The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

by Margaret Thatcher

  I argued this last point through with Jim Baker when he came to see me on the evening of Friday 9 November. But I was not able to sway him. He said that UN authority was crucial to sustain the support of American public opinion for military action. I also raised my worries about delaying the military option until the extra American forces now being sent had arrived in the Gulf. I said that it was vital not to miss the window of opportunity which would close in early March. He was able to reassure me on this point. But by now time was running out for me as well as for Saddam Hussein.

  In response to Jim Baker’s request and at my last Cabinet on Thursday 22 November — to which I announced my resignation as Prime Minister — the decision was made to double Britain’s military commitment and to deploy an extra brigade to the Gulf. We would send the 4th Brigade from Germany, comprising a regiment of Challenger tanks, two armoured infantry battalions and a regiment of Royal Artillery, with reconnaissance and supporting services. Together the two brigades would form the 1st Armoured Division. The total number of UK forces committed would amount to more than 30,000.

  Since the morning of Thursday 2 August hardly a day had passed without my involvement in diplomatic and military moves to isolate and defeat Iraq. One of my very few abiding regrets is that I was not there to see the issue through. The failure to disarm Saddam Hussein and to follow through the victory so that he was publicly humiliated in the eyes of his subjects and Islamic neighbours was a mistake which stemmed from the excessive emphasis placed right from the start on international consensus. The opinion of the UN counted for too much and the military objective of defeat for too little. And so Saddam Hussein was left with the standing and the means to terrorize his people and foment more trouble. In war there is much to be said for magnanimity in victory. But not before victory.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Men in Lifeboats

  The background to and course of the 1990 Conservative Party leadership campaign — and resignation

  BACKGROUND TO THE 1990 LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN

  In 1975 I was the first candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party to challenge an existing leader under the rules which had been instituted by Sir Alec Douglas-Home a decade earlier. Having entered the field as a rank outsider, I won the leadership in an open contest. So I am the last person to complain about having to meet a challenge to my own leadership. But the circumstances of 1990, when Michael Heseltine challenged me, were very different. I had won three general elections and lost none, whereas Ted Heath had lost three out of four. I was a sitting prime minister of eleven and a half years in office, whereas Ted was a newly-defeated Opposition leader. The beliefs and policies which I had pioneered in Britain were helping to remould world affairs. And our country was at that moment on the verge of war in the Gulf.

  Of course, democracy is no respecter of persons, as my great predecessor, Winston Churchill, learned when having led Britain through her supreme struggle against the Nazi tyranny and in the midst of negotiations crucial to the post-war world order, he was defeated in the 1945 general election. At least, however, it was the British people who dismissed him from office. I was not given the opportunity to meet the voters — and they were not able to pronounce on my final term of office, except by proxy.

  The 1965 procedure for electing the Tory leader was, by unwritten convention, not intended for use when the Party was in office. Theoretically, I had to be re-elected every year; but since no one else stood, this was a formality. Ever since Michael Heseltine flounced out of the Cabinet in January 1986, however, he had kept up a constant if unavowed campaign to replace me. Inevitably, as problems mounted in late 1988 and 1989, closer attention was paid to the precise details of the system.

  I have already described the growth of political discontent in the summer and autumn of 1989. Of its causes, the most important was the economy, as high interest rates had to be applied to curb the inflation which Nigel Lawson’s policy of shadowing the deutschmark had generated. This aggravated what would otherwise have been more manageable problems, such as the agitation over the community charge — a running sore which would get much worse the following year. There was also a hard core of opposition to my approach to the European Community, though this was very much a minority view. And there was, of course, a range of back-benchers who for various idiosyncratic reasons, or because they had been denied or removed from office, would be happy to line up against me. There was even talk of one of them putting up for the leadership as a ‘stalking horse’ for the real contender, Michael Heseltine, lurking in the wings.

