‘I think this episode showed her at her worst’, recalled Leon Brittan. ‘She egged me on with fierce support, but she refused to argue directly with him. Far from being the Iron Lady, she proved curiously weak and indecisive.’18
The Prime Minister’s indecision almost proved fatal. As the next moves in the saga were to show, she turned a problem into a crisis. She was willing to wound her adversary, but afraid to stop him in his tracks with a direct order. Her hesitation set the stage for a far more personal and damaging battle. Within a month, the explosion into open warfare caused two cabinet resignations, and came perilously close to forcing Margaret Thatcher out of Downing Street. After more than five years as a successful Prime Minister, the Westland crisis needlessly developed into a personal failure that took her to the brink of resignation.
THE WESTLAND CRISIS EXPLODES
On 3 January 1986, Michael Heseltine’s continuing efforts to sabotage the UTC–Fiat investment in Westland took a new twist when he leaked to The Times his carefully orchestrated exchange of letters with Lloyds Merchant Bank, the advisers to the European consortium. In this correspondence he warned that Westland risked losing future European orders if it accepted an American partner.19 This was a deliberate contradiction of the assurances Margaret Thatcher had given in writing to Sir John Cuckney, Westland’s chairman, in a letter of 1 January 1986.20
Instead of confronting her Defence Secretary directly, Margaret Thatcher found a more complicated method of crushing his rebellion using leaks and legalities. Her first move was to arrange for the Solicitor General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, to write to Heseltine with an opinion querying the factual basis for his letter to the merchant bank. Mayhew’s letter contained a complaint of a ‘material inaccuracy’ in Heseltine’s correspondence.21
These two words, wrenched out of context, were used to damage the Defence Secretary when the Solicitor General’s letter was leaked to the press. ‘You LIAR’ was the screaming headline in the Sun.22 ‘Heseltine told by Law Chief: Stick to the Facts’ was the more sober version of the story in The Times.23 Yet the broadsides against Heseltine misfired. For, in an extraordinary turn of events, the issue became not who lied, but who leaked.
Leaking is one of the most frequently practised arts in politics. Both Michael Heseltine and Margaret Thatcher were ruthless exponents of it. But as all players of the game should know, some kinds of leak are off limits. Perhaps the most arcane area of forbidden leaking is a Law Officer’s opinion. These are supposed to be protected by the highest walls of confidentiality. Quite why this should be so is baffling to ordinary mortals. To the lawyer politicians who serve in the posts of Attorney General or Solicitor General, it is part of the mystique of their ancient offices that their legal opinions must always be cloaked in secrecy. Precious little reverence for this mystique affected the next move in the Westland saga, although precisely whodunnit, who leaked it or who should be blamed for it became an incredible fudge.
The initiative to make public the Solicitor General’s view that Michael Heseltine’s letter contained a ‘material inaccuracy’ came from the Prime Minister. She later admitted this to Parliament. ‘It was vital to have accurate information in the public domain … It was to get that accurate information to the public domain that I gave my consent.’24 But what exactly she gave her consent to remains murky to this day.
The way the Prime Minister’s consent worked in practice was that two officials at No. 10 – Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell – were in contact with Leon Brittan’s Private Secretary and his head of Information at the Department of Trade and Industry. Brittan was out of the office at a lunch when Colette Bowe, his press secretary, reached him to ask whether the Solicitor General’s criticism of a ‘material inaccuracy’ in the Heseltine letter should be made public. Leon Brittan said that he would prefer that any such disclosure should be made by No. 10, but failing this he authorised his press office to make it public ‘subject to the agreement of No. 10’.25 He returned from lunch unaware that he had made a momentous decision. He had expressed no view about the timing or method of the disclosure. He thought he had passed the responsibility for it back to the Prime Minister who had wanted to get the ‘material inaccuracy’ into the public domain in the first place. ‘I had no doubt whatsoever that these were her instructions’, recalled Leon Brittan, ‘because my officials had been told by No. 10 that she wanted the information made public.’26
For a layman unversed in the sacred mysteries surrounding advice from Law Officers, it is difficult to see any wrongdoing in the sequence of events outlined above. The Prime Minister wanted the Solicitor General’s criticisms of Michael Heseltine’s inaccurate letter to be released into the public domain. As head of the government she was entitled to authorise this release. If she had taken up this position in justification of the instructions she gave, why should there have been a fuss about it?
