TLIAW: The Curse of Maggie

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Bold text - wait, what's going on?
Just checking to see how many people just scroll past the Obligatory TLIAD Intro Duologue.

Well I didn't.
Good for you. Have a sherbert lemon.

Er...thanks. So what is this about?
As always, I am jumping on bandwagons. Having just finished the latest volume of LTTW (hint hint go and read it) I have a chance to do something a bit different, and Meadow's recent successful TLIAD encouraged me to do the same.

So it will be totally original then?
Not entirely; parts of this are recycled from PM lists I've posted on the PM list thread over the years. But the general concept is new.

Does that mean that next week one of us can copy it and set it in America?
'Twould be hypocritical if I said no, wouldn't it?

All right. Anyway, get on with it!
That had better not be a Python reference...

This looks fun, and I like your intro.

Ooh, so a successful Brighton bombing? Or ghostly visitations from the Prime Ministers of Parliaments Past? Or something else entirely? Either way, you've got me hooked.

Also, what does the green arrow thingamabob to the left of both this and LTTW signify?

From “The Andrew Marr Show”, recorded 25th January 2015 and broadcast live on Channel Six

ANDREW MARR: And now we come to the review of today’s newspapers, for which I am joined by Observer deputy editor Polly Toynbee and the Conservative Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury and sometime Daily Telegraph columnist, Matthew Parris.

POLLY TOYNBEE/MATTHEW PARRIS: Hello/Thank you for having us.

A.M.: And what stories leap out at you today?

P.T.: There’s no real defining story this week, the Prime Minister hasn’t done anything that even the most fevered imaginations could twist into a ‘gaffe’, and I emphasise the inverted commas.

M.P. (laughs): Even if the Prime Minister is not on his usual form, there is plenty to keep us entertained regardless.

P.T. <death glare>: It seems to me that my…colleague’s ideological stablemates across the Atlantic are providing enough entertainment themselves. Kasich is threatening to veto the Congress’ attempt to recognise climate change as a thing that exists. Again.

M.P.: I really don’t think I need be held responsible for what the American President thinks.

P.T.: That’s not the impression I got when your leader invited him to speak at your last party conference by television. Even if he did turn you down.

M.P.: The special relationship…

P.T.: Is a bit, well, ‘special’, isn’t it?

A.M. (reluctantly interrupting with finger to ear): Ah, moving on. One thing I was amused by is that the Sun is carrying a treatment of the so-called Curse of Maggie. Matthew Parris, you were there, just what really happened?

M.P. (laughs): Oh, that old chestnut again? Surely nobody believes in that? I mean the Prime Minister…

A.M.: Technically has not broken the curse.

M.P.: No, he’s inflicted us with the curse of himself instead.

P.T. <death glare>: The real Curse of Maggie is the devastation her policies wrought on the working people of this country—

A.M. (hastily): But just what is the Curse of Maggie?

M.P.: You want me to describe it for all the youngsters out there who don’t remember?

P.T. (under breath): Though they’ve been surrounded by the damage of her policies all their lives…

A.M.: Yes.

M.P.: Oh well—the story goes that when Mrs Thatcher was forced out in ’89, the last guest she entertained in Number Ten before she left was not anyone from the Party, but the Haitian Ambassador. (Laughs) I think some chap writing in the Independent the last time the whole business came up did some digging and proved that there wasn’t even an Ambassador from Haiti appointed to UK at the time.

A.M.: So why Haiti then?

M.P.: I think he said the story hadn’t even been reported until the millennium…what? Well, Haiti because of the voodoo connection. The silly idea is that Mrs Thatcher wanted revenge for her removal and had the Ambassador put a voodoo curse on Number Ten Downing Street, that none of her successors would be able to serve a full parliamentary term as Prime Minister.

P.T.: Appallingly racist.

M.P.: It is a bit beyond the pale, I have to admit. But it came from the mind of some conspiracy theorist years after the event.

A.M.: So that’s the Curse of Maggie. And it’s in the papers again.

M.P.: It seems to be every time there’s an election or a PM trips over. The whole thing doesn’t make sense anyway. (pause) If I was making it up I’d have gone with the Japanese Ambassador.

A.M.: (pause) …Why?

M.P. (laughs): Well, isn’t it obvious—they’re the short ones, not the Haitians!

