* In the Daily Telegraph, T. E. Utley wrote that ‘Gow’s resignation has done something to improve the moral health of public life.’ On the whole the press supported the Agreement and had little sympathy with Unionist defiance (‘Press Digest’, Ingham to Thatcher, 18 November 1985, CAC: THCR 3/5/50).
† An Irish-language version of the Agreement was issued by the Irish government, though it had no standing in domestic or international law.
* According to Michael Lillis, who drafted these words, the point FitzGerald was trying to convey was that this event should portend an end to the humiliation for successive generations of Nationalists (Interview with Michael Lillis).
* Mrs Thatcher, it appeared, did not take this to heart. Paisley might be a ‘hardliner’, she told President Reagan several months later, ‘but not a terrorist; his bark is worse than his bite’. (Memcon, 4 May 1986, Exec Sec, NSC System I, #8603593, Reagan Library.)
† They all retained their seats by this process, except for one seat, gained by Seamus Mallon of the SDLP.
‡ After the Agreement had been signed, King worked hard to implement it. ‘He was a loyal trouper,’ recalled Richard Ehrman, then King’s special adviser. ‘He managed to keep the lid on the Unionist reaction … He won back Thatcher’s respect because she realized what a hot potato the Agreement became.’ (Interview with Richard Ehrman.)
§ Mrs Thatcher received letters from wives and mothers of RUC officers who were worried about security. ‘I can well understand the anguish you must feel as a mother of three police officers in the Royal Ulster Constabulary,’ she replied to one. ‘I have nothing but the deepest admiration for their courage and fortitude in carrying out their duties in the most difficult circumstances.’ (Thatcher letter, 7 May 1986, CAC: THCR 3/2/190.)
* Notably, she had been told of FitzGerald’s difficulties signing up to the ECST.
* See the reflections of Michael Lillis and David Goodall on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, in ‘Edging towards Peace’, Dublin Review of Books, issue 16, Winter 2010 (http://www.drb.ie/essays/edging-towards-peace). The view that Mrs Thatcher paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement was repeated by many commentators after her death. See, for example, the Irish Times, 9 April 2013.
† In private, she cast around for someone to blame for a decision she now regretted. ‘It was the pressure from the Americans that made me sign the Agreement,’ she told Alistair McAlpine. (Alistair McAlpine, Once a Jolly Bagman: Memoirs, Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1997, p. 272.) In fact, while American views mattered, there is precious little evidence that they ever came close to being decisive.
* The old business vote in local elections had long been abolished.
* An additional irritation for the government was that the bills from the GLC and the metropolitan counties were not separately received by ratepayers, but were ‘precepts’ – sums added to the rates bill sent out by the lower-tier councils (in London, the boroughs). This meant that voters were often confused about which extravagant authorities were hitting their pockets. Conservative boroughs could, and did, see their rates shoot up because of profligate Labour metropolitan county councils.
* Terence (‘Terry’) Heiser (1932–), educated Windsor County Boys’ School and Birkbeck College, University of London; joined Civil Service, 1949; various posts culminating in permanent secretary of the Department of the Environment, 1985–92; knighted 1992. As permanent secretary he was the most senior civil servant dealing with the poll tax.
† The sanest version of these ideas appears in John Campbell’s biography. He speaks of ‘delayed revenge for her repressed and joyless childhood’. (Campbell, Margaret Thatcher: The Iron Lady, p. 375.)
* In July of the same year, Jenkin had written to Mrs Thatcher arguing for a rate revaluation in England ‘now that we have decided that rates are here to stay’ (Jenkin to Thatcher, 27 July 1983, TNA: PREM 19/1565 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/141600)). The fact that her own Secretary of State thought the government had abandoned rate reform for good shows that Mrs Thatcher had not made her mind understood.
* Stephen Sherbourne, who had been Jenkin’s special adviser in the previous Parliament, when he was Industry Secretary, remembered a meeting before the 1983 general election in which his boss saw, for the first time, the policy of GLC abolition expressed in the manifesto. Jenkin ‘showed surprise and a touch of shock’. (Interview with Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury.)
