Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (86 page)

The only senior colleague who shared her attitudes was her Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Nicholas Ridley. He gave a recklessly anti-German interview to the editor of
The
Spectator
, Dominic Lawson, in July 1990. In its sensational article, Ridley was recorded as saying that European Monetary Union was, ‘a German racket to take over the whole of Europe … I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’

To stir up even more mischief, the magazine’s front cover portrayed Nicholas Ridley drawing a Hitler moustache on a likeness of Chancellor Helmut Kohl. In his article, Dominic Lawson opined that, ‘Mr Ridley’s confidence in expressing his views … must owe a little something to the knowledge that they are not significantly different from those of the Prime Minister’.
²⁵
It was a fair comment. As I knew from having lunched with Nicholas Ridley a week before
The Spectator
article, he was to a large extent repeating the anti-German vitriol which he had privately heard straight from His Mistress’s Voice.

Margaret Thatcher tried hard to save Nicholas’s Ridley’s skin as the storm raged over his interview. Her initial view was that his gaffe was not a resigning issue. ‘It was an excess of honesty that ultimately brought him down’, she said.
²⁶

The reason why he had to go was that the Chairman and Executive Committee of the 1922 Committee insisted on it. Ridley had been the high priest of political incorrectness for many an entertaining year, but the PC vultures got him in the end. He was the last keeper of the Thatcherite flame left in the cabinet, so his departure left her even more exposed.

A sadder loss came on 30 July, when Ian Gow was assassinated by an IRA bomb placed under his car in the garage of his Eastbourne home. Margaret Thatcher immediately drove down from No. 10. She spent several hours comforting Ian’s widow, Jane, attending an evening mass at the family church – St Luke’s, Stone Cross. Of all the terrorist killings during her years as Prime Minister, the death of Ian Gow was probably the bereavement that touched her most deeply. She had built an enduring friendship with him in the tough and early years when he was her first PPS.

He survived many difficult shared experiences, including his principled resignation over the Anglo-Irish agreement. The key to their political intimacy lay in the chemistry between their two personalities.

There has never been, and perhaps never will be, such a successful Prime Minister–PPS relationship as the one that flourished between Ian Gow and Margaret Thatcher in her first term. It was founded on two pillars: his absolute loyalty to her, and her willingness to respond to his faithful reporting on the moods and murmurings of the Conservative Party in Parliament. Only when she had moved him higher to temporary ministerial office did she realise how much she missed him. Yet he remained her confidant. Although he failed to build bridges between her and his other great friend, Geoffrey Howe, Ian Gow always stayed unsycophantically yet reverentially close to ‘The Lady’, as he called her. His last great service was to minimise the effect of the 1989 stalking-horse challenge. If murder had not prevented him from repeating his pivotal role a year later, it is unlikely that the Prime Minister would have narrowly lost the first round of the 1990 contest.

‘Such a stalwart … so steadfast in his faith … so courageous in his convictions’ were three of the phrases Margaret Thatcher used when talking to me about Ian Gow after his funeral in Eastbourne on 8 August.
²⁷
Ian would have reciprocated the compliments. He would also have seen, more clearly than she could see, that the months ahead were going to be hard pounding for a Prime Minister who, for one reason or another, had lost virtually all her truest bondsmen.

REFLECTION

‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
’
Lady Bracknell’s words in Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance
of Being Ernest
can be adjusted to apply, all too appropriately, to Margaret Thatcher’s losses of her senior cabinet colleagues in the 1989–1990 period. It may even be argued that the Prime Minister herself bore a passing resemblance to Lady Bracknell because of her domineering wilfulness, her refusal to listen and the symbolic wielding of her handbag to silence dissent.

Seen purely in terms of man-management, there is little doubt that the departures from their posts of the Foreign Secretary and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were blows to the government that could easily have been avoided. Less gratuitous rudeness; more collegiate teamwork; an observance of convention that the views of the holders of the great offices of state have primacy over the opinions of Downing Street advisers – such changes in Margaret Thatcher’s style of governance could have avoided the debacle at the top of her cabinet.

But it was not that simple for two important reasons. First, the faults of personality were far from one-sided among the dysfunctional trio who headed the British government in this period. Second, the splits between them were not just about man-management. They were also about important issues of foreign and economic policy where divisions between the principal office holders ran deep. With the wisdom of hindsight and history, it is now possible to offer an answer to the question: Who was right?

