Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (121 page)

On as many Monday mornings as possible I used to meet Ken Baker and the Central Office team to look through the diary for the week ahead. Over lunch I would also discuss the political situation with Ken, the business managers and some other Cabinet colleagues. That Monday we talked about almost everything except what was on everyone’s mind – whether or not there would be a leadership contest. A feeling was now evident in the British press that Michael had perhaps overplayed his hand in his open letter. If he did not now stand, he would be accused of cowardice. If he did stand, he would probably lose – despite the tremors over Geoffrey’s departure.

This was the background to the discussion I had with Peter Morrison, my PPS, and Cranley Onslow, Chairman of the ′22, on Tuesday afternoon (6 November) after a short visit to Geneva to address the World Climate Conference. We were all concerned that the speculation about the leadership was doing the Party and the Government great harm. It seemed best to try to bring matters to a head and get the leadership campaign – if
there was to be one – out of the way quickly. The contest had to take place within twenty-eight days of the opening of the new parliamentary session, but it was up to the Leader of the Party, in consultation with the Chairman of the ′22, to name the precise date. Accordingly, we agreed to bring forward the date for the closing of nominations to Thursday 15 November, with the first ballot on Tuesday 20 November. This meant that I would be away in Paris for the CSCE summit when the first ballot – if there was one – occurred. The disadvantage, of course, would be that I would not be at Westminster to rally support. But Peter Morrison and I did not in any case envisage that I would canvass on my own behalf. As things turned out, this may have been a wrong judgement. But it is important to understand why it was made.

First, it would have been absurd for a Prime Minister of eleven and a half years’ standing to behave as if she were entering the lists for the first time. Tory MPs knew me, my record and my beliefs. If they were not already persuaded, there was not much left for me to persuade them with. I had been listening week after week to MPs’ grumbles; but I could not now credibly tell an MP worried about the community charge that I had been convinced by what he said and intended to scrap the whole scheme. Nor would I have dreamt of doing so. Thus there were strict limits on any canvassing I could usefully do to maximize my vote. A challenger like Michael, however, could promise promotion to those out of office as well as security for those already in it; he would be the beneficiary of all the resentments of the backbenchers.

Second, I felt that, as in 1989, the most effective campaign would be carried out by others on my behalf. In Peter Morrison I considered that I had an experienced House of Commons man who could put together a good team to work for me. He had been one of the first backbenchers to urge me to stand in 1975. I knew that I could rely on his loyalty. Unfortunately, the same quality of serene optimism which made Peter so effective at cheering us all up was not necessarily so suitable for calculating the intentions of that most slippery of electorates – Conservative MPs. I also envisaged, of course, that Peter would have other heavyweights in my team, including George Younger who had done such a good job in 1989.

The debate on the Address would give me an opportunity to renew my authority and the Government’s momentum. So I put extra effort into work on the speech. On the day itself (Wednesday 7 November), I was helped by yet another feeble attack from Neil Kinnock whose latest metamorphosis as a market socialist I mocked in the line: ‘The Leader of the
Opposition is fond of talking about supply side socialism. We know what that means: whatever the unions demand, Labour will supply.’ But I also had to deal with the more delicate issue of Geoffrey’s resignation. And that had hidden traps.

In his resignation letter Geoffrey had not spelt out any significant policy differences between us. Instead, he had concentrated on what he described as ‘the mood I had struck … in Rome last weekend and in the House of Commons this Tuesday’. I therefore felt entitled to point out in my speech that ‘If the Leader of the Opposition reads my Rt Hon. and learned friend’s letter, he will be very pressed indeed to find any significant policy difference on Europe between my Rt Hon. and learned friend and the rest of us on this side.’

The debate went quite well. But it soon became clear that Geoffrey was furious about what I had said. He apparently felt that there were substantial points of difference on policy between us, even if he had not so far managed to articulate what they were. We had reached nothing more than a lull before a political storm that was to rage ever more strongly.

At the end of Thursday’s Cabinet (8 November), we took the unusual step of adjourning for a political session. Ken Baker warned of the likelihood of extremely bad results at the Bootle and Bradford North by-elections. Things turned out as he feared. The worst result was in Bradford, where we slumped to third place. Early the next morning (Friday 9 November), Ken telephoned me to discuss these results. I put on a brave face, saying it was no worse than I expected. But it was bad enough, and at the wrong time.

What really set the political commentators talking, however, was a statement that day by Geoffrey that he would ‘be seeking an opportunity in the course of the next few days to explain in the House of Commons the reasons – of substance as well as style – which prompted [his] difficult decision’. The speculation that Michael Heseltine would stand naturally increased over the weekend. Indeed, politics entered one of those febrile, nervous phases in which events seem to be moving towards some momentous but unknowable climax almost independent of the wishes of the actors. And there was little I could do about any of this. I soldiered on with my arranged programme.

On Monday (12 November), as the previous week, there was only one subject on our minds at my morning ‘Week Ahead’ meeting with Ken Baker and at the subsequent lunch with colleagues – and again, significantly, none of us really wished to talk about it. No one knew as yet what
Geoffrey would say, or even when he would say it. But never had a speech by Geoffrey been so eagerly awaited.

I delivered my own speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in Guildhall that evening, striking a deliberately defiant note. But words now began to fail me. I employed a cricketing metaphor which that evening drew warm applause but which would later be turned to my disadvantage:

I had now learned that Geoffrey would speak in the House the following day, Tuesday 13 November, about his resignation. I would, of course, stay on after Questions to hear him.

