Mrs Thatcher was heartened, however, to get a call from the White House before she set off for Finchley. With diplomatic correctness, the US Embassy in London had kept out of sight during the Westland crisis, but the Ambassador, Charlie Price, had sent Mrs Thatcher a personal letter of support. Now President Reagan came on the telephone because ‘he thought she might like to hear a friendly voice.’169 ‘He was furious’, recorded Powell, ‘that anyone had the gall to challenge her integrity. He wanted her to know that “out here in the colonies” she had a friend. He urged the Prime Minister to go out and do her darnedest.’* She was also fortified by a bunch of flowers and a letter from a member of the public, Andrew M. Fox, a young international bond dealer recently out of university. He dismissed suggestions that she had favoured the Sikorsky bid to suck up to Reagan as ‘totally overblown’ and thanked her for the changes in public attitudes she had brought about since 1979. ‘Many changes are irreversable [sic],’ he wrote, ‘but the struggle is to maintain the … commitment to the principles of liberty and free enterprise which offer young people such opportunities today.’170 These friendly words inspired Mrs Thatcher to write on the letter a list of issues to which she wished to return: ‘Rates Inner Cities Education – Teacher Pay Changes in Social Security … Public Order Privatisation’, and she added, ‘gather with renewed strength & determination to propound and implement these positive policies.’
The biggest fear (or, for some, hope) all weekend was that Leon Brittan would use his power to bring down the Prime Minister. Her vulnerability was emphasized by a television interview with Douglas Hurd on Sunday, in which he defended her but called for proper Cabinet government – a coded attack. He also said, ‘The worst thing for the country now would be to lurch into discussion of the leadership,’171 thereby making such discussion more likely. On this cue, John Patten,* claiming the support of two other young ministers on the left of the party, Chris Patten and William Waldegrave, suggested to Hurd that evening that he throw his hat into the ring for the leadership.172 Hurd declined, but was probably not unhappy that the idea of a change of leadership was in circulation.
Hurd’s television performance that Sunday was watched with interest at Chevening, Geoffrey Howe’s official country residence. According to Howe’s PPS, Richard Ryder, ‘Geoffrey believed he would become leader’ if Mrs Thatcher fell: ‘He’d got all his ducks in a row.’173 So friends of Howe watching the TV interview grumbled that Hurd was ‘on manoeuvres’. Their man had decided to ‘keep a low profile’, but he told Ryder that if there were a contest he would stand. He sought Ryder’s opinion of his chances. Hearing ‘widespread rumours on the Commons Rialto’, Ryder told him, ‘I was 80 per cent sure he’d get it.’174
There were also stirrings on the back benches. Cranley Onslow, the chairman of the 1922 Committee (and a paid adviser to Westland), was, in Ryder’s view, ‘not always on her side’.175 Even the ultra-loyal Ian Gow, who had telephoned Mrs Thatcher that day, had privately formed the view that it was all up with her.176 Mrs Thatcher’s advisers knew that nothing in her speech in Monday’s debate should provoke Brittan. For several hours later on Sunday, Howe, Wakeham and other colleagues went through the draft with Armstrong, but deliberately without her tense and distracting presence, to ‘satisfy themselves that the speech was as convincing as it could be, and left minimal risk of further intensifying the Government’s political problems’.177
On the morning of the debate, Monday 27 January 1986, the fear of Brittan’s reaction had not receded. The problem was not just Brittan himself, but the mutinous feelings of his officials, who resented being outmanoeuvred by Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell. That morning’s Financial Times reported their anger with Ingham, because he had taken ‘an active role in the decision on how the letter should be leaked’ and had played a part in what happened earlier.178 The same sources alleged that Mrs Thatcher had given an incomplete version of events to the Commons on Thursday. Ingham wrote to Nigel Wicks, complaining about ‘all the gossiping by DTI’.179 Sir Brian Hayes,* the Permanent Secretary at the DTI, told Wicks that morning, ‘There is clearly a conflict of testimony and I think it right that this should be disclosed – I hope in a relatively innocuous way.’180 Geoffrey Howe acted as Brittan’s ambassador in discussion of the text of Mrs Thatcher’s speech, and was part of a small group discussing it with her in Downing Street right up to the last minute. In front of this group, she said, ‘I may not be Prime Minister by six o’clock tonight.’181† She thought this, according to Brittan, because she feared ‘she would be shown to have plotted by underhand means against her own ministers. Because that is what she had done.’182 Those present when she made this remark inwardly acknowledged that she might be right, and so did not protest. Howe found it piquant to be helping her in her hour of need because ‘Even to my cautious eye it was not possible to discern any successor but myself.’183
