The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  By 1993 Lady Thatcher had concluded that the whole philosophy behind the 1985 Agreement had been a mistake. She did not suggest what an alternative approach might be: the implication was tougher security, even a ‘military’ solution. But she had not attempted that in office, nor were her successors tempted by it. The same logic that impelled her, against her instincts, drove them too; and the 1985 Agreement gradually bore fruit. It can now be seen as the start of a process which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the power-sharing government of 2007. First, it served a warning to the Unionists that their bluff could be called: London’s repeated guarantee that Northern Ireland would remain a part of the United Kingdom, so long as the majority of its people wanted, did not give them a veto on how Britain chose to implement its sovereignty. Second, it did help to reconcile the nationalists to British rule, shored up the position of the SDLP and, most significantly, began to convert Sinn Fein and the IRA itself to the idea that more might be achieved by negotiation than by endless violence. At the same time the machinery of cooperation established in 1985 provided mechanisms to defuse problems between the two governments; and the Agreement did – as was perhaps Mrs Thatcher’s primary motivation – convince the United States that Britain was genuinely trying to resolve the problem, which led to better American understanding of the Unionist position and encouraged increased international, particularly American, investment in Northern Ireland.35 All these beneficial developments flowed from the 1985 Agreement. It was understandable, as the murder of soldiers continued unabated, that MrsThatcher should have felt disappointed; understandable too, when Ian Gow was killed in the drive of his own house in 1990, that she should feel guilty that perhaps she had betrayed Ulster after all. But she was wrong to disparage the Agreement. She was brave and far-sighted to have concluded it, and it should stand among her diplomatic achievements alongside the Zimbabwe and Hong Kong settlements. If lasting peace finally comes to Northern Ireland, she will have played her part in the process.

  20

  Elective Dictatorship

  ‘She who must be obeyed’

  THE idea that the Prime Minister is merely the first among equals has long been a fiction. The power of the Prime Minister vis-à-vis his Cabinet colleagues has increased steadily for a number of reasons to do with the growth of the state, the increasing complexity of the government machine and the escalating demands of the media. Both Harold Wilson and Ted Heath in their day were criticised for being excessively ‘presidential’. Unquestionably, however, the concentration of power in the person of the Prime Minister grew still more pronounced under Mrs Thatcher, as a result partly of her longevity in the job, partly of her personality.

  During her first term she was to some extent constrained by her own relative inexperience, by the presence in the Cabinet of several heavyweight colleagues profoundly sceptical of her approach and by the dire economic situation. Even so, by placing her few reliable allies in the key departments, she broadly got her way most of the time and managed to remove or neutralise most of her critics. By the middle of her second term she had achieved a Cabinet much more nearly of her own choice. Though the old wet/dry dichotomy had been resolved, there were still three identifiable groups around the table. Despite the loss of Parkinson, she now had a solid core of true believers: Lawson, Howe and (till 1986) Keith Joseph, reinforced by Norman Tebbit, Leon Brittan, Nicholas Ridley, David Young and (from 1986) John Moore. In the middle there was the ballast of steady loyalists who took their cue from Willie Whitelaw: Tom King, Norman Fowler, Nicholas Edwards, George Younger, Michael Jopling and (from 1986) Paul Channon, to whom may be added the senior, sometimes cantankerous but generally supportive figure of Lord Hailsham. Then, coming into the Cabinet between 1984 and 1986 was a new generation of ambitious former Heathites who were happy, after a period of probation, to turn their coats: Douglas Hurd, John MacGregor, Kenneth Baker, Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm Rifkind.

  Mrs Thatcher’s most ardent allies and supporters worried that she was storing up trouble for the future by promoting too many of these fair-weather friends from the left of the party, rather than true believers from the right. But she scarcely seemed to worry any more about the left – right balance, because by 1983 she thought the economic argument had been won. She was uneasily aware that the ablest candidates tended to be of the left; but she appointed them as individuals to serve her, not as representatives of wings of the party.

  In addition there were three unclassifiable individuals who belonged to no group: Peter Walker, the last survivor of the old wets; John Biffen, one of Mrs Thatcher’s original ‘true believers’, now increasingly out of sympathy with her approach; and Michael Heseltine, an ambitious loner already identified as the likeliest challenger if ever the Prime Minister’s authority should slip.

  This was the personnel: but the Cabinet as a body had a much diminished sense of corporate identity. It met only once a week, on Thursday, compared with twice a week under previous administrations, and rarely enjoyed anything approaching general discussion. Moreover, Mrs Thatcher created fewer Cabinet committees than her predecessors. Sometimes she would set up an ad hoc committee of three or four ministers, often chaired by herself, to deal with a subject that had arisen; more often than not she would simply get the relevant minister to prepare a paper for herself alone; she would then interrogate him on it personally with two or three of her advisers from the Cabinet Office or the Policy Unit, thus acting as ‘judge and jury in her own cause’ without reference to the Cabinet.1 This might almost be a definition of presidential government. None of these practices originated with Mrs Thatcher: but she took them further than any of her predecessors. Cabinet was reduced to an occasion for reporting decisions, not the mechanism for taking them.

