Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (65 page)

When Ian MacGregor addressed the Conservative Philosophy Group it was soon apparent that he had little talent for speaking or answering questions. His dour appearance and his corporate American jargon – ‘I don’t give a diddly-squat for the press’ – put him on a different planet from the world of politics. He seemed insensitive to any wider issues relating to the mining industry other than the figures ‘at the all-important bottom line’ of the NCB’s annual accounts. He told us ‘kow-towing to the unions pervades our entire management, our board, and stops only at my feet’.
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His image as a hard man evidently appealed to the confrontational instincts of Arthur Scargill, who greeted MacGregor’s arrival at the NCB as that of ‘A Yankee steel butcher waiting in the wings, waiting to chop us to pieces’.
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This was not a cry of fear. It was a trumpet call to battle. Scargill was a revolutionary who longed to repeat a triumph he had enjoyed as a local union leader at Saltley Coke Works in 1972, when the mass picketing he had organised caused the Heath government to cave in to the miners. This time the humiliation of the Thatcher government was Scargill’s target. He relished the prospect of an all-out coal strike. His problem was that he could not persuade his fellow miners to vote for one.

In his first two years as NUM President, Scargill called his members to ballot for a national strike on three occasions. Each time, he had failed to get the 55 per cent majority required by the union’s constitution. In March 1984, when the NCB announced its plan for closing another twenty uneconomic pits, Scargill managed to orchestrate a national strike without a national ballot. His method was to get the most militant coalfields – Yorkshire, Scotland and Kent – to walk out and then to send mass pickets to other regions to coerce them into joining the chain of strike action.

There was a turning point at the beginning of these walkout and picketing activities, when Margaret Thatcher rumbled Scargill’s strategy and responded instinctively to his challenge. The moment came when Ian MacGregor arrived for a meeting at No. 10 that had nothing to do with the coal industry. Wearing his hat as Chairman of British Steel, he had come to lobby the government about
a proposal to build a privately financed Channel-crossing road bridge. But before opening his presentation, MacGregor told the Prime Minister that the NUM had just launched strike action at several coalfields. He said that the position was particularly worrying in the East Midlands, because many miners there did not want to join the strike but had been prevented from going to their jobs at the pitheads by aggressive picketing from NUM militants.

Margaret Thatcher was appalled. ‘Get me the Home Secretary!’ she told the Downing Street switchboard operator. When Leon Brittan came on the line, he was asked whether he knew what was happening. ‘You must speak to the Chief Constable of Nottingham immediately’, instructed the Prime Minister, ‘and tell him that the government expects him to uphold the lawful right of working men to go to work.’
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Present in the room when she gave this order was her Private Secretary, Andrew Turnbull. He was in no doubt that this was a turning point. He said:

Had she not given that signal, history would have been completely different. She realised at once that the battle she had been expecting had begun. Up to then, the police were being cautious. But when they were told their duty, they did it. And from then on at No. 10 we were on a war footing.
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The war footing was largely invisible. Externally, the government wanted to preserve the fiction that this was an industrial dispute between the NCB and the NUM. Internally, Margaret Thatcher knew that her credibility, and Britain’s, depended on not being defeated by Arthur Scargill. So, behind the scenes she exercised an extraordinary degree of hands-on control over the response to the miners’ strike, sometimes using men and methods that were highly unorthodox.

The Prime Minister’s problem was that she never had complete confidence in either of the two figures who were fronting the strike on behalf of the NCB and the Department of Energy. Ian MacGregor was so inept at the skills of politics and public relations that for all his determination to improve the industry’s bottom line, he looked like an accident waiting to happen. Peter Walker had plenty of PR and political experience, but he was a notoriously semi-detached wet from the Jim Prior School of softly, softly conciliation. Margaret Thatcher feared that either or both of these front men might sell the pass at any moment.
To prevent this happening, she put in place her own political, administrative and clandestine machinery to ensure victory.

