The Iron Lady

ahead.’¹¹ From the SDP bench below the gangway, Owen kept his eye on Geoffrey Howe. ‘He looked miserable and unhappy, truly, I thought, a dead sheep. How wrong I proved to be.’¹²

If Howe needed any further prompting the next day’s press – led by the Sun with the gleeful headline ‘Up Yours, Delors’ – pushed him over the edge.¹³ He had already drafted his resignation letter before he attended Cabinet on Thursday morning. With now characteristic insensitivity Mrs Thatcher lectured him in front of his colleagues over the fact that two or three Bills to be included in the Queen’s Speech were not quite ready. Some of them felt later that this was the final provocation.¹⁴ But Howe denies it. ‘Far from being the last straw, this final tantrum was the first confirmation that I had taken the right decision.’¹⁵

His resignation letter – running to over 1,000 words – repeated his concern that Britain should remain on the ‘inside track’ in Europe. He insisted that he was ‘not a Euro-idealist or federalist’. He did not want a single currency imposed any more than she did, but ‘more than one form of EMU is possible. The important thing is not to rule in or out any one particular solution absolutely.’ ‘In all honesty,’ he concluded, ‘I now find myself unable to share your view of the right approach to this question.’¹⁶

Mrs Thatcher regarded this as typically feeble stuff and tried to brush off Howe’s complaints, as she had done Lawson’s, as differences of style only, not of policy. ‘I do not believe these are nearly as great as you suggest,’ she replied.¹⁷ They parted with mutual relief and a formal handshake – the first time, Howe thought, they had ever shaken hands in fifteen years – leaving the Prime Minister to carry out her fourth reshuffle of the year.

For nearly two weeks, Mrs Thatcher seemed to have ridden out this latest crisis, helped by Bernard Ingham’s bullish briefings. ‘She will survive it,’ The Times asserted confidently.¹⁸ Parliament was not sitting – her report on the Rome summit had been the fag end of the previous session – so Howe had no early opportunity to make a resignation statement. Michael Heseltine congratulated him on his ‘courageous decision’ but told him it did not materially affect his own position. Just to post a reminder that he was still in the wings, however, Heseltine reworked an article intended for the Sunday Times and published it as an open letter to his Henley constituents before leaving on a visit to the Middle East. This was a mistake which allowed Ingham to charge him with cowardice.

But why should Ingham have wished to provoke Heseltine? The answer would seem to be that Mrs Thatcher wanted to flush him into the open. The same rules that had allowed Meyer to challenge her the year before were still in place, and not a day passed without another Tory MP calling for a contest to ‘lance the boil’.¹⁹ That being so, she resolved to get it over quickly. On Tuesday 6 November she arranged to bring forward the date of any contest by two weeks, with the closing date for nominations on Thursday 15 November and the first round of voting the following Tuesday. What was extraordinary was not the haste but the fact that she was due to be out of the country on 20 November attending the CSCE conference in Paris. She knew this, but thought either that it did not matter, since she did not intend to canvass personally, or that it would be of positive benefit to her by reminding Tory MPs of her standing as an international stateswoman. The idea that she did not expect a serious contest when she changed the date does not stand up. On the contrary, she expected Heseltine to stand but thought the best way of beating him was to beat him quickly. ‘It’ll be a fortnight’s agony,’ she told Ronnie Millar. ‘Oh well. Never mind.’²⁰ It was a fateful miscalculation.

Normal political business resumed on 7 November, with the opening of the new session of Parliament. Despite a concerted effort by Labour MPs to throw her off her stride, Mrs Thatcher opened the debate on the Queen’s Speech in characteristically combative style, outlining new Bills ranging from longer sentences for criminals, through the setting up of the Child Support Agency, to privately financed roads and privatised ports. She wiped the floor as usual with Kinnock and played down the differences with Howe, squaring her own scepticism about the hard ecu with the possibility that it nevertheless could evolve into a single currency with the clever formula that ‘We have no bureaucratic timetable: ours is a market approach, based on what people and governments choose to do.’ When John Reid asked why in that case Howe had resigned, she replied – with a dangerous echo of the Lawson resignation – that only Howe could answer that.²¹ Howe let it be known that he would make a statement the following Tuesday. Meanwhile, Major, in his autumn economic statement, was forced to admit that the economy was now officially in recession; and the next day the Conservatives were hammered in two more by-elections.