† The Militant Tendency was a long-standing Trotskyist entry group in the Labour movement. Although it was forbidden to affiliate to Labour in 1982, and several of its leading figures were expelled from the party the following year, it continued to play an important subversive role in Labour, particularly in local government, for most of the 1980s. Militant was the name of its journal, allowing members to say, when challenged, ‘Militant is not an organization: it’s a newspaper.’ This, said Ken Livingstone, who, despite his own left-wing views, hated Militant’s ideological rigidity, was ‘always a lie’. (Interview with Ken Livingstone.)
‡ Derek Hatton (1948–), educated Liverpool Institute for Boys; deputy leader, Liverpool City Council, 1983; expelled from the Labour Party in 1986 for belonging to Militant.
* Although the phrase ‘political correctness’ was not yet current.
† Letwin admitted that ‘One of the many people defeated by the complexity of the system was me.’ He remembered a meeting chaired by Whitelaw in which his own computer’s projection, happily accepted by those present, later turned out to be wrong by £10 billion. He had to apologize to Mrs Thatcher for this. She was indulgent of what she called ‘computer error’. (Interview with Oliver Letwin.)
‡ This arose from a trick of accounting by which councils could transfer money from rate funds into ‘special funds’; and then, in the following year, transfer it back again into ‘rate funds’ thus classifying it as ‘negative public expenditure’.
* Indeed, in her Carlton Lecture at the end of November, Mrs Thatcher advanced many of the points she had removed from her Brighton speech: ‘At the one end of the spectrum are the terrorist gangs within our borders, and the terrorist states which finance them and arm them. At the other are the Hard Left operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power and the apparatus of local government to break, defy and subvert the law’ (The Second Carlton Lecture, 26 November 1984 (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105799)).
* Only one Treasury civil servant, Jill Rutter, worked on the studies. Although highly regarded, she held quite junior rank at this time. According to Nigel Lawson, the only reason for her presence was ‘so that we could know what was going on’. (Interview with Lord Lawson of Blaby.) It was ‘my initiative’ to join the team, Rutter insisted. ‘The Treasury didn’t want the thing at all.’ (Interview with Jill Rutter.)
† Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild (3rd Baron Rothschild) (1910–90), educated Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge; scientist; chairman, N. M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd, 1975–6; director-general, Central Policy Review Staff, Cabinet Office, 1971–4; chairman, Rothschilds Continuation Ltd, 1976–88.
‡ Leonard ‘Lennie’ Hoffmann (1934–), educated South African College School, Cape Town and the Queen’s College, Oxford; judge; served as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, 1995–2009; knighted, 1985; created Lord Hoffmann, 1995.
* David Blunkett (1947–), educated Shrewsbury College of Technology and Richmond College of Further Education; leader, Sheffield City Council, 1980–87; Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside, 1987–2010; for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, 2010–15; Secretary of State for Education and Employment, 1997–2001; for Home Department, 2001–4; for Work and Pensions, 2005; granted a peerage in the Dissolution Honours List, 2015.
† This approach became known as the doctrine of ‘quarter past twelve’.
* It may be asked why an increase in rateable values automatically produced an increase in rates. After all, it was open to councils to charge a lower rate in the pound. The
answer – apart from the perennial desire of local government, especially Labour local government, to get more money whenever it could – lay in the fact that revaluation put some values down when it put others up, so payments were bound to alter to reflect this. This created new winners, and new losers.
* Whitelaw was held in great respect by both officials and ministers for his shrewdness, and this led Cabinet committee colleagues to disbelieve his self-deprecation when he told them in meetings that he did not understand the complex system of rates and grants in Scotland. They gradually realized that he was telling the truth: ‘They thought he was fooling. He wasn’t. He didn’t really understand it at all’ (Interview with Sir Brian Unwin). Whitelaw was not alone in his incomprehension.