The political will to defeat Scargill was led by the Prime Minister, although her most influential supporter was Nicholas Ridley, then only a Minister of State at the Department of Industry. He was the hard-line strategist in whom she placed her greatest trust. But the impetus for implementing the strategy came straight from the top. ‘For the best part of a year, at least half of the Prime Minister’s working day was devoted to the miners’ strike’, recalled Andrew Turnbull. ‘She kept the pressure up at a level of intensity comparable to the Falklands, with a constant flow of ministerial meetings, ad hoc meetings, and meetings of MISC 101, the key cabinet committee.’
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MISC 101, administratively headed by a capable Cabinet Office Deputy- Secretary, Peter Gregson, was the clearing-house and co-ordinating committee that delivered the goods. It ensured that coal stocks at the power stations stayed at an all-time high; that the CEGB generators kept running at full steam; and that police forces were well co-ordinated and well equipped in their operations to contain the violence of the flying pickets.

One vital factor in winning the battle on the many fronts where it was being joined was to make sure the NUM was kept isolated. If the strike had been supported for reasons of solidarity by other unions, Margaret Thatcher’s government might well have been as badly humiliated as Ted Heath’s was ten years earlier. The Prime Minister herself was sometimes dangerously combative in wishing to make premature legal challenges using the government’s new powers. This might have triggered support for Scargill from other unions, but wiser counsels prevailed at MISC 101 and elsewhere. In any case, she was a model of restraint compared with Arthur Scargill, who had few friends in the union movement. He managed to lose them, and to alienate many rank and file members in his own NUM, by a series of bad mistakes and bombastic claims.

Scargill’s first mistake was to call the strike in the spring, when coal stocks were plentiful and demand for electricity waning. If he had launched his offensive in the autumn, the supplies to the power stations might have run worryingly low before the end of the winter.

The second and greater mistake was Scargill’s refusal to hold a national ballot of NUM members. This split the moderate Nottinghamshire miners from
the rest of the union. It also ensured that other potentially sympathetic unions, such as the power and transport workers, refused to back the strike.

The third negative perception of Scargill’s leadership was his encouragement of the escalating violence on the picket lines. The worst example of this occurred on 29 May 1984, outside the Orgreave Coke Works in South Yorkshire, when Scargill organised mass picketing to prevent coke convoys reaching Scunthorpe steelworks. For several hours over 6,000 pickets and 1,700 riot police fought pitched battles of a size and ferocity not seen since the English Civil War. Although the police remained in control, at least seventy people were seriously injured in the clashes.
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The television coverage of these scenes appalled Margaret Thatcher, who denounced the violence in a speech the following day during a visit to Banbury Cattle Market. She called it ‘an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law, and it must not succeed’.
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Throughout the year-long strike, Margaret Thatcher continued to worry that Ian MacGregor was inadequate at putting across the NCB’s economic argument for pit closures. This should have been an easy task considering that Scargill’s position was that no pit should ever be closed no matter how much money it was losing. Yet MacGregor was constantly out-manoeuvred by the NUM in the propaganda battle. His worse moment of media ineptitude was to be photographed covering his head with a newspaper in an effort to avoid reporters’ questions.

After many such gaffes, the Prime Minister could bear it no longer. Using as an intermediary David Young – her newly appointed Minister without Portfolio – she sent her favourite public relations guru, Tim Bell, to act as a mentor to Ian MacGregor. More riskily, she brought in a most unorthodox adviser, David Hart, to perform dark arts in the heat of the miners’ strike, which made a considerable contribution to her eventual victory over Arthur Scargill.

DAVID HART: HER SECRET BLUE PIMPERNEL

David Hart was the most exotic figure ever to penetrate the inner circle of advisers to Margaret Thatcher. He had initially attracted her interest in the mid-1970s by making generous donations to her favourite think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies. Later, with some encouragement from Ian Gow, he sent her briefing notes on topical issues.

