Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  Denis was waiting for her. He had been dining at Mark’s club with Carol and Alistair McAlpine. Thatcher père et fille had put on a brave face during the meal, but as they walked across Horse Guards Parade they broke down in tears. ‘Oh, it’s just the disloyalty of it all’, said Denis. It was the only time Carol had ever seen her father cry.19

  Despite his tears, Denis wanted his wife to depart with dignity and not to be hustled out in humiliation. He had seen the outcome more clearly than she did from the moment the first-ballot result came through. So he comforted her and with his special brand of loving, down-to-earth practicality, he guided her to the inevitable decision.

  She had work to do before any announcement of her resignation could be made. At the height of the Tory traumas Labour had tabled an opportunistic motion of no confidence, which was to be debated on the afternoon of Thursday 22 November. Knowing that she would have announced her resignation by then, it would have been easy to ask another senior minister, probably the Leader of the House, John MacGregor, to reply to the debate on behalf of the government. But this thought did not occur to her.

  Instead, at around 11 p.m. she knuckled down to the task of writing her last speech as Prime Minister, calling in Charles Powell, Tim Bell, Gordon Reece and John Gummer for help. The drafting was briefly interrupted by Michael Portillo, accompanied by Michael Forsyth and Michael Fallon, who made one final appeal to her to fight on. It was an emotional moment, but after wiping away a tear she refused to be swayed by these ‘last-ditchers’, as she called them.20

  At about 3 a.m. she went to bed, insisting that she would follow her usual practice of sleeping on important decisions. The short night’s rest did not change her mind. At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday 22 November, she telephoned down to her Principal Private Secretary, Andrew Turnbull, to say that she had finally resolved to resign. He implemented a prepared plan for the day ahead, which included a briefing for Prime Minister’s Questions, a statement to the cabinet and an audience with the Queen.

  The cabinet met at 9 a.m. that morning, ninety minutes earlier than usual, not because of the leadership drama but because several ministers planned to attend the Westminster Abbey memorial service for Lady Home of the Hirsel.† The atmosphere in the anteroom resembled a gathering of mourners assembling in church before a funeral. Margaret Thatcher, red-eyed and in a black suit, noticed how her colleagues ‘stood with their backs against the wall, looking in every direction except mine’.21

  She began by saying that before the formal business of the cabinet she wanted to make her position known. She started to read from a paper in front of her, but after the first five words, ‘Having consulted widely among colleagues …’ she broke down and was unable to continue.22 ‘For God’s sake, you read it, James’, said Cecil Parkinson to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay.

  The Prime Minister shook her head, blew her nose, and unsuccessfully tried to start again. Her distress moved several ministers to tears of their own, some real, some crocodile. Eventually she got it all out:

  Having consulted widely among colleagues, I have concluded that the unity of the party and the prospects of victory in a General Election will be better served if I stood down to enable colleagues to enter the ballot for the Leadership. I should like to thank all those in Cabinet and outside who have given me such dedicated support.23

  Lord Mackay then read out a tribute on behalf of the cabinet to which Kenneth Baker and Douglas Hurd added their own words of appreciation. Margaret Thatcher found the sympathy almost unbearable, so she intervened with some practical politics. Her line was that the cabinet must unite to defeat Heseltine, otherwise all the things she had stood for during the past eleven years would be lost. How many of her colleagues agreed with this final imperative command was unclear.

  After a short coffee break, during which the news of her impending resignation was released, the cabinet resumed its normal business. The most important decision was to increase British forces in the Gulf by sending a second armoured brigade. Margaret Thatcher handled the agenda with subdued aplomb, although she was again close to tears towards the end.

  Her last cabinet ended at 10.15 a.m. She invited its members to stay on for an informal political discussion. The officials melted away. Among the politicians sitting round the table, the talk immediately turned to the leadership election. Again, there was much emphasis on the importance of stopping Heseltine. In a heated moment, one colleague declared, ‘We’re going to pin regicide on him’. Margaret Thatcher looked perplexed for a moment, and then made a devastating reply. ‘Oh no, it wasn’t Heseltine, it was the Cabinet’, she said.24 The way she delivered the line, without a trace of rancour, gave the impression of a history teacher correcting an error of fact in a pupil’s essay. Of course, she was right.

  Her last tasks of the morning were to send messages to Presidents Bush and Gorbachev, and to European heads of government. Then she went to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the Queen. After that, she went back to work on the draft of her speech for the no confidence debate. Curiously, this lifted her spirits. For the realisation struck home that now she had announced her resignation, the Tory Party would be totally united behind her. Even the opposition might be sympathetic. So she began to anticipate a good reception in the House. She guessed it would be ‘roses, roses, all the way’.25 Again, she was right.

  A BRAVURA FAREWELL PERFORMANCE

  Margaret Thatcher’s last speech to the House of Commons as Prime Minister was a triumph. After a morning in tears, she had an afternoon of glory. It was as though a diva was singing her last and greatest ever role, hitting all the high notes at her final appearance. To do this on the day of her resignation was a miracle of political confidence and courage. Those who were present in the chamber will never forget it.

