Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (83 page)

On the ERM, she spelt out Britain’s conditions for joining when the time was right. Although she gave no date and said it depended on success in the fight against inflation and progress towards implementing the single market, she gave a clear although disingenuous impression of her commitment by her words, ‘I can reaffirm today the United Kingdom’s intention to join the ERM’.
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This statement went down well at the summit, although in the absence of a date for joining it was nothing new as a statement of future British policy. Nevertheless, her fellow heads of government felt they could detect a more positive approach by Margaret Thatcher. This was largely based on mood music, for she seemed unusually calm and non-confrontational in the way she contributed to the discussions. Yet whatever the change of style, there was no movement of substance. She was buying time in order to fight another day both on the European stage and within her own cabinet.

Her speech may have lulled the participants at the summit into a false complacency that the British Prime Minister had been won over to a positive view of the ERM. But she did not fool all of the people all of the time. Listening to her final press conference at Madrid was a perceptive reporter from the
Daily Telegraph
, twenty-five-year-old Boris Johnson. He recalled:

As she bustled her way through the door, she gave a loud grunt of contemptuous exasperation. She kept her head uncharacteristically down as she read out a prepared statement at high speed. I remember that she looked distinctly sexy, with a flush about her cheeks as though she was up to something rather naughty. I thought she didn’t believe a word of what she was saying. My piece reflected this, saying that she had successfully fought a rearguard action against the ever-tightening ratchet of European federation.
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It had indeed been a rearguard action, camouflaged in enough dissimulation to outflank her rebellious Foreign Secretary and Chancellor. She met none of their demands in Madrid. They were fooled by her deceptively mild tone.
Having roared like lions as they threatened their joint resignations on the brink of the summit, they retreated like lambs immediately after it.

Nigel Lawson even had the effrontery to observe two days later in the margins of a cabinet meeting that ‘Madrid had gone rather well’. Her amused private reaction was, ‘He certainly had a nerve’.
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The Prime Minister was much more bitter about Geoffrey Howe’s imitation of sweetness and light, but she kept her own counsel. At Madrid, he had enjoyed receiving the plaudits of European leaders for transforming Margaret Thatcher’s attitude.

‘Congratulations, Geoffrey,’ said a delighted Jacques Delors ‘on having won the intellectual argument within the British Government.’
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This Gallic bouquet was wide of the mark. The Foreign Secretary had not won his argument with the Prime Minister. Nor did he have the slightest inkling that she might be planning to remove him from the job he loved.

THE DISMISSAL OF GEOFFREY HOWE

Hell hath no fury like a Prime Minister who feels she has been blackmailed. This was the explanation for the cabinet reshuffle that Margaret Thatcher executed a month after the Madrid summit. It was a badly botched affair, strangely reminiscent of Harold Macmillan’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in July 1962. Both episodes precipitated the departure of the Prime Minister within eighteen months of their attempts to reconstruct their respective administrations.

Margaret Thatcher’s July 1989 reshuffle was an emotionally charged whirligig of exits, entrances and job changes. Although numerous and extensive, the thirteen place movements around the cabinet table were of secondary importance. The primary upheaval, round which everything else revolved, was the dismissal of Geoffrey Howe from the Foreign Office.

The Foreign Secretary saw the Prime Minister alone at No. 10 on the morning of Monday 24 July. To his astonishment, he was told that he was being moved. He could either be Leader of the House of Commons, or Home Secretary. Geoffrey Howe countered by saying that he would prefer to stay at the Foreign Office. ‘That option is not open’, was her reply.
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He was shattered. ‘The word “shock” cannot do justice to my feelings at the way in which this was sprung on me’, was how he described his reaction.
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Howe’s outrage was understandable, but his surprise seems synthetic. There had been press rumours about his demotion, which the Prime Minister had conspicuously failed to quash. He knew that he was at loggerheads with her over European policy. He was also aware that their personal relationship had deteriorated to the point of mutual animosity. The tipping point towards his dismissal had been her anger over his manipulation of Nigel Lawson into their pre-Madrid ambush on the ERM. She saw Howe as the prime mover in this plot to blackmail her. Now she was taking her revenge.

