by Chris Patten
Britain could at least be governed again after the Thatcher years. But was what emerged from the ideological struggles of this era, often fought over very muddy terrain with few intellectual peaks in view, the sort of cultural shift in Britain that was her aim? Did she help to change Britain’s soul? She would undoubtedly have hated some of the results of her decade in office. She was a committed unionist, but the United Kingdom faced the growing threat that Scottish nationalism would break it up. She usually believed strongly in traditional middle-class values – prudence, saving, looking after your family against a rainy day, and would have had no time surely for ‘loads of money’ triumphalism, from city yobs to retail slobs – but she did not seem to comprehend that if you banged on the whole time about price the notion of values could easily go for a burton. Some go further and question whether she made it more difficult in Britain to conserve anything any more. I do not agree with that. It should always be possible to conserve in a wet sort of way while conceding sufficient change to keep things much the same. Margaret’s intellectual hero, Hayek, would not have approved of this idea. In the book she said that she most admired (The Constitution of Liberty), he explained at the end why he was not a Conservative at all. Conservatism, which he thought was far too close to nationalism, could never be more than a brake on the wrong journey. ‘Conservatism,’ he concluded, ‘may often be a useful practical maxim but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range development.’ She surely cannot have believed this; perhaps she skipped that chapter.
Thatcher’s departure from the leadership was sad. Tears were shed, often by crocodiles: ‘dust to dust, and ashes to ashes’. All of us in the Cabinet had been required to see her individually after she didn’t do quite well enough in the first leadership ballot. I do not think that many urged her to fight on with promises of abiding, strong support. For my part, I told her that I thought she would lose if she went on and that it would be humiliating. Better to go now than to face this. When she decided not to fight on (Denis’s advice too) and a new ballot for the leadership was held, I worked with several of my friends for Douglas Hurd, making it clear (for example, to the inquiries of Norman Lamont) that I would not myself be a candidate. I did not think I could win and have always found sentiments like ‘it’s sensible to put down a marker for the future’ pretty risible. The imagined future rarely comes. I would have been happy with either John Major or Michael Heseltine as leader, but Douglas was the man in the Cabinet whom I most admired – both clever and wise, a senatorial figure and a great delegator. At last, I reckoned, we would have a Prime Minister who was pretty normal.
We actually got one in John Major, by a comfortable margin, though not as a result of the myths about matricide spread by the right wing of the party. They convinced themselves that Margaret had been brought down by a coup, triggered by disloyal left-wing Cabinet ministers and their henchmen and henchwomen, largely on account of her tough views on developments in Europe. It is true that Thatcher’s rows with her close colleagues Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, over whether Britain should join the Exchange Rate Mechanism and link sterling informally to the Deutschmark as a way of disciplining the economy, contributed – through their shrill antagonism – to a feeling that she was losing her grip. But the biggest reason for her fall was hostility to the poll tax, the unpopularity of which stuck to her like fly paper. Moreover, as has invariably been the case, it was right-wingers who were the flakiest when it came to trying to keep the ship afloat through choppy waters, though some of her most ideologically loyal praetorian guard did continue to support her long past the moment when her position was lost.
John was elected leader partly because she was thought to favour him rather than anyone else. Above all, he was not Michael Heseltine, whom she regarded as regicide-in-chief. John had been advanced by her rapidly from one great office of state to another as the casualties of her eccentric man-management fell by the wayside. No one had any reason to know what his views really were. Margaret herself did not seek to block him, as she did Heseltine, and even gave the impression that she could manage the direction and speed of travel from the back seat of the car. She implied that she might need to be disloyal in some higher cause, and more than lived up to this once John had been elected. She became even more stridently right wing, albeit usually in semi-private, than her political instincts had ever allowed her to be in office. So, while she had certainly helped to save Britain, she paradoxically also came close to destroying the Conservative Party. Her legacy may still achieve that, all these years afterwards. She injected a virus of disloyalty into the body of the party which had given her more loyalty than she sometimes deserved – for example, during the Westland helicopter company row, when her closest advisers behaved pretty dubiously to save her skin.
So John inherited a party many of whose members were sullen and vitriolic about her departure. These mutinous sentiments were given a sharper edge following John’s extraordinarily successful negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. What emerged from these discussions was an outcome full of opt-outs from European policies like economic and monetary union which Britain did not like. Maastricht was a great achievement. We remained members of the EU on pretty much our own terms. Tristan Garel-Jones was European Minister at the time. Years later, when he was becoming a member of the House of Lords, he asked whether he could take Maastricht as his territorial designation. It was explained to him that foreign places could usually be used only if they were the scene of a great British victory. (El Alamein etc.) ‘Precisely,’ said Tristan. But the authorities made him settle less romantically for Watford.
