by Andrew Marr
Bruges in Belgium is a pretty town. Thanks to the channel tunnel and cheap flights, British people flock there for romance, beer, art and chocolate. When Margaret Thatcher rode into town in 1988, year of hubris, none of these things was on her agenda. She had come to make her definitive speech against the federalism now openly advancing towards her. The Foreign Office had tried to soften her message. She had promptly pulled out her pen and written the barbs and thorns back in again. She had not, she informed her audience, ‘successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain’ (a claim already anatomized) ‘only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European super-state exercising a new level of dominance from Brussels.’ There was much else besides. Her bluntness much offended continental politicians and the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. Next, she reappointed as her economic adviser a lugubrious and outspoken monetarist academic, Sir Alan Walters, who was contemptuous of Lawson’s exchange rate policy and said so, repeatedly. Thus she was taking on Howe and Lawson, the two Chancellors of her revolutionary years, together. A dangerous split was becoming evident at the top of government. She seemed not to care, biffing Howe about as carelessly as she always had. Nor was anyone much convinced when she told the world she ‘fully, gladly, joyfully, unequivocally, generously…fully, fully, fully, fully’ supported Lawson as her Chancellor. People said she had no sense of humour. They were wrong. It was just a slightly strange one.
Then Jacques Delors, the wry and determined French socialist, re-entered the story, with his fleshed-out plan for economic and monetary union, which would end with the single currency, the euro. To get there, all EU members would start by putting their national currencies into the ERM, which would draw them increasingly tightly together – just what Lawson and Howe wanted and just what Thatcher did not. Howe and Lawson, Pinky and Perky, ganged up. They told her she must announce that Britain would soon join the ERM, even if she left the single currency itself to one side, for the time. She wriggled, then fought back. On the eve of a summit in Madrid where Britain had to announce her view the two of them visited her in private, had a blazing row and threatened to resign together if she did not give way. Truculently she did, and the crisis passed. But she was merely waiting. Four weeks after the summit, in July 1989, Thatcher hit back. She unleashed a major cabinet reshuffle, compared at the time to Macmillan’s ‘night of the long knives’ in 1962. Howe was demoted to being Leader of the Commons. She reluctantly allowed him the face-saving title of Deputy Prime Minister, a concession rather diminished when her press officer, Bernard Ingham, instantly told journalists it was a bit of a non-job. Howe was replaced by the relatively unknown John Major, the former chief secretary. Lawson survived only because the economy was weakening and to lose him was thought too dangerous just then.
So the drama advanced. The atmosphere in the Commons was a combustible mix of sulphur and adrenalin. Lawson was having a bad time on all sides, including from the Labour shadow chancellor John Smith. When Thatcher’s adviser Walters had another pop at his ERM policy, he decided enough was enough and resigned on 26 October, telling the Prime Minister she should treat her ministers better. She pretended to have no idea what he was on about. Lawson was replaced by the still relatively unknown John Major, who was having an interesting autumn. Around them all, the world was changing. A few days after these events, East Germany announced the opening of the border to the West and joyous Berliners began hacking their wall to pieces. Then the communists fell in Czechoslovakia. Then the Romanian dictator Ceaus¸escu was dragged from power. A few weeks after that, in February 1990, Nelson Mandela, a man she had once denounced as a terrorist, was released to global acclaim. In the middle of all this the Commons had witnessed an event which seemed the opposite of historic. Thatcher had been challenged as leader of the Conservative Party by Sir Anthony Meyer, an obscure, elderly pro-European backbencher much mocked as ‘the stalking donkey’. It was a little like Ronnie Corbett challenging Mike Tyson to a punch-up. Yet, ominously for Thatcher, when the vote was held sixty Tory MPs either voted donkey or abstained. In the shadows, prowling through Conservative associations and the corridors of Westminster was a more dangerous creature. Michael Heseltine, no donkey, self-expelled from the Thatcher cabinet four years earlier, was looking uncommonly chipper. Tory MPs whimpered to him about the trouble they were in with the poll tax. He sympathized, trying neither to lick his lips nor sharpen his claws too obviously.
