Letters from London (11 page)

The first ballot was held on Tuesday, November 20, and the result was perfect for the Labour Party—what Tory managers had called “the nightmare scenario”: Thatcher 204 votes, Heseltine 152, abstentions 16. So although the Prime Minister had won a straight race by 52 clear votes, she had failed by four to obtain the 15 percent over and above a clear majority which the rules demanded. (At this point, people started asking who had invented such a batty system. The answer turned out to be a former Conservative MP, Humphry Berkeley, back in 1964 at the request of the then Tory leader, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Berkeley subsequently deserted the Tories for Labour, deserted Labour for the SDP, and deserted the SDP for Labour again. Such a career perhaps helps explain the tortuous rules he invented.) The result meant that Mrs. Thatcher was wounded, but not mortally; that Mr. Heseltine had shown himself a more serious contender than had been imagined; and that another grueling round of campaigning was to come. The former Tory Party chairman and loyal Thatcherite Cecil Parkinson immediately called the result “as bad as it could be for the Party as a whole.”

Mrs. Thatcher promptly made it worse. Before the election, she had let it be known that she would fight to the last in defense of her Premiership, that victory by even the smallest margin was still victory. This was widely taken to be a rhetorical declaration: a bad result
for Mrs. Thatcher and she would make way for a Thatcherite successor in the second round—whether a calmingly paternal figure like Douglas Hurd, her thriller-writing Foreign Secretary, or one of the next generation, like her Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Major. But what was a bad result for Mrs. Thatcher? The BBC’s political editor, John Cole, estimated that 210 was the lowest acceptable vote, while 200 or under was “unacceptable.” It was at 6:34
P.M
. that the news came through that Mrs. Thatcher had received 204 votes. Clearly, the pundits agreed, this would mean an evening on the telephone-advice from “the men in suits,” as senior Party figures are picturesquely termed. She would sleep on the result and announce her decision in the fullness of time. The BBC’s chief Parliamentary correspondent, standing in front of the British Embassy residence in Paris, where Mrs. Thatcher was staying, assured viewers that nothing much was likely to happen for a while, and prepared to sign off. But Mrs. Thatcher is, as has been repeated many times, a “conviction politician,” and one of her convictions has always been that she is the best person to lead the Conservative Party. At 6:36
P.M
., just as the correspondent in Paris was about to return viewers to London, there was a scurry of activity over his right shoulder. Mrs. Thatcher, having thought over her predicament for a full ninety seconds, came roaring down the residence steps and fell upon the waiting journalists like a wolf on the fold. She had clearly won the first round; therefore, she would allow her name to go forward to the second ballot. Once more, the Prime Minister had plunged the nation into certainty. She had also killed off the possibility that Mr. Hurd or Mr. Major would come in as a compromise Thatcherite candidate on the second round. One of the more pathetic sights of the evening was that of Mr. Hurd later trooping out of the Embassy residence to record his continuing loyalty to his leader. It took him forty minutes to make this appearance, and it was one of the shorter declarations of obeisance on record, occupying a full twenty-three seconds.

Perhaps this exorbitant display of Thatcherian self-certainty, her conviction that she was still playing the role of The Entire Conservative Party, and her snubbingly public contempt for advice—even for
the niceties of appearing to seek advice—stiffened the resistance of Cabinet ministers and the men in suits. (There is, naturally, some crossover between the two categories.) The next day, November 21, she returned to London, replaced her campaign manager, declared, “I fight on, I fight to win,” and summoned her Cabinet one by one to listen to what seemed distinctly post hoc consultations. Most of her ministers said they would continue to support her in the second round of voting. Many added, however, that they thought she would lose; some expressed fear that she might be humiliated. At seven-thirty the next morning, this time having slept on it, Mrs. Thatcher told her private office that she had decided to resign. The Cabinet was summoned for nine o’clock, an hour earlier than usual, and shortly afterward the country heard that the longest Premiership since 1827 would be over within a week. Once again, Douglas Hurd was sent into a scuttle, for second-round nominations (accompanied by the names of proposer and seconder) had to be in by midday. The Chancellor, John Major, also scuttled, while Mrs. Thatcher set off to break the news officially to the Queen. The Prime Minister’s widely reported comment on the fact that she could be deposed after winning three general elections, never losing a confidence motion in the House, and manifestly defeating her main challenger was couched with a homeliness appropriate to the tabloid headline it soon became:
WHAT A FUNNY OLD WORLD IT IS
. Kenneth Baker, the Tory Party chairman and a person of literary aspirations, reached stylistically somewhat higher, saying, “I do not believe we will see her like again”—though the resemblance between the departing leader and Hamlet’s father was not immediately apparent. (Both poisoned by ambitious rivals?) Winston Churchill, MP, in the House of Commons that afternoon, called her “the greatest peacetime Prime Minister this country has ever had,” carefully reserving the wider title for his own grandfather.

