The Iron Lady
Page 61
Of all her colleagues Geoffrey Howe was perhaps the least likely political assassin.Yet there was poetic justice in the fact that it was he who pressed the button. Several of those closest to the Prime Minister had feared that the contemptuous way she treated Howe might in the end rebound on her. Though nominally deputy Prime Minister he was so comprehensively frozen out of policy towards Europe that he only learned that Britain was finally joining the ERM when the Queen asked him what he thought of the news. Mrs Thatcher believed that Howe was still deeply ambitious and scheming to replace her. ‘You know what he’s like and what he’s up to now,’ she complained to Wyatt in February.5 Yet at the same time she did not really believe he would ever strike at her: she did not think he had the guts. When Howe finally cracked, George Walden wrote, it was ‘like seeing a battered wife finally turning on a violent husband’.6
What caused him to crack was her intemperate reaction to the European Council held in Rome the last weekend in October 1990. In truth even Howe admitted that she had some ground to be upset. The next stage of EMU was due to be discussed at the intergovernmental conference fixed – over her objections – for December. But then the Italians called an extra Council in October and used it to try to pre-empt the wider discussions at the IGC by setting a timetable for the second and third stages of the Delors plan immediately. Contrary to prior assurances, Kohl and Mitterrand went along with this, and Mrs Thatcher found herself at Rome suddenly confronted by the other eleven ready to commit themselves to start stage 2 in 1994 and complete the single currency in 2000. Hurd was as shocked as Mrs Thatcher by the Italian ambush; once again Britain was cast as the lone obstructive voice. She objected that it was absurd to set a timetable before it was even agreed what form stages 2 and 3 should take. But her objections were heard ‘in stony silence’.7
Back in Britain she reported to the House of Commons on Tuesday 30 October. At Prime Minister’s Questions Kinnock seized on the more positive tone Howe had taken with with Brian Walden and tried to get her to endorse her deputy: this she pointedly declined to do, merely asserting that Howe was ‘too big a man to need a little man like the right hon. Gentleman to stand up for him’. What Howe had actually said was that Britain’s alternative proposal for a common currency – the so-called ‘hard ecu’ – might in time grow into a single currency. This was no more than Major had also said, and was in fact the Government’s policy. In her written statement Mrs Thatcher duly toed this line – the first time, Howe believed, that she had done so:
The hard ecu would be a parallel currency, not a single currency. If, as time went by, peoples and Governments chose to use it widely, it could evolve towards a single currency. But our national currency would remain unless a decision to abolish it were freely taken by future generations of Parliament and people. A single currency is not the policy of this Government.
So far, so moderate. But then Kinnock riled her with the usual charge that her performance in Rome had damaged Britain’s interest and she was away.
The President of the Commission, M. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No.8
Once again it was her tone – defiant, intransigent and glorying in her intransigence – more than her actual words which horrified her colleagues. ‘It was already clear,’ David Owen wrote, ‘that she was on an emotional high and the adrenalin was pumping round her system as she handbagged every federalist proposal’.9 In particular – answering a question from a Labour Eurosceptic – she departed from her carefully phrased backing of the hard ecu:
The hard ecu… could be used if people chose to do so. In my view, it would not become widely used throughout the Community… I am pretty sure that most people in this country would prefer to continue to use sterling.10
‘I nearly fell off the bench,’ Major wrote. ‘With this single sentence she wrecked months of work and preparation. Europe had been suspicious that the hard ecu was simply a tactic to head off a single currency, and now the Prime Minister, in a matter of a few words, convinced them it was.’ He had no doubt about the likely effect of her ‘unscripted outburst’. ‘I heard our colleagues cheer, but knew there was trouble ahead.’11 From the SDP bench below the gangway, Owen kept his eye on Geoffrey Howe. ‘He looked miserable and unhappy, truly, I thought, a dead sheep. How wrong I proved to be.’12
If Howe needed any further prompting the next day’s press – led by the Sun with the gleeful headline ‘Up Yours, Delors’ – pushed him over the edge.13 He had already drafted his resignation letter before he attended Cabinet on Thursday morning. With now characteristic insensitivity Mrs Thatcher lectured him in front of his colleagues over the fact that two or three Bills to be included in the Queen’s Speech were not quite ready. Some of them felt later that this was the final provocation.14 But Howe denies it. ‘Far from being the last straw, this final tantrum was the first confirmation that I had taken the right decision.’15
His resignation letter – running to over 1,000 words – repeated his concern that Britain should remain on the ‘inside track’ in Europe. He insisted that he was ‘not a Euro-idealist or federalist’. He did not want a single currency imposed any more than she did, but ‘more than one form of EMU is possible. The important thing is not to rule in or out any one particular solution absolutely.’ ‘In all honesty,’ he concluded, ‘I now find myself unable to share your view of the right approach to this question.’16
Mrs Thatcher regarded this as typically feeble stuff and tried to brush off Howe’s complaints, as she had done Lawson’s, as differences of style only, not of policy. ‘I do not believe these are nearly as great as you suggest,’ she replied.17 They parted with mutual relief and a formal handshake – the first time, Howe thought, they had ever shaken hands in fifteen years – leaving the Prime Minister to carry out her fourth reshuffle of the year.
