Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (93 page)

THE ELECTION OF A NEW LEADER

It was an extraordinary irony that Margaret Thatcher put in much more hard work to secure the election of John Major on the second ballot than she had to support her own position on the first. He suddenly became her chosen successor, although this process required some degree of self-delusion. Faced with choosing between the three candidates, she did not hesitate. Michael Heseltine was anathema to her. She respected Douglas Hurd, but thought him too much of an old school consensualist. As she told Woodrow Wyatt:

It may be inverted snobbishness but I don’t want old style, old Etonian Tories of the old school to succeed me and to go back to the old complacent consensus ways. John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is far more in tune with the skilled and ambitious and worthwhile working classes than Douglas Hurd is.
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Even so, to anoint John Major with enthusiasm she needed to believe that he was a right-winger, a Eurosceptic and a Thatcherite. None of these three labels rang true. But she convinced herself otherwise. This was superficially possible because, having been Foreign Secretary for only three months and Chancellor for only a year, John Major carried little baggage. Ideologically, he was the unknown candidate, even to the Prime Minister who now wanted him to be her successor.

Major had the best campaign team, led by Norman Lamont. Hurd was a half-hearted starter. As Willie Whitelaw shrewdly observed of him, ‘The trouble with Douglas is the same with me in 1975. He doesn’t really want the job.’
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As for Heseltine, he again was handicapped by having weak campaign managers. Yet even so, some momentum started to build for him for the first
couple of days after the resignation. Ironically, this new but fleeting support came mostly from furious Thatcherites. They were so angry at the assassination of their heroine that they wanted to have nothing to do with those they thought had betrayed her. So, to punish Norman Lamont, Richard Ryder and Peter Lilley, who had by now become the leaders of John Major’s campaign, some hotheads of the Thatcher fan club declared they would vote for Heseltine. Another tranche of pledges came from MPs who felt that the colourful Tarzan was a future election winner, while ‘the grey men in suits’ (Hurd and Major) were not.

Margaret Thatcher did a valuable service to the Major camp by reversing this flow of support for Heseltine. She telephoned a number of her loyalists to urge them to vote for her chosen successor. Her advocacy of the reasons why Heseltine must be stopped was powerful. By the time she deployed these arguments, many a Tory MP was feeling guilty about the deposition of a leader who, for all her faults, had just put on a firework display of her leadership skills in the no confidence debate.

One way or another, her enthusiastic backing for Major was an important factor in swinging the contest his way. However, it was not as important as a MORI opinion poll, which suggested that John Major would be even more successful as a vote-getter with the electorate than Michael Heseltine.
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Once the febrile party started to believe that Tarzan’s alleged powers of election winning might be surpassed by the least known prime ministerial candidate, the Heseltine bandwagon juddered to a halt, and the uncommitted votes rolled Major’s way.

Margaret Thatcher was active but not over-active in the five days of second-ballot leadership campaigning. She was too busy with the mundane but essential task of moving out. Packing up her flat after eleven and a half years in residence at No. 10 proved a wearisome task. Fortunately, unlike some previous prime ministers who lost office unexpectedly, she had somewhere to move to.

Three years earlier, Denis had presciently said, ‘Look, we should never be homeless. You don’t know with politics; we might have to move in a hurry and we must have somewhere to go.’
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As a result, the Thatchers had bought a house on a new estate overlooking the golf course at Dulwich. So their accumulated possessions were transported there in a shuttle service operated mainly by Denis’s Ford Cortina and Carol’s Mini-Metro.

With the help of Crawfie, Carla Powell and Joy Robilliard (her constituency secretary), Margaret Thatcher supervised the moving operations, padding around in her stockinged feet as she filled tea chests and mobile wardrobes. No longer occupied with the decisions of government, she spent her time deciding ‘whether to wrap knick-knacks in two layers of paper, or whether one would do’.
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Her last weekend as Prime Minister was spent at Chequers. It was a house she had come to love, so parting from it was an emotional wrench. On her final Sunday there she went to church, gave a drinks party for the Chequers staff and then, in the late afternoon, had a farewell stroll round the main rooms as the winter light was fading. She and Denis were in tears as they walked hand in hand along the gallery that overlooked the great hall.