After Maastricht we had to settle down to plan the General Election campaign. When John became Prime Minister, he moved me from the Environment Department, to become party chairman, to run his re-election campaign, his closest political colleague. We had first discussed the election as the Gulf War drew to a close. I was in John’s flat the evening that Saddam Hussein’s army was streaming home north to Iraq from Kuwait. John talked to President Bush on the hotline to Washington about calling off the so-called ‘turkey shoot’, the continued destruction of the Iraq forces now unable to defend themselves. I was impressed by John’s assurance in raising the right military strategic questions. Later that evening, we agreed that it would be wrong to use the successful aftermath of the campaign to call an election. It would seem like taking partisan advantage of a national military success.
As the succeeding months brought more and more bad economic news, the timing of the election – despite John’s successful dismantling of the poll tax – became increasingly difficult. Eventually, we left it until very nearly the last moment and fought and won the election – with over 14 million votes, the largest number ever cast for the victorious party in a British General Election – principally on two issues: John’s quiet competence and authority as Prime Minister, and the likelihood of economic trouble and tax increases if Labour under Neil Kinnock won. Losing my seat in the campaign and going off in the late summer of 1992 to Hong Kong, I was on the other side of the world in September when Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which we had eventually agreed to join in 1990 at the wrong time and – thanks in part to Margaret Thatcher’s insistence – at the wrong rate. Despite the later success of the Major government, with Kenneth Clarke as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in getting the economy back on an even keel and laying the basis for future economic growth, the events of the early 1990s had lost the Conservatives the most important ingredient in politics: the benefit of the doubt.
Clarke, Chancellor for four years, gave Britain the steadiest and most successful period of economic management for a quarter-century or more. He led the recovery from recession, brought down unemployment and interest rates, reduced the budget deficit from £50.8 billion in 1993 to £15.5 billion in 1997, and cut the basic rate of income tax. He passed on to the successor Labour government a golden legacy of sustainable growth. No wonder Labour s
tuck to the letter of Clarke’s spending plans for two years. Rab Butler, Roy Jenkins and Ken Clarke were the most successful Chancellors since the war; it was a pity that Clarke did not have the chance to build on a foundation that he had laid in adversity.
John’s difficulty as a leader came principally from two causes. He was elected to follow an unusual leader who had ridden her Cabinet hard, centralizing policy making and delivery on herself and her immediate entourage. She had driven the coach at breakneck speed along winding mountain roads; the result was inevitably a crash. John was a much more conventional leader, with an admirably collegial style. He actually listened to other opinions. At the first Cabinet meetings with John in the chair several of us felt as we were invited to contribute to the discussion a little like the prisoners in Fidelio, staggering up out of the dark into the light. A brilliant negotiator, within government and abroad, John often got his own way because of hard work (he always knew the brief better than anyone else in the room), charm, courtesy, a phlegmatic determination to go on until he got an acceptable outcome, and a brilliant ability to read body language. But the party and its senior members had got used to being roughed up, and seemed to find it difficult to summon the grace to behave well when they were themselves treated like grown-ups, for example when Major set out for debate in the Commons his negotiating stance at Maastricht before the European Council began.
The second reason for John’s difficulty was Europe and the antics of his predecessor, who not only tried her hand at back-seat driving but aimed the car at the oncoming traffic. A largely invented Thatcherite history of her own views on Europe destabilized her successor. She gathered around her standard, openly raised with increasing regularity, a cabal of dogmatic subversives whose views on Europe she would have trampled into the dust when as Prime Minister she was driving through legislation on the Single European Act which made the single market possible. The combination of her own behaviour and the ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism gave opponents of the government’s European policies open season to attack Major and the Cabinet and to render the smooth management of business all but impossible. I watched this play out from Hong Kong, talking to John when I could by telephone or during my quarterly visits back to London. I felt bad not being around to help. This had not been the plan before 1992. Like Thatcher, John Major was patronized, but he did not develop a thick enough skin to deal with it comfortably. He should have regarded these critics, and their mock tweedy ways, with the contempt they usually deserved. But he allowed them to cause him pain.
John was one of the most decent people ever to lead the Conservative Party. Moreover, despite so little formal education, he was formidably clever and worked harder than any of his contemporaries. He was rarely not working. When he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury and I was negotiating my departmental budget with him, he asked me if I would be happy to do it with him alone without civil servants on either side. I swallowed hard, agreed and went into the lion’s den with a man who appeared to know at least as much about the complications of my brief as I did. While I was alone with him, contending with his grasp of housing benefit and local-government capital-spending controls, my team of civil servants chatted in his outer office with his Treasury officials. In the office there was a long row of photographs of his predecessors in the job. One of my team, pointing at the photographs, asked, ‘Who was the best of all of them?’ ‘Easy,’ came the reply. ‘This one.’
