Marching to the Fault Line

by David Hencke

  According to Walker there was a brusque phone call between Thatcher and MacGregor – a detail missing from MacGregor’s autobiographical account of events. By that time Hunt had arrived. According to his account he was ushered into MacGregor’s flat and made a cup of tea by Lady MacGregor, though MacGregor’s book says she was away in Florida at the time.

  Hunt persuaded MacGregor to leave the table where the negotiators were. He then explained in detail what MacGregor had done, and why it had caused panic at Westminster. According to Hunt ‘MacGregor went pale and said, “I didn’t realize. What shall I do?” Hunt replied, “There is nothing for it but for you to gather up all those papers. Tell them you need to look at them again for a moment.” MacGregor did what he was told. According to Hunt the papers were replaced with ones from the ministry which carefully did not use the words ‘deemed exhausted’. The government had been saved at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour from a grossly embarrassing situation.

  MacGregor’s account brushes the whole episode aside as ‘largely a matter of semantics’.13 This was certainly not Hunt’s or Walker’s view. That very evening Walker put down his view for posterity in a ‘secret and personal’ letter to MacGregor, starting by saying how disturbed he was by what had happened that afternoon.14

  The last time he had spoken to MacGregor, he wrote, they were just discussing procedural matters with the TUC General Secretary - talks about talks. ‘I did not know that you had negotiated with Norman Willis an overall agreement for the settlement of the dispute.’ Then, just after 4 p.m., MacGregor had telephoned Walker to tell him that papers were on the way to Walker’s office. ‘By the time they arrived’, wrote Walker ‘you were actually in discussion with Norman Willis, and presumably had presented him with these papers. I would have thought that we could have been consulted on the wording of any paper which was going to form the final agreement with the TUC and through them the NUM.’

  When Walker saw the papers, he was horrified. First, he was opposed to the linking of the deal to the 1946 Coal Industry Act because of the ‘public interests’ clause put in by the Attlee government. ‘This of course would enable Scargill to claim that the most important aspects of public interest at the moment are those of unemployment and the impact of pit closures upon mining communities during a period of high unemployment.’ Second, there was the use of the phrase ‘deemed exhausted’ in the context of pit closures. This could be taken to mean that the NUM had a veto over pit closures. Third, he was furious that there was a reference to the impossibility of a no-strike deal. ‘Although one could argue [this] expresses the reality of not being able to obtain a no-strike agreement, it is drafted in such a positive way for the unions that Scargill could immediately announce he had obtained a settlement on the basis that the NUM will continue its policy of opposing the closure of pits for economic reasons.’

  Finally, Walker expressed alarm over a clause allowing the NUM to delay agreement on a new independent body to review pit closures. He thought this would allow the NUM to delay any decisions as long as there was no agreement.

  ‘I hope you have succeeded in not tabling these offers,’ he wrote. ‘I am very concerned that at the most crucial stage of this dispute I was given no opportunity of expressing any criticisms of the document you were tabling.’

  Next day MacGregor defended his position. He thought what he was offering was no worse than the deal the government had already given to NACODS and offered at the time to the NUM - which may have been true, but the whole battle since the NACODS deal was signed had been fought on the basis that the NUM had already lost its chance to sign up to those terms. He had only been trying to get a procedure that enabled him to close uneconomic pits.

  He added: ‘You will realize that, built into the legislation under which the NCB operates, is a degree of consultation on a scale which I doubt is matched in any other industry. This already pre-empts much of the management’s rights, and moving away from that is a task which will take a considerable time and much patience. We are attempting to take the first steps in restoring a balance in which management will have the chance to exercise their proper role.’

  This did not save MacGregor from being the main casualty of the exchange. Walker decided that MacGregor must go within a year of the settlement of the dispute, which is what happened. According to David Hunt it was discussed that very evening. The near-disaster was regarded as the last straw, as bad as some of the other gaffes that had made negotiations difficult.

