Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (85 page)

These floundering exchanges left a bad impression. The general public, most of whom knew nothing about Professor Walters and his views, were mystified by what seemed to be a spat about personalities. In fact, the row was rooted in far deeper issues, such as the disagreement about the ERM and who had the ultimate authority for conducting Britain’s economic policy. But neither the press nor most politicians understood this. As a result, Margaret Thatcher was pilloried for her capricious handling of personnel problems with her Chancellor.

One ominous sign of the damage done by the Lawson resignation was the warning given to the Prime Minister by the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, Cranley Onslow. She met him and other members of the executive just before the prorogation of Parliament at the beginning of November. They were underwhelmed by her explanation that her Chancellor had wanted to quit anyway and was just using Walters as a pretext. Instead, one member of the committee bluntly told her that more and more colleagues were getting fed up with what he called ‘the revolving door of the Carry On Downing Street Show’. He added the rider, ‘and if you don’t get your act together they won’t let you carry on much longer’.
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Margaret Thatcher frowned but failed to acknowledge the warning. She was probably unfamiliar with ‘Carry On’ humour and made no response.

There were some signs that the 1922’s danger signals were heeded. The Prime Minister made a flurry of appearances in the tea room, reassuring her back-benchers that the new trio at the top were working in step with each other and with her. This was true. John Major as Chancellor, Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary and David Waddington as the new Home Secretary were a far more cohesive team in the great offices of state than when the strong-willed Lawson and the resentful Howe had been at the top of the government. Their quarrels had left Margaret Thatcher a wounded Prime Minister. How wounded? It was a question about to be probed by the arrival of a stalking horse.

THE STALKING HORSE

The mood among Tory MPs was irritable rather than irascible as the new session of Parliament opened in November 1989. Many colleagues were critical of the Prime Minister, but few wanted to see her ousted from No. 10. In any case, there was not the faintest consensus about a candidate suitable to succeed her. The only conceivable but still covert contender was Michael Heseltine. Yet for all his assiduous courting in the
salon des refusés
he had too few disciples and too many detractors. Trapped in his own twilight zone of being unwilling to put up, yet unable to shut up, he continued to prowl around the camps of the discontented stirring up ill-will but declining to make his own challenge. He realised that the time was not ripe for him to wield the dagger. As his closest lieutenant, Keith Hampson MP, put it, ‘Michael knew perfectly well that Margaret was falling apart and that all he had to do was to wait for his moment’.
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A challenger of the moment that November did however emerge in the quixotic form of Sir Anthony Meyer. He was a parliamentary oddball. From a background of inherited wealth, an Oppidan scholarship at Eton and a Baronetcy, he championed extreme liberalism by Tory Party standards. An early diplomatic career with long stints in Paris and in the European Department of the Foreign Office had made him the most ardently Europhile MP on either side of the House of Commons. Besides promoting a federal union with Europe, his other lost cause was to be the only Conservative Member to oppose the recapture of the Falklands.

Outwardly fey, shy and gentle, he had an inner core of steel. This mixture of qualities, plus some heavy prompting from Ian Gilmour and other friends of Heseltine, led Meyer to put his hat into the ring as a stalking-horse candidate for the leadership election that could be called at the start of any new session of Parliament.

Margaret Thatcher had no time for Sir Anthony Meyer. When Ian Gilmour, at an early stage of the contest, coined the phrase ‘the Meyerites’, the Prime Minister’s private reaction was: ‘Meyerites! They’re just Adullamites!’ Baffled by this label, Ian Gow sought further and better particulars, only to be told by her, ‘Cave dwellers with nowhere else to go – look it up in the Old Testament’. Biblical research produced the verse, ‘All those who were distressed or
discontented gathered in the cave of Adullam’. The preacher’s daughter had not forgotten her scripture.
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Although Meyer was an absurd leadership candidate, quickly dubbed ‘the stalking donkey’ by many of his colleagues, his campaign was nevertheless met with serious tactics by Margaret Thatcher. She put in place an election team, which ironically was far more energetic and better organised than the team with which she defended herself against Michael Heseltine’s much more serious challenge a year later. Her core supporters included George Younger as campaign manager, Kenneth Baker as cheer-leader in chief, Ian Gow, Tristan Garel Jones, Richard Ryder, Bill Shelton – her initial campaign chief in 1975 – and Mark Lennox-Boyd, her PPS.

