THAT BLOODY WOMAN
The Westland crisis did, however, leave a bad taste in many mouths. Although the general public soon forgot about the involutions and convolutions of the saga, within Whitehall and Westminster it was seen as a symptom of a more disturbing disease. A common diagnosis was that the Prime Minister’s relationship with her cabinet had become too dysfunctional, while the No. 10 triumvirate who really seemed to be running the country – Margaret Thatcher, Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell – had become too powerful.
This situation was not the fault of the Prime Minister’s two closest civil servants. They kept the Downing Street machine humming like a Rolls-Royce, but they were only its mechanics. It was the driver who seemed to worry less and less about which corners she cut, or which other motorists and pedestrians had to jump out of her way.
One sign of this emerging streak of recklessness in her leadership skills was her aggressive discourtesy towards parliamentary colleagues. During her first term she was respectful towards the Executive of the 1922 Committee. By the end of her second term, she could be gratuitously offensive towards members of this group when they made their annual visit to report on the mood of the party. Ironically, Ted Heath had made the same mistake in the second half of his premiership.
‘No backbone! No stomach for a fight!’ was how she addressed the Vice-Chairman of the 1922 Committee, Winston Churchill, after he had told her that her plans for rating reform, first announced in 1986, were unpopular with his fellow-Tory colleagues in Manchester. ‘And they said my grandfather was a bully! At least he listened as much as he bullied’, complained Churchill soon after his handbagging.41
One of Margaret Thatcher’s problems in dealing with her parliamentary party was that she missed the bridge-building efforts of her most gifted Parliamentary Private Secretary, Ian Gow. He had been a tower of strength to her and to her back-benchers in her first term. His successors lacked his wit, his subtlety and his ability for establishing a politically close relationship with the Lady.
After Gow, she imposed unusual criteria on her selection of Parliamentary Private Secretaries. They must be Members of Parliament with a private income. She thought it unfair to ask for long hours of House of Commons service from someone who received no salary. Hence her subsequent choices of Michael Alison, Archie Hamilton, Mark Lennox-Boyd and Peter Morrison. This quartet of comfortably-off Old Etonians were too polite in offering reassurance to the Prime Minister at times when she needed to be confronted by back-bench criticism. Not that she listened much when it was delivered.
In early 1987, I was wheeled in to see her because I had sponsored a well-supported motion calling for parliamentary oversight of the security services. She opened the conversation, ‘How can you believe this nonsense?’42
I ran through a list of recent failings and fiascos at MI5, and suggested that a Westminster version of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence might have helped to prevent some of them. ‘What rot!’ she retorted. ‘That would mean people like you poking their noses into security matters they know nothing about.’43
I said that she could select the parliamentary overseers, but without them there would be no external oversight. ‘Absolutely wrong. There is perfectly good oversight now. I do it’, she asserted with ringing certainty.44
On that basis there was no point in having a prolonged argument. I was more amused than affronted by this l’état c’est moi approach to the issue. At her behest the oversight motion was duly voted down, despite some appropriately clandestine murmurs of support for it within the security services themselves.†
Dealing with the secret world produced astonishingly proprietorial instincts in Margaret Thatcher. ‘Backbenchers should have nothing to do with national security matters’, she told Richard Shepherd MP when he tried to win her support for his Private Member’s Bill to reform the Official Secrets Act 1911. She was wrong to take such a high-handed attitude, as later reforms bringing in new oversight procedures and a new Official Secrets Act were to prove.
High handedness was an increasingly visible feature of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership but it was not accompanied by an increase in her electoral popularity. As she approached the seventh anniversary of her entry into No. 10 Downing Street, her poll ratings fell to their lowest point – 28 per cent – since the dark days of inner-city riots and Geoffrey Howe’s expenditure cuts budget in 1981.
