The Iron Lady

The mistake was to leak a Law Officer’s letter. There is a strict convention, jealously guarded by the Law Officers themselves, that legal advice is confidential. Yet Mrs Thatcher, who had once been a lawyer and was generally a stickler for correct procedure – however she might bend the spirit of it – and Brittan, a QC who should certainly have known his brother lawyers’ sensitivity, chose to use a letter commissioned from the Solicitor- General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, without his permission, to discredit Heseltine. They had ample provocation. Over Christmas and the New Year Heseltine continued his efforts to keep the European option in play. On 3 January 1986 he gave The Times an exchange of letters with the merchant bankers acting for the European consortium in which he warned that Westland risked losing future European orders if it accepted the American rescue – explicitly contradicting assurances which Mrs Thatcher had given Sir John Cuckney a few days earlier. Mrs Thatcher understandably determined that this must be repudiated. Instead of doing so directly, however, she persuaded Mayhew to write to Heseltine querying the basis for his warning, and then arranged for a damaging simplification of his letter to be made public.

Mrs Thatcher subsequently admitted that it was she who initiated Mayhew’s letter. ‘I therefore, through my office, asked him to consider writing to the Defence Secretary to draw that opinion to his attention.’⁴ In fact, she thought Mayhew’s effort pretty feeble. He did no more than suggest, tentatively, that on the evidence he cited Heseltine might be overstating his case.⁵ He asked for clarification – which Heseltine promptly provided (and Mayhew accepted).⁶ But Mayhew’s letter did contain the words ‘material inaccuracies’; and it was these two words, torn out of context, which were leaked to the Press Association with a crude spin which was reflected in the next day’s headlines. ‘YOU LIAR’ screamed the Sun; while The Times paraphrased the same message more sedately as ‘Heseltine Told by Law Chief: Stick to the Facts’.⁷ Mrs Thatcher afterwards maintained that, while she regretted the way it was done, ‘it was vital to have accurate information in the public domain’.⁸ ‘It was a matter of duty that it should be known publicly that there were thought to be material inaccuracies’ in Heseltine’s letter.⁹ But there was no contrary information in Mayhew’s letter. The only possible purpose of leaking it was to discredit Heseltine and maybe provoke him to resign. The difference between this and earlier operations to discredit failing or dissenting ministers was that Mayhew – and his senior, the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers – were outraged by the use made of his letter and demanded an inquiry to discover the culprit.

The leaked letter by itself did not provoke Heseltine to resign. Of course when he dramatically walked out of the Cabinet two days later there was speculation that his action was premeditated, especially since he was able within a few hours to publish a 2,500-word statement detailing his complaints about Mrs Thatcher’s style of government. But it was no secret at Westminster that he had been close to resignation for months; so it is not surprising that he should already have roughed out his grievances, to be polished up when the moment arose. His closest associates in the Cabinet were convinced that he did not mean to resign that day. The more interesting question is whether Mrs Thatcher deliberately forced his hand. She certainly laid down the law very firmly in Cabinet, insisting that the public wrangling between ministers must stop and that all future statements about Westland must be cleared though the Cabinet Office. But Heseltine accepted this without demur, until Nicholas Ridley intervened to spell out that this requirement should apply to the repetition of past statements as well. It was this that seemed to be gratuitously aimed at humiliating Heseltine. His response was to gather up his papers and leave the room. No one was sure whether he had resigned or merely gone to the bathroom. But Lady Thatcher wrote with undisguised satisfaction in her memoirs that while some of the Cabinet were ‘stunned’ by his demarche, ‘I was not. Michael had made his decision and that was that. I already knew who I wanted to succeed him.’¹⁰ The suspicion is that Ridley had been primed to push Heseltine over the brink.

