On one of these nocturnal visits a refreshed Hart attempted to make a pass at the Prime Minister, telling her that he thought she was ‘incredibly beautiful and sexy’. She fended him off with the rebuke, ‘Don’t be such a silly boy’.29 But she could not have been entirely displeased by his compliment, for she continued to use him both as an intelligence gatherer and as her link man to the anti-Scargill miners of Nottingham, whose coal production was steadily increasing.
After the strike, Hart was invited to join her speech-writing team for a while. Eventually, she was persuaded that he was too much of an unguided missile, and refused him further access after he was reported as having presented himself as her personal representative to a US defence corporation. But in her memoirs she complimented him as ‘a friend who was making a great effort to help the working miners’, from whom she learned ‘a good deal informally about what was happening on the ground’.30
Margaret Thatcher’s subterranean encouragement of David Hart’s activities highlighted her own nervousness about the outcome of the miners’ strike for most of 1984. She was troubled by what she called the ‘laid-back optimism’ of Peter Walker.31 However, the sanguine views of her Secretary of State for Energy were confirmed when she held a secret meeting on the subject of power-station endurance with the CEGB chairman, Sir Walter Marshall. He gave her the good news that the power stations could be kept running until at least June 1985, and probably until November or even later. The Prime Minister was delighted, although she took on board the all-important rider that Marshall’s forecasts depended on the continuing supply of coal from the Nottinghamshire pits. No wonder she concentrated on encouraging the working miners in both her public speeches and in her private initiatives through David Hart. As Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Blue Pimpernel’, he had his niche in an important chapter of her history.
THE NACODS CRISIS AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE STRIKE
The Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire miners were just starting to trickle back to work in significant numbers when Margaret Thatcher’s expectation of victory was threatened by the possibility of a strike by National Association of Colliery Overmen, Deputies and Shotfirers (NACODS). This was the obscure and small union of safety overseers whose supervision was required by law before coal could be mined from any pit. The membership of NACODS suddenly voted for strike action by an 82 per cent majority because a tactical error had been made by the NCB management.
For the first six months of the dispute, NACODS’ maintenance and safety workers kept the pits open. Those who decided not to cross the NUM picket lines continued to be paid in the interests of expediency. Suddenly, the NCB announced that it would stop paying the comparatively few supervisors who refused to defy NUM pickets. This brought NACODS, until now keeping its distance from the NUM, to the brink of a strike in solidarity with Scargill. This would have been a disaster for the government’s strategy because without the NACODS men carrying out their safety checks, the working miners could not go down the pits.
Margaret Thatcher was horrified by this development. Ian MacGregor’s lack of political nous was responsible for it. He said he couldn’t care less whether NACODS walked out. In his view Scargill was going to be beaten anyway.
By contrast, the Prime Minister felt it was vital to keep the moderate Nottinghamshire miners bringing up the coal. She was furious with the NCB chairman for his obstinacy. ‘We were in danger of losing everything because of a silly mistake’, was how she put it.32
Correcting the mistake was not easy. Margaret Thatcher was anxious to preserve the fiction that the government was keeping above the fray of the strike, which was still being presented as just an industrial dispute between the NCB and the NUM. She pretended not to be exerting any kind of interventionist influence on the NCB management. But the NACODS crisis was so serious she had to do just that.
By chance, the crisis came to a head in the middle of the Conservative Party Conference. There was a meeting on NACODS in the Prime Minister’s suite in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, on the very evening when some four hours later the IRA bomb exploded. The conclusion of the meeting was that NACODS must be bought off with whatever was needed to keep the mines working. Norman Tebbit, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, was deputed to telephone Ian MacGregor to persuade him to make a better offer to NACODS. MacGregor did not agree. The conversation became acrimonious, with Tebbit saying: ‘You’ve got to give in. You’ve got to give NACODS what they want.’
‘Is that an instruction, Secretary of State?’ replied MacGregor, repeating his question with a touch of menace in his voice.
