Thatcher’s downfall: ‘plot’ or not?
The real interest in tomorrow’s special session of parliament could be in the Lords not the Commons. So many of Margaret Thatcher‘s former cabinet colleagues sit there. So many old quarrels still rumble on the Tory benches there. Not least amongst them is the argument over her downfall. Did it have to happen in November 1990? Was there a conspiracy?
I spoke to three of them about the still controversial story of Margaret Thatcher’s political downfall. After Michael Heseltine’s challenge and the result of the first round of the leadership contest in 1990, Ken Clarke (still in the Commons, not to mention the cabinet) says he knew instantly that Margaret Thatcher’s premiership was over. Lords Parkinson and Baker say it wasn’t so.
Lord Baker says different tactics – meeting the cabinet as a whole, not one by one – would’ve saved her. He and other allies would’ve choreographed the whole meeting to make sure loyalists spoke first and stared down the wobblers. Lord Parkinson has sharp words for Lord Wakeham – campaign manager for the short-lived second round campaign, calling him “defeatist” and saying he failed to organise.
Lord Wakeham says the first he heard about being campaign manager was when he saw Norman Tebbit announcing it on the TV around 4pm on Wednesday 21 November 1990. He asked experienced whips like Richard Ryder and Tristan Garel-Jones if Margaret Thatcher stood a chance of winning a second round and they said it was out of the question. He’d spoken to some cabinet ministers like Ken Clarke (who was threatening to resign if Margaret Thatcher stood again) and decided she should hear their thoughts directly from them.
Ken Clarke says the format of the one-on-one chats meant there was something like a cabinet meeting but an informal one without her knowledge in the office immediately above hers in the House of Commons. He says cabinet ministers chatted freely beforehand about what they might say to Margaret Thatcher and when he returned from the first of the cabinet minister one-on-one talks in her office he found “all these little eyes looking at me and people saying, “‘Did you tell her?’ And I said ‘Yes, I told her’ … and then one by one they went and told her the same thing.'”
Against the conspiracy theorists is Lord Turnbull, later cabinet secretary but then her principal private secretary. He was the only witness who sat in the prime minister’s Commons office through every meeting. His note on the meetings sits in the archive for a couple more years yet but he told me he did not detect the pre-scripted coordination that Margaret Thatcher sensed as she listened to her ministers tell her one after another that they’d support her but didn’t think support was holding up elsewhere and it might be wise to pull out.
Lords Parkinson and Baker think Margaret Thatcher could’ve held on and fought the next general election in the summer of 1991, standing down with dignity a year or so after that. Lord Wakeham told me even if she’d held on through that week she’d have been toppled in another crisis pretty soon. When the Thursday 22 November cabinet took place Ken Clarke was ready to resign in the room if Margaret Thatcher hadn’t said she was about to go. He says Chris Patten would’ve done the same.
What this tells you is that the bitter divisions of Margaret Thatcher’s downfall live on. One Tory minister said it was all still too raw to talk about.
Some political deaths can enhance a political party’s reputation or image. Labour’s sense of loss when its leader John Smith died in 1994 communicated itself to voters and somehow enhanced the standing of the party. With Margaret Thatcher’s death the Tories have a much trickier and still politically radioacative legacy. And a week or so of attention on her style and certainties risks reminding some Thatcherites what they yearn for even now.
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