What Shakespeare called ‘the insolence of office’
²⁸
grows with the years spent in occupancy of great positions. At the height of the personality clashes described in the last three chapters, Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for a full decade. Nigel Lawson was the second longest serving Chancellor of the twentieth century. His six years and four months in the job were exceeded only by the seven years and one month of David Lloyd George. Geoffrey Howe had been Foreign Secretary for six years, preceded by four years as Chancellor. All three had grown not only in experience, but also in over-confident certainty that their views were right.

Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson were both resentful of the Prime Minister’s challenges to the received wisdom of their departments. They both thought that they were in charge of foreign and economic policy. They could be secretive, sneaky and devious in their public and private efforts to outmanoeuvre the Prime Minister in order to get their own way. Un-collegiate behaviour was by no means a one-way street among the top three figures.

Geoffrey Howe’s enthusiasm for closer monetary and political union with Europe was the fault-line in his relationship with Margaret Thatcher. But it has since emerged that she was on the right side of that line, and that he was spectacularly wrong. Who today would defend Howe’s championship of EMU during the 1980s, now we can so clearly see the disaster of the Eurozone and the single currency of the present day?

Similarly with Nigel Lawson, most economists would now say that his enthusiasm for Britain joining the ERM was a strategic mistake. So were his policies of shadowing the Deutschmark, and of sowing the seeds of a recklessly inflationary boom in his 1988 Budget. Again, as we look back with the perspective of history, it appears that it was the Prime Minister, not the Chancellor, who made the better judgements.

Margaret Thatcher was not always right She could be petty (as she was over the official residences); vindictive (in authorising Bernard Ingham to brief against the authority of the Deputy Prime Minister); and foolishly stubborn (in fighting to keep Alan Walters). Yet these were unhappy sideshows. On the important policy questions that separated the Prime Minister from her Foreign Secretary and her Chancellor, Margaret Thatcher has largely been vindicated by subsequent events. Whatever the errors of her tactics, and the excesses of her zeal and her language, Margaret Thatcher was right on the great issue of Britain’s involvement in European Monetary and Political Union. It is the paradox of history that because she was right, she fell.

35

Countdown to the coup

THE INVASION OF KUWAIT

Margaret Thatcher’s last months as Prime Minister were dominated by the two issues that brought her down: the poll tax and Europe. They were compounded by her inability to hold on to her support base within the Conservative parliamentary party. Yet, although she handled her domestic problems with a singular lack of skill and subtlety, she remained an influential figure on the world stage, particularly when shaping the West’s response to the invasion of Kuwait.

On 2 August 1990, the day when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and declared it to be Iraqi territory, Margaret Thatcher was at the Aspen Institute in Colorado, preparing to address its fortieth anniversary conference, which was to be opened by President George H.W. Bush. The coincidence of the two leaders being together had the effect of strengthening the Western response. The President’s first reaction to the crisis was that Arab diplomacy should be given a chance to bring about the withdrawal of Iraqi forces and the restoration of the lawful government of Kuwait.

The Prime Minister was underwhelmed by this approach. During the next few weeks of the crisis she was the voice of the hawkish tendency within the Western alliance. Her most famous advice to the US President, ‘Well, all right, George, but this is no time to go wobbly’,
¹
was given in the context of an Anglo-American disagreement about whether or not to go after two Iraqi tankers which were violating the rules of the immediate Western blockade of the Gulf. On that occasion George H.W. Bush’s instinct to prefer diplomacy to naval intervention was the course of action that prevailed. But the President took the Prime Minister’s phrase to heart, repeating it like a mantra almost daily
to his staff, as if to prove that he would be resolute in leading the US response to the invasion. In this way the spirit of the Iron Lady hovered over the White House like a guardian angel warning against wobbliness in the build-up to the war.

Five days after the opening of the Aspen conference, Margaret Thatcher cut short a planned family holiday in Colorado in order to go to Washington for further talks on the Iraq crisis at the White House. It had been widely speculated that her influence with the new administration was waning because she did not see eye to eye with President Bush on German reunification. Although this disagreement was real, it did not prevent Margaret Thatcher from moving into her familiar role of presidential confidante on planning the international response to the invasion of Kuwait during her visit to Washington on 6 August. As she recalled: ‘For all the friendship and co-operation I had had from President Reagan, I was never taken into the Americans’ confidence more than I was during the two hours or so I spent that afternoon at the White House.’
²

