On 2nd April 1982, Margaret Thatcher ordered a large task force
to set sail for the Falkland Islands.
The islands had been captured by Argentina only hours before.
The loss of the Falklands was a political and diplomatic disaster
which threatened Margaret Thatcher's future
and the survival of her Government.
She was well aware the stakes were high.
I can only tell you
that from the day that I heard
they might invade...
to the night when we heard
that the white flags were flying over Port Stanley,
I lived at an intensity,
at a concentration,
that I have never experienced before...or since.
She saw our failure here as a damning indictment,
potentially, of our whole philosophy.
This would be the critical, final, irrevocable evidence
of the decline of this country.
And that was the thing that hit her, I think,
hardest between the eyes, right from the start.
As the Argentine people celebrated the capture of the Falklands,
few there expected Britain to respond.
Mrs Thatcher's Government had given every signal
to the President, General Galtieri,
that Britain had lost interest in this colonial relic
thousands of miles from home.
Every war in my lifetime need not have happened.
If the European powers had handled Hitler sensibly in the '30s
that war wouldn't have happened.
The Falklands war was an extraordinary thing
because we'd been through the situation when we were in power.
We knew the Argentinians,
if they saw a chance of taking the Falklands, would do it.
She didn't make it absolutely clear -
she should have done, to Galtieri -
that if he went for the Falklands, she would resist.
We were full of anger.
They were our people, they were the Queen's islands,
they're our territory, and we thought the days had gone
when anyone belonging to the United Nations
attempted to take someone else's territory by conquest.
Those dictators were stupid.
They misjudged us.
In the days which followed the invasion,
Margaret Thatcher was dangerously vulnerable.
Her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington
shouldered the blame for the disaster and resigned.
Carrington's self-sacrifice
gave Margaret Thatcher the political breathing space she needed.
British territory had been invaded by the Argentines,
it was a humiliating disaster
and when you go to war,
I think you have to go as a united country
and I think for everyone to start arguing about who was to blame
and why doesn't he resign and all the rest of it, I think that's all wrong.
I think you take responsibility.
I was the Foreign Secretary and I took the responsibility
and I think that was absolutely right.
Margaret Thatcher's hostility to the Foreign Office
was not eased by Lord Carrington's departure.
It came as no surprise to her
that the Foreign Office counselled against sending the task force,
calling instead for a negotiated settlement.
The diplomats warned of the grave dangers of military action.
Margaret Thatcher believed
that the Foreign Office was trying to thwart her historic duty
to recover the islands.
There are always two sorts of people in life.
One who look at the difficulties and who are swayed by those -
and that was the Foreign Office.
Others who look at and weigh up all the difficulties
and all the opportunities...
..and the courageous course of action
for the larger freedom.
I refused to accept
that she was any more patriotic than I was, or the Foreign Office was,
but we had to tell the Foreign Secretary
and we had to tell the Prime Minister
what we saw were the consequences
of the particular line that she wanted to take.
She wanted to take it but, I think, actually, in her heart,
she probably wanted to hear what the downside was as well.
We had to tell her but it made us sound, perhaps, in her view,
cautious, negative, conciliatory.
SHE SIGHS Well, I do think it's spineless
when you put all the difficulties.
They wanted us to negotiate and you can't negotiate away an invasion,
you can't negotiate away
that the freedom of your people has been taken.
That it's been taken by a cruel dictator.
You've got to stand up and you've got to have the spine to do it.
Yes, I know I got very ratty sometimes and said, "Look...
"when I'm out of politics I'm going to run a business,
"it'll be called Rent A Spine."
In Argentina, a deeply loathed dictatorship
had gained popularity overnight by invading the Falklands.
Diplomats at the Foreign Office suspected
Margaret Thatcher's determination to recapture the Falklands
sprang from a similar desire on her part
to salvage her beleaguered political position.
We saw, with the Argentines, I think,
the fact that they were in a very difficult domestic situation
induced them to behave very foolishly internationally
in the hope of obscuring their domestic difficulties.
That's by no means peculiar to military dictatorships,
it's a feature of all political life.
And a Prime Minister who has problems at home
will sometimes try to recover them
by one kind of activity or another abroad.
I've just taken over from Lord Carrington,
who was a very fine Foreign Secretary,
a very fine Foreign Secretary indeed.
And, of course, my first concern is the affair of the Falkland Islands
and I'm going to start...
I've already started work on that this evening.
'Margaret Thatcher's distrust of the Foreign Office
'was intensified by the arrival of a new Foreign Secretary.'
'At a time of political weakness,
'she was obliged to appoint a rival
'and a wet of the old school, Francis Pym,
'who supported a negotiated settlement.'
'There's no doubt that Francis Pym and I did have a different view'
on many of the things.
