Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (74 page)

This resentment became a two-way street. Margaret Thatcher excluded her Defence Secretary from most of the Anglo-American discussions on the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), which caused great pique on his part. Heseltine, responding to questions in Parliament from the Labour benches, launched an internal Ministry of Defence inquiry into the sinking of the
General Belgrano
, to assure himself that there was ‘not a Watergate in this somewhere’.
¹⁰
The comparison was ludicrous, as the later inquiry showed. Margaret Thatcher was right to be offended by it.

She was also angry at Heseltine’s use of the Defence budget for social engineering purposes. They had a row over whether to build two new frigates at the Tyneside shipyard of Swan Hunter (the best value for money option), or whether to split the order with Cammell Laird in order to create jobs on Merseyside, although at a higher cost for the taxpayer. Heseltine got his way but only by threatening to resign. This disagreement became so personal that the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister were barely on speaking terms. As Nigel Lawson put it, ‘From then on, she was as determined to do him down as he was to run his Department in his own way’.
¹¹

These tensions became so visible that in October 1985 the
Sunday Times
reported that Heseltine ‘could even be brewing up towards a spectacular resignation’.
¹²
This was a prescient forecast. The reasons for these advance warnings were rooted in the festering personality clash between two hostile egos. The eventual cause of the explosion that blew them apart – technical arguments about the future of a helicopter company – had barely begun to surface.

Westland was Britain’s sole helicopter manufacturing company. It had a turnover of £300 million a year, small by the standards of defence industries, but important in terms of West Country jobs. It was making losses and faced a perilous future. The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Leon Brittan reported to the Prime Minister that Westland would go into receivership unless a new shareholder came in to inject fresh capital into the company. The Westland board, unable to find any such British investors, were inclined to accept an offer from Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, a subsidiary of the American United Technologies Corporation and Fiat, the Italian conglomerate, who were willing to invest in the company in exchange for a 29.9 per cent shareholding.
¹³

Michael Heseltine, a passionate Europhile, believed that Westland should join up with a potential consortium of European defence companies. His arguments sounded worth further consideration to a cabinet committee whose ministers, ranging from Geoffrey Howe to Norman Tebbit, gave the Defence Secretary more time to explore his European option. But Heseltine embarked on a much more dramatic course than mere exploration. He did his utmost to sabotage the deal with Sikorsky. To achieve this, on 29 November, he called a meeting of the National Armament Directors (NADS) of France, Italy, Germany and Britain, persuading them to sign a document declaring that in future they would only buy European-made helicopters. With the flames being fanned by many Heseltine leaks and press briefings, the issue flared up into a test of strength between a European versus an American solution for Westland, and a Heseltine versus Thatcher power struggle. This was how a minor issue became a major crisis. The government itself took the perfectly sensible line that the Westland board should make the final decision. This in practice meant backing the American option and overruling Michael Heseltine’s manoeuvres to obtain a recommendation from the pro-European NADs.

The government decided to support the Westland board and approve the Sikorsky shareholding – which had by December 1985 become formally known as the United Technologies–Fiat shareholding – with each of these partners planning to hold 14.5 per cent of the company. This decision to approve it was taken by the cabinet’s Economic Sub-Committee on 9 December by a clear majority vote. Heseltine, however, did not accept the decision and wanted the issue debated at full cabinet. Margaret Thatcher initially refused this. She cut short his attempt to raise Westland at a cabinet meeting on 12 December, on
the grounds that no papers had been circulated on the issue. Heseltine was incensed and launched what she called ‘a short ill tempered discussion’.
¹⁴
He may have been silenced in the cabinet room, but he continued both the argument and the ill temper at full volume.

For the next three weeks Michael Heseltine was in overdrive, leaking his version of the controversy to newspapers, bankers, industrialists, lobbyists or anyone else whom he hoped to convince that the proposed UT–Fiat investment in Westland was wrong because it was not his preferred European option. This behaviour was a flagrant violation of the rules of collective cabinet responsibility. Margaret Thatcher was furious with Heseltine, but she uncharacteristically shied away from having a meeting with him and telling him to toe the line.

