One of the more spectacular eruptions followed by a counter-eruption came during the 1985 arguments over the privatisation of British Leyland. Norman Tebbit, still at the helm of the Department of Trade and Industry although convalescing from his Brighton bomb injuries, was against selling off Land Rover as a separate company. The Prime Minister took the opposite view. At one heated moment, she overruled her Secretary of State. Norman Tebbit was furious. ‘If you think you can do my job better than I can, then do it!’ he shouted, throwing his papers on the floor and making for the door. ‘Margaret was completely shaken’, said Norman Lamont, Tebbit’s junior minister at the DTI and the only other person present in the Prime Minister’s study. ‘She was obviously alarmed that she had managed to upset him so badly, and at a time when he was not in the best of health. She climbed down immediately.’ As a result, Land Rover was not sold off separately from the rest of the British Leyland group.3
Another minister who stood up to Margaret Thatcher robustly was Nigel Lawson. At one memorable moment in full cabinet, he told her to ‘Shut up and listen – for once’.4 On these occasions she was chastened – at least for a while. But they were the rare exceptions. Most cabinet ministers were either too respectful or too fearful to clash swords with a woman prime minister. They shut up in silence rather than put up with resistance, often with a growing sense of resentment.
One way or another, the cabinet was not a happy ship. Some of its unhappiness came from the growing and often unpleasantly handled dominance Margaret Thatcher exerted over her colleagues. It was lampooned in the satirical television programme Spitting Image, which portrayed the Prime Minister as a bullying dominatrix in a gangster’s pin-striped suit continuously berating her cringing ministers into submission.
One memorable sketch on the show involved the Prime Minister dining with her puppet cabinet in a restaurant as the waitress took the order, addressing the Prime Minister as ‘Sir’. ‘I will have the steak’, said Thatcher. ‘And what about the vegetables?’ ‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me’, answered Thatcher.5
This caricature was uncomfortably close to the truth. For the reality was that Margaret Thatcher did despise a great many of her colleagues. She showed this by being gratuitously rude to them in front of their own officials; never apologising for her tirades; rarely praising them when they had done something well; and often undermining them through anonymous briefings to journalists.
A classic example of this was the denigration of John Biffen when Leader of the House as ‘a semi-detached member of the Government’.6 This phrase, which emerged from a Bernard Ingham lobby briefing, appeared all over the newspapers in May 1986. To no one’s surprise Biffen was completely detached and sacked from the cabinet in the next reshuffle. Perhaps he deserved this fate, since in some of his own comments to the press he had been imprudently critical of his boss. But there were many loyal and supportive members of the cabinet whose dismissals were leaked well in advance of their execution dates. It was a cruel and capricious way of running a government.
To give a rounded picture of Margaret Thatcher’s man-management techniques it should be said that there were some key figures she never undermined, even when they were under-performing. Sir Keith Joseph was one of them, largely because of her political and personal affection for him, which dated back to the 1960s. She also had great admiration for his intellect, if not for his political skills. Willie Whitelaw was a protected species too, deservedly so, since he was such a bulwark of support for her leadership. As for her changing cast of court favourites, like Cecil Parkinson, John Moore, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young, they had their difficult moments with their boss. All of them, even Joseph, Whitelaw and Carrington, felt the rough edge of the Prime Minister’s tongue when she disagreed with them, or thought they had not done their homework over some point on which she had been better briefed. There was always a lurking anger in Margaret Thatcher making her liable to pounce unexpectedly at ministerial meetings. ‘It was rather like going into a cage with a leopard’, said her Principal Private Secretary, Robin Butler. ‘You believed that the leopard was friendly and house-trained and that you would come to no harm. But you would always be worried that things might take a turn for the worse and that you could get your arm bitten off.’7
Fear of the Prime Minister’s bite was not conducive to good collegiate relationships in the cabinet. Junior ministers also found her rather terrifying if they attended an ad hoc meeting and dared to disagree with her views. But if they were well briefed and good at presenting their case they could survive and prosper, for she was keen to identify talent and to promote it. She could be admirably protective of a young minister who she thought was coming under fire unfairly.
An entertaining example of this came when William Waldegrave, then a junior Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of the Environment, was hauled in front of her at No. 10 at the instigation of Norman Tebbit for a dressing down – or worse. Waldegrave’s crime had been to negotiate an agreement in Brussels which reduced the number of parts per million of exhaust gases permitted for British Leyland cars. In the middle of this nocturnal negotiation, Norman Tebbit, who as Secretary of State for Trade was in charge of the car industry, telephoned Waldegrave with an instruction to change his negotiating brief, and to agree to a deal which would have been further in favour of British Leyland’s out-of-date technology. Waldegrave refused and settled within his brief.
For this heinous offence, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment was summoned to see the Prime Minister, flanked by Norman Tebbit, Nicholas Ridley (Secretary of State for Transport), Patrick Jenkin (Secretary of State for the Environment) and various officials. There was a courtroom flavour to the occasion, with Norman Tebbit taking the role of counsel for the prosecution. Tebbit’s opening attack on William Waldegrave was so vitriolic that Nicholas Ridley intervened to say that no colleague should refer to another colleague in such terms. The atmosphere became electric.
