‘Treachery with a smile on its face’
Mrs Thatcher returned to London next morning having had no sleep, still determined to fight on. She had, after all, comfortably defeated her challenger and fallen only four votes short of outright victory. Woodrow Wyatt toyed with the notion that she could ask the Queen to grant her a General Election.41 She herself still believed she could win the second ballot ‘if the campaign were to go into high gear and every potential supporter pressed to fight for my cause’.42 She knew now that this had not been the case so far. But most observers shared the view bluntly expressed in his memoirs by Michael Heseltine. ‘To anyone with the faintest knowledge of how Westminster politics work, her position was manifestly untenable. It says much for Mrs Thatcher’s capacity for self-delusion that at first she stubbornly refused to recognise the fact.’43
The BBC’s political editor John Cole felt the mood as soon as he got to the House of Commons on Wednesday morning. ‘Conservative MPs began stopping me in the corridors and in the Members’ Lobby to tell me that if she persisted in her declared intention to enter the second ballot, they would switch their votes to Michael Heseltine.’ The Heseltine camp was now confident of winning if she stayed in the contest.44 But by the same token, urgent discussions had already been going on all over London to prevent that eventuality. The younger members of the Cabinet had no wish to see Mrs Thatcher deposed to put Heseltine in her place. Whenever she went, they wanted her to be replaced by one of themselves. If it really looked as if she could not beat Heseltine, it followed that she should be persuaded to withdraw in favour of another candidate who could. The supposedly crucial meeting took place on Tuesday evening at the home of Tristan Garel-Jones. Those present included four Cabinet Ministers from the left of the party – Chris Patten, William Waldegrave, Malcolm Rifkind and Tony Newton – plus Norman Lamont from the right and two or three ministers from outside the Cabinet, including Alan Clark.
It was not really much of a conspiracy. ‘The really sickening thing,’ Clark wrote, ‘was the urgent and unanimous abandonment of the Lady. Except for William’s little opening tribute, she was never mentioned again.’45 But with thirty to forty of her supporters on the first ballot said to have deserted, the conclusion that she was finished was pretty obvious. The consensus of the group at this stage was to back Hurd. The importance of the meeting was not that it decided anything, but simply that it showed the way several of the younger ministers were thinking. Ken Clarke, John Wakeham and John Gummer had reached the same conclusion without being present; and others were holding countless similar conversations by telephone.
Before Mrs Thatcher returned to London three more formal consultations had taken place. All told the same story of crumbling support. The question was who would tell Mrs Thatcher. Denis was the first to try when she returned to Downing Street at lunchtime. ‘Don’t go on, love,’ he begged her. But she felt – ‘in my bones’ – that she owed it to her supporters not to give up so long as there was still a chance.46 Wakeham warned that she would face the argument that she should step down voluntarily to avoid humiliation, but professed that this was not his own view. All the other emissaries ducked it. These were the famous ‘men in suits’ who were supposed to tell her when it was time to go. But over a working lunch at Number Ten ‘the greybeards’, as Hurd called them, ‘failed to deliver the message’.47 ‘The message of the meeting, even from those urging me to fight on, was implicitly demoralising,’ Lady Thatcher wrote in retrospect.48 But for the moment she formed the impression that she should still fight on.