Pushed to this brink, Tebbit backed off, at least to the extent of passing the receiver to Tim Bell, saying, ‘Go on, you tell him’. By this time Tim Bell had developed a close relationship with Ian MacGregor, so was able to say to him, after some cajoling, ‘C’mon, Mac. At the end of the day we’re all working for these people. Let’s do what they ask.’ ‘OK, then’, grumped MacGregor. ‘I’ll hold my nose and do it.’33
What was then done by the NCB was to make greater concessions to NACODS than had been offered to the NUM, including an independent review of pit closures. If Scargill had been cleverer he would have accepted the NACODS terms for the NUM and declared that he had won the strike. But he had his own political agenda, which went far beyond improving the conditions for NUM members. So he bombastically rejected any settlement that did not result in the unconditional withdrawal of all pit closures. The result was to hand unconditional victory to Margaret Thatcher.
Once the NACODS crisis was over, the government only had to wait for the strike to crumble. Disillusionment with Scargill was growing in many mining communities. His antics with Libyan and Soviet paymasters contributed to his unpopularity. A greater cause of discontent was that after seven months of strike action with no discernible progress, many miners were fed up and hard up. As the economic pressures on their families mounted, they faced a bleak Christmas. They were becoming incredulous about Scargill’s forecasts that coal stocks at the power stations were running out and that the government would soon crumble. Margaret Thatcher’s resolution sounded far more real.
By November 1984 there was little doubt as to who was winning the battle. The NCB, again guided by the not-so-invisible hand of the Prime Minister, operating via David Young and Tim Bell, offered a handsome bonus to those miners who returned to work by 19 November. Over 11,000 of them did so. By the end of the year, 70,000 out of 180,000 miners were working, and the coal they produced was getting to the power stations.
Nevertheless, the violence and the intimidation continued, with one death and many injuries. An angry Margaret Thatcher became overtly interventionist in response to initiatives to settle the strike. She upped the ante of the NCB’s negotiating position by insisting that it must receive a written guarantee from the NUM saying that management alone would be the decision-makers on pit closures. ‘Let us get it written down’, she said in a January television interview. ‘I want it dead straight, honest and no fudging.’34
She was attacked by Neil Kinnock for being ‘a stubborn Salome who wants the miners’ heads on a plate’.35 This was not a million miles from the truth – even if Arthur Scargill was improbably cast as John the Baptist.
By mid-January 110,000 out of 180,000 miners were back at work. Scargill, however, was in total denial about his inevitable defeat. His NUM bully boys continued to victimise ‘scabs’, often in brutal ways that ranged from sticking screwdrivers into their testicles to fire-bombing their homes. Appalled by such violence, Margaret Thatcher became preoccupied with the plight of the working miners, and discussed plans to welcome their representatives to No. 10. Reluctantly, she accepted Peter Walker’s advice that it would be unwise to do this while there was still fighting on the picket lines. But she made her sympathies clear in a letter of 4 February 1985 to the wife of a working miner, promising her that there would be ‘no betrayal of the working miners to whom we owe so much’.36
The strike finally collap
sed almost a year after it had begun. Bowing to reality on 3 March 1985, an NUM delegate conference voted, against Arthur Scargill’s advice, for the return to work that had already happened. Amidst emotional scenes of brass bands playing and banners held aloft, virtually all the miners still on strike marched back to the pitheads the next day. The exceptions were the Kent miners who stayed out for another six weeks.
One evening in the House of Commons in early April, Margaret Thatcher asked me why my NUM constituents were being so stubborn. ‘Because they think Arthur Scargill is a wet for giving way’, I replied. She did not find this amusing. ‘But he did not give way! He was crushed’, she retorted with eyes blazing.37
LOSERS BUT NO VICTORS
The crushing of Arthur Scargill was essential, because he had led the miners over a precipice for reasons of political extremism, which had little to do with their economic interests. Outside his own introverted circle of NUM militants, few people agreed with his views or his tactics. So his defeat by Margaret Thatcher might have been expected to be seen as another popular victory for her. This was not the way it turned out.