  Norman Willis, baulked of his prey, sought to exploit what he could see was some disarray in the enemy camp – a task made harder by the disarray in his own, where Scargill still seemed determined not to compromise. On 15 February Willis called in the executives of both the NUM and NACODS. He told them the NCB still required, before talks could start, agreement that pits could be closed for economic reasons, but this need not any longer be in writing. He circulated another NCB document, which the board intended to be part of any final agreement.

  Scargill wanted it thrown out, but for the first time his executive rebelled, though in a minor way: they asked the TUC seven if three amendments could be tried out on the Board. Scargill was furious. He said he would be the last miner to go back. And Keys saw an extraordinary private exchange between Scargill and McGahey: ‘Mick saying that he will chain Arthur’s mouth up for five years when all this is over.’15

  The NCB rejected the NUM amendments. That negotiation was over. But Bill Keys still had his private channel to Whitelaw, and he managed to persuade Scargill to ask him to try again to talk to both the government and the NCB. For the first time, Scargill agreed that if the three amendments went in, the document would form a part of the final agreement. The TUC negotiators thought this a significant concession, and agreed to ask for a meeting with the Prime Minister, which Keys had reason to believe they would get.

  Here then was the culmination of the Keys initiative, the meeting Bill Keys had been working towards ever since that first secret meeting with Whitelaw over a bottle of Chablis, and his conversation with Mick McGahey. Thatcher herself, no doubt as a result of Whitelaw’s private urging, was going to sit down and talk to the leaders of Britain’s trade unions and see if a deal could be done.

  And Whitelaw, unusually, was to be at the meeting, staring across the table at his old union chum Bill Keys. He was there partly at the urging of John Wakeham, the PM’s trusted Chief Whip. Wakeham, who had been trapped for seven hours in the rubble of the Grand Hotel after the IRA Brighton bombing which killed his wife, suggested that Whitelaw, the Cabinet’s chief wet and Lord President, attend the meeting to show that the government was united on what he called ‘the “who governs Britain” issue’.

  Thatcher readily agreed to Whitelaw’s presence, though Wakeham thinks that it was for another reason. She was very keen to demonstrate to the revered Tory establishment figure how she could be could seen to be reasonable in handling such a divisive issue without losing her cool or being overtly confrontational.

  The TUC leaders sitting on the other side of the table may not have realized that her knowledge and reasonableness were based more on the need to demonstrate her command of the situation to the chief wet and the representative of Tory landed gentry than to demonstrate it to them. The Iron Lady, a shopkeeper’s daughter made good rather than a member of the Old Tory establishment, still had a deferential streak when it came to its chief spokesman. Wakeham may not have realized the crucial role Whitelaw had already played in setting up the meeting, or that it was done in secret with that most overtly proletarian of trade union leaders, Bill Keys.

  On the other side, Arthur Scargill was forced to do something he had vowed never to do. He asked the TUC effectively to negotiate directly with the government, rather than to act as a messenger boy or postman delivering the latest letter to ministers.

  So both sides were readier to talk than they had been for months. Bill Keys, never a man to underestimate his own cleverness, was, with considerab
le justice, rather proud of himself.

  Of course Scargill’s decision reflects a certain desperation. The gloomy parallel with the 1926 strike, when the miners’ union refused to allow the TUC to negotiate regardless of the outcome, was not followed to the letter. The TUC did, in the end, go in to negotiate. But the TUC leaders were wary of a sell-out by Scargill. They wanted to be sure he was not setting them up to be the fall guys. So they asked the NUM President to confirm that if the government accepted the three amendments put by the NUM, the NUM would ensure that it was part of the final deal. Only when he agreed and it was minuted by the TUC did they agree to approach Thatcher.

  The meeting on 19 February was a historic one: the only time Thatcher met the TUC directly to discuss the miners’ dispute and one of only sixteen (three of them being routine meetings of the National Economic Development Council) that the PM had had with TUC leaders since she won the 1979 general election, according to a chronology of meetings prepared by Andrew Turnbull, her private secretary.16 Her last meeting with the TUC was almost nine months previously when she met leaders at the International TUC London Economic summit on 31 May.

