‘Unless the PM is the most marvellous actress I’ve ever seen in my life she was as shocked as anybody that in fact it was on Leon Brittan’s instructions.’20
It was the Prime Minister’s veracity that was at stake in the House of Commons on 23 and 27 January. More strictly, it was her ability to avoid being caught in a demonstrable untruth, since most MPs of all parties found it impossible to believe that she had not checked up, either in advance or very soon afterwards, on how her closest aides had implemented her instructions.
Her statement was carefully framed to protect all parties: Brittan and his officials, the Prime Minister and her officials, all had ‘acted in good faith’.The Attorney-General, in agreement with the Director of Public Prosecutions, had accordingly decided that no one should be prosecuted. Most significantly, Mrs Thatcher acknowledged that the DTI had not only ‘the authority of its Secretary of State [but] cover from my office for proceeding’.21 That word ‘cover’ was included at Brittan’s insistence; yet it was not enough to save him. He was forced to resign next day – not because he took responsibility for the leak, but because he ‘no longer commanded the full confidence of his colleagues’.22
The ugly truth was that Brittan had never been popular. He was too brainy, supercilious, soft – and Jewish. He had made a poor showing in the House, most glaringly when Heseltine tricked him into denying that he had received a letter from the Chief Executive of British Aerospace. He had to come back to the House a few hours later to admit that he had in fact received it. In the matter of Mayhew’s letter he had been, at worst, naive. He was not a willing scapegoat. But the Tory party’s famous ‘men in grey suits’ told him firmly that the backbenchers wanted his head. Like Lord Carrington after the Falklands invasion, someone had to be sacrificed to save the Prime Minister. Brittan’s price was a fulsome exchange of letters in which she put on record that she had tried to persuade him to stay – thereby implicitly acknowledging that he had done no wrong – and all but promised to bring him back into the Cabinet very soon.
Brittan’s sacrifice did not get her off the hook. Labour had set down an adjournment motion for Monday 27 January. There were still unanswered questions, above all about the role of Bernard Ingham and Charles Powell. If Mrs Thatcher had not personally authorised the leak, then one or both of them must have done so, in which case they had abused their position as civil servants. Likewise the Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong appeared to have lent himself to a sham inquiry designed not to discover the truth but to obscure it. The trivial matter of the leaked letter seemed to have exposed a culture of manipulation and deceit at the heart of the Government which the Prime Minister had still to clear up. Her speech, like her statement four days earlier, had to be carefully drafted to cover every angle. A form of words had to be agreed with Brittan to ensure his silence, and Heseltine might yet torpedo her. She and her staff, including Armstrong, spent the whole weekend – except for Saturday evening when she had to attend her annual dinner dance in Finchley – working on it, unusually in the Cabinet Room, the Cabinet table piled high with files. On Monday morning a group of senior ministers was allowed to vet the draft. Never again before November 1990 was Mrs Thatcher’s dependence on colleagues so painfully exposed.
Simultaneously Ronnie Millar was summoned to lend his final polish to the text. He found Mrs Thatcher exceptionally tense and indecisive. It was then that she remarked that she might not be Prime Minister by six o’clock that evening.23 Ingham maintains that this was a joke;24 and she herself later claimed on television that it was ‘just one of those things you say’.25 But she unquestionably believed it at the time; and it could have come true, if Neil Kinnock had taken his opportunity.
