The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  With even Tory newspapers increasingly doubtful whether she could – or should – survive, there was an unmistakable whiff of defeat in the air even before the vote. Douglas Hurd added to it by failing to deny categorically that he might stand himself. ‘Against her, no,’ he told an interviewer, thus betraying that he recognised at least the possibility of a second ballot.32 Willie Whitelaw issued a statement of support but told Wyatt that the whole thing was ‘absolutely ghastly’. He believed that Mrs Thatcher should win, but he was afraid she would not win by enough. If it came to a second ballot he might have to advise her to stand down. ‘Whatever happens, we can’t have her humbled. But then she is wise enough to know that.’33 John Major, nursing an infected wisdom tooth away from the snake pit of Westminster, thought that she would probably scrape through; but Jeffrey Archer, who came on Monday to tell him the gossip, told him that her chances were ‘bleak’. Major’s phone kept ringing with colleagues wanting him to be ready to stand if she did not win well enough.34

  In Paris on Monday morning Mrs Thatcher had breakfast with George Bush at the American Embassy, followed by a joint press conference, mainly about the Gulf. She attended the first plenary session of the conference and emerged to give another press conference at the British Embassy, hailing the signing of what she called ‘the biggest international disarmament agreement since the end of the last World War’ and brushing off questions about the leadership. 35 After lunch with the other leaders at the Elysée Palace – at which her old adversary Helmut Kohl was particularly supportive – she made her own speech at the conference, confessing that she had initially been sceptical about the Helsinki process, but admitting that with the arrival of Gorbachev in the Kremlin it had worked in the end and hoping that the CSCE would provide a forum for continuing progress on establishing human rights in the old Soviet empire.36 On Tuesday, while Tory MPs were voting in the House of Commons, she had talks with Gorbachev, Mitterrand and the President of Turkey and lunch with her favourite European leader, the Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers. The conference finished for the day around 4.30 p.m., and she returned to the British Embassy to await the result.

  Back in London a meeting rather oddly composed of her campaign team plus party officials had drawn up alternative forms of words for her to use whatever the figures. Obviously if she won handsomely, or lost absolutely, there was no problem: discussion centred on what she should say if – as seemed increasingly likely – she led, but without the necessary margin to win on the first ballot. According to the rules she had to gain not only a simple majority (187) but a margin of 15 per cent of all those entitled to vote – that is fifty-six votes. In the event of her falling short, Norman Tebbit wanted her to make a clear commitment to fight on. Baker thought she should say she must consult her colleagues. It was John Wakeham who proposed the compromise formula that she should declare her ‘intention’ to contest a second ballot. Mrs Thatcher accepted this advice, so that when the result came through she had her response ready.

  Waiting in Peter Morrison’s room at the embassy – Morrison (her current PPS) had flown over to be with her for the result – she sat at the dressing table with her back to the company, displaying ‘an inordinate calm’.37 Charles Powell sat on the bed. Morrison, Bernard Ingham, Cynthia Crawford (her dresser), the deputy Chief Whip and the British Ambassador in Paris were also present.Around 6.20 p.m. Tim Renton (the Chief Whip) rang from London. Morrison answered, wrote down the figures and gave them to Mrs Thatcher. ‘Not, I am afraid, as good as we had hoped.’ (Powell, typically, had his own line and had got the news half a minute earlier: behind Mrs Thatcher’s back he gave a thumbs down.) She had only 204 votes to Heseltine’s 152, with sixteen void or spoiled ballots: four votes short of the margin needed. She received the news calmly and after checking with Hurd that he and Major would still support her, immediately marched downstairs and out into the courtyard to give her predetermined response to the waiting press. Dramatically interrupting John Sergeant’s report for the BBC’s Six O’Clock News, she seized his microphone and announced, live to the cameras:

  I am naturally very pleased that I got more than half of the Parliamentary party and disappointed that it’s not quite enough to win on the first ballot, so I confirm that it is my intention to let my name go forward for the second ballot.38