Returning to No. 10, it was clear to her and other insiders that the momentum in the leadership election was moving heavily towards John Major. But she did make one or two last canvassing phone calls on his behalf, only to find that these alleged waverers had already become his supporters.

Her only outside public engagement on Monday was to go and say a farewell thank you to the staff at Central Office. This caused the sole glitch in her post-resignation appearances, when she told them that she would be ‘a very good back seat driver’.

The remark was immediately misinterpreted, not least in the Major campaign headquarters in Gayfere Street, where I heard an explosion of expletives in reaction to it. This was an error of judgement. For Margaret Thatcher was not signalling her intention of exercising influence on her successor.

It was clear from the context that she was not referring to John Major, but to President George Bush. She told the Central Office staffers that she had been ‘very, very thrilled’ to receive a phone call from the President soon after her resignation announcement. She went on to say that they had discussed the military situation in the Gulf, where ‘He won’t falter, and I won’t falter. It’s just that I won’t be pulling the levers there. But I shall be a very good back seat driver.’
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Two last outings as a front-seat driver took place at a party for the staff of 10 Downing Street and at her final appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions. The farewell staff party attended by cleaners, drivers, police officers and telephonists, as well as by her private office, was described by Ronnie Millar as a ‘triumphant’ occasion. She expressed her farewell thanks with great verve, standing on a chair
to be cheered. Her last line, ‘Life begins at sixty-five’, brought the house down. She was presented with a first edition of Kipling’s poems and a high-frequency portable radio. Her Private Secretary, Andrew Turnbull, said that the gift had been chosen ‘So wherever you are in the world, you can continue to be cross with the BBC’.
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On Tuesday 27 November, her last full day in office, she cast her own vote in the leadership election and then answered her 698th session of Prime Minister’s Questions. It was more of an occasion for congratulations than interrogation. But she did get in one Parthian shot when the Liberal MP, Rosie Barnes, asked her about electoral reform of the national voting system. ‘I am sure that the hon. Lady will understand that I am all for first past the post’, replied Margaret Thatcher.
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The laughter among Tory MPs included many pangs of regret that such a system had not been in place for her leadership election.

Soon after 6 p.m., the results of the ballot were announced. John Major topped the poll with 185 votes to Heseltine’s 131 and Hurd’s 56. Although this left Major technically short of two votes for the absolute majority required under the rules, this was academic since Heseltine and Hurd immediately withdrew. So the crown went to John Major, although as Margaret Thatcher observed to her family, he was elected by nineteen fewer votes than she had received a week earlier.

As soon as Michael Heseltine and Douglas Hurd had delivered their withdrawal statements, the outgoing Prime Minister went through the connecting door to No. 11 and congratulated her successor. ‘Well done, John, well done’, she said, shaking his hand.
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She was more effusive to Norma Major, giving her a hug and a kiss, saying, ‘It’s everything I’ve dreamt of for such a long time. The future is assured.’
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With the media massing in Downing Street, it was time for John Major to emerge with a victory statement. Margaret Thatcher wanted to make it a joint appearance. ‘I’ll come out’, she said. But Norman Lamont, sensitive to the ‘back-seat driver’ controversy of the previous day, dissuaded her with the request, ‘Please let him have his moment’.
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She complied, and watched him from an upstairs window, peeping sadly from behind a curtain. It made a poignant photograph symbolising the passing of her era.

Her last night at No. 10 consisted of more hard labour filling up the last of the packing cases, followed by a quiet supper with Denis, Mark and Carol.

In the morning, she was down in the front hallway just after 9 a.m., where the entire No. 10 staff were lined up, some of them weeping. They burst into applause as she appeared. She shook hands with her private office team and many others. At first, she tried to suppress her own tears at these farewells, but soon was unable to stem the flow. By the time she had gone down the line of well-wishers her eyes were red and her mascara was smudged. Crawfie had to step in with a handkerchief to do some emergency make-up repairs.

