Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (88 page)

The vehemence of Margaret Thatcher’s reaction to the Rome summit unsettled Geoffrey Howe for two reasons. Although he was clear minded enough to see that the Italian manoeuvres were unprofessional and unfair, he nevertheless believed that Britain should have given a measured and patient response by simply postponing the arguments on EMU until the next Intergovernmental Conference. When the Prime Minister came out of her corner with unconcealed rage, Sir Geoffrey’s pro-European sensibilities were grievously offended.

A more serious blow was Howe’s realisation that Margaret Thatcher’s rejection of EMU and the Delors philosophy that accompanied it were surprisingly popular. As Leader of the House, he could read the parliamentary runes as well as anyone. The eruptions of cheering during the 30 October statement marked a watershed. Sir Geoffrey was a child of the Heath era, when most Conservatives intoned the mantra, ‘We are the party of Europe’. Suddenly it was apparent that this ground was crumbling. The Eurosceptics had moved into the ascendant.

Everything that Howe had worked for as Foreign Secretary was being challenged by a populist Prime Minister who was showing a fierce determination to rally support for her cause, not only in the House but also in the country. This last fear loomed large in Sir Geoffrey’s mind as he asked himself: ‘Was she, I began to wonder, talking herself into the mode in which she intended, consciously or unconsciously, to fight the next election?’
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To heighten such worries, this anti-European populism, which the Prime Minister had unleashed in Parliament, was magnified by the media. ‘Up Yours – Delors’ was the headline in the
Sun
on 31 October. It was the most colourful example of a swelling chorus of support for the Prime Minister. To see this surge of public opinion erupting so passionately against Europe upset Sir Geoffrey even more. It was sweeping away whatever residual hopes he might still have harboured of succeeding Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. It was breaking his remaining moorings of loyalty and collective responsibility to her government. So it was for a variety of complex private emotions and public policy differences that Geoffrey Howe seized his moment and sat down to compose his letter of resignation.

The letter was a laborious production running to nearly 1,200 words, and taking two days to draft. When it was still incomplete, the Deputy Prime Minister attended his last cabinet meeting. He had little more than a walk-on part in the proceedings, but before he opened his mouth several colleagues picked up the vibrations of heightened Howe–Thatcher antagonism.

One perceptive observer of the scene, a Howe sympathiser, was John Major, who described Howe’s final cabinet meeting, on the morning of his resignation, as the worst of all:

Geoffrey and Margaret were sitting side by side, directly opposite me. They could barely bring themselves to look at one another. Geoffrey stared down at his papers, his lips pursed; Margaret had a disdainful air, her eyes glittering. When he looked down the long cabinet table, she looked up it. When she put her head down to read her notes, he looked straight up. The body language said it all. This treatment of a senior colleague was embarrassing for the whole cabinet.
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The treatment got worse. When the discussion turned to the legislative programme, which was due to be introduced at the opening of the new session of Parliament in a few days time, Geoffrey Howe as Leader of the House and Lord President of the Council made the anodyne comment that two or three departments had not yet finalised their bills. This was merely a polite prompt to the ministers concerned, which needed no further comment. The Prime Minister exploded like a headmistress delivering a rocket to an errant schoolboy. ‘Why aren’t their bills ready?’ she demanded. ‘Isn’t it the Lord President’s responsibility to see that this kind of thing has been done?’ The rebuke flowed on for a couple of embarrassing minutes.

‘What the hell? This is positively the last time’, was Howe’s unspoken thought as he suffered the insults in silence. He had already made up his mind to resign. As he later recalled the incident: ‘So far from being the last straw, this final tantrum was for me the first confirmation that I had taken the right decision.’
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The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister met for the last time as cabinet colleagues at 6 p.m. later that day. Although she had been forewarned of his imminent resignation, she appeared to be shaken by it. ‘Is there anything we can do that would cause you to change your mind?’ she asked. The answer was a polite negative. Geoffrey Howe then produced his resignation
letter. ‘It’s very generous’, she commented as she reached the end of page one. ‘Better wait till you’ve read it all’, was his response. By the time she finished reading it her tone had changed. ‘I can see now why we shouldn’t be able to change your mind. You’ve obviously thought a lot about it.’
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They parted with the odd formality of their first-ever handshake. In the tension of the moment, both of them forgot the tradition that fellow Members of Parliament do not shake hands. It was a strange ending to what, at its best, had once been a strong political partnership.