For nearly two weeks, Mrs Thatcher seemed to have ridden out this latest crisis, helped by Bernard Ingham’s bullish briefings. ‘She will survive it,’ The Times asserted confidently.18 Parliament was not sitting – her report on the Rome summit had been the fag end of the previous session – so Howe had no early opportunity to make a resignation statement. Michael Heseltine congratulated him on his ‘courageous decision’ but told him it did not materially affect his own position. Just to post a reminder that he was still in the wings, however, Heseltine reworked an article intended for the Sunday Times and published it as an open letter to his Henley constituents before leaving on a visit to the Middle East. This was a mistake which allowed Ingham to charge him with cowardice.
But why should Ingham have wished to provoke Heseltine? The answer would seem to be that Mrs Thatcher wanted to flush him into the open. The same rules that had allowed Meyer to challenge her the year before were still in place, and not a day passed without another Tory MP calling for a contest to ‘lance the boil’.19 That being so, she resolved to get it over quickly. On Tuesday 6 November she arranged to bring forward the date of any contest by two weeks, with the closing date for nominations on Thursday 15 November and the first round of voting the following Tuesday. What was extraordinary was not the haste but the fact that she was due to be out of the country on 20 November attending the CSCE conference in Paris. She knew this, but thought either that it did not matter, since she did not intend to canvass personally, or that it would be of positive benefit to her by reminding Tory MPs of her standing as an international stateswoman. The idea that she did not expect a serious contest when she changed the date does not stand up. On the contrary, she expected Heseltine to stand but thought the best way of beating him was to beat him quickly. ‘It’ll be a fortnight’s agony,’ she told Ronnie Millar. ‘Oh well. Never mind.’20 It was a fateful miscalculation.
Normal political business resumed on 7 November, with the opening of the new session of Parliament. Despite a
concerted effort by Labour MPs to throw her off her stride, Mrs Thatcher opened the debate on the Queen’s Speech in characteristically combative style, outlining new Bills ranging from longer sentences for criminals, through the setting up of the Child Support Agency, to privately financed roads and privatised ports. She wiped the floor as usual with Kinnock and played down the differences with Howe, squaring her own scepticism about the hard ecu with the possibility that it nevertheless could evolve into a single currency with the clever formula that ‘We have no bureaucratic timetable: ours is a market approach, based on what people and governments choose to do.’ When John Reid asked why in that case Howe had resigned, she replied – with a dangerous echo of the Lawson resignation – that only Howe could answer that.21 Howe let it be known that he would make a statement the following Tuesday. Meanwhile, Major, in his autumn economic statement, was forced to admit that the economy was now officially in recession; and the next day the Conservatives were hammered in two more by-elections.
Howe made his statement on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Prime Minister’s Questions, to a packed House which nevertheless had no expectation that it was about to witness one of the parliamentary occasions of the century. Its impact was greatly enhanced by being one of the first major occasions to be televised. Howe never raised his voice above its habitual courteous monotone. But almost from his first words he gripped the House with a hitherto unsuspected passion. He started lightly by dismissing the idea that he had resigned purely over differences of style. He recalled the privilege of serving as Chancellor for four years, paying tribute to Mrs Thatcher’s essential contribution to their economic achievements, but also suggesting that ‘they possibly derived some little benefit from the presence of a Chancellor who was not exactly a wet himself’.
The core of his speech then spelt out their real differences over Europe. First, he recalled that he and Lawson had wanted to join the ERM since at least 1985 and revealed for the first time – with Lawson sitting beside him nodding his assent – that they had both threatened to resign if she did not make a definite commitment to join at the time of Madrid. He gently corrected Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly public placing of all the blame for the renewal of inflation on Lawson by insisting that it could have been avoided if Britain had joined the ERM much earlier. Next, he mocked her ‘nightmare image’ of a Europe ‘teeming with ill-intentioned people scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy” and “dissolve our national identities”’, preferring to quote against it both Macmillan’s 1962 warning against retreating into ‘a ghetto of sentimentality about our past’ and Churchill’s vision of a ‘larger sovereignty’ which alone, he had declared in 1950, could protect Europe’s diverse national traditions. Again he warned against getting left out of the forging of new institutions. Of course Britain could opt out of the single currency, but she could not prevent the others going ahead.
