Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (90 page)

Even worse than the awkward methodology of Hezza’s canvassing were the results of it. For in the opening days of the campaign the number of polite (sometimes not so polite!) rebuffs to Heseltine were discouraging. If he was keeping any kind of reliable scorecard, he must have known that he was well behind Margaret Thatcher. She was clearly ahead of him, even if the size of her lead was unclear. So the election was hers to lose – and lose it she did.

PETER MORRISON’S COMPLACENCY

Margaret Thatcher badly misjudged her campaign to be re-elected as leader of the Conservative Party. The reasons were a combination of hubris, poor intelligence and complacency. She also made a bad decision to attend a non-essential Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in Paris on the day of the vote, which she should have devoted to corralling waverers and doubters. These failures were part of a wider picture of being out of touch with the MPs who were the lifeblood of her support.

The hubris was the product of her increasingly isolated life at No. 10 after eleven and a half years as Prime Minister. She had become a poor listener, unable to grasp the seriousness of the Howe–Heseltine threat to her position. Instead of realising that she needed to put up a strong personal fight, she decided to remain aloof from the battle and to rely on surrogates and subordinates, who performed far from competently.

Her first hubristic decision was not to do any canvassing. Her attitude was, ‘Tory MPs know me, my record and my beliefs. If they were not already persuaded, there was not much left for me to persuade them with’.
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This was a serious mistake, as she belatedly acknowledged in her memoirs. ‘She’s off her rocker’, said Nicholas Budgen, who at the time was looking forward to his anticipated audience with the Prime Minister. ‘I suppose I’ll vote for her just the same, but I know at least a dozen colleagues who will be so offended by her refusal to see them that they’ll take umbrage and abstain or vote for Heseltine just to teach her a lesson.’
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Budgen’s comment reflected the fact of parliamentary life that many colleagues were expecting to be seen by their leader in the days before the election. This was the custom and practice of previous contests. To be snubbed by not being seen was a vote loser. More importantly, there is little doubt that in the run-up to the poll Margaret Thatcher could have won over a substantial number of waverers by meeting them in small groups and asking for their support. The power of prime ministerial incumbency can be magical, but Margaret Thatcher was too proud to use it. As a result, she forfeited anywhere between ten and thirty vital votes.

Her pride was buttressed by poor intelligence. She herself believed that it was unthinkable for a prime minister, in power with a large majority, to be thrown out between general elections as a result of a coup organised by her own MPs. This self-certainty was reinforced by unreliable forecasts of the votes she was confident of receiving. She had no help from the whips’ office in calculating this total. Although she had previously referred to it as ‘my office’, it was no such thing. Under the new Chief Whip, Tim Renton (a close friend of Geoffrey Howe), it was decreed that the whips as a body would stay scrupulously neutral in the campaign, in order to reflect the divisions in the party. To many back-benchers, it seemed an odd decision that the government whips were not supporting the head of the government, as they had done in the leadership election a year earlier. Their neutrality was a symptom of the undisciplined malaise that had infected the parliamentary party.

With the whips’ office neutralised, the task of counting, canvassing and organising Margaret Thatcher’s supporters fell to her campaign team. But this was not a well-drilled or energetic unit. It was characterised by absenteeism,
lack of commitment, laziness and incompetence. Why the leader herself failed to know this when half her party saw it all too clearly was a mystery.

Margaret Thatcher was nominated for the leadership by her Chancellor and Foreign Secretary, but neither John Major nor Douglas Hurd was asked to do any canvassing for their nominee. This task fell to her appointed campaign manager, George Younger, the Member for Ayr and a former Secretary of State for Scotland.

