Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. Mandela believed that the Commonwealth’s anti-apartheid stance had been vital, as was the Queen’s role in keeping the organization unified. “Sonny Ramphal [secretary-general of the Commonwealth] was sitting in London with [Thabo] Mbeki and [Oliver] Tambo from the ANC,” recalled Canada’s Brian Mulroney. “He would pass on everything that went on in the Commonwealth, and they would pass it on to Mandela. In the area of moral leadership, Mandela would say that the Commonwealth saved South Africa.”
The South African denouement came as a relief to Margaret Thatcher as she began her eleventh year as prime minister after leading the Tory party to victory three times—in 1979, 1983, and 1987. Britain’s difficult years of stringent monetary policy, high unemployment, and union busting had been eclipsed by an economic boom in the late 1980s. Thatcher had broken the back of inflation, encouraged entrepreneurs, expanded the number of homeowners, privatized state industries, reduced the size of government, and opened London’s financial markets to foreign investment. Internationally, she had bolstered the country’s image with her strong anticommunist stance (in concert with Ronald Reagan), and her economic policies offered a model to the rising Eastern European countries that had elected noncommunist governments after the breakup of the Soviet Union that began in 1989.
In July 1990, David Airlie presented the prime minister with a new proposal to fund the Civil List. Having instituted most of the Peat Report reforms, he was able to show the government that Palace officials could be “in charge of our own destiny.” His presentation called for returning to the ten-year funding set by the Civil List Act of 1972, a formula that the Labour government had superseded in 1975 with a law reverting to annual requests for increases. Thatcher agreed to raise the annual Civil List payment from ?5.1 million to ?7.9 million through 2000.
Persuaded by the professionalism and efficiency of the Queen’s advisers, the prime minister also shifted the job of managing the finances of the occupied royal palaces—Buckingham, St. James’s, Kensington, Marlborough House, Clarence House, Windsor Castle, and assorted properties in Windsor Great Park and the Home Park—from the Department of the Environment to the royal household, with Michael Peat serving in the new position of director of finance and property services. Thatcher defended the Civil List plan by emphasizing that it would “give much more dignity and continuity to the Crown,” adding that “an overwhelming number of people in the nation regard the royal family as the greatest asset that the United Kingdom has and greatly admire everything that it does.”
Despite Thatcher’s numerous successes, she faced growing opposition in the electorate as well as within the Conservative Party. To raise revenue for local services such as education and trash collection, she had abolished property taxes and created instead a poll tax. Every adult was required to pay the same amount, but local authorities used the new system to impose rates that caused many low-income people to pay considerably more than they had previously. The widespread unpopularity of the poll tax threatened the prospects for a Tory victory in the 1991 general election.
Inside Tory ranks, liberal members objected to Thatcher’s increasingly “Euro-skeptic” position as the European Economic Community moved toward greater integration in the post–Cold War period. She emphatically opposed abandoning the pound sterling to join a single European currency, a policy advocated by several of her senior ministers. One of them, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, resigned in protest on November 1, 1990. Two weeks later, Michael Heseltine, who had left Thatcher’s cabinet in 1986, challenged her leadership.
Although she won a majority in the first ballot on Tuesday, November 20, she needed a wider margin under party rules to win decisively. She was in Paris at the time and returned to London Wednesday morning, determined to prevail in the second ballot. But after meeting with her principal supporters, she decided to consult each of her cabinet ministers individually. One by one, her erstwhile liege men told her she would lose the vote. By that evening, Thatcher decided to withdraw her name from the second ballot rather than face defeat. On Thursday morning she went to Buckingham Palace to inform the Queen she would be resigning. “She’s a very understanding person,” Thatcher said later. “She understood … the rightness of the decision I was taking.… It was very sad to know that was the last time I’d go to the Palace as prime minister after eleven-and-a-half years.”
When the second ballot took place on the 27th, Thatcher’s nemesis, Michael Heseltine, was defeated by John Major, the chancellor of the exchequer and her preferred candidate. The next morning Margaret Thatcher submitted her resignation to the Queen, and forty-five minutes later Major arrived at the Palace to accept the sovereign’s invitation to form a government. At age forty-seven, he was the youngest prime minister in more than a century.
The Queen showed her esteem for Thatcher by quickly awarding her the sovereign’s two most prestigious personal honors, the Order of the Garter and the Order of Merit. Founded in 1902 by King Edward VII for distinction in the military, arts, and sciences, the Order of Merit, like the Garter, only has twenty-four members at a time and has included just three previous prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Macmillan. “The Garter tends to go to all ex–prime ministers in time, but the Order of Merit is mostly scientists and academics. That really mattered to her,” said her longtime adviser Charles Powell.
The Queen Mother was deeply upset by Thatcher’s departure, calling her “very patriotic” and expressing the hope that she would come to stay at Balmoral after she left office. “She said they [meaning the royal family] think it is desperately unfair and an appalling way to do things,” her friend Woodrow Wyatt recorded in his diary two days after Thatcher stepped down. “They admire her, they think she was wonderful, and she did so much for Britain, not only at home but in the world at large.” According to Wyatt, any stories about the Queen disliking Thatcher were “pure invention.”
Queen Elizabeth II making her
SIXTEEN
OF ALL ELIZABETH II’S PRIME MINISTERS, JOHN MAJOR HAD THE most unusual background, as exotic as it was humble. His father had sought his fortune in the United States, working in the steel mills of Pittsburgh before making a career as a circus trapeze artist and performer on the vaudeville circuit in America and Britain. After the death of his first wife, he married a young dancer and built a business selling novelty garden ornaments. John was their fourth child, born when his father was sixty-four and had suffered financial reversals.
The family moved to the Brixton slums, and John had to leave school at sixteen to help support his parents. He worked in a variety of odd jobs until he took up banking, where he found success. Attracted to politics, he rose from his local council to Parliament and entered the Thatcher cabinet in 1987. He was known for his steady hand, mastery of policy detail, quiet determination, and shrewd judgment.
When he became prime minister, Major focused on conciliating the bitterly divided factions of the Tory party. After five months in office, he scrapped the hated poll tax and replaced it with a newly crafted property tax based on the value of a residence as well as the number of its occupants. He built on the economic gains of the Thatcher years and successfully negotiated advantageous terms in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty that kept Britain in the strengthened European Union (formerly the European Economic Community) without ceding independence on issues such as workers’ wages, health and safety, or abolishing the pound for the continent’s proposed single currency.
