Wielding the Knife Thatcher: The Downing Street Years

APPLAUSE

In October 1989,

the Conservative Party celebrated Margaret Thatcher's 64th birthday

and her tenth anniversary as Prime Minister at the party conference...

# Happy birthday, dear Margaret... #

Yet, just over a year later, those same colleagues who clapped

and cheered her in public would force her from office.

For some time, many in the party had been wishing to get rid of her.

They felt that Margaret Thatcher had lost her way, that she

was dictatorial in Cabinet and out of touch with the country.

They feared her policies, especially on the poll tax and Europe,

would lose them the next election.

But Margaret Thatcher was determined that SHE would decide

the timing and the manner of her going.

MARGARET THATCHER: I knew that the time would come when I had to go.

I felt that I should fight one more election

and then the time would be best about two years after that election.

Also, I was really grooming several people to run for the leadership,

so it was really all worked out, but, of course,

the best-laid plans "gang aft agley."

Margaret correctly analysed the situation

that she was unpopular in the polls,

that a large number of her colleagues were

frightened that she would lose an election or,

more particularly, that they might lose their seats.

But, after all, we'd been through that in '81

and we'd been through it in '85-'86

and on each occasion she'd shown her resilience

and her ability to come back and win an election.

So she was very confident.

Perhaps she may have been overconfident because of that.

As Margaret Thatcher celebrated ten years with her closest admirers,

senior Conservatives began to plan a dignified departure for the leader.

The men in grey suits had decided that the time had come

for a gracious handover, but it was not to be.

-LORD WHITELAW:

-I think probably her greatest mistake

was not to make up her mind

to give up before the 1992 election.

I think ten years was a remarkable achievement

and it would have been wise probably to have given up at that stage.

Difficult but I think probably wise.

Shortly after her tenth anniversary in power, Margaret Thatcher

was invited to Bledlow, Lord Carrington's country seat.

Carrington, a party grandee and a former Foreign Secretary,

had taken on the difficult task of telling Margaret Thatcher

the time had come for her to leave office.

It was quite clear really that Peter wanted to talk to me

about when I would go.

Quite clear that I think he was speaking for other people too.

That was the impression I got, that he thought the party wanted me to go.

They wanted me to go at a time of my own choosing and with dignity...

but that I had the impression that he wanted me

to go rather sooner than had been in my mind.

I think it happens to everybody. They stay too long.

Particularly when you're in a position of that authority.

You know so much more than your advisers know

because if you've been there 11 years or 12 years maybe

you've had three or four advisers and you think you know everything.

There was alarm at the Prime Minister's tendency

to appear regal in public.

We have become a grandmother

of a grandson called Michael.

She was, I thought, starting to show some of the signs of metal fatigue.

Not very surprising.

She'd been in office as Prime Minster for a decade.

She worked incredibly hard but I think she was starting to portray

some signs of, um, tiredness

and not always being on top of the subject.

And many of Margaret Thatcher's colleagues were concerned that she

was ignoring the advice of her Cabinet,

whose support she needed above all,

and was becoming dangerously self-sufficient.

In 1988, she lost an important restraining influence

when Willie Whitelaw retired as Deputy Prime Minister.

-NIGEL LAWSON:

-He was a tremendous stabilising force.

A force for sanity.

And it was a great loss when he went.

Then there was really no restraint on her at all.

From his retirement, Whitelaw cautioned

the Prime Minister against provoking a split with her senior colleagues.

He warned her that her Chancellor, Nigel Lawson,

and her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, were increasingly angered

by her style and her policies, but the Prime Minister ignored him.

I think I wasn't far wrong. I think that was a problem for her by then.

I think it was a great problem that she wasn't getting on with Nigel

by that stage and that, evidently,

she wasn't getting on really with Geoffrey Howe either.

But it had become bigger than that.

The Prime Minster depended on the backing of her Foreign Secretary

and her Chancellor for her authority in Cabinet.

If she dared alienate these two torchbearers of Thatcherism,

she risked everything.

She did and she lost.

In the early days of her government, Margaret Thatcher

and Geoffrey Howe had been close allies on economic policy,

but now, in Mrs Thatcher's view, Sir Geoffrey had become dangerously

pro-European and had fallen under the influence of the community.

I think Geoffrey was much more of a compromiser

and a consensus man than I was so he, in fact,

in negotiations would move more towards their position while I wanted

to keep far more of the sovereignty as a matter of principle,

and that really was the difference.

Well, she'd never been lacking in egocentricity,

and that may be attributed as a criticism, but when she became

engaged in hand-to-hand combat, as it were,

around the European Council table, I think

her manner then became more strident than her colleagues liked

and actually became counterproductive

and led to our losing tricks that we might otherwise have won.

MARGARET THATCHER: 'Now I did point out that we had

'all foreign ministers here

'and if they could agree in two or three weeks' time,'

we could have had a special meeting here tonight

so that they could have agreed then.

This obvious factor did not escape them. They merely refused to have it.

You were ready to go, weren't you?

LAUGHTER

Really, it's an absolutely... I can't tell you.

Only a Frenchman could have done that. Absolutely unbelievable.

She was completely confrontational with them on everything.

The result was twofold.

First of all, they were not prepared,

after they realised what the game was that she was playing,

they were not prepared to give her anything on any issue

because they could see they would get nothing in return.

So we achieved nothing as a nation.

And what we did do

was unite all the other Europeans

in a way that was totally counterproductive

because they were united against us, against Britain.

No, Britain's interests were never damaged in my time.

Don't forget, I took over a declining Britain,

a Britain that was accepting decline,

a Britain whose voice meant nothing in the world.

And I finished up with a Britain whose voice meant

something in Europe.