Which was strange, in a way.
He had been a Secretary of State for Defence,
he had been a very gallant officer in World War II.
And he also was a very good and skilled parliamentarian.
And I thought on this matter,
although we might differ on home affairs,
we might have been very much together.
We were, as it happened, a little bit further apart than I ever though.
It would be quite true to say that we didn't hit it off
because our philosophy of life, our outlook on life, are different.
We approached it from different points of view,
so that was obviously inherently difficult - a difficult situation.
The Prime Minister was equally irritated by America's failure
to give Britain its full and unequivocal backing.
It's a very difficult situation for the United States
because we're friends with both of the countries
engaged in this dispute.
And we stand ready to do anything we can to help them
and what we hope for and would like to help in doing
is have a peaceful resolution of this
with no forceful action or no bloodshed.
Unlike her Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister had no time
for the American Secretary of State Al Haig's Peace Shuttle.
To Margaret Thatcher,
Haig's proposals for a negotiated settlement with Argentina
reeked of appeasement.
I did say to him, look, Al,
this is where Neville Chamberlain walked,
this is where he talked about peace with honour over a faraway country.
I'm not in the business of appeasement.
Appeasement is wrong,
it only encourages dictators.
Dictators have to be beaten.
Appeasement is no part of my psyche.
I don't think Mrs Thatcher really liked negotiations at all
or the negotiating process.
Indeed, in her moments, I think she thought the whole concept
was in some way dishonourable,
which I found very curious
because in a crisis of this kind
if one can negotiate one's way out of it
so that one doesn't have to use the force of arms,
it must be to everybody's advantage.
Indeed, I thought it was my duty as Foreign Secretary
to go to the ultimate limits
in trying to find a way of not having to go to war.
The Haig Peace Shuttle gave the task force time to train for war.
A conflict Mrs Thatcher considered inevitable.
By contrast, on April 21st,
the ever-hopeful British Foreign Secretary
travelled to Washington to discuss Al Haig's latest peace proposals.
I come because of the very serious situation
that has developed in the South Atlantic,
due to the aggression by the Argentine
and her unlawful invasion of the Falkland Islands.
Al Haig's latest plan,
which allowed for an Argentine presence remaining in the Falklands,
was not welcome to the Prime Minister
when she learned of it in London.
Francis came to see me in my study
and showed me what he'd brought back,
which was a deterioration
on the third proposals that Al Haig had had.
And they were worse from our viewpoint.
And he told me that he was minded to recommend
the acceptance of these by the War Cabinet.
I was really just appalled and said, "We can't possibly.
"We shall never hold up our heads again."
If you're searching for a peace formula
and a lot of colleagues in this country,
people in this country are involved in it,
I see nothing wrong
in putting on the table what Al Haig had worked out.
And that's what I did.
As the War Cabinet assembled in Downing Street,
Francis Pym lobbied his colleagues for their support
for the proposals the Prime Minister regarded as a sell-out.
I got into Number Ten about five to six
and the first person I saw was Francis Pym
and he said to me,
"I've got the final Haig proposals.
"I'm going to recommend that they be accepted
"and I hope I'll have your support."
The meeting was about to begin.
We all assemble in the anteroom to the Cabinet Room
and Francis said he was still going to prepare to recommend acceptance.
And I got Willie Whitelaw and said,
"Come, we must have a talk",
and told him there's no way in which I could accept them.
Francis Pym put forward the peace plan
to his colleagues in the War Cabinet.
They joined with Margaret Thatcher
in utterly rejecting the proposals for a negotiated settlement.
They were quite clear that that price was too high
and this was going too far
and we couldn't possibly go down that road.
So, there was no question of any problem with the War Cabinet,
they were all very much of a mind
and I think afterwards I recognised
that they were quite right in taking that view.
I think that was the worst moment of confrontation, if you like,
but I think from that time on
she felt that the Foreign Office had got him
and that the Foreign Office
were basically in the business of selling out.
A great crisis had passed.
I'd had a day of such anxiety,
looking at all of those proposals
and had we accepted that last one,
to me it would have dis-armoured Britain
and that I could not have lived with.
I'd tried to warn Denis earlier in the day
of the great matters which we had to decide
and said that, if it didn't go the way I wanted, I would have to resign.
When Argentina rejected the final Haig proposals,
armed conflict became inevitable.
Margaret Thatcher had prevailed
over the Foreign Office and Francis Pym.
Although she did allow peace talks to continue at the UN,
any further talk of a compromise settlement had been killed.
British armed forces now recaptured the island of South Georgia
as the first stage of the military campaign.
For Margaret Thatcher the choice was simple -
total victory or oblivion.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Secretary of State for Defence
has just come over to give me some very good news
and I think you'd like to have it at once.