Unfortunately for both Margaret Thatcher and Leon Brittan, the leaking of the Solicitor General’s letter produced a fuss of titanic proportions created by the Attorney General. His outrage derived from the questionable proposition that the advice of the government’s Law Officers automatically assumes a unique degree of confidentiality, which can never under any circumstances be breached. On these grounds Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney General, became so indignant that he threatened to send the police into No. 10 with orders to conduct an investigation into the leak of the Solicitor General’s letter, under the Official Secrets Act. Margaret Thatcher headed this off at the gates of Downing Street by setting up an internal inquiry conducted by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong. The Defence Select Committee of the House of Commons then launched its own inquiry into the imbroglio. It eventually reported that, ‘the method of disclosure that was adopted, the unattributable communication of tendentious extracts from the letter, was disreputable’.27
Michael Heseltine may well have thought it disreputable too, but unaccustomed as he was to be more leaked against than leaking, he kept his powder dry for two more days. On Thursday 9 January he took his case on Westland to full cabinet. He did not present it well. Even his friend and ally, Geoffrey Howe, felt that the Defence Secretary on this occasion seemed unconvincing, unimpressive and so obsessive that he seemed ‘faintly reminiscent of Tony Benn’.*28
Yet even if Heseltine failed to win support for his argument against the UTC–Fiat rescue plan for Westland, he struck deeper chords with his grievances against the Prime Minister’s management of cabinet discussions. For instead of giving a clear lead, her unstructured, combative style of government had encouraged chaos to reign in the argument between two of her senior ministers. A squall about helicopters had been allowed to blow up into a tempest that was now rocking the government to its foundation.
Determined to restore her authority over the chaos for which she was at least partly responsible, Margaret Thatcher called a meeting of the cabinet on 9 January. She summed up the cabinet discussion on Westland with a firmness that had been lacking in her handling of the problem so far. The government would support the decision of the Westland board to accept the UTC–Fiat shareholding. The squabbling between ministers must stop. All government statements on Westland, past as well as future ones, must be cleared by the Cabinet Secretary. She ended by declaring, ‘this matter has now been decided’.29
This was too much for Heseltine. ‘If this is the way Government is going to be conducted, I no longer wish to be part of it’, he said as he gathered up his papers and left the room.30 Opinions of his colleagues were divided as to whether this was a sudden impulsive reaction or a carefully choreographed exit whose next moves had been well prepared.
Inside the Cabinet Room there was a stoically British display of carrying on as if nothing unusual had happened. The Prime Minister, scarcely missing a beat, led her colleagues through routine items on European Community affairs, Nigeria and Northern Ireland. Only then did she call for an unscheduled coffee break.
While some colleagues wondered whether
Heseltine had come to the meeting with an open mind about remaining in the government, Margaret Thatcher had no doubt that his departure was premeditated. She may even have intended to provoke his resignation. She was certainly ready for it. Within a quarter of an hour she appointed a new Defence Secretary, George Younger. She made Malcolm Rifkind his successor as the Secretary of State for Scotland. The cabinet meeting resumed with a sensible discussion about the options for reforming the rates.
Heseltine went back to the Ministry of Defence, where he delivered a twenty-five minute statement attacking the Prime Minister for allowing ‘the complete breakdown of Cabinet government’.31 It made an exciting item on the television news bulletins for a few hours. But because the British public were not worked up about a row over the details of which international company was going to be allowed to invest in Westland, it seemed unlikely that Heseltine’s resignation would significantly rock the boat. However, this was only the calm before a much more serious storm.