  While the TUC seven were preparing the ground with Scargill, Thatcher was receiving equally pertinent advice on how to handle the TUC leadership from Gregson, Turnbull and Bernard Ingham. The memo from Ingham was characteristically brusque and dealt with how to handle the media in the aftermath of talks. ‘You cannot trust any one of those coming to see you,’ he said of the seven union leaders, who included Keys, Willis, David Basnett, Ray Buckton and Moss Evans. ‘The TUC will seize on the slightest sign of softening and weakening to suggest you are moving (and will blame you afterwards if there is a breakdown).’

  His plan to promote the government’s case was forceful. He did not want Thatcher to wait for Prime Minister’s Questions at 3.15 p.m. (the talks were in the morning). ‘You will not be able to control presentation,’ he warned. ‘It is vital that the Secretary of State for Energy [Peter Walker] gets on to the midday news bulletins with an authorized version, and that Mr Walker and Mr Hunt play the media strongly and firmly subsequently.’

  At the NCB he suggested that spokesman Michael Eaton be given ‘a confident line to deploy’. He disclosed that Eaton had been blocked from going on radio and television to persuade more miners to return to work. ‘I told him I agreed absolutely and that he could operate confidently inside the NCB on that basis.’

  Finally he warned that the lobby journalists would be at Downing Street in force. ‘We shall pen them behind barriers. But we cannot avoid them, and we should not do so. We must carry our message to them, confidently and firmly.’

  The industrial correspondents were being carefully nurtured and fed stories by the NCB, working closely with Ingham. Every Friday evening MacGregor would call in George Jones, political editor of the Sunday Times (and brother of Nicholas Jones), and Paul Potts of the News of the World, and give them a story for Sunday morning, normally about how many miners had returned to work that week. Ingham’s clear-sighted view of media handling makes a sad contrast with that of the NUM, which had now thrown away such influence with the media as it might have had.

  On the NUM side, the industrial correspondents were ‘demonized’ by Scargill, as the BBC’s Nicholas Jones puts it. Jones was following Scargill around and, despite Scargill’s view that the industrial correspondents were the enemy’s front-line troops, was continually getting calls from the miners’ leader at home, but the trouble was this: ‘He played up the intrigue, and he did get useful tipoffs from people, but he would tell me about a document and never show it to me. So it was always his version. I had no way of knowing whether it was genuine.’ That is why his tipoffs to Jones seldom resulted in useful coverage for the miners.

  All the same, Jones was becoming increasingly unhappy about the way he felt he was being manipulated by the government and the NCB, used to exaggerate the drift back to work and hail every returning miner as a hero. The NCB, he knew, had been massaging the figures, so that fewer men appeared on the books, and the day on which it could claim that more than half of them had returned to work grew closer. He decided to blow the whistle, and the Today programme agreed to run his exposé. ‘A week later’, writes Jones, ‘I was told to report to the secretary of the BBC governors as there had been a number of letters criticizing my story; my revelations were not regarded as having been “helpful”.’

  Jones was able to prove that, helpful or not, his story was true. But the only way he could get any more publicity for it would be if the NUM took up the story, and Scargill would not do that because it came from one of the hated industrial correspondents.17

  Gregson’s advice to Thatcher in advance of the meeting came in the form of a ‘suggested game plan’. The bulk of the meeting should be taken up with the TUC outlining the progress they had made and the remaining points of difficulty. His section on tactics was illuminating. ‘The main tactic must be to draw out the TUC on what they think they can deliver, and to manoeuvre them, if possible, into a position where, if the Government and NCB respond positively, they are prepared to put effective pressure on the NUM executive.’

  The tone of the meeting should be firm, constructive and realistic. Thatcher, he said, should be ‘dispelling the impression that it is the government which, for political reasons, is putting obstacles in the way of a negotiated settlement’ and she should be ‘offering a faint glimmer of light – for which responsibility should be pinned firmly on the TUC, thus increasing pressure on them – but avoiding arousing excessive expectations.’ He proposed there should be a clearly identified next step after the meeting.