The House was packed, with Members overflowing the benches and perching in all the gangways. Neil Kinnock opened the debate. Although he got in a few pertinent questions, he was quickly blown off course. He comically said ‘Heseltine’ when he meant Westland, got flustered, accused the Tories of being dishonest, and tangled with the Speaker. Then he fell back upon the rhetorical generalities for which he was well known. As Alan Clark put it, ‘For a few seconds Kinnock had her cornered, and you could see fear in those blue eyes. But then he had an attack of wind, gave her time to recover.’184 The mood of the House changed. Tony Blair, then a young Labour MP in his first Parliament, learnt from Kinnock’s failure of leadership as he watched in the Chamber that day: ‘As Neil went on, I could see the wave of relief pass over the Tories. She thought the guillotine was going to come. Instead, she got the reprieve.’ Kinnock’s approach was wrong: ‘She was vulnerable to a forensic dissection. It needed a scalpel. All she got from Neil was a rather floppy baseball bat.’185 Kinnock agreed with his critics: ‘I added excessive points at the front of my speech. It was stupid. Entirely my own bloody fault.’186 He had failed to expose what he called ‘the effort of complicated deception’.187 He missed his most important single moment so far as leader of the Opposition.
When Mrs Thatcher answered him, she got the worst bit out of the way quickly. She admitted how closely she had been involved in the decision to drum up an opinion from the Solicitor-General. She repeated her previously expressed regret that the letter had been leaked without reference to him, and she added, with more contrition than before: ‘Indeed, with hindsight, it is clear that this was one, and doubtless there were others, of a number of matters that could have been handled better, and that, too, I regret.’188 She explained that she had known something of the leak in the hours after it had happened. Attempting to account for the respective behaviour of her office and Brittan’s in the DTI, she took refuge in Armstrong’s self-parodically careful mandarin phrase: there had been ‘a genuine difference of understanding’ between the two offices. This was a better formulation than ‘misunderstanding’ would have been, because it implied fault on neither side. It dealt with Hayes’s point about a ‘conflict of testimony’. Her speech was successful, Sherbourne remembered, because ‘She was solid,’189 and that was enough. ‘A brilliant performance, shameless and brave,’ Alan Clark wrote. ‘We are out of the wood.’190
With the forensic skill which Kinnock lacked, David Owen then made a series of strong specific points against Mrs Thatcher, dragging Powell and Ingham, by name, into the spotlight; but by then the House had decided that she had won. Heseltine intervened, saying he had previously intended not to. He declared that Mrs Thatcher’s expression of regret had been ‘a difficult and very brave thing for a Prime Minister to say in such circumstances’, and that he had his own regrets about what he had done. She had, he said, now brought ‘the politics of this matter to an end’. The Tory benches loudly cheered his apparent magnanimity. Brittan, speaking for the first time since his resignation, upheld the truthfulness of Mrs Thatcher’s account, and took responsibility for his
role in the leak. His officials, he said, were ‘not to be blamed’. The great traditional Tory combination of loyalty and humbug had reasserted itself. Mrs Thatcher had survived.
Her escape was reflected in the press the morning after. ‘Tide stemmed by Thatcher’ judged the Telegraph, ‘Maggie Stops the Rot’ proclaimed the Daily Mail, while the Express commented that she was ‘Not, after all, the Wicked Witch’.191 On 12 February, after a great deal of intervention by mystery buyers and other City jiggery-pokery, the Westland shareholders finally agreed to accept the Sikorsky bid, sparing Mrs Thatcher further embarrassment. But by then the political caravan had moved on, and few pretended any more that Westland itself mattered much. The details of this scandal, which lacked the usual preferred ingredients of sex, spies and money, faded into confusion and boredom.