  Dealing with the Prime Minister one to one was a testing business, too. She was still always formidably well briefed from a variety of different sources – the official departmental brief, another from the Policy Unit and often a third in her handbag whose origin the unfortunate minister never quite knew, which she would produce triumphantly to catch him out; she could always find a weak point even when he thought he had everything covered. At her best she had not only read everything but had, in Charles Powell’s words, ‘a phenomenal recall of detail’. She did not just absorb information but actively digested what she read.2

  She made it her business to give ministers a hard time. ‘I think sometimes a Prime Minister should be intimidating,’ she once declared. ‘There’s not much point in being a weak floppy thing in the chair, is there?’3 Much of the time this approach was highly effective, so long as she was dealing with a strong character who could handle her firmly, argue his corner and bring her round to a sensible policy if necessary. On this view her destructive style was simply a way of testing policies – and the minister who would have to defend them – against every possible line of attack before she agreed to them. But the longer she stayed in the job, the more she tended to have formed her view in advance and the less prepared she was to listen to other arguments.After 1983 she became increasingly irrational and harder to deal with. Ministers would look forward to a vigorous discussion, one recalled, only to find themselves subjected to a one-sided tirade: they became afraid to mention this or that subject for fear of setting her off on some hobby horse.4 Her briefing was now not always so well focused.

  Mrs Thatcher prided herself on liking a good argument; but she argued to win – or, as she told Nigel Lawson bluntly during their difference about the exchange rate in 1988: ‘I must prevail.’5 She never learned to concede even a small point with good grace. There was another revealing episode when John Major first caught her attention at a whips’ dinner at Number Ten in July 1985, at a time when the Government was trailing in third place in the polls. Major took the chance to tell her frankly about backbench worries: she became angry and attacked him in unfairly personal terms. The story is that she was impressed by the way he stood up to her and promoted him soon afterwards. Den
is actually congratulated him and told him, ‘She enjoyed that.’ But Major did not enjoy it at all: he thought she had behaved unforgivably when he was only doing his job, part of which was to tell her unpalatable truths.6 Viewed positively, this was an example of Mrs Thatcher working constructively, testing subordinates through tough argument with no quarter given but no grudges taken. Alternatively, it was an example of sheer bad manners which nearly provoked Major to resign: a bullying type of man management which was not productive but steadily alienated her best supporters.

  If a Prime Minister needs to be a good butcher, Mrs Thatcher passed that test with flying colours. As well as those she got rid of for ideological reasons, several ministers who in her view failed to deliver were sacked. The turnover of ministers was extraordinarily high. Over the whole eleven years from 1979 to 1990 no fewer than thirty-six Cabinet Ministers departed. Eight resigned as a result of a policy failure, personal or political embarrassment or disagreement with the Prime Minister. Thirteen retired more or less voluntarily either through ill health, to ‘spend more time with the family’ or to go into business. But fifteen were involuntarily removed. Though Mrs Thatcher always claimed to hate sacking people, the casualty rate was designed to keep the survivors on their toes. By the time Howe resigned in October 1990 the Prime Minister herself was the only survivor from her first Cabinet.

  The decline of Parliament

  Mrs Thatcher was never a great parliamentarian. Though she revered the institution of Parliament she never liked the place or had any feel for its ambience or traditions. Her sex was a factor here, partly because as a young female Member she could never be one of the boys – she had a young family to get back to, and she would never have been one for sitting around in bars anyway – but also because she found it difficult to make herself heard without shouting, particularly when she became leader and a target for Labour heckling. But even after she had established her command of the House, she never wooed or flattered it: her manner was always to hector and assert, and when she was interrupted or in difficulties she would simply shout louder.

  She knew she was not a good speaker, was nervous before she had to make a speech and consequently overprepared. Her speeches tended to be loaded with statistics and came alive only when she was interrupted and had something to respond to. As a result she spoke as rarely as possible in debates – far less frequently than her predecessors. More often she made statements (after every European summit, for instance) and then answered questions, which was what she was good at. The twice-weekly circus of Prime Minister’s Questions suited her down to the ground. She had no respect for Neil Kinnock and took great delight in exposing his inadequacy in front of her baying supporters. But it did not add much to the dignity or usefulness of Parliament.

  The abuse of Prime Minister’s Questions had started with Harold Wilson, but it became more systematic under Mrs Thatcher. Bernard Weatherill, who succeeded George Thomas as Speaker in 1983, tried to put a stop to these abuses, but Mrs Thatcher would not hear of it. She did not see Question Time as an opportunity for accountability to the House, but as her chance to project her message to the nation – via radio, which had started broadcasting the proceedings in 1978. Weatherill wanted to restore the former practice whereby questions of detail were deflected to the departmental minister concerned, leaving the Prime Minister to answer for broad strategy.7 But Mrs Thatcher liked open questions precisely because they enabled her to display her command of detail: the fact that she might be asked about anything gave her the excuse she needed to keep tabs on every department. She regarded Prime Minister’s Questions as ‘the real test of your authority in the House’ and prepared for them with obsessive thoroughness: she prided herself that ‘no head of government anywhere in the world has to face this sort of regular pressure and many go to great lengths to avoid it’.8 This shallow gladiatorial bunfight, she thought, was what Parliament was all about.

