American decision to halt the pursuit of Saddam’s fleeing forces and leave the dictator still in power.Yet the truth is, as Field-Marshal Sir Michael Carver wrote in 1992, that ‘the decision to call a halt was a rare example of voluntarily ceasing hostilities at the right moment’.70 Having achieved the limited objective of getting Iraq out of Kuwait, the coalition had no authority to go on to topple Saddam, while the Americans very wisely had no wish to get sucked into a long-term occupation of Iraq. ‘When she was in office,’ Percy Cradock recalled, ‘there was no serious talk of that kind, for good reasons.’71 In retirement Lady Thatcher forgot that when in office she was punctilious about respecting international law. From the start of the crisis she was always careful to limit the coalition’s objective to reversing the occupation of Kuwait: she repeatedly denied any intention of removing Saddam which, she said on 19 November, was ‘a matter for the people of Iraq’.72 Though she believed strongly in the proper application of military force, she was also passionately legalistic.
25
On and On
Ten more years?
ON 3 May 1989 Margaret Thatcher chalked up ten years as Prime Minister. Sixteen months earlier, on 3 January 1988, she had already become the longest-serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century. Nevertheless she was reluctant to draw too much attention to the anniversary, partly from superstition, partly for fear that people would say ten years was enough.
Several of her senior colleagues, even as they applauded her achievement, felt she should have chosen this moment to announce that she would step down soon, when she could still have gone in triumph. Peter Carrington actually invited her to his house in Oxfordshire to urge her to retire ‘rather sooner than had been in my mind’.1 According to Carol, Denis had made up his mind as early as June 1987 that she should not fight another election as leader. He told her so around December 1988 and briefly thought he had convinced her. But at this stage Willie Whitelaw told her it would split the party. Denis knew she did not really want to give up and accepted defeat gracefully.2 But from now on he made no secret of his longing to name the day. He did not force the issue: it was her decision, but he had seen enough of politics to suspect that she would be hurt in the end if she stayed too long.
Having worked so hard all her life Mrs Thatcher dreaded retirement. She loved the job and felt no loss of ability to do it. She believed she had much more still to do. Moreover, she could not think of going until she was sure that she could hand over to a worthy successor who would protect her legacy and carry on her work with the same zeal that she had brought to it; and like most dominant leaders she saw no one who fitted the bill. She was determined to deny any candidate of her own political generation – that is Howe, Heseltine, Lawson or Tebbit – but did not believe that anyone in the next generation was yet ready. Her real problem was that none of the leading contenders from the next two political generations were true Thatcherites.
If she had wanted to groom a Thatcherite successor in the short term, the obvious candidate was Norman Tebbit. But Tebbit’s caustic style represented the unacceptable face of Thatcherism. ‘I couldn’t get him elected as leader of the Tory party even if I wanted to – nor would the country elect him if he was,’ she once told Rupert Murdoch.3 In any case – apart from the question of his injuries in the Brighton bomb – Tebbit had already fallen from favour before the 1987 election. The one presentable right-winger whom she had tried to bring on was John Moore, briefly puffed by the media as her chosen heir; but he had muffed his big chance at the Department of Health and disappeared from view in 1989.All this explains her identification, quite early on, of John Major.
Elected in 1979 with little ideological baggage, Major was not obviously either wet or dry but made his mark first as a whip, then as an able, industrious, self-effacing junior minister at Social Security until appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1987. Quietly ambitious, he allowed the Prime Minister to think he was more of a Thatcherite than he really was: in fact, having known poverty as a boy and unemployment as a young man, he had a strong sympathy for the underdogs in society. In May 1989 Major was the only current minister invited to her anniversary lunch at Chequers. Woodrow Wyatt had not met him before but was impressed. ‘I am glad you like him,’ Mrs Thatcher told Wyatt later, ‘because I think he’s splendid.’4
Given that she had no intention of stepping down in the foreseeable future, it was difficult to strike the right note in public. As she had already learned in 1987, talk of going ‘on and on’ was counterproductive. She must not sound as if she intended to stay for ever. In her determination to give the media no opportunity to treat her as a lame duck, however, she sometimes spoke incautiously of going on to a fourth or even a fifth term.5
If the party conference loved the idea of ‘ten more years’, most of her parliamentary colleagues were much less enthusiastic. In politics, any long-serving leader represents a block on the prospects of others. After ten years a very high proportion of Tory MPs not in the Government had either had their chance or knew that it was never going to come; while those in office were uncomfortably aware that the only way she could freshen the Government, since she had no intention of retiring herself, was to keep shuffling the faces around her. One way and another, her support base at Westminster was growing dangerously thin.
Even as Mrs Thatcher insisted on her determination and fitness to carry on, therefore, there was a growing sense that her time was inexorably running out. She had come through dreadful by-elections and dire opinion polls before, in 1981 and again in 1986, and recorded landslide victories less than two years later. She saw no reason why she could not do it again. But this time round two things had changed. First, whereas in those previous pits of unpopularity her personal approval rating had always kept ahead of the Government’s, now her own figure fell commensurately. By the spring of 1990 it had settled at a lower level – around 25 per cent – than she had ever touched previously. At the same time Labour had begun to look – as John Biffen put it – ‘distinctly electable’.6 By late 1989 Labour was pushing towards 50 per cent in the polls and in February 1990 (for the first time since a brief moment in 1986) was the party thought most likely to win the next election.7
She was worried by the polls, but she half believed that everything would come right, as it always had before, as soon as the economy was back under control. She was most hurt by the personal polls. ‘They say I am arrogant,’ she complained to Wyatt. ‘I am the least arrogant person there is.’8 The trouble was, as an unnamed media adviser shrewdly put it in 1990, that she was the victim of her own success:
In 1979, 1983, 1987, they needed Mrs Thatcher to slay dragons… Now in 1990 many of the dragons are perceived to be slain, i.e. trade unions, communism, socialism, unemployment… The new dragons are perceived to be of the Government’s own making… The result of this is that people no longer know what they need Mrs Thatcher for.9
‘The Chancellor’s position was unassailable’
When Mrs Thatcher determined, after the Madrid summit, that she must break what she saw as the Lawson – Howe axis, she made the wrong choice by demoting Geoffrey Howe. Her real problem was with Nigel Lawson.There is a good case that she should have sacked Lawson the year before, when it became clear that they were pursuing irreconcilable financial policies. The trouble was that she admired and was slightly afraid of Lawson, despite her loss of trust in him, whereas she increasingly despised Howe; so Howe was the easy scapegoat, while she went on protesting her ‘full and unequivocal and generous backing’ for Lawson.10 But the fundamental difference between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister remained,