A.M.: Err…

*

Matthew Parris always insisted he had been making a joke about how Japanese Prime Ministers traditionally were in office for only short terms, as has increasingly become the case in the UK since the end of the Thatcher premiership. However he was accused of making a racist comment and was forced to resign after resisting media pressure for three days. The scandal came at the beginning of, and may have been the catalyst for, the decline in Conservative poll ratings that would see an incumbent Labour government actually gain seats for the first time since 1974.




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That all seems quite interesting, and disturbingly plausible.... though I'm not sure how Thatcher was forced out in '89.

This will be fun.

Another Thande-ist creation. Yay!

I will be looking forwards to seeing how exactly Maggie gets forced out ITTL. "Tarzan" having more support, maybe.

lots of Japanese style 12-18 month premierships

…the supreme irony of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership, however, was that after successfully defeating the Argentine junta, the National Union of Mineworkers and the European Commission, she was finally brought down from within. The Conservative Party did what the Labour Party and the Alliance between them could not, and ultimately denied them the catharsis of defeating the woman who had become the most polarising Prime Minister of the twentieth century.

Mrs Thatcher’s image of invincibility had cracked earlier that year when the early introduction of the community charge reform to council funding—derided by its opponents as a ‘poll tax’, as it was possible to dodge the tax by failing to register to vote—met with mass protests across the United Kingdom. It has been argued (for example by Iain Dale in Prime Minister Portillo and Other Things That Never Happened) that if Mrs Thatcher had stuck with the original plan to trial the community charge as a pilot in Scotland before its nationwide implementation, the problems in the system could have been ironed out and the shaking of the public’s faith in the government avoided. However, it has also been pointed out that this might have led to a sense of victimisation and being singled out in Scotland, which would likely only have helped Gordon Wilson and his successor Alex Salmond build more support for the SNP. Indeed, it would probably have harmed the Tories’ performance in Scotland to the point that the Scottish Tory MPs that were required to push the party over the majority post in subsequent elections might have been crucially fewer.

As it was, the rage against the community charge was a nationwide affair (except, inevitably, Northern Ireland which had an opt-out. Private Eye published an ‘Opposite Day’ issue wryly pointing out that Great Britain had become the violent riotous one at a time when Northern Ireland was fairly quiet). Mrs Thatcher had been in power for a decade and was the longest-serving Prime Minister since Lord Salisbury. Even before the community charge fiasco, murmurs had begun that she had served long enough and it was time for fresh blood. Thatcher, on the other hand, insisted she would ‘go on, and on, and on’ and privately envisaged a fifteen-year term before retiring in 1994 after finding a suitably right-wing successor. However, it is questionable whether she would really have ever left of her own accord, as every time she had thought she might have found such a successor, they went on to be embroiled in scandal and removed from consideration. This may have contributed to her indisputable sense of paranoia that what she regarded as the legacy of her government would be endangered by the Tory ‘wets’; towards the end she regarded them as a greater threat to the prosperity of the United Kingdom than the Labour Party.

Thatcher was challenged for the party leadership in December by backbencher Sir Anthony Meyer, who was nothing more than a stalking horse who hoped that more heavyweight wets would jump in. In his biography Michael Heseltine records that even with Thatcher’s newfound weakness, he hesitated before entering the leadership contest, but in the end elected to do so. Despite everything, Mrs Thatcher still led on the first ballot, but narrowly, and it seemed likely that she would lose on the second. ‘The men in grey suits’ visited Number Ten and warned Thatcher that if she did not jump, she would be pushed. Thatcher resigned and refused to endorse any successor, betrayed by the last-minute support of Geoffrey Howe for Heseltine’s leadership bid.

Like her predecessor Edward Heath, Thatcher would spend the rest of her life stewing about her removal from power. Unlike Heath, though, she did not remain in Parliament and instead embarked on a lucrative career as a visiting speaker and writer, largely in the United States, until her death in 2011. For the last few years of her life, following the death of her husband Denis, she was secluded and persistent rumours continue to circulate that she might have suffered from dementia, though these are strongly denied by her children. Regardless of the legendary ‘Curse of Maggie’, she may have had one last laugh, when by the timing of her death she embroiled a sitting Labour government in the awkward predicament of whether to give a state funeral to an unquestionably ‘great’ Prime Minister in terms of longevity and influence but one they despised…

Really looking forward to this Tom me old mucker (and apologies to all of you who have had this delayed, entirely my own fault!)

I've got an inkling as to who some of the Prime Ministers are going to be, but certainly not all of them, nor what order they are going to come in.