  In fact, Sir Anthony Meyer decided to mount a challenge for reasons of his own in 1989, and there had to be a contest. Mark Lennox-Boyd, my PPS, George Younger, Ian Gow, Tristan Garel-Jones (a Foreign Office Minister of State), Richard Ryder (Economic Secretary) and Bill Shelton constituted my campaign team who quietly identified supporters, waverers and opponents. They did their job well. I did not myself campaign and no one seriously thought that I should. The results were by no means unsatisfactory. I won 314 votes, Sir Anthony Meyer 33. There were 24 spoilt ballots and 3 abstentions. But the contest had revealed, as George Younger told me, a certain amount of discontent.

  Accordingly, I increased the amount of time set aside in my diary for meeting back-benchers. I made more frequent visits to that fount of gossip, the Commons tea-room. I also began regular meetings with groups of back-benchers, usually recruited according to region so as to ensure a wide spectrum of views. At these meetings, which usually took place in my room in the House, I would ask everyone around the table to speak their mind and then come in at the end to answer point by point. There was frank speaking on both sides — on one occasion a back-bencher told me it was time for me to go. I may not have complied, but I did listen.

  But no amount of discussion or attention to personal sensitivities could compensate for the political situation in the summer of 1990. High community charge bills made Conservative MPs anxious about their seats. Inflation and interest rates were still high. Divisions in the Parliamentary Party and the Government over Europe sharpened as the pace of the federalist programme accelerated. The rank and file of the Party was still with me, as they would show at the 1990 Party Conference, indeed perhaps stronger than ever in their support. But too many of my colleagues had an unspoken contempt for the party faithful whom they regarded as organization fodder with no real right to hold political opinions. And in the event, no one would seriously listen to them — though they were formally consulted and pronounced heavily in my favour — when it came for my fate to be decided.

  For my part, I remained confident that we could ride out these difficulties and win the next election. High interest rates were already doing their work in bringing down inflation, whatever the headline RPI figures showed. I was only waiting for signs that the money supply was firmly under control before cutting interest rates — and continuing to cut them even if that would entail a changed parity in the ERM. At the end of April I had my first serious discussion with the Policy Unit about policies that might be in the next manifesto. And that summer I had discussions with colleagues on setting up manifesto policy groups. My Party Conference speech in October 1990 raised the curtain on just a little of this, outlining proposals for privatization, training vouchers (and hinting at education vouchers), and increasing the number of grant-maintained schools. I had not decided when we would go to the country. But I wanted to be ready for the summer of 1991.

  I had also been thinking about my future beyond the next election. There was still much that I wanted to do. Most immediately, we had to defeat Saddam Hussein and establish a durable security framework for the Gulf. The economy was fundamentally strong, but I wanted to overcome inflation and recession and restore a stable framework for growth. I thought there was a good prospect of mopping up communism in central and eastern Europe and establishing limited government under law in the new democracies. Above all I hoped to win the battle for my kind of European Community — one in whi
ch a free and enterprising nation-state like Britain could comfortably flourish. But I also knew that the wider framework of international relations which was needed in the post-Cold War world — one in which international bodies like the UN, the GATT, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO and the CSCE held the ring, while nation-states and international commerce were left to their own proper spheres of activity — would not be built in a day. This was a substantial long-term programme.

  My problem was the lack of a successor whom I could trust both to keep my legacy secure and to build on it. I liked John Major and thought that he genuinely shared my approach. But he was relatively untested and his tendency to accept the conventional wisdom had given me pause for thought. For reasons I have explained, however, no other candidate found greater favour with me.[118] Given time, John might grow in stature, or someone else might emerge. So, both because of the scale of the challenges and my uncertainty over the succession, I did not wish to step down before the next election.

  Nor, however, did I seriously intend to go ‘on and on’. I thought that about two years into the next Parliament would be the right time to leave. Of course, even then it would be a wrench. I felt as full of energy as ever. But I accepted that one day it would be my duty to leave No. 10, whether the electorate had demanded it or not.

