Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (89 page)

Yet for all her mistakes, her high handedness, and her poor party management, Margaret Thatcher remained a colossus who bestrode the world as well as the domestic stage. Her preparations for the coming conflict in the Gulf were applauded by the defence and foreign-policy specialists in the House. There was a feeling that if it came to hostilities over Kuwait, then Britain’s experienced Prime Minister was indispensable as a war leader.

On Europe, opinions on Margaret Thatcher were more divided. Yet, as the dust began to settle after her ‘
No
.
No
.
No
’ denunciation of Delors, there was a growing feeling that she had been right to take a strong stand against European Monetary Union. The Tory party began shifting its ground in response to her strong leadership. It was moving towards the much more Eurosceptic-inclined policy it has embraced today. All this started to happen in the early days of November 1990. Like all huge policy upheavals, it was confusing at first. But few now would argue in the age of the eurozone crisis that Margaret Thatcher was wrong to sound the tocsin of battle about British opposition to monetary and political union in Europe.

Perhaps it was the realisation that Britain had arrived at a crossroads of European policy that encouraged Sir Geoffrey Howe to unsheathe his dagger, as he prepared what turned out to be the most dramatic resignation statement in parliamentary history.

36

End game

HOWE GOES FOR THE JUGULAR

The days leading up to Geoffrey Howe’s resignation statement were packed with tension at Westminster. Margaret Thatcher was worried, although this was hard to discern from the carapace of calm with which she carried out her public duties at constituency events and at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. But she let the mask slip in her speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on Monday 12 November, where she gave way not to emotions of anxiety but to an excess of bravado. Using the imagery of cricket, she struck a high note of defiance:

I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And in case anyone doubted it, can I assure you there will be no ducking bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling’s going to get hit all round the ground.
¹

Margaret Thatcher’s sally into the unfamiliar language of Wisden not only revealed her ignorance of cricket
^*
(bouncers usually should be ducked!); it acted as a further provocation to Sir Geoffrey Howe. As he sat in the pavilion composing his resignation speech, he seized the opportunity offered by her metaphor, proving himself to be no flannelled fool when it came to venomous spin. Yet almost no one, particularly the Prime Minister, believed he was capable of knocking out her middle stump.

A resignation speech from the departed Deputy Prime Minister was bound to be a significant event. Yet in the days before he delivered his bombshell there
was no expectation of an impending apocalypse. In the Commons, Howe was regarded as a capable but colourless speaker. Even if he decided to be severely critical of the Prime Minister, most MPs anticipated that she would survive it. On past form, Howe had been unimpressive when trying to wield the knife. It was ‘rather like being savaged by a dead sheep’ had been Denis Healey’s disparaging description of Sir Geoffrey’s best-known previous attempt at launching an
ad hominem
attack on an opponent.
^2
†
The taunt was much cited as the political world waited to hear what he had to say.

It may never be clear, perhaps even to himself, when precisely the worm turned in Geoffrey Howe and changed his instinct to be loyal into a determination to have revenge. Was there an accumulation of bitterness over Margaret Thatcher’s numerous acts of rudeness to him, which finally boiled over? Or was there a sudden rush of anger caused by unpleasant surprises from 30 October onwards. Her ‘
No
.
No
.
No
.’ denunciation of Jacques Delors; her effrontery in pretending that the differences between Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister were about style not substance; and her boastful assertion that she would hit his bowling all over the ground had been blows for Sir Geoffrey’s pride. But did they add up to a
casus belli
for an all-out war? On past form, it seemed improbable.

Like Brutus in Julius Caesar, Howe struggled to be seen as an honourable man. He had hesitated, retreated and avoided confrontation for years, before aligning himself with the Cassiuses and Cascas of the Conservative Party who were plotting to bring about the political death of Margaret Thatcher. But once he finally decided to make his move, he delivered the unkindest cut of all.

At 3.30 p.m. on Tuesday 13 November, Sir Geoffrey Howe made far and away the most memorable and effective speech of his career. His purpose was to destroy the Prime Minister using a lethal blend of sarcastic humour mingled with personal poison. The House was spellbound, realising that history was being made.