Although he had done a competent job in the role a year earlier, when given the much easier task of seeing off Sir Anthony Meyer, Younger was not the right man to deliver the defeat of Heseltine. He was too much of a Scottish gent, too remote from the new intake of English MPs preoccupied with the poll tax and too busy with his extensive business interests, which included being Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

If ‘Gentleman George’ was only a part-time member of the Prime Minister’s campaign team, some of the others she invited to help in this task were even less committed. Michael Jopling, the former Chief Whip, bowed out. So did Norman Fowler, citing his friendship with Geoffrey Howe. John Moore was absent on a business trip to the United States for most of the campaigning period. Although some robust cheer-leading came from Norman Tebbit, who had the chutzpah to hold a press conference on the doorstep of Michael Heseltine’s Wilton Crescent mansion, the team effort as a whole was noticeably lacklustre. The gaps in it had to be covered by Margaret Thatcher’s recently appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary, Peter Morrison, who
de facto
became her acting campaign manager. He was a disaster.

I knew Peter Morrison as well as anyone in the House. We had been school friends. He was the best man at my wedding in St Margaret’s, Westminster. We shared many private and political confidences. So I knew the immense pressures he was facing at the time when he was suddenly overwhelmed with the greatest new burden imaginable – running the Prime Minister’s election campaign.

Sixteen years in the House of Commons had treated Peter badly. His health had deteriorated. He had an alcohol problem that made him ill, overweight and prone to take long afternoon naps. In the autumn of 1990 he became embroiled in a police investigation into aspects of his personal life. The allegations against him were never substantiated, and the inquiry was subsequently
dropped. But at the time of the leadership election, Peter was worried, distracted and unable to concentrate. He covered up his difficulties by exuding an air of supreme confidence about the solidity of support for Margaret Thatcher. Not for him the tried and tested methods of probing voting intentions in this notoriously mendacious electorate. He blandly accepted every assurance he was given at face value, making little or no effort to check and double check them with the help of third parties. Unsurprisingly, this laid-back indolence produced false optimism and false figures.

One Thatcher supporter whose antennae detected the disintegration of the Prime Minister’s campaign team was Alan Clark. The day before the poll, he was sufficiently worried to cancel his afternoon engagements at the Ministry of Defence. He went to the House of Commons to see if he could help pull in a few more votes.

Clark found Peter Morrison asleep in his room. When roused, the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary dismissed his visitor’s anxiety.

‘Quite all right, old boy, relax.’

‘What’s the arithmetic look like?’

‘Tightish, but OK … I’ve got Michael on 115. It could be 124, at the worst.’

‘Look, Peter, I don’t think people are being straight with you’, said Alan Clark. ‘Don’t you think we should be out there twisting arms?’

‘No point. In fact, it could be counter-productive. I’ve got a theory about this. I think some people may abstain on the first ballot in order to give Margaret a fight, then rally to her on the second.’

Clark thought this was ‘balls’. He left the room in deep gloom, complaining in his diary, ‘There is absolutely no oomph in her campaign
whatsoever
. Peter is useless, far worse than I thought … He’s sozzled. There isn’t a single person working for her who cuts any ice at all … And she’s in Paris.’
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The decision to go to Paris instead of staying at Westminster to campaign was a fatal error of judgement. What was calling her to the other side of the Channel was the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a largely ceremonial event to celebrate the ending of the Cold War and to set up a new forum for discussing human rights and security issues in Eastern Europe. The heads of government attending the conference included Presidents Bush, Mitterrand, Gorbachev and Chancellor Kohl. They were all politicians capable of understanding Margaret Thatcher’s need to be absent in order to fight a
leadership election at home. But she had no such understanding herself. She wanted to be on the world stage, not grubbing around for votes at Westminster. It was another indication of her aloofness from domestic politics, which was making her unpopular with her own troops.

