Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  As well as disgusting wider opinion,† the violence did not stop the return to work. This picked up as soon as the NACODS strike was called off. By 7 November, 72,000 men were working, roughly 30,000 more than at the beginning of the strike. A further 6,000 returned in the course of the next week, with miners responding to a pre-Christmas deadline from the NCB for anyone wishing to qualify for back-payments of holiday pay. It now became clear to the government, for the first time, that it would almost certainly win. ‘The miners were going to lose,’ Neil Kinnock recalled thinking, but he comforted himself: ‘I was dedicated to ensuring that Scargill would never avoid the blame.’155 On 8 November, Mrs Thatcher told the US Ambassador, Charlie Price, that she believed ‘the strike would end by “crumbling”; this would be the best result since it would dampen animosity between the working miners and those who were now drifting back.’156 ‘Ministers’, said the Cabinet minutes for 15 November, ‘should avoid any appearance of gloating over the continuing return to work.’157 On 13 November, Harold Macmillan, elevated by Mrs Thatcher to the House of Lords as the Earl of Stockton, made his maiden speech there, at the age of ninety. Lamenting the coal conflict, he declared that the miners were ‘the best men in the world. They beat the Kaiser’s army and they beat Hitler’s army. They never gave in.’158 Whether or not Macmillan was right in his history, it was already perceptible that the miners were not going to beat Margaret Thatcher.

  Mrs Thatcher did not feel, however, that the way to victory lay plain before her. The drift back to work was not yet a flood, and it remained possible that the Coal Board might fall for an inadequate settlement. There was also a countervailing danger that any victory might be seen by the public as pyrrhic, with Mrs Thatcher blamed for harshness. Within the government, there were disagreements about tactics. Some, such as the Policy Unit, thought that matters should be brought to a head by withdrawing the promise of no compulsory redundancies to those still on strike. But Mrs Thatcher, despite her instinctive support for a tough line, could see the dangers. When Turnbull wrote to her that ‘I don’t agree that the time has come to switch from the carrot to the stick … Withdrawing the job guarantee and the redundancy terms would represent a major change of course by NCB/Government,’ she scribbled, ‘I agree with you.’159 Nothing should be done which might threaten the industry’s capacity to endure until the spring.

  Desperate to bring the strike to a close without any obvious humiliation of trade unionism, the TUC, and some union leaders acting individually, tried to reach out to the government for deals. Bernard Ingham, well plugged in to the union movement, had a secret meeting with David Basnett, the fairly moderate head of the large General, Municipal, Boilermakers’ and Allied Trades Union. Private discussions between Peter Walker and the TUC took place. But the government was conscious of the dangers. Mrs Thatcher told a meeting with Walker that ‘nothing should be agreed which would undercut the position of the working miners,’ and that it was ‘essential to prevent the NUM from claiming that the programme of pit closures had been withdrawn’.160 Besides, as Peter Walker pointed out, Scargill would not agree to anything anyway. At every twist and turn, the NUM’s intransigence made things easier for the government. On 20 December 1984, the private office of the Department of Energy sent a letter to Mrs Thatcher’s private office: ‘Happy Christmas to all,’ it said; ‘– the lights are still on!’161 On 17 January 1985, the demand for electricity was higher than it had ever been at any point in British history. The CEGB met the demand with no difficulty.

  In that month, yet more attempts at new negotiations between the NCB and the NUM were floated, some based on a TUC document. There were the usual posturings and the rumours of concessions that came to nothing. Mrs Thatcher wrote to Pauline Linton, one of the leaders of the working miners’ wives, to reassure her: ‘For my part, I have made clear that there can be no fudging of the central issue, and no betrayal of the working miners to whom we owe so much.’162 In what Andrew Turnbull called ‘A good letter for once’,163 the NCB wrote to the NUM to say that, since Scargill had not changed his mind on uneconomic pits, there was nothing to discuss.