  What would not persuade me to depart, however, was the kind of argument put to me by Peter Carrington over dinner at his house one Sunday evening in April 1990. Denis was not there: he was away for the weekend. Peter argued that the Party wanted me to leave office both with dignity and at a time of my own choosing. I took this to be a coded message: dignity might suggest a rather earlier departure than I would otherwise choose. Peter was, I suspect, speaking on behalf of at least a section of the Tory establishment. My own feeling was that I would go ‘when the time was ripe’. I reflected that if the great and the good of the Tory Party had had their way, I would never have become Party leader, let alone Prime Minister. Nor had I the slightest interest in appearances nor in the trappings of office. I would fight — and, if necessary, go down fighting — for my beliefs as long as I could. ‘Dignity’ did not come into it.

  GEOFFREY HOWE’S RESIGNATION

  The restiveness of Tory back-benchers was transformed into open panic by the Eastbourne by-election later in October. Ian Gow’s old seat went to the Liberals with a swing of 20 per cent. The opinion polls also looked bad. Labour had a substantial lead. This was not a happy background to the Rome summit which I attended over the weekend of 27–28 October.[119] Yet even as I was fighting a lone battle in Rome, Geoffrey Howe went on television and told Brian Waiden that we did not in fact oppose the principle of a single currency, implying that I would probably be won round. This was either disloyal or remarkably stupid. At the first Prime Minister’s Questions on my return, I was inevitably asked about his remarks. I countered Opposition taunts by saying that Geoffrey was ‘too big a man to need a little man like [Neil Kinnock] to stand up for him’. But I could not endorse what he had said.

  And my difficulties were just beginning. I now had to stand up in the House and make my statement on the outcome of the Rome summit. I duly stressed that ‘a single currency is not the policy of this Government’. But this assertion — which I considered essential — had two important qualifications. The first was that our own proposal for a parallel or ‘common’ currency in the form of the hard ecu might evolve towards a single currency. The second was a form of words, which ministers had come to use, that we would not have a single currency ‘imposed upon us’. And, inevitably, there were differing interpretations of precisely what that delphic expression meant. Such hypothetical qualifications could be used by someone like Geoffrey to keep open the possibility that we would at some point end up with a single currency. That was not our intention, and I felt there was a basic dishonesty in this interpretation. It was the removal of this camouflage which — if any single policy difference mattered — probably provided the reason for Geoffrey’s resignation.

  I said in reply to questions that ‘in my view [the hard ecu] would not become widely used throughout the Community — possibly most widely used for commercial transactions. Many people would continue to prefer their own currency.’ I also expressed firm agreement with Norman Tebbit when he made the vital point that ‘the mark of a single currency is not only that all other currencies must be extinguished but that the capacity of other institutions to issue currencies must also be extinguished.’ My reply was: ‘This Government believes in the pound sterling.’ And I vigorously rejected the Delors concept of a federal Europe in which the European Parliament would be the Community’s House of Representatives, the Commission its Executive, and the Council of Ministers its Senate. ‘No, no, no,’ I said.

  This performance set Geoffrey on the road to resignation. Exactly why is still unclear, perhaps to him, certainly to me. I do not know whether he actually wanted a single currency. Neither now or later, as far as I am aware, did he ever say where he stood — only where I should not stand. Perhaps the enthusiastic — indeed uproarious — support I received from the back-benchers convinced him that he had to strike at once, or I would win round the Parliamentary Party to the platform I earlier set out in Bruges.

  No matter what I had said, however, Geoffrey would sooner or later have objected and gone. By this time the gap between us, unlike the rows I had with Nigel Lawson, was as much a matter of personal antipathy as of policy difference. I have explained how Geoffrey reacted when I asked him to leave the Foreign Office.[120] He never put his heart into the Leadership of the House. In the Cabinet he was now a force for obstruction, in the Party a focus of resentment, in the country a source of division. On top of all that, we found each other’s company almost intolerable. I was surprised at the immediate grounds of his resignation. But in some ways it is more surprising that he remained so long in a position which he clearly disliked and resented.