With composure recovered, the front door opened. She stepped out to a bank of microphones, and said:

Ladies and Gentlemen. We’re leaving Downing Street for the last time after eleven and a half wonderful years, and we’re very happy that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came eleven and a half years ago.

After reiterating her gratitude to her staff and to the people who had sent her flowers and letters, she ended:

Now it’s time for a new chapter to open, and I wish John Major all the luck in the world. He’ll be splendidly served and he has the makings of being a great Prime Minister, which I am sure he will be in a very short time. Thank you very much. Goodbye.
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She and Denis got into the waiting car. As it moved away, she turned in her seat for a sideways look at the throng of media. The photographers caught an affecting picture of her face crumpling in sadness. It was a reminder of Enoch Powell’s adage, ‘All political careers end in tears’.
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REFLECTION

Politics is a rough trade, but the fall of Margaret Thatcher will go down as the most unpleasant and unattractive destruction of a prime minister in modern history. It brought out the worst aspects of the Tory Party – panic, disloyalty, deviousness, score settling and a cavalier disregard for the rights of the electorate.

The big question remains: should a serving prime minister ever be removed by a faction of MPs within their own party? In Margaret Thatcher’s case, the issue was particularly acute because she was a leader of such outstanding stature,
who had been confirmed as Prime Minister by three substantial election victories. If she was going to be overthrown, it should have been done by the voters, in a general election.

It is true that Margaret Thatcher brought many of her troubles on herself. She stopped listening to her party, and even to the most loyal of her colleagues. Her man-management became deplorable. Hubris and arrogance grew within her. The way she handled her leadership election challenge from Michael Heseltine was downright sloppy – an adjective which could not be applied to any other episode in her political career. These were grave mistakes, but did they amount to a charge sheet that justified her political execution? ‘No! No! No!’, to echo the words she memorably used in an earlier context.

She was ousted because a section of the Conservative Party in Parliament, and particularly about half the members of the cabinet, worked themselves up into a mid-term panic. The woes of the poll tax and a clutch of bad by-election results meant that a swathe of MPs, particularly in the North West, were convinced that they were going to lose their seats. Experience suggests that by the time a general election came round in 1992 these fears would have significantly abated. The poll tax was in the process of being amended and alleviated. Other issues such as the improvement in the economy and success in the Gulf War would have had more impact in an election.

A Kinnock versus Thatcher head-to-head contest at the polls would have broken all precedents if the result had been a knockout victory for the challenger. If these probabilities of political life had been explained by reassuring voices from the cabinet, the chances are that the back-bench hysteria would have been contained.

Unfortunately, several cabinet ministers were themselves in a state of panic. All of them liked and respected Geoffrey Howe. They were aghast at the harshness of his treatment by the Prime Minister and at the havoc unleashed by his resignation statement.

Michael Heseltine would never have challenged Margaret Thatcher as a sitting Prime Minister had it not been for the invitation to do so issued at the end of Howe’s resignation statement. The collusion between these two enemies of their leader, whether plotted or telepathic, caused chaos. Most of the cabinet were not expecting it. They reacted with irrational fear. Had they closed ranks and strongly supported the Prime Minister, the chances of her defeating him by
a simple majority (as the second-ballot rules required) would have risen to at least 50–50. But instead of giving her that steadfast support, the cabinet’s loyalty disintegrated.

The charge of treachery by the cabinet, which Margaret Thatcher herself made in her post-resignation years, is difficult to sustain, at least in the extreme form that involves plotting and backstabbing. What happened was that the cabinet took its lead from the back-benchers. Usually in politics it is the other way round. But this cabinet lacked ministers willing to go into battle for their leader. They were feeble turncoats rather than resolute traitors. In retrospect, they look like weak politicians who lost their bearings in a crisis. Some may have been treacherous, but most of them defected because they had no stomach for the fight.