In the first year of the tax in Scotland, £158 million, or 16.3 percent of expected revenue, went uncollected. The next year, it got worse: by September 1990, almost halfway through the fiscal year, £769 million, or 73 percent of the tax, had still not been paid. Attempts at arresting bank accounts and wages proved largely unsuccessful; in Strathclyde, 500,000 warrants had to be issued. Many refused to pay the second year’s tax as a protest against subsidizing those who hadn’t paid the first time round. In England and Wales, the poll tax was no less resented. On March 31, there was the biggest riot central London had seen in decades: a pitched battle in Trafalgar Square, cars burned out in St. Martin’s Lane, looting in the Charing Cross Road. Three hundred and thirty-nine people were arrested, and 144 needed hospital treatment. Trotskyist and anarchist groups were blamed for hijacking a peaceful demonstration; even so, that protest was itself massive, consisting of 200,000 people.
Complaints came from all political quarters, about both the nature of the tax and the blithe ineptitude of its implementation. The Government had estimated that nationally the average community-charge bill would be £278 (as opposed to the previous year’s average rates of £274); it turned out to be £370. Nor could the Government blame those “high-spending” Labour councils; the Tory tax hit the Tory shires. Government estimates of tax levels in Chelmsford and Dover, for instance, were £180 and £150; the levels set by these Tory councils were, respectively, £397 and £298. In West Oxfordshire, eighteen Conservative councilors resigned en masse in protest against the community charge; when the leader of this group stood for reelection as an independent, he defeated the official Tory candidate by a margin of four to one.
The grumbles and the rumbles continued all year, as a stretched bureaucracy sought to administer an unwelcome tax. Demands sent out to those who had recently died seemed more shocking when the charge was per capita rather than merely on property. A group of soldiers on Salisbury Plain tried to refuse the charge, on the ground that they didn’t use council services; magistrates ordered 389 of them to pay. On the Isle of Wight, there was a mass summons of 4,000 defaulters; the case collapsed in farce, because the reminders had been sent out by second-class post, thus not giving people enough time to pay. In the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, the Liberal Democrat council threatened to cut off refuse collection for those who failed to stump up. Elsewhere, bailiffs did a growing business. “Can’t Pay—Won’t Pay” was the protesters’ slogan. By the end of October, six months after the introduction of the charge, one in seven of the 36 million poll-tax payers in England had paid nothing; a quarter of Londoners were not cooperating; the London borough of Haringey had nonpayment running at 42 percent. Nor could it even be argued that the tax was efficient to organize: collecting it cost twelve pounds per head, as against five pounds per head for the rates.
The most prominent Tory to campaign against the poll tax—or, at least, against the manner of its implementation—was Michael Heseltine. In May, writing in The Times, he linked it directly, if grandiloquently, to Tory chances at the next election: “In many of the marginal constituencies by which the tenure of power is determined, the community charge is perceived to have broken the Disraelian compact upon which Tory power rests,” which translates as “Make it easy on the skilled workers or we’re scuppered, mate.” His three main suggestions were: that local authorities should be free to set whatever level of budget they chose, but that if they exceeded the Government’s calculation by a certain percentage local elections must be called to give the budget a proper mandate; that politically damaging taxes—on students, student nurses, the elderly living at home, and the physically disabled—should be scrapped; and that better-off members of the community should pay more. The lumpy Newspeak for this last, un-Thatcherite concept is “banding upwards by income.”