Howe began with a joke about the claim that he had resigned over issues of style, not substance. ‘If some of my former colleagues are to be believed,’ he said, ‘I must be the first Minister in history who has resigned because he was
in full agreement with Government policy.’
³
Even the Prime Minister managed to simulate laughter at that one, but her smile soon vanished as her former Deputy moved into stiletto plunging mode, blaming her for damaging the government and its efforts to control inflation by delaying entry into the ERM.

Then he compared the European vision of Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan with

the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people scheming, in her words, to ‘extinguish democracy’, to ‘dissolve our national identities’, and to lead us ‘through the back door into a federal Europe.’ What kind of vision is that … ?

By now, there were perceptible shivers running down the Tory back benches, as Sir Geoffrey exposed raw nerve after raw nerve on the rift over European policy.

He accused the Prime Minister of sabotaging the efforts of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England to put forward Britain’s hard ECU proposal, by casually dismissing the very idea ‘with such personalised incredulity’. How on earth, he asked, are the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England ‘to be taken as serious participants in the debate against that type of background noise?’ Sharp intakes of breath from all parts of the House followed that phrase.

Worse reactions followed as Sir Geoffrey poured scorn on Margaret Thatcher’s cricketing allusions, linking them with a better one of his own to her treatment of the Chancellor and Governor: ‘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.’
⁴

By coincidence, I was sitting on the fourth bench below the gangway immediately behind Sir Geoffrey Howe as he delivered his resignation statement. This meant that I was ‘doughnutted’ in the television pictures of virtually every word he uttered. My agonised grimaces were thus captured for posterity and have been replayed many times since. They were also recorded in his diary by Alan Clark, who wrote of the moment of the broken bats analogy, ‘Everyone
gasped, and I looked round to catch Jonathan’s eye. He had that special incredulous look he occasionally gets, mouth open.’
⁵

However incredulous my expression, it was nothing to the waves of emotion that rippled through the House in various forms. Labour and a few members of the Howe–Heseltine fan club guffawed derisively. Thatcher loyalists reeled in horror, some with eyes closed as if to avert their gaze from the brutality of the killing. It was the equivalent of the cathartic moment in Shakespeare’s play when Julius Caesar is struck down with the assassin’s cry, ‘Speak, hands, for me!’
⁶

A few feet along the back benches, I saw Dame Elaine Kellett Bowman start to weep. Dame Jill Knight gripped the bench in front of her, seeming to writhe in pain as though she had been physically stabbed herself. As for the most important lady in the House, on whom all eyes were focused, she appeared as steady as a rock. But ‘underneath the mask of composure, my emotions were turbulent’, Margaret Thatcher recalled. ‘I had not the slightest doubt that the speech was deeply damaging to me.’
⁷

After the damage came a few mock turtle tears as Howe spoke of his ‘sadness and dismay’ over the ‘very real tragedy that the Prime Minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation’. Then, in the last sentence of his statement, the ex-Chancellor, ex-Foreign Secretary, ex-Deputy Prime Minister put a deadly thrust into his ex-colleague the Prime Minister: ‘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.’
⁸

Stunned silence was the immediate response of the House. There were no sounds of ‘hear, hear’, no groans of disapproval, and only a single muted rumble of ‘Shame!’ from Michael Carttiss, the MP for Great Yarmouth. But as the chamber emptied, the collective shock at having witnessed an assassination was replaced by a growing hubbub of speculation. For we all knew that the landscape of British politics had irreversibly changed. Howe’s last twenty-six words were seen as a carefully calculated call to Michael Heseltine to unsheathe his sword and destroy the Prime Minister.

Depending on your point of view, Howe had either given an unpopular leader her deserved come-uppance, or he had committed an unforgivable act of malicious insurrection. Many Tory MPs were apoplectic at what some
were calling co-ordinated treachery. This derived from the speech’s implied invitation for Michael Heseltine to stand against Margaret Thatcher. Both Howe and Heseltine subsequently denied any collusion. Perhaps their remarkable collaboration happened by telepathy.

HESELTINE ENTERS THE RING

Scenes close to internecine mayhem exploded within the Tory Party during the hours after Geoffrey Howe’s statement. It was reported that two colleagues came to blows in the tea room, but even without the fisticuffs the angry divisions were erupting, with colleagues ferociously arguing the toss on questions like: Was Howe a regicide or a hero? Had Elspeth written the most venomous parts of the speech? Was Heseltine a party to the plot? The most frequently repeated inquiry of the day was: ‘What happens next?’