  In a characteristically highly coloured missive, David Hart summed up the situation in terms that were probably not displeasing to Mrs Thatcher, who underlined parts of it: ‘Like the snow, the last few weeks of the dispute must be endured bravely. We are on the brink of a great victory. If we don’t throw it away at the last moment. Much greater than the Falklands because the enemy within is so much harder to conquer.’164 He was also, it seems, the first person to set out to her on paper ‘the most likely’ way the strike would end. ‘The NUM will lead its men back to work with no settlement,’ he foretold. ‘It is the best option for us … an unequivocally clear victory,’ which would prove ‘the utter pointlessness of the strike’.

  Hart’s prediction was correct, including the suggestion that there were still a few weeks left to run. Mrs Thatcher agreed to meet the TUC in person on 18 February. But the aim was chiefly presentational – to demonstrate the government’s willingness to find a good settlement. Bernard Ingham wrote her a note beforehand to point out the danger of entrapment and misrepresentation: ‘the TUC will seize on the slightest sign of softening or weakening to suggest you are moving (and will blame you afterwards if there is a breakdown) … you cannot trust any one of those coming to see you.’165 The main purpose, from a media point of view, was to ‘carry our message to them, confidently and firmly’. To her speaking note for the meeting, Mrs Thatcher added her own thought about the nature of an agreement: ‘language – such as is clear to the Ordinary Person – meaning clear & unambiguous’.166 After the meeting, in which the TUC claimed signs of movement by the NUM and the government found none, the NUM national executive duly rejected the final position of the NCB. Neil Kinnock complained that it was ‘foolish and divisive’ of the government to seek a return to work by attrition rather than negotiation, but by this time ‘attrition’ was no longer the right word. On 25 February, 3,807 new faces – a record – presented themselves for work. Two days later, the Daily Coal Report noted that ‘Over 93,000 NUM members – 50.25 per cent – are now not on strike.’167 This was the first time that more men were working than striking.

  On 3 March 1985, a special delegate conference of the NUM voted to return to work without a settlement. Scargill promised that ‘guerrilla warfare’ would continue. Men went back to the pits, some marching to the music of colliery bands. On 8 March, the Daily Coal Report said that 97 per cent of the men were now not on strike: ‘Because the situation has settled down coal reports will no longer be issued on a daily basis.’168 ‘We shall miss you!’ wrote Andrew Turnbull.

  Mrs Thatcher had won the most important single victory of her career. Naturally she did not put it this way. ‘If anyone has won,’ she said outside 10 Downing Street, ‘it has been the miners who stayed at work’ and all those ‘that have kept Britain going’.169

  The internal post-mortem on the strike, conducted under the chairmanship of Peter Gregson and presented to Mrs Thatcher in late May, told the story in simple narrative form. The economic loss directly attributable to the strike in 1984–5 was 1.25 per cent of GDP, it said, and public expenditure had increased by £2.5 billion because of it. Coal stocks held up, and by the end of the strike an endurance of ten months, better than at the beginning, was assured. Twenty-six civil cases were brought against the NUM and forty-seven injunctions granted; remedies under the ‘Tory laws’ were used as well as under the common law. In England and Wales, 1,390 police officers were injured, and 10,372 criminal charges were brought. The report identified three main reasons for the defeat of the NUM: the provisions for endurance, the NUM’s failure to get enough support from other unions and its own members, and the success of police ‘mutual aid’.170

  Passing it on to Mrs Thatcher, Turnbull commented that the report did not convey ‘how near, on occasions, the Government came to disaster’.171 Mrs Thatcher agreed, describing it as ‘too turgid’. In h
er substantive points, she focused chiefly on the working miners. She wanted the government to ‘instruct’ the Coal Board that working miners who wanted a transfer to another pit (to escape retribution) should have one, expenses paid, and should not suffer financially in any way for having worked through the strike. In the aftermath of the dispute, it was this matter that absorbed most of her energies. She intervened with MacGregor who, she felt, did not care enough about the issue in general, to support the Fjaelberg family – Mrs Fjaelberg, one of the three wives who had visited No. 10, had been prominent in the working miners’ wives group – who wanted a transfer from Wales to Nottinghamshire because of harassment. She attended a secret dinner at Woodrow Wyatt’s* house in St John’s Wood to meet the Nottinghamshire-based president of the Working Miners’ Committee, Colin Clarke, and leaders from other regions.† They discussed how best to set up their own national union, which eventually, in December, became the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Robin Butler, who also attended, remembered being introduced to a working miners’ leader with another arboreal codename, ‘Lone Pine’.172