Personally, Howe concluded, he had tried to reconcile the differences from within the Government, but he now realised that ‘the task has become futile: trying to stretch the meaning of words beyond what was credible, and trying to pretend that there was a common policy when every step forward risked being subverted by some casual comment or impulsive answer’. The conflict between the ‘instinct of loyalty’ to the Prime Minister, which was ‘still very real’, and ‘loyalty towards what I perceive to be the true interests of the nation’ had become intolerable. ‘That is why I have resigned.’ In the very last sentence came the killer punch. ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’22
Lawson called it ‘the most devastating speech I, or I suspect anyone else in the House that afternoon, had heard uttered in the House of Commons… It was all the more powerful because it was Geoffrey, that most moderate, long-suffering and patient of men, that was uttering it.’23 ‘It was the measured way in which Howe gave the speech which made it so deadly,’ Paddy Ashdown wrote in his diary. ‘The result is that she appears terminally damaged’.24
Howe denied that his final sentence was a prearranged invitation to Heseltine to end his hesitation.25 But it is hard to see what else it could have meant. Heseltine too denied collusion; yet his lieutenant Michael Mates was already canvassing possible allies, before Howe spoke, on whether it would be helpful for him to mention Heseltine by name.26 In such a highly charged situation, a hint was more than enough. In fact Heseltine’s mind was already made up; but Howe’s speech gave him a more favourable wind than he would have had the previous week. An hour after Howe sat down, Cecil Parkinson made a last attempt to dissuade him. ‘Cecil, she is finished,’ Heseltine told him. ‘After Geoffrey’s speech, she is finished.’27 The next day he announced his candidacy.
Tarzan’s moment
He gave three reasons – a shrewd amalgam of real policy differences with an appeal to the survival instinct of Tory backbenchers. First, he agreed with Howe that Mrs Thatcher held ‘views on Europe behind which she has not been able to maintain a united Cabinet. This damages the proper pursuit of British self-interest in Europe.’ Second, and perhaps most important, polls showed that he was the alternative leader best placed to rebuild Tory support and win the next election. Third, he promised an immediate review of the poll tax. At this stage he did not promise to abolish it: the undertaking merely to look at it again was designed to attract both those who still believed in the principle and those who thought the only possible result of a review would be to scrap it entirely.28 But he was careful not to repudiate Mrs Thatcher’s record entirely. On the contrary he claimed with some justice to have been ‘at the leading edge of Thatcherism’ for the past ten years. His resignation from the Cabinet in 1986 had seemed to be a storm in a teacup at the time – but his criticism of her handling of Cabinet had subsequently been corroborated by Lawson and Howe. Finally, he was a charismatic politician of undoubted Prime Ministerial calibre who had scrupulously refrained from open disloyalty over the past four years, while assiduously cultivating the constituencies and anxious MPs. Thus he was in every way a serious candidate and difficult for her to disparage.
In common with most political commentators, Mrs Thatcher did not really think it conceivable that a Prime Minister in possession of a good majority could be thrown out between elections by her own party. Though she had always known that she had enemies who would be glad to see the back of her, she took it for granted that her senior colleagues and her appointees in the party organisation would rally round to ensure that the challenge was seen off as it had been in 1989. In the event those she charged with running her campaign made a very poor fist of the job.
With hindsight she recognised that her insistence on going to Paris, which took her out of the country for the last two days of the campaign and the day of the ballot, was a mistake. It was not as if the CSCE was actually an important event. There was one symbolic treaty to be signed, cutting the levels of conventional forces; but it was more in the nature of an international celebration of the ending of the Cold War. President Bush, President Gorbachev, Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterrand were all going to be there, so Mrs Thatcher naturally wanted to be there too, to take her share of the credit. In truth it set the seal most appropriately on her premiership: but that was not her intention. By going to Paris she sent a signal that she was more interested in strutting the world stage than in meeting the worries of her troops at Westminster. She thought it was more important for her to be seen doing her job than grubbing for votes; for the same reason she spent the Friday before the poll in Northern Ireland. But this was not the message the party wanted to hear. ‘The plaudits are abroad,’ Kenneth Baker warned her, ‘but the votes are back home.’29 Heseltine by contrast, as Alan Clark noted, was working the Members’ Lobby and the tea rooms every day.
Fundamentally, the very fact that the Prime Minister’s supporters, with or without her presence, could not put together a decent campaign showed that she had lost the supp
ort of the central core of the parliamentary party. The necessary level of enthusiasm simply was not there. Those MPs who were neither passionately for her nor passionately against were listening to their constituencies. When George Walden consulted his local party in Buckingham, the show of hands was for loyalty. But in private three-quarters of those who said they supported her told him it was time for her to go, and he suspects this was typical.30 Ironically Mrs Thatcher herself had articulated the clinching argument. Replying to Kinnock and Ashdown at Prime Minister’s Questions the previous autumn, she had asserted that ‘the country’s best long-term interests consist of keeping those who are in opposition there in perpetuity’.31 It was precisely to ensure this that a large minority of Tory MPs thought that Mrs Thatcher should be replaced. Moreover, they were right: with a new Prime Minister, Labour was kept in opposition – if not in perpetuity, at least for another seven years.