One by one, the inner core of true Thatcherites fell back. Her bone-dry Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, had to resign after being rude about the Germans in a magazine interview – given, piquantly, to Lawson’s son Dominic. John Major turned out to be worryingly pro-European after all. Ian Gow, one of her closest associates, though no longer in the government, was murdered by an IRA bomb at his home. Abroad, great world events continued to stalk the last days of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and she urged President George Bush the elder towards what would become the first Gulf War – ‘Don’t wobble, George.’ There was another summit in Rome and further pressure on the Delors plan. Again, Thatcher felt herself being pushed and dragged towards a federal scheme. She vented her contempt and anger in the Commons, shredding the proposals with the words, ‘No…No…No!’ And at this point the one person who could never have been expected to finish her off, did so.
For years Geoffrey Howe had absorbed her slights, her impatience, her mockery, her snarls. He had taken it all, with the rubbery fatalism of the battered husband who will never leave. Now, observing her flaming anti-Brussels crusade, he decided he had had enough. She probably tipped him over the edge by turning on him savagely and unfairly over some legislation that was not ready, but he had decided to go. On 13 November 1990 he stood up rather lugubriously in the House of Commons and did her in. His resignation statement was designed to answer the story put around by Number Ten that he had gone over nothing much at all. To a packed chamber he revealed that Lawson and he had threatened to resign together the previous year and accused her of sending her ministers to negotiate in Brussels like a cricket team going to the crease, having first broken their bats in the changing room. She was wrong over Europe, he insisted; and then threw the door open to the further leadership challenge that was now inevitable: ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I myself have wrestled for perhaps too long.’ Television cameras had just been allowed into the Commons. Across the country people could watch Howe, with Nigel Lawson nodding behind him, could see Heseltine’s studied, icy calm, and observe the white-faced reaction of the Prime Minister herself. The next day Heseltine announced he would stand against her as leader. She told The Times that he was a socialist at heart, someone whose philosophy at its extreme end had just been defeated in the Soviet Union. She would see him off, of course.
The balloting system for Tory MPs required her to beat Heseltine by winning both a clear majority of the parliamentary party and being 15 per cent ahead of him in votes cast. At a summit in Paris, surrounded by many old enemies, she heard that she had missed the second hurdle by four votes. There would be a second ballot. As one of the few people in public life who could swarm all by herself, she swarmed out of the summit, somehow found a BBC microphone and announced that though disappointed, she would fight on. Then she returned with heroic sangfroid to sit through a ballet with the other leaders, who were pleasant enough to her face. While she watched the ballet, Tory MPs were dancing through Westminster in anger or delight. It was a night of softening support and hardening hearts. Many key Thatcherites believed she was finished and feared that if she fought again, Heseltine would beat her. This would tear the party in two. It would be better for her to withdraw and let someone else assassinate the assassin.
Even then, had she been in London throughout the crisis and summoned her cabinet together to back her, she might have pulled it off. But by the time she was back and taking advice from her whips the new
s was bleak. In what was probably a tactical mistake, she decided to see her cabinet one by one in her Commons office. Douglas Hurd and John Major had already given her their reluctant agreement to nominate her for the next round of voting but the message from most of the rest of her ministers was strangely uniform. They would personally back her if she was determined to fight but, frankly, she would lose. That would mean Heseltine. Better, Prime Minister, to stand aside and free Major and Hurd from their promises of support. Later, she was wryly amusing about the process. It looked very much as if most of them had agreed the line beforehand. The whips concurred. The cabinet were going through the motions of supporting her if she insisted, but they did not mean it, or mean her to believe it. She had lost them. Only a few ultras, mostly outside the cabinet, were sincerely urging her to continue the struggle. One was that wicked diarist and right-wing maverick Alan Clark, who told her to fight on at all costs: ‘Unfortunately he went on to argue that I should fight on even though I was bound to lose because it was better to go down in a blaze of glorious defeat than to go gentle into that good night. Since I had no particular fondness for Wagnerian endings, this lifted my spirits only briefly.’