Geoffrey’s speech was a powerful Commons performance – the most powerful of his career. If it failed in its ostensible purpose of explaining the policy differences that had provoked his resignation, it succeeded in its real purpose, which was to damage me. It was cool, forensic, light at points, and poisonous. His long-suppressed rancour gave Geoffrey’s words more force than he had ever managed before. He turned the cricketing metaphor against me with a QC’s skill, claiming that my earlier remarks about the hard ecu undermined the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England: ‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ He persuasively caricatured my arguments of principle against Europe’s drift to federalism as mere tics of temperamental obstinacy. And his final line – ‘the time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long’ – was an open invitation to Michael Heseltine to stand against me that electrified the House of Commons.

It was a peculiar experience listening to this bill of particulars, rather like being the accused during a prosecutor’s summing up in a capital case. For I was as much the focus of attention as was Geoffrey. If the world was listening to him, it was watching me. And underneath the mask of composure, my emotions were turbulent. I had not the slightest doubt that the speech was deeply damaging to me. One part of my mind was making the usual political calculations of how I and my colleagues should
react to it in the lobbies. Michael Heseltine had been handed more than an invitation to enter the lists; he had been given a weapon as well. How would we blunt it?

At a deeper level than calculation, however, I was hurt and shocked. Perhaps in view of the irritability that had been the coin of my relations with Geoffrey in recent years, I was foolish to be so pierced. But any ill-feeling between us had been expressed behind closed doors, even if news of it had sometimes leaked into political gossip columns. In public, I had been strongly supportive of him both as Chancellor and as Foreign Secretary. Indeed, the memory of the battles we had fought alongside each other in Opposition and in the early 1980s had persuaded me to keep him in the Cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister when a closer attention to my own political interests on Europe, exchange rates, and a host of other issues would have led me to replace him with someone more of my way of thinking.

Yet he had not been similarly swayed by those memories and he had deliberately set out to bring down a colleague in this brutal and public way. Geoffrey Howe, from this point on, would be remembered not for his staunchness as Chancellor, nor for his skilful diplomacy as Foreign Secretary, but for this final act of bile and treachery. The very brilliance with which he wielded the dagger ensured that the character he assassinated was in the end his own.

The following morning (Wednesday 14 November) Cranley Onslow telephoned to say that he had received formal notification of Michael Heseltine’s intention to stand for the leadership. Douglas Hurd now proposed my nomination; John Major seconded it; this was intended as a demonstration of the Cabinet’s united support for me. Peter Morrison quickly had my own leadership team up and running, though some people subsequently suggested that this was too energetic a metaphor. The key figures were to be George Younger, Michael Jopling, John Moore, Norman Tebbit and Gerry Neale. MPs would be discreetly asked their views so that we knew who were supporters, waverers and opponents. Michael Neubert was to keep the tally. Opponents would not be approached again, but waverers were to be called on by whichever member of the team seemed most likely to be persuasive.

It was agreed that I would use press interviews as the main platform for me to set out my case. So on Thursday evening (15 November) I was interviewed by Michael Jones of the
Sunday Times
and Charles Moore of the
Sunday Telegraph.
Nor did I back away from the European issue which
Geoffrey’s speech had reopened. Indeed, I said that a referendum would be necessary before there was any question of our having a single currency. This was a constitutional issue, not just an economic one, and it would be wrong not to consult the people directly.

When the nuts and bolts of my campaign were explained to me, they sounded fine. Unfortunately, it was not clear how much time some of the main members of my team could give to the campaign. Norman Fowler had been approached by Peter and agreed to be part of it, but then dropped out immediately, claiming past friendship with Geoffrey Howe. George Younger, about to become Chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland, was heavily involved in his business affairs. Michael Jopling too bowed out. John Moore was not always in the country. Subsequently, a number of my younger supporters in the ‘No Turning Back Group’ of MPs, alarmed at the way my campaign was going, drafted themselves as helpers and pulled out every stop. Their help was welcome; but why had it become necessary? This should have been a warning sign. But the campaign played on, and I carried on with the arrangements already in my diary, spending Friday 16 November on a visit to Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Michael Heseltine’s campaign was in full swing. He had promised a fundamental review of the community charge and was talking about transferring the cost of services like education to central taxation. I had already noted in the House that this could mean an extra 5 pence on income tax or large cuts in other public spending – or a budget deficit just when we had enjoyed four years of surplus and had redeemed debt.

I now pressed home the attack on Michael’s approach in a
Times
interview with Simon Jenkins where I drew attention to Michael’s long-standing corporatist and interventionist views. This appeared on Monday and was promptly criticized in some circles as being too aggressive. But there was nothing remotely personal about it. Michael Heseltine and I disagreed fundamentally about all that is at the heart of politics. MPs should be reminded that this was a contest between two philosophies as well as between two personalities. It was a sign of the funk and frivolity of the whole exercise that they did not want to think anything was at stake apart from their seats.

On Saturday evening (17 November) Denis and I had friends and advisers to dinner at Chequers – Peter Morrison, the Bakers, the Wakehams, Alistair McAlpine, Gordon Reece, the Bells, the Neuberts, the Neales, John Whittingdale (my political secretary) and of course Mark
and Carol. (George Younger could not attend because he had another engagement in Norfolk.) My team gave me a run down on the figures which seemed quite favourable. Peter Morrison told me he thought he had 220 votes for, 110 against and 40 abstentions, which would be an easy win. (To win in the first round I would need a majority of at least 15 per cent of those entitled to vote.) Even allowing for a ‘lie factor’, I would be all right. But I was not convinced, telling Peter: ‘I remember Ted thought the same thing. Don’t trust our figures – some people are on the books of both sides.’ Everybody else seemed to be far more confident, and indeed spent their time discussing what should be done to unite the Party after my victory. I hoped they were right. Some instinct told me otherwise.