Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster
his authority but the gamble misfired badly when Thatcher, superbly assisted by her campaign manager, Airey Neave, capitalized on the discontent of Tory back-benchers and defeated him on the first ballot. She was just short of the required fifty per cent of the votes but got there easily after Heath withdrew and she beat Willie Whitelaw, Geoffrey Howe and others on the second ballot.
Many of the Tory establishment – Whitelaw, Lord Carrington, James Prior, most on the liberal wing of the party – supported Heath. Some of them, including Heath, never forgave her and were to give her a rough time when she took over. They did not like the hard-line economic thinking of Thatcher and her mentor, Sir Keith Joseph. There was something about the rich and patrician that rubbed the Prime Minister up the wrong way. Her biggest assault on the ‘wets’ came in September 1981, when she finally acted to give herself a Cabinet that was more in tune with her tough monetarist stance and with that of her chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was very much in her good books in those days.
On 12 September 1981, I wrote in The Times that the ‘wets’ in the Cabinet feared that her move against them would be more extensive than expected.
I knew Sir Ian Gilmour well from my spell as a young reporter in Norfolk when he was an MP there. He kindly always used to invite me to his annual summer party in Isleworth on the Thames – not far from my home across the A4 in Osterley – which was always full of like-minded MPs and figures from other parties to whom he felt closer than some in his own. At around 10.30 on the Monday morning following publication of my article, I picked up a ringing phone in The Times Room in the Commons. It was Gilmour who, calling from the phone box at the end of Whitehall after he left Downing Street, had rung to tell us that ‘She’ had just sacked him.
Gilmour knew several of us in the office quite well and I passed him across to Julian Haviland, the political editor. Gilmour knew in advance that his fate was sealed and read out his prepared remarks, stating that while it did no harm to throw the occasional man overboard ‘it does not do much good if you are steering full-speed ahead for the rocks’. Other casualties that day were Mark Carlisle (from education), Lord (Christopher) Soames (leader of the Lords) and Lord Thorneycroft (party chairman). Just as important, Jim Prior, who had not gone as far as Thatcher wanted on trade union reform, was side-lined to the Northern Ireland Office.
Thatcher told in her memoirs that Gilmour had been huffy, and had gone out and denounced government policy, giving a ‘flawless imitation of a man who had resigned on principle’. Soames was equally angry but in a grander way. ‘I got the distinct impression that he felt he was being dismissed by his housemaid,’ recalled Thatcher. She had acted after a Cabinet meeting in July when the ‘wets’, backed by some ministers who would normally have supported her, opposed her plans to make a further £5 billion cut to public spending.
In a recent book, Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng argued that the reshuffle marked the end of a six-month period that defined Thatcher, helping her to two more election victories and delaying for nine years the moment when, in Gilmour’s words, she finally hit the rocks. The period had begun with the Howe budget of March 1981 that slashed spending and raised taxes in the quest of sound finances. Thatcher then had to cope with the IRA hunger strikes, the Brixton and Toxteth riots, and the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) by the Gang of Four – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and William Rodgers – who quit the Labour Party in protest at its leftward shift.
But the reshuffle did not stop the dissent, which again erupted at the October conference. Thatcher looked far from the dominating figure she was to become and few believed she could take the Tories on to more victories. The economy was still in trouble and the SDP was riding high. The Falklands changed all that. Both Houses of Parliament met that Saturday with a sense of national shame hanging over the Government. Lord Carrington resigned shortly afterwards as foreign secretary, and two of his ministers went as well. They were not pushed but went as a matter of honour, recognizing the Foreign Office’s failure to anticipate events.
Thatcher told MPs that the islands would be recaptured but there was no contingency plan in play. Some on her own side advised against going to war. But Thatcher overruled the worried voices and ordered the task force to sail on 5 April. The aircraft carriers Hermes and Invincible were in a fleet that eventually contained thirty-eight warships and 11,000 soldiers and marines.
Thatcher was to turn humiliation for Britain to national and personal glory, winning her the Iron Lady sobriquet, one that would stick throughout her leadership. Securing a landslide victory over Michael Foot’s Labour in 1983, she used her popularity to press on with her revolution, but first she had some more personnel business to do. Thatcher had made Francis Pym her foreign secretary after Lord Carrington resigned in the wake of the Falklands invasion by Argentina in April 1982. But she soon regretted promoting a man who, as defence secretary, had opposed cuts sought by the Treasury. When she made him Commons leader, he had become more and more associated with those backing an alternative economic strategy.
Now at the Foreign Office during the war, he allied himself with those in the USA and Peru who favoured some kind of compromise. It confirmed Thatcher’s view of the Foreign Office and Pym, and when he spoke of the dangers of landslide governments during the election campaign it was a nail in the coffin. She was furious and had had enough of him. Her ruthless reshuffle put a stop to Pym’s career but she was not satisfied. When it came to making changes again in 1983, she still wanted to beef up her team with more who shared her view of life. ‘There was a revolution still to be made, but too few revolutionaries,’ she was later to write.
So Willie Whitelaw went to the Lords and was succeeded as home secretary by Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson came in as chancellor, Cecil Parkinson for a brief time ran the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) before resigning (see next chapter), and crucially John Wakeham – who was to become a vital figure in the latter years – became her chief whip. After Parkinson went, Norman Tebbit was promoted to the DTI and Nick Ridley, of whom she was greatly fond and compared to her mentor, Keith Joseph, also came into the Cabinet.
The ‘wets’ were vanquished and the revolution proceeded. The Iron Lady had set herself free.
How I Upset the Commons by Doing My Job
The Falklands was a brilliant story to cover. But it was its aftermath that got me into trouble with the Commons authorities. It was Sunday, 17 April 1983. I was the Sunday duty man and had a splash of splashes to tell the news desk about. In my hands was a copy of an explosive draft report on the aftermath of the Falklands war.
For six months the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee had been deliberating on the future of the islands in the wake of the war and had come to the conclusion that Margaret Thatcher’s so-called Fortress Falklands policy – retaining enough British forces on the island to deter future aggression from Argentina – was untenable over the long term. Furthermore, the committee (which had a Conservative majority) was proposing that the Government should not turn its back on future talks with Argentina to achieve a negotiated settlement. Reporters were then – as now – often briefed on what was likely to appear in select committee reports. Provided we kept it reasonably vague, without specifically mentioning anything directly from the reports themselves, we could probably get away with publishing without attracting the ire of the Commons authorities (who regarded leaks with dread and threatened punitive action against anyone responsible for them, particularly if they were MPs). This was different. In my hands I had an actual copy of the report given to me by an extremely good source. The protection I guaranteed him then still applies.
A very excited Charles Douglas-Home, editor of The Times from 1982 until his death in 1985, came over to me to discuss the story. We got on well. On the day Harold Evans appointed me to the Lobby in 1981, Charlie, then foreign editor, had offered me a posting in Washington – unaware of the other approach. I chose the Lobby and everyone understood. He was my third Times editor. I told him there were two choices. I could write up the story in a Lobby-style way, with a