Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2

by Charles Moore

  John Redwood, before leaving the Policy Unit, also tried to sum up the difficult politics of that summer and turn them into a way of planning to win the next election. In a long memo, he threw at Mrs Thatcher the various unkind phrases widely used about the government – ‘Uncaring Britain’, ‘class-ridden Britain’, ‘Tatty Britain’ (with developers ‘raping the countryside’), and the feeling of ‘Time for a change’.101 He sketched out a possible, even likely state which would ensure victory at the next general election – low inflation, unemployment falling for at least six months before the poll, seven years of continuous growth, transformed industrial relations, ‘every earner an owner’, strong defence. Redwood sought to link, rather than contrast, economic reform with concern for the social fabric. The charge that she did not care about public services like health and education should be countered by her commitment to patient and parent power. Jobs should be tackled squarely: ‘You should not ignore unemployment policies. You do need further measures, and they are needed this autumn … A generous Family credit accompanied by a cut in income tax rates, is probably the best run in to the Election, spending the asset sales money. This really is the last chance.’102

  Because she believed that her government was fundamentally on the right track, Mrs Thatcher was more disposed to follow Ingham’s advice, and reshuffle with presentation in mind, than to review policy. Having spared her colleagues from July executions, she spent much of August pondering her September reshuffle. This was a process which she protested that she hated. She was speaking the truth. Politically ruthless though she was, she had a vivid sense of how shattering it could be for ministers to lose office. She understood but resented the fact that good people sometimes had to be moved just to let new blood through the system. She also realized that she would be creating enemies.* Reshuffling was ‘the worst and rottenest job a prime minister ever has to do’, she thought.103 When she returned from holiday in Austria, where she and Denis had been staying with the British Honorary Consul, the Austrian timber merchant Martin Kaindl, at Imlau, near Salzburg, she settled down to making some decisions.

  One change she had hoped for was immediately frustrated. On the day after her return, she took the starring role in a plot organized by the Arts Minister, Lord Gowrie, and by Jacob Rothschild. Gowrie had ascertained that Paul Getty, the oil heir, was disposed to give a large sum of money to the National Gallery (of which Rothschild was the chairman), but hoped he would get a knighthood in return. Gowrie explained this to Mrs Thatcher and persuaded her to visit Getty to indicate to him, without stating as much, that the ‘gong’ would indeed be his. This she was happy to do. She loved raising private money for the arts, partly to show that it could work better than public money, partly because of her desire to maintain the prestige of Britain’s greatest cultural institutions.

  The reclusive Getty had been what Gowrie described as ‘an A-grade smack addict’104 and was still living full-time in the London Clinic recovering from his addiction and drinking ‘eighteen cans of lager a day’. ‘What am I going to say to her?’ asked Getty nervously. ‘Don’t worry,’ replied Gowrie. ‘She’ll take over your case.’ So it proved. Getty received Mrs Thatcher in his dressing-gown. She was flattering and briskly helpful: ‘Oh, Mr Getty, we must get you out of here.’ He happily received the implied promise of the knighthood, and soon afterwards gave the National Gallery £50 million. ‘It sort of cured Paul,’ Gowrie recalled. ‘He remade his marriage and became a pillar of society.’

  As Gowrie left with Mrs Thatcher, he asked to see her later that day at No. 10. After more than six years on a peer’s ministerial wages, he ‘felt very broke’* and wanted to accept an offer from Sotheby’s to become its chairman. He told Mrs Thatcher that he would like to leave the government at the next reshuffle. ‘But I really want to offer you Education,’ she revealed.105 She had finally plucked up the courage to contemplate retiring her beloved but increasingly ineffective Keith Joseph. Gowrie refused, telling Mrs Thatcher that people would not accept someone from the Lords running one of the main social departments of government. But it was rarely a bar in Mrs Thatcher’s mind that a minister was a peer, since this meant that he would be one of the ‘eunuchs in the seraglio’106 and could be no rival to her. ‘I think peers as Ministers should be able to answer for their policies at the bar of the House of Commons,’† she said, revealing a shaky understanding of the constitution.107 She was greatly enamoured of Gowrie, whom she considered ‘very lucid with an excellent mind’.108 She thought that, with his ‘great personality’, he would ‘electrify’ Education. But it was not to be. She came to regard Gowrie’s refusal of the job and departure from the government as ‘the greatest loss’.109 Poor Keith Joseph, unknowing of his near-dismissal, soldiered on.