At one No. 10 discussion during this period, Leon Brittan, baffled by the Prime Minister’s unwillingness to see the Defence Secretary face to face, said to her, ‘You’ve just got to lay down the law to him’. Bernard Ingham then interjected, ‘You don’t want to have him resigning, do you?’
¹⁵
Dread of a personality clash with Heseltine was a curious chink in the Prime Minister’s armour. It had first appeared right at the start of her premiership on Saturday 5 May 1979, when he declined the cabinet post she offered him. She had decided to appoint him Secretary of State for Energy. He refused, arguing that he should stay with the Environment portfolio he had been shadowing in Opposition. Margaret Thatcher caved in immediately. Just after suffering this blow to her authority, she said to the Private Secretary who had been present at the meeting, ‘I don’t like one-to-one confrontations with Michael’.
¹⁶

Heseltine had no such inhibitions. He was reckless in the determination of his desire to oppose the Prime Minister. Going out of the Cabinet Room on the 12 December row over Westland, the angry Defence Secretary encountered Charles Powell in the corridor. ‘She’s not going to win on this one’, stormed Heseltine. ‘I’m going to defeat her.’ ‘Oh come on’, said Powell.
¹⁷

By the turn of the year, the Prime Minister’s reluctance to confront her rebellious colleague led to a stand-off. Heseltine was aggressively promoting his own European solution for Westland. It was the opposite of the government’s policy, but the Defence Secretary’s justification for his disobedience was that Westland had never been properly discussed by the full cabinet. Margaret Thatcher thought this was a bogus excuse for his misconduct, but was unwilling
to tell him so directly. Instead, she fought Heseltine by proxy, encouraging her Secretary of State for Trade to counter-attack her Defence Secretary.

‘I think this episode showed her at her worst’, recalled Leon Brittan. ‘She egged me on with fierce support, but she refused to argue directly with him. Far from being the Iron Lady, she proved curiously weak and indecisive.’
¹⁸

The Prime Minister’s indecision almost proved fatal. As the next moves in the saga were to show, she turned a problem into a crisis. She was willing to wound her adversary, but afraid to stop him in his tracks with a direct order. Her hesitation set the stage for a far more personal and damaging battle. Within a month, the explosion into open warfare caused two cabinet resignations, and came perilously close to forcing Margaret Thatcher out of Downing Street. After more than five years as a successful Prime Minister, the Westland crisis needlessly developed into a personal failure that took her to the brink of resignation.

THE WESTLAND CRISIS EXPLODES

On 3 January 1986, Michael Heseltine’s continuing efforts to sabotage the UTC–Fiat investment in Westland took a new twist when he leaked to
The Times
his carefully orchestrated exchange of letters with Lloyds Merchant Bank, the advisers to the European consortium. In this correspondence he warned that Westland risked losing future European orders if it accepted an American partner.
¹⁹
This was a deliberate contradiction of the assurances Margaret Thatcher had given in writing to Sir John Cuckney, Westland’s chairman, in a letter of 1 January 1986.
²⁰

Instead of confronting her Defence Secretary directly, Margaret Thatcher found a more complicated method of crushing his rebellion using leaks and legalities. Her first move was to arrange for the Solicitor General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, to write to Heseltine with an opinion querying the factual basis for his letter to the merchant bank. Mayhew’s letter contained a complaint of a ‘material inaccuracy’ in Heseltine’s correspondence.
²¹

These two words, wrenched out of context, were used to damage the Defence Secretary when the Solicitor General’s letter was leaked to the press. ‘You LIAR’ was the screaming headline in the
Sun
.
²²
‘Heseltine told by Law Chief: Stick to the Facts’ was the more sober version of the story in
The Times
.
²³
Yet the
broadsides against Heseltine misfired. For, in an extraordinary turn of events, the issue became not who lied, but who leaked.

