She had flattened the wets and she could always trounce Michael Foot in the House of Commons, puncturing his windy outrage with reminders of his own record laced with helpful quotations from Callaghan and Healey. Within weeks of the budget, however, two new developments occurred which were harder to deal with. First, at the end of March the Labour party finally split. The pro-European right led by Roy Jenkins (recently returned from Brussels) and three former Cabinet Ministers (Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rodgers) sealed their disillusion with the leftward direction of the party and resigned to form a new Social Democratic Party (SDP), which immediately linked up with the Liberals and began to register high levels of support in the opinion polls. In July, at the new party’s first electoral test, Jenkins came within 2,000 votes of capturing the safe Labour seat of Warrington. The SDP’s direct challenge was to Labour; but the huge appeal of the new Alliance sent a warning to worried Tories of the danger of abandoning the middle ground. One Conservative MP crossed the floor to join the SDP, and all summer there were rumours that others might follow.
Second, beginning in April in Brixton, then spreading in July to other rundown areas of Liverpool, Birmingham and other cities, there was a frightening explosion of riots and looting on a scale not seen in Britain since Victorian times. This was precisely the sort of civil disorder that Prior and Gilmour had predicted if the Government was not seen to show more concern about unemployment. The riots seemed to confirm the conventional analysis that a level of 2.5 million unemployed was not politically sustainable, and increased the pressure from worried backbenchers for a change of policy.
Mrs Thatcher reacted characteristically to both challenges. She despised the SDP defectors for running away instead of fighting their corner in the Labour party. There was no room in her conviction politics for centre parties. In her memoirs she called them ‘retread socialists who… only developed second thoughts about socialism when their ministerial salaries stopped in 1979’.63 There was enough truth in this to make it an effective argument. Though the Alliance undoubtedly represented an unpredictable electoral danger to the Government, tapping a deep well of public distaste for both the ‘extremes’ of militant Labour and Thatcherite Conservatism, it lacked a clear political identity; while clarity was Mrs Thatcher’s principal asset. The SDP was just another gang of wets.
She was shaken by the riots, on two levels. First, she was genuinely shocked at the violence and destruction of property. Her famous exclamation, on seeing the extent of the damage, ‘Oh, those poor shopkeepers!’, was a heartfelt cry of identification with the victims.64 She felt no sympathy whatever with the rioters, or interest in what might drive a normally quiescent population to rebel. She was determined to treat the episode as a purely law-and-order matter, though she did allow Whitelaw, as Home Secretary, to appoint a liberal judge to inquire into strained relations between the local black population and the police.
The second wave of disturbances, which started in Liverpool on 3 July and spread over the next three weeks to Manchester, Birmingham, Blackburn, Bradford, Leeds, Derby, Leicester and Wolverhampton, involving young whites as well as blacks, was much more serious, since it could be interpreted not simply as an outbreak of local tension but as a political challenge to the Government. Now she was alarmed at a different level. One colleague observed that ‘the Prime Minister’s nerve seemed momentarily to falter’.65 On television she appeared unusually nervous and succeeded only in displaying the limitations of her law-and-order response. Two days later she visited Brixton police station and spent the night in the operations room at Scotland Yard to demonstrate her support for the police. She returned to Downing Street to impress on Willie Whitelaw the urgency of arming them with the latest American anti-riot equipment.
Back in the Commons she blamed the permissive society – and its godfather, Roy Jenkins. ‘A large part of the problem we are having now has come from a weakening of authority in many aspects of life over many, many years. This has to be corrected.’66 Prompted by a friendly backbencher, she condemned Jenkins’ dictum that ‘a permissive society is a civilised society’ as ‘something that most of us would totally reject. Society must have rules if it is to continue to be civilised.’67
In truth, Mrs Thatcher was very lucky. The riots that summer died down as suddenly as they had erupted, dissolved in a warm glow of patriotic sentiment surrounding the ‘fairytale’ wedding of the Prince of Wales to Lady Diana Spencer on 29 July. There was a further outbreak in September 1985. But there was no political violence directed against the Government until the anti-poll-tax demonstrations of 1990, which did help to destroy her. In 1981 she contrived to transform a potentially devastating crisis for her Government into a vindication of her own analysis of society. At the same time police forces were supplied with the most modern anti-riot technology: shields, truncheons, vehicles, rubber bullets and water cannon. This armoury was to prove as critical as the building up of coal stocks in the Government’s confrontation with the miners in 1984 – 5.
Mrs Thatcher
Some who had hitherto supported her, however, were losing faith, or patience. Several senior Conservatives, including the party chairman Peter Thorneycroft, were beginning to call for a change of direction; and in July the revolt reached the Cabinet. The one concession the wets had managed to wring from their defeat in March was a promise that the Cabinet should never again have the budget sprung on them without advance warning, but should be allowed to discuss broad economic strategy in advance. Mrs Thatcher agreed reluctantly as a sop to Geoffrey Howe, who felt that Prior and Gilmour had ‘some justification’ for feeling excluded from ‘a secretive monetarist clique’; he believed that, given a more collegiate style, he could persuade them that there was no alternative to his policy.70 Howe’s faith in his power of advocacy did him credit; but Mrs Thatcher’s political sense was more acute. The first test of the new openness demonstrated exactly why she had been right to fear it.
Howe and Leon Brittan produced a paper proposing a further package of spending cuts for 1982 – 3.They were supported by Keith Joseph but by virtually no one else. Practically the whole of the rest of the Cabinet rebelled. Most seriously, from Mrs Thatcher’s point of view, two of her original handful of ‘true believers’, John Biffen and John Nott, defected. But Biffen, though a monetarist by long conviction, was always sceptical by temperament and had been making damp noises for some time. It was Nott’s desertion which most upset the Prime Minister. Hitherto she had seen him as her next Chancellor. Now she felt that he had been infected by ‘the big-spending culture’ of the Ministry of Defence.71 The defection of Nott and Biffen left the Prime Minister and Chancellor dangerously isolated.
At this potential crisis of her premiership Willie Whitelaw’s position was crucial. As Home Secretary he had borne the full impact of the summer riots; he did not believe they had nothing to do with Government policies. Now, if ever, was the moment when he might have exerted his influence, without disloyalty, on the side of an easing of policy. In fact he stayed true, vainly urging loyalty on the rest of the Cabinet. With his protection, Mrs Thatcher was able to close the meeting without conceding any ground, promising that the discussion would be resumed in the autumn.
But that Cabinet never met again. The July revolt convinced her that she must assert herself or lose control of the Government. After two years she could legitimately drop some of those she had felt obliged to include in 1979. So in September – after the summer holidays but before the party conference – she struck. Yet once again she showed caution in her choice of victims, picking off only those of the wets – Gilmour, Soames and Education Minister Mark Carlisle – who had least following in the party. Gilmour went with the most style, marching out of Downing Street to announce that throwing a few men overboard would not help when the ship was steering ‘full steam ahead for the rocks’.72 Soames’ outrage could be heard across Horse Guards’ Parade. Carlisle was probably less surprised to be sacked than he had been to be appointed in the first place. But Mrs Thatcher wanted his job for Keith Joseph, who specifically requested Education when he earned his release from the Department of Industry.
Paradoxically, the biggest casualty of the reshuffle was Jim Prior, who remained in the Cabinet. He was clearly earmarked for a move, since Mrs Thatcher was determined on another measure of trade-union reform. Over the summer Downing Street let it be known that he was going to be offered Northern Ireland. Prior in turn told the press he would refuse. But Mrs Thatcher called his bluff. When it came to the point he could not refuse the