And if they were against what I said,

they should have done it by argument,

not by the attempted bulldozer.

Margaret Thatcher had come to rely on the advice of Charles Powell,

her private secretary.

He shared her hostility to Europe.

But the pomp of state affairs brought the Foreign Secretary

and the Prime Minister into frequent contact.

Sir Geoffrey Howe had become one of the most influential

opponents of Margaret Thatcher's stance on Europe.

But the disagreement between the two politicians went far beyond policy.

I think as the years wore on,

they got on each other's nerves to an increasing degree.

One of the problems seemed to me

that Geoffrey Howe has a rather roundabout way of expressing things

and when he came over to Number 10,

he used very circumlocutory language.

He would start from the middle, as it were, rather than the beginning.

Most people know the one thing you have to do with Mrs Thatcher

is to get to your point in the first half of the first sentence because

that may well be the only sentence you're ever allowed to speak.

-GEOFFREY HOWE:

-'We achieved that because we've been able,

'during the two terms in office...'

Even in public,

Margaret Thatcher found it difficult to hide her impatience with

Sir Geoffrey's determination to cover the ground thoroughly.

MRS THATCHER: Geoffrey's personal style was very different from mine.

He has a lovely speaking voice, quiet speaking voice.

But at Cabinet we always reported on foreign affairs.

This quiet voice was

so quiet sometimes that people couldn't hear and I had to say,

"Speak up." And then he gave it, in a way, which wasn't exactly

scintillating, and foreign affairs, you know, are interesting.

They affect everything that happens to our own way of life

and they are exciting.

And so we just diverged.

From 1983, when Geoffrey Howe became Foreign Secretary,

colleagues had been first embarrassed

and later appalled by the Prime Minister's public

humiliation of this senior politician.

-NIGEL LAWSON:

-I think because he is very polite and didn't answer back,

it was almost as if he was being treated as a cross

between a doormat and a punchbag.

She would delight in front of others.

What she said to him in private was her own business, but in front of

others, in front of colleagues, she would, er,

treat what he said in the most dismissive way,

be extremely discourteous to him, trample all over him,

and it was very embarrassing for others to witness.

-JOHN WHITTINGDALE:

-Mrs Thatcher would always be

very critical of Geoffrey, sometimes almost rudely.

I mean, I felt uncomfortable

as a relatively junior member of her staff to be present

to hear her talking pretty sternly to

a minister as senior as Geoffrey Howe.

I think one of the things that she had never fully absorbed is

that it's bad management as well as bad manners

to reproach, as it were, officers in front of other ranks.

If you want to tick people off or have arguments with them,

then you should, as a matter of courtesy, do it first in private.

But I think that she had then become increasingly reckless, if you like,

of the way in which she conducted personal relationships of that kind.

I wish he'd come and said.

Why not?

Other people didn't fear to come and discuss, although I did have

discussions with Geoffrey as Foreign Secretary, usually once a week.

What a pity

he didn't say.

Margaret Thatcher was unable to get on with her Foreign Secretary.

She came to find it almost unbearable to be with him

in the same room. Her respect for the Chancellor was greater.

She was said to fear his intellect, but the split with him was,

if anything, more damaging and went to the heart of policy.

For some time, Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher had

been at odds over the management of the economy.

In 1985, both Lawson and Howe concluded that a stable pound

with the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the ERM,

was the best way of controlling inflation and helping industry.

The Prime Minister disagreed.

But in 1987, Lawson decided that if she wouldn't let him

join the ERM, he would at least peg sterling to the German currency,

a policy called "Shadowing The Deutschmark."

I first found out about that entirely by accident.

I used to do an annual, more or less annual,

interview with the Financial Times and one of the questions

they put to me on that particular day when they came was,

"Why are you shadowing the Deutschmark?"

And I vigorously denied it. I said, "We're not."

Not only is it absurd to suggest that

I could have carried out that policy secretly

when everybody in the markets, let alone the Prime Minister, knew

it had been carried out, but she was given every day, every evening,

a piece of paper which showed how much we had intervened,

what the rate was and so on.

And I spoke to her every week and discussed it with her every week.

The Prime Minster always felt that Lawson was secretive.

On many occasions, she'd been frustrated that he didn't

inform her of the details of his budgets in advance.

Indeed, by her own admission, she was forced to telephone spies in the

Treasury and at the Bank of England to find out what he was doing.

It was even rumoured that she had bugged Number 11.

Nigel did play his own cards very much close to his chest

and when I found out accidentally

and then said to my own treasury secretary,

"Look, find out what's going on," we rang up the Treasury and said,

"If he's shadowing it, what's the range in which he's shadowing it?"

They said, "We don't know." They couldn't tell us.

She was slightly paranoid by that time and was, I think,

afraid that I may be up to something that she didn't know about.

In fact, that was never the case.

Although we had a disagreement on exchange rate policy,

that was always entirely open.

I was always completely open with her

throughout my time as Chancellor.

As First Lord of the Treasury,

the Prime Minister was responsible for economic policy.

In March 1988, she ordered Lawson to stop shadowing the Deutschmark.

Reluctantly, he obeyed.

But an unbridgeable gulf had opened up between the Prime Minister

and her neighbour next door in Downing Street.

Policy drifted, inflation climbed.

Each side blamed the other for the return of economic malaise.

Inevitably, Conservative backbenchers

became aware of the schism.

Certainly I realised that the split between Nigel Lawson

and Mrs Thatcher was irreparable.

No bridge could be flung across that chasm and I saw in it

the seeds of ultimate destruction of her leadership.

On 24th June 1989, Margaret Thatcher was at Chequers

preparing for a European summit in Madrid.