  Many MPs thought she would not come to Parliament that day. They expected her to be traumatised by the speed and brutality of her fall. But the Iron Lady knew that she had been presented with a great theatrical opportunity. She seized it, fortified by a vitamin B6 booster injection and by the mood of the parliamentary audience, which was in overdrive with excitement at the high drama it was about to witness.

  As usual, Neil Kinnock helped her. Even allowing for the fact that his fox had been shot before the debate began, he managed to deliver an opening speech which was not just mediocre; it was abysmal. So she hit a soft target when in her opening sentences she attacked him for his ‘windy rhetoric … just a lot of disjointed opaque, words’.26

  She was the opposite of opaque. When preparing the final draft of her speech with the help of Charles Powell, she said she wanted it to be ‘my testament at the bar of History’.27 Her delivery was too rough-hewn to fulfil the elegiac nature of this aspiration. But as a robust and often spontaneous defence of her record it was a thrilling performance, vintage Margaret Thatcher with the bark off. It was, as Morley said of Gladstone, ‘the character breathing through the sentences that counted’.28

  She was at her best when dealing with interventions. She chided Labour for not saying where they stood on the central issues of Europe’s future. ‘Do they want a single currency? The right hon. Gentleman does not even know what it means, so how can he know?’29

  Neil Kinnock feebly interjected, ‘It is a hypothetical question’. ‘Absolute nonsense. It is appalling’, she thundered back, hammering on the despatch box. ‘It will not be a hypothetical question. Someone must go to Europe and argue knowing what it means.’30

  The Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, Alan Beith, intervened to ask, ‘Will the Prime Minister tell us whether she intends to continue her personal fight against a single currency and an independent central bank when she leaves office?’

  Before she had time to reply, Dennis Skinner, the Labour MP for Bolsover, bellowed from a sedentary position on the first bench below the gangway, ‘No. She is going to be the governor.’

  Margaret Thatcher rode on the wave of laughter and joined in the knockabout.

  �
�What a good idea!’ she retorted. ‘I had not thought of that.’ Then she turned the humour to her advantage.

  But if I were, there would be no European central bank accountable to no one, least of all national Parliaments. The point of that kind of Europe with a central bank is no democracy, taking away powers from every single Parliament, and having a single currency, a monetary policy and interest rates which take all political power away from us … a single currency is about the politics of Europe, it is about a federal Europe by the back door. So I shall consider the proposal of the Hon. Member for Bolsover. Now, where were we? I am enjoying this.31

  The House of Commons was enjoying it too. Amidst the cheering, the Tory MP for Great Yarmouth, Michael Carttiss, shouted, ‘Cancel it. You can wipe the floor with these people.’

  ‘Yes, indeed’, beamed Margaret Thatcher.32

  There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that she was wiping away the impact of Geoffrey Howe’s resignation statement. For she was counter-attacking his ideas so forcefully. Moreover, she was winning both the argument and the presentation. It was game, set and match to Thatcher. An important legacy of this speech was that it killed the chances of Britain ever signing up to EMU, or to the euro.

  Moving to the higher ground of international statecraft, she claimed credit for helping Eastern Europe to escape from totalitarian rule, and for ending the Cold War. ‘These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated.’33

  The theme of intimidation brought her to a powerful peroration focused on the past conflict in the South Atlantic, and the coming conflict in the Gulf.

  Twice in my time as Prime Minister we have had to send our forces across the world to defend a small country against ruthless aggression: first to our own people in the Falklands, and now to the borders of Kuwait. To those who have never had to take such decisions, I say that they are taken with a heavy heart and in the knowledge of the manifold dangers, but with tremendous pride in the professionalism and courage of our armed forces.34

  Roars of ‘hear, hear’ rang out again, but then the House fell to a hush, perhaps sensing that as Britain was again on the brink of a war, the former war leader might have an important message in her closing sentences. She did not disappoint. Dropping her voice low before soaring upwards to the climax of her speech, she said:

  There is something else which one feels. That is a sense of this country’s destiny: the centuries of history and experience which ensure that, when principles have to be defended, when good has to be upheld and when evil has to be overcome, Britain will take up arms. It is because we on this side have never flinched from difficult decisions that this House and this country can have confidence in this Government today.35

  The cheers rang to the welkin of the chamber, and not just from her own side. By any standards it had been one of the most remarkable House of Commons speeches in living memory. The supreme irony was that many of those cheering loudest and waving their order papers most vigorously were those who had just voted her out. Hypocrisy in excelsis! Behind the applause one could hear the sound of consciences pricking. If the leadership ballot could have been reinstated and held that afternoon, she would have won by a landslide.

  In the tea room afterwards I sat at a table with Michael Carttiss, the rough and ready Norfolk MP who had made the ‘You can wipe the floor with these people’ interjection in the Prime Minister’s speech. He was in a state of utter despair. ‘What have we done? What have we done?’ he kept asking. He was not alone in his anguish.

