The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  She recognised that clothes were of huge importance to a woman politician, an asset if chosen with care, a liability if worn badly. ‘She was convinced,’ Nigel Lawson wrote, ‘that her authority… would be diminished if she were not impeccably turned out at all times. She was probably right.’34 From about 1985, however, as her power grew, so her style of dressing became more commanding. Charles Powell’s wife Carla was credited with getting her into what was called ‘power-dressing’, following the styles set by the matriarchs of the American TV series Dynasty and Dallas: stronger, simpler cuts, darker colours and big shoulders. It was before her 1987 visit to Moscow that she discovered Aquascutum: thereafter she got most of her clothes from there, though she was still said to use a ‘little lady’ in Battersea who had been making clothes for her since the 1970s.35

  By now she was extraordinarily dominant on television. An academic study of her technique showed that she intimidated even the most experienced interviewers by turning the tables and attacking them, refusing to be interrupted, while accusing them of interrupting her. She put them on the defensive by using their Christian names. ‘She tends to personalise issues and take questions as accusations,’ Donald McCormick commented. For instance, he once dared to suggest that she was inflexible. ‘Inflexible?’ she retorted. ‘I am inflexible in defence of democracy, in defence of freedom, in defence of law and order and so should you be, so should the BBC be and so should everyone else be.’36

  And yet she hated television. She rehearsed intensively for major interviews, and when she got to the studio she had to be handled very carefully. ‘She needs settling like a horse, highly spirited’, Gordon Reece told Woodrow Wyatt. ‘She gets nervous if people surround and crowd her. She must be kept calm.’37 As she once told Ronnie Millar, ‘I’m not a performer, dear.’38 Like everything else in her life, she only taught herself to dominate by willpower and hard work.

  Above all she still needed very little sleep. Four hours a night was perhaps an exaggeration, but she could certainly go for several days on that little, and never slept for more than five or six. She sometimes caught up a bit at Chequers at weekends, but during the week she rarely went to bed before two o’clock, and was up again at six. She dominated the Government by sheer physical stamina.

  Her health was generally robust, though she did suffer from colds and a number of minor ailments which never laid her low for long. She never put on weight, although she took no exercise; but she took a number of vitamin pills and was widely believed to have some form of hormone replacement therapy to keep her young. She had three minor operations while she was Prime Minister: one for varicose veins in 1982, the second for a detached retina in 1983; and the third to correct a contraction of the fingers of her right hand, Dupuytren’s contracture (also known as ‘coachman’s grip’), in 1986. She had a painful tooth abscess during the June 1987 election, and generally her teeth gave her increasing trouble. She also – inevitably in her sixties – needed reading glasses, but did not like to be seen wearing them in public, so her briefs for Prime Minister’s Questions and speech scripts had to be printed in large type. She would never admit to any hint of weakness. She was particularly annoyed, therefore, when she nearly fainted from the heat during a diplomatic reception at Buckingham Palace in November 1987, giving rise to speculation that she was finally cracking up and a spate of articles offering pseudo-medical advice that she should slow down.39 She was sensitive to any suggestion that she was beginning to show her age, and tried to stop the party conference in 1989 serenading her sixty-fourth birthday by singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’.

  She had no real friends, because she had never left time in her life for friendship. In a sense Denis was her best friend. They were much closer in Downing Street than they had been in the earlier part of their marriage. He had friends, certainly, but they had few as a couple, because they had never operated as a couple. They never entertained privately in Downing Street; but they did very occasionally go out to dinner quietly with other trusted couples where she could briefly and genuinely relax.

  Janet Young once wished Mrs Thatcher a happy Christmas and was appalled when she replied that she was having a houseful of colleagues and advisers to Chequers. Of course she had the family too (Mark and Carol if they were around, and at least once her sister Muriel and her husband) but they were always outnumbered by political friends. Christmas Day was rigidly structured around church in the morning, a traditional lunch which ended punctually in time for the Queen’s broadcast at 3.00 p.m., then a short walk followed later by a cold buffet supper, often joined by other political guests who lived nearby. On Boxing Day there would be another lunch for favoured friends and allies – people like Rupert Murdoch, the American Ambassador, Lord King and Marmaduke Hussey. On these occasions Mrs Thatcher was the perfect hostess, not overtly political but tirelessly devoted to ensuring that everyone had everything they wanted. At the same time, though the atmosphere was carefully relaxed, these lunches like everything else in her life were unmistakably political gatherings – a symbolic summoning of key supporters at the turn of the year.

  The sad truth is that Mrs Thatcher, behind the hugely successful front which enabled her to dominate her generation, was a driven, insecure and rather lonely woman who lived for her work and would be lost when her astonishing career ended, as one day it eventually must. In her early days her phenomenal energy, her single-mindedness, her inability to relax, to admit any weakness or trust anyone to do anything better than she could do it herself, were all strengths and part of the reason for her success; but the longer she went on, the more these strengths turned to weaknesses – a loss of perspective, growing self-righteousness, a tendency to believe her own myth, an inability to delegate or trust her colleagues at all, so that instead of leading a team and preparing for an eventual handover to a successor, the Government became ever more centred on herself. There were bound to be tears in the end, and there were.