  Mrs Thatcher’s other appointments came about in a less eccentric manner, though not easily. The changes she was about to make, John Wakeham warned her, were ‘some of the most difficult you will ever have to do’.110 With a Chief Whip’s caution, his note of recommendations named no names, but only the proposed jobs reshuffled, so that Parkinson was referred to as ‘the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry’ and the millionaire novelist Jeffrey Archer,* who, though neither an MP nor a peer, was gathering momentum, as the proposed ‘Minister for Sport’. Wakeham was warning against both. Parkinson’s return would look like ‘going backwards’; Archer did not seem ‘right’. In the case of Archer, a peerage would have been required, and this would have been controversial because of his chequered business career, which had forced him to leave the Commons when Parliament was dissolved ahead of the October 1974 election. Stephen Sherbourne also warned against Parkinson because he was ‘unpopular with many women in the Party’ and ‘the real fear is that there would be further revelations from Sarah [sic] Keays and this time they would rebound on you and not just him.’111† Sherbourne’s overall case was that the government’s policy direction was good and the presentation wasn’t. With that in mind, he recommended that Norman Tebbit replace Gummer as party chairman, that Jeffrey Archer come in as deputy chairman (a post for which membership of neither House was required), and that communicators – Kenneth Baker, John Moore, Kenneth Clarke – be chosen for key posts. Mrs Thatcher gave red ticks to all these names, except for Clarke’s.‡ Worried by Nigel Lawson’s lack of communicative gifts, Sherbourne described the Chancellor as ‘clearly unmoveable’ but ‘he does need some confidant who can advise him regularly on PR’.

  Other advice tended to concentrate on presentational questions and be more alive to risk than to opportunity. David Wolfson, himself Jewish, told her that she should get rid of Keith Joseph, though he was ‘certainly the nicest person I have met in politics’, because he was unsuccessful and there were ‘already enough Jewish Members of the Cabinet’.112 He also counselled that Parkinson’s return was too risky and that the elderly Lord Hailsham should be removed from the Lord Chancellorship because his presence was ‘a clear sign of weakness’. She should promote those who ‘are seen to care about unemployment’. People like the Thatcherite Nicholas Ridley were not good for election victory, he thought. So worried was Wolfson about the narrowness of Mrs Thatcher’s political base and appeal that he actually recommended that ‘Prospective Cabinet Members should have one particular qualification. They must not be “one of us”!’

  Norman Tebbit also submitted his thoughts. By this time, he knew that he was Gummer’s likely successor as chairman. His relationship with Mrs Thatcher was a complicated one. He was close to her ideologically, and famous for his bruising political rhetoric. He revelled in the satirical television programme Spitting Image’s depiction of him as her loyal skinhead.113* He was also grateful for her personal kindness after the Brighton bomb. Because his wife Margaret had been lying paralysed by her Brighton injuries in Stoke Mandeville hospital near Chequers, Mrs Thatcher had invited him to stay in her country house for several weeks, so that he could easily visit ‘his Margaret’. Indeed, his private office was set up in the hospita
l so that he could continue with his DTI work, a move partly intended to show to the world that the IRA had not beaten him. Tebbit himself still needed medical attention, which he received at the hospital. He had lost a chunk of one side of his stomach and needed frequent skin grafts. He was in ‘constant, managed pain’.114 According to Andrew Lansley,† Tebbit’s private secretary at the time, Mrs Thatcher was ‘utterly charming and supportive’ to Tebbit, ‘beyond what convention demanded’.115 She asked friends to rally round, and got the Duke of Westminster,‡ London’s biggest residential property owner, to offer the Tebbits the special accommodation which they now needed. In Tebbit’s own view, his presence near Mrs Thatcher provoked in her:

  not a guilty conscience, but a feeling that somehow she was responsible. She had been the target but others had paid the price. Every time I walked into the room, she remembered how narrowly she’d escaped death. Because she was a good woman, there was an element of feeling bad about this.116

  Thus did her very sympathy for her injured minister make her feel that his presence was almost unwelcome.