So it was over. In their various ways, her cabinet were too tired to support her any longer and her MPs were too scared of the electoral vengeance to be wreaked after the poll tax. She returned to Downing Street, conferred with Denis, slept on it, and then announced to her cabinet secretary at 7.30 the next morning that she had decided to resign. She held an uncomfortable cabinet meeting with those she believed had betrayed her, saw the Queen, phoned other world leaders and then finished with one final splendid Commons performance – ‘I’m enjoying this!’ – vigorously defending her record. Come back, cried one emotional Tory MP. When Margaret Thatcher left Downing Street for the last time in tears, she already knew that she had successfully completed a final political campaign, which was to ensure that she was replaced as Prime Minister by John Major, rather than Michael Heseltine. She had rallied support for him by phone among her closest supporters. They felt he had not been quite supportive enough. She also harboured private doubts. So ended the most extraordinary and nation-changing premiership of modern British history.
Part Five
Nippy Metro People: Britain from 1990
Thatcher’s children? By the time she left office, only a minority were true believers. Most would have voted her out had her cabinet ministers not beaten them to it. History is harshest to a leader just as they fall. She had been such a strident presence for so long that many who had first welcomed her as a gust of fresh air now felt harried. Those who wanted a quieter leader were about to get one. Yet most people had in the end done well under her, not just the Yuppies and Essex boys, but also her snidest middle-class critics. Britons were on average much wealthier than they had been at the end of seventies. The country was enjoying bigger cars, a far wider range of holidays, better food, a wider choice of television channels, home videos, and the first slew of gadgets from the computer age. Yet this was not quite the Britain of today.
More people smoked. The idea of smoke-free public areas, or smoking bans in offices and restaurants, was lampooned as a weird Californian innovation that would never come here. People seen talking to themselves with a wire dangling from one ear would have been considered worryingly disturbed. There were no Starbucks: coffee shops were still mainly locally owned places selling instant coffee, tea, fried food or cakes. Lunch had been under threat for some years in the City and the days of midday drinking were beginning to die in other professions too. The chic sandwich bar had begun to spread since the early eighties, when BLTs, avocado and blue cheese began to be regularly offered, alongside the traditional fillings of cheese, ham and egg. At a by-election outside Liverpool in 1986 a Labour activist had allegedly pointed to the mushy peas in a local chip-shop and asked for some of the ‘avocado dip’ too: it was a story, perhaps an urban myth, much re-told as symbolizing the gap between real Britain and the new metropolitan Britain of the south. The habit of urbanites carrying bottled water wherever they went had not yet taken off, though meaningless corporate language was already sullying business life. The ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation was in its infancy. Passengers, rather than ‘customers’, travelled on British Rail trains, with the double-arrow symbol which had been familiar since 1965. On the roads were plenty of flashy Ford Sierras, Austin Montegos and nippy Metros.
For a wealthy country, the mood was uneasy. An old jibe, ‘public affluence, public squalor’, was much heard. The most immediate worry was economic as the hangover effects of the Lawson boom began to throb. Inflation was rising towards double figures, interest rates were at 14 per cent and unemployment was heading towards two million. Over the next four years a serious white-collar recession was to hit Britain, particularly in the south, where house prices would fall by a quarter. An estimated 1.8 million people found that their homes were worth less than the money they had borrowed to buy them in the heady easy-credit eighties. During 1991 alone, more than 75,000 families would have their homes repossessed. With hindsight it is generally accepted that the Thatcher revolution reshaped the country’s economy and prepared Britain well for the new age of globalization waiting in the wings, but in 1990 it did not feel quite like that.
