Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  Mrs M. Thatcher (Conservative) 19,616

  L. Spigel (Labour) 10,302

  M. Joachim (SDP–Liberal Alliance) 7,763

  (Eight minor party candidates) 736

  The Conservative national vote had, in fact, fallen by nearly 700,000 to 13,012,316, but the Labour vote had collapsed from 11.5 million in 1979 to 8,456,934. Voters had deserted Labour in droves in favour of the Alliance. In 1979, the Liberal Party had received 4,313,811 votes. In 1983, the Alliance received 7,780,949 votes. It had 25.4 per cent of the total vote. Labour had only 27.6 per cent. The Conservatives had 42.4 per cent, compared with 43.9 per cent in 1979. They won 397 seats, Labour 209 and the Alliance 23. The Tories had an overall majority of 144, the largest for either party since the Labour landslide of 1945.

  There were scenes of jubilation in Central Office and Mrs Thatcher, arriving there shortly before four in the morning, got Cecil Parkinson to join her at the window to acknowledge the cheers in Smith Square. She said little publicly during the evening, beyond declaring her ‘very great sense of responsibility and humility’.73 One witness to that night was the long-serving Peter Cropper, the head of the Research Department. For him at least, the moment of victory was ambiguous: ‘She really did start walking on water. It was wonderful in a way. But the triumphalism horrified me.’74

  4

  Jobs for her boys

  ‘To write the concerns and views of your Government into the grammar book of politics’

  After her landslide victory on 9 June 1983, Mrs Thatcher received a note setting out the statistical and historical scale of her triumph. Her private office informed her that, in the twentieth century, she was the first leader of any party to serve a full term and then increase her majority, and the first Conservative Prime Minister to win two elections in a row.1* The increase in the government’s majority was the greatest in parliamentary history and the Labour share of the vote was the smallest since the party had begun to contest every seat. The margin of votes by which she had won (over 4.5 million) was the greatest since 1931.

  Only two years earlier, until victory in the Falklands, most people, including most at the top of her party, had believed that she could not win another election. Now her enemies – outside her party and within it – lay prostrate before her. The leaders of the Labour Party and of the SDP, Michael Foot and Roy Jenkins, announced their resignations and the Liberal leader, David Steel, retreated to Ettrick Bridge for several weeks in a state of near-collapse. Robin Butler, who remained her principal private secretary, recalled that, faced with this vacuum, ‘It was not so clear what she was supposed to do.’2 Mrs Thatcher herself – safely back in, rather than starting the job for the first time – did not pause to reflect on the overall situation which she now enjoyed. ‘She had no list of three main things to do.’3 She was simply relieved, and, as always, eager to get on with her work. She does not seem to have analysed the political consequences of her own triumph. The scale of her success was a problem in itself, as Bernard Ingham, writing to her before the result, warned it would be: she should not ‘under-estimate the British capacity to reject success’ but rather ‘play down expectations and prepare people for a quiet life’.4

  Mrs Thatcher carefully annotated Ingham’s advice warning her not to overplay her electoral success.

  Stephen Sherbourne, appointed at Cecil Parkinson’s request to revive Mrs Thatcher’s political office in Downing Street, recalled the atmosphere as he entered No. 10 to take up his new post: ‘It was as if I was in a very well-run country house and the couple had gone away for a three-week cruise, and everything was working just as before. The whole machine was ticking over and the whole machine was expecting them back.’5 The usually restless chatelaine was ‘very comfortable with everybody and everything’. ‘There was no discussion about what we were going to do,’ Sherbourne added. ‘It was just straight down to business.’ Unlike in 1979, Mrs Thatcher had no new surroundings with which to familiarize herself; she was happy with her able and mostly, by this time, quite long-serving private secretaries and personal staff. She treated them all as ‘part of the family’,6 fussing over them in what her diary secretary Caroline Ryder called ‘her Jewish-mother style’.7