The economy was now overheating and inflation was rising

but the Prime Minister still could not agree with her

Chancellor about economic policy.

She was also at loggerheads with Geoffrey Howe, who,

with Nigel Lawson, had long been urging Britain's entry into the ERM.

MARGARET THATCHER: I was at Chequers for the Saturday working on my speech

for the Madrid summit.

I suddenly received a message from Number 10 -

"Both Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson want to see you together

"before you go to Madrid."

And I was pretty cross. I had so much work to do.

And so I said, "All right, they can do it at 11.15 tonight

"or at 8.15 tomorrow morning."

They chose 8.15 Sunday morning.

I returned to Number 10.

Early on Sunday, 25th June,

the Foreign Secretary went to Downing Street to meet

the Chancellor and with him

demand the Prime Minister set a date for entry to the ERM.

The Prime Minister had banned the matter from Cabinet discussion.

LORD RIDLEY: I thought it was absolutely disgraceful.

I was horrified.

They did it behind the backs of the colleagues in the Cabinet.

We had no idea that anything of this sort was going on.

The ERM wasn't on the agenda for the Madrid summit and I just don't

think these are the tactics you should use however strongly

you feel about something.

-NIGEL LAWSON:

-If a prime minister is about to go to a major international

meeting to discuss with heads of government from other countries

the monetary affairs of Europe,

you would think that she would want to have a meeting with her

Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, even if

she doesn't want to take their advice.

She regarded this request for a meeting as, itself,

almost an act of treachery.

I was the minister to be with her at the Madrid summit.

Nigel Lawson was the minister in charge of economic policy.

If we had not had that meeting with her then what should history

have said then? It was our duty.

I should have welcomed the chance to present the same

case in the context of a larger group of ministers because we should

once again have secured the support of the larger group.

The fact that we were arguing at two-to-one was

because we were not able to mobilise a larger army.

That wasn't our choice.

They both came in in a rather self-conscious way,

but, um, clearly just a little bit pleased with themselves, holding

a document and they sat down opposite me, the other side of the fire.

Geoffrey started

and said he and Nigel had decided,

both of them,

they were not going merely to ask me to set a date

and specify a date at Madrid as to when we'd go into the

Exchange Rate Mechanism, but if I did not do so, they would resign.

Geoffrey Howe reiterated what we had suggested in our paper

and said, you know, that...

if you're not prepared to accept my advice,

then I will have to consider my position, or whatever...

..the appropriate formulation is for saying that he'd have to resign.

And, er, so I said,

I did say at that meeting,

a much shorter meeting, that you should know, Prime Minister,

that if Geoffrey goes I would have to go too.

They got up looking rather smug...

..and left.

It had been a grubby little meeting.

On the plane journey to the Madrid summit,

Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe maintained an icy silence.

Their relationship was permanently damaged.

That Sunday afternoon, the Prime Minister and Charles Powell

set to work on her response

to Lawson and Howe's ultimatum on the ERM.

Later, Margaret Thatcher announced for the first time

specific conditions for Britain's entry,

most importantly, the reduction of domestic inflation.

No date was set.

But Geoffrey Howe was convinced

that Margaret Thatcher had bowed to his wishes

by setting out conditions for Britain's joining the ERM.

Although Margaret Thatcher had set no date for entry,

he did not resign.

We achieved our objective,

which was Britain remaining part of the continuing debate

on the future of the European Monetary System.

We were perceived to have achieved our objective

by the press, by Parliament and by our partners in Europe.

It would have been entirely futile to resign

having achieved an important advance.

Strangely enough, the briefing I saw,

which had been given to the press, not from us,

can only have come from Geoffrey or from Nigel,

was they had had a great victory.

In fact, it had a great defeat.

Such is presentation.

How different from reality.

She called their bluff.

And then the most despicable thing of all was that when she got back,

and it was all over, they didn't resign.

Having threatened to resign and not got what they wanted,

they didn't resign.

The following day, Margaret Thatcher confronted her colleagues.

Normally, I'm just sitting in my place in the Cabinet room

and they all come in and take their places.

In view of what they had attempted to do to me

on the Sunday, I went to the door of the Cabinet room,

saw each minister in, just waited as they passed me.

Geoffrey came and went straight past.

Nigel came...

..and he said...

..in his rather nice way, "Went rather well, didn't it?"

I said, "Yes, no date."

And that was that.

Oh, I think that that was one of those little things

which was characteristic of her.

I don't think I took that very seriously.

What I was much more concerned about was the bad blood that

that occasion had created.

And there's no doubt about it, it had created very bad blood

between us and, of course, between Geoffrey and herself.

Margaret Thatcher had won a battle with her colleagues

but she'd not won the war.

Her enmity with Lawson and Howe persisted.

It was to poison her last year in office.

Now she decided that Sir Geoffrey Howe must be punished.

It seemed as if he felt he had a right to anything he wanted.

And he seemed as if he felt he should be Foreign Secretary for ever

and I think perhaps he had come to enjoy the trappings of office.

Always, perhaps, a fatal temptation.

The trappings of office never appealed to me at all.

In July 1989, Margaret Thatcher had her revenge

and demoted Sir Geoffrey Howe.

Although he remained in the Cabinet,

she gave him the junior post of Leader of the House of Commons.

For a change of that kind to happen, as it were, out of the blue

and thought through with such apparently careful thought

did come as an immense shock, as a great thunderbolt.

No doubt Prime Ministers are entitled to proceed like that

and if they do approach decisions in that way,

it says something about relationships.

It's very difficult to suddenly ask somebody

to give up being Foreign Secretary all of a sudden.

It undoubtedly was all of a sudden

that he was asked to give up being Foreign Secretary.

And I think he'd done a very considerable job

and I don't think he had any idea that that was going to happen.