Perhaps the most formidable operator in this team was Tristan Garel-Jones, the Deputy Chief Whip. He took leave of absence from this official post in the government in order to devote his full time to securing the re-election of the Prime Minister by her own party. The task proved more difficult than expected. ‘We really had to work hard to get a good result for her’, said Garel-Jones. ‘It wasn’t easy. At the end of the day, I was left with deep feelings of disquiet.’
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These anxious feelings were barely discernible to the public. On the face of it, the result looked good for Margaret Thatcher. A vote of 314 to thirty-three was by normal standards a convincing victory. But a closer examination of the figures showed that in addition to the thirty-three votes cast for Sir Anthony Meyer, another twenty-four Tory MPs had spoiled their ballot papers and three more had abstained. This meant that sixty members of her party were now opposed to the Prime Minister.

It also emerged from the sophisticated canvassing operations masterminded by Tristan Garel-Jones that a further forty-two MPs were so critical of Margaret Thatcher that they had to be ‘worked on’ by her campaign team before they reluctantly agreed to cast their votes in her favour. Some of these dissidents allowed themselves to be arm-twisted into the Prime Minister’s camp only after making it clear that they would not support her in a subsequent election unless she changed her ways or her policies.

The most insistent demand from these invisible but audible opponents of Margaret Thatcher’s leadership was that the poll tax should be scrapped. Others wanted her to soft-pedal her hostility to the European Community. Among
lesser complaints, the most frequent was that she had become too aloof and had stopped listening to her own MPs.

These grievances had such a bitter edge to them that Tristan Garel-Jones decided he should pass them right to the top. With the help of Bernard Ingham, he saw the Prime Minister alone on a Sunday evening some two weeks after her apparently decisive defeat of Meyer.

‘I know I’m only the Deputy Chief Whip’, began Garel-Jones, ‘but I’ve got to warn you that there are 102 of our colleagues lurking in the bushes and they’re going to kill you.’
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After such a dramatic opening, one might have thought that the Prime Minister would wish to listen carefully. But when Garel-Jones explained the high level of discontent over the poll tax, Margaret Thatcher responded with a lecture demonstrating that she had the right policy and would not change it. Ditto on Europe. ‘But all you’ve got to do is to pretend you like one or two people in the EEC’, protested Garel-Jones. ‘Can’t you just dissemble a little?’

‘Certainly not!’ retorted the Prime Minister, who embarked on a lengthy diatribe against Delors, Kohl, Mitterrand and other European leaders. It was too much for the Spanish-born Garel-Jones. Realising he was wasting his time in a dialogue of the deaf, he made his excuses and cut short the meeting. But as he departed, he paused to repeat his warning with a theatricality worthy of Sir Laurence Olivier. ‘Don’t forget that a year from now, those 100 and many more assassins will rise up from the bushes’, declared Tristan the prophet. To emphasise his point, he acted out the gesture of a killer flourishing his dagger and plunging it into a dying corpse. ‘And they will murder you, even while you are still serving as Prime Minister.’
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After such a histrionic exit, Margaret Thatcher could hardly complain that she had not been warned. But, like Caesar on the Ides of March, she took no heed of the soothsayer. She felt she should devote her attention to more important matters.

GREATER EVENTS

While plotters squabbled at Westminster, great events were taking place on the world stage. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, swiftly followed
by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. These developments were both a vindication and a challenge for Margaret Thatcher.