Although he knew the Prime Minister was furious with him for his attempt to pressurise her into setting a date for joining the ERM, Howe calculated that the storm had blown over and that he was secure in his job. This self-delusion was largely due to Margaret Thatcher’s ability to play to the gallery at the Madrid summit. Despite her outward emollience, she was inwardly seething. She had made up her mind to get rid of her Foreign Secretary on the day they travelled to Spain together in such frigid separation. But for tactical reasons, she had stayed her hand for a month. Now she wrapped up his dismissal in a broader reshuffle, in order to make it look as though his move was part of a strategic plan to rejuvenate the entire cabinet.

The strategy failed because media and parliamentary attention focused almost entirely on the Howe drama. His first reply was to say that he could not give the Prime Minister an answer to either of her proposals until he had talked them over with his wife Elspeth. As Lady Howe had come to loathe the Prime Minister even more than her husband did, this was hardly a positive response. It also had the effect of delaying the progress of the reshuffle, a hiatus that gave rise to increasingly feverish media speculation.

Sir Geoffrey’s initial decision, backed by his wife, was to turn down both the jobs he had been offered. He drafted a pained letter of resignation, which he showed to the Chief Whip, David Waddington, who was alarmed at the prospect of such a major loss to the cabinet.

In the next few hours Waddington brokered an arrangement that would make Howe Deputy Prime Minister as well as Leader of the House. But this all depended on how well the new Deputy could work with his old boss. The two of them had a far from encouraging meeting, at which Howe said that his confidence in their future relationship had been ‘greatly damaged by today’s events’.
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Margaret Thatcher replied that ‘The problem was mutual’. It was hardly
a reassuring start. But since Sir Geoffrey could not bear, when push came to shove, to leave the government, he accepted the best of a bad deal.

If the Prime Minister’s purpose in keeping him in her cabinet was to rock the boat as little as possible, she failed. This was because the Downing Street press machine set out to disparage the new Deputy Prime Minister. In briefings by Bernard Ingham, his post was called ‘a courtesy title with no constitutional status’.
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In retaliation, Howe leaked that he had been offered and rejected Douglas Hurd’s job as Home Secretary.

The media had a field day of mockery at this reshuffle chaos, which had many dimensions of further unpleasantness. Under one tabloid headline, ‘Howesey Housey’,
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it was reported that the Foreign Secretary had engaged in an unedifying bargaining session with the Prime Minister about which government residence he would be allowed to live in – Chevening or Dorneywood. In fact, there was no bargaining. Geoffrey and Elspeth Howe were understandably upset at having to move from the first house to the second for reasons that were inexplicable except as a further act of personal humiliation.

The final picture that emerged was that of an unnecessarily brutal execution of a loyal colleague, who for over ten years had occupied two great offices of state with distinction. Many recognised, although she evidently did not, that the success of Thatcherite leadership owed a great deal to Howe’s dogged attention to detail. Because of this perception, he swiftly became the beneficiary of a groundswell of sympathy in the House of Commons and in the country.

I well remember Sir Geoffrey’s first appearance at the despatch box as Leader of the House on 27 July 1989. He rose to make a routine announcement about the next week’s parliamentary business. Before he could open his mouth, a deep-throated rumble, burgeoning into a roar, of ‘hear, hear’ filled the chamber. On and on it rolled from all sides of the House, lasting for well over a minute. It was a patently sincere outpouring of goodwill coming from not only Howe’s well-wishers but also from his critics, who ranged from Tory Eurosceptics to Labour left-wingers. It was a spontaneous display of affection, and the high point of the ex-Foreign Secretary’s parliamentary popularity.

With the Prime Minister fidgeting awkwardly alongside him on the front bench, Geoffrey Howe was overcome with emotion. He had lost his old place at the pinnacle of the government, but his rough treatment won him a niche in the sentimental feelings of Westminster, which he had never occupied before.

Margaret Thatcher would have been wise to take note of this unexpected side effect of her reshuffle. Amidst the waves of warmth for him there was also a strong undertow of hostility towards her. But by this time she had lost her political antennae when it came to the subject of Sir Geoffrey. She continued with her attitude of unpleasantness and underestimation for her new Deputy Prime Minister. The consequences of this hostility were to prove fatal.