A succession of by-election losses was unnerving both Conservative Central Office and the Tory back benches. From Ryedale in North Yorkshire to Fulham in Central London, safe seats were falling to the Liberals and to Labour. The government was coming a poor third in the national polls. This seemed strange, for many of its policies – council-house sales, diminishing the power of the unions and the general management of the economy – were being well received. The paradox was explained by what was called ‘The TBW factor’.45 Canvassers at by-elections and local elections kept on reporting a line they heard time and again on the doorsteps. ‘I would vote for you if it wasn’t for that bloody woman.’
David Frost was the first to tell Margaret Thatcher, live on Sunday morning television, about the TBW factor. It was one of the rare occasions when she looked as though she had been knocked off balance in a media appearance. When she received the same message from her Party Chairman, Norman Tebbit, TBW became ‘That Angry Woman’.
She found it hard to accept that her personality and her stubbornness were grating on large sections of the electorate. Still less did she like to hear from her PPS, Michael Alison, that many Tory back-benchers were openly talking about a succession race, with Michael Heseltine said to be moving up fast on the rails. Not in the least a dark horse, he travelled all over the country to speak at Conservative Association fêtes, dinners and annual general meetings in response to the cry of alarmed colleagues, ‘Save Our Seats’.
His blatant ambition infuriated the Prime Minister, but it also worried her. So did the polls. As she read the runes of the political scene at the end of the summer of 1986, she knew she was in trouble. She began to plan a fight-back with a new electoral strategy.
REFLECTION
For all the rumblings of discontent chronicled in this chapter, they were mainly about issues that troubled the Westminster village, not the wider electorate. Snakes and ladders in the cabinet interested only the players at or hoping to be at the cabinet table.
Westland was more serious, but it was too complicated a squabble to interest the man on the Clapham omnibus. The controversy was eventually buried by the emollient skills of Sir Humphrey, aka Sir Robert Armstrong. He produced a report that smoothed out all the uncomfortable problems exposed by the leak of the Solicitor General’s letter. His conclusions bore more that a passing comparison to Voltaire’s satire Candide: ‘All is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.’46
When summoned to explain his sanguine findings by the Defence Select Committee, the Cabinet Secretary gave such a masterly performance that the Daily Mail reported the event with the headline, ‘Mandarin 3, Parliament 0’.47 The only difficult moment for him came when he was asked to explain the Prime Minister’s admission that she had authorised the leak with her words in a parliamentary answer: ‘It was to get that accurate information to the public domain that I gave my consent.’48 Sir Robert loftily brushed this smoking gun aside with the observation that it must have been ‘a slip of the tongue’.49 The MPs on the Select Committee were so tongue-tied that they never pursued the point.
Although the Westland storm passed with no lasting damage, there was a clear perception that the loss of two senior cabinet ministers was somehow Margaret Thatcher’s fault for being too autocratic and for not listening. She worried about these charges.
Although the word ‘re-launch’ never entered her political vocabulary, she began to work hard on improving the presentation of substantive policies. The effort would deliver her a third term.
________________
* The former Labour cabinet minis
ter Tony Benn had by the mid-1980s become a caricature, at least in Tory eyes, of an obsessive conspiracy theorist. Twenty years later, as a diarist and one-man show performer, he came to be regarded as a national treasure.
† Parliamentary oversight of the security services became an established feature of the UK’s intelligence arrangements soon after Margaret Thatcher ceased to be Prime Minister. Since 1994, oversight has been quietly and effectively carried out by the Security and Intelligence Committee. The current Chairman is the former Foreign Secretary, The Rt Hon. Sir Malcolm Rifkind QC MP.
30
Into the third term
APPROACHING THE 1987 ELECTION
The developing perception of Margaret Thatcher after seven years in power was that she had become a one-woman band who did not listen to or care about anyone else’s opinions. Even if this view of her was exaggerated, she herself admitted that it ‘contained a grain of truth’.1 So for a while she made an effort to re-invent herself as a prime minister with a caring and listening personality. Neither metamorphosis was entirely successful. But in the short term the makeover worked. Its key ingredients were her attempts to be a more collegiate leader; her handling of a successful party conference; and the emergence of defence and foreign-policy issues as vote winners.