  I heard nothing of Geoffrey on Wednesday (31 October). On Thursday morning at Cabinet I took him to task, probably too sharply, about the preparation of the legislative programme. I was slightly curious at the time that he had so little to say for himself. Afterwards, I had lunch in the flat, worked on my speech for the debate on the Loyal Address, had a short meeting with Douglas Hurd about the situation in the Gulf, and then went off to Marsham Street where, in the cellars beneath the DoE/Department of Transport complex, the Gulf Embargo Surveillance unit was operating. I had not been there long when a message came through that Geoffrey wanted urgently to see me back at No. 10. He intended to resign.

  I was back there at 5.50 p.m. for what turned out to be almost a rerun of Nigel Lawson’s resignation. I asked Geoffrey to postpone his decision till the following morning: I already had so much to think about — surely a little more time was possible. But he insisted. He said that he had already cancelled the speech he was due to give that evening at the Royal Overseas League, and the news was bound to get out. So the letters were prepared and his resignation was announced.

  In a sense it was a relief he had gone. But I had no doubt of the political damage it would do. All the talk of a leadership bid by Michael Heseltine would start again. Apart from myself, Geoffrey was the last survivor of the 1979 Cabinet. The press were bound to draw disparaging attention to my longevity. It was impossible to know what Geoffrey himself planned to do. But presumably he would not remain silent. It was vital that the Cabinet reshuffle, made necessary by his departure, should reassert my authority and unite the Party. That would not be easy, and indeed the two objectives might by now be in conflict.

  I could not discuss all this with my advisers immediately, however, because I had to host a reception at No. 10 for the Lord’s Taverners, the charitable organization with which Denis was involved. But, as soon as I could, I broke away and went to my study where Ken Baker, John Wakeham and Alastair Goodlad, the Deputy Chief Whip, who was standing in for Tim Renton, got down to discussing what must be done.

  I already knew my ideal
solution: Norman Tebbit back in the Cabinet as Education Secretary. Norman shared my views on Europe — as on so much else; he was tough, articulate and trustworthy. He would have made a superb Education Secretary who could sell his programme to the country and wrong-foot the Labour Party. We could not reach him that night but made contact the following morning (Friday 2 November), and he agreed to come in and discuss it. As I feared, he would not be persuaded. He had left the Cabinet to look after his wife and that duty took precedence over all else. He would give me all the support he could from outside, but he could not come back into Government.

  When Norman left, Tim Renton, the Chief Whip, now back in London, came in. He had undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief that Norman was not coming back. He now argued strongly that William Waldegrave — who was on the left of the Party — should join the Cabinet. William was slim, cerebral and aloof — a sort of Norman St John Stevas without jokes — and he seemed likely to be even less of an ally. But I had never kept talented people out of my Cabinets just because they were not of my way of thinking, and I was not going to start even now. I asked him to take on the Department of Health.

  But I still wanted a new face at Education, where John MacGregor’s limitations as a public spokesman were costing us dear in an area of great importance. So I appointed Ken Clarke — again not someone on my wing of the Party, but an energetic and persuasive bruiser, very useful in a brawl or an election. John MacGregor I moved to Geoffrey’s old post as Leader of the House. The appointments were well received. Although my preferred strategy of bringing back Norman had failed, my objective of uniting the Party seemed to be succeeding.

  Any prospect of a return to business as usual, however, was quickly dispelled. I spent Saturday 3 November at Chequers working with my advisers on my speech on the Address, which had, of course, now assumed a new importance in the light of Geoffrey’s resignation. That evening Bernard Ingham rang through to read me an open letter Michael Heseltine had written to his constituency chairman. It was ostensibly about the need for the Government to chart a new course on Europe. In fact, it was the first tentative public step in the Heseltine leadership bid. Sunday’s papers (4 November) were accordingly full of stories about the leadership. They also contained the first opinion poll findings taken after Geoffrey’s departure. Unsurprisingly, they were very bad. Labour was shown in one to be 21 per cent ahead. I spent the day working on another speech — on the environment — which I was to deliver on Tuesday in Geneva.