The opinions in these briefs were alleged ‘to come straight from the lips of those parts of the general populace which your officials cannot reach’. For David Hart claimed to run an unofficial intelligence service, whose agents ranged from working miners in Nottinghamshire to roller-blading West Indians in Brixton. Both sources reported to HQ Hart at Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair, and their views were conveyed to the Prime Minister as ‘the word on the street’.
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This ‘word’ was suspiciously supportive of the most robust opinions of Margaret Thatcher. She could sometimes be a sucker for the notion that she had a hot-line to the man in the street, the cleaner of her flat at No. 10 being her primary fountain of such wisdom. So she was delighted to have her prejudices confirmed by Hart’s proletarian voices, telling him in one early morning phone call, ‘Gosh, you do cheer one up’.
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By cheering up the Prime Minister with his well-crafted blend of street-wise reporting and worldly-wise flattery, Hart’s bulletins gained increasing credibility with her, much to the dismay of her private office. ‘She pays far too much attention to him’, her new Political Secretary, Stephen Sherbourne, was told. ‘He’s a spiv. Give him a wide berth.’
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Son of the successful Ansbacher merchant banker ‘Boy’ Hart, David Hart had in his first thirty-eight years been an anarchic Eton schoolboy, an avant-garde film-maker, a poet, a playwright, a financier and a bankrupt. After settling with his creditors, he had re-emerged as a property developer with a personal helicopter, a suite at Claridge’s and a country estate in Suffolk. I had known him well since we had been in the same house at school. Nothing usually surprised me about his maverick waywardness. But in 1984 I grew astonished at his increasingly influential role in helping the Prime Minister to win the miners’ strike.

Eccentric in behaviour, unconventional in dress and contrarian in his thinking, David Hart was passionate in his right-wing politics. Like Margaret Thatcher, he saw the Scargill strike as a make or break crisis for Britain. Unlike her, he had a high opinion of Ian MacGregor, whom he befriended at a time when Peter Walker was refusing to speak to the NCB Chairman.

Taking MacGregor’s side in this quarrel, Hart managed to plant in the Prime Minister’s mind the notion that the Energy Secretary was planning to betray her by making an early settlement of the dispute with the NUM. This was considered such a subversive theory that the normally mild-mannered Andrew Turnbull had a stand-up row with Hart about it. Along with other members
of the private office, Turnbull tried to block him from meeting the Prime Minister. But Hart overcame the obstacles placed in his way by officialdom. With the help of Ronnie Millar, he managed to gain access to Margaret Thatcher to discuss his take on the miners’ strike, usually late at night in her flat at No. 10.

At the first of these encounters, Margaret Thatcher was surprised by the oddity of her visitor’s appearance. Sporting a Mafioso moustache, a scruffy pair of sneakers, a Savile Row pinstripe suit and puffing on a Monte Cristo cigar, Hart lived up to Ronnie Millar’s description of him as ‘a kind of Blue Pimpernel’.
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But enjoying, as she often did, receiving undercover despatches from unorthodox sources, the Prime Minister soon became intrigued by what Hart had to tell her from his missions behind the front-lines of the Nottinghamshire miners.

Initially disguising himself as a miner in T-shirt, tattered blue jeans and the same scruffy sneakers he was wearing at No. 10, Hart established his presence in one or two Nottinghamshire pubs, where an increasing band of anti-Scargill rebels congregated after working their shifts in the East Midlands pits. Hart’s technique was to play dominoes with them, to lose, to pay for his losses in pints of beer and, above all, to take snuff with them. This was his trump card. Many miners, because of the rules against smoking down the pit, were heavy snuff users. So was Hart, who had formed this rarefied habit in his schooldays to circumnavigate the rules against smoking at Eton.

Men who take snuff together bond together, or so Margaret Thatcher was persuaded. She was shaken by Hart’s stories of the brutal intimidation the Nottingham miners were suffering. She was impressed that he had used his own money to found and grow the National Working Miners’ Committee, which she later described as ‘an important development in the history of the working miners’ movement’.
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Both the Prime Minister and her improbable undercover agent to the working miners understood the strategic importance of keeping the coal moving from the Nottinghamshire pits to the power stations. If this supply line could be increased, Scargill would be defeated; if it was broken, coal stocks would run out.