At lunchtime that day, Bowe was asked by John Mogg to join him in the private office of Leon Brittan, who was out to lunch. He and Jon Michell, the other DTI civil servant chiefly involved, there showed her a copy of the Solicitor-General’s letter to Heseltine, which had been expected and had recently arrived. The original had just been sent to Heseltine. Bowe read it: ‘I sucked my teeth.’205 Michell explained that the Westland board was holding its press conference at 4 p.m. and people needed to have heard the news of the letter by that time. Mogg then rang Brittan, fishing him out of his lunch. He told him that the letter had arrived and reminded him of the timing. ‘It’s her [that is, Mrs Thatcher’s] letter,’ Brittan told Mogg. ‘If she wants it done, fine. Get it in the public domain, but clear it first with No. 10.’206 Mogg recalled: ‘I had to ring Charles [Powell] to confirm that action should take place.’207 Powell told him that the letter must be got into the public domain. Both men spoke, in Mogg’s view, as private secretary to private secretary, working on the implicit assumption that if the private secretary says something is wanted, he does so on behalf of his principal. Besides, ‘Charles was extremely good at interpreting what his boss wanted: he was speaking with her authority.’208 Mogg asked how best to get the letter out and Powell said, ‘I’ve given a copy to Bernard.’209 Powell also, however, ‘somehow conveyed that No. 10 did not want to do the business itself’.210 To Bowe, who previously had no inkling of No. 10’s involvement, ‘That did not seem an unreasonable position.’211 Mogg then reported the call to Bowe and asked her to ring Ingham. ‘Hang on,’ said Bowe, worried at what was happening. ‘This is a letter from a Law Officer. Let’s ring Brian Hayes [the Permanent Secretary].’212 They tried, but Hayes was out of town in a car (in the days before government cars were automatically supplied with car-phones)† and could not be reached. Given the pressure of time, she agreed to ring Ingham.
Bowe and Ingham were colleagues and had, she thought, ‘a warm relationship’.213 He was not her boss – in those days, unlike in the Blair era, there was no media command system across Whitehall – but he was the most senior of her tribe. Because of the Mogg–Powell conversation, she did not believe that, in ringing Ingham, she was raising a question of whether or not the letter should be leaked. She thought she was having a conversation between professionals about ‘ways and means’ of leaking (she preferred the word ‘disclosing’), about ‘who does what’.214 In his version of events, Ingham recalled that Bowe told him, ‘I’ve got permission to leak this letter.’215 ‘My eyebrows [his most famous attribute: they were very bushy] hit the ceiling,’ he said, and they did not resume their normal position when she went on, ‘We want you to leak it.’ He refused, but did not try to prevent her: ‘I had no authority over her.’216 For her part, Bowe remembered asking Ingham, ‘What’s supposed to be happening?’ He replied, ‘Charles has given a copy of the letter to me and says it must be got out.’ He added, however, ‘I’ve got to keep the PM above the fray.’217* ‘I took a deep breath,’ Bowe recalled, ‘and thought “OK, I’ll have to do it.” ’ ‘I’ll give it to Chris [Moncrieff of the Press Association],’ she told Ingham, who asked her if Moncrieff would protect the source. She said he would, so he agreed. She did not feel she was under orders from Ingham or that he had bullied her, but she did believe that if he had advised against she would not have leaked. ‘There’s an implicit contract here’ was how she put it nearly thirty years later. ‘I was either Rosencrantz,’ Bowe said, ‘or Guildenstern.’218 She leaked, getting hold of Chris Moncrieff just after 2 p.m. All hell duly broke loose that afternoon.