John’s sensitivity about his background and identity had three effects. First, he was always careful about what he would look like. Would he be wearing the right clothes? To his credit, he would have been mortified to show a builder’s cleavage when clambering into a lorry in a way that never seems to embarrass Boris Johnson. The image of wimpishness – shirt tucked into his underpants as Alastair Campbell mendaciously suggested – was the reverse of the truth. He had a strong personal presence and could be surprisingly physical with a very firm handshake. He was also conspicuously good dealing with the women who worked for him, taking their views as seriously as was deserved. He was not one of those men who look for other men to talk to at dinner. Second, he never turned the rise from Brixton into the rather heroic story of social ascent and mobility it could have become in the telling of other more populist politicians. Third, he was horribly sensitive to criticism in the press, the amount of which increased as some of the bullies of Wapping discovered how much they could hurt him. ‘Don’t read the bloody things,’ we would all say to him. But he did – even poring over the first editions so that he could worry himself to a bad night’s sleep. Even when I was chairman of the Conservative Party, I was extremely reluctant to telephone a newspaper editor or journalist to complain or argue about something I did not like. I thought it a bit demeaning. This probably took things too far in the opposite direction to that taken by John. He would have been happier if he had had some of Margaret Thatcher’s homemade iron cladding. This combination of (mostly) strength and (a few) weaknesses made up a man I liked and inordinately respected. I was proud to work for him and to call him a friend.
John Major was the only member of my age group to lead the Conservative Party and the country. He was Prime Minister for seven years, longer than Brown, Macmillan, Douglas-Home or Heath, longer in fact than most holders of the office. History may not sufficiently celebrate his intrepid qualities; he was a rather quiet hero who had to manage the country through a difficult period. But on one issue after another he has been shown to have taken the right decisions and to have been on the right side, not least over European policy, especially the eurozone and the Schengen area. He led Britain in wartime; dismantled the poll tax; and somehow kept a truculent Conservative Party more or less afloat – having had to put to sea in stormy waters and in a pretty leaky craft. When I think about his years in No. 10, I just wish that he had enjoyed the experience much more.
7
Crazy Irish Knots
We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.
Winston Churchill
A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.
Seamus Heaney (2008)
My first ministerial job introduced me with all the thunderous reverberation of a Lambeg drum to the violence that identity politics often breeds. One particular incident (which I will describe later) combined the prosaic with the stomach-turning. How did it come about?
After re-election in Bath with a much increased majority in the 1983 General Election, I was offered a junior job in her government by Margaret Thatcher. In my first four years in Parliament, I had blotted my copy-book with party managers by occasionally speaking out against some of the more bruising, ideological aspects of the government’s economic policy, as described in a previous chapter, especially the quasi-religious reverence for reducing the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. The odd abstention vote or slightly coded but critical article or speech, and a pamphlet written with my closest political friends, had caused some teeth-sucking in Downing Street. While originally tapped for rapid promotion, I had plainly been relegated to the slow lane on account of being a trifle too independent-minded, even ornery. So in my first Parliament I saw members of my peer group taking their first steps on the ministerial ladder well before me. Was I jealous? Yes, a bit. But I think I understood that you had to lie on the bed that you had made. It was simply not in my constitution – maybe vanity or naivety came into it – to lickspittle my way to the top, or just play cautiously ‘shtum’ from time to time. Before the 1983 election, Alan Clark, who seemed to think that he had spotted a fellow anarchic rebel with few conventional careerist instincts, suggested that we should organize a lunch after the election for all those like us who had been passed over. Somewhat to our embarrassment, come the lunch, Alan and I found that we had been invited to take on junior posts in the government. The truth is we were both more ambitious for office than we let on.
The call from Downing Street in June 1983 sent me to what wags called, rather reveali
ngly for what it said about national priorities, the Siberian power station: Northern Ireland. This seemed to have become a place to which those whose Thatcherite sympathies could not be wholly trusted were exiled. The Secretary of State was Jim Prior, one of the last ‘wet’ critics of government economic policy left in the administration; his deputy was Nick Scott, an attractive, left-wing Conservative, once tapped for great things. It was suggested that since I was keen on public spending, I should be given lots of money to distribute in Northern Ireland before being weaned off it with some future return to a domestic, mainland department.
This fairly cynical approach to the Northern Ireland Office rather bore out the contention of the Irish Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, that the British government and public did not take the issues that Northern Ireland had to confront sufficiently seriously. By the time the Blair government brokered a peace deal in Northern Ireland in 1998, more than 3,500 people (about half of them civilians) had been murdered during the euphemistically called ‘Troubles’; thousands more had been maimed, economic prospects ruined, businesses destroyed, civil liberties curtailed and mayhem brought to the streets of Northern Ireland – and to some cities in mainland Britain. Yet it often seemed as though political initiatives and imperatives could be put on hold provided an ‘acceptable level of violence’ (as the senior Conservative minister Reginald Maudling once called it) could be achieved. Northern Ireland had once been dubbed ‘John Bull’s political slum’; often it appeared to have morphed into ‘John Bull’s forgotten tragedy’. Maudling himself, after paying his first visit to the Province as Home Secretary in 1970, got on the plane to fly home and demanded ‘a large scotch!’ He went on, ‘What a bloody awful country.’