  Despite her reflex defiance, both Powell and Ingham believe that those around her, and probably Mrs Thatcher herself, knew in their hearts that she was finished.39 So, certainly, did Denis. The first thing she did on coming back into the embassy was to ring him. ‘Denis was fabulous,’ Carol remembered. ‘“Congratulations, Sweetie-Pie, you’ve won; it’s just the rules,” he said, as tears trickled down his face. He was crying for her, not for himself.’ But when he put down the phone he turned to the friend who was with him and said: ‘We’ve had it. We’re out.’40

  ‘Treachery with a smile on its face’

  Mrs Thatcher returned to London next morning having had no sleep, still determined to fight on. She had, after all, comfortably defeated her challenger and fallen only four votes short of outright victory. Woodrow Wyatt toyed with the notion that she could ask the Queen to grant her a General Election.41 She herself still believed she could win the second ballot ‘if the campaign were to go into high gear and every potential supporter pressed to fight for my cause’.42 She knew now that this had not been the case so far. But most observers shared the view bluntly expressed in his memoirs by Michael Heseltine. ‘To anyone with the faintest knowledge of how Westminster politics work, her position was manifestly untenable. It says much for Mrs Thatcher’s capacity for self-delusion that at first she stubbornly refused to recognise the fact.’43

  The BBC’s political editor John Cole felt the mood as soon as he got to the House of Commons on Wednesday morning. ‘Conservative MPs began stopping me in the corridors and in the Members’ Lobby to tell me that if she persisted in her declared intention to enter the second ballot, they would switch their votes to Michael Heseltine.’ The Heseltine camp was now confident of winning if she stayed in the contest.44 But by the same token, urgent discussions had already been going on all over London to prevent that eventuality. The younger members of the Cabinet had no wish to see Mrs Thatcher deposed to put Heseltine in her place. Whenever she went, they wanted her to be replaced by one of themselves. If it really looked as if she could not beat Heseltine, it followed that she should be persuaded to withdraw in favour of another candidate who could. The supposedly crucial meeting took place on Tuesday evening at the home of Tristan Garel-Jones. Those present included four Cabinet Ministers from the left of the party – Chris Patten, William Waldegrave, Malcolm Rifkind and Tony Newton – plus Norman Lamont from the right and two or three ministers from outside the Cabinet, including Alan Clark.

  It was not really much of a conspiracy. ‘The really sickening thing,’ Clark wrote, ‘was the urgent and unanimous abandonment of the Lady. Except for William’s little opening tribute, she was never mentioned again.’45 But with thirty to forty of her supporters on the first ballot said to have deserted, the conclusion that she was finished was pretty obvious. The consensus of the group at this stage was to back Hurd. The importance of the meeting was not that it decided anything, but simply that it showed the way several of the younger ministers were thinking. Ken Clarke, John Wakeham and John Gummer had reached the same conclusion without being present; and others were holding countless similar conversations by telephone.

  Before Mrs Thatcher returned to London three more formal consultations had taken place. All told the same story of crumbling support. The question was who would tell Mrs Thatcher. Denis was the first to try when she returned to Downing Street at lunchtime. ‘Don’t go on, love,’ he begged her. But she felt – ‘in my bones’ – that she owed it to her supporters not to give up so long as there was still a chance.46 Wakeham warned that she would face the argument that she should step down voluntarily to avoid humiliation, but professed that this was not his own view. All th
e other emissaries ducked it. These were the famous ‘men in suits’ who were supposed to tell her when it was time to go. But over a working lunch at Number Ten ‘the greybeards’, as Hurd called them, ‘failed to deliver the message’.47 ‘The message of the meeting, even from those urging me to fight on, was implicitly demoralising,’ Lady Thatcher wrote in retrospect.48 But for the moment she formed the impression that she should still fight on.