  Mrs Thatcher was extremely sensitive in later years to what she thought was a ‘widespread belief that the Government had let the working miners down’.173 In a sense, this belief was correct. The let-down was not intentional, and government documents all through the strike show numerous plans and suggestions for building a thriving coal industry once the war was over. But in the struggle to win the strike, no clarity had ever been reached about what ought to happen after it. Some of Mrs Thatcher’s advisers, notably in the Policy Unit, had argued for bold new policies, such as a great increase in open-cast mining, and a break-up of the NCB, to create an era of modern, profitable and decentralized coal production. But Peter Walker and Ian MacGregor, who by this time had more or less lost confidence in one another, were in no mental state to think through a new business plan. Strange though it seems in retrospect, everyone was preoccupied with the idea that any bold move would provoke another strike. Immediately after the strike, Walker publicly scotched the idea of privatization.‡ Closures proceeded, but, in order to avoid Scargill mobilizing once more, not according to any discernible strategy.

  Besides, the economics of the entire business were even worse than the government had earlier believed. In Turnbull’s retrospective view, it was the collapse in the oil price to $10 a barrel in 1986 which finally discouraged serious efforts to maintain a big coal industry:

  Everyone wanted gas, and people could see that the social costs of mining are immense. Deep-mined coal is a kind of barbaric way of producing energy … Economics had to prevail. You couldn’t fight for the principle of economic pits and then keep uneconomic pits open because of a fondness for the working miners.174

  By the 1990s, Arthur Scargill’s prediction that the coal industry would be destroyed had more or less come true. What he could not acknowledge was that, but for his total resistance to the idea of an economic pit and the immense cost of his suicidal strike, this need not have happened. Much of the destruction of mining communities, of which he complained and which was real enough, could have been mitigated. Virtually all the bitter divisions between working and striking miners could have been prevented if he had agreed to a national ballot.

  The political and psychological situation for Mrs Thatcher after the end of the strike was a strained one. Even for the victors, there was a sense of melancholy. The certainty, both moral and political, that Scargill must be defeated did not remove sympathy for miners in general. ‘It was the most miserable thing I’d ever been involved with,’ John Redwood recalled, ‘because I could see that the miners had a point as well as the Coal Board.’175 Millions of people who had no time for Scargill had nevertheless felt uneasy on behalf of the miners, and resented the divisive pressure to take sides. There was also a problem of tone. Mrs Thatcher had won the key industrial relations battle of the post-war era, but she felt she could not say so publicly. Some of her staff, including Tim Flesher and Stephen Sherbourne, thought this was a mistake. ‘We need to find a way to say clearly, but without sounding triumphalist, that the Government has won,’ Sherbourne told her.176 In answers to questions after a speech in Malaysia in April, Mrs Thatcher did say that the government ‘saw off’ the miners’ strike and that trade unions were at last ‘learning the facts of life’,177 but this was considered deplorably insensitive; she was particularly attacked for making such remarks abroad. Writing to her after this, Bernard Ingham set out the dominant view of how to handle the matter. He was ‘profoundly unconvinced’, he said,

  that it would have been wise at the time to rub the NUM’s nose in it, but we ought progressively to get over [that is, convey] the fact that the NUM lost … I also take the view that the Labour Party/TUC performance during the NUM strike will be a serious liability [for Labour] at the next election, provided the point of their performance is steadily and regularly registered with the public.178

  The calculation was that the public were relieved by the defeat of Scargill, but also distressed by the amount of conflict which it had entailed. Their feeling that Mrs Thatcher was too confrontational a figure would only be exacerbated if she were to drive her victory home. There was sense in this view, but it probably underestimated the extent to which a failure to say something important in politics tends to be interpreted as evidence of self-doubt or divided counsels. Without a full explanation from Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues of what they had achieved, the field was open for the mythologizing of the strike by the left, something which achieved its apogee in the film Billy Elliot. Thirty years on, it was commonplace to find people talking about the strike who had no idea of its central, distinguishing feature – that it was called and continued without a ballot.