Will be watching and reading with great interest!

So, Tarzan takes a swing (ohitsapun) in '89 then? A sensible point of divergence (coupled with the Poll Tax, which presumably opens the way to Malcolm Rifkind become Premier at some point), and very much the last real chance he had of getting elected on his own merits, before the 'Thatcherite But Not Thatcher' mob finally picked up on John Major.

Now - we've seen what the Curse is going to be, but I do recall that Mr Abe made a comeback in 2012 so...

In the wake of the Community Charge Riots, the Conservatives desperately needed new leadership, leadership that would represent a clean break with the Thatcher years. Their only hope of being competitive in the 1992 general election—for it seemed clear that it would be delayed to the latest point that the quinquennial requirements of the Representation of the People Act would allow—was to create a new vision. Or so it seemed: it turned out that a better strategy was to embrace one which was not so much novel as long-established as being opposed to Thatcherism. This was emphatically true of Heseltine, forever nicknamed ‘Tarzan’ by the press after a 1976 incident when he had seized the parliamentary mace and brandished it at opposition Labour left-wingers who were singing The Red Flag in celebration after a successful nationalisation vote. During his brief premiership (the first of many following Thatcher’s decade in office), the nickname was sometimes mutated to ‘Toryzan’ or ‘Torzan’ due to his image as anointed saviour of the once-doomed Conservative Party. Certainly, the leadership clash between himself and Thatcher effectively forced the press to ignore the alternative represented by Kinnock and the Alliance in favour of ‘palace intrigue’ speculation within the Tories.


After Thatcher resigned, Heseltine faced only token opposition before being elected leader, reflecting both the fact that the ‘dry’ Tory Right was in disarray and the general relief across the Party at escaping the nightmare of Thatcher’s intransigence—what had been named steadfast courage in the face of the Argentines or Arthur Scargill had become suicidal stubbornness amidst the backdrop of the Community Charge Riots. This sense of unity did not last long, of course, Heseltine’s unapologetic pro-Europeanism put him at odds with much of his own party and allowed Labour to accuse the Tories of division and uncertainty (while quietly ignoring their own internal disagreements over the issue). It seemed certain that Heseltine’s premiership would be dominated by the ‘European Question’. But history is never so neat.

On August 2nd 1990, in what seemed to all commentators but the keener observers of Middle Eastern affairs to be an utterly random act of aggression, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded its small neighbour Kuwait. The attack met with global condemnation, distracting the attention of the United States from the ongoing collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and heralded the appearance of a new kind of warfare, a new global order. An international coalition including countries as diverse as France, Syria and Australia was formed, including some contributions even from former Warsaw Pact members like Poland and Czechoslovakia, with the intent of driving the Iraqis from Kuwait and preventing attacks on Saudi Arabia and Israel. Described as ‘the first television war’, journalists embedded with the coalition forces covered it more thoroughly than any conflict before. It was also described as ‘the videogame war’ due to the way in which the far technologically superior coalition forces could strike at the Iraqis from far away with missiles, which some accused of being a dehumanising factor. Despite Iraqi attacks with Scud missiles and chemical weapons on civilian targets, the much-hyped Iraqi army was contemptuously swatted aside by the coalition forces and Kuwait was liberated in that rarity, a true ‘short victorious war’. Of course, there was more to it than this, just as there had been more to the German attacks on the Sudetenland and ‘plucky little Poland’ that popular narratives ignore. Spitting Image carried a sketch pointing out that Kuwait was just as bad a human rights abuser as Iraq, and accusations flew that the US would not have intervened if oil supplies were not threatened. Nonetheless, the war had a profound effect on geopolitical relations. Relations between the USA and UK had become increasingly strained since the election of George Bush, who Thatcher had regarded as a fool for ignoring the longstanding military collaboration between the two anglophone countries in favour of treating West Germany (later reunited Germany) as a most favoured nation. The Gulf War helped bring the two countries together again (despite the Americans killing more British soldiers in friendly fire incidents than the Iraqis did in the actual war) and Heseltine achieved a fresh start with Bush. Both the men achieved huge boosts in their personal approval ratings as a consequence of the victory.

Both would not live to see any electoral benefit.

Oh my. Bush Sr. and Tarzan passing away before their respective next elections?

So, if Bush passes away before the next presidential elections in '92, then Dan Quayle becomes the interim president. The question is, who gets to be PM/Leader of the Tories before the next election? Portillo? Howard? Someone else?