The message we've got is that British troops
landed on South Georgia this afternoon...
'That need to ensure'
that she didn't go down,
having lost the fundamental battle,
which was nearest of all to her political beliefs,
her political faith and what she saw as her role as Prime Minister,
would have, I think, finished her off, personally.
She'd never have gone on in the same way that she did.
Be pleased to inform Her Majesty
that the White Ensign flies alongside the Union Jack
in South Georgia.
God save the Queen.
What happens next? Thank you very much.
Just rejoice at that news
and congratulate our forces and the marines.
Some accused her of glorying in the conflict...
Rejoice.
..but for the military, her defects in peace were virtues in war.
She's inclined to make up her mind
and then not listen to the other side at all.
As far as the Falklands campaign was concerned, this didn't arise,
because there were really two sides to the question.
One wanted a decision and she gave it.
From the military man's point of view,
she was an ideal Prime Minister for an operation.
The Prime Minister's decisiveness
over the sinking of the Argentine cruiser the General Belgrano
only confirmed the military's opinion.
The Navy asked Margaret Thatcher for permission to attack the ship
on a Sunday when she was staying at Chequers.
Her reply, after consulting the War Cabinet, came swiftly -
sink the Belgrano.
The ship's destruction was
the single most controversial action of the war.
At the time of the sinking,
the ship was sailing away from the task force
outside the exclusion zone.
This came to haunt her in the coming months and years.
I think when people look back on that,
they'll see that the loss of life was unnecessary
and a settlement could have been reached
but she didn't want a settlement.
And she didn't torpedo the Belgrano,
she torpedoed the prospects
of a peaceful settlement in the Falklands.
Ships do change direction.
That one had zigzagged quite a bit.
But you cannot ignore the intelligence.
You have their big cruises AND you expected an aircraft carrier
soon to be within range of your fleet.
No, I think this criticism comes from people
who criticise, criticise, criticise
but have never had to make these decisions.
And had we not and we lost either Invincible or Hermes or both...
..we should have been culpable.
Very heavily culpable.
During the Falklands War,
Margaret Thatcher was in her element.
The certainties of war - friend or enemy, life or death,
victory or defeat - were in tune with her own conviction
of the rightness of her cause and the error of her opponents'.
Every fibre of one's being was concerned with what was happening
and, of course, we did have quite a lot of bad news
and it leaves a permanent mark upon you.
But...
..you have to take these risks if the larger issues,
like freedom and law,
are ones which steadily gain the world over.
For Margaret Thatcher,
with her fondness for Churchillian comparisons,
the Falklands was her finest hour,
a turning point when Britain could once again, in her words,
hold its head up high.
But there were those who felt the mood of triumphalism
had been allowed to go too far
and that the spirit of reconciliation,
both at home and abroad, had been forgotten.
In our prayers we shall quite rightly remember
those who are bereaved in our own country
and the relations of the young Argentinian soldiers who were killed.
'I was dismayed that'
a jingoistic spirit should take over to such an extent
that for years the parents of the Argentine dead
were not even allowed to visit the graves of their loved ones
and that seemed to be a kind of symbol
of the failure to build creatively upon the sorrows which
we both shared.
CHEERING
BAND PLAY "RULE, BRITANNIA!"
If the Falklands was, as some thought, a watershed for the nation,
it certainly was one for Margaret Thatcher.
From being dubbed
"the most unpopular Prime Minister since polls began",
she had become a unique phenomenon in British politics.
She was totally confident, utterly dominant.
In 1983, as the economy came out of recession,
Margaret Thatcher went to the polls.
To her opponents, she was too ready to exploit the Falklands
conflict for political gain.
'It was a risk she took. She should never have had to take it.'
Put herself into a position where she had to take it. But it did come off.
And, of course, she milked it for all it was worth in domestic politics.
She kept talking about the Falklands Factor, which means,
"I am always right."
The Falklands Factor was widely credited with winning the election.
WOMAN: Three cheers for Mrs Thatcher. Hip-hip... CROWD: Hurrah!
Margaret Thatcher won a majority of 144 at the polls.
The Labour Party was divided
and the fledging Social Democrats had been annihilated.
Even some of those who supported her politics detected the early
signs of a presidential style.
As she grew in stature
and as the media, of course, personalised politics
to a very considerable extent in her,
and everything was "Margaret Thatcher doing this,
"Margaret Thatcher doing that," it wasn't the Government.
That was how it was presented. Of course, she was extremely successful.
And she was the leader and she was a very strong leader.
But the result was, I think she came almost to believe the media
presentation and to act in a quasi-presidential way.
The Prime Minister's personality became
the subject of fascinated speculation.
She was reputed to survive on a diet of black coffee and vitamins.
It was even rumoured that she relaxed in an electric bath.
