Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  Both Labour spokesmen had to back down – Healey by apologising with the explanation that he had meant to say ‘glorifying in conflict’,40 while Kinnock felt obliged to write to the Welsh Guards, the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment and to the relatives of the servicemen killed or injured at Goose Green.41

  The battle of the manifestos was a one-sided contest. ‘Somehow not an exciting document’, was Margaret Thatcher’s characterisation of the Conservative blueprint for the next five years.42 It promised little apart from further privatisation and local government reform in London. ‘More of the same’ could well have been its title, although the Prime Minister said she preferred Tim Bell’s label, ‘Keep on with the change’.43

  By contrast, the Labour manifesto lived up to its cruel caricature as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Margaret Thatcher found it an easy target for negative campaigning. She called it ‘the most chilling and alien Manifesto ever put before the British people by a major political party’,44 adding for good measure, ‘It would be a suicide note for Britain too’.45 She costed Labour’s public expenditure programme over the next Parliament at a price tag of between £36 and £43 billion – a figure almost equal to the total revenue from income tax. She mocked the plans for extending the nationalisation of key industries including banks, with the punch-line, ‘Put your savings in your socks and they’d nationalise socks’.46

  These attacks were so devastating that Labour candidates all over the country began losing heart. In my constituency I saw my unilateralist opponent booed off a council estate to shouts of ‘Commie!’ from people who were usually Labour supporters. There was no need to intervene in this private grief.

  Towards the end of the campaign, even Margaret Thatcher began to pull her punches. Four days before the poll, she cancelled some of the Conservative Party’s planned Sunday-newspaper advertising on grounds of thrift. Earlier, on grounds of bad taste, she had vetoed a Saatchi and Saatchi poster depicting Michael Foot as a geriatric pensioner. But she laughed at the even worse taste of the comedian Kenny Everett, who joked at a final Tory election rally in Wembley Stadium: ‘Let’s bomb Russia, and let’s kick Michael Foot’s stick away.’47

  The final result of the 1983 general election was a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher. In the new House of Commons she had a stunning majority of 144 over all other parties. But on closer analysis it became clear that the result was more of a disaster for Labour than a decisive vote of confidence in Thatcherism. For the Conservatives’ share of the national vote was lower than it had been in 1979 – down from 43.9 per cent to 42.4 per cent. This less than stellar numerical result nevertheless converted into a torrent of Tory gains in individual constituencies, because the Alliance did so much damage to Labour. Although it won woefully few seats itself – only twenty-three – the Alliance cut Labour’s vote so severely that many socialist strongholds toppled into the Conservative camp.

  On election night, no one was much concerned about these psephological calculations. Under Westminster’s first past the post system, winner takes all and unquestionably the big winner was Margaret Thatcher.

  She was greeted at Conservative Central Office by cheering crowds and the Party Chairman, Cecil Parkinson. Then it was back to 10 Downing Street at 4.30 a.m. where the house manager greeted her with the words, ‘Welcome home’. Her second term as Prime Minister had begun.

  REFLECTION

  It took a while for the political world to recognise that the Falklands War had transformed both the personal image and the political prospects of Margaret Thatcher.

  The period May 1982 to May 1983 was an annus mirabilis for her, not because she was loved but because she was needed. On defence, foreign-policy and security issues, which occupied much of her time, she was thought to be taking the right decisions in the national interest, while her unilateralist opponents were seen as disastrously wrong. On economics, she was given the benefit of the doubt with the huge bonus that she was now believed to be tough enough to stand up to the union militants. That was a future confrontation everyone was expecting. It was now thought that there was a prime minister strong enough to win it.

  It was clever of her image-makers to accentuate the softer side of Margaret Thatcher’s character in the months running up to the election. This exercise may have convinced the many. The few knew perfectly well that the Prime Minister showed remarkably little interest or sympathy for the deprived, the marginalised and the down-on-their-luck at the lower end of society. She had other priorities. She was much more interested in delivering the rising tide that lifts all boats than finding welfare mechanisms to help those that were sinking.