So, I suppose, if you have no idea it's going to happen,

in a way you must feel humiliated, mustn't you?

John Major replaced Sir Geoffrey Howe as Foreign Secretary.

-What would you like me to do?

-INDISTINCT RESPONSE

Major's lack of experience and the fact

that he was nearly 20 years younger than the outgoing Foreign Secretary

seems to have compounded Sir Geoffrey's humiliation.

Clearly he felt that obviously John's experience

was nothing like his, which was true.

I think there was really something else,

again which one could understand.

All of a sudden, it came to him

that the possibility of being Prime Minister

was slipping from his grasp

as others came up and would rival his claim.

Still in Cabinet,

with the courtesy title of Deputy Prime Minister,

Sir Geoffrey brooded on his treatment

and became ever more incensed at the Prime Minister's attitude to Europe.

Despite the celebration of ten glorious years,

the party conference of 1989 was held in an atmosphere of gloom

and recrimination.

Inflation and interest rates were high. Recession loomed.

While Lawson and Howe dutifully clapped their leader,

the intensity of her look betrayed for an instant

their mutual mistrust.

The Prime Minister's breach with her Chancellor was beyond repair.

Despite a public show of unity,

she now openly blamed Lawson for the return of inflation.

And she turned once more to her adviser Alan Walters, who,

like her, had little faith in Nigel Lawson or the ERM.

It's like that immortal line of Dickens',

he was the best of chancellors and the worst of chancellors.

Er...

As a person, he was intelligent...

..hard-working, devoted and so on.

But he was also arrogant...

..self-centred,

completely convinced that there was nobody cleverer than he was.

And alas, there was somebody cleverer than he was,

Mrs Thatcher.

Alan Walters was a frequent visitor to Number Ten,

where, in contrast to Nigel Lawson, his views were welcomed.

His opposition to the Chancellor's policy soon became public.

In October 1989, the Financial Times

published an article about Alan Walters

which repeated Walters' view

that the Exchange Rate Mechanism was half-baked.

For the beleaguered Chancellor, this was too much.

I felt really that it is quite impossible for me

to carry on my job...

..effectively.

Impossible for any Chancellor to carry on the job effectively

if his authority is being undermined all the time,

in the way that mine was being undermined,

apparently with the authority of the Prime Minister.

He came on very sensitive, I must say.

I was never expected to be sensitive but all of the rest of them were.

There was only one woman in the Cabinet.

Believe you me, there were a lot more prima donnas than that.

Oh, they came round. Goodness me, their reputation.

Never mind about mine,

never mind all the briefing that was going on

against my viewpoint, in the background.

Goodness me, they were touchy.

Oh, you had to smooth them down.

As the economy deteriorated, the Daily Mail accused Lawson

of betraying his party and the people of Britain.

It reflected Mrs Thatcher's views.

The Chancellor retreated to his country home,

where he was besieged by journalists.

With the return of inflation and interest rates high,

his position had become precarious.

-JOURNALIST:

-..ask about your speech?

Are you considering another rise in interest rates, Mr Lawson?

As the Chancellor fled back to London,

he decided he could no longer tolerate

Mrs Thatcher's preference for Alan Walters.

Early in the morning, on the 26th of October,

Nigel Lawson came to Number Ten to confront the Prime Minister.

He told her that if she didn't sack Alan Walters, he would resign.

Now, you could have knocked me down with a feather.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer,

with all of the importance and reputation of that position,

to come to me and say,

"Unless you sack one of your most loyal advisers, I will resign."

I couldn't believe it.

She said, "Well, if Alan goes, that would destroy my authority."

So I said, "That is nonsense, Prime Minister.

"Your authority is in no way dependent on Alan Walters.

"It would not be destroyed. But I realise that it...

"..you might well want the current hullabaloo to die down.

"And then I could carry on,

"certainly carry on as your Chancellor if you wish me to,

"provided he goes at the end of the year."

And she refused even that.

The Prime Minister ignored Lawson's warning that he intended to resign.

At 2.30 that afternoon,

she went across to the Commons to prepare for Question Time.

As she did so, Nigel Lawson sent a message, repeating his ultimatum.

Now, it was a pretty nasty thing

to have to go into the House of Commons...

It reminded me, I suppose,

of the things they had tried to do to me

just before going to the Madrid summit.

In retrospect, I think Nigel was looking for an excuse to resign

because of the inflation he had created.

And I think he was pestering me to get the information out...

..because he feared that I might otherwise ring up Alan

and Alan would say, "Well, of course I will go."

And then his excuse would have been no longer valid

and he would have had to have stayed on

and deal with the inflation himself.

To suggest that I resigned

because the economy was in a desperate state

and I couldn't face the responsibility is ludicrous.

First of all, although the economy was going through a bad patch

it wasn't in a desperate state.

And I knew perfectly well that my resigning would inevitably

cause me to be made the scapegoat for whatever happened afterwards.

By this time, it was nearly seven.

I thought, "The press are going to get on to Alan. I must tell him."

And I telephoned him. He was utterly dismayed.

All he'd done was to give sound advice.

And said...I said, "You're not going, Alan.

"You've been absolutely wonderful."

He said, "But I am in an intolerable position.

"I will have to go."

And he decided to go.

But I had stayed loyal to someone who'd been loyal to me.

And again, I wasn't going to be blackmailed

by such appalling tactics.

I had not been disloyal to her at any time.

I had been extremely loyal to her.

In fact, one of the problems with Margaret Thatcher towards the end

was that she saw loyalty as a one-way street.

I mean, she expected all her ministers to be totally loyal to her

and by and large they were.

She didn't feel a similar obligation to be loyal to them.