The Oval Office meeting began a highly restricted session attended by the President, the Prime Minister and their key aides, Brent Scowcroft, US National Security Adviser, and Charles Powell. Margaret Thatcher’s main concern was how to protect Saudi Arabia. With Iraqi tanks moving up to the Saudi border, she thought the main danger was that the oil-rich kingdom would be invaded before its rulers formally asked the West for help. Fortunately, King Fahd did make the request quickly and within twenty-four hours the 82nd Airborne Division and forty-eight USAF F-15 fighters had arrived in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Margaret Thatcher was the first to see that limited deterrence might not be enough. She was as clear in her assessment of Saddam Hussein as she had been in her view of General Galtieri. She believed that Iraqi troops would never leave Kuwait until they were thrown out and she thought the West must remain in a state of maximum preparedness to prevent Saddam from extending his invasion into Saudi Arabia. As she put it in a minute to her Defence Secretary, Tom King, on 12 April: ‘We thought that Iraq would not move into Kuwait, although their forces were massing on the border. Let us not make the same mistake again. They may move into Saudi Arabia. We must be ready.’
³

She was as good as her written word. During August, Britain dispatched one squadron of Tornado and one squadron of Jaguar combat aircraft to the
region, supported by AWACs and tanker planes. The Prime Minister also authorised the despatch of the 7th Armoured Brigade, a self-supporting force of 7,500 men, including 120 tanks, a regiment of Field Artillery, a battalion of armoured infantry and anti-tank helicopters. ‘My heavens, a marvellous commitment, this is really something’,
⁴
said President Bush when she told him of Britain’s decision, which was supported by a Commons vote of 437 to thirty-five.
⁵

Although most of her moves were made within the secret confines of diplomatic contacts and military preparations, Margaret Thatcher’s early contributions to the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein were of pivotal importance. Fortified by her experiences during the Falklands conflict, she was at the top of her game in terms of thinking several moves ahead. Three of her initiatives deserve particular mention.

First, she insisted on the appointment of General Sir Peter de la Billière to be the commander of UK forces in the Gulf. She had known him since they struck up a good rapport in the aftermath of the siege of the Iranian Embassy in 1980, when he had been in command of the SAS. She admired both his leadership and his linguistic skills in Arabic. He was not the choice of the Ministry of Defence to be commander in the Gulf, partly because he was regarded as something of a maverick, and partly because he was one week away from retirement. But Margaret Thatcher beat off these objections, saying that she needed ‘a fighting General’, and that if Sir Peter was not appointed, she would make him her personal adviser on military affairs at No. 10. This threat caused the Ministry of Defence to beat a retreat. General Peter de la Billière was quickly appointed Commander of UK forces in the Gulf.
⁶

Second, the Prime Minister conducted a vigorous diplomatic battle to achieve unity among Arab governments and rulers, many of whom she had come to know well. King Hussein of Jordan, who surprised everyone by supporting the Iraqi invasion, was given a right royal handbagging when he came to lunch with the Prime Minister on 31 August. It appeared to weaken his already faltering backing for Saddam Hussein.
⁷

Across the Middle East, Margaret Thatcher was credited for the speed and strength of the West’s response to the invasion of Kuwait. Her Defence Secretary, Tom King, made an early visit to the region as the military build up got under way. ‘The Gulf rulers were all certain that it was because she persuaded President
Bush at Aspen to move immediately that Saddam did not move on into Saudi Arabia’,
⁸
he recalled.

The same view was held by the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, who was frequently telephoned by Margaret Thatcher with advice and promises of support. A year after the conflict, I had an audience with the king in Riyadh, who said, ‘Your Prime Minister was terrific – she strengthened me, she strengthened President Bush and she helped to unite the whole coalition against Saddam’.
⁹

In the early stages of these preparatory moves I had a conversation about the Kuwait crisis with Margaret Thatcher after Ian Gow’s funeral on 8 August. I found her resolve and commitment to the inevitable war with Saddam to be positively Churchillian. At a time when her Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was holding the optimistic view that sanctions and military pressures would cause the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait, the Prime Minister’s reaction was a beacon of clarity. ‘We will have to fight Saddam, you mark my words’, she said.
¹⁰

Convinced of this outcome of events, she devoted a huge amount of time and effort in her last four months of power to preparing Britain and its coalition partners for the conflict. ‘I found myself reliving in an only slightly different form my experiences of the build-up to the battle for the Falklands’, she recalled.
¹¹
With a small group of ministers and service chiefs, she made almost daily decisions on selecting military targets, wording UN resolutions and questioning the military about the quality of their equipment. Her grilling of the directors of Vickers about the reliability of the Challenger tank became a legend in company folklore.

One of her last major decisions as Prime Minister was to double the British commitment to the Gulf War preparations to 30,000 men, an upgrade from a brigade to a division. It was ratified by the cabinet at their historic meeting on 22 November, the day when she announced her resignation as Prime Minister.