  She still had a statement to make in the Commons on the Paris summit. As she left Downing Street she called out to reporters: ‘I fight on. I fight to win’, managing, as she later wrote, to sound more confident than by now she felt.49 In the House she gave another characteristically brave performance, hailing ‘the end of the Cold War in Europe and the triumph of freedom, democracy and the rule of law’, spiritedly rebutting opposition taunts and thanking the one Tory loyalist who hoped that she would ‘continue to bat for Britain with all the vigour, determination and energy at her command’. Only once, uncharacteristically, did she forget the second half of a question and have to be reminded what it was.50 Then Tebbit took her round the tea room in a belated effort to shore up her support. ‘I had never experienced such an atmosphere before,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘Repeatedly I heard: “Michael has asked me two or three times for my vote already. This is the first time we have seen you.”’51

  Around five o’clock she saw the Queen and assured her that she still intended to contest the second ballot. What finally convinced her that her cause was hopeless was a series of individual interviews with the members of the Cabinet between six and eight that evening. This procedure has been widely regarded as another misjudgement. The summons to see her individually meant that they all congregated along the ministerial corridor to concert what they were going to say before they went in. This explains why, when they saw her, so many of them said the same thing. Mrs Thatcher sat tense and upright at the end of one sofa next to the fireplace, the ministers on the opposite sofa. ‘Almost to a man,’ she wrote bitterly, ‘they used the same formula. This was that they themselves would back me, of course, but that regretfully they did not believe I could win… I felt I could almost join in the chorus.’52

  There were some variations. Clarke, Patten and Rifkind were the only three to tell her frankly that they would not support her if she stood again. Clarke – ‘in the brutalist style he has cultivated’ – warned her that Heseltine would become Prime Minister unless she made way for either Hurd or Major. She was ‘visibly stunned’ by this estimate.53 Only Baker and Cecil Parkinson told her that she could still win. The rest, with varying degrees of embarrassment (some with tears in their eyes) advised her to give up.

  The one interview she describes as light relief was that with Alan Clark, who also – though not a member of the Cabinet – somehow managed to get in to see her. He too told her she would lose, but encouraged her to go down fighting gloriously to the end. Earlier he had written in his diary that ‘the immediate priority is to find a way, tactfully and skilfully, to talk her out of standing a second time’. Presumably this was his way of doing so. After a pause while she contemplated this Wagnerian scenario she said: ‘It’d be so terrible if Michael won. He would undo everything I have fought for.’54 So maybe Clark, while convincing her that he was still on her side, had more effect than the faint hearts whom she accused of betraying her.

  By the end of this dismal procession Mrs Thatcher had accepted that the game was up. ‘I had lost the Cabinet’s support. I could not even muster a credible campaign team. It was the end.’55 ‘She was pale, subdued and shaking her head, saying “I am not a quitter, I am not a quitter”,’ Baker recalled. ‘But the tone was one of resignation, not defiance.’56 She was upset not so much by her poor vote in the ballot, which could be attributed to electoral nerves, nor by the frank opposition of those who had never supported her, but by what she saw as the treachery of those from whom she felt entitled to expect loyalty. ‘What grieved me,’ she wrote, ‘was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words whereby they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.’57 It was treachery, she charged later on television. ‘Treachery with a smile on its face.’58

  The best answer to this allegation comes from Kenneth Clarke. ‘There was no treachery,’ he told one of his biographers.The Cabinet gave her ‘wholly sensible advice’ that, having failed to win by a sufficient margin on the first ballot, she would not win the second and should now withdraw. ‘That was nothing to do with the Cabinet. It was the parliamentary party where she’d suffered the defeat.’59 The fact was that not just her long-time enemies but many of her strongest supporters thought it was time for her to go, in order to protect her legacy. On this analysis it was not merely the party but Thatcherism itself which needed a new leader if it was to survive. It was cruel, but Margaret Thatcher had never been one to let personal feelings stand in the way of what she thought was right. Though she talked of loyalty, she had never shown much mercy herself to colleagues who threatened or disappointed her. As Prime Ministers go, she was a good butcher: that was part of her strength. But she could not complain when she was butchered in turn. She had only gained the leadership in the first place by boldly challenging Ted Heath when all his other colleagues were restrained by loyalty. She had lived by the sword and was always likely to perish by the sword. Really she would have wanted it no other way. As she said, she was not a quitter. What perhaps galled her most in retrospect about the Cabinet’s advice was that it forced her to quit voluntarily when temperamentally she would rather have gone down to defeat, as Clark suggested. But her first priority was to defend her legacy, and she was reluctantly persuaded that self-immolation was the only way to do it.