† Those involved disagreed about Rothschild’s personal influence on Mrs Thatcher. Robin Butler and Charles Powell believed that it was small, and even, in Powell’s view, that she ‘did not like him much’. (Interviews with Lord Powell of Bayswater and Lord Butler of Brockwell.) Others – Waldegrave, Letwin – put his influence much higher. It is true that Rothschild was not close to Mrs Thatcher, but it is also true that he carried intellectual and social prestige, and this weighed with her.
* A Green Paper is the Whitehall phrase for an official document which sets out government plans for a piece of legislation in an early, relatively tentative version, offering them for consultation. A White Paper, which always comes after the Green, is the final version of the plans before they take actual legislative form.
* The word ‘charge’ was favoured by supporters of reform, including Mrs Thatcher, because it reflected the costs of local government to those who used its services, rather than being a ‘tax’ for general purposes. Nigel Lawson regarded this argument as ‘completely bogus’. (Interview with Lord Lawson of Blaby.)
† Waldegrave had been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, since 1971.
‡ Waldegrave writes a clear and amusing account of the poll tax story in A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir, Constable, 2015. It begins, ‘The poll tax is the issue to which most people attribute Thatcher’s fall; and I was central to it’ (p. 218). Oddly, he makes no mention of the Chequers meeting, which was his moment of greatest triumph in the saga.
* Lawson’s memo of 16 May 1985 is extensively quoted and his views on the poll tax fully recorded in his memoirs The View from No. 11, chs. 45 and 46.
* The press did later run some stories (The Times, for example, on 23 September) that the Chancellor did not support the poll tax. But they did not attract much attention. Internal discipline kept the disagreement subterranean.
* This was not a universal view. William Waldegrave considered Department of the Environment officials such as Robin Young and Anthony Mayer, who worked for his unit, as among the very best he had ever met. He did not take refuge later in the excuse of poor-quality advice: ‘I don’t know an occasion when more firepower was produced.’ (Interview with Lord Waldegrave of North Hill.)
* Kenneth Baker wrote to Mrs Thatcher: ‘When I met them last week David Sheppard called Hatton “wicked”. That is quite something from a Bishop’ (Baker to Thatcher, 1 October 1985, TNA: PREM 19/1562).
* A tax is ‘progressive’ if the proportion of tax paid rises as the income rises, ‘regressive’ if the proportion decreases. These are not terms of praise or blame (necessarily), simply of fiscal description.
* The fullest and best account of the poll tax story is Failure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll Tax, by David Butler, Andrew Adonis and Tony Travers, Oxford University Press, 1994. Many of its criticisms of the policy are right, and well evidenced. It suffers, however, from being so certain of Mrs Thatcher’s malice towards the very idea of local government itself that it does not do justice to the seriousness of her government’s quest for better accountability. If the government had not sought better accountability, it would never have chosen the poll tax.
† An important part of the politicization of councils which she resented was the tendency of Labour members to be elected representatives on one council and salaried employees of another. She saw this as an abuse of public money and also of power. This was a subject on which Denis Thatcher particularly liked to fulminate.
* The term ‘residence charge’ (or ‘resident’s charge’ or ‘residents’ charge’) was, at this stage, still competing with ‘community charge’.
† The only important Conservative who wanted Scotland to go first precisely because the poll tax was damaging (though not because he bore ill will to Scotland) was Nigel Lawson: ‘I thought, “If Younger is so keen, let him introduce it.” I hoped it would then become clear what a disaster it was. At least this would prevent it being done across the nation.’ (Interview with Lord Lawson of Blaby.)
* Brian Unwin (1935–), educated Chesterfield School, New College, Oxford and Yale University; civil servant; Treasury, 1968–85; seconded to the Cabinet Office, 1981–3; Deputy Secretary, Cabinet Office, 1985–7; knighted, 1990.
* Waldegrave succeeded Baker as minister for local government in September 1985, but at the time when he took on the Local Government Finance Studies he was only the Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the department.