So the first round of the leadership election, a straight fight between Tarzan and The Iron Lady, was about Europe, the poll tax, the Conservative Party’s chances of winning a fourth successive general election, the notion that the Cabinet should be properly consulted by the Prime Minister, and the notion that Mrs. Thatcher was barkingly out of control and handbagged anyone who uttered a squeak against her. The campaign lasted less than a week, but was nasty enough to gratify the most vampiric Opposition. The natural tactics for a sitting Prime Minister would have been to go about her business as normal, looking serene and efficient, while the impertinent pretender jumped up and down trying to draw attention to himself. In fact, the opposite took place—a clear sign of unease on the part of the Thatcher camp. True, the PM took herself off to Paris a couple of days before the vote, to attend the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the reckless accusations were all coming from her side. These were mainly along the risible line that Mr. Heseltine, the richest man in the House of Commons, the counter-jumping squire, the committed privatizer, was secretly, deep down under that suspicious blond hair of his, some kind of crypto-socialist. Mrs. Thatcher attacked Heseltine from Paris, while at home her team wheeled out two of her favorite old bruisers, Norman Tebbit and the inescapable Nicholas Ridley, to do a bit of kneeing and gouging on their former Cabinet colleague. Ridley, ironically, was now seen as the official Thatcher spokesman on Europe, although this time he managed to avoid references to uppity Germans and the Poodles of Paris. The chief wicked things alleged against Heseltine were that in economic policy he would be “interventionist” and “corporatist,” while over Europe he would be “federalist.” It was rather too jargonized for true knee-in-the-groin stuff, but at least it allowed Heseltine to take the high, not to say Prime Ministerial, ground. When Mrs. Thatcher accused him of a mixture of “personal ambitions and private rancor,” he could afford a statesmanlike smile, while the rest of us were left to wonder at the concept of “impersonal ambitions,” from which presumably Mrs. Thatcher had been suffering when she ousted the sitting Tory leader Edward Heath in 1975.
The Labour Party, which knows all about political masochism and ruling oneself out of power by internal strife, sat back with rare pleasure as the Tory Party drew the ceremonial sword across its own belly. Tory MPs of an older vintage must have looked back with fondness to the pre-1965 days, when a “magic circle” decided such matters, and when after “the customary processes of consultation” a new leader simply “emerged.” Postulant A would be told to dust off his morning suit for a visit to Buckingham Palace, and Postulant B instructed to walk out into the snow and not come back for some time. Now the whole system had gone open, messy, and uncontrollably democratic. Worse, it had snarled itself up with some quite unnecessary sophistications. To win on the first ballot, a candidate needs to obtain an overall majority but also 15 percent more of the votes cast than his or her opponent. Thus, in the present case, if there were no abstentions, Mrs. Thatcher could defeat Mr. Heseltine by fifty or so votes in a straight fight and yet be driven to a second ballot. At a second ballot, other candidates might come in, complicating things further and splitting the vote. The 15 percent factor is discarded in this second round, but if no candidate has an overall majority the contest might still be deadlocked, and thus go into a third round. Worse, there are no provisions for candidates to drop out between the second and third rounds, and if no clear majority is obtained at the third time of asking, then a transferable-vote system operates until white smoke finally dribbles from the chimney.
The first ballot approached with the Tories in extraordinary disarray. Nobody knew quite how the voting system worked. Nobody knew who might or might not declare himself in a second ballot. Those who wanted neither Heseltine nor Thatcher would have to decide whether to abstain, and perhaps hand Thatcher a first-ballot victory, or to vote for Heseltine, and possibly give him such a head of steam that their own second-ballot candidate would have no chance. Conservative MPs faced more than tactical problems, too. Should they be loyal to the past, to a Prime Minister who had won three successive elections, or be practical about saving their own skins at the next general ele
ction? Polls published over the crucial weekend of the first-round campaign showed that while a Thatcher-led Party trailed Labour by fifteen points, a switch to Heseltine would transform the deficit into a one-point lead. Yet even if the troubled MP persuaded himself into that juicy position where personal, party, and national interests appeared to be the same, there were other, rogue factors. A cross section of the Party at this time would have shown a layer-cake effect: the Cabinet publicly supporting Thatcher, the back benches deeply split, the hard-core constituency workers very pro-Thatcher, the soft core much less committed. If you were an MP in a marginal constituency, Mrs. Thatcher might win you one solid vote from the electorate, while Mr. Heseltine might win you one and a half shaky ones. How to make the calculation? And how to explain it to your Thatcherite Party workers? Mr. Cyril Townsend, MP for Bexleyheath since 1974, decided to vote for Heseltine, though he knew that support among his own grassroots organizers was running four to one in favor of Mrs. Thatcher. The chairman of the Bexleyheath Conservative Association took Townsend aside ten minutes before a meeting of the local executive committee and urged him to keep his mouth shut about his voting intentions. “His views,” said the chairman, “went against those of the ward committees, ladies’ clubs, luncheon and supper clubs, the businessmen, the local council, and all but one senior member of the executive.” Mr. Townsend declined to keep his mouth shut; worse, he appealed over the heads of the luncheon and supper clubs, the ladies’ clubs, and the businessmen. “I believe I have the support of the majority of people who voted for me,” he declared as he endorsed Mr. Heseltine. The vice chairman of his own organization responded by demanding a new Parliamentary candidate: “I am asking [the chairman] to set the process in motion. Candidates will come forward and one of them will be Cyril Townsend. I hope he loses.”