  One of the first jobs for Mrs Thatcher was to reshuffle her Cabinet, a job she disliked. ‘I’m not a good butcher,’ she told the BBC’s Robin Day, ‘but have had to learn to carve the joint,’ implying that this traditionally male role was not to her taste.8 At last, however, Mrs Thatcher was able to forge a Cabinet more or less as she wanted it, rather than as she reluctantly acknowledged it had to be. The most important change was to make Nigel Lawson, the greatest exponent of her free-market philosophy, Chancellor of the Exchequer. This was a bold move which she might not have risked with a small majority: the ‘establishment’ candidate was Patrick Jenkin, then Industry Secretary. Jenkin had been a ‘very good lawyer’, and was sound on economics (‘not real right but centre-right’), but this was not what she was looking for at the Treasury.9 Lawson, by contrast, ‘had a creative mind, he was imaginative’, she thought.10 And after years of struggle, it did feel as if the economic doctrines of Thatcherism – tax cuts, privatization, deregulation and tax reform, as well as strong monetary controls – having been tested in adversity, could now be boldly applied in what was beginning to look like prosperity. Alan Walters went so far, in private, as to suggest that the pound might now start to replace the dollar and the Swiss franc as a world currency.11 This was comically hubristic, but it showed how much confidence, and with it the sense of possibility, had grown.

  It was, noted her Treasury private secretary Michael Scholar, as he liaised between Mrs Thatcher and her new Chancellor, ‘a very sweet time for both of them’.12 Early in this glad, confident morning, Scholar was summoned to Chequers. Mrs Thatcher needed to discuss public spending cuts with Lawson and had decided the issue would be best tackled in the relaxed setting of her country retreat. Scholar was supposed to be with her in advance of Lawson’s arrival, but his car would not start and then he got lost in Slough en route. He arrived forty minutes after Lawson, cursing himself and fearing the wrath of his boss: ‘I felt desperate, but they were sitting there wreathed in smiles.’13 ‘Don’t worry, Michael,’ Mrs Thatcher told him, ‘Nigel and I have fixed the whole thing – it’s all done.’ It was evident that they felt ‘very pleased with one another’.

  Mrs Thatcher was able to build most of the rest of her Cabinet as she – though not always they – wanted it. When John Wakeham,* whom she saw as ‘another of my boys’,14 became her new chief whip, he was summoned to discuss the reshuffle. His arrival coincided with the Sovereign’s Birthday Parade, so it was only after bands had tootled and regiments had marched below the windows, a display followed by the traditional lunch for Commonwealth high commissioners, that he sat down with her. Instead of discussing the matter, she simply handed him a complete list of her proposed Cabinet which she had already worked out with Willie Whitelaw, Cecil Parkinson and her outgoing Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, whom she now made minister of agriculture. Reluctantly she had accepted that Cecil Parkinson could not become Foreign Secretary owing to the expected birth of his extramarital baby (see Chapter 3). Instead, she followed his suggestion of amalgamating two government departments, and put him in the post he had invented, making him secretary of state for trade and industry. This left Lord Cockfield* and Patrick Jenkin without jobs. Jenkin she sent to Environment, which Mrs Thatcher considered to be ‘a really big job’ because of plans to press ahead with the abolition of the Greater London Council;15 Cockfield she kept in the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a supernumerary adviser on tax and trade. Parkinson’s elevation upset Norman Tebbit, who had been wanting to move on from Employment and hoping for a version of this job.16 Mrs Thatcher intended it as no insult to Tebbit, however. She agreed with the reshuffle advice from David Wolfson, the unpaid chief of staff to her political office, that ‘The crucial battle over the next 5 years will be with the Unions
,’17 and that Tebbit was the best person to fight it. But Tebbit was irritated that his old friend Parkinson was ahead of him.† His lack of promotion marked the beginning of increasingly fractious relations between Mrs Thatcher and her toughest public defender.

  Francis Pym, originally appointed Foreign Secretary for the sake of party unity in the wake of the Falklands invasion, was the major casualty of the reshuffle. He had sealed his fate during the election campaign with his gloomy warning of the dangers of a landslide majority. It was a mark of how power had shifted that his dismissal did not present Mrs Thatcher with a serious political problem. She removed him altogether from the government, without regret (‘He was soft’), but with a slight sense of guilt.18 By way of compensation, she hoped to engineer the Speakership of the Commons for him: ‘with a history like his in the family’ (his ancestor, John Pym, had been one of the ‘Five Members’ who had resisted the power of King Charles I), she believed he would welcome the chance.19 Without disclosing her intentions about Pym, she had already asked Jopling to tell Jack Weatherill,* the most likely candidate to succeed George Thomas as Speaker, that she would prefer it if he did not stand. Jopling had pleaded with her that this was an impossible request since the choice rested with MPs, not with her. She had insisted that he make it regardless. Weatherill, as predicted, had said ‘Go jump in the lake.’20 She was attempting something which she had in the past wisely left to others – the management of the House of Commons.