The next morning, Colette Bowe was wrestling with the consequences of the leak when John Whittingdale, Brittan’s special adviser, came to see her. He had just been to No. 10, he said, where it had been made clear to him that ‘the PM is very relaxed about the Solicitor-General’s letter.’219 The idea was that this message should be conveyed to Brittan. In the minds of the DTI, therefore, they felt they had been given cover from No. 10 both before and after the fact. No one at No. 10 had criticized them for the leak. They were stunned when Mrs Thatcher announced the inquiry. ‘We gasped. We said, “What on earth is this inquiry for?” ’220
Charles Powell gave a different account of his conversation with John Mogg. He believed Mogg, ‘a fairly devious fellow’, had set him up, for use ‘posthumously’ when people started to ask questions.221 Powell denied telling Mogg that the letter had to be made public. Instead, he recalled Mogg asking, ‘Is this all going to reach the press?’ to which Powell replied, ‘I expect it will: everything else seems to.’ Powell pointed to the conversation between Ingham and Bowe ‘which seems to have gone rather further than that’. That too was part of the ‘set-up’ by the DTI of No. 10, Powell believed. He did not give the DTI oblique permission to leak, he maintained: press relations were not his job. As soon as Brittan resigned, the former DTI Secretary wanted Powell out as well, as a punishment to Mrs Thatcher for letting her loyal minister go, inadequately defended.222
These ‘who did what?’ arguments – a customary form of recrimination after something goes wrong – might not have mattered much had it not been for Armstrong’s inquiry. But once this began, the officials feared that it might turn into sauve qui peut. It was natural that Robert Armstrong, appalled by the damage done to the reputation of the Prime Minister, to his own Cabinet Office and to the Civil Service, would look for scapegoats, most likely Bowe, Mogg and Michell. Luckily for them, their Permanent Secretary, Sir Brian Hayes, insisted on accompanying Bowe to her meetings with Armstrong, and threatened to resign if his officials were punished.223 Bowe was particularly incensed by the idea that her leak was a breach of the Official Secrets Act and was therefore being compared with the case of Clive Ponting. She had been acting under authority, she maintained, and her action had been inspired by the opposite motives to Ponting’s – to save her minister and the government from embarrassment. She told Armstrong the full story, including about the message from No. 10, relayed by Whittingdale, to the DTI. She warned the Cabinet Office officials conducting the leak inquiry that if she were charged under the Official Secrets Act, ‘I’ll see you in court.’224*
Bowe’s story explains why Armstrong’s inquiry found as it did, and why the officials concerned could not be permitted to appear in front of the select committee. In his own evidence, Armstrong had to give an accurate account of what had happened which nevertheless involved a good deal of suppressio veri. If Bowe had told a parliamentary committee what had passed between her and Ingham (which in turn involved what Powell had said to Mogg), and had then revealed what she knew about Mrs Thatcher’s support for the leak, the storm would have broken upon Mrs Thatcher’s head. Hence the very careful words chosen by Mrs Thatcher in which she said that she had favoured the Solicitor-General’s letter being in the public domain but had not known of the method of getting it there and would not have approved of it if she had. Hence the importance of stating that all the officials involved were part of ‘a genuine difference of understanding’. And hence, too, Mrs Thatcher’s insistence that she had not asked what really happened before she heard the result of the Armstrong inquiry. Of course she had not asked what really happened: she was quite cunning enough to understand that the answer would be highly embarrassing to know. In the weeks in which the select committee was accumulating its material, Mrs Thatcher more than once wrote to her officials warning against what she called ‘spurious accuracy’.225 She meant, which is true, that people asked for formal evidence sometimes answer with a precision that their memory does not justify. But what she really feared in this case was accuracy itself. As Charles Powell himself put it, ‘Her hands were not entirely clean.’226
At the end of January, Mrs Thatcher received two contradictory signals. Ingham warned her that, among the lobby, the government was seen as ‘tossing on a sea of trouble … I get the feeling that there is a great deal of gossip going on in the party and that Cabinet Ministers are participants. They are described as extremely
worried about the next election and in need of rallying.’227 But her postbag told a different story. During the week of 31 January, the political office reported that Mrs Thatcher had received some 700 letters (five times the usual number). ‘Virtually all these letters expressed their unqualified support for your leadership.’228 By mid-February Mrs Thatcher was trying to move on from the affair. It had been ‘a very, very difficult few weeks’, she told the Finchley Times, but ‘that’s all behind us now.’229 Armstrong wrote a letter to the DTI at the end of his inquiry saying that ‘no official acted culpably or irresponsibly in this matter’ and that all should continue in their work with their careers unaffected. But opinion was not so ready to give a clean bill of health to Mrs Thatcher. This was not because many agreed with Michael Heseltine. Although he was admired for his panache and supported by some in his interventionist industrial policies, few in the Tory Party shared his obsession with the Westland issue, and most of them thought it confected for his own advantage. His vanity was widely commented on (‘What a conceited thing he is,’ wrote the loyal backbencher Fergus Montgomery to Mrs Thatcher).230 It was also acknowledged that it is not easy to run a government when one of its senior members decides to kick over the traces. In being slow to take Heseltine in hand, Mrs Thatcher had erred on the side of trusting colleagues rather than throwing her weight about. As she understandably protested, if she had acted earlier, critics would have said: ‘there you are! Old Bossy Boots at it again.’231 It really was not her fault that Heseltine sought a fight, and it is clear from the evidence that he, not she, was the first to throw a spanner in the works of collective responsibility.