Margaret Thatcher, who had done her homework, seemed to be relishing it. She began to purr – dangerously. She said:
Now, Norman, I am a chemist and will explain it to you. You see, here it is: they refer to CO and NOx. Those are gases, Norman. And here it says some numbers with ‘ppm’ after them – that’s parts per million, Norman. And here is what William settled at, and you see it is between the numbers we allowed him. Oh, and here is your name, Norman. You were at the committee and agreed the numbers!
The prosecution collapsed without the defendant having said a word. As the attendees left the Cabinet Room, the Prime Minister gripped William Waldegrave by the elbow and whispered into his ear, ‘I always look after my young people, William’.8
Such support for a junior minister in trouble was an endearing feature of Margaret Thatcher’s style of governance, but it was counter-balanced by less attractive dimensions of her personality. She liked to divide and rule. She wanted to hog the limelight and take the credit for herself. Thanks to the dedication of her two key Downing Street aides, Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell, she was able to achieve these goals quite easily, sidelining even her most important ministers in the process.
Geoffrey Howe, who was downgraded in the Prime Minister’s esteem from the bold Chancellor of 1979–1983 to the bullied Foreign Secretary of 1983–1989 caught the essence of her dominance with a clever analogy. According to Howe, the cabinet could be compared to the solar system. The Prime Minister was the sun. Ministers revolved around her, but in their own orbits. They were not allowed to shine in their own right or to constellate together as a planetary team.9
In such a system a large number of ministerial stars burned out, fell out or were kicked out by the Sun Queen. The turnover of the cabinet was numerically astonishing. No less than thirty-six senior ministers left the government between 1979 and 1990. When Margaret Thatcher finally resigned after eleven years as Prime Minister, she was the only survivor of the original cabinet she had formed in May 1979. The attrition rate w
as not a creditable feature of her leadership.
Some of the ministerial departures were right for a variety of reasons. Others were wrong, and would have not happened under a different kind of prime minister. But the most exotic and egocentric exit from Margaret Thatcher’s government was that of Michael Heseltine.
CLASHING WITH HESELTINE
Michael Heseltine and Margaret Thatcher were chalk and cheese. She mistrusted his character, questioned his motives, deplored his showmanship, disliked his interventionist policies and saw his vaulting ambition as a constant threat. He was initially more covert in his antipathy towards her, deep seated though it was. As time went on his alienation soured into antagonism. Long before Westland was on the agenda of British politics, Hezza versus Maggie was a train crash of personalities waiting to happen.
If there was an early event that set Margaret Thatcher’s suspicions of Heseltine in stone, it was the mace incident of 27 May 1976. This consisted of him losing his temper late at night in the House of Commons, seizing the ceremonial mace and brandishing it menacingly at the Labour government on the benches opposite. She was sitting alongside Heseltine on the front bench as Leader of the Opposition when he exploded at the announcement of a one-vote majority for the government on its bill to nationalise the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. As the Conservative Party’s industry spokesman, he had expected to win the division because of Labour defections. He believed he had been cheated out of his victory by chicanery on the part of the Labour whips over the counting of sick and unpaired votes. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this controversy, Heseltine made himself look like a fanatic from The Planet of the Apes by grabbing the ceremonial mace and shaking it in the manner of an aggressive gorilla towards the government Chief Whip. The parliamentary sketch writers mocked Heseltine with the nickname ‘Tarzan’ – which stuck. Among MPs there were more frowns than laughs. To the constitutionally minded, Tarzan’s excesses seemed a contempt of the House, because the mace is the symbol of the Crown in Parliament.
Heseltine was lucky that television cameras were not permitted at Westminster in the 1970s, or his moment of madness would have been preserved for posterity. As it was, the episode was fairly soon forgotten – but not by Margaret Thatcher. She was affronted by her Industry spokesman’s mace-waving idiocy and wanted to sack him from her shadow cabinet. She was persuaded not to do this by Jim Prior and William Whitelaw.
There was some friction in their relationship between 1979 and 1983, particularly when Heseltine expanded one part of his duties as Environment Secretary into the aggrandised role (as she saw it) of Minister for Merseyside. Even though she ignored most of his interventionist recommendations for reviving Liverpool, his public relations skills won her reluctant respect. In 1983 she moved him to Defence where he was good at winning the presentational battles against CND protestors over the stationing of cruise missiles on UK soil. However, she also became resentful of his energetic self-promotion, and jealous of his oratorical talent for rousing the faithful at Conservative Party conferences.
This resentment became a two-way street. Margaret Thatcher excluded her Defence Secretary from most of the Anglo-American discussions on the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), which caused great pique on his part. Heseltine, responding to questions in Parliament from the Labour benches, launched an internal Ministry of Defence inquiry into the sinking of the General Belgrano, to assure himself that there was ‘not a Watergate in this somewhere’.10 The comparison was ludicrous, as the later inquiry showed. Margaret Thatcher was right to be offended by it.
