Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  The shift of political circumstances allowed Mrs Thatcher to make exactly the sort of speech she loved best, yet without it containing any message of defiance of Wets or moderates in her own party. She later recalled that the conference was ‘a total success. My recollection is at the end of that Bournemouth speech the message was you’ve really got to vote Conservative because Labour can’t be trusted with defence. We really had something to bite on.’196 The occasion was harmonious. The opinion polls responded, putting the Conservatives ahead of Labour for the first time since well before the Westland crisis.

  A fortnight after the Conservative conference, Jeffrey Archer was accused in the News of the World of arranging a cash pay-off for a prostitute who said she had slept with him. After a short period of blustering, in which he tried to resist the bringer of bad news, Michael Dobbs, he resigned as deputy chairman of the party. This was embarrassing for Mrs Thatcher, since, in appointing Archer, she had overruled advice that his judgment was unreliable. Now hers was criticized. Norman Tebbit was relieved. He had not wanted Archer appointed in the first place, and the peripatetic novelist was not the man to help him with what he most needed – tightening the nuts and bolts of Conservative Central Office as a general election approached.

  For this purpose, Tebbit had already, with Mrs Thatcher’s agreement, appointed another deputy chairman, Peter Morrison. Morrison, liked by Mrs Thatcher as a supporter even before she became leader of the party, and respected by colleagues as a hard-working if unglittering junior minister, was suitable for the task. He was loyal, well connected in the party and no political threat to anyone.*

  There were two problems with Morrison, the first a fact, the second a rumour, the two conceivably connected. The first was that he drank too much. This had begun because of severe back-pain,197 but had become habitual. Morrison was not a mercurial or loud-mouthed drunk, more a ‘woozy’ one, who ‘would start on a vodka and tonic at 12 o’clock’198 and could seem rather unfocused even as he toiled away. In the view of a doctor who observed him at the party conference at this time, he exhibited clear symptoms of alcoholism.199 In a culture where being drunk was commonplace, his rather quiet drinking did not stand out, but it did cause anxiety.

  The other problem was that rumours circulated about Morrison’s sexual behaviour. There were no very precise allegations, but suggestions that Morrison might have attended gay parties and engaged in casual pick-ups. As early as before the 1983 general election, the press sometimes ‘doorstepped’ Morrison and even, on one occasion, pursued him to his family’s estate on the island of Islay. Morrison was asked by whips about the accusations and always categorically denied them. The allegations put strain on him, and were thought to have contributed to his heavy drinking.200 Tebbit recalled, ‘I began to hear allegations, coming from his constituency [Chester], when he was with me at CCO, that he was excessively interested in schoolboys. I faced him. He swore absolutely that there was no truth in it. I wasn’t absolutely convinced.’201 Tebbit did not discuss the rumours with Mrs Thatcher, however, and she never raised them. The only effect of such stories was that an informal ceiling was put on Morrison’s career. He was known to want to be chairman of the party after the 1987 election, but it was understood that this would be too risky.202 Robin Butler recalled that, in his time as Mrs Thatcher’s principal private secretary, which ended in 1985, no accusations came up about Morrison. When Butler became Cabinet secretary in 1987, however, allegations did surface. They were about homosexuality, and therefore the possibility of being compromised by Soviet agents, rather than about child abuse.203*

  Unbeknown to Butler, the issue had arisen before. At the beginning of 1986, Robert Armstrong was made aware, through the Security Service, of rumours about Morrison. He asked his own office if there were any existing papers on the subject. An internal, undated, handwritten Cabinet Office note to him, signed ‘MS’, responded. ‘We have none,’ it said; ‘it appears that previous contacts have been oral and not recorded.’ It went on, ‘the rumours persist and have become more widespread but do not necessarily indicate anything new since 1983.’ The same note reported: ‘Nigel Wicks says that the PM is aware of the issue. He does not want any further enquiries made – just to keep our ears open.’204 On 13 January, Armstrong wrote to Sir Antony Duff, the head of MI5, telling him, ‘I have made sure that the Prime Minister is aware that there is a potential problem.’205*

  In June the following year, by which time Morrison was an energy minister as well as deputy chairman of the party, Armstrong wrote to Nigel Wicks, Mrs Thatcher’s principal private secretary in succession to Butler. Armstrong had heard that Morrison was to make a ministerial visit to the Soviet Union. He warned that there had been:

  persistent rumours in Fleet Street over the last six years of homosexual activities on the part of Mr Morrison. He has made it clear that, if anything was published, he would sue for libel … There must, however, be a high probability, amounting to a racing certainty – that the rumours have come to the notice of Russian intelligence. Mr Morrison would be liable to Russian attempts to compromise him.206

  Mrs Thatcher underlined this last sentence. Armstrong proposed that Morrison be accompanied at all times and ‘be strongly advised not to drink alcohol when he is in Russia’. ‘It would be a lot simpler for Cecil Parkinson to undertake this engagement at my request on seniority grounds,’ Mrs Thatcher wrote.† Parkinson duly went instead of Morrison.