It was the other things the Westland affair exposed which were so difficult for Mrs Thatcher. By the end of it all, her government resembled a man who has suddenly had a tooth knocked out, and has not been to the dentist for a long time. When he is examined, it turns out that his whole mouth is in bad shape. Not much worked well that December and January – not Cabinet government, nor the Cabinet Office; not the whips’ management of party opinion, nor media presentation; not interdepartmental relations, nor her private office. Blame naturally attached to the woman supposed to be in charge of all of the above. This blame was not only ex officio: it also dwelt on her personal defects. If, in her own phrase, Westland was ‘a drama of personalities, not realities’,232 one of the two main personalities was hers, and the story did not show her in a favourable light. Two of her strongest qualities – her leadership competence and her integrity – fell under question in a way that had not really happened before. ‘The Tory Party isn’t expected to behave like that,’ she wrote to a supporter in the middle of the crisis.233 The affair of the Solicitor-General’s letter showed that she, too, had fallen short of expected behaviour.
As for her much discussed ‘style of government’, the crisis exposed how Mrs Thatcher, as Charles Powell put it, ‘operated in two parallel universes’.234 One was ‘the Government’, with its institutions, procedures, committees and so on. She saw this as somewhat alien and was quite capable of saying ‘What on earth does the Government think it is up to?’, as if she were not at its head. The other was ‘her universe’235 of ‘inspiration, ideas, argument, great causes’. In her universe, ‘she saw herself as a lonely campaigner’ overcoming formalism and ‘being an identifiable figure-head for change’. ‘To use an Everest analogy,’ Powell went on, ‘she needed the Expedition/Government to get her up to a certain altitude. After that she just needed herself and a few Sherpas. The dangers of self-exaltation are obvious.’ In the case of Westland, when the two universes collided, ‘she showed an uncertain touch: seeing herself as leading a campaign for the right of the market to decide while lacking the political guile to dish Heseltine’s squalid manoeuvres.’236 Powell observed, in this case and at all times, ‘a strange innocence or naivety about her which most people thought a fake, but was terrifyingly real!’237
Although Mrs Thatcher exhibited definite signs of unease at what she had done, she learnt the wrong lesson from the Westland debacle. Her most trusted associates, the objects of opprobrium in the crisis, noticed this more than anyone. According to Bernard Ingham, ‘Her arteries certainly hardened.’238 After Westland, ‘She was always playing things very close to her chest and felt she had to in order to keep government going.’ Charles Powell, who had ‘thought I’d be made to walk the plank’, was grateful for her loyalty, but noticed ‘no regret or revision’ in her mind about how to govern. Indeed, though temporarily reined in, she became more arbitrary in her attitudes. She was very angry, for example, that Clive Whitmore, her former principal private secretary, had not helped her deal with Heseltine. She ignored the fact that, as his Permanent Secretary, Whitmore owed his loyalty to him, not to her. ‘It cost Clive Whitmore any possibility he might have had of being Cabinet Secretary,’ she said when writing her memoirs, ‘because I really felt at this time he should have warned us.’239 Nor did she see the need to start cultivating backbenchers in the tea room again, as she had done in her early days. ‘They’ve chosen someone to lead them, and that’s what I do,’ she told Powell: they could like it or lump it.240 She was reinforced in her self-confidence by the view – surely correct in itself – that she had been right about the subject. It would have been ludicrous and inconsistent if the government she led had organized a European, monopolistic, state-backed rescue for Westland when a reasonable private sector buyer was available. She often was right when others were wrong, thanks to her courage and independence of mind; but, at this crucial juncture, she failed to pause and think self-critically about what had gone amiss.