Cabals and conclaves were forming in the corridors, the bars and the smoking room with raised voices and jabbing fingers. The only people who looked happy were Michael Heseltine’s camp followers, headed by William Powell, Michael Mates and Keith Hampson. They were in a frenzy of excitement. It did not take long for their hero to pick up the gauntlet so helpfully thrown at his feet. The following morning, Michael Heseltine formally announced his candidacy. The 1990 Tory leadership battle had begun, with the first ballot fixed for Tuesday 20 November.

There were two enormous surprises in the next few days. They were that both the challenger and the incumbent lost the election. This was only partly a product of the complex rules, which ordained that for either of them to win the contest outright without a second ballot, the victor had to achieve a simple majority plus 15 per cent – a total of 208 votes.

What stymied Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine was not the artificial target of 208 votes. It was that they both carried too much baggage to reach this winning post, and that they both ran campaigns of considerable incompetence.

Michael Heseltine should have been an entirely credible candidate to become leader of the party and the next prime minister. He had the necessary ministerial experience. He was an outstanding speaker, blessed with the gift of political charisma. He had spent the past four years running a well-planned and handsomely financed campaign to become Margaret Thatcher’s successor.
And yet when his hour came, in the most favourable circumstances imaginable, Heseltine failed. Why?

The answer lies in what is known as the ‘ocean liner test’ – an amusing analogy invented by Nye Bevan and embellished by Michael Foot. It compares a sojourn in the House of Commons to setting off on a long voyage with a collection of fellow passengers you might never have picked to be your companions. But by the time the ship has crossed the Bay of Biscay and passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, the changing seas and the shared experiences of shipboard life have made it possible for the leading figures on the boat to have their characters assessed with remarkable accuracy. These favourable and unfavourable judgements are the House of Commons equivalent of the separation of the sheep and the goats. In the context of the 1990 leadership election, all that needs to be said is that Michael Heseltine failed the ocean liner test.

Tarzan looked good from the outside, but among his own parliamentary colleagues he had never been able to muster anything like the required level of support. He was too much of a loner to be liked, and too much of an egoist to be trusted. His motives, his volatility and his vanity were considered highly suspect. ‘He is so uninterested in meeting his fellow Members, he doesn’t even know where the tea room is’, grumbled Gerald Howarth.
⁹
Yet, for all these long-standing disadvantages, the extraordinary circumstances of the election gave him a better chance than he could ever previously have hoped for. Sir Geoffrey Howe had effectively endorsed his candidacy. Opinion polls suggested that with Heseltine as leader, the Conservatives would have their best chance of winning the next election. His strongest card was that he was promising an immediate review of the poll tax. This should have been the ace of trumps when it came to picking up new votes in the leadership election, because so many Tory MPs were convinced that they would lose their seats unless the poll tax was dropped.

Yet, even with these strong tides running in his favour, Heseltine could not build sufficient momentum to pull ahead of Margaret Thatcher. This was partly because his campaign was badly run. His principal lieutenants, Michael Mates, the MP for Petersfield, and Keith Hampson, the MP for Ripon, did not have sufficient organisational skills.

To counter the impression that he was leading a second eleven team, Hezza turned his strategy into a one-man band operation. The cat who walked by
himself now had to canvass by himself. He did this rather embarrassingly, standing for hours at a stretch in the Members’ Lobby, accosting colleagues as they went in and out of the chamber. ‘How about coming my way?’ he asked me on the steps of the stone-flagged corridor leading down from the lobby to the Members’ Cloakroom. ‘Your talents have been overlooked for far too long. We’d love to have you with us.’
¹⁰

Variations on these lines were deployed to dozens of other colleagues. Some were flattered, while others were repelled by Hezza’s synthetic smiles and ersatz charm at these forced encounters. Norman Lamont mocked Heseltine for canvassing ‘like a child molester, hanging around the lavatories and waiting to pounce on people’.
¹¹
Even for Michael Heseltine, a shy and sensitive man beneath the flashy surface, these advances must have felt almost as maladroit as they seemed to his targets.