  At the same time as Mrs Thatcher felt sympathy and guilt, she also felt anger. The rumour spread that Tebbit was organizing his own leadership plans from his hospital bed,117 and she seems to have believed this. According to Tebbit’s special adviser, Michael Dobbs,* she was misinformed. Tebbit had ‘completely ruled himself out of any leadership bid since the bomb’.118 Not long after he became chairman, indeed, he confided in Dobbs that he would give up all ministerial office at the next election in order to look after his wife. Mrs Thatcher, of course, did not know this. In her memoirs, she wrote of making Tebbit chairman, ‘I thought he might one day succeed me if we won the election,’ adding: ‘better than an inspiration: he was an example.’119 But in reality there was some suspicion. ‘He wanted the chairmanship’, she recalled privately, ‘as a springboard to take over from me.’120 She also came to doubt his administrative skills.

  There was perhaps some truth in Mrs Thatcher’s perception of his ambition, despite Dobbs’s account. Senior politicians are rarely absolutely unequivocal in their refusal to contemplate becoming prime minister. In fact, though, Tebbit had not really wanted the chairmanship. He had enjoyed the DTI and would have preferred to remain a departmental minister, but he also found the strain of the work too great. When he returned to his office in January 1985, ‘I thought I was more recovered than I really was. It was not only the shock, but I was physically quite weak. I concealed the extent of my own injuries.’121 The chairmanship, having no departmental duties, was a much less heavy burden, as well as being obviously suited to Tebbit’s gifts of political attack and communicative clarity. In Andrew Lansley’s view, the effect of the Brighton bomb on Tebbit was extremely painful psychologically. He realized two incompatible things at the same time – that he had the ability and possibly the party backing to become leader, but that his own health, and even more that of his wife, made it impossible. This ‘added a bitter edge. He had a sense of lost ambition afterwards, without having fully had that ambition before.’122 None of this made for the sort of harmonious relationship between Chairman and Prime Minister which had been such a feature of the Parkinson period. Besides, ‘Norman and Margaret Thatcher were never friends. He didn’t have the charm with women that Cecil had.’123 From the very start, Dobbs came to believe, Mrs Thatcher was uneasy about Tebbit in the chairmanship, and therefore inclined to permit ‘a parallel operation’ to intervene in party matters without consulting him.

  In his note to Mrs Thatcher about the reshuffle, Tebbit assumed no change in the very top jobs, and said he took it ‘for granted’ that Mrs Thatcher would not feel she could sack Michael Heseltine or Peter Walker. He was unequivocal, however, in his view of the former. ‘Defence is in a mess and we cannot afford things to get worse,’ he wrote, continuing with characteristic acerbity, ‘… Michael is not really thinking things through and although I would like to see him carry the can for the errors he has made you may feel that he should be moved.’124 If so, Tebbit proposed his great rival be given Energy* and Walker be sent to Health and Social Security. Parkinson (‘If he doesn’t come back now, he never will’) should go to Defence.

  On re-reading this note from Tebbit while composing her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher was moved to comment on the character of Michael Heseltine. She thought him lazy. ‘At Defence he didn’t take work home … He did actually give quite a lot of luncheon parties at his large house. It is usually a sign.’125 She had in her mind a long list of minor incidents in which Heseltine had not endeared himself to her – how, when she was at Education, he had ordered her officials, without asking her, to come and brief him on which were the best schools for him to send his own children to; how, at the fortieth anniversary of D-Day in 1984, he had failed to ensure, until she intervened, that war widows could be flown out for the ceremony; how, at Defence, he had, despite being a famed manager, failed to get a grip of procurement. She also remembered a story told her by her PPS in the late 1970s, John Stanley,† which she apologized for relating because it involved repeating ‘a word I hate … a four-letter word’. Heseltine had told Stanley that the secret of his own advancement was that ‘I have only got on in life by being an absolute shit.’126 All this, of course, was said by her after Heseltine had brought about her fall. As Mrs Thatcher contemplated the reshuffle at the time, however, none of these thoughts stirred her to action. Perhaps she preferred Tebbit’s hint that if Heseltine stayed at Defence he would have to ‘carry the can’ for that department’s failings. She dared neither promote nor demote him. He stayed in post.