  Similar questions about Morrison would later be raised, but the situation remained essentially the same. Mrs Thatcher was informed of nothing more than rumours, which Morrison had denied. No actual evidence was produced, nor did the police bring any charges, or even, so far as is known, issue a caution. Her attitude in such cases was to be careful (hence her suggestion of Parkinson replacing Morrison in Moscow), but not punitive. Anything else would, in her mind, have been unfair. It would also have been imprudent. Prime ministers are very frequently told unpleasant stories about their associates. They make terrible trouble for themselves if they follow all these whispers up. There was an added complication: what if Morrison, rather than breaking any law, had simply been trying to pick up homosexual partners? Mrs Thatcher did not herself approve of such behaviour, but neither did she think it was her business. As with the stories about Leon Brittan, Mrs Thatcher noted them, but did not act.

  Stories about Peter Morrison also reached Mrs Thatcher by other means. Barry Strevens, her detective, recalled being asked by a senior officer in the Cheshire constabulary to convey to the Prime Minister, probably in the autumn of 1987, that journalists had been ‘sniffing around’ all-male parties in Peter Morrison’s home in his Chester constituency, ‘particularly in relation to a 15-year-old’.207 She saw Strevens in her flat, in the presence of Archie Hamilton,* who had been appointed her parliamentary private secretary after the election. He told her about what he had been told, though not mentioning the fifteen-year-old. ‘She just thanked me for telling her.’208 But this story, too, did not constitute evidence. Indeed, according to Strevens, the police officer who told him himself ‘said it was just rumours’. No one, it seems, thought the matter should be followed up. Hamilton confirmed Strevens’s account of the meeting: ‘It was alleged that he had held a party, exclusively for men. He may have said “including young men”. The suggestion was that Peter was homosexual, not paedophile.’209 Hamilton, who had been a whip from 1982 to 1986, remembered hearing, in relation to Morrison, ‘vague rumours about public lavatories’, this at a time when ‘homosexuality itself was seen as dodgy.’ The whips’ attitude, however, was that if a crime had been suspected or committed, that was a matter for the police. They never heard any evidence or received any complaint. When Mrs Thatcher heard the story that Barry Strevens repeated, she said something like ‘Oh dear, well, there we are.’210 She did not feel that rumours of homosexuality (or of personal behaviour of which she privately disapproved) required any action on her part.

  Whatever the truth about Morrison,
he worked harmoniously with Tebbit in Central Office. The spirits of the Conservatives, and particularly of Mrs Thatcher herself, began to rise. Almost all the economic indicators were favourable. Even unemployment, which had hit its highest point ever in January 1986, was now starting to fall. In November, after the third monthly drop (and the sharpest since May 1983), it stood at 3,237,154.211 At the end of October, Big Bang in the City began successfully. In early December, 4.5 million applications for British Gas were received when it was privatized. Mrs Thatcher was getting rid of the rates. Everything seemed to be coming together. Composing her memoirs in the early 1990s, Mrs Thatcher recalled:

  It was only about 1986 that I realised that it was all going to be all right, because until that time I had been worried to death that this country had taken so much socialism that I wondered if the spirit of enterprise had left us. We were not getting the rate of formation of small businesses. Then by 1986, we began to come back … So I knew it was all right and it was just a question of getting it across.212

  It was about this time, Bernard Ingham recalled, that, one day sitting with Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street, ‘She seemed to experience a moment of pure joy. She believed that, at last, her policies really were working.’213

  16

  Against Queen and Commonwealth

  ‘Blacks and their families out of work. Moral? Poof!’

  Over the summer of 1986, as Mrs Thatcher sought to recover her domestic political standing, she was also engaged in a struggle on the international stage over her approach to South Africa. Her opposition to economic sanctions designed to put pressure on the white minority government and her decision to maintain contact with the Prime Minister (later State President) P. W. Botha* were extremely controversial policies. Mrs Thatcher was accused at home and abroad of being a sympathizer with apartheid. The issue dominated two Commonwealth conferences – at Nassau in 1985 and London in 1986 – when friends and allies insisted that Mrs Thatcher was putting British business interests before the interests of the black people of South Africa. The rows over South Africa did lasting damage to Mrs Thatcher’s relationship with her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, and famously caused a rift between No. 10 and Buckingham Palace. In Mrs Thatcher’s mind, however, there was a purpose behind all this conflict with the establishment, both at home and abroad. She wished to assert Britain’s right to its own trade – Britain was one of South Africa’s largest trading partners and the largest single investor – and its own foreign policy, and she saw domestic political advantage in doing this. She believed that British influence could do more for the multi-racial future of South Africa by engaging with its white government than by shunning it. While her policy earned her opprobrium in many quarters, it struck a chord with significant sections of British society.† By the end of 1986, she had survived the assaults of the Commonwealth and her own Foreign Secretary, and maintained her position to be developed in better days.