Economically, the NCB’s and the government’s side of the case was overwhelming. Only Scargill could have argued with a straight face that no pit could ever be closed for financial reasons. Margaret Thatcher was right to claim that the miners’ strike was political in the sense, as she put it, that ‘Marxists wanted to defy the law of the land in order to defy the laws of economics’.38
Legally, the new trade-union legislation introduced by Norman Tebbit and vigorously backed by the Prime Minister was crucially important in defeating the strike. The total immunity at law conferred on trade unions in 1906 had been changed by the 1982 Employment Act which required a strike ballot to be held before immunity could be claimed. As a result of this reform, the NUM was vulnerable for having claimed their strike was official without the required ballot. The sequestration of NUM assets that was ordered for contempt of court because of this breach of the law was one of the turning points in the dispute. It could not have happened without Margaret Thatcher’s earlier support, against the wishes of most of her cabinet in 1981, for ‘Tebbit’s Law’ as it was called.
Symbolically, the Prime Minister’s victory over the NUM was much more than the breaking of a strike: it was the breaking of a spell. Ever since the demise of the Heath government at the hands of the miners in 1974, it had become part of the mythology of British politics that a democratically elected government could not defeat an industrial challenge from the NUM. Margaret Thatcher exploded that myth. She had decisively answered, as Heath had failed to do, the neuralgic question: ‘Who governs Britain?’
Politically, at least in the House of Commons, the exchanges on the miners’ strike highlighted the government’s dominance over the Labour opposition. This was not just a matter of numbers in the division lobbies. Nor was it because Margaret Thatcher seemed particularly effective at the despatch box. Her ascendancy was established because Neil Kinnock, the newly elected Leader of the Opposition, looked so weak.
From the start of the dispute, Kinnock found himself in an invidious position after Scargill had avoided the constitutionally required national ballot. As a new Labour leader, dependent on NUM votes, and as the MP for a mining constituency, Kinnock could not bring himself to condemn the strike. So for a year’s worth of parliamentary duelling in debates and at Prime Minister’s Questions, the Leader of the Opposition had to evade, equivocate, bluster and fudge.
Margaret Thatcher made mincemeat of him. In one of her more memorable assaults towards the end of the strike, she taunted Kinnock:
Throughout the strike, the right hon. Gentleman has had the choice between standing up to the NUM leadership and keeping silent. He has kept silent. When the leadership of the NUM called a strike without a ballot, in defiance of union rules, the right honourable Gentleman stayed silent. When pickets tried by violence to close down the pits in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere, against the democratically expressed wishes of the local miners, the right hon. Gentleman stayed silent. When the NUM tried to impose mob rule at Orgreave, the right hon. Gentleman stayed silent …39
Kinnock might have done better if he had stayed as silent as a Trappist monk. Instead, he played his hand with a windy verbosity that exposed not only the weakness of his position, but also the inadequacy of his abilities. Long before the strike ended, there were several MPs on the Labour benches saying that he was a loser who would never make a prime minister. Kinnock never recovered from his bellicose ambivalence in facing both ways on Scargill’s militants.
After trouncing all her adversaries during the miners’ strike, Margaret Thatcher must have been expecting to collect a dividend of electoral popularity. Yet, although the polls showed the public to be strongly anti-Scargill, the ratings for the Prime Minister recorded no gains. To some, this was mystifying. The government’s authority had increased, the sovereignty of Parliament had been restored, the defeat of union power met with widespread approval and the economy could look forward to an unprecedented era of industrial peace. So why was Margaret Thatcher not basking in the same sort of acclaim she enjoyed after the Falklands?
