Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (81 page)

After Sir Geoffrey became Foreign Secretary his problems with Margaret Thatcher grew more difficult. They had weekly bilaterals, which demonstrated as never before that their personal styles were chalk and cheese. She was brisk and business-like, displaying an impatience to take and implement decisions. He was rambling and discursive, preferring to talk round a subject obliquely, without an outcome. Even when they did agree a course of action, he would sum it up in slow motion, often adding some qualifying phrase that nettled her. Two such phrases, used by him
ad nauseam
in her view, were ‘with all due deliberate speed’ and ‘subject to contract and survey’.
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Howe never recognised, let alone understood, why these clichés excited the ire of his boss.

The only third party who attended these mutually unendurable bilaterals was the Prime Minister’s Foreign Affairs Private Secretary, Charles Powell. He became so concerned by the stylistic gulf between the two principals that on one occasion he took it upon himself to suggest to Sir Geoffrey that he should come to the meetings with a set agenda and a prepared speaking note. The advice went unheeded. The Foreign Secretary continued to meander indecisively, and the Prime Minister reacted with increasing aggression.

Margaret Thatcher developed the view that the change of job had changed Sir Geoffrey’s personality. She felt that her once resolute Chancellor had
transmogrified into a vacillating Foreign Secretary. ‘His insatiable appetite for compromise led me to lash out at him in front of others’, was her description of their deteriorating relationship.
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These tongue-lashings could be vicious.

‘I know what you are going to say, Geoffrey, and the answer is no’,
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is how she began one meeting. ‘Your paper is twaddle, complete and utter twaddle. I don’t know how you have the nerve to submit it’,
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was her opening salvo at another. ‘If you know so much about industry, why don’t you go and work there’, was her insult to him during a presentation he made about European economic models. All these rude remarks were made in the presence of embarrassed officials.
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She could behave even worse in front of fellow politicians. At the time when her doubts over the SEA were growing, she called in Bill Cash, the Eurosceptic Member for Stafford. ‘There were just the three of us in the room’, recalled Cash. ‘She didn’t just give Geoffrey a handbagging. He got a massive sandbagging. She was just utterly and impossibly rude to him.’
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Sir Geoffrey Howe’s response to these torments was usually to suffer in silence. When her rants were in full flow, he would sometimes open his red box, take out a pile of letters and sign them in front of her. Occasionally, he would gradually return to the point she had been denouncing, ‘rather like a submarine coming up for air after a torpedo attack, with its conning tower wrecked and its hull badly damaged’, said one observer of this warfare. ‘Then it would be “bombs away” from her, all over again.’
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She may have intuitively understood that her Foreign Secretary was smouldering with ill-will towards her. Because neither of them ever attempted to clear the air, their mutual resentment grew worse. It was not their policy disagreements over issues such as South Africa, ‘Star Wars’ and above all Europe that caused their split, however much they contributed to it. What drove Margaret Thatcher up the wall with her Foreign Secretary were intangible and irrational irritations. They were perhaps best encapsulated in the French phrase ‘
une question de peau
’
.
It was as though proximity to his presence had the effect of sprinkling itching powder on her skin.

Four personal aspects of Geoffrey Howe’s life particularly irritated the Prime Minister’s skin: his ambition, his wife, his houses and his plotting. As grievances they did not add up to serious charges on objective examination. But Margaret Thatcher became incapable of objectivity towards her most senior colleague.

After the departure from the cabinet of Willie Whitelaw, and perhaps for some while before that, Geoffrey Howe was the odds on favourite to become the next prime minister if a vacancy unexpectedly occurred at No. 10. Margaret Thatcher woke up to this reality at the time of Westland when she herself briefly thought that she might have to resign. She believed that Howe secretly harboured the ambition to succeed her, and suspiciously magnified the possibility in her mind.

She spoke of it at least once to Ian Gow in the autumn of 1988. Being a friend and fan of the Foreign Secretary, he did not demur from the idea of a Prime Minister Howe, but pointed out that it was unlikely to happen because ‘Geoffrey is always so loyal’. ‘Not in private he isn’t,’ retorted Margaret Thatcher, ‘and anyway, it’s out of the question that he should be my successor. He’s quite past it. He will never, never, never succeed me!’
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The eruption of her anger so distressed Ian Gow that he quickly left the flat at No. 10 and repaired to the smoking room of the House of Commons, where he poured out his heart and the story to one or two friends, including me.
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Our nocturnal consensus was that Thatcher–Howe relations was becoming much worse than the Macmillan–Butler antipathy of the 1950s. This eventually killed off Rab Butler’s expected inheritance of the Tory crown in 1963.

One person who took the possibility of a Geoffrey Howe succession with the utmost seriousness was his wife, Elspeth. She was the personification of a familiar adage in the Westminster village: ‘Margaret is bad with wives.’ This was true. From her yanking handshake which pulled women she did not want to converse with past her at high speed in a reception line, to forgetting their names or talking past them with bored dismissiveness, the Prime Minister generally gave the impression in her encounters with cabinet wives that none of her colleagues had such a thing as a ‘better half’.

She was more respectful towards the spouses of grandees like Celia Whitelaw or Iona Carrington. But if there was one wife who irritated her more than any other, it was Elspeth Howe.