  Besides, the miners’ strike was not, in reality, an event which showed Mrs Thatcher’s character in a bad light. She was not intemperate, as she often was in her EEC dealings, or vengeful, as she was accused of being over GCHQ, or uncollegiate with Cabinet ministers, or divisive of her party. Whatever her longing for dramatic interventions, she maintained personal and collective discipline throughout, listening carefully to Peter Walker and others and, more often than not, erring on the side of caution. She was in charge but not embroiled. To return to the metaphor of war which dominated the entire year, one could say that she fought a battle which she saw as necessary rather than welcome. ‘She fought every skirmish like a good commander,’ recalled Stephen Sherbourne, ‘and she brought limitless energy to everything she tussled with.’179 Even Ian MacGregor, with whom she had many disagreements, was in no doubt about her leadership. ‘If you fight a war,’ he told Tim Bell when it was all over, ‘you want a great general. She was a great general.’180 Tim Flesher concluded that ‘No other British Prime Minister would have won the Falklands War or the miners’ strike. She showed unique resolution and clarity. She was terrifically inspiring. If she hadn’t won, we’d be like Greece.’181 Even Peter Walker, who had little cause to love Mrs Thatcher, said that, in the miners’ strike, ‘I felt I had a PM who always backed me.’182 Such points were not publicly made at the time. In some areas of policy – privatization, for example – Mrs Thatcher was given more personal credit than was really due. For the conduct of the miners’ strike, she was given too little.

  Mrs Thatcher’s most passionate feelings in the whole saga had been engaged by the cause of the working miners. A month after the end of the strike, she wrote a remarkable letter to a Mrs Hackett, from Staffordshire, whose husband Terry had been one of those who refused to strike and who had met Mrs Thatcher at the dinner given by Woodrow Wyatt. She had already thanked Mr Hackett, she wrote, but she wanted to thank her as well because she knew ‘how much he values the help and support which you have given him throughout this difficult time’.183 She added ‘how much I also appreciate and admire your courage’. Her letter set out what she thought about people like Terry Hackett:

  The miners who stood up for their right to work in the mining dispute were defending a
fundamental privilege of a free people. We can be very proud of them. They withstood, and continue to withstand, the most extreme threats and intimidations with a courage which is an example to us all. The nation owes them a debt of gratitude.

  When Mrs Thatcher checked the letter and signed it, she had the imagination to consider the effect on the recipient of receiving a letter marked ‘10 Downing Street’ in the potentially hostile territory of a mining community. With a thoughtfulness and attention to detail which is hard to imagine in a male prime minister, she wrote a covering note which said: ‘Please send in Plain envelope.’184

  7

  Sales of the century

  ‘Tell Sid’

  Critics had attacked the 1983 Conservative general election manifesto for being too bland. Many of her closest supporters – and Mrs Thatcher herself1 – considered it had been a wasted opportunity to set a clear direction for the second term. But in fact it had set out lucidly, though not in detail, the government’s overall economic approach. This included tax reform, further union reform, removing barriers to job creation, and the sale of nationalized industries to the public. So great was the convulsion of the miners’ strike that it is hard to remember that in the year over which it lasted, absorbing so much of Mrs Thatcher’s time and energy, the government she led nevertheless embarked on further major tax reform, and on privatization on a grand scale. Nigel Lawson’s 1984 Budget, indeed, was delivered to Parliament on 13 March, the day after the calling of the miners’ strike.