The truth was more mundane.
A lawyer's training, a scientist's eye for detail,
and relentless energy.
"Marxists," she once said,
"get up early in the morning to further their cause.
"We must get up even earlier."
She had an ability to absorb detail until late in the night.
And a most astonishing memory.
That in many ways was the most striking characteristic of all.
This phenomenal recall of detail of things she had read.
It was interesting to see how she did it.
She used to wade through these huge documents, underlining as she went.
And one got to know the signs.
A straight underlining just meant, "I'm committing that to memory."
A squiggly line meant, "This is rubbish."
A double underlining meant, "I agree."
Triple underlining meant, "Bull's-eye."
The Prime Minister had little patience with those who didn't
share her working habits.
'She could be merciless.'
I have seen ministers reduced to not tears
but to a state of considerable distress
when they realised that she knew more about their paper than the
minister himself and that he had not brought a case together properly.
As she grew larger and bolder and more powerful,
the way in which she treated some male colleagues was unacceptable.
Particularly, for example, bullying constantly of Geoffrey Howe.
And, of course, that sort of attitude which courteous men do not
respond to in like kind led to the emergence of another
harshness among less courteous colleagues.
They, too, followed their leader in some of the less attractive
facets of her personality.
I think sometimes the Prime Minister should be intimidating.
There's not much point in being a weak,
floppy thing in the chair, is there?
But I spent hours getting the facts. I spent hours deploying them.
It was known it was my whole approach.
I was fascinated by statistics and, having had the training
in science, first find the facts and then deduce your conclusion.
Yes, I would deploy them. Yes, I would argue, I hope, formidably.
There's nothing wrong in that.
What they may be complaining about was that
I won the argument sometimes.
Shortly after the election,
Mrs Thatcher faced a challenge which called forth those very
characteristics which had seen her through the Falklands.
In 1974, the miners had brought down the Conservative
Government of Edward Heath, of which Margaret Thatcher had been a member.
..obstructing my path,
and you could've arrested me for no reason whatsoever.
It was a humiliation the party had neither forgiven nor forgotten.
CROWD CHEER AND WHISTLE
Together, if we remain united, not only will we never be defeated
but, in the process, we will roll back the years of Thatcherism...
The arrival in 1982 of Arthur Scargill as leader
of the National Union of Mineworkers made the prospect of a strike
over pit closures a certainty.
To Margaret Thatcher, he had another, more sinister purpose.
We're going to win, keep on, we're going to win!
MARGARET THATCHER: 'Mr Scargill was a real militant trade unionist.'
The militants weren't content to use strikes merely to further
their own people and the standard of living of their own people.
They wanted to use them to bring down a Government.
They were quite open about it.
If they could not get what they wanted by democracy,
they would take the fight to the streets.
Arthur Scargill and the miners were trying to defend the one raw
material we have which will last us for another thousand years.
'And to present Arthur Scargill...
'Who stood up against her, that was the objection.
'He stood up against her in support of his members.
'To present him as a revolutionary -
'whatever his political opinions may be - was absurd.'
And when that is looked back on,
people will see it had nothing to do with economics.
It was an attempt to destroy the strongest union in order to
gain a command over all the other unions.
CROWD JEERING
When British Coal announced a pit closure on 1 March 1984,
Arthur Scargill called the miners out on strike
without a national ballot.
We reaffirm the unanimous decision of March 8th to declare official,
in accordance with Rule 41, the strike action...
CHEERING DROWNS SPEECH
By refusing a vote, he split both his own union
and the labour movement.
The greatest gift that Mrs Thatcher has had
is in having the right enemies.
Galtieri was a good enemy to have.
A fascist dictator. I would like such enemies.
Arthur Scargill was a good enemy to have because he didn't have a ballot.
And because he tried to excuse illegal actions.
The script was written for the Conservatives by that.
Without a ballot,
the NUM used flying pickets to press working miners to join the strike.
In the early days of the strike,
the police appeared unable to restrain the pickets.
The chairman of the National Coal Board,
a British-born American, urged the Prime Minister to take firm action.
Mrs Thatcher said to me,
"What would you do with a strike like this in the United States?"
Well, I said, "The first thing is, the police would establish
"law and order as that is what they are required to do.
"But if they couldn't do that, the governor of the state would
"probably call out the National Guard.
"You would see tanks and armoured cars up and down the street."
"Oh, my goodness, we can't do that.
"That would be political suicide in this country."
Margaret Thatcher became increasingly
concerned about Ian MacGregor.
Although he was brought in as a hardliner,
she didn't share his desire for tanks on the streets.
And his attempt at a joke with a plastic bag fell terribly flat.
Indeed, she came to regard him as both stubborn
and a public relations disaster.
He was not prepared for this kind of battle.