  Pym was naturally angry about being sacked as Foreign Secretary and ‘absolutely refused’21 her offer of the Speakership, on the correct grounds that it was not hers to offer.22 He said he preferred the freedom of the back benches, which was exactly what she did not want him to have. He quickly became a focus for discontented Tory MPs. In his stead, Mrs Thatcher appointed Geoffrey Howe, whom, before she learnt of Parkinson’s affair, she had pencilled in for the Home Office. The Foreign Office was what Howe wanted. With what she saw as his preference for negotiation and discussion (the Foreign Office’s ‘two stars in the firmament’)23 over making decisions, he was well suited to it. At the time, however, she seems not to have foreseen any differences with Howe in their European outlook. He was greatly respected by colleagues because of how, as Chancellor, he had borne and overcome the economic difficulties of the early years.

  In relation to Willie Whitelaw, Mrs Thatcher faced a delicate situation. She wanted to remove him from the Home Office, where she felt he had ‘not been the most overwhelming success’.24 He and she had differed over crime and punishment, especially capital punishment, which he opposed and she always supported. On the other hand, she regarded him as ‘quite simply, indispensable to me in Cabinet’25 because ‘When it really mattered I knew he would be by my side and because of his background, personality and position in the party he could sometimes sway colleagues when I could not.’26 She wanted to retain him as her Cabinet fixer and elder statesman, by ‘kicking him upstairs’ to be Leader of the House of Lords. Perhaps aware that Whitelaw would not be pleased, she took a cowardly way out and got Jopling to ring him. Contrary to what he later told colleagues, Whitelaw had not expected this turn of events and was indeed ‘very, very disgruntled’.27 He said to Jopling that he feared a bad result in the by-election in his constituency that his elevation would cause. Besides, he wanted to stay in the House of Commons.

  Using the well-tried technique of piling honours and flattery upon those whom she was dropping, Mrs Thatcher consoled Whitelaw by reviving the dormant right to create hereditary peers. She made him a viscount.* This readiness to put the clock back was evidence of the romantic, high Tory streak in her nature. She also emphasized more strongly than in the past that Whitelaw was deputy prime minister, an office ‘unknown to the constitution’ but useful in establishing hierarchy.† He accepted, without further complaint. The consequence of Whitelaw’s move was that he had more time to assist Mrs Thatcher in the management of the Cabinet, but much less knowledge of what was going on in the Commons. To effect the change she desired, Mrs Thatcher had to jettison the existing Leader of the Lords, Lady Young, whom she liked but regarded as far too cautious. She persuaded her (‘By God she was difficult’)28 to become minister of state at the Foreign Office. Characteristically, Mrs Thatcher seems to have been unworried that she was removing the only woman in the Cabinet apart from herself. There would never be another, so long as she was prime minister.

  The new Home Secretary was Leon Brittan, promoted from the relatively junior Cabinet post of chief secretary to the Treasury, where Mrs Thatcher had considered him a great success. His proved the most controversial of her appointments. Being one of the three ‘great offices of state’, the Home Office was traditionally filled by a senior politician of independent standing. Brittan was not such a man, but an extremely able barrister who had risen, it was widely considered, as a creature of Mrs Thatcher. This was an unfair view, not least because, with his strongly pro-European opinions and liberal social views, Brittan was a Thatcherite only in strictly economic matters. He was a member of the so-called ‘Cambridge mafia’ who had been at the university together in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Other mafiosi included Norman Fowler,* Kenneth Clarke,† John Selwyn Gummer‡ and Norman Lamont,§ most of them on the left of the party. These men owed their political careers to Mrs Thatcher, although they were not necessarily Thatcherites. Contained in the adverse reaction to Brittan’s appointment was a submerged element of anti-Semitism: the belief that it was all very well for Jews to take ‘clever’ ministries to do with money, but in matters of law and order the Tory Party tended to prefer someone ‘more English’. Peter Rees, who replaced Brittan as chief secretary, and subsequently fell out with Mrs Thatcher, alleged to the present author that she had a ‘freemasonry’ of Jews in her Cabinet – Brittan, Keith Joseph (who stayed on at Education) and Lawson.29 Harold Macmillan made the same point more obliquely when, in 1986,30 he privately joked that there were now ‘more Estonians than Etonians’ in the Cabinet. Mrs Thatcher certainly had no thought of creating a defined Jewish group among her ministers, and anyway Brittan and Lawson were not close; but her sympathy with Jews was part of her anti-establishment instincts and her belief that conservatism was a creed of opportunity. She did, however, later come to accept the view that she had promoted Brittan too fast. ‘If I had my time again,’ she recalled, ‘I would know that people who are excellent lawyers, excellent at taking a brief, aren’t much good at … deciding a line to take.’31 She did not acknowledge, for these purposes, that she was a lawyer herself.