Alone among European leaders, she had held the view since 1982 that the Iron Curtain might be cracking and that freedom for the oppressed peoples of the Warsaw Pact countries could be just around the corner of twentieth-century history. She had sensed this from her dialogues with Mikhail Gorbachev, from her visits to Hungary and Poland, and from her many private briefings from dissidents, intelligence experts and academics. In her Bruges speech she had spoken of her hope that Warsaw, Prague and Budapest would return to their roots as great European cities. Although this vision was coming to pass, it was not immediately happening in the form that Margaret Thatcher had hoped for, namely the enlargement of the European Community by the looser and wider participation of more independent nation-states.

Instead, the short-term effects of the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany brought about demands for the European Community to bind itself together in both monetary and political union. This surge in the momentum for a full-blown federalist Europe was anathema to the British Prime Minister.

She said as much at the Dublin summit in April 1990, as she highlighted the consequences of political union to the national parliaments, monarchies, heads of state and electoral systems of the member states. This ten-minute
tour d’horizon
of the problems which she described as ‘a tongue in cheek’ speech had the effect of sowing seeds of confusion, since it immediately became clear that there was little or no agreement at the summit about what exactly was meant by ‘political union’.
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Margaret Thatcher also made an ill-judged attempt to block German reunification. Her obstructionism was a hopelessly lost cause. The Berlin Wall had come down amidst scenes of exultant rejoicing in the East. Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s drive for reunification was enthusiastically supported by Washington and not objected to by Moscow. Margaret Thatcher’s only hope of stopping Kohl was to win President Mitterand over to her corner. She lobbied the French President at a meeting in Strasbourg in December 1989, pulling maps of Germany’s pre- and post-war borders out of her handbag. Pointing to Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania, she told Mitterand: ‘They’ll take all of that and Czechoslovakia too!’
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However much he may privately have shared such fears, Mitterand was not about to break the Franco-German axis within the EU by opposing reunification. So Margaret Thatcher was left out on her own anti-German limb. She remained there in impotent isolation, often expressing her views in a style and language that gave the impression that she had become an anachronistic bigot.

In the months after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, Margaret Thatcher became obsessed with a fear of Germany, which shocked some of those who heard her express it. She was careful to let out her feelings only in private settings and conversations. But there were so many of them that the news travelled quickly. One early indication of her anti-German views came at a private lunch at the Centre for Policy Studies in December 1989. She shocked several of those present, particularly one of her informal foreign-policy advisers on Eastern Europe, George Urban, when she said to him.

You know, George, there are things that your generation and mine ought never to forget. We’ve been through the war and we know perfectly well what the Germans are like, and what dictators can do, and how national character doesn’t basically change.
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In the same vein, she clashed with the Centre for Policy Studies’ Director Hugh Thomas, rebuking him for saying that German reunification marked the defeat of communism. ‘Don’t you realise what’s happening? I’ve read my history, but you don’t seem to understand.’
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Even within her own cabinet, the Prime Minister was isolated. She held a seminar at Chequers in March 1990 at which she sought to persuade the assembled company of ministers, foreign-policy specialists and academics that German reunification presented a danger to British interests and to long-term stability in Europe. Virtually everyone disagreed with her. ‘Very well, very well, I am outnumbered round this table’, she eventually conceded. ‘I promise you that I will be sweet to the Germans, sweet to Helmut when he comes next week, but I shall not be defeated. I shall be sweet to him, but I will uphold my principles.’
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It seemed as though Margaret Thatcher’s principles were locked in the time warp of the Second World War. In a note of the Chequers seminar, Charles Powell solemnly recorded, surely echoing his mistress’s voice: ‘Some even less flattering attributes were also mentioned as an abiding part of the German character: in alphabetical order, angst,
aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality.’ When this memorandum was embarrassingly released,
Private Eye
parodied it with its own memo along the lines of ‘Germans: wear moustaches, eat sausages, drink beer in cellars, etc. etc.’
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The Prime Minister’s prejudices were not all that far removed from the parody. She gave no credence to the view that the new generation of post-war Germany might be different from their forebears. Her line was that the national character of Germany had not changed, and that sooner or later the re-united country would exert its power, although by economic means not territorial aggression. ‘Germany is thus by its very nature a destabilising rather than a stabilising force in Europe’ was her judgement.
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