As Parliament reassembled on Monday 13 January 1986 after the Christmas recess, the drama of the Westland crisis shifted away from helicopters and Heseltine. It now focused on the leak of the Solicitor General’s letter and who should carry the can for it. It was the received wisdom that the leak amounted to a most heinous offence. But who had committed it?
Between 13 January and 27 January Margaret Thatcher and Leon Brittan made statements, speeches and answered questions in the House of Commons about this aspect of the Westland affair. A summary of their performances might be that the Secretary of State for Trade had more right on his side but performed unconvincingly. By contrast, the Prime Minister appeared to be in worse trouble but bluffed her way back from the precipice with greater luck, but also with more uncomfortable economy of the truth.
Margaret Thatcher’s first attempt at explaining her role in the Westland drama was rightly described by her biographer Hugo Young as ‘probably the most unconvincing statement she ever made to the House of Commons’.32
Some of her back-benchers made harsher comments. Before she gave her account to Parliament on 23 January, nervous government whips circled round Westminster’s bars and dining rooms drumming up support among Conservative colleagues. One of them was Alan Clark, who described in his diary the approach made to him by the Chief Whip, John Wakeham.
Then, unexpectedly, the Chief Whip came up and sat with us. He showed me a copy of the statement. I read a few paragraphs, started a faux-rire. I couldn’t help it. ‘I’m sorry, John. I simply can’t keep a straight face.’ The paper passed from hand to hand. Others agreed, but were too polite to say so. How can she say these things without faltering? But she did.33
The Prime Minister may not have faltered but many of her listeners were unimpressed. She high-speed read her way through a whitewash job, claiming that all concerned at the Department of Trade and Industry and at No. 10 had ‘acted in good faith’. Few believed her. One ex-minister, Alex Fletcher, asked her if she was ‘satisfied that the statement she has made this afternoon has enhanced the integrity of her Government?’
‘Good question!’ a voice called out from the depths of the sceptical Tory back-benchers. Margaret Thatcher replied like Jim Hacker in Yes Minister that she had set up the Cabinet Secretary’s inquiry in order to give the House ‘as full an account as I possibly can because the House deserves to have it’.34 It was bluff and nonsense.
The statement ended among many rumblings and grumblings from Conservative MPs. ‘This won’t do. It simply will not do’, Sir Bernard Braine protested,35 over and over again, as we trickled out of the chamber. This was the spirit of frustration in which Leon Brittan became the target of the parliamentary party’s anger.
Leon Brittan had shown himself to be a cabinet minister of considerable intellect and talent. But by January 1986 he was visibly unhappy in his own skin. His confidence had been shaken some months earlier by the Prime Minister’s demotion of him from Home Secretary to Trade and Industry Secretary because, as she put it, he was ‘not getting the message across on television’.36 Now his Westland duel with Michael Heseltine had left him bleeding, although not yet mortally wounded. What brought Brittan down later in the afternoon of 23 January was that his back-bench colleagues would not close ranks and support him. If there had to be a fall guy for the leak of the Solicitor General’s letter, it would have to be him. The alternative sacrifice was the Prime Minister.
Unfortunately for Margaret Thatcher, the facts pointed all too inexorably towards her being the prime mover in the leak. She had initiated the Solicitor General’s letter. She had wanted it to be made public. Her two key aides, Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell, had been involved in the discussions with DTI officials, which led to the now-infamous release to the Press Association.
Leon Brittan had insisted that before any disclosure was made that it should be ‘subject to the agreement of No. 10’. It was so agreed. Surely Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand men would not have given this agreement without the blessing of their Prime Minister? But the absence of her specific authority, however improbable, was the only explanation that might enable her to escape from censure or even resignation. Even so, her personal integrity was on the line.
Leon Brittan’s career was also on the line. Soon after a poisonous meeting of Tory back-benchers at the 1922 Committee he fell on his sword. It was a combination of a witch-hunt and the search for a scapegoat – tainted by an undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Personally, I felt disgusted by the attacks of several of my colleagues. I spoke up for Leon Brittan, but was the only voice of support for him in the committee that evening. I believed what should have been obvious to anyone else, that he was being used as a lightning conductor to deflect the fire that the Prime Minister had started and inflamed.
The fire was not immediately quenched by Leon Brittan’s resignation on 24 January. The opposition was able to call an emergency debate for Monday 27 January. Over the weekend Margaret Thatcher’s preparations for her speech were frenetic and at times paranoid. She had to agree a form of words with Leon Brittan, who had it in his power to destroy her if her narrative shifted the blame on to him. She also had to explain away the exculpatory but still critical findings of the Cabinet Secretary’s leak inquiry. She needed to protect her closest aides. Above all, she had to protect herself against what could easily have been lethal questions from the leaders of either Her Majesty’s Opposition or the Heseltine opposition. The latter group was fast becoming a sizeable faction on the Conservative back benches.
The debate was due to begin at 3.30 p.m. on 27 January. At 2.30 p.m. the Prime Minister’s speech was still being redrafted in the small private secretary’s room at No. 10, where the throng of script-writers included Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe, John Wakeham, Nigel Wicks, the Principal Private Secretary, Ronnie Millar, Charles Powell and Bernard Ingham. ‘We all needed, like so many printer’s devils, to be near to the stone where the final text was being cast’, recalled Howe as the final preparations became more and more intense.
Margaret Thatcher kept popping in and out of the crowded room. In a distracted moment she remarked to no one in particular, ‘I may not be Prime Minister by six o’clock tonight’.37
Although there were immediate murmurs of dissent, the possibility was real. Even the phlegmatic Geoffrey Howe realised that the forecast could turn out to be right. ‘My own heart missed a beat’, he recalled as he contemplated ‘the frightening thought that I might suddenly find myself taking Margaret’s place.’38
This extraordinary outcome of the crisis continued to prey on the Prime Minister’s mind. For when travelling to the House of Commons in her car she again said, this time to her Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, ‘You do realise, don’t you Robert, that by six o’clock I may no longer be Prime Minister’.39
The Westland debate, which could indeed have ended Margaret Thatcher’s days in No 10, turned out to be an anti-climax. She was on trial, and although she did not win an acquittal, she did achieve an escape. Th
ere were two factors that turned her into a political Houdini. The first was the unexpected failure of Neil Kinnock. The second was a late developing fervour of loyalty on her backbenches.
As Leader of the Opposition, Kinnock opened the debate in front of an open goal. All he had to do was to ask the questions whose answers would have established the Prime Minister’s complicity in the leak of the Solicitor General’s letter. But instead of the cold forensic interrogation that the moment required, he performed like a hot air balloon, failing to get off the ground whilst blasting his Bunsen burners at full throttle in the wrong direction. As he roared and blustered his way though a flurry of vague insults, Kinnock changed the mood of the divided Tory backbenchers from suspicion of the Prime Minister to support for her. His ranting about her ‘dishonesty, duplicity, conniving and manoeuvring’ not only brought the Speaker to his feet demanding the withdrawal of the unparliamentary term ‘dishonesty’.40 They also produced a surge of Conservative unity that had been noticeably absent throughout the Westland crisis.
Amidst the partisan histrionics that the Leader of the Opposition created, it was much easier for Margaret Thatcher to beat a retreat. She showed just enough candour and contrition to wriggle out of the danger zone. She told some of the truth rather than the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but she was in a parliamentary bear-pit not a court of law. Although the SDP leader, David Owen, later asked the forensic questions that should have been put to her at the start of the debate, his speech was made to a half-empty House. Margaret Thatcher was confident enough to ignore him. By then she knew the tide had turned in her favour.
Even Michael Heseltine was forced to acknowledge this. Recognising that the adversary he had been so bitterly challenging for the past few weeks had got away with it, the ex-Defence Secretary put his tongue in his cheek, professed his loyalty for the Prime Minister and declared he would be voting with the government in the ten o’clock division. The Westland crisis was over.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 65