  One aspect of her positioning and presentational efforts in 1982–1983 was that she talked a great deal about values. The arguments about defence gave her the platform to champion the values of a free society versus Soviet society. She had no interest in co-existing with values of communism. Her line, well ahead of its time, was that ‘the demise of the communist creed is inevitable because it is not a creed for human beings with spirit who wish to lead their own lives under the rule of law’.48

  Such forthright declarations projected the Prime Minister’s personality. By the time of the 1983 election the voters, if they bothered to read the remarkably content-free Tory manifesto, would only have had the vaguest idea of what a Conservative government might do. Nevertheless, they had a very clear perception of who the Conservative leader was, and what she stood for. Her values combined with her victory in the Falklands gave her a decisive majority and a second term in office. The 1983 election was the hinge of history opening the door to seven more years of Margaret Thatcher’s pre-eminence on the international and domestic stages of politics.

  ________________

  * Ian Gow framed the two Enoch Powell quotations about the metal of the Prime Minister during the Falklands crisis. She was so delighted that she hung them on the walls of her study at No. 10.

  † Margaret Eleanor Glover, heiress wife of Sir Douglas Glover (1908–1982), former Conservative MP for Ormskirk, 1953–1970. ‘The Widow Glover’, as she was known in the No. 10 private office, had inherited from her first husband the 2,000-acre Schloss Freudenberg estate in Switzerland. It became Margaret Thatcher’s favourite holiday retreat.

  23

  Stumbling into the second term

  CECIL PARKINSON AND THE SPEAKER

  Margaret Thatcher’s second term should have begun with huge confidence from her election victory and high competence after four years’ experience at the helm of government. Instead, she was plagued by a series of difficulties with appointments, misjudgements and avoidable errors. It took her some while to steady the ship.

  Her first major difficulty was caused by Cecil Parkinson. He had performed well as Party Chairman during the election, and earlier as a member of the Falklands war cabinet. He was skilful in handling her, particularly at moments of stress when her temperament became difficult. She admired his presentational skills, his good looks and his political judgement. She had complete confidence in him. So it was a pleasant but not a great surprise when on the Wednesday before polling day she said to him: ‘Come and have tea tomorrow, and tell me what you would like to do in government.’1

  She opened the conversation by saying that she intended to make him Foreign Secretary. ‘Before you go any further’, said Cecil Parkinson, ‘I have to tell you that there is a problem.’ He began to explain that he had been having an affair with his secretary, Sara Keays.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ interrupted Margaret Thatcher. ‘They tell me Anthony Eden jumped into bed with every good-looking woman he ever met.’2

  Astonished by this lack of censoriousness from the Prime Minister, whom he had always thought of as ‘a rather strait-laced lady from Grantham’.3 Parkinson explained that his problem was more complicated. Sara Keays was pregnant with his child.*

  Although Margaret Thatcher paused on receiving this news, she did not immediately see it as an insuperable ob
stacle to appointing Parkinson as Foreign Secretary.4 He demurred, and asked her to leave him out of the cabinet so that he would have some privacy in which to sort out his problems.

  ‘But you won’t have any privacy’, retorted the Prime Minister. ‘Every newspaper will be wanting to know why you are not in the cabinet. It will be the only story.’5

  Cecil Parkinson reluctantly accepted her point. But he insisted that he needed privacy in order to conduct delicate negotiations about his child with Sara Keays and her family. ‘It would be very difficult to do this surrounded by twenty-four-hour a day bodyguards’, he said.6

  Margaret Thatcher was so keen to keep him that she offered him the lower (and unguarded) post of Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. She also emphasised the importance of him staying married to his wife, Ann. Cecil Parkinson agreed to both points. So, having settled these matters, the Prime Minister and her still-favourite secretary of state moved on to settling the membership of the entire cabinet.