REFLECTION

The sacking of Sir Geoffrey Howe increased the flow of poison in the relationship between him and Margaret Thatcher. She could easily have applied balm to his injured feelings. The ‘Howesey Housey’ row was entirely avoidable. Chevening was just as appropriate an official residence for a Deputy Prime Minister as it was for a Foreign Secretary. As these arrangements were in the gift of Margaret Thatcher, she could perfectly well have allowed the Howes to remain living close to their constituency in the country house they had come to love. But for reasons of pure spite, she was determined to displace them. Was it her intense dislike of Elspeth Howe, or paranoia about ‘holding court’, or imagined ‘leadership plotting’ that motivated the Prime Minister to behave so unpleasantly? These pinpricks against Sir Geoffrey revealed a mean streak in Margaret Thatcher’s personality that had not surfaced before.

Other slights were reported that confirmed the bitter atmospherics of the reshuffle. There was an unedifying squabble as to whether or not the new Deputy Prime Minister should sit at cabinet meetings on Margaret Thatcher’s left as Willie Whitelaw had done. She gave way on this with bad grace. It was clear that her main reaction to having Howe as her Deputy was to downgrade his appointment as much as possible.

These petty manoeuvres against Geoffrey Howe rebounded against Margaret Thatcher. The rest of the reshuffle was largely ignored by the media. They were so busy chronicling the stories about the Deputy Prime Minister’s houses, titles and status that they underplayed the new appointments except to keep pointing out the youth and inexperience of her surprising choice to be the new Foreign Secretary – John Major.

Although the dust settled on the reshuffle during the summer parliamentary recess, it left behind a feeling that the Prime Minister had treated Sir Geoffrey
Howe unfairly. It was widely believed that her personal dislike of him had been a more important factor in her motivation than their disagreements over Europe.

Because even well-informed members of Parliament were slow to grasp the constitutional importance of the movement towards a federal Europe that Jacques Delors was proposing and Geoffrey Howe was supporting, it was easy to downgrade the reasons for Margaret Thatcher’s rejection of her Foreign Secretary to matters of personality. Those frictions were real, and at times rather nasty. Yet the fundamental explanation for the great Howe–Thatcher divide was that it was all to do with past history and future vision.

Margaret Thatcher had a profound sense of Britain’s legal and constitutional history as a sovereign nation-state. She woke up rather slowly to an understanding that the foundations on which the rule of law and the parliamentary system she cherished were going to be irreversibly changed by the Delors vision for European economic, monetary and, ultimately, political union. She had an utterly different vision based on her patriotic nationalism. She was mortified that she was not supported by her Foreign Secretary.

If she turned against Howe too venomously, it was because she found herself unable to separate her personal and political feelings about the greatest issue Britain had faced since the Second World War. She was way out in front of public and parliamentary opinion on the European crisis that was looming. Both would catch up with her during the next two decades, but at the time she was unappreciated for being right. The prevailing view in the late summer of 1989 was that the Prime Minister had been getting her jaundiced view of both Howe and Europe out of proportion.

A few days after the House of Commons went into recess, a surprising number of Tory MPs descended on Canterbury cricket ground to watch Kent play the Australians. This quintessentially English event was the centrepiece of the annual festival known as Canterbury Week. In August 1989, the new cricket-loving Foreign Secretary, John Major, was a noted spectator, as were a less knowledgeable gathering of parliamentarians who came to drink the Pimm’s as much as to watch the play.

As an East Kent MP, I moved around the hospitality tents, and recall being amazed by how many doubts, criticisms and questions were expressed by my off-duty colleagues about the Prime Minister. Many of them were clearly getting fed up with her; not just because she had bungled the Geoffrey Howe dismissal,
but for deeper reasons, such as the growing unpopularity of the poll tax, the debacle of the European elections and, above all, the feeling that she would no longer listen to her supporters. ‘Is she losing her grip?’ asked one MP. ‘Is she becoming a liability?’ inquired another. Perhaps the most prophetic comment was: ‘And if she were to lose her Chancellor after another bloody Cabinet row – we’re sunk!’
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