And therefore, perhaps, he hadn't the guile or the cunning necessary
and didn't quite understand some of the tactics that were being
used against him.
Well, that is absolute balderdash.
That is unfair criticism
because I think we did things that enabled this campaign to be
fought out and won, which we never got any credit for.
It was crucial to Mrs Thatcher that miners in Nottinghamshire
continued to be bussed to work across picket lines.
CROWD SHOUTING OUTSIDE
Judas!
The NUM's traitors were Margaret Thatcher's saviours.
'If she could smash the NUM,
'she could take on any union in the country.'
And she couldn't believe her luck that a group of miners would
support her because that is what Notts miners did.
They supported and propped Mrs Thatcher up.
I'm not saying the rank-and-file miner realised at that time
that that's what he was doing but, in essence, that's what they did.
The strike became a battle between two implacable opponents,
each resolved on the other's total defeat.
Get moving. Move. Get moving. Come on, move. No way! Move! No way!
Go away! You're blocking...
Margaret Thatcher had introduced new civil laws to deal with
secondary picketing but she didn't want to use them
and thereby give other unions an excuse to unite with
the miners against the Government's reforms.
So, with her characteristic pragmatism,
she ordered the police to deal with Scargill's flying pickets.
On 29 May, thousands of police and pickets fought the Battle of Orgreave
at a coking depot in Yorkshire.
The violence on both sides shocked the nation.
The police had to keep order but the police also had the duty,
which we made clear through the Attorney General
right at the beginning,
it is the duty of the police to enable the law-abiding citizen
to get to his place of work.
'Amongst a lot of people, including many policemen, there was
'a feeling that they were, in words used by a police officer,
'the meat in the sandwich.'
That there was an irreconcilable attitude
amongst the miners' leadership,
an irreconcilable attitude in the Government,
that the issue was being fought out by ordinary people
and the police were handed the duty
because nobody else could do it, of trying to intercede in that battle.
I must tell you that what we have got is an attempt to
substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of law.
And it must not succeed!
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
'It must not succeed.
'There are those who are using violence and intimidation
'to impose their world on others who do not want it.'
Many of Scargill's supporters saw the defeat of the Conservative
Government as the only way of saving their communities and livelihoods.
'The fact was, we had no choice.'
If we didn't fight, then those 30 pits were going to go.
At least we were trying to attempt to defend
the communities in Great Britain.
30 pits at that time meant 30,000 jobs, which was a lot.
We had already been decimated somewhat by pit closure programmes,
by communities going.
We were determined that we were going to fight.
Throughout, the Government maintained in public that the strike
was a matter for the miners and the Coal Board to resolve.
But, behind the scenes, the erratic behaviour of the Coal Board
chairman forced the Prime Minister to intervene.
To Margaret Thatcher,
it seemed that Ian MacGregor was intent on losing the strike.
The Prime Minister depended on the ability of working miners to
continue to go down the pit.
Without them, she was finished.
But in October 1984,
MacGregor nearly caused the union of pit deputies, NACODS, to strike.
Right then, old flower, let's have you.
He ordered the deputies, responsible for safety,
to work in pits closed by the dispute. They refused.
A NACODS strike would have meant the closure of all working mines
and, thus, utter defeat for the Government.
'We got so far.'
We were in danger of losing everything
because of a silly mistake and we had to make it quite clear that,
if that was not cured immediately,
then the actual management of the National Coal Board
could indeed have brought down the Government.
And the future of the Government then at that moment was in their hands
and they had to remedy their terrible mistake.
Ian MacGregor was summoned to Downing Street
by the Prime Minister.
She told him with typical bluntness that her future
depended on his backing down.
With Mrs Thatcher,
when she has made her mind up about something you listen.
Margaret Thatcher was well aware that, in taking on the miners,
as with the Falklands, there was no survival without victory.
She has no pity for her opponents,
regarding them as traitors to the nation.
When she called them the enemy within, the biggest insult,
she didn't serve in the armed forces and many of the miners I talked to
had been in the Armed Forces and they were bitter
that they were treated in that way.
She saw them as the enemy, treated them as the enemy.
With the winter drawing in,
internal support for the strike began to waver.
Increasing numbers of miners left the picket lines
and joined the ranks of men they had denounced as scabs
and traitors only weeks before.
By 27th February, more than half of the miners were back at work,
the majority have voted with their feet.
The strike officially ended on 3rd March, 1985.
But now, nearly a decade after the strike,
many of those working miners who saved Margaret Thatcher are bitter.
During the strike, they received a letter of thanks from the Prime Minister
but now they feel their only reward has been for their mines to be closed
and, as Scargill predicted, their jobs to be taken from them.
There is a deep sense of betrayal.
The men in this county have been betrayed.