The other big event in Britain at the beginning of 1986 was Rupert Murdoch’s coup against the print unions. Under their noses, he had secretly prepared his Wapping plant to produce all his British newspapers – The Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World. For years, the print unions, perhaps the most unreformed and resistant to new technology of all British unions, had refused to agree to a move to Wapping from the papers’ separate, existing ‘hot-metal’ sites at the back of their respective newspapers. Early in the spring of 1985, Murdoch decided to move against his long-standing tormentors. He had seen how the regional newspaper proprietor Eddie Shah had won his dispute with the unions over printing the Warrington Messenger in late 1983. Shah had invoked the Thatcher administration’s new union laws to overcome the mass pickets which beset his plant after he had sacked six members of the print union, the National Graphical Association, and de-recognized the unions. ‘We felt the atmosphere was changing. And we had this plant lying idle.’241 Murdoch decided to go ahead without any agreement, in secret, and make Wapping ready with the new technology to prepare and print all his newspapers. He invented a cover story that he was using the site to launch a London ‘24-hour’ paper, the London Post. With a strange lack of curiosity, neither the unions nor the media worked out what was really going on.
On 24 January 1986, the day, by coincidence, of Leon Brittan’s resignation, 6,000 News International workers went on strike against the company’s attempts to modernize technology and print an extra section of the Sunday Times in Wapping. This confrontation suited Murdoch’s plan. On the same day, he activated it. Instead of the print unions, he had arranged with the right-wing Electricians’ Union (the EETPU), which, under Frank Chapple and then Eric Hammond, had a long history of fighting Communist infiltration, to replace the printers with their members overnight, and get the papers out. He sacked all those who were on strike. To circumvent the attempted union boycott of newspaper distribution that followed, he used his own freight company, TNT, to transport the papers by road rather than rail. Large crowds of often violent pickets – several thousands on Saturday nights – assembled outside the Wapping plant to try to prevent workers going in. One of the tricks of the protesters was to throw darts into the rumps of police horses, causing them to rear up and making it look, for the benefit of cameras, as if they were trying to crush the pickets. Some journalists refused to take
part in the move to Wapping. The Labour Party announced that it would not deal with representatives of the Murdoch papers.
Mrs Thatcher was not, naturally, part of this plan. According to Murdoch, he never rang her during the dispute: ‘I avoided all contacts with her so that if anyone asked, she’d be in a stronger position.’242 But in the summer of 1985, Charles Douglas-Home, the editor of The Times (who was to die of cancer later in the year), had been to see her to tell her ‘This is a very serious thing, and we’re going ahead.’243 Murdoch believed that, as a result of this, Mrs Thatcher informed the then Home Secretary, Brittan, about the potential need for large numbers of police, as had been required so often in the miners’ strike. As Murdoch himself put it, ‘We would probably not have done it if she hadn’t reformed the unions.’244 News International’s victory in the contest was extremely important to her. This was the first front-rank private sector fight with the unions since her reforms. If it turned out that the newspaper industry could be beaten, then her previous achievements in the field would be set back, and the issue which made so much of Fleet Street support her so strongly would have been lost.
Yet the astonishing fact is that, among the Prime Minister’s papers in the government’s possession, there is no file about the Wapping dispute, and virtually no mention of any kind. The same is almost equally true of Mrs Thatcher’s private papers. This is not because her contacts over the dispute were considered too secret to be recorded, but because there were almost none. There is a perfectly good reason for this. She had brought about a reform of the law so successful that the battle needed no management by government. This reflects her success. But there is a further reason. Because of the Westland effect, Mrs Thatcher was so weakened that she did not dare engage in the argument which raged about Wapping. Her answers to Commons questions on the subject were fully supportive, but restrained and slightly distanced: ‘I wish those newspapers well in their efforts to print on the latest equipment. Management and everyone else, including trade unions, are entitled to take full advantage of the law.’245 Kenneth Clarke, her anti-Thatcherite employment minister, felt emboldened to criticize Murdoch for his bad ‘public relations’ in the dispute, and she did not feel strong enough to slap him down. Luckily for her, Murdoch prevailed: after about a year, the picketing collapsed. A new era for British newspapers had begun.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 Page 64