  At 11.15 p.m. she rang Tim Bell and told him: ‘I’ve decided to go. Can you come and see me?’ He went, collecting Gordon Reece on the way, and ‘blubbed hopelessly’ in the car on the way.60 Her two ‘laughing boys’, as she had called them in happier times, sat up with her till two o’clock helping to write her resignation statement, while Andrew Turnbull, her private secretary rang the Governor of the Bank and others to give them advance warning of her decision.

  As she always did before a big decision, she slept on it – briefly – before committing herself. At 7.30 she asked Turnbull to arrange another audience with the Queen. Then at 9.00 she chaired her final Cabinet. It was an intensely awkward occasion. She began by reading out her prepared statement, which was a model of dignified euphemism:

  Having consulted widely among colleagues, I have concluded that the unity of the party and the prospects of victory in a General Election would be better served if I stood down to enable Cabinet colleagues to enter the ballot for the leadership. I should like to thank all those in Cabinet and outside who have given me such dedicated support.61

  Twice she almost broke down, but she rejected Parkinson’s suggestion that the Lord Chancellor should read it for her. After embarrassed tributes from several ministers, she then expanded on her statement by emphasising the importance of the Cabinet now uniting to defeat Heseltine and protect her legacy. Insisting that she could handle business but not sympathy, she recovered her composure to conduct the rest of the meeting in her usual brisk manner. After a short coffee break she reported on her latest talks with Bush and Gorbachev in Paris, and it was agreed to send another armoured brigade to the Gulf.

  The announcement of Mrs Thatcher’s withdrawal from the contest was made at 9.25 a.m. (during the Cabinet’s coffee break), though of course she remained Prime Minister until the party had elected her successor. The news, though not unexpected at Westminster, evoked extraordinary scenes of jubilation and disbelief among the public: she had been there so long that her departure was hard to comprehend.

  Last rites

  Even in defeat Mrs Thatcher still had a last bravura performance up her sleeve. Another leader might have chosen to let someone else answer Labour’s ‘no confidence’ motion. On the contrary, she saw it as
a last opportunity to vindicate her record. Even as her position crumbled the previous evening, she had not stopped working on her speech for the next day: never had her dedication been more impressive or her power of concentration more extraordinary. She was up before dawn to carry on crafting it. ‘Each sentence,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘was my testimony at the Bar of History.’62

  After Prime Minister’s Questions – where she was given a fairly gentle ride – and a typically ungenerous speech by Kinnock, when a word of sympathy might have disarmed her, she started her speech by reminding the House of Nicholas Henderson’s gloomy 1979 dispatch describing Britain’s economic failure and loss of influence in the world since 1945. ‘Conservative government has changed all that,’ she boasted. ‘Once again, Britain stands tall in the councils of Europe and of the world, and our policies have brought unparalleled prosperity to our citizens at home.’ Once the interventions started she really got into her stride; and by the time she came on to defending her record in Europe she was ready to demolish Kinnock one last time. He did not know whether he was in favour of the single currency or not, she jeered, because ‘he does not even know what it means’. When the Labour left-winger Denis Skinner suggested that she should become Governor of the European Bank she seized on the notion with delight. ‘What a good idea! I had not thought of that… Now where were we? I am enjoying this.’

  From this moment, she had the House in the palm of her hand. A Eurosceptic Tory called out, ‘Cancel it. You can wipe the floor with these people.’ She went on to expound her vision of ‘a free and open Britain in a free and open Europe… in tune with the deepest instincts of the British people’, took credit for winning the Cold War, and ended with the Gulf, comparing it with the Falklands. Her last words were the apotheosis of the Iron Lady: