“On the platform, surrounded by an applauding and apparently adoring Cabinet, the star acknowledges the rapturous acclaim of her public, both arms held aloft as they have been every year since 1975. TEN MORE YEARS! roar the faithful five thousand, stomping their feet in time with the words, TEN MORE YEARS! TEN MORE YEARS! they cry fortissimo.”
Ronnie Millar, Conservative Party Conference, Bournemouth, 1990
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In 1987, the Conservatives won a landslide third election victory under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Not since Lord Liverpool in the 1820s had a Prime Minister won three consecutive general elections. With the slogan ‘It’s Great to be Great Again’, the Conservatives celebrated a booming economy, low inflation, low taxes, and a strong defence. Despite attempts to reform its image, the Labour Party suffered another crushing defeat and its leader Neil Kinnock ridiculed by the press. The Conservatives could claim that their radical plans for privatisation, local government finance, and the expansion of choice in education and housing, all trailed in their manifesto, had a clear mandate.
Yet the Conservative position was not as dominant as it perhaps appeared. While the Conservatives won large majorities in the 1983 and 1987 elections, they achieved this on 42% of the vote, benefiting from the first-past-the-post electoral system and three-party politics. The main opposition party Labour was divided and wedded to unpopular policies, in particular unilateral nuclear disarmament and higher taxes. Some voters favoured the Tories due to the strong economy of the 1980s, but from 1989 rising inflation, interest rates, and mortgage payments undermined this support. Surveys also began to show that many voters held different values to the Conservatives: they wanted a strong welfare state to look after the vulnerable, and high quality public services. By large majorities they favoured more investment in public services over further tax cuts. Thatcherism could be viewed, in the words of Ivor Crewe, as ‘a crusade that failed’.
These long-term shifts in attitudes were added to by the explosive issues of Europe and the ‘poll tax’. At first Thatcher had been a strong advocate of the single market within Europe, yet by 1988, she became suspicious of the European Commission’s moves towards greater federalisation, as articulated in her Bruges Speech. Her Cabinet colleagues Chancellor Nigel Lawson and the Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, however, believed that UK membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) was necessary to fight inflation. They were part of a growing consensus in favour of membership among the Foreign Office, the Treasury, businesspeople, trade unionists, and much of the press. Lawson and Howe ‘ambushed’ Thatcher at a Madrid summit in June 1989, both threatening resignation if she did not accede to the ERM. She refused, demoting Howe to deputy prime minister. Lawson resigned in October when Thatcher refused to sack her anti-ERM economic advisor Alan Walters. John Major was appointed as Chancellor, and Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary, in a quick reshuffle.
Lawson’s resignation in October 1989 shook the government’s authority to its foundations. He was the longest serving Chancellor since the war, and a key ideological ally of the Prime Minister. In an interview with Brian Walden, the Prime Minister reluctantly admitted that she preferred to keep an adviser over a Cabinet minister. Backbench critics agreed that something had to be done, and Sir Anthony Meyer stepped forward as a ‘stalking horse’ candidate against Thatcher - or unkindly as the newspapers referred to him, a ‘stalking donkey’. Thatcher won the contest by a large margin, but 60 of her MPs voted for Meyer or abstained.
The poll tax, in the words of Environment Secretary Chris Patten, was ‘fundamentally flawed and politically incredible...the single most unpopular policy any government has introduced since the war.’ For decades local government rates were unpopular with Tory activists, particularly with the example of the ‘elderly widow’ (and likely Tory voter) with low income paying high rates for a large house, while many people did not pay any rates at all. By the 1980s, the issue of the rates became more controversial as Conservatives believed that many (Labour) councils were wasting local taxpayers’ money, and the Government had waged war on the ‘loony left’ in local government through rate capping and the abolition of the Greater London Assembly. The Community Charge or ‘poll tax’ as it became known, aimed to replace the rates with a fixed fee for every individual within a local authority area. The tax was highly regressive and deeply unpopular: a family living in a small house could pay the fee several times over for each individual, while a high income individual in a large house paid the fee once. Millions of people defaulted or refused to pay, and in March 1990, there were huge riots across the country, including in Trafalgar Square.
The spring of 1990 was a deeply depressing period for the Thatcher government. The ailing economy and the disaster of the poll tax had extended Labour’s lead in the opinion polls to over 20%. The Conservative Party in Parliament and in the country was fearful of a general election and speculation was rife of a leadership challenge by the former Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, whose ambition was far from secret. Tory MPs rebelled on issues from the poll tax, citizenship for Hong Kong residents, to income support for the elderly. The situation improved for the Government with the local elections in May 1990. The results were poor for the Conservatives, with a loss of 300 seats and 11 councils to Labour, but were better than the catastrophe that some had predicted. The elections were masterfully spun by the Chairman of the Conservative Party Kenneth Baker as a great victory. Heseltine ruled out a challenge to Thatcher, and speculation began to fade, for now.
On 2nd August 1990, Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait. This had domestic political implications in Britain, with right-leaning newspapers depicting Thatcher as a world leader who had strengthened the resolve of President Bush in standing up to Saddam. In September, Thatcher and the Conservatives’ poll ratings rose sharply. Thatcher went above and beyond US demands in committing British troops to the Gulf, with 7,500 ground troops and 120 tanks. However, she failed to persuade the Americans against the idea of a UN resolution ahead of intervention, which she felt to be an unnecessary delay.
Later in the autumn, the European issue returned to the forefront. Thatcher had finally agreed, against her instincts, to her Cabinet’s demands to enter the ERM, and the UK signed up on 8th October. The issue of further European integration, however, remained controversial. The Prime Minister departed for a European council meeting in Rome on 27th October. At this conference, Thatcher found herself isolated in opposition to a single European currency, which she undiplomatically described as ‘living in cloud cuckoo land’, and was outvoted 11 to 1. On her return to London in the House of Commons, Thatcher delivered her famous ‘No! No! No!’ remarks in opposition to greater European integration. This was the final straw for the now deputy prime minister Sir Geoffrey Howe, who resigned.
Sir Geoffrey’s resignation speech on 13th November was unexpected in its complete denunciation of the Prime Minister’s position on Europe and her style of government. With understated brutality, he criticised Thatcher’s vision of Europe as a continent ‘positively teeming with ill-intentioned people, scheming, in her words, to extinguish democracy, to dissolve our national identities, and to lead us through the backdoor into a federal Europe.’ He argued that the Prime Minister had made his job impossible by undermining the Cabinet’s agreed position on Europe through impulsive remarks, comparing this to a batsman sent to the crease only to find out that his bat had been broken by the team captain before the game. He ended by stressing that the conflict of loyalty between the Prime Minister and the national interest had become too great, and asked others ‘to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’
Sir Geoffrey sat down to stunned silence from the Conservative benches in the House of Commons. For a fiercely loyal and honourable man to denounce the Prime Minister so brutally in public was a game changer for the future of the Thatcher government. Thatcher was shocked and wounded by the speech. A leadership challenge was now inevitable, and the following day, Heseltine raised his standard and announced that he was running for the leadership of the party.
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The timing of the leadership contest was decided by Thatcher in coordination with the chairman of the 1922 Committee Cranley Onslow. Thatcher’s first instinct was to get the leadership contest over quickly to restore order to the Government, with the potential date of the first ballot on the following week of 20th November. However, Thatcher would be away in Paris on that date at a summit to celebrate the end of the Cold War, and was persuaded by her former PPS Ian Gow to push the ballot back to the 27th November when she would be in London. In 1983 and 1987 Thatcher had been more than prepared to trim down her attendance at foreign summits in favour of domestic elections, and she followed the same course in 1990.
To win in the first round, as Thatcher had done in the year before against Sir Anthony Meyer, a candidate needed not just to win an absolute majority, but also a lead over the runner-up of 15% of the total electorate. There were 372 Conservative MPs at this time, so a lead of 56 MPs was required. If no candidate achieved this, then nominations would be re-opened for a second ballot. If necessary the top three candidates from the second ballot would go through to the third ballot held under an alternative vote system.
Thatcher’s campaign was run officially by John Wakeham, but unofficially by Ian Gow. Gow had masterminded a similar unofficial campaign for the Prime Minister against Anthony Meyer in 1989. He was supported by the Machiavellian former whip Tristan Garel-Jones, who although held doubts about the Prime Minister’s stance on Europe, believed that the party would not survive the bitter factionalism that would follow her removal before an election. The team canvassed surreptitiously in order to ascertain MPs true opinions, choosing MPs from different wings of the party to sound out colleagues, for example, the Europhile Nicholas Soames sounded out opinion among backbench ‘Wets’. Members were divided into ‘Sound’, ‘Dodgy’, and ‘Untouchable’ according to their allegiance. At one stage, Thatcher’s campaign was almost undermined by the potential defection of Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, but Hurd announced on television that the Prime Minister had his full support. With great reluctance, Thatcher herself met with small groups of MPs ahead of the final vote, hoping to win them over with the power of prime ministerial incumbency.
Heseltine’s campaign was run by lieutenants Michael Mates (known as ‘the Colonel’), Keith Hampson, and Peter Temple-Morris. From their headquarters in Victoria Street, the team tracked the support of MPs and estimated their support to be wavering around 130 to 150 of Conservative MPs. Heseltine admitted in his memoirs that this was a ‘rudimentary campaign’ with a limited number of helpers. To raise his profile, Heseltine toured the television studios, promising to abolish the poll tax and bring the UK closer to the heart of Europe. Heseltine benefited from the growing unpopularity of the Prime Minister and the poll tax, and was a man of considerable political vision and charisma. But he could also turn off some MPs as too unreliable and unpredictable, given his walkout from the Cabinet in 1986 over the Westland affair and memories of him seizing the Commons mace in 1976, and was considered a loner. A shy man behind the flashy surface, he awkwardly stood for hours at a stretch in the Members’ Lobby of the House of Commons to approach MPs.
On 27th November, MPs huddled outside of a Committee room in anticipation of the results of the leadership election…
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Conservative leadership election, 27th November 1990
Margaret Thatcher - 219
Michael Heseltine - 140
Abstentions - 13
‘If we win according to the rules, we win. The rules are not made by me. I abide by the rules. I expect others to abide by the rules.’
Margaret Thatcher to Charles Moore, The Sunday Telegraph, 18th November 1990