The artificiality continued with the exchange of resignation letters. Howe’s was too turgid to make much impact – at least in comparison with his resignation statement to the House of Commons two weeks later. He made the obvious point that he felt he must leave the government because he did not share the Prime Minister’s views on Europe. But then he confused the issue by presenting a most opaque picture of his own views. He was not a Euro-idealist or federalist. He was against an
imposed
single currency, but believed that the risks of being left out of EMU were severe. On the other hand, he thought that, ‘more than one form of EMU possible. The important thing is not to rule in or out any one particular solution absolutely.’
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When these words of Delphic ambivalence were passed round late at night in the smoking room of the House of Commons, the Tory MP for Saddleworth, Geoffrey Dickens, created pantomime hilarity by booming out, ‘Written by Mr Wishy-Washy!’
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The obscurity of Howe’s prose style in his letter of resignation left it far from clear what exactly were his disagreements with the Prime Minister over Europe. This gave Margaret Thatcher the opportunity to blur their differences still further in her reply. Her line was that their policy disagreements were not nearly as great as he had suggested. She even had the chutzpah to claim that her statement on the Rome summit had demonstrated the unity of the Conservatives: ‘We have always been the party of Europe and will continue to be so.’
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Prime Ministerial correspondence at the time of resignations often falls into the category of what Dr Johnson called, ‘in lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath’.
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Parts of Margaret Thatcher’s valedictory epistle to Sir Geoffrey Howe might well win first prize for lapidary fabrication.

Having completed her reply to his resignation letter, the Prime Minister faced the new political situation with gritty realism. ‘It was a relief he had gone. But I had no doubt of the political damage it would do. All the talk of a leadership
bid by Michael Heseltine would start again’ was her assessment.
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So her first moves were to try and shore up her crumbling authority with the necessary reshuffle – her fourth in less than a year. She made John McGregor the new Leader of the House; moved Kenneth Clarke into McGregor’s job at Education; and brought William Waldegrave into the cabinet as Secretary of State for Health. Her first priority had been to persuade Norman Tebbit to come back into her first line of senior ministers, but he declined on the grounds that he had to look after his paralysed wife, Margaret. Another explanation voiced by some wag in Annie’s Bar
^‡
was that ‘Norman may have been a pilot, but he’s not a kamikaze pilot’.
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Whatever the reasons at the time, Tebbit was remorseful about his decision in later life. Three days after the death of Margaret Thatcher he caustically told the House of Lords, ‘I left her, I fear, at the mercy of her friends. That I do regret.’
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There was a widespread expectation at Westminster among both friends and foes that another leadership election would take place in the new session of Parliament, but no one knew who would stand in it, or who would win it. Michael Heseltine was the obvious contender, having been trailing his coat ever since his departure over the Westland crisis almost five years earlier. Yet he began by playing his hand badly. He published an open letter to his constituency chairman calling for the Conservative Party to chart a new course in Europe. But before the ink was dry, its author set off on a private visit to the Middle East. This absence was an error of judgement, which became a focal point for mockery by his critics. The noisiest of these was Bernard Ingham, who orchestrated a ‘put up or shut up’ stream of anti-Heseltine stories in the press. ‘This was just lighting the blue touch paper and retiring to a safe distance – in this case to Amman’, was Ingham’s contribution to the furore from the Downing Street press office.
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With Heseltine hesitating in Arabia, and MPs enjoying a brief recess away from Westminster, there was an uneasy lull in the countdown to the anticipated outbreak of hostilities against the Prime Minister. For a week or so it looked as though the pressures on her might be receding. Then they were sharply increased
by two dreadful by-election results, first in Bootle and then an even worse one in Bradford North, where the Tory candidate came bottom of the poll.
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These humiliations had been preceded by a disastrous Tory defeat in Ian Gow’s old stronghold of Eastbourne, where the Liberal Democrats captured the seat, with a swing of 21.1 per cent against the government.
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Despite the ill omens from the electorate, the new session of Parliament began well for Margaret Thatcher, as she wiped the floor with Neil Kinnock in her opening speech in the debate on the Loyal Address. In those exchanges the Prime Minister indulged in a sally of over-confidence, which had serious consequences for her with one of her listeners. Attempting to play down the seriousness of her quarrels with her recently departed Deputy, Margaret Thatcher declared