Nigel Lawson's resignation damaged the Prime Minister

and made her vulnerable in Parliament.

She'd lost the support of the two men, Lawson and Howe,

who many regarded as her standard-bearers.

And the manner of Lawson's departure triggered a backbench challenge

to Mrs Thatcher's leadership.

Sir Anthony Meyer, a pro-European Conservative MP,

stood against Margaret Thatcher in November 1989

as a stalking-horse,

in the vain hope that a more substantial candidate would emerge.

Even so, in the secret leadership ballot,

33 Conservative MPs voted for Sir Anthony Meyer,

27 abstained.

The party managers were worried,

despite the Prime Minister's confidence in her party's backing.

Ladies and gentlemen, just a brief word.

I'd like to say how very pleased I am with this result

and very pleased I am to have had the overwhelming support

of my colleagues in the House

and of people from the party, in the country.

Late one evening, following the Meyer challenge,

the Deputy Chief Whip paid a secret visit to Downing Street.

He warned the Prime Minister that many of her backbenchers

felt she'd become regal and isolated.

They were out for her blood.

Using the rather, sort of, graphic imagery that I do, I said,

"Look, there are about 100 more people,"

that is in addition to those who had abstained

or voted against, at Meyer.

"They're lurking in the bushes, they've got daggers in their hands

"and they want to engage in the daylight assassination

"of a sitting prime minister."

After the Meyer challenge,

one of the messages which came back from her campaign team was

that there was great dissatisfaction among the backbenchers.

And that was something which certainly we recognised

had to be put right.

And so after the Meyer challenge,

we set up a series of meetings with backbenchers

to allow them to come in, in groups,

and to tell her, raise with her, anything which they wished to do so.

During one of those meetings, one backbench MP said,

"Don't you think, Mrs Thatcher, it's time for you to go?"

And I didn't, I still had so much to do.

And I felt that at that time we had

changed president in the United States, as well.

And I felt that at that time,

to get the continuity of policy and to go forward

and to reap the full benefit of the changes we had brought about,

both at home and overseas,

I still was the person to complete that task.

Like many powerful leaders before her,

Margaret Thatcher could see no suitable successor.

She was grooming John Major,

whom she'd rapidly promoted to Chancellor.

But even he, she began to think, had his drawbacks.

He came up very quickly.

After all, to jump from being Chief Secretary to Foreign Secretary

and then back to Chancellor of the Exchequer

meant that there were several years' experience missing

and I think that was probably the difference between us.

Don't forget, I came into the House of Commons in 1959.

So, there are a number of things, John, that come out of the...

The Prime Minister became suspicious of what she saw

as Major's yielding nature.

In private, she said that John Major

had an India rubber attitude to Europe

and that he played the same cracked record as Lawson

on exchange rates.

John is much more a consensus man and will much more compromise.

That seems to be very agreeable.

I had noticed that perhaps he tended to go with the crowd

and the conventional wisdom.

But therefore he needed to be tested

to see how he would perform in other roles.

And she came to think that he lacked both the vision

and the mental agility necessary for a senior politician.

If you don't have a really great intellectual background,

you can acquire that.

But what is important is that you require

a political instinct for what the people think.

Now, people liked John very much. You couldn't not like John.

But it's quite different from liking a person

from having a political instinct of the right direction

in which to go, in the long run.

Perhaps I had developed that over the years.

There was no doubt that Margaret Thatcher promoted

John Major to be Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer

because she'd identified him as her successor.

If she had believed then what she now says she believed about him

she would not have promoted him.

She promoted him, identified him as the heir

and gave him her wholehearted support

when he stood for the leadership.

Anything else, I'm afraid, is a change of recollection

that's come from looking back over those events,

which I have no doubt Margaret has.

There were few others whom she considered

might take her chair in the Cabinet.

She'd either sacked, lost or sidelined those senior politicians

who shared her experience and political outlook.

Like a medieval monarch, as a colleague once observed,

she wondered fearfully who might have eyes on her crown.

I think that's one of the weaknesses that

shadowed the Government as the years went by -

that older statesmen, for one reason or another,

fell by the wayside.

And it increasingly became a Cabinet

with the Prime Minister towering above people who were younger than,

less experienced than herself.

I think it would have been better,

from her point of view and the country's point of view,

had she retained a broader band of equally mature colleagues.

-NORMAN TEBBIT:

-Over a period of time,

she found fewer and fewer people in her government

who were of her view.

That was what happened to Margaret Thatcher.

And progressively, after 1987, in consequence,

she lost control of her Cabinet.

SHOUTING

The Prime Minister was further isolated by

her dogged attachment to the poll tax.

It was almost universally unpopular

and led to some of the worst rioting witnessed on the streets of London.

Conservative backbenchers,

fearing the community charge might lose them their seats,

talked openly about a change of leader.

But it was simply not in Mrs Thatcher's character

to change policy, even in the face of disaster.

What one picked up very quickly was that

some of those who were suggesting that it was time for me to go

wanted to relax the very policies that had been successful.

In Truman's phrase, they couldn't stand the heat in the kitchen.

I, of course, was used to the heat in the kitchen.

The Prime Minister seemed curiously out of step

with the tide of world events.

When the Berlin Wall came down and German reunification became inevitable,

hers was a lone voice in opposition.

Even Saddam Hussein's invasion of the Gulf

failed to revive her fortunes as a war leader.

The Conservative Party remained consistently

ten points behind Labour in the polls.

After years of resistance,

Margaret Thatcher did finally give way on one matter,

she bowed to John Major and agreed

that Britain should join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

But by now, inflation was rising to 10%

and interest rates were punitively high.

But the concession of sterling's entry into the ERM

seemed to make her more, not less, hostile to the community.

