Inside Story: Politics, Intrigue and Treachery from Thatcher to Brexit. Philip Webster
ready to fight a fifth election ‘by popular acclaim’.
At the time, Tory back-bencher Sir Anthony Meyer had launched the first challenge to her leadership. In Washington we questioned her about that as well as her meeting with Bush, which had resulted in an agreement that the West must maintain its guard because the Cold War was not yet over. She declared that she was not ‘a lame duck’ leader after Sir Anthony had reacted to the Times interview by suggesting it was time for the party to decide whether it wanted ‘a president for life’. Thatcher retorted: ‘I have never regarded myself in that way. I regarded it then, as now, the biggest possible honour to be elected for my constituency and to be prime minister.’
I travelled with Mrs Thatcher again only two months before her removal from office. By then – September 1990 – her caution about the Cold War had gone and – speaking in Prague – she urged the European Community to open its doors to all the countries of Eastern Europe. She got a rapturous reception as she entered the federal assembly chamber and Alexander Dubcek, the father of the Prague Spring in 1968 and in 1990 chairman of the assembly, told her: ‘For us you are not the Iron Lady. You are the Kind Lady.’
She must have wished that her MPs back home appreciated her as much.
How Thatcher Decided Our Fate: Fly On
It was the end of a productive trip as far as the travelling Lobby pack was concerned. A massive demo, one of the biggest Norway had seen, had happened in the centre of the capital the previous night and given us plenty to write home about. There had also been something of a spat between our Prime Minister and her Norwegian counterpart.
We lifted off out of Oslo’s Fornebu Airport on a Friday evening in an RAF VC10, carrying Thatcher, her husband Denis, a few Downing Street officials and us. About forty in all. Only we did not get too far too quickly. Almost as soon as we had got into the air, the plane slowed noticeably and, while the take-off was not aborted, we did not seem to be going very fast. In fact, it seemed as if we were going to return to the airport as the plane laboured.
In a VC10 you sit with your backs to the cockpit and the small first-class cabin is in front of you. At this point the captain, the wonderfully named Squadron Leader Jimmy Jewell, walked urgently through the main cabin and into the first-class territory containing the Prime Minister and her husband. After a minute or so he emerged, returned to the cockpit and within seconds there was a roar of the engines and the plane was up and away and heading for Heathrow. The incident was soon put to one side as we enjoyed the RAF hospitality on the way home, with none of the crew divulging anything about the captain’s visit.
As we landed at Heathrow, however, the picture changed rapidly. Fire engines and ambulances were lining both sides of the runway and as the plane touched down, they followed it along the runway to the VIP suite near Terminal 4. We were ordered to get off the plane as swiftly as possible. The Thatcher party was out within seconds. Within seconds of us leaving the plane, police went on board with sniffer dogs. The aircraft was then towed away to a more remote part of the airport.
By now it was clear something serious was afoot. As we waited in the suite for our luggage to come off the aircraft, we were told the whole story by an official. Just after the plane took off, an anonymous call to a newspaper office in Oslo said a bomb had been put on board. The message was passed on to air traffic control at the military airport and it was quickly flashed to Captain Jimmy Jewell.
We were off the ground when he received it. He decided that he should tell the Prime Minister. After listening to his explanation, and his assurance that the plane had been under watch throughout the trip, she told him: ‘Fly on. We will not bow to terrorism.’ I wrote in a story on the front page the next day that, although it was clear that the warning was taken highly seriously, Mrs Thatcher expressed her total confidence in the security of the plane.
Reflecting on this drama as I drove home from the airport, it occurred to me that I, and everyone else on the plane, literally had our lives in the Prime Minister’s hands after that warning came through. We certainly had no vote over our destiny; indeed, we were not even told that we were under any kind of threat. I wondered whether the crew, had it been on its own and received the call, would have taken the plane down or gone on. Eventually, I decided, it was better not to have known.
The reasons for the concern were obvious because at least some of the demonstrations in Oslo the previous night were inspired by IRA sympathizers. An embarrassed Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Norwegian prime minister, ordered an inquiry into the failure of the police to prevent hundreds of demonstrators forcing their way into the grounds of the 800-year-old castle where Thatcher was to attend a banquet. Brundtland said: ‘Last night was not pleasant for me as a hostess. It was embarrassing and regrettable. I apologized to our guests. A police inquiry has started.’
Asked whether she had been surprised by the strength of public opposition to her, Thatcher said: ‘No. I am used to demonstrations. These looked as if they were very professionally organized.’ It was one of the biggest demos Thatcher had faced since taking office and the rest of the Lobby had Gordon Greig, then political editor of the Daily Mail, to thank for being made aware of it.
We were left at our hotel while the Thatcher party had gone off to the dinner and we had no knowledge that trouble was brewing in what seemed an unlikely place for a big demo. We were thinking about having dinner ourselves but Gordon was tipped off by a security source and he kindly shared the news with us.
The confrontation between Mrs Thatcher and Brundtland – the Norwegian Socialist leader and the only other female prime minister in Europe at the time – had been eagerly awaited in Norway. She delivered what amounted to a public lecture in which she drew attention to the two governments’ differences on acid rain and South Africa and attacked Britain’s attitude to the welfare state and unemployment.
Thatcher had prepared a polite speech for a lunch, telling the people of Tromsø that they sat ‘in the front line of the defence of freedom’. But she sat grim-faced as Brundtland, who had a reputation as the Iron Lady of Nordic politics, lost no time in highlighting the issues which she said marred otherwise smooth relations between the two countries. She made a thinly veiled reference to the North–South divide in Britain. She also said the Norwegian Government was determined to ensure that employment opportunities and social benefits ‘are available to all of our residents’.
Thatcher did not hit back at Brundtland. It was clear that she did not want to raise the political temperature of her visit and probably accepted that the remarks were aimed at her counterpart’s domestic political audience. But she was clearly shaken by the strength of the demonstrations against her.
That was on the Thursday night. But by Friday she was again in no mood for turning.
Some Stories Are Just Too Good …
It was just after my birthday in June 1985 when I thought I had been given a late present.
At around 6.30 p.m. the phone on the desk of my boss, Julian Haviland, in The Times Room at the Commons rang. I was finishing off a story and was alone. I picked up the call and it was my editor, Charles Douglas-Home, calling from hospital where he was being treated for cancer.
Charlie loved a story and he told me he had got a corker. He then proceeded to read out the details of a Cabinet reshuffle which, he recounted, had just been given to him by a confidant of Margaret Thatcher, who had himself been in to see the Prime Minister that day. Charlie seemed to have got every last detail. He told me he would ring the Back-bench, that part of the office where late decisions on placing of stories is made, and tell them that I would be supplying them with a splash in the next hour or so.
His final instruction was slightly worrying, He told me not to check it with Bernard Ingham, the Prime Minister’s press secretary, who would, he said, be duty-bound to deny it. That went against the grain for many reasons, as there were things that Charlie had not told me, like the timing of the reshuffle, that I would have liked to run past Bernard.
I had by then learnt that the way