In June 1986, at the urging of Willie Whitelaw and John Wakeham, Margaret Thatcher set up a strategy group of senior ministers to make plans for the next election. Headlined by the tabloids as the ‘A-Team’ after a topical television series, this political inner cabinet included Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and Douglas Hurd as the holders of the three great offices of state; Norman Tebbit as Party Chairman supported by his ebulliently unorthodox deputy Jeffrey Archer. The last two A-Team members were the originators of the idea, Willie Whitelaw and John Wakeham. The group’s much publicised existence created an impression of united teamwork.
In fact this was something of an illusion for a rift was growing between Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit. Like several other cabinet ministers, the Party Chairman was becoming vexed by the flow of hostile press stories about himself that were being planted without attribution with journalists. Following a show-down with the Prime Minister they stopped. The ‘A-Team’, which met every Monday morning, gradually injected some unifying co-operation into the highest ranks of government. Its finest hour was co-ordinating the Conservative Party Conference in October 1986.
Under the slogan ‘The Next Moves Forward’, the Bournemouth conference featured minister after minister coming to the rostrum to unveil policy proposals likely to attract voter support. Nigel Lawson stole the show with the vision of income tax reduced to twenty-five pence. He was buttressed by Douglas Hurd promising longer sentences for criminals; Norman Fowler offering big increases in hospital building; and Lord Young revealing plans to reduce youth unemployment. ‘More than ever before there has been the impression of a ministerial team’, reported The Times, adding the view that this was important because the Prime Minister’s personal electoral appeal was fading.2
Fading is the last adjective that could be used to describe Margaret Thatcher’s closing speech to the conference. She came out of her corner swinging her handbag. Attack was her method of defence. In response to the familiar allegation that the Conservatives were not a caring party, she slammed Labour for supporting strikes by NHS workers and miners who had tried to ‘deprive industry, homes and pensioners of power, heat and light’. She roused the delegates with her crescendo: ‘Mr President, we’re not going to take any lessons in caring from people with that sort of record.’3
Her second wave of attack was directed at the Liberals, who had passed a motion in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament at their party conference three weeks earlier. But her prime target was Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party, which had nailed its colours to the mast of a non-nuclear defence policy and the closing of American bases in Britain.
‘Let there be no doubt about the gravity of that decision’, she thundered.
You cannot be a loyal member of NATO while disavowing its fundamental strategy. A Labour Britain would be a neutralist Britain. It would be the greatest gain for the Soviet Union in forty years. And they would have got it without firing a shot.’4
Within days of this conference speech there was a surge of support for the government in the opinion polls. The Conservatives moved ahead of Labour by nine percentage points, and ahead of the Alliance by nineteen points. At the turn of the year there was widespread speculation that there would be a general election in 1987. Poll fever was fanned by Nigel Lawson’s March budget, which cut the standard rate of income tax by 2p while boosting expenditure on the NHS. Hard on the heels of this economic good news came Margaret Thatcher’s telegenic visit to Moscow. The coverage on the BBC and ITV news bulletins made a major impact on the electorate.
A few weeks afterwards, Charles Powell wrote a most un-civil servant like letter to his Foreign Office colleague Sir Bryan Cartledge, Britain’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union, jokingly expressing gratitude to the Moscow Embassy for helping the Prime Minister to win a third term.5 Behind the humour lay the truth that 1987 was one of those rare general elections whose result turned on defence and foreign policy.
After her return from Moscow, the momentum for a summer election became almost unstoppable. In late March, a formal meeting of the cabinet was followed by a political cabinet, without civil servants present, at which the options for an election date were discussed at length. Margaret Thatcher was uncharacteristically ambivalent. At various stages of the debate she intervened in favour of both a June and a September poll. What made up her mind were the results of the local elections on 7 May. Expecting losses in many areas, the Conservatives were pleasantly surprised to make modest but nationwide gains.