  Forty-eight hours later, with the election result declared, Willie Whitelaw and the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, came round to No. 10 to give their advice on the choosing of the new cabinet. Cecil Parkinson was already with her. Margaret Thatcher made a show of pretending that she had not already selected her cabinet the previous day. In the middle of her charade for the benefit of Whitelaw and Jopling, a call came in from the White House. The President of the United States wanted to congratulate the Prime Minister on her re-election.

  As they retreated into the Downing Street garden while this transatlantic conversation took place on the hot-line, Willie Whitelaw sought to convince Cecil Parkinson that he deserved a higher place in the government.

  ‘Look, Cecil, you absolutely must get one of the top three jobs’, said Whitelaw. ‘I shall tell her so myself. You must either be Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or Home Secretary. You have earned it.’ With some difficulty Parkinson persuaded his benefactor to back off. ‘Look, Willie, for reasons I am not free to explain, on this occasion I can’t consider it’,7 he said. The Deputy Prime Minister was left puzzled.

  This was not the only complicated puzzle that arose as Margaret Thatcher tried to decide who was coming or going in her new administration. She made a grave misjudgement involving the Speakership of the House of Commons. In a foolish display of arrogance, she thought she could deliver this job to her own nominee.

  As the incumbent Speaker, George Thomas, was retiring, she decided to give the post to Francis Pym, who she was intending to sack as Foreign Secretary. He was not interested. So the Prime Minister then offered it to Humphrey Atkins, who was close to her both personally and politically. He had been Chief Whip, and her clandestine supporter, during the leadership election of 1975. Smooth, handsome and ambitiously charming, Atkins was her court favourite before the rise of Cecil Parkinson. Unfortunately, he enjoyed far lower esteem among his parliamentary colleagues. He had not been a popular Chief Whip, and had resigned from the cabinet when he was No. 2 at the Foreign Office under Lord Carrington at the start of the Falklands crisis. But Margaret Thatcher retained a soft spot for Atkins, and assured him that the Speakership would be his. Accordingly, she put the word out through the whips to Conservative MPs that they should vote her choice into the chair.

  This was a serious mistake. The election of a Speaker, which takes place before a new Parliament can formally open, is strictly a House of Commons matter. MPs who knew the constitutional conventions were outraged that the Prime Minister should be encroaching on their territory by trying to impose her own candidate. I well remember the furious resistance expressed in all parties to ‘Maggie’s poodle’, as Humphrey Atkins was being called. Once the interventions of No. 10 were spotted, a bandwagon began rolling for Bernard ‘Jack’ Weatherill, the likeable Deputy Speaker, who looked the strongest alternative to the Prime Minister’s candidate.

  When she heard of the growing opposition to Humphrey Atkins, Margaret Thatcher played it rough. First she briefed against Weatherill, telling a number of colleagues that she thought he was not up to the job. This was so palpably unfair that it increased the groundswell of support for him. Then she tried to twist the arm of Robin Maxwell Hyslop, the Member for Tiverton, who had let it be known that he intended to move the motion to elect Weatherill as the new Speaker. ‘Jack and I were subjected to intense and repeated pressure from the Conservative whips and No. 10 to give way to the “official candidate”,’ recalled Maxwell Hyslop, ‘but we stood firm.’8

  In the face of this firmness, Margaret Thatcher tried a knock-out blow. She summoned Jack Weatherill to No. 10.

  ‘I hear you’re trying to thwart me’, was her opening line to him.

  ‘I’m not thwarting anyone, Prime Minister’, replied Weatherill. ‘I’m simply allowing my name to go forward in the election for the new Speaker.’

  ‘Then I will make you the senior Minister of State at the Foreign Office. How about that?’

  ‘That would be quite wrong for me, and for you’, was Weatherill’s answer, arguing that it was without precedent for a sitting Deputy Speaker to leave the neutrality of the chair and re-enter party politics as a minister.

  Angered by his steely integrity, Margaret Thatcher lost her temper and shouted, ‘You’re just being obstructive to me!’9 The interview ended as unpleasantly as it began.