The final clincher of her decision to go to Paris was the report from her campaign team that she was home and dry. Margaret Thatcher held a supper at Chequers on the evening of Saturday 17 November for her core group of supporters and campaigners. The guests included Peter Morrison, Kenneth Baker, John Wakeham, Gerry Neale and Michael Neubert – MPs who had supposedly been assiduously working to re-elect the Prime Minister. All of them were supremely optimistic about her prospects. Peter Morrison reported that he was confident of 220 votes for Thatcher, 110 for Heseltine and with forty predicted abstentions. That gave the Prime Minister what she called ‘an easy win’. However, she was also cautious enough to warn her listeners of what she called ‘the lie factor’. She told Morrison, ‘I remember Ted thought the same thing. Don’t trust our figures – some people are on the books of both sides.’
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There was one other last-minute ingredient in the election that may have swung votes away from her. The only form of campaigning she engaged in was giving newspaper interviews. Her final salvo appeared in
The Times
on Monday 19 November. It was counter-productive. Interviewed by the paper’s editor, Simon Jenkins, Margaret Thatcher launched an aggressive attack on Michael Heseltine, stabbing her heavily annotated copy of his book
Where There’s a Will
as she declared that his policies of interventionism, corporatism, reducing the Community Charge and reducing taxation ‘sounds just like the Labour party’. Her challenger, she claimed, would ‘stop up the well-head of enterprise’ and take the country back to the bad old days. To many readers, this sounded batty. Whatever could be said about Michael Heseltine, he was no socialist. As for his plans to cut the poll tax, this was just what many Tory MPs wanted if they were going to have any chance of retaining their seats. Some of them crossed over into the Heseltine camp after reading this interview.

Perhaps Margaret Thatcher may have intuitively sensed that her grip on her party was slipping. She had growing doubts about the upbeat Morrison vote predictions. Simon Jenkins felt he had spotted a moment of her personal vulnerability during his
Times
interview with her when Margaret lent forward in her chair to say: ‘After three election victories, it really would be the cruellest thing.’
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Despite these forebodings, she ignored her electorate at Westminster in the vital forty-eight hours before the vote, and headed off to Paris.

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT IN PARIS

Election day dawned uneasily and lethargically for the headless Thatcher camp at Westminster. Not only was the candidate absent; her proposer, John Major, was in hospital having a wisdom tooth extracted and her seconder, Douglas Hurd, was accompanying the Prime Minister to Paris. Peter Morrison, in contrast to the Heselteenies, decided not to do any last-minute campaigning. Instead, on the morning of the poll he intermittently patrolled the corridor outside Committee Room 14 where MPs were trickling in throughout the day to cast their votes. ‘Thank you for supporting the Prime Minister’,
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he kept intoning, like a bishop bestowing blessings on those he presumed were the faithful. If his assumptions had been correct she would have won by a landslide.

In Paris, Margaret Thatcher was having a busy forty-eight hours. She breakfasted with President Bush at the US Embassy, lunched with the other leaders at the Elysée Palace, spoke at the CSCE conference and had bilateral talks with several heads of government, including President Gorbachev. The conference ended at 4.30 p.m. with a final dinner at Versailles, scheduled for 8 p.m. Between the two engagements she returned to the British Embassy to await the result, which was due soon after 6 p.m.

At the appointed hour her inner circle assembled in her bedroom at the Embassy. Peter Morrison had flown over to be at her side for the result. Also present were Charles Powell, Bernard Ingham, Cynthia Crawford and the British Ambassador Sir Ewen Fergusson. The Chief Whip, Tim Renton, rang with the result at 6.20 p.m. It was already known to Charles Powell, who had ingeniously set up his own line to the House of Commons. So he got the bad news ten seconds earlier. He did not pass it on to the Prime Minister, but gave a thumbs-down sign behind her back.
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As the official channel of communication, Peter Morrison took down the figures from Renton and passed them to Margaret Thatcher, who was sitting calmly at the dressing table with her back to everyone else. ‘Not, I am afraid, as good as we had hoped’, was the verdict of her PPS as he handed her the result.
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It showed: Thatcher 204; Heseltine 152; Abstentions or Void 16.

What to an outsider would have looked like a victory was immediately recognised by the insiders as a defeat. For by the tantalisingly narrow margin of four votes, she had just failed to avert a second ballot. This was a body blow, as Margaret Thatcher knew. Although her back was turned to everyone in the room as the news came through, Charles Powell was watching her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. ‘I could see from the look that crossed her face that her immediate reaction was “That’s it”’, he recalled.
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