The second round of the election was fought in an overtly correct fashion, as if in deliberate defiance of the Thatcher manner. It was that curious thing, a healing battle. A small amount of mileage was made out of the candidates’ social origins, though, this being the
modern Conservative Party, it was along the lines of “prolier than thou.” (Mr. Major, it turned out, had left school at sixteen and worked on a building site. This gave him the drop on Mr. Hurd, who had been burdened with a thorough education and a father who had been an MP before him. Hurd was driven by the handicap of privilege into some awkward son-of-the-soil reminiscences about planting potatoes as a boy.) No scandal was mooted, though the press enjoyed disinterring Mr. Hurd’s out-of-print thrillers and quoting all the descriptions of breasts they could find in them. (The Hurd camp at once ascribed these passages to their boss’s coauthor.) But the main sounds heard during the campaign were of eerie concord. Each candidate was eager to unite the Party; each claimed support from left, right, and center; each admired the other’s achievements; each was keen on Europe—or, at least, keener than Mrs. Thatcher, whose negative image and opinions hung over the contest. Each was committed to a review of the poll tax, though here there was a slight difference, for once prettily mocked by Neil Kinnock: “When it comes to the poll tax, the choice is between Heseltine, who knows there is a problem and doesn’t really know what to do about it; Major, who knows there is a problem and doesn’t really want to do anything about it; and Hurd, who has only just found out there’s a problem.”

T
HE CONTEST WAS
fought in a gentlemanly fashion—except, of course, by the Lady herself. What would Mrs. Thatcher do? Well, it was generally agreed that, having retired from the election, she would do her best to assist the search for Tory unity by not interfering too much, though she might perhaps allow it to be gently intuited which way she was going to vote. But allowing things to be gently intuited has never been Mrs. Thatcher’s style. It soon became known that she would be voting for Major; and it was even suggested that if Heseltine won she would resign her seat in the House of Commons and force a by-election in her constituency of Finchley. (This was one of those “damaging but deniable” rumors, which came with the qualification that she might, of course, have been merely speaking in the heat of the moment.) The day before the second round, she was on the
telephone actively arm-twisting for Major. And, being Mrs. Thatcher, of course, she went too far. Her farewell speech to Conservative Central Office, which, not surprisingly, was recorded by someone present and leaked to the press, contained praise for both President Bush and herself over the crisis in the Gulf: “He won’t falter, and I shan’t falter. It’s just that I shan’t be pulling the levers there. But I shall be a very good back-seat driver.” Thatcher might have gone, but Thatcherism would continue, she was instructing the candidates. Anyone would have thought she had just read the
Encyclopædia Britannica
entry for the second Earl of Liverpool, whose length of Premiership she would never now exceed: “Lord Liverpool was destitute of wide sympathies and of true political insight, and his resignation of office was followed almost immediately by the complete and permanent reversal of his domestic policy.” None of that for Mrs. Thatcher: the rebels might have pushed her out of the driver’s seat and seized the wheel, but she had crawled along the running board and climbed back in behind them.

The second campaign was marked by slightly nervous, negative speculation. Sir Geoffrey Howe (now “the Assassin” to Tory loyalists) endorsed Heseltine, just as Mrs. Thatcher endorsed Major. How welcome was either kiss? Conservative MPs declared themselves “the most sophisticated electorate in the world,” which meant mainly that some of them lied to the press, some to the men in suits, some to the three candidates, and most to their own constituency organizations. At the local level, the removal of Mrs. Thatcher was widely regarded as akin to treason, and a vote for Heseltine as an endorsement of murder. Would a sense of shame at the murky deed lead MPs to favor her nominee, Mr. Major? Was Heseltine too risky? Was Hurd, lauded as the “safe pair of hands,” too fogeyish? Was Major, at forty-seven, too young? And not just young in experience: what if he lasted as long as She had done, and thus clogged up the normal processes of succession?

The three candidates had a long weekend to make their pitches: nominations had closed at midday on Thursday, the twenty-second, and voting opened on Tuesday, the twenty-seventh. Campaign managers
looked under stones for hitherto disregarded MPs and tickled them behind the ears; senior Party figures came out with endorsements; constituency parties were consulted with trepidation. Mr. Heseltine had generously announced that as Prime Minister he would keep his rivals in the Cabinet in their present positions; the two others cannily made no promises to Mr. Heseltine. By the day of voting, it was clear that Mr. Heseltine’s first-round surge was not continuing, that Mr. Hurd’s wise-head, safe-hands appeal was limited, and that the only recognizable progress was being made by the least known, least experienced, least charismatic, and least characterizable figure of John Major. Over the weekend, the polls confirmed what they had said seven days earlier—that Mr. Heseltine would be capable of defeating Labour—but they menacingly added that Mr. Major would too, and by a greater margin. Such brief opinion samplings ought to be easily discountable, but if the earlier poll had given Mr. Heseltine extra credibility, perhaps this would do the same for Mr. Major. Every little helps, particularly in the uncertain, slightly mesmerized condition the Conservative Party found itself in. They had killed the Wicked Witch and flung her onto the dung heap, but they still believed in magic. They were long familiar with the hex of Hez; maybe the featureless fellow they knew little about had some special juju they were ‘ as yet unaware of?