There were other changes too. The British were fewer than they are today. The population was smaller by at least three million souls. Also, the ethnic mix of the country was simpler. Of the roughly three million non-white British, the largest groups were Indian (840,000), black Caribbean (500,000) and Pakistani (476,000), pretty much what an extrapolation from the seventies would have predicted. No serious concern was expressed politically about whether Muslims could fully integrate. In the interests of keeping an eye on troublemakers, and maintaining Britain’s traditions of tolerance, a number of the most radical Islamic militants, on the run from their own countries, had been given safe haven in London. The largest white migrant group was from Ireland, which was still relatively poor. Any Poles or Russians in Britain were diplomats or refugees from communism. The term ‘bogus asylum seeker’ would have met with a puzzled frown. Looking to east or west, Britain was far less penetrated by overseas culture and people than she would soon become.
Britain was also about to go to war again as the junior partner to the Americans in the first Gulf conflict, which freed Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invasion and immolated the Iraqi army’s Republican Guard. Despite British forces losing lives and the use by Saddam of human shields, the war generated nothing like the controversy of the later Iraq war. It was widely seen as a necessary act of international retribution against a particularly horrible dictator. After the controversies and alarms of the Thatcher years, foreign affairs generated less heat, except for the great issue of European federalism. There was a real sense of optimism caused by the end of the Cold War, which had resulted in the deaths of up to 40 million people around the world, and involved no fewer than 150 smaller conflicts. At last, perhaps, the West could relax. Politicians and journalists talked excitedly of the coming ‘peace dividend’ and the end of the surveillance and espionage secret state that had been needed for so long. The only present threat to British security was the Provisional IRA, which would continue its attacks with ferocity and cunning for some years to come. They would hit Downing Street with a triple mortar attack on a snowy day in February 1991, coming close to killing the Prime Minister and the top team of ministers and officials directing the Gulf War.
Environmental worries were present too, though a bat-squeak compared to today’s panic. British scientists played a big role in alerting the world. Among the handful of Britons in the second half of the twentieth century who may be remembered centuries hence is James Lovelock. He is the scientist who in 1965 after studying the long-term chemical composition of the planet’s systems, and their interaction with living organisms, developed the ‘Gaia’ theory. The name, from a Greek goddess, came from the British Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding
, a neighbour of Lovelock’s in Devon, during a country walk. ‘Gaia’ demonstrated how fragile the life-supporting atmosphere and chemistry of the planet is, an immensely complex self-regulating system keeping temperatures fit for life. Some hippies and ‘New Age’ mystics mistakenly thought Lovelock was saying the Earth was herself alive. He was using a metaphor but one with powerful implications for man-made climate change. At the same time as Lovelock was writing his most influential book, in the late seventies, far south the British Antarctic Survey was just beginning to notice a thinning of the ozone layer. It is said that when the first measurements were taken later in 1985 the readings were so low the scientists assumed their instruments were faulty and sent home for replacements. This led to an important treaty cutting ozone-depleting CFCs. British influence was important at the first world climate conference in Geneva in 1979, which had appealed to nations to do more research.
By 1990, a follow-up conference attended by 130 countries focused on the growing evidence that global warming was a real threat, but no agreement was reached about what should be done. Were any senior politicians worried? One was. Two years earlier Margaret Thatcher, science-trained, had made a speech about global warming. She had been persuaded that it was a profound issue by Britain’s outgoing ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Crispin Tickell, who had ironically enough got at her with worrying data during a long international plane flight. So in September 1988 she had told the Royal Society that she believed it possible that ‘we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of the earth itself.’ Such was the interest that no television cameras were sent to record her speech and the prime minister had to read it by the light of wax candles held over her head in an ancient hall. For most people in 1990 ‘the environment’ or green issues meant containable local problems such as the use of chemical pesticides or the problems of disposing of nuclear waste. Books about the fate of the earth concerned themselves with nuclear weapons.