The first ballot was held on Tuesday, November 20, and the result was perfect for the Labour Party—what Tory managers had called “the nightmare scenario”: Thatcher 204 votes, Heseltine 152, abstentions 16. So although the Prime Minister had won a straight race by 52 clear votes, she had failed by four to obtain the 15 percent over and above a clear majority which the rules demanded. (At this point, people started asking who had invented such a batty system. The answer turned out to be a former Conservative MP, Humphry Berkeley, back in 1964 at the request of the then Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Berkeley subsequently deserted the Tories for Labour, deserted Labour for the SDP, and deserted the SDP for Labour again. Such a career perhaps helps explain the tortuous rules he invented.) The result meant that Mrs. Thatcher was wounded, but not mortally; that Mr. Heseltine had shown himself a more serious contender than had been imagined; and that another grueling round of campaigning was to come. The former Tory Party chairman and loyal Thatcherite Cecil Parkinson immediately called the result “as bad as it could be for the Party as a whole.”
Mrs. Thatcher promptly made it worse. Before the election, she had let it be known that she would fight to the last in defense of her Premiership, that victory by even the smallest margin was still victory. This was widely taken to be a rhetorical declaration: a bad result for Mrs. Thatcher and she would make way for a Thatcherite successor in the second round—whether a calmingly paternal figure like Douglas Hurd, her thriller-writing Foreign Secretary, or one of the next generation, like her Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major. But what was a bad result for Mrs. Thatcher? The BBC’s political editor, John Cole, estimated that 210 was the lowest acceptable vote, while 200 or under was “unacceptable.” It was at 6:34 P.M. that the news came through that Mrs. Thatcher had received 204 votes. Clearly, the pundits agreed, this would mean an evening on the telephone-advice from “the men in suits,” as senior Party figures are picturesquely termed. She would sleep on the result and announce her decision in the fullness of time. The BBC’s chief Parliamentary correspondent, standing in front of the British Embassy residence in Paris, where Mrs. Thatcher was staying, assured viewers that nothing much was likely to happen for a while, and prepared to sign off. But Mrs. Thatcher is, as has been repeated many times, a “conviction politician,” and one of her convictions has always been that she is the best person to lead the Conservative Party. At 6:36 P.M., just as the correspondent in Paris was about to return viewers to London, there was a scurry of activity over his right shoulder. Mrs. Thatcher, having thought over her predicament for a full ninety seconds, came roaring down the residence steps and fell upon the waiting journalists like a wolf on the fold. She had clearly won the first round; therefore, she would allow her name to go forward to the second ballot. Once more, the Prime Minister had plunged the nation into certainty. She had also killed off the possibility that Mr. Hurd or Mr. Major would come in as a compromise Thatcherite candidate on the second round. One of the more pathetic sights of the evening was that of Mr. Hurd later trooping out of the Embassy residence to record his continuing loyalty to his leader. It took him forty minutes to make this appearance, and it was one of the shorter declarations of obeisance on record, occupying a full twenty-three seconds.