  Her most striking decision, not foreshadowed in the written communications she had received, was driven by her desire for better presentation. At the beginning of September, she invited Leon Brittan to Chequers, in order, he supposed, to get his reshuffle advice. Instead, she sacked him from the Home Office, offering him the Department of Trade and Industry instead. Her reasoning was that the three men holding the great offices of state were all bad public communicators. Brittan ‘had a first-class brain but he just couldn’t get his point over at all’.127 To Bernard Ingham, she was blunt: ‘I’ve got Geoffrey at the Foreign Office, Nigel at the Treasury and Leon at the Home Office. Between them, they can’t sell anything.’128 She still considered Lawson vital to her government, and had no proper excuse for moving Howe, so Leon Brittan was the weakest link.*

  Despite his undoubted ability, and his importance in the miners’ strike, Brittan had never won a parliamentary following. He was seen as too much the lawyer, and was the victim of some behind-the-hand backbench anti-Semitism. He also suffered from rumours that, though married, he was homosexual, and even that he had been a child abuser (too often in those days the two were conflated in the minds of many). No one produced actual evidence for either accusation. Michael Jopling who, in his role as chief whip through the whole of Mrs Thatcher’s first Parliament, was the recipient of most unsavoury stories and rumours about colleagues, recalled, ‘I never heard a whisper about Leon at the time: and I knew him very well because he was the MP in the Yorkshire seat where I lived.’129 Those involved in the reshuffle – Wakeham and Ingham – denied that the rumours affected Mrs Thatcher’s decision.130 But they did reinforce prejudices against Brittan and therefore weakened him politically. ‘He always seemed quaint as a coot to me,’ recalled Ingham, though admitting he had no evidence about anything.131 Mrs Thatcher seems not to have had any personal suspicions of Brittan, or anxiety about his sexuality, but she did pick up his lack of standing among backbench colleagues.

  She knew some of the background to the rumours. On 21 June of the previous year, 1984, a story had appeared in The Times denying rumours of a scandal involving a Cabinet minister. Robert Armstrong reported to her what had happened next. On the evening of the day the Times story appeared, Richard Ryder, who, as a former journalist, had good links with the press, had met Jonathan Holborow, the associate editor of the Mail on Sunday. Holborow, Ryder told Armstrong, ha
d informed him that the paper was ‘on to a very good thing’ (as Holborow put it) about Leon Brittan’s private life.132 Neither Armstrong’s report nor any of the press coverage at the time said what the stories were, but they seem to have involved accusations of child sex abuse, including an alleged relationship with a boy in his early teens said to live in Brittan’s constituency.133 Its source was a reliable one, Holborow said, but ‘their investigations had run into the sand, and they really had no usable evidence.’ The paper did have one remaining allegation, however, which was ‘that the Security Services were putting it about that Michael Bettaney [the MI5 officer who had been caught trying to spy for the Russians in 1984] had said in the course of his interrogation that Moscow had information about Mr Leon Brittan’s life that laid him open to blackmail’. Acting on this, Armstrong told Mrs Thatcher, he had checked the story with MI5 who assured him that Bettaney had said no such thing. Besides, ‘The story was inherently improbable: Bettaney had been unable to establish contact with Russian intelligence service in London.’*

  Armstrong explained that he had passed all this on to John Wakeham. Richard Ryder’s opinion was that the Mail on Sunday was looking for a way of using the MI5 angle to carry a Brittan story: he thought the paper might turn it into a piece about how the Security Services were not accountable to ministers.134 Armstrong said he had then talked to Bernard Ingham and agreed ‘if any signs of allegations of this kind manifested themselves over the weekend, he should make it categorically clear that they were absolutely without foundation.’ In fact, no Sunday papers went with the story, but Private Eye took refuge in announcing the untruth of the rumour in order to be able to repeat it, to suggest bad behaviour by disgruntled MI5 sources, and to name Leon Brittan.135 Bernard Ingham then briefed about ‘assassination by gossip’ and the Guardian ran a story with the headline ‘Brittan named in sex scandal rumours’.136 Brittan issued a denial via the Press Association. A Labour MP, Harry Cohen, wrote to Mrs Thatcher demanding that she investigate the accusations against renegade MI5 officers.137 She replied to Cohen, refusing his request on the grounds that, as ‘the rumours to which you refer are totally unfounded, I see no need for any further statement’.138 She did not answer Cohen’s follow-up invitation to correspond further on the matter.