But Kinnock blew it. He had two possible lines of attack. He might have taken the constitutional high ground and tried to mobilise the disquiet felt on both sides of the House at the blurring of the conventions of good government and the politicisation of the Civil Service. Or he might have conducted a forensic examination of the gaps, evasions and admissions in her previous testimony. Instead he plunged straight into a vague rhetorical denunciation of the Government’s ‘dishonesty, duplicity, conniving and manoeuvring’ which instantly created a partisan atmosphere and united the Tories in the Prime Minister’s defence. Within a minute he was punctured when the Speaker obliged him to withdraw the word ‘dishonesty’.26 ‘For a few seconds’, Alan Clark wrote, ‘Kinnock had her cornered, and you could see fear in those blue eyes. But then he had an attack of wind, gave her time to recover.’27
The result of Kinnock’s blustering was that she was able to get away with adding almost nothing to her previous story, beyond admitting that it was she who had initiated Mayhew’s letter, that it was leaked without his permission and that it was Havers who had demanded an inquiry. These details apart, she held to her line that the leak arose from ‘a genuine difference of understanding between officials as to exactly what was being sought and what was being given’. She apologised after a fashion, but repeated that she knew nothing about the disclosure ‘until some hours after it had occurred’. She said nothing at all about Powell or Ingham. As she gained in confidence she turned the attack back on Kinnock for ‘playing politics with people’s jobs’, and ended with a defiant promise to carry on with ‘renewed strength to extend freedom and ownership… and to keep our country strong and secure’.28 Clark thought it ‘a brilliant performance, shameless and brave. We are out of the wood.’29
Mrs Thatcher managed to hide behind her officials, with the repeated insistence that she was not consulted, while at the same time denying that they had exceeded their powers. She blocked the committee of inquiry by refusing to allow Powell and Ingham to give evidence; instead Robert Armstrong appeared for the Civil Service as a whole and performed a masterly whitewash on the whole business. But by then it did not matter. The crisis passed the moment Neil Kinnock failed to put Mrs Thatcher on the spot on 27 January. No one recognised this more clearly than the man who had started it all, Michael Heseltine, who described Kinnock’s speech as the worst parliamentary performance for a decade. ‘It is the constitutional duty of the Opposition to exploit the Government’s difficulties,’ he reflected with a touch of frustration, ‘but they cannot even make a decent job of that.’ Realising that there was no more mileage to be got out of pursuing the Prime Minister, he congratulated her instead on her ‘difficult and very brave’ statement and pronounced himself satisfied with the words she had used. ‘What the Prime Minister said today brings the politics of the matter to an end.’ He would be supporting the Government in the lobby that evening.30
In that moment of prudent political calculation Heseltine set his course for the next five years. Resigning from the Government in January 1986 did his career no harm at all. He would have received no further promotion from Mrs Thatcher – certainly not the department he most coveted, the DTI. By walking out, instead of waiting to be sacked, he was able to carve out a distinctive position as a dissenting but loyal alternative Prime Minister, touring the Tory constituency associations as the challenger-in-waiting if and when she stumbled. When the moment came in November 1990 he wielded the knife yet failed to claim the crown. But by keeping clear of the wreckage of her final years he gained another seven years of office under John Major – five of them at the DTI – ending as a more than usually powerful deputy Prime Minister.
By contrast Leon Brittan’s career in domestic politics was finished. The promises Mrs Thatcher made to buy his silence were not kept. Instead she sent him to Brussels as an EC Commissioner, overlooking – in her anxiety to be rid of him – his record as a convinced pro-European. Released from his debt of silence, Brittan lost no time in stating explicitly on television (in April 1989) what he had declined to spell out in 1986, that Powell and Ingham had expressly authorised the Westland leak.31
Mrs Thatcher herself was the biggest loser from the Westland imbroglio, for she lost what had hitherto been her most priceless asset, her reputation for integrity. The Westland cover-up concerned nothing more serious than a leaked letter: yet she left the inescapable impression that she had misled the House of Commons to save her own embarrassment and protect her entourage, letting a hapless colleague take the rap for a piece of skulduggery she had initiated. For one who prided herself on her honesty and preached a moralistic politics based on a clear sense of right and wrong, it was a painful and humiliating shock, the lowest point of her career. She recovered, but never fully regained the moral high ground. Henceforth she was just another slippery politician who would lie when cornered.
‘That Bloody Woman’
The early months of 1986 were the lowest period of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. She had been unpopular in 1980 – 81, but then she was sustained by her own burning belief that what she was doing was right and by the support of a small band of like-minded believers. There was something epic, Churchillian, in her defiance of the