Perhaps this exorbitant display of Thatcherian self-certainty, her conviction that she was still playing the role of The Entire Conservative Party, and her snubbingly public contempt for advice—even for the niceties of appearing to seek advice—stiffened the resistance of Cabinet ministers and the men in suits. (There is, naturally, some crossover between the two categories.) The next day, November 21, she returned to London, replaced her campaign manager, declared, “I fight on, I fight to win,” and summoned her Cabinet one by one to listen to what seemed distinctly post hoc consultations. Most of her ministers said they would continue to support her in the second round of voting. Many added, however, that they thought she would lose; some expressed fear that she might be humiliated. At seven-thirty the next morning, this time having slept on it, Mrs. Thatcher told her private office that she had decided to resign. The Cabinet was summoned for nine o’clock, an hour earlier than usual, and shortly afterward the country heard that the longest Premiership since 1827 would be over within a week. Once again, Douglas Hurd was sent into a scuttle, for second-round nominations (accompanied by the names of proposer and seconder) had to be in by midday. The Chancellor, John Major, also scuttled, while Mrs. Thatcher set off to break the news officially to the Queen. The Prime Minister’s widely reported comment on the fact that she could be deposed after winning three general elections, never losing a confidence motion in the House, and manifestly defeating her main challenger was couched with a homeliness appropriate to the tabloid headline it soon became: WHAT A FUNNY OLD WORLD IT IS. Kenneth Baker, the Tory Party chairman and a person of literary aspirations, reached stylistically somewhat higher, saying, “I do not believe we will see her like again”—though the resemblance between the departing leader and Hamlet’s father was not immediately apparent. (Both poisoned by ambitious rivals?) Winston Churchill, MP, in the House of Commons that afternoon, called her “the greatest peacetime Prime Minister this country has ever had,” carefully reserving the wider title for his own grandfather.
The second round of the election was fought in an overtly correct fashion, as if in deliberate defiance of the Thatcher manner. It was that curious thing, a healing battle. A small amount of mileage was made out of the candidates’ social origins, though, this being the modern Conservative Party, it was along the lines of “prolier than thou.” (Mr. Major, it turned out, had left school at sixteen and worked on a building site. This gave him the drop on Mr. Hurd, who had been burdened with a thorough education and a father who had been an MP before him. Hurd was driven by the handicap of privilege into some awkward son-of-the-soil reminiscences about planting potatoes as a boy.) No scandal was mooted, though the press enjoyed disinterring Mr. Hurd’s out-of-print thrillers and quoting all the descriptions of breasts they could find in them. (The Hurd camp at once ascribed these passages to their boss’s coauthor.) But the main sounds heard during the campaign were of eerie concord. Each candidate was eager to unite the Party;
each claimed support from left, right, and center; each admired the other’s achievements; each was keen on Europe—or, at least, keener than Mrs. Thatcher, whose negative image and opinions hung over the contest. Each was committed to a review of the poll tax, though here there was a slight difference, for once prettily mocked by Neil Kinnock: “When it comes to the poll tax, the choice is between Heseltine, who knows there is a problem and doesn’t really know what to do about it; Major, who knows there is a problem and doesn’t really want to do anything about it; and Hurd, who has only just found out there’s a problem.”
THE CONTEST WAS fought in a gentlemanly fashion—except, of course, by the Lady herself. What would Mrs. Thatcher do? Well, it was generally agreed that, having retired from the election, she would do her best to assist the search for Tory unity by not interfering too much, though she might perhaps allow it to be gently intuited which way she was going to vote. But allowing things to be gently intuited has never been Mrs. Thatcher’s style. It soon became known that she would be voting for Major; and it was even suggested that if Heseltine won she would resign her seat in the House of Commons and force a by-election in her constituency of Finchley. (This was one of those “damaging but deniable” rumors, which came with the qualification that she might, of course, have been merely speaking in the heat of the moment.) The day before the second round, she was on the telephone actively arm-twisting for Major. And, being Mrs. Thatcher, of course, she went too far. Her farewell speech to Conservative Central Office, which, not surprisingly, was recorded by someone present and leaked to the press, contained praise for both President Bush and herself over the crisis in the Gulf: “He won’t falter, and I shan’t falter. It’s just that I shan’t be pulling the levers there. But I shall be a very good back-seat driver.” Thatcher might have gone, but Thatcherism would continue, she was instructing the candidates. Anyone would have thought she had just read the Encyclopædia Britannica entry for the second Earl of Liverpool, whose length of Premiership she would never now exceed: “Lord Liverpool was destitute of wide sympathies and of true political insight, and his resignation of office was followed almost immediately by the complete and permanent reversal of his domestic policy.” None of that for Mrs. Thatcher: the rebels might have pushed her out of the driver’s seat and seized the wheel, but she had crawled along the running board and climbed back in behind them.
Letters From London Page 8