If the Leader of the Opposition reads my right hon. and learned Friend’s letter, he will be very pressed indeed to find any significant policy difference on Europe between my right hon. and learned Friend and the rest of us on this side.
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This was a factually correct statement, yet it contained a great untruth. Sir Geoffrey Howe’s resignation letter had waffled negatively about ‘the mood’ the Prime Minister had struck after the Rome summit, but had omitted the specifics of their disagreements. Nevertheless, their divisions on Europe ran deep, as she well knew. Her attempt to minimise their differences on policy was a sophistry that infuriated Sir Geoffrey. From that moment he was determined not only to make a resignation statement, but to bring the Prime Minister down with it. At long last he prepared to strike.

REFLECTION

The final months of Margaret Thatcher’s eleven years as Prime Minister were dominated by two contradictory features: her inability to listen to her political friends at home and her ability to make far-sightedly bold judgements on major international issues.

Longevity in high office often leads to arrogant remoteness. The nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton expressed this in his aphorism, ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.
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There was nothing corrupt
in the venal sense of the word about Margaret Thatcher. But in the decaying or decomposing meaning of the word, her political antennae were falling apart. She was looking tired. Her Defence Secretary, Tom King, noticed ‘her worrying new tendency to yawn with exhaustion at cabinet meetings’.
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Whether it was from tiredness or stubbornness, she was no longer a listening politician.

All sorts of friendly voices tried to warn her about the danger signals. Right up to the time of his assassination, Ian Gow kept begging her not to let her irritation with Geoffrey Howe fester into an irreparable rift. Tristan Garel-Jones, who had played a key role in minimising the Meyer vote in the 1989 leadership election, told her in the bluntest of terms that she could lose up to a hundred more votes to Heseltine in any future contest if she did not sort out the poll tax. George Younger urged her to tone down the aggression in her anti-European rhetoric because over half the party were still pro-Europe. These well-intentioned suggestions were made to the Prime Minister in late 1989, but she took no notice of any of them.

Perhaps the most balanced flow of advice came from the Executive of the 1922 Committee, who met her on a monthly basis. All shades of party opinion were represented at these small gatherings. The overwhelming majority of the Executive were supporters of the Prime Minister and wanted her to continue in office. But she ignored their suggestions with an ill-disguised contempt that was painfully reminiscent of Ted Heath’s rudeness to the 1922 Committee fifteen years earlier.

One of Margaret Thatcher’s keenest supporters on the back benches was Dame Jill Knight, whose popularity with her colleagues ensured her re-election as Vice-Chair of the 1922 Committee for over a decade. She became disappointed with the Prime Minister’s intransigence, particularly on the poll tax. ‘Sadly, Margaret got to the point where she just wouldn’t listen to any of us’, she recalled. ‘She hunkered down in her Downing Street bunker with Charles Powell and Bernard Ingham, and preferred their opinions to those of us who knew what was going on in the country and in the House. It was terribly sad.’
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The sadness of her supporters was matched by the high spirits of her adversaries. Michael Heseltine sensed that the Prime Minister was on the skids, so he greased them with cunning and diligence. Support for him was growing since he was the obvious rallying point for discontent, even though he seemed cautious about actually raising the standard of rebellion. But even those
who opposed Heseltine’s policies, particularly towards Europe, saw him as a formidable challenger. One of the most vocal Eurosceptics, Tony Marlow, the MP for Northampton North, was gloomily predicting ‘a new Prime Minister by Christmas’ as early as mid-October.
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To the listeners who agreed with this forecast, the PM in waiting was Hezza.