Oddly, though, Heseltine had been too merciful to Mrs Thatcher in declaring the politics of the crisis at an end. The questions about what had really happened and what she had known still lurked, and these doubts were used against her officials and the way she governed. On the evening of her parliamentary triumph, Charles Powell wrote Mrs Thatcher a private letter of congratulation on her ‘stirring performance’,192 and he thanked her ‘for fighting so hard for Bernard & for me. Your loyalty and thoughtfulness towards your staff far exceeds anything which I have known in over 20 years in government service.’ He stood ready to sacrifice himself: ‘If you conclude that you would be better served by a less notorious Private Secretary, I would readily understand and offer to slip away – but would always be proud to have served you.’193 Powell’s letter was clearly couched as an offer which Mrs Thatcher could not accept, but in describing himself as ‘notorious’, he drew attention to an important aspect of the Westland affair. Until then, although he had already made a strong mark in Whitehall, Powell had been unknown to the public. The idea that a non-political official might be a known player was anathema, even more than it is today, to the Civil Service, and it was not what Powell, ambitious though he was, wanted. The brilliant ‘regular’, the top-class professional civil servant, had begun to look like one of her ‘irregulars’, using dark arts. Bernard Ingham, too, although much better known to the public than Powell, was also, unlike twenty-first-century press secretaries and media operatives, a career civil servant with no party affiliation. He never, for example, attended the Conservative Party conference nor, which is more surprising, sat regularly in on the Cabinet. The suggestion that Powell and Ingham were the two most powerful people below the Prime Minister, and in effect ran her government, was explosive, especially as it was not completely untrue. So was the idea, nowadays almost commonplace, that officials from different departments would be agents in media wars against one another’s ministers.
In the case of Powell and Ingham, it did not help that the two often had uneasy relations with each other. Ingham thought that ‘the real problem was Charles Powell because he made life so difficult for every other private secretary and for the Foreign Office and tried to run with the media too.’194 Powell thought that Ingham was too jealous of his patch and had a tendency, when reporting from European and other summits, to have such a strong eye for the domestic press that he would stir up controversies which upset allies.195
Part of the difficulty arose from what was, in more normal circumstances, a huge advantage. Both men were outstandingly able, probably more so than anyone who had previously occupied their respective roles. No one else had Ingham’s power for a crisp summation of a story, nor his instinct for Mrs Thatcher’s attitudes and idiom. His daily press digest to Mrs Thatcher, complained about in many Cabinet ministers’ memoirs for its suppression of bad news and distortion of her critics, was actually a very clear, amusing and useful summary of who said what and what mattered. It is rarely true, though it was often alleged, that Ingham hid news from Mrs Thatcher because she might not like it. Powell, for his part, was a man of astonishing industry and intelligence, and of speed and precision in writing. His memos to Mrs Thatcher, flowing almost constantly through day and night and often over weekends, form a uniquely full and eloquent documentation of the years he served her (1984–90). They expounded policy lucidly, and gave masterly, often witty explanations of diplomacy and dealing with other world leaders and with ministers. They also mirrored and prompted her thoughts, which enhanced their freedom to act and thus their power. ‘Please don’t misunderstand this, but in a strange sense it was quite hard to tell what was me and what was her,’ Powell reflected.* ‘I knew her way of doing things and what she wanted, so I could pretty much read her mind.’196† Mrs Thatcher was right to value Ingham and Powell extremely highly, and also to trust them. At the time of Westland, her private office was not working very well. Her principal private secretary, Nigel Wicks, though able and hard working, was too cautious, anxious and reactive to give the necessary lead. He and David Norgrove, her newish Treasury private secretary, had failed to foresee the embarrassment of being isolated at her meeting with Nigel Lawson and others over ERM entry in November 1985 (see Chapter 13). As the Westland trouble blew up, she needed a more adroit service. Powell saw the vacuum and filled it with panache. Indeed, it is completely impossible to imagine Mrs Thatcher being able to find her way through the Westland crisis without Powell’s help. ‘She was professionally extremely well served by Powell and Ingham,’ Stephen Sherbourne recalled, ‘and she relied on Charles even more than Bernard. But I do think it was a problem. They were too personal to her and too powerful.’197
Once Powell and Ingham were so widely reported, this became a problem in itself. As the several select committees geared up to investigate the Westland affair, one of the issues which arose was whether the officials involved, including Colette Bowe at the DTI and Powell and Ingham, should appear before them. Robert Armstrong had to deploy all his arguments about lack of precedent and ‘double jeopardy’ (he had already interviewed them for his own inquiry) to stop them being forced to appear. The highest official and political energies had to be put into the defence of people who, in theory, were not of the highest rank. This succeeded, though with considerable strain. Robert Armstrong appeared on behalf of the officials as, for the DTI, did Brian Hayes. As a result, both Ingham and Powell survived and grew in their importance to Mrs Thatcher, who had only to hear her good people attacked to defend them even more forthrightly. If they had fallen, that would have been disastrous for her, but the fact that they stayed on, their power undiminished, was damaging too. The pattern of Westland, the idea of a kitchen Cabinet more powerful than the real one, was established. It would recur in differing forms in the coming years.