Such was the febrile state of parliamentary opinion on domestic issues in the autumn of 1990 that the Prime Minister’s preparations for the defeat of Saddam Hussein were seen as a sideshow. But the fact that Britain, the United States and their coalition partners were so ready and so determined to restore the lawful government of Kuwait deserves to be recorded in history as another of Margaret Thatcher’s finest hours, even though she was forced out of office five months before the eventual victory in the Gulf War.

THE POISON OF THE POLL TAX

The year 1990 was when the poll tax poisoned the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and her backbenchers. The month of March was the turning point. The rot started with a disastrous by-election in Mid Staffordshire on 22 March. When Conservative MPs saw a Tory majority of 14,654 converted into a Labour gain by 9,449, many of them were aghast; not only about their own electoral prospects, but even more about the root cause of the 21 per cent swing against the government – which they identified as the growing unpopularity of the new tax.
¹²

On 31 March, the day before the introduction of the Community Charge in England and Wales, a demonstration at Trafalgar Square erupted into serious rioting, with 341 arrests and 331 police officers, plus eighty-six members of the public injured.
¹³
Although Margaret Thatcher rightly blamed the violence on left-wing militants, there was almost as much non-violent anger in the Tory shires when the first poll tax bills arrived. MPs’ post-bags were full of furious letters demanding a U-turn.

Margaret Thatcher had executed many a discreet reversal of policy during her eleven years as Prime Minister, but this was a U-turn too far. The problem was that she had gone out on such a limb with her passionate advocacy for her flagship tax. This zeal was to prove her undoing. Unable to back down, she tried to alleviate the effects of the tax with a series of complicated emasculations. They included transitional relief measures, capping proposals, and a root and branch review carried out by the new Secretary of State for the Environment, Chris Patten. However, the most important of the changes required legislation, and it looked as though the mood on the back benches was so anti-poll tax that no measure except dropping the tax would pass through the House. It was stand-off time between the Prime Minister and her party in Parliament.

Meanwhile the political situation in the country continued to deteriorate. Opinion polls in April showed that Labour was enjoying a 24.5 per cent lead over the Conservatives. Margaret Thatcher’s personal ratings plummeted to 23 per cent, even worse than her low point in 1981, when she had been deemed to be the most unpopular prime minister ever.
¹⁴

On 4 May 1990 there were English local government elections that confirmed to the Prime Minister’s critics that her unpopularity was increasing. The Tories
lost control of another twelve councils and could only hold on to 32 per cent of the overall vote. However, there were some pleasant surprises amidst the general disaster. A handful of councils, which had been pursuing a strategy of Thatcherite expenditure cuts, demonstrated that their good housekeeping could result in low Community Charge figures and electoral popularity. These local authorities, which included Wandsworth, Westminster, Hastings, Thanet, Trafford and Southend, held on to their Conservative majorities. Margaret Thatcher seized on these scraps of good electoral news as evidence that ‘the Community Charge is beginning to work. It will increasingly bring the profligate and inefficient to book’.
¹⁵

Although she may well have been right about this, a growing number of Tory MPs were in no mood to give their leader time to work out solutions to the poll tax problems. An alarmist atmosphere began to take root at meetings of the 1922 Committee and other party committees. Late at night around the bars on the House of Commons terrace, a spirit of
sauve qui peut
emerged among the defeatist tendency of colleagues who had convinced themselves that they would lose their seats in two years time. A whispering campaign got under way with the message that both the poll tax and the Prime Minister should go.

This was by no means a one-way street. In the country, there was evidence to suggest that the tide was turning in Margaret Thatcher’s direction. Opinion polls indicated that Labour’s lead had been halved, and that the Prime Minister was well ahead of the opposition leader, Neil Kinnock, on the question of ‘Who would you trust to run the country?’ There was also a solid hard core of government loyalists at Westminster who grew increasingly angry at the whisperers and the trouble-stirrers associated with Michael Heseltine.

Amidst the growing tension, the loyalists were fond of quoting two lines from a previous era of Tory infighting: ‘Steady the Buffs’ and ‘Pro bono publico, no bloody panico’. But in the volatile mood among at least a third of Conservative MPs in the summer of 1990, there was too little steadiness and too much ‘panico’.
^*

The government did have one stroke of luck in the middle of the poll tax crisis. On the night of 13 June, the Prime Minister was working her way through her pile of red boxes when she came across a note from her private secretary, reporting on a telephone call received earlier in the evening from government lawyers. They advised, on the basis of a recent court judgment, that many local authorities could have their spending capped under the existing legislation, if the government set an early figure for what it deemed to be ‘excessive’ spending.
¹⁶