And that betrayal knows no bounds because every one of these pits
is making a profit and yet they are still going to be closed.
For no reason. And they do feel a sense of betrayal
when Margaret sent a letter thanking but what's happened?
Margaret's letter has been condemned to the bin
and the pits in Notts will be shut.
I understand now that those marvellous working miners,
the democratic union, feel a sense of betrayal.
Things have happened since I left to the coal mines and those
working miners that I would never have countenanced had I been there.
Indeed, I turned down a similar proposition
when it was made to me during my time as Prime Minister.
The debt we have to those miners is a continuing one
and should be honoured by the continuing Government.
But, in 1984, many in her party praised Mrs Thatcher's
handling of the strike.
All Conservatives agreed that in seeking total victory over
the miners she could wipe away the humiliation of Edward Heath's
defeat in 1974.
Victory, the Conservatives believed,
sent a message not just to the NUM but to other unions too.
Margaret Thatcher was looking for a solution to the problem.
She knew full well that the nuclear weapon of the Trades Union Congress
was the miners' union - the miners' strike.
And if she could survive that nuclear weapon then she could beat any
challenge which came and of course she was proved right.
They exploded their nuclear weapon and it blew them
off the face of the battlefield.
EMERGENCY SERVICE SIRENS
On 11th October 1984, at the height of the miners' strike,
an IRA bomb exploded at the Grand Hotel in Brighton.
The Conservative Party Conference was in full swing.
Margaret Thatcher, working on her papers at 2am,
narrowly escaped death.
Although she survived, the impact of the bombing had a devastating
effect on the Conservative party and her own administration.
THATCHER: The air was full of cement, cement and dust.
And by that time there was an eerie silence.
I was still in evening dress because, even though
I had to do my speech that night,
you have to break to go to the Benevolent Ball of the Agents
and then come back - so I stood in full evening dress.
Denis had pulled a suit over his pyjamas
and we managed to quickly seize some of our clothes to take with us.
And have a quick look in the bathroom which was the room
worst affected which had some plaster down and the glass had come in
which would have been nasty had one been in the bathroom at that time.
We left together and then we went down the main staircase
and we saw the debris and we saw the whole front of the building
full of rubble and the whole entrance full of rubble.
For Christ's sake, go away!
I knew as soon as it happened that it was a bomb.
And my wife and I woke and I said, "That was a bomb."
And, er, the roof,
the ceiling, began to collapse we saw the chandelier swinging
and there was a progressive collapse and we were tipped down,
we didn't know how far, under shower of debris.
Can we organise a good knife, a big butchers' knife?
I doubted whether I was going to survive very long
because I knew I was bleeding extensively.
Um, but after a while
we heard these noises and began to shout
and made contact with Fred, the fireman.
Um, I don't think I've ever held on more strongly to another man's hand
than I held on to Fred's hand which,
as he was wearing heavy asbestos gloves, made it slightly ridiculous
but I was intent on not letting go once I got hold of another human.
Norman Tebbit suffered severe injuries,
his wife Margaret was left permanently paralysed.
'We went straight to the police station where gradually
'people gathered together.'
Thank you very much.
Our worry is whether there's anyone under that rubble
because, I don't know whether you've seen it, but it's pretty awful.
We then learnt that it had been a bomb inside the building
and not in a car and they really rather wanted to get me
back to Downing Street and I said no, I'm staying here.
Life must go on as usual. And your conference will go on?
The conference will go on. All right, John...
The conference will go on as usual.
Thank you, Prime Minister.
I remember they took us from the police station in Brighton to
a police college where we were to stay the night
and the speed with which we went was horrendous.
Screaming through these country lanes,
not really knowing where we were going.
Eventually, we arrived at this police college
and we were allocated rooms - coffee was laid on,
everybody was terribly worried about what we'd left behind in Brighton.
We just went into the bedroom
what could we do?
We just quietly said a prayer
and I said the Lord's prayer.
It was somehow just a little comfort
in that most distressing day.
And then we tried to sleep
because the new day was almost there.
The Prime Minister was determined not to be defeated by the terrorists.
The conference had to continue.
We had all these people who had come out of the Grand Hotel
and they were wearing bath towels and dressing gowns
and clearly were not fit to spend a day in a conference.
Margaret Thatcher said business as usual, get the thing organised
so we had to get them clothes.
Alistair McAlpine had the brilliant idea to get onto Marks & Spencer
and say, "Please, open up your shop at 8am -
"we want to come and get some clothes so we can start the conference."
So they were decked out very smartly in Marks & Spencer clothes.
APPLAUSE
We walked onto the platform and we started at 9:30am precisely.
For all the robust show of unity at the end of the Brighton conference
the IRA's attack left a deep and abiding scar on the body politic.