  Andrew Turnbull’s advice was more measured. His secret speaking notes prepared before the meeting give the flavour. He anticipated what Norman Willis would say. He told the PM to expect ‘a lengthy account’ from the TUC General Secretary. Willis, he said, ‘will emphasize the need for a negotiated [underlined] settlement. He will say that the TUC efforts have helped bring the first shift of opinion in the NUM executive, pointing out the NUM’s acceptance of the NCB’s right to manage, the need for pits to go through a colliery review procedure, and that the board has the right of final decision.’

  He predicted that Willis would end by asking the government to agree that ‘the gap is small and bridgeable and that if only the NCB were prepared to negotiate reasonably, particularly on points of text which seemed designed to humiliate the NUM, a settlement can be achieved.’

  The PM was advised to ‘take the opportunity to praise TUC’s role again and disavow any intention of negotiating’. She was told to set out the government’s objectives, and advised (surely unnecessarily) to be firm.

  The key sentence was: ‘There must be a clear resolution of the central issues which have been raised by the dispute. It is in no one’s interests for strike to be settled in a way which dodges these issues.’ The issues were then set out. A proper procedure for settling the dispute –with ‘a substantial advance’ by the NUM in accepting the independent review element first agreed with NACODS; an acknowledgement of the Board’s duty to manage; and an acknowledgement that in making its decisions on the future of the pits the Board must take the economic performance of those pits into account.

  The last was to be a major stumbling block for the NUM. But Mrs Thatcher was advised to invite the TUC to enlarge on how it could bridge the gap. Then, on cue, Peter Walker would be expected to insist that if the TUC were to come to an understanding with the NCB, the NUM should not use the position for further negotiation.

  The briefing concluded: ‘Tell TUC that you have found their views interesting and helpful. Recognize that still formidable difficulties to be resolved but undertake to convey the points the TUC have made to the NCB, who will consider them carefully.’

  The Cabinet Office minutes of the meeting at Number Ten18 reflect these briefings. Thatcher expressed ‘her appreciation of the TUC’s efforts to promote a settlement of the coal dispute’. She then, as briefed, i
nvited Willis to tell her the position ‘as he saw it’ and he did, as expected, go on at length.

  He described in detail the to-ing and fro-ing between the TUC, NUM, NACODS and NCB over the previous weekend. This ended with a Sunday morning meeting, where the TUC asked the Deputy Chairman of the NCB to consider the three amendments to the deal agreed at a meeting of the NUM executive. But the NCB had said their proposals were a fixed position.

  He told Mrs Thatcher that in ‘his judgement the last meeting of the NUM had seen a significant shift and he doubted whether this had been fully appreciated by the NCB’. He told her that the full executive of the NUM had ‘accepted that it was the Board’s duty to manage the industry’. He reported ‘acceptance of the modified colliery review procedure’ and ‘acceptance of the NCB’s right to take final decision’.

  The TUC team made a detailed presentation. They showed that the deal now being offered to the NUM was far worse than the deal offered to NACODS, which at the time was also on offer to the NUM, and the NUM had rejected it. They said that the miners had moved a long way. The NUM was willing to recognize the NCB’s duty to manage the industry efficiently; to accept the colliery review procedure as NACODS had done; to accept that the Board made final decisions; to commit themselves to reconciliation and a restoration of relationships. Could not the Prime Minister move a little too?

  What was unacceptable was the right of the NCB to close pits on the grounds that they were uneconomic. Willis was firm: ‘The union could not sign away such a right,’ the minutes record, and he cited NACODS’ opposition as well. He also pledged TUC help to get an agreed return to work once an agreement had been reached.

  Thatcher is recorded as appreciating the TUC’s efforts and is minuted as saying that she ‘wanted to see the strike settled as soon as possible on a basis which allowed the industry to operate successfully’. But then came the rub. This ‘required a clear resolution of the central issues of the dispute’. She stressed that there must be no ‘unclear document’ as ‘this would only be the basis for the next dispute with arguments about interpretation and bad faith’. Thatcher also challenged the notion that the NUM executive had really changed its mind. She accused the NUM of changing its mind on pit closures, first accepting that loss-making pits must close and now opposing any closures outright.