs Thatcher that the government was ‘under a duty not to withhold any information it knows to be relevant’91 and would be ‘at serious risk’ if it did not convey ‘the fact that there are indications from European governments and companies that they take the view that a number of projects in which Westland are currently expecting to participate in co-operation with other European countries may be lost to Westland if the Sikorsky offer is accepted’. Mrs Thatcher put a loop and an exclamation mark linking the word ‘fact’ with the word ‘indications’.
This letter, which infuriated Mrs Thatcher, had very obviously been inspired by Heseltine. Heseltine and Patrick Mayhew were old friends, going back to Oxford days. The Defence Secretary, seeking to trump Mrs Thatcher’s proposed response to Cuckney, had rushed the Solicitor-General into it. Mayhew’s letter was more a favour to a friend than a considered document that was strictly necessary from a legal point of view. The use of the Law Officers in government was (and is still) a sensitive issue because of the distinction between law and politics. Under the British system, this conflict is internalized: the Law Officers are politicians but, in their capacity of giving legal advice to government, they are not allowed to behave politically. By the same token, ministers are not supposed to abuse Law Officers’ advice for political purposes or ever to disclose it – even its existence – without the agreement of the officers. Paradoxically, therefore, the Law Officers’ advice can be a potent political weapon because its apparent objectivity makes it difficult to challenge. Heseltine knew that Mrs Thatcher would have to go carefully in the face of such advice.
In her reply to Cuckney on New Year’s Day, Mrs Thatcher followed Mayhew’s legal advice. But she also confirmed that as long as Westland continued in the UK, the government would continue to regard it as a British – and therefore as a European – company: ‘The Government would wish to see Westland play a full part in existing and future European collaborative projects.’92 It would make sure that Westland was not discriminated against. Two days later, Heseltine fought back through yet another exchange of correspondence. Replying to a letter which he had himself inspired – indeed dictated to its sender by telephone – Heseltine wrote to David Horne of Lloyds Merchant Bank, which was acting for the European bid. In the guise of factual advice to Lloyds, he set out arguments which would sway the shareholders against the Sikorsky bid. He put in all the points which he had wanted Mrs Thatcher to include in her reply to Cuckney, but which she had not. ‘The Government … has no intention of procuring the Black Hawk,’ he wrote.93 Mrs Thatcher was not shown the reply to Horne before Heseltine sent it. It was subsequently leaked from the MOD to The Times.
Although the government remained formally neutral about who should buy Westland, all the energies of both camps – Heseltine and 10 Downing Street – were now expended on fighting for one side or the other.
There is no evidence, as has sometimes been suggested, that Mrs Thatcher came under any US government pressure to support the Sikorsky bid. Nor did she have a strong personal opinion of the merits of the bids, although she certainly did dislike Heseltine’s corporatist concoction. She was fired up for other reasons. As Powell put it, ‘She did not want Sikorsky per se. She wanted a board solution [as opposed to a government-sponsored one] and one which would guarantee her triumph over Heseltine.’94
Powell was effectively in sole charge of the campaign to make sure she succeeded. His next move, however, came directly at the behest of Mrs Thatcher, who had become aware that Heseltine’s recent letter to David Horne contained a factual mistake. As Powell recalled, ‘I sat down with her at Chequers and she said, “We must make sure a Law Officer knows this.” She then instructed me to contact Paddy Mayhew.’95 Revenge was about to be executed. As Powell put it, ‘Heseltine tried to deploy the Law Officers and got it right back between the eyes.’96 Mrs Thatcher was now directly involved in a potentially dangerous game of
retaliation. On 4 January 1986, Powell reported to Mrs Thatcher that he had got Brittan to speak to the Solicitor-General, who had not previously seen Heseltine’s letter to David Horne. Having now read it, Patrick Mayhew had concluded that – in a phrase that was to become famous – ‘it contained a material inaccuracy’.97 Revealing irritation with what he saw as the Industry Secretary’s feebleness, Powell went on,
Since Mr Brittan does not appear to have done so, I am proposing to suggest to the Solicitor that he should write to Mr Heseltine to say that he has read a copy of his letter to Lloyds Bank International in the Times [where it had been published]; that he regrets that it was not cleared with him in advance; that it contains a material inaccuracy; that Mr Heseltine ought to issue a letter of correction.
Heseltine should also be made to give his letter to the press since he had done the same with his letter to Horne, Powell added. He then got in touch directly with Mayhew and ‘told him’, as he himself put it, ‘what was expected of him’.98 It cannot have been welcome to Mayhew, who did not rush to respond, but he made no objection.
The following day, a Sunday, Mrs Thatcher met Whitelaw and Wakeham at Chequers for a discussion of how to deal with Heseltine. She told them that the Solicitor-General was likely to object to what appeared in Heseltine’s letter to Horne, though she did not say by what means. They agreed that Heseltine should be brought to order at the next Cabinet meeting on Thursday 9 January. She still did not want to sack him. ‘I don’t want to look petty,’ she told Woodrow Wyatt on the telephone that evening.99* She and her colleagues were not even trying to engineer his resignation – though they realized it was a strong possibility that he would resign and therefore designated the Scottish Secretary, George Younger, as his replacement if one were needed. They were trying to devise a way of forcing Heseltine into line.
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