At a summit in Rome, late in October 1990, she hit out

at her Italian hosts, accusing them of living in cloud cuckoo land.

On her return to London, she departed from a neutral statement

to denounce the European Commission and its president.

The chairman or the president of the Commission, Mr Delors,

said at a press conference the other day that he wanted

the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community,

he wanted the Commission to be the Executive

and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate.

No. No. No.

Or... Or...

Well, I thought that "No. No. No." had a stridency about it

that was not calculated to

impress our partners, with whom we had to live for the rest of time,

it was the language of the battlefield,

rather than the language of the partnership.

Criticising the mood she'd struck on Europe,

Sir Geoffrey resigned from the Cabinet on 1st November 1990.

Having lost his voice, he was unable to speak out,

but he bided his time and when the power of speech returned

a few days later, he was to use it to devastating effect.

Margaret Thatcher had now lost the man who ten years before

had been her most loyal ally.

Geoffrey had been a believer, right from the beginning,

and so had Nigel Lawson,

and my trouble was the believers had fallen away.

They hadn't had the perseverance and the persistence to take it through,

and it's not whether you start a task,

it's whether you can take it through to completion.

On 13th November, Sir Geoffrey came to the House to

explain his resignation.

Not since Neville Chamberlain, 50 years before,

had a sitting Prime Minister been subjected to such

an attack by a senior member of the same party.

Order. I remind the House that a resignation statement is

heard in silence and without interruption. Sir Geoffrey Howe.

Mr Speaker, Sir, I find to my astonishment that

a quarter of a century has passed

since I last spoke from one of these backbenches.

'I clearly was wrestling with a conflict of conscience which was'

very difficult and very important.

I had to get that view across quite clearly

and explain why I was doing it, to convince people it wasn't just

personal bitterness, that it was for real reasons of substance.

And I suppose the only judgment

I made was that a speech of that kind could either be

a damp squib or could make an impact that it deserved to make.

And I was anxious that it shouldn't be a damp squib

and I seem to have succeeded in that.

I have to say, Mr Speaker,

that I find Winston Churchill's perception a good deal more

convincing and more encouraging for the interests of our nation than the

nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my Right Honourable 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.

'I was just amazed'

at the mixture of bile and treachery

that poured out in a speech, every word of which

had clearly been carefully drafted

and in a speech which he delivered, if I might say so,

better than any other speech I'd ever heard him deliver.

This perhaps was his feeling coming to the fore.

Mr Speaker, I believe that both the Chancellor

and the Governor are cricketing enthusiasts.

So I hope there's no monopoly of cricketing metaphors.

It's 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.

LAUGHTER

I had to sit, my back to him. I could turn around and see him,

but I didn't particularly wish to,

and I knew that the press were facing me in the gallery opposite.

I knew therefore that I must keep my features very much composed and calm.

At the same time, I was trying to assess the effect that that

speech would have, because I knew by this time some of the discussion

and rumours that were taking place.

It was an experience I would not wish to go through again.

The tragedy is, and it is for me,

personally, for my party, for our whole people

and for my Right Honourable Friend herself, a very real tragedy,

that the Prime Minister's perceived attitude towards Europe is

running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation.

The wielding the knife.

Cleverly. So very cleverly.

Too cleverly.

Because, in the end, it was not my record it assassinated.

He assassinated his own character.

I've done what I believe to be right for my party and my country.

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.

The idea that anyone should take the decisions that

I took or make the speech that I made for grounds of personal bitterness

is quite frankly grotesque.

I devoted a large chunk of my adult life to membership

of the House of Commons - to membership of Ted Heath's

and Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet -

to support of our economic and foreign policies and I was

deeply dismayed to see that going awry,

that I felt the time had come when I could no longer suppress

those anxieties, and I expressed them and it was plain, from what

happened subsequently, that I was far from being alone.

'Quite obviously, someone would be standing against me

'in the leadership stakes.

'Quite obviously,

'his speech was an open invitation to Michael Heseltine to stand.'

And therefore I realised we were in for a rough ride.

I have accordingly informed the Chief Whip and the Chairman of the 1922 Committee

that I intend to let my name go forward.

Thank you very much.

Michael Heseltine's high-profile campaign began immediately.

By contrast, Margaret Thatcher's team seemed overcome by inertia.

People speak of a Margaret Thatcher campaign.

In truth, there was no campaign.

Only one person was running a campaign

and that was Michael Heseltine.

And it was a very good campaign.

He'd been building up to it for a long time, he had made

friends with a lot of backbenchers and he pursued people. I mean,

I had friends who were rung up in their bath by Michael Heseltine.

It was a very, very busy period

and we agreed right at the beginning that it really wouldn't be

right for me to go around and canvas people myself,

to go through the tea rooms and say, "Please, will you support me?"

If, by the time you've been eleven and a half years as Prime Minister,

they don't know what you've done

and what wouldn't have happened unless you'd been there...

I didn't feel it would make that much difference to say,

"Will you support me?"

On Sunday 18th November, Mrs Thatcher travelled to France to

join world leaders formally celebrating the end of the Cold War.

The Prime Minister herself was beginning to feel the strain.

And, in her absence, her support in Parliament continued to fall away.

But her team, as if paralysed, did nothing.

Early in the evening on Tuesday 20th November,

the Prime Minister hurried back to the British Embassy.

As press and television gathered in the courtyard, Mrs Thatcher

and her staff, closeted inside, awaited the results of the first ballot.

Under the leadership election rules, the winner had to have a majority

plus 15% of the MPs' votes cast to prevent a second ballot.

The ambassador had made ready a room with a telephone

so that I could be there to receive the telephone call, and

Peter Morrison had come over.