After months of hearings and deliberations, the Defence Select Committee reported, in terms which, though scarcely pleasing to the government, did not cause Mrs Thatcher further personal damage. The heat had gone out of the issue. The day the report was published, Bernard Ingham wrote sardonically to Wicks about his press briefing on it:
Remarkably little interest by a small lobby which lasted 10 minutes … I shook my head sadly, with much tut-tutting, about the splurge of leaks … This concern about leaks does not add up, I said … Would this be my last lobby? I doubted it; I hadn’t packed my pictures. There had of course already been expressions of confidence in the officials mentioned.198
The select committee had not been able to establish precisely what did happen in the affair of the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s letter. It raised the right questions about what the government was concealing, but could not fully answer them. The machine had managed – just – to exert enough discipline upon itself to stave off disaster. If the committee had known and published what had really happened, however, and had been allowed to question the officials involved, it is hard to see how Mrs Thatcher would have been able to remain in office.
The answers which Mrs Thatcher had given in the debate in which she finally prevailed over her enemies on 27 January had been the truth, but not the whole truth. She was lucky that the official at the centre of the leak row, C
olette Bowe, was a highly professional civil servant and, in her private views, a strong supporter of the Thatcher ‘revolution’. If she had not been, she could probably have brought the government down. Until speaking to the present author for this book, Bowe put all her personal records of the saga in a bank vault and said nothing to anyone, other than Armstrong’s inquiry, about what had happened.*
Colette Bowe had served in the DTI since the late 1970s, most recently as press secretary to Norman Tebbit, remaining in post after Brittan took over. In her recollection, the department had ‘felt a bit protective’ towards its reluctant and bruised new minister. When, in November, Heseltine suddenly began to turn the Westland issue into ‘a trial of strength with Mrs Thatcher’, Bowe and her colleagues thought it was ‘a bit unfair’.199 Brittan was not totally into the brief of this seemingly quite minor matter. It seemed to his civil servants that Mrs Thatcher was giving him tacit support, but ‘not explicit’, and he had to pursue government policy alone.200 Far from noticing Downing Street exerting too much authority, Bowe felt there was too little: ‘I thought “Where’s Nigel Wicks?” At that point, I had never even heard of Charles Powell.’201 ‘At the time,’ she recalled, ‘it all seemed puzzlingly chaotic. As I see it now, it looks as if there was some lack of control from the centre, and Heseltine was out of line: the Prime Minister was the only person who could really bring him back into line.’202
In the era before spin-doctors and mobile phones, let alone emails, holidays were considered sacred, and so when Colette Bowe took a fortnight’s leave for Christmas, she was completely out of touch. The same was true of Brittan’s private secretary, John Mogg.* When both returned to work on Monday 6 January, ‘it felt like a maelstrom,’ and it still seemed that ‘a central organising force was absent.’203 She came into the office that morning ‘not realising what was happening’.204 As endless phone calls from the press came in, Bowe fended them off by saying that the Cabinet meeting on Thursday would settle matters.
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