Obviously Mrs Thatcher was not sorry to see her most dangerous colleague self-destruct. She adjourned the Cabinet for coffee, conferred briefly with Whitelaw and Wakeham, then called George Younger back and offered him the Ministry of Defence. Younger insisted that he had not been tipped off; but the MoD was the job he had always wanted and he accepted on the spot. Never was a resigning minister so quickly replaced.¹¹

A few hours later Heseltine published his statement giving his side of the argument and alleging ‘the complete breakdown of Cabinet government’.¹² Heseltine was not the first or the last of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers to conclude that this was no way to run a government. But the argument over helicopters, and Heseltine’s departure, were only the beginning of the Westland affair. Far more serious was the unravelling of the apparently trivial matter of the leak of Mayhew’s letter, which called into question not the Prime Minister’s strength but her honesty.

Sir Michael Havers took a serious view of the leaking of the Solicitor-General’s advice to a colleague. The morning that Mayhew’s letter was splashed all over the papers he went straight to Number Ten threatening to go to the police unless an inquiry was set up immediately to find the source. Mrs Thatcher had no choice but to agree. The difficulty was that she was being asked to investigate a process which she herself had set in motion and in which her own private office was, at the least, involved. If she did not know already how the letter had reached the Press Association, she had only to ask her own staff to be told in five minutes. So inviting Robert Armstrong to undertake a ten-day inquiry was a charade from the start. It could only be a cover-up, and it was.

After all the inquiries and the testimony of most of the protagonists there remains only a narrow area of disagreement about what happened. It is admitted that Mrs Thatcher asked Mayhew to write a letter over the weekend. He took his time, but did so on the Monday morning, sending copies to the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the DTI. Mrs Thatcher made it clear to the DTI that she considered it ‘urgent that it should become public knowledge before 4 p.m.’, when Westland was due to hold a press conference to announce its decision.¹³ Brittan’s head of information at the DTI, Colette Bowe – a Civil Service high-flier only temporarily serving a spell as an information officer – was well aware that she was being asked to do something irregular. She tried to consult her Permanent Secretary, but unluckily he was out of the office and out of contact. So she contacted her superior in the Government Information Service, Bernard Ingham, hoping that he would handle the matter through the Number Ten press office. One way or another he declined. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘I told Colette Bowe I had to keep the Prime Minister above that sort of thing.’¹⁴ But Miss Bowe clearly understood that in leaking the letter she was acting on her minister’s behalf, with Number Ten’s knowledge, if not directly on instructions.[m]

In view of the subsequent controversy, it is important to note that Mrs Thatcher, in reporting to the Commons the result of Armstrong’s inquiry, plainly acknowledged Number Ten’s complicity in the leak. ‘It was accepted that the DTI should disclose the fact [that Mayhew considered Heseltine’s letter inaccurate] and that, in view of the urgency of the matter, the disclosure should be made by way of a telephone call to the Press Association.’ That admission unambiguously implicates her office, which is usually taken to mean Ingham and Charles Powell. She insisted that she herself was not consulted, but only because she did not need to be. She repeated, however, that ‘had I been consulted, I should have said that a different method must be found of making the relevant facts known’.¹⁵

Under questioning she several times repeated that she wished the disclosure had been made by ‘a more correct method’ – even though there is no correct method of making public a Law Officer’s advice. But in answer to a friendly question from Cranley Onslow she let slip an admission that she had given her approval.‘It was vital to have accurate information in the public domain… It was to get that accurate information to the public domain that I gave my consent.’¹⁶ Only the maverick Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell seems to have picked this up. When he quoted it back to her in the main Westland debate four days later she explained that she had meant her consent to an inquiry, not her consent to the leak. But the context makes it plain that this was not so. Later, before the select committee which investigated the affair, Robert Armstrong glossed her words as ‘a slip of the tongue’.¹⁷ But slips of the tongue not infrequently betray the truth. It is extraordinary that the persistent Dalyell let this critical admission go.

Instead she was allowed to continue to maintain that she had not known about the leak, or at least the method of it, until ‘some hours later’.¹⁸ She then went through the charade of setting Armstrong to inquire into the actions of her own office. For ten days, while Armstrong pretended to pursue his bogus inquiry, Mrs Thatcher pretended still to know nothing. Then, when he presented his report, concluding that the DTI had leaked the letter on Brittan’s instruction, she made a pantomime of shocked amazement. ‘Leon, why didn’t you tell me?’¹⁹ Michael Havers, promised his scapegoat, was impressed.