The injuries to Norman Tebbit and his wife were a particular blow.
Tebbit had been a long-time ally of the Prime Minister.
His removal left Margaret Thatcher without a key
supporter at a crucial time.
But, at the time, the blow was not just political, it was emotional.
Of course a pall hung over us.
I went off to see the hospital and to see the patients there.
I saw John Wakeham who had not yet come round,
his wife had been killed.
We had lost Tony Berry, I saw Norman, I scarcely
recognised him because as he had come out of the rubble he looked
simply terrible and had just come out of the operating theatre.
I saw Margaret Tebbit in the intensive care unit.
And I'll never forget.
She was conscious.
And she said to me, "Margaret, I can't feel anything below my neck."
You can best describe it that when you shoot someone with a heavy calibre pistol,
fine, it's not the bullet that necessarily kills them,
it's the shock of the bullet hitting them and the shock of this,
though it killed only a small number of unfortunate people,
it had a profound effect on the Tory party.
In the wake of the bombing,
Mrs Thatcher seemed to lose her political touch.
In the months that followed,
her Government faced crisis after crisis.
She was forced to shelve policies, U-turns became common.
It became a time when we stumbled over small things
and were stopped from doing some of the things which I wanted to do
because you couldn't go ahead. The timing just wasn't right.
For example, this was the period when we came into Westland,
we wanted to privatise British Leyland and we were stopped from doing that.
In December 1985, from very small beginnings, a minor industrial
problem over a helicopter company blew up into a major
political storm.
The origins of the battle were small enough.
The Westland helicopter company faced bankruptcy.
Mrs Thatcher's Government refused to bail it out
but an American firm Sikorski offered to rescue the company.
Mrs Thatcher's role in the ensuing crisis penetrated to the heart of her Government.
It cast a revealing light on her personality and on the often
tense and distrustful relations with her Cabinet colleagues.
Mrs Thatcher and her trade secretary Leon Brittan were happy to
let the American takeover go ahead.
But Michael Heseltine, the Defence Secretary, thought that Westland
should have a European buyer.
The disagreement brought into focus their fraught relationship.
Michael Heseltine was not only ambitious -
there's nothing wrong with that - but overpoweringly ambitious
and that seemed to be the foremost thing in his mind.
It mattered more than anything else and therefore he had to get his way.
Mrs Thatcher regarded Michael Heseltine as an ineffective minister.
She believed he was unable to control his tendency to what
she called "vulgar exaggeration".
When he appeared wearing a flak jacket on television
her friends saw this as a deliberate ploy to steal her thunder.
This was the sort of publicity pose reserved for the Prime Minister.
I think that the criticism will be made that she didn't have
a sufficient instinctive understanding of some members of her Cabinet,
including Michael Heseltine, and that that being so there was always
the problem that sooner or later there'd be a personality mismatch.
And certainly I think the Westland affair produced that.
The Westland issue was soon dwarfed by a titanic clash of personalities.
Michael Heseltine persisted in demanding a European
buyer for Westland.
But Margaret Thatcher, wanting the American option,
refused to let him put his case to colleagues in full Cabinet.
I did tell the Prime Minister, five weeks before I resigned,
that if she refused to allow the Cabinet to discuss the plans
which I had been invited by collective judgment of my colleagues
at a meeting of the Economic Affairs of the Cabinet in December,
if she refused to allow those matters to be discussed,
ventilated, explored at full Cabinet, I would resign.
If every minister wanted everything as small a point as Westland
to come to Cabinet, we would be sitting half the week
and you simply couldn't carry on Government that way.
The truth is Michael had got a thing about this.
He got it all out of proportion,
he tried to magnify it into a question of an American
solution or a European solution
and there wasn't in fact a practical European solution in hand, on offer.
So, it had to take its course and it did.
Unable to argue his case in Cabinet, Michael Heseltine lobbied in public.
In a desperate attempt to silence him,
the Government leaked a letter from the Solicitor General.
The letter to Heseltine accused him
of peddling "material inaccuracies" in his campaign.
When the Cabinet met on 9th January 1986, the Prime Minister made
it plain that the disarray over Westland could not continue.
Michael Heseltine must stop arguing his case in public.
It's the only time I can ever remember the Prime Minister
reading out the conclusions of the meeting of a discussion
which didn't take place.
They were already written before the meeting started.
Mrs Thatcher was not prepared to allow my case to be put to Cabinet.
The Cabinet meeting was in full swing,
we'd all of us, save Michael, decided we must exercise
the principal of collective responsibility,
coordinate our statements and clear them through the Cabinet office.
Not through me, through the Cabinet office,
that was necessary for political and legal reasons.
The difficulty was Michael. Would he accept that?
I put it to him and Nick Ridley put it to him twice.