She still had a statement to make in the Commons on the Paris summit. As she left Downing Street she called out to reporters: ‘I fight on. I fight to win’, managing, as she later wrote, to sound more confident than by now she felt.49 In the House she gave another characteristically brave performance, hailing ‘the end of the Cold War in Europe and the triumph of freedom, democracy and the rule of law’, spiritedly rebutting opposition taunts and thanking the one Tory loyalist who hoped that she would ‘continue to bat for Britain with all the vigour, determination and energy at her command’. Only once, uncharacteristically, did she forget the second half of a question and have to be reminded what it was.50 Then Tebbit took her round the tea room in a belated effort to shore up her support. ‘I had never experienced such an atmosphere before,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘Repeatedly I heard: “Michael has asked me two or three times for my vote already. This is the first time we have seen you.”’51
Around five o’clock she saw the Queen and assured her that she still intended to contest the second ballot. What finally convinced her that her cause was hopeless was a series of individual interviews with the members of the Cabinet between six and eight that evening. This procedure has been widely regarded as another misjudgement. The summons to see her individually meant that they all congregated along the ministerial corridor to concert what they were going to say before they went in. This explains why, when they saw her, so many of them said the same thing. Mrs Thatcher sat tense and upright at the end of one sofa next to the fireplace, the ministers on the opposite sofa. ‘Almost to a man,’ she wrote bitterly, ‘they used the same formula. This was that they themselves would back me, of course, but that regretfully they did not believe I could win… I felt I could almost join in the chorus.’52
There were some variations. Clarke, Patten and Rifkind were the only three to tell her frankly that they would not support her if she stood again. Clarke – ‘in the brutalist style he has cultivated’ – warned her that Heseltine would become Prime Minister unless she made way for either Hurd or Major. She was ‘visibly stunned’ by this estimate.53 Only Baker and Cecil Parkinson told her that she could still win. The rest, with varying degrees of embarrassment (some with tears in their eyes) advised her to give up.
The one interview she describes as light relief was that with Alan Clark, who also – though not a member of the Cabinet – somehow managed to get in to see her. He too told her she would lose, but encouraged her to go down fighting gloriously to the end. Earlier he had written in his diary that ‘the immediate priority is to find a way, tactfully and skilfully, to talk her out of standing a second time’. Presumably this was his way of doing so. After a pause while she contemplated this Wagnerian scenario she said: ‘It’d be so terrible if Michael won. He would undo everything I have fought for.’54 So maybe Clark, while convincing her that he was still on her side, had more effect than the faint hearts whom she accused of betraying her.
By the end of this dismal procession Mrs Thatcher had accepted that the game was up. ‘I had lost the Cabinet’s support. I could not even muster a credible campaign team. It was the end.’55 ‘She was pale, subdued and shaking her head, saying “I am not a quitter, I am not a quitter”,’ Baker recalled. ‘But the tone was one of resignation, not defiance.’56 She was upset not so much by her poor vote in the ballot, which could be attributed to electoral nerves, nor by the frank opposition of those who had never supported her, but by what she saw as the treachery of those from whom she felt entitled to expect loyalty. ‘What grieved me,’ she wrote, ‘was the desertion of those I had always considered friends and allies and the weasel words whereby they had transmuted their betrayal into frank advice and concern for my fate.’57 It was treachery, she charged later on television. ‘Treachery with a smile on its face.’58
The best answer to this allegation comes from Kenneth Clarke. ‘There was no treachery,’ he told one of his biographers.The Cabinet gave her ‘wholly sensible advice’ that, having failed to win by a sufficient margin on the first ballot, she would not win the second and should now withdraw. ‘That was nothing to do with the Cabinet. It was the parliamentary party where she’d suffered the defeat.’59 The fact was that not just her long-time enemies but many of her strongest supporters thought it was time for her to go, in order to protect her legacy. On this analysis it was not merely the party but Thatcherism itself which needed a new leader if it was to survive. It was cruel, but Margaret Thatcher had never been one to let personal feelings stand in the way of what she thought was right. Though she talked of loyalty, she had never shown much mercy herself to colleagues who threatened or disappointed her. As Prime Ministers go, she was a good butcher: that was part of her strength. But she could not complain when she was butchered in turn. She had only gained the leadership in the first place by boldly challenging Ted Heath when all his other colleagues were restrained by loyalty. She had lived by the sword and was always likely to perish by the sword. Really she would have wanted it no other way. As she said, she was not a quitter. What perhaps galled her most in retrospect about the Cabinet’s advice was that it forced her to quit voluntarily when temperamentally she would rather have gone down to defeat, as Clark suggested. But her first priority was to defend her legacy, and she was reluctantly persuaded that self-immolation was the only way to do it.
At 11.15 p.m. she rang Tim Bell and told him: ‘I’ve decided to go. Can you come and see me?’ He went, collecting Gordon Reece on the way, and ‘blubbed hopelessly’ in the car on the way.60 Her two ‘laughing boys’, as she had called them in happier times, sat up with her till two o’clock helping to write her