  21

  Stumble and Recovery

  Helicopters, leaks and lies

  THE episode that threw the sharpest light on Mrs Thatcher’s conduct of government was the crisis over the future of Westland helicopters which erupted at the beginning of 1986. More than any other incident in her whole premiership, Westland exposed to public gaze the reality of her relationship with her colleagues and the far greater trust she placed in unelected officials in her private office. The issue was relatively trivial in itself; but the questions raised went to the heart of constitutional government. As a result, the Westland affair came closer than anything else – before the combination of Europe and the poll tax arose in 1990 – to bringing her rule to an untimely end.

  It arose from the refusal of one ambitious and independent-minded minister to be bullied. Michael Heseltine had always been the cuckoo in Mrs Thatcher’s nest. Neither a monetarist nor a wet, he was an energetic and unapologetic corporatist very much in the manner of Ted Heath: his political hero was David Lloyd George. Mrs Thatcher was forced to recognise him as an effective minister, both at the Department of the Environment and later at Defence, where he deployed the case against unilateral nuclear disarmament with conviction and flair. But she distrusted both his interventionist instincts and his ambition, and doubted his grasp of detail. Likewise she resented his exploitation of the sort of photo-opportunity – looking over the Berlin Wall or wearing a flak jacket to visit Greenham Common – that she regarded as her own preserve. In the MoD he was dealing with matters in which she took a particularly close interest. It was inevitable that the two biggest egos in the Cabinet would clash on this territory.

  Among other things they differed over nuclear policy, and specifically the British response to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. In her memoirs Lady Thatcher made no apology for keeping this question under ‘tight personal control’ since in her view ‘neither the Foreign Office nor the Ministry of Defence took SDI sufficiently seriously’.1 Though she had her own doubts about the programme, she was ad
amant that Britain must be seen to back it. Heseltine was much less enthusiastic and resented her taking this sort of major defence decision unilaterally without reference to himself as the responsible minister.

  These tensions formed the background to the Westland affair. Lady Thatcher subsequently blamed the whole crisis on one man’s overweening ambition and egotistical refusal to accept the discipline of collective responsibility.2 Certainly Heseltine was riding for a fall. Unquestionably he got the relatively minor issue of the future of a small helicopter manufacturer out of perspective. He elevated the question of whether Westland should join up with the American firm Sikorsky or a somewhat shadowy consortium of European arms manufacturers (including British Aerospace and GEC) into a major issue of principle reflecting an American or European orientation in foreign policy, and by extension a trial of strength between himself and the Prime Minister. When she threw the Government’s weight behind the American option – which was also the Westland board’s preference – he blatantly flouted her authority by continuing to lobby energetically for the European alternative. First he induced the European national armaments directors to declare that in future they would buy only European-made helicopters.Then he planted correspondence in the press still pushing the European case after Leon Brittan, the new Trade and Industry Secretary, had announced the Government’s support for Westland’s decision in favour of Sikorsky.

  This was outrageous behaviour by a Cabinet minister, defying the decision of his own government. Heseltine’s justification was that he had been denied the opportunity to press the European option within the Government, so was forced to take the fight outside. In particular he accused the Prime Minister – after his resignation – of having unilaterally cancelled a meeting of the Cabinet’s Economic Affairs Committee arranged for 13 December 1985 because, at a previous meeting four days earlier, he had won too much support. On the contrary, Mrs Thatcher insisted, there was no need for a second meeting since the majority view was quite clear at the first: the Government had made its decision and Heseltine alone refused to accept it.

  Most testimony suggests that by this time she was right. Initially Heseltine had gained a good deal of support. Always a cat who walked by himself, however, Heseltine played his hand extremely badly. When it came to a stand-up fight with the Prime Minister, the relative merits of rival helicopter manufacturers were forgotten: his potential allies slipped back to the Prime Minister. Nevertheless he did have grounds for grievance. Mrs Thatcher was by no means as neutral as she pretended. Not only did she clearly favour the American option, but she was just as determined to defeat Heseltine as he was to defeat her. Colleagues like Willie Whitelaw believed as a matter of principle that a senior minister with a strongly held conviction in his own area of responsibility was entitled to take his case to Cabinet.3 But Westland never went to Cabinet. The one time Heseltine tried to force it on to the agenda, on 12 December, he was peremptorily ruled out of order.

  The trouble was that Mrs Thatcher was prepared neither to accommodate Heseltine by giving him the chance to put his case in full Cabinet, nor to confront him directly and force him to back down. By mid-December it was plain that he did not accept the Government’s decision. With hindsight, she should have sacked him, or required his resignation, then. But he was too powerful: she did not dare. He would not have gone quietly, like the despised wets: on the back benches he would have become a much more dangerous rallying point for her critics than Pym. She chose instead to try to undermine him by the familiar method of press manipulation and inspired leaking deployed over the past six years against several less formidable colleagues. This time she – or someone on her behalf – carelessly laid a charge which blew up in her own face, and came closer than anything between the Falklands invasion and the poll tax to bringing her down.