The answer was that she overplayed her hand. She was right to be vitriolic about Scargill, but wrong to sound so totally unsympathetic to the NUM rank and file who supported him. This was a distinction that could have been subtly exploited, but when her dander was up, Margaret Thatcher did not do subtlety. Indeed, through the red mist of her anger she came perilously close to blurring the lines between her battle against Argentine military invaders and her battle against British miners.
Addressing the 1922 Committee of Conservative back-benchers in July 1984, she became so carried away on the tide of her anti-Scargill rhetoric that she drew a parallel between the Falklands War and the miners’ strike, saying that, ‘At the time of the conflict they had to fight the enemy without; but the enemy within, much more difficult to fight, was just as dangerous to liberty’.40
The thought may have been right, but the words on the lips of a Prime Minister were wrong. Sitting in a packed Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons when she delivered this onslaught, I saw several winces across the faces of her colleagues. The tribal banging on desks by her enthusiasts easily drowned out the sharp intakes of breath among her doubters. But the doubters were right in at least one important cultural respect.
When the miners’ strike was finally over, with even the militants in Kent and other enclaves returning to work, the end result had the air of a melancholy wake, not a glorious victory.
For the mining communities suffered greatly as a consequence of Scargill’s folly. Pit closures multiplied, bitter enmities festered, jobs vanished in the tens of thousands, suicide rates tragically soared and a whole way of life ground to a sad halt in many parts of Britain.
Margaret Thatcher had little or no sympathy for such feelings. But a clear majority of the British public did. Their sympathy showed in opinion polls, donations to miners’ families’ charities, and in the success of plays and movies such as Billy Elliott and Brassed Off. There was even a joint demonisation of Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill, who were voted respectively Man and Woman of the Year by listeners of the Today programme and lampooned as a composite hate figure, ‘Martha Scarthatch’. None of this worried the Prime Minister, who often saw being hated as a badge of honour. But it changed her domestic image by permanently adding the dimension of harshness to toughness in many people’s political judgement of her. It was a great pity that she never followed Winston Churchill’s famous advice, ‘In victory; magnanimity’.
REFLECTION
In the judgement of history the outcome of the miners’ strike was of fundamental importance. The power struggle against union militancy had to be fought and had to be won. The British had instinctively known this ever since the three-day week, the ‘winter of discontent’ and many disastrous episodes of industrial chaos in between. So when the chips were down and the consequences of
Scargill winning his miners’ strike challenge were faced by the public, most voters, whatever their political loyalties, wanted him to be defeated.
It was therefore a strange paradox that Margaret Thatcher gained no victor’s laurels. She may have been cheered by the few, but the many reacted with sullen ingratitude. The Conservative government fell to third place in the opinion polls – well behind Labour and the Alliance. By the same yardstick of political measurement, Margaret Thatcher herself fell rather than rose in public esteem, particularly in the North. Nevertheless, she had done what was right, indeed essential, for the future health of parliamentary government and economic well-being in Britain. However melancholy the human side-effects in mining communities, defeating the Scargill strike was the most important and enduring achievement of the Prime Minister’s second term.
________________
* Sir Ian MacGregor (1912–1998), Director British Leyland, 1977; Chairman British Steel, 1980; Chairman National Coal Board, 1983–1985. Arthur Scargill branded him ‘the American butcher of British industry’. McGregor replied that he was ‘a plastic surgeon’ whose job was to ‘try to rebuild damaged features’ (New York Times, 15 April 1998).
† For new revelations on Moscow’s side of this story see the author’s interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, Chapter 28.
27
Strengthening the Special Relationship with Ronald Reagan
THE GOLD SEAM AND THE FAULT-LINE
In her second term there were important new challenges on the international stage for Margaret Thatcher. She tackled them from a position of greater prestige than any British prime minister since Winston Churchill. For her triumph in the Falklands had given her the status of a superstar in the foreign-policy and geopolitical power elites of the world. She understood how to parley this stardom into global influence.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 58