The Downing Street Years (72 page)

Then a fortnight later the publication of our acceptance of the Top Salary Review Board (TSRB) recommendations provided the occasion for a large back-bench revolt in the House of Commons. What caused the outrage was the large increases for top civil servants. There was no doubt in my mind that we could not retain the right people in vitally important posts in government administration unless their salaries bore at least some comparison with their counterparts in the private sector. The cost of doing this to the public purse was, of course, only a tiny fraction of even a modest increase to large groups of public sector workers. I came to the conclusion that it was best to put the anomaly right at one go. When the Labour Party erupted I reminded them that Jim Callaghan had done the same thing in 1978. That said, we did not handle the issue well. Fear of leaks meant that those entrusted with explaining the rationale of our policy simply did not know about it in time. Even Bernard Ingham had been kept in the dark which, when he raised the matter with me afterwards, I conceded was absurd. In future we handled the TSRB announcements much more carefully. But for this occasion the damage had been done.

Generally, a political malaise spreads because underlying economic conditions are bad or worsening. But this was not the case on this occasion. True, inflation had moved upwards from the low point it had reached after the election and unemployment, always a lagging indicator, remained stubbornly high; but the economy was growing quite fast. It became clear to me that the root of our problems was presentation and therefore personnel. Of course, there is a tendency for all governments — particularly Conservative governments — to blame presentation and not policy for their woes: but in 1985 it really was the case that some ministers were not in the right jobs and could not explain our policies to the people. So there was only one way of changing the image of the Government and that was by changing its members. A reshuffle was required.

My first discussion about the 1985 reshuffle was with Willie Whitelaw and John Wakeham, now Chief Whip, over supper in the flat at No. 10 in late May. Willie and John were both shrewd and party to the gossip which constitutes parliamentary opinion. Each had his own personal likes and dislikes, which I would privately try to discount, but I listened to their advice very carefully. They urged on me a July reshuffle. I could not agree with them. I hated sacking ministers and I could not prevent myself thinking what it meant to them and their families, suddenly losing salary, car and prestige.
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I used to like to feel that they would have the long summer recess in office before coming back in September to learn the bad news. The trouble was that the press would then spend the whole of that period speculating on who was to stay and who would go. So I eventually agreed to reshuffles at the end of July; but not yet.

Planning a reshuffle is immensely complex. There is never a perfect outcome. It is necessary to get the main decisions about the big offices of state right and then work outward and downward from these. Nor is it possible always to give the best positions to one’s closest supporters. Not only must the Cabinet to some extent reflect the varying views in the Parliamentary Party at a particular time: there are some people that it is better to bring in because they would cause more trouble outside. Peter Walker and, to a lesser extent, Kenneth Clarke are examples, precisely because they fought their corner hard. There is another problem: I generally found that the Left seemed to be best at presentation, the Right at getting the job done — although Norman Tebbit and Cecil Parkinson managed to do both.

I wanted to ensure that the Government’s policies were presented properly between now and the general election. This meant some movement in the most senior three posts — Chancellor, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary. Nigel Lawson was turning out to be an effective tax-reforming Chancellor. Geoffrey Howe seemed a competent Foreign Secretary; I had not yet taken the full measure of our disagreements. Leon Brittan was the obvious candidate to be moved:
however unfairly, he just did not carry conviction with the public. I knew that he would be devastated, but it had to be done.

I asked Leon to come to Chequers on Sunday afternoon 1 September where Willie, John and I were putting the final touches to the decisions. Willie is a good judge of character. He told me that the first thing Leon would ask when I broke the news to him was whether he would keep his order of precedence in the Cabinet list. To my surprise, this was indeed what he asked. Forewarned, I was able to reassure him. I was also able to say — and mean it — that with complex Financial Services legislation coming up to provide a framework of regulation for the City Leon’s talents would be well employed at the Department of Trade and Industry to which I was moving him.