  The mistake was to leak a Law Officer’s letter. There is a strict convention, jealously guarded by the Law Officers themselves, that legal advice is confidential. Yet Mrs Thatcher, who had once been a lawyer and was generally a stickler for correct procedure – however she might bend the spirit of it – and Brittan, a QC who should certainly have known his brother lawyers’ sensitivity, chose to use a letter commissioned from the Solicitor-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, without his permission, to discredit Heseltine. They had ample provocation. Over Christmas and the New Year Heseltine continued his efforts to keep the European option in play. On 3 January 1986 he gave The Times an exchange of letters with the merchant bankers acting for the European consortium in which he warned that Westland risked losing future European orders if it accepted the American rescue – explicitly contradicting assurances which Mrs Thatcher had given Sir John Cuckney a few days earlier. Mrs Thatcher understandably determined that this must be repudiated. Instead of doing so directly, however, she persuaded Mayhew to write to Heseltine querying the basis for his warning, and then arranged for a damaging simplification of his letter to be made public.

  Mrs Thatcher subsequently admitted that it was she who initiated Mayhew’s letter. ‘I therefore, through my office, asked him to consider writing to the Defence Secretary to draw that opinion to his attention.’4 In fact, she thought Mayhew’s effort pretty feeble. He did no more than suggest, tentatively, that on the evidence he cited Heseltine might be overstating his case.5 He asked for clarification – which Heseltine promptly provided (and Mayhew accepted).6 But Mayhew’s letter did contain the words ‘material inaccuracies’; and it was these two words, torn out of context, which were leaked to the Press Association with a crude spin which was reflected in the next day’s headlines. ‘YOU LIAR’ screamed the Sun; while The Times paraphrased the same message more sedately as ‘Heseltine Told by Law Chief: Stick to the Facts’.7 Mrs Thatcher afterwards maintained that, while she regretted the way it was done, ‘it was vital to have accurate information in the public domain’.8 ‘It was a matter of duty that it should be known publicly that there were thought to be material inaccuracies’ in Heseltine’s letter.9 But there was no contrary information in Mayhew’s letter. The only possible purpose of leaking it was to discredit Heseltine and maybe provoke him to resign. The difference between this and earlier operations to discredit failing or dissenting ministers was that Mayhew – and his senior, the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers – were outraged by the use made of his letter and demanded an inquiry to discover the culprit.

  The leaked letter by itself did not provoke Heseltine to resign. Of course when he dramatically walked out of the Cabinet two days later there was speculation that his action was premeditated, especially since he was able within a few hours to publish a 2,500-word statement detailing his complaints about Mrs Thatcher’s style of government. But it was no secret at Westminster that he had been close to resignation for months; so it is not surprising that he should already have roughed out his grievances, to be polished up when the moment arose. His closest associates in the Cabinet were convinced that he did not mean to resign that day. The more interesting question is whether Mrs Thatcher deliberately forced his hand. She certainly laid down the law very firmly in Cabinet, insisting that the public wrangling between ministers must stop and that all future statements about Westland must be cleared though the Cabinet Office. But Heseltine accepted this without demur, until Nicholas Ridley intervened to spell out that this requirement should apply to the repetition of past statements as well. It was this that seemed to be gratuitously aimed at humiliating Heseltine. His response was to gather up his papers and leave the room. No one was sure whether he had resigned or merely gone to the bathroom. But Lady Thatcher wrote with undisguised satisfaction in her memoirs that while some of the Cabinet were ‘stunned’ by his démarche, ‘I was not. Michael had made his decision and that was that. I already knew who I wanted to succeed him.’10 The suspicion is that Ridley had been primed to push Heseltine over the brink.

  Obviously Mrs Thatcher was not sorry to see her most dangerous colleague self-destruct. She adjourned the Cabinet for coffee, conferred briefly with White
law and Wakeham, then called George Younger back and offered him the Ministry of Defence. Younger insisted that he had not been tipped off; but the MoD was the job he had always wanted and he accepted on the spot. Never was a resigning minister so quickly replaced.11

  A few hours later Heseltine published his statement giving his side of the argument and alleging ‘the complete breakdown of Cabinet government’.12 Heseltine was not the first or the last of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers to conclude that this was no way to run a government. But the argument over helicopters, and Heseltine’s departure, were only the beginning of the Westland affair. Far more serious was the unravelling of the apparently trivial matter of the leak of Mayhew’s letter, which called into question not the Prime Minister’s strength but her honesty.

  Sir Michael Havers took a serious view of the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s advice to a colleague. The morning that Mayhew’s letter was splashed all over the papers he went straight to Number Ten threatening to go to the police unless an inquiry was set up immediately to find the source. Mrs Thatcher had no choice but to agree. The difficulty was that she was being asked to investigate a process which she herself had set in motion and in which her own private office was, at the least, involved. If she did not know already how the letter had reached the Press Association, she had only to ask her own staff to be told in five minutes. So inviting Robert Armstrong to undertake a ten-day inquiry was a charade from the start. It could only be a cover-up, and it was.