And Czechoslovakia survives whilst the Iraqis use WMDs...

Did Isreal respond with nukes or anything?

Michael Heseltine’s death from a heart attack on August 14th 1991 came as a huge shock to both his family and the country. None had suspected, likely including the man himself, of having any such susceptibility. Unquestionably it was the strains of managing the country’s contribution to the Gulf War coupled with turning his party’s fortunes around that had spelled the end for Tarzan. Many mourned, though the colder-hearted members of the opposition felt relief that the Tories’ poll turnaround might now dip again before the election. In the short term, however, there was the pressing question of who would succeed Heseltine. The last Prime Minister to die in office had been Lord Palmerston, over a century before, in an age when it was was considered perfectly fine to leave the office of Prime Minister vacant for a few days while the matter of who might command a majority in Parliament was sorted out. In the modern global information age, that was simply not an option. As a consequence, there was no neat line of succession as there was in the United States—as, tragically, that country’s people would be reminded when George Bush perished at the hands of Directorate 14 assassins in October 1992. With Parliament in recess and most MPs on holiday, there was only one cabinet minister in London and within easy communication when Heseltine died: the Environment Secretary, John Selwyn Gummer.

Gummer was and is praised by environmentalist groups as the best man in the role the country has ever seen, throwing himself passionately into the office rather than seeing it as a disappointing consolation prize as many of its holders have. At the time, he had cancelled his holiday in order to continue managing the ongoing (but now fading) outbreak of ‘mad cow disease’ along with his colleague Gillian Shepherd who had taken over his recently-vacated post at MAFF. As the only Cabinet minister and Privy Councillor available at the time, he was sent for and hastily kissed hands with the Queen to become caretaker Prime Minister. He immediately called a leadership election to be held when the Tory parliamentary party had returned to London. There was some speculation about whether Gummer would put his own name forward for the leadership, but he gave a ‘Shermanesque’ statement and stated that his only wish was to remove the ‘distraction’ of being premier in order to refocus on the environmental challenges affecting the country. He did, however, use his brief moment in the sun to snub the French government by altering the plans for the Channel Tunnel and adding a new London Underground line serving it, which would be named the Trafalgar Line. This is thought to be revenge for the French blockade on British beef during the BSE crisis, and together with his ‘Cincinnatian’ image is probably why Gummer is so fondly remembered—one generally cannot go far wrong in seeking the approval of the lowest common denominator of the British public if one sets out to antagonise the French.

The leadership process was over in six weeks—as observed enviously by some Americans, who were even then in the early parts of the dragged-out electoral process for what was in any case at that point, wrongly, considered to be a desultory re-election campaign for the hugely popular George Bush. Selwyn Gummer returned to the Department for the Environment where he continued until the Conservatives lost power in 1992. He was made a peer in 2010 and his daughter Cordelia was elected to the Commons in 2015.

Lord Roem said:

Really looking forward to this Tom me old mucker (and apologies to all of you who have had this delayed, entirely my own fault!)

Click to expand...

No problem, it works better at this time anyway as we have a meetup at the end of next week.

Magnum said:

And Czechoslovakia survives whilst the Iraqis use WMDs...

Did Isreal respond with nukes or anything?

Click to expand...

I was intending the Gulf War to be pretty much OTL, but on checking it I see I misremembered--the Iraqis did use Scuds against Israeli civilian targets, but it was only feared that they would use chemical warheads.

Not familiar with this guy, but it does seem like a typically British solution - bodge something together, and make it work regardless.

Oh, and it should say 1991-1992.

Which suggests that Kinnock becomes PM, unless John Smith, Roy Hattersley (or someone else) has replaced him as Labour leader by the time of the election.

EDIT: Hmm, will this involve some form of arrangement with the Liberals, perchance?

Analytical Engine said:

Oh, and it should say 1991-1992.

Click to expand...

No, it shouldn't. He was PM for six weeks in 1991. You may be confused because I referred ahead to an American event from 1992.

Thande said:

No, it shouldn't. He was PM for six weeks in 1991. You may be confused because I referred ahead to an American event from 1992.

Click to expand...

Ah, right. Sorry.

In that case, isn't having 1991-1991 a tad redundant? Perhaps just have "1991" by itself instead. But, hey, this is your TL.

EDIT: Actually, having a modern PM die suddenly like that might prompt the British government to have a more formal succession procedure.

Well, this is an interesting idea.