Charles Powell was there and Crawfie was with me, as always.

So that we would take the telephone call in that room.

We did.

Peter took it.

And he wrote it down on a piece of paper and said to me,

"Not quite as good as we'd hoped."

I looked quickly and said,

"We haven't got enough to be through the first ballot."

I felt at that moment that it was all over.

I don't say that just with hindsight, it's very easy to invent

that sort of thing after the event.

I'd gone over it in my mind so many times -

I felt that this was it.

Looking at her eyes and her expression,

I think she knew, as well.

Of course, as is Mrs Thatcher's wont, when she has a job to do,

she does it and doesn't stop for anything.

And she charged out

and I charged down and tried to rescue the central microphone.

-Mrs Thatcher, could I ask you to comment?

-Good evening. Good evening.

-Where's the microphone?

-It's here, this is the microphone.

I'm actually very pleased that I got more than half

the parliamentary party

and disappointed that it's not quite enough to win on the first ballot.

So, I confirm it is my intention to let my name go forward

-for the second ballot.

-Isn't the..? Isn't the...?

'I think she'd been pretty badly advised during the first ballot.'

And in the run-up to that,

I don't think she'd campaigned as she should have done.

And, I think, if I thought at the time that if that

statement reflected advice that she was getting,

it wasn't very sensible advice, it would have been at least,

I think, better to have come back to London before saying anything.

It didn't seem to me

that an extra two or three votes were that difficult to obtain.

And we might, on a second round, have got more, a lot more than that.

What really went wrong was I was away when the vote was announced

and not therefore able to say to people,

"Now, come on, we must go out and campaign and get those extra...

"I want an extra 10 to 20 votes before the next count.

"Go out and start tonight."

I was away.

And it was while I was away,

in those few hours

and overnight, that I think people lost their nerve.

And the plotting began.

At 8.30 in the evening, Margaret Thatcher left the British Embassy.

Her failure to prevent a second ballot was a severe,

if not mortal, blow.

The result of the ballot had made her untypically late

for the ballet and dinner at Versailles

with her fellow world leaders.

By that time, all the other heads of government had been

out at the ballet for a long time.

And then I got there, the last to arrive,

and President Mitterrand was still waiting for me in the reception.

I said, "I'm so sorry, I did send a message not to wait."

He said, "We wouldn't have dreamed of starting without you.

"Now, how are you?"

Isn't it nice that when you were going back to face people who were

far from kind or thoughtful that we had some friends at the top

who knew what life at the top was like

and felt for you?

While Mrs Thatcher endured the ballet in Versailles,

a group of Cabinet colleagues, ministers and backbenchers

had gathered in the Westminster home of a former whip.

The consensus was clear - the Prime Minister was finished by

her poor showing in the first ballot.

The conclusion was arrived at before the meeting began,

because everybody came to the meeting, carrying on their backs

their experiences of being

in the House that afternoon and that evening.

So, there was very little discussion about

whether the position was sustainable.

I think that conclusion was arrived at more or less on arrival.

There was every sort of objective evidence that she was

unlikely to win a second ballot,

that if she did win a second ballot, it would be after a huge shedding

of blood and by a margin so narrow that it would be difficult,

subsequently, for her or the Government to regain its authority.

And I've never heard a convincing argument against that.

Still in Paris at nine o'clock the following morning,

Wednesday 21st November,

Margaret Thatcher signed a treaty ending the Cold War.

She was unaware at this stage that most of her Cabinet colleagues

had decided that her career was over.

Mrs Thatcher had the first hint of the gravity of her position

as she travelled to the airport to fly home.

She asked her staff whether her protege Peter Lilley,

the Trade and Industry Secretary,

had agreed to help a Parliamentary speech.

I just said, "Charles, did you get on to Peter?"

He said, "Yes."

Something in his tone which made me say,

"Is he going to do the speech?"

He said, "Peter said, 'There's no point. She's finished.'"

That turned a knife in my heart.

Peter was a real friend.

He was a believer.

And I think that was the first real inkling I had

that all was far from well.

At twelve o'clock in the morning,

Margaret Thatcher arrived back in London.

She was still determined to stand in the second ballot as she sped

home to Downing Street.

And we went in

and Denis was waiting, just standing by the fireplace...

And he just said, almost before I had spoken, "Don't go on, love.

"Don't go on."

I think he was more, even more hurt, than I was.

I went down to my study, where Norman Tebbit

and John Wakeham were waiting for me.

And we discussed things together.

Norman said he thought that the support on the backbenches

was good enough to get through

and that we could win and we'd have to fight for it.

John Wakeham said he thought the area of weakest support

was my own Cabinet.

Which was a bit of a shaker.

At 2.30 in the afternoon,

Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street to go to the House of Commons.

Despite her husband's advice, she was still determined to carry on.

I fight on. I fight to win.

John Wakeham, her new campaign manager, had counselled her to meet

her Cabinet colleagues one by one that evening to gauge their support.

At Question Time,

she responded with typical gusto to taunts about her waning career.

The first eleven and a half years haven't been so bad

and with regard to twilight, please remember there are 24 hours in a day.

At four o'clock, she swallowed her pride and canvassed the votes of her

backbenchers in the parliamentary tea rooms.

And as I went through, I saw so many of one's loyal supporters.

And even they said to me,

"Look, Mike Heseltine's been and asked us for our votes

"three times.

"This is the first time you've been to ask us."

And I was a bit upset about that.

And gradually, as I got this message, it dawned on me that what they

were saying was, "Look, why haven't you had a vigorous enough campaign?

"We're concerned for you, we're concerned that you haven't."

And I began then to realise the magnitude of the task

and how much I would need, not only a few helpers, but need to

mobilise all of Cabinet to be the spearhead of the attack.