Michael Heseltine seemed to be saying that should apply
to 20 members of the Cabinet but not to him
because he was responsible for conducting the deal.
And I questioned that and Michael Jopling questioned that
and I questioned it again and it was at that moment
that he decided to shut his folder and leave the Cabinet.
I folded my papers and I said, "In which case,
"I cannot remain a member of this Cabinet," and I left very quietly.
And in such a way that the comment of colleagues afterwards,
if you remember, was they weren't quite sure what had happened.
It would be wrong for me to say anything at this instant.
I have resigned from the Cabinet and I will make a full statement later today.
And we went back into Cabinet. Just before we did, Nick said to me...
"I hope I didn't provoke him,
"I hope I did the right thing"
and I said to Nick, "Time alone will tell, Nick."
Only four years later, Michael Heseltine was to mount
a devastating challenge to Margaret Thatcher.
Even at the time, many senior colleagues felt
the Prime Minister should have let him put his case in Cabinet.
It would have been better if there'd been more discussion,
he'd been able...
Well, put it this way, that he could have felt
that he had been able to put his case strongly to the Cabinet.
He always felt he had been denied that and I think it was perhaps,
looking back on it, a pity that he appeared to feel that.
I think to some extent had been denied it.
After the departure of Michael Heseltine,
parliamentary attention now focused on the role of the Prime Minister
and the leak of the Law Office's letter attacking Heseltine's views.
Who was responsible? Many suspected the Prime Minister
and her officials inside Number Ten.
The information contained in the Solicitor General's letter,
as I explained to the House, it would have been useful
to have in the public domain but one wouldn't have done it that way.
Of course not. Had you wished to get it in,
you would have consulted with the...um...
Solicitor General, that would have been the correct way to go about it.
But in the charged atmosphere there was much misunderstanding
and much that went wrong.
It was, really, a great storm in a teacup
but it left some very serious things behind.
The Trade Secretary, Leon Brittan, accepted responsibility
for making the Solicitor General's letter public and resigned.
The disclosure of a Law Officer's letter is considered a particularly
grave offence and forced Brittan's departure from office.
But Leon Brittan always made it plain the leak had been
made on instructions from Number Ten.
The release of the Solicitor General's letter was something
which was approved by Mr Charles Powell,
the relevant private secretary at Number Ten.
And it was approved by Mr Bernard Ingham,
the Prime Minister's press secretary.
And, as I made clear at the time, there would have been
no question of the release of that document without that express approval from Number Ten.
The Minister authorised the disclosure.
Now, Leon Brittan maintains that I authorised the disclosure.
Well, it's a novel concept
of the kind of Governments we have
that an official can authorise that disclosure.
Um, and I think the explanation of this is that,
and I regret that I didn't do this, but the explanation
for that is that I didn't actually positively say, "Don't."
What I did say is that I'm not doing it.
The loss of two ministers in quick succession made
the Prime Minister appear careless and vulnerable.
Many felt she owed her survival to Leon Brittan's self-sacrifice.
Her own personal position was extremely weak
and I remember talking to her at that time and she was in a terrible state.
She almost found it impossible to focus on what was being said to her.
And had Leon Brittan, I think,
revealed everything that had
come from Number Ten, directly and indirectly,
which had led to the misguided publication of the Attorney General's letter in the Westland affair
then I think that the pressure having been gone up one notch further
might well have been too much for her to withstand.
The opposition had called for a full debate on the Westland affair
for Monday, 27th January.
On the eve of the debate, Margaret Thatcher was heard to remark
that by the end of the day, "I may no longer be Prime Minister."
But she survived.
NEIL KINNOCK: Today, the Prime Minister must answer the questions
that she signally and significantly
failed to answer six times last Thursday.
'I certainly believe my speech in the second Westland debate'
was the biggest single failure, other than losing the two elections,
of my whole period as leader of the opposition.
And the reason for that failure was overelaboration.
'Thirdly, did the Prime Minister establish an inquiry
'in response to the justifiable outrage of two law officers.'
And it may have been overconfidence or overpreparation
or a combination of both that made me
add on some additional points at the beginning of my speech.
Anyway, it's a matter of history.
What did happen is I let Mrs Thatcher off the hook.
But the affair damaged the Prime Minister.
She was seen to have been not quite straight enough with the facts,
even those closest to her felt she had blundered.
There is no doubt that, at the end of the month, the Prime Minister
herself felt that her position was very gravely undermined
and I think it's true that the crisis shook her administration
more profoundly than anything else until the end of it.
The combined effect of the Brighton bombing
and the Westland affair was to give Margaret Thatcher potent
notice of her actual and political mortality.
Victory in the Falklands
and again over the miners had made her appear all-powerful
but as the poet Dryden said, "Even victors are by victories undone."
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