  Among the Cabinet ministers who fairly fundamentally disagreed with Mrs Thatcher’s whole approach and had dominated her first Cabinet in 1979, only three survived – Michael Heseltine, who remained at Defence after fighting unilateral disarmament successfully during the election campaign, Jim Prior, now clearly in the autumn of his career, who stayed on in Northern Ireland, and Peter Walker, whom she promoted from Agriculture to Energy, in the expectation that he would have to deal with coming confrontations in the coal industry. She respected Walker’s talents. Besides, ‘I didn’t frankly want to take Peter Walker out of the Cabinet because he would have been a deadly enemy on the backbenches.’32

  As usual, finalizing changes in the junior ranks took a bit longer. Alan Clark,* longing for his first government job, became impatient. On Monday 13 June, he wrote in his diary, ‘I had been getting more and more irritable all day as the “junior” appointments were leaking out on to the TV screens.’33 At last, his wife Jane came across the lawn at Saltwood Castle, which he was mowing, to tell him that Ian Gow was on the telephone. Clark, Gow revealed, was to become parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Employment, a position of great unimportance. Unknown to Clark, his appointment had come about in a strange way. He had written and photocopied a letter to Mrs Thatcher saying that he was running what (in his diary though not in his letter to her) he called a ‘Shadow Cabinet’ to keep her government up to the mark with right-wing policies. He se
ems not to have sent the letter, but he had carelessly left a copy in a Commons copier; someone found it and brought it to John Wakeham.

  Wakeham showed it to Mrs Thatcher. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, ‘I’ll speak to him.’ ‘No!’ exclaimed Wakeham. ‘That would be dangerous. Make him a minister.’ Mrs Thatcher, who had a soft spot for Clark, agreed. Wakeham encountered a uniform resistance to Clark among Cabinet ministers, however, and it took a long time to find a taker. This was Norman Tebbit, who accepted on the grounds that ‘I don’t really mind who my junior ministers are, so long as they keep out of my hair.’34 Thus did the era’s most celebrated political diarist start work for the woman he always referred to as ‘the Lady’.

  Despite his new office, Clark still gave his ‘Shadow Cabinet’ lunch a few days later. The theme for discussion was ‘What the Government Should be Doing with Its Huge New Mandate’.35 He noted how reserved his colleagues were in talking about the ‘broad canvas’: ‘I fear that we all still suffer from a lack of confidence. Very deep-seated it is, running back as far, perhaps, as before the war and those Admiralty memoranda saying we couldn’t even take on the Italian Fleet in the Mediterranean. So when we win something we can barely believe our eyes. There is no follow-through.’ This was a good summation of traditional male Tory psychology, a state of mind which Mrs Thatcher never shared and always fought.

  Although Ian Gow had rung his friend Clark about his new job, he was not, strictly speaking, the person to do so. His role had already changed. After his four extraordinarily successful years as Mrs Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary (PPS), she had promoted Gow to be minister of housing. Although she does not appear to have worried at the time, Gow’s departure from her side did serious damage. No one understood her better, was more devoted to her or knew more about human frailty as exhibited by Conservative MPs. For the whole of the first term, Gow had worked from 7 a.m. in the office till late into the night in the Smoking Room ‘with the wine flowing’,36 tirelessly absorbing the grumbles of backbenchers and then reporting to Mrs Thatcher and advising how best to handle them. He had advanced her causes, and protected her from her own innocence about the motivations of colleagues. He had also, because of his old friendship with Geoffrey Howe – the two men liked to smoke together and chat – helped keep relations between Mrs Thatcher and her Chancellor in tolerable repair. With Gow absent, and Howe translated to the more distant role of Foreign Secretary, there was no one to prevent the two drifting apart.