The explanation for this tension was that Lady Howe was a formidable character in her own right. Forthright in her opinions, feminist in her sympathies, sharp-tongued in her humour and fiercely supportive of her husband in his battles, she had an inner strength that grated against Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Iron Lady’ persona. There were no overt clashes between the two of them, although
many sensed their antagonism. John Biffen memorably compared the Elspeth–Margaret relationship to that of ‘two wasps in a jam jar’.
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Elspeth Howe kept her opinion to herself. Margaret Thatcher was less successful in this, scornfully deprecating the ‘feminist views’, ‘the progressive attitude’ and the ‘equal opportunities
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mindset’ of the Foreign Secretary’s wife. There was not much substance in these grumblings, but they did illustrate that both personally and politically Margaret Thatcher and Elspeth Howe were poles apart.
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A third area of bitchiness – no other word for it will do – that began to trouble Howe–Thatcher relations concerned the Foreign Secretary’s official residences: No. 1 Carlton Gardens and Chevening in Kent. Because the Howes were good home-makers and hosts, they made the most of these two ‘tied cottages’, particularly Chevening, which is one of England’s most beautiful country houses. They loved its parkland walks, its trees, its splendid eighteenth-century library, and its relaxing atmosphere of elegance and grace.

Political guests who were lucky enough to be invited to both Chequers and Chevening often said they preferred the atmosphere of Chevening. There is no suggestion that Margaret Thatcher ever had such feelings for she enjoyed Chequers to the full.

She mysteriously developed the view that the Howes were using Chevening to build up a base of support for a future leadership bid. She complained that they were using the house ‘to hold court’ – a phrase she used unkindly on more than one occasion.
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If there was a rational explanation for the Prime Ministerial jealousy that seeped out over Chevening, it may have started because several MPs returned from lunches, dinners or overnight stays with the Howes saying how much they had enjoyed themselves. Geoffrey Howe on duty could seem a rather stodgy figure. Off duty at Chevening, he relaxed into being a genial host, an amusing raconteur and a whizz at the billiards table.

If there was a serious issue that could ever make a section of the Conservative Party contemplate replacing Margaret Thatcher with Geoffrey Howe, it was
Europe. However improbable this imaginary threat seemed to the world, the fear of it lurked in the back of her mind. This was why her feud with the Foreign Secretary grew to be personal as well as political. So when she began working on her Bruges speech, in the summer recess of 1988, she had not one but two objectives. She wanted to check the Jacques Delors vision of a federal Europe and she wanted to checkmate the ambitions of Geoffrey Howe.

THE BRUGES SPEECH

Margaret Thatcher’s speech in Bruges was a carefully crafted and powerfully phrased oration. Read in its totality, it can be seen as a balanced mixture of strong support and sharp criticism for the European Community. But, as she must have known, it was the negative parts of the speech that made the biggest headlines.

She began with a barbed jest about how her invitation to speak about Britain in Europe could be compared to ‘inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence!’ In the next paragraph she sounded uncomfortably like an alien invader determined to overthrow the status quo of the Community as she declared: ‘Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution.’

She rowed back from that early hint of confrontation by emphasising that ‘Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’

She also highlighted the idea that east of the Iron Curtain there were nations that belonged to Europe just as much as the twelve member states in the Community. This was a visionary outlook expressed long before the communist bloc began to crumble.

The most important part of her speech was her head-on challenge to what Jacques Delors had been saying about a future government of Europe. She insisted that the way to build a successful community was by ‘willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states’ and not by closer integration. She warned of the follies of trying to fit strong nation-states into ‘some sort of identikit European personality’, in which the Community became ‘an institutional device constantly modified according to the dictates of some abstract intellectual concept … ossified by endless regulation’.

With her tone and language growing increasingly acerbic, she delivered two explosive sentences, which sent shock waves through many Europhile institutions and individuals:

Working more closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy … We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

After some sideswipes against a European Central Bank and in favour of the maintenance of frontiers to control illegal immigrants, she ended with a clarion call for ‘relishing our national identity no less than our common European endeavour’, and preserving ‘that Atlantic community – that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic – which is our noblest inheritance and our greatest strength’.
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Although polite applause greeted her at the College of Europe in Bruges, as she sat down after the speech its ripple effect produced sharp polarisation. Ardent Eurosceptics wanted to throw their hats into the air. Dedicated Europhiles wanted to throw up. Margaret Thatcher had cast down a gauntlet to the governing classes of Europe, particularly to the Brussels bureaucracy of the Commission and its President, Jacques Delors. She had not named him in the speech, but she might as well have declared war on him, for she was clearly targeting him as an enemy, not far behind Arthur Scargill or General Galtieri in her demonology.

Inevitably, the Bruges speech brought adverse reactions in high European places. On the evening it was delivered Margaret Thatcher dined with the Prime Minister of Belgium, who criticised her argument with considerable force. Similar reactions came from the pro-European professionals from Britain. Sir Michael Butler, Britain’s Ambassador and Permanent UK Representative to the EEC, described the Prime Minister’s portrayal of a European conglomerate state dominated by Brussels bureaucrats as ‘very dangerous stuff indeed’.
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Her Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, professed himself ‘deeply dismayed’ by the speech. He compared his own position to ‘being married to a clergyman who had suddenly proclaimed his disbelief in God’.
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It could be argued that both the jeers and the cheers for the speech were overdone. Margaret Thatcher had made a number of justified criticisms of the
Commission’s way of doing business, but she had also included a number of strikingly pro-European passages. However, two further factors caused the speech to be seen as an indictment of the Community. The first was the spin of Bernard Ingham’s press briefings, which accentuated the negative hostility of her Bruges message. The second factor was that the Prime Minister herself amplified it. Excited by the effect of her critical words, she returned to them with more partisan and more chauvinistic embellishments when she addressed the Tory Party Conference three weeks later in Brighton on 14 October 1989. She began with a rather boastful description of the impact her speech had made.

It caused a bit of a stir. [Laughter.] Indeed, from some of the reactions, you would have thought I had re-opened the Hundred Years War. [Laughter.] And from the avalanche of support, you’d have thought I’d won it single-handed. [Cheers, laughter and stamping applause from the delegates.]