* Lawson, untypically, was muddling his reference. ‘King Charles’s head’ is a phrase from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. The amiable Mr Dick has a mental quirk which always returns his conversation to the subject of King Charles’s head. Lawson seems to have used the phrase to suggest her nemesis or fatal flaw. Perhaps he meant ‘Achilles heel’. (Or perhaps Baker misremembered it.)
* In 2000, Ken Livingstone became the first directly elected mayor of London. In a curious way, he felt grateful to Mrs Thatcher: ‘The abolition of the GLC became an issue of democracy and people’s rights. If she’d just ignored me, I would never have become a public figure’ (Interview with Ken Livingstone).
* Michael Ancram, who had to help get the Scottish reform through the House in late 1986, disparaged this as ‘paying people to pay a tax’, but was overruled. (See Butler, Adonis and Travers, Failure in the British Government, p. 102.)
* Michael Ancram (13th Marquess of Lothian) (1945–), educated Ampleforth, Christ Church, Oxford and Edinburgh University; Conservative MP for Berwick and East Lothian, February–September 1974; for Edinburgh South, 1979–87; for Devizes, 1992–2010; Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Scottish Office, 1983–7; NIO, 1993–4; Minister of State, NIO, 1994–7; Chairman, Conservative Party in Scotland, 1980–83; Chairman, Conservative Party, 1998–2001; created life peer, 2010.
* Pierre Morel (1944–), diplomatic adviser to French President, 1991; French Ambassador to Georgia, 1992–3; to the Russian Federation and, at the same time, to Turkmenistan, Mongolia, Tadjikistan and Moldova, 1992–6; to Kirghizstan, 1993–6; to the People’s Republic of China, 1996–2002; to the Holy See, 2002–5; EU Special Representative for Central Asia since 2006; for the crisis in Georgia since 2008.
* Roland Dumas (1922–), French lawyer and Socialist politician; Minister for European Affairs, 1983–4; government spokesman, 1984; Foreign Minister, 1984–6 and 1988–93; President, Commission for Foreign Affairs, National Assembly, 1986–7; Chairman, Constitutional Council, 1995–2000.
† Claude Cheysson (1920–2012), French Socialist politician; European Commissioner, 1973–81; Foreign Minister, 1981–4; Member, European Parliament, 1989–94.
* Another came when she visited Moscow for Chernenko’s funeral in 1985 (see Chapter 9).
† David Williamson (1934–2015), educated Tonbridge and Exeter College, Oxford; Deputy Secretary, Cabinet Office, 1983–7; Secretary-General, European Commission, 1987–97; knighted, 1998; created Lord Williamson of Horton, 1999.
* Michael Butler (1927–2013), educated Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford; Ambassador and UK Permanent Representative to EEC, 1979–85; knighted, 1980.
† All matters having been settled, Pierre Morel put the first samples of the projected EEC/national passports on the lunch table for the l
eaders to peruse (Interview with Pierre Morel). These were unpopular in Britain and disliked by Mrs Thatcher, so it was perhaps fortunate for her mood that Morel saved this gesture for after Britain’s rebate had been agreed.
* Hubert Védrine (1947–), diplomatic adviser to President Mitterrand, 1981–6; Secretary-General, Office of the French Presidency, 1991–5; Minister of Foreign Affairs, 1997–2002.
† Jacques Attali (1943–), economist and senior civil servant; Member, Council of State, France, 1981–90 and since 1993; special adviser to President of French Republic, 1981–91; founding president, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1991–3; president, Commission for Liberation of French Economic Growth, 2007–8.
‡ Attali’s tale improved in the telling. For an interview with the BBC in 2009, he said that Mrs Thatcher twice had to ask for the percentage she finally got and actually burst into tears: ‘It was an embarrassing begging for a tip and then we give them half the tip that she was requesting and we went on to very more [sic] serious issues’ (Jacques Attali, Interview with the BBC, 6 July 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8136326.stm).
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