  In her first term, Mrs Thatcher’s approach to southern Africa had been governed by the problem of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (see Volume I, Chapter 16). Once this had been settled, and with it the last British colonial responsibility in mainland Africa, she felt freer to concentrate on the most important country on the continent. Three factors predominated in her mind – the importance of British trade and kinship with South Africa, a desire to bring a peaceful end to apartheid and white minority rule, and a Cold War fear of Soviet adventurism in the region. She was more ambitious than her predecessors to influence change, but she saw it as her task to keep these three factors in balance. While it is true that Mrs Thatcher opposed the sanctions for which other nations were increasingly clamouring because she believed they would damage British business, she also believed that they would impoverish blacks in South Africa and make the white government retreat into the ‘laager’. As early as 1980, she chided South Africa’s Foreign Minister, R. F. ‘Pik’ Botha,* about his attitude to black Africans and told him not to assume that policy was ‘only a question of economics and hunger: questions of dignity mattered.’1 This simple sentiment filled out, later on, into a considered, if controversial policy.

  In the mid-1980s, the Cold War factor was uppermost in Mrs Thatcher’s mind. She was determined to get Cuban forces – proxies of the Soviet Union – out of the former Portuguese colony of Angola and to make sure that independence for Namibia,† which was illegally occupied by South African forces, should be linked with the withdrawal of the Cubans. She was suspicious of the largest black grouping in South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC), because of its links with the Communist Party and its intermittent use of violence. She feared its monopoly power: ‘they don’t represent all the Africans, all the interests must be protected’.2

  There is no doubt, however, that Mrs Thatcher thought that apartheid was unjust – a form of oppressive ‘racial socialism’3 which forcibly moved people hither and thither, kept them poor and denied their human worth and their right to vote. All along, as the last State President of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk,* recalled, the white leaders of South Africa knew that she ‘never supported apartheid’.4 Indeed, she regarded it with what she called ‘total abhorrence and loathing’.5 From 1984, she believed that Nelson Mandela,† the most prominent imprisoned black leader, and other ANC prisoners should be released from prison. Even in captivity, Mandela recognized Mrs Thatcher as a leader he would want to have on his side.‡ ‘She is an enemy of apartheid,’ he said not long after he was released from prison in 1990.6

  Mrs Thatcher sought the replacement of white power, but not its violent overthrow. In this sense, her attitude to change in South Africa resembled her attitude to change in the Soviet Union in the Gorbachev era: she opposed the existing regime and wanted it replaced, but not in such a way that the country would collapse into revolution.

  What was also true, however – unlike with the Soviet Union – was that Mrs Thatcher had personal sympathies with the tribe who dominated South Africa: the whites. Denis Thatcher had relations there, and often visited on business. It was to South Africa that he went in 1964, when he suffered a nervous breakdown and thought that his marriage to Margaret was on the rocks (see Volume I, pp. 173–4). He always called it ‘God’s own country’,7 resented attempts to break its participation in Test cricket and international rugby, and had a low opinion of the efficiency of black African governments. He was caustic, too, about the capacity of the Commonwealth either to understand or to improve the situation. This was what the Commonwealth Secretary-General, ‘Sonny’ Ramphal,§ called Mrs Thatcher’s ‘pillow-talk’8 on the subject of South Africa. Denis’s wife shared her husband’s irritation with the Commonwealth, but was much less cynical about the possibility of majority rule in South Africa. She actively sought to meet dissidents and leaders of all races working for such change by peaceful means. She was more shocked than Denis by the indignities inflicted on the black population. Her views, in fact, rarely differed from those of Helen Suzman,* the veteran liberal white South African anti-apartheid politician, with whom she had friendly relations. She firmly believed, however, that British interests in South Africa and the interests of British passport holders in the country – of whom there were about 800,000† – must be looked after. So her strategy was peaceful transition, and her tactic was one of engagement with the people central to such a change – the white government itself.

  Mrs Thatcher was correct that Britain, because of its history and its economic and human presence, had greater salience in South Africa than any other Western country. But she was also conscious that the same history made the issue a delicate one. The white government of South Africa was composed almost solely of Afrikaners, not those of British descent. The ruling National Party saw itself as the heir of the men who had fought the Boer War against British imperial domination at the turn of the twentieth century. Its victory in the South African elections of 1948 had been a repudiation of the British legacy. Full apartheid, which the new National Party government established after 1948,
was seen by its supporters as a means of securing for Afrikaners the power and prosperity of which Britain had robbed them. So lectures from a British prime minister about how best the South African government should behave could easily backfire. In this sense – though both would have been enraged by the comparison – the South African Prime Minister (later President) P. W. Botha resembled the Zimbabwean Prime Minister (later State President) Robert Mugabe. Both saw themselves as part of a liberation struggle against Britain. Mrs Thatcher knew that if she were to persuade the National Party leaders of anything, she must not preach at them.