Leaking is one of the most frequently practised arts in politics. Both Michael Heseltine and Margaret Thatcher were ruthless exponents of it. But as all players of the game should know, some kinds of leak are off limits. Perhaps the most arcane area of forbidden leaking is a Law Officer’s opinion. These are supposed to be protected by the highest walls of confidentiality. Quite why this should be so is baffling to ordinary mortals. To the lawyer politicians who serve in the posts of Attorney General or Solicitor General, it is part of the mystique of their ancient offices that their legal opinions must always be cloaked in secrecy. Precious little reverence for this mystique affected the next move in the Westland saga, although precisely whodunnit, who leaked it or who should be blamed for it became an incredible fudge.

The initiative to make public the Solicitor General’s view that Michael Heseltine’s letter contained a ‘material inaccuracy’ came from the Prime Minister. She later admitted this to Parliament. ‘It was vital to have accurate information in the public domain … It was to get that accurate information to the public domain that I gave my consent.’
²⁴
But what exactly she gave her consent to remains murky to this day.

The way the Prime Minister’s consent worked in practice was that two officials at No. 10 – Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell – were in contact with Leon Brittan’s Private Secretary and his head of Information at the Department of Trade and Industry. Brittan was out of the office at a lunch when Colette Bowe, his press secretary, reached him to ask whether the Solicitor General’s criticism of a ‘material inaccuracy’ in the Heseltine letter should be made public. Leon Brittan said that he would prefer that any such disclosure should be made by No. 10, but failing this he authorised his press office to make it public ‘subject to the agreement of No. 10’.
²⁵
He returned from lunch unaware that he had made a momentous decision. He had expressed no view about the timing or method of the disclosure. He thought he had passed the responsibility for it back to the Prime Minister who had wanted to get the ‘material inaccuracy’ into the public domain in the first place. ‘I had no doubt whatsoever that these were her instructions’, recalled Leon Brittan, ‘because my officials had been told by No. 10 that she wanted the information made public.’
²⁶

For a layman unversed in the sacred mysteries surrounding advice from Law Officers, it is difficult to see any wrongdoing in the sequence of events outlined above. The Prime Minister wanted the Solicitor General’s criticisms of Michael Heseltine’s inaccurate letter to be released into the public domain. As head of the government she was entitled to authorise this release. If she had taken up this position in justification of the instructions she gave, why should there have been a fuss about it?

Unfortunately for both Margaret Thatcher and Leon Brittan, the leaking of the Solicitor General’s letter produced a fuss of titanic proportions created by the Attorney General. His outrage derived from the questionable proposition that the advice of the government’s Law Officers automatically assumes a unique degree of confidentiality, which can never under any circumstances be breached. On these grounds Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney General, became so indignant that he threatened to send the police into No. 10 with orders to conduct an investigation into the leak of the Solicitor General’s letter, under the Official Secrets Act. Margaret Thatcher headed this off at the gates of Downing Street by setting up an internal inquiry conducted by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong. The Defence Select Committee of the House of Commons then launched its own inquiry into the imbroglio. It eventually reported that, ‘the method of disclosure that was adopted, the unattributable communication of tendentious extracts from the letter, was disreputable’.
²⁷

Michael Heseltine may well have thought it disreputable too, but unaccustomed as he was to be more leaked against than leaking, he kept his powder dry for two more days. On Thursday 9 January he took his case on Westland to full cabinet. He did not present it well. Even his friend and ally, Geoffrey Howe, felt that the Defence Secretary on this occasion seemed unconvincing, unimpressive and so obsessive that he seemed ‘faintly reminiscent of Tony Benn’.
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28

Yet even if Heseltine failed to win support for his argument against the UTC–Fiat rescue plan for Westland, he struck deeper chords with his grievances against the Prime Minister’s management of cabinet discussions. For instead of giving
a clear lead, her unstructured, combative style of government had encouraged chaos to reign in the argument between two of her senior ministers. A squall about helicopters had been allowed to blow up into a tempest that was now rocking the government to its foundation.