I replaced Leon at the Home Office with Douglas Hurd, who looked more the part, was immensely reassuring to the police, and, though no one could call him a natural media performer, inspired a good deal of confidence in the Parliamentary Party. He had become a harder and wiser man through serving as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He also knew the department, having earlier been Leon’s number two there. By and large, it was a successful appointment.

I had to move Leon; but was I right to move him to the DTI? Although the main fault in what lay ahead certainly resided elsewhere, Leon’s attitude on going to his new department carried its own dangers. He was obviously shaken — friends later described him as somewhat demoralized — and determined to make his political mark. As a result he proved oversensitive about his position when the Westland affair blew up. All this made for errors of judgement when facing a ruthless opponent like Michael Heseltine. It turned out that the DTI had even more pitfalls for this civilized but not very streetwise politician than did the Home Office. At the time, however, it seemed that this was a job which would put Leon less in the limelight, while making the most of his formidable intellect and phenomenal industry, which was what I wanted. But even had Leon weathered Westland he would have found himself in difficulties over the question of privatizing BL.

Leon’s position turned out therefore to be the key to the plan for the reshuffle. It might have worked out differently. For I thought long and hard about bringing Cecil Parkinson back to the Cabinet. I missed his dry views and great presentational skills. But my advisers were divided on the merits of doing so and in the end I reluctantly concluded that it was too soon.

There were three departures from the Cabinet. Nigel Lawson had become almost as irritated with Peter Rees as Chief Secretary as
Geoffrey Howe had been with John Biffen. Peter was an able tax lawyer and an amiable colleague. I always got on well with him. But I took the view that a Chancellor has the right to select his own subordinates. At Nigel’s request, I replaced Peter with John MacGregor. John had a good financial brain as he had shown as part of the Shadow Treasury team. Although I considered him very much a Ted Heath man, I had been impressed by his acumen and diligence and felt he would do this demanding job well — which he did.

Grey Gowrie — after only a year in Cabinet, as Leader of the House of Lords — to my great regret decided that he wanted to earn more than a Cabinet member who was a peer — and therefore had no MP’s salary — was able to do. He decided to go back into business. He had a fine, highly cultivated mind and great style. I had offered him the job of Secretary of State for Education, planning to keep Keith Joseph, who I knew was thinking of retirement, as minister without portfolio. But that was not to be. Keith agreed to stay at Education a little longer.

I regretted in a different way the loss of Patrick Jenkin. No one could have been more conscientious than Patrick — loyal, kind, selfless. But I could not have the constant haemorrhage of political support which his inability to put over a case in the Department of the Environment caused. I was becoming increasingly worried about what to do with the rating system which would be an even more difficult issue than GLC abolition. So I appointed Ken Baker to succeed Patrick. It was a good decision. Ken turned the tables on the Left, proved a superb communicator of our policies and was the foster-father of the community charge.

I had brought David Young into the Cabinet as minister without portfolio the previous year and I now had him succeed Tom King, who went to be Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. It is difficult to conceive of a greater contrast than David and Tom. I had started off with a wrong view of Tom King, inherited from Opposition. I had thought that he was a man with a taste for detail who, when I made Michael Heseltine Secretary of State for the Environment in 1979, would complement Michael’s very broad-brush approach. I then made the uncomfortable discovery that detail was not at all Tom’s forte, as the way in which we became steadily more enmeshed in almost incomprehensible formulae for rate support grant amply demonstrated. At Employment — in particular on the whole question of trade union political funds where he adopted a half-hearted compromise — he had not shown himself to best effect. Norman Tebbit, his predecessor, was unimpressed; and I felt rightly so. At Northern Ireland,
Tom subsequently demonstrated the other side of his character, which was a robust, manly good sense that won even hardened opponents to his point of view, at least as far as is possible in Northern Ireland. Even though from the standpoint of Ulster affairs it was a slightly difficult time to put in a new Secretary of State, with negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in its final stages, Tom went with good grace and to good effect.