  With the security of huge majorities after 1983 Mrs Thatcher had no need, most of the time, to bother about the House of Commons. She certainly did not bother about the opposition. She saw no need to cut any deals with the Labour party, and was suspicious of Leaders of the House like Pym and Biffen who were too accommodating to them. Whenever any difficulty arose, her bible was Erskine May, the parliamentary rule book.9 She was more sensitive to her own back benches. During her first term, when her position in the Cabinet was precarious and she still remembered who it was that had made her leader, she was careful to keep her lines of communication open. On several contentious issues in the second term she backed down in the face of party anxiety. But inevitably, as all Prime Ministers do, she became increasingly remote from her backbench troops.

  To compensate for the lack of serious opposition in the Commons, the House of Lords became increasingly assertive, to the extent that the Government suffered regular defeats in the Upper House – more than 200 between 1979 and 1987.Though the Tories always had a large nominal majority in the Lords, there was a substantial component of crossbenchers – in addition to Labour and Alliance peers – who did not take a party whip but considered issues on their merits. Mostly these defeats were reversed when the legislation came back to the Commons, but on some major issues the Lords’ will prevailed. Mrs Thatcher was not pleased by this show of independence by the peers, particularly since she had appointed so many of them. She considered reducing their powers, but concluded that it was not worth the effort.10

  The House of Lords, despite its indefensible composition, was a useful counterweight to the Government’s unchecked hegemony in the Commons; but it could not redress the increasing irrelevance of Parliament in the political process. The ‘elective dictatorship’ of which Lord Hailsham had warned in 1975 – when he objected to a Labour Government elected by 39 per cent of the votes cast (and only 29 per cent of the electorate) ruling as though it commanded a majority mandate – was a far more pressing reality in the mid-1980s when Mrs Thatcher used her huge parliamentary majorities to push through her revolution on the basis of no more than 43 per cent support (or 31 per cent of the whole electorate). The size of her majorities, Labour’s impotence and her own functional view of Parliament as a legislative sausage factory meant that opposition to her policies found expression elsewhere: in local government, in parts of the press, occasionally on the streets, but above all on television and radio. Again, this shift of the political debate from Westminster to the airwaves had been under way for some time, but it was markedly accelerated in the Thatcher years, measured by the steep decline in serious press reporting of Parliament: insofar as debates were reported at all, it was in the form of satirical sketches. The journalists would say that the debates were no longer worth reporting, and they might be right; the process was self-fulfilling. But all that most of the public ever heard of Parliament was the crude knockabout of Prime Minister’s Questions.

  The obvious response to the usurpation of Parliament by television was to televise Parliament. But Mrs Thatcher strongly opposed letting cameras into the chamber, partly because she believed that they would damage the reputation of the House by showing in full colour the rowdiness which was already offending radio listeners, and change its character by encouraging publicity seekers to play to the gallery; but partly also because she thought it would do her personally no good. Gordon Reece and Bernard Ingham both tried to persuade her that she would only gain from being seen trouncing Kinnock at the dispatch box twice a week; but she was afraid she would come over as strident (as well as being seen wearing glasses to read her brief) and feared that the BBC would edit the exchanges to her disadvantage. When the issue came to a vote in late 1985 – at the height of her vendetta with the BBC – she did not speak publicly against it, but Tory MPs waited to see which way she was voting before following her into the ‘No’ lobby. The proposal was defeated by twelve votes. Two years later, in February 1988, she spoke and lobbied openly against the cameras: a majority of Tories still followed her line, but this time a six-month experiment wa
s agreed by a majority of fifty-four.11 The televising finally started in November 1989. Most observers thought the effect was, as Reece had anticipated, to underline the Prime Minister’s dominance. But the cameras caught their first moment of real parliamentary drama when they were able to broadcast Geoffrey Howe’s devastating resignation speech in November 1990. After that there was no going back – though still very little is ever shown on terrestrial channels apart from Question Time.

  The power of patronage

  For most of its life the Thatcher Government was not popular. Between General Elections it usually trailed in the polls – often in third place – and even its two landslide election victories were gained with well under half the votes cast. Yet except for a brief period in the spring of 1986, after the Westland crisis and the bombing of Libya, few commentators anticipated anything other than a third Tory victory in 1987 and probably a fourth after that. Labour under Neil Kinnock was slowly rowing back from the extremism of the early 1980s, becoming a better organised and credible opposition; yet such was Mrs Thatcher’s dominance that it took an extraordinary leap of faith to imagine anyone else forming the next government. There was a despairing fatalism on the left, and a corresponding complacency on the right, that the political pendulum had been halted and the Tories would be in power for ever. The restraints traditionally imposed by the expectation of a periodic alternation of power between the main parties consequently exerted a diminishing force.As a result, from the mid-1980s, the Government began to give off an unmistakable odour of corruption arising from overconfidence, constitutional corner-cutting and mounting hubris.