was beginning to show her age, and tried to stop the party conference in 1989 serenading her sixty-fourth birthday by singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’.
She had no real friends, because she had never left time in her life for friendship. In a sense Denis was her best friend. They were much closer in Downing Street than they had been in the earlier part of their marriage. He had friends, certainly, but they had few as a couple, because they had never operated as a couple. They never entertained privately in Downing Street; but they did very occasionally go out to dinner quietly with other trusted couples where she could briefly and genuinely relax.
Janet Young once wished Mrs Thatcher a happy Christmas and was appalled when she replied that she was having a houseful of colleagues and advisers to Chequers. Of course she had the family too (Mark and Carol if they were around, and at least once her sister Muriel and her husband) but they were always outnumbered by political friends. Christmas Day was rigidly structured around church in the morning, a traditional lunch which ended punctually in time for the Queen’s broadcast at 3.00 p.m., then a short walk followed later by a cold buffet supper, often joined by other political guests who lived nearby. On Boxing Day there would be another lunch for favoured friends and allies – people like Rupert Murdoch, the American Ambassador, Lord King and Marmaduke Hussey. On these occasions Mrs Thatcher was the perfect hostess, not overtly political but tirelessly devoted to ensuring that everyone had everything they wanted. At the same time, though the atmosphere was carefully relaxed, these lunches like everything else in her life were unmistakably political gatherings – a symbolic summoning of key supporters at the turn of the year.
The sad truth is that Mrs Thatcher, behind the hugely successful front which enabled her to dominate her generation, was a driven, insecure and rather lonely woman who lived for her work and would be lost when her astonishing career ended, as one day it eventually must. In her early days her phenomenal energy, her single- mindedness, her inability to relax, to admit any weakness or trust anyone to do anything better than she could do it herself, were all strengths and part of the reason for her success; but the longer she went on, the more these strengths turned to weaknesses – a loss of perspective, growing self-righteousness, a tendency to believe her own myth, an inability to delegate or trust her colleagues at all, so that instead of leading a team and preparing for an eventual handover to a successor, the Government became ever more centred on herself. There were bound to be tears in the end, and there were.
21
Stumble and Recovery
Helicopters, leaks and lies
THE episode that threw the sharpest light on Mrs Thatcher’s conduct of government was the crisis over the future of Westland helicopters which erupted at the beginning of 1986. More than any other incident in her whole premiership, Westland exposed to public gaze the reality of her relationship with her colleagues and the far greater trust she placed in unelected officials in her private office. The issue was relatively trivial in itself; but the questions raised went to the heart of constitutional government. As a result, the Westland affair came closer than anything else – before the combination of Europe and the poll tax arose in 1990 – to bringing her rule to an untimely end.
It arose from the refusal of one ambitious and independent-minded minister to be bullied. Michael Heseltine had always been the cuckoo in Mrs Thatcher’s nest. Neither a monetarist nor a wet, he was an energetic and unapologetic corporatist very much in the manner of Ted Heath: his political hero was David Lloyd George. Mrs Thatcher was forced to recognise him as an effective minister, both at the Department of the Environment and later at Defence, where he deployed the case against unilateral nuclear disarmament with conviction and flair. But she distrusted both his interventionist instincts and his ambition, and doubted his grasp of detail. Likewise she resented his exploitation of the sort of photo-opportunity – looking over the Berlin Wall or wearing a flak jacket to visit Greenham Common – that she regarded as her own preserve. In the MoD he was dealing with matters in which she took a particularly close interest. It was inevitable that the two biggest egos in the Cabinet would clash on this territory.
Among other things they differed over nuclear policy, and specifically the British response to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. In her memoirs Lady Thatcher made no apology for keeping this question under ‘tight personal control’ since in her view ‘neither the Foreign Office nor the Ministry of Defence took SDI sufficiently seriously’.1 Though she had her own doubts about the programme, she was adamant that Britain must be seen to back it. Heseltine was much less enthusiastic and resented her taking this sort of major defence decision unilaterally without reference to himself as the responsible minister.
These tensions formed the background to the Westland affair. Lady Thatcher subsequently blamed the whole crisis on one man’s overweening ambition and egotistical refusal to accept the discipline of collective responsibility.2 Certainly Heseltine was riding for a fall. Unquestionably he got the relatively minor issue of the future of a small helicopter manufacturer out of perspective. He elevated the question of whether Westland should join up with the American firm Sikorsky or a somewhat shadowy consortium of European arms manufacturers (including British Aerospace and GEC) into a major issue of principle reflecting an American or European orientation in foreign policy, and by extension a trial of strength between himself and the Prime Minister. When she threw the Government’s weight behind the American option – which was also the Westland board’s preference – he blatantly flouted her authority by continuing to lobby energetically for the European alternative. First he induced the European national armaments directors to declare that in future they would buy only European-made helicopters.Then he planted correspondence in the press still pushing the European case after Leon Brittan, the new Trade and Industry Secretary, had announced the Government’s support for Westland’s decision in favour of Sikorsky.
This was outrageous behaviour by a Cabinet minister, defying the decision of his own government. Heseltine’s justification was that he had been denied the opportunity to press the European option within the Government, so was forced to take the fight outside. In particular he accused the Prime Minister – after his resignation – of having unilaterally cancelled a meeting of the Cabinet’s Economic Affairs Committee arranged for 13 December 1985 because, at a previous meeting four days earlier, he had won too much support. On the contrary, Mrs Thatcher insisted, there was no need for a second meeting since the majority view was quite clear at the first: the Government had made its decision and Heseltine alone refused to accept it.
Most testimony suggests that by this time she was right. Initially Heseltine had gained a good deal of support. Always a cat who walked by himself, however, Heseltine played his hand extremely badly. When it came to a stand-up fight with the Prime Minister, the relative merits of rival helicopter manufacturers were forgotten: his potential allies slipped back to the Prime Minister. Nevertheless he did have grounds for grievance. Mrs Thatcher was by no means as neutral as she pretended. Not only did she clearly favour the American option, but she was just as determined to defeat Heseltine as he was to defeat her. Colleagues like Willie Whitelaw believed as a matter of principle that a senior minister with a strongly held conviction in his own area of responsibility was entitled to take his case to Cabinet.3 But Westland never went to Cabinet. The one time Heseltine tried to force it on to the agenda, on 12 December, he was peremptorily ruled out of order.
The trouble was that Mrs Thatcher was prepared neither to accommodate Heseltine by giving him the chance to put his case in full Cabinet, nor to confront him directly and force him to back down. By mid-December it was plain that he did not accept the Government’s decision. With hindsight, she should have sacked him, or required his resignation, then. But he was too powerful: she did not dare. He would not have gone quietly, like the despised wets: on the back benches he would have become a much more dangerous rallying point for her critics than Pym. She chose instead to try to undermine him by the familiar method of press manipulation and inspired leaking deployed over the past six years against several less formidable colleagues. This time she – or someone on her behalf – carelessly laid a charge which blew up in her own face, and came closer than anything between the Falklands invasion and the poll tax to bringing her down.