On the final Tuesday morning, Mr. Major opened a Japanese bank in the City, Mr. Hurd had a photo session with Alexander Dubşek at the Foreign Office, and poor Mr. Heseltine went off to his publishing company. The results came through at about half past six that evening. For once, all 372 Conservative MPs had managed to vote without spoiling even one ballot paper: 185 for Major, 131 for Heseltine, 56 for Hurd. Two kinds of gasp went up: one of surprise at the extent of Major’s progress, and one of seething frustration at what the voting system had once again managed to achieve. If Mrs. Thatcher had been 4 votes short of accepted victory on the first ballot, Major was even closer: 2 short. So what did the rules, those blasted un-Conservative rules so many had fretted against, say now? They ordered a third ballot in two days’ time, with both the trailing
candidates instructed to soldier on whether they liked it or not. Whereupon two things happened. First, Heseltine and Hurd effectively conceded defeat by announcing that on the third ballot they would vote for Major; and shortly afterward the Tory back-bench 1922 Committee, which is in charge of running leadership elections, decided that the rule book they had been obliged to work with was a frightful piece of non-Tory hogwash. Transferable votes? Who ever heard of such a thing? There would be no third ballot, and that was that. Who were they to be dictated to by some chappie who in any case had deserted the Party for the pinkos?

So a second man from the East Anglian county town of Huntingdon had been selected to govern the country—the previous one being Oliver Cromwell. And the country was left puzzling briefly over a small mystery: how Mrs. Thatcher, supported by 204 Conservative MPs, was judged to have lost the Premiership, while Mr. Major, supported by only 185, was judged to have won it. Still, this was a time of freaks and records: the Tories, in deposing the longest-serving Prime Minister this century, had replaced her with the youngest Prime Minister this century. (The previous youngest was Lord Rosebery, who in 1894 had inherited power, as John Major did, from a formidable predecessor: Gladstone. Coincidentally, Rosebery was also a great admirer of Cromwell. Mr. Major would be advised not to hope for closer comparison with Rosebery’s Premiership, which swiftly ran into trouble—Asquith said it was “ploughing the sands.” Rosebery was out within sixteen months, defeated in the Commons on a vote over the supply and reserve of small-arms ammunition. Major himself has no more than eighteen months before he is obliged to call an election.)

The country also settled back to puzzle over a larger mystery: the nature of John Major, this man thrust so quickly into both the leadership and the Premiership, a man who in four days of campaigning achieved more than Michael Heseltine had done in five years of eating rubber-chicken dinners throughout the length of the country. What do we know about the sudden victor? He is, as his supporters told us perhaps too often during the election, “a man of the people.”
His father, who was sixty-six when he begat John, was a music-hall and circus artiste, who with his first wife, Kitty Drum, had an act called Drum & Major; later, he set up in business manufacturing garden ornaments, including gnomes. John’s schooling ended at sixteen; he worked as a navvy, spent nine months on the dole, and then applied to become a bus conductor. “There were three of us,” he recalled when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, “and there was an arithmetic test, then they tried us out with these machines to see how good we were, and I wasn’t the best at that.” (It is interesting to note how irrelevant academic qualifications have become to obtaining the highest office. The current leaders of the two main political parties have, between them, the combined achievement of a single pass degree, received at the second attempt, from the University of Wales. Is this bracingly meritocratic, dismally anti-intellectual, or just hazard?) Mr. Major, who had also dreamed of becoming a professional cricketer, joined an insurance company, then went into the Standard Chartered Bank. Local politics in South London led to national politics, a seat in Parliament in 1979, work in the Whips’ Office, junior postings, an unhappy three months as Foreign Secretary, then a year at the Exchequer. He is said to be on the right of the Party in economics, on the left in social policy, central on Europe, and pretty much God knows where on the world outside. Everyone who has worked with him has described him—so far, at least—as decent, honest, able, and hardworking; the word
flair
is rarely mentioned. His first move in forming his Cabinet was shrewd enough: he appointed Michael Heseltine his Minister of the Environment, thus making the principal Tory critic of the poll tax responsible for sorting it out and saving the Government’s neck. (Within days of Tarzan’s return, an unemployed Lincolnshire builder became the first person to be jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax; with perfect appropriateness, the case happened in Grantham, a town famous mainly for being the birthplace of Margaret Thatcher.) Major’s second move was less shrewd: having announced a Cabinet “of all the talents,” he forgot to include a single woman.