  Three days later, Bernard Weatherill was elected as the new Speaker of the House of Commons with an overwhelming majority of support from all parties. ‘Jack’s great strength was that everybody knew that Margaret Thatcher didn’t want him’,10 observed Cecil Parkinson. To have shown her hand so counter-productively was a blunder. In an attempt to cover it up, she concocted a face-saving device that allowed her aborted candidate, Humphrey Atkins, to move the motion in favour of Jack Weatherill’s appointment.

  This fooled no one. For days after the election, the talk of the tea room was fiercely critical of Margaret Thatcher for trying to use her muscle to control what was regarded as a purely House of Commons decision. Had she simply failed to understand that prime ministers have no right to influence the election of the Speaker? Or had her triumph at the polls blinded her to the limits of her power? Either way, she allowed herself to be seen in a bad light. Even more foolishly, she went on to show herself to be a bad loser.

  Margaret Thatcher had an unattractive side to her personality – a tendency to bear grudges. Because Jack Weatherill had ‘thwarted’ her, she made a later attempt to undermine him, using much the same negative briefing techniques as she deployed against some of her ministers who had fallen out of favour. This was a dangerous tactic for a Prime Minister to use against a Speaker. Jack Weatherill soon rumbled what was happening, calling her efforts to discredit him by anonymous leaks a ‘Black Glove’ operation. As he later explained:

  Black Glove is a political phrase not known to too many people … rather nasty things are said and written about you, and the great art is finding whose fingers are in it. Well, I did discover this. Margaret Thatcher had her spin doctors too, notably in the person of Bernard Ingham, and some pretty unflattering articles appeared …11

  When the Black Glove operation was at its dirtiest, with the Sunday Telegraph openly reporting that a campaign to bring about the Speaker’s resignation was being orchestrated by elements in the government itself,12 Jack Weatherill’s friends started to rally round. I was one of them. As he told the story:

  One day Jonathan Aitken came to me and said, ‘You realise, Mr Speaker, this is a put-up job, and they’re trying to make you resign … You’ve got to go and see the editors.’ I said I don’t know any editors. And he said, ‘Well, we do!’ And the result of that was that I began seeing the editors in the evening time. They used to come and talk to me, and leading articles began to appear in the newspapers, particularly the heavy newspapers, saying how important it was to have a Speaker who would stand up to a powerful Prime Minister.

  With the help of Matthew Parris, the presenter of Weekend World in 1988, the Speaker took
the unprecedented step of appearing live on the programme to put across his message that he was ‘not going to be put off in any way from doing what I believe to be my undoubted duty’.13 What he meant by this was that he would continue to be more helpful to back-benchers on matters like granting more Private Notice Questions than Margaret Thatcher wanted. Because this made him popular with the House of Commons, she eventually saw that her war against the Speaker was rebounding on her. So she sent her PPS, Michael Alison, on a late-night mission to Weatherill, saying to him: ‘Mr Speaker, the Prime Minister asks if we may have a truce.’14

  The truce held, somewhat uneasily, for the next two and a half years. Jack Weatherill ceased to be a beleaguered Speaker once No. 10 became silent. But he remained hurt by Margaret Thatcher’s treatment of him.

  There is an intriguing postscript to these battles between the Prime Minister and the Speaker. It is little known that Jack Weatherill came to play an almost invisible yet pivotal part in her downfall.

  On 13 November 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was highly vulnerable, Sir Geoffrey Howe made his dramatic resignation statement† to a packed and silent House of Commons, immediately after Prime Minister’s Questions. He was only able to deliver it at this time and in this way because of a most helpful ruling from the Speaker.

  Sir Geoffrey was planning to explain the reasons for his resignation in the course of the Queen’s Speech debate, exactly as Nigel Lawson had done a year earlier. If that and similar precedents had been followed, the ex-Deputy Prime Minister would have been called at about 5.30 p.m., when the House would not have been full. His speech would have been susceptible to questions and interruptions. Given the likely reaction to his planned remarks from Thatcher loyalists, they might well have diminished if not undermined the impact of his speech.