  The fact of the matter was that back-bench opinion on Margaret Thatcher was extremely volatile. Her fans and her foes remained more or less constant. But the fickle middle of the party lurched from being for her or against her depending on whether they had spent the weekend in their constituencies (where local support for the Prime Minister was generally strong), or whether they had been listening to Geoffrey Howe or courted by Michael Heseltine, or now whether they had seen and heard Margaret Thatcher on her finest form as a leader.

  In the aftermath of her final speech as Prime Minister, guilt stalked the corridors of Conservative Westminster. The Daily Mail caught the spectre of this shame with its headline, ‘Too Damn Good for the Lot of Them’.36 That was the perfect epitaph for her on the day when her stature had soared stratospherically above the MPs and cabinet ministers who had abandoned her.

  THE ELECTION OF A NEW LEADER

  It was an extraordinary irony that Margaret Thatcher put in much more hard work to secure the election of John Major on the second ballot than she had to support her own position on the first. He suddenly became her chosen successor, although this process required some degree of self-delusion. Faced with choosing between the three candidates, she did not hesitate. Michael Heseltine was anathema to her. She respected Douglas Hurd, but thought him too much of an old school consensualist. As she told Woodrow Wyatt:

  It may be inverted snobbishness but I don’t want old style, old Etonian Tories of the old school to succeed me and to go back to the old complacent consensus ways. John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is far more in tune with the skilled and ambitious and worthwhile working classes than Douglas Hurd is.37

  Even so, to anoint John Major with enthusiasm she needed to believe that he was a right-winger, a Eurosceptic and a Thatcherite. None of these three labels rang true. But she convinced herself otherwise. This was superficially possible because, having been Foreign Secretary for only three months and Chancellor for only a year, John Major carried little baggage. Ideologically, he was the unknown candidate, even to the Prime Minister who now wanted him to be her successor.

  Major had the best campaign team, led by Norman Lamont. Hurd was a half-hearted starter. As Willie Whitelaw shrewdly observed of him, ‘The trouble with Douglas is the same with me in 1975. He doesn’t really want the job.’38

  As for Heseltine, he again was handicapped by having weak campaign managers. Yet even so, some momentum started to build for him for the first couple of days after the resignation. Ironically, this new but fleeting support came mostly from furious Thatcherites. They were so angry at the assassination of their heroine that they wanted to have nothing to do with those they thought had betrayed her. So, to punish Norman Lamont, Richard Ryder and Peter Lilley, who had by now become the leaders of John Major’s campaign, some hotheads of the Thatcher fan club declared they would vote for Heseltine. Another tranche of pledges came from MPs who felt that the colourful Tarzan was a future election winner, while ‘the grey men in suits’ (Hurd and Major) were not.

  Margaret Thatcher did a valuable service to the Major camp by reversing this flow of support for Heseltine. She telephoned a number of her loyalists to urge them to vote for her chosen successor. Her advocacy of the reasons why Heseltine must be stopped was powerful. By the time she deployed these arguments, many a Tory MP was feeling guilty about the deposition of a leader who, for all her faults, had just put on a firework display of her leadership skills in the no confidence debate.

  One way or another, her enthusiastic backing for Major was an important factor in swinging the contest his way. However, it was not as important as a MORI opinion poll, which suggested that John Major would be even more successful as a vote-getter with the electorate than Michael Heseltine.39 Once the febrile party started to believe that Tarzan’s alleged powers of election winning might be surpassed by the least known prime ministerial candidate, the Heseltine bandwagon juddered to a halt, and the uncommitted votes rolled Major’s way.

  Margaret Thatcher was active but not over-active in the five days of second-ballot leadership campaigning. She was too busy with the mundane but essential task of moving out. Packing up her flat after eleven and a half years in residence at No. 10 proved a wearisome task. Fortunately, unlike some previous prime ministers who lost office unexpectedly, she had somewhere to move to.

  Three years earlier, Denis
had presciently said, ‘Look, we should never be homeless. You don’t know with politics; we might have to move in a hurry and we must have somewhere to go.’40 As a result, the Thatchers had bought a house on a new estate overlooking the golf course at Dulwich. So their accumulated possessions were transported there in a shuttle service operated mainly by Denis’s Ford Cortina and Carol’s Mini-Metro.

  With the help of Crawfie, Carla Powell and Joy Robilliard (her constituency secretary), Margaret Thatcher supervised the moving operations, padding around in her stockinged feet as she filled tea chests and mobile wardrobes. No longer occupied with the decisions of government, she spent her time deciding ‘whether to wrap knick-knacks in two layers of paper, or whether one would do’.41

  Her last weekend as Prime Minister was spent at Chequers. It was a house she had come to love, so parting from it was an emotional wrench. On her final Sunday there she went to church, gave a drinks party for the Chequers staff and then, in the late afternoon, had a farewell stroll round the main rooms as the winter light was fading. She and Denis were in tears as they walked hand in hand along the gallery that overlooked the great hall.