Howe made his statement on Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Prime Minister’s Questions, to a packed House which nevertheless had no expectation that it was about to witness one of the parliamentary occasions of the century. Its impact was greatly enhanced by being one of the first major occasions to be televised. Howe never raised his voice above its habitual courteous monotone. But almost from his first words he gripped the House with a hitherto unsuspected passion. He started lightly by dismissing the idea that he had resigned purely over differences of style. He recalled the privilege of serving as Chancellor for four years, paying tribute to Mrs Thatcher’s essential contribution to their economic achievements, but also suggesting that ‘they possibly derived some little benefit from the presence of a Chancellor who was not exactly a wet himself’.

The core of his speech then spelt out their real differences over Europe. First, he recalled that he and Lawson had wanted to join the ERM since at least 1985 and revealed for the first time – with Lawson sitting beside him nodding his assent – that they had both threatened to resign if she did not make a definite commitment to join at the time of Madrid. He gently corrected Mrs Thatcher’s increasingly public placing of all the blame for the renewal of inflation on Lawson by insisting that it could have been avoided if Britain had joined the ERM much earlier. Next, he mocked her ‘nightmare image’ of a Europe ‘teeming with ill-intentioned people scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy” and “dissolve our national identities”’, preferring to quote against it both Macmillan’s 1962 warning against retreating into ‘a ghetto of sentimentality about our past’ and Churchill’s vision of a ‘larger sovereignty’ which alone, he had declared in 1950, could protect Europe’s diverse national traditions. Again he warned against getting left out of the forging of new institutions. Of course Britain could opt out of the single currency, but she could not prevent the others going ahead.

Personally, Howe concluded, he had tried to reconcile the differences from within the Government, but he now realised that ‘the task has become futile: trying to stretch the meaning of words beyond what was credible, and trying to pretend that there was a common policy when every step forward risked being subverted by some casual comment or impulsive answer’. The conflict between the ‘instinct of loyalty’ to the Prime Minister, which was ‘still very real’, and ‘loyalty towards what I perceive to be the true interests of the nation’ had become intolerable. ‘That is why I have resigned.’ In the very last sentence came the killer punch. ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’²²

Lawson called it ‘the most devastating speech I, or I suspect anyone else in the House that afternoon, had heard uttered in the House of Commons… It was all the more powerful because it was Geoffrey, that most moderate, long-suffering and patient of men, that was uttering it.’²³ ‘It was the measured way in which Howe gave the speech which made it so deadly,’ Paddy Ashdown wrote in his diary. ‘The result is that she appears terminally damaged’.²⁴

Howe denied that his final sentence was a prearranged invitation to Heseltine to end his hesitation.²⁵ But it is hard to see what else it could have meant. Heseltine too denied collusion; yet his lieutenant Michael Mates was already canvassing possible allies, before Howe spoke, on whether it would be helpful for him to mention Heseltine by name.²⁶ In such a highly charged situation, a hint was more than enough. In fact Heseltine’s mind was already made up; but Howe’s speech gave him a more favourable wind than he would have had the previous week. An hour after Howe sat down, Cecil Parkinson made a last attempt to dissuade him. ‘Cecil, she is finished,’ Heseltine told him. ‘After Geoffrey’s speech, she is finished.’²⁷ The next day he announced his candidacy.

Tarzan’s moment

He gave three reasons – a shrewd amalgam of real policy differences with an appeal to the survival instinct of Tory backbenchers. First, he agreed with Howe that Mrs Thatcher held ‘views on Europe behind which she has