She was also angry at Heseltine’s use of the Defence budget for social engineering purposes. They had a row over whether to build two new frigates at the Tyneside shipyard of Swan Hunter (the best value for money option), or whether to split the order with Cammell Laird in order to create jobs on Merseyside, although at a higher cost for the taxpayer. Heseltine got his way but only by threatening to resign. This disagreement became so personal that the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister were barely on speaking terms. As Nigel Lawson put it, ‘From then on, she was as determined to do him down as he was to run his Department in his own way’.11
These tensions became so visible that in October 1985 the Sunday Times reported that Heseltine ‘could even be brewing up towards a spectacular resignation’.12 This was a prescient forecast. The reasons for these advance warnings were rooted in the festering personality clash between two hostile egos. The eventual cause of the explosion that blew them apart – technical arguments about the future of a helicopter company – had barely begun to surface.
Westland was Britain’s sole helicopter manufacturing company. It had a turnover of £300 million a year, small by the standards of defence industries, but important in terms of West Country jobs. It was making losses and faced a perilous future. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Leon Brittan reported to the Prime Minister that Westland would go into receivership unless a new shareholder came in to inject fresh capital into the company. The Westland board, unable to find any such British investors, were inclined to accept an offer from Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, a subsidiary of the American United Technologies Corporation and Fiat, the Italian conglomerate, who were willing to invest in the company in exchange for a 29.9 per cent shareholding.13
Michael Heseltine, a passionate Europhile, believed that Westland should join up with a potential consortium of European defence companies. His arguments sounded worth further consideration to a cabinet committee whose ministers, ranging from Geoffrey Howe to Norman Tebbit, gave the Defence Secretary more time to explore his European option. But Heseltine embarked on a much more dramatic course than mere exploration. He did his utmost to sabotage the deal with Sikorsky. To achieve this, on 29 November, he called a meeting of the National Armament Directors (NADS) of France, Italy, Germany and Britain, persuading them to sign a document declaring that in future they would only buy European-made helicopters. With the flames being fanned by many Heseltine leaks and press briefings, the issue flared up into a test of strength between a European versus an American solution for Westland, and a Heseltine versus Thatcher power struggle. This was how a minor issue became a major crisis. The government itself took the perfectly sensible line that the Westland board should make the final decision. This in practice meant backing the American option and overruling Michael Heseltine’s manoeuvres to obtain a recommendation from the pro-European NADs.
The government decided to support the Westland board and approve the Sikorsky shareholding – which had by December 1985 become formally known as the United Technologies–Fiat shareholding – with each of these partners planning to hold 14.5 per cent of the company. This decision to approve it was taken by the cabinet’s Economic Sub-Committee on 9 December by a clear majority vote. Heseltine, however, did not accept the decision and wanted the issue debated at full cabinet. Margaret Thatcher initially refused this. She cut short his attempt to raise Westland at a cabinet meeting on 12 December, on the grounds that no papers had been circulated on the issue. Heseltine was incensed and launched what she called ‘a short ill tempered discussion’.14 He may have been silenced in the cabinet room, but he continued both the argument and the ill temper at full volume.
For the next three weeks Michael Heseltine was in overdrive, leaking his version of the controversy to newspapers, bankers, industrialists, lobbyists or anyone else whom he hoped to convince that the proposed UT–Fiat investment in Westland was wrong because it was not his preferred European option. This behaviour was a flagrant violation of the rules of collective cabinet responsibility. Margaret Thatcher was furious with Heseltine, but she uncharacteristically shied away from having a meeting with him and telling him to toe the line.
At one No. 10 discussion during this period, Leon Brittan, baffled by the Prime Minister’s unwillingness to see the Defence Secretary face to face, said to her, ‘You’ve just got to lay down the law to him’. Bernard Ingham then interjected, ‘You don’t want to have hi
m resigning, do you?’15 Dread of a personality clash with Heseltine was a curious chink in the Prime Minister’s armour. It had first appeared right at the start of her premiership on Saturday 5 May 1979, when he declined the cabinet post she offered him. She had decided to appoint him Secretary of State for Energy. He refused, arguing that he should stay with the Environment portfolio he had been shadowing in Opposition. Margaret Thatcher caved in immediately. Just after suffering this blow to her authority, she said to the Private Secretary who had been present at the meeting, ‘I don’t like one-to-one confrontations with Michael’.16
Heseltine had no such inhibitions. He was reckless in the determination of his desire to oppose the Prime Minister. Going out of the Cabinet Room on the 12 December row over Westland, the angry Defence Secretary encountered Charles Powell in the corridor. ‘She’s not going to win on this one’, stormed Heseltine. ‘I’m going to defeat her.’ ‘Oh come on’, said Powell.17
By the turn of the year, the Prime Minister’s reluctance to confront her rebellious colleague led to a stand-off. Heseltine was aggressively promoting his own European solution for Westland. It was the opposite of the government’s policy, but the Defence Secretary’s justification for his disobedience was that Westland had never been properly discussed by the full cabinet. Margaret Thatcher thought this was a bogus excuse for his misconduct, but was unwilling to tell him so directly. Instead, she fought Heseltine by proxy, encouraging her Secretary of State for Trade to counter-attack her Defence Secretary.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 64