David Young did not claim to understand politics: but he understood how to make things happen. He had revolutionized the working of the Manpower Services Commission (MSC) and at the Department of Employment his schemes for getting the unemployed back into work made a major contribution to our winning the 1987 general election. He shared Keith Joseph’s and my view about how the economy worked and how jobs were created — not by government but by enterprise. He understood the relationship between the price of labour and the number of jobs. And he had that sureness of touch in devising practical projects which make sense in the marketplace that few but successful businessmen ever acquire. The ‘Action for Jobs’ programme was the single most effective economic programme we launched in my term in office. As a general rule I did not bring outsiders directly into Cabinet, feeling that previous experience of this — as with John Davies in Ted Heath’s Government — had not been altogether happy. David Young was an exception and proved eminently worthy of being so.

If the Government’s presentation was to be improved something had to be done about Conservative Central Office. Central Office rightly claims that it is a universal scapegoat for whatever goes wrong. It is blamed by the Government when the Party is restive or lethargic. It is blamed by the Party when the Government seems insensitive or out of touch. But equally there is no doubt that the performance of Central Office is variable and by this point it was causing alarm. John Gummer just did not have the political clout or credibility to rally the troops. I had appointed him as a sort of nightwatchman: but he seemed to have gone to sleep on the job. It was time for a figure of weight and authority to succeed him and provide the required leadership. In many ways, the ideal man seemed to be Norman Tebbit. Norman is one of the bravest men I have ever met. He will never deviate on a point of principle — and those principles are ones which even the least articulate Tory knows he shares.

There were, though, arguments against Norman’s appointment. He was still not well and would indeed have to undergo more painful surgery at a very difficult political time for us. He was not a first-class
administrator. I later came to have some vigorous arguments with him. There were also those who said that he and I were too close politically. They argued that what was needed, in John Biffen’s foolish phrase, was a more ‘balanced ticket’, which seemed to me a recipe for paralysis.

But there was no doubt in my mind that Norman was the man for the job, and so it proved. I knew he wanted it, though he never asked me for it. I thought that one day he might succeed me if we won the election, though Party Chairmanships have generally been something of a poisoned chalice. Above all, I knew that the rank and file of the Party would give their all for Norman Tebbit, whom everyone admired for bearing his sufferings with such heroism, never complaining but never concealing either that, whatever politics might bring, it was his own family and Margaret Tebbit’s needs which came first. Norman was better than an inspiration: he was an example. So I appointed him Chairman of the Party; he remained a member of the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. At least for the moment, party morale soared.

Norman needed a Deputy Chairman who would be able to make those visits to the Party around the country which Norman’s health precluded him from doing. Only someone with a high profile already could do this successfully and I decided that Jeffrey Archer was the right choice. He was the extrovert’s extrovert. He had prodigious energy; he was and remains the most popular speaker the Party has ever had. Unfortunately, as it turned out, Jeffrey’s political judgement did not always match his enormous energy and fund-raising ability: ill-considered remarks got him and the Party into some awkward scrapes, but he always got himself out of them.

I also made quite a large number of changes in the ranks of junior ministers. Two future Cabinet ministers came into the Government — Michael Howard at the DTI and John Major who moved from the Whips’ Office to the DHSS. John Major was certainly not known to be on the right of the Party during his first days as an MP. When as a whip he came to the annual whips’ lunch at Downing Street with the other whips he disagreed with me about the importance of getting taxation down. He argued that there was no evidence that people would rather pay lower taxes than have better social services. I did not treat him or his argument kindly and some people, I later heard, thought that he had ruined his chances of promotion. But in fact I enjoy an argument and when the whips’ office suggested he become a junior minister I gave him the job which I myself had done first, dealing with the complex area of pensions and national insurance. If
that did not alert him to the realities of social security and the dependency culture, nothing would.