exasperated her as much as Pym’s had done. She also became convinced that Howe was ambitious for her job. Yet in truth it was an excellent appointment. For the whole of Mrs Thatcher’s second term, at summits and international negotiations, they made an effective combination on the global stage, each complementing the other’s qualities, while Howe put up heroically with being treated as her punchbag.
The hot tip to become the new Chancellor was Patrick Jenkin. But Mrs Thatcher now had the self- confidence to choose the more flamboyant Nigel Lawson. If Howe had been the perfect helmsman for the first term, Lawson’s slightly Regency style presented the right image of prosperity and expansion for the calmer waters of the second. This combination too worked well for the next four years, though Lawson was always more independent and self-confident than Howe had been.
Below these two key appointments, the rest of the Cabinetmaking was largely a rearrangement of the pack. Willie Whitelaw left the Commons and the Home Office to become Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords. This was a position from which he could better exercise his non-departmental role as deputy Prime Minister; but it entailed the displacement of Lady Young, thus ending the short-lived experiment of a second woman in the Thatcher Cabinet. There was never another.
Whitelaw’s replacement at the Home Office was one of Mrs Thatcher’s least successful appointments. Leon Brittan had done well as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and seemed to be a rising star. But he was at once too junior, too brainy and – it must be said – too Jewish to satisfy the Tory party’s expectations of a Home Secretary. He was never convincing in the job and was shifted after two years.
This was the new team. It was a measure of the change already wrought since 1979 that the Cabinet could no longer be usefully classified into ‘wets’ and ‘dries’. In the medium term the only likely threat to Mrs Thatcher’s dominance came from the undisguised ambition of Michael Heseltine.
15
Popular Capitalism
High noon
A QUARTER of a century on, the second Thatcher Government looks like the zenith of Thatcherism.This, after all, was the period of economic recovery, when the economy – at least in the south of England – finally emerged from the recession of the early 1980s into the heady expansion of what came to be known as the ‘Lawson boom’; it was the heroic period of privatisation, with the successful sell-off of whole utilities undreamed of in the first term; it was the time of deregulation in the City of London – the so-called ‘Big Bang’ – when quick fortunes were suddenly there to be made by young men in red braces known to the press as ‘yuppies’; a time of tax cuts, easy credit and rapidly increased spending power for the fortunate majority able to enjoy it, leading to a heady consumer boom which helped float the Government back to office for a third term amid excited talk of a British economic ‘miracle’. It was the moment when the hundred-year-old political argument between capitalism and socialism seemed to have been decisively resolved in favour of the former. The moral and practical superiority of the market as an engine of wealth creation and the efficient delivery of public services was incontestably established, its critics reduced to impotent irrelevance, while the Conservative party, under its all- conquering leader, the tireless personification of this liberation of the nation’s energy, seemed likely to retain power for as long as she wanted. Her hegemony appeared complete; or, in the catchphrase of the day, picked up from graffiti scrawled on a thousand walls, ‘Maggie Rules OK’.
Yet it did not feel quite like that at the time. The years 1983–7 were seen by many of the Prime Minister’s keenest supporters as a period of drift and wasted opportunity when the Government, if not exactly blown off course, was distracted from pursuing its long-term objectives by a series of bruising political battles and an accumulation of accidents which so sapped its energy and authority that, contrary to the legend of unchallenged dominance, the Tories actually trailed the supposedly unelectable Labour party – and sometimes the Alliance too – in the opinion polls for more than half the period. Margaret Thatcher’s hyperactive personality unquestionably dominated the political stage; but her popularity steadily dwindled so that in 1986 her poll rating was barely higher than in the darkest days of 1981. Though in the event she was comfortably re-elected the following year, her ascendancy was never so secure as the triumphalism of her instant myth-makers contrived to suggest.
The second term got off to a bad start with a series of minor embarrassments described by the press as ‘banana skins’. Then most of the second year, 1984 – 5, was overshadowed by a critical confrontation with the Tories’ old nemesis, the National Union of Mineworkers, which stirred deep passions on both sides and brought parts of the country close to civil war. The Government eventually prevailed, but it used up a lot of political energy and capital in doing so. At the same time it had picked a harder battle than it expected over the abolition of the Greater London Council, as well as several more tussles with Labour-controlled local authorities around the country over the level of their spending. It faced serious challenges to public order at the Greenham Common air base, where the first American cruise missiles arrived in November 1983; in parts of London, Birmingham and Liverpool, where another wave of riots erupted in September 1985; and in London’s docklands, where through much of 1986 the police fought pitched battles with the printing unions who were attempting to defy the Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch’s imposition of new technology in the newspaper industry. A series of security controversies further served to keep the Government on the defensive.
In October 1984 an IRA bomb planted at the Conservative Party Conference hotel in Brighton claimed five lives, seriously injured two members of the Cabinet and only narrowly failed to kill Mrs Thatcher herself. The Government was more seriously destabilised in January 1986 by a major political crisis arising from the future of the Westland helicopter company, which cost two senior ministers their jobs and for a time even threatened the Prime Minister. Between them these events necessitated several hasty reshuffles which disrupted the ministerial team. In addition Mrs Thatcher’s attention was increasingly diverted from the domestic front by an exceptionally demanding foreign-policy agenda: not only the European Community, but Hong Kong, South Africa, Anglo-Irish negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland, the fallout from American military adventures in Grenada, Lebanon and Libya, and the emergence of a promising new leader in the Soviet Union who held out the possibility of an end to the Cold War – all these helped to ensure that even Mrs Thatcher’s phenomenal energies were very fully stretched. There was not much time to chart the way ahead.
As a result, she was never quite so dominant as she appeared. Immediately after the 1983 election Michael Foot announced that he was standing down as Labour leader. Though the party’s laborious processes took three months to elect his successor, the result was never in much doubt. Neil Kinnock was young (forty-one), inexperienced (he had never held even junior office) and came from the left of the party: he was as emotionally committed as Foot to CND, and not much less hostile to Europe. Nevertheless he was fresh, idealistic and eloquent, if incurably verbose; he had grasped that Labour must change to make itself electable and quickly showed himself ready to jettison most of the left’s unpopular ideological baggage. From the moment he took over, Labour’s fortunes began to improve. There was, as it turned out, still a long way to go; but in the summer of 1984 the opposition registered its first lead in the polls since the invasion of the Falklands two years earlier.
At the same time Roy Jenkins was replaced as leader of the SDP by the much younger, more dashing and dynamic Dr David Owen. Owen’s relationship with the Liberal leader David Steel was never easy; yet under the double-headed leadership of the two Davids the Alliance recovered its standing quickly too and from the end of 1984 maintained a regular presence between 25 and 33 per cent in the polls, winning a string of spectacular by- election victories as it had done in 1981–2. Mrs Thatcher’s command of her party was never seriously challenged. Yet a powerful chorus of senior dissidents kept up a steady critique of the Government and its policies. Contrary to collective memory, the Thatcherite revolution did not carry all before it, even in 1983–7.
Banana skins