The chastened Prime Minister immediately approached

those colleagues whom she thought most loyal.

She started with John Major,

who was recovering from dental treatment at home in Huntingdon.

There must have been things going on that I didn't know of.

And I rang John and said, "I have decided to stand again."

And Douglas was going to sign my nomination paper. Would he second it?

And there was a moment's silence

and you're super sensitive in these circumstances.

However, I assumed that he might be in some pain

from the dental treatment.

And he said, "Yes, if that's what you want."

At six o'clock in the evening, the Prime Minister was in her

rooms in the House of Commons, waiting to see her colleagues.

She was badly rattled.

Even John Major, the man who in her view owed her everything,

seemed to be lukewarm in his support.

At half past six, the Cabinet parade began.

That evening, only four Cabinet colleagues

offered their unqualified support.

The rest advised her that she was unlikely to win.

Ken Clarke came in in his usual robust, rather bruising, style,

sat down and said, "The whole process was farcical,"

that he personally could support me for another five or ten years.

But most of the Cabinet thought I would lose

and therefore I should stand down and let John Major or Douglas Hurd stand,

either of whom had a better chance of winning than I did.

After that, Peter Lilley came in.

I already had had an inkling of what he would say.

He came in clearly uncomfortable

and spoke very carefully.

Yes, if I chose to stand, he would support me.

But it was inconceivable that I would win.

And if I lost, everything I'd achieved would be put at risk.

Therefore, I should stand down.

Then Chris Patten, the same message.

And I somehow thought that Chris would have some different formula,

some greater insight, some magical words.

No.

"If you wish to stand, I will support you.

"But I don't think you can win."

The most difficult of all was Malcolm Rifkind.

Again, very much on the left of the party.

And I'd had problems with Malcolm before.

He came in, didn't think I could possibly win,

and therefore I should stand down.

And I said to him,

"Malcolm, if I choose to stand, will you support me?"

He turned his eyes away and said he would have to think about that.

But he wouldn't campaign against me.

By that time, I was thankful for small mercies.

The candid friend, Ken Clarke.

Candid minister, Malcolm Rifkind.

The candid, loyal friends.

All with the same message.

What hurt most of all was that this was treachery while

I had been away at an international conference,

signing treaties on behalf of my country for the end of the Cold War.

It was treachery with a smile on its face.

Perhaps that was the worst thing of all.

There was no treachery against her, there was a pattern of events which

was what it appeared to be, and a Cabinet that was prepared to

support her gave her wholly sensible advice - that she had

been defeated, that she must now withdraw. That was good advice.

She had been defeated.

She had no chance of winning in the second ballot

and that was nothing to do with the Cabinet.

It was the parliamentary party where she'd suffered the defeat.

By 8.30 in the evening, the Prime Minister knew that without

Cabinet support, she could not continue.

The meetings with colleagues had left her emotionally devastated.

I came into the room

and she broke down in tears.

I said "Good luck, we're all with you."

And she said, "I'm afraid it's all drifting away."

And so I tried to reassure her.

I squeezed her arm and said, "Well, look, don't worry, we're behind you."

You know, just trying to be helpful.

That really summed up the unreal world, to me,

of the Number 10 court or the Number 10 bunker,

the idea that she didn't need to worry

about her parliamentary colleagues, about the party...

that somehow all that mattered was

the court and the courtiers remaining loyal to her and

that this could be any comfort to her was...

It seemed to me to epitomise the state in which

she'd allowed herself to become.

You wouldn't have believed it could have happened, but it had.

And I knew that I would have to decide, finally,

the next morning, as I always do, but at that moment,

I dictated a statement that I would make,

if the following morning I had decided to go.

At nine o'clock the next morning, Thursday 22nd November 1990,

Margaret Thatcher's colleagues arrived for her last Cabinet.

She'd now decided finally to resign.

My study was upstairs, I came down the stairs

and all members of the Cabinet usually would have been

scattered around the anteroom and I would have just gone through them

and walked in.

They were all, kind of, over the far side and not meeting my eyes.

And I just walked past and went in. And they followed me in.

She was sitting at the table, she was clearly upset.

She clearly had been crying.

But she was all right at that moment.

And she said, "Before Cabinet begins,

"I want to read you a statement which will be issued to the public

"at the end of Cabinet."

And she started to read the statement,

saying that she was going to resign.

And after reading a few words,

she broke down and then she started again and she broke down.

Because I looked at them all.

They had brought it about.

They looked a bit sheepish, some of them, and that was the time,

I'm afraid, when I did break down, because I realised then,

for the first time,

the full impact of what I was doing.

And I said, "Oh, for God's sake, James," meaning James Mackay,

the Chancellor, who sat next to her.

"You read it."

And there was a bit of an argument and people said, "No, no, no."

It only took seconds, but in those seconds,

she recovered her composure and she read the statement out

and then one or two people started to say nice things about her.

And she said something like, "I'm much better at handling

"business than sympathy.

"Let's get on with the Cabinet."

And after it was over, there was a look on their faces,

some of them,

"What have we done?"

But it had been done. There was no turning back.

Margaret Thatcher left office reluctantly and unhappily.

She remains bitter about her downfall to this day.

In her 11 years in office,

she grew in stature and became enormously powerful.

Her impact on Britain was undeniable.

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 a great prime minister,

which I'm sure he'll be in very short time.

Thank you very much. Goodbye.

In her going, she discovered, to her cost,

that a British prime minister cannot govern without the consent

and support of colleagues and that her downfall

was the inevitable result of a tragic sense of self-sufficiency.

As the political philosopher Edmund Burke wrote,

"Those who've been once intoxicated with power

"can never willingly abandon it."

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