After a meeting of the ‘A-Team’ at Chequers, the Prime Minister announced the following day that the general election would be held on 11 June. With the Tories running at just over 40 per cent in the polls and the anti-government vote helpfully divided between Labour and the Alliance at 30 and 28 per cent respectively, Margaret Thatcher looked an odds on certainty to be re-elected to power.
WINNING FOR THE THIRD TIME
Although the opinion polls suggested it would be almost impossible for the Prime Minister to lose the election, her campaign got off to a slow and shaky start. It was her idea to begin gradually. But when she realised that the opposition were setting a fast pace in the vacuum left by the torpor of the Conservatives’ opening week, Margaret Thatcher became tetchy. ‘A slow start, however, is one thing’, she grumbled. ‘No start at all is quite another.’6
What rattled her was the professionalism of Labour’s early media campaign. It was a slick operation masterminded by Peter Mandelson.* The highlight was Labour’s opening party political broadcast, starring its first couple, the youthful Neil and Glenys Kinnock. As they walked hand in hand along a scenic coastal path with waves pounding below and seagulls soaring above, the freshness of the imagery seemed optimistic and futuristic. It evidently struck a chord with younger voters, because the Leader of the Opposition’s poll ratings shot up by sixteen points overnight.7
By contrast, the rival Conservative broadcast was a tired old rehash of yesterday’s Britain. It featured Winston Churchill voice-overs, newsreel clips from the Battle of Britain and Margaret Thatcher’s favourite hymn, ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’. The nostalgia was interspersed with excerpts from speeches by Arthur Scargill and Ken Livingstone, both sounding more like prehistoric dinosaurs than contemporary demons.
Although these television overtures from both sides were focused more on style than substance, they managed to send Margaret Thatcher’s morale plummeting. ‘Kinnock had a marvellous programme – it’s hardly worth bothering. Let’s give up, it’s the end’, she declared after a dishearteningly rainy day on the campaign trail in North London.
She made this melodramatic announcement to a small group of friends and family members in the flat above No. 10 at the conclusion of
the first week. Carol Thatcher thought that on this particular evening her mother ‘was looking more upset than I could remember for a long time’.8 But the mood changed after a whisky or two and some upbeat contributions from Tim Bell, Lord Young and Denis. These three wise men managed to convince her that the campaign could soon be revived by a combination of banging the drum on the government’s record and battering the opposition for their unilateralist defence policies.
This strategy was somewhat out of kilter with the plans prepared by Conservative Central Office. Margaret Thatcher’s relationship with the Party Chairman, Norman Tebbit, had become strained. This was partly because he was a strong enough character to stand up to her, but more because she suspected him of harbouring an ambition to be her successor. ‘It was the kiss of death if she ever suspected anyone of being a potential leadership contender’,9 observed Lord Young, her Secretary of State for Employment since 1986 and her latest court favourite.
The problem did not really exist. Conservative Central Office was doing a good job. However, Margaret Thatcher’s confidence was at a low ebb so she sent Lord Young as her personal ferret down every campaign rabbit hole where she suspected failings. One of the first casualties of her bark combined with Young’s bite was John Wakeham. He was helping Tebbit with the organisation of ministerial media interviews in the campaign. Unfortunately, one of the first ones, his appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Election Call, was a disaster. This at least was the opinion of the Prime Minister, who listened to it and exploded to Lord Young: ‘John doesn’t understand the first thing about the media. You must stop him and take charge of it yourself.’10 This was the first of many counter-orders by Margaret Thatcher, who caused disorder by issuing them to Young without telling the recipients.
A particular area of discord was the schedule for the Prime Minister’s daily tours that, according to Norman Tebbit, ‘became a near disaster that threatened the campaign’.11 Some of the troubles were caused by Margaret Thatcher’s wilful refusal to stick to, or even mention, the